“ -— • ■ : ^ . > 
 
 BT 715 .B6 1922 
 Bicknell, E. J. 1882-1934. 
 The Christian idea of sin 
 and original sin in the 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2019 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/christianideaofs00bick_0 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF 
 SIN AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
By the same Author 
 
 A THEOLOGICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 TO THE 
 
 THIRTY-NINE ARTICLES 
 
 OF THE 
 
 CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 8vo. 215. net. 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
 London New York Toronto Bombay 
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THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF 
 SIN AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN 
 KNOWLEDGE 
 
 y/ 
 
 Being the Pringle-Stuart Lectures for iq 2 i 
 delivered at Kehle College , Oxford 
 
 E. J. BICKNELL, M.A. 
 
 VICE-PRINCIPAL OF CUDDESDON THEOLOGICAL COLLEGE 
 PREBENDARY OF CHICHESTER 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C. 4 
 NEW YORK, TORONTO 
 BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 
 
 1922 
 
Made in Great Britain 
 
PREFACE 
 
 By the kind invitation of the Warden of Keble 
 I was invited to deliver the lectures on the Pringle- 
 Stuart foundation for 1921. This book is the 
 lectures so delivered at Keble College in the 
 summer term of that year, with slight alterations. 
 In treating of the Christian idea of sin, I have 
 avoided as far as possible those aspects of its 
 history of which a full and satisfactory treatment 
 has recently been given elsewhere. Thus I have 
 only alluded to the chief points of the Pelagian 
 controversy, since an admirable study of St. 
 Augustine’s position has been given by Canon Lacey 
 in the first of these series of lectures, published 
 under the title of ‘ Nature, Miracle, and Sin,’ and 
 many adequate histories of the controversy can 
 be found. Again Dr. Tennant has given a detailed 
 account of the teaching of post-canonical Jewish 
 writings of the early Fathers on the origin of sin. 
 May I take this opportunity of expressing my own 
 great obligation to Dr. Tennant’s books, though 
 at times I am unable to accept his position ? All 
 Christian teachers owe him a debt of gratitude 
 for his pioneer work and his reverent and fearless 
 attempt to restate old truths in the light of modern 
 knowledge. 
 
VI 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 I have made bold to publish these lectures in 
 the belief that they will fill a gap. It would appear 
 that modern psychology has shed new light on the 
 material of sin as consisting of misdirected in¬ 
 stinct, and has made possible a fresh interpretation 
 of original sin, as moral disease, due to the mis¬ 
 shaping of the individual mind by bad social 
 environment. If this is accepted, we get only one 
 more instance of the fact that the traditional 
 doctrines of the Church prove in the long run to 
 be more fully in accord with a completer know¬ 
 ledge of the truth than the popular denials of 
 them. I have also attempted to show that 
 Christianity provides the exact remedy that sin 
 requires. 
 
 It is, I think, important to grasp that any 
 real doctrine of sin carries with it certain psycho¬ 
 logical and, still more, certain philosophical im¬ 
 plications. In dwelling on this I have been com¬ 
 pelled to wander over a wide field, and to make 
 many assertions which may be felt to need a further 
 defence. I can only appeal to the reader’s charity 
 to believe that I am not unaware of this, and that 
 silence on these matters is not due to ignorance 
 or dogmatism, but to want of space. I refer in 
 the course of the book to several modern writers, 
 to which I am most conscious of being indebted. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Introduction 
 
 
 PAGES 
 
 ix-x 
 
 Lecture I 
 
 Actual Sin 
 
 I-I5 
 
 The meaning of sin in the O.T., pp. 1-5—In 
 the teaching of Christ, pp. 5-10—In the rest of 
 the N.T., p. 10—Sin contains its own punish¬ 
 ment, since human life depends on fellowship 
 with God, pp. 11-14—The supernatural perfects 
 the natural, pp. 14-15. 
 
 Lecture II Original Sin 16-28 
 
 The meaning of the term, pp. 16-18—The 
 teaching of the O.T., pp. 18-19—Of the non- 
 canonical writings, p. 19—Of St. Paul, especially 
 in the Epistle to the Romans, pp. 20-26—Of 
 St. Augustine, pp. 26-27—Of the later Church, 
 pp. 27-28. 
 
 Lecture III Objections to the Idea 
 
 of Original Sin 
 
 The nature of the story in Genesis, pp. 29-30 
 —Dr. Tennant’s limitation of the term ‘ sin,' 
 pp. 30-32—Sin is not simply moral evil, pp. 32-34 
 —Nor confined to the individual will, pp. 34-37— 
 
 Christ’s teaching implies original sin, pp. 37-39 
 —In what sense can it be transmitted, pp. 39- 
 43—Sin and the sense of sin and guilt, pp. 43-49. 
 
 Lecture IV Psychology and Sin a 
 
 The rise of the New Psychology, pp. 50-51— 
 
 It regards all mental life as built up out of 
 instincts, pp. 51-55—And lays stress on the ' un¬ 
 conscious mind,' pp. 55-56—-The direct bearing 
 of this on the Christian idea of sin, pp. 56-59— 
 
 The concept of ‘ moral disease,’ pp. 59-61—But 
 this psychology may be used to deny free-will 
 and the objective truth of morality and religion, 
 p. 61—As against this we hold, that psychology 
 can only describe conduct, pp. 61-63—Its 
 
 29-49 
 
 50-78 
 
 ippbtte 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGES 
 
 Vlll 
 
 apparent determinism is due to its limitations, 
 pp. 63-65—It can give a history of morality, 
 pp. 65-67—And explain the idea of God as a 
 projection, pp. 67-68—But fails to give any real 
 account of moral judgments, pp. 68-69—Which 
 have as much claim to validity as intellectual 
 judgments, pp. 69-72—And substitutes the idea 
 of God for God, pp. 72-79—Its limitations are 
 self-evident, pp. 75-76—The idea of sin remains 
 unaffected, pp. 76-78. 
 
 Lecture V Philosophy and Sin 79-96 
 
 The teaching of Christ implies a certain philo¬ 
 sophical outlook, pp. 79-82—The Christian 
 doctrine of creation rules out certain views of 
 sin, pp. 82-83—Evil is not only negative, pp. 83- 
 85—Its existence is compatible with the power 
 and goodness of God, pp. 85-89—While deter¬ 
 minism is not, 89-90—Pantheism denies all sin, 
 pp. 90-92—An undue insistence on the immanence 
 of God has to explain away sin, pp. 92-95— 
 
 In what sense God is the absolute, p. 96. 
 
 Lecture VI Has there been a Fall ? 97-112 
 
 Two explanations of the disorder of the 
 world, pp. 97-98—Dr. Tennant’s denial of any 
 fall, pp. 98-100—A criticism of his position, 
 pp. 100-102—Science may suggest a different 
 view, pp. 102-103—Sin is not being outgrown, 
 pp. 103-104—Moral does not keep pace with 
 material progress, pp. 104-106—The cause lies 
 within man, pp. 106-108—Sin is never a means 
 of progress, p. 108—The possibility of super¬ 
 human forces of evil, pp. 108-111—The teaching 
 of Christ suggests a growing separation between 
 good and evil, pp. m-112. 
 
 Lecture VII God’s Remedy for Sin t> 113-129 
 
 The nature of the disease, pp. 113-114—Sug- 
 gested remedies, pp. 115-116—The Christian 
 remedy, p. 116—Christ reveals the possibilities x n 
 of human nature, pp. 117-118—And also God's ^ 
 purpose and character, pp. 118-119—He is the 
 supreme example of personal influence, pp. 120- 
 123—Which lives on in the Christian Church, 
 pp. 123-125—He has also made God’s forgive¬ 
 ness possible, pp. 12 5-12 7—His saving power is 
 as wide as the world, pp. 127-129. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 The Christian idea of sin is essentially a religious 
 idea. It implies a relationship to God. Hence 
 any attempt to discuss the nature and meaning 
 of sin that forgets or minimises its Godward aspect 
 cannot satisfy the Christian consciousness. To an 
 atheist the idea of sin can only be an ecclesiastical 
 delusion. He may recognise the existence of moral 
 evil as a problem for ethics or the existence of 
 crime as a problem for political philosophy. He 
 may be able to define sin as he would define any 
 other fiction of the human mind—as, for instance, 
 a centaur—but the term can have no real meaning 
 for him. It corresponds to nothing that has 
 actual existence. It must be explained away. 
 One reason why many modern discussions of sin 
 are unsatisfactory is that even Christian writers 
 attempt to isolate sin from its relation to God. 
 As Christians we protest that a sound theology 
 can never be assisted by provisional lapses into 
 naturalism and that the full meaning of sin must 
 always elude the temporary atheist. 
 
 Again, the problem of sin is, in the first instance, 
 a problem of religion as opposed not only to ethics 
 or politics, but to theology. Any treatment of 
 good or evil as subjects for merely theoretical 
 
X 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 discussion runs the risk of blurring the distinction 
 between them. Evil is primarily an enemy to be 
 fought and conquered. To regard it in any other 
 way is really to evade the problem. A solution 
 that is not a practical solution is no real solution 
 at all. When evil is viewed as sin against God 
 this becomes doubly true. For religion the primary 
 demand is for deliverance and restoration to fellow¬ 
 ship with God. Christianity offers, in the first 
 instance, a remedy for sin, not an explanation of 
 it. Here, as always, a theology is necessary, but 
 only in the wake of religion. Christian insistence 
 on the gravity of sin can only be intelligible to 
 those who are fighting against it. To the non- 
 combatant critic Christians always seem to be 
 making an unnecessary fuss about nothing. 
 
 These two thoughts control the treatment of 
 sin in these lectures. The first two deal with 
 the ideas of ‘ actual ’ and ‘ original 5 sin, and the 
 treatment is largely historical. The three subse¬ 
 quent lectures discuss some of the problems of 
 psychology and philosophy that are involved in 
 the idea of sin. This leads up to a discussion of 
 the belief in the ‘ fall ’ of man in the sixth lecture. 
 The last deals with the Gospel as containing God’s 
 remedy for the practical problem of sin. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 ACTUAL SIN 
 
 The Christian doctrine of sin, as it appears in the 
 New Testament, springs out of the Old Testament 
 doctrine of sin. This again has a long history 
 behind it. We must begin by summarising its 
 development. 
 
 Among the early Hebrews, as among all primitive 
 peoples, sin was simply that which offended God. 
 Disaster or sickness was regarded as the sign that 
 God was angry, and search had to be made, if 
 necessary, to discover what sin had offended Him 
 and who had committed it. The deity of the 
 savage is as fitful and capricious a being as the 
 savage himself. His disapproval is often arbitrary. 
 In the early stages of society sin and crime are 
 hardly yet distinguished. Sin is practically co¬ 
 extensive with the violation of tribal custom, 
 which is viewed as expressing the will of the deity 
 and being under his protection. In the ancient 
 story of Exodus iv. 24-26 we may find an illus¬ 
 tration of these principles. God met Moses and 
 
 B 
 
2 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 ' sought to kill him.’ In other words, Moses fell 
 dangerously ill, and his illness was interpreted as 
 a sign that Jehovah was offended. It was left 
 to Zipporah’s wits to discover the cause. This 
 was found in the neglect of the tribal custom of 
 circumcision by Moses, whether for himself or 
 his son is not quite clear. Jehovah’s wrath was 
 appeased by the performance of the right action. 
 
 Further, the idea of sin in primitive times is 
 limited in two ways. First, primitive thought 
 deals with sins rather than sin. A sin is a definite 
 and outward act, either the performance of what 
 custom forbids or the failure to perform what 
 custom enjoins. There is as yet no reference 
 to inward desire or intention. Ignorance is no 
 plea. By the mere fact of having committed the 
 deed the doer is a sinner, and a sinner he remains 
 until the sin is expiated. (Edipus, for example, 
 in the Greek story is guilty even though he sinned 
 in ignorance and had done his best to avoid the 
 act. Secondly, the conception of individuality is 
 undeveloped. The unit for religion, as for all life, 
 is the family or the clan. Hence when the god is 
 offended and punishes the offence by misfortune 
 of some kind, no sense of injustice is caused if the 
 punishment lights, not on the offender, but on the 
 community to which he belongs. When Achan’s 
 sin brings defeat on Israel, his family are included 
 in the punishment. 1 
 
 Traces of ideas such as these are to be found 
 in many of the earliest parts of the Old Testament. 
 
 1 Joshua vii. 
 
ACTUAL SIN 
 
 3 
 
 It is necessary to insist that they do not correspond 
 with the fuller revelation in Christ. But it is 
 more important for our purpose to notice how they 
 are gradually transcended under the influence of 
 the prophets. As men gained a fuller revelation 
 of the character of Jehovah, so the idea of sin was 
 purified and deepened. Sin is still that which 
 offends God. But God’s disapproval is no longer 
 arbitrary. He is a righteous God. His commands 
 are for the highest good of His people always. His 
 supreme demand from man is not for the punctilious 
 performance of external actions, but for mercy 
 and righteousness. And again He looks not only 
 at the outward act, but searches the heart. Sin 
 begins to include not only outward acts, but in¬ 
 ward intention. ‘ He hath showed thee, 0 man, 
 what is good ; and what doth the Lord require 
 of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to 
 walk humbly with thy God ? ’ 1 So, too, from the 
 time of Jeremiah and Ezekiel the individual begins 
 to come to his own. The idea of national or 
 corporate sin is in no way weakened, but side by 
 side there has emerged the conviction of individual 
 responsibility to God. ‘ The soul that sinneth, 
 it shall die.’ 2 A righteous member of an un¬ 
 righteous nation can be acceptable to God. This 
 growth of individual religion reinforces the growing 
 sense of the inwardness of sin. 
 
 In the Psalms we find the Old Testament idea 
 of sin in its most spiritual form. In such a Psalm 
 as the fifty-first sin is felt to be personal disobedience 
 
 Micah vi. 8. s Ezekiel xviii. 4. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 4 
 
 to a good and holy God. Whatever damage a 
 man’s sin may have done to the community or to 
 his neighbour or to himself, the thought of it is 
 swallowed up in the sense of what it means to God. 
 ‘ Against thee, and thee only, have I sinned.’ In 
 his attitude to sin the Psalmist places himself on 
 God’s side and asks not to be let off punishment, 
 but for a new heart which will make possible a 
 restored fellowship with God. The supreme penalty 
 is the loss of the presence of God. Sin is no longer 
 viewed as a mere external action; it is rather the 
 sinful heart and character that the Psalmist has in 
 mind. It is seemingly compared to leprosy, as being 
 a consuming disease of the soul. And God’s 
 disapproval is no longer a merely external judg¬ 
 ment : it is confirmed by the sinner’s highest 
 self. ‘ I acknowledge my transgressions, and my 
 sin is ever before me.’ In Psalms such as this, 
 where we are allowed to overhear the prayers of 
 the saints of the old covenant, we can see what sin 
 had come to mean to religion at its highest. 
 
 No doubt even to the end Judaism retained 
 much of the old legalistic idea of sin. It was one 
 of the results of the place that the Law came to hold. 
 In the priestly code many of the regulations com¬ 
 ing down from primitive times confuse moral and 
 ceremonial purity. A man might easily become 
 unclean unwittingly. A ‘ sin offering ’ is still 
 required for a woman after child-birth. We do, 
 however, find the distinction between unintentional 
 sins and sins committed with a high hand. 1 The 
 
 1 Numbers xv. 29-30. 
 
ACTUAL SIN 
 
 5 
 
 teaching of the Law about sin must be judged by 
 the upward tendency that it represents as compared 
 with earlier codes, rather than by the actual de¬ 
 velopment that it attained. At least it succeeded 
 in bringing home to the mass of the people some 
 conception of God’s holiness, when the prophets 
 had failed. 1 
 
 The teaching of Christ consummates that puri- w 
 fication and deepening of the idea of sin whose 
 course we have briefly traced in the Old Testament. 
 He gives no definition of sin. He deals more often 
 with particular sins than sins in general. He 
 corrects the current estimate of sins. Yet His dis¬ 
 courses and parables imply a definite idea of sin. 
 
 The leading characteristic of His teaching on 
 sin is that He puts it into relation with the holy love 1 
 of God for every individual soul and for all mankind. 
 God is pre-eminently the Father, the Father alike 
 of Israel and of each human soul. As Father, God 
 pierces behind the outward action to the state of 
 heart and will from which it springs. Sin is at 
 bottom the refusal of trust and obedience on the 
 part of the child to the all-wise and all-loving Father. 
 The truest illustrations of its meaning are to be 
 found in the home. Imagine the perfect father. 
 His commands are not arbitrary, but spring from 
 a desire for his child’s highest welfare. They are 
 guided by an experience and an insight that the child 
 cannot yet possess. In this home there are many 
 
 1 On the O.T. doctrine of sin, see article ‘ Sin ' (Hebrew and 
 Jewish) in Hastings's Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. xi.; 
 Schultz, Old Testament Theology, vol. ii. pp. 281 ff.; Davidson, 
 
 Old Testament Theology, pp. 203 ff. 
 
6 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 children, but no favourites. The welfare of all is 
 bound up with the welfare of each. The love and 
 confidence for which the Father asks is in complete 
 harmony with the love of the brethren. In glad 
 obedience all alike will find their own true satisfaction 
 and also forward the true happiness of others. In 
 the parable of the Prodigal Son each brother in 
 turn cuts himself off from the joy and fellowship of 
 the home, the one by his desire to possess for him¬ 
 self and to be free from all restraints, the other by 
 his sullen refusal to share the largeness of the Father’s 
 heart. Sin is still that of which God disapproves, 
 but its whole meaning has become transfigured in 
 the light of God’s fatherly love. No doubt in the 
 Old Testament we find anticipations of this view, 
 but Christ first made the thought of God’s holy love 
 the controlling factor in the idea of sin. 
 
 The freshness of this standpoint can be best 
 appreciated when we contrast the teaching of Christ 
 with the current ideas of contemporary Judaism. 
 As a result of the growing predominance of the Law 
 since Maccabean days, the Jews increasingly came 
 to construe man’s relation to God in legal terms. 
 Sin tended to become a series of individual acts, 
 the running up a debt with God. Further, the 
 consequence of the development of oral tradition 
 as an attempt to apply the Law to every possible 
 situation of life led to a tendency to confuse sin 
 with ignorance. The sinner was the man who had 
 not learnt the right application of the Law to this 
 or that problem of conduct, and so did not know 
 how to please God by doing the right thing. Holiness 
 
ACTUAL SIN 
 
 7 
 
 became confused with correctness, and righteousness 
 with religious etiquette. Moreover, the failure to 
 distinguish between moral and ceremonial purity, 
 that Pharisaism served to increase rather than 
 diminish, produced a largely external view of sin. 
 Sins were, so to say, detachable from the sinner. 
 
 As against this Christ insisted upon the inward- * 
 ness of true religion. In His teaching upon eating 
 with unwashen hands He swept away for ever the 
 notion that man could be unfitted for fellowship 
 with God by any merely outward defilement. Sin 
 is no external stain. It resides in the heart and 
 will. ‘ Perceive ye not that whatever from without 
 goeth into the man, it cannot defile him ? . . . That 
 which proceedeth out of the man, that defileth the 
 man. For from within, out of the heart of men, 
 proceed/ and then follows a long list of evil things. 3 
 So, too, the angry thought, the lustful look, or the 
 evil desire, even though they do not issue in any 
 outward action, are sinful because they express the 
 heart and will of the man. 2 Christ never depreciates 
 the importance of conduct, but Pie insists that sin 
 is more than a series of sins : it is a corruption of 
 the man’s inmost self. It disables him from true 
 life. It cripples his freedom and, in effect, changes 
 him from being a son in the liberty of his 
 Father’s house into being a slave to a cruel and 
 alien master. 
 
 In the teaching of Christ, just as the thought of 
 God as Father is primary, so the thought of sin as 
 
 1 Mark vii. 18-23. 
 
 2 See especially Matthew v. 20-28. 
 
8 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 related to holy love is primary. But the manifold 
 relation in which we stand to God cannot be con¬ 
 tained within the limits of a single metaphor. God 
 is not only the Father but the King, the Master, and 
 the Judge. The kingdom of God, whatever doubt 
 there may be about the interpretation of the phrase, 
 holds a large place in Christ’s teaching, and a 
 kingdom implies a king. So sin is depicted as 
 rebellion against God, who is bound to punish all 
 disloyalty in His subjects. Or sin is the failure 
 of the servant to render due service to his Master. 
 In one parable, ‘ The Unforgiving Servant,’ sin is 
 even represented as a debt, 1 though it must be 
 observed that the main lesson of the parable is to 
 emphasize the infinity of the debt, our inability to 
 pay it for ourselves, and our dependence upon God’s 
 free forgiveness, which is conditioned by our 
 willingness to forgive the tiny debts of our fellow- 
 men. In short, the Fatherhood of God is nothing 
 weak or sentimental. Because His love desires 
 the highest welfare of every soul, He cannot spare 
 it the discipline that it needs, and because He 
 desires the welfare of the whole family He must 
 punish the selfishness of one member that neglects 
 or injures other members. The jealousy of God has 
 a true meaning. If a father were not to be jealous 
 when the love and loyalty due to him alone is 
 withheld and squandered on some unworthy object, 
 it would show that his own love for his child had 
 grown cold. Nor is there anything unworthy in 
 the idea of God’s wrath. A father must be angry 
 
 1 Matthew xviii. 21-35. 
 
ACTUAL SIN 9 
 
 with all that mars the home. God’s wrath is the 
 energy of perfect love against all that threatens 
 the happiness of the loved ones. God’s hostility 
 to sin is in no way watered down when He is re¬ 
 garded as the Father. No excuse is given to those 
 who would substitute the ideal of heartiness for the 
 ideal of holiness. 
 
 To the Christian, however, the fullest revelation 
 of the meaning of sin is to be found in the Cross. ^ 
 Whatever else the Cross is, it is the showing up of 
 sin. In Christ the goodness and holiness of God 
 were displayed in a human life, and men found His 
 presence so intolerable that they crucified Him. 
 There is the essential nature of sin—incompati¬ 
 bility with God. The awareness of God’s presence 
 and claims can never leave men neutral. It com¬ 
 pels a decision. It at once discloses and deepens 
 the condition of men’s hearts and wills. The Cross 
 is the public manifestation for all time of what we 
 do when we reject God’s claims and God’s love, and 
 use the power that we possess to silence His voice 
 and banish Him from our lives. It demonstrates 
 that sin is more than a negation, the refusal to attend 
 or to obey ; it is active hostility. By the Cross 
 the essential meaning of sin has for ever been laid 
 bare. When we sin, we do our best to stifle all that 
 is divine within us. 
 
 It is often said, and said truly, that the Cross 
 destroys sin by showing it to be an offence against 
 holy love. Men cannot go on wounding God when 
 they see how meekly and lovingly He bears the 
 blow. But that is only half the truth. It is well 
 
lo THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 to remember that Christ spoke of a day to come, 
 when He should come no longer in weakness but 
 in power, and when God’s holy love should be dis¬ 
 closed not in the Cross but in wrath and judgment 
 against sin. 
 
 In the rest of the New Testament we find the 
 same doctrine of sin. In St. Paul, as we shall see 
 in our next lecture, the term ‘ sin * is undoubtedly 
 used so as to include more than actual sin. It 
 is applied to conduct and conditions for which 
 the will of the individual is not responsible. But 
 with him actual sin is clearly disobedience to the 
 known will of God. It includes, however, far more 
 than a number of sinful acts or thoughts. The 
 true antithesis to sin is faith—the faith that ‘ worketh 
 through love/ and faith is a positive attitude of 
 enthusiastic adhesion to God. It is the life of 
 sonship. St. Paul in his stress on faith as opposed 
 to works is a true interpreter of the mind of his 
 Master. In St. John we get the nearest approach 
 to a definition of sin. ‘ Everyone that doeth sin, 
 doeth also lawlessness: and sin is lawlessness.’ 1 
 Again the rest of the Epistle shows that the term 
 is used in no stiff and legal sense. God is love, 
 but love carries with it obligations. No one can 
 rightly claim to live in fellowship with Him unless 
 he is striving to show his love by righteousness 
 and good-will to his fellow-men. Once again, sin 
 is the unfilial attitude. Lawlessness is an offence 
 against the sovereignty of holy love. 
 
 If this is the Christian doctrine of sin it contains 
 
 1 i John iii. 4. 
 
