SIN AND THE DIVINE REACTION AGAINST IT
We have now seen in a general way what is meant by the Atonement, and
what are the characteristics of the mind to which the Atonement has to
make its appeal. In that mind there is, as I believe, much which falls
in with the Atonement, and prepares a welcome for it; but much also which
creates prejudice against it, and makes it as possible still as in the
first century to speak of the offence of the cross. No doubt the
Atonement has sometimes been presented in forms which provoke antagonism,
which challenge by an ostentation of unreason, or by a defiance of
morality, the reason and conscience of man; but this alone does not
explain the resentment which it often encounters. There is such a thing
to be found in the world as the man who will have nothing to do with
Christ on any terms, and who will least of all have anything to do with
Him when Christ presents Himself in the character which makes man His
debtor for ever. All men, as St. Paul says, have not faith: it is a
melancholy fact, whether we can make anything of it or not. Discounting,
however, this irrational or inexplicable opposition, which is not
expressed in the mind but in the will, how are we to present the
Atonement so that it shall excite the least prejudice, and find the most
unimpeded access to the mind of our own generation? This is the question
to which we have now to address ourselves.
To conceive the Atonement, that is, the fact that forgiveness is mediated
to us through Christ, and specifically through His death, as clearly and
truly as possible, it is necessary for us to realise the situation to
which it is related. We cannot think of it except as related to a given
situation. It is determined or conditioned by certain relations
subsisting between God and man, as these relations have been affected by
sin. What we must do, therefore, in the first instance, is to make clear
to ourselves what these relations are, and how sin affects them.
To begin with, they are personal relations; they are relations the truth
of which cannot be expressed except by the use of personal pronouns. We
need not ask whether the personality of God can be proved antecedent to
religion, or as a basis for a religion yet to be established; in the only
sense in which we can be concerned with it, religion is an experience of
the personality of God, and of our own personality in relation to it. 'O
Lord, _Thou_ hast searched _me_ and known _me_.' '_I_ am continually
with _Thee_! No human experience can be more vital or more normal than
that which is expressed in these words, and no argument, be it ever so
subtle or so baffling, can weigh a feather's-weight against such
experience. The same conception of the relations of God and man is
expressed again as unmistakably in every word of Jesus about the Father
and the Son and the nature of their communion with each other. It is
only in such personal relations that the kind of situation can emerge,
and the kind of experience be had, with which the Atonement deals; and
antecedent to such experience, or in independence of it, the Atonement
must remain an incredible because an unrealisable thing.
But to say that the relations of God and man are personal is not enough.
They are not only personal, but universal. _Personal_ is habitually used
in a certain contrast with _legal_, and it is very easy to lapse into the
idea that personal relations, because distinct from legal ones, are
independent of law; but to say the least of it, that is an ambiguous and
misleading way of describing the facts. The relations of God and man are
not lawless, they are not capricious, incalculable, incapable of moral
meaning; they are personal, but determined by something of universal
import; in other words, they are not merely personal but ethical. That
is ethical which is at once personal and universal. Perhaps the simplest
way to make this evident is to notice that the relations of man to God
are the relations to God not of atoms, or of self-contained individuals,
each of which is a world in itself, but of individuals which are
essentially related to each other, and bound up in the unity of a race.
The relations of God to man, therefore, are not capricious though they
are personal: they are reflected or expressed in a moral constitution to
which all personal beings are equally bound, a moral constitution of
eternal and universal validity, which neither God nor man can ultimately
treat as anything else than what it is.
