Section II.—Nature Of Sin.

I. Definition of Sin.

Sin is lack of conformity to the moral law of God, either in act,

disposition, or state.

In explanation, we remark that (_a_) This definition regards sin as

predicable only of rational and voluntary agents. (_b_) It assumes,

however, that man has a rational nature below consciousness, and a

voluntary nature apart from actual volition. (_c_) It holds that the

divine law requires moral likeness to God in the affections and tendencies

of the nature, as well as in its outward activities. (_d_) It therefore

considers lack of conformity to the divine holiness in disposition or

state as a violation of law, equally with the outward act of

transgression.

In our discussion of the Will (pages 504-513), we noticed that

there are permanent states of the will, as well as of the

intellect and of the sensibilities. It is evident, moreover, that

these permanent states, unlike man’s deliberate acts, are always

very imperfectly conscious, and in many cases are not conscious at

all. Yet it is in these very states that man is most unlike God,

and so, as law only reflects God (see pages 537-544), most lacking

in conformity to God’s law.

One main difference between Old School and New School views of sin

is that the latter constantly tends to limit sin to mere act,

while the former finds sin in the states of the soul. We propose

what we think to be a valid and proper compromise between the two.

We make sin coëxtensive, not with act, but with activity. The Old

School and the New School are not so far apart, when we remember

that the New School “choice” is _elective preference_, exercised

so soon as the child is born (Park) and reasserting itself in all

the subordinate choices of life; while the Old School “state” is

not a dead, passive, mechanical thing, but is a _state of active

movement_, or of tendency to move, toward evil. As God’s holiness

is not passive purity but purity willing (pages 268-275), so the

opposite to this, sin, is not passive impurity but is impurity

willing.

The soul may not always be conscious, but it may always be active.

At his creation man “_became a living soul_” (_Gen. 2:7_), and it

may be doubted whether the human spirit ever ceases its activity,

any more than the divine Spirit in whose image it is made. There

is some reason to believe that even in the deepest sleep the body

rests rather than the mind. And when we consider how large a

portion of our activity is automatic and continuous, we see the

impossibility of limiting the term “sin” to the sphere of

momentary act, whether conscious or unconscious.

E. G. Robinson: “Sin is not mere act—something foreign to the

being. It is a quality of being. There is no such thing as a sin

apart from a sinner, or an act apart from an actor. God punishes

sinners, not sins. Sin is a mode of being; as an entity by itself

it never existed. God punishes sin as a state, not as an act. Man

is not responsible for the consequences of his crimes, nor for the

acts themselves, except as they are symptomatic of his personal

states.” Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 5:162—“The knowledge

of sin has justly been termed the β and ψ of philosophy.”

Our treatment of Holiness, as belonging to the nature of God (pages

268-275); of Will, as not only the faculty of volitions, but also a

permanent state of the soul (pages 504-513); and of Law as requiring the

conformity of man’s nature to God’s holiness (pages 537-544); has prepared

us for the definition of sin as a state. The chief psychological defect of

New School theology, next to its making holiness to be a mere form of

love, is its ignoring of the unconscious and subconscious elements in

human character. To help our understanding of sin as an underlying and

permanent state of the soul, we subjoin references to recent writers of

note upon psychology and its relations to theology.

We may preface our quotations by remarking that mind is always

greater than its conscious operations. The man is more than his

acts. Only the smallest part of the self is manifested in the

thoughts, feelings, and volitions. In counting, to put myself to

sleep, I find, when my attention has been diverted by other

thoughts, that the counting has gone on all the same. Ladd,

Philosophy of Mind, 176, speaks of the “dramatic sundering of the

ego.” There are dream-conversations. Dr. Johnson was once greatly

vexed at being worsted by his opponent in an argument in a dream.

M. Maury in a dream corrected the bad English of his real self by

the good English of his other unreal self. Spurgeon preached a

sermon in his sleep after vainly trying to excogitate one when

awake, and his wife gave him the substance of it after he woke.

Hegel said that “Life is divided into two realms—a night-life of

genius, and a day-life of consciousness.”

Du Prel, Philosophy of Mysticism, propounds the thesis: “The ego

is not wholly embraced in self-consciousness,” and claims that

there is much of psychical activity within us of which our common

waking conception of ourselves takes no account. Thus when “dream

dramatizes”—when we engage in a dream-conversation in which our

interlocutor’s answer comes to us with a shock of surprise—if our

own mind is assumed to have furnished that answer, it has done so

by a process of unconscious activity. Dwinell, in Bib. Sac., July,

1890:369-389—“The soul is only imperfectly in possession of its

organs, and is able to report only a small part of its activities

in consciousness.” Thoughts come to us like foundlings laid at our

door. We slip in a question to the librarian, Memory, and after

leaving it there awhile the answer appears on the bulletin board.

Delbœuf, Le Sommeil et les Rêves, 91—“The dreamer is a momentary

and involuntary dupe of his own imagination, as the poet is the

momentary and voluntary dupe, and the insane man is the permanent

and involuntary dupe.” If we are the organs not only of our own

past thinking, but, as Herbert Spencer suggests, also the organs

of the past thinking of the race, his doctrine may give

additional, though unintended, confirmation to a Scriptural view

of sin.

William James, Will to Believe, 316, quotes from F. W. H. Myers,

in Jour. Psych. Research, who likens our ordinary consciousness to

the visible part of the solar spectrum; the total consciousness is

like that spectrum prolonged by the inclusion of the ultra-red and

the ultra-violet rays—1 to 12 and 96. “Each of us,” he says, “is

an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows—an

individuality which can never express itself completely through

any corporeal manifestation. The self manifests itself through the

organism; but there is always some part of the self unmanifested,

and always, as it seems, some power of organic expression in

abeyance or reserve.” William James himself, in Scribner’s

Monthly, March, 1890:361-373, sketches the hypnotic investigations

of Janet and Binet. There is a secondary, subconscious self.

Hysteria is the lack of synthetising power, and consequent

disintegration of the field of consciousness into mutually

exclusive parts. According to Janet, the secondary and the primary

consciousnesses, added together, can never exceed the normally

total consciousness of the individual. But Prof. James says:

“There are trances which obey another type. I know a

non-hysterical woman, who in her trances knows facts which

altogether transcend her possible normal consciousness, facts

about the lives of people whom she never saw or heard of before.”

Our affections are deeper and stronger than we know. We learn how

deep and strong they are, when their current is resisted by

affliction or dammed up by death. We know how powerful evil

passions are, only when we try to subdue them. Our dreams show us

our naked selves. On the morality of dreams, the London Spectator

remarks: “Our conscience and power of self-control act as a sort

of watchdog over our worse selves during the day, but when the

watchdog is off duty, the primitive or natural man is at liberty

to act as he pleases; our ‘soul’ has left us at the mercy of our

own evil nature, and in our dreams we become what, except for the

grace of God, we would always be.”

Both in conscience and in will there is a self-diremption. Kant’s

categorical imperative is only one self laying down the law to the

other self. The whole Kantian system of ethics is based on this

doctrine of double consciousness. Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind,

169 _sq._, speaks of “psychical automatism.” Yet this automatism

is possible only to self-conscious and cognitively remembering

minds. It is always the “I” that puts itself into “that other.” We

could not conceive of the other self except under the figure of

the “I.” All our mental operations are ours, and we are

responsible for them, because the subconscious and even the

unconscious self is the product of past self-conscious thoughts

and volitions. The present settled state of our wills is the

result of former decisions. The will is a storage battery, charged

by past acts, full of latent power, ready to manifest its energy

so soon as the force which confines it is withdrawn. On

unconscious mental action, see Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 139,

515-543, and criticism of Carpenter, in Ireland, Blot on the

Brain, 226-238; Bramwell, Hypnotism, its History, Practice and

Theory, 358-398; Porter, Human Intellect, 333, 334; _versus_ Sir

Wm. Hamilton, who adopts the maxim: “Non sentimus, nisi sentiamus

nos sentire” (Philosophy, ed. Wight, 171). Observe also that sin

may infect the body, as well as the soul, and may bring it into a

state of non-conformity to God’s law (see H. B. Smith, Syst.

Theol., 267).

In adducing our Scriptural and rational proof of the definition of sin as

a state, we desire to obviate the objection that this view leaves the soul

wholly given over to the power of evil. While we maintain that this is

true of man apart from God, we also insist that side by side with the evil

bent of the human will there is always an immanent divine power which

greatly counteracts the force of evil, and if not resisted leads the

individual soul—even when resisted leads the race at large—toward truth

and salvation. This immanent divine power is none other than Christ, the

eternal Word, the Light which lighteth every man; see John 1:4, 9.

_John 1:4, 9_—“_In him was life, and the life was the light of

men.... There was the true light, even the light which lighteth

every man._” See a further statement in A. H. Strong, Cleveland

Sermon, May, 1904, with regard to the old and the new view as to

sin:—“Our fathers believed in total depravity, and we agree with

them that man naturally is devoid of love to God and that every

faculty is weakened, disordered, and corrupted by the selfish bent

of his will. They held to original sin. The selfish bent of man’s

will can be traced back to the apostacy of our first parents; and,

on account of that departure of the race from God, all men are by

nature children of wrath. And all this is true, if it is regarded

as a statement of the facts, apart from their relation to Christ.

But our fathers did not see, as we do, that man’s relation to

Christ antedated the Fall and constituted an underlying and

modifying condition of man’s life. Humanity was naturally in

Christ, in whom all things were created and in whom they all

consist. Even man’s sin did not prevent Christ from still working

in him to counteract the evil and to suggest the good. There was

an internal, as well as an external, preparation for man’s

redemption. In this sense, of a divine principle in man striving

against the selfish and godless will, there was a total

redemption, over against man’s total depravity; and an original

grace, that was even more powerful than original sin.

“We have become conscious that total depravity alone is not a

sufficient or proper expression of the truth; and the phrase has

been outgrown. It has been felt that the old view of sin did not

take account of the generous and noble aspirations, the unselfish

efforts, the strivings after God, of even unregenerate men. For

this reason there has been less preaching about sin, and less

conviction as to its guilt and condemnation. The good impulses of

men outside the Christian pale have been often credited to human

nature, when they should have been credited to the indwelling

Spirit of Christ. I make no doubt that one of our radical

weaknesses at this present time is our more superficial view of

sin. Without some sense of sin’s guilt and condemnation, we cannot

feel our need of redemption. John the Baptist must go before

Christ; the law must prepare the way for the gospel.

“My belief is that the new apprehension of Christ’s relation to

the race will enable us to declare, as never before, the lost

condition of the sinner; while at the same time we show him that

Christ is with him and in him to save. This presence in every man

of a power not his own that works for righteousness is a very

different doctrine from that ’divinity of man’ which is so often

preached. The divinity is not the divinity of man, but the

divinity of Christ. And the power that works for righteousness is

not the power of man, but the power of Christ. It is a power whose

warning, inviting, persuading influence renders only more marked

and dreadful the evil will which hampers and resists it. Depravity

is all the worse, when we recognize in it the constant antagonist

of an ever-present, all-holy, and all-loving Redeemer.”

1. Proof.

As it is readily admitted that the outward act of transgression is

properly denominated sin, we here attempt to show only that lack of

conformity to the law of God in disposition or state is also and equally

to be so denominated.

A. From Scripture.

(_a_) The words ordinarily translated “sin,” or used as synonyms for it,

are as applicable to dispositions and states as to acts (חטאה and ἁμαρτία

= a missing, failure, coming short [_sc._ of God’s will]).

