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, 1:361-361-"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 passions 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.

(6) 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 constitute 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 Napoleon, 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 secking of enjoyment, and the submission 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

66

men in France, he called for the boys, saying: A boy can stop a bullet as well as a man," and so the French nation lost two inches of stature. Before the battle of Leipzig, when there was prospect of unexampled slaughter, he exclaimed: "What are the lives of a million of men, to carry out the will of a man like me?" His most truthful epitaph was: "The little butchers of Ghent to Napoleon the Great" [butcher]. Heine represents Napoleon as saying to the world: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." Memoirs of Madame de Rémusat, 1:225-"At a fête given by the city of Paris to the Emperor, the repertory of inscriptions being exhausted, a brilliant device was resorted to. Over the throne which he was to occupy, were placed, in letters of gold, the following words from the Holy Scriptures: I am the I am.' And no one seemed to be scandalized." Iago, in Shakespeare's Othello, is the greatest villain of all literature; but Coleridge, Works, 4: 180, calls attention to his passionless character, His sin is, like that of Goethe and of Napoleon, sin not of the flesh but of the intellect and will.

(d) It leads to absurd conclusions,-as, for example, that asceticism, by weakening the power of sense, must weaken the power of sin; that man becomes less sinful as his senses fail with age; that disembodied spirits are necessarily holy; that death is the only Redeemer.

Asceticism only turns the current of sin in other directions. Spiritual pride and tyranny take the place of fleshly desires. The miser clutches his gold more closely as he nears death. Satan has no physical organism, yet he is the prince of evil. Not our own death, but Christ's death, saves us. But when Rousseau's Émile comes to die, he calmly declares: "I am delivered from the trammels of the body, and am myself without contradiction." At the age of seventy-five Goethe wrote to Eckermann: "I have ever been esteemed one of fortune's favorites, nor can I complain of the course my life has taken. Yet truly there has been nothing but care and toil, and I may say that I have never had four weeks of genuine pleasure." Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:743-"When the authoritative demand of Jesus Christ, to confess sin and beg remission through atoning blood, is made to David Hume, or David Strauss, or John Stuart Mill, none of whom were sensualists, it wakens intense mental hostility."

(e) It interprets Scripture erroneously. In passages like Rom. 7:18— οὐκ οἰκεῖ ἐν ἐμοί, τοῦτ' ἔστιν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου, ἀγαθόν — σάρξ, or flesh, signifies, not man's body, but man's whole being when destitute of the Spirit of God. The Scriptures distinctly recognize the seat of sin as being in the soul itself, not in its physical organism. God does not tempt man, nor has he made man's nature to tempt him (James 1:13, 14).

In the use of the term "flesh," Scripture puts a stigma upon sin, and intimates that human nature without God is as corruptible and perishable as the body would be without the soul to inhabit it. The "carnal mind," or "mind of the flesh "(Rom. 8:7), accordingly means, not the sensual mind, but the mind which is not under the control of the Holy Spirit, its true life. See Meyer, on 1 Cor. 1: 26 — σápέ—“the purely human element in man, as opposed to the divine principle"; Pope, Theology, 2:65–σáp§ = "the whole being of man, body, soul, and spirit, separated from God and subjected to the creature"; Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 19—σápέ—“human nature as living in and for itself, sundered from God and opposed to him." The earliest and best statement of this view of the term cap is that of Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:295-333, especially 321. See also Dickson, St. Paul's Use of the Terms Flesh and Spirit, 270-271 — σáp§➡ “human nature without the veμa . . . . man standing by himself, or left to himself, over against God. . . . the natural man, conceived as not having yet received grace, or as not yet wholly under its influence."