This is a point at which some prejudice has been raised against the
Atonement by theologians, and more, perhaps, by persons protesting
against what they supposed theologians to mean. If one may be excused a
personal reference, few things have astonished me more than to be charged
with teaching a 'forensic' or 'legal' or 'judicial' doctrine of
Atonement, resting, as such a doctrine must do, on a 'forensic' or
'legal' or 'judicial' conception of man's relation to God. It is all the
more astonishing when the charge is combined with what one can only
decline as in the circumstances totally unmerited compliments to the
clearness with which he has expressed himself. There is nothing which I
should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which
is expressed by these words. To say that the relations of God and man
are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statute--that sin is a
breach of statute--that the sinner is a criminal--and that God
adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his
case. Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth, and it is
surprising that any one should be charged with teaching it, or that any
one should applaud himself, as though he were in the foremost files of
time, for not believing it. It is superfluously apparent that the
relations of God and man are not those of a magistrate on the bench
pronouncing according to the act on the criminal at the bar. To say
this, however, does not make these relations more intelligible. In
particular, to say that they are personal, as opposed to forensic, does
not make them more intelligible. If they are to be rational, if they are
to be moral, if they are to be relations in which an ethical life can be
lived, and ethical responsibilities realised, they must be not only
personal, but universal; they must be relations that in some sense are
determined by law. Even to say that they are the relations, not of judge
and criminal, but of Father and child, does not get us past this point.
The relations of father and child are undoubtedly more adequate to the
truth than those of judge and criminal; they are more adequate, but so
far as our experience of them goes, they are not equal to it. If the
sinner is not a criminal before his judge, neither is he a naughty child
before a parent whose own weakness or affinity to evil introduces an
incalculable element into his dealing with his child's fault. I should
not think of saying that it is the desire to escape from the
inexorableness of law to a God capable of indulgent human tenderness that
inspires the violent protests so often heard against 'forensic' and
'legal' ideas: but that is the impression which one sometimes
involuntarily receives from them. It ought to be apparent to every one
that even the relation of parent and child, if it is to be a moral
relation, must be determined in a way which has universal and final
validity. It must be a relation in which--ethically speaking--some
things are for ever obligatory, and some things for ever impossible; in
other words, it must be a relation determined by law, and law which
cannot deny itself. But law in this sense is not 'legal.' It is not
'judicial,' or 'forensic,' or 'statutory.' None the less it is real and
vital, and the whole moral value of the relation depends upon it. When a
man says--as some one has said--'There are many to whom the conception of
forgiveness resting on a judicial transaction does not appeal at all,' I
entirely agree with him; it does not appeal at all to me. But what would
be the value of a forgiveness which did not recognise in its eternal
truth and worth that universal law in which the relations of God and man
are constituted? Without the recognition of that law--that moral order
or constitution in which we have our life in relation to God and each
other--righteousness and sin, atonement and forgiveness, would all alike
be words without meaning.
In connection with this, reference may be made to an important point in
the interpretation of the New Testament. The responsibility for what is
called the forensic conception of the Atonement is often traced to St.
Paul, and the greatest of all the ministers of grace is not infrequently
spoken of as though he had deliberately laid the most insuperable of
stumbling-blocks in the way to the gospel. Most people, of course, are
conscious that they do not look well talking down to St. Paul, and
occasionally one can detect a note of misgiving in the brave words in
which his doctrine is renounced, a note of misgiving which suggests that
the charitable course is to hear such protests in silence, and to let
those who utter them think over the matter again. But there is what
claims to be a scientific way of expressing dissent from the apostle, a
way which, equally with the petulant one, rests, I am convinced, on
misapprehension of his teaching. This it would not be fair to ignore.
It interprets what the apostle says about law solely by reference to the
great question at issue between the Jewish and the Christian religions,
making the word law mean the statutory system under which the Jews lived,
and nothing else. No one will deny that Paul does use the word in this
sense; the law often means for him specifically the law of Moses. The
law of Moses, however, never means for him anything less than the law of
God; it is one specific form in which the universal relations subsisting
between God and man, and making religion and morality possible, have
found historical expression. But Paul's mind does not rest in this one
historical expression. He generalises it. He has the conception of a
universal law, to which he can appeal in Gentile as well as in Jew--a law
in the presence of which sin is revealed, and by the reaction of which
sin is judged--a law which God could not deny without denying Himself,
and to which justice is done (in other words, which is maintained in its
integrity), even when God justifies the ungodly. But when law is thus
universalised, it ceases to be legal; it is not a statute, but the moral
constitution of the world. Paul preached the same gospel to the Gentiles
as he did to the Jews; he preached in it the same relation of the
Atonement and of Christ's death to divine law. But he did not do this by
extending to all mankind a Pharisaic, legal, forensic relation to God: he
did it by rising above such conceptions, even though as a Pharisee he may
have had to start from them, to the conception of a relation of all men
to God expressing itself in a moral constitution--or, as he would have
said, but in an entirely unforensic sense, in a law--of divine and
unchanging validity. The maintenance of this law, or of this moral
constitution, in its inviolable integrity was the signature of the
forgiveness Paul preached. The Atonement meant to him that forgiveness
was mediated through One in whose life and death the most signal homage
was paid to this law: the very glory of the Atonement was that it
manifested the righteousness of God; it demonstrated God's consistency
with His own character, which would have been violated alike by
indifference to sinners and by indifference to that universal moral
order--that law of God--in which alone eternal life is possible.
