Part 5 — Chapter III. Sin, Or Man's State Of Apostasy. (continued 6)

Dr. Hovey claims that the Augustinian view breaks down when applied to the connection between the justification of believers and the righteousness of Christ; for believers were not in Christ, as to the substance of their souls, when he wrought out redemption for them. But we reply that the life of Christ which makes us Christians is the same life which made atonement upon the cross and which rose from the grave for our justification. The parallel between Adam and Christ is of the nature of analogy, not of identity. With Adam, we have a connection of physical life; with Christ, a connection of spiritual life.

Stahl, Philosophie des Rechts, quoted in Olshausen's Com. on Rom. 5:12-21—“Adam is the original matter of humanity; Christ is its original idea in God; both personally living. Mankind is one in them. Therefore Adam's sin became the sin of all; Christ's sacrifice the atonement for all. Every leaf of a tree may be green or wither by itself; but each suffers by the disease of the root, and recovers only by its healing. The shallower the man, so much more isolated will everything appear to him; for upon the surface all lies apart. He will see in mankind, in the nation, nay, even in the family, mere individuals, where the act of the one has no connection with that of the other. The profounder the man, the more do these inward relations of unity, proceeding from the very centre, force themselves upon him. Yea, the love of our neighbor is itself nothing but the deep feeling of this unity; for we love him only, with whom we feel and acknowledge ourselves to be one. What the Christian love of our neighbor is for the heart, that unity of race is for the understanding. If sin through one, and redemption through one, is not possible, the command to love our neighbor is also unintelligible. Christian ethics and Christian faith are therefore in truth indissolubly united. Christianity effects in history an advance like that from the animal kingdom to man, by its revealing the essential unity of men, the consciousness of which in the ancient world had vanished when the nations were separated.”

If the sins of the parents were not visited upon the children, neither could their virtues be; the possibility of the one involves the possibility of the other. If the guilt of our first father could not be transmitted to all who derive their life from him, then the justification of Christ could not be transmitted to all who derive their life from him. We do not, however, see any Scripture warrant for the theory that all men are justified from original sin by virtue of their natural connection with Christ. He who is the life of all men bestows manifold temporal blessings upon the ground of his atonement. But justification from sin is conditioned upon conscious surrender of the human will and trust in the divine mercy. The immanent Christ is ever urging man individually and collectively toward such decision. But the acceptance or rejection of the offered grace is left to man's free will. This principle enables us properly to estimate the view of Dr. Henry E. Robins which follows.

H. E. Robins, Harmony of Ethics with Theology, 51—“All men born of Adam stand in such a relation to Christ that salvation is their birthright under promise—a birthright which can only be forfeited by their intelligent, personal, moral action, as was Esau's.” Dr. Robins holds to an inchoate justification of all—a justification which becomes actual and complete only when the soul closes with Christ's offer to the sinner. We prefer to say that humanity in Christ is ideally justified because Christ himself is justified, but that individual men are justified only when they consciously appropriate his offered grace or surrender themselves to his renewing Spirit. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 312—“The grace of God is as organic in its relation to man as is the evil in his nature. Grace also reigns wherever justice reigns.” William Ashmore, on the New Trial of the Sinner, in Christian Review, 26:245-264—“There is a gospel of nature commensurate with the law of nature; Rom. 3:22—‘unto all, and upon all them that believe’; the first ‘all’is unlimited; the second ‘all’ is limited to those who believe.”

R. W. Dale, Ephesians, 180—“Our fortunes were identified with the fortunes of Christ; in the divine thought and purpose we were inseparable from him. Had we been true and loyal to the divine idea, the energy of Christ's righteousness would have drawn us upward to height after height of goodness and joy, until we ascended from this earthly life to the larger powers and loftier services and richer delights of other and diviner [pg 637]worlds; and still, through one golden age of intellectual and ethical and spiritual growth after another, we should have continued to rise towards Christ's transcendent and infinite perfection. But we sinned; and as the union between Christ and us could not be broken without the final and irrevocable defeat of the divine purpose, Christ was drawn down from the serene heavens to the confused and troubled life of our race, to pain, to temptation, to anguish, to the cross and to the grave, and so the mystery of his atonement for our sin was consummated.”

For replies to the foregoing and other objections, see Schaff, in Bib. Sac., 5:230; Shedd, Sermons to the Nat. Man, 266-284; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 507-509, 529-544; Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 134-188; Edwards, Original Sin, in Works, 2:473-510; Atwater, on Calvinism in Doctrine and Life, in Princeton Review, 1875:73; Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 96-100. Per contra, see Moxom, in Bap. Rev., 1881:273-287; Park, Discourses, 210-233; Bradford, Heredity, 237.

Section VI.—Consequences Of Sin To Adam's Posterity.

As the result of Adam's transgression, all his posterity are born in the same state into which he fell. But since law is the all-comprehending demand of harmony with God, all moral consequences flowing from transgression are to be regarded as sanctions of law, or expressions of the divine displeasure through the constitution of things which he has established. Certain of these consequences, however, are earlier recognized than others and are of minor scope; it will therefore be useful to consider them under the three aspects of depravity, guilt, and penalty.

I. Depravity.

By this we mean, on the one hand, the lack of original righteousness or of holy affection toward God, and, on the other hand, the corruption of the moral nature, or bias toward evil. That such depravity exists has been abundantly shown, both from Scripture and from reason, in our consideration of the universality of sin.

Salvation is twofold: deliverance from the evil—the penalty and the power of sin; and accomplishment of the good—likeness to God and realization of the true idea of humanity. It includes all these for the race as well as for the individual: removal of the barriers that keep men from each other; and the perfecting of society in communion with God; or, in other words, the kingdom of God on earth. It was the nature of man, when he first came from the hand of God, to fear, love, and trust God above all things. This tendency toward God has been lost; sin has altered and corrupted man's innermost nature. In place of this bent toward God there is a fearful bent toward evil. Depravity is both negative—absence of love and of moral likeness to God—and positive—presence of manifold tendencies to evil. Two questions only need detain us:

1. Depravity partial or total?

The Scriptures represent human nature as totally depraved. The phrase “total depravity,” however, is liable to misinterpretation, and should not be used without explanation. By the total depravity of universal humanity we mean:

A. Negatively,—not that every sinner is: (a) Destitute of conscience,—for the existence of strong impulses to right, and of remorse for wrong-doing, show that conscience is often keen; (b) devoid of all qualities pleasing to men, and useful when judged by a human standard,—for the [pg 638] existence of such qualities is recognized by Christ; (c) prone to every form of sin,—for certain forms of sin exclude certain others; (d) intense as he can be in his selfishness and opposition to God,—for he becomes worse every day.

(a) John 8:9—“And they, when they heard it, went out one by one, beginning from the eldest, even unto the last” (John 7:53-8:11, though not written by John, is a perfectly true narrative, descended from the apostolic age). The muscles of a dead frog's leg will contract when a current of electricity is sent into them. So the dead soul will thrill at touch of the divine law. Natural conscience, combined with the principle of self-love, may even prompt choice of the good, though no love for God is in the choice. Bengel: “We have lost our likeness to God; but there remains notwithstanding an indelible nobility which we ought to revere both in ourselves and in others. We still have remained men, to be conformed to that likeness, through the divine blessing to which man's will should subscribe. This they forget who speak evil of human nature. Absalom fell out of his father's favor; but the people, for all that, recognized in him the son of the king.”

(b) Mark 10:21—“And Jesus looking upon him loved him.” These very qualities, however, may show that their possessors are sinning against great light and are the more guilty; cf. Mal. 1:6—“A son honoreth his father, and a servant his master: if then I am a father, where is mine honor? and if I am a master, where is my fear?” John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:75—“The assertor of the total depravity of human nature, of its absolute blindness and incapacity, presupposes in himself and in others the presence of a criterion or principle of good, in virtue of which he discerns himself to be wholly evil; yet the very proposition that human nature is wholly evil would be unintelligible unless it were false.... Consciousness of sin is a negative sign of the possibility of restoration. But it is not in itself proof that the possibility will become actuality.” A ruined temple may have beautiful fragments of fluted columns, but it is no proper habitation for the god for whose worship it was built.

(c) Mat. 23:23—“ye tithe mint and anise and cummin, and have left undone the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy, and faith: but these ye ought to have done, and not to have left the other undone”; Rom. 2:14—“when Gentiles that have not the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are the law unto themselves; in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith.”The sin of miserliness may exclude the sin of luxury; the sin of pride may exclude the sin of sensuality. Shakespeare, Othello, 2:3—“It hath pleased the devil Drunkenness to give place to the devil Wrath.” Franklin Carter, Life of Mark Hopkins, 321-323—Dr. Hopkins did not think that the sons of God should describe themselves as once worms or swine or vipers. Yet he held that man could sink to a degradation below the brute: “No brute is any more capable of rebelling against God than of serving him; is any more capable of sinking below the level of its own nature than of rising to the level of man. No brute can be either a fool or a fiend.... In the way that sin and corruption came into the spiritual realm we find one of those analogies to what takes place in the lower forms of being that show the unity of the system throughout. All disintegration and corruption of matter is from the domination of a lower over a higher law. The body begins to return to its original elements as the lower chemical and physical forces begin to gain ascendancy over the higher force of life. In the same way all sin and corruption in man is from his yielding to a lower law or principle of action in opposition to the demands of one that is higher.”

