Still the Trumpet Sounds, pp.24-25; Revell: Wallace Hamilton
Conversion Nothing is right until it is right at the heart. 0ur word gospel means good news, and this is the good news ... now we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of our sins. That is the word that rings like music through the New Testament. That was the impulse in which the Christian church was born. That was what the apostles preached with a kind of delirious joy. That was the force that propelled it across the Roman Empire, bringing hope to people who lived in the grip of fatalism, and bringing what Lecky called "a new morality" into European life. That was what commended the Gospel to our own rough ancestors in the Tin Islands, and gradually changed the character of the Anglo-Saxon world. The love of God is forgiveness and the transformation of the inner life.
John Bunyan put it in a little picture in a book, which came in England to be second only to the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress. If you have forgotten the picture, let me paraphrase it for you: In my dream I saw a man clothed with rags, with a book in his hand and a great burden on his back. I saw him run up the highway, not without great difficulty because of the burden on his back. But when he came to the Cross, the burden loosed from his shoulders, fell from his back into the Sepulcher, and I saw it no more. Then he gave three leaps for joys and went on singing. In that little picture John Bunyan was really writing the history of the English-speaking world. England was the man clothed in rags with the great burden on his back. The whole Anglo Saxon race was lifted up from savagery by the light and power of the cross. You can trace it in our hymns. Look through the hymn books that our forefathers made and see how often somebody is bursting into song because of One who breaks the power of cancelled sin and sets the prisoner free.
At the cross, at the cross,
where I first saw the light
And the burden of my heart rolled away.
It was there by faith that I first saw the light
And now I am happy all the day.
The forgiveness of sin!
Now if this old Bunyan picture seems queer to us and the word sin, as the late Archbishop Temple said, has our generation vague meaning and scant understanding, it is not because the reality of sin has lessened: it is mostly because we are calling sin by other names and seek to cure it by other means. Our religious vocabulary has been rewritten by psychologists, and we have changed the pattern of our thinking. Substitute maladjustment for the word sin and the burden is still on our backs. Substitute frustration for what our fathers called conviction, substitute neurosis for what the Bible called a demon, and modern man is still a pilgrim with a great burden on his back, only he is not looking to a cross to lift it. He turns to amusement to forget it, or to bromides to deaden it, or he goes to the psychiatrist, if he can afford it, to get his twist straightened out.