Part 5 — Chapter III. Sin, Or Man's State Of Apostasy. (continued 2)

(e) Sin is represented as existing in the soul, prior to the consciousness of it, and as only discovered and awakened by the law (Rom. 7:9, 10—“when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died”—if sin “revived,” it must have had previous existence and life, even though it did not manifest itself in acts of conscious transgression).

Rom. 7:8—“apart from the law sin is dead”—here is sin which is not yet sin of act. Dead or unconscious sin is still sin. The fire in a cave discovers reptiles and stirs them, but they were there before; the light and heat do not create them. Let a beam of light, says Jean Paul Richter, through your window-shutter into a darkened room, and you reveal a thousand motes floating in the air whose existence was before unsuspected. So the law of God reveals our “hidden faults” (Ps. 19:12)—infirmities, imperfections, evil tendencies and desires—which also cannot all be classed as acts of transgression.

(f) The allusions to sin as a permanent power or reigning principle, not only in the individual but in humanity at large, forbid us to define it as a momentary act, and compel us to regard it as being primarily a settled depravity of nature, of which individual sins or acts of transgression are the workings and fruits (Rom. 5:21—“sin reigned in death”; 6:12—“let not therefore sin reign in your mortal body”).

In Rom. 5:21, the reign of sin is compared to the reign of grace. As grace is not an act but a principle, so sin is not an act but a principle. As the poisonous exhalations from [pg 554]a well indicate that there is corruption and death at the bottom, so the ever-recurring thoughts and acts of sin are evidence that there is a principle of sin in the heart,—in other words, that sin exists as a permanent disposition or state. A momentary act cannot “reign” nor “dwell”; a disposition or state can. Maudsley, Sleep, its Psychology, makes the damaging confession: “If we were held responsible for our dreams, there is no living man who would not deserve to be hanged.”

(g) The Mosaic sacrifices for sins of ignorance and of omission, and especially for general sinfulness, are evidence that sin is not to be limited to mere act, but that it includes something deeper and more permanent in the heart and the life (Lev. 1:3; 5:11; 12:8; cf. Luke 2:24).

The sin-offering for sins of ignorance (Lev. 4:14, 20, 31), the trespass-offering for sins of omission (Lev. 5:5, 6), and the burnt offering to expiate general sinfulness (Lev. 1:3; cf. Luke 2:22-24), all witness that sin is not confined to mere act. John 1:29—“the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin,” not the sins, “of the world”. See Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:233; Schmid, Bib. Theol. N. T., 194, 381, 442, 448, 492, 604; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:210-217; Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:259-306; Edwards, Works. 3:16-18. For the New School definition of sin, see Fitch, Nature of Sin, and Park, in Bib. Sac., 7:551.

B. From the common judgment of mankind.

(a) Men universally attribute vice as well as virtue not only to conscious and deliberate acts, but also to dispositions and states. Belief in something more permanently evil than acts of transgression is indicated in the common phrases, “hateful temper,” “wicked pride,” “bad character.”

As the beatitudes (Mat. 5:1-12) are pronounced, not upon acts, but upon dispositions of the soul, so the curses of the law are uttered not so much against single acts of transgression as against the evil affections from which they spring. Compare the “works of the flesh” (Gal. 5:19) with the “fruit of the Spirit” (5:22). In both, dispositions and states predominate.

(b) Outward acts, indeed, are condemned only when they are regarded as originating in, and as symptomatic of, evil dispositions. Civil law proceeds upon this principle in holding crime to consist, not alone in the external act, but also in the evil motive or intent with which it is performed.

The mens rea is essential to the idea of crime. The “idle-word” (Mat 12:36) shall be brought into the judgment, not because it is so important in itself, but because it is a floating straw that indicates the direction of the whole current of the heart and life. Murder differs from homicide, not in any outward respect, but simply because of the motive that prompts it,—and that motive is always, in the last analysis, an evil disposition or state.

(c) The stronger an evil disposition, or in other words, the more it connects itself with, or resolves itself into, a settled state or condition of the soul, the more blameworthy is it felt to be. This is shown by the distinction drawn between crimes of passion and crimes of deliberation.

Edwards: “Guilt consists in having one's heart wrong, and in doing wrong from the heart.” There is guilt in evil desires, even when the will combats them. But there is greater guilt when the will consents. The outward act may be in each case the same, but the guilt of it is proportioned to the extent to which the evil disposition is settled and strong.

(d) This condemning sentence remains the same, even although the origin of the evil disposition or state cannot be traced back to any conscious act of the individual. Neither the general sense of mankind, nor the civil law in which this general sense is expressed, goes behind the fact of an [pg 555] existing evil will. Whether this evil will is the result of personal transgression or is a hereditary bias derived from generations passed, this evil will is the man himself, and upon him terminates the blame. We do not excuse arrogance or sensuality upon the ground that they are family traits.

The young murderer in Boston was not excused upon the ground of a congenitally cruel disposition. We repent in later years of sins of boyhood, which we only now see to be sins; and converted cannibals repent, after becoming Christians, of the sins of heathendom which they once committed without a thought of their wickedness. The peacock cannot escape from his feet by flying, nor can we absolve ourselves from blame for an evil state of will by tracing its origin to a remote ancestry. We are responsible for what we are. How this can be, when we have not personally and consciously originated it, is the problem of original sin, which we have yet to discuss.

(e) When any evil disposition has such strength in itself, or is so combined with others, as to indicate a settled moral corruption in which no power to do good remains, this state is regarded with the deepest disapprobation of all. Sin weakens man's power of obedience, but the can-not is a will-not, and is therefore condemnable. The opposite principle would lead to the conclusion that, the more a man weakened his powers by transgression, the less guilty he would be, until absolute depravity became absolute innocence.

The boy who hates his father cannot change his hatred into love by a single act of will; but he is not therefore innocent. Spontaneous and uncontrollable profanity is the worst profanity of all. It is a sign that the whole will, like a subterranean Kentucky river, is moving away from God, and that no recuperative power is left in the soul which can reach into the depths to reverse its course. See Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:110-114; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:79-92, 152-157; Richards, Lectures on Theology, 256-301; Edwards, Works, 2:134; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 243-262; Princeton Essays, 2:224-239; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 394.

C. From the experience of the Christian.

Christian experience is a testing of Scripture truth, and therefore is not an independent source of knowledge. It may, however, corroborate conclusions drawn from the word of God. Since the judgment of the Christian is formed under the influence of the Holy Spirit, we may trust this more implicitly than the general sense of the world. We affirm, then, that just in proportion to his spiritual enlightenment and self-knowledge, the Christian

(a) Regards his outward deviations from God's law, and his evil inclinations and desires, as outgrowths and revelations of a depravity of nature which lies below his consciousness; and

(b) Repents more deeply for this depravity of nature, which constitutes his inmost character and is inseparable from himself, than for what he merely feels or does.

In proof of these statements we appeal to the biographies and writings of those in all ages who have been by general consent regarded as most advanced in spiritual culture and discernment.

“Intelligentia prima est, ut te noris peccatorem.” Compare David's experience, Ps. 51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom”—with Paul's experience in Rom. 7:24—“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?”—with Isaiah's experience (6:5), when in the presence of God's glory he uses the words of the leper (Lev. 13:45) and calls himself “unclean,” and with Peter's experience (Luke 5:8) when at the manifestation of Christ's miraculous power he “fell down at Jesus' [pg 556]knees, saying, Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” So the publican cries: “God, be thou merciful to me the sinner” (Luke 18:13), and Paul calls himself the “chief” of sinners (1 Tim. 1:15). It is evident that in none of these cases were there merely single acts of transgression in view; the humiliation and self-abhorrence were in view of permanent states of depravity. Van Oosterzee: “What we do outwardly is only the revelation of our inner nature.” The outcropping and visible rock is but small in extent compared with the rock that is underlying and invisible. The iceberg has eight-ninths of its mass below the surface of the sea, yet icebergs have been seen near Cape Horn from 700 to 800 feet high above the water.

It may be doubted whether any repentance is genuine which is not repentance for sin rather than for sins; compare John 16:8—the Holy Spirit “will convict the world in respect of sin/” On the difference between conviction of sins and conviction of sin, see Hare, Mission of the Comforter. Dr. A. J. Gordon, just before his death, desired to be left alone. He was then overheard confessing his sins in such seemingly extravagant terms as to excite fear that he was in delirium. Martensen, Dogmatics, 389—Luther during his early experience “often wrote to Staupitz: ‘Oh, my sins, my sins!’ and yet in the confessional he could name no sins in particular which he had to confess; so that it was clearly a sense of the general depravity of his nature which filled his soul with deep sorrow and pain.” Luther's conscience would not accept the comfort that he wishedto be without sin, and therefore had no real sin. When he thought himself too great a sinner to be saved, Staupitz replied: “Would you have the semblance of a sinner and the semblance of a Savior?”

After twenty years of religious experience, Jonathan Edwards wrote (Works 1:22, 23; also 3:16-18): “Often since I have lived in this town I have had very affecting views of my own sinfulness and vileness, very frequently to such a degree as to hold me in a kind of loud weeping, sometimes for a considerable time together, so that I have been often obliged to shut myself up. I have had a vastly greater sense of my own wickedness and the badness of my heart than ever I had before my conversion. It has often appeared to me that if God should mark iniquity against me, I should appear the very worst of all mankind, of all that have been since the beginning of the world to this time; and that I should have by far the lowest place in hell. When others that have come to talk with me about their soul's concerns have expressed the sense they have had of their own wickedness, by saying that it seemed to them they were as bad as the devil himself; I thought their expressions seemed exceeding faint and feeble to represent my wickedness.”