Hence it is a mistake to say--though this also has been said--that
'Paul's problem was not that of the possibility of forgiveness; it was
the Jewish law, the Old Testament dispensation: how to justify his breach
with it, how to demonstrate that the old order had been annulled and a
new order inaugurated.' There is a false contrast in all such
propositions. Paul's problem was that of the Jewish law, and it was also
that of the possibility of forgiveness; it was that of the Jewish law,
and it was also that of a revelation of grace, in which God should
justify the ungodly, Jew or Gentile, and yet maintain inviolate those
universal moral relations between Himself and man for which law is the
compendious expression. It does not matter whether we suppose him to
start from the concrete instance of the Jewish law, and to generalise on
the basis of it; or to start from the universal conception of law, and to
recognise in existing Jewish institutions the most available and definite
illustration of it: in either case, the only Paul whose mind is known to
us has completely transcended the forensic point of view. The same false
contrast is repeated when we are told that, 'That doctrine (Paul's
"juristic doctrine") had its origin, not so much in his religious
experience, as in apologetic necessities.' The only apologetic
necessities which give rise to fundamental doctrines are those created by
religious experience. The apologetic of any religious experience is just
the definition of it as real in relation to other acknowledged realities.
Paul had undoubtedly an apologetic of forgiveness--namely, his doctrine
of atonement. But the acknowledged reality in relation to which he
defined forgiveness--the reality with which, by means of his doctrine of
atonement, he showed forgiveness to be consistent--was not the law of the
Jews (though that was included in it, or might be pointed to in
illustration of it): it was the law of God, the universal and inviolable
order in which alone eternal life is possible, and in which all men, and
not the Jews only, live and move and have their being. It was the
perception of this which made Paul an apostle to the Gentiles, and it is
this very thing itself, which some would degrade into an awkward,
unintelligent, and outworn rag of Pharisaic apologetic, which is the very
heart and soul of Paul's Gentile gospel. Paul himself was perfectly
conscious of this; he could not have preached to the Gentiles at all
unless he had been. But there is nothing in it which can be
characterised as 'legal,' 'judicial,' or 'forensic'; and of this also, I
have no doubt, the apostle was well aware. Of course he occupied a
certain historical position, had certain historical questions to answer,
was subject to historical limitations of different kinds; but I have not
the courage to treat him, nor do his words entitle any one to do so, as a
man who in the region of ideas could not put two and two together.
But to return to the point from which this digression on St. Paul
started. We have seen that the relations of God and man are personal,
and also that they are universal, that is, there is a law of them, or, if
we like to say so, a law in them, on the maintenance of which their whole
ethical value depends. The next point to be noticed is that these
relations are deranged or disordered by sin. Sin is, in fact, nothing
else than this derangement or disturbance: it is that in which wrong is
done to the moral constitution under which we live. And let no one say
that in such an expression we are turning our back on the personal world,
and lapsing, or incurring the risk of lapsing, into mere legalism again.
It cannot be too often repeated that if the universal element, or law, be
eliminated from personal relations, there is nothing intelligible left:
no reason, no morality, no religion, no sin or righteousness or
forgiveness, nothing to appeal to mind or conscience. In the widest
sense of the word, sin, as a disturbance of the personal relations
between God and man, is a violence done to the constitution under which
God and man form one moral community, share, as we may reverently express
it, one life, have in view the same moral ends.
