It remained for Burnham, the youngest born, to fill the lives of his father and mother with anxious care. Through his aggressive babyhood and imperious childhood his parents, wise in their experience with three others, had tried in vain to apply the principles that had helped to tide the others through shoals and hidden rocks to the safe waters of responsible manhood and womanhood. Burnham simply would not be guided, would not follow, and he would lead. Always and everywhere he managed to secure his own way.

Self-love is one thing and selfishness is quite another. Self-love of the true type requires self-knowledge. What are we living for? Is it for bodily ease, and comfort and self-enjoyment, and recognition, and tributes of praise? Really, what are you living for? The development of a wholesome wide-reaching civilization, or merely success for your own narrow little self? You need to be saved. Selfishness accepted and never resisted is hell.

“I gave up everything for others.” “That is true, you made one great sacrifice for your mother; but haven’t you been making her unhappy in a hundred petty ways ever since? In thousands of trifles that make up your life have you not in a sense taken revenge for the very great sacrifice you made?”

“What do I believe, anyhow. A host of things; among them that there is a moral law that you have broken; and that there is such a being as God who has said that there was only one way for a transgressor of the law to escape, by accepting the substitution offered.”

… a single flash of memory at this moment sent him back to the ringing voice that was saying: “The doctrine of the forgiveness of sin is not even distantly imitated by any other religion.” It had sounded like a challenge to the idle young man, who had traveled in many lands and amused himself over the peculiarities of many religions, and he waited for the speaker to prove his point. He did it, and did yet more. As distinctly as though the words were being spoken now, came back their echo in the silence of the woods.

“Can a man really forgive himself? Oh, if we are morally flabby, we can forgive our selves, and continue to sin again, and yet again.” He had been sinning against his father and mother and regretting it, and forgetting it, and repeating it, all his life. He was “morally flabby.” …

“Can an honorable God forgive sin?” The answer led by logical sequence to the one way, the expiation, the atonement. “The moral man,” said the speaker, “will have nothing to do with cheap absolution.”

“The Christian life is not a single act, it is an attitude. The kernel of it is just this: ‘I am Christ’s. I tie myself up to Christ by every string that I know; and if there is any other string, I want to find it.’ That is the continuous attitude of one who has looked Jesus in the face and said: ‘Thou art Christ, and I am Christ’s.’”