See _Num. 15:28_—“_sinneth unwittingly_”; _Ps. 51:2_—“_cleanse me

from my sin_”; _5_—“_Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And

in sin did my mother conceive me_”; _Rom. 7:17_—“_sin which

dwelleth in me_”; compare _Judges 20:16_, where the literal

meaning of the word appears: “_sling stones at a hair-breadth, and

not miss_” (חטא). In a similar manner, משע [LXX ἀσέβεια] =

separation from, rebellion against [sc. God]; see _Lev. 16:16,

21_; _cf._ Delitzsch on _Ps. 32:1_. עון [LXX ἀδικία] = bending,

perversion [sc. of what is right], iniquity; see _Lev. 5:17_;

_cf._ _John 7:18_. See also the Hebrew רע, רשע, [= ruin,

confusion], and the Greek ἀποστασία, ἐπιθυμία, ἔχθρα, κακία,

πονηρία, σάρξ. None of these designations of sin limits it to mere

act,—most of them more naturally suggest disposition or state.

Ἁμαρτία implies that man in sin does not reach what he seeks

therein; sin is a state of delusion and deception (Julius Müller).

On the words mentioned, see Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms; Cremer,

Lexicon N. T. Greek; Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 28, pp. 43-47;

Trench, N. T. Synonyms, part 2:61, 73.

(b) The New Testament descriptions of sin bring more distinctly to view

the states and dispositions than the outward acts of the soul (1 John

3:4—ἡ ἁμαρτία ἐστὶν ἡ ἀνομία, where ἀνομία =, not “transgression of the

law,” but, as both context and etymology show, “lack of conformity to law”

or “lawlessness”—Rev. Vers.).

See _1 John 5:17_—“_All unrighteousness is sin_”; _Rom.

14:23_—“_whatsoever is not of faith is sin_”; _James 4:17_—“_To

him therefore that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it

is sin._” Where the sin is that of _not doing_, sin cannot be said

to consist in _act_. It must then at least be a _state_.

(_c_) Moral evil is ascribed not only to the thoughts and affections, but

to the heart from which they spring (we read of the “evil thoughts” and of

the “evil heart”—Mat. 15:19 and Heb. 3:12).

See also _Mat. 5:22_—anger in the heart is murder; _28_—impure

desire is adultery. _Luke 6:45_—“_the evil man out of the evil

treasure_ [of his heart] _bringeth forth that which is evil._”

_Heb. 3:12_—“_an evil heart of unbelief_”; _cf._ _Is. 1:5_—“_the

whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint_”; _Jer. 17:9_—“_The

heart is deceitful above all things, and it is exceedingly

corrupt: who can know it?_”—here the sin that cannot be known is

not sin of act, but sin of the heart. “Below the surface stream,

shallow and light, Of what we _say_ we feel; below the stream, As

light, of what we _think_ we feel, there flows, With silent

current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we

feel _indeed_.”

(_d_) The state or condition of the soul which gives rise to wrong desires

and acts is expressly called sin (Rom. 7:8—“Sin ... wrought in me ... all

manner of coveting”).

_John 8:34_—“_Every one that committeth sin is the bondservant of

sin_”; _Rom. 7:11, 13, 14, 17, 20_—“_sin ... beguiled me ...

working death to me ... I am carnal, sold under sin ... sin which

dwelleth in me._” These representations of sin as a principle or

state of the soul are incompatible with the definition of it as a

mere act. John Byrom, 1691-1763: “Think and be careful what thou

art within, For there is sin in the desire of sin. Think and be

thankful in a different case, For there is grace in the desire of

grace.”

Alexander, Theories of the Will, 85—“In the person of Paul is

represented the man who has been already justified by faith and

who is at peace with God. In the 6th chapter of Romans, the

question is discussed whether such a man is obliged to keep the

moral law. But in the 7th chapter the question is not, _must_ man

keep the moral law? but why is he so _incapable_ of keeping the

moral law? The struggle is thus, not in the soul of the

unregenerate man who is dead in sin, but in the soul of the

regenerate man who has been pardoned and is endeavoring to keep

the law.... In a state of sin the will is determined toward the

bad; in a state of grace the will is determined toward

righteousness; but not wholly so, for the flesh is not at once

subdued, and there is a war between the good and bad principles of

action in the soul of him who has been pardoned.”

(_e_) Sin is represented as existing in the soul, prior to the

consciousness of it, and as only discovered and awakened by the law (Rom.

7:9, 10—“when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died”—if sin

“revived,” it must have had previous existence and life, even though it

did not manifest itself in acts of conscious transgression).

_Rom. 7:8_—“_apart from the law sin is dead_”—here is sin which is

not yet sin of act. Dead or unconscious sin is still sin. The fire

in a cave discovers reptiles and stirs them, but they were there

before; the light and heat do not create them. Let a beam of

light, says Jean Paul Richter, through your window-shutter into a

darkened room, and you reveal a thousand motes floating in the air

whose existence was before unsuspected. So the law of God reveals

our “_hidden faults_” (_Ps. 19:12_)—infirmities, imperfections,

evil tendencies and desires—which also cannot all be classed as

_acts_ of transgression.

(_f_) The allusions to sin as a permanent power or reigning principle, not

only in the individual but in humanity at large, forbid us to define it as

a momentary act, and compel us to regard it as being primarily a settled

depravity of nature, of which individual sins or acts of transgression are

the workings and fruits (Rom. 5:21—“sin reigned in death”; 6:12—“let not

therefore sin reign in your mortal body”).

In _Rom. 5:21_, the reign of sin is compared to the reign of

grace. As grace is not an act but a principle, so sin is not an

act but a principle. As the poisonous exhalations from a well

indicate that there is corruption and death at the bottom, so the

ever-recurring thoughts and acts of sin are evidence that there is

a principle of sin in the heart,—in other words, that sin exists

as a permanent disposition or state. A momentary act cannot

“reign” nor “dwell”; a disposition or state can. Maudsley, Sleep,

its Psychology, makes the damaging confession: “If we were held

responsible for our dreams, there is no living man who would not

deserve to be hanged.”

(_g_) The Mosaic sacrifices for sins of ignorance and of omission, and

especially for general sinfulness, are evidence that sin is not to be

limited to mere act, but that it includes something deeper and more

permanent in the heart and the life (Lev. 1:3; 5:11; 12:8; _cf._ Luke

2:24).

The sin-offering for sins of ignorance (_Lev. 4:14, 20, 31_), the

trespass-offering for sins of omission (_Lev. 5:5, 6_), and the

burnt offering to expiate general sinfulness (_Lev. 1:3_; _cf._

_Luke 2:22-24_), all witness that sin is not confined to mere act.

_John 1:29_—“_the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin,_” not the

sins, “_of the world_”. See Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:233; Schmid,

Bib. Theol. N. T., 194, 381, 442, 448, 492, 604; Philippi,

Glaubenslehre, 3:210-217; Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin,

2:259-306; Edwards, Works. 3:16-18. For the New School definition

of sin, see Fitch, Nature of Sin, and Park, in Bib. Sac., 7:551.

B. From the common judgment of mankind.

(_a_) Men universally attribute vice as well as virtue not only to

conscious and deliberate acts, but also to dispositions and states. Belief

in something more permanently evil than acts of transgression is indicated

in the common phrases, “hateful temper,” “wicked pride,” “bad character.”

As the beatitudes (_Mat. 5:1-12_) are pronounced, not upon acts,

but upon dispositions of the soul, so the curses of the law are

uttered not so much against single acts of transgression as

against the evil affections from which they spring. Compare the

“_works of the flesh_” (_Gal. 5:19_) with the “_fruit of the

Spirit_” (_5:22_). In both, dispositions and states predominate.

(_b_) Outward acts, indeed, are condemned only when they are regarded as

originating in, and as symptomatic of, evil dispositions. Civil law

proceeds upon this principle in holding crime to consist, not alone in the

external act, but also in the evil motive or intent with which it is

performed.

The _mens rea_ is essential to the idea of crime. The

“_idle-word_” (_Mat 12:36_) shall be brought into the judgment,

not because it is so important in itself, but because it is a

floating straw that indicates the direction of the whole current

of the heart and life. Murder differs from homicide, not in any

outward respect, but simply because of the motive that prompts

it,—and that motive is always, in the last analysis, an evil

disposition or state.

(_c_) The stronger an evil disposition, or in other words, the more it

connects itself with, or resolves itself into, a settled state or

condition of the soul, the more blameworthy is it felt to be. This is

shown by the distinction drawn between crimes of passion and crimes of

deliberation.

Edwards: “Guilt consists in having one’s heart wrong, and in doing

wrong from the heart.” There is guilt in evil desires, even when

the will combats them. But there is greater guilt when the will

consents. The outward act may be in each case the same, but the

guilt of it is proportioned to the extent to which the evil

disposition is settled and strong.

(_d_) This condemning sentence remains the same, even although the origin

of the evil disposition or state cannot be traced back to any conscious

act of the individual. Neither the general sense of mankind, nor the civil

law in which this general sense is expressed, goes behind the fact of an

existing evil will. Whether this evil will is the result of personal

transgression or is a hereditary bias derived from generations passed,

this evil will is the man himself, and upon him terminates the blame. We

do not excuse arrogance or sensuality upon the ground that they are family

traits.

The young murderer in Boston was not excused upon the ground of a

congenitally cruel disposition. We repent in later years of sins

of boyhood, which we only now see to be sins; and converted

cannibals repent, after becoming Christians, of the sins of

heathendom which they once committed without a thought of their

wickedness. The peacock cannot escape from his feet by flying, nor

can we absolve ourselves from blame for an evil state of will by

tracing its origin to a remote ancestry. We are responsible for

what we are. How this can be, when we have not personally and

consciously originated it, is the problem of original sin, which

we have yet to discuss.

(_e_) When any evil disposition has such strength in itself, or is so

combined with others, as to indicate a settled moral corruption in which

no power to do good remains, this state is regarded with the deepest

disapprobation of all. Sin weakens man’s power of obedience, but the

can-not is a will-not, and is therefore condemnable. The opposite

principle would lead to the conclusion that, the more a man weakened his

powers by transgression, the less guilty he would be, until absolute

depravity became absolute innocence.

The boy who hates his father cannot change his hatred into love by

a single act of will; but he is not therefore innocent.

Spontaneous and uncontrollable profanity is the worst profanity of

all. It is a sign that the whole will, like a subterranean

Kentucky river, is moving away from God, and that no recuperative

power is left in the soul which can reach into the depths to

reverse its course. See Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:110-114; Shedd,

Hist. Doct., 2:79-92, 152-157; Richards, Lectures on Theology,

256-301; Edwards, Works, 2:134; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 243-262;

Princeton Essays, 2:224-239; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 394.

C. From the experience of the Christian.

Christian experience is a testing of Scripture truth, and therefore is not

an independent source of knowledge. It may, however, corroborate

conclusions drawn from the word of God. Since the judgment of the

Christian is formed under the influence of the Holy Spirit, we may trust

this more implicitly than the general sense of the world. We affirm, then,

that just in proportion to his spiritual enlightenment and self-knowledge,

the Christian

(_a_) Regards his outward deviations from God’s law, and his evil

inclinations and desires, as outgrowths and revelations of a depravity of

nature which lies below his consciousness; and

(_b_) Repents more deeply for this depravity of nature, which constitutes

his inmost character and is inseparable from himself, than for what he

merely feels or does.

In proof of these statements we appeal to the biographies and writings of

those in all ages who have been by general consent regarded as most

advanced in spiritual culture and discernment.

