not think that thou hast made any progress toward perfection, till thou feelest that thou art less than the least of all human beings." Young's Night Thoughts: "Heaven's Sovereign saves all beings but himself That hideous sight- a naked human heart."

Law's Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life: "You may justly condemn yourself for being the greatest sinner that you know, 1. Because you know more of the folly of your own heart than of other people's, and can charge yourself with various sins which you know only of yourself and cannot be sure that others are guilty of them. 2. The greatness of our guilt arises from the greatness of God's goodness to us. You know more of these aggravations of your sins than you do of the sins of other people. Hence the greatest saints have in all ages condemned themselves as the greatest sinners." We may add: 3. That, since each man is a peculiar being, each man is guilty of peculiar sins, and in certain particulars and aspects may constitute an example of the enormity and hatefulness of sin, such as neither earth nor hell can elsewhere show.

Of Cromwell, as a representative of the Puritans, Green says (Short History of the English People, 454): “The vivid sense of the divine Purity close to such men, made the life of common men seem sin." Dr. Arnold of Rugby (Life and Corresp., App. D.): "In a deep sense of moral evil, more perhaps than anything else, abides a saving knowledge of God." Augustine, on his death-bed, had the 32d Psalm written over against him on the wall. For his expressions with regard to sin, see his Confessions, book 10. See also Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 284, note.

2. Inferences.

In the light of the preceding discussion, we may properly estimate the elements of truth and of error in the common definition of sin as the voluntary transgression of known law.'

(a) Not all sin is voluntary as being a distinct and conscious volition; for evil disposition and state often precede and occasion evil volition, and evil disposition and state are themselves sin. All sin, however, is voluntary as springing either directly from will, or indirectly from those perverse affections and desires which have themselves originated in will. 'Voluntary' is a term broader than 'volitional,' and includes all those permanent states of intellect and affection which the will has made what they are. Will, moreover, is not to be regarded as simply the faculty of volitions, but as primarily the underlying determination of the being to a supreme end.

Will, as we have seen, includes preference ( déλnua, voluntas, Wille) as well as volition (Bovλý, arbitrium, Willkür). We do not, with Edwards and Hodge, regard the sensibilities as states of the will. They are, however, in their character and their objects determined by the will, and so they may be called voluntary. The permanent state of the will (New School "elective preference") is to be distinguished from the permanent state of the sensibilities (dispositions, or desires). But both are voluntary because both are due to past decisions of the will, and "whatever springs from will we are responsible for" (Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 243). Julius Müller, 2:51-"We speak of self-consciousness and reason as something which the ego has, but we identify the will with the ego. No one would say, my will has decided this or that,' although we do say, my reason, my conscience teaches me this or that.' The will is the very man himself, as Augustine says: Voluntas est in omnibus; imo omnes nihil aliud quam voluntates sunt.'"

For other statements of the relation of disposition to will, see Alexander, Moral Science, 151-"In regard to dispositions, we say that they are in a sense voluntary, They properly belong to the will, taking the word in a large sense. In judging of the morality of voluntary acts, the principle from which they proceed is always included in our view and comes in for a large part of the blame "; see also pages 201, 207, 208. Edwards on the Affections, 3:1-22; on the Will, 3:4-"The affections are only certain modes of the exercise of the will." A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 234 — “ All sin is voluntary, in the sense that all sin has its root in the perverted dispositions, desires, and affections which constitute the depraved state of the will." But to Alexander, Edwards, and Hodge, we reply that the first sin was not voluntary in this sense, for there was no such depraved state of the will from which it could spring. We are

responsible for dispositions, not upon the ground that they are a part of the will, but upon the ground that they are effects of will, in other words, that past decisions of the will have made them what they are. See pages 504-513.

(b) Deliberate intention to sin is an aggravation of transgression, but it is not essential to constitute any given act or feeling a sin. Those evil inclinations and impulses which rise unbidden and master the soul before it is well aware of their nature, are themselves violations of the divine law, and indications of an inward depravity which in the case of each descendant of Adam is the chief and fontal transgression.

Joseph Cook: "Only the surface-water of the sea is penetrated with light. Beneath is a half-lit region. Still further down is absolute darkness. We are greater than we know." Weismann, Heredity, 2:8-"At the depth of 170 meters, or 552 feet, there is about as much light as that of a starlight night when there is no moon. Light penetrates as far as 400 meters, or 1,300 feet, but animal life exists at a depth of 4,000 meters, or 13,000 feet. Below 1,300 feet, all animals are blind." Cf. Ps. 51: 6; 19: 12 —"the inward parts the hidden parts. ... hidden faults"—hidden not only from others, but even from ourselves. The light of consciousness plays only on the surface of the waters of man's soul.