ACTUAL SIN 
 
 ii 
 
 in itself the answer to the question, What is the 
 punishment of sin ? In the plainest manner Christ 
 rebuked the popular error that exceptional suffering 
 is the proof of exceptional sin, or, again, that the 
 victims of some startling misfortune are the peculiar 
 objects of God’s anger . 1 The Cross itself witnesses 
 that in the world as we find it, suffering may be 
 not only the lot but the duty of the innocent. 
 On the other hand, He proclaimed that the Jewish 
 nation by its faithlessness to God and its rejection 
 of Himself had merited punishment, and He fore¬ 
 told the certainty of divine judgment on all un¬ 
 righteousness. There is no contradiction between 
 the two statements. On the Christian view of sin, 
 punishment is inevitable. As St. Augustine in¬ 
 sisted, ‘ peccatum poena peccati'—sin is the punish¬ 
 ment of sin. Alienation from God must issue in 
 loss and misery. About this penalty there is 
 nothing arbitrary. Man was created in the image 
 of God—that is, able to know and love God—for 
 only like can know like. This capacity for fellow¬ 
 ship with God is an integral part of human nature. 
 Only through exercising it can man become truly 
 and fully man. We to-day more and more view 
 human nature dynamically, not statically. It is 
 not a clear-cut and ready-made entity, as the older 
 theology tended to assume. Rather is it a process. 
 The new-born child possesses not human nature, 
 but the possibility of acquiring it. That pos¬ 
 sibility is never fully realised in this life. There 
 are in all of us many potentialities that remain 
 
 1 E.g. Luke xiii. 1-5. 
 
12 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 undeveloped in this world. ‘ Man partly is and 
 wholly hopes to be.’ But growth is conditioned 
 throughout by fellowship with God. Throughout 
 nature the life of any organism is determined by 
 response to environment. Its capacities are limited 
 by its power of response. The wider the environ¬ 
 ment which it is able to use, the more advanced 
 is its life. When we reach man we reach a being 
 who is able to respond to an environment wider 
 than visible and material things, a spiritual environ¬ 
 ment that includes God. Human life depends for 
 its maintenance and growth upon its correspondence 
 with God. And this correspondence is no longer 
 anything merely automatic or physical. It tran¬ 
 scends the order of being that is studied by biology. 
 It is moral and spiritual. Here for the first time 
 we get the possibility of sin, of wilful refusal to 
 correspond. And sin must weaken that fellow¬ 
 ship which conditions all sound and healthy human 
 life. Religion has been defined as ‘ walking with 
 God.’ But two cannot walk together ‘ except they 
 be agreed/ The child who knows that he has 
 done something of which his parents disapprove 
 feels that a barrier has sprung up between him and 
 them. Hence the disorder that follows sin is its 
 inevitable result, in accordance with moral laws. 
 Apart from God the heart grows cold and the mind 
 darkened. The balance of human nature is upset 
 so that the lower passions get out of control. Such 
 alienation from God breaks up the unity of human 
 life. Its growth is hampered and its direction 
 perverted, because fellowship with God is a necessary 
 
ACTUAL SIN 
 
 13 
 
 constituent in its nature. Sin is indeed its own 
 punishment. And as we shall see more clearly in 
 our next lecture, the consequences of sin cannot be 
 limited to the sinner. The disorder that follows 
 on alienation from God must spread to other 
 members of the home until the home life is thrown 
 into confusion. So we see that the proper punish¬ 
 ment of sin lies within itself. So long as the sinner 
 identifies himself with sin, he is exposed to the 
 wrath of God. The lawlessness and want of peace, 
 the darkness of vision and incapacity for good-will, 
 are all the inevitable consequences that flow from 
 the loss of the inspiration and guidance that fellow¬ 
 ship with God bestows. Apart from Him we cannot 
 make right use of this present world, and the world, 
 as misused by the blindness and sinfulness of man, 
 is turned into an instrument of his punishment. 
 It is true indeed that in the individual life we can¬ 
 not find any proportion between sin and suffering. 
 In any particular case the innocent may suffer 
 far more than the guilty. This is the result of the 
 solidarity of the race. But we can see that, viewed 
 broadly, the disorder that produces suffering is 
 the result of sin, and that if we take a wide view 
 of nations and societies, there is a certain proportion 
 between unrighteousness and suffering. The moral 
 law cannot in the long run be broken with impunity. 
 Further, mysterious as the suffering of the innocent 
 is, it does not impair fellowship of will with God, 
 and God is able in wonderful ways to give faith 
 and courage to bear it and to transform suffering 
 into a means of forwarding His glory. Sin causes 
 
14 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 suffering, but suffering borne rightly may be a 
 very sharing of the suffering of Christ. 
 
 We have tried above to put into modern dress 
 the truth that Catholic theology expressed in the 
 doctrine that Adam possessed a supernatural en¬ 
 dowment, which he forfeited by the Fall. The 
 question was at one time widely discussed whether 
 man’s nature was left in itself uncorrupted, but 
 weak as a result of this loss, or whether in itself 
 his nature was corrupted. For us to-day such a 
 controversy is largely meaningless. All sound 
 theology holds that the natural and the super¬ 
 natural are not two elements side by side, but 
 rather that the supernatural grace that comes 
 from fellowship with God perfects the development 
 of the natural. The natural cannot become all 
 that it has in it to become, without it. Conversely, 
 the supernatural is not the unnatural. It is not 
 an intruder or an addition to an already complete 
 nature. It does not make man an angel or a demi¬ 
 god : it makes him truly human. Man, in virtue 
 of those special capacities that distinguish him 
 from the beasts, can only grow into his true nature 
 by responding to an environment wider than theirs, 
 in ways that are not possible to them. He can 
 only become truly natural in and through the 
 supernatural. That is the plane of life on which 
 alone the problem of sin can arise. On the other 
 hand, when he is cut off from union with God by 
 sin, man does not sink back into being an animal. 
 An unsuccessful man can never be only a successful 
 beast. Here we may join in the protest that has 
 been heard in several quarters of late against 
 
ACTUAL SIN 
 
 *5 
 
 treating the grace of God as, shall we say, a species 
 of divine electricity, a current that can be turned 
 on or off by suitable machinery . 1 ‘ The infusion of 
 grace/ said Dr. Bright, ‘ is merely a convenient 
 theological expression for the personal action of 
 the Divine Paraclete / 2 There is, perhaps, no better 
 definition of grace than the personal influence of 
 God. Once again we find ourselves coming back 
 to the analogy of the home. The remedy for sin 
 is grace. Each term alike finds its best illustra¬ 
 tion in the home circle. Sin inevitably shuts out 
 grace, just as a child's disobedience shuts out the 
 father's influence. We shall only confuse our 
 minds if we substitute a theology of the engine- 
 room for a theology of the home. For in the picture 
 of the untrustful and disobedient child we find a 
 simple analogy, that awakens a response in all 
 lives, and yet goes deeper to the root of the problem 
 than any statement in terms of philosophy. 
 
 Only by becoming as children can we enter the 
 Father’s home, and only when we have entered can 
 we appreciate the full enormity of rebellion against 
 the Father’s love. The Christian doctrine of sin 
 springs out of the experience of those who have 
 tasted the joy of fellowship with God and with 
 one another through Christ. The vocabulary of 
 the home only has its full meaning for those who 
 know something of the home from inside. As we 
 insisted at the outset, the idea of sin is primarily 
 an idea of religion. 
 
 1 E.g., in the writings of Dr. Oman, or in several contributions 
 to The Spirit. 
 
 2 Bright, Lessons from the Lives of Three Great Fathers, 
 p. 163. 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 In our last lecture we considered the idea of actual 
 sin. We saw that within the Old Testament there 
 could be traced a development of the idea. As 
 men received a fuller revelation of the character 
 of God, their idea of sin was deepened and purified. 
 Sin Was always in relation to God. It was that 
 which displeased Him, that of which He disapproved. 
 In the light of the fuller knowledge of God, sin was 
 seen to be not merely outward action or a series 
 of outward acts, but a state of the heart and will. 
 Also, as the sense of individuality developed, it 
 carried with it a new sense of personal responsi¬ 
 bility. In the teaching of Christ sin is viewed 
 primarily as the alienation of a child from an all¬ 
 holy and loving Father, the refusal of the trust 
 and obedience that He rightly claims. Further, 
 since man is so constituted that fellowship with 
 God is an indispensable condition of his true growth, 
 the penalty of sin which weakens or destroys that 
 fellowship is inevitably a disordered life, and the 
 disorder which ensues cannot be limited to the 
 actual sinner. 
 
 We now approach the difficult question of 
 v ‘ original sin/ /The doctrine of original sin is the 
 
ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 *7 
 
 attempt to account for the apparently universal 
 presence of sin. As Dr. Mozley wrote, * Original 
 sin is fundamentally simply universal sin. That 
 is the fact which is at once the evidence and the 
 substance of it. We know that if sin is universal 
 and if there is no instance of a human being without 
 it, universal sin must receive the same interpreta¬ 
 tion that any other universal does, namely, that it 
 implies a law, in consequence of which it is universal. 
 Nobody supposes that anything takes place uni¬ 
 versally by chance, accident, or what we call curious 
 coincidence/ 1 Or, to look at it from another point 
 of view, if man was made for fellowship with God, 
 why does he find that fellowship so difficult ? He 
 perceives in himself from the earliest years desires 
 and impulses which conflict with the known will of 
 God. We can understand how actual sin disables 
 a man for fellowship with God. In accordance with 
 the law of habit, it forms in him a character out 
 of sympathy with God. But as we look into our 
 own lives we seem to be disqualified for fellowship 
 with God before ever the life of conscious choice 
 begins. We seem to inherit evil inclinations and 
 tastes for what God has forbidden. The problem 
 is not simply that we have passions of our animal 
 nature that need control, but that the will appears 
 universally unable to control them. It appears as 
 if we do not start fair, but with a bias to evil. 
 The root of the difficulty lies in the apparently 
 universal presence of sin in human nature prior to 
 and independent of acts of wrong choice made by 
 
 1 J. B. Mozley, Lectures and Theological Papers, p. 136, 
 
 C 
 
18 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 the individual. The traditional Christian explana¬ 
 tion has been that man inherits a corrupted, or at 
 least a weakened and disordered, nature. This 
 explanation is being to-day widely challenged. 
 In considering it we must distinguish carefully 
 between the facts, the universal sense of moral 
 weakness and alienation from God, and the ex¬ 
 planation that has been given of the facts. 
 
 In the Old Testament there is no formal doctrine 
 of original sin. The story of Adam’s disobedience 
 in the third chapter of Genesis is not explicitly 
 connected either there or elsewhere with the com¬ 
 mission of later sins. Indeed, in order to account 
 for the wickedness of the generation before the 
 Flood, quite another story is narrated. In the 
 Canonical Books there is not one undisputed allu¬ 
 sion to the fall of Adam. On the other hand, there 
 are confessions of universal human wickedness. 
 
 ‘ The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his 
 youth.’ 1 ‘ There is no man that sinneth not.’ 2 
 ‘ In thy sight shall no man living be justified.’ 3 
 ‘ How can man be just with God, or how can he 
 be clean that is born of a woman ? ’ 4 There is a 
 far more widely diffused sense of human depravity 
 than can be gathered from any collection of isolated 
 proof texts. The Psalmist who writes : ‘ Behold 
 I was shapen (born) in iniquity, and in sin did my 
 mother conceive me,’ 5 confesses that sin inheres 
 in man from his birth. The Jews recognised the 
 problem of universal estrangement from God, but 
 
 1 Genesis viii. 21. 
 3 Psalm cxxx. 3. 
 
 2 1 Kings viii. 46. 
 
 4 Job xxv. 4. 5 Psalm li. 5. 
 
ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 *9 
 
 as yet attempted no theological explanation of it. 
 The passages quoted above are acknowledgments 
 of what actually is rather than theories of how it 
 came to be. 1 
 
 In the non-canonical writings the next stage is 
 reached. We begin to find attempts to account 
 for the wickedness of mankind. In several cases 
 it is explicitly connected with the disobedience of 
 Adam. In other cases it is connected rather with 
 the story of the union between the sons of God and 
 the daughters of men. Side by side we find the 
 development of an idea, already present in the Old 
 Testament, of an evil impulse in the heart of man. 
 It was held that Adam was created possessing such 
 an evil impulse which readily became the ally of 
 temptation and issued in sin. In short, Judaism 
 by the time of Christ possessed a number of not 
 altogether consistent speculations on the subject. 
 Many authorities hold that the certainty with which 
 the Mishna connects the sinfulness of man with the 
 fall of Adam proves that the idea must be at least 
 as old as the third century b.c. Hence it is un¬ 
 necessary, and probably incorrect, to suppose that 
 St. Paul borrowed his teaching about Adam from 
 any written book, .gather the uncanonical Jewish 
 books and St. Paul alike borrowed"Trorn a wefl- 
 
 1 For a discussion of the attitude of the Old Testament to 
 universal sin, see Tennant, The Fall and Original Sin, chapter iv., 
 especially pp. 100-102. 
 
 2 For the teaching of the uncanonical books, see Tennant, 
 op. cit., cc., v.-ix. For a briefer statement see Thackeray, The 
 Relation of St. Paul to Contemporary Jewish Thought, c. ii., or 
 Sanday and Headlam, Romans, pp. 136-8. 
 
20 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 To St. Paul, therefore, let us turn, since all later 
 Christian teaching on this subject is based on his 
 Epistles. The most important passage is Romans v. 
 12-21, whose opening sentences run thus : ‘ Where¬ 
 fore, as through one man sin entered into the world, 
 and death through sin ; and so death passed unto 
 all men, for that (e</>’«) all sinned : for until the 
 law sin was in the world : but sin is not imputed 
 when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned 
 from Adam until Moses, even over them that had 
 not sinned after the likeness of Adam’s transgression, 
 who is a figure of him that was to come.’ JThe 
 central thought of the whole passage is the 
 parallelism between Adam and Christ. The dis¬ 
 obedience of ‘ the one/ namely Adam, brought sin 
 and death to ‘ the many/ Even so the one act 
 of righteousness wrought by Christ has brought 
 righteousness and life to the many who close with 
 God’s free offer. ‘ As through the one man’s dis¬ 
 obedience the many were made sinners, even so 
 through the obedience of the one shall the many be 
 made righteous.’ It is true that the phrases ‘ in 
 Adam ’ and ‘ in Christ ’ do not actually occur, 
 but the contrast drawn implicitly in i Cor. xv. 22, 
 * As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be 
 made alive,’ runs all through the passage. All men 
 by their natural birth are ‘ in Adam,’ and, apart from 
 the new life which is received through faith in Christ, 
 in Adam they remain. By faith in Christ men pass 
 from the condition of being in Adam to that of being 
 in Christ. St. Paul, however, is more concerned 
 to dwell upon the blessings won by Christ, and to 
 
ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 21 
 
 exhort men to enjoy them, than he is to expound any / 
 doctrine of original sin. His mention of Christ is / 
 primary, and his mention of Adam is secondary, j 
 We must not treat the passage as if it were a lecture j 
 on sin. The real difficulty centres in the words? 
 
 ‘ because sinned-/ All scholars to-day would 
 agree that e<£’ co cannot mean ‘ in whom ’—‘ in quo/ 
 as the Vulgate translates it, and as Augustine 
 quotes it. It means ‘ because/ 7 for that/ But 
 when and how did all men sin ? Ought we to supply 
 the words ‘ in Adam/ so that the sentence means 
 that when Adam sinned, all men in some sense 
 sinned in him, or does St. Paul only mean that 
 all men have as a matter of fact followed Adam's 
 bad example and fallen into sin, without giving any 
 explanation of why they should have done so ? 
 Clearly the former alternative is preferable, because 
 otherwise the parallelism of the context is destroyed. 
 
 If we go on to ask in what sense did all his descen¬ 
 dants sin in Adam, St. Paul gives us no answer. 
 
 It was an accepted Jewish tradition that they had 
 done so. There are suggestions in contemporary 
 Jewish literature of the view that the connection 
 between Adam's sin and death and the sin and death 
 of his descendants was simply the fiat of God’s will. 
 Or again, the argument of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 that Levi paid tithes to Abraham might suggest that 
 Adam’s seed existed seminally in him and so shared 
 his sin. It is better, however, to search for a clue 
 to St. Paul’s meaning on other lines. If we 
 re-examine the passage we may draw out three 
 points. 
 
f 
 
 S<r 
 
 : v 
 
 22 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 First, the idea f in Adam ’ must be interpreted 
 by the idea ‘ in Christ/ and not vice versa. It is 
 the latter that is primary to St. Paul’s thought. 
 ‘ In Christ ’ is commonly said to express St. Paul’s 
 doctrine of a mystical union with the living Christ 
 through the Spirit, a union so close that the very 
 death and resurrection of Christ are reproduced 
 in the Christian. That is true, but it is far from 
 the whole truth. We must insist that ‘ in Christ ’ 
 includes the thought of membership in the visible 
 body of Christ, the Church. ' As the body is one, 
 and hath many members ... so also is Christ ’ 
 (i Cor. xii. 12). For St. Paul, sharing the fullness 
 of the Christian life, was always mediated by sharing 
 the fellowship of the Christian brotherhood. The 
 idea of a direct personal relation to Christ by faith 
 and the idea of membership in the body of Christ 
 through baptism were separable only in thought. 
 The new life that he experienced in Christ included 
 both. So, if we interpret the unknown by the known, 
 it is at least probable that for St. Paul ‘ in Adam ’ 
 would include the idea of membership in an un¬ 
 regenerate race, side by side with the idea of indi¬ 
 vidual humanity. All men sin in Adam because 
 they belong to a race of sinners. 
 
 Secondly, sin in this passage is personified. St. 
 Paul beyond all doubt believed in evil spirits tempt¬ 
 ing men to sin. It would be in the fullest accord 
 both with Jewish and Gentile thought to interpret 
 * through one man sin entered into the world ’ as 
 being more than a picturesque way of saying that 
 the first sin was committed. It implies that an 
 
ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 23 
 
 external evil power gained admittance into the world- 
 order. That an evil power once admitted volun¬ 
 tarily cannot be expelled at will, is an idea that 
 could be illustrated from folklore of all ages. And 
 we are told to-day that primitive tales embody a 
 profound philosophy of life. 
 
 Thirdly, a careful reading of the passage shows 
 that St. Paul here, as elsewhere, uses ‘ sin ’ to 
 include far more than actual sin. He applies the 
 term ‘ sin ’ to acts and conditions of will and heart 
 for the badness of which the individual is not per¬ 
 sonally responsible. As we saw, sin originally 
 meant anything of which God disapproved. This 
 primitive way of viewing acts and characters 
 objectively, and of judging them so far as they fail 
 to conform to the divine standard of perfection, 
 still survives in St. Paul. Sin is for him all that 
 contradicts or falls short of God’s purpose. When 
 he wishes to bring in the further idea of personal 
 responsibility he calls it transgression (7rapdf3acns) 
 or trespass (■ irapaTTrcofia) or disobedience. All 
 cases of transgression are cases of sin, but all cases 
 of sin are not cases of transgression. ‘ Until the 
 law, sin was in the world ; but sin is not imputed 
 where there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned 
 from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not 
 sinned after the likeness of Adam’s transgression.’ 
 Adam committed transgression. He did wrong, 
 knowing it to be wrong. His descendants com¬ 
 mitted acts that were not in accordance with God’s 
 purpose for men, and so objectively were sinful, 
 but they did not commit transgression because 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 24 
 
 they knew no better ; they had as yet no conscious¬ 
 ness of God’s moral law. ‘ Where there is no law, 
 neither is there transgression.’ 1 Further, it is clear 
 that to St. Paul all sin does not involve guilt. He 
 distinguishes between sin that ‘ is imputed ’ and 
 sin that is not. Sin only involves guilt or account¬ 
 ability when it is transgression. But at the same 
 time all kinds of sin alike bring with them fatal 
 consequences. The inevitable consequence of such 
 sin, even though it incurs no guilt, is an incapacity 
 for fellowship with God, and the death which is the 
 ultimate and typical result of that disorder of nature 
 which follows on loss of fellowship with God. In 
 short, men from Adam to Moses were suffering from 
 a fatal moral and spiritual disease, though they 
 did not know it. The function of the law as sent 
 by God—for Jews, the law of Moses, for Gentiles, 
 the recognition of a standard, the law of conscience, 
 ‘ written in their hearts,’ 2 was to bring them to a 
 sense of their true condition—‘ through law cometh 
 the knowledge of sin ’ 3 —or, in St. Paul’s language, 
 to produce transgressions. ‘ The law came in 
 beside that the trespass might abound.’ 4 In 
 other words, it awakened them to a sense of their 
 alienation from God, and held Before them the 
 moral ideal, but did not give them power to 
 achieve it. But this new sense of sin was a stage 
 towards restoration. 
 
 So, we would suggest, the meaning of the passage 
 
 1 Romans iv. 15. 2 Romans ii. 15. 
 
 8 Romans iii. 20 ; cp. vii. 7-13. 
 
 4 Romans v. 20; cp. Galatians iii. 19. 
 
 jr 
 
ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 25 
 
 is this. \ By Adam’s disobedience sin got an entrance 
 into the world of man. Sin, once admitted, blinded 
 men’s eyes, and perverted men’s hearts, through 
 what we should call bad racial tradition. It inca¬ 
 pacitated them for union with God. It led them 
 astray involuntarily from God’s purpose and involved 
 them in death. * In Adam ’ they died. St. Paul 
 was feeling after the idea of corporate or racial sin, 
 tendencies to evil for which the individual is not 
 personally responsible, but in which he is entangled. 
 Such sin is not imputed. It does not carry with it 
 guilt, but it is a disease of the soul that can only lead 
 to death. It cripples men for their true life as sons 
 of God. 1 
 
 We may mention only to reject without hesita¬ 
 tion the view that St. Paul found in the flesh as 
 such the cause of universal sin. The belief that 
 we are tainted because we live in material bodies 
 is Greek, not Jewish. St. Paul’s use of the term 
 ‘ flesh ’ is derived from the Old Testament. There 
 * flesh ' either stands for the material element in 
 man or expresses the weakness and transitoriness 
 of human nature. In itself it is in no way sinful. 
 In the passage considered above, St. Paul clearly 
 distinguishes between sin and the flesh. But 
 through Adam’s trespass sin has entered into it 
 and, taking possession of it, made it its instru¬ 
 ment. That is, flesh is not essentially but empiri¬ 
 cally evil. Adam was originally sinless. He fell 
 
 1 On the interpretation of St. Paul’s teaching see Sanday 
 and Headlam, Romans, especially pp. 143-7; Tennant, The Fall 
 and Original Sin, c. xi., and especially on the use of the term ‘ sin,’ 
 Shears, The Gospel according to St. Paul, c. i. 
 
26 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 by disobedience. For St. Paul the root of sin lies 
 in the will. 1 
 
 From St. Paul we may, for our present purpose, 
 pass to St. Augustine, noting, however, that in 
 the early Fathers there are considerable varieties 
 of opinion about the Fall and its consequences. 2 
 There were Augustinians before St. Augustine, 
 but he was the first to attempt to formulate a 
 complete system of doctrine on the subject, and 
 his influence on later theology has been enormous. 
 As against the individualism of Pelagius, he was 
 concerned to insist on the solidarity of the race. 
 Men did not merely one by one imitate Adam’s 
 bad example, as Pelagius argued. Rather, just as 
 in the individual life, the commission of a sinful 
 act weakens the will and goes to form a sinful 
 habit, so all men inherit a bias to evil, due not to 
 their own actions, but to a corruption of nature 
 traceable in the last resort to Adam’s sin. St. 
 Augustine is not content to leave the idea where 
 St. Paul left it. He wishes to be definite where 
 St. Paul is vague. Relying on the mistranslation 
 of Romans v. 12, ‘ in whom all sinned,’ he asserts 
 that all men in some sense sinned in Adam’s sin, 
 and therefore shared his guilt. Sometimes he 
 explains this on the lines of the seminal existence 
 of all men in Adam. Elsewhere he adopts a kind 
 of realism which makes not only Adam’s nature 
 
 1 For St. Paul’s use of the term ‘flesh,’ see Sanday and 
 Headlam, p. 181 ; Stevens, The Theology of the New Testament, 
 p. 338 ff. ; Wheeler Robinson, The Christian Doctrine of Man, 
 p. 113 ff. 
 