(d) Gen. 15:16—“the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full”; 2 Tim. 3:13—“evil men and impostors shall wax worse and worse.” Depravity is not simply being deprived of good. Depravation (de, and pravus, crooked, perverse) is more than deprivation. Left to himself man tends downward, and his sin increases day by day. But there is a divine influence within which quickens conscience and kindles aspiration for better things. The immanent Christ is “the light which lighteth every man” (John 1:9). Prof. Wm. Adams Brown: “In so far as God's Spirit is at work among men and they receive ‘the Light which lighteth every man,’ we must qualify our statement of total depravity. Depravity is not so much a state as a tendency. With growing complexity of life, sin becomes more complex. Adam's sin was not the worst. ‘It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee’ (Mat. 11:24).”

Men are not yet in the condition of demons. Only here and there have they attained to “a disinterested love of evil.” Such men are few, and they were not born so. There are degrees in depravity. E. G. Robinson: “There is a good streak left in the devil yet.” Even Satan will become worse than he now is. The phrase “total depravity”has respect only to relations to God, and it means incapability of doing anything [pg 639]which in the sight of God is a good act. No act is perfectly good that does not proceed from a true heart and constitute an expression of that heart. Yet we have no right to say that every act of an unregenerate man is displeasing to God. Right acts from right motives are good, whether performed by a Christian or by one who is unrenewed in heart. Such acts, however, are always prompted by God, and thanks for them are due to God and not to him who performed them.

B. Positively,—that every sinner is: (a) totally destitute of that love to God which constitutes the fundamental and all-inclusive demand of the law; (b) chargeable with elevating some lower affection or desire above regard for God and his law; (c) supremely determined, in his whole inward and outward life, by a preference of self to God; (d) possessed of an aversion to God which, though sometimes latent, becomes active enmity, so soon as God's will comes into manifest conflict with his own; (e) disordered and corrupted in every faculty, through this substitution of selfishness for supreme affection toward God; (f) credited with no thought, emotion, or act of which divine holiness can fully approve; (g) subject to a law of constant progress in depravity, which he has no recuperative energy to enable him successfully to resist.

(a) John 5:42—“But I know you, that ye have not the love of God in yourselves.” (b) 2 Tim. 3:4—“lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God”; cf. Mal 1:6—“A son honoreth his father, and a servant his master: if then I am a father, where is mine honor? and if I am a master, where is my fear?” (c) 2 Tim. 3:2—“lovers of self”; (d) Rom. 8:7—“the mind of the flesh is enmity against God.” (e) Eph. 4:18—“darkened in their understanding.... hardening of their heart”; Tit. 1:15—“both their mind and their conscience are defiled”; 2 Cor. 7:1—“defilement of flesh and spirit”; Heb. 3:12—“an evil heart of unbelief”; (f) Rom. 3:9—“they are all under sin”; 7:18—“in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.” (g) Rom. 7:18—“to will is present with me, but to do that which is good is not”; 23—“law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members.”

Every sinner would prefer a milder law and a different administration. But whoever does not love God's law does not truly love God. The sinner seeks to secure his own interests rather than God's. Even so-called religious acts he performs with preference of his own good to God's glory. He disobeys, and always has disobeyed, the fundamental law of love. He is like a railway train on a down grade, and the brakes must be applied by God or destruction is sure. There are latent passions in every heart which if let loose would curse the world. Many a man who escaped from the burning Iroquois Theatre in Chicago, proved himself a brute and a demon, by trampling down fugitives who cried for mercy. Denney, Studies in Theology, 83—“The depravity which sin has produced in human nature extends to the whole of it. There is no part of man's nature which is unaffected by it. Man's nature is all of a piece, and what affects it at all affects it altogether. When the conscience is violated by disobedience to the will of God, the moral understanding is darkened, and the will is enfeebled. We are not constructed in water-tight compartments, one of which might be ruined while the others remained intact.” Yet over against total depravity, we must set total redemption; over against original sin, original grace. Christ is in every human heart mitigating the affects of sin, urging to repentance, and “able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him” (Heb. 7:25). Even the unregenerate heathen may “put away ... the old man”and “put on the new man” (Eph. 4:23, 24), being delivered “out of the body of this death ... through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 7:24, 25).

H. B. Smith, System, 277—“By total depravity is never meant that men are as bad as they can be; nor that they have not, in their natural condition, certain amiable qualities; nor that they may not have virtues in a limited sense (justitia civilis). But it is meant (1) that depravity, or the sinful condition of man, infects the whole man: intellect, feeling, heart and will; (2) that in each unrenewed person some lower affection is supreme; and (3) that each such is destitute of love to God. On these positions: as to (1) the power of depravity over the whole man, we have given proof from Scripture; as to (2) the fact that in every unrenewed man some lower affection is supreme, experience may be always appealed to; men know that their supreme affection is fixed on some lower good—intellect, heart, and will going together in it; or that some form of selfishness is predominant—using selfish in a general sense—self [pg 640]seeks its happiness in some inferior object, giving to that its supreme affection; as to (3) that every unrenewed person is without supreme love to God, it is the point which is of greatest force, and is to be urged with the strongest effect, in setting forth the depth and ‘totality’ of man's sinfulness: unrenewed men have not that supreme love of God which is the substance of the first and great command.” See also Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 248; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 510-522; Chalmers, Institutes, 1:519-542; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 1:516-531; Princeton Review, 1877:470.

2. Ability or inability?

In opposition to the plenary ability taught by the Pelagians, the gracious ability of the Arminians, and the natural ability of the New School theologians, the Scriptures declare the total inability of the sinner to turn himself to God or to do that which is truly good in God's sight (see Scripture proof below). A proper conception also of the law, as reflecting the holiness of God and as expressing the ideal of human nature, leads us to the conclusion that no man whose powers are weakened by either original or actual sin can of himself come up to that perfect standard. Yet there is a certain remnant of freedom left to man. The sinner can (a) avoid the sin against the Holy Ghost; (b) choose the less sin rather than the greater; (c) refuse altogether to yield to certain temptations; (d) do outwardly good acts, though with imperfect motives; (e) seek God from motives of self-interest.

But on the other hand the sinner cannot (a) by a single volition bring his character and life into complete conformity to God's law; (b) change his fundamental preference for self and sin to supreme love for God; nor (c) do any act, however insignificant, which shall meet with God's approval or answer fully to the demands of law.

So long, then, as there are states of intellect, affection and will which man cannot, by any power of volition or of contrary choice remaining to him, bring into subjection to God, it cannot be said that he possesses any sufficient ability of himself to do God's will; and if a basis for man's responsibility and guilt be sought, it must be found, if at all, not in his plenary ability, his gracious ability, or his natural ability, but in his originalability, when he came, in Adam, from the hands of his Maker.

Man's present inability is natural, in the sense of being inborn,—it is not acquired by our personal act, but is congenital. It is not natural, however, as resulting from the original limitations of human nature, or from the subsequent loss of any essential faculty of that nature. Human nature, at its first creation, was endowed with ability perfectly to keep the law of God. Man has not, even by his sin, lost his essential faculties of intellect, affection, or will. He has weakened those faculties, however, so that they are now unable to work up to the normal measure of their powers. But more especially has man given to every faculty a bent away from God which renders him morally unable to render spiritual obedience. The inability to good which now characterizes human nature is an inability that results from sin, and is itself sin.

We hold, therefore, to an inability which is both natural and moral,—moral, as having its source in the self-corruption of man's moral nature and the fundamental aversion of his will to God;—natural, as being inborn, and as affecting with partial paralysis all his natural powers of intellect, affection, conscience, and will. For his inability, in both these aspects of it, man is responsible.

The sinner can do one very important thing, viz.: give attention to divine truth. Ps. 119:59—“I thought on my ways, And turned my feet unto thy testimonies.” G. W. Northrup: “The sinner can seek God from: (a) self-love, regard for his own interest; (b) feeling of duty, sense of obligation, awakened conscience; (c) gratitude for blessings already received; (d) aspiration after the infinite and satisfying.” Denney, Studies in Theology, 85—“A witty French moralist has said that God does not need to grudge to his enemies even what they call their virtues; and neither do God's ministers.... But there is onething which man cannot do alone,—he cannot bring his state into harmony with his nature. When a man has been discovered who has been able, without Christ, to reconcile [pg 641]himself to God and to obtain dominion over the world and over sin, then the doctrine of inability, or of the bondage due to sin, may be denied; then, but not till then.” The Free Church of Scotland, in the Declaratory Act of 1892, says “that, in holding and teaching, according to the Confession of Faith, the corruption of man's whole nature as fallen, this church also maintains that there remain tokens of his greatness as created in the image of God; that he possesses a knowledge of God and of duty; that he is responsible for compliance with the moral law and with the gospel; and that, although unable without the aid of the Holy Spirit to return to God, he is yet capable of affections and actions which in themselves are virtuous and praiseworthy.”

