Not Under the Law

by Grace Livingston Hill

The next time he entered a church in his search the preacher was reading the Bible, and the words he read caught Darcy’s attention.

They seemed to be stranger and sweeter than any words he had ever heard. It reminded him of the place where Jesus heard that the blind man had been cast out and He came to find him. The words were these:

“Behold, what manner of love the father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore, the world knoweth us not because it knew him not. Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”

So far he had been listening with deep interest. It seemed like what would have been written for Mary Massey and her niece. They were pure. They lived their lives according to what would please God. That was the dominating principle of their existence. He listened wistfully. They were so far removed from his world. He had never counted himself in with them, never expected to be nearer to them, except that one bright day in his childhood; but they had always lingered like luminaries in his sky, and always he had felt that if he had been born into a different walk in life, among Christian people like them, he would have belonged to them, have chosen them for his life-long companions if they had been willing. He had known even as a child that he did not belong with them—known that he could not fit, and kept away. Yet he had never been able to feel satisfied with other people; always there had been a silent aloofness in his manner, except with little children, among whom there was no such thing as class.

He had named this thing that separated them “class” in his thoughts. Now he began to see that it was something else. It was sin. It was right and wrong that had separated them all these years. They were not people who stopped at class. There were no social classes in their eyes, else they would not have companioned with him that glorious day so intimately. He had come to know, years back, that education had something to do with separations, and he had taken pains to study and read, and make himself acquainted with the best literature, and now he no longer felt that he would be separated from them in that way. But this thing that was back of it all was sin—had been sin all along. Perhaps if he had gone there, as that woman with the dear eyes had asked, he would have learned to know sin and not have been wise in his own conceit. Perhaps he might even have come to be in the same world with them.

But the words were going on and they struck him sharply:

“Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law; for sin is the transgression of the law.”

Yes, he was a transgressor of the law. He had broken the law of the land. That had never seemed a sin before. It had been only a matter of getting away with it. The sin would have been in being discovered, to his mind. Everybody else was doing it, some doing it bunglingly, and not getting away with it. He despised them. He had gone into it more for the game than the money. He had known he could do it without discovery.

But he had not gotten away with it. He had been discovered. And by that girl! Not only that, but by the girl he most honored in all the earth!

If he had been asked at the start whether he would like to have her know what he was doing he might not have thought much about it, but when her eyes looked into his with their question it was to him as if the great God had asked him: “What are you doing?” It was like the question that the Lord God called in the garden in the cool of the evening: “Adam, where art thou?” only Darcy did not even know that story, knew Adam only as a hazy being of history or mythology, he could not have told which.