1. Natural likeness to God, or personality…

1. Natural likeness to God, or personality

Man was created a personal being, and was by this personality distinguished from the brute. By personality we mean the twofold power to know self as related to the world and to God, and to determine self in view of moral ends. By virtue of this personality, man could at his creation choose which of the objects of his knowledge—self, the world, or God—should be the norm and centre of his development. This natural likeness to God is inalienable, and as constituting a capacity for redemption gives value to the life even of the unregenerate (Gen. 9:6; 1 Cor. 11:7; James 3:9).

For definitions of personality, see notes on the Anthropological Argument, page 82; on Pantheism, pages 104, 105; on the Attributes, pages 252-254; and on the Person of Christ, in Part VI. Here we may content ourselves with the formula: Personality = self-consciousness + self-determination. Self-consciousness and self-determination, as distinguished from the consciousness and determination of the brute, involve all the higher mental and moral powers which constitute us men. Conscience is but a mode of their activity. Notice that the term “image” does not, in man, imply perfect representation. Only Christ is the “very image” of God (Heb. 1:3), the “image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15—on which see Lightfoot). Christ is the image of God absolutely and archetypally; man, only relatively and derivatively. But notice also that, since God is Spirit, man made in God’s image cannot be a material thing. By virtue of his possession of this first element of the image of God, namely, personality, materialism is excluded.

This first element of the divine image man can never lose until he ceases to be man. Even insanity can only obscure this natural image,—it cannot destroy it. St. Bernard well said that it could not be burned out, even in hell. The lost piece of money (Luke 15:8) still bore the image and superscription of the king, even though it did not know it, and did not even know that it was lost. Human nature is therefore to be reverenced, and he who destroys human life is to be put to death: Gen. 9:6—“for in the image of God made he man”; 1 Cor. 11:7—“a man indeed ought not to have his head veiled, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God”; James 3:9—even men whom we curse “are made after the likeness of God”; cf. Ps. 8:5—“thou hast made him but little lower than God”; 1 Pet. 2:17—“Honor all men.” In the being of every man are continents which no Columbus has ever yet discovered, depths of possible joy or sorrow which no plummet has ever yet sounded. A whole heaven, a whole hell, may lie within the compass of his single soul. If we could see the meanest real Christian as he will be in the great hereafter, we should bow before him as John bowed before the angel in the Apocalypse, for we should not be able to distinguish him from God (Rev. 22:8, 9).

Sir William Hamilton: “On earth there is nothing great but man; In man there is nothing great but mind.” We accept this dictum only if “mind” can be understood to include man’s moral powers together with the right direction of those powers. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2:2—“What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!” Pascal: “Man is greater than the universe; the universe may crush him, but it does not know that it crushes him.” Whiton, Gloria Patri, 94—“God is not only the Giver but the Sharer of my life. My natural powers are that part of God’s power which is lodged with me in trust to keep and use.” Man can be an instrument of God, without being an agent of God. “Each man has his place and value as a reflection of God and of Christ. Like a letter in a word, or a word in a sentence, he gets his meaning from his context; but the sentence is meaningless without him; rays from the whole universe converge in him.” John Howe’s Living Temple shows the greatness of human nature in its first construction and even in its ruin. Only a noble ship could make so great a wreck. Aristotle, Problem, sec. 30—“No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.” Seneca, De Tranquillitate Animi, 15—“There is no great genius without a tincture of madness.”

Kant: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end, and never as a means only.” If there is a divine element in every man, then we have no right to use a human being merely for our own pleasure or profit. In receiving him we receive Christ, and in receiving Christ we receive him who sent Christ (Mat. 10:40). Christ is the vine and all men are his natural branches, cutting themselves off only when they refuse to bear fruit, and condemning themselves to the burning only because they destroy, so far as they can destroy, God’s image in them, all that makes them worth preserving (John 15:1-6). Cicero: “Homo mortalis deus.” This possession of natural likeness to God, or personality, involves boundless possibilities of good or ill, and it constitutes the natural foundation of the love for man which is required of us by the law. Indeed it constitutes the reason why Christ should die. Man was worth redeeming. The woman whose ring slipped from her finger and fell into the heap of mud in the gutter, bared her white arm and thrust her hand into the slimy mass until she found her ring; but she would not have done this if the ring had not contained a costly diamond. The lost piece of money, the lost sheep, the lost son, were worth effort to seek and to save (Luke 15). But, on the other hand, it is folly when man, made in the image of God, “blinds himself with clay.” The man on shipboard, who playfully tossed up the diamond ring which contained his whole fortune, at last to his distress tossed it overboard. There is a “merchandise of souls” (Rev. 18:13) and we must not juggle with them.

Christ’s death for man, by showing the worth of humanity, has recreated ethics. “Plato defended infanticide as under certain circumstances permissible. Aristotle viewed slavery as founded in the nature of things. The reason assigned was the essential inferiority of nature on the part of the enslaved.” But the divine image in man makes these barbarities no longer possible to us. Christ sometimes looked upon men with anger, but he never looked upon them with contempt. He taught the woman, he blessed the child, he cleansed the leper, he raised the dead. His own death revealed the infinite worth of the meanest human soul, and taught us to count all men as brethren for whose salvation we may well lay down our lives. George Washington answered the salute of his slave. Abraham Lincoln took off his hat to a negro who gave him his blessing as he entered Richmond; but a lady who had been brought up under the old regime looked from a window upon the scene with unspeakable horror. Robert Burns, walking with a nobleman in Edinburgh, met an old townsfellow from Ayr and stopped to talk with him. The nobleman, kept waiting, grew restive, and afterward reproved Burns for talking to a man with so bad a coat. Burns replied: “I was not talking to the coat,—I was talking to the man.” Jean Ingelow: “The street and market place Grow holy ground: each face—Pale faces marked with care, Dark, toilworn brows—grows fair. King’s children are all these, though want and sin Have marred their beauty, glorious within. We may not pass them but with reverent eye.” See Porter, Human Intellect, 393, 394, 401; Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 2:42; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:343.

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2. Moral likeness to God, or holiness

In addition to the powers of self-consciousness and self-determination just mentioned, man was created with such a direction of the affections and the will, as constituted God the supreme end of man’s being, and constituted man a finite reflection of God’s moral attributes. Since holiness is the fundamental attribute of God, this must of necessity be the chief attribute of his image in the moral beings whom he creates. That original righteousness was essential to this image, is also distinctly taught in Scripture (Eccl. 7:29; Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10).