To the use of the term “natural ability” to designate merely the sinner's possession of all the constituent faculties of human nature, we object upon the following grounds:

A. Quantitative lack.—The phrase “natural ability” is misleading, since it seems to imply that the existence of the mere powers of intellect, affection, and will is a sufficient quantitative qualification for obedience to God's law, whereas these powers have been weakened by sin, and are naturally unable, instead of naturally able, to render back to God with interest the talent first bestowed. Even if the moral direction of man's faculties were a normal one, the effect of hereditary and of personal sin would render naturally impossible that large likeness to God which the law of absolute perfection demands. Man has not therefore the natural ability perfectly to obey God. He had it once, but he lost it with the first sin.

When Jean Paul Richter says of himself: “I have made of myself all that could be made out of the stuff,” he evinces a self-complacency which is due to self-ignorance and lack of moral insight. When a man realizes the extent of the law's demands, he sees that without divine help obedience is impossible. John B. Gough represented the confirmed drunkard's efforts at reformation as a man's walking up Mount Etna knee-deep in burning lava, or as one's rowing against the rapids of Niagara.

B. Qualitative lack.—Since the law of God requires of men not so much right single volitions as conformity to God in the whole inward state of the affections and will, the power of contrary choice in single volitions does not constitute a natural ability to obey God, unless man can by those single volitions change the underlying state of the affections and will. But this power man does not possess. Since God judges all moral action in connection with the general state of the heart and life, natural ability to good involves not only a full complement of faculties but also a bias of the affections and will toward God. Without this bias there is no possibility of right moral action, and where there is no such possibility, there can be no ability either natural or moral.

Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 21—“Hatred is like love Herein, that it, by only being, grows. Until at last usurping quite the man, It overgrows him like a polypus.” John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 1:53—“The ideal is the revelation in me of a power that is mightier than my own. The supreme command ‘Thou oughtest’ is the utterance, only different in form, of the same voice in my spirit which says ‘Thou canst’; and my highest spiritual attainments are achieved, not by self-assertion, but by self-renunciation and self-surrender to the infinite life of truth and righteousness that is living and reigning within me.” This conscious inability in one's self, together with reception of “the strength which God supplieth” (1 Pet. 4:11), is the secret of Paul's courage; 2 Cor. 12:10—“when I am weak, then am I strong”; Phil. 2:12, 13—“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure.”

C. No such ability known.—In addition to the psychological argument just mentioned, we may urge another from experience and observation. [pg 642] These testify that man is cognizant of no such ability. Since no man has ever yet, by the exercise of his natural powers, turned himself to God or done an act truly good in God's sight, the existence of a natural ability to do good is a pure assumption. There is no scientific warrant for inferring the existence of an ability which has never manifested itself in a single instance since history began.

“Solomon could not keep the Proverbs,—so he wrote them.” The book of Proverbs needs for its complement the New Testament explanation of helplessness and offer of help: John 15:5—“apart from me ye can do nothing”; 6:37—“him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” The palsied man's inability to walk is very different from his indisposition to accept a remedy. The paralytic cannot climb the cliff, but by a rope let down to him he may be lifted up, provided he will permit himself to be tied to it. Darling, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., July, 1901:505—“If bidden, we can stretch out a withered arm; but God does not require this of one born armless. We may ‘hear the voice of the Son of God’ and ‘live’ (John 5:25), but we shall not bring out of the tomb faculties not possessed before death.”

D. Practical evil of the belief.—The practical evil attending the preaching of natural ability furnishes a strong argument against it. The Scriptures, in their declarations of the sinner's inability and helplessness, aim to shut him up to sole dependence upon God for salvation. The doctrine of natural ability, assuring him that he is able at once to repent and turn to God, encourages delay by putting salvation at all times within his reach. If a single volition will secure it, he may be saved as easily to-morrow as to-day. The doctrine of inability presses men to immediate acceptance of God's offers, lest the day of grace for them pass by.

Those who care most for self are those in whom self becomes thoroughly subjected and enslaved to external influences. Mat. 16:25—“whosoever would save his life shall lose it.” The selfish man is a straw on the surface of a rushing stream. He becomes more and more a victim of circumstance, until at last he has no more freedom than the brute. Ps. 49:20—“Man that is in honor, and understandeth not, Is like the beasts that perish;” see R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 121. Robert Browning, unpublished poem: “ ‘Would a man 'scape the rod?’ Rabbi Ben Karshook saith, ‘See that he turn to God The day before his death.’ ‘Aye, could a man inquire When it shall come?’ I say. The Rabbi's eye shoots fire—‘Then let him turn to-day.’ ”

Let us repeat, however, that the denial to man of all ability, whether natural or moral, to turn himself to God or to do that which is truly good in God's sight, does not imply a denial of man's power to order his external life in many particulars conformably to moral rules, or even to attain the praise of men for virtue. Man has still a range of freedom in acting out his nature, and he may to a certain limited extent act down upon that nature, and modify it, by isolated volitions externally conformed to God's law. He may choose higher or lower forms of selfish action, and may pursue these chosen courses with various degrees of selfish energy. Freedom of choice, within this limit, is by no means incompatible with complete bondage of the will in spiritual things.

John 1:13—“born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”; 3:5—“Except one be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God”; 6:44—“No man can come to me, except the Father that sent me draw him”; 8:34—“Every one that committeth sin is the bondservant of sin”; 15:4, 5—“the branch cannot bear fruit of itself ... apart from me ye can do nothing”; Rom. 7:18—“in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing; for to will is present with me, but to do that which it good is not”; 24—“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?” 8:7, 8—“the mind of the flesh is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can it be: and they that are is the flesh cannot please God”; 1 Cor. 2:14—“the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; [pg 643]and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged”; 2 Cor. 3:5—“not that we are sufficient of ourselves, to account anything as from ourselves”; Eph. 2:1—“dead through your trespasses and sins”; 8-10—“by grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not of works, that no man should glory. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works”; Heb. 11:6—“without faith it is impossible to be well-pleasing unto him.”

Kant's “I ought, therefore I can” is the relic of man's original consciousness of freedom—the freedom with which man was endowed at his creation—a freedom, now, alas! destroyed by sin. Or it may be the courage of the soul in which God is working anew by his Spirit. For Kant's “Ich soll, also Ich kann,” Julius Müller would substitute: “Ich sollte freilich können, aber Ich kann nicht”—“I ought indeed to be able, but I am not able.” Man truly repents only when he learns that his sin has made him unable to repent without the renewing grace of God. Emerson, in his poem entitled “Voluntariness,” says: “So near is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.” But, apart from special grace, all the ability which man at present possesses comes far short of fulfilling the spiritual demands of God's law. Parental and civil law implies a certain kind of power. Puritan theology called man “free among the dead” (Ps. 88:5, A. V.). There was a range of freedom inside of slavery,—the will was “a drop of water imprisoned in a solid crystal” (Oliver Wendell Holmes). The man who kills himself is as dead as if he had been killed by another (Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:106).

Westminster Confession, 9:3—“Man by his fall into a state of sin hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation; so, as a natural man, being altogether averse from that good and dead in sin, he is not able by his own strength to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.” Hopkins, Works, 1:233-235—“So long as the sinner's opposition of heart and will continues, he cannot come to Christ. It is impossible, and will continue so, until his unwillingness and opposition be removed by a change and renovation of his heart by divine grace, and he be made willing in the day of God's power.” Hopkins speaks of “utter inability to obey the law of God, yea, utter impossibility.”

Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:257-277—“Inability consists, not in the loss of any faculty of the soul, nor in the loss of free agency, for the sinner determines his own acts, nor in mere disinclination to what is good. It arises from want of spiritual discernment, and hence want of proper affections. Inability belongs only to the things of the Spirit. What man cannot do is to repent, believe, regenerate himself. He cannot put forth any act which merits the approbation of God. Sin cleaves to all he does, and from its dominion he cannot free himself. The distinction between natural and moral ability is of no value. Shall we say that the uneducated man can understand and appreciate the Iliad, because he has all the faculties that the scholar has? Shall we say that man can love God, if he will? This is false, if will means volition. It is a truism, if will means affection. The Scriptures never thus address men and tell them that they have power to do all that God requires. It is dangerous to teach a man this, for until a man feels that he can do nothing, God never saves him. Inability is involved in the doctrine of original sin; in the necessity of the Spirit's influence in regeneration. Inability is consistent with obligation, when inability arises from sin and is removed by the removal of sin.”

Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:213-257, and in South Church Sermons, 33-59—“The origin of this helplessness lies, not in creation, but in sin. God can command the ten talents or the five which he originally committed to us, together with a diligent and faithful improvement of them. Because the servant has lost the talents, is he discharged from obligation to return them with interest? Sin contains in itself the element of servitude. In the very act of transgressing the law of God, there is a reflex action of the human will upon itself, whereby it becomes less able than before to keep that law. Sin is the suicidal action of the human will. To do wrong destroys the power to do right. Total depravity carries with it total impotence. The voluntary faculty may be ruined from within; may be made impotent to holiness, by its own action; may surrender itself to appetite and selfishness with such an intensity and earnestness, that it becomes unable to convert itself and overcome its wrong inclination.” See Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,—noticed in Andover Rev., June, 1886:664. We can merge ourselves in the life of another—either bad or good; can almost transform ourselves into Satan or into Christ, so as to say with Paul, in Gal 2:20—“it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me”; or be minions of “the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience” (Eph. 2:2). But if we yield ourselves to the influence of Satan, the recovery of our true personality becomes increasingly difficult, and at last impossible.