It is no more necessary in connection with the Atonement than in any
other connection that we should have a doctrine of the origin of sin. We
do not know its origin, we only know that it is here. We cannot observe
the genesis of the bad conscience any more than we can observe the
genesis of consciousness in general. We see that consciousness does
stand in relief against the background of natural life; but though we
believe that, as it exists in us, it has emerged from that background, we
cannot see it emerge; it is an ultimate fact, and is assumed in all that
we can ever regard as its physical antecedents and presuppositions. In
the same way, the moral consciousness is an ultimate fact, and
irreducible. The physical theory of evolution must not be allowed to
mislead us here, and in particular it must not be allowed to discredit
the conception of moral responsibility for sin which is embodied in the
story of the Fall. Each of us individually has risen into moral life
from a mode of being which was purely natural; in other words, each of
us, individually, has been a subject of evolution; but each of us also
has fallen--fallen, presumably, in ways determined by his natural
constitution, yet certainly, as conscience assures us, in ways for which
we are morally answerable, and to which, in the moral constitution of the
world, consequences attach which we must recognise as our due. They are
not only results of our action, but results which that action has
merited, and there is no moral hope for us unless we accept them as such.
Now what is true of any, or rather of all, of us, without compromise of
the moral consciousness, may be true of the race, or of the first man, if
there was a first man. Evolution and a Fall cannot be inconsistent, for
both enter into every moral experience of which we know anything; and no
opinion we hold about the origin of sin can make it anything else than it
is in conscience, or give its results any character other than that which
they have to conscience. Of course when one tries to interpret sin
outside of conscience, as though it were purely physical, and did not
have its being in personality, consciousness, and will, it disappears;
and the laborious sophistries of such interpretations must be left to
themselves. The point for us is that no matter how sin originated, in
the moral consciousness in which it has its being it is recognised as a
derangement of the vital relations of man, a violation of that universal
order outside of which he has no true good.
In what way, now, let us ask, does the reality of sin come home to the
sinner? How does he recognise it as what it is? What is the reaction
against the sinner, in the moral order under which he lives, which
reveals to him the meaning of his sinful act or state?
In the first place, there is that instantaneous but abiding reaction
which is called the bad conscience--the sense of guilt, of being
answerable to God for sin. The sin may be an act which is committed in a
moment, but in this aspect of it, at least, it does not fade into the
past. An animal may have a past, for anything we can tell, and
naturalistic interpreters of sin may believe that sin dies a natural
death with time, and need not trouble us permanently; but this is not the
voice of conscience, in which alone sin exists, and which alone can tell
us the truth about it. The truth is that the spiritual being has no
past. Just as he is continually with God, his sin is continually with
him. He cannot escape it by not thinking. When he keeps silence, as the
Psalmist says--and that is always his first resource, as though, if he
were to say nothing about it, God might say nothing about it, and the
whole thing blow over--it devours him like a fever within: his bones wax
old with his moaning all day long. This sense of being wrong with God,
under His displeasure, excluded from His fellowship, afraid to meet Him
yet bound to meet Him, is the sense of guilt. Conscience confesses in it
its liability to God, a liability which in the very nature of the case it
can do nothing to meet, and which therefore is nearly akin to despair.
But the bad conscience, real as it is, may be too abstractly interpreted.
Man is not a pure spirit, but a spiritual being whose roots strike to the
very depths of nature, and who is connected by the most intimate and
vital relations not only with his fellow-creatures of the same species,
but with the whole system of nature in which he lives. The moral
constitution in which he has his being comprehends, if we may say so,
nature in itself: the God who has established the moral order in which
man lives, has established the natural order also as part of the same
whole with it. In some profound way the two are one. We distinguish in
man, legitimately enough, between the spiritual and the physical; but man
is one, and the universe in which he lives is one, and in man's relation
to God the distinction of physical and spiritual must ultimately
disappear. The sin which introduces disorder into man's relations to God
produces reactions affecting man as a whole--not reactions that, as we
sometimes say, are purely spiritual, but reactions as broad as man's
being and as the whole divinely constituted environment in which it
lives. I am well aware of the difficulty of giving expression to this
truth, and of the hopelessness of trying to give expression to it by
means of those very distinctions which it is its nature to transcend.