Besides the possession of natural powers, the image of God involves the possession of right moral tendencies. It is not enough to say that man was created in a state of innocence. The Scripture asserts that man had a righteousness like God’s: Eccl. 7:29—“God made man upright”; Eph. 4:24—“the new man, that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth”—here Meyer says: “κατὰ Θεόν, ‘after God,’ i. e., ad exemplum Dei, after the pattern of God (Gal. 4:28—κατὰ Ἰσαάκ, ‘after Isaac’ = as Isaac was). This phrase makes the creation of the new man a parallel to that of our first parents, who were created after God’s image; they too, before sin came into existence through Adam, were sinless—‘in righteousness and holiness of truth.’ ” On N. T. “truth” = rectitude, see Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:257-260.

Meyer refers also, as a parallel passage, to Col. 3:10—“the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created him.” Here the “knowledge” referred to is that knowledge of God which is the source of all virtue, and which is inseparable from holiness of heart. “Holiness has two sides or phases: (1) it is perception and knowledge; (2) it is inclination and feeling” (Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:97). On Eph. 4:24 and Col. 3:10, the classical passages with regard to man’s original state, see also the Commentaries of DeWette, Rückert, Ellicott, and compare Gen. 5:3—“And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image,” i. e., in his own sinful likeness, which is evidently contrasted with the “likeness of God” (verse 1) in which he himself had been created (An. Par. Bible). 2 Cor. 4:4—“Christ, who is the image of God”—where the phrase “image of God” is not simply the natural, but also the moral, image. Since Christ is the image of God primarily in his holiness, man’s creation in the image of God must have involved a holiness like Christ’s, so far as such holiness could belong to a being yet untried, that is, so far as respects man’s tastes and dispositions prior to moral action.

“Couldst thou in vision see Thyself the man God meant, Thou nevermore couldst be The man thou art—content.” Newly created man had right moral tendencies, as well as freedom from actual fault. Otherwise the communion with God described in Genesis would not have been possible. Goethe: “Unless the eye were sunlike, how could it see the sun?” Because a holy disposition accompanied man’s innocence, he was capable of obedience, and was guilty when he sinned. The loss of this moral likeness to God was the chief calamity of the Fall. Man is now “the glory and the scandal of the universe.” He has defaced the image of God in his nature, even though that image, in its natural aspect, is ineffaceable (E. H. Johnson).

The dignity of human nature consists, not so much in what man is, as in what God meant him to be, and in what God means him yet to become, when the lost image of God is restored by the union of man’s soul with Christ. Because of his future possibilities, the meanest of mankind is sacred. The great sin of the second table of the decalogue is the sin of despising our fellow man. To cherish contempt for others can have its root only in idolatry of self and rebellion against God. Abraham Lincoln said well that “God must have liked common people,—else he would not have made so many of them.” Regard for the image of God in man leads also to kind and reverent treatment even of those lower animals in which so many human characteristics are foreshadowed. Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 166—“The current philosophy says: The fittest will survive; let the rest die. The religion of Christ says: That maxim as applied to men is just, only as regards their characteristics, of which indeed only the fittest should survive. It does not and cannot apply to the men themselves, since all men, being children of God, are supremely fit. The very fact that a human being is sick, weak, poor, an outcast, and a vagabond, is the strongest possible appeal for effort toward his salvation. Let individuals look upon humanity from the point of view of Christ, and they will not be long in finding ways in which environment can be caused to work for righteousness.”

This original righteousness, in which the image of God chiefly consisted, is to be viewed:

(a) Not as constituting the substance or essence of human nature,—for in this case human nature would have ceased to exist as soon as man sinned.

Men every day change their tastes and loves, without changing the essence or substance of their being. When sin is called a “nature,” therefore (as by Shedd, in his Essay on “Sin a Nature, and that Nature Guilt”), it is only in the sense of being something inborn (natura, from nascor). Hereditary tastes may just as properly be denominated a “nature” as may the substance of one’s being. Moehler, the greatest modern Roman Catholic critic of Protestant doctrine, in his Symbolism, 58, 59, absurdly holds Luther to have taught that by the Fall man lost his essential nature, and that another essence was substituted in its room. Luther, however, is only rhetorical when he says: “It is the nature of man to sin; sin constitutes the essence of man; the nature of man since the Fall has become quite changed; original sin is that very thing which is born of father and mother; the clay out of which we are formed is damnable; the fœtus in the maternal womb is sin; man as born of his father and mother, together with his whole essence and nature, is not only a sinner but sin itself.”

(b) Nor as a gift from without, foreign to human nature, and added to it after man’s creation,—for man is said to have possessed the divine image by the fact of creation, and not by subsequent bestowal.

As men, since Adam, are born with a sinful nature, that is, with tendencies away from God, so Adam was created with a holy nature, that is, with tendencies toward God. Moehler says: “God cannot give a man actions.” We reply: “No, but God can give man dispositions; and he does this at the first creation, as well as at the new creation (regeneration).”

(c) But rather, as an original direction or tendency of man’s affections and will, still accompanied by the power of evil choice, and so, differing from the perfected holiness of the saints, as instinctive affection and child-like innocence differ from the holiness that has been developed and confirmed by experience of temptation.

Man’s original righteousness was not immutable or indefectible; there was still the possibility of sinning. Though the first man was fundamentally good, he still had the power of choosing evil. There was a bent of the affections and will toward God, but man was not yet confirmed in holiness. Man’s love for God was like the germinal filial affection in the child, not developed, yet sincere—“caritas puerilis, non virilis.”

(d) As a moral disposition, moreover, which was propagable to Adam’s descendants, if it continued, and which, though lost to him and to them, if Adam sinned, would still leave man possessed of a natural likeness to God which made him susceptible of God’s redeeming grace.

Hooker (Works, ed. Keble, 2:683) distinguishes between aptness and ableness. The latter, men have lost; the former, they retain,—else grace could not work in us, more than in the brutes. Hase: “Only enough likeness to God remained to remind man of what he had lost, and enable him to feel the hell of God’s forsaking.” The moral likeness to God can be restored, but only by God himself. God secures this to men by making “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, ... dawn upon them” (2 Cor. 4:4). Pusey made Ps. 72:6—“He will come down like rain upon the mown grass”—the image of a world hopelessly dead, but with a hidden capacity for receiving life. Dr. Daggett: “Man is a ‘son of the morning’ (Is. 14:12), fallen, yet arrested midway between heaven and hell, a prize between the powers of light and darkness.” See Edwards, Works, 2:19, 20, 381-390; Hopkins, Works, 1:162; Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:50-66; Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 14:11.