Edwards continues: “My wickedness, as I am in myself, has long appeared to me perfectly ineffable and swallowing up all thought and imagination—like an infinite deluge, or mountains over my head. I know not how to express better what my sins appear to me to be, than by heaping infinite on infinite and multiplying infinite by infinite. Very often for these many years, these expressions are in my mind and in my mouth: ‘Infinite upon infinite—infinite upon infinite!’ When I look into my heart and take a view of my wickedness, it looks like an abyss infinitely deeper than hell. And it appears to me that were it not for free grace, exalted and raised up to the infinite height of all the fulness and glory of the great Jehovah, and the arm of his power and grace stretched forth in all the majesty of his power and in all the glory of his sovereignty, I should appear sunk down in my sins below hell itself, far beyond the sight of everything but the eye of sovereign grace that can pierce even down to such a depth. And yet it seems to me that my conviction of sin is exceeding small and faint; it is enough to amaze me that I have no more sense of my sin. I know certainly that I have very little sense of my sinfulness. When I have had turns of weeping for my sins, I thought I knew at the time that my repentance was nothing to my sin.... It is affecting to think how ignorant I was, when a young Christian, of the bottomless, infinite depths of wickedness, pride, hypocrisy, and deceit left in my heart.”

Jonathan Edwards was not an ungodly man, but the holiest man of his time. He was not an enthusiast, but a man of acute, philosophic mind. He was not a man who indulged in exaggerated or random statements, for with his power of introspection and analysis he combined a faculty and habit of exact expression unsurpassed among the sons of men. If the maxim “cuique in arte sua credendum est” is of any value, Edwards's statements in a matter of religious experience are to be taken as correct interpretations of the facts. H. B. Smith (System. Theol., 275) quotes Thomasius as saying: “It is a striking fact in Scripture that statements of the depth and power of sin are chiefly from the regenerate.” Another has said that “a serpent is never seen at its whole length until it is dead.” Thomas à Kempis (ed. Gould and Lincoln, 142)—“Do [pg 557]not think that thou hast made any progress toward perfection, till thou feelest that thou art less than the least of all human beings.” Young's Night Thoughts: “Heaven's Sovereign saves all beings but himself That hideous sight—a naked human heart.”

Law's Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life: “You may justly condemn yourself for being the greatest sinner that you know, 1. Because you know more of the folly of your own heart than of other people's, and can charge yourself with various sins which you know only of yourself and cannot be sure that others are guilty of them. 2. The greatness of our guilt arises from the greatness of God's goodness to us. You know more of these aggravations of your sins than you do of the sins of other people. Hence the greatest saints have in all ages condemned themselves as the greatest sinners.”We may add: 3. That, since each man is a peculiar being, each man is guilty of peculiar sins, and in certain particulars and aspects may constitute an example of the enormity and hatefulness of sin, such as neither earth nor hell can elsewhere show.

Of Cromwell, as a representative of the Puritans, Green says (Short History of the English People, 454): “The vivid sense of the divine Purity close to such men, made the life of common men seem sin.” Dr. Arnold of Rugby (Life and Corresp., App. D.): “In a deep sense of moral evil, more perhaps than anything else, abides a saving knowledge of God.” Augustine, on his death-bed, had the 32d Psalm written over against him on the wall. For his expressions with regard to sin, see his Confessions, book 10. See also Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 284, note.

2. Inferences.

In the light of the preceding discussion, we may properly estimate the elements of truth and of error in the common definition of sin as “the voluntary transgression of known law.”

(a) Not all sin is voluntary as being a distinct and conscious volition; for evil disposition and state often precede and occasion evil volition, and evil disposition and state are themselves sin. All sin, however, is voluntary as springing either directly from will, or indirectly from those perverse affections and desires which have themselves originated in will. “Voluntary” is a term broader then “volitional,” and includes all those permanent states of intellect and affection which the will has made what they are. Will, moreover, is not to be regarded as simply the faculty of volitions, but as primarily the underlying determination of the being to a supreme end.

Will, as we have seen, includes preference (θέλημα, voluntas, Wille) as well as volition (βουλή, arbitrium, Willkür). We do not, with Edwards and Hodge, regard the sensibilities as states of the will. They are, however, in their character and their objects determined by the will, and so they may be called voluntary. The permanent state of the will (New School “elective preference”) is to be distinguished from the permanent state of the sensibilities (dispositions, or desires). But both are voluntary because both are due to past decisions of the will, and “whatever springs from will we are responsible for” (Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 243). Julius Müller, 2:51—“We speak of self-consciousness and reason as something which the ego has, but we identify the will with the ego. No one would say, ‘my will has decided this or that,’ although we do say, ‘my reason, my conscience teaches me this or that.’ The will is the very man himself, as Augustine says: ‘Voluntas est in omnibus; imo omnes nihil aliud quam voluntates sunt.’ ”

For other statements of the relation of disposition to will, see Alexander, Moral Science, 151—“In regard to dispositions, we say that they are in a sense voluntary. They properly belong to the will, taking the word in a large sense. In judging of the morality of voluntary acts, the principle from which they proceed is always included in our view and comes in for a large part of the blame”; see also pages 201, 207, 208. Edwards on the Affections, 3:1-22; on the Will, 3:4—“The affections are only certain modes of the exercise of the will.” A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 234—“All sin is voluntary, in the sense that all sin has its root in the perverted dispositions, desires, and affections which constitute the depraved state of the will.” But to Alexander, Edwards, and Hodge, we reply that the first sin was not voluntary in this sense, for there was no such depraved state of the will from which it could spring. We are [pg 558]responsible for dispositions, not upon the ground that they are a part of the will, but upon the ground that they are effects of will, in other words, that past decisions of the will have made them what they are. See pages 504-513.

(b) Deliberate intention to sin is an aggravation of transgression, but it is not essential to constitute any given act or feeling a sin. Those evil inclinations and impulses which rise unbidden and master the soul before it is well aware of their nature, are themselves violations of the divine law, and indications of an inward depravity which in the case of each descendant of Adam is the chief and fontal transgression.

Joseph Cook: “Only the surface-water of the sea is penetrated with light. Beneath is a half-lit region. Still further down is absolute darkness. We are greater than we know.” Weismann, Heredity, 2:8—“At the depth of 170 meters, or 552 feet, there is about as much light as that of a starlight night when there is no moon. Light penetrates as far as 400 meters, or 1,300 feet, but animal life exists at a depth of 4,000 meters, or 13,000 feet. Below 1,300 feet, all animals are blind.” (Cf. Ps. 51:6; 19:12—“the inward parts ... the hidden parts ... hidden faults”—hidden not only from others, but even from ourselves.) The light of consciousness plays only on the surface of the waters of man's soul.

(c) Knowledge of the sinfulness of an act or feeling is also an aggravation of transgression, but it is not essential to constitute it a sin. Moral blindness is the effect of transgression, and, as inseparable from corrupt affections and desires, is itself condemned by the divine law.

It is our duty to do better than we know. Our duty of knowing is as real as our duty of doing. Sin is an opiate. Some of the most deadly diseases do not reveal themselves in the patient's countenance, nor has the patient any adequate understanding of his malady. There is an ignorance which is indolence. Men are often unwilling to take the trouble of rectifying their standards of judgment. There is also an ignorance which is intention. Instance many students' ignorance of College laws.

We cannot excuse disobedience by saying: “I forgot.” God's commandment is: “Remember”—as in Ex. 20:8; cf. 2 Pet. 3:5—“For this they wilfully forget.” “Ignorantia legis neminem excusat.” Rom. 2:12—“as many as have sinned without the law shall also perish without the law”; Luke 12:48—“he that knew not, and did things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten [though] with few stripes.”The aim of revelation and of preaching is to bring man “to himself” (cf. Luke 15:17)—to show him what he has been doing and what he is. Goethe: “We are never deceived: we deceive ourselves.” Royce, World and Individual, 2:359—“The sole possible free moral action is then a freedom that relates to the present fixing of attention upon the ideas of the Ought which are already present. To sin is consciously to choose to forget, through a narrowing of the field of attention, an Ought that one already recognizes.”

(d) Ability to fulfill the law is not essential to constitute the non-fulfilment sin. Inability to fulfill the law is a result of transgression, and, as consisting not in an original deficiency of faculty but in a settled state of the affections and will, it is itself condemnable. Since the law presents the holiness of God as the only standard for the creature, ability to obey can never be the measure of obligation or the test of sin.

Not power to the contrary, in the sense of ability to change all our permanent states by mere volition, is the basis of obligation and responsibility; for surely Satan's responsibility does not depend upon his power at any moment to turn to God and be holy.