The distinctions are easy and obvious; what we have to learn is that they
are not final. It seems so conclusive to say, as some one has done in
criticising the idea of atonement, that spiritual transgressing brings
spiritual penalty, and physical brings physical; it seems so conclusive,
and it is in truth so completely beside the mark. We cannot divide
either man or the universe in this fashion into two parts which move on
different planes and have no vital relations; we cannot, to apply this
truth to the subject before us, limit the divine reaction against sin, or
the experiences through which, in any case whatever, sin is brought home
to man as what it is, to the purely spiritual sphere. Every sin is a sin
of the indivisible human being, and the divine reaction against it
expresses itself to conscience through the indivisible frame of that
world, at once natural and spiritual, in which man lives. We cannot
distribute evils into the two classes of physical and moral, and
subsequently investigate the relation between them: if we could, it would
be of no service here. What we have to understand is that when a man
sins he does something in which his whole being participates, and that
the reaction of God against his sin is a reaction in which he is
conscious, or might be conscious, that the whole system of things is in
arms against him.
There are those, no doubt, to whom this will seem fantastic, but it is a
truth, I am convinced, which is presupposed in the Christian doctrine of
Atonement, as the mediation of forgiveness through the suffering and
death of Christ: and it is a truth also, if I am not much mistaken, to
which all the highest poetry, which is also the deepest vision of the
human mind, bears witness. We may distinguish natural law and moral law
as sharply as we please, and it is as necessary sometimes as it is easy
to make these sharp and absolute distinctions; but there is a unity in
experience which makes itself felt deeper than all the antitheses of
logic, and in that unity nature and spirit are no more defined by
contrast with each other: on the contrary, they interpenetrate and
support each other: they are aspects of the same whole. When we read in
the prophet Amos, 'Lo, He that formeth the mountains, and createth the
wind, and declareth unto man what is his thought, that maketh the morning
darkness and treadeth upon the high places of the earth, the Lord, the
God of hosts, is His name,' this is the truth which is expressed. The
power which reveals itself in conscience--telling us all things that ever
we did, declaring unto us what is our thought--is the same which reveals
itself in nature, establishing the everlasting hills, creating the winds
which sweep over them, turning the shadow of death into the morning and
making the day dark with night, calling for the waters of the sea, and
pouring them out on the face of the earth. Conscience speaks in a still
small voice, but it is no impotent voice; it can summon the thunder to
give it resonance; the power which we sometimes speak of as if it were
purely spiritual is a power which clothes itself spontaneously and of
right in all the majesty and omnipotence of nature. It is the same
truth, again, in another aspect of it, which is expressed in Wordsworth's
sublime lines to Duty:
'Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong,
And the most ancient Heavens through Thee are fresh and strong.'
When the mind sees deepest, it is conscious that it needs more than
physical astronomy, more than spectrum analysis, to tell us everything
even about the stars. There is a moral constitution, it assures us, even
of the physical world; and though it is impossible for us to work it out
in detail, the assumption of it is the only assumption on which we can
understand the life of a being related as man is related both to the
natural and the spiritual. I do not pretend to prove that there is
articulate or conscious reflection on this in either the Old Testament or
the New; I take it for granted, as self-evident, that this sense of the
ultimate unity of the natural and the spiritual--which is, indeed, but
one form of belief in God--pervades the Bible from beginning to end. It
knows nothing of our abstract and absolute distinctions; to come to the
matter in hand, it knows nothing of a sin which has merely spiritual
penalties. Sin is the act or the state of man, and the reaction against
it is the reaction of the whole order, at once natural and spiritual, in
which man lives.
Now the great difficulty which the modern mind has with the Atonement, or
with the representation of it in the New Testament, is that it assumes
some kind of connection between sin and death. Forgiveness is mediated
through Christ, but specifically through His death. He died for our
sins; if we can be put right with God apart from this, then, St. Paul
tells us, He died for nothing. One is almost ashamed to repeat that this
is not Paulinism, but the Christianity of the whole Apostolic Church.