In the light of the preceding investigation, we may properly estimate two theories of man’s original state which claim to be more Scriptural and reasonable:

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A. The image of God as including only personality

This theory denies that any positive determination to virtue inhered originally in man’s nature, and regards man at the beginning as simply possessed of spiritual powers, perfectly adjusted to each other. This is the view of Schleiermacher, who is followed by Nitzsch, Julius Müller, and Hofmann.

For the view here combated, see Schleiermacher, Christl. Glaube, sec. 60; Nitzsch, System of Christian Doctrine, 201; Julius Müller, Doct. of Sin, 2:113-133, 350-357; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:287-291; Bib. Sac., 7:409-425. Julius Müller’s theory of the Fall in a preëxistent state makes it impossible for him to hold here that Adam was possessed of moral likeness to God. The origin of his view of the image of God renders it liable to suspicion. Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 113—“The original state of man was that of child-like innocence or morally indifferent naturalness, which had in itself indeed the possibility (Anlage) of ideal development, but in such a way that its realization could be reached only by struggle with its natural opposite. The image of God was already present in the original state, but only as the possibility (Anlage) of real likeness to God—the endowment of reason which belonged to human personality. The reality of a spirit like that of God has appeared first in the second Adam, and has become the principle of the kingdom of God.”

Raymond (Theology, 2:43, 132) is an American representative of the view that the image of God consists in mere personality: “The image of God in which man was created did not consist in an inclination and determination of the will to holiness.” This is maintained upon the ground that such a moral likeness to God would have rendered it impossible for man to fall,—to which we reply that Adam’s righteousness was not immutable, and the bias of his will toward God did not render it impossible for him to sin. Motives do not compel the will, and Adam at least had a certain power of contrary choice. E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 119-122, also maintains that the image of God signified only that personality which distinguished man from the brute. Christ, he says, carries forward human nature to a higher point, instead of merely restoring what is lost. “Very good” (Gen. 1:31) does not imply moral perfection,—this cannot be the result of creation, but only of discipline and will. Man’s original state was only one of untried innocence. Dr. Robinson is combating the view that the first man was at his creation possessed of a developed character. He distinguishes between character and the germs of character. These germs he grants that man possessed. And so he defines the image of God as a constitutional predisposition toward a course of right conduct. This is all the perfection which we claim for the first man. We hold that this predisposition toward the good can properly be called character, since it is the germ from which all holy action springs.

In addition to what has already been said in support of the opposite view, we may urge against this theory the following objections:

(a) It is contrary to analogy, in making man the author of his own holiness; our sinful condition is not the product of our individual wills, nor is our subsequent condition of holiness the product of anything but God’s regenerating power.

To hold that Adam was created undecided, would make man, as Philippi says, in the highest sense his own creator. But morally, as well as physically, man is God’s creature. In regeneration it is not sufficient for God to give power to decide for good; God must give new love also. If this be so in the new creation, God could give love in the first creation also. Holiness therefore is creatable. “Underived holiness is possible only in God; in its origin, it is given both to angels and men.” Therefore we pray: “Create in me a clean heart” (Ps. 51:10); “Incline my heart unto thy testimonies” (Ps. 119:36). See Edwards, Eff. Grace, sec. 43-51; Kaftan, Dogmatik, 290—“If Adam’s perfection was not a moral perfection, then his sin was no real moral corruption.” The animus of the theory we are combating seems to be an unwillingness to grant that man, either in his first creation or in his new creation, owes his holiness to God.

(b) The knowledge of God in which man was originally created logically presupposes a direction toward God of man’s affections and will, since only the holy heart can have any proper understanding of the God of holiness.

“Ubi caritas, ibi claritas.” Man’s heart was originally filled with divine love, and out of this came the knowledge of God. We know God only as we love him, and this love comes not from our own single volition. No one loves by command, because no one can give himself love. In Adam love was an inborn impulse, which he could affirm or deny. Compare 1 Cor. 8:3—“if any man loveth God, the same [God] is known by him”; 1 John 4:8—“He that loveth not knoweth not God.” See other Scripture references on pages 3, 4.

(c) A likeness to God in mere personality, such as Satan also possesses, comes far short of answering the demands of the Scripture, in which the ethical conception of the divine nature so overshadows the merely natural. The image of God must be, not simply ability to be like God, but actual likeness.

God could never create an intelligent being evenly balanced between good and evil—“on the razor’s edge”—“on the fence.” The preacher who took for his text “Adam, where art thou?” had for his first head: “It is every man’s business to be somewhere;” for his second: “Some of you are where you ought not to be;” and for his third: “Get where you ought to be, as soon as possible.” A simple capacity for good or evil is, as Augustine says, already sinful. A man who is neutral between good and evil is already a violator of that law, which requires likeness to God in the bent of his nature. Delitzsch, Bib. Psychol., 45-84—“Personality is only the basis of the divine image,—it is not the image itself.” Bledsoe says there can be no created virtue or viciousness. Whedon (On the Will, 388) objects to this, and says rather: “There can be no created moral desert, good or evil. Adam’s nature as created was pure and excellent, but there was nothing meritorious until he had freely and rightly exercised his will with full power to the contrary.” We add: There was nothing meritorious even then. For substance of these objections, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:346. Lessing said that the character of the Germans was to have no character. Goethe partook of this cosmopolitan characterlessness (Prof. Seely). Tennyson had Goethe in view when he wrote in The Palace of Art: “I sit apart, holding no form of creed, but contemplating all.” And Goethe is probably still alluded to in the words: “A glorious devil, large in heart and brain, That did love beauty only, Or if good, good only for its beauty”; see A. H. Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 331; Robert Browning, Christmas Eve: “The truth in God’s breast Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed: Though he is so bright, and we so dim, We are made in his image to witness him.”

B. The image of God as consisting simply in man’s natural capacity for religion.

This view, first elaborated by the scholastics, is the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. It distinguishes between the image and the likeness of God. The former (צלם—Gen. 1:26) alone belonged to man’s nature at its creation. The latter (דמות) was the product of his own acts of obedience. In order that this obedience might be made easier and the consequent likeness to God more sure, a third element was added—an element not belonging to man’s nature—namely, a supernatural gift of special grace, which acted as a curb upon the sensuous impulses, and brought them under the control of reason. Original righteousness was therefore not a natural endowment, but a joint product of man’s obedience and of God’s supernatural grace.

