Page:The stuff of manhood (1917).djvu/67

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produced none of it. They gave it its opportunity and its chance, but it was all somewhere all the time and it might not have come forth if something inside had not released the spring of our will to God's will and let those great energies of good come pulsing out to do their work.

And the same thing is true of the inwrought and enshrouded capacities for ill. Jesus Christ laid off His limitations as well as His activities that Saturday in the grave; and He left His limitations there when He came out. Out of such Saturday graves in man's character it may be only the limitations that emerge. Out of many a man's life it is the dog that ought to be chained that is allowed to roam free, while all the possibilities for good and sacrifice and ministry are still-born inside. And sometimes, thank God, men discover all this latent ill within and lay on it the restraining and throttling hand. As godly old John Newton said when one day he saw a criminal being led by, "There, but for the grace of God, goes John Newton." He knew that everything that had escaped in that brother of his lay latent in himself, and he thanked God that a hand had been laid on all those inner capacities for evil and wreckage and that that hand held them in check and let only the good and the true and the pure go free.

There is something infinitely hopeful and encouraging in the principle of that Saturday in