good and evil, as we know it so sadly well in our narrow experience,
as representing a universal conflict between opposite principles. The
world is a composite thing, men have supposed, the result of the
antagonism of two Principles, two kingdoms, two Gods, one good and the
other evil; or they have explained the world as representing the
action of a good God upon an intractable material, eternal as Himself,
which limits His power and restrains His hand. On either of these
cognate theories[610] the soul of man is naturally represented as a
creation of the good Principle or a particle of it, embedded in a vile
body of material evil which clogs and hinders and impedes it, which is
the seat of lusts and passions, defiling the purity of the spiritual
element. The spirit is good and the body is evil. This is the theory
upon which so much of Oriental asceticism has proceeded. The object of
such asceticism is to liberate the pure spirit from the trammels of
the corrupting and imprisoning body. That is most spiritual which is
least material. Purification is abstraction from the body. The spirit
is akin to God, and will one day win its way up to be re-absorbed in
God. The body is material and evil, the seat of sin, and to be dealt
with as such. Hence the remorseless persecution of the body which has
been exhibited by the devotees of Gnosticism or Brahmanism--the
denunciation of marriage, of animal flesh and wine. Hence, on the
other hand, the wild rebound into licentiousness which has sometimes
characterized Gnostic or Manichaean sects. For, after all, when
asceticism has done its utmost we are still in the body. If connection
with the body is sin, eating and drinking at all is as sinful as
excess; marriage the same as licence. Outward acts become
indifferent--indifferently bad. This principle explains the reaction
from extreme mortification to extreme licence which characterizes
Orientalism.
Once more, in modern times, from a different point of view,
materialism has again interpreted sin as an essential part of nature.
Ignoring the distinction of what is moral and what is physical, the
materialistic Positivism, for instance, of Mr. Cotter Morison
represents goodness and badness in men as the simple product of
natural forces like goodness and badness in fruits of the earth, each
class of good and bad men being essentially and inevitably what it
shows itself to be. 'Nothing is gained,' he says, 'by disguising the
fact that there is no remedy for a bad heart and no substitute for a
good one[611].'
It is common to all the anti-Christian views of sin that at the last
resort they make sin natural, a part of nature. It is characteristic
of Christ's view of sin--of the Scriptural view of it--that it makes
it unnatural. It is characteristic, again, of the non-Christian view
that it makes the body, the material, the seat of sin. It is essential
to the Christian view to find its seat and only source in the
_will_[612].
Take the vilest crime, and Christianity assures you that throughout
the transaction, as you may observe it, there is nothing evil in the
natural material which is employed, there is only the lawless misuse
of material which is in itself good. The worst passions are but the
disorderly exercise of feelings and faculties in themselves good and
capable of redemption. Lust is only love uncontrolled by the will,
and, therefore, lawless. Take the lowest criminal, and Christianity
assures you that, however habituated all his nature to run to evil, if
you can once get his will--what Scripture calls his 'heart'--set right
and given to God, that right direction of the will, the heart, will
after long battle at last carry with it all the nature; the forces of
grace are set free to act when the obstacle of the will's rebellion or
apathy is removed, and (though it takes ages beyond this mortal life)
at last the whole being will be purified, and what began in the
surrender of the will will take effect in the illumination of the
intellect and the purifying of the affections. Thus it is that
Christianity can represent God as justifying the sinner in virtue of
faith. Faith is the first movement of the will and heart by which the
sinner, from the far-off country of his exile, seeks his true home,
from the depth of his sin, claims Christ as his own. At this first
movement God welcomes him. He meets him with His acceptance. He claims
him as His true son, because in that first movement of the moral being
God sees the pledge of all that is to come. He sees the forces let
loose which will bring the final victory. He deals with the sinner by
a Divine anticipation, not as he is, but as he is on the way to
become[613]. 'His faith is reckoned for righteousness.'
Let us dwell on the Christian view of sin, in its essence, in its
appeal, in its practical justification, in its anthropological
results.
(1) In its essence. It is expressed by S. John, 'Sin is lawlessness:'
ἡ ἁμαρτία ἐστὶν ἡ ἀνομία. The two terms are coincident. For God, and
God only, made the world, and there is no other Creator, no other
creation. He made it, and pronounced it very good in its completeness.
The universe, in all its sum of forces and existences, is good, and of
God. The very existence of anything is a pledge of its natural
goodness. It exists only because God created it and sustains it and
dwells in it. It must cease to exist, S. Augustine tells us, if it
were simply evil[614]. Positive existence is always, so far, good.
What then is sin in men or in devils? In one word, _lawlessness_--the
violation of nature, the misuse of good by rebellion of the will.