Roman Catholicism holds that the white paper of man’s soul received two impressions instead of one. Protestantism sees no reason why both impressions should not have been given at the beginning. Kaftan, in Am. Jour. Theology, 4:708, gives a good statement of the Roman Catholic view. It holds that the supreme good transcends the finite mind and its powers of comprehension. Even at the first it was beyond man’s created nature. The donum superadditum did not inwardly and personally belong to him. Now that he has lost it, he is entirely dependent on the church for truth and grace. He does not receive the truth because it is this and no other, but because the church tells him that it is the truth.

The Roman Catholic doctrine may be roughly and pictorially stated as follows: As created, man was morally naked, or devoid of positive righteousness (pura naturalia, or in puris naturalibus). By obedience he obtained as a reward from God (donum supernaturale, or superadditum) a suit of clothes or robe of righteousness to protect him, so that he became clothed (vestitus). This suit of clothes, however, was a sort of magic spell of which he could be divested. The adversary attacked him and stripped him of his suit. After his sin he was one despoiled (spoliatus). But his condition after differed from his condition before this attack, only as a stripped man differs from a naked man (spoliatus a nudo). He was now only in the same state in which he was created, with the single exception of the weakness he might feel as the result of losing his customary clothing. He could still earn himself another suit,—in fact, he could earn two or more, so as to sell, or give away, what he did not need for himself. The phrase in puris naturalibus describes the original state, as the phrase spoliatus a nudo describes the difference resulting from man’s sin.

Many of the considerations already adduced apply equally as arguments against this view. We may say, however, with reference to certain features peculiar to the theory:

(a) No such distinction can justly be drawn between the words צלם and דםות. The addition of the synonym simply strengthens the expression, and both together signify “the very image.”

(b) Whatever is denoted by either or both of these words was bestowed upon man in and by the fact of creation, and the additional hypothesis of a supernatural gift not originally belonging to man’s nature, but subsequently conferred, has no foundation either here or elsewhere in Scripture. Man is said to have been created in the image and likeness of God, not to have been afterwards endowed with either of them.

(c) The concreated opposition between sense and reason which this theory supposes is inconsistent with the Scripture declaration that the work of God’s hands “was very good” (Gen. 1:31), and transfers the blame of temptation and sin from man to God. To hold to a merely negative innocence, in which evil desire was only slumbering, is to make God author of sin by making him author of the constitution which rendered sin inevitable.

(d) This theory directly contradicts Scripture by making the effect of the first sin to have been a weakening but not a perversion of human nature, and the work of regeneration to be not a renewal of the affections but merely a strengthening of the natural powers. The theory regards that first sin as simply despoiling man of a special gift of grace and as putting him where he was when first created—still able to obey God and to coöperate with God for his own salvation,—whereas the Scripture represents man since the fall as “dead through ... trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1), as incapable of true obedience (Rom. 8:7—“not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can it be”), and as needing to be “created in Christ Jesus for good works” (Eph. 2:10).

At few points in Christian doctrine do we see more clearly than here the large results of error which may ultimately spring from what might at first sight seem to be only a slight divergence from the truth. Augustine had rightly taught that in Adam the posse non peccare was accompanied by a posse peccare, and that for this reason man’s holy disposition needed the help of divine grace to preserve its integrity. But the scholastics wrongly added that this original disposition to righteousness was not the outflow of man’s nature as originally created, but was the gift of grace. As this later teaching, however, was by some disputed, the Council of Trent (sess. 5, cap. 1) left the matter more indefinite, simply declaring man: “Sanctitatem et justitiam in qua constitutus fuerat, amisisse.” The Roman Catechism, however (1:2:19), explained the phrase “constitutus fuerat” by the words: “Tum originalis justitiæ admirabile donum addidit.” And Bellarmine (De Gratia, 2) says plainly: “Imago, quæ est ipsa natura mentis et voluntatis, a solo Deo fieri potuit; similitudo autem, quæ in virtute et probitate consistit, a nobis quoque Deo adjuvante perficitur.”... (5) “Integritas illa ... non fuit naturalis ejus conditio, sed supernaturalis evectio.... Addidisse homini donum quoddam insigne, justitiam videlicet originalem, qua veluti aureo quodam fræno pars inferior parti superiori subjecta contineretur.”

Moehler (Symbolism, 21-35) holds that the religious faculty—the “image of God”; the pious exertion of this faculty—the “likeness of God.” He seems to favor the view that Adam received “this supernatural gift of a holy and blessed communion with God at a later period than his creation, i. e., only when he had prepared himself for its reception and by his own efforts had rendered himself worthy of it.” He was created “just” and acceptable to God, even without communion with God or help from God. He became “holy” and enjoyed communion with God, only when God rewarded his obedience and bestowed the supernaturale donum. Although Moehler favors this view and claims that it is permitted by the standards, he also says that it is not definitely taught. The quotations from Bellarmine and the Roman Catechism above make it clear that it is the prevailing doctrine of the Roman Catholic church.

So, to quote the words of Shedd, “the Tridentine theology starts with Pelagianism and ends with Augustinianism. Created without character, God subsequently endows man with character.... The Papal idea of creation differs from the Augustinian in that it involves imperfection. There is a disease and languor which require a subsequent and supernatural act to remedy.” The Augustinian and Protestant conception of man’s original state is far nobler than this. The ethical element is not a later addition, but is man’s true nature—essential to God’s idea of him. The normal and original condition of man (pura naturalia) is one of grace and of the Spirit’s indwelling—hence, of direction toward God.

From this original difference between Roman Catholic and Protestant doctrine with regard to man’s original state result diverging views as to sin and as to regeneration. The Protestant holds that, as man was possessed by creation of moral likeness to God, or holiness, so his sin robbed his nature of its integrity, deprived it of essential and concreated advantages and powers, and substituted for these a positive corruption and tendency to evil. Unpremeditated evil desire, or concupiscence, is original sin; as concreated love for God constituted man’s original righteousness. No man since the fall has original righteousness, and it is man’s sin that he has it not. Since without love to God no act, emotion, or thought of man can answer the demands of God’s law, the Scripture denies to fallen man all power of himself to know, think, feel, or do aright. His nature therefore needs a new-creation, a resurrection from death, such as God only, by his mighty Spirit, can work; and to this work of God man can contribute nothing, except as power is first given him by God himself.