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There is nothing in literature sadder or more significant than the self-bewailing of Charles Lamb, the gentle Elia, who writes in his Last Essays, 214—“Could the youth to whom the flavor of the first wine is delicious as the opening scenes of life or the entering of some newly discovered paradise, look into my desolation, and be made to understand what a dreary thing it is when he shall feel himself going down a precipice with open eyes and a passive will; to see his destruction, and have no power to stop it; to see all goodness emptied out of him, and yet not be able to forget a time when it was otherwise; to bear about the piteous spectacle of his own ruin,—could he see my fevered eye, fevered with the last night's drinking, and feverishly looking for to-night's repetition of the folly; could he but feel the body of this death out of which I cry hourly, with feebler outcry, to be delivered, it were enough to make him dash the sparkling beverage to the earth, in all the pride of its mantling temptation.”

For the Arminian “gracious ability,” see Raymond, Syst. Theol., 2:130; McClintock & Strong, Cyclopædia, 10:990. Per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, bk. 2, chap. 2 (1:282); Edwards, Works, 2:464 (Orig. Sin, 3:1); Bennet Tyler, Works, 73; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 523-528; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 1:567-639; Turretin, 10:4:19; A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 260-269; Thornwell, Theology, 1:394-399; Alexander, Moral Science, 89-208; Princeton Essays, 1:224-239; Richards, Lectures on Theology. On real as distinguished from formal freedom, see Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:1-225. On Augustine's lineamenta extrema (of the divine image in man), see Wiggers, Augustinism and Pelagianism, 119, note. See also art. by A. H. Strong, on Modified Calvinism, or Remainders of Freedom in Man, in Bap. Rev., 1883:219-242; and reprinted in the author's Philosophy and Religion, 114-128.

II. Guilt.

1. Nature of guilt.

By guilt we mean desert of punishment, or obligation to render satisfaction to God's justice for self-determined violation of law. There is a reaction of holiness against sin, which the Scripture denominates “the wrath of God” (Rom. 1:18). Sin is in us, either as act or state; God's punitive righteousness is over against the sinner, as something to be feared; guilt is a relation of the sinner to that righteousness, namely, the sinner's desert of punishment.

Guilt is related to sin as the burnt spot to the blaze. Schiller, Die Braut von Messina: “Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht; Der Uebel grösstes aber ist die Schuld”—“Life is not the highest of possessions; the greatest of ills, however, is guilt.”Delitzsch: “Die Schamröthe ist die Abendröthe der untergegangenen Sonne der ursprünglichen Gerechtigkeit”—“The blush of shame is the evening red after the sun of original righteousness has gone down.” E. G. Robinson: “Pangs of conscience do not arise from the fear of penalty,—they are the penalty itself.” See chapter on Fig-leaves, in McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 142-154—“Spiritual shame for sin sought an outward symbol, and found it in the nakedness of the lower parts of the body.”

The following remarks may serve both for proof and for explanation:

A. Guilt is incurred only through self-determined transgression either on the part of man's nature or person. We are guilty only of that sin which we have originated or have had part in originating. Guilt is not, therefore, mere liability to punishment, without participation in the transgression for which the punishment is inflicted,—in other words, there is no such thing as constructive guilt under the divine government. We are accounted guilty only for what we have done, either personally or in our first parents, and for what we are, in consequence of such doing.

Ez. 18:20—“the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father”—, as Calvin says (Com. in loco): “The son shall not bear the father's iniquity, since he shall receive the reward due to himself, and shall bear his own burden.... All are guilty through their own fault.... Every one perishes through his own iniquity.” In other words, the whole race fell in Adam, [pg 645]and is punished for its own sin in him, not for the sins of immediate ancestors, nor for the sin of Adam as a person foreign to us. John 9:3—“Neither did this man sin, nor his parents”(that he should be born blind)—Do not attribute to any special later sin what is a consequence of the sin of the race—the first sin which “brought death into the world, and all our woe.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:195-213.

B. Guilt is an objective result of sin, and is not to be confounded with subjective pollution, or depravity. Every sin, whether of nature or person, is an offense against God (Ps. 51:4-6), an act or state of opposition to his will, which has for its effect God's personal wrath (Ps. 7:11; John 3:18, 36), and which must be expiated either by punishment or by atonement (Heb. 9:22). Not only does sin, as unlikeness to the divine purity, involve pollution,—it also, as antagonism to God's holy will, involves guilt. This guilt, or obligation to satisfy the outraged holiness of God, is explained in the New Testament by the terms “debtor” and “debt” (Mat. 6:12; Luke 13:4; Mat. 5:21; Rom. 3:19; 6:23; Eph. 2:3). Since guilt, the objective result of sin, is entirely distinct from depravity, the subjective result, human nature may, as in Christ, have the guilt without the depravity (2 Cor. 5:21), or may, as in the Christian, have the depravity without the guilt (1 John 1:7, 8).

Ps. 51:4-6—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight; That thou mayest be justified when thou speakest, And be clear when thou judgest”; 7:11—“God is a righteous judge, Yea, a God that hath indignation every day”; John 3:18—“he that believeth not hath been judged already”; 36—“he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him”; Heb. 9:22—“apart from shedding of blood there is no remission”; Mat. 6:12—“debts”; Luke 13:4—“offenders” (marg. “debtors”); Mat. 5:21—“shall be in danger of [exposed to] the judgment”; Rom. 3:19—“that ... all the world may be brought under the judgment of God”; 6:23—“the wages of sin is death”—death is sin's desert; Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath”; 2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf”; 1 John 1:7, 8—“the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin. [Yet] If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”

Sin brings in its train not only depravity but guilt, not only macula but reatus. Scripture sets forth the pollution of sin by its similies of “a cage of unclean birds” and of “wounds, bruises, and putrefying sores”; by leprosy and Levitical uncleanness, under the old dispensation; by death and the corruption of the grave, under both the old and the new. But Scripture sets forth the guilt of sin, with equal vividness, in the fear of Cain and in the remorse of Judas. The revulsion of God's holiness from sin, and its demand for satisfaction, are reflected in the shame and remorse of every awakened conscience. There is an instinctive feeling in the sinner's heart that sin will be punished, and ought to be punished. But the Holy Spirit makes this need of reparation so deeply felt that the soul has no rest until its debt is paid. The offending church member who is truly penitent loves the law and the church which excludes him, and would not think it faithful if it did not. So Jesus, when laden with the guilt of the race, pressed forward to the cross, saying: “I have a baptism to be baptised with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!” (Luke 12:50; Mark 10:32).

All sin involves guilt, and the sinful soul itself demands penalty, so that all will ultimately go where they most desire to be. All the great masters in literature have recognized this. The inextinguishable thirst for reparation constitutes the very essence of tragedy. The Greek tragedians are full of it, and Shakespeare is its most impressive teacher: Measure for Measure, 5:1—“I am sorry that such sorrow I procure, And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart That I crave death more willingly than mercy; 'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it”; Cymbeline, 5:4—“and so, great Powers, If you will take this audit, take this life, And cancel these cold bonds!... Desired, more than constrained, to satisfy, ... take No stricter render of me than my all”; that is, settle the account with me by taking my life, for nothing less than that will pay my debt. And later writers follow Shakespeare. Marguerite, in Goethe's Faust, fainting in the great cathedral under the solemn reverberations of the Dies Iræ; Dimmesdale, in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, putting himself side by side with Hester Prynne, his victim, in her place of obloquy; Bulwer's Eugene Aram, coming forward, though unsuspected, to confess the murder he had committed, all these are illustrations of the [pg 646]inner impulse that moves even a sinful soul to satisfy the claims of justice upon it. See A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 215, 216. On Hawthorne, see Hutton, Essays, 2:370-416—“In the Scarlet Letter, the minister gains fresh reverence and popularity as the very fruit of the passionate anguish with which his heart is consumed. Frantic with the stings of unacknowledged guilt, he is yet taught by these very stings to understand the hearts and stir the consciences of others.” See also Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life.

Nor are such scenes confined to the pages of romance. In a recent trial at Syracuse, Earl, the wife-murderer, thanked the jury that had convicted him; declared the verdict just; begged that no one would interfere to stay the course of justice; said that the greatest blessing that could be conferred on him would be to let him suffer the penalty of his crime. In Plattsburg, at the close of another trial in which the accused was a life-convict who had struck down a fellow-convict with an axe, the jury, after being out two hours, came in to ask the Judge to explain the difference between murder in the first and second degree. Suddenly the prisoner rose and said: “This was not a murder in the second degree. It was a deliberate and premeditated murder. I know that I have done wrong, that I ought to confess the truth, and that I ought to be hanged.”This left the jury nothing to do but render their verdict, and the Judge sentenced the murderer to be hanged, as he confessed he deserved to be. In 1891, Lars Ostendahl, the most famous preacher of Norway, startled his hearers by publicly confessing that he had been guilty of immorality, and that he could no longer retain his pastorate. He begged his people for the sake of Christ to forgive him and not to desert the poor in his asylums. He was not only preacher, but also head of a great philanthropic work.