Physical decay, death, dissolution, change, these are of nature; sin,
on the other hand, is contrary to nature. It is simply misuse,
disorder. It has no positive substance. A sinful man is not the man as
God made him with something else introduced called sin. He is simply
the man as God made him, disordered by ignoring God, by claiming
independence of God, by lawlessness. The same act may constitute
either the sin of murder or the heroism of a soldier fighting in his
country's defence; either the sin of adultery or Christian marriage,
because in the one case the act is done in accordance with the
God-given law of our being; in the other case in defiance of it. The
humanity of Christ and the humanity of the greatest criminal are
consubstantial the one with the other. All that the criminal sins with
belongs to Christ's nature; He has all the faculties that are used for
sin. 'He could sin if He could _will_ to sin,' the Fathers tell us,
'but God forbid that we should think of His willing it[615].' What is
disordered, ungoverned in the criminal is in Christ perfectly
subordinated to a will, itself controlled in loving harmony by the
Divine Spirit. If it sounds preposterous to say that the _nature_ of
the criminal is not of itself sinful, to make the statement reasonable
and true we have only to bear in mind the results of sin which have
taken slow effect upon his nature in the sequence of generations of
bad habit. The body may have become so accustomed to sin, so moulded
to sin by forces within and without as to justify S. Paul calling it a
'body of sin[616],' but only in the sense in which our Lord calls
money or mammon 'the mammon of unrighteousness[617].' Money, our Lord
meant, has become so accustomed, so to speak, to lend itself to the
purposes of unrighteousness that it requires attention as alert,
wisdom as far-sighted, as that of the unjust steward, in the children
of light, to divert it again to its true uses. The body in the same
way has been so moulded to sin, accustomed to sin, that it requires
the strong hand of an asceticism, rightly motived, to 'keep it under,'
to lead it as a slave, to wrest it to good uses. It requires the
cutting off of the right hand or the plucking out of the right
eye--the disuse for a time, that is, by doing violence to oneself of
what has become so misused, so lawless. The bow must be bent violently
back, if it is to be made straight. But the end of all this Christian
asceticism is the restoration of our whole nature to its true law. We
mortify our bodies only to offer them at last a living sacrifice of
rational service. At last all the impulses and passions and parts of
even the criminal nature shall be subjugated again to the law of the
Spirit. Christ shall purify the impure and harmonise the disorderly.
Thus down the vista of an endless future Christianity forces us to see
the nature of the criminal, if he will but turn Godwards, only
reconstituted, not substantially changed, one with Christ in glory.
This is the Christian doctrine of sin, the doctrine that Athanasius
and Augustine and Anselm, the Christian Fathers as a whole, repeat and
reiterate; that sin has no substance; that there is no positively
sinful nature; that sin lies not in things, but in our relation to
things; that the introduction of sin is simply the privation of order;
that moral recovery waits for nothing but the conversion of will[618].
(2) This is the Christian doctrine, and its appeal is to moral
experience. Looking at the world from the point of view of physical
science, it may appear as if goodness and badness were like good and
bad fruit; but to suppose this is to leave out of sight the whole
witness of _moral_ experience. It was not Christian belief but
inextinguishable consciousness that made Byron cry--
'Our life is a false nature--'tis not in
The harmony of things.'
Or Shelley:--
'The universe
In Nature's silent eloquence declares
That all fulfil the works of love and joy,
All but the outcast man[619].'
In proportion as the moral consciousness is keen and active, in that
proportion men know that sin is not nature, but its violation; that
they are not what they are meant to be in sinning; that sin has no
analogy in the failures of nature, because it is what they are not,
avoidable and morally wrong; that it violates what they fulfil, the
law of the world. Natural failure is part of the world's fruitfulness.
The seeds that fail supply material for the seeds that grow. Moral
failure--sin, that is, as distinguished from mere imperfection--is
never fruitful. Sins are always the 'unfruitful works of
darkness[620].'
(3) And the justification of this Christian theory lies in its
_success_. The moral triumphs of the Church depend upon it. Mr.
Herbert Spencer constantly assures us that the fundamental postulates
of human experience are assumptions or hypotheses at the bottom, which
are continuously verified and justified by the correspondence of the
results reached. That is true of the Christian postulate of sin. The
hypothesis that sin is not nature, but lack of will, is verified by
the victory which follows action upon it. 'According to thy faith be
it done to thee'--that is Christ's challenge. Man after man sick of
moral paralysis lies at Christ's feet explaining why he cannot get up.