According to the Roman Catholic view, however, since the image of God in which man was created included only man’s religious faculty, his sin can rob him only of what became subsequently and adventitiously his. Fallen man differs from unfallen only as spoliatus a nudo. He loses only a sort of magic spell, which leaves him still in possession of all his essential powers. Unpremeditated evil desire, or concupiscence, is not sin; for this belonged to his nature even before he fell. His sin has therefore only put him back into the natural state of conflict and concupiscence, ordered by God in the concreated opposition of sense and reason. The sole qualification is this, that, having made an evil decision, his will is weakened. “Man does not need resurrection from death, but rather a crutch to help his lameness, a tonic to reinforce his feebleness, a medicine to cure his sickness.” He is still able to turn to God; and in regeneration the Holy Spirit simply awakens and strengthens the natural ability slumbering in the natural man. But even here, man must yield to the influence of the Holy Spirit; and regeneration is effected by uniting his power to the divine. In baptism the guilt of original sin is remitted, and everything called sin is taken away. No baptized person has any further process of regeneration to undergo. Man has not only strength to coöperate with God for his own salvation, but he may even go beyond the demands of the law and perform works of supererogation. And the whole sacramental system of the Roman Catholic Church, with its salvation by works, its purgatorial fires, and its invocation of the saints, connects itself logically with this erroneous theory of man’s original state.

See Dorner’s Augustinus, 116; Perrone, Prælectiones Theologicæ, 1:737-748; Winer, Confessions, 79, 80; Dorner, History Protestant Theology, 38, 39, and Glaubenslehre, 1:51; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 376; Cunningham, Historical Theology, 1:516-586; Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:140-149.

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II. Incidents of Man’s Original State

1. Results of man’s possession of the divine image.

(a) Reflection of this divine image in man’s physical form.—Even in man’s body were typified those higher attributes which chiefly constituted his likeness to God. A gross perversion of this truth, however, is the view which holds, upon the ground of Gen. 2:7, and 3:8, that the image of God consists in bodily resemblance to the Creator. In the first of these passages, it is not the divine image, but the body, that is formed of dust, and into this body the soul that possesses the divine image is breathed. The second of these passages is to be interpreted by those other portions of the Pentateuch in which God is represented as free from all limitations of matter (Gen. 11:5; 18:15).

The spirit presents the divine image immediately: the body, mediately. The scholastics called the soul the image of God proprie; the body they called the image of God significative. Soul is the direct reflection of God; body is the reflection of that reflection. The os sublime manifests the dignity of the endowments within. Hence the word “upright,” as applied to moral condition; one of the first impulses of the renewed man is to physical purity. Compare Ovid, Metaph., bk. 1, Dryden’s transl.: “Thus while the mute creation downward bend Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend, Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes Beholds his own hereditary skies.” (Ἄνθρωπος, from ἀνά, ἄνω, suffix tra, and ὢψ, with reference to the upright posture.) Milton speaks of “the human face divine.” S. S. Times, July 28, 1900—“Man is the only erect being among living creatures. He alone looks up naturally and without effort. He foregoes his birthright when he looks only at what is on a level with his eyes and occupies himself only with what lies in the plane of his own existence.”

Bretschneider (Dogmatik, 1:682) regards the Scripture as teaching that the image of God consists in bodily resemblance to the Creator, but considers this as only the imperfect method of representation belonging to an early age. So Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:687. They refer to Gen. 2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground”; 3:8—“Jehovah God walking in the garden.” But see Gen. 11:5—“And Jehovah came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded”; Is. 66:1—“Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool”; 1 K. 8:27—“behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee.” On the Anthropomorphites, see Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 1:103, 308, 491. For answers to Bretschneider and Strauss, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:364.

(b) Subjection of the sensuous impulses to the control of the spirit.—Here we are to hold a middle ground between two extremes. On the one hand, the first man possessed a body and a spirit so fitted to each other that no conflict was felt between their several claims. On the other hand, this physical perfection was not final and absolute, but relative and provisional. There was still room for progress to a higher state of being (Gen. 3:22).

Sir Henry Watton’s Happy Life: “That man was free from servile bands Of hope to rise or fear to fall, Lord of himself if not of lands, And having nothing yet had all.” Here we hold to the æquale temperamentum. There was no disease, but rather the joy of abounding health. Labor was only a happy activity. God’s infinite creatorship and fountainhead of being was typified in man’s powers of generation. But there was no concreated opposition of sense and reason, nor an imperfect physical nature with whose impulses reason was at war. With this moderate Scriptural doctrine, contrast the exaggerations of the Fathers and of the scholastics. Augustine says that Adam’s reason was to ours what the bird’s is to that of the tortoise; propagation in the unfallen state would have been without concupiscence, and the new-born child would have attained perfection at birth. Albertus Magnus thought the first man would have felt no pain, even though he had been stoned with heavy stones. Scotus Erigena held that the male and female elements were yet undistinguished. Others called sexuality the first sin. Jacob Boehme regarded the intestinal canal, and all connected with it, as the consequence of the Fall; he had the fancy that the earth was transparent at the first and cast no shadow,—sin, he thought, had made it opaque and dark; redemption would restore it to its first estate and make night a thing of the past. South, Sermons, 1:24, 25—“Man came into the world a philosopher.... Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam.” Lyman Abbott tells us of a minister who assured his congregation that Adam was acquainted with the telephone. But God educates his children, as chemists educate their pupils, by putting them into the laboratory and letting them work. Scripture does not represent Adam as a walking encyclopædia, but as a being yet inexperienced; see Gen. 3:22—“Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil”; 1 Cor. 15:46—“that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is spiritual.” On this last text, see Expositor’s Greek Testament.

(c) Dominion over the lower creation.—Adam possessed an insight into nature analogous to that of susceptible childhood, and therefore was able to name and to rule the brute creation (Gen. 2:19). Yet this native insight was capable of development into the higher knowledge of culture and science. From Gen. 1:26 (cf. Ps. 8:5-8), it has been erroneously inferred that the image of God in man consists in dominion over the brute creation and the natural world. But, in this verse, the words “let them have dominion” do not define the image of God, but indicate the result of possessing that image. To make the image of God consist in this dominion, would imply that only the divine omnipotence was shadowed forth in man.

Gen. 2:19—“Jehovah God formed every beast of the field, and every bird of the heavens; and brought them unto the man to see what he would call them”; 20—“And the man gave names to all cattle”; Gen. 1:26—“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle”; cf. Ps. 8:5-8—“thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor. Thou makest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, Yea, and the beasts of the field.” Adam’s naming the animals implied insight into their nature; see Porter, Hum. Intellect, 393, 394, 401. On man’s original dominion over (1) self, (2) nature, (3) fellow-man, see Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 105.