Such is the movement and demand of the enlightened conscience. The lack of conviction that crime ought to be punished is one of the most certain signs of moral decay in either the individual or the nation (Ps. 97:10—“Ye that love the Lord, hate evil”; 149:6—“Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, And a two-edged sword in their hand”—to execute God's judgment upon iniquity).

This relation of sin to God shows us how Christ is “made sin on our behalf” (2 Cor. 5:21). Since Christ is the immanent God, he is also essential humanity, the universal man, the life of the race. All the nerves and sensibilities of humanity meet in him. He is the central brain to which and through which all ideas must pass. He is the central heart to which and through which all pains must be communicated. You cannot telephone to your friend across the town without first ringing up the central office. You cannot injure your neighbor without first injuring Christ. Each one of us can say of him: “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned” (Ps. 51:4). Because of his central and all-inclusive humanity, Christ can feel all the pangs of shame and suffering which rightfully belong to sinners, but which they cannot feel, because their sin has stupefied and deadened them. The Messiah, if he be truly man, must be a suffering Messiah. For the very reason of his humanity he must bear in his own person all the guilt of humanity and must be “the Lamb of God who” takes, and so “takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).

Guilt and depravity are not only distinguishable in thought,—they are also separable in fact. The convicted murderer might repent and become pure, yet he might still be under obligation to suffer the punishment of his crime. The Christian is freed from guilt (Rom. 8:1), but he is not yet freed from depravity (Rom. 7:23). Christ, on the other hand, was under obligation to suffer (Luke 24:26; Acts 3:18; 26:23), while yet he was without sin (Heb. 7:26). In the book entitled Modern Religious Thought, 3-29, R. J. Campbell has an essay on The Atonement, with which, apart from its view as to the origin of moral evil in God, we are in substantial agreement. He holds that “to relieve men from their sense of guilt, objective atonement is necessary,”—we would say: to relieve men from guilt itself—the obligation to suffer. “If Christ be the eternal Son of God, that side of the divine nature which has gone forth in creation, if he contains humanity and is present in every article and act of human experience, then he is associated with the existence of the primordial evil.... He and only he can sever the entail between man and his responsibility for personal sin. Christ has not sinned in man, but he takes responsibility for that experience of evil into which humanity is born, and the yielding to which constitutes sin. He goes forth to suffer, and actually does suffer, in man. The eternal Son in whom humanity is contained is therefore a sufferer since creation began. This mysterious passion of Deity must continue until redemption is consummated and humanity restored to God. Thus every consequence of human ill is felt in the experience of Christ. Thus Christ not only assumes the guilt but bears the punishment of every human soul.” We claim however that the necessity of this suffering lies, not in the needs of man, but in the holiness of God.

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C. Guilt, moreover, as an objective result of sin, is not to be confounded with the subjective consciousness of guilt (Lev. 5:17). In the condemnation of conscience, God's condemnation partially and prophetically manifests itself (1 John 3:20). But guilt is primarily a relation to God, and only secondarily a relation to conscience. Progress in sin is marked by diminished sensitiveness of moral insight and feeling. As “the greatest of sins is to be conscious of none,” so guilt may be great, just in proportion to the absence of consciousness of it (Ps. 19:12; 51:6; Eph. 4:18, 19—ἀπηλγηκότες). There is no evidence, however, that the voice of conscience can be completely or finally silenced. The time for repentance may pass, but not the time for remorse. Progress in holiness, on the other hand, is marked by increasing apprehension of the depth and extent of our sinfulness, while with this apprehension is combined, in a normal Christian experience, the assurance that the guilt of our sin has been taken, and taken away, by Christ (John 1:29).

Lev. 5:17—“And if any one sin, and do any of the things which Jehovah hath commanded not to be done; though he knew it not, yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity”; 1 John 3:20—“because if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things”; Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”; 51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom”; Eph. 4:18, 19—“darkened in their understanding ... being past feeling”; John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away [marg. “beareth”] the sin of the world.”

Plato, Republic, 1:330—“When death approaches, cares and alarms awake, especially the fear of hell and its punishments.” Cicero, De Divin., 1:30—“Then comes remorse for evil deeds.” Persius, Satire 3—“His vice benumbs him; his fibre has become fat; he is conscious of no fault; he knows not the loss he suffers; he is so far sunk, that there is not even a bubble on the surface of the deep.” Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:1—“Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all”; 4:5—“To my sick soul, as sin's true nature is, Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss; So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt”; Richard III, 5:3—“O coward conscience, how thou dost afflict me!... My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain”; Tempest, 3:3—“All three of them are desperate; their great guilt, Like poison given to work a great time after, Now 'gins to bite the spirits”; Ant. and Cleop., 3:9—“When we in our viciousness grow hard (O misery on't!) the wise gods seel our eyes; In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us Adore our errors; laugh at us, while we strut To our confusion.”

Dr. Shedd said once to a graduating class of young theologians: “Would that upon the naked, palpitating heart of each one of you might be laid one redhot coal of God Almighty's wrath!” Yes, we add, if only that redhot coal might be quenched by one red drop of Christ's atoning blood. Dr. H. E. Robins: “To the convicted sinner a merely external hell would be a cooling flame, compared with the agony of his remorse.”John Milton represents Satan as saying: “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.”James Martineau, Life by Jackson, 190—“It is of the essence of guilty declension to administer its own anæsthetics.” But this deadening of conscience cannot last always. Conscience is a mirror of God's holiness. We may cover the mirror with the veil of this world's diversions and deceits. When the veil is removed, and conscience again reflects the sunlike purity of God's demands, we are visited with self-loathing and self-contempt. John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 2:25—“Though it may cast off every other vestige of its divine origin, our nature retains at least this one terrible prerogative of it, the capacity of preying on itself.” Lyttelton in Lux Mundi, 277—“The common fallacy that a self-indulgent sinner is no one's enemy but his own would, were it true, involve the further inference that such a sinner would not feel himself guilty.” If any dislike the doctrine of guilt, let them remember that without wrath there is no pardon, without guilt no forgiveness. See, on the nature of guilt, Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:193-267; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 208-209; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:346; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 461-473; Delitzsch, Bib. Psychologie, 121-148; Thornwell, Theology, 1:400-424.

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2. Degrees of guilt.

The Scriptures recognize different degrees of guilt as attaching to different kinds of sin. The variety of sacrifices under the Mosaic law, and the variety of awards in the judgment, are to be explained upon this principle.

Luke 12:47, 48—“shall be beaten with many stripes ... shall be beaten with few stripes”; Rom. 2:6—“who will render to every man according to his works.” See also John 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”; Heb. 2:2, 3—if “every transgression ... received a just recompense of reward; how shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?” 10:28, 29—“A man that hath set at nought Moses' law dieth without compassion on the word of two or three witnesses: of how much sorer punishment, think ye, shall he be judged worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God?”

Casuistry, however, has drawn many distinctions which lack Scriptural foundation. Such is the distinction between venial sins and mortal sins in the Roman Catholic Church,—every sin unpardoned being mortal, and all sins being venial, since Christ has died for all. Nor is the common distinction between sins of omission and sins of commission more valid, since the very omission is an act of commission.

Mat. 25:45—“Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least”; James 4:17—“To him therefore that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.” John Ruskin: “The condemnation given from the Judgment Throne—most solemnly described—is for all the ‘undones’ and not the ‘dones.’ People are perpetually afraid of doing wrong; but unless they are doing its reverse energetically, they do it all day long, and the degree does not matter.” The Roman Catholic Church proceeds upon the supposition that she can determine the precise malignity of every offence, and assign its proper penance at the confessional. Thornwell, Theology, 1:424-441, says that “all sins are venial but one—for there is a sin against the Holy Ghost,” yet “not one is venial in itself—for the least proceeds from an apostate state and nature.” We shall see, however, that the hindrance to pardon, in the case of the sin against the Holy Spirit, is subjective rather than objective.

J. Spencer Kennard: “Roman Catholicism in Italy presents the spectacle of the authoritative representatives and teachers of morals and religion themselves living in all forms of deceit, corruption, and tyranny; and, on the other hand, discriminating between venial and mortal sin, classing as venial sins lying, fraud, fornication, marital infidelity, and even murder, all of which may be atoned for and forgiven or even permitted by the mere payment of money; and at the same time classing as mortal sins disrespect and disobedience to the church.”

The following distinctions are indicated in Scripture as involving different degrees of guilt:

A. Sin of nature, and personal transgression.

Sin of nature involves guilt, yet there is greater guilt when this sin of nature reasserts itself in personal transgression; for, while this latter includes in itself the former, it also adds to the former a new element, namely, the conscious exercise of the individual and personal will, by virtue of which a new decision is made against God, special evil habit is induced, and the total condition of the soul is made more depraved. Although we have emphasized the guilt of inborn sin, because this truth is most contested, it is to be remembered that men reach a conviction of their native depravity only through a conviction of their personal transgressions. For this reason, by far the larger part of our preaching upon sin should consist in applications of the law of God to the acts and dispositions of men's lives.