Definitions of sin—Melanchthon: Defectus vel inclinatio vel actio pugnans cum lege Dei. Calvin: Illegalitas, seu difformitas a lege. Hollaz: Aberratio a lege divina. Hollaz adds: “Voluntariness does not enter into the definition of sin, generically considered. Sin may be called voluntary, either in respect to its cause, as it inheres in the will, or in respect to the act, as it procedes from deliberate volition. Here is the antithesis to the Roman Catholics and to the Socinians, the latter of whom define sin as a voluntary [i. e., a volitional] transgression of law”—a view, says Hase (Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 162-164), “which is derived from the necessary methods of civil tribunals, and which is incompatible with the orthodox doctrine of original sin.” [pg 559]On the New School definition of sin, see Fairchild, Nature of Sin, in Bib. Sac., 25:30-48; Whedon, in Bib. Sac., 19:251, and On the Will, 328. Per contra, see Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:180-190; Lawrence, Old School in N. E. Theol., in Bib. Sac., 20:317-328; Julius Müller, Doc. Sin, 1:40-72; Nitzsch, Christ. Doct., 216; Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 124-126.

II. The Essential Principle of Sin.

The definition of sin as lack of conformity to the divine law does not exclude, but rather necessitates, an inquiry into the characterizing motive or impelling power which explains its existence and constitutes its guilt. Only three views require extended examination. Of these the first two constitute the most common excuses for sin, although not propounded for this purpose by their authors: Sin is due (1) to the human body, or (2) to finite weakness. The third, which we regard as the Scriptural view, considers sin as (3) the supreme choice of self, or selfishness.

In the preceding section on the Definition of Sin, we showed that sin is a state, and a state of the will. We now ask: What is the nature of this state? and we expect to show that it is essentially a selfish state of the will.

1. Sin as Sensuousness.

This view regards sin as the necessary product of man's sensuous nature—a result of the soul's connection with a physical organism. This is the view of Schleiermacher and of Rothe. More recent writers, with John Fiske, regard moral evil as man's inheritance from a brute ancestry.

For statement of the view here opposed, see Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 1:361-364—“Sin is a prevention of the determining power of the spirit, caused by the independence (Selbständigkeit) of the sensuous functions.” The child lives at first a life of sense, in which the bodily appetites are supreme. The senses are the avenues of all temptation, the physical domineers over the spiritual, and the soul never shakes off the body. Sin is, therefore, a malarious exhalation from the low grounds of human nature, or, to use the words of Schleiermacher, “a positive opposition of the flesh to the spirit.” Pfleiderer, Prot. Theol. seit Kant, 113,—says that Schleiermacher here repeats Spinoza's “inability of the spirit to control the sensuous affections.” Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:230—“In the development of man out of naturality, the lower impulses have already won a power of self-assertion and resistance, before the reason could yet come to its valid position and authority. As this propensity of the self-will is grounded in the specific nature of man, it may be designated as inborn, hereditary, or originalsinfulness.”

Rothe's view of sin may be found in his Dogmatik, 1:300-302; notice the connection of Rothe's view of sin with his doctrine of continuous creation (see page 416 of this Compendium). Encyclopædia Britannica, 21:2—“Rothe was a thorough going evolutionist who regarded the natural man as the consummation of the development of physical nature, and regarded spirit as the personal attainment, with divine help, of those beings in whom the further creative process of moral development is carried on. This process of development necessarily takes an abnormal form and passes through the phase of sin. This abnormal condition necessitates a fresh creative act, that of salvation, which was however from the very first a part of the divine plan of development. Rothe, notwithstanding his evolutionary doctrine, believed in the supernatural birth of Christ.”

John Fiske, Destiny of Man, 103—“Original sin is neither more nor less than the brute inheritance which every man carries with him, and the process of evolution is an advance toward true salvation.” Thus man is a sphynx in whom the human has not yet escaped from the animal. So Bowne, Atonement, 69, declares that sin is “a relic of the animal not yet outgrown, a resultant of the mechanism of appetite and impulse and reflex action for which the proper inhibitions are not yet developed. Only slowly does it grow into a consciousness of itself as evil.... It would be hysteria to regard the common life of men as rooting in a conscious choice of unrighteousness.”

[pg 560]

In refutation of this view, it will be sufficient to urge the following considerations:

(a) It involves an assumption of the inherent evil of matter, at least so far as regards the substance of man's body. But this is either a form of dualism, and may be met with the objections already brought against that system, or it implies that God, in being the author of man's physical organism, is also the responsible originator of human sin.

This has been called the “caged-eagle theory” of man's existence; it holds that the body is a prison only, or, as Plato expressed it, “the tomb of the soul,” so that the soul can be pure only by escaping from the body. But matter is not eternal. God made it, and made it pure. The body was made to be the servant of the spirit. We must not throw the blame of sin upon the senses, but upon the spirit that used the senses so wickedly. To attribute sin to the body is to make God, the author of the body, to be also the author of sin,—which is the greatest of blasphemies. Men cannot “justly accuse Their Maker, or their making, or their fate” (Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:112). Sin is a contradiction within the spirit itself, and not simply between the spirit and the flesh. Sensuous activities are not themselves sinful—this is essential Manichæanism. Robert Burns was wrong when he laid the blame for his delinquencies upon “the passions wild and strong.” And Samuel Johnson was wrong when he said that “Every man is a rascal so soon as he is sick.” The normal soul has power to rise above both passion and sickness and to make them serve its moral development. On the development of the body, as the organ of sin, see Straffen's Hulsean Lectures on Sin, 33-50. The essential error of this view is its identification of the moral with the physical. If it were true, then Jesus, who came in human flesh, must needs be a sinner.

(b) In explaining sin as an inheritance from the brute, this theory ignores the fact that man, even though derived from a brute ancestry, is no longer brute, but man, with power to recognize and to realize moral ideals, and under no necessity to violate the law of his being.

See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-180, on The Fall and the Redemption of Man, in the Light of Evolution: “Evolution has been thought to be incompatible with any proper doctrine of a fall. It has been assumed by many that man's immoral course and conduct are simply survivals of his brute inheritance, inevitable remnants of his old animal propensities, yieldings of the weak will to fleshly appetites and passions. This is to deny that sin is truly sin, but it is also to deny that man is truly man.... Sin must be referred to freedom, or it is not sin. To explain it as the natural result of weak will overmastered by lower impulses is to make the animal nature, and not the will, the cause of transgression. And that is to say that man at the beginning is not man, but brute.” See also D. W. Simon, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1897:1-20—“The key to the strange and dark contrast between man and his animal ancestry is to be found in the fact of the Fall. Other species live normally. No remnant of the reptile hinders the bird. The bird is a true bird. Only man fails to live normally and is a true man only after ages of sin and misery.” Marlowe very properly makes his Faustus to be tempted by sensual baits only after he has sold himself to Satan for power.

To regard vanity, deceitfulness, malice, and revenge as inherited from brute ancestors is to deny man's original innocence and the creatorship of God. B. W. Lockhart: “The animal mind knows not God, is not subject to his law, neither indeed can be, just because it is animal, and as such is incapable of right or wrong.... If man were an animal and nothing more, he could not sin. It is by virtue of being something more, that he becomes capable of sin. Sin is the yielding of the known higher to the known lower. It is the soul's abdication of its being to the brute.... Hence the need of spiritual forces from the spiritual world of divine revelation, to heal and build and discipline the soul within itself, giving it the victory over the animal passions which constitute the body and over the kingdom of blind desire which constitutes the world. The final purpose of man is growth of the soul into liberty, truth, love, likeness to God. Education is the word that covers the movement, and probation is incident to education.” We add that reparation for past sin and renewing power from above must follow probation, in order to make education possible.

[pg 561]

Some recent writers hold to a real fall of man, and yet regard that fall as necessary to his moral development. Emma Marie Caillard, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893: 879—“Man passed out of a state of innocence—unconscious of his own imperfection—into a state of consciousness of it. The will became slave instead of master. The result would have been the complete stoppage of his evolution but for redemption, which restored his will and made the continuance of his evolution possible. Incarnation was the method of redemption. But even apart from the fall, this incarnation would have been necessary to reveal to man the goal of his evolution and so to secure his coöperation in it.” Lisle, Evolution of Spiritual Man, 39, and in Bib. Sac., July, 1892: 431-452—“Evolution by catastrophe in the natural world has a striking analogue in the spiritual world.... Sin is primarily not so much a fall from a higher to a lower, as a failure to rise from a lower to a higher; not so much eating of the forbidden tree, as failure to partake of the tree of life. The latter represented communion and correspondence with God, and had innocent man continued to reach out for this, he would not have fallen. Man's refusal to choose the higher preceded and conditioned his fall to the lower, and the essence of sin is therefore in this refusal, whatever may cause the will to make it.... Man chose the lower of his own free will. Then his centripetal force was gone. His development was swiftly and endlessly away from God. He reverted to his original type of savage animalism; and yet, as a self-conscious and free-acting being, he retained a sense of responsibility that filled him with fear and suffering.”

On the development-theory of sin, see W. W. McLane, in New Englander, 1891: 180-188; A. B. Bruce, Apologetics, 60-62; Lyman Abbott, Evolution of Christianity, 203-208; Le Conte, Evolution, 330, 365-375; Henry Drummond, Ascent of Man, 1-13, 329, 342; Salem Wilder, Life, its Nature, 266-273; Wm. Graham, Creed of Science, 38-44; Frank H. Foster, Evolution and the Evangelical System; Chandler, The Spirit of Man, 45-47.

(c) It rests upon an incomplete induction of facts, taking account of sin solely in its aspect of self-degradation, but ignoring the worst aspect of it as self-exaltation. Avarice, envy, pride, ambition, malice, cruelty, revenge, self-righteousness, unbelief, enmity to God, are none of them fleshly sins, and upon this principle are incapable of explanation.