Courage and a good conscience have a power over the brute creation, and unfallen man can well be supposed to have dominated creatures which had no experience of human cruelty. Rarey tamed the wildest horses by his steadfast and fearless eye. In Paris a young woman was hypnotized and put into a den of lions. She had no fear of the lions and the lions paid not the slightest attention to her. The little daughter of an English officer in South Africa wandered away from camp and spent the night among lions. “Katrina,” her father said when he found her, “were you not afraid to be alone here?” “No, papa,” she replied, “the big dogs played with me and one of them lay here and kept me warm.” MacLaren, in S. S. Times, Dec. 23, 1893—“The dominion over all creatures results from likeness to God. It is not then a mere right to use them for one’s own material advantage, but a viceroy’s authority, which the holder is bound to employ for the honor of the true King.” This principle gives the warrant and the limit to vivisection and to the killing of the lower animals for food (Gen. 9:2, 3.).

Socinian writers generally hold the view that the image of God consisted simply in this dominion. Holding a low view of the nature of sin, they are naturally disinclined to believe that the fall has wrought any profound change in human nature. See their view stated in the Racovian Catechism, 21. It is held also by the Arminian Limborch, Theol. Christ., ii, 24:2, 3, 11. Upon the basis of this interpretation of Scripture, the Encratites held, with Peter Martyr, that women do not possess the divine image at all.

(d) Communion with God.—Our first parents enjoyed the divine presence and teaching (Gen. 2:16). It would seem that God manifested himself to them in visible form (Gen. 3:8). This companionship was both in kind and degree suited to their spiritual capacity, and by no means necessarily involved that perfected vision of God which is possible to beings of confirmed and unchangeable holiness (Mat. 5:8; 1 John 3:2).

Gen. 2:16—“And Jehovah God commanded the man”; 3:8—“And they heard the voice of Jehovah God walking in the garden in the cool of the day”; Mat. 5:8—“Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God”; 1 John 3:2—“We know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is”; Rev. 22:4—“and they shall see his his face.”

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2. Concomitants of man’s possession of the divine image

(a) Surroundings and society fitted to yield happiness and to assist a holy development of human nature (Eden and Eve). We append some recent theories with regard to the creation of Eve and the nature of Eden.

Eden—pleasure, delight. Tennyson: “When high in Paradise By the four rivers the first roses blew.” Streams were necessary to the very existence of an oriental garden. Hopkins, Script. Idea of Man, 107—“Man includes woman. Creation of a man without a woman would not have been the creation of man. Adam called her name Eve but God called their name Adam.” Mat. Henry: “Not out of his head to top him, nor out of his feet to be trampled on by him; but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected by him, and near his heart to be beloved.” Robert Burns says of nature: “Her ’prentice hand she tried on man, And then she made the lasses, O!” Stevens, Pauline Theology, 329—“In the natural relations of the sexes there is a certain reciprocal dependence, since it is not only true that woman was made from man, but that man is born of woman (1 Cor. 11:11, 12).” Of the Elgin marbles Boswell asked: “Don’t you think them indecent?” Dr. Johnson replied: “No, sir; but your question is.” Man, who in the adult state possesses twelve pairs of ribs, is found in the embryonic state to have thirteen or fourteen. Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolution, 148—“Why does not the male man lack one rib? Because only the individual skeleton of Adam was affected by the taking of the rib.... The unfinished vertebral arches of the skin-fibrous layer may have produced a new individual by a process of budding or gemmation.”

H. H. Bawden suggests that the account of Eve’s creation may be the “pictorial summary” of an actual phylogenetic evolutionary process by which the sexes were separated or isolated from a common hermaphroditic ancestor or ancestry. The mesodermic portion of the organism in which the urinogenital system has its origin develops later than the ectodermic or the endodermic portions. The word “rib” may designate this mesodermic portion. Bayard Taylor, John Godfrey’s Fortunes, 392, suggests that a genius is hermaphroditic, adding a male element to the woman, and a female element to the man. Professor Loeb, Am. Journ. Physiology, Vol. III, no. 3, has found that in certain chemical solutions prepared in the laboratory, approximately the concentration of sea-water, the unfertilized eggs of the sea-urchin will mature without the intervention of the spermatozoön. Perfect embryos and normal individuals are produced under these conditions. He thinks it probable that similar parthenogenesis may be produced in higher types of being. In 1900 he achieved successful results on Annelids, though it is doubtful whether he produced anything more than normal larvæ. These results have been criticized by a European investigator who is also a Roman priest. Prof. Loeb wrote a rejoinder in which he expressed surprise that a representative of the Roman church did not heartily endorse his conclusions, since they afford a vindication of the doctrine of the immaculate conception.

H. H. Bawden has reviewed Prof. Loeb’s work in the Psychological Review, Jan. 1900. Janósik has found segmentation in the unfertilized eggs of mammalians. Prof. Loeb considers it possible that only the ions of the blood prevent the parthenogenetic origin of embryos in mammals, and thinks it not improbable that by a transitory change in these ions it will be possible to produce complete parthenogenesis in these higher types. Dr. Bawden goes on to say that “both parent and child are dependent upon a common source of energy. The universe is one great organism, and there is no inorganic or non-organic matter, but differences only in degrees of organization. Sex is designed only secondarily for the perpetuation of species; primarily it is the bond or medium for the connection and interaction of the various parts of this great organism, for maintaining that degree of heterogeneity which is the prerequisite of a high degree of organization. By means of the growth of a lifetime I have become an essential part in a great organic system. What I call my individual personality represents simply the focusing, the flowering of the universe at one finite concrete point or centre. Must not then my personality continue as long as that universal system continues? And is immortality conceivable if the soul is something shut up within itself, unshareable and unique? Are not the many foci mutually interdependent, instead of mutually exclusive? We must not then conceive of an immortality which means the continued existence of an individual cut off from that social context which is really essential to his very nature.”

J. H. Richardson suggests in the Standard, Sept. 10, 1901, that the first chapter of Genesis describes the creation of the spiritual part of man only—that part which was made in the image of God—while the second chapter describes the creation of man’s body, the animal part, which may have been originated by a process of evolution. S. W. Howland, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1903:121-128, supposes Adam and Eve to have been twins, joined by the ensiform cartilage or breast-bone, as were the Siamese Chang and Eng. By violence or accident this cartilage was broken before it hardened into bone, and the two were separated until puberty. Then Adam saw Eve coming to him with a bone projecting from her side corresponding to the hollow in his own side, and said: “She is bone of my bone; she must have been taken from my side when I slept.” This tradition was handed down to his posterity. The Jews have a tradition that Adam was created double-sexed, and that the two sexes were afterwards separated. The Hindus say that man was at first of both sexes and divided himself in order to people the earth. In the Zodiac of Dendera, Castor and Pollux appear as man and woman, and these twins, some say, were called Adam and Eve. The Coptic name for this sign is Pi Mahi, “the United.” Darwin, in the postscript to a letter to Lyell, written as early as July, 1850, tells his friend that he has “a pleasant genealogy for mankind,” and describes our remotest ancestor as “an animal which breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull, and was undoubtedly a hermaphrodite.”

