ART. V.-THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN.

In the teaching of Jesus sin is described as the loss of the soul or, according to the Revised Version, as the forfeiture of the life (Mark viii, 37). Again, the sinner is said to lose or forfeit "his own self" (Luke ix, 25). Hence those who live in sin are described as "lost"-lost to the true meaning and ends of life. The sinner is like a sheep that has wandered away from the flock into the mountains, like a son who has banished himself from his home. and his father. But Jesus spoke of sin not so much in general terms as in concrete. The particular sins to which he referred most pointedly were pride, hypocrisy, resentment, and unmercifulness. Nothing was so sinful in his eyes as a selfish and malicious heart; the worst sins to him were sins of disposition. The self-righteous Pharisee cloaking deceit and selfishness under an ostentatious religiousness; the purse-proud miser gloating over his possessions; the pitiless priest and Levite whose prejudice had consumed their humanity; the merciless servant who, though "much forgiven," refused to forgive-these were the typical embodiments of sin in the view of Jesus. All sin has its seat in the heart-that is, in the inner life, in a perversion and corruption of the will. Sin is not primarily a matter of action, but of character. Man is defiled by the evil thoughts and desires which proceed from within. Hate is the source of murder. Lust is the essence of adultery. If men are justified or condemned by their words and deeds it is because it is out of the inner treasury of thought and motive that good and evil deeds alike proceed, because it is แ "out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaketh."

In the gospel of John the terms in which Jesus's teaching concerning sin is construed are different from those found in the synoptics, but their import is essentially the same. Here, too, the sinful world is lost in alienation from God; sin is moral darkness or moral bondage. Christ came to save the world, to bring to it the heavenly light, to release the enslaved wills and bring the hearts of men into the freedom which the truth gives. As man's true life consists in sonship to God—that is, in moral kinship and

likeness to him—so sin is described as a sonship to Satan (John viii, 44), a radical inner perversion, a blindness in mind and heart to truth and to goodness. This is but a graphic description of that perversion of the inner vision, the evil eye which sees all things false, the dim or broken lamp which leaves "the whole body full of darkness."

Jesus made little or no reference to what we call the "problems" of sin-its beginning, its relation to heredity, to physical death or outward calamities. He held himself entirely aloof from the fruitless disputes on these subjects which were rife in the Jewish schools of his time, and refused to be drawn into controversy concerning them. When asked whether those on whom the tower in Siloam fell were sinners above all others in Jerusalem he replied in the negative, and added only a warning of the consequences of impenitence. The Johannine tradition likewise reports him as repudiating the current view that congenital blindness was the penalty of some particular sin (John ix, 2, 3). To the first appearance of sin in the world he made no reference. Unless it be in the incidental reference to Satan as a "murderer from the beginning" (John viii, 44), his words contain no allusion to Adam or the fall. He never intimates that men are guilty for the sins of their ancestors, immediate or remote. He does not touch upon the disputed question whether or not physical death is the consequence of sin. There could be no better proof that no particular theory concerning these points is essential to Christian belief than is offered by this silence of Jesus. Our Lord spoke of sin as a fact of experience. He described it in its real character and effects. He neither exaggerated nor minimized its nature. He did not regard men-even the worst of them-as utterly sinful. He could find at least a spark of goodness in the most depraved life. He knew nothing of such artificial distinctions as that sometimes made by theologians between natural and spiritual goodness, according to which men may be described as totally depraved religiously, however numerous and great their civil virtues, such as uprightness, generosity, and charity. On the other hand, none ever estimated sin so seriously and truly. Sins were something more to him than excusable mistakes and inci

dental lapses. He recognized the existence of sin as well as of sins. Individual sins have their root and source in the depraved heart, in the sinful character. The tree is known by its fruit. Sins are but the symptoms of the disease. Sin is the ruination of the moral health; it is an abnormal state of life. More specifically, it is disharmony with God; it is essential unreason, absurdity; it is, as the biblical words for it indicate, a missing of the mark, a false aim, an effort to realize the good by the renunciation of the right and the true.