'Take up thy bed and walk,' 'According to thy faith be it unto thee,'
is the word of Christ. Claim for your own the morally best. Act on
Christ's promise as if it were true and you find it is. This is
faith--to act on what transcends experience, to act on what you do not
feel possible, to act in faith on a promised strength, and to find it
really given only in the using. Faith involves the recognition of our
own weakness, the surrender of our own independence into the hands of
God; it gains as its reward the promised help; it sets free the
'virtue which goes out' of Christ. Reason can only analyse and
rationalise what it already experiences. Faith can do what reason,
what understanding, at any rate, cannot do--it can yield life up to
higher forces than it has yet known. Only when the forces have become
in experience thoroughly familiar can they be subjected to the
analysis of reason. _Credo ut intelligam._ The justification of the
Christian view of sin as something which is not nature, but failure or
disorder of will--something therefore which faith, that is the right
direction and use of will, can overcome, or put in the way to be
overcome--the justification of this view is, I say, to be found in
experience. Act against sin, in Christ's name, as if you had strength,
and you will find you have. Expect and you receive. It finds its
justification not in the recovery of our own lives only, but in that
of others. The Christian lifts others by believing in them. He sees in
each the subject of redemption. Behind heaps of sin, ingrained habits
of sin, he sees a man's true self, true nature, as God made it and
intended it to grow, and to this he appeals. 'According to thy faith
be it unto thee' means not only 'You can be saved, if you believe;' it
means also 'You can save others'--save them by believing in them and
in God, save them, not according to your own foolish desires, but in
accordance with God's intention for them, with the original law of
their being. The best modern novel literature is full of this truth.
What are the moral recoveries of Jean Valjean in _Les Miserables_, and
of Sidney Carton in the _Tale of Two Cities_, and of the selfish old
peer in the child story of the _Little Lord Fauntleroy_, but so many
instances of the redemptive power of Christian love because it
'believeth all things, hopeth all things,' believes past belief, hopes
beyond hope. The justification of the Christian view of sin lies,
then, in its success; partly in the results it actually produces,
partly in the larger promise which it opens out beyond the horizon of
what we see. 'There is no remedy for a bad character and no substitute
for a good one'--that is the only outcome of the physical view of sin.
'According to thy faith, be it unto thee'--that is the Christian
answer; there is for thyself no limit to what thou mayest become, on
the lines, that is to say, not of thine own ambition, but of God's
purpose, except what thou settest by thine own want of faith, thine
own failure of moral appetite; there is in the case of others no limit
to what thou mayest help them to become, on the lines, once again, of
their fundamental nature--except the limits of their faith and thine.
(4) This Christian view of sin determines in part its whole
anthropology. What sin is in us, and now, and in recorded history, sin
is also in the whole of humanity. Sin actual is of a piece with sin
historical, with sin original. Each man does not start afresh. He
inherits the moral conditions from which his life starts. I am aware
that a modern school of biologists, headed by Professor Weissmann, is
modifying the current doctrine of heredity so far as to deny that
acquired character can be transmitted, so far as to deny that the acts
or habits of men can physically modify the organisation of their
descendants. It is not yet clear that this view, in its extreme form,
is at all likely to gain acceptance. But I suppose Christianity can
await the result with patience. It may not be in any region to which
scientific analysis or investigation can penetrate, but at least in
the inner region of man's personality Christianity must maintain that
the individual does not start afresh. He starts the subject of sinful
tendencies which he did not originate, but which those who went before
him did, if not originate, at least let loose from restraint, and so
make sinful. Sin is in the race as well as in the individual; stayed
more or less by moral effort and resistance here; let loose by
self-indulgence or luxury there: in varying force and alterable sway
therefore, but everywhere more or less present, everywhere making a
man conscious not merely of imperfection, but of inward taint,
everywhere needing re-creation, recovery, redemption. And everywhere
sin is of a piece. My sins are only fresh specimens of what has been
going on all along. They work just the same result upon humanity as a
whole as the sins of my predecessors, as the first sin: I am driven
logically as well as theologically to extend my theory of sin and to
generalise it beyond present experience. Sin, not in the individual,
as I know him merely, but in the whole of humanity from the first, has
been always rebellion, not nature. At the beginning of human life,
properly so called, when first a being truly called a man woke up to
consciousness of his relation to God, to nature, to himself, he did
not find sin part of his being; he might have obeyed the movement of
the Spirit of God and realised his true sonship by keeping his animal
nature under the control of the spirit: so he would have fulfilled the
law of his destined manhood. Sin at the origin of our human life, as
through all its history, was treason to our higher capacity, which
made man the slave of the flesh. The 'slave of the flesh,' because he
was not meant to be an animal: he was meant to be a spiritual being.
And it was the capacity for the higher life which turned to sin his
choice of a lower; which tinged it with the colour of 'remorse,' with
the bitterness of 'self-contempt[621].'
As the essential Christian doctrine of sin finds the guarantee of its
permanence in the moral consciousness, so it would not appear to
involve any conflict with the disclosures of science. Yet it has been
sufficiently distorted in statement for a conflict to have arisen. And
the points at issue are briefly three.
(_a_) Broadly, it is said, the Christian religion represents man as
starting in a state of perfection and gradually degrading. Science,
with all the evidences on its side, represents man as starting in a
state of savagery and gradually rising.