Matthew Arnold speaks of “the freshness of the early world.” Novalis says that “all philosophy begins in homesickness.” Shelley, Skylark: “We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those That tell of saddest thought.”—“The golden conception of a Paradise is the poet’s guiding thought.” There is a universal feeling that we are not now in our natural state; that we are far away from home; that we are exiles from our true habitation. Keble, Groans of Nature: “Such thoughts, the wreck of Paradise, Through many a dreary age, Upbore whate’er of good or wise Yet lived in bard or sage.” Poetry and music echo the longing for some possession lost. Jessica in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice: “I am never merry when I hear sweet music.” All true poetry is forward-looking or backward-looking prophecy, as sculpture sets before us the original or the resurrection body. See Isaac Taylor, Hebrew Poetry, 94-101; Tyler, Theol. of Greek Poets, 225, 226.

Wellhausen, on the legend of a golden age, says: “It is the yearning song which goes through all the peoples: having attained the historical civilization, they feel the worth of the goods which they have sacrificed for it.” He regards the golden age as only an ideal image, like the millennial kingdom at the end. Man differs from the beast in this power to form ideals. His destination to God shows his descent from God. Hegel in a similar manner claimed that the Paradisaic condition is only an ideal conception underlying human development. But may not the traditions of the gardens of Brahma and of the Hesperides embody the world’s recollection of an historical fact, when man was free from external evil and possessed all that could minister to innocent joy? The “golden age” of the heathen was connected with the hope of restoration. So the use of the doctrine of man’s original state is to convince men of the high ideal once realized, properly belonging to man, now lost, and recoverable, not by man’s own powers, but only through God’s provision in Christ. For references in classic writers to a golden age, see Luthardt, Compendium, 115. He mentions the following: Hesiod, Works and Days, 109-208; Aratus, Phenom., 100-184; Plato, Tim., 233; Vergil, Ec., 4, Georgics, 1:135, Æneid, 8:314.

(b) Provisions for the trying of man’s virtue.—Since man was not yet in a state of confirmed holiness, but rather of simple childlike innocence, he could be made perfect only through temptation. Hence the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2:9). The one slight command best tested the spirit of obedience. Temptation did not necessitate a fall, If resisted, it would strengthen virtue. In that case, the posse non peccare would have become the non posse peccare.

Thomasius: “That evil is a necessary transition-point to good, is Satan’s doctrine and philosophy.” The tree was mainly a tree of probation. It is right for a father to make his son’s title to his estate depend upon the performance of some filial duty, as Thaddeus Stevens made his son’s possession of property conditional upon his keeping the temperance-pledge. Whether, besides this, the tree of knowledge was naturally hurtful or poisonous, we do not know.

(c) Opportunity of securing physical immortality.—The body of the first man was in itself mortal (1 Cor. 15:45). Science shows that physical life involves decay and loss. But means were apparently provided for checking this decay and preserving the body’s youth. This means was the “tree of life” (Gen. 2:9). If Adam had maintained his integrity, the body might have been developed and transfigured, without intervention of death. In other words, the posse non mori might have become a non posse mori.

The tree of life was symbolic of communion with God and of man’s dependence upon him. But this, only because it had a physical efficacy. It was sacramental and memorial to the soul, because it sustained the life of the body. Natural immortality without holiness would have been unending misery. Sinful man was therefore shut out from the tree of life, till he could be prepared for it by God’s righteousness. Redemption and resurrection not only restore that which was lost, but give what man was originally created to attain: 1 Cor. 15:45—“The first man Adam became a living soul. The last man Adam became a life-giving spirit”; Rev. 22:14—“Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they may have the right to come to the tree of life.”

The conclusions we have thus reached with regard to the incidents of man’s original state are combated upon two distinct grounds:

1st. The facts bearing upon man’s prehistoric condition point to a development from primitive savagery to civilization. Among these facts may be mentioned the succession of implements and weapons from stone to bronze and iron; the polyandry and communal marriage systems of the lowest tribes; the relics of barbarous customs still prevailing among the most civilized.

For the theory of an originally savage condition of man, see Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, and Origin of Civilization: “The primitive condition of mankind was one of utter barbarism”; but especially L. H. Morgan, Ancient Society, who divides human progress into three great periods, the savage, the barbarian, and the civilized. Each of the two former has three states, as follows: I. Savage: 1. Lowest state, marked by attainment of speech and subsistence upon roots. 2. Middle state, marked by fish-food and fire. 3. Upper state, marked by use of the bow and hunting. II. Barbarian: 1. Lower state, marked by invention and use of pottery. 2. Middle state, marked by use of domestic animals, maize, and building stone. 3. Upper state, marked by invention and use of iron tools. III. Civilized man next appears, with the introduction of the phonetic alphabet and writing. J. S. Stuart-Glennie, Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1892:844, defines civilization as “enforced social organization, with written records, and hence intellectual development and social progress.”

With regard to this view we remark:

(a) It is based upon an insufficient induction of facts.—History shows a law of degeneration supplementing and often counteracting the tendency to development. In the earliest times of which we have any record, we find nations in a high state of civilization; but in the case of every nation whose history runs back of the Christian era—as for example, the Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians—the subsequent progress has been downward, and no nation is known to have recovered from barbarism except as the result of influence from without.

Lubbock seems to admit that cannibalism was not primeval; yet he shows a general tendency to take every brutal custom as a sample of man’s first state. And this, in spite of the fact that many such customs have been the result of corruption. Bride-catching, for example, could not possibly have been primeval, in the strict sense of that term. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:48, presents a far more moderate view. He favors a theory of development, but with degeneration “as a secondary action largely and deeply affecting the development of civilization.” So the Duke of Argyll, Unity of Nature: “Civilization and savagery are both the results of evolutionary development; but the one is a development in the upward, the latter in the downward direction; and for this reason, neither civilization nor savagery can rationally be looked upon as the primitive condition of man.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:467—“As plausible an argument might be constructed out of the deterioration and degradation of some of the human family to prove that man may have evolved downward into an anthropoid ape, as that which has been constructed to prove that he has been evolved upward from one.”