...

(c) Knowledge of the sinfulness of an act or feeling is also an aggravation of transgression, but it is not essential to constitute it a sin. Moral blindness is the effect of transgression, and, as inseparable from corrupt affections and desires, is itself condemned by the divine law.

It is our duty to do better than we know. Our duty of knowing is as real as our duty of doing. Sin is an opiate. Some of the most deadly diseases do not reveal themselves in the patient's countenance, nor has the patient any adequate understanding of his malady. There is an ignorance which is indolence. Men are often unwilling to take the trouble of rectifying their standards of judgment. There is also an ignorance which is intention. Instance many students' ignorance of College laws.

We cannot excuse disobedience by saying: "I forgot." God's commandment is: "Remember" - as in Ex. 20:8; cf. 2 Pet. 3:5-"For this they wilfully forget." "Ignorantia legis neminem excusat." Rom. 2:12 "as many as have sinned without the law shall also perish without the law"; Luke 12:48" he that know not, and did things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten [ though] with few stripes." The aim of revelation and of preaching is to bring man "to himself" (cf. Luke 15:17) — to show him what he has been doing and what he is. Goethe: "We are never deceived: we deceive ourselves." Royce, World and Individual, 2:359-"The sole possible free moral action is then a freedom that relates to the present fixing of attention upon the ideas of the Ought which are already present. To sin is consciously to choose to forget, through a narrowing of the field of attention, an Ought that one already recognizes."

(d) Ability to fulfill the law is not essential to constitute the non-fulfilment sin. Inability to fulfill the law is a result of transgression, and, as consisting not in an original deficiency of faculty but in a settled state of the affections and will, it is itself condemnable. Since the law presents the holiness of God as the only standard for the creature, ability to obey can never be the measure of obligation or the test of sin.

Not power to the contrary, in the sense of ability to change all our permanent states by mere volition, is the basis of obligation and responsibility; for surely Satan's responsibility does not depend upon his power at any moment to turn to God and be holy. Definitions of sin - Melanchthon: Defectus vel inclinatio vel actio pugnans cum lege Dei, Calvin: Illegalitas, seu difformitas a lege. Hollaz: Aberratio a lege divina. Hollaz adds: "Voluntariness does not enter into the definition of sin, generically considered. Sin may be called voluntary, either in respect to its cause, as it inheres in the will, or in respect to the act, as it procedes from deliberate volition. Here is the antithesis to the Roman Catholics and to the Socinians, the latter of whom define sin as a voluntary [ i. e., a volitional] transgression of law"-a view, says Hase (Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 162-164), "which is derived from the necessary methods of civil tribunals, and which is incompatible with the orthodox doctrine of original sin."

On the New School definition of sin, see Fairchild, Nature of Sin, in Bib. Sac., 25:3048; Whedon, in Bib. Sac., 19: 251, and On the Will, 328. Per contra, see Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2: 180-190; Lawrence, Old School in N. E. Theol., in Bib. Sac., 20:317-328; Julius Müller, Doc. Sin, 1:40-72; Nitzsch, Christ. Doct., 216; Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 124-126.

II. THE ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLE OF SIN.

The definition of sin as lack of conformity to the divine law does not exclude, but rather necessitates, an inquiry into the characterizing motive or impelling power which explains its existence and constitutes its guilt. Only three views require extended examination. Of these the first two constitute the most common excuses for sin, although not propounded for this purpose by their authors: Sin is due (1) to the human body, or (2) to finite weakness. The third, which we regard as the Scriptural view, considers sin as (3) the supreme choice of self, or selfishness.

In the preceding section on the Definition of Sin, we showed that sin is a state, and a state of the will. We now ask: What is the nature of this state? and we expect to show that it is essentially a selfish state of the will.

1. Sin as Sensuousness.

This view regards sin as the necessary product of man's sensuous nature a result of the soul's connection with a physical organism. This is the view of Schleiermacher and of Rothe. More recent writers, with John Fiske, regard moral evil as man's inheritance from a brute ancestry.

For statement of the view here opposed, see Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 1:361-364-"Sin is a prevention of the determining power of the spirit, caused by the independence (Selbständigkeit) of the sensuous functions." The child lives at first a life of sense, in which the bodily appetites are supreme. The senses are the avenues of all temptation, the physical domineers over the spiritual, and the soul never shakes off the body. Sin is, therefore, a malarious exhalation from the low grounds of human nature, or, to use the words of Schleiermacher, a positive opposition of the flesh to the spirit." Pfleiderer, Prot. Theol. seit Kant, 113,—says that Schleiermacher here repeats Spinoza's "inability of the spirit to control the sensuous affections." Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:230-"In the development of man out of naturality, the lower impulses have already won a power of self-assertion and resistance, before the reason could yet come to its valid position and authority. As this propensity of the self-will is grounded in the specific nature of man, it may be designated as inborn, hereditary, or original sinfulness."

