For sin is so vile and so greatly to be hated that it may be likened to no pain that is not sin. But we cannot do this without taking account of the context in which people live their lives, or of the alternatives to the gospel which they find attractive. Some of our evangelism has been very superficial on this account. We must sometimes get away from the Authorized Version, if for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty exalts, but beauty also lulls.
Early associations endear, but they also confuse.
Through that beautiful solemnity, the transporting or horrifying realities of which the Book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed, and we may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame, or struck dumb with terror, or carried out of ourselves by ravishing hopes and adorations. A seventeenth-century man like Blaise Pascal, who thought himself a mathematician and scientist of genius, found it quite ridiculous that anyone should suppose that rational processes could lead to any ultimate conclusions about life, but easily accepted the authority of the Scriptures. The early Christians laid great stress on quality of life. To live in a fully predictable world is not to be a true man, and Christ was a true man. His prayer in Gethsemane, his sweat of blood, show that the preceding anxiety is a part of human affliction, which we must try to accept with some sort of submission.