This is a most delusive antithesis. It is certainly true that progress
has not been uniform. There is such a thing as moral deterioration. A
history of the progress of sin from will to intellect, from intellect
to heart, till it penetrates the whole nature and plunges it into the
lowest depths of denaturalisation represents what has been a fact both
in the individual and in society. Such a record of one element in
human experience S. Paul gives us in Romans i[622]. Its truth cannot
be denied. But so far is this from representing the Christian view of
human history as a whole that, on the contrary, the Scriptures stand
alone among ancient literatures in presenting the idea of gradual
progress, gradual education, movement onwards to a climax. The Bible
is the book of development. 'God Who in many parts and many manners
spoke of old time ... hath in the end of these days spoken by His
Son;' and still we move on in the realisation and appropriation of all
that is revealed and given in Christ 'till we all come ... unto the
perfect man.' Nor is it the least true to say that this development is
_only_ the attempt to regain the platform on which man was first
placed. The idea of the first man as a being of developed intellectual
and spiritual capacity, perfect in all the range of his faculties--the
idea which would admit of our saying with Robert South that 'an
Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments
of Paradise'--may be, indeed has been, found in theologians, it may
have passed into the imagination of the English nation as part of the
debt, theologically very largely a debt of evil, which we owe to the
great poem of Milton; but it is not Scriptural, it is not Christian
theology at its best[623]. All the fabric of civilisation the Bible
represents as being gradually built up, whether by Jabal, 'who was the
father of such as dwell in tents and have cattle,' or by Jubal, 'who
was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ,' or by Tubal
Cain, 'who was the instructor of every artificer of brass and iron.'
There is no impression given us that any of the arts or the knowledge
of civilisation existed before. All that we are led to believe is that
the historical development of man has not been the development simply
as God meant it. It has been tainted through its whole fabric by an
element of moral disorder, of human wilfulness. We cannot draw a
picture of how human nature was intended to fight the battle of
progress. We cannot relate the state of the savage to the intention of
God, any more than we can relate the present state of our great cities
to that intention[624]. All we can say is that the state of things as
they were in days of savagery, or as they are in days of civilisation,
represents a _parody_ of the Divine intention for the childhood and
manhood of the race. Man was made to grow by gradual effort in range
and exercise of every faculty of his being. But all this gradual
growth might have been conditioned by a conscious fellowship with God,
which would have introduced into it an element of nobility and
stability which in fact it has lacked. For the historical development
of man has been a development with God only too often left out, the
development under conditions of merely physical laws of a being meant
to be spiritual[625].
(_b_) 'But no,' the biologist rejoins; 'you will not get off thus
easily. Christianity regards even so absolutely natural a fact as
death, a fact so inextricably interwoven into the structural growth of
the world, as a mere consequence of sin. Christianity is refuted by
every evidence of death being a law of physical nature.' So far from
this being true, it is the case that the early Christian writers,
S. Augustine as well as S. Athanasius, emphasise the truth that death
is the law of physical nature; that when man died he was undergoing
what belonged to his animal nature. 'Paul,' says Augustine, 'describes
man's body as dead, not as mortal, because of sin. Mortal it was by
nature, because, as being animal, it was subject to death[626].' In
being left to death, Athanasius teaches, man was only left to the law
of his physical being[627]. What, in fact, the Christian teachers hold
is not that death, but death as it has been known among men, is the
penalty of sin, because man's spiritual or supernatural life would
have blunted the forces of corruption and lifted him into a higher
immortal state. Man would not have died because he would have been
spiritual rather than animal. And even here, if we are asked what this
means, we must hesitate in our answer. If sin is said to have brought
human death, Christ is said to have abolished it. 'This is the bread
which cometh down from heaven that a man may eat thereof and not die.'
'If any man eat of this bread he shall live for ever.' 'Whosoever
liveth and believeth on Me shall never die.' 'Christ Jesus ...
abolished death.' Sin, we may suppose, only introduced death in the
sense in which Christ abolished it[628]. Christ has not abolished the
physical transition, but it ceases to be what death implies:--
'Henceforth is death
But the gate of life immortal.'
Death as it has borne upon sinful man has been the sad ending of
hopes, the rending of his heart-strings, the collapse of his plans,
the overshadowing fear, the horrible gulf, the black destruction. In
all that makes it death, it has been the result of sin, of the
misdirection of his aims and hopes. Had man not sinned there might,
indeed, have been a passage from one state to another, a physical
dissolution, a moral victory--but it would not have been what men have
known as 'death.'
If this be the right way of regarding the matter, as it is certainly
permissible, we shall be able to echo in all its breadth Athanasius's
teaching, that sin did not directly alter _things_, but only our
attitude towards them[629].