What St. Paul made the basis of his preaching, that Christ died for our
sins, according to the Scriptures, he had on his own showing received as
the common Christian tradition. But is there anything in it? Can we
receive it simply on the authority of the primitive Church? Can we
realise any such connection between death and sin as makes it a truth to
us, an intelligible, impressive, overpowering thought, that Christ died
for our sins?
I venture to say that a great part of the difficulty which is felt at
this point is due to the false abstraction just referred to. Sin is put
into one world--the moral; death is put into another world--the natural;
and there is no connection between them. This is very convincing if we
find it possible to believe that we live in two unconnected worlds. But
if we find it impossible to believe this--and surely the impossibility is
patent--its plausibility is gone. It is a shining example of this false
abstraction when we are told, as though it were a conclusive objection to
all that the New Testament has to say about the relation of sin and
death, that 'the specific penalty of sin is not a fact of the natural
life, but of the moral life.' What right has any one, in speaking of the
ultimate realities in human life, of those experiences in which man
becomes conscious of all that is involved in his relations to God and
their disturbance by sin, to split that human life into 'natural' and
'moral,' and fix an impassable gulf between? The distinction is
legitimate, as has already been remarked, within limits, but it is not
final; and what the New Testament teaches, or rather assumes, about the
relation of sin and death, is one of the ways in which we are made
sensible that it is not final. Sin and death do not belong to unrelated
worlds. As far as man is concerned, the two worlds, to use an inadequate
figure, intersect; and at one point in the line of their intersection sin
and death meet and interpenetrate. In the indivisible experience of man
he is conscious that they are parts or aspects of the same thing.
That this is what Scripture means when it assumes the connection of death
and sin is not to be refuted by pointing either to the third chapter of
Genesis or to the fifth of Romans. It does not, for example, do justice
either to Genesis or to St. Paul to say, as has been said, that according
to their representation, 'Death--not spiritual, but natural death--is the
direct consequence of sin and its specific penalty.' In such a dictum,
the distinctions again mislead. To read the third chapter of Genesis in
this sense would mean that what we had to find in it was a mythological
explanation of the origin of physical death. But does any one believe
that any Bible writer was ever curious about this question? or does any
one believe that a mythological solution of the problem, how death
originated--a solution which _ex hypothesi_ has not a particle of truth
or even of meaning in it--could have furnished the presupposition for the
fundamental doctrine of the Christian religion, that Christ died for our
sins, and that in Him we have our forgiveness through His blood? A truth
which has appealed so powerfully to man cannot be sustained on a
falsehood. That the third chapter of Genesis is mythological in form, no
one who knows what mythology is will deny; but even mythology is not made
out of nothing, and in this chapter every atom is 'stuff o' the
conscience.' What we see in it is conscience, projecting as it were in a
picture on a screen its own invincible, dear-bought, despairing
conviction that sin and death are indissolubly united--that from death
the sinful race can never get away--that it is part of the indivisible
reality of sin that the shadow of death darkens the path of the sinner,
and at last swallows him up. It is this also which is in the mind of St.