Two historical examples may suffice to show the insufficiency of the sensuous theory of sin. Goethe was not a markedly sensual man; yet the spiritual vivisection which he practised on Friederike Brion, his perfidious misrepresentation of his relations with Kestner's wife in the “Sorrows of Werther,” and his flattery of Napoleon, when a patriot would have scorned the advances of the invader of his country, show Goethe to have been a very incarnation of heartlessness and selfishness. The patriot Boerne said of him: “Not once has he ever advanced a poor solitary word in his country's cause—he who from the lofty height he has attained might speak out what none other but himself would dare pronounce.” It has been said that Goethe's first commandment to genius was: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor and thy neighbor's wife.” His biographers count up sixteen women to whom he made love and who reciprocated his affection, though it is doubtful whether he contented himself with the doctrine of 16 to 1. As Sainte-Beuve said of Châteaubriand's attachments: “They are like the stars in the sky,—the longer you look, the more of them you discover.” Christiane Vulpius, after being for seventeen years his mistress, became at last his wife. But the wife was so slighted that she was driven to intemperance, and Goethe's only son inherited her passion and died of drink. Goethe was the great heathen of modern Christendom, deriding self-denial, extolling self-confidence, attention to the present, the seeking of enjoyment, and the submission of one's self to the decrees of fate. Hutton calls Goethe “a Narcissus in love with himself.” Like George Eliot's “Dinah,” in Adam Bede, Goethe's “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,” in Wilhelm Meister, are the purely artistic delineation of a character with which he had no inner sympathy. On Goethe, see Hutton, Essays, 2:1-79; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:490; A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 279-331; Principal Shairp, Culture and Religion, 16—“Goethe, the high priest of culture, loathes Luther, the preacher of righteousness”; S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 149-156.

Napoleon was not a markedly sensual man, but “his self-sufficiency surpassed the self-sufficiency of common men as the great Sahara desert surpasses an ordinary sand patch.” He wantonly divulged his amours to Josephine, with all the details of his ill-conduct, and when she revolted from them, he only replied: “I have the right to meet all your complaints with an eternal I.” When his wars had left almost no able-bodied [pg 562]men in France, he called for the boys, saying: “A boy can stop a bullet as well as a man,” and so the French nation lost two inches of stature. Before the battle of Leipzig, when there was prospect of unexampled slaughter, he exclaimed: “What are the lives of a million of men, to carry out the will of a man like me?” His most truthful epitaph was: “The little butchers of Ghent to Napoleon the Great” [butcher]. Heine represents Napoleon as saying to the world: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”Memoirs of Madame de Rémusat, 1:225—“At a fête given by the city of Paris to the Emperor, the repertory of inscriptions being exhausted, a brilliant device was resorted to. Over the throne which he was to occupy, were placed, in letters of gold, the following words from the Holy Scriptures: ‘I am the I am.’ And no one seemed to be scandalized.”Iago, in Shakespeare's Othello, is the greatest villain of all literature; but Coleridge, Works, 4:180, calls attention to his passionless character. His sin is, like that of Goethe and of Napoleon, sin not of the flesh but of the intellect and will.

(d) It leads to absurd conclusions,—as, for example, that asceticism, by weakening the power of sense, must weaken the power of sin; that man becomes less sinful as his senses fail with age; that disembodied spirits are necessarily holy; that death is the only Redeemer.

Asceticism only turns the current of sin in other directions. Spiritual pride and tyranny take the place of fleshly desires. The miser clutches his gold more closely as he nears death. Satan has no physical organism, yet he is the prince of evil. Not our own death, but Christ's death, saves us. But when Rousseau's Émile comes to die, he calmly declares: “I am delivered from the trammels of the body, and am myself without contradiction.” At the age of seventy-five Goethe wrote to Eckermann: “I have ever been esteemed one of fortune's favorites, nor can I complain of the course my life has taken. Yet truly there has been nothing but care and toil, and I may say that I have never had four weeks of genuine pleasure.” Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:743—“When the authoritative demand of Jesus Christ, to confess sin and beg remission through atoning blood, is made to David Hume, or David Strauss, or John Stuart Mill, none of whom were sensualists, it wakens intense mental hostility.”

(e) It interprets Scripture erroneously. In passages like Rom. 7:18—οὐκ οἰκεῖ ἐν ἐμοί, τοῦτ᾽ ἐστιν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου, ἀγαθόν—σάρξ, or flesh, signifies, not man's body, but man's whole being when destitute of the Spirit of God. The Scriptures distinctly recognize the seat of sin as being in the soul itself, not in its physical organism. God does not tempt man, nor has he made man's nature to tempt him (James 1:13, 14).

In the use of the term “flesh,” Scripture puts a stigma upon sin, and intimates that human nature without God is as corruptible and perishable as the body would be without the soul to inhabit it. The “carnal mind,” or “mind of the flesh” (Rom. 8:7), accordingly means, not the sensual mind, but the mind which is not under the control of the Holy Spirit, its true life. See Meyer, on 1 Cor. 1:26—σάρξ—“the purely human element in man, as opposed to the divine principle”; Pope, Theology, 2:65—σάρξ—“the whole being of man, body, soul, and spirit, separated from God and subjected to the creature”; Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 19—σάρξ—“human nature as living in and for itself, sundered from God and opposed to him.” The earliest and best statement of this view of the term σάρξ is that of Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:295-333, especially 321. See also Dickson, St. Paul's Use of the Terms Flesh and Spirit, 270-271—σάρξ—“human nature without the πνεῦμα.... man standing by himself, or left to himself, over against God.... the natural man, conceived as not having yet received grace, or as not yet wholly under its influence.”

James 1:14, 15—“desire, when it hath conceived, beareth sin”—innocent desire—for it comes in before the sin—innocent constitutional propensity, not yet of the nature of depravity, is only the occasion of sin. The love of freedom is a part of our nature; sin arises only when the will determines to indulge this impulse without regard to the restraints of the divine law. Luther, Preface to Ep. to Romans: “Thou must not understand ‘flesh’as though that only were ‘flesh’ which is connected with unchastity. St. Paul uses ‘flesh’ of the whole man, body and soul, reason and all his faculties included, because all that is in him longs and strives after the ‘flesh’.” Melanchthon: “Note that ‘flesh’signifies the entire nature of man, sense and reason, without the Holy Spirit.” Gould, [pg 563]Bib. Theol. N. T., 76—“The σάρξ of Paul corresponds to the κόσμος of John. Paul sees the divine economy; John the divine nature. That Paul did not hold sin to consist in the possession of a body appears from his doctrine of a bodily resurrection (1 Cor. 15:38-49). This resurrection of the body is an integral part of immortality.” On σάρξ, see Thayer, N. T. Lexicon, 571; Kaftan, Dogmatik, 319.

(f) Instead of explaining sin, this theory virtually denies its existence,—for if sin arises from the original constitution of our being, reason may recognize it as misfortune, but conscience cannot attribute to it guilt.

Sin which in its ultimate origin is a necessary thing is no longer sin. On the whole theory of the sensuous origin of sin, see Neander, Planting and Training, 386, 428; Ernesti, Ursprung der Sünde, 1:29-274; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:132-147; Tulloch, Doctrine of Sin, 144—“That which is an inherent and necessary power in the creation cannot be a contradiction of its highest law.” This theory confounds sin with the mere consciousness of sin. On Schleiermacher, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:341-349. On the sense-theory of sin in general, see John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:26-52; N. R. Wood, The Witness of Sin, 79-87.

2. Sin as Finiteness.

This view explains sin as a necessary result of the limitations of man's finite being. As an incident of imperfect development, the fruit of ignorance and impotence, sin is not absolutely but only relatively evil—an element in human education and a means of progress. This is the view of Leibnitz and of Spinoza. Modern writers, as Schurman and Royce, have maintained that moral evil is the necessary background and condition of moral good.

The theory of Leibnitz may be found in his Théodicée, part 1, sections 20 and 31; that of Spinoza in his Ethics, part 4, proposition 20. Upon this view sin is the blundering of inexperience, the thoughtlessness that takes evil for good, the ignorance that puts its fingers into the fire, the stumbling without which one cannot learn to walk. It is a fruit which is sour and bitter simply because it is immature. It is a means of discipline and training for something better,—it is holiness in the germ, good in the making—“Erhebung des Menschen zur freien Vernunft.” The Fall was a fall up, and not down.

John Fiske, in addition to his sense-theory of sin already mentioned, seems to hold this theory also. In his Mystery of Evil, he says: “Its impress upon the human soul is the indispensable background against which shall be set hereafter the eternal joys of heaven”; in other words, sin is necessary to holiness, as darkness is the indispensable contrast and background to light; without black, we should never be able to know white. Schurman, Belief in God, 251 sq.—“The possibility of sin is the correlative of the free initiative God has vacated on man's behalf.... The essence of sin is the enthronement of self.... Yet, without such self-absorption, there could be no sense of union with God. For consciousness is possible only through opposition. To know A, we must know it through not-A. Alienation from God is the necessary condition of communion with God. And this is the meaning of the Scripture that ‘where sin abounded, grace shall much more abound.’... Modern culture protests against the Puritan enthronement of goodness above truth.... For the decalogue it would substitute the wider new commandment of Goethe: ‘Live resolutely in the Whole, in the Good, in the Beautiful.’ The highest religion can be content with nothing short of the synthesis demanded by Goethe.... God is the universal life in which individual activities are included as movements of a single organism.”