Rothe's view of sin may be found in his Dogmatik, 1:300-302; notice the connection of Rothe's view of sin with his doctrine of continuous creation (see page 416 of this Compendium). Encyclopædia Britannica, 21: 2-" Rothe was a thorough going evolutionist who regarded the natural man as the consummation of the development of physical nature, and regarded spirit as the personal attainment, with divine help, of those beings in whom the further creative process of moral development is carried on. This process of development necessarily takes an abnormal form and passes through the phase of sin. This abnormal condition necessitates a fresh creative act, that of salvation, which was however from the very first a part of the divine plan of development. Rothe, notwithstanding his evolutionary doctrine, believed in the supernatural birth of Christ."

John Fiske, Destiny of Man, 103-" Original sin is neither more nor less than the brute inheritance which every man carries with him, and the process of evolution is an advance toward true salvation." Thus man is a sphynx in whom the human has not yet escaped from the animal. So Bowne, Atonement, 69, declares that sin is "a relic of the animal not yet outgrown, a resultant of the mechanism of appetite and impulse and reflex action for which the proper inhibitions are not yet developed. Only slowly does it grow into a consciousness of itself as evil. . . . . It would be hysteria to regard the common life of men as rooting in a conscious choice of unrighteousness."

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

(a) It involves an assumption of the inherent evil of matter, at least so far as regards the substance of man's body. But this is either a form of dualism, and may be met with the objections already brought against that system, or it implies that God, in being the author of man's physical organism, is also the responsible originator of human sin.

This has been called the "caged-eagle theory" of man's existence; it holds that the body is a prison only, or, as Plato expressed it, "the tomb of the soul," so that the soul can be pure only by escaping from the body. But matter is not eternal. God made it, and made it pure. The body was made to be the servant of the spirit. We must not throw the blame of sin upon the senses, but upon the spirit that used the senses so wickedly. To attribute sin to the body is to make God, the author of the body, to be also the author of sin,-which is the greatest of blasphemies. Men cannot "justly accuse Their Maker, or their making, or their fate" (Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:112). Sin is a contradiction within the spirit itself, and not simply between the spirit and the flesh. Sensuous activities are not themselves sinful-this is essential Manichæanism. Robert Burns was wrong when he laid the blame for his delinquencies upon "the pas sions wild and strong." And Samuel Johnson was wrong when he said that "Every man is a rascal so soon as he is sick." The normal soul has power to rise above both passion and sickness and to make them serve its moral development. On the development of the body, as the organ of sin, see Straffen's Hulsean Lectures on Sin, 33-50. The essential error of this view is its identification of the moral with the physical. If it were true, then Jesus, who came in human flesh, must needs be a sinner.

(b) In explaining sin as an inheritance from the brute, this theory ignores the fact that man, even though derived from a brute ancestry, is no longer brute, but man, with power to recognize and to realize moral ideals, and under no necessity to violate the law of his being.

See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163–180, on The Fall and the Redemption of Man, in the Light of Evolution: "Evolution has been thought to be incompatible with any proper doctrine of a fall. It has been assumed by many that man's immoral course and conduct are simply survivals of his brute inheritance, inevitable remnants of his old animal propensities, yieldings of the weak will to fleshly appetites and passions. This is to deny that sin is truly sin, but it is also to deny that man is truly man..... Sin must be referred to freedom, or it is not sin. To explain it as the natural result of weak will overmastered by lower impulses is to make the animal nature, and not the will, the cause of transgression. And that is to say that man at the beginning is not man, but brute." See also D. W. Simon, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1897:1-20-"The key to the strange and dark contrast between man and his animal ancestry is to be found in the fact of the Fall. Other species live normally. No remnant of the reptile hinders the bird. The bird is a true bird. Only man fails to live normally and is a true man only after ages of sin and misery." Marlowe very properly makes his Faustus to be tempted by sensual baits only after he has sold himself to Satan for power.

To regard vanity, deceitfulness, malice, and revenge as inherited from brute ancestors is to deny man's original innocence and the creatorship of God. B. W. Lockhart: "The animal mind knows not God, is not subject to his law, neither indeed can be, just because it is animal, and as such is incapable of right or wrong. . . . . If man were an animal and nothing more, he could not sin. It is by virtue of being something more, that he becomes capable of sin. Sin is the yielding of the known higher to the known lower. It is the soul's abdication of its being to the brute.... Hence the need of spiritual forces from the spiritual world of divine revelation, to heal and build and discipline the soul within itself, giving it the victory over the animal passions which wonstitute the body and over the kingdom of blind desire which constitutes the world. The final purpose of man is growth of the soul into liberty, truth, love, likeness to God. Education is the word that covers the movement, and probation is incident to education." We add that reparation for past sin and renewing power from above must follow probation, in order to make education possible.