Jesus never defined sin abstractly, but always viewed and pictured it in its actual manifestations. He exhibited its nature and heinousness by contrast with goodness. Therefore he spoke more of the true life than of its loss or perversion. His primary emphasis was upon the good life which opens before every man. Hence men are to be saved from sin by recovery to goodness. The only cure of error is truth; the only salvation from evil is through the realization of righteousness. Sin is unlikeness to God; salvation is likeness to him. Sin is the unfilial life, the life of self-banishment from the soul's true home in God; salvation is found in return to the Father's house and in the life of obedient sonship. Hence Jesus summarized all goodness and all duty in love to God, or in sonship to God. Be the sons of your Father in heaven, he said to men; become like him in the motives and spirit of your action; learn what God is, and you will know what God requires; be his true children, and all else will follow. The reason Jesus gave for not sinning was that it was unfilial. Cease from your hatreds, your cruelties and narrowness. Why? Because it is unlike God. Love all men, even your enemies; be generous and charitable. Why? In order that by so doing you may become the true sons of God, may prove yourselves to be truly kindred to him in thought and action; for he loves and blesses all, even the unworthy and the unthankful. Godlikeness, then, is the deep foundation of all goodness; to be like God-that is the reason for the good life on which all other reasons rest. By contrast, sin is the forfeiture of the Godlike life, and the curse of it is that it separates man from God, gives him a wrong direction and dooms him to moral failure. Jesus held up before men the consequences

of their sin. The misery, the penalties, the fiery Gehenna of remorse and shame to these he pointed in solemn warning. But why do these consequences follow sin? Because of what sin is; because it is a perversion of man's true nature, a repudiation of his destiny as a son of God. This is the Christian doctrine of sin; this is the evil, the terrible and disastrous loss-the loss of man's true selffrom which Jesus came to save him.

When we turn to the writings of Paul the principal peculiarities which we note in his doctrine of sin are these: 1. He is accustomed to personify sin and to describe it as a world-ruling power. 2. He traces its beginning back to Adam, conceives it as entering the world in his transgression and spreading itself thence upon all mankind. 3. He regards physical death as due to sin. And, 4. He associates sin with the flesh, in which he conceives moral evil as having its seat and sphere of manifestation. All these characteristics of Paul's thought are capable of a natural explanation, either by the peculiarities of his mind or by the nature of his training. The personification of sin is, of course, a realistic rhetorical figure. Sin enters the world and so takes possession of men that, as Paul expresses it, it is no longer they who govern themselves, but the sin which has mastered them. The proper ego, the better self, is suppressed and vanquished, and sin rules the life. If the inner man, the law of the reason, protests against this dominion it is, nevertheless, powerless to break it. In vain does the enslaved will yearn to be free. Sin is master; it is no longer the man himself who acts, but sin which dwells in him (Rom. vii, 7-25). In this picture of sin's power we have a transcript of the apostle's own pre-Christian experience, when he was vainly seeking peace and victory over evil by deeds of obedience to the law. Psychologically speaking, it is a graphic portrayal of that evil bias or radical perversion of the will which constitutes the very essence of sin. The clash of opposing impulses in the soul is objectified and seen as a conflict of the man himself with a power invading his life from without. The bitter strife seems like a grapple with a personal foe. Carry the personification a step further, and you have the form of thought in which men have always represented moral struggle-as a conflict with a personal

enemy, a black demon or wily Satan, as in Bunyan's description of the battle between Christian and Apollyon.

Paul's allusions to Adam and the fall are quite incidental. In writing of the resurrection he says: "As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Cor. xv, 22), and in his argument to show that the grace of God in Christ is more than a match for the power of sin he declares that as sin and death entered the world by the transgression of Adam, so righteousness and life have come to men through the work of the second Adam, Jesus Christ (Rom. v, 12, 19). He makes only this illustrative use of the fall narrative, and does not indicate how he conceives the relation of the first sin to all subsequent transgressions. It cannot, therefore, be maintained that any particular conjecture which we may make regarding the nature of this relation is essential to Paul's doctrine. Whether the sins of men in general be connected with the first sin by realistic identification, constructive imputation, heredity, or a figure of speech, each theory is powerless to prove itself Pauline. Some speculations on this subject are, indeed, more reasonable than others; some are more germane to Paul's thought-world than others; but the apostle has offered us no theory of “original sin."

Paul's allusions to Adam and the fall have for us rather an antiquarian than a practical interest. They do not seem to have affected the organism of his thought or to have determined the character of his doctrine of salvation. For the most part Paul treats sin practically and experimentally. Let us inquire what the essence of his working theory is. This we can best learn from his picture of the sinful world in the opening chapters of Romans. The principal forms or manifestations of sin which he there describes are as follows: a repression of the truth, a self-blinding, a refusal to follow the light which one has, a foolish pride, a selfsufficiency, base ingratitude and indifference to the knowledge of God, corrupt and selfish passions, such as cruelty and hate, and, perhaps worst of all, an assumed superiority and self-righteous contempt of others. Further on in the same epistle he associates sin with the flesh. Sin reigns in the body of the sinner and makes his members instruments of unrighteousness; it is a law in the