Royce, World and Individual, 2:364-384—“Evil is a discord necessary to perfect harmony. In itself it is evil, but in relation to the whole it has value by showing us its own finiteness and imperfection. It is a sorrow to God as much as to us; indeed, all our sorrow is his sorrow. The evil serves the good only by being overcome, thwarted, overruled. Every evil deed must somewhere and at some time be atoned for, by some other than the agent, if not by the agent himself.... All finite life is a struggle with evil. Yet from the final point of view the Whole is good. The temporal order contains at no moment anything that can satisfy. Yet the eternal order is perfect. We have all sinned and come short of the glory of God. Yet in just our life, viewed in its [pg 564]entirety, the glory of God is completely manifest. These hard sayings are the deepest expressions of the essence of true religion. They are also the most inevitable outcome of philosophy.... Were there no longing in time, there would be no peace in eternity. The prayer that God's will may be done on earth as it is in heaven is identical with what philosophy regards as simple fact.”

We object to this theory that

(a) It rests upon a pantheistic basis, as the sense-theory rests upon dualism. The moral is confounded with the physical; might is identified with right. Since sin is a necessary incident of finiteness, and creatures can never be infinite, it follows that sin must be everlasting, not only in the universe, but in each individual soul.

Goethe, Carlyle, and Emerson are representatives of this view in literature. Goethe spoke of the “idleness of wishing to jump off from one's own shadow.” He was a disciple of Spinoza, who believed in one substance with contradictory attributes of thought and extension. Goethe took the pantheistic view of God with the personal view of man. He ignored the fact of sin. Hutton calls him “the wisest man the world has seen who was without humility and faith, and who lacked the wisdom of a child.”Speaking of Goethe's Faust, Hutton says: “The great drama is radically false in its fundamental philosophy. Its primary notion is that even a spirit of pure evil is an exceedingly useful being, because he stirs into activity those whom he leads into sin, and so prevents them from rusting away in pure indolence. There are other and better means of stimulating the positive affections of men than by tempting them to sin.” On Goethe, see Hutton, Essays, 2:1-79; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:490; A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 279-331.

Carlyle was a Scotch Presbyterian minus Christianity. At the age of twenty-five, he rejected miraculous and historical religion, and thenceforth had no God but natural Law. His worship of objective truth became a worship of subjective sincerity, and his worship of personal will became a worship of impersonal force. He preached truth, service, sacrifice, but all in a mandatory and pessimistic way. He saw in England and Wales “twenty-nine millions—mostly fools.” He had no love, no remedy, no hope. In our civil war, he was upon the side of the slaveholder. He claimed that his philosophy made right to be might, but in practice he made might to be right. Confounding all moral distinctions, as he did in his later writings, he was fit to wear the title which he invented for another: “President of the Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation Society.” Froude calls him “a Calvinist without the theology”—a believer in predestination without grace. On Carlyle, see S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 131-178.

Emerson also is the worshiper of successful force. His pantheism is most manifest in his poems “Cupido” and “Brahma,” and in his Essays on “Spirit” and on “The Over-soul.”Cupido: “The solid, solid universe Is pervious to Love; With bandaged eyes he never errs, Around, below, above. His blinding light He flingeth white On God's and Satan's brood, And reconciles by mystic wiles The evil and the good.” Brahma: “If the red slayer thinks he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame or fame. They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings. The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven; But thou, meek lover of the good, Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.”

Emerson taught that man's imperfection is not sin, and that the cure for it lies in education. “He lets God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a Deity in the concrete, nor a superhuman Person, but rather the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendental cult.” His view of Jesus is found in his Essays, 2:263—“Jesus would absorb the race; but Tom Paine, or the coarsest blasphemer, helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power.” In his Divinity School Address, he banished the person of Jesus from genuine religion. He thought “one could not be a man if he must subordinate his nature to Christ's nature.” He failed to see that Jesus not only absorbs but transforms, and that we grow only by the impact of nobler souls than our own. Emerson's essay style is devoid of clear and precise theological statement, and in this vagueness lies its harmfulness. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, xii—“Emerson's pantheism [pg 565]is not hardened into a consistent creed, for to the end he clung to the belief in personal immortality, and he pronounced the acceptance of this belief ‘the test of mental sanity.’ ” On Emerson, see S. L. Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 97-123.

We may call this theory the “green-apple theory” of sin. Sin is a green apple, which needs only time and sunshine and growth to bring it to ripeness and beauty and usefulness. But we answer that sin is not a green apple, but an apple with a worm at its heart. The evil of it can never be cured by growth. The fall can never be anything else than downward. Upon this theory, sin is an inseparable factor in the nature of finite things. The highest archangel cannot be without it. Man in moral character is “the asymptote of God,”—forever learning, but never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. The throne of iniquity is set up forever in the universe. If this theory were true, Jesus, in virtue of his partaking of our finite humanity, must needs be a sinner. His perfect development, without sin, shows that sin was not a necessity of finite progress. Matthews, in Christianity and Evolution, 137—“It was not necessary for the prodigal to go into the far country and become a swineherd, in order to find out the father's love.” E. H. Johnson, Syst. Theol., 141—“It is not the privilege of the Infinite alone to be good.” Dorner, System, 1:119, speaks of the moral career which this theory describes, as “a progressus in infinitum, where the constant approach to the goal has as its reverse side an eternal separation from the goal.” In his “Transformation,”Hawthorne hints, though rather hesitatingly, that without sin the higher humanity of man could not be taken up at all, and that sin may be essential to the first conscious awakening of moral freedom and to the possibility of progress; see Hutton, Essays, 2:381.

(b) So far as this theory regards moral evil as a necessary presupposition and condition of moral good, it commits the serious error of confounding the possible with the actual. What is necessary to goodness is not the actuality of evil, but only the possibility of evil.

Since we cannot know white except in contrast to black, it is claimed that without knowing actual evil we could never know actual good. George A. Gordon, New Epoch for Faith, 49, 50, has well shown that in that case the elimination of evil would imply the elimination of good. Sin would need to have place in God's being in order that he might be holy, and thus he would be divinity and devil in one person. Jesus too must needs be evil as well as good. Not only would it be true, as intimated above, that Christ, since his humanity is finite, must be a sinner, but also that we ourselves, who must always be finite, must always be sinners. We grant that holiness, in either God or man, must involve the abstract possibility of its opposite. But we maintain that, as this possibility in God is only abstract and never realized, so in man it should be only abstract and never realized. Man has power to reject this possible evil. His sin is a turning of the merely possible evil, by the decision of his will, into actual evil. Robert Browning is not free from the error above mentioned; see S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 207-210; A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 433-444.

This theory of sin dates back to Hegel. To him there is no real sin and cannot be. Imperfection there is and must always be, because the relative can never become the absolute. Redemption is only an evolutionary process, indefinitely prolonged, and evil must remain an eternal condition. All finite thought is an element in the infinite thought, and all finite will an element in the infinite will. As good cannot exist without evil as its antithesis, infinite righteousness should have for its counterpart an infinite wickedness. Hegel's guiding principle was that “What is rational is real, and what is real is rational.” Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, remarks that this principle ignores “the riddle of the painful earth.” The disciples of Hegel thought that nothing remained for history to accomplish, now that the World-spirit had come to know himself in Hegel's philosophy.

Biedermann's Dogmatik is based upon the Hegelian philosophy. At page 649 we read: “Evil is the finiteness of the world-being which clings to all individual existences by virtue of their belonging to the immanent world-order. Evil is therefore a necessary element in the divinely willed being of the world.” Bradley follows Hegel in making sin to be no reality, but only a relative appearance. There is no free will, and no antagonism between the will of God and the will of man. Darkness is an evil, a destroying agent. But it is not a positive force, as light is. It cannot be attacked and overcome as an entity. Bring light, and darkness disappears. So evil is not a positive force, as [pg 566]good is. Bring good, and evil disappears. Herbert Spencer's Evolutionary Ethics fits in with such a system, for he says: “A perfect man in an imperfect race is impossible.”On Hegel's view of sin, a view which denies holiness even to Christ, see J. Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:390-407; Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of Christ, B. 3:131-162; Stearns, Evidence of Christ. Experience, 92-96; John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 2:1-25; Forrest, Authority of Christ, 13-16.

(c) It is inconsistent with known facts,—as for example, the following: Not all sins are negative sins of ignorance and infirmity; there are acts of positive malignity, conscious transgressions, wilful and presumptuous choices of evil. Increased knowledge of the nature of sin does not of itself give strength to overcome it; but, on the contrary, repeated acts of conscious transgression harden the heart in evil. Men of greatest mental powers are not of necessity the greatest saints, nor are the greatest sinners men of least strength of will and understanding.

Not the weak but the strong are the greatest sinners. We do not pity Nero and Cæsar Borgia for their weakness; we abhor them for their crimes. Judas was an able man, a practical administrator; and Satan is a being of great natural endowments. Sin is not simply a weakness,—it is also a power. A pantheistic philosophy should worship Satan most of all; for he is the truest type of godless intellect and selfish strength.

John 12:6—Judas, “having the bag, made away with what was put therein.” Judas was set by Christ to do the work he was best fitted for, and that was best fitted to interest and save him. Some men may be put into the ministry, because that is the only work that will prevent their destruction. Pastors should find for their members work suited to the aptitudes of each. Judas was tempted, or tried, as all men are, according to his native propensity. While his motive in objecting to Mary's generosity was really avarice, his pretext was charity, or regard for the poor. Each one of the apostles had his own peculiar gift, and was chosen because of it. The sin of Judas was not a sin of weakness, or ignorance, or infirmity. It was a sin of disappointed ambition, of malice, of hatred for Christ's self-sacrificing purity.