 3 Cp. Tennant, op. cit., cc. xii. and xiii. 
 
ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 27 
 
 but Adam’s personality to be shared by his descen¬ 
 dants. Since no one shows more persuasively than 
 St. Augustine that sin lies in the will, these attempted 
 solutions cannot be regarded as successful, even 
 by himself. Further, unlike St. Paul, he regards 
 guilt as coextensive with sin. The mere receiving 
 of Adam’s nature carries with it a share not only 
 in the consequences of his action, but in his guilt. 
 He finds in infant baptism a proof of this. Un¬ 
 baptised infants, even though they die before they 
 are capable of committing actual sin, are lost. 
 In discussing the transmission of guilt, he is be¬ 
 trayed into the lamentable suggestion that original 
 sin is handed on from parent to child through the 
 act of generation, since under the conditions of 
 fallen humanity there is, even in lawful wedlock, 
 some measure of lust uncontrolled by right reason. 
 Again, in opposing Pelagianism, St. Augustine is 
 led to exaggerate the depravity of fallen man and 
 in effect to deny to him any real power of choice 
 at all. No doubt there are other elements in St. 
 Augustine’s writings that mitigate the harshness 
 of this teaching. Even so, it was never accepted 
 in its completeness by the Church, and its opponents 
 have no right to confuse the Catholic doctrine of 
 original sin with the Augustinian presentation of it. 1 
 
 At the Reformation Augustine’s doctrine of 
 original sin was developed to its logical conclusions 
 by Calvin, without any of that insistence on counter¬ 
 truths which softens the teaching of St. Augustine. 
 
 1 For a full examination of St. Augustine’s teaching, see 
 Lacey, Nature, Miracle, and Sin. 
 
28 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 At the Council of Trent the Roman Church accepted 
 a very much modified Augustinianism, based on 
 the teaching of the schoolmen, especially Aquinas. 
 It was content to affirm that the Fall resulted in 
 a loss of supernatural gifts and consequent dis¬ 
 solution of the harmony of man’s nature, that free¬ 
 will has been impaired but not destroyed, and that 
 original sin is transmitted by generation, not by 
 imitation. Our own Anglican Article goes further 
 than the Council of Trent, but refuses to assert 
 that man’s nature is wholly corrupt. 1 Up to 
 recent times there has been a general agreement 
 among Christians that man, when he is born into 
 the world, inherits a disordered, or at least a 
 weakened, nature, and that this is due to a ‘ fall ’ 
 in the past. This position is now challenged. 
 The whole idea of original sin is said to be obsolete 
 in the light of modern knowledge. There never 
 was an Adam, and he never fell. Even if he had, 
 his fall could not have affected his descendants. 
 And supposing that it could have affected them, 
 it could not produce sin, for sin can only be pre¬ 
 dicated of voluntary action. 2 
 
 These objections are indeed formidable. They 
 will have to be considered at length in our next 
 lecture. 
 
 1 For a fuller statement see Bicknell, A Theological Introduction 
 to the Thirty-nine Articles, pp. 231-3. 
 
 2 See especially Tennant, The Origin and Propagation of Sin 
 and The Concept of Sin. 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 OBJECTIONS TO THE IDEA OF 
 ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 In discussing the doctrine of original sin, we must 
 begin by sweeping away one common objection. 
 The validity of the doctrine is entirely independent 
 of the historical value of the third chapter of 
 Genesis. The story of Adam’s disobedience is a 
 piece of folklore. In the form in which it has come 
 down to us it has been shaped by the early prophets 
 so as to give an admirable picture of the meaning 
 of actual sin. Adam and Eve are capable of receiv¬ 
 ing a command. They know the distinction between 
 right and wrong. They acknowledge the will of 
 God as binding on them, and they disobey the 
 command of God. As a lesson in the meaning of 
 sin as disobedience to God, the chapter is admir¬ 
 able, and wakens an echo in all who read it, but it 
 throws no light on the origin of sin in the world. 
 Historical origins can only be proved by historical 
 evidence. Nor is it relevant to our present purpose 
 to discuss the original form of the story or its pos¬ 
 sible meaning. 1 We are only concerned with it 
 as we find it now in Genesis. It is enough to 
 insist that the frankest recognition that this chapter 
 1 On these points see Tennant. 
 
30 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 is myth, and not history, in no way disproves the 
 truth of original sin. Nor, again, is it necessary 
 to show that all mankind are descended from a 
 single pair. That is a question for science to in¬ 
 vestigate, and theology has no right to dispute 
 its verdict, whatever it be. For our present pur¬ 
 poses the important truth is that mankind is in a 
 \ real sense a unity The human race can for many 
 purposes be treated as one And it is a plain fact 
 that sin is widespread, if not universal. The race 
 is one in sin. The facts of experience and history 
 which attest this are entirely independent of the 
 story of Adam. It was because they were so clear, 
 and demanded some explanation, that an explana¬ 
 tion was sought in the disobedience of Adam. 
 Putting aside for the moment the question of 
 whether man can be said in any true sense to have 
 fallen, the facts of life certainly suggest that moral 
 evil is as wide as the human race. 
 
 At once we are faced with an objection. Have 
 we any right to use the term ‘ sin ’ so as to include 
 more than ‘ actual ’ sin ? Can we in any real 
 sense speak of corporate or racial ‘ sin ’ ? Or, 
 again, supposing that it is possible to inherit ten¬ 
 dencies to evil, have we any right to speak of them 
 as ‘ sinful ’ ? Dr. Tennant urges that the word 
 * sin’ should be confined to actual sin. Such sin 
 he defines as ‘ moral imperfection for which an 
 agent is in God’s sight accountable.’ 1 He wishes 
 to insist on this limitation in order to bring out 
 the exceeding sinfulness of actual sin. Such a 
 
 1 The Concept of Sin, p. 245. 
 
OBJECTIONS TO IDEA OF ORIGINAL SIN 31 
 
 definition, he pleads, ‘ alone safeguards sin from 
 confusion at once with imperfection—with ignorance, 
 with non-moral conative tendencies, with tempta¬ 
 tion, with unreal counterpart to illusory individual 
 experience. . . . It . . . strikes at the root of morbid 
 self-accusation. ... It insists more strongly than 
 can any concept of wider and looser meaning upon the 
 responsibility of the sinner for his sin. . . . While 
 pronouncing nothing to be sin but that to which 
 guilt attaches, it unconditionally declares that to 
 every sin there attaches guilt. It refuses to shift 
 one whit of the responsibility for real sin to the 
 subject's environment, the conditions of his life, 
 or his natural endowments. Volition, and volition 
 alone, it declares is sinful. ... In the light of 
 such a definition of sin as we have formulated, 
 the dictum so much in favour to-day, “to know 
 all is to pardon all '' is a thoroughly immoral and 
 unchristian exaggeration. . . . When we have made 
 every allowance that true charity suggests, and have 
 pleaded every extenuating circumstance that know¬ 
 ledge can discover, there remains in much lawless 
 conduct that occurs an element which is not to 
 be explained away, and which it is simply wicked 
 to ignore: namely, the fact of deliberate choosing 
 of the worse when a better course is both known 
 and possible.' 1 We have quoted Dr. Tennant at 
 length because his position has often been attacked 
 unfairly. He has no desire to minimise or deny sin, 
 but he wishes to limit the term to the voluntary 
 conduct of individuals and the moral condition that 
 
 1 Op. cit., pp. 246-7. 
 
32 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 results from it. He gets what he aims at, a logically 
 perfect concept of sin. If we agree to use ‘ sin ’ 
 in this sense only, then for the phrase ‘ original 
 sin ’ we should have to substitute some other 
 term, such as, perhaps, ‘ moral disease.' 
 
 Dr. Tennant's view is logical and consistent; he 
 succeeds in attaining a clear-cut definition. On 
 the other hand, we may plead that the limitation 
 of the term ‘ sin ’ to actual sin, i.e. to moral imperfec¬ 
 tion for which an agent is, in God’s sight, account¬ 
 able, would obscure certain vital elements of truth 
 which the wider use of the term preserves. We 
 must not simplify problems in order to get clear 
 definitions or 'logically perfect concepts.’ Life 
 is often wider than logic. Dr. Tennant makes two 
 assumptions. First, he treats sin primarily from 
 the point of view of the moral philosopher. Sin 
 is to him first and foremost moral evil, springing 
 from wrong choice. Its relation to God he treats 
 as secondary. Secondly, his view of sin is purely 
 individualistic : for him sin resides only in the 
 will of the individual. Both these assumptions 
 are open to criticism that seriously weakens his 
 position. 
 
 Let us take the first, that sin is primarily moral 
 evil. We must sympathise with many of his 
 objections to the strict Augustinian position. From 
 the standpoint of morality it is unjust that original 
 sin should carry with it personal guilt. A just 
 God cannot blame a man for a condition of will 
 and heart for which he is not responsible. But 
 these objections lose their force when we modify 
 
OBJECTIONS TO IDEA OF ORIGINAL SIN 33 
 
 the teaching of St. Augustine by an appeal to 
 St. Paul. ‘ Sin is not imputed, where there is no 
 law.’ There is abundant Catholic authority for the 
 view that original sin does not involve personal guilt. 
 Dr. F. J. Hall can write, ‘The word “sin” in the 
 phrase " original sin,” does not signify either actual 
 sin or personal guilt, but is employed in a secondary 
 sense to describe an inherited defect of nature/ 1 
 Nor, again, can we accept St. Augustine’s argu¬ 
 ments to prove that we share Adam’s guilt. As 
 Dr. Caird observes, ‘ Rightly construed, the concep¬ 
 tion of seminal guilt, or of a sin which contains or 
 involves all future sins, if any real meaning could 
 be attached to it, would seem to imply that Adam 
 was guilty of all the sins of his descendants, rather 
 than they of his.’ 2 But when we move into regions 
 of life and thought that lie outside the sphere of 
 the moral philosopher, we find that original sin, 
 as a matter of actual fact, disables men for fellow¬ 
 ship with God as really as actual sin. It equally 
 contradicts God’s will and purpose for us. As 
 such, therefore, it falls under God’s condemnation. 
 We must distinguish. God does not condemn the 
 individual for a state or condition for which he 
 is not personally accountable; rather God pities 
 him, as one who suffers from a disease of the soul. 
 But, taken in the abstract, God does hate and 
 condemn the state and condition which shuts out 
 the man from fellowship with Himself. It is only 
 in this abstract sense that original sin can be said 
 
 1 Hall, The Fall and Original Sin, p. 134 ; cp. also pp. I 94 _ 7 - 
 
 3 Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, vol. i. p. 211. 
 
 D 
 
34 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 to deserve God’s wrath. 1 The individual only de¬ 
 serves God’s wrath so far as he identifies himself 
 with it. 
 
 As we saw, sin historically means simply that 
 of which God disapproves. It is in this sense that 
 St. Paul uses it to cover original sin. A state of 
 moral disease which renders man’s life so different 
 from what God intended, clearly falls under this use 
 of the term. It is a misfortune and a handicap, 
 but because it is a state of man’s inmost being, 
 he therefore cannot heal himself. To be free from 
 it he needs more than teaching; he needs redemp¬ 
 tion and new life. He needs reconciliation with 
 God, from whom he has become estranged. There 
 must be repentance, ft erdvoca , a change of heart 
 and will which he cannot carry through in his own 
 strength. So from the purely religious point of 
 view, because it is a state of the inner man, almost 
 indistinguishable from that of the wilful sinner in 
 all except guilt, and calling for like remedy and 
 deliverance, it may be fitly called original sin. 
 Only when we have been saved from it can we take 
 our true place as children in our Father’s house. 
 
 Dr. Tennant’s second assumption—the purely 
 individual nature of sin—'has become curiously out 
 of date since he wrote. 
 
 During these last few years we have become 
 familiar with the idea of corporate responsibility 
 and corporate guilt. In the late war we held 
 
 1 Cp. R. W. Church, Life and Letters, pp. 294-5. It should 
 not be necessary to insist that in Ephesians ii. 3 ‘ children of 
 wrath ’ merely = ‘ objects of wrath,' and has no reference to 
 infancy. 
 
OBJECTIONS TO IDEA OF ORIGINAL SIN 35 
 
 Germany as a whole responsible for gross outrages 
 against humanity. Individual Germans, though 
 not personally guilty of such actions, were held to 
 be involved in the shame of their nation. So far 
 as they acquiesced in its crimes, their consent 
 carried with it a share in the national guilt. That 
 is only an illustration of a general principle that 
 has won recognition. Corporate action is more 
 than the sum-total of individual actions. The idea 
 of a corporate mind or corporate will is more than 
 a metaphor. ‘ We must recognise the existence 
 in a certain sense of non-individual or collective 
 minds. We may fairly define a mind as an organised 
 system of mental or purposive forces : and in the 
 sense so defined every highly organised human 
 society may properly be said to possess a collective 
 mind. For the collective actions which constitute 
 the history of any such society are conditioned by 
 an organisation which can only be described in 
 terms of mind, and which yet is not comprised within 
 the mind' of any individual; the society is rather 
 constituted by the system of relations obtaining 
 between the individual minds which are its units of 
 composition. Under any given circumstances the 
 actions of the society are, or may be, very different 
 from the mere sum of the actions with which its 
 several members would react to the situation in 
 the absence of the system of relations which render 
 them a society : or, in other words, the thinking 
 and acting of each man, in so far as he thinks and 
 acts as a member of a society are very different 
 from his thinking and acting as an isolated 
 
36 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 individual.’ 1 That is the teaching of modern > 
 psychology. It needs, no doubt, modification as 
 applied to mankind as a whole, but granted that 
 a community has, even to a rudimentary degree, a 
 collective mind and will, we get the real possibility 
 of collective sin. Such a mind and will either are 
 or are not in accord with the mind and will of 
 God. And when they conflict with God’s purpose, it 
 is impossible to assign the due measure of guilt to 
 each member of the community, and yet the respon¬ 
 sibility lies among its members, past and present. 
 
 From another point of view, it is obvious that 
 a perfect life can only be lived in a perfect society. 
 That is the difficulty of the Sermon on the Mount. 
 The literal carrying out of its precepts requires 
 a perfect society, a community of men all striving 
 to live in accordance with its principles. The 
 individual Christian to-day cannot literally fulfil 
 it: it would not indeed, under present conditions, 
 be possible to do so, because we are living in a sinful 
 world. So we have to adapt its principles to an 
 unideal condition. In other words, full spiritual 
 growth is hampered by our social environment. 
 
 In short, any idea of sin that limits it to the in¬ 
 dividual will is inadequate. Dr. Tennant has 
 fallen into the error of Pelagius, an atomic view 
 of humanity. St. Augustine, with all his exaggera¬ 
 tion, held fast to a real truth. Sin stretches out 
 farther than the individual will. The term cannot 
 be rightly confined to actual sin. The individual 
 is estranged from God by something wider than his 
 
 1 McDougall, Psychology (Home University Library), p. 229. 
 
OBJECTIONS TO IDEA OF ORIGINAL SIN 37 
 
 ^ own personal disobedience. What is needed is 
 something larger than a redemption of individuals. 
 
 When we examine the teaching of Christ, we 
 find that He assumes man’s universal need of 
 deliverance from moral evil. He formulates no 
 doctrine of original sin, but speaks and acts in a 
 way that implies the truth. He announces that 
 He has come ‘ not to call the righteous, but sinners,’ 
 ‘ to seek and save the lost.’ 1 He includes a peti¬ 
 tion for forgiveness in the universal prayer. 2 
 Quite incidentally, and therefore all the more 
 impressively, He speaks of men as ‘ being evil.’ 3 
 When St. Peter tempts Him, He is said to think ‘ as 
 a man.’ 4 His ministry is more than one of enlight¬ 
 enment and example. It is to be one of deliverance 
 from bondage and redemption from the yoke of 
 an alien power. Men need to be ‘ ransomed ’ and 
 ‘ born again.’ 5 The works of healing are signs and 
 pledges of that deeper healing of the whole man 
 that He has come to bring. 6 Men need a physician 
 ‘ because they are sick.’ The remedy that He 
 offers emphasises the seriousness of the disease. 
 There is a necessity that ‘ He should give His life 
 a ransom for many.’ He identifies Himself with 
 the sacrificial offering of the Suffering Servant. 7 
 
 1 Mark ii. 17 ; Luke xix. 10. 
 
 2 Matthew vi. 12; Luke xi. 4. 
 
 3 Matthew vii. 11 ; Luke xi. 13. 
 
 4 Mark viii. 33. 
 
 6 Mark x. 45 ; cp. viii. 36-7; John iii. 3. 
 
 6 Cp. Matthew xii. 28 ; Luke xi. 20 ; Matthew xi. 4 ff. ; 
 Luke vii., 20 ff. 
 
 7 This has been denied in the interests of a particular theory 
 of the Atonement, but all the evidence that we possess goes to 
 support it. 
 
38 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 His language is the more remarkable in that He feels 
 no need of healing or forgiveness in His own life. 
 The Prince of this world can find nothing in Him. 
 In a later lecture we shall consider His language 
 about evil spiritual powers, but at least it shows 
 that He speaks of forces hostile to the will of God 
 operating in a wider field than that of the individual 
 will. 
 
 Dr. Tennant, however, goes so far as to claim 
 the authority of Christ Himself for limiting the 
 term ' sin ' to actual sin. He admits that St. Paul 
 uses it in a wider sense. The evidence that he 
 produces must be judged inadequate to prove his 
 case. It is always difficult to prove a negative. 
 He succeeds, indeed, in quoting words of Christ to 
 show that the gravity of sin varies according to 
 the knowledge of God’s will which the doer possesses, 
 but he can only find two passages that even appear 
 to give positive support to his case. Both come 
 from St. John. Christ says to the Pharisees, 
 
 ‘ If ye were blind, ye would have no sin : but now 
 ye say, We see; your sin remaineth’; and again 
 to the Jews who rejected Him, ‘ If I had not come 
 and spoken to them they would not have had 
 sin : but now they have no excuse for their sin. . . . 
 If I had not done among them the works that 
 none other did, they had not had sin : but now 
 they have both seen and hated both me and my 
 Father/ 1 These passages are insufficient to bear 
 
 1 John ix. 41 and xv. 22 ; quoted in the Concept oj Sin, 
 pp. 30-31. When a Modern Churchman is driven to find 
 evidence for a case in a minute exegesis of a discourse in St. John, 
 we may conjecture that his need is urgent. 
 
OBJECTIONS TO IDEA OF ORIGINAL SIN 39 
 
 the weight of the argument that Dr. Tennant 
 builds on them. What is the meaning of ‘ they 
 would have had no sin ’ ? It cannot mean they 
 would have been sinless. Clearly it means that 
 they would have been free from sin on this particular 
 point. They would not have been guilty of reject¬ 
 ing Christ after full opportunity. Indeed the 
 sentence, ‘ Now they have no excuse for their sin/ 
 suggests that there are sins for which there is 
 excuse, which is exactly our contention. We do 
 not find anywhere a formal definition of sin in 
 Christ’s teaching. He spoke and taught as an 
 evangelist rather than as a theologian. He came 
 to rouse men to repentance and effort, and to bring 
 deliverance from sin, not to explain it. The illus¬ 
 trations that He uses of the lost sheep, and still 
 more the lost coin, the comparison of sin to sick¬ 
 ness, the picture of the enemy sowing tares in the 
 field, all suggest that the unhappy condition in 
 which men find themselves is due to some other 
 cause than the commission of acts of disobedience 
 by a large number of separate individuals. When 
 we combine such teaching with His words that 
 assume the universality of sin, we shall hardly be 
 rash in concluding that His use of the term ‘sin’ 
 was in extent identical with St. Paul’s. It may 
 further be noted that He speaks beyond all doubt 
 of corporate sins when He denounces the cities who 
 have rejected Him. 1 
 
 Assuming, then, the broad truth of original sin, 
 can we speak of its transmission ? St. Augustine 
 
 1 Matthew xi. 20-24 ; Luke x. 13-15. 
 
40 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 and the majority of theologians have taught that 
 each man inherits from his parents sinful tendencies, 
 a nature that is disordered. Dr. Tennant argues 
 that this is scientifically impossible. Such tenden¬ 
 cies would be of the nature of acquired characteris¬ 
 tics, and characteristics acquired during the lifetime 
 of an organism cannot be inherited. 1 Dr. Tennant 
 states this with great confidence, but his position 
 is by no means so secure as his book suggests. 
 An important school of biologists holds that satis¬ 
 factory evidence has now been produced of the 
 inheritance of acquired characteristics. The whole 
 subject is very complicated and still under dis¬ 
 cussion. The final decision lies with science. We 
 are content to maintain that whatever be the issue 
 of the debate, the inheritance of evil tendencies 
 can be maintained independently of physical trans¬ 
 mission. In any case, no element of our nature 
 can have become intrinsically evil, for God’s world 
 does not contain such. Only an evil will is in¬ 
 trinsically evil. Nor, again, can we inherit a sinful 
 tendency in quite the same way as, let us say, a 
 Roman nose or red hair. Rather the balance of 
 our nature as we receive it is upset. We have lost 
 that sympathy with God which should govern and 
 guide the development of our life. In this sense 
 original sin may be inherited through our social 
 environment. The infant that is born into the 
 world is a mere bundle of possibilities. By the 
 time that its moral life becomes possible, its nature 
 has been largely shaped by the influence of our 
 1 Tht Fall and Original Sin, pp. 35-8 and 179-83. 
 
OBJECTIONS TO IDEA OF ORIGINAL SIN 41 
 
 social environment. Our mental make-up is to a 
 very large degree conditioned not only by our 
 home and early training but by all the subtle 
 influences that stream around us. If we perforce 
 grow up in social surroundings that reflect the 
 estrangement from God that all men more or less 
 share, we inevitably come to share that estrange¬ 
 ment. Our nature lacks its true balance. When 
 once we grasp that human nature does not come 
 into the world ready made, we see that the distinc¬ 
 tion between nature and nurture is only partially 
 true. Nature is only developed through nurture. 
 
 From this standpoint original sin may be 
 described as the devil’s counterpart of grace. 
 Grace is God’s personal influence. And grace is 
 always mediated directly or indirectly through 
 the divine society, the people of God. Without 
 denying for one moment the possibility of God’s 
 direct dealing with the individual soul, we maintain 
 it for a fact that in no narrowly ecclesiastical 
 sense the Church, the body of Christ, is the home 
 of grace. It is in and through the divine society 
 that the child learns the ways of God. The sacred 
 writings, the common worship, the sacraments, all 
 the means of grace, are social. Original sin is 
 the antithesis of this. It acts through all the 
 social influences that drag us down, that implant 
 in our imaginations false ideas of God, that en¬ 
 courage unlawful or anti-social desires, that divert 
 our impulses into wrong channels. Original sin 
 may be in itself a moral weakness, a spiritual 
 handicap, but its ultimate effect is not paralysis, 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 42 
 
 but disorder. The forces of our nature, uncontrolled 
 by the grace of God, run riot. Man never stands 
 still. If he does not grow right, he grows wrong. 
 
 So original sin may be regarded as the move¬ 
 ment of the race away from God’s purpose. The 
 solidarity of mankind is the condition of all progress : 
 it may equally become the condition of misdirected 
 advance. We cannot escape our share in it. 
 Membership in the union of all men is obligatory. 
 It is indispensable for obtaining not only employ¬ 
 ment, but manhood. And the individual must 
 share the disabilities as well as the advantages 
 of membership. If we inherit the gains of the past 
 we must also inherit its losses. To quote Dr. 
 McDougall again : ‘ The aggregate which is a society 
 has, in virtue of its past history, positive qualities 
 which it does not derive from the units which 
 compose it at any one time ; and in virtue of these 
 qualities it acts upon its units in a manner very 
 different from that in which the units as such 
 interact with one another.’ 1 No doubt his words 
 receive their completest fulfilment in organised 
 * societies, but in their measure they apply to the 
 race as a whole. 
 
 To sum up, the common criticisms of the doctrine 
 of original sin are based on an individualistic view 
 of the spiritual nature of man. It is perfectly 
 true that man can only be accounted guilty of 
 actual sin so far as he has apprehended God’s 
 will and refused compliance. But man cannot 
 be viewed in abstraction from his social life. 
 
 1 McDougall, The Group Mind, p. 7. 
 
OBJECTIONS TO IDEA OF ORIGINAL SIN 43 
 
 Society is prior to the individual. The individual 
 is steeped from his birth in influences that are based 
 on the past history of his kind. He grows up in 
 a moral atmosphere that shapes and colours his 
 whole personality. The purely individualistic con¬ 
 ception of man runs counter to the plain facts of 
 experience. Hence it is not only in accord with 
 the historical meaning of the term, but also 
 with the recognition of the organic unity of 
 the race, to refuse to confine sin to the indivi¬ 
 dual will. 
 
 Some concept such as that of original sin is an v 
 intellectual necessity. And the phrase witnesses to 
 the truth that our present condition of moral 
 weakness is contrary to the purpose of God. It is 
 that which ought not to be, though its existence 
 is due not to our personal transgressions, but to 
 the transgressions of the past, which have infected 
 the life of the race. 
 