“Intelligentia prima est, ut te noris peccatorem.” Compare David’s

experience, _Ps. 51:6_—“_Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward

parts: And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know

wisdom_”—with Paul’s experience in _Rom. 7:24_—“_Wretched man that

I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?_”—with

Isaiah’s experience (_6:5_), when in the presence of God’s glory

he uses the words of the leper (_Lev. 13:45_) and calls himself

“_unclean_,” and with Peter’s experience (_Luke 5:8_) when at the

manifestation of Christ’s miraculous power he “_fell down at

Jesus’ __ knees, saying, Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O

Lord._” So the publican cries: _“__God, be thou merciful to me the

sinner__”__ (Luke 18:13)_, and Paul calls himself the “_chief_” of

sinners (_1 Tim. 1:15_). It is evident that in none of these cases

were there merely single acts of transgression in view; the

humiliation and self-abhorrence were in view of permanent states

of depravity. Van Oosterzee: “What we do outwardly is only the

revelation of our inner nature.” The outcropping and visible rock

is but small in extent compared with the rock that is underlying

and invisible. The iceberg has eight-ninths of its mass below the

surface of the sea, yet icebergs have been seen near Cape Horn

from 700 to 800 feet high above the water.

It may be doubted whether any repentance is genuine which is not

repentance for _sin_ rather than for _sins_; compare _John

16:8_—the Holy Spirit “_will convict the world in respect of

sin_/” On the difference between conviction of sins and conviction

of sin, see Hare, Mission of the Comforter. Dr. A. J. Gordon, just

before his death, desired to be left alone. He was then overheard

confessing his sins in such seemingly extravagant terms as to

excite fear that he was in delirium. Martensen, Dogmatics,

389—Luther during his early experience “often wrote to Staupitz:

‘Oh, my sins, my sins!’ and yet in the confessional he could name

no sins in particular which he had to confess; so that it was

clearly a sense of the general depravity of his nature which

filled his soul with deep sorrow and pain.” Luther’s conscience

would not accept the comfort that he _wished_ to be without sin,

and therefore had no real sin. When he thought himself too great a

sinner to be saved, Staupitz replied: “Would you have the

semblance of a sinner and the semblance of a Savior?”

After twenty years of religious experience, Jonathan Edwards wrote

(Works 1:22, 23; also 3:16-18): “Often since I have lived in this

town I have had very affecting views of my own sinfulness and

vileness, very frequently to such a degree as to hold me in a kind

of loud weeping, sometimes for a considerable time together, so

that I have been often obliged to shut myself up. I have had a

vastly greater sense of my own wickedness and the badness of my

heart than ever I had before my conversion. It has often appeared

to me that if God should mark iniquity against me, I should appear

the very worst of all mankind, of all that have been since the

beginning of the world to this time; and that I should have by far

the lowest place in hell. When others that have come to talk with

me about their soul’s concerns have expressed the sense they have

had of their own wickedness, by saying that it seemed to them they

were as bad as the devil himself; I thought their expressions

seemed exceeding faint and feeble to represent my wickedness.”

Edwards continues: “My wickedness, as I am in myself, has long

appeared to me perfectly ineffable and swallowing up all thought

and imagination—like an infinite deluge, or mountains over my

head. I know not how to express better what my sins appear to me

to be, than by heaping infinite on infinite and multiplying

infinite by infinite. Very often for these many years, these

expressions are in my mind and in my mouth: ‘Infinite upon

infinite—infinite upon infinite!’ When I look into my heart and

take a view of my wickedness, it looks like an abyss infinitely

deeper than hell. And it appears to me that were it not for free

grace, exalted and raised up to the infinite height of all the

fulness and glory of the great Jehovah, and the arm of his power

and grace stretched forth in all the majesty of his power and in

all the glory of his sovereignty, I should appear sunk down in my

sins below hell itself, far beyond the sight of everything but the

eye of sovereign grace that can pierce even down to such a depth.

And yet it seems to me that my conviction of sin is exceeding

small and faint; it is enough to amaze me that I have no more

sense of my sin. I know certainly that I have very little sense of

my sinfulness. When I have had turns of weeping for my sins, I

thought I knew at the time that my repentance was nothing to my

sin.... It is affecting to think how ignorant I was, when a young

Christian, of the bottomless, infinite depths of wickedness,

pride, hypocrisy, and deceit left in my heart.”

Jonathan Edwards was not an ungodly man, but the holiest man of

his time. He was not an enthusiast, but a man of acute,

philosophic mind. He was not a man who indulged in exaggerated or

random statements, for with his power of introspection and

analysis he combined a faculty and habit of exact expression

unsurpassed among the sons of men. If the maxim “cuique in arte

sua credendum est” is of any value, Edwards’s statements in a

matter of religious experience are to be taken as correct

interpretations of the facts. H. B. Smith (System. Theol., 275)

quotes Thomasius as saying: “It is a striking fact in Scripture

that statements of the depth and power of sin are chiefly from the

regenerate.” Another has said that “a serpent is never seen at its

whole length until it is dead.” Thomas à Kempis (ed. Gould and

Lincoln, 142)—“Do not think that thou hast made any progress

toward perfection, till thou feelest that thou art less than the

least of all human beings.” Young’s Night Thoughts: “Heaven’s

Sovereign saves all beings but himself That hideous sight—a naked

human heart.”

Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life: “You may justly

condemn yourself for being the greatest sinner that you know, 1.

Because you know more of the folly of your own heart than of other

people’s, and can charge yourself with various sins which you know

only of yourself and cannot be sure that others are guilty of

them. 2. The greatness of our guilt arises from the greatness of

God’s goodness to us. You know more of these aggravations of your

sins than you do of the sins of other people. Hence the greatest

saints have in all ages condemned themselves as the greatest

sinners.” We may add: 3. That, since each man is a peculiar being,

each man is guilty of peculiar sins, and in certain particulars

and aspects may constitute an example of the enormity and

hatefulness of sin, such as neither earth nor hell can elsewhere

show.

Of Cromwell, as a representative of the Puritans, Green says

(Short History of the English People, 454): “The vivid sense of

the divine Purity close to such men, made the life of common men

seem sin.” Dr. Arnold of Rugby (Life and Corresp., App. D.): “In a

deep sense of moral evil, more perhaps than anything else, abides

a saving knowledge of God.” Augustine, on his death-bed, had the

32d Psalm written over against him on the wall. For his

expressions with regard to sin, see his Confessions, book 10. See

also Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 284, note.

2. Inferences.

In the light of the preceding discussion, we may properly estimate the

elements of truth and of error in the common definition of sin as “the

voluntary transgression of known law.”

(_a_) Not all sin is voluntary as being a distinct and conscious volition;

for evil disposition and state often precede and occasion evil volition,

and evil disposition and state are themselves sin. All sin, however, is

voluntary as springing either directly from will, or indirectly from those

perverse affections and desires which have themselves originated in will.

“Voluntary” is a term broader then “volitional,” and includes all those

permanent states of intellect and affection which the will has made what

they are. Will, moreover, is not to be regarded as simply the faculty of

volitions, but as primarily the underlying determination of the being to a

supreme end.

Will, as we have seen, includes preference (θέλημα, _voluntas_,

_Wille_) as well as volition (βουλή, _arbitrium_, _Willkür_). We

do not, with Edwards and Hodge, regard the sensibilities as states

of the will. They are, however, in their character and their

objects determined by the will, and so they may be called

voluntary. The permanent state of the will (New School “elective

preference”) is to be distinguished from the permanent state of

the sensibilities (dispositions, or desires). But both are

voluntary because both are due to past decisions of the will, and

“whatever springs from will we are responsible for” (Shedd,

Discourses and Essays, 243). Julius Müller, 2:51—“We speak of

self-consciousness and reason as something which the ego _has_,

but we identify the will _with_ the ego. No one would say, ‘my

will has decided this or that,’ although we do say, ‘my reason, my

conscience teaches me this or that.’ The will is the very man

himself, as Augustine says: ‘Voluntas est in omnibus; imo omnes

nihil aliud quam voluntates sunt.’ ”

For other statements of the relation of disposition to will, see

Alexander, Moral Science, 151—“In regard to dispositions, we say

that they are in a sense voluntary. They properly belong to the

will, taking the word in a large sense. In judging of the morality

of voluntary acts, the principle from which they proceed is always

included in our view and comes in for a large part of the blame”;

see also pages 201, 207, 208. Edwards on the Affections, 3:1-22;

on the Will, 3:4—“The affections are only certain modes of the

exercise of the will.” A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 234—“All

sin is voluntary, in the sense that all sin has its root in the

perverted dispositions, desires, and affections which constitute

the depraved state of the will.” But to Alexander, Edwards, and

Hodge, we reply that the first sin was not voluntary in this

sense, for there was no such depraved state of the will from which

it could spring. We are responsible for dispositions, not upon the

ground that they are a part of the will, but upon the ground that

they are effects of will, in other words, that past decisions of

the will have made them what they are. See pages 504-513.

(_b_) Deliberate intention to sin is an aggravation of transgression, but

it is not essential to constitute any given act or feeling a sin. Those

evil inclinations and impulses which rise unbidden and master the soul

before it is well aware of their nature, are themselves violations of the

divine law, and indications of an inward depravity which in the case of

each descendant of Adam is the chief and fontal transgression.

Joseph Cook: “Only the surface-water of the sea is penetrated with

light. Beneath is a half-lit region. Still further down is

absolute darkness. We are greater than we know.” Weismann,

Heredity, 2:8—“At the depth of 170 meters, or 552 feet, there is

about as much light as that of a starlight night when there is no

moon. Light penetrates as far as 400 meters, or 1,300 feet, but

animal life exists at a depth of 4,000 meters, or 13,000 feet.

Below 1,300 feet, all animals are blind.” (_Cf._ _Ps. 51:6;

19:12_—“_the inward parts ... the hidden parts ... hidden

faults_”—hidden not only from others, but even from ourselves.)

The light of consciousness plays only on the surface of the waters

of man’s soul.

(_c_) Knowledge of the sinfulness of an act or feeling is also an

aggravation of transgression, but it is not essential to constitute it a

sin. Moral blindness is the effect of transgression, and, as inseparable

from corrupt affections and desires, is itself condemned by the divine

law.

It is our duty to do better than we know. Our duty of knowing is

as real as our duty of doing. Sin is an opiate. Some of the most

deadly diseases do not reveal themselves in the patient’s

countenance, nor has the patient any adequate understanding of his

malady. There is an ignorance which is indolence. Men are often

unwilling to take the trouble of rectifying their standards of

judgment. There is also an ignorance which is intention. Instance

many students’ ignorance of College laws.

We cannot excuse disobedience by saying: “I forgot.” God’s

commandment is: “_Remember_”—as in _Ex. 20:8_; _cf._ _2 Pet.

3:5_—“_For this they wilfully forget._” “Ignorantia legis neminem

excusat.” _Rom. 2:12_—“_as many as have sinned without the law

shall also perish without the law_”; _Luke 12:48_—“_he that knew

not, and did things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten_ [though]

_with few stripes._” The aim of revelation and of preaching is to

bring man “_to himself_” (_cf._ _Luke 15:17_)—to show him what he

has been doing and what he is. Goethe: “We are never deceived: we

deceive ourselves.” Royce, World and Individual, 2:359—“The sole

possible free moral action is then a freedom that relates to the

present fixing of attention upon the ideas of the Ought which are

already present. To sin is _consciously to choose to forget_,

through a narrowing of the field of attention, an Ought that one

already recognizes.”

(_d_) Ability to fulfill the law is not essential to constitute the

non-fulfilment sin. Inability to fulfill the law is a result of

transgression, and, as consisting not in an original deficiency of faculty

but in a settled state of the affections and will, it is itself

condemnable. Since the law presents the holiness of God as the only

standard for the creature, ability to obey can never be the measure of

obligation or the test of sin.

Not power to the contrary, in the sense of ability to change all

our permanent states by mere volition, is the basis of obligation

and responsibility; for surely Satan’s responsibility does not

depend upon his power at any moment to turn to God and be holy.