Paul when he says that by one man sin entered into the world and death by
sin. It is not the origin of death he is interested in, nor the origin
of sin either, but the fact that sin and death hang together. And just
because sin is sin, this is not a fact of natural history, or a fact
which natural history can discredit. Scripture has no interest in
natural history, nor does such an interest help us to understand it. It
is no doubt perfectly true that to the biologist death is part of the
indispensable machinery of nature; it is a piece of the mechanism without
which the movement of the whole would be arrested; to put it so, death to
the biologist is part of the same whole as life, or life and death are
for him aspects of one thing. One can admit this frankly without
compromising, because without touching, the other and deeper truth which
is so interesting and indeed so vital alike in the opening pages of
revelation and in its consummation in the Atonement. The biologist, when
he deals with man, and with his life and death, deliberately deals with
them in abstraction, as merely physical phenomena; to him man is a piece
of nature, and he is nothing more. But the Biblical writers deal with
man in the integrity of his being, and in his relations to God; they
transcend the distinction of natural and moral, because for God it is not
final: they are sensible of the unity in things which the everyday mind,
for practical purposes, finds it convenient to keep apart. It is one
great instance of this that they are sensible of the unity of sin and
death. We may call sin a spiritual thing, but the man who has never felt
the shadow of death fall upon it does not know what that spiritual thing
is: and we may call death a natural thing, but the man who has not felt
its natural pathos deepen into tragedy as he faced it with the sense of
sin upon him does not know what that natural thing is. We are here, in
short, at the vanishing point of this distinction--God is present, and
nature and spirit interpenetrate in His presence. We hear much in other
connections of the sacramental principle, and its importance for the
religious interpretation of nature. It is a sombre illustration of this
principle if we say that death is a kind of sacrament of sin. It is in
death, ultimately, that the whole meaning of sin comes home to the
sinner; he has not sounded it to its depths till he has discovered that
this comes into it at last. And we must not suppose that when Paul read
the third chapter of Genesis he read it as a mythological explanation of
the origin of physical death, and accepted it as such on the authority of
inspiration. With all his reverence for the Old Testament, Paul accepted
nothing from it that did not speak to his conscience, and waken echoes
there; and what so spoke to him from the third chapter of Genesis was not
a mythical story of how death invaded Paradise, but the profound
experience of the human race expressed in the story, an experience in
which sin and death inter-penetrate, interpret, and in a sense constitute
each other. To us they are what they are only in relation to each other,
and when we deny the relation we see the reality of neither. This is the
truth, as I apprehend it, of all we are taught either in the Old
Testament or in the New about the relation of sin and death. It is part
of the greater truth that what we call the physical and spiritual worlds
are ultimately one, being constituted with a view to each other; and most
of the objections which are raised against it are special cases of the
objections which are raised against the recognition of this ultimate
unity. So far as they are such, it is not necessary to discuss them
further; and so far as the ultimate unity of the natural and the
spiritual is a truth rather to be experienced than demonstrated, it is
not probable that much can be done by argument to gain acceptance for the
idea that sin and death have essential relations to each other. But
there are particular objections to this idea to which it may be worth
while to refer.
There is, to begin with, the undoubted fact that many people live and die
without, consciously at least, recognising this relation. The thought of
death may have had a very small place in their lives, and when death
itself comes it may, for various reasons, be a very insignificant
experience to them. It may come in a moment, suddenly, and give no time
for feeling; or it may come as the last step in a natural process of
decay, and arrest life almost unconsciously; or it may come through a
weakness in which the mind wanders to familiar scenes of the past, living
these over again, and in a manner escaping by so doing the awful
experience of death itself; or it may come in childhood before the moral
consciousness is fully awakened, and moral reflection and experience
possible. This last case, properly speaking, does not concern us; we do
not know how to define sin in relation to those in whom the moral
consciousness is as yet undeveloped: we only know that somehow or other
they are involved in the moral as well as in the natural unity of the
race. But leaving them out of account, is there any real difficulty in
the others? any real objection to the Biblical idea that sin and death in
humanity are essentially related? I do not think there is. To say that
many people are unconscious of the connection is only another way of
saying that many people fail to realise in full and tragic reality what
is meant by death and sin. They think very little about either. The
third chapter of Genesis could never have been written out of their
conscience. Sin is not for them all one with despair: they are not,
through fear of death, all their lifetime subject to bondage. Scripture,
of course, has no difficulty in admitting this; it depicts, on the
amplest scale, and in the most vivid colours, the very kind of life and
death which are here supposed. But it does not consider that such a life
and death are _ipso facto_ a refutation of the truth it teaches about the
essential relations of death and sin. On the contrary, it considers them
a striking demonstration of that moral dulness and insensibility in man
which must be overcome if he is ever to see and feel his sin as what it
is to God, or welcome the Atonement as that in which God's forgiveness of
sin is mediated through the tremendous experience of death. I know there
are those who will call this arrogant, or even insolent, as though I were
passing a moral sentence on all who do not accept a theorem of mine; but
I hope I do not need here to disclaim any such unchristian temper. Only,
it is necessary to insist that the connection of sin and death in
Scripture is neither a fantastic piece of mythology, explaining, as
mythology does, the origin of a physical law, nor, on the other hand, a
piece of supernaturally revealed history, to be accepted on the authority
of Him who has revealed it; in such revelations no one believes any
longer; it is a profound conviction and experience of the human
conscience, and all that is of interest is to show that such a conviction
and experience can never be set aside by the protest of those who aver
that they know nothing about it. One must insist on this, however it may
expose him to the charge of judging. Can we utter any truth at all, in
which conscience is concerned, and which is not universally acknowledged,
without seeming to judge?