E. H. Johnson: “Sins are not men's limitations, but the active expressions of a perverse nature.” M. F. H. Round, Sec. of Nat. Prison Association, on examining the record of a thousand criminals, found that one quarter of them had an exceptionally fine basis of physical life and strength, while the other three quarters fell only a little below the average of ordinary humanity; see The Forum, Sept. 1893. The theory that sin is only holiness in the making reminds us of the view that the most objectionable refuse can by ingenious processes be converted into butter or at least into oleomargarine. It is not true that “tout comprendre est tout pardonner.” Such doctrine obliterates all moral distinctions. Gilbert, Bab Ballads, “My Dream”: “I dreamt that somehow I had come To dwell in Topsy-Turvydom, Where vice is virtue, virtue vice; Where nice is nasty, nasty nice; Where right is wrong, and wrong is right; Where white is black and black is white.”

(d) like the sense-theory of sin, it contradicts both conscience and Scripture by denying human responsibility and by transferring the blame of sin from the creature to the Creator. This is to explain sin, again, by denying its existence.

Œdipus said that his evil deeds had been suffered, not done. Agamemnon, in the Iliad, says the blame belongs, not to himself, but to Jupiter and to fate. So sin blames everything and everybody but self. Gen. 3:12—“The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” But self-vindicating is God-accusing. Made imperfect at the start, man cannot help his sin. By the very fact of his creation he is cut loose from God. That cannot be sin which is a necessary outgrowth of human nature, which is not our act but our fate. To all this, the one answer is found in Conscience. Conscience testifies that sin is not “das Gewordene,” but “das Gemachte,” and that it was his own act when man by transgression fell. The Scriptures refer man's sin, not to the limitations of his being, but to the free will of man himself. On the theory here combated, see Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:271-295; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:123-131; N. R. Wood, The Witness of Sin, 20-42.

[pg 567]

3. Sin as Selfishness.

We hold the essential principle of sin to be selfishness. By selfishness we mean not simply the exaggerated self-love which constitutes the antithesis of benevolence, but that choice of self as the supreme end which constitutes the antithesis of supreme love to God. That selfishness is the essence of sin may be shown as follows:

A. Love to God is the essence of all virtue. The opposite to this, the choice of self as the supreme end, must therefore be the essence of sin.

We are to remember, however, that the love to God in which virtue consists is love for that which is most characteristic and fundamental in God, namely, his holiness. It is not to be confounded with supreme regard for God's interests or for the good of being in general. Not mere benevolence, but love for God as holy, is the principle and source of holiness in man. Since the love of God required by the law is of this sort, it not only does not imply that love, in the sense of benevolence, is the essence of holiness in God,—it implies rather that holiness, or self-loving and self-affirming purity, is fundamental in the divine nature. From this self-loving and self-affirming purity, love properly so-called, or the self-communicating attribute, is to be carefully distinguished (see vol. 1, pages 271-275).

Bossuet, describing heathendom, says: “Every thing was God but God himself.” Sin goes further than this, and says: “I am myself all things,”—not simply as Louis XVI: “I am the state,” but: “I am the world, the universe, God.” Heinrich Heine: “I am no child. I do not want a heavenly Father any more.” A French critic of Fichte's philosophy said that it was a flight toward the infinite which began with the ego, and never got beyond it. Kidd, Social Evolution, 75—“In Calderon's tragic story, the unknown figure, which throughout life is everywhere in conflict with the individual whom it haunts, lifts the mask at last to disclose to the opponent his own features.”Caird, Evolution of Religion, 1:78—“Every self, once awakened, is naturally a despot, and ‘bears, like the Turk, no brother near the throne.’ ” Every one has, as Hobbes said, “an infinite desire for gain or glory,” and can be satisfied with nothing but a whole universe for himself. Selfishness—“homo homini lupus.” James Martineau: “We ask Comte to lift the veil from the holy of holies and show us the all-perfect object of worship,—he produces a looking-glass and shows us ourselves.” Comte's religion is a “synthetic idealization of our existence”—a worship, not of God, but of humanity; and “the festival of humanity” among Positivists—Walt Whitman's “I celebrate myself.” On Comte, see Martineau, Types, 1:499. The most thorough discussion of the essential principle of sin is that of Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:147-182. He defines sin as “a turning away from the love of God to self-seeking.”

N. W. Taylor holds that self-love is the primary cause of all moral action; that selfishness is a different thing, and consists not in making our own happiness our ultimate end, which we must do if we are moral beings, but in love of the world, and in preferring the world to God as our portion or chief good (see N. W. Taylor, Moral Govt., 1:24-26; 2:20-24, and Rev. Theol., 134-162; Tyler, Letters on the New Haven Theology, 72). We claim, on the contrary, that to make our own happiness our ultimate aim is itself sin, and the essence of sin. As God makes his holiness the central thing, so we are to live for that, loving self only in God and for God's sake. This love for God as holy is the essence of virtue. The opposite to this, or supreme love for self, is sin. As Richard Lovelace writes: “I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more,” so Christian friends can say: “Our loves in higher love endure.” The sinner raises some lower object of instinct or desire to supremacy, regardless of God and his law, and this he does for no other reason than to gratify self. On the distinction between mere benevolence and the love required by God's law, see Hovey, God With Us, 187-200; Hopkins, Works, 1:235; F. W. Robertson, Sermon I. Emerson: “Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.” See Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 327-370, on duties toward self as a moral end.

Love to God is the essence of all virtue. We are to love God with all the heart. But what God? Surely, not the false God, the God who is indifferent to moral distinctions [pg 568]and who treats the wicked as he treats the righteous. The love which the law requires is love for the true God, the God of holiness. Such love aims at the reproduction of God's holiness in ourselves and in others. We are to love ourselves only for God's sake and for the sake of realizing the divine idea in us. We are to love others only for God's sake and for the sake of realizing the divine idea in them. In our moral progress we, first, love self for our own sake; secondly, God for our own sake; thirdly, God for his own sake; fourthly, ourselves for God's sake. The first is our state by nature; the second requires prevenient grace; the third, regenerating grace; and the fourth, sanctifying grace. Only the last is reasonable self-love. Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 27—“Reasonable self-love is a virtue wholly incompatible with what is commonly called selfishness. Society suffers, not from having too much of it, but from having too little.” Altruism is not the whole of duty. Self-realization is equally important. But to care only for self, like Goethe, is to miss the true self-realization, which love to God ensures.

Love desires only the best for its object, and the best is God. The golden rule bids us give, not what others desire, but what they need. Rom. 15:2—“Let each one of us please his neighbor for that which is good, unto edifying.” Deutsche Liebe: “Nicht Liebe die fragt: Willst du mein sein? Sondern Liebe die sagt: Ich muss dein sein.” Sin consists in taking for one's self alone and apart from God that in one's self and in others to which one has a right only in God and for God's sake. Mrs. Humphrey Ward, David Grieve, 403—“How dare a man pluck from the Lord's hand, for his wild and reckless use, a soul and body for which he died? How dare he, the Lord's bondsman, steal his joy, carrying it off by himself into the wilderness, like an animal his prey, instead of asking it at the hands and under the blessing of the Master? How dare he, a member of the Lord's body, forget the whole, in his greed for the one—eternity in his thirst for the present?”Wordsworth, Prelude, 546—“Delight how pitiable, Unless this love by a still higher love Be hallowed, love that breathes not without awe; Love that adores, but on the knees of prayer. By heaven inspired.... This spiritual love acts not nor can exist Without imagination, which in truth Is but another name for absolute power, And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, And reason in her most exalted mood.”

Aristotle says that the wicked have no right to love themselves, but that the good may. So, from a Christian point of view, we may say: No unregenerate man can properly respect himself. Self-respect belongs only to the man who lives in God and who has God's image restored to him thereby. True self-love is not love for the happinessof the self, but for the worth of the self in God's sight, and this self-love is the condition of all genuine and worthy love for others. But true self-love is in turn conditioned by love to God as holy, and it seeks primarily, not the happiness, but the holiness, of others. Asquith, Christian Conception of Holiness, 98, 145, 154, 207—“Benevolence or love is not the same with altruism. Altruism is instinctive, and has not its origin in the moral reason. It has utility, and it may even furnish material for reflection on the part of the moral reason. But so far as it is not deliberate, not indulged for the sake of the end, but only for the gratification of the instinct of the moment, it is not moral.... Holiness is dedication to God, the Good, not as an external Ruler, but as an internal controller and transformer of character.... God is a being whose every thought is love, of whose thoughts not one is for himself, save so far as himself is not himself, that is, so far as there is a distinction of persons in the Godhead. Creation is one great unselfish thought—the bringing into being of creatures who can know the happiness that God knows.... To the spiritual man holiness and love are one. Salvation is deliverance from selfishness.” Kaftan, Dogmatik, 319, 320, regards the essence of sin as consisting, not in selfishness, but in turning away from God and so from the love which would cause man to grow in knowledge and likeness to God. But this seems to be nothing else than choosing self instead of God as our object and end.

B. All the different forms of sin can be shown to have their root in selfishness, while selfishness itself, considered as the choice of self as a supreme end, cannot be resolved into any simpler elements.