Definitions of sin—Melanchthon: Defectus vel inclinatio vel actio

pugnans cum lege Dei. Calvin: Illegalitas, seu difformitas a lege.

Hollaz: Aberratio a lege divina. Hollaz adds: “Voluntariness does

not enter into the definition of sin, generically considered. Sin

may be called voluntary, either in respect to its cause, as it

inheres in the will, or in respect to the act, as it procedes from

deliberate volition. Here is the antithesis to the Roman Catholics

and to the Socinians, the latter of whom define sin as a voluntary

[_i. e._, a volitional] transgression of law”—a view, says Hase

(Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 162-164), “which is derived from

the necessary methods of civil tribunals, and which is

incompatible with the orthodox doctrine of original sin.” On the

New School definition of sin, see Fairchild, Nature of Sin, in

Bib. Sac., 25:30-48; Whedon, in Bib. Sac., 19:251, and On the

Will, 328. _Per contra_, see Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:180-190;

Lawrence, Old School in N. E. Theol., in Bib. Sac., 20:317-328;

Julius Müller, Doc. Sin, 1:40-72; Nitzsch, Christ. Doct., 216;

Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 124-126.

II. The Essential Principle of Sin.

The definition of sin as lack of conformity to the divine law does not

exclude, but rather necessitates, an inquiry into the characterizing

motive or impelling power which explains its existence and constitutes its

guilt. Only three views require extended examination. Of these the first

two constitute the most common excuses for sin, although not propounded

for this purpose by their authors: Sin is due (1) to the human body, or

(2) to finite weakness. The third, which we regard as the Scriptural view,

considers sin as (3) the supreme choice of self, or selfishness.

In the preceding section on the Definition of Sin, we showed that sin is a

_state_, and a state of the _will_. We now ask: What is the nature of this

state? and we expect to show that it is essentially a _selfish_ state of

the will.

1. Sin as Sensuousness.

This view regards sin as the necessary product of man’s sensuous nature—a

result of the soul’s connection with a physical organism. This is the view

of Schleiermacher and of Rothe. More recent writers, with John Fiske,

regard moral evil as man’s inheritance from a brute ancestry.

For statement of the view here opposed, see Schleiermacher, Der

Christliche Glaube, 1:361-364—“Sin is a prevention of the

determining power of the spirit, caused by the independence

(Selbständigkeit) of the sensuous functions.” The child lives at

first a life of sense, in which the bodily appetites are supreme.

The senses are the avenues of all temptation, the physical

domineers over the spiritual, and the soul never shakes off the

body. Sin is, therefore, a malarious exhalation from the low

grounds of human nature, or, to use the words of Schleiermacher,

“a positive opposition of the flesh to the spirit.” Pfleiderer,

Prot. Theol. seit Kant, 113,—says that Schleiermacher here repeats

Spinoza’s “inability of the spirit to control the sensuous

affections.” Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:230—“In the

development of man out of naturality, the lower impulses have

already won a power of self-assertion and resistance, before the

reason could yet come to its valid position and authority. As this

propensity of the self-will is grounded in the specific nature of

man, it may be designated as inborn, hereditary, or _original_

sinfulness.”

Rothe’s view of sin may be found in his Dogmatik, 1:300-302;

notice the connection of Rothe’s view of sin with his doctrine of

continuous creation (see page 416 of this Compendium).

Encyclopædia Britannica, 21:2—“Rothe was a thorough going

evolutionist who regarded the natural man as the consummation of

the development of physical nature, and regarded spirit as the

personal attainment, with divine help, of those beings in whom the

further creative process of moral development is carried on. This

process of development necessarily takes an abnormal form and

passes through the phase of sin. This abnormal condition

necessitates a fresh creative act, that of salvation, which was

however from the very first a part of the divine plan of

development. Rothe, notwithstanding his evolutionary doctrine,

believed in the supernatural birth of Christ.”

John Fiske, Destiny of Man, 103—“Original sin is neither more nor

less than the brute inheritance which every man carries with him,

and the process of evolution is an advance toward true salvation.”

Thus man is a sphynx in whom the human has not yet escaped from

the animal. So Bowne, Atonement, 69, declares that sin is “a relic

of the animal not yet outgrown, a resultant of the mechanism of

appetite and impulse and reflex action for which the proper

inhibitions are not yet developed. Only slowly does it grow into a

consciousness of itself as evil.... It would be hysteria to regard

the common life of men as rooting in a conscious choice of

unrighteousness.”

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

considerations:

(_a_) It involves an assumption of the inherent evil of matter, at least

so far as regards the substance of man’s body. But this is either a form

of dualism, and may be met with the objections already brought against

that system, or it implies that God, in being the author of man’s physical

organism, is also the responsible originator of human sin.

This has been called the “caged-eagle theory” of man’s existence;

it holds that the body is a prison only, or, as Plato expressed

it, “the tomb of the soul,” so that the soul can be pure only by

escaping from the body. But matter is not eternal. God made it,

and made it pure. The body was made to be the servant of the

spirit. We must not throw the blame of sin upon the senses, but

upon the spirit that used the senses so wickedly. To attribute sin

to the body is to make God, the author of the body, to be also the

author of sin,—which is the greatest of blasphemies. Men cannot

“justly accuse Their Maker, or their making, or their fate”

(Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:112). Sin is a contradiction within the

spirit itself, and not simply between the spirit and the flesh.

Sensuous activities are not themselves sinful—this is essential

Manichæanism. Robert Burns was wrong when he laid the blame for

his delinquencies upon “the passions wild and strong.” And Samuel

Johnson was wrong when he said that “Every man is a rascal so soon

as he is sick.” The normal soul has power to rise above both

passion and sickness and to make them serve its moral development.

On the development of the body, as the organ of sin, see

Straffen’s Hulsean Lectures on Sin, 33-50. The essential error of

this view is its identification of the moral with the physical. If

it were true, then Jesus, who came in human flesh, must needs be a

sinner.

(_b_) In explaining sin as an inheritance from the brute, this theory

ignores the fact that man, even though derived from a brute ancestry, is

no longer brute, but man, with power to recognize and to realize moral

ideals, and under no necessity to violate the law of his being.

See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-180, on The Fall and the

Redemption of Man, in the Light of Evolution: “Evolution has been

thought to be incompatible with any proper doctrine of a fall. It

has been assumed by many that man’s immoral course and conduct are

simply survivals of his brute inheritance, inevitable remnants of

his old animal propensities, yieldings of the weak will to fleshly

appetites and passions. This is to deny that sin is truly sin, but

it is also to deny that man is truly man.... Sin must be referred

to freedom, or it is not sin. To explain it as the natural result

of weak will overmastered by lower impulses is to make the animal

nature, and not the will, the cause of transgression. And that is

to say that man at the beginning is not man, but brute.” See also

D. W. Simon, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1897:1-20—“The key to the strange

and dark contrast between man and his animal ancestry is to be

found in the fact of the Fall. Other species live normally. No

remnant of the reptile hinders the bird. The bird is a true bird.

Only man fails to live normally and is a true man only after ages

of sin and misery.” Marlowe very properly makes his Faustus to be

tempted by sensual baits only after he has sold himself to Satan

for power.

To regard vanity, deceitfulness, malice, and revenge as inherited

from brute ancestors is to deny man’s original innocence and the

creatorship of God. B. W. Lockhart: “The animal mind knows not

God, is not subject to his law, neither indeed can be, just

because it is animal, and as such is incapable of right or

wrong.... If man were an animal and nothing more, he could not

sin. It is by virtue of being something more, that he becomes

capable of sin. Sin is the yielding of the known higher to the

known lower. It is the soul’s abdication of its being to the

brute.... Hence the need of spiritual forces from the spiritual

world of divine revelation, to heal and build and discipline the

soul within itself, giving it the victory over the animal passions

which constitute the body and over the kingdom of blind desire

which constitutes the world. The final purpose of man is growth of

the soul into liberty, truth, love, likeness to God. Education is

the word that covers the movement, and probation is incident to

education.” We add that reparation for past sin and renewing power

from above must follow probation, in order to make education

possible.

Some recent writers hold to a real fall of man, and yet regard

that fall as necessary to his moral development. Emma Marie

Caillard, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893: 879—“Man passed out of a

state of innocence—unconscious of his own imperfection—into a

state of consciousness of it. The will became slave instead of

master. The result would have been the complete stoppage of his

evolution but for redemption, which restored his will and made the

continuance of his evolution possible. Incarnation was the method

of redemption. But even apart from the fall, this incarnation

would have been necessary to reveal to man the goal of his

evolution and so to secure his coöperation in it.” Lisle,

Evolution of Spiritual Man, 39, and in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:

431-452—“Evolution by catastrophe in the natural world has a

striking analogue in the spiritual world.... Sin is primarily not

so much a fall from a higher to a lower, as a failure to rise from

a lower to a higher; not so much eating of the forbidden tree, as

failure to partake of the tree of life. The latter represented

communion and correspondence with God, and had innocent man

continued to reach out for this, he would not have fallen. Man’s

refusal to choose the higher preceded and conditioned his fall to

the lower, and the essence of sin is therefore in this refusal,

whatever may cause the will to make it.... Man chose the lower of

his own free will. Then his centripetal force was gone. His

development was swiftly and endlessly away from God. He reverted

to his original type of savage animalism; and yet, as a

self-conscious and free-acting being, he retained a sense of

responsibility that filled him with fear and suffering.”

On the development-theory of sin, see W. W. McLane, in New

Englander, 1891: 180-188; A. B. Bruce, Apologetics, 60-62; Lyman

Abbott, Evolution of Christianity, 203-208; Le Conte, Evolution,

330, 365-375; Henry Drummond, Ascent of Man, 1-13, 329, 342; Salem

Wilder, Life, its Nature, 266-273; Wm. Graham, Creed of Science,

38-44; Frank H. Foster, Evolution and the Evangelical System;

Chandler, The Spirit of Man, 45-47.

(_c_) It rests upon an incomplete induction of facts, taking account of

sin solely in its aspect of self-degradation, but ignoring the worst

aspect of it as self-exaltation. Avarice, envy, pride, ambition, malice,

cruelty, revenge, self-righteousness, unbelief, enmity to God, are none of

them fleshly sins, and upon this principle are incapable of explanation.

Two historical examples may suffice to show the insufficiency of

the sensuous theory of sin. Goethe was not a markedly sensual man;

yet the spiritual vivisection which he practised on Friederike

Brion, his perfidious misrepresentation of his relations with

Kestner’s wife in the “Sorrows of Werther,” and his flattery of

Napoleon, when a patriot would have scorned the advances of the

invader of his country, show Goethe to have been a very

incarnation of heartlessness and selfishness. The patriot Boerne

said of him: “Not once has he ever advanced a poor solitary word

in his country’s cause—he who from the lofty height he has

attained might speak out what none other but himself would dare

pronounce.” It has been said that Goethe’s first commandment to

genius was: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor and thy neighbor’s

wife.” His biographers count up sixteen women to whom he made love

and who reciprocated his affection, though it is doubtful whether

he contented himself with the doctrine of 16 to 1. As Sainte-Beuve

said of Châteaubriand’s attachments: “They are like the stars in

the sky,—the longer you look, the more of them you discover.”

Christiane Vulpius, after being for seventeen years his mistress,

became at last his wife. But the wife was so slighted that she was

driven to intemperance, and Goethe’s only son inherited her

passion and died of drink. Goethe was the great heathen of modern

Christendom, deriding self-denial, extolling self-confidence,

attention to the present, the seeking of enjoyment, and the

submission of one’s self to the decrees of fate. Hutton calls

Goethe “a Narcissus in love with himself.” Like George Eliot’s

“Dinah,” in Adam Bede, Goethe’s “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,”

in Wilhelm Meister, are the purely artistic delineation of a

character with which he had no inner sympathy. On Goethe, see

Hutton, Essays, 2:1-79; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:490; A. H.