 We must now consider the relation between sin 
 and the sense of sin. Clearly in actual fact the two 
 do not stand in that direct proportion to one another 
 that we might expect. We must begin with the 
 fully awakened Christian moral consciousness. 
 Within this a distinction must be made between 
 the sense of sin and the sense of guilt. The sense 
 of guilt always includes the sense of sin—that is, 
 the awareness of alienation from God, but it also 
 carries with it the conviction by conscience of being 
 responsible for acts or habits which have led to 
 this alienation. Even here the sense of guilt is 
 not always proportionate to the gravity of the sin. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 44 
 
 A man’s personal sense of guilt, either at the time 
 of sinning or as he looks back on his sin, is no 
 infallible criterion of his guilt in the sight of God. 
 As we said, the degree of guilt, i.e. accountability 
 or blameworthiness, depends not on the objective 
 badness of an action nor on its consequences as 
 such, but on the knowledge and motive of the agent. 
 The same deed committed by two different men 
 may carry with it a very different measure of 
 guilt. Guilt attaches either to a voluntary infringe¬ 
 ment of God’s will, so far as it is known to us, 
 or might have been known but for our own fault, 
 or to a condition of character that is the result 
 of such past infringements. In strict accuracy it 
 should be predicated of the doer rather than the 
 deed. Christ’s teaching makes it clear that God 
 judges us according to our opportunities. Servants 
 are punished with many or few stripes, according 
 to their knowledge of their Master’s will. 1 Tyre 
 and Sidon will fare better than the cities that, after 
 hearing and seeing Christ, rejected Him. Further, 
 guilt is reckoned by God not in proportion as a 
 man comes short of actual perfection, but as he 
 comes short of the best that was possible for him 
 at the moment. It depends on his failure to live 
 up to the highest that he knows or the refusal to do 
 the right that it lies in his power to choose. What 
 I can do here and now is limited by my present 
 capacities. God does not condemn me because 
 I am as yet undeveloped, except in so far as my 
 want of development is due to my own misconduct. 
 
 1 Luke xii. 47-8. 
 
OBJECTIONS TO IDEA OF ORIGINAL SIN 45 
 
 Since God alone knows the heart, God alone can 
 truly estimate guilt. 
 
 That does not mean that for practical purposes 
 we can dispense with the idea of guilt. There have 
 been times when we know for certain that we have 
 committed actual sin. We had the power to choose 
 the right and chose the wrong. We saw God's 
 will and did not do it. We yielded to temptation 
 when we had the power to resist. Our judgment 
 does not depend on the feeling of the moment, but 
 is reinforced by later reflection. And we find that 
 our experience in this matter is corroborated by 
 that of other men, and especially the saints. They 
 are convinced that, like ourselves, they have at 
 times wilfully disobeyed God with their eyes open. 
 It would be untrue to our deepest conviction to 
 explain away all sense of guilt simply because the 
 verdict of our conscience needs to be tested and must 
 always fall short of infallibility. 1 Just as the fact 
 that conscience needs to be trained and educated 
 in giving any moral judgment does not impair its 
 authority or excuse us from striving to attain to 
 moral truth, so the fact that its judgments about 
 guilt may need revision gives us no excuse for 
 refusing to attempt to estimate our guilt. By 
 honest thought and self-examination we can do 
 much. By submitting our case to the decision of 
 others, especially of a trained director, we can 
 approach to a more certain knowledge. When we 
 
 1 This is the position reached by Dr. Orchard in his Modern 
 Theories of Sin. He in effect reduces sin to the sense of sin 
 and denies the existence of guilt. See especially pp. 125-6 and 
 135 - 6 . 
 
46 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 have done our best, the final verdict must rest with 
 God. 
 
 If, then, we start with the idea of guilt, as appre¬ 
 hended by a fully conscious moral experience, we 
 can draw up a descending scale of cases, in which 
 the degree of guilt becomes increasingly smaller, 
 until we reach a point at which it would seem that 
 the ignorance or moral sickness of the agent is 
 such that little or no guilt attaches to his con¬ 
 duct, though it is undoubtedly sinful in the sense 
 of being contrary to God’s will. We can imagine 
 a child allowed or even encouraged to form bad 
 habits. Such are objectively bad. They form a 
 barrier between him and any true service of God. 
 But they partake of the nature of original rather 
 than actual sin, and the child’s guilt is infinitesimal. 
 The late Father Dolling, who had every opportunity 
 of studying human nature under unideal conditions, 
 could write thus : * A man who falls from a height 
 is wounded to death—every limb is shattered, 
 every feature disfigured. He who slips on the pave¬ 
 ment by a casual chance pulls himself up and goes 
 on unhurt. Oh, most blessed truth ! Our falls in 
 Portsmouth entailed no complete destruction of 
 character, hardly any disfigurement at all. Boys 
 stole because stealing seemed to them the only 
 method of living . . . girls sinned because their 
 mothers had sinned before them—oftentimes their 
 grandmothers too—unconscious of any shame in it, 
 regarding it as a necessary circumstance of life, if 
 they were to live at all. The soul unquickened, the 
 body alone is depraved, and therefore the highest 
 
OBJECTIONS TO IDEA OF ORIGINAL SIN 47 
 
 part is still capable of the most beautiful develop¬ 
 ment/ 1 We are often warned in the New Testa¬ 
 ment against the unnecessary judging of others. 
 Men stand or fall to God, for He alone knows the 
 measure of guilt. At the same time we must bear 
 in mind that all sin—even original sin—involves 
 guilt somewhere, since sin contradicts God’s pur¬ 
 pose for human life. The guilt of the man who 
 commits a particular sin may be very small, but 
 the guilt of those who brought into being conditions 
 that caused him to sin may be very great. If all 
 the disorder of the world is ultimately traceable 
 to rebellious human wills, then collectively guilt 
 balances sin. In a real sense we may bear the 
 responsibility for the sins of others. 
 
 So, then, the divergence between guilt and the 
 sense of guilt is one aspect of the problem of the 
 education of conscience. The verdict of guilty 
 which, after reflection, we pass on ourselves or on 
 others is a moral judgment. It springs from a 
 sense of guilt, but is not identical with it. The 
 keenness of our sense of guilt depends partly on our 
 temperament, partly on our moral development, 
 partly on the vision of God. If it is dull it may be 
 perhaps that our conscience is as yet far from fully 
 awakened, and that we have only dimly recognised 
 the holy love of God and His demands upon us. 
 Or it may be that our conscience was once awakened 
 and that it has been dulled by the wilful rejec¬ 
 tion of God. We can, by continued disobedience, 
 
 1 Dolling, Ten Years in a Portsmouth Slum, pp. 17-18, quoted 
 in Green, The Origin of Evil, p. 199. 
 
48 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 silence conscience, and all sloth or indulgence helps 
 to disqualify us for hearing its voice. One of the 
 penalties of sin is to lose the knowledge and hatred 
 of sin. The sense of guilt is often a sign of dawning 
 spiritual life. It proves that even though we have 
 been feeding on husks in a far country, we are 
 coming to ourselves and are aware that we are 
 not really swine, and can still be homesick for the 
 fellowship of our Father’s house. 
 
 When we turn to the sense of sin as distinguished 
 from the sense of guilt, much of what we have said 
 above still holds good. The sense of sin is often 
 keenest where the sin is least. The saints are most 
 conscious of the horror of sin both in themselves 
 and in the world at large. On the other hand, the 
 open and notorious sinner may be quite unconscious 
 of his alienation from God, and show no signs of 
 distress at his position. The sense of sin as fully 
 developed depends on an awareness of God. It is 
 the growing vision of God that awakens it. Strictly 
 speaking, it should be distinguished from the feel¬ 
 ing of imperfection or creaturely unworthiness, 
 though these are closely akin to it. It is rather 
 the consciousness of moral incompatibility with God, 
 a sense of being out of harmony with God and God’s 
 purposes. No doubt it often springs from a sense 
 of dissatisfaction with ourselves, or fear of punish¬ 
 ment, or mere boredom with life, and these elements 
 are not easily disentangled. But it only becomes 
 a sense of sin in the true meaning of the term when 
 it is brought into relation with God. So viewed, 
 the sense of sin is God’s provision against a false 
 
OBJECTIONS TO IDEA OF ORIGINAL SIN 49 
 
 independence. We are so constituted as to be 
 restless and dissatisfied with anything short of the 
 highest life based on union with Him. The sense 
 of sin and the sense of guilt alike prove that God 
 has not left us to ourselves. We should not be 
 aware of our alienation from Him unless He were 
 still seeking us. 
 
 E 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 PSYCHOLOGY AND SIN 
 
 Before we begin to consider the bearing of modern 
 psychology upon the idea of sin, it is well to re¬ 
 member that from apostolic days down to the 
 present Christian teachers have availed themselves 
 of current psychology in order to interpret the 
 conflict of the spiritual life and the nature of sin. 
 It is clear that an understanding of the way in which 
 the mind works, and of the laws that govern mental 
 and spiritual health, must be of service to religion. 
 Such knowledge cannot of itself produce spiritual 
 life, but it can guide our efforts in seeking it, and it 
 can assist us to use the best methods in combating 
 evil tendencies and desires. St. Paul, for instance, 
 when he speaks of the ‘ flesh working against the 
 spirit/ is making use of the psychology of his 
 day for purposes of practical religion. Tertullian, 
 in his ‘ De Anima/ quite unashamedly bases his 
 teaching on psychology. So, too, St. Augustine’s 
 ‘ Confessions ’ is in part a psychological study of his 
 own religious experiences. 
 
 To-day we are getting a new psychology built 
 up on strictly scientific lines. It differs from the 
 older psychology, both in its methods and in 
 
PSYCHOLOGY AND SIN 
 
 5i 
 
 collecting its material not only from introspection 
 but from the observation of human conduct, includ¬ 
 ing the conduct of savages and undeveloped races. 
 Evidence is sought in the behaviour of animals and 
 in the abnormal mental states of human beings. 
 I say we are getting a new psychology ; for we have 
 not yet got it, or rather we have got so many and 
 varied new psychologies that they cannot all be true. 
 The confusion is increased by the fact that each 
 writer tends to use technical phrases in a sense of 
 his own. It is fashionable in certain quarters to 
 argue that the new psychology has disproved the 
 Christian doctrine of sin. The question may well 
 be asked, Which new psychology is meant ? At the 
 same time, there are considerable grounds of general 
 agreement, and these we must prepare to face, so far 
 as they affect traditional belief. We may take as 
 a typical book Mr. Tansley’s ‘New Psychology.’ 1 
 He combines, as he tells us, the view of mind ex¬ 
 pounded by Dr. McDougall in his ‘Social Psycho¬ 
 logy ’ with the concepts and methods of the 
 schools of Professor Freud and Dr. Jung. We will 
 begin by giving a rough outline of his general 
 position. 
 
 First of all, the new psychology takes a biological 
 view of all mental life. It regards * mind ’—using 
 ‘ mind ’ in the widest sense—as a structure built up 
 gradually, by a process of evolution, out of a small 
 number of simple elements, namely, instincts. We 
 are familiar with the idea that our bodies have been 
 evolved from those of pre-human ancestors. Now 
 
 1 Tansley, The New Psychology and its Relation to Life. 
 
52 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 this conception is extended to our minds. Psycho¬ 
 logy no more admits anything in the nature of gaps 
 or sudden breaks in the evolution of mind than in 
 the evolution of body. All the highest activities 
 of human life, our religion, our morality, our art, 
 and our science have, as regards their origin in 
 time, been built up out of certain instincts which 
 we share with the lower animals. 
 
 In psychology the term ‘ instinct ’ is used in a 
 technical sense. It denotes ‘ an innate specific 
 tendency to action common to all members of a 
 species/ In other words, an instinct is an impulse 
 to behave in a certain way that we find born within 
 us, and that only waits for the right object to appear 
 in our environment to prompt us to action. The 
 core of instinct is emotion, what is technically called 
 ‘ affect/ An instinct has indeed a certain element 
 of cognition in it; what Aristotle would call a 
 KpiTucr) hvvapu^, a power of picking out a certain 
 kind of object out of the many present in the 
 environment. But the central element, which 
 always remains constant, is the emotion of a parti¬ 
 cular quality which it determines its possessor to 
 experience upon perceiving the object. And that 
 emotion passes at once into conation, that is, a 
 striving to act in a particular manner in regard 
 to the object perceived. Take a simple instance. 
 A dog is hungry. Its instinct for food enables it to 
 distinguish a bone. When it perceives it, it feels— 
 we have no name for the emotion—but we all know 
 it when we are hungry and have the prospect of 
 food. This feeling immediately prompts the dog 
 
PSYCHOLOGY AND SIN 53 
 
 to action. The important point is that without 
 that feeling there would have been no action. 1 
 
 Psychology attempts to trace out the building 
 up of all human conduct out of a small number of 
 primitive instincts. Instincts are largely modified 
 by experience. The cognitive element can be 
 developed so as to include other objects than those 
 which it originally selected. In man instincts 
 can even be aroused not only by the perception of 
 actual objects, but by ideas of objects, and even by 
 abstract ideas. Or, again, the emotion may be 
 modified. The instinct comes to find its expression 
 in new bodily movements and to achieve its end 
 by new forms of activity. A large part of human 
 progress has consisted in the ‘ sublimation * of in¬ 
 stinct—that is, the direction of instinctive impulses 
 into new channels of action. But all through these 
 modifications the central affective part of the 
 instinct remains unchanged. Further, under the 
 complicated conditions of human life we rarely find 
 an emotional state arising out of a single instinct, 
 as in the case of the dog and the bone. The objects 
 and ideas that prompt us to action usually excite 
 several instincts simultaneously. Thus the emotional 
 state that issues in conduct is compounded of several 
 primary instincts, mixed in varying proportions. 
 Further, instinctive tendencies organise themselves 
 round certain objects and ideas that play a large 
 
 1 For one view of instinct see McDougall, Social Psychology, 
 c. ii. All psychologists, however, do not accept the position that 
 all instincts have a specific emotional core. Dr. Brown, for 
 instance, speaks of an instinct of sleep, Suggestion and Mental 
 Analysis, pp. 33-4. 
 
54 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 part in our lives, into what are, perhaps, best called 
 ‘ complexes ’ or what Dr. McDougall calls * senti¬ 
 ments/ Strictly speaking, a ‘ sentiment ’ is the 
 affective tone of a complex. A sentiment is a 
 tendency to experience certain emotions whenever 
 particular objects are present to thought. Love 
 and hate are the typical sentiments. They arise out 
 of not single instincts, but complexes of instincts 
 which, as a result of past experience, have formed 
 themselves round certain persons or objects. The 
 bond that holds together the instinctive emotions 
 that form a sentiment, is an emotional bond, not an 
 intellectual. The result of such a complex is that 
 when anything to do with the person or object 
 arouses one of the instincts, the instinct awakened 
 tends to awaken all the others with it. Once formed, 
 the complex limits and controls the manner in which 
 the instincts that compose it find expression. 1 
 
 In short, psychology holds that instinct is the 
 driving power of all life and conduct. No action 
 of any kind can be performed unless it is prompted 
 by some instinctive impulse. Man likes to consider 
 himself a rational being, but if the above theory 
 is true, in very few of his actions, if indeed ever, is 
 he a purely rational being. His conduct, his pre¬ 
 ferences, his prejudices, even his thinking, are 
 governed far more than he is aware by largely 
 unconscious impulses that he shares with his dog 
 and his cat. Reason can indeed, and should, direct 
 instinct. It judges between conflicting instincts. 
 
 1 On complexes, see Tansley, c. v.; McDougall, cc. v.-vi.; Hart, 
 T he Psychology of Insanity, c. v. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY AND SIN 
 
 55 
 
 It considers methods of action by which instinctive 
 desires may find satisfaction. But reason by itself 
 can initiate nothing. It is limited, so to say, by 
 the instincts that are available. As Aristotle said 
 long ago, Scavoca al)Tr\ ovOev Kivel aX\■ r\ hyena rov 
 nal 7rpa/cTLK7 7 . Psychology teaches that the driving 
 force of all intelligent action is instinct. 
 
 Further, we must accustom ourselves to the 
 idea that the thoughts and feelings of which we are 
 conscious form only a small part of the mind. 
 Our conduct is largely conditioned by instinctive 
 impulses of which we are only partially conscious, 
 if at all. In fact, we are rarely aware of all the 
 motives that prompt any given action. The 
 existence of the unconscious mind accounts for much 
 that is perplexing. Conflicts inevitably arise within 
 the mind. Two rival complexes built up either out 
 of the same or different instincts cannot both be 
 satisfied. The mind is divided against itself. The 
 ideal solution is to face out the position with the aid 
 of reason and, deliberately adopting a policy that 
 will satisfy one complex, at the same time to divert 
 the energy of the rival complex into some new 
 channel that is no longer inconsistent with the policy 
 adopted. Conflict may thus be a great factor in 
 mental development, the emotion of one aim being 
 transformed to a similar but higher aim. If unity 
 is attained by the sublimation of instinct, mental 
 health is forwarded. But often the mind, for 
 various causes, brings the pain of conflict to an end 
 by shirking rather than solving it. One method 
 by which the strain of battle is eased is ‘ repression.’ 
 
56 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 In this case the desire or impulse which is repugnant 
 to the dominant character of the individual is either 
 consciously or unconsciously pushed down below 
 the level of consciousness. There is a natural 
 tendency of the mind to forget or ignore whatever 
 is unpleasant. The means of repression seems to 
 be the refusal to attend to any of the elements of 
 the hostile complex, and so to cut it off from the 
 conscious activity of the mind. When the complex 
 is of weak affect, no harm is done. But when it is 
 of strong affect, having behind it the full energy 
 of one or more primary instincts, the result is 
 disastrous. Its possessor is unaware of its existence, 
 but it is by no means idle. It seeks expression 
 indirectly, often in perverted or morbid ways. It 
 realises itself in some manifestation so disguised 
 that it is no longer apparent to the individual. 
 So the true balance and unity of the mind is upset, 
 and the cause of the trouble lies down in the un¬ 
 conscious. We get a new concept, that of ‘ moral 
 disease/ a disordered state of mind, due to causes 
 of which the patient is unconscious, but showing 
 itself in a vague sense of discomfort, in morbid and 
 perverted desires, in general loss of power and the 
 like. The aim of mental analysis is to discover the 
 repressed complex and by bringing it up into the 
 conscious life to restore harmony If its possessor 
 can be got to own it and face it out, and employ¬ 
 ment can be found for its energies, health of mind 
 is restored. 
 
 In all this there is nothing that necessarily 
 conflicts with the Christian idea of sin. Christians 
 
PSYCHOLOGY AND SIN 
 
 57 
 
 have always insisted that sin was not merely intel¬ 
 lectual error or ignorance. Man’s sinful condition 
 is largely emotional. He desires the wrong objects. 
 He responds to the wrong stimuli. He loves what 
 is evil and selfish. If life is built up out of elements 
 of instinct, this stress on the emotional and affective 
 side of man’s nature is quite sound. The power of 
 sin lies in the misdirection of instincts that have 
 their place in human nature, so as to disorder the 
 personal life of the sinner and to do harm to the 
 community. We may illustrate our position by 
 examining what we mean by ‘ common sense.’ 
 At first this appears to be a capacity for right 
 thinking. When, however, we begin to consider the 
 difference between sitting down and thinking out in 
 the abstract how to deal with a given situation and 
 our actual flurried and confused behaviour when 
 we do actually face it, we see that the common sense 
 which deals adequately with an emergency is largely 
 an emotional capacity. Our ability to cope with 
 problems depends quite as much on right impulse 
 and right feeling as right thinking. So sin is 
 largely the emotional inability to make the right 
 response to a situation. Our outward conduct is 
 wrong because our inner mechanism of action is 
 disordered. 
 
 On the other hand, not only Christians but all 
 teachers of morality must insist on the supreme 
 importance of the conscious life. In a reaction 
 against an unduly intellectual view of life, we must 
 not disparage reason. ‘ Our Christianity is not in 
 the least afraid to acknowledge how deep our roots 
 
58 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 go down into the hidden soil of the underworld. 
 But none of this avails to conceal the compensating 
 truth, which is, that, small as is the space which 
 consciousness illumines, nevertheless in that illumi¬ 
 nated spot lies the key to our whole position. There, 
 in it, is laid out the arena on which the spiritual 
 battle is lost or won. ... It is on the supreme 
 importance of consciousness that the faith of Jesus 
 Christ lays all its emphasis.’ 1 As we saw, actual 
 sin—that is, disobedience to God’s will, or the state 
 that results from such disobedience—cannot occur 
 until we have become aware of the law of God as 
 binding on us. Nor can original sin, or the aware¬ 
 ness of our moral disability and lack of harmony 
 with God, exist until we are capable of having ideals 
 and understanding to some degree the meaning of 
 morality. The new psychology only conflicts with 
 the doctrine of sin when it lays such exclusive stress 
 on the unconscious or emotional side of man’s 
 nature as practically to deny him any power of 
 reason or conscious choice at all. 
 
 Further, psychology throws much light upon 
 the origin of sin. It shows us whence we get those 
 impulses and desires which constitute the raw 
 material of sin. They are a part of our nature as 
 we inherit it from our animal ancestry. Again, we 
 must insist that the mere possession of strong 
 passions of any kind, even though they need careful 
 control and readily prompt us to sinful conduct, 
 cannot be in itself sinful. Every instinct has its 
 place and serves a purpose. The same impulses 
 1 Scott Holland, The Philosophy of Faith, pp. 97-8. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY AND SIN 
 
 59 
 
 from which spring all kinds of vice and selfishness 
 are also the condition of all virtue and heroism. If 
 we did not possess them, we could not become 
 sinners, but we could not become saints either. 
 
 Again, in the psychological concept of ‘ moral 
 disease ' we get an idea that comes very close indeed 
 to that of ‘ original sin/ It is a state of moral 
 weakness and distraction for which the individual 
 is not personally responsible. His life is disordered. 
 He cannot attain to the unification of mind which 
 alone brings peace and satisfaction. The causes lie 
 in himself, but he cannot discover them. Once more 
 we must be careful. It is true that modern know¬ 
 ledge may show that people have often been blamed 
 for conduct for which they were not really blame¬ 
 worthy, since it was due to moral disease. It may 
 well be that much that has been regarded as actual 
 sin should be more truly put down to original sin. 
 Still, unless we are prepared to deny any possibility 
 of conscious choice and rational conduct and to 
 declare that all sense of responsibility for our 
 actions is an illusion, we cannot go on to argue that 
 all sin is due to repressions. Actual sin and moral 
 disease have been confused in the past and the line 
 between them in any particular case is hard to draw, 
 but we must not rush to the other extreme and say 
 that all sin is moral disease. That would only be to 
 substitute a new confusion for the old. Only so 
 far as our repressions are due to the wilful refusal to 
 face the facts of life or to shirking the pain of con¬ 
 flict, or again to deliberate unwillingness to find 
 healthy employment for some impulse at the cost 
 
6 o 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 of thought and trouble, can the disorder that 
 results be counted as actual sin. Otherwise the 
 true responsibility lies with our bad social environ¬ 
 ment, wrong education, evil traditions and the like. 
 Some psychologists would trace repressed complexes 
 back to the earliest infancy. Others suggest that 
 this is precarious. The adult who is being analysed 
 would readily grasp at the happy suggestion that 
 his state is due to infantile conditions for which 
 he cannot be blamed. An infant self is a most 
 desirable whipping-boy. 1 
 
 In any case the recognition that much apparent 
 sin is really due to moral disease and that people 
 are often better than they seem, introduces no new 
 theological difficulties. We have long acknow¬ 
 ledged that physical conditions modify the guilt 
 of apparently sinful acts. An operation for adenoids 
 will change the character of an ill-disposed child. 
 A blow on the head will reduce to moral decadence 
 a man who has hitherto been sober and honest. 
 Now we are asked to enlarge this acknowledg¬ 
 ment to include damage done to the mental as well 
 as the physical organism by which a man lives out 
 his life here. No doubt this adds to the practical 
 difficulty of administering reproof and punishment. 
 
 1 On the strict Freudian view repression begins in earliest 
 infancy, and all repressed complexes are regarded as sexual, 
 using the term in the widest sense. On the other hand, during 
 the war shell-shock cases afforded instances of repressions that 
 could not possibly be classed as sexual, cp. Brown, Psychology and 
 Psychotherapy. The school of Dr. Jung rather regards repressions 
 as due to weakness of the libido or impulse, so that the man cannot 
 face the strains of life. This leads to ‘ regression.' Others regard 
 buried complexes as due rather to repressed ego-instinct. Probably 
 all these views need to be combined. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY AND SIN 
 
 61 
 
 But, as we have said before, guilt can only be 
 estimated by God. The Christian doctrine of sin 
 in all its essentials remains unaffected. Even if we 
 prefer to designate ‘ original sin ’ by the new name 
 of * moral disease/ the word ‘ sin ’ cannot be erased 
 from our vocabulary, though we may be less con¬ 
 fident in estimating the guilt of particular cases. 
 
 So far then the Christian doctrine can be fairly 
 expressed in terms of the new psychology. But 
 here we come face to face with certain vital issues. 
 The Christian doctrine assumes that man possesses 
 a real power of choice, that the moral law as appre¬ 
 hended by conscience is objectively valid, and that 
 God is a moral personality with a will and mind of 
 His own over against man. On the other hand, 
 many psychologists suggest, if they do not actually 
 assert, that a scientific account of man’s behaviour 
 leaves no room for free will in any sense, that 
 conscience is only an emotion, and therefore moral 
 distinctions exist only in the mind of the individual 
 or the community and that God is only a ‘ projec¬ 
 tion ’ of the human mind. If any of these assump¬ 
 tions be granted, clearly the Christian doctrine of 
 sin is no longer tenable. 
 
 Before we discuss these objections we may 
 begin by considering the nature of psychology. 
 How far is it competent to pronounce a verdict 
 on ultimate realities ? Psychology employs the 
 methods of physical science, and especially of bio¬ 
 logy. It collects and observes mental facts of all 
 kinds. It may be defined as * the science of behav¬ 
 iour ’ It traces out the rise and history of mental 
 
62 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 phenomena, the processes by which we come to 
 act and think. The only kind of explanation of 
 conduct that it can offer is a description of what is 
 found regularly to occur in studying it. It can 
 explain the processes by which I come to desire 
 or think or know. It rightly seeks to discover 
 and formulate the laws of mental activity. But 
 there its authority ends. It is unable to deal with 
 ultimate questions, as for instance those of validity. 
 It describes the mental processes by which I do a 
 sum in arithmetic, but it cannot prove that my 
 conclusions are true for all minds. Further, we may 
 even doubt whether the phenomena which it studies, 
 namely the mental processes by which we apprehend 
 the external world, are not so essentially different 
 from those which physical science studies, namely 
 the external world itself, as to demand different 
 categories and methods. It may be that psychology 
 will in the long run be found to have been hampered 
 and distorted by the categories which it has 
 borrowed from biology, just as biology itself was 
 formerly hindered by using those which it had 
 borrowed from physics and chemistry. Or, as Dr. 
 Pratt has recently put it, ‘ Psychology seems to be 
 a mixture of two sciences. . . . It is in part a descrip¬ 
 tion of certain physical processes which are directly 
 connected with certain physiological processes, 
 and which therefore obey the laws of the bodily 
 mechanism ; and it is also a description of the way 
 in which persons usually think and act. ... If 
 this view be true, then the ‘ explanations ’ of 
 psychology will be only the most general sort of 
 
PSYCHOLOGY AND SIN 
 
 63 
 
 description, since the activities of personality 
 can be psychologised only in a most superficial 
 way. This, however, by no means does away with 
 psychology. Inasmuch as even free personalities 
 are more or less alike, and since all human persons 
 are compelled to make use of the same physiological 
 machine, their customary activities and experiences 
 will be capable of description in generalised lan¬ 
 guage. And this generalised description—which 
 is psychology—would still hold even if themselves 
 were surrounded by a non-human spiritual world 
 with which they had actual commerce/ 1 
 
 These considerations may go far to account for 
 the determinism to which a merely biological view 
 of our mental life readily leads. If all volition is 
 in every case due to the complexes that a man has 
 formed, combined with the stimulus given by the 
 environment, and if the formation of these com¬ 
 plexes is due to past instinctive responses to environ¬ 
 ment, then all possibility of choice or freedom seems 
 ruled out . 2 It is strange that the same psychology 
 which starts with a protest against a mechanical 
 view of the world, asserting that even the humblest 
 organism affords evidence of purpose in its life and 
 conduct, should end in a determinism as rigid as any 
 maintained by the most mechanical of philosophies. 
 It may be suggested that the difficulty is caused by 
 the dual nature of psychology. If science cannot 
 find free-will in human conduct it is because it has 
 
 1 Pratt, The Religious Consciousness, pp. 456-7. 
 
 2 This is a real perplexity to Dr. McDougall, who faces out 
 the consequences with a candour that contrasts favourably with 
 the evasions of other writers. Social Psychology, pp. 231-5. 
 
64 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 already abstracted it. Science is and must be 
 determinist. And so far as psychology adopts the 
 methods of physical science, it must be determined 
 too. But in so far as it attempts to explain actual 
 life— life as it is being lived—it must recognise that 
 it is prevented by its abstract method from giving 
 an exhaustive account. Psychology can take an 
 action that is past and trace out the instincts that 
 prompted it, but it cannot say that at the moment 
 when it was performed that and that action only 
 was possible. By the time that an action has come 
 under the analysis of the psychologist, the life has 
 gone out of it. He can only hold a post-mortem, 
 and he must not mistake it for an operation on the 
 living subject. Further, in many discussions of this 
 question there appears to be a serious confusion 
 between the two senses of ‘ will/ The word ‘ will ’ 
 may mean either a strong and dominant purpose, or 
 it may mean the power of choosing at a given moment 
 between two alternative and inconsistent courses of 
 action. When it is used in the former sense, the 
 existence of a strong will is admirably explained by 
 psychology as depending on the existence of a strong 
 self-regarding sentiment. When it is used in the 
 latter sense, we are up against the mystery of life itself. 
 Self-determination appears to be one of the ultimate 
 elements of life as it is lived. Psychology legiti¬ 
 mately attempts to break up the self into a collec¬ 
 tion of states of mind, but the self, though indeed it 
 does not exist apart from its states, is not merely 
 the sum total of its states. In the analysis some¬ 
 thing escapes which is not restored when the states 
 
PSYCHOLOGY AND SIN 
 
 65 
 
 are combined together again. And this something 
 is not an element of the same character as the states 
 of mind that it holds together in life. Rather we 
 hold that behind all ideas and states of conscious¬ 
 ness lies the self through which alone they live. It 
 is the self that acts and chooses. Moral action 
 is the real choice of a real living self. And the 
 problem of the self which lies behind all the mani¬ 
 festations of its activity falls outside the province 
 of psychology. In short, psychology can neither 
 prove nor disprove free-will. It can describe the 
 mental machinery by which I choose, but the 
 problem still remains what is meant by ‘1/ and 
 whether my apparent freedom to choose is only 
 an illusion. 
 
 We may now turn to the question of the moral 
 law. Here again we are prepared to accept the 
 account that psychology gives of the historical 
 origin of morality. Moral conduct springs out of 
 the regulation of the impulses of the individual by 
 the custom of the group or herd. By social customs 
 or herd law the herd is kept together and rendered 
 effective. The instinct that prompts obedience 
 is the ‘ herd instinct ’—that is, an instinct based on 
 * the specific sensitiveness of the individual mind 
 of the gregarious animal to suggestions arising from 
 the herd.’ 1 In virtue of this the individual becomes 
 aware of the herd and its call, desires to be at one 
 
 1 Tansley, p. 194, quoted from Trotter, Instincts of the Herd 
 in Peace and War. Many psychologists, including Dr. McDougall, 
 deny the existence of any specific ‘ herd instinct.’ For our 
 present purpose this is unimportant, as a similar result is attained 
 by combining other elements of instinct. 
 
 F 
 
66 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 with it, and only finds satisfaction when that oneness 
 is attained. Hence the ‘ moral sense ’ is in origin 
 sensitiveness to the call of the herd. A bad con¬ 
 science is the feeling of discomfort that arises from 
 thwarted herd instinct. An illustration of this may 
 be taken from the animal world, if we compare the 
 behaviour of a dog with that of a cat. A dog has 
 a conscience and a cat none. When a cat is caught, 
 say, stealing milk, it simply runs away. It never 
 was a herd animal. When a dog has done what it 
 knows from past experience will be punished, it 
 comes to its master reluctantly to receive its punish¬ 
 ment. Its master represents the leader of the pack. 
 
 Man, however, has learnt in some measure to 
 transcend herd morality. He has come to develop 
 an ‘ ethical self/ He has asserted his right to 
 individual judgment. As a member of the herd 
 he built up a strong self-regarding sentiment. He 
 formed in his own mind a picture of himself as a 
 loyal member of the herd, a picture of himself as 
 admired by his fellow-members. In this way the 
 impulse to fulfil herd law came to be reinforced by 
 a new instinct, the ego instinct, the instinct of self- 
 assertion. At first these two instincts—the herd 
 instinct prompting him to obey herd law, and the 
 ego-instinct prompting him to be a loyal herd- 
 member—coincided in their aim. But under certain 
 conditions they began to come into conflict. The 
 self-regarding complex managed to escape from 
 bondage to the herd law. The individual used his 
 reason to compare his herd code with that of other 
 herds, to criticise it and to form a new ideal for 
 
PSYCHOLOGY AND SIN 67 
 
 himself, starting indeed from the old morality, but 
 in certain ways modifying it and rising above it. 
 This new idea has behind it no longer herd instinct 
 in alliance with ego instinct, but only a strongly 
 developed ego complex. On this level a bad con¬ 
 science is still the discomfort that rises from thwarted 
 instinct, now, however, no longer the thwarted herd 
 instinct, but the thwarted self-regarding instinct. 
 We have reached a higher morality rising out of 
 and always largely dependent on the original herd 
 morality. Good is now what the ‘ ethical' self 
 approves. 1 
 
 If, then, the moral law is conduct approved either 
 by the herd or by the ethical self, and its force is 
 derived from instinct, how does God come to be 
 regarded as its source ? The answer suggested 
 is that God is a ‘ projection.’ Projection, like 
 repression, is one of the methods by which the mind 
 tries to attain to harmony when a conflict arises 
 between two complexes built up either out of the 
 same or different instincts. In order to get peace, 
 the mind refuses to acknowledge one complex as 
 part of its own content and projects it upon some 
 imaginary external substitute. In primitive times 
 the individual feels the pressure of his tribe. Soon 
 desire, prompted by egoistic instincts, clashes with 
 tribal law. A conflict arises between two instincts 
 within himself. In order to ease this, he projects 
 one set of impulses upon a tribal god, a supreme 
 herd leader, and regards all impulses in himself 
 
 1 Tansley, especially cc. xvi., xviii., and xix. Cf. McDougall, 
 c. viii. and supplementary c. i. 
 
68 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 that conflict with the herd code as sinful. At a 
 later stage of development, all promptings that are 
 recognised as beneficial are assigned to a good god, 
 other promptings recognised as harmful are assigned 
 to an evil spirit. So the internal battle is repre¬ 
 sented as due to rival powers outside, and by evading 
 personal responsibility the mind is restored to some 
 sort of harmony. Again, when the individual passes 
 from the stage of mere herd morality to that of 
 personal morality, the same process occurs. He 
 projects his ethical self—that is, his highest standard 
 of conduct—upon a god, with whom he claims to 
 enter into communion. In this way moral progress 
 is strengthened. The ideal which the mind has 
 created is regarded as a goal to which an extended 
 conation can be directed. ‘ The ideal may be 
 projected upon a god, represented as the will of 
 God, and when it is thus definitely externalised, an 
 added feeling of security is often felt—the treasure 
 is safe in a supernatural sanctuary/ 1 
 
 This suggests that the sense of sin simply rises 
 from an unsatisfied instinct of some kind. Sin is 
 not really disobedience to a living God ; it is rather 
 the failure to attain unification of mind. The com¬ 
 plex which remains unsatisfied takes its revenge 
 by causing the mind to picture the action that 
 satisfies the victorious complex as an act of hostility 
 not to itself, but to an external entity, namely God. 
 
 We may take first the question of the moral 
 law, accepting the description given by psychology 
 of the origin of conscience as probably correct. 
 
 1 Tansley, p. 139. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY AND SIN 69 
 
 Morality has a history in time. Conscience itself 
 may rightly be considered, not as a distinct faculty, 
 but as emerging out of an elaboration and sub¬ 
 limation of instincts shared by the lower animals. 
 But this does not touch the vital issue which is 
 one, not of the origin, but the validity of moral 
 judgments. As a matter of actual fact, conscience 
 has emerged : we do make judgments of value. We 
 say this is good and that is bad; this is right and that 
 is wrong; and these judgments claim to be valid 
 for all minds. They may be mistaken, just as 
 intellectual judgments may be mistaken in particular 
 cases, but this does not affect their claim to express 
 propositions which, if true, are true for all m.nds. 
 Mere emotion cannot possibly claim this objectivity. 
 I may like pickles, or I may not. It is a question 
 of taste, and everyone recognises it to be such. If 
 our moral judgments were equally the mere expres¬ 
 sion of our personal like or dislike, they would be 
 equally subjective, and the words ‘ right' or ‘ wrong ’ 
 would cease to have any practical meaning. That 
 is just what our moral consciousness denies. When 
 it makes such judgments it affirms that conduct is 
 right or wrong in itself quite independently of what 
 I or other individuals, or even the community, may 
 think or feel. In other words, it implies the existence 
 of a moral law that we find and do not make. 
 Psychology can describe the mental development 
 by which we have become aware of the existence 
 of the moral law, but it can give no real account 
 of the sense of obligation that attaches to it. 
 
 The question of intellectual judgments is strictly 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 70 
 
 parallel. Mr. Tansley admits that science itself and 
 the whole desire for and conception of intellectual 
 truth has been evolved out of primitive instincts. 
 There is a tendency in the mind to strive after 
 intellectual unity as well as after unity of purpose. 
 But he does not therefore doubt that scientific truth 
 is true for all minds. He would regard it as un¬ 
 reasonable to dispute his conclusions on the ground 
 that he once babbled as an infant or that his mental 
 processes spring from the instinct of curiosity which 
 he shares with his horse. He would postulate 
 the validity of the laws of thought which are implied 
 in all statements of truth. So we maintain that, 
 as man has become capable of striving after and 
 apprehending intellectual, so he has equally become 
 capable of apprehending moral truth. 1 
 
 To look at it from another point of view, Mr. 
 Tansley argues as if morality was no more than an 
 elaboration of herd instinct, or at a later stage of 
 
 1 On this question see especially Sorley, Moral Values and 
 the Idea of God, pp. 68-79 and 93-107. Harley Walker, The 
 Construction of the World in Terms of Fact and Value (Blackwell). 
 On ‘ conscience,' see on the one side McDougall, Social Psychology, 
 pp. 8 and 229. In Body and Mind he writes, ‘ Objects have value 
 for us in proportion as they excite our conative tendencies ; 
 our consciousness of their value positive or negative is our 
 consciousness of the strength of the conation they awake in 
 us.’ This appears to reduce conscience to an emotion. This 
 standpoint is criticised by Dr. Rashdall in Is Conscience an 
 Emotion ? For a simpler statement see his article in the Hibbert 
 Journal of July 1921. A valuable statement from a psycholo¬ 
 gical point of view is given in Hocking, Human Nature and Its 
 Remaking. ‘ Conscience stands outside the instinctive life of 
 man, not as something separate, but as an awareness of the 
 success or failure of that life in maintaining its status and its 
 growth ' (p. 99). The truth seems to be that conscience is an 
 activity of the whole man, involving reason, emotion, and will. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY AND SIN 71 
 
 ego instinct. That we entirely deny. The appear¬ 
 ance of a new name suggests that a new fact is 
 recognised. The very use of the same term for 
 conduct based on two distinct instincts, at least 
 suggests the presence of some common element that 
 is not to be identified with either of them. The 
 admission that morality does not disappear when 
 the pressure of the herd code is weakened, but 
 assumes a new and higher form, implies that morality 
 and herd law are not entirely identical. There 
 may well have been a time when their content was 
 identical, when the content of the moral law was 
 coextensive with tribal custom, but the fact that 
 they did become, in course of time, differentiated 
 implies that from the first there was a latent differ¬ 
 ence between them, though primitive man was 
 long unconscious of it. Nor can we argue that the 
 fact that full consciousness of the moral law was 
 late in time in emerging is any proof of inferiority, 
 or the fact that it emerged gradually in any way 
 weakens the truth that something essentially new 
 has appeared which cannot be explained in terms 
 of the old. 
 
 We must always judge things not by what they 
 once were, but by what they have become. The ( 
 higher explains the lower, not the lower the higher. 
 We cannot, indeed, demonstrate by some infallible 
 proof that our moral values are more than individual 
 or group tastes, or that our science is not a mere 
 dream. Our belief in both must, in the last resort, 
 depend on an act of faith in the reasonableness 
 of the universe; we are compelled to stake our lives 
 
72 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 on the venture that our experience is not a ghastly 
 and meaningless illusion. Men of religion and 
 men of science alike make the plunge when they 
 assert the validity of moral and intellectual truth. 
 All such assertion lies outside the province of 
 psychology. 
 
 Similarly we allow that our minds use projection, 
 and that projection may well be one of the forms 
 of mental activity by which we come to form an 
 idea of God. But this is very different from saying 
 that God is only a projection. We might argue 
 on similar lines that all our friends are ‘ projections/ 
 As a result of the many conflicting complexes within 
 myself, I project them upon a succession of external 
 entities, and behold I create all my friends and 
 acquaintances with their various characters ! That 
 is equally sound psychology and equally ridiculous 
 argument. 
 
 It is more reasonable to suppose that we come 
 to know God in much the same way as we come 
 to know our fellow-men. I do not first become 
 conscious of myself and then proceed to deduce 
 the existence of other similar selves. My earliest 
 experience includes both the knowledge of myself 
 and of other selves. I come to know myself in 
 relation to others. It is at least a tenable position 
 that from the first the experience of the race con¬ 
 tained a certain dim and undeveloped knowledge 
 of God. Gradually what had always been implicit 
 was made explicit. What was given by experience 
 was analysed and differentiated. Men came to 
 believe in a power behind the world, however 
 
PSYCHOLOGY AND SIN 73 
 
 vaguely conceived ; and projection may very well 
 have been the psychological method through which 
 men came to interpret and express their belief. 
 Even to-day, we can only think of God in terms of 
 the highest that we know. There is a necessary 
 anthropomorphism in all religion. For a long time 
 man hardly conceived of the power behind the world 
 as personal, because he had very little idea of his 
 own personality. He believed in a power close to 
 him and his tribe as they wrestled with their environ¬ 
 ment to wrest from it the highest kind of life that 
 they knew. He thought of his God in relation to 
 whatever he regarded as most important. When 
 food is most important, God is mainly concerned 
 with the getting of food. So, too, when man has 
 advanced to the stage of recognising higher social 
 values, these are equally rooted in God. Just as 
 truth is recognised as being independent of this 
 or that man’s or even the tribe’s apprehension, 
 so God’s will, as expressed in the moral law, is re¬ 
 garded as being independent of the worshipper’s 
 own will, or of the group will. We can never escape 
 from ‘ projection,’ in so far as we find in our highest 
 ideals the clue to the knowledge of God. But this 
 in no way proves that God is created by human 
 imagination. 
 
 Mr. Tansley writes, ‘ It cannot be doubted that 
 God has been a necessity to the human race, that 
 He is still a necessity and will long continue to be so. 
 If all religious tradition had been destroyed at any 
 moment, and a new generation brought up in ignor¬ 
 ance that it ever existed, it can scarcely be doubted 
 
74 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 that a new religion of substantially the same type, 
 though varying in form according to the epoch, 
 would have appeared. If this be so, we cannot 
 deny the truth of the substance of religion, though 
 we criticise many of its forms. All universal and 
 self-consistent expressions of the activity of the 
 human spirit have a claim to the name of truth. 
 It is clear that religious truth is incommensurate 
 with scientific truth, just as mathematical truth is 
 incommensurate with artistic truth/ 1 Here is prag¬ 
 matism with a vengeance! Mr. Tansley’s view would 
 clearly reduce religion to the sphere of art and 
 imagination. Religion becomes a human achieve¬ 
 ment. All that would be possible would be a vague 
 mysticism free from moral intolerance. 
 
 In other words it substitutes the idea of God 
 for God. This is in effect not to explain but to 
 abolish religion. Religion means to be objective. 
 It is an attitude towards a power that it postulates 
 as real. The irony of Mr. Tansley’s position is 
 that it makes the psychology of religion be born only 
 to commit suicide. It destroys the reality of religion 
 by the very act of describing it. The reward of 
 its study is to prove that there is nothing to study. 
 By the same method, as we saw, conscience is re¬ 
 duced to being a mere emotion, and the sense of 
 value only the mark of a specially strong conation. 
 Morality, like religion, is in effect abolished. For 
 the moral ideal claims to be more than a matter of 
 personal taste. If it is not grounded in reality, 
 its obligation ceases. Once again psychology makes 
 
 1 Op. cit., pp. 133-9. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY AND SIN 
 
 75 
 
 impossible the very experience that it sets out to 
 study. And, as we suggested before, why should 
 it stop here ? Why should it not equally deny the 
 validity of all scientific truth, since it can describe ; 
 the psychical processes by which the mind comes 
 to hold it ? 1 
 
 Yet psychology bears within itself evidence of 
 its inability to explain all things. We read much 
 about the conduct of organisms as involving pur¬ 
 pose, even though in the case of the lower organisms 
 there is no knowledge of the purpose, and even in man 
 that knowledge is far from complete. Does not 
 the very idea of purpose running through the course 
 of evolution imply some consciousness to which 
 that purpose is present ? Can we speak in any 
 intelligible sense of an unconscious purpose, or an 
 unconscious purpose developing upwards into con¬ 
 sciousness ? Further, this upward development 
 of life, this building up of an elaborate mental 
 structure out of a few simple elements of instinct 
 is conditioned throughout by environment. It is 
 the environment that moulds the development of 
 mind. What, then, is the relation between the 
 environment and the life-process ? Are they in 
 harmony or in opposition ? Must there not be some 
 ultimate and inclusive reality beyond both ? In 
 other words, psychology itself can hardly dispense 
 with the idea of the immanent purpose of a God 
 who transcends the world-process. 
 
 Lastly, psychology as a whole knows nothing 
 of any specific religious instinct. Religious emotions 
 1 Cp. Pratt, pp. 40-41 and 335-6- 
 
76 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 and impulses have been evolved out of instincts that 
 are in no way specifically religious. This in no way 
 affects Christian belief. We do not hold that we 
 possess one set of faculties for doing big things and 
 another for doing little things. As the last quota¬ 
 tion from Mr. Tansley shows, even though we 
 possess no specific instinct for religion, it still re¬ 
 mains true that in face of the world, man’s instincts 
 universally tend to organise themselves into re¬ 
 ligion. 1 In that sense, man is naturally religious. 
 The important question is not the mental elements 
 into which our religious life can be decomposed, 
 nor again, the part played by group influence in 
 developing religious awe and belief, but the reality 
 of the God with whom we hold converse. Once 
 again, we allow that we walk by faith, not sight. 
 We only protest that psychology has no authority 
 to dispute the verdict of faith. 
 
 To sum up, the Christian believes that the 
 development which psychology records is the 
 working out in time of the purpose of a God of love. 
 In man we see the attainment of a new level of life. 
 He is able not only to live in accordance with the 
 divine purpose, but to understand and consciously 
 to co-operate with it. Through a long process by 
 which instincts have been elaborated he has become 
 able to recognise the obligations of truth and the 
 
 1 Religion seems to have developed like tool-making, quite 
 independently in many places. The real question is whether 
 it is an illusion beneficial to the race in its early stages, but one 
 which it will in due time outgrow, or whether there is behind 
 religion a God who can be truly conceived as a loving Father. 
 Cp. Coe, Psychology of Religion, cc. vi. and xiv.-xv. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY AND SIN 
 
 77 
 
 moral law. That is, from the standpoint of religion, 
 through this new-born and slowly developing con¬ 
 sciousness of truth and right, God has been revealing 
 Himself. ‘ Conscience cannot be the product of 
 the existing moral code of society, for then we could 
 not explain either the genesis of that public opinion 
 or the persistent revolt against its limitations 
 which we find in the greater minds. The only 
 hypothesis which explains the facts is that in con¬ 
 science we feel the motions of the universal Reason 
 which strives to convert the human organism into 
 an organ of itself.’ 1 Only on this level, when man 
 has become conscious of the world-purpose and is 
 able to co-operate with it by voluntary choice, can 
 the possibility of sin arise. All wilful failure to 
 understand or forward the vital process, all wilful 
 refusal to obey the progressive requirements of 
 the moral law or to be loyal to the quest for truth, 
 are for the Christian disloyalty to the living God, 
 unfilial conduct against the holy and loving Father. 
 The Christian finds in man’s dissatisfaction and 
 search for inward harmony and peace God’s own 
 method of drawing him into fellowship with Him¬ 
 self. Man’s nature can only be truly harmonised, 
 he can only find true happiness by doing the will 
 of God. Though sin is not ‘ merely unsublimated 
 instinct,’ unsatisfied instinct is the God-given 
 material out of which the sense of sin has been 
 developed on the plane of moral life. Further, 
 since man is through and through a social being, 
 we find not only individuals but communities 
 1 Inge, Christian Mysticism, p. 33. 
 