(a) Selfishness may reveal itself in the elevation to supreme dominion of any one of man's natural appetites, desires, or affections. Sensuality is selfishness in the form of inordinate appetite. Selfish desire takes the forms respectively of avarice, ambition, vanity, pride, according as it is set upon property, power, esteem, independence. Selfish affection is falsehood or [pg 569] malice, according as it hopes to make others its voluntary servants, or regards them as standing in its way; it is unbelief or enmity to God, according as it simply turns away from the truth and love of God, or conceives of God's holiness as positively resisting and punishing it.

Augustine and Aquinas held the essence of sin to be pride; Luther and Calvin regarded its essence to be unbelief. Kreibig (Versöhnungslehre) regards it as “world-love”; still others consider it as enmity to God. In opposing the view that sensuality is the essence of sin, Julius Müller says: “Wherever we find sensuality, there we find selfishness, but we do not find that, where there is selfishness, there is always sensuality. Selfishness may embody itself in fleshly lust or inordinate desire for the creature, but this last cannot bring forth spiritual sins which have no element of sensuality in them.”

Covetousness or avarice makes, not sensual gratification itself, but the things that may minister thereto, the object of pursuit, and in this last chase often loses sight of its original aim. Ambition is selfish love of power; vanity is selfish love of esteem. Pride is but the self-complacency, self-sufficiency, and self-isolation of a selfish spirit that desires nothing so much as unrestrained independence. Falsehood originates in selfishness, first as self-deception, and then, since man by sin isolates himself and yet in a thousand ways needs the fellowship of his brethren, as deception of others. Malice, the perversion of natural resentment (together with hatred and revenge), is the reaction of selfishness against those who stand, or are imagined to stand, in its way. Unbelief and enmity to God are effects of sin, rather than its essence; selfishness leads us first to doubt, and then to hate, the Lawgiver and Judge. Tacitus: “Humani generis proprium est odisse quem læseris.” In sin, self-affirmation and self-surrender are not coördinate elements, as Dorner holds, but the former conditions the latter.

As love to God is love to God's holiness, so love to man is love for holiness in man and desire to impart it. In other words, true love for man is the longing to make man like God. Over against this normal desire which should fill the heart and inspire the life, there stands a hierarchy of lower desires which may be utilized and sanctified by the higher love, but which may assert their independence and may thus be the occasions of sin. Physical gratification, money, esteem, power, knowledge, family, virtue, are proper objects of regard, so long as these are sought for God's sake and within the limitations of his will. Sin consists in turning our backs on God and in seeking any one of these objects for its own sake; or, which is the same thing, for our own sake. Appetite gratified without regard to God's law is lust; the love of money becomes avarice; the desire for esteem becomes vanity; the longing for power becomes ambition; the love for knowledge becomes a selfish thirst for intellectual satisfaction; parental affection degenerates into indulgence and nepotism; the seeking of virtue becomes self-righteousness and self-sufficiency. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 323—“Jesus grants that even the heathen and sinners love those who love them. But family love becomes family pride; patriotism comes to stand for country right or wrong; happiness in one's calling leads to class distinctions.”

Dante, in his Divine Comedy, divides the Inferno into three great sections: those in which are punished, respectively, incontinence, bestiality, and malice. Incontinence—sin of the heart, the emotions, the affections. Lower down is found bestiality—sin of the head, the thoughts, the mind, as infidelity and heresy. Lowest of all is malice—sin of the will, deliberate rebellion, fraud and treachery. So we are taught that the heart carries the intellect with it, and that the sin of unbelief gradually deepens into the intensity of malice. See A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 133—“Dante teaches us that sin is the self-perversion of the will. If there is any thought fundamental to his system, it is the thought of freedom. Man is not a waif swept irresistibly downward on the current; he is a being endowed with power to resist, and therefore guilty if he yields. Sin is not misfortune, or disease, or natural necessity; it is wilfulness, and crime, and self-destruction. The Divine Comedy is, beyond all other poems, the poem of conscience; and this could not be, if it did not recognize man as a free agent, the responsible cause of his own evil acts and his own evil state.” See also Harris, in Jour. Spec. Philos., 21:350-451; Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life, 69-86.

In Greek tragedy, says Prof. Wm. Arnold Stevens, the one sin which the gods hated and would not pardon was ὕβρις—obstinate self-assertion of mind or will, absence of reverence and humility—of which we have an illustration in Ajax. George MacDonald: “A man may be possessed of himself, as of a devil.” Shakespeare depicts this insolence of infatuation in Shylock, Macbeth, and Richard III. Troilus and Cressida, [pg 570]4:4—“Something may be done that we will not; And sometimes we are devils to ourselves, When we will tempt the frailty of our powers, Presuming on their changeful potency.” Yet Robert G. Ingersoll said that Shakespeare holds crime to be the mistake of ignorance! N. P. Willis, Parrhasius: “How like a mounting devil in the heart Rules unrestrained ambition!”

(b) Even in the nobler forms of unregenerate life, the principle of selfishness is to be regarded as manifesting itself in the preference of lower ends to that of God's proposing. Others are loved with idolatrous affection because these others are regarded as a part of self. That the selfish element is present even here, is evident upon considering that such affection does not seek the highest interest of its object, that it often ceases when unreturned, and that it sacrifices to its own gratification the claims of God and his law.

Even in the mother's idolatry of her child, the explorer's devotion to science, the sailor's risk of his life to save another's, the gratification sought may be that of a lower instinct or desire, and any substitution of a lower for the highest object is non-conformity to law, and therefore sin. H. B. Smith, System Theology, 277—“Some lower affection is supreme.” And the underlying motive which leads to this substitution is self-gratification. There is no such thing as disinterested sin, for “every one that loveth is begotten of God” (1 John 4:7). Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ: Much of the heroism of battle is simply “resolution in the actors to have their way, contempt for ease, animal courage which we share with the bulldog and the weasel, intense assertion of individual will and force, avowal of the rough-handed man that he has that in him which enables him to defy pain and danger and death.”

Mozley on Blanco White, in Essays, 2:143: Truth may be sought in order to absorb truth in self, not for the sake of absorbing self in truth. So Blanco White, in spite of the pain of separating from old views and friends, lived for the selfish pleasure of new discovery, till all his early faith vanished, and even immortality seemed a dream. He falsely thought that the pain he suffered in giving up old beliefs was evidence of self-sacrifice with which God must be pleased, whereas it was the inevitable pain which attends the victory of selfishness. Robert Browning, Paracelsus, 81—“I still must hoard, and heap, and class all truths With one ulterior purpose: I must know! Would God translate me to his throne, believe That I should only listen to his words To further my own ends.” F. W. Robertson on Genesis, 57—“He who sacrifices his sense of right, his conscience, for another, sacrifices the God within him; he is not sacrificing self.... He who prefers his dearest friend or his beloved child to the call of duty, will soon show that he prefers himself to his dearest friend, and would not sacrifice himself for his child.” Ib., 91—“In those who love little, love [for finite beings] is a primary affection,—a secondary, in those who love much.... The only true affection is that which is subordinate to a higher.” True love is love for the soul and its highest, its eternal, interests; love that seeks to make it holy; love for the sake of God and for the accomplishment of God's idea in his creation.

Although we cannot, with Augustine, call the virtues of the heathen “splendid vices”—for they were relatively good and useful,—they still, except in possible instances where God's Spirit wrought upon the heart, were illustrations of a morality divorced from love to God, were lacking in the most essential element demanded by the law, were therefore infected with sin. Since the law judges all action by the heart from which it springs, no action of the unregenerate can be other than sin. The ebony-tree is white in its outer circles of woody fibre; at heart it is black as ink. There is no unselfishness in the unregenerate heart, apart from the divine enlightenment and energizing. Self-sacrifice for the sake of self is selfishness after all. Professional burglars and bank-robbers are often carefully abstemious in their personal habits, and they deny themselves the use of liquor and tobacco while in the active practice of their trade. Herron, The Larger Christ, 47—“It is as truly immoral to seek truth out of mere love of knowing it, as it is to seek money out of love to gain. Truth sought for truth's sake is an intellectual vice; it is spiritual covetousness. It is an idolatry, setting up the worship of abstractions and generalities in place of the living God.”

(c) It must be remembered, however, that side by side with the selfish will, and striving against it, is the power of Christ, the immanent God, [pg 571] imparting aspirations and impulses foreign to unregenerate humanity, and preparing the way for the soul's surrender to truth and righteousness.

Rom. 8:7—“the mind of the flesh is enmity against God”; Acts 17:27, 28—“he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being”; Rom. 2:4—“the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance”; John 1:9—“the light which lighteth every man.” Many generous traits and acts of self-sacrifice in the unregenerate must be ascribed to the prevenient grace of God and to the enlightening influence of the Spirit of Christ. A mother, during the Russian famine, gave to her children all the little supply of food that came to her in the distribution, and died that they might live. In her decision to sacrifice herself for her offspring she may have found her probation and may have surrendered herself to God. The impulse to make the sacrifice may have been due to the Holy Spirit, and her yielding may have been essentially an act of saving faith. In Mark 10:21, 22—“And Jesus looking upon him loved him ... he went away sorrowful”—our Lord apparently loved the young man, not only for his gifts, his efforts, and his possibilities, but also for the manifest working in him of the divine Spirit, even while in his natural character he was without God and without love, self-ignorant, self-righteous, and self-seeking.