Strong, Great Poets, 279-331; Principal Shairp, Culture and

Religion, 16—“Goethe, the high priest of culture, loathes Luther,

the preacher of righteousness”; S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern

Literature, 149-156.

Napoleon was not a markedly sensual man, but “his self-sufficiency

surpassed the self-sufficiency of common men as the great Sahara

desert surpasses an ordinary sand patch.” He wantonly divulged his

amours to Josephine, with all the details of his ill-conduct, and

when she revolted from them, he only replied: “I have the right to

meet all your complaints with an eternal I.” When his wars had

left almost no able-bodied men in France, he called for the boys,

saying: “A boy can stop a bullet as well as a man,” and so the

French nation lost two inches of stature. Before the battle of

Leipzig, when there was prospect of unexampled slaughter, he

exclaimed: “What are the lives of a million of men, to carry out

the will of a man like me?” His most truthful epitaph was: “The

little butchers of Ghent to Napoleon the Great” [butcher]. Heine

represents Napoleon as saying to the world: “Thou shalt have no

other gods before me.” Memoirs of Madame de Rémusat, 1:225—“At a

fête given by the city of Paris to the Emperor, the repertory of

inscriptions being exhausted, a brilliant device was resorted to.

Over the throne which he was to occupy, were placed, in letters of

gold, the following words from the Holy Scriptures: ‘I am the I

am.’ And no one seemed to be scandalized.” Iago, in Shakespeare’s

Othello, is the greatest villain of all literature; but Coleridge,

Works, 4:180, calls attention to his passionless character. His

sin is, like that of Goethe and of Napoleon, sin not of the flesh

but of the intellect and will.

(_d_) It leads to absurd conclusions,—as, for example, that asceticism, by

weakening the power of sense, must weaken the power of sin; that man

becomes less sinful as his senses fail with age; that disembodied spirits

are necessarily holy; that death is the only Redeemer.

Asceticism only turns the current of sin in other directions.

Spiritual pride and tyranny take the place of fleshly desires. The

miser clutches his gold more closely as he nears death. Satan has

no physical organism, yet he is the prince of evil. Not our own

death, but Christ’s death, saves us. But when Rousseau’s Émile

comes to die, he calmly declares: “I am delivered from the

trammels of the body, and am myself without contradiction.” At the

age of seventy-five Goethe wrote to Eckermann: “I have ever been

esteemed one of fortune’s favorites, nor can I complain of the

course my life has taken. Yet truly there has been nothing but

care and toil, and I may say that I have never had four weeks of

genuine pleasure.” Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:743—“When the

authoritative demand of Jesus Christ, to confess sin and beg

remission through atoning blood, is made to David Hume, or David

Strauss, or John Stuart Mill, none of whom were sensualists, it

wakens intense mental hostility.”

(_e_) It interprets Scripture erroneously. In passages like Rom. 7:18—οὐκ

οἰκεῖ ἐν ἐμοί, τοῦτ᾽ ἐστιν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου, ἀγαθόν—σάρξ, or flesh,

signifies, not man’s body, but man’s whole being when destitute of the

Spirit of God. The Scriptures distinctly recognize the seat of sin as

being in the soul itself, not in its physical organism. God does not tempt

man, nor has he made man’s nature to tempt him (James 1:13, 14).

In the use of the term “_flesh_,” Scripture puts a stigma upon

sin, and intimates that human nature without God is as corruptible

and perishable as the body would be without the soul to inhabit

it. The “carnal mind,” or _“__mind of the flesh__”__ (Rom. 8:7)_,

accordingly means, not the sensual mind, but the mind which is not

under the control of the Holy Spirit, its true life. See Meyer, on

_1 Cor. 1:26_—σάρξ—“the purely human element in man, as opposed to

the divine principle”; Pope, Theology, 2:65—σάρξ—“the whole being

of man, body, soul, and spirit, separated from God and subjected

to the creature”; Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 19—σάρξ—“human

nature as living in and for itself, sundered from God and opposed

to him.” The earliest and best statement of this view of the term

σάρξ is that of Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:295-333,

especially 321. See also Dickson, St. Paul’s Use of the Terms

Flesh and Spirit, 270-271—σάρξ—“human nature without the

πνεῦμα.... man standing by himself, or left to himself, over

against God.... the natural man, conceived as not having yet

received grace, or as not yet wholly under its influence.”

_James 1:14, 15_—“_desire, when it hath conceived, beareth

sin_”—innocent desire—for it comes in before the sin—innocent

constitutional propensity, not yet of the nature of depravity, is

only the _occasion_ of sin. The love of freedom is a part of our

nature; sin arises only when the will determines to indulge this

impulse without regard to the restraints of the divine law.

Luther, Preface to Ep. to Romans: “Thou must not understand

‘flesh’ as though that only were ‘flesh’ which is connected with

unchastity. St. Paul uses ‘flesh’ of the whole man, body and soul,

reason and all his faculties included, because all that is in him

longs and strives after the ‘flesh’.” Melanchthon: “Note that

‘flesh’ signifies the entire nature of man, sense and reason,

without the Holy Spirit.” Gould, Bib. Theol. N. T., 76—“The σάρξ

of Paul corresponds to the κόσμος of John. Paul sees the divine

economy; John the divine nature. That Paul did not hold sin to

consist in the possession of a body appears from his doctrine of a

bodily resurrection (_1 Cor. 15:38-49_). This resurrection of the

body is an integral part of immortality.” On σάρξ, see Thayer, N.

T. Lexicon, 571; Kaftan, Dogmatik, 319.

(_f_) Instead of explaining sin, this theory virtually denies its

existence,—for if sin arises from the original constitution of our being,

reason may recognize it as misfortune, but conscience cannot attribute to

it guilt.

Sin which in its ultimate origin is a necessary thing is no longer

sin. On the whole theory of the sensuous origin of sin, see

Neander, Planting and Training, 386, 428; Ernesti, Ursprung der

Sünde, 1:29-274; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:132-147; Tulloch,

Doctrine of Sin, 144—“That which is an inherent and necessary

power in the creation cannot be a contradiction of its highest

law.” This theory confounds sin with the mere consciousness of

sin. On Schleiermacher, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin,

1:341-349. On the sense-theory of sin in general, see John Caird,

Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:26-52; N. R. Wood, The Witness of

Sin, 79-87.

2. Sin as Finiteness.

This view explains sin as a necessary result of the limitations of man’s

finite being. As an incident of imperfect development, the fruit of

ignorance and impotence, sin is not absolutely but only relatively evil—an

element in human education and a means of progress. This is the view of

Leibnitz and of Spinoza. Modern writers, as Schurman and Royce, have

maintained that moral evil is the necessary background and condition of

moral good.

The theory of Leibnitz may be found in his Théodicée, part 1,

sections 20 and 31; that of Spinoza in his Ethics, part 4,

proposition 20. Upon this view sin is the blundering of

inexperience, the thoughtlessness that takes evil for good, the

ignorance that puts its fingers into the fire, the stumbling

without which one cannot learn to walk. It is a fruit which is

sour and bitter simply because it is immature. It is a means of

discipline and training for something better,—it is holiness in

the germ, good in the making—“Erhebung des Menschen zur freien

Vernunft.” The Fall was a fall up, and not down.

John Fiske, in addition to his sense-theory of sin already

mentioned, seems to hold this theory also. In his Mystery of Evil,

he says: “Its impress upon the human soul is the indispensable

background against which shall be set hereafter the eternal joys

of heaven”; in other words, sin is necessary to holiness, as

darkness is the indispensable contrast and background to light;

without black, we should never be able to know white. Schurman,

Belief in God, 251 _sq._—“The possibility of sin is the

correlative of the free initiative God has vacated on man’s

behalf.... The essence of sin is the enthronement of self.... Yet,

without such self-absorption, there could be no sense of union

with God. For consciousness is possible only through opposition.

To know A, we must know it through not-A. Alienation from God is

the necessary condition of communion with God. And this is the

meaning of the Scripture that ‘where sin abounded, grace shall

much more abound.’... Modern culture protests against the Puritan

enthronement of goodness above truth.... For the decalogue it

would substitute the wider new commandment of Goethe: ‘Live

resolutely in the Whole, in the Good, in the Beautiful.’ The

highest religion can be content with nothing short of the

synthesis demanded by Goethe.... God is the universal life in

which individual activities are included as movements of a single

organism.”

Royce, World and Individual, 2:364-384—“Evil is a discord

necessary to perfect harmony. In itself it is evil, but in

relation to the whole it has value by showing us its own

finiteness and imperfection. It is a sorrow to God as much as to

us; indeed, all our sorrow is his sorrow. The evil serves the good

only by being overcome, thwarted, overruled. Every evil deed must

somewhere and at some time be atoned for, by some other than the

agent, if not by the agent himself.... All finite life is a

struggle with evil. Yet from the final point of view the Whole is

good. The temporal order contains at no moment anything that can

satisfy. Yet the eternal order is perfect. We have all sinned and

come short of the glory of God. Yet in just our life, viewed in

its entirety, the glory of God is completely manifest. These hard

sayings are the deepest expressions of the essence of true

religion. They are also the most inevitable outcome of

philosophy.... Were there no longing in time, there would be no

peace in eternity. The prayer that God’s will may be done on earth

as it is in heaven is identical with what philosophy regards as

simple fact.”

We object to this theory that

(_a_) It rests upon a pantheistic basis, as the sense-theory rests upon

dualism. The moral is confounded with the physical; might is identified

with right. Since sin is a necessary incident of finiteness, and creatures

can never be infinite, it follows that sin must be everlasting, not only

in the universe, but in each individual soul.

Goethe, Carlyle, and Emerson are representatives of this view in

literature. Goethe spoke of the “idleness of wishing to jump off

from one’s own shadow.” He was a disciple of Spinoza, who believed

in one substance with contradictory attributes of thought and

extension. Goethe took the pantheistic view of God with the

personal view of man. He ignored the fact of sin. Hutton calls him

“the wisest man the world has seen who was without humility and

faith, and who lacked the wisdom of a child.” Speaking of Goethe’s

Faust, Hutton says: “The great drama is radically false in its

fundamental philosophy. Its primary notion is that even a spirit

of pure evil is an exceedingly useful being, because he stirs into

activity those whom he leads into sin, and so prevents them from

rusting away in pure indolence. There are other and better means

of stimulating the positive affections of men than by tempting

them to sin.” On Goethe, see Hutton, Essays, 2:1-79; Shedd, Dogm.

Theol., 1:490; A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology,

279-331.

Carlyle was a Scotch Presbyterian _minus_ Christianity. At the age

of twenty-five, he rejected miraculous and historical religion,

and thenceforth had no God but natural Law. His worship of

objective truth became a worship of subjective sincerity, and his

worship of personal will became a worship of impersonal force. He

preached truth, service, sacrifice, but all in a mandatory and

pessimistic way. He saw in England and Wales “twenty-nine

millions—mostly fools.” He had no love, no remedy, no hope. In our

civil war, he was upon the side of the slaveholder. He claimed

that his philosophy made right to be might, but in practice he

made might to be right. Confounding all moral distinctions, as he

did in his later writings, he was fit to wear the title which he

invented for another: “President of the

Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation Society.” Froude calls him “a

Calvinist without the theology”—a believer in predestination

without grace. On Carlyle, see S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern

Literature, 131-178.