78 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 setting themselves in opposition to the world pur¬ 
 pose. Hence we get corporate sin, and through such 
 corporate sin the character of the individual 
 members of such communities becomes marked from 
 the earliest moments of their life. Psychology 
 has much to say of ‘ moral disease/ Christians 
 have long been accustomed to speak of ' original 
 sin,’ a phrase that brings out the truth that such 
 moral disease, so far as is caused by the perverted 
 will and mind of the community, conflicts with the 
 purpose of God and disables the individual through 
 no fault of his own from pure fellowship with God. 
 Thus we hold that psychology can teach us nothing 
 new about the essential nature of sin or original 
 sin. It has thrown much light on the psychical 
 machinery of sin. It is proving of enormous 
 assistance in distinguishing between the commission 
 of actual sin and moral disease. For practical 
 dealing with sin the increased knowledge of the 
 structure of the mind cannot fail to be of the highest 
 importance. Spiritual direction will be in the 
 future largely on psychological lines. Many of 
 our old methods have been shown to be faulty. 
 But from the standpoint of pure theology the idea 
 of sin still remains unaffected. Our acceptance or 
 rejection of the Christian view of sin must be deter¬ 
 mined on other grounds than those of psychology. 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 PHILOSOPHY AND SIN 
 
 The Christian idea of sin is in the closest connexion 
 with the Christian belief as to the relations between 
 God and the world. It postulates a definite attitude 
 towards reality. There are certain types of philo¬ 
 sophy that are inconsistent with the Christian 
 attitude either towards God or towards sin. If they 
 are accepted as true, their acceptance must in the 
 end cause the Christian idea of sin to be modified 
 or discarded. Sin has to be regarded not as sin, but 
 as something else. In this lecture some attempt 
 will be made to draw out the presuppositions of the 
 Christian idea of sin, and to show how the acceptance 
 in many quarters of doctrines that conflict with 
 these has undermined the sense of the reality and 
 seriousness of sin. 
 
 If we take the teaching of Jesus Christ in broad 
 outline we find that the religion that He taught 
 was not indeed a metaphysic, but yet has certain 
 metaphysical implications by which it stands or 
 falls. In His discourses and His parables He 
 assumes certain truths about the ultimate relation 
 of God to the world and to mankind. 
 
 First of all, then, He assumes the traditional 
 Jewish doctrine of the all-sovereignty of God. 
 
8 o THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 All life and all power depend upon His will. The 
 words so often upon His lips, ‘ Do not be anxious/ 
 spring from an optimism based upon the wisdom 
 and power of God. God cares for the birds and 
 the flowers. 1 He created all that exists. 2 With 
 God all things are possible. 3 He alone can destroy 
 soul and body in Gehenna. 4 His power is not 
 exhausted, as the scepticism of the Sadducees 
 implied, in the present order of being. 5 So in 
 the parables, God is the Supreme King. His word 
 is law. Even the great men of His court are 
 slaves. Against Him they have no legal claims. 
 God is the Householder. He sets the slaves their 
 tasks. They can never render Him more than 
 their due service. The money that they trade 
 with is His money. The vineyard with which 
 they are entrusted is His. He has ordered all the 
 circumstances of their employ. They are at best 
 stewards, and at the end an account has always 
 to be rendered. 6 There is no need to elaborate 
 the theme. Such teaching in picture form describes 
 the all-sovereignty of the God and Father of Jesus 
 Christ. It leaves room for no alien or hostile 
 powers independent of that sovereignty. The 
 devil is no rival god. His dominion is usurped. 
 He has no claim to worship. 7 In God’s own time 
 He will go into the fire that has already been 
 prepared for him. 8 Even now one stronger than 
 
 1 Matthew vi. 26-8. 2 Matthew xi. 25. 
 
 3 Mark x. 27. 4 Matthew x. 28. 6 Mark xii. 24. 
 
 6 E.g. Matthew xxii. 2 £f., xviii. 23 ff. ; Luke xvii. 10 ; 
 Mark xii. 1 ff., etc. 
 
 7 Matthew iv. 10. 
 
 8 Matthew xxv. 41. 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND SIN 81 
 
 he has appeared and his tyranny is being over¬ 
 thrown. 1 
 
 Secondly, our Lord assumes in human life a 
 measure of true independence. God not only 
 loans out His power to man in varying measure 
 as He wills, but goes ‘ into a far country.' He, 
 as it were, withdraws Himself a space to give men \ 
 room to lead their own lives and develop the 
 capacities that He has lent. 2 That is to say, in 
 the Christian religion, side by side with the possi¬ 
 bility of abiding intercourse with God to be realised 
 in prayer, and side by side with the conviction of 
 the utter dependence of all created life on His 
 will, there is the recognition of a distinctness, of 
 a withdrawal of God which is necessary to make 
 possible a true probation. 
 
 Thirdly, our Lord from first to last assumes 
 that men have a true power of choice. They can 
 either respond or not respond to His appeal. 3 The 
 slave who does not watch or who fails to use the 
 money entrusted to him is blamed as being re¬ 
 sponsible for his act. 4 There can be no recon¬ 
 ciliation between the Gospel and determinism. 
 When the time of judgment comes, men are 
 judged for the use that they have made of their 
 opportunities. Our Lord’s teaching fully recognises 
 the great differences of opportunity. His verdict 
 on human life depends not on actual achievement 
 but on possible achievement. But always He 
 
 1 Mark iii. 27. 
 
 2 Matthew xxv. 14 ; Luke xix. 12 ; cf. Mark xii. 1. 
 
 3 E.g. Luke xiv. 16-24 ; Matthew xi. 28-30, etc. 
 
 4 E.g. Matthew xxv. 26-7, 45 ; Mark xiii. 33-37. 
 
 G 
 
82 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 insists on the reality and seriousness of acts of 
 choice made here and now. 
 
 It is clear, then, that our Lord’s teaching implies 
 a definite attitude both of mind and will towards 
 ultimate reality. No view of the world that 
 contradicts it can claim to be Christian. On the 
 other hand, Christian theology represents an attempt 
 to be loyal to the moral and spiritual outlook of 
 Christ. 
 
 First, there is the Christian doctrine of creation. 
 ‘ I believe in one God the Father all-sovereign, 
 maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible 
 and invisible.’ The doctrine of creation out of 
 nothing is largely a negative doctrine, the ruling 
 out of certain other doctrines of God’s relation 
 to the world. It sets aside all dualism. God is 
 not limited by having to operate upon some in¬ 
 tractable substance or matter of any kind which 
 exists independently of Himself and is reluctant to 
 be subjected to His will. Nor, again, is God limited 
 by being obliged to conform to certain necessary 
 laws independent of His own will. The idea of 
 ‘ creation ’ is frankly a metaphor. It is simply 
 the attempt to express the belief that God is not 
 working under alien conditions or on foreign 
 material. Rather all that exists, seen or unseen, 
 came into being by His will and continues to exist 
 by the active exercise of the same will. In virtue 
 of its creation the world has an existence of its 
 own distinct from, but not independent of that 
 of God. All power in the world is God’s power, 
 though He may will to lend it to created beings. 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND SIN 83 
 
 No doubt such a view of the world has its diffi¬ 
 culties, but I do not know that they are greater 
 than those that are involved in other attempts to 
 account for existence. The universe is not an easy 
 thing to explain. For our present purpose it is 
 sufficient to point out that this doctrine of creation 
 at once sets aside certain explanations of sin. 
 Sin is not due to the intractability of matter or 
 to the necessary conditions of existence. We do 
 not sin merely because we live in material bodies, 
 nor do we sin because God was obliged to make us 
 sinful. All that God has created is in itself good : 
 it only becomes evil when it is misused or prevented 
 by the free-will of created beings. 
 
 To bring out more fully the importance of this 
 view, we may stop to consider the assertion made, 
 for instance, by St. Augustine, that evil is negative, 
 that it is a privatio, an absence of due good, as 
 darkness is the absence of light. This theory 
 witnesses to the truth that in God’s universe there 
 is no nature or substance intrinsically evil. But 
 it breaks down badly when we come to an evil 
 will. Indeed, in St. Augustine himself it would 
 appear that * evil is a negation, but in the same 
 sense in which fire is a negation, because it tends 
 to destroy the material on which it feeds.’ 1 In 
 other words, so long as we consider material things 
 or the various powers of action possessed by living 
 creatures, we see at once that they can only be 
 
 1 Miiller, The Christian Doctrine of Sin (E.T.), vol. i. p. 292. 
 For St. Augustine’s teaching see also Lacey, Nature , Miracle, 
 and Sin, Lectures v.-vi. 
 
84 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 called evil, not in virtue of any quality inherent 
 in themselves, but in so far as they are being used 
 for some wrong purposes. The evil lies in the 
 misuse or perversion of what is good if used rightly. 
 Or again, evil is often good out of place. Dirt is 
 good in a flower-bed but bad in a tea-cup. A bull 
 is magnificent in a field but undesirable in a china- 
 shop. In such cases it may be argued that evil 
 is essentially negative. It denotes good mis¬ 
 directed so as to impede or prevent right action. 
 Even so, however, it is always relative to some 
 purpose. And when we pass on to human beings, 
 evil clearly becomes more than a negative idea. 
 An evil will is a very positive and destructive force. 
 A man full of spite and malice cannot in any in¬ 
 telligible sense be described as simply lacking 
 in due good. In other words, when we reach the 
 * plane of moral action, on which alone sin becomes 
 possible, the idea of evil as privation proves in¬ 
 adequate. The sinner is not simply the man who 
 is lacking in good He is the man who loves and 
 chooses and works evil, who so misuses his powers 
 as not only to fall short of the purpose for which 
 he was created, but as to oppose the will of God. 
 Even so, moral evil is always a disruptive force. 
 It can destroy, but not construct, except in so far 
 as it makes use of means and forces that in them¬ 
 selves are good. A gang of thieves can only be 
 effective by practising honesty among themselves. 
 Even the Satan of ‘ Paradise Lost ’ is admirable 
 only in virtue of his good qualities, though he 
 exhibits them in a bad cause. The very instincts 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND SIN 85 
 
 that prompt the cruelty of war are in themselves 
 good and capable of being directed to good ends. 
 The pugnacity that destroys can be harnessed in 
 the service of adventure for humanity. Sin has 
 been rightly called * the one irrational thing in 
 the universe/ 1 It is irrational in the sense that 
 it makes for chaos, it disorders and thwarts the 
 world-purpose, it borrows its strength only from 
 the good that it perverts. If left to itself it must 
 ultimately issue in the negation of all life worth 
 the name. But though it is irrational it has vast 
 powers of destruction. We cannot afford to treat 
 it as a mere negation, a mere absence of good. 
 We may believe that in the long run a wholly 
 evil will must stultify itself, but in the meantime 
 its capacities for damage are enormous. 
 
 Granted, then, that on the Christian view there 
 is nothing essentially evil except an evil will, we 
 are at once faced with the obvious objection that 
 the mere existence of evil, however caused, is 
 sufficient to disprove the all sovereignty of a good 
 God. Is God willing to prevent evil but not 
 able ? Then He is impotent. Is He able but not 
 willing ? Then He is malevolent. The traditional 
 Christian answer has been often enough stated 
 during the last few years. We need only sum¬ 
 marise the chief lines of argument. Perhaps it 
 can be most conveniently put thus. 
 
 If we believe that God is perfect love and 
 wisdom and power, we must believe that He pur¬ 
 posed to bring into being a world which does not 
 1 Aubrey Moore, Essays Scientific and Philosophical, p. 165. 
 
86 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 fall short of, however much it may surpass, the 
 best that we can conceive, and that is a world 
 of beings able to share and return His love and 
 to work with Him in carrying out His purpose. 
 And the creation of such a universe involved the 
 possibility of sin. We may consider the marvellous 
 beauty of the world. In beauty we have a value 
 that can from its essential nature be called into 
 existence, as it were, in a moment by God. Assuredly 
 this world is crammed with beauty ; it is lavished 
 even where human eye rarely gazes. No doubt 
 there are details in nature that may be called ugly, 
 but as a whole it is beautiful; and when we look 
 below the surface in detail there is the strangely 
 delicate texture of leaf and flesh. We may claim 
 that the present beauty of the world is a pledge of 
 the final purpose of the Creator. When we con¬ 
 sider the other qualities that mark the highest 
 life—righteousness, truth, and the like—we see that 
 these cannot be created ready-made by the decree 
 of God. 1 God is ‘ almighty/ not in the sense that 
 He can do all things, but that He can do all possible 
 things. He cannot escape the law of contradiction. 
 Creation of any kind involves determination; 
 in actualising certain possibilities, certain other 
 possibilities are ruled out. If, then, God willed to 
 bring into existence men and women capable of 
 love and righteousness, able to live as sons and 
 daughters in their Father's home, love and right¬ 
 eousness involve the gift of freedom. Compulsory 
 love, machine-made righteousness, are self-con- 
 1 Cp. D'Arcy in God and the Struggle for Existence, pp. 23-5. 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND SIN 
 
 87 
 
 tradictory terms. A man can in truth no more love 
 God of necessity than he can love a woman for her 
 money. Or again if we are to render to God the 
 glad service of children, that calls for sympathy 
 and co-operation. Forced human labour, as we 
 know it, becomes dehumanised. The slave is no 
 longer a man but an animated tool. In short, 
 even God could not create sons and daughters by 
 word of command. The capacity for the home life 
 of heaven must be acquired by acts of free choice. 
 
 If men and women were to be more than conscious 
 machines, they must be free to withhold the love 
 and obedience which they owe. We must not 
 exaggerate man's freedom. He can only exercise it 
 within certain limits. A consistent and ordered 
 life is only possible under the conditions of an 
 external world governed by fixed laws. All that is „ 
 necessary is a true power of choice—the possibility 
 of self-determination in response to a given environ¬ 
 ment. In the parable of the Talents, the conditions 
 under which they are lent are fixed. The sum 
 distributed varies. For these the servants are not 
 responsible. But they are responsible for the use 
 that they severally make of their various talents 
 under the conditions laid down. 1 
 
 In short, we maintain that the creation of the 
 world was a great adventure of love, springing from 
 the desire of our heavenly Father that a family 
 of sons and daughters might share the fullness of 
 His bliss and activity. That involved the risk of 
 
 1 On free-will, see Sorley, Moral Values and the Idea of God, 
 pp. 398-9 and c. xvii. 
 
88 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 sin and the disorder consequent on sin. Hence at 
 this moment it is not the best of all possible worlds; 
 Rather we are witnessing the working out of that 
 process by which alone the best of all worlds could 
 be produced. Sin and the suffering caused by sin 
 are the price that has had to be risked : they are 
 worth while, because of the magnificence of the 
 end in view. God cannot interfere to compel 
 righteousness or annihilate sin, because that would 
 destroy that free co-operation with Him which is 
 the very condition of the working out of the world 
 purpose. God has indeed intervened, but in a very 
 different manner. God has provided a remedy for 
 sin which we shall consider in our final lecture. 
 
 The question may be raised, whether sin may 
 not wreck the world purpose ? What guarantee 
 have we that the majority of created beings will not 
 persist in sin ? No logical demonstration is possible. 
 To the Christian the Cross and Resurrection of 
 Jesus Christ suggest the outline of an answer. 
 The Cross was in one aspect a real defeat of God. 
 Sin triumphed. Righteousness was silenced. But 
 God’s power and wisdom were able to turn the very 
 defeat into the means of victory. Sin still remained 
 sin, but its success was overruled to be the very 
 weapon of its destruction. Through the Cross 
 Christ passed to new and fuller powers of salvation. 
 He became the source of redeeming life. So the 
 Christian can find compressed into the three days 
 from Good Friday to Easter an epitome of the history 
 of the universe. The Cross issuing in the Resurrec¬ 
 tion discloses a philosophy of the world in miniature. 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND SIN 
 
 89 
 
 God is able to cope with even the worst of all situa¬ 
 tions in the world that He has created. He knows 
 all the many possibilities that the world contains 
 and is able to overrule to His purpose whichever 
 of them is actually realised by the free will of created 
 beings. He can never be taken by surprise. It 
 may be that very many beings possessed of free will 
 whom He created will fall short of the full possi¬ 
 bilities open to them. We may be right in regarding 
 men not as immortal but as probationers for immor¬ 
 tality. But in the light of the Cross, as interpreted 
 by the Resurrection, we have a ground of confidence 
 that the divine purpose will be carried through to 
 some glorious end. 
 
 While the Christian doctrine of sin leaves open 
 a belief in both the goodness and power of God, 
 the determinist view makes a belief in a good God 
 untenable, unless we deny any real opposition 
 between good and evil. If a man’s conduct is 
 his inevitable response to his environment, then 
 God is the author of sin. For He made both. It 
 is no answer to plead that a man acts in accordance 
 with his character, that is himself. On this view 
 his present character has been formed by past 
 responses of a like nature. If God could have made 
 all men good by giving them the right disposition 
 and the right environment, why did He not do so ? 
 No doubt the scientist and philosopher both find 
 free will, in any real sense of the word, a nuisance. 
 The scientist rightly and inevitably abstracts it 
 from those aspects of reality with which he deals. 
 Science must be determinist. We are only bound 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 90 
 
 to protest when the scientist forgets the limitations 
 of his method or carries his conclusions into fields 
 where they are no longer applicable. The case of 
 philosophy is more serious. The philosopher claims 
 to take into account the whole of experience, and 
 hence cannot abstract free will. We can only point 
 out that if we hold that morality involves freedom 
 and at the same time the moral life is a real part 
 of experience, then any philosophy which denies 
 or explains away freedom must be condemned as 
 failing to account for the whole of experience. 
 
 There remains for consideration the truth that 
 is represented in the parables by the relative inde¬ 
 pendence of the workers. Any philosophy that lays 
 excessive or exclusive stress upon the immanence of 
 God must deny the very possibility of any serious 
 or lasting alienation from God. The Christian 
 doctrine of creation asserts two truths, first, that 
 all that is depends on God, and secondly that the 
 world of relatively free spirits coexists side by side 
 with Him. 
 
 It is clear that any form of monism or pantheism 
 is fatal to a real belief in moral evil. So long as 
 we confine ourselves to intellectual truth it is possible 
 _.to regard each of two opposite and contradictory 
 statements as containing elements of truth that are 
 transcended in a higher unity that goes beyond and 
 includes them both. So reality can be built up 
 out of truth and counter-truth. But when we 
 attempt to apply the same method to moral distinc¬ 
 tions and depict the opposition between good and 
 evil as transcended in an ultimate unity that includes 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND SIN 
 
 9* 
 
 both, we are in effect abolishing all moral distinc¬ 
 tions : we are evacuating morality of all meaning. 
 For in the moral life good is that which ought to be 
 and evil that which ought not to be. The whole 
 conflict between right and wrong becomes futile 
 and unreal. We must protest again that any 
 philosophy that explains away moral experience is 
 thereby condemned. 
 
 And this is no mere question of theory. Pan¬ 
 theism is the avowed philosophic background of 
 certain forms of religion. Pantheism can and does 
 provide abundance of so-called ‘ religious experience.’ 
 It can produce mystics. Man is exhorted to lose 
 himself in God, to feel his kinship with the one 
 universal life. So we find religion in abundance, 
 but it is a religion in which there is and can be no 
 real doctrine of sin. There can be no true moral 
 distinctions. The one possible sin might be reluc¬ 
 tance to submit cheerfully to the world process. 
 
 All life is equally divine. All men are by nature 
 partakers of the divine life. In the religions of 
 India the consequences of a pantheistic creed are 
 apparent. Ramakrishna, a Bengali ascetic who 
 died in 1886 and was a leader in the modern revival 
 of Hinduism, taught: ‘ It is God who bids the thief 
 break into the house ; and it is God who rouses the 
 householder to watch for the thief.’ His chief dis¬ 
 ciple and prophet, Surmi Vivekananda, who died 
 in 1902, at the Chicago Congress of Religions, pro¬ 
 claimed : ‘ You call yourselves sinners. That is 
 blasphemy. You are Gods ! ’ He also could write : 
 ‘ When I see a young mother bending over her child 
 
92 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 I bow down before the image of God our mother. . . . 
 When I see a harlot leaning down from her balcony, 
 I bow before her also. I say, “ Behold the mother 
 at her sport among the children of men.” ’ 1 The 
 fruits of such teaching are not far to seek. Indian 
 temples are defiled by vice practised openly in the 
 name and under the official sanction of religion, as 
 the local sanctuaries of Israel were in the days of the 
 prophets. And, what is more serious, the custom 
 is defended on pantheistic grounds. The saints 
 and mystics of India have done extraordinarily 
 little to improve the social and moral condition 
 of their country. Whatever may be said against 
 English rule in India, few will deny that it is to 
 the Englishman that India owes the importation of 
 two virtues that are sorely lacking, namely truthful¬ 
 ness and justice. The moral ineffectiveness of the 
 religious leaders of India as contrasted with the 
 Hebrew prophets is the direct result of their religion. 
 It includes no hunger and thirst after righteousness 
 and no conception of sin as an offence against a holy 
 and loving God. There we see the fruit of pantheism 
 when it is believed in and acted on. There can be 
 little doubt, if it were seriously adopted as a creed 
 by many in our own country, the same results would 
 follow. 
 
 Or again, if we pass to certain forms of idealism, 
 we find such stress on the immanence of God that 
 it is difficult to see how sin can be regarded as more 
 than a passing phase, as that which indeed ought 
 
 1 I owe these references to Fr. Cyril Pearson of the Oxford 
 Mission to Calcutta. 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND SIN 93 
 
 not to be, but only in the sense that it ought to 
 be transcended as soon as possible, as a temporary 
 but necessary means towards a higher good. Evil 
 by being conquered becomes the means towards a 
 good that would not otherwise have been. Chris¬ 
 tianity has always asserted that sin and moral evil 
 not only ought not to be, in the sense that it is 
 our duty as soon as possible to put an end to them, 
 but that they ought never to have been. God is 
 able indeed to overrule them to a purpose of love, 
 but that does not make them the less evil in them¬ 
 selves. We shall have to develop this point in a 
 later lecture. 
 
 We are not called upon to consider here the 
 profound question whether creation is an eternal 
 and essential activity of God. Even if we hold that 
 God is always and essentially a Creator, we certainly 
 are not compelled to believe that the existence of 
 this particular world, still less the existence of myself 
 or any other individual, is essential to God, so that 
 we are in some sense as necessary to Him as He to 
 us. ‘ To say that we were created for God’s glory 
 is a very different thing from saying that He could 
 not have got on without us.’ 1 Accordingly, we are 
 able to deny that human sin is an element in the 
 life of God. God is not the direct agent in all 
 conduct, nor is every event, good and bad alike, a 
 manifestation of His nature. ‘ It is of the essence 
 of theism that God has, by the process which we 
 
 1 R. Knox, Some Loose Stones, p. 206. In this connexion 
 the whole chapter is worth reading as containing a criticism 
 of the idealism of Mr. Moberly as stated in his articles in 
 Foundations. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 94 
 
 inadequately term Creation, given an existence to 
 finite beings such that they may be said to stand 
 in relation to Him—as His creatures, as doing His 
 will, as alienated from or reconciled to Him or in 
 other ways. All these are relations between God 
 and other beings who have a status such that they 
 must be regarded as other than He/ 1 
 
 Further, Christianity declares that the ultimate 
 reality is love. If this is so then it implies a certain 
 distinction. I am indeed made in God’s image. I 
 am intended for fellowship with Him. I can rise 
 to moral and spiritual union with Him. But this 
 fellowship of love implies that the distinction between 
 myself and God persists. Otherwise the possibility 
 of fellowship ceases. The very condition which 
 renders sin possible, renders love possible too. My 
 ability to refuse love and obedience follows from 
 my ability to give God something that is my own 
 and not His. If heaven is the perfection of love, 
 personal distinctions must abide. If I am absorbed 
 into God, I cannot continue to serve Him. Our 
 sense of humour, if not our sense of humility, 
 should prevent us from a facile acquiescence in the 
 belief that we are already and unavoidably divine. 
 