Modern nations fall far short of the old Greek perception and expression of beauty. Modern Egyptians, Bushmen, Australians, are unquestionably degenerate races. See Lankester, Degeneration. The same is true of Italians and Spaniards, as well as of Turks. Abyssinians are now polygamists, though their ancestors were Christians and monogamists. The physical degeneration of portions of the population of Ireland is well known. See Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 146-160, who applies to the savage-theory the tests of language, morals, and religion, and who quotes Herbert Spencer as saying: “Probably most of them [savages], if not all of them, had ancestors in higher states, and among their beliefs remain some which were evolved during those higher states.... It is quite possible, and I believe highly probable, that retrogression has been as frequent as progression.” Spencer, however, denies that savagery is always caused by lapse from civilization.

Bib. Sac., 6:715; 29:282—“Man as a moral being does not tend to rise but to fall, and that with a geometric progress, except he be elevated and sustained by some force from without and above himself. While man once civilized may advance, yet moral ideas are apparently never developed from within.” Had savagery been man’s primitive condition, he never could have emerged. See Whately, Origin of Civilization, who maintains that man needed not only a divine Creator, but a divine Instructor. Seelye, Introd. to A Century of Dishonor, 3—“The first missionaries to the Indians in Canada took with them skilled laborers to teach the savages how to till their fields, to provide them with comfortable homes, clothing, and food. But the Indians preferred their wigwams, skins, raw flesh, and filth. Only as Christian influences taught the Indian his inner need, and how this was to be supplied, was he led to wish and work for the improvement of his outward condition and habits. Civilization does not reproduce itself. It must first be kindled, and it can then be kept alive only by a power genuinely Christian.” So Wallace, in Nature, Sept. 7, 1876, vol. 14:408-412.

Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 149-168, shows that evolution does not necessarily involve development as regards particular races. There is degeneration in all the organic orders. As regards man, he may be evolving in some directions, while in others he has degenerated. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 245, speaks of “Prof. Clifford as pointing to the history of human progress and declaring that mankind is a risen and not a fallen race. There is no real contradiction between these two views. God has not let man go because man has rebelled against him. Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” The humanity which was created in Christ and which is upheld by his power has ever received reinforcements of its physical and mental life, in spite of its moral and spiritual deterioration. “Some shrimps, by the adjustment of their bodily parts, go onward to the higher structure of the lobsters and crabs; while others, taking up the habit of dwelling in the gills of fishes, sink downward into a state closely resembling that of the worms.” Drummond, Ascent of Man: “When a boy’s kite comes down in our garden, we do not hold that it originally came from the clouds. So nations went up, before they came down. There is a national gravitation. The stick age preceded the stone age, but has been lost.” Tennyson: “Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good, And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.” Evolution often becomes devolution, if not devilution. A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 104—“The Jordan is the fitting symbol of our natural life, rising in a lofty elevation, and from pure springs, but plunging steadily down till it pours itself into that Dead Sea from which there is no outlet.”

(b) Later investigations have rendered it probable that the stone age of some localities was contemporaneous with the bronze and iron ages of others, while certain tribes and nations, instead of making progress from one to the other, were never, so far back as we can trace them, without the knowledge and use of the metals. It is to be observed, moreover, that even without such knowledge and use man is not necessarily a barbarian, though he may be a child.

On the question whether the arts of civilization can be lost, see Arthur Mitchell, Past in the Present, 219: Rude art is often the debasement of a higher, instead of being the earlier; the rudest art in a nation may coëxist with the highest; cave-life may accompany high civilization. Illustrations from modern Scotland, where burial of a cock for epilepsy, and sacrifice of a bull, were until very recently extant. Certain arts have unquestionably been lost, as glass-making and iron-working in Assyria (see Mivart, referred to above). The most ancient men do not appear to have been inferior to the latest, either physically or intellectually. Rawlinson: “The explorers who have dug deep into the Mesopotamian mounds, and have ransacked the tombs of Egypt, have come upon no certain traces of savage man in those regions which a wide-spread tradition makes the cradle of the human race.” The Tyrolese peasants show that a rude people may be moral, and a very simple people may be highly intelligent. See Southall, Recent Origin of Man, 386-449; Schliemann, Troy and her Remains, 274.

Mason, Origins of Invention, 110, 124, 128—“There is no evidence that a stone age ever existed in some regions. In Africa, Canada, and perhaps Michigan, the metal age was as old as the stone age.” An illustration of the mathematical powers of the savage is given by Rev. A. E. Hunt in an account of the native arithmetic of Murray Islands, Torres Straits. “Netat” (one) and “neis” (two) are the only numerals, higher numbers being described by combinations of these, as “neis-netat” for three, “neis-i-neis” for four, etc., or by reference to one of the fingers, elbows or other parts of the body. A total of thirty-one could be counted by the latter method. Beyond this all numbers were “many,” as this was the limit reached in counting before the introduction of English numerals, now in general use in the islands.

Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 171—“It is commonly supposed that the direction of the movement [in the variation of species] is ever upward. The fact is on the contrary that in a large number of cases, perhaps in the aggregate in more than half, the change gives rise to a form which, by all the canons by which we determine relative rank, is to be regarded as regressive or degradational.... Species, genera, families, and orders have all, like the individuals of which they are composed, a period of decay in which the gain won by infinite toil and pains is altogether lost in the old age of the group.” Shaler goes on to say that in the matter of variation successes are to failures as 1 to 100,000, and if man be counted the solitary distinguished success, then the proportion is something like 1 to 100,000,000. No species that passes away is ever reinstated. If man were now to disappear, there is no reason to believe that by any process of change a similar creature would be evolved, however long the animal kingdom continued to exist. The use of these successive chances to produce man is inexplicable except upon the hypothesis of an infinite designing Wisdom.

(c) The barbarous customs to which this view looks for support may better be explained as marks of broken-down civilization than as relics of a primitive and universal savagery. Even if they indicated a former state of barbarism, that state might have been itself preceded by a condition of comparative culture.

Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Rev. Sept., 1882:194—“There is no cruel treatment of females among animals. If man came from the lower animals, then he cannot have been originally savage; for you find the most of this cruel treatment among savages.” Tylor instances “street Arabs.” He compares street Arabs to a ruined house, but savage tribes to a builder’s yard. See Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, 129, 133; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 223; McLennan, Studies in Ancient History. Gulick, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:517—“Cannibