They let us enter
into the full conception of that which the new life which is offered to
man really is. There are two conceptions which come to every man when he
is entering upon a new life, changing his present life to something that
is different from the present life, and being a different sort of
creature and living in a different sort of a way. The first way in which
it presents itself to him--almost always at the beginning of every
religion, perhaps--is in the way of restraint and imprisonment. Man
thinks of every change that is to come to him as in the nature of denial
of something that he is at the present doing and being, as the laying
hold upon himself of some sort of restraint, bringing to him something
which says: "I must not do the thing which I am doing. I must lay upon
myself restraints, restrictions, commandments, and prohibitions. I must
not let myself be the man that I am." You see how the Old Testament
comes before the New Testament, the law ringing from the mountain top
with the great denials, the great prohibitions, that come from the mouth
of God. "Thou shalt not do this, that, or the other--Thou shalt not
murder. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt
not covet thy neighbor's goods." That is the first conception which
comes to a man of the way in which he is to enter upon a new life, of
the way in which the denial in his experience is to take effect. It is
as if the hands were stretched out in order that fetters might be placed
upon them.
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