James 1:14, 15-"desire, when it hath conceived, beareth sin" innocent desire-for it comes in before the sin - innocent constitutional propensity, not yet of the nature of depravity, is only the occasion of sin. The love of freedom is a part of our nature; sin arises only when the will determines to indulge this impulse without regard to the restraints of the divine law. Luther, Preface to Ep. to Romans: "Thou must not understand 'flesh' as though that only were flesh' which is connected with unchastity. St. Paul uses 'flesh' of the whole man, body and soul, reason and all his faculties included, because all that is in him longs and strives after the 'flesh'." Melanchthon: "Note that 'flesh ' signifies the entire nature of man, sense and reason, without the Holy Spirit." Gould,

Bib. Theol. N. T., 76-"The σápέ of Paul corresponds to the κóσμos of John. Paul sees the divine economy; John the divine nature. That Paul did not hold sin to consist in the possession of a body appears from his doctrine of a bodily resurrection (1 Cor. 15:38-49). This resurrection of the body is an integral part of immortality." On σápέ, see Thayer, N. T. Lexicon, 571; Kaftan, Dogmatik, 319.

(f) Instead of explaining sin, this theory virtually denies its existence, - for if sin arises from the original constitution of our being, reason may recognize it as misfortune, but conscience cannot attribute to it guilt.

Sin which in its ultimate origin is a necessary thing is no longer sin. On the whole theory of the sensuous origin of sin, see Neander, Planting and Training, 386, 428; Ernesti, Ursprung der Sünde, 1:29-274; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:132-147; Tulloch, Doctrine of Sin, 144-"That which is an inherent and necessary power in the creation cannot be a contradiction of its highest law." This theory confounds sin with the mere consciousness of sin. On Schleiermacher, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:341-349. On the sense-theory of sin in general, see John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2: 26-52; N. R. Wood, The Witness of Sin, 79-87.

2. Sin as Finiteness.

This view explains sin as a necessary result of the limitations of man's finite being. As an incident of imperfect development, the fruit of ignorance and impotence, sin is not absolutely but only relatively evil-an element in human education and a means of progress. This is the view of Leibnitz and of Spinoza. Modern writers, as Schurman and Royce, have maintained that moral evil is the necessary background and condition of moral good.

The theory of Leibnitz may be found in his Théodicée, part 1, sections 20 and 31; that of Spinoza in his Ethics, part 4, proposition 20. Upon this view sin is the blundering of inexperience, the thoughtlessness that takes evil for good, the ignorance that puts its fingers into the fire, the stumbling without which one cannot learn to walk. It is a fruit which is sour and bitter simply because it is immature. It is a means of discipline and training for something better,—it is holiness in the germ, good in the making -"Erhebung des Menschen zur freien Vernunft." The Fall was a fall up, and not down. John Fiske, in addition to his sense-theory of sin already mentioned, seems to hold this theory also. In his Mystery of Evil, he says: "Its impress upon the human soul is the indispensable background against which shall be set hereafter the eternal joys of heaven"; in other words, sin is necessary to holiness, as darkness is the indispensable contrast and background to light; without black, we should never be able to know white. Schurman, Belief in God, 251 sq.-"The possibility of sin is the correlative of the free initiative God has vacated on man's behalf. . . . The essence of sin is the enthronement of self. . . . Yet, without such self-absorption, there could be no sense of union with God. For consciousness is possible only through opposition. To know A, we must know it through not-A. Alienation from God is the necessary condition of communion with God. And this is the meaning of the Scripture that 'where sin abounded, grace shall much more abound.'. . . . Modern culture protests against the Puritan enthronement of goodness above truth. . . . For the decalogue it would substitute the wider new commandment of Goethe: 'Live resolutely in the Whole, in the Good, in the Beautiful.' The highest religion can be content with nothing short of the synthesis demanded by Goethe. . . . God is the universal life in which individual activities are included as movements of a single organism."

...

Royce, World and Individual, 2 : 364-384-“Evil is a discord necessary to perfect harmony. In itself it is evil, but in relation to the whole it has value by showing us its own finiteness and imperfection. It is a sorrow to God as much as to us; indeed, all our sorrow is his sorrow. The evil serves the good only by being overcome, thwarted, overruled. Every evil deed must somewhere and at some time be atoned for, by some other than the agent, if not by the agent himself. . . . All finite life is a struggle with evil. Yet from the final point of view the Whole is good. The temporal order contains at no moment anything that can satisfy. Yet the eternal order is perfect. We have all sinned and come short of the glory of God. Yet in just our life, viewed in its

...