Some years ago, when I had to attend weekly chapel services at a college where I once taught, a preacher used the following illustration during a sermon.

It was the first Sunday of Lent, a moment of personal stock-taking, the weighing-up of sins and the means by which one might lesson their burden through some self-denial. But it was also a time to ponder the evils of sin, the contours of seduction, the foul consequences of perpetration. And so he began: once there was a baker who was accustomed