Sometimes, apart from the general denial of any connection between death
and sin, it is pointed out that death has another and a totally different
character. Death in any given case may be so far from coming as a
judgment of God, that it actually comes as a gracious gift from Him; it
may even be an answer to prayer, a merciful deliverance from pain, an
event welcomed by suffering human nature, and by all who sympathise with
it. This is quite true, but again, one must point out, rests on the
false abstraction so often referred to. Man is regarded in all this
simply in the character of a sufferer, and death as that which brings
suffering to an end; but that is not all the truth about man, nor all the
truth about death. Physical pain may be so terrible that consciousness
is absorbed and exhausted in it, sometimes even extinguished, but it is
not to such abnormal conditions we should appeal to discover the deepest
truths in the moral consciousness of man. If the waves of pain subsided,
and the whole nature collected its forces again, and conscience was once
more audible, death too would be seen in a different light. It might not
indeed be apprehended at once, as Scripture apprehends it, but it would
not be regarded simply as a welcome relief from pain. It would become
possible to see in it something through which God spoke to the
conscience, and eventually to realise its intimate relation to sin.
The objections we have just considered are not very serious, because they
practically mean that death has no moral character at all; they reduce it
to a natural phenomenon, and do not bring it into any relation to the
conscience. It is a more respectable, and perhaps a more formidable
objection, when death is brought into the moral world, and when the plea
is put forward that so far from being God's judgment upon sin, it may be
itself a high moral achievement. A man may die greatly; his death may be
a triumph; nothing in his life may become him like the leaving it. Is
not this inconsistent with the idea that there is any peculiar connection
between death and sin? From the Biblical point of view the answer must
again be in the negative. There is no such triumph over death as makes
death itself a noble ethical achievement, which is not at the same time a
triumph over sin. Man vanquishes the one only as in the grace of God he
is able to vanquish the other. The doom that is in death passes away
only as the sin to which it is related is transcended. But there is more
than this to be said. Death cannot be so completely an action that it
ceases to be a passion; it cannot be so completely achieved that it
ceases to be accepted or endured. And in this last aspect of it the
original character which it bore in relation to sin still makes itself
felt. Transfigure it, as it may be transfigured, by courage, by
devotion, by voluntary abandonment of life for a higher good, and it
remains nevertheless the last enemy. There is something in it monstrous
and alien to the spirit, something which baffles the moral intelligence,
till the truth dawns upon us that for all our race sin and death are
aspects of one thing. If we separate them, we understand neither; nor do
we understand the solemn greatness of martyrdom itself if we regard it as
a triumph only, and eliminate from the death which martyrs die all sense
of the universal relation in humanity of death and sin. No one knew the
spirit of the martyr more thoroughly than St. Paul. No one could speak
more confidently and triumphantly of death than he. No one knew better
how to turn the passion into action, the endurance into a great spiritual
achievement. But also, no one knew better than he, in consistency with
all this, that sin and death are needed for the interpretation of each
other, and that fundamentally, in the experience of the race, they
constitute one whole. Even when he cried, 'O death, where is thy sting?'
he was conscious that 'the sting of death is sin.' Each, so to speak, had
its reality in the other. No one could vanquish death who had not
vanquished sin. No one could know what sin meant without tasting death.
These were not mythological fancies in St. Paul's mind, but the
conviction in which the Christian conscience experimentally lived, and
moved, and had its being. And these convictions, I repeat, furnish the
point of view from which we must appreciate the Atonement, _i.e._ the
truth that forgiveness, as Christianity preaches it, is specifically
mediated through Christ's death.