Emerson also is the worshiper of successful force. His pantheism

is most manifest in his poems “Cupido” and “Brahma,” and in his

Essays on “Spirit” and on “The Over-soul.” Cupido: “The solid,

solid universe Is pervious to Love; With bandaged eyes he never

errs, Around, below, above. His blinding light He flingeth white

On God’s and Satan’s brood, And reconciles by mystic wiles The

evil and the good.” Brahma: “If the red slayer thinks he slays, Or

if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near;

Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear;

And one to me are shame or fame. They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt,

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings. The strong gods pine for my

abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven; But thou, meek lover of

the good, Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.”

Emerson taught that man’s imperfection is not sin, and that the

cure for it lies in education. “He lets God evaporate into

abstract Ideality. Not a Deity in the concrete, nor a superhuman

Person, but rather the immanent divinity in things, the

essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of

the transcendental cult.” His view of Jesus is found in his

Essays, 2:263—“Jesus would absorb the race; but Tom Paine, or the

coarsest blasphemer, helps humanity by resisting this exuberance

of power.” In his Divinity School Address, he banished the person

of Jesus from genuine religion. He thought “one could not be a man

if he must subordinate his nature to Christ’s nature.” He failed

to see that Jesus not only absorbs but transforms, and that we

grow only by the impact of nobler souls than our own. Emerson’s

essay style is devoid of clear and precise theological statement,

and in this vagueness lies its harmfulness. Fisher, Nature and

Method of Revelation, xii—“Emerson’s pantheism is not hardened

into a consistent creed, for to the end he clung to the belief in

personal immortality, and he pronounced the acceptance of this

belief ‘the test of mental sanity.’ ” On Emerson, see S. L.

Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 97-123.

We may call this theory the “green-apple theory” of sin. Sin is a

green apple, which needs only time and sunshine and growth to

bring it to ripeness and beauty and usefulness. But we answer that

sin is not a green apple, but an apple with a worm at its heart.

The evil of it can never be cured by growth. The fall can never be

anything else than downward. Upon this theory, sin is an

inseparable factor in the nature of finite things. The highest

archangel cannot be without it. Man in moral character is “the

asymptote of God,”—forever learning, but never able to come to the

knowledge of the truth. The throne of iniquity is set up forever

in the universe. If this theory were true, Jesus, in virtue of his

partaking of our finite humanity, must needs be a sinner. His

perfect development, without sin, shows that sin was not a

necessity of finite progress. Matthews, in Christianity and

Evolution, 137—“It was not necessary for the prodigal to go into

the far country and become a swineherd, in order to find out the

father’s love.” E. H. Johnson, Syst. Theol., 141—“It is not the

privilege of the Infinite alone to be good.” Dorner, System,

1:119, speaks of the moral career which this theory describes, as

“a _progressus in infinitum_, where the constant approach to the

goal has as its reverse side an eternal separation from the goal.”

In his “Transformation,” Hawthorne hints, though rather

hesitatingly, that without sin the higher humanity of man could

not be taken up at all, and that sin may be essential to the first

conscious awakening of moral freedom and to the possibility of

progress; see Hutton, Essays, 2:381.

(_b_) So far as this theory regards moral evil as a necessary

presupposition and condition of moral good, it commits the serious error

of confounding the possible with the actual. What is necessary to goodness

is not the actuality of evil, but only the possibility of evil.

Since we cannot know white except in contrast to black, it is

claimed that without knowing actual evil we could never know

actual good. George A. Gordon, New Epoch for Faith, 49, 50, has

well shown that in that case the elimination of evil would imply

the elimination of good. Sin would need to have place in God’s

being in order that he might be holy, and thus he would be

divinity and devil in one person. Jesus too must needs be evil as

well as good. Not only would it be true, as intimated above, that

Christ, since his humanity is finite, must be a sinner, but also

that we ourselves, who must always be finite, must always be

sinners. We grant that holiness, in either God or man, must

involve the abstract possibility of its opposite. But we maintain

that, as this possibility in God is only abstract and never

realized, so in man it should be only abstract and never realized.

Man has power to reject this possible evil. His sin is a turning

of the merely possible evil, by the decision of his will, into

actual evil. Robert Browning is not free from the error above

mentioned; see S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature,

207-210; A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 433-444.

This theory of sin dates back to Hegel. To him there is no real

sin and cannot be. Imperfection there is and must always be,

because the relative can never become the absolute. Redemption is

only an evolutionary process, indefinitely prolonged, and evil

must remain an eternal condition. All finite thought is an element

in the infinite thought, and all finite will an element in the

infinite will. As good cannot exist without evil as its

antithesis, infinite righteousness should have for its counterpart

an infinite wickedness. Hegel’s guiding principle was that “What

is rational is real, and what is real is rational.” Seth,

Hegelianism and Personality, remarks that this principle ignores

“the riddle of the painful earth.” The disciples of Hegel thought

that nothing remained for history to accomplish, now that the

World-spirit had come to know himself in Hegel’s philosophy.

Biedermann’s Dogmatik is based upon the Hegelian philosophy. At

page 649 we read: “Evil is the finiteness of the world-being which

clings to all individual existences by virtue of their belonging

to the immanent world-order. Evil is therefore a necessary element

in the divinely willed being of the world.” Bradley follows Hegel

in making sin to be no reality, but only a relative appearance.

There is no free will, and no antagonism between the will of God

and the will of man. Darkness is an evil, a destroying agent. But

it is not a positive force, as light is. It cannot be attacked and

overcome as an entity. Bring light, and darkness disappears. So

evil is not a positive force, as good is. Bring good, and evil

disappears. Herbert Spencer’s Evolutionary Ethics fits in with

such a system, for he says: “A perfect man in an imperfect race is

impossible.” On Hegel’s view of sin, a view which denies holiness

even to Christ, see J. Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:390-407; Dorner, Hist.

Doct. Person of Christ, B. 3:131-162; Stearns, Evidence of Christ.

Experience, 92-96; John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 2:1-25; Forrest,

Authority of Christ, 13-16.

(_c_) It is inconsistent with known facts,—as for example, the following:

Not all sins are negative sins of ignorance and infirmity; there are acts

of positive malignity, conscious transgressions, wilful and presumptuous

choices of evil. Increased knowledge of the nature of sin does not of

itself give strength to overcome it; but, on the contrary, repeated acts

of conscious transgression harden the heart in evil. Men of greatest

mental powers are not of necessity the greatest saints, nor are the

greatest sinners men of least strength of will and understanding.

Not the weak but the strong are the greatest sinners. We do not

pity Nero and Cæsar Borgia for their weakness; we abhor them for

their crimes. Judas was an able man, a practical administrator;

and Satan is a being of great natural endowments. Sin is not

simply a weakness,—it is also a power. A pantheistic philosophy

should worship Satan most of all; for he is the truest type of

godless intellect and selfish strength.

_John 12:6_—Judas, “_having the bag, made away with what was put

therein_.” Judas was set by Christ to do the work he was best

fitted for, and that was best fitted to interest and save him.

Some men may be put into the ministry, because that is the only

work that will prevent their destruction. Pastors should find for

their members work suited to the aptitudes of each. Judas was

tempted, or tried, as all men are, according to his native

propensity. While his motive in objecting to Mary’s generosity was

really avarice, his pretext was charity, or regard for the poor.

Each one of the apostles had his own peculiar gift, and was chosen

because of it. The sin of Judas was not a sin of weakness, or

ignorance, or infirmity. It was a sin of disappointed ambition, of

malice, of hatred for Christ’s self-sacrificing purity.

E. H. Johnson: “Sins are not men’s limitations, but the active

expressions of a perverse nature.” M. F. H. Round, Sec. of Nat.

Prison Association, on examining the record of a thousand

criminals, found that one quarter of them had an exceptionally

fine basis of physical life and strength, while the other three

quarters fell only a little below the average of ordinary

humanity; see The Forum, Sept. 1893. The theory that sin is only

holiness in the making reminds us of the view that the most

objectionable refuse can by ingenious processes be converted into

butter or at least into oleomargarine. It is not true that “tout

comprendre est tout pardonner.” Such doctrine obliterates all

moral distinctions. Gilbert, Bab Ballads, “My Dream”: “I dreamt

that somehow I had come To dwell in Topsy-Turvydom, Where vice is

virtue, virtue vice; Where nice is nasty, nasty nice; Where right

is wrong, and wrong is right; Where white is black and black is

white.”

(_d_) like the sense-theory of sin, it contradicts both conscience and

Scripture by denying human responsibility and by transferring the blame of

sin from the creature to the Creator. This is to explain sin, again, by

denying its existence.

Œdipus said that his evil deeds had been suffered, not done.

Agamemnon, in the Iliad, says the blame belongs, not to himself,

but to Jupiter and to fate. So sin blames everything and everybody

but self. _Gen. 3:12_—“_The woman whom thou gavest to be with me,

she gave me of the tree, and I did eat._” But self-vindicating is

God-accusing. Made imperfect at the start, man cannot help his

sin. By the very fact of his creation he is cut loose from God.

That cannot be sin which is a necessary outgrowth of human nature,

which is not our act but our fate. To all this, the one answer is

found in Conscience. Conscience testifies that sin is not “das

Gewordene,” but “das Gemachte,” and that it was his own act when

man by transgression fell. The Scriptures refer man’s sin, not to

the limitations of his being, but to the free will of man himself.

On the theory here combated, see Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:271-295;

Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:123-131; N. R. Wood, The Witness of

Sin, 20-42.

3. Sin as Selfishness.

We hold the essential principle of sin to be selfishness. By selfishness

we mean not simply the exaggerated self-love which constitutes the

antithesis of benevolence, but that choice of self as the supreme end

which constitutes the antithesis of supreme love to God. That selfishness

is the essence of sin may be shown as follows:

A. Love to God is the essence of all virtue. The opposite to this, the

choice of self as the supreme end, must therefore be the essence of sin.

We are to remember, however, that the love to God in which virtue consists

is love for that which is most characteristic and fundamental in God,

namely, his holiness. It is not to be confounded with supreme regard for

God’s interests or for the good of being in general. Not mere benevolence,

but love for God as holy, is the principle and source of holiness in man.

Since the love of God required by the law is of this sort, it not only

does not imply that love, in the sense of benevolence, is the essence of

holiness in God,—it implies rather that holiness, or self-loving and

self-affirming purity, is fundamental in the divine nature. From this

self-loving and self-affirming purity, love properly so-called, or the

self-communicating attribute, is to be carefully distinguished (see vol.

1, pages 271-275).

Bossuet, describing heathendom, says: “Every thing was God but God

himself.” Sin goes further than this, and says: “I am myself all

things,”—not simply as Louis XVI: “I am the state,” but: “I am the

world, the universe, God.” Heinrich Heine: “I am no child. I do

not want a heavenly Father any more.” A French critic of Fichte’s

philosophy said that it was a flight toward the infinite which

began with the ego, and never got beyond it. Kidd, Social

Evolution, 75—“In Calderon’s tragic story, the unknown figure,

which throughout life is everywhere in conflict with the

individual whom it haunts, lifts the mask at last to disclose to

the opponent his own features.” Caird, Evolution of Religion,

1:78—“Every self, once awakened, is naturally a despot, and

‘bears, like the Turk, no brother near the throne.’ ” Every one

has, as Hobbes said, “an infinite desire for gain or glory,” and

can be satisfied with nothing but a whole universe for himself.

Selfishness—“homo homini lupus.” James Martineau: “We ask Comte to

lift the veil from the holy of holies and show us the all-perfect

object of worship,—he produces a looking-glass and shows us

ourselves.” Comte’s religion is a “synthetic idealization of our

existence”—a worship, not of God, but of humanity; and “the

festival of humanity” among Positivists—Walt Whitman’s “I

celebrate myself.” On Comte, see Martineau, Types, 1:499. The most

thorough discussion of the essential principle of sin is that of

Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:147-182. He defines sin as “a turning

away from the love of God to self-seeking.”

