He selected his text from St.
John's Gospel: "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that
which is born of the Spirit is spirit." In the course of his sermon he
pointed out that the unhappy prisoners in the gaol, awaiting the
summons to answer before an earthly tribunal for the evil deeds they
had committed, had been led into their present miserable condition by
the seductions of the flesh. They had fallen into sin, he went on, by
the indulgence of their passions; they had placed no restraint upon
their animal appetites and guilty pleasures; they had sunk gradually
into crime, and had now to meet the penalty of the law. But did no
blame, he asked, attach to those who had remained indifferent to their
downward course; who had never stretched forth a friendly hand to
rescue them from destruction; who had made no effort to teach and guide
in the ways of truth and righteousness these outcasts of society? Were
we, he demanded, at liberty to ignore our responsibility by asking in
the words of earth's first criminal, "Am I my brother's keeper?" No; it
was at once our duty and our privilege to engage in the noble work of
man's reformation--to raise the fallen--to seek out the lost, and to
restore the outcast; and this, he argued, could only be accomplished
by a widely-disseminated knowledge of God's truth, by patient,
self-denying labour in God's work, and by a devout dependence on God's
Holy Spirit.
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