Some recent writers hold to a real fall of man, and yet regard that fall as necessary to his moral development. Emma Marie Caillard, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893:879"Man passed out of a state of innocence - unconscious of his own imperfection - into a state of consciousness of it. The will became slave instead of master. The result would have been the complete stoppage of his evolution but for redemption, which restored his will and made the continuance of his evolution possible. Incarnation was the method of redemption. But even apart from the fall, this incarnation would have been necessary to reveal to man the goal of his evolution and so to secure his coöperation in it." Lisle, Evolution of Spiritual Man, 39, and in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:431-452"Evolution by catastrophe in the natural world has a striking analogue in the spiritual world. . . . . Sin is primarily not so much a fall from a higher to.a lower, as a failure to rise from a lower to a higher; not so much eating of the forbidden tree, as failure to partake of the tree of life. The latter represented communion and correspondence with God, and had innocent man continued to reach out for this, he would not have fallen. Man's refusal to choose the higher preceded and conditioned his fall to the lower, and the essence of sin is therefore in this refusal, whatever may cause the will to make it.... Man chose the lower of his own free will. Then his centripetal force was gone. His development was swiftly and endlessly away from God. He reverted to his original type of savage animalism; and yet, as a self-conscious and free-acting being, he retained a sense of responsibility that filled him with fear and suffering."

On the development-theory of sin, see W. W. McLane, in New Englander, 1891: 180-188; A. B. Bruce, Apologetics, 60-62; Lyman Abbott, Evolution of Christianity, 203-208; Le Conte, Evolution, 330, 365-375; Henry Drummond, Ascent of Man, 1-13, 329, 342; Salem Wilder, Life, its Nature, 266–273; Wm. Graham, Creed of Science, 38-44; Frank H. Foster, Evolution and the Evangelical System; Chandler, The Spirit of Man, 45-47.

(c) It rests upon an incomplete induction of facts, taking account of sin solely in its aspect of self-degradation, but ignoring the worst aspect of it as self-exaltation. Avarice, envy, pride, ambition, malice, cruelty, revenge, self-righteousness, unbelief, enmity to God, are none of them fleshly sins, and upon this principle are incapable of explanation.

Two historical examples may suffice to show the insufficiency of the sensuous theory of sin. Goethe was not a markedly sensual man; yet the spiritual vivisection which he practised on Friederike Brion, his perfidious misrepresentation of his relations with Kestner's wife in the "Sorrows of Werther," and his flattery of Naporeon, when a patriot would have scorned the advances of the invader of his country, show Goethe to have been a very incarnation of heartlessness and selfishness. The patriot Boerne said of him: "Not once has he ever advanced a poor solitary word in his country's causehe who from the lofty height he has attained might speak out what none other but himself would dare pronounce." It has been said that Goethe's first commandment to genius was: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor and thy neighbor's wife." His biographers count up sixteen women to whom he made love and who reciprocated his affection, though it is doubtful whether he contented himself with the doctrine of 16 to 1. As Sainte-Beuve said of Châteaubriand's attachments: "They are like the stars in the sky, the longer you look, the more of them you discover." Christiane Vulpius, after being for seventeen years his mistress, became at last his wife. But the wife was so slighted that she was driven to intemperance, and Goethe's only son inherited her passion and died of drink. Goethe was the great heathen of modern Christendom, deriding self-denial, extolling self-confidence, attention to the present, the seeking of enjoyment, and the subinission of one's self to the decrees of fate. Hutton calls Goethe "a Narcissus in love with himself." Like George Eliot's "Dinah," in Adam Bede, Goethe's "Confessions of a Beautiful Soul," in Wilhelm Meister, are the purely artistic delineation of a character with which he had no inner sympathy. On Goethe, see Hutton, Essays, 2:1-79; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:490; A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 279-331; Principal Shairp, Culture and Religion, 16—“Goethe, the high priest of culture, loathes Luther, the preacher of righteousness"; S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 149-156.

Napoleon was not a markedly sensual man, but "his self-sufficiency surpassed the self-sufficiency of common men as the great Sahara desert surpasses an ordinary sand patch." He wantonly divulged his amours to Josephine, with all the details of his illconduct, and when she revolted from them, he only replied: "I have the right to meet all your complaints with an eternal I." When his wars had left almost no able-bodied