N. W. Taylor holds that self-love is the primary cause of all

moral action; that selfishness is a different thing, and consists

not in making our own happiness our ultimate end, which we must do

if we are moral beings, but in love of the world, and in

preferring the world to God as our portion or chief good (see N.

W. Taylor, Moral Govt., 1:24-26; 2:20-24, and Rev. Theol.,

134-162; Tyler, Letters on the New Haven Theology, 72). We claim,

on the contrary, that to make our own happiness our ultimate aim

is itself sin, and the essence of sin. As God makes his holiness

the central thing, so we are to live for that, loving self only in

God and for God’s sake. This love for God as holy is the essence

of virtue. The opposite to this, or supreme love for self, is sin.

As Richard Lovelace writes: “I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not honor more,” so Christian friends can say: “Our loves

in higher love endure.” The sinner raises some lower object of

instinct or desire to supremacy, regardless of God and his law,

and this he does for no other reason than to gratify self. On the

distinction between mere benevolence and the love required by

God’s law, see Hovey, God With Us, 187-200; Hopkins, Works, 1:235;

F. W. Robertson, Sermon I. Emerson: “Your goodness must have some

edge to it, else it is none.” See Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics,

327-370, on duties toward self as a moral end.

Love to God is the essence of all virtue. We are to love God with

all the heart. But what God? Surely, not the false God, the God

who is indifferent to moral distinctions and who treats the wicked

as he treats the righteous. The love which the law requires is

love for the true God, the God of holiness. Such love aims at the

reproduction of God’s holiness in ourselves and in others. We are

to love ourselves only for God’s sake and for the sake of

realizing the divine idea in us. We are to love others only for

God’s sake and for the sake of realizing the divine idea in them.

In our moral progress we, first, love self for our own sake;

secondly, God for our own sake; thirdly, God for his own sake;

fourthly, ourselves for God’s sake. The first is our state by

nature; the second requires prevenient grace; the third,

regenerating grace; and the fourth, sanctifying grace. Only the

last is reasonable self-love. Balfour, Foundations of Belief,

27—“Reasonable self-love is a virtue wholly incompatible with what

is commonly called selfishness. Society suffers, not from having

too much of it, but from having too little.” Altruism is not the

whole of duty. Self-realization is equally important. But to care

only for self, like Goethe, is to miss the true self-realization,

which love to God ensures.

Love desires only _the best_ for its object, and the best is

_God_. The golden rule bids us give, not what others desire, but

what they need. _Rom. 15:2_—“_Let each one of us please his

neighbor for that which is good, unto edifying._” Deutsche Liebe:

“Nicht Liebe die fragt: Willst du mein sein? Sondern Liebe die

sagt: Ich muss dein sein.” Sin consists in taking for one’s self

alone and apart from God that in one’s self and in others to which

one has a right only in God and for God’s sake. Mrs. Humphrey

Ward, David Grieve, 403—“How dare a man pluck from the Lord’s

hand, for his wild and reckless use, a soul and body for which he

died? How dare he, the Lord’s bondsman, steal his joy, carrying it

off by himself into the wilderness, like an animal his prey,

instead of asking it at the hands and under the blessing of the

Master? How dare he, a member of the Lord’s body, forget the

whole, in his greed for the one—eternity in his thirst for the

present?” Wordsworth, Prelude, 546—“Delight how pitiable, Unless

this love by a still higher love Be hallowed, love that breathes

not without awe; Love that adores, but on the knees of prayer. By

heaven inspired.... This spiritual love acts not nor can exist

Without imagination, which in truth Is but another name for

absolute power, And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, And

reason in her most exalted mood.”

Aristotle says that the wicked have no right to love themselves,

but that the good may. So, from a Christian point of view, we may

say: No unregenerate man can properly respect himself.

Self-respect belongs only to the man who lives in God and who has

God’s image restored to him thereby. True self-love is not love

for the _happiness_ of the self, but for the _worth_ of the self

in God’s sight, and this self-love is the condition of all genuine

and worthy love for others. But true self-love is in turn

conditioned by love to God as holy, and it seeks primarily, not

the happiness, but the holiness, of others. Asquith, Christian

Conception of Holiness, 98, 145, 154, 207—“Benevolence or love is

not the same with altruism. Altruism is instinctive, and has not

its origin in the moral reason. It has utility, and it may even

furnish material for reflection on the part of the moral reason.

But so far as it is not deliberate, not indulged for the sake of

the end, but only for the gratification of the instinct of the

moment, it is not moral.... Holiness is dedication to God, the

Good, not as an external Ruler, but as an internal controller and

transformer of character.... God is a being whose every thought is

love, of whose thoughts not one is for himself, save so far as

himself is not himself, that is, so far as there is a distinction

of persons in the Godhead. Creation is one great unselfish

thought—the bringing into being of creatures who can know the

happiness that God knows.... To the spiritual man holiness and

love are one. Salvation is deliverance from selfishness.” Kaftan,

Dogmatik, 319, 320, regards the essence of sin as consisting, not

in selfishness, but in turning away from God and so from the love

which would cause man to grow in knowledge and likeness to God.

But this seems to be nothing else than choosing self instead of

God as our object and end.

B. All the different forms of sin can be shown to have their root in

selfishness, while selfishness itself, considered as the choice of self as

a supreme end, cannot be resolved into any simpler elements.

(_a_) Selfishness may reveal itself in the elevation to supreme dominion

of any one of man’s natural appetites, desires, or affections. Sensuality

is selfishness in the form of inordinate appetite. Selfish desire takes

the forms respectively of avarice, ambition, vanity, pride, according as

it is set upon property, power, esteem, independence. Selfish affection is

falsehood or malice, according as it hopes to make others its voluntary

servants, or regards them as standing in its way; it is unbelief or enmity

to God, according as it simply turns away from the truth and love of God,

or conceives of God’s holiness as positively resisting and punishing it.

Augustine and Aquinas held the essence of sin to be pride; Luther

and Calvin regarded its essence to be unbelief. Kreibig

(Versöhnungslehre) regards it as “world-love”; still others

consider it as enmity to God. In opposing the view that sensuality

is the essence of sin, Julius Müller says: “Wherever we find

sensuality, there we find selfishness, but we do not find that,

where there is selfishness, there is always sensuality.

Selfishness may embody itself in fleshly lust or inordinate desire

for the creature, but this last cannot bring forth spiritual sins

which have no element of sensuality in them.”

Covetousness or avarice makes, not sensual gratification itself,

but the things that may minister thereto, the object of pursuit,

and in this last chase often loses sight of its original aim.

Ambition is selfish love of power; vanity is selfish love of

esteem. Pride is but the self-complacency, self-sufficiency, and

self-isolation of a selfish spirit that desires nothing so much as

unrestrained independence. Falsehood originates in selfishness,

first as self-deception, and then, since man by sin isolates

himself and yet in a thousand ways needs the fellowship of his

brethren, as deception of others. Malice, the perversion of

natural resentment (together with hatred and revenge), is the

reaction of selfishness against those who stand, or are imagined

to stand, in its way. Unbelief and enmity to God are effects of

sin, rather than its essence; selfishness leads us first to doubt,

and then to hate, the Lawgiver and Judge. Tacitus: “Humani generis

proprium est odisse quem læseris.” In sin, self-affirmation and

self-surrender are not coördinate elements, as Dorner holds, but

the former conditions the latter.

As love to God is love to God’s holiness, so love to man is love

for holiness in man and desire to impart it. In other words, true

love for man is the longing to make man like God. Over against

this normal desire which should fill the heart and inspire the

life, there stands a hierarchy of lower desires which may be

utilized and sanctified by the higher love, but which may assert

their independence and may thus be the occasions of sin. Physical

gratification, money, esteem, power, knowledge, family, virtue,

are proper objects of regard, so long as these are sought for

God’s sake and within the limitations of his will. Sin consists in

turning our backs on God and in seeking any one of these objects

for its own sake; or, which is the same thing, for our own sake.

Appetite gratified without regard to God’s law is lust; the love

of money becomes avarice; the desire for esteem becomes vanity;

the longing for power becomes ambition; the love for knowledge

becomes a selfish thirst for intellectual satisfaction; parental

affection degenerates into indulgence and nepotism; the seeking of

virtue becomes self-righteousness and self-sufficiency. Kaftan,

Dogmatik, 323—“Jesus grants that even the heathen and sinners love

those who love them. But family love becomes family pride;

patriotism comes to stand for country right or wrong; happiness in

one’s calling leads to class distinctions.”

Dante, in his Divine Comedy, divides the Inferno into three great

sections: those in which are punished, respectively, incontinence,

bestiality, and malice. Incontinence—sin of the heart, the

emotions, the affections. Lower down is found bestiality—sin of

the head, the thoughts, the mind, as infidelity and heresy. Lowest

of all is malice—sin of the will, deliberate rebellion, fraud and

treachery. So we are taught that the heart carries the intellect

with it, and that the sin of unbelief gradually deepens into the

intensity of malice. See A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their

Theology, 133—“Dante teaches us that sin is the self-perversion of

the will. If there is any thought fundamental to his system, it is

the thought of freedom. Man is not a waif swept irresistibly

downward on the current; he is a being endowed with power to

resist, and therefore guilty if he yields. Sin is not misfortune,

or disease, or natural necessity; it is wilfulness, and crime, and

self-destruction. The Divine Comedy is, beyond all other poems,

the poem of conscience; and this could not be, if it did not

recognize man as a free agent, the responsible cause of his own

evil acts and his own evil state.” See also Harris, in Jour. Spec.

Philos., 21:350-451; Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life,

69-86.

In Greek tragedy, says Prof. Wm. Arnold Stevens, the one sin which

the gods hated and would not pardon was ὕβρις—obstinate

self-assertion of mind or will, absence of reverence and

humility—of which we have an illustration in Ajax. George

MacDonald: “A man may be possessed of himself, as of a devil.”

Shakespeare depicts this insolence of infatuation in Shylock,

Macbeth, and Richard III. Troilus and Cressida, 4:4—“Something may

be done that we will not; And sometimes we are devils to

ourselves, When we will tempt the frailty of our powers, Presuming

on their changeful potency.” Yet Robert G. Ingersoll said that

Shakespeare holds crime to be the mistake of ignorance! N. P.

Willis, Parrhasius: “How like a mounting devil in the heart Rules

unrestrained ambition!”

(_b_) Even in the nobler forms of unregenerate life, the principle of

selfishness is to be regarded as manifesting itself in the preference of

lower ends to that of God’s proposing. Others are loved with idolatrous

affection because these others are regarded as a part of self. That the

selfish element is present even here, is evident upon considering that

such affection does not seek the highest interest of its object, that it

often ceases when unreturned, and that it sacrifices to its own

gratification the claims of God and his law.

Even in the mother’s idolatry of her child, the explorer’s

devotion to science, the sailor’s risk of his life to save

another’s, the gratification sought may be that of a lower

instinct or desire, and any substitution of a lower for the

highest object is non-conformity to law, and therefore sin. H. B.

Smith, System Theology, 277—“Some lower affection is supreme.” And

the underlying motive which leads to this substitution is

self-gratification. There is no such thing as disinterested sin,

for “_every one that loveth is begotten of God_” (_1 John 4:7_).

Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ: Much of the heroism of

battle is simply “resolution in the actors to have their way,

contempt for ease, animal courage which we share with the bulldog

and the weasel, intense assertion of individual will and force,

avowal of the rough-handed man that he has that in him which

enables him to defy pain and danger and death.”