 Lastly, all true theism claims that our relation to 
 God should be expressed not only in ontological 
 but in ethical terms. From one point of view, no 
 doubt, we exist in the life of God, just as stones and 
 animals do. This existence is dependent on His 
 
 1 Sorley, op. cit., p. 494. On the whole question, see 
 Chandler, Scala Mundi , with special attention to his criticism 
 of Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God in Recent Philosophy. 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND SIN 95 
 
 will. It presents a problem for ontology. But as 
 moral and spiritual persons we stand in other 
 relations to Him, which constitute a problem for 
 ethics as well as ontology. Here we ascend on to a 
 new level of life, on to a new plane of relationship 
 springing from and dependent on the old relation¬ 
 ship indeed but rising above it—relationship between 
 persons. On this level sharing in the life of God 
 up to the full capacity of man’s created being is 
 no longer automatic and universal. On the lower 
 level God is equally in all forms of existence, in the 
 stone or the animal, but on the higher level we 
 share the life of God in so far as we grow into moral 
 sympathy with Him, and that growth calls for 
 personal effort and choice. If in this insistence 
 upon the distinctness between the individual life 
 and the life of God we lay ourselves open to the 
 charge of thinking in terms of space, our answer 
 is that the distinction between personalities is not 
 a spatial or material distinction but a moral and 
 spiritual distinction. To minimise or deny it is 
 fatal to a belief in the ultimate reality of righteous¬ 
 ness and love. 
 
 We have been skirting round the profound 
 philosophical question as to whether God is to be 
 identified with the absolute or no. 1 Into that 
 question this is not the place to enter. We believe 
 that the teaching of Christ and the experience of 
 Christians postulate first that God is not limited 
 by anything outside Himself. In that sense He 
 is the absolute. And secondly in creation God 
 1 Cp. Webb, God and Personality, Lectures vi., viii., ix. 
 
96 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 willed to limit Himself so as to make possible for 
 finite beings a life in real but restricted independence 
 of Himself communicated by His own divine will. 
 Thus He is the active ground of the universe, the 
 source and sustainer of all that is : His supremacy 
 is unshared. He is a worthy object of worship. 
 On the other hand, sin really exists but is no element 
 in the Life of God. He stands as an authoritative 
 moral Person, distinct from and ever against the 
 sinner. Sin is that which ought never to have been. 
 It has no legitimate place in the systematic whole. 
 It mediates no ultimate good which could not have 
 been attained without it. It is always and every¬ 
 where an enemy to good. We look forward to a day 
 in which God will be all in all, and in that day there 
 will be no more sin. 
 
LECTURE VI 
 
 HAS THERE BEEN A FALL ? 
 
 This world is certainly a world of mystery. Its 
 inconsistencies and incoherencies worry and per¬ 
 plex all who think. Its struggles and sufferings 
 pain all who feel and love. It is a strange mixture 
 of order and disorder. Not far below the surface 
 we find apparent contradiction, no single and 
 harmonious system working for the common good, 
 but a widespread and wasteful conflict. Or, if we 
 look into our own hearts, we are conscious of the 
 gulf between what we have been, and what we wish 
 that we had been. Our own self is divided and at 
 war. From this conflict good often fails to emerge. 
 We act and we are ashamed of our act. Of these 
 facts two lines of explanation are possible. The 
 first has been the well-nigh unanimous explanation 
 of Christian teachers till quite recent days. We 
 view a world thrown into confusion by rebellious 
 wills. Mankind has fallen away from God’s purpose. 
 Not simply this or that man, but humanity has 
 gone wrong. The course of human history has been 
 very different from God’s plan. Men have forfeited 
 that full harmony with God which is the condition 
 of right progress. To-day, however, a second and 
 new explanation is offered largely in the name of 
 
 H 
 
98 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 natural science : and one that fits in with many 
 popular types of philosophy that regard the life 
 of God as, in some sense, developing in and through 
 the life of the world. On this view the world is 
 not a cosmos which has in part become a chaos : 
 it is rather a chaos which is gradually becoming 
 a cosmos. Man has not fallen : he is rising. Sin 
 is a temporary and inevitable by-product of this 
 process of development. Its existence, or at least 
 its conquest, is a necessary condition of growth. 
 It is a working out of the brute. As man advances 
 he is learning to subdue and discipline the passions 
 that he has inherited from his animal ancestry. 
 The apparent disorder will be resolved into order. 
 
 Before considering these two explanations, we 
 must deliberately put aside the old idea so pro¬ 
 minent in the theology of past generations, that 
 Genesis witnesses to the historical existence of a 
 so-called state of ‘ original righteousness/ As we 
 have already said, the early chapters of Genesis 
 do not give historical information. As we have 
 repeatedly insisted, historical origins can only be 
 proved by historical evidence. These chapters, 
 however, do witness to a widespread belief that 
 man’s present condition is unnatural. They are 
 evidence that he is dissatisfied with himself as he is. 
 
 The new explanation is set out from the side of 
 science by Dr. Tennant in his Hulsean Lectures . 1 
 As we saw, he frankly admits the fact of moral 
 disorder. He refuses to minimise the gravity of 
 actual sin, the wilful disobedience to God’s com- 
 1 The Origin and Propagation of Sin. 
 
HAS THERE BEEN A FALL ? 
 
 99 
 
 mands. He recognises that such sin is possible 
 and widespread. But he denies altogether any¬ 
 thing of the nature of ‘ original sin/ or that man’s 
 sense of dissatisfaction with himself is a proof of 
 anything like a ‘ fall ’ in the past. 
 
 On his view man first became conscious of sin 
 when he became aware of something in the nature 
 of law binding upon him. This law, in the shape 
 of tribal custom, conflicted with his own natural 
 impulses. In so far as it expressed an ideal for his 
 life, he began to be dissatisfied with himself. He 
 contrasted his present state with that higher con¬ 
 dition to which he desired to advance. He began 
 to feel ashamed of impulses which were indeed useful 
 and necessary at the earlier stages of evolution, 
 but this sense of shame was the first step in learn¬ 
 ing to control them. ‘ Man fell . . . when he first 
 became conscious of the conflict of freedom and 
 conscience. To the evolutionist sin is not an 
 innovation but is the survival or misuse of habits 
 and tendencies that were incidental to an earlier 
 stage of development, whether of the individual 
 or of the race, and were not originally sinful but 
 actually useful. Their sinfulness lies in their 
 anachronism : in their resistance to the evolutionary 
 and divine force that makes for moral development 
 and righteousness/ 1 Or again, ‘ It was natural, 
 if not inevitable, to identify the universality of sin 
 with its heredity, so long as thought was dominated 
 by the idea that man’s first estate was one of moral 
 
 1 Quoted with approval from an address by Canon J. M. 
 Wilson, op. cit., p. 82. 
 
100 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 excellence or innocence, of natural or miraculous 
 harmony of quiescent flesh and calmly ruling spirit. 
 The evil of his heart could only then be supposed 
 to come through the corruption of his once pure 
 and passionless being. But for us there has emerged 
 an alternative view of man’s original condition. 
 What if he were flesh before spirit; lawless, impulse- 
 governed organism, fulfilling as such the nature 
 necessarily his, and therefore the life God willed for 
 him in his earliest age, until his moral conscious¬ 
 ness was awakened to start him, heavily weighted 
 with the inherited load, not indeed of abnormal or 
 corrupted nature, but of non-moral and necessary 
 animal instinct and self-assertive tendency on that 
 race-long struggle of flesh with spirit and spirit 
 with flesh, which for us, alas! becomes but another 
 name for the life of sin ? On such a view man’s 
 moral evil would be the consequence of no defection 
 from his endowment, natural or miraculous, at the 
 start : it would bespeak, rather, the present non¬ 
 attainment of his final goal.’ 1 
 
 In criticising this statement we must begin by 
 making clear that we entirely accept Dr. Tennant’s 
 position up to a certain point. Science has beyond 
 all reasonable doubt been able to account for the 
 raw material out of which human life is made. 
 And this material, the instincts and impulses that 
 we inherit, is non-moral. In itself it is not sinful. 
 But we are yet a long way off the problem of sin. 
 The problem of sin, as we have seen, resides in the 
 will. Science accounts for the material with which 
 
 1 Op. cit., pp. io—ii. 
 
HAS THERE BEEN A FALL ? 
 
 IOI 
 
 the will has to deal. It explains how temptation 
 inevitably arises, temptation for which the indi¬ 
 vidual is in no sense personally responsible, tempta¬ 
 tion that is in no sense the result of past sin, and 
 may well be part of God’s purpose—but it explains 
 no more. Temptation is not sin. The awareness 
 of imperfection is not sin. Sin arises, not when a 
 man becomes conscious of a law as binding upon 
 himself and compares his personal unsatisfactory 
 state with what he would fain become, but when, 
 having recognised the law as binding, he refuses 
 obedience to it. Sin is not imperfection, but the 
 refusal to advance, the refusal to grow towards 
 perfection. The problem of original sin is not the 
 universal presence of impulses that need control ■ 
 and easily become sin, but the universal failure of 
 men to control their impulse for which they feel 
 that they are responsible. Further, Dr. Tennant 
 fails to discuss the results of sin. He does, indeed, 
 point out the absurdity of the Pelagian position , 
 that sin has no effect on character and leaves the 
 sinner as free as he was before. But my sin affects 
 not only me but others. It taints not only my life 
 but the life of others. It introduces disorder into 
 the moral world and into the physical world too. 
 
 If we believe that in any true sense, when we rise 
 up to the level of human life, fellowship with God 
 is the indispensable condition of all true advance, 
 then it is clear that consequences follow to which 
 science can adduce no parallel from animal life. 
 We are moving on a new plane, and the final court 
 of appeal is the evidence of the men and women 
 
102 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 who are the experts in the life of fellowship with God. 
 On this level a comparison with angels would be 
 more useful than a comparison with apes. 
 
 Again, if we turn to science itself, science can 
 be quoted as suggesting a much less optimistic view 
 of human nature. We are told that as we follow 
 the upward development of life in this world many 
 species have, as it were, made false steps. They 
 have chosen the easier road and been content to 
 adapt themselves so thoroughly to their present 
 environment that they have reached a state of 
 equilibrium. Advance is no longer possible. They 
 remain stationary. And the inevitable result of 
 this refusal to co-operate with the upward move¬ 
 ment is, in the long run, death. The forward 
 track, once deserted, can never be regained. When 
 sooner or later changes occur in the environment 
 they have become incapable of corresponding. So 
 the penalty for the refusal to adventure themselves 
 on the upward course is, for the race, extinction. 1 
 
 We may apply this to the spiritual evolution of 
 the human race. It is perfectly conceivable that 
 the race as a whole has failed to live up to God’s 
 purpose. It has developed along wrong lines. Its 
 evolution has been misdirected. No doubt there 
 is this important difference in dealing with the 
 human race. A new factor has appeared, the unit 
 of moral life is no longer the race but the individual 
 member of the race. The will, which can alone 
 cause sin in the full sense, resides in the individual. 
 
 1 For this view see McDowall, Evolution and the Need of 
 A tonement. 
 
HAS THERE BEEN A FALL ? 
 
 103 
 
 But as we saw, the individual is interpenetrated by 
 the race. Moral tradition has an overwhelmingly 
 important part to play in the make-up of human 
 nature. Through suggestion it shapes even the 
 will. Our humanity is not purely individual, even 
 in its moral personality. If this is so, if the race 
 is evolving along wrong lines due to misdirection 
 in the past, the individual, even though he is in no 
 sense personally responsible, is barred out from God. 
 Each member bears the burden of the misdirection 
 of the race. He is not personally guilty, but he 
 suffers from that moral and spiritual disability 
 which we call original sin. Now, if this view repre¬ 
 sents the truth, original sin is indeed the grave matter 
 that Christian theology has always supposed. It is 
 no passing weakness that mankind will outgrow. 
 No regression is possible. In nature, steps made in 
 the wrong direction cannot be retraced. Humanity 
 can never save itself. It can never get back on 
 to the right lines. 
 
 That this is the truer statement we most firmly 
 believe, and in support of it we appeal to the facts 
 both of the individual life and the world at large. 
 
 As I look into my own past, I know that this 
 cannot be the best world, the world in all respects 
 that God meant it to be, because I have had oppor¬ 
 tunities of making it better and have not taken them, 
 or again, because I have chosen a course of action 
 that I knew to be wrong. I am as sure that I have 
 committed this sin and that as of any fact in my 
 whole life. My conscience delivers its message with a 
 clearness that allows of no doubt. And I know that 
 
104 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 this is so not only in my own case, but in the case 
 of thousands of others, and those who are most 
 conscious, not simply of moral disability or of 
 imperfection but of sin, include all those men and 
 women without exception who have been judged 
 by those who knew them to be living closest to 
 Christ. Who can limit the consequences of these 
 acts of sin ? Further, we observe that, as a matter 
 of simple fact, as men grow older they do not neces¬ 
 sarily and always grow better. They advance, no 
 doubt, in many ways. They gain a riper wisdom, 
 a greater power of appreciation and discernment in 
 dealing with the good things of this world ; but side 
 by side with the growth of intellectual or artistic 
 abilities or the development of a capacity to make 
 more of present opportunities, we do not always find 
 a corresponding growth in love and unselfishness. 
 Truth and righteousness do not always go hand in 
 hand with worldly experience. Old men do not 
 always say their prayers with greater reality. If 
 Christianity is true, it means that qualities such as 
 love, righteousness, truth, and spirituality are those 
 that alone abide in eternity. No doubt the pleasures 
 of sin often grow stale. Sinning has been compared 
 to ‘ drinking sea-water to quench thirst/ But 
 even when a man has learnt that sin is unprofitable 
 and unsatisfying, he cannot always give it up. He 
 finds himself in the grip of evil habits that will 
 not let him go and that disable him for the higher 
 life. It is a shallow optimism to suppose that men 
 automatically outgrow the taste for sin. 
 
 Turning to the world at large, we find the same 
 
HAS THERE BEEN A FALL ? 105 
 
 facts on a grander scale. Man has made great 
 advances in knowledge and culture. He has ad¬ 
 vanced in material prosperity. His moral ideals, 
 too, have advanced. They are more complex. A 
 social organisation has been developed which makes 
 possible, at least for a large number, a great enrich¬ 
 ment of life. But all this progress is not necessarily 
 moral and spiritual progress, nor is it in the least 
 inconsistent with a belief in ‘ original sin/ Scripture 
 suggests what science affirms, that primitive man 
 was a savage, naked and ignorant. The pictures 
 of a state of ‘ original righteousness/ in which he 
 was endowed with all knowledge, are fancies destitute 
 of any basis of solid fact. The truth which is con¬ 
 tained in the phrase ‘ original righteousness ’ is that 
 God’s purpose for man was a life of union with Him¬ 
 self, very different from his present condition. 
 Whether that purpose was in actual fact at one period 
 realised up to a certain stage on this earth, or 
 whether its realisation was perverted from the very 
 moment that man appeared, through the action of 
 evil wills other than human, we must leave open. 
 At most ‘ original righteousness ’ suggests that up 
 to a point the human race went forward on the right 
 lines of development. Man may not have risen far 
 above the beasts, but he was all that God intended 
 him to be at that particular stage. History and 
 science can prove that man has developed in many 
 directions, but they cannot prove that the lines on 
 which he has actually developed were the only 
 lines possible to him or that they correspond fully 
 with the divine purpose. Rather, everything points 
 
io6 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 to the fact that progress has been retarded by 
 selfishness and sloth. Man’s advance has not been 
 uniform or consistent. Material progress has been 
 largely independent of moral and spiritual progress. 
 Man as he is to-day has been well compared to a 
 being with the body of a giant and the soul of 
 a pigmy. 
 
 As we saw above, moral goodness depends not 
 on wide knowledge or elaborate moral ideals, but 
 on entire faithfulness to the best that is known. 
 A child or a savage may be holy. A professor may 
 be learned and cultured, but unholy because he is 
 unfaithful to his wider vision of truth. Judged 
 by the Christian standard, the poor and ignorant 
 savage may be living closer to God than the civilised 
 man. Our culture is largely based on the use of 
 machinery, including means of locomotion. We 
 are gaining an increasing mastery over the forces 
 of the physical world. The war demonstrated, 
 what we knew before, that knowledge apart from 
 love and righteousness may be equally used to 
 forward or destroy life. Every advance in science 
 can be employed in the service of good or evil. 
 Education divorced from moral training produces 
 the clever criminal. Science impartially lends her 
 aid to construct a hospital or a Zeppelin. Behind 
 all mechanism and laboratories there stands human 
 nature. Many are wondering whether man’s in¬ 
 ventions have not so far outrun his moral strength 
 that they will destroy him. He has forged weapons 
 that offer gigantic temptations to hatred and greed, 
 and those temptations are not always resisted. 
 
HAS THERE BEEN A FALL ? 
 
 107 
 
 The problem lies in man himself. If we look round 
 our modern cities we see that the outward splendour 
 of civilisation is, as a matter of actual fact, paid 
 for at the cost of many human lives. Thousands 
 are living in slums where any decent existence is 
 impossible. Our triumphs in electricity serve to 
 convey us with unparalleled rapidity from over¬ 
 crowding and vice in Battersea to overcrowding 
 and vice in Hoxton. We can find money for ex¬ 
 pensive amusements, but not for healthy houses. 
 In short, we have the knowledge and the means 
 that would go far to remedy acknowledged evils, 
 but we have not the will. We could get a far 
 happier England in a few months if men would 
 lay aside all suspicions and jealousy, all desire for 
 selfish profit or pleasure, and set to work to reform 
 abuses, even if individuals were the poorer by the 
 process. There is nothing external that prevents 
 it. The weakness lies in the hearts of men. We 
 do not love our neighbours as ourselves. It is sin 
 in its many forms that holds us back and blinds 
 our eyes to tolerate evils that could be soon abolished 
 if a sufficient number of people wished to do so and 
 were prepared to make the sacrifice. What ex¬ 
 planation can we give of this moral inability ? The 
 Christian answer is that the root of the trouble lies 
 in the will of man. We have lost that union with 
 God and vision of His glory which could alone 
 inspire us with the enterprise and vigour to cope 
 with the situation. In other words, something 
 like a falling away from God’s purpose for the race 
 can best account for the failure of man’s moral and 
 
io8 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 spiritual growth to keep pace with his intellectual 
 and material development. 
 
 We can make no terms with any suggestion 
 that sin in any form is a means of promoting human 
 advance. Sin is always the enemy of happiness 
 and progress. Not the actuality but the possibility 
 of sin is the necessary condition of moral growth. 
 It is true that God’s love and wisdom do overrule 
 even sin to the forwarding of His purposes, but that 
 is very different from saying that sin was necessary 
 for the fulfilment of those purposes. ‘ There never 
 was an evil action performed, but that a good one 
 in its place would have led to better results. Sin is 
 wrong, but God’s action in reference to it is right, 
 and from right action springs good. The soul of 
 goodness which is in things evil is the presence 
 of the indwelling God, and it is from that fountain 
 of light that the good flows forth, and not from the 
 darkness of sin.’ 1 The only alternative to the view 
 that mankind has fallen away from a full realisation 
 of the divine purpose is to suppose that, say, the 
 late war was a necessary factor in the evolution 
 of the world, or that the Cross was a part of the 
 predestined world order. It raises great moral 
 difficulties to find the cause of such war in anything 
 short of rebellion against the love and wisdom of 
 God, or to suppose that God crucified Himself on 
 Calvary. 
 
 Once again certainly St. Paul and the great 
 majority of Christian teachers have believed that 
 behind the world of men there lay a world of 
 
 1 Dinsmore, Atonement in Life and Literature, p. 244. 
 
HAS THERE BEEN A FALL ? 
 
 109 
 
 spiritual beings, some of whom are in rebellion 
 against God. No doubt the devil has often been 
 caricatured. But if we set aside foolish and super¬ 
 stitious representations, it still remains a real 
 possibility that there is behind the veil of sense a 
 world of evil wills able to influence mankind and 
 thwart God’s purpose. This is no solution to the 
 ultimate problem of evil. It only puts it a stage 
 further back. If the devil tempted man, who 
 tempted the devil ? No doubt many modern 
 psychologists suggest that all such belief in evil 
 spirits is a projection of conflicting desires that are 
 really to be found within the soul. Voices and 
 visions of the Evil One can be explained in terms of 
 psychology. But neither of these facts rules out 
 the ultimate possibility of an evil will or wills at 
 work in the unseen. Such a view has certainly 
 commended itself to the saints. And much of our 
 Lord’s teaching about temptation implies a similar 
 belief. We may regard such teaching as meta- 
 phorica lor a concession to popular belief, or again 
 we may suppose that our Lord in His incarnate life 
 accepted this belief as He did other beliefs of His 
 day as part of the mental furniture of His time, 
 because it expressed metaphorically a real truth. 
 We should not dare to say that anyone who accepted 
 such a position was disloyal to Christ. On such 
 a question no final evidence can be produced. 
 Certainly the existence of other spiritual beings 
 besides man in God’s universe can never be disproved. 
 It shows a suburban mind in these days to maintain 
 that the whole universe must have been designed 
 
no THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 solely for man’s benefit. But there is one small 
 piece of evidence that must be taken into account. 
 It has seemed to some thinkers as, for instance, to 
 Mr. Webb, 1 that the apparently pointless suffering 
 of nature can best be explained on the hypothesis 
 that some such evil will has disturbed the unfolding 
 of God’s purposes in nature. Dr. Sorley, in his 
 Gifford Lectures, argues with great force that an 
 imperfect world was needed for the moral education 
 of mankind. 2 We can all understand the value of 
 effort and suffering, that man can only come to his 
 full stature by struggling against adversities and 
 overcoming obstacles. We can appreciate the need 
 of pain. But is it sufficient to call this present 
 world an ‘ imperfect ’ world ? There is so much 
 suffering that seems utterly and entirely purposeless. 
 Who is morally the better, say, for the massacre of 
 the Armenians ? or for the lingering horrors of 
 cancer ? It may be replied that much suffering 
 is due to human sin. That is no doubt true to a 
 far greater extent than we suppose at first sight. 
 But human sin cannot be held responsible for the 
 sufferings of animals before man appeared, or for 
 so-called * dysteleology ’ in Nature, where she seems 
 to put forth all her ingenuity in adaptations and 
 contrivances to inflict suffering and disease. 3 Facts 
 of this kind afford an objective argument for the 
 existence of hostile influences able to disarrange the 
 processes of evolution. The author of ‘ Evil and 
 
 1 Problems in the Relations of God and Man, pp. 269-71. 
 
 2 Moral Values and the Idea of God, pp. 346 ff. and 515-16. 
 
 3 For a popular statement of this view see Wells, The 
 Undying Fire, pp. 89-104. 
 
HAS THERE BEEN A FALL ? 
 
 hi 
 
 Evolution ’ attempted to trace out in detail how 
 things that are evil in nature may have become so. 
 For example, ‘ Evolutionists are agreed that it is 
 just the fierce struggle of created things that has 
 produced these birds and beasts of prey, and that 
 there can be little doubt that it is the malignity of 
 the struggle that has produced the venom of so 
 many reptiles .’ 1 It is worth noticing that Scrip¬ 
 ture regards the redemption wrought by Christ as 
 extending to all creation. Our modern knowledge 
 makes clear that the human nature which He 
 assumed has a native kinship with the beasts and 
 the lower creation of which such writers did not 
 dream. This truth illuminates St. Paul’s hope that 
 the Incarnation would be in a real sense a means of 
 redemption to them as to us. 
 
 Finally, as we consider the facts of life, we would 
 suggest that the truer conclusion to base upon such 
 a survey would be, not that sin is being outgrown, 
 or that the brute is gradually getting worked out, 
 but rather that the distinction between good and , 
 evil is becoming increasingly apparent. In the 
 Parable of the Tares we get the nearest approach 
 in all the teaching of Christ to any explanation of 
 the origin of evil. ' An enemy hath done this.’ 
 The world is a strange mixture of good and evil, 
 not because the full harvest has not yet arrived, 
 but because side by side with the wheat have been 
 sown the tares. They cannot now be plucked up 
 without endangering the original sowing. 
 
 1 Evil and Evolution, p. 142. The whole book deserves 
 consideration. 
 
H2 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 But as each seed develops, its true nature will 
 become increasingly clear, until at the end separa¬ 
 tion will be effected. That is the philosophy of 
 life that we have tried to maintain, not to deny the 
 presence of the tares, nor to maintain that their 
 presence is beneficial to the wheat, nor to cherish 
 an unfounded hope that they will one day turn into 
 wheat, but to hold that this intermixture of good 
 and bad goes far back into the past and was not the 
 work of the farmer but it is due to the interference 
 of an enemy. As time goes on, the distinction 
 between wheat and tares becomes increasingly clear 
 and a final separation will be ultimately possible. 1 
 
 To sum up, without in any way denying the 
 progress of mankind we hold that the highest kind 
 of progress has been prevented by a falling away 
 from the true line of advance. Evil has come into 
 the world and shows no signs of being outgrown. 
 Sin is that which not only ought not to be, but ought 
 never to have been. The disorder of the world 
 may well be in part due to evil influences other 
 than human. But we believe that even though sin 
 cannot be automatically outgrown, it is being 
 increasingly distinguished. Man will in the long 
 run be compelled to take sides openly for good or 
 evil. When the new order appears, only those who 
 have so lived here as to correspond with its demand 
 for righteousness will be able to enter into and 
 enjoy its fullness. 
 
 1 Cf. Quick, Essays in Orthodoxy, c. iv. 
 
LECTURE VII 
 
 GOD’S REMEDY FOR SIN 
 
 Christianity claims to provide the remedy for sin. 
 Before we consider the remedy, it will be best to 
 recall what we have seen to be the true nature 
 of sin. 
 
 Sin is the disorder of man’s inward being. He 
 was made to know and serve God, to co-operate with 
 God in the carrying out of a great purpose and in 
 that co-operation to find the satisfaction of his whole 
 nature. Fellowship with God was to be the con¬ 
 trolling and inspiring factor of his life on earth. 
 Through such fellowship he was to become truly 
 and fully human. His capacities were to be 
 developed in due order and proportion. His desires 
 were to be educated and his will trained so as to 
 issue in right action for the glory of God and the 
 good of man. He was to feel an even deeper hunger 
 and thirst after righteousness that he might know 
 increasingly the blessedness of being filled. He was 
 to love God with all his heart, and all his mind, and 
 all his soul, and all his strength, and his neighbour 
 as himself, so that no power of love should be 
 dissipated in rival and contradictory affections. 
 In such love he was to grow, and growing to become 
 
 I 
 
H4 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 more like the God in whose image he was formed, 
 and so capable of a closer union with Him. For 
 God is love. The world was to be a great family 
 circle living in fellowship with one another and with 
 God, united in the common effort to carry forward 
 the divine purpose and explore the riches of the 
 divine wisdom. That plan has been thrown into 
 confusion by the refusal by mankind of that trust 
 and love, which, just because it was trust and love, 
 they must be free to refuse. Accordingly in what¬ 
 ever way it has come to be, man finds himself 
 deprived of that full control and inspiration of 
 fellowship with God which was to guide and unify 
 his life. The elements of instinct out of which all 
 conduct is built up have been misdirected. Wrong 
 complexes have been formed. Often he has ideals 
 that he knows to be best and has not the energy to 
 attain them. He is out of sympathy with God and 
 God’s purposes. He fails to find satisfaction and 
 peace. He does not love his neighbour. Competi¬ 
 tion has largely taken the place of co-operation. 
 The objects that he has come to desire are such that 
 they can often only be obtained and enjoyed at 
 the cost of the loss and suffering of his fellow men. 
 His mind is clouded ; he seeks vision and hope. 
 And the cause of all this lies in man himself. He is 
 unable to save himself because he is his own enemy. 
 It is not this or that man who is a sinner but the race 
 as a whole is infected with the taint of moral disease. 
 No child that is born into it can escape the influence. 
 That is why human ability can find no remedy. 
 Nothing more nor less is needed than the remaking 
 
GOD’S REMEDY FOR SIN 
 
 ii5 
 
 of human nature, the refashioning of the race ; 
 and man can no more remake himself than make 
 himself. 
 
 This impotence of man is shown by a considera¬ 
 tion of the remedies that are suggested. His 
 present condition is often put down to bad environ¬ 
 ment and it is proposed to remedy it by new laws 
 and better conditions of life. No one would wish 
 to deny that a large amount of human degradation 
 is due to bad surroundings, want of food, want of air, 
 overcrowding and the like. Nor again can we deny 
 that new systems of government might do much to 
 sweep away conditions that cramp and pervert 
 human life. They might pass laws to discourage 
 great moral evils, to make drunkenness and gambling 
 painful and difficult. But when we admit this, we 
 have not got near the bottom of the problem. 
 Mere change of outward surroundings will be 
 insufficient by itself. Men and women can be as 
 quarrelsome, as selfish, as covetous in palaces as in 
 hovels. The love and purity of God may be more 
 effectively obscured in the drawing-rooms of the 
 smart set than in the slums. Further, the very 
 environment whose ill-effects we deplore is largely 
 the creation of man himself. To establish and to 
 maintain a better environment, we require better 
 men. So too with laws. Whatever constitution 
 we have, its working must depend on the energy 
 and fairness of our political leaders. Whatever 
 laws we have must be dependent for their adminis¬ 
 tration on human integrity and human vigilance. 
 The problem is always at bottom the problem of 
 
n6 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 character. In bad institutions and bad conditions 
 of life we are really up against original sin in one 
 of its forms. 
 
 The same is true of education. If we use the 
 term in its narrower sense, it is abundantly clear 
 that the mere increase of knowledge will not produce 
 a happier world. Our education may easily produce 
 a race of clever devils. Knowledge in itself is a 
 good thing ; it is indispensable for the higher life, 
 but like all other good things it may be misused. 
 If we use the term education in its true sense, 
 education would indeed re-create the race. But 
 whence can we get such education ? We are merely 
 re-stating the problem. ‘ The disciple is not above 
 his master/ The teacher cannot give that which 
 he has not got. Education in its true sense is the 
 drawing out and organising on right lines of all 
 the latent possibilities of the infant. Where can the 
 power be found to do that and to rule out all the 
 subtle influences that make for evil ? Where can 
 the right social environment be obtained ? What 
 men have always needed is a power from outside, 
 able to quicken and arouse, but not supplant the 
 moral energy of their own lives. 
 
 Our belief is that in Jesus Christ, God Himself 
 has intervened to meet the needs of men. He has 
 supplied exactly what men require. He has recon¬ 
 ciled the world to Himself. He has afforded the 
 possibility of a new start. ‘ If any man is in Christ, 
 he is a new creature ’; or ‘there is a new creation/ 
 He has founded a new society, a new race, a new 
 people of God to be the nursing home of a new 
 
GOD’S REMEDY FOR SIN 
 
 ii 7 
 
 humanity. That has been the claim of the Church 
 from the first. 
 
 First, then, in Jesus Christ we have a revelation 
 of the possibilities of human nature. We see one 
 who is perfect man at every stage of His develop¬ 
 ment. His life is full of energy and power. All 
 the instincts of human nature are harmonised. The 
 balance between them is maintained in a strong 
 and vigorous life. There is no inner conflict, no 
 rebellious passion or impulse within, no waste of 
 energy. Temptation comes, but it comes from 
 without. It finds indeed a ground of appeal. 
 The tempter suggests that some lawful and innocent 
 desire should be satisfied in an unlawful way, but 
 never for one single moment does Christ’s human will 
 falter. This unity and harmony of life is very far 
 from being attained by the absence of tasks to be 
 faced or obstacles to be overcome. Christ’s life is 
 certainly no pale or featureless existence. It is 
 crowded with activity and energy. The secret of 
 its peace and strength lies in His union with the 
 Father who sent Him. From His earliest years 
 He lives as a son, yielding the complete trust and 
 obedience that the Father’s holy love demands. 
 He shows what fellowship with God can be to one 
 who trusts and obeys Him absolutely. Every 
 power of His nature finds its true satisfaction in 
 being consecrated to the task of forwarding the 
 Kingdom of Heaven. His whole being is guided 
 and inspired by an obedient fellowship with the 
 Father. His loyalty and obedience are perfected 
 by the Cross. In Him we see the example of what 
 
n8 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 man was intended to be in the purpose of God. We 
 see a human nature developed on sound lines under 
 the controlling and inspiring influences of perfect 
 union with God and free from all moral disease 
 and all taint of racial evil. 1 This example has 
 always served to bring home to men their condition. 
 For the first time in the Incarnation the full con¬ 
 sequences of sin are made apparent, because we 
 can place side by side what we are with what we 
 were meant to be. In the presence of Christ the 
 hatefulness of sin is clear. In so far as He is taken 
 as the ideal of human life, the sense of sin is aroused. 
 Men are made dissatisfied with themselves. 
 
 Again, Jesus Christ is the great revelation not 
 only of man but of God. He is the ‘ visible portrait 
 of the invisible God.' In Him we see God expressing 
 Himself in terms of human life. This, as we have 
 already seen, gives a new meaning to sin. It opens 
 our eyes to what we do when we sin. The Cross 
 is the disclosure of God’s love wounded by our sin. 
 When we reject the love and claims of God we crucify 
 Christ afresh and put Him to an open shame. 
 The Cross is the revelation in time of an element 
 in the eternal life of God. Once more, as a matter 
 of simple fact, nothing has brought home to men the 
 meaning of sin more than the Cross. 
 
 Further, we have assumed throughout these 
 lectures that there is an objective standard of 
 righteousness by which actions can be tested, and 
 
 1 The fact is here simply recorded on the evidence supplied 
 by the New Testament. This is not the place to discuss how 
 such freedom from original sin was possible in one who was truly 
 man. 
 
GOD’S REMEDY FOR SIN 
 
 IX 9 
 
 that it is possible to know the will and character 
 of God. For Christians that assumption rests on 
 the supreme revelation of God in Christ. ‘ He that 
 hath seen Me hath seen the Father.’ As against 
 the shifting standards of a merely human morality 
 and the uncertain deliverances of a merely social 
 conscience, we set the pattern of human life as lived 
 out by God Himself in Christ and as expounded in 
 His teaching. No doubt, even so, problems of con¬ 
 duct arise. Christ laid down not laws but principles. 
 There is need to apply His teaching to the ever- 
 changing circumstances of modern times. We 
 search the Gospels in vain for precise directions. 
 Just because He taught for all time, He did not 
 give detailed regulations for His own or for any 
 other generation. But He promised the guidance of 
 the Holy Spirit to His disciples. So it still remains 
 true that for us the nature of sin is for ever revealed 
 as that which conflicts with the standard and prin¬ 
 ciples of Christ, as interpreted by the Holy Spirit 
 to the conscience of the Christian society and of the 
 individual. Sin is not a mere breach of rules. It is 
 a state of the inner man that is out of harmony with 
 God as manifested in Christ. St. Paul often insists 
 that the Law, the disclosure of God’s will in a code 
 of definite ordinances, brought home to men the 
 sinfulness of sin and the sense of their own weakness. 
 If it is true of the law, that inability to live up to its 
 commands brought into the light man’s alienation 
 from God, much more is it true of Christ. 
 
 In Christ we have a living person who claims 
 unlimited obedience. Obedience to a living Master 
 
120 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 is a far more searching test than obedience to a code. 
 A personal appeal is far more exacting than an 
 impersonal law. And Christ demands not only the 
 fulfilment of external obligations by a precise 
 and ordered conduct, but faith and love which 
 involve the surrender of the whole man, the affec¬ 
 tions and will. Formal and outward obedience, 
 such as might seem to satisfy the claims of the Law, 
 are insufficient. The claim of love is unlimited. 
 In short, by itself the example of Christ’s human 
 life and the searching inward demands of His 
 teaching might seem to provoke despair rather than 
 hope. It could only serve to show up the moral 
 infirmity of mankind, to make men aware of the 
 impassable gulf between what they are and what 
 they should be. An example, taken by itself, can 
 provide no remedy for sin. 
 
 Christianity offers, however, not only an example 
 but a living Saviour. Of all moral forces it is 
 usually agreed that personal influence is the greatest. 
 When a man has gone wrong, the first question that 
 arises is, Who are his friends ? Psychologists lay 
 the utmost stress on the part played by great per¬ 
 sonalities in carrying forward the moral tradition 
 of the race. 
 
 In Christ we see personal influence raised to its 
 highest pitch. He is the ideal friend. The power 
 of His example is communicated to others by Him¬ 
 self. He is a living Saviour, not a dead Teacher. 
 He is able not only to convince men of sin but to 
 deliver them from it, to re-make them in His own 
 likeness by the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit. 
 
GOD’S REMEDY FOR SIN 121 
 
 The ideal of Christianity, unlike that of the Stoics, 
 is not the repression of emotions but the redirec¬ 
 tion of them into new and fruitful channels. In 
 ‘ Ecce Homo ’ Professor Seeley anticipated modern 
 psychology in insisting on the positive nature of all 
 sound living. Speaking of the contrast between the 
 water-baptism of John and the baptism with the 
 Holy Spirit and with fire, which he foretold as the 
 peculiar gift of Christ, he asks, ‘ How can warmth 
 cleanse ? The answer is that moral warmth does 
 cleanse. No heart is pure that is not passionate. 
 No virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic. And such 
 an enthusiastic virtue Christ was to introduce.’ 
 It is a deduction from Christ’s own teaching about 
 the impossibility of an empty heart. A real part 
 of the work of Christ in delivering mankind from 
 sin was to set before them as focussed in Himself 
 a cause worthy to enlist all their energies and to 
 engage all their affections. He Himself lived and 
 died for the kingdom of God. He showed in His 
 own life and work the power and beauty of that 
 kingdom in which He claimed that He Himself 
 would be at the right hand of power. He inspired 
 His disciples with the twofold idea of loyalty to 
 Himself and to the Kingdom for which He stood, 
 and to forward which He gave His life. So in the 
 vision of God’s kingdom, the rule of righteousness 
 and love, He set before men a great cause to which 
 they might give themselves, and in giving themselves 
 find deliverance from the power and attractiveness 
 of sin. Again, there is no power in the world greater 
 than that of love. But love can only be evoked 
 
122 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 by a worthy object. In Christ we find one who is 
 able to arouse even in the outcast and degraded 
 a love capable of lifting them up to new levels of 
 life. Christianity is largely built on gratitude to 
 the Son of God, who discovered to me the worth 
 of my own personality in that He ‘ loved me and 
 gave Himself for me.’ Christ knew what has been 
 called the ‘ expulsive power of a new affection/ 
 The sinner cannot keep his sins and Christ. And 
 more than this, Christ by His supreme personal 
 influence, and by the gratitude He evokes, not only 
 gives to men a new power to reorganise their life 
 and to redirect their impulses in a cause in which 
 true and lasting satisfaction is obtained, but in 
 doing this He is reconciling men to God. He sets 
 them not only at peace with themselves but at peace 
 with God. In drawing men to Himself He is 
 drawing men to God. For the whole Incarnation 
 is a great act of God in man. The influence of 
 Christ is nothing short of the grace of God Himself. 
 The unique intimacy that He offers to each human 
 soul is that vital intimacy that is only possible 
 between the soul and its Creator. In short, in 
 Christ we see God offering to man that fellowship 
 with Himself which we saw to be the condition 
 of all full and healthy human life. Christ is the 
 grace of God made visible, God seeking and saving 
 the lost, God entering into human life and bring¬ 
 ing a new power of recovery. Other religions offer 
 to men high ideals and noble visions, but only 
 Christianity has a gospel for the weak and fallen. 
 Christ came not to call the righteous, but sinners. 
 
GOD’S REMEDY FOR SIN 
 
 123 
 
 God’s work in redemption is on a level with God’s 
 work in creation. Through the Incarnation and 
 the Cross God came to remake the world that had 
 gone astray from the divine purpose. 
 
 We have insisted that Christ is a living Saviour. 
 The New Testament also insists with equal clearness 
 that the grace and power of Christ live on through 
 the Holy Spirit in the society which he founded, 
 the Church which is His body, the new Israel, the 
 people of God. The Christian Church is the visible 
 representative, the sacramental expression on earth 
 of mankind as remade by the grace of Christ. Just 
 as the race is the medium through which the taint 
 of original sin is transmitted, so the Church is to be 
 the medium through which the grace and power of 
 the living Christ are to be handed on. As we saw, 
 to be ‘ in Christ ’ means far more than to be united 
 to Christ by a merely individual faith. It means 
 membership in His body, the Church. All that 
 modern psychology teaches us about the possi¬ 
 bilities of the group mind or about the capacity 
 of membership in an organised society for raising 
 men above themselves and their limitations, is 
 ideally fulfilled in the Church. By Baptism the 
 individual is transferred from the realm of the 
 merely human, the sphere of unregenerate humanity, 
 into a new realm, the divine society, the sphere of 
 grace. There he is to grow up into the full stature 
 of the child of God, interpenetrated by the life of 
 the Body of Christ, sustained by spiritual food, 
 taught by the Holy Spirit. His faculties and 
 impulses are to be trained and directed into the 
 
124 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 right channels. He is to learn to devote all his 
 energies to a cause in which they will find true 
 and harmonious satisfaction, namely the cause of 
 God’s kingdom, for the furtherance of which the 
 Church exists. His whole life is mediated by 
 fellowship in the Christian brotherhood. Love of 
 God and love of the brethren are not two separate 
 activities : rather it is in and through love of the 
 brethren that the love of God is learned and 
 deepened. As man is created a social being, so he 
 is recreated as a social being. The sacraments, the 
 appointed means of grace, are all social acts. Christ 
 lives on on earth in His body, the Church, filled 
 with His Spirit, and it is as members of the body 
 that Christians are saved. This truth is doubtless 
 obscured by the imperfection and sinfulness of the 
 Church. Not only has the Church not yet come 
 to its full stature, but in its visible fellowship it 
 includes evil as well as good. But it still remains 
 true that ideally and in the purpose of God the 
 Church is mankind in the process of being renewed 
 in Christ, and that the corporate life of the Church 
 is charged with the saving energy of Christ Him¬ 
 self. God’s remedy is not a single act of redeeming 
 power, but a new life bestowed by a new birth and 
 developed in a new home. The life of the Church 
 is more than the corporate life of a human society 
 —it is rather human life raised to a supernatural 
 level by divine grace and becoming for the first 
 time fully human by its union with God. The 
 very means which the powers of evil have used 
 to propagate sin are used by God to propagate 
 
GOD’S REMEDY FOR SIN 
 
 125 
 
 life. As in Adam we die, so in Christ we are 
 made alive. 
 
 There still remains the problem of forgiveness. 
 Religion is a personal relationship, and, as a matter 
 of fact, we have personally sinned against our 
 Heavenly Father by acts of disobedience. Fellow¬ 
 ship with God is impossible without God’s forgive¬ 
 ness. The child in a human home is miserable Ind 
 unable to share the old intimacy with its parent until, 
 after confessing its wrong-doing, it has been assured 
 of the father’s forgiveness. The same need is felt 
 in religion. And forgiveness is no easy matter even 
 in human life. When we deal with rebellion against 
 God, if we take God’s claims upon us seriously, the 
 difficulty of forgiveness is felt to be overwhelming. 
 Many have regarded divine pardon as impossible. 
 Yet Christ claimed to forgive sins as one who had 
 the power and the will to do all that was necessary 
 to make forgiveness possible. By His identifica¬ 
 tion of Himself with the ‘ Suffering Servant ’ He 
 taught His disciples to view His death as an atoning 
 sacrifice. In the institution of the Eucharist He 
 interpreted His death in advance as being the 
 inauguration of a new covenant. 
 
 The writers of the New Testament unanimously 
 believe that the death of Christ actually and 
 eternally achieved what the sacrifices of the old 
 covenant only prefigured—that by the ‘ blood ’ 
 of Christ, to use the metaphor that came naturally 
 to their lips, men are truly reconciled to God, who 
 has put away their sins. The Cross not only 
 represents but achieves the permanent possibility 
 
126 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 of forgiveness for all mankind. It is not our place 
 here to discuss the manner of the Atonement or the 
 many theories that have been put forward about it. 
 It is sufficient to insist that they all, even the 
 crudest, have been attempts to make clear to men’s 
 conscience that Christ has done whatever is neces¬ 
 sary to make possible God’s forgiveness of sin. In 
 the days when the power of evil spirits was a real 
 and present terror to men’s souls, Christ’s death was 
 viewed as abolishing for ever any hold that they 
 had usurped over the lives of men. In days when 
 God was viewed as the supreme feudal chieftain, 
 Christ’s death was regarded as paying to the full 
 that homage which was rightly due to Him and 
 of which He had been unlawfully deprived by the 
 sins of men. At a later date Christ has been 
 represented as offering to God as our representative 
 and in our name a full confession of sin and a perfect 
 offering of vicarious penitence. It would be rash 
 to deny that all such views contain some measure of 
 truth; we must be content now to point out that they 
 all agree in setting forward Christ crucified as the 
 ground of forgiveness. Further, Christian tradition 
 is unanimous in holding that Christ left to the 
 Church the power to forgive sins in His name. 
 Absolution brings home to the individual the 
 personal application to himself of the forgiveness 
 won by Christ. His full membership in the Christian 
 brotherhood, the body of Christ, to which he is 
 restored by absolution, is an abiding assurance that 
 as a member of Christ, he shares in the blessings 
 won by the Head. Mental analysis may bring to 
 
GOD’S REMEDY FOR SIN 
 
 127 
 
 light moral disease and moral failure. The practice 
 of confession has been in some degree an anticipa¬ 
 tion of modern methods of healing in so far as 
 it has insisted on the need of facing out unpleasant 
 and shameful facts. 1 The mental analyst brings 
 back unity to the life by reassociation : the repressed 
 complex is linked up with the conscious life, the 
 perverted instinct is sublimated. Absolution can 
 add what the mental analyst cannot add, the cer¬ 
 tainty of God’s forgiveness for wilful sin and the 
 assurance of fellowship with God through fellowship 
 in the body of Christ. The Church’s dealing with 
 sin goes to the root of the matter, if once it is granted 
 that sin is against God. 
 
 Lastly, we have seen that the consequences of 
 sin are not limited to the sinner. Not only does he 
 suffer the degradation of his own character, but his 
 wrong action increases the disorder of the world. 
 The result of even a slight sin may be very far- 
 reaching. Accordingly before the sinner can be 
 fully at peace with himself, he needs to be assured 
 not only of his own personal forgiveness, but that 
 the evil which he has wrought in the lives of others 
 can be remedied. In one sense the past can never 
 be undone. But even as in his own case he has found 
 that through repentance his own sin can be, as it 
 were, transfigured by God’s forgiveness so that he 
 can now look on it as forgiven, and through pardon 
 
 1 This needs qualification. Confession can only deal with the 
 conscious life. Mental analysis deals also with the unconscious 
 life and brings up moral conditions of which the individual by 
 himself could never become aware. At the same time confession 
 should prevent repressions. 
 
128 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 he has entered into a closer fellowship with God, 
 so he desires that the disastrous effect of his own 
 sin on others and on the world may be transformed 
 by the redeeming power of God. That is one 
 reason why a merely subjective view of the Atone¬ 
 ment is so unsatisfying. In the Cross of Christ we 
 find the ground of hope that to God even this is 
 possible. We see there the very sin of man made 
 the material of God’s greatest triumph, and so we 
 may believe that God is able to overrule even our 
 sins in so far as they affect others to His glory. 
 That does not mean that sin is ever right or necessary, 
 but it does mean that even sin is not outside the 
 power of God. In Christ crucified we may see an 
 inexhaustible power of salvation for ourselves and 
 for the whole world, a redeeming energy that is 
 able to counteract and overrule even the conse¬ 
 quences of sinful human wills. St. Paul did not 
 limit the reconciling work of Christ to mankind. 
 He speaks of the whole creation as being * delivered 
 from the bondage of corruption into the glorious 
 liberty of the children of God,’ 1 or of God’s purpose 
 ‘to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the 
 heavens and the things upon the earth.’ 2 He seems 
 to know of no limit to the efficacy of God’s grace. 
 We may therefore find in the Cross God’s promise 
 that He will do all that is possible to undo the 
 mischief wrought by our sins. 
 
 To sum up, the aim of these lectures has been 
 to show that in its essential nature the problem 
 of sin remains unaffected by modern knowledge. 
 
 1 Romans viii. 21. 3 Ephesians i. io. 
 
GOD’S REMEDY FOR SIN 
 
 129 
 
 Sin is still sin against God. It still needs redemp¬ 
 tion and forgiveness, and we believe that in Christ 
 alone we have the remedy for the situation. We 
 can still repeat the old text, ‘ Thou shalt call His 
 name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their 
 sins.’ 
 
 Printed in England at Thk Ballantyne Press 
 Spottiswoode, Ballantyne & Co. Ltd. 
 Colchester, London & Eton 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
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