Mat. 19:14—“to such belongeth the kingdom of heaven”—relative innocence of childhood; 23:32—“Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers”—personal transgression added to inherited depravity. In preaching, we should first treat individual transgressions, and thence proceed to [pg 649]heart-sin, and race-sin. Man is not wholly a spontaneous development of inborn tendencies, a manifestation of original sin. Motives do not determine but they persuadethe will, and every man is guilty of conscious personal transgressions which may, with the help of the Holy Spirit, be brought under the condemning judgment of conscience. Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 169-174—“Original sin does not do away with the significance of personal transgression. Adam was pardoned: but some of his descendants are unpardonable. The second death is referred, in Scripture, to our own personal guilt.”

This is not to say that original sin does not involve as great sin as that of Adam in the first transgression, for original sin is the sin of the first transgression; it is only to say that personal transgression is original sin plus the conscious ratification of Adam's act by the individual. “We are guilty for what we are, as much as for what we do. Our sin is not simply the sum total of all our sins. There is a sinfulness which is the common denominator of all our sins.” It is customary to speak lightly of original sin, as if personal sins were all for which man is accountable. But it is only in the light of original sin that personal sins can be explained. Prov. 14:9, marg.—“Fools make a mock at sin.”Simon, Reconciliation, 122—“The sinfulness of individual men varies; the sinfulness of humanity is a constant quantity.” Robert Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies: “Man lumps his kind i' the mass. God singles thence unit by unit. Thou and God exist—So think! for certain: Think the mass—mankind—Disparts, disperses, leaves thyself alone! Ask thy lone soul what laws are plain to thee,—Thou and no other, stand or fall by them! That is the part for thee.”

B. Sins of ignorance, and sins of knowledge.

Here guilt is measured by the degree of light possessed, or in other words, by the opportunities of knowledge men have enjoyed, and the powers with which they have been naturally endowed. Genius and privilege increase responsibility. The heathen are guilty, but those to whom the oracles of God have been committed are more guilty than they.

Mat 10:15—“more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city”; Luke 12:47, 48—“that servant, who knew his Lord's will ... shall be beaten with many stripes; but he that knew not ... shall be beaten with few stripes”; 23:34—“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”—complete knowledge would put them beyond the reach of forgiveness. John 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”; Acts 17:30—“The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked”; Rom. 1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent with them that practise them”; 2:12—“For as many as have sinned without the law shall also perish without the law: and as many as have sinned under the law shall be judged by the law”; 1 Tim. 1:13, 15, 16—“I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.”

Is. 42:19—“Who is blind ... as Jehovah's servant?” It was the Pharisees whom Jesus warned of the sin against the Holy Spirit. The guilt of the crucifixion rested on Jews rather than on Gentiles. Apostate Israel was more guilty than the pagans. The greatest sinners of the present day may be in Christendom, not in heathendom. Satan was an archangel; Judas was an apostle; Alexander Borgia was a pope. Jackson, James Martineau, 362—“Corruptio optimi pessima est, as seen in a drunken Webster, a treacherous Bacon, a licentious Goethe.” Sir Roger de Coverley observed that none but men of fine parts deserve to be hanged. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 317—“The greater sin often involves the lesser guilt; the lesser sin the greater guilt.” Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, 227 (Pope, 1975)—“There's a new tribunal now Higher than God's,—the educated man's! Nice sense of honor in the human breast Supersedes here the old coarse oracle!” Dr. H. E. Robins holds that “palliation of guilt according to light is not possible under a system of pure law, and is possible only because the probation of the sinner is a probation of grace.”

C. Sins of infirmity, and sins of presumption.

Here the guilt is measured by the energy of the evil will. Sin may be known to be sin, yet may be committed in haste or weakness. Though haste and weakness constitute a palliation of the offence which springs therefrom, yet they are themselves sins, as revealing an unbelieving and disordered heart. But of far greater guilt are those presumptuous choices of evil in which not weakness, but strength of will, is manifest.

[pg 650]

Ps. 19:12, 13—“Clear thou me from hidden faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins”; Is. 5:18—“Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of falsehood, and sin as it were with a cart-rope”—not led away insensibly by sin, but earnestly, perseveringly, and wilfully working away at it; Gal. 6:1—“overtaken in any trespass”; 1 Tim. 5:24—“Some men's sins are evident, going before unto judgment; and some men also they follow after”—some men's sins are so open, that they act as officers to bring to justice those who commit them; whilst others require after-proof (An. Par. Bible). Luther represents one of the former class as saying to himself: “Esto peccator, et pecca fortiter.” On sins of passion and of reflection, see Bittinger, in Princeton Rev., 1873:219.

Micah 7:3, marg.—“Both hands are put forth for evil, to do it diligently.” So we ought to do good. “My art is my life,” said Grisi, the prima donna of the opera, “I save myself all day for that one bound upon the stage.” H. Bonar: “Sin worketh,—Let me work too. Busy as sin, my work I ply, Till I rest in the rest of eternity.” German criminal law distinguishes between intentional homicide without deliberation, and intentional homicide with deliberation. There are three grades of sin: 1. Sins of ignorance, like Paul's persecuting; 2. sins of infirmity, like Peter's denial; 3. sins of presumption, like David's murder of Uriah. Sins of presumption were unpardonable under the Jewish law; they are not unpardonable under Christ.

D. Sin of incomplete, and sin of final, obduracy.

Here the guilt is measured, not by the objective sufficiency or insufficiency of divine grace, but by the degree of unreceptiveness into which sin has brought the soul. As the only sin unto death which is described in Scripture is the sin against the Holy Spirit, we here consider the nature of that sin.

Mat 12:31—“Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven”; 32—“And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come”; Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”; 1 John 5:16, 17—“If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and God will give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin into death: not concerning this do I say that he should make request. All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death”; Heb. 10:26—“if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, then remaineth no more a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries.”

Ritschl holds all sin that comes short of definitive rejection of Christ to be ignorance rather than sin, and to be the object of no condemning sentence. This is to make the sin against the Holy Spirit the only real sin. Conscience and Scripture alike contradict this view. There is much incipient hardening of the heart that precedes the sin of final obduracy. See Denney, Studies in Theology, 80. The composure of the criminal is not always a sign of innocence. S. S. Times, April 12, 1902:200—“Sensitiveness of conscience and of feeling, and responsiveness of countenance and bearing, are to be retained by purity of life and freedom from transgression. On the other hand composure of countenance and calmness under suspicion and accusation are likely to be a result of continuance in wrong doing, with consequent hardening of the whole moral nature.”

Weismann, Heredity, 2:8—“As soon as any organ falls into disuse, it degenerates, and finally is lost altogether.... In parasites the organs of sense degenerate.” Marconi's wireless telegraphy requires an attuned “receiver.” The “transmitter” sends out countless rays into space: only one capable of corresponding vibrations can understand them. The sinner may so destroy his receptivity, that the whole universe may be uttering God's truth, yet he be unable to hear a word of it. The Outlook: “If a man should put out his eyes, he could not see—nothing could make him see. So if a man should by obstinate wickedness destroy his power to believe in God's forgiveness, he would be in a hopeless state. Though God would still be gracious, the man could not see it, and so could not take God's forgiveness to himself.”

The sin against the Holy Spirit is not to be regarded simply as an isolated act, but also as the external symptom of a heart so radically and finally set against God that no power which God can consistently use will ever save it. This sin, therefore, can be only the culmination of a long course of self-hardening and self-depraving. He who has committed it must be [pg 651] either profoundly indifferent to his own condition, or actively and bitterly hostile to God; so that anxiety or fear on account of one's condition is evidence that it has not been committed. The sin against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven, simply because the soul that has committed it has ceased to be receptive of divine influences, even when those influences are exerted in the utmost strength which God has seen fit to employ in his spiritual administration.

The commission of this sin is marked by a loss of spiritual sight; the blind fish of the Mammoth Cave left light for darkness, and so in time lost their eyes. It is marked by a loss of religious sensibility; the sensitive-plant loses Its sensitiveness, in proportion to the frequency with which it is touched. It is marked by a loss of power to will the good; “the lava hardens after it has broken from the crater, and in that state cannot return to its source” (Van Oosterzee). The same writer also remarks (Dogmatics, 2:438): “Herod Antipas, after earlier doubt and slavishness, reached such deadness as to be able to mock the Savior, at the mention of whose name he had not long before trembled.” Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:425—“It is not that divine grace is absolutely refused to any one who in true penitence asks forgiveness of this sin; but he who commits it never fulfills the subjective conditions upon which forgiveness is possible, because the aggravation of sin to this ultimatum destroys in him all susceptibility of repentance. The way of return to God is closed against no one who does not close it against himself.” Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 97-120, illustrates the downward progress of the sinner by the law of degeneration in the vegetable and animal world: pigeons, roses, strawberries, all tend to revert to the primitive and wild type. “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?” (Heb.2:3).

Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3:5—“You all know security Is mortals' chiefest enemy.”Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, 90-124—“Richard III is the ideal villain. Villainy has become an end in itself. Richard is an artist in villainy. He lacks the emotions naturally attending crime. He regards villainy with the intellectual enthusiasm of the artist. His villainy is ideal in its success. There is a fascination of irresistibility in him. He is imperturbable in his crime. There is no effort, but rather humor, in it; a recklessness which suggests boundless resources; an inspiration which excludes calculation. Shakespeare relieves the representation from the charge of monstrosity by turning all this villainous history into the unconscious development of Nemesis.”See also A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 188-193. Robert Browning's Guido, in The Ring and the Book, is an example of pure hatred of the good. Guido hates Pompilia for her goodness, and declares that, if he catches her in the next world, he will murder her there, as he murdered her here.

Alexander VI, the father of Cæsar and Lucrezia Borgia, the pope of cruelty and lust, wore yet to the day of his death the look of unfailing joyousness and geniality, yes, of even retiring sensitiveness and modesty. No fear or reproach of conscience seemed to throw gloom over his life, as in the cases of Tiberius and Louis XI. He believed himself under the special protection of the Virgin, although he had her painted with the features of his paramour, Julia Farnese. He never scrupled at false witness, adultery, or murder. See Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia, 294, 295. Jeremy Taylor thus describes the progress of sin in the sinner: “First it startles him, then it becomes pleasing, then delightful, then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed; then the man is impenitent, then obstinate, then resolved never to repent, then damned.”

There is a state of utter insensibility to emotions of love or fear, and man by his sin may reach that state. The act of blasphemy is only the expression of a hardened or a hateful heart. B. H. Payne: “The calcium flame will char the steel wire so that it is no longer affected by the magnet.... As the blazing cinders and black curling smoke which the volcano spews from its rumbling throat are the accumulation of months and years, so the sin against the Holy Spirit is not a thoughtless expression in a moment of passion or rage, but the giving vent to a state of heart and mind abounding in the accumulations of weeks and months of opposition to the gospel.”

Dr. J. P. Thompson: “The unpardonable sin is the knowing, wilful, persistent, contemptuous, malignant spurning of divine truth and grace, as manifested to the soul by the convincing and illuminating power of the Holy Ghost.” Dorner says that “therefore this sin does not belong to Old Testament times, or to the mere revelation of law. It implies the full revelation of the grace in Christ, and the conscious rejection of it by [pg 652]a soul to which the Spirit has made it manifest (Acts 17:30—‘The times of ignorance, therefore, God overlooked’; Rom. 3:25—‘the passing over of the sins done aforetime’).” But was it not under the Old Testament that God said: “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever” (Gen. 6:3), and “Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone” (Hosea 4:17)? The sin against the Holy Ghost is a sin against grace, but it does not appear to be limited to New Testament times.

It is still true that the unpardonable sin is a sin committed against the Holy Spirit rather than against Christ: Mat. 12:32—“whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come.” Jesus warns the Jews against it,—he does not say they had already committed it. They would seem to have committed it when, after Pentecost, they added to their rejection of Christ the rejection of the Holy Spirit's witness to Christ's resurrection. See Schaff, Sin against the Holy Ghost; Lemme, Sünde wider den Heiligen Geist; Davis, in Bap. Rev., 1862:317-326; Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, 283-289. On the general subject of kinds of sin and degrees of guilt, see Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:284, 298.

III. Penalty.

1. Idea of penalty.

By penalty, we mean that pain or loss which is directly or indirectly inflicted by the Lawgiver, in vindication of his justice outraged by the violation of law.

Turretin, 1:213—“Justice necessarily demands that all sin be punished, but it does not equally demand that it be punished in the very person that sinned, or in just such time and degree.” So far as this statement of the great Federal theologian is intended to explain our guilt in Adam and our justification in Christ, we can assent to his words; but we must add that the reason, in each case, why we suffer the penalty of Adam's sin, and Christ suffers the penalty of our sins, is not to be found in any covenant-relation, but rather in the fact that the sinner is one with Adam, and Christ is one with the believer,—in other words, not covenant-unity, but life-unity. The word “penalty,”like “pain,” is derived from pœna, ποινή, and it implies the correlative notion of desert. As under the divine government there can be no constructive guilt, so there can be no penalty inflicted by legal fiction. Christ's sufferings were penalty, not arbitrarily inflicted, nor yet borne to expiate personal guilt, but as the just due of the human nature with which he had united himself, and a part of which he was. Prof. Wm. Adams Brown: “Loss, not suffering, is the supreme penalty for Christians. The real penalty is separation from God. If such separation involves suffering, that is a sign of God's mercy, for where there is life, there is hope. Suffering is always to be interpreted as an appeal from God to man.”

In this definition it is implied that:

A. The natural consequences of transgression, although they constitute a part of the penalty of sin, do not exhaust that penalty. In all penalty there is a personal element—the holy wrath of the Lawgiver,—which natural consequences but partially express.

We do not deny, but rather assert, that the natural consequences of transgression are a part of the penalty of sin. Sensual sins are punished, in the deterioration and corruption of the body; mental and spiritual sins, in the deterioration and corruption of the soul. Prov. 5:22—“His own iniquities shall take the wicked, And he shall be holden with the cords of his sin”—as the hunter is caught in the toils which he has devised for the wild beast. Sin is self-detecting and self-tormenting. But this is only half the truth. Those who would confine all penalty to the reaction of natural laws are in danger of forgetting that God is not simply immanent in the universe, but is also transcendent, and that “to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31) is to fall into the hands, not simply of the law, but also of the Lawgiver. Natural law is only the regular expression of God's mind and will. We abhor a person who is foul in body and in speech. There is no penalty of sin more dreadful than its being an object of abhorrence to God. Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate!” Add to this the law of continuity which makes sin reproduce itself, and the law of conscience which makes sin its own detecter, judge, and tormentor, and we have sufficient evidence of God's wrath against it, apart from any external inflictions. [pg 653]The divine feeling toward sin is seen in Jesus' scourging the traffickers in the temple, his denunciation of the Pharisees, his weeping over Jerusalem, his agony in Gethsemane. Imagine the feeling of a father toward his daughter's betrayer, and God's feeling toward sin may be faintly understood.

The deed returns to the doer, and character determines destiny—this law is a revelation of the righteousness of God. Penalty will vindicate the divine character in the long run, though not always in time. This is recognized in all religions. Buddhist priest in Japan: “The evil doer weaves a web around himself, as the silkworm weaves its cocoon.” Socrates made Circe's turning of men into swine a mere parable of the self-brutalizing influence of sin. In Dante's Inferno, the punishments are all of them the sins themselves; hence men are in hell before they die. Hegel: “Penalty is the other half of crime.” R. W. Emerson: “Punishment not follows, but accompanies, crime.”Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 59—“Corruption is destruction, and the sinner is a suicide; penalty corresponds with transgression and is the outcome of it; sin is death in the making; death is sin in the final infliction.” J. B. Thomas, Baptist Congress, 1901:110—“What matters it whether I wait by night for the poacher and deliberately shoot him, or whether I set the pistol so that he shall be shot by it when he commits the depredation?” Tennyson, Sea Dreams: “His gain is loss; for he that wrongs his friend Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about A silent court of justice in his breast, Himself the judge and jury, and himself The prisoner at the bar, ever condemn'd: And that drags down his life: then comes what comes Hereafter.”

B. The object of penalty is not the reformation of the offender or the ensuring of social or governmental safety. These ends may be incidentally secured through its infliction, but the great end of penalty is the vindication of the character of the Lawgiver. Penalty is essentially a necessary reaction of the divine holiness against sin. Inasmuch, however, as wrong views of the object of penalty have so important a bearing upon our future studies of doctrine, we make fuller mention of the two erroneous theories which have greatest currency.

(a) Penalty is not essentially reformatory.—By this we mean that the reformation of the offender is not its primary design,—as penalty, it is not intended to reform. Penalty, in itself, proceeds not from the love and mercy of the Lawgiver, but from his justice. Whatever reforming influences may in any given instance be connected with it are not parts of the penalty, but are mitigations of it, and they are added not in justice but in grace. If reformation follows the infliction of penalty, it is not the effect of the penalty, but the effect of certain benevolent agencies which have been provided to turn into a means of good what naturally would be to the offender only a source of harm.

That the object of penalty is not reformation appears from Scripture, where punishment is often referred to God's justice, but never to God's love; from the intrinsic ill-desert of sin, to which penalty is correlative; from the fact that punishment must be vindicative, in order to be disciplinary, and just, in order to be reformatory; from the fact that upon this theory punishment would not be just when the sinner was already reformed or could not be reformed, so that the greater the sin the less the punishment must be.

Punishment is essentially different from chastisement. The latter proceeds from love (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”; Heb. 12:6—“Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth”). Punishment proceeds not from love but from justice—see Ez. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”; 36:21, 22—in judgment, “I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”; Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”; Rev. 15:1, 4—“wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”; 16:5—“Righteous art thou, ... thou Holy One, because thou didst thus judge”; 19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot.” [pg 654]So untrue is the saying of Sir Thomas More's Utopia: “The end of all punishment is the destruction of vice, and the saving of men.” Luther: “God has two rods: one of mercy and goodness; another of anger and fury.” Chastisement is the former; penalty the latter.

