Now the question of sin will hardly concern those damned and lost by
nature, if such there be. Sin is not the same thing as damnation, as
we have just defined damnation. Damnation is a state, but sin is an
incident. One is an essential and the other an incidental separation
from God. It is possible to sin without being damned; and to be
damned is to be in a state when sin scarcely matters, like ink upon a
blackamoor. You cannot have questions of more or less among absolute
things.
It is the amazing and distressful discovery of every believer so soon as
the first exaltation of belief is past, that one does not remain always
in touch with God. At first it seems incredible that one should ever
have any motive again that is not also God’s motive. Then one
finds oneself caught unawares by a base impulse. We discover
that discontinuousness of our apparently homogeneous selves, the
unincorporated and warring elements that seemed at first altogether
absent from the synthesis of conversion. We are tripped up by
forgetfulness, by distraction, by old habits, by tricks of appearance.
There come dull patches of existence; those mysterious obliterations of
one’s finer sense that are due at times to the little minor poisons one
eats or drinks, to phases of fatigue, ill-health and bodily disorder, or
one is betrayed by some unanticipated storm of emotion, brewed deep in
the animal being and released by any trifling accident, such as personal
jealousy or lust, or one is relaxed by contentment into vanity.
All these rebel forces of our ill-coordinated selves, all these
“disharmonies,” of the inner being, snatch us away from our devotion to
God’s service, carry us off to follies, offences, unkindness, waste, and
leave us compromised, involved, and regretful, perplexed by a hundred
difficulties we have put in our own way back to God.
This is the personal problem of Sin. Here prayer avails; here God can
help us. From God comes the strength to repent and make such reparation
as we can, to begin the battle again further back and lower down. From
God comes the power to anticipate the struggle with one’s rebel self,
and to resist and prevail over it.