Mozley on Blanco White, in Essays, 2:143: Truth may be sought in

order to absorb truth in self, not for the sake of absorbing self

in truth. So Blanco White, in spite of the pain of separating from

old views and friends, lived for the selfish pleasure of new

discovery, till all his early faith vanished, and even immortality

seemed a dream. He falsely thought that the pain he suffered in

giving up old beliefs was evidence of self-sacrifice with which

God must be pleased, whereas it was the inevitable pain which

attends the victory of selfishness. Robert Browning, Paracelsus,

81—“I still must hoard, and heap, and class all truths With one

ulterior purpose: I must know! Would God translate me to his

throne, believe That I should only listen to his words To further

my own ends.” F. W. Robertson on Genesis, 57—“He who sacrifices

his sense of right, his conscience, for another, sacrifices the

God within him; he is not sacrificing self.... He who prefers his

dearest friend or his beloved child to the call of duty, will soon

show that he prefers himself to his dearest friend, and would not

sacrifice himself for his child.” _Ib._, 91—“In those who love

little, love [for finite beings] is a primary affection,—a

secondary, in those who love much.... The only true affection is

that which is subordinate to a higher.” True love is love for the

soul and its highest, its eternal, interests; love that seeks to

make it holy; love for the sake of God and for the accomplishment

of God’s idea in his creation.

Although we cannot, with Augustine, call the virtues of the

heathen “splendid vices”—for they were relatively good and

useful,—they still, except in possible instances where God’s

Spirit wrought upon the heart, were illustrations of a morality

divorced from love to God, were lacking in the most essential

element demanded by the law, were therefore infected with sin.

Since the law judges all action by the heart from which it

springs, no action of the unregenerate can be other than sin. The

ebony-tree is white in its outer circles of woody fibre; at heart

it is black as ink. There is no unselfishness in the unregenerate

heart, apart from the divine enlightenment and energizing.

Self-sacrifice for the sake of self is selfishness after all.

Professional burglars and bank-robbers are often carefully

abstemious in their personal habits, and they deny themselves the

use of liquor and tobacco while in the active practice of their

trade. Herron, The Larger Christ, 47—“It is as truly immoral to

seek truth out of mere love of knowing it, as it is to seek money

out of love to gain. Truth sought for truth’s sake is an

intellectual vice; it is spiritual covetousness. It is an

idolatry, setting up the worship of abstractions and generalities

in place of the living God.”

(_c_) It must be remembered, however, that side by side with the selfish

will, and striving against it, is the power of Christ, the immanent God,

imparting aspirations and impulses foreign to unregenerate humanity, and

preparing the way for the soul’s surrender to truth and righteousness.

_Rom. 8:7_—“_the mind of the flesh is enmity against God_”; _Acts

17:27, 28_—“_he is not far from each one of us: for in him we

live, and move, and have our being_”; _Rom. 2:4_—“_the goodness of

God leadeth thee to repentance_”; _John 1:9_—“_the light which

lighteth every man._” Many generous traits and acts of

self-sacrifice in the unregenerate must be ascribed to the

prevenient grace of God and to the enlightening influence of the

Spirit of Christ. A mother, during the Russian famine, gave to her

children all the little supply of food that came to her in the

distribution, and died that they might live. In her decision to

sacrifice herself for her offspring she may have found her

probation and may have surrendered herself to God. The impulse to

make the sacrifice may have been due to the Holy Spirit, and her

yielding may have been essentially an act of saving faith. In

_Mark 10:21, 22_—“_And Jesus looking upon him loved him ... he

went away sorrowful_”—our Lord apparently loved the young man, not

only for his gifts, his efforts, and his possibilities, but also

for the manifest working in him of the divine Spirit, even while

in his natural character he was without God and without love,

self-ignorant, self-righteous, and self-seeking.

Paul, in like manner, before his conversion, loved and desired

righteousness, provided only that this righteousness might be the

product and achievement of his own will and might reflect honor on

himself; in short, provided only that self might still be

uppermost. To be dependent for righteousness upon another was

abhorrent to him. And yet this very impulse toward righteousness

may have been due to the divine Spirit within him. On Paul’s

experience before conversion, see E. D. Burton, Bib. World, Jan.

1893. Peter objected to the washing of his feet by Jesus (_John

13:8_), not because it humbled the Master too much in the eyes of

the disciple, but because it humbled the disciple too much in his

own eyes. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:218—“Sin is the

violation of the God-willed moral order of the world by the

self-will of the individual.” Tophel on the Holy Spirit, 17—“You

would deeply wound him [the average sinner] if you told him that

his heart, full of sin, is an object of horror to the holiness of

God.” The impulse to repentance, as well as the impulse to

righteousness, is the product, not of man’s own nature, but of the

Christ within him who is moving him to seek salvation.

Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browning after she had accepted

his proposal of marriage: “Henceforth I am yours for everything

but to do you harm.” George Harris, Moral Evolution, 138—“Love

seeks the true good of the person loved. It will not minister in

an unworthy way to afford a temporary pleasure. It will not

approve or tolerate that which is wrong. It will not encourage the

coarse, base passions of the one loved. It condemns impurity,

falsehood, selfishness. A parent does not really love his child if

he tolerates the self-indulgence, and does not correct or punish

the faults, of the child.” Hutton: “You might as well say that it

is a fit subject for art to paint the morbid exstasy of cannibals

over their horrid feasts, as to paint lust without love. If you

are to delineate man at all, you must delineate him with his human

nature, and therefore you can never omit from any worthy picture

that conscience which is its crown.”

Tennyson, in In Memoriam, speaks of “Fantastic beauty such as

lurks In some wild poet when he works Without a conscience or an

aim.” Such work may be due to mere human nature. But the lofty

work of true creative genius, and the still loftier acts of men

still unregenerate but conscientious and self-sacrificing, must be

explained by the working in them of the immanent Christ, the life

and light of men. James Martineau, Study, 1:20—“Conscience may act

as human, before it is discovered to be divine.” See J. D. Stoops,

in Jour. Philos., Psych., and Sci. Meth., 2:512—“If there is a

divine life over and above the separate streams of individual

lives, the welling up of this larger life in the experience of the

individual is precisely the point of contact between the

individual person and God.” Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity,

2:122—“It is this divine element in man, this relationship to God,

which gives to sin its darkest and direst complexion. For such a

life is the turning of a light brighter than the sun into

darkness, the squandering or bartering away of a boundless wealth,

the suicidal abasement, to the things that perish, of a nature

destined by its very constitution and structure for participation

in the very being and blessedness of God.”

On the various forms of sin as manifestations of selfishness, see

Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:147-182; Jonathan Edwards, Works,

2:268, 269; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:5, 6; Baird, Elohim

Revealed, 243-262; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers, 11-91;

Hopkins, Moral Science, 86-156. On the Roman Catholic “Seven

Deadly Sins” (Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, Lust),

see Wetzer und Welte, Kirchenlexikon, and Orby Shipley, Theory

about Sin, preface, xvi-xviii.

C. This view accords best with Scripture.

(_a_) The law requires love to God as its all-embracing requirement. (_b_)

The holiness of Christ consisted in this, that he sought not his own will

or glory, but made God his supreme end. (_c_) The Christian is one who has

ceased to live for self. (_d_) The tempter’s promise is a promise of

selfish independence. (_e_) The prodigal separates himself from his

father, and seeks his own interest and pleasure. (_f_) The “man of sin”

illustrates the nature of sin, in “opposing and exalting himself against

all that is called God.”

(_a_) _Mat. 22:37-39_—the command of love to God and man; _Rom.

13:8-10_—“_love therefore is the fulfilment of the law_”; _Gal.

5:14_—“_the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou

shalt love thy neighbor as thyself_”; _James 2:8_—“_the royal

law._” (_b_) _John 5:30_—“_my judgment is righteous; because I

seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me_”;

_7:18_—“_He that speaketh from himself seeketh his own glory: but

he that seeketh the glory of him that sent him, the same is true,

and no unrighteousness is in him_”; _Rom. 15:3_—“_Christ also

pleased not himself._” (_c_) _Rom. 14:7_—“_none of us liveth to

himself, and none dieth to himself_”; _2 Cor. 5:15_—“_he died for

all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves,

but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again_”; _Gal.

2:20_—“_I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I

that live, but Christ liveth in me._” Contrast _2 Tim.

3:2_—“_lovers of self._” (_d_) _Gen. 3:5_—“_ye shall be as God,

knowing good and evil._” (_e_) _Luke 15:12, 13_—“_give me the

portion of thy substance ... gathered all together and took his

journey into a far country._” (_f_) _2 Thess. 2:3, 4_—“_the man of

sin ... the son of perdition, he that opposeth and exalteth

himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped; so

that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as

God._”

Contrast “_the man of sin_” who “_exalteth himself_” (_2 Thess.

2:3, 4_) with the Son of God who “_emptied himself_” (_Phil.

2:7_). On “_the man of sin_”, see Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Bap.

Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328-360. Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 24—“We

are conscious of sin, because we know that our true self is God,

from whom we are severed. No ethics is possible unless we

recognize an ideal for all human effort in the presence of the

eternal Self which any account of conduct presupposes.” John

Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:53-73—“Here, as in all

organic life, the individual member or organ has no independent or

exclusive life, and the attempt to attain to it is fatal to

itself.” Milton describes man as “affecting Godhead, and so losing

all.” Of the sinner, we may say with Shakespeare, Coriolanus,

5:4—“He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne

in.... There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male

tiger.” No one of us, then, can sign too early “the declaration of

dependence.” Both Old School and New School theologians agree that

sin is selfishness; see Bellamy, Hopkins, Emmons, the younger

Edwards, Finney, Taylor. See also A. H. Strong, Christ in

Creation, 287-292.

Sin, therefore, is not merely a negative thing, or an absence of love to

God. It is a fundamental and positive choice or preference of self instead

of God, as the object of affection and the supreme end of being. Instead

of making God the centre of his life, surrendering himself unconditionally

to God and possessing himself only in subordination to God’s will, the

sinner makes self the centre of his life, sets himself directly against

God, and constitutes his own interest the supreme motive and his own will

the supreme rule.

We may follow Dr. E. G. Robinson in saying that, while sin as a state is

unlikeness to God, as a principle is opposition to God, and as an act is

transgression of God’s law, the essence of it always and everywhere is

selfishness. It is therefore not something external, or the result of

compulsion from without; it is a depravity of the affections and a

perversion of the will, which constitutes man’s inmost character.

See Harris, in Bib. Sac., 18:148—“Sin is essentially egoism or

selfism, putting self in God’s place. It has four principal

characteristics or manifestations: (1) self-sufficiency, instead

of faith; (2) self-will, instead of submission; (3) self-seeking,

instead of benevolence; (4) self-righteousness, instead of

humility and reverence.” All sin is either explicit or implicit

“_enmity against God_” (_Rom. 8:7_). All true confessions are like

David’s (_Ps. 51:4_)—“_Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And

done that which is evil in thy sight._” Of all sinners it might be

said that they “_Fight neither with small nor great, save only

with the king of Israel_” (_1 K. 22:31_).

Not every sinner is conscious of this enmity. Sin is a principle

in course of development. It is not yet “_full-grown_” (_James

1:15_—“_the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death_”).

Even now, as James Martineau has said: “If it could be known that

God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the

streets of London and Paris.” But this indifference easily grows,

in the presence of threatening and penalty, into violent hatred to

God and positive defiance of his law. If the sin which is now

hidden in the sinner’s heart were but permitted to develop itself

according to its own nature, it would hurl the Almighty from his

throne, and would set up its own kingdom upon the ruins of the

moral universe. Sin is world-destroying, as well as

God-destroying, for it is inconsistent with the conditions which

make being as a whole possible; see Royce, World and Individual,

2:366; Dwight, Works, sermon 80.