If the reform-theory of penalty is correct, then to punish crime, without asking about reformation, makes the state the transgressor; its punishments should be proportioned, not to the greatness of the crime, but to the sinner's state; the death-penalty should be abolished, upon the ground that it will preclude all hope of reformation. But the same theory would abolish any final judgment, or eternal punishment; for, when the soul becomes so wicked that there is no more hope of reform, there is no longer any justice in punishing it. The greater the sin, the less the punishment; and Satan, the greatest sinner, should have no punishment at all.

Modern denunciations of capital punishment are often based upon wrong conceptions of the object of penalty. Opposition to the doctrine of future punishment would give way, if the opposers realized what penalty is ordained to secure. Harris, God the Creator, 2:447, 451—“Punishment is not primarily reformatory; it educates conscience and vindicates the authority of law.” R. W. Dale: “It is not necessary to prove that hanging is beneficial to the person hanged. The theory that society has no right to send a man to jail, to feed him on bread and water, to make him pick hemp or work a treadmill, except to reform him, is utterly rotten. He must deserve to be punished, or else the law has no right to punish him.” A House of Refuge or a State Industrial School is primarily a penal institution, for it deprives persons of their liberty and compels them against their will to labor. This loss and deprivation on their part cannot be justified except upon the ground that it is the desert of their wrong doing. Whatever gracious and philanthropic influences may accompany this confinement and compulsion, they cannot of themselves explain the penal element in the institution. If they could, a habeas corpus decree could be sought, and obtained, from any competent court.

God's treatment of men in this world also combines the elements of penalty and of chastisement. Suffering is first of all deserved, and this justifies its infliction. But it is at the beginning accompanied with all manner of alleviating influences which tend to draw men back to God. As these gracious influences are resisted, the punitive element becomes preponderating, and penalty reflects God's holiness rather than his love. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 1-25—“Pain is not the immediate object of punishment. It must be a means to an end, a moral end, namely, penitence. But where the depraved man becomes a human tiger, there punishment must reach its culmination. There is a punishment which is not restorative. According to the spirit in which punishment is received, it may be internal or external. All punishment begins as discipline. It tends to repentance. Its triumph would be the triumph within. It becomes retributive only as the sinner refuses to repent. Punishment is only the development of sin. The ideal penitent condemns himself, identifies himself with righteousness by accepting penalty. In proportion as penalty fails in its purpose to produce penitence, it acquires more and more a retributive character, whose climax is not Calvary but Hell.”

Alexander, Moral Order and Progress, 327-333 (quoted in Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 67)—“Punishment has three characters: It is retributive, in so far as it falls under the general law that resistance to the dominant type recoils on the guilty or resistant creature; it is preventive, in so far as, being a statutory enactment, it aims at securing the maintenance of the law irrespective of the individual's character. But this latter characteristic is secondary, and the former is comprehended in the third idea, that of reformation, which is the superior form in which retribution appears when the type is a mental ideal and is affected by conscious persons.” Hyslop on Freedom, Responsibility, and Punishment, in Mind, April, 1894:167-189—“In the Elmira Reformatory, out of 2295 persons paroled between 1876 and 1889, 1907 or 83 per cent. represent a probably complete reformation. Determinists say that this class of persons cannot do otherwise. Something is wrong with their theory. We conclude that 1. Causal responsibility justifies preventive punishment; 2. Potential moral responsibility justifies corrective punishment; 3. Actual moral responsibility justifies retributive punishment.” Here we need only to point out the incorrect use of the word “punishment,” which belongs only to the last class. In the two former cases the word “chastisement” should have been used. See Julius Müller, Lehre von der Sünde, 1:334; Thornton, Old Fashioned Ethics, 70-73; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:238, 239 (Syst. Doct., 3:134,135); Robertson's [pg 655]Sermons, 4th Series, no. 18 (Harper's ed., 752); see also this Compendium, references on Holiness, A. (d), page 273.

(b) Penalty is not essentially deterrent and preventive.—By this we mean that its primary design is not to protect society, by deterring men from the commission of like offences. We grant that this end is often secured in connection with punishment, both in family and civil government and under the government of God. But we claim that this is a merely incidental result, which God's wisdom and goodness have connected with the infliction of penalty,—it cannot be the reason and ground for penalty itself. Some of the objections to the preceding theory apply also to this. But in addition to what has been said, we urge:

Penalty cannot be primarily designed to secure social and governmental safety, for the reason that it is never right to punish the individual simply for the good of society. No punishment, moreover, will or can do good to others that is not just and right in itself. Punishment does good, only when the person punished deserves punishment; and that desert of punishment, and not the good effects that will follow it, must be the ground and reason why it is inflicted. The contrary theory would imply that the criminal might go free but for the effect of his punishment on others, and that man might rightly commit crime if only he were willing to bear the penalty.

Kant, Praktische Vernunft, 151 (ed. Rosenkranz)—“The notion of ill-desert and punishableness is necessarily implied in the idea of voluntary transgression; and the idea of punishment excludes that of happiness in all its forms. For though he who inflicts punishment may, it is true, also have a benevolent purpose to produce by the punishment some good effect upon the criminal, yet the punishment must be justified first of all as pure and simple requital and retribution.... In every punishment as such, justice is the very first thing and constitutes the essence of it. A benevolent purpose, it is true, may be conjoined with punishment; but the criminal cannot claim this as his due, and he has no right to reckon on it.” These utterances of Kant apply to the deterrent theory as well as to the reformatory theory of penalty. The element of desert or retribution is the basis of the other elements in punishment. See James Seth, Ethical Principles, 333-338; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:717; Hodge, Essays, 133.

A certain English judge, in sentencing a criminal, said that he punished him, not for stealing sheep, but that sheep might not be stolen. But it is the greatest injustice to punish a man for the mere sake of example. Society cannot be benefited by such injustice. The theory can give no reason why one should be punished rather than another, nor why a second offence should be punished more heavily than the first. On this theory, moreover, if there were but one creature in the universe, and none existed beside himself to be affected by his suffering, he could not justly be punished, however great might be his sin. The only principle that can explain punishment is the principle of desert. See Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 2:348.

“Crime is most prevented by the conviction that crime deserves punishment; the greatest deterrent agency is conscience.” So in the government of God “there is no hint that future punishment works good to the lost or to the universe. The integrity of the redeemed is not to be maintained by subjecting the lost to a punishment they do not deserve. The wrong merits punishment, and God is bound to punish it, whether good comes of it or not. Sin is intrinsically ill-deserving. Impurity must be banished from God. God must vindicate himself, or cease to be holy” (see art. on the Philosophy of Punishment, by F. L. Patton, in Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:126-139).

Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 186, 274—Those who maintain punishment to be essentially deterrent and preventive “ignore the metaphysics of responsibility and treat the problem ‘positively and objectively’ on the basis of physiology, sociology, etc., and in the interests of public safety. The question of guilt or innocence is as irrelevant as the question concerning the guilt or innocence of wasps and hornets. An ancient holder of this view set forth the opinion that ‘it was expedient that one man should die for the people’ [pg 656](John 18:14), and so Jesus was put to death.... A mob in eastern Europe might be persuaded that a Jew had slaughtered a Christian child as a sacrifice. The authorities might be perfectly sure of the man's innocence, and yet proceed to punish him because of the mob's clamor, and the danger of an outbreak.” Men high up in the French government thought it was better that Dreyfus should suffer for the sake of France, than that a scandal affecting the honor of the French army should be made public. In perfect consistency with this principle, McKim, Heredity and Human Progress, 192, advocates infliction of painless death upon idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, habitual drunkards, insane criminals, murderers, nocturnal house breakers, and all dangerous and incorrigible persons. He would change the place of slaughter from our streets and homes to our penal institutions; in other words, he would abandon punishment, but protect society.

Failure to recognize holiness as the fundamental attribute of God, and the affirmation of that holiness as conditioning the exercise of love, vitiates the discussion of penalty by A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 243-250—“What is penal suffering designed to accomplish? Is it to manifest the holiness of God? Is it to express the sanctity of the moral law? Is it simply a natural consequence? Does it manifest the divine Fatherhood? God does not inflict penalty simply to satisfy himself or to manifest his holiness, any more than an earthly father inflicts suffering on his child to show his wrath against the wrongdoer or to manifest his own goodness. The idea of punishment is essentially barbaric and foreign to all that is known of the Deity. Penalty that is not reformatory or protective is barbarism. In the home, punishment is always discipline. Its object is the welfare of the child and the family. Punishment as an expression of wrath or enmity, with no remedial purpose beyond, is a relic of barbarism. It carries with it the content of vengeance. It is the expression of anger, of passion, or at best of cold justice. Penal suffering is undoubtedly the divine holiness expressing its hatred of sin. But, if it stops with such expression, it is not holiness, but selfishness. If on the other hand that expression of holiness is used or permitted in order that the sinner may be made to hate his sin, then it is no more punishment, but chastisement. On any other hypothesis, penal suffering has no justification except the arbitrary will of the Almighty, and such a hypothesis is an impeachment both of his justice and his love.” This view seems to us to ignore the necessary reaction of divine holiness against sin; to make holiness a mere form of love; a means to an end and that end utilitarian; and so to deny to holiness any independent, or even real, existence in the divine nature.