Paul, in like manner, before his conversion, loved and desired righteousness, provided only that this righteousness might be the product and achievement of his own will and might reflect honor on himself; in short, provided only that self might still be uppermost. To be dependent for righteousness upon another was abhorrent to him. And yet this very impulse toward righteousness may have been due to the divine Spirit within him. On Paul's experience before conversion, see E. D. Burton, Bib. World, Jan. 1893. Peter objected to the washing of his feet by Jesus (John 13:8), not because it humbled the Master too much in the eyes of the disciple, but because it humbled the disciple too much in his own eyes. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:218—“Sin is the violation of the God-willed moral order of the world by the self-will of the individual.”Tophel on the Holy Spirit, 17—“You would deeply wound him [the average sinner] if you told him that his heart, full of sin, is an object of horror to the holiness of God.”The impulse to repentance, as well as the impulse to righteousness, is the product, not of man's own nature, but of the Christ within him who is moving him to seek salvation.

Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browning after she had accepted his proposal of marriage: “Henceforth I am yours for everything but to do you harm.” George Harris, Moral Evolution, 138—“Love seeks the true good of the person loved. It will not minister in an unworthy way to afford a temporary pleasure. It will not approve or tolerate that which is wrong. It will not encourage the coarse, base passions of the one loved. It condemns impurity, falsehood, selfishness. A parent does not really love his child if he tolerates the self-indulgence, and does not correct or punish the faults, of the child.” Hutton: “You might as well say that it is a fit subject for art to paint the morbid exstasy of cannibals over their horrid feasts, as to paint lust without love. If you are to delineate man at all, you must delineate him with his human nature, and therefore you can never omit from any worthy picture that conscience which is its crown.”

Tennyson, in In Memoriam, speaks of “Fantastic beauty such as lurks In some wild poet when he works Without a conscience or an aim.” Such work may be due to mere human nature. But the lofty work of true creative genius, and the still loftier acts of men still unregenerate but conscientious and self-sacrificing, must be explained by the working in them of the immanent Christ, the life and light of men. James Martineau, Study, 1:20—“Conscience may act as human, before it is discovered to be divine.”See J. D. Stoops, in Jour. Philos., Psych., and Sci. Meth., 2:512—“If there is a divine life over and above the separate streams of individual lives, the welling up of this larger life in the experience of the individual is precisely the point of contact between the individual person and God.” Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:122—“It is this divine element in man, this relationship to God, which gives to sin its darkest and direst complexion. For such a life is the turning of a light brighter than the sun into darkness, the squandering or bartering away of a boundless wealth, the suicidal abasement, to the things that perish, of a nature destined by its very constitution and structure for participation in the very being and blessedness of God.”

On the various forms of sin as manifestations of selfishness, see Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:147-182; Jonathan Edwards, Works, 2:268, 269; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:5, 6; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 243-262; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers, 11-91; Hopkins, Moral Science, 86-156. On the Roman Catholic “Seven Deadly Sins” (Pride, Envy, [pg 572]Anger, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, Lust), see Wetzer und Welte, Kirchenlexikon, and Orby Shipley, Theory about Sin, preface, xvi-xviii.

C. This view accords best with Scripture.

(a) The law requires love to God as its all-embracing requirement. (b) The holiness of Christ consisted in this, that he sought not his own will or glory, but made God his supreme end. (c) The Christian is one who has ceased to live for self. (d) The tempter's promise is a promise of selfish independence. (e) The prodigal separates himself from his father, and seeks his own interest and pleasure. (f) The “man of sin” illustrates the nature of sin, in “opposing and exalting himself against all that is called God.”

(a) Mat. 22:37-39—the command of love to God and man; Rom. 13:8-10—“love therefore is the fulfilment of the law”; Gal. 5:14—“the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”; James 2:8—“the royal law.” (b) John 5:30—“my judgment is righteous; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me”; 7:18—“He that speaketh from himself seeketh his own glory: but he that seeketh the glory of him that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him”; Rom. 15:3—“Christ also pleased not himself.” (c) Rom. 14:7—“none of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself”; 2 Cor. 5:15—“he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again”; Gal. 2:20—“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me.”Contrast 2 Tim. 3:2—“lovers of self.” (d) Gen. 3:5—“ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.” (e) Luke 15:12, 13—“give me the portion of thy substance ... gathered all together and took his journey into a far country.”(f) 2 Thess. 2:3, 4—“the man of sin ... the son of perdition, he that opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God.”

Contrast “the man of sin” who “exalteth himself” (2 Thess. 2:3, 4) with the Son of God who “emptied himself” (Phil. 2:7). On “the man of sin”, see Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Bap. Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328-360. Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 24—“We are conscious of sin, because we know that our true self is God, from whom we are severed. No ethics is possible unless we recognize an ideal for all human effort in the presence of the eternal Self which any account of conduct presupposes.” John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:53-73—“Here, as in all organic life, the individual member or organ has no independent or exclusive life, and the attempt to attain to it is fatal to itself.” Milton describes man as “affecting Godhead, and so losing all.” Of the sinner, we may say with Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 5:4—“He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.... There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger.” No one of us, then, can sign too early “the declaration of dependence.” Both Old School and New School theologians agree that sin is selfishness; see Bellamy, Hopkins, Emmons, the younger Edwards, Finney, Taylor. See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 287-292.

Sin, therefore, is not merely a negative thing, or an absence of love to God. It is a fundamental and positive choice or preference of self instead of God, as the object of affection and the supreme end of being. Instead of making God the centre of his life, surrendering himself unconditionally to God and possessing himself only in subordination to God's will, the sinner makes self the centre of his life, sets himself directly against God, and constitutes his own interest the supreme motive and his own will the supreme rule.

We may follow Dr. E. G. Robinson in saying that, while sin as a state is unlikeness to God, as a principle is opposition to God, and as an act is transgression of God's law, the essence of it always and everywhere is selfishness. It is therefore not something external, or the result of compulsion from without; it is a depravity of the affections and a perversion of the will, which constitutes man's inmost character.

See Harris, in Bib. Sac., 18:148—“Sin is essentially egoism or selfism, putting self in God's place. It has four principal characteristics or manifestations: (1) self-sufficiency, instead of faith; (2) self-will, instead of submission; (3) self-seeking, instead of [pg 573]benevolence; (4) self-righteousness, instead of humility and reverence.” All sin is either explicit or implicit “enmity against God” (Rom. 8:7). All true confessions are like David's (Ps. 51:4)—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight.” Of all sinners it might be said that they “Fight neither with small nor great, save only with the king of Israel”(1 K. 22:31).

Not every sinner is conscious of this enmity. Sin is a principle in course of development. It is not yet “full-grown” (James 1:15—“the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death”). Even now, as James Martineau has said: “If it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the streets of London and Paris.” But this indifference easily grows, in the presence of threatening and penalty, into violent hatred to God and positive defiance of his law. If the sin which is now hidden in the sinner's heart were but permitted to develop itself according to its own nature, it would hurl the Almighty from his throne, and would set up its own kingdom upon the ruins of the moral universe. Sin is world-destroying, as well as God-destroying, for it is inconsistent with the conditions which make being as a whole possible; see Royce, World and Individual, 2:366; Dwight, Works, sermon 80.

Section III.—Universality Of Sin.

We have shown that sin is a state, a state of the will, a selfish state of the will. We now proceed to show that this selfish state of the will is universal. We divide our proof into two parts. In the first, we regard sin in its aspect as conscious violation of law; in the second, in its aspect as a bias of the nature to evil, prior to or underlying consciousness.

I. Every human being who has arrived at moral consciousness has committed acts, or cherished dispositions, contrary to the divine law.

1. Proof from Scripture.

The universality of transgression is:

(a) Set forth in direct statements of Scripture.

1 K. 8:46—“there is no man that sinneth not”; Ps. 143:2—“enter not into judgment with thy servant; For in thy sight no man living is righteous”; Prov. 20:9—“Who can say, I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin?”; Eccl. 7:20—“Surely there is not a righteous man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not”; Luke 11:13—“If ye, then, being evil”; Rom. 3:10, 12—“There is none righteous, no, not one.... There is none that doeth good, no, not so much as one”; 19, 20—“that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may be brought under the judgment of God: because by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified in his sight; for through the law cometh the knowledge of sin”; 23—“for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God”; Gal. 3:22—“the scripture shut up all things under sin”; James 3:2—“For in many things we all stumble”; 1 John 1:8—“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Compare Mat. 6:12—“forgive us our debts”—given as a prayer for all men; 14—“if ye forgive men their trespasses”—the condition of our own forgiveness.

(b) Implied in declarations of the universal need of atonement, regeneration, and repentance.

Universal need of atonement: Mark 16:16—“He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved” (Mark 16:9-20, though probably not written by Mark, is nevertheless of canonical authority); John 3:16—“God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish”; 6:50—“This is the bread which cometh down out of heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die”; 12:47—“I came not to judge the world, but to save the world”; Acts 4:12—“in none other is there salvation: for neither is there any other name under heaven, that is given among men, wherein we must be saved.” Universal need of regeneration: John 3:3, 5—“Except one be born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.... Except one be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” Universal need of repentance: Acts 17:30—“commandeth men that they should all everywhere repent.” Yet Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy, in her “Unity of Good,” speaks of “the illusion which calls sin real and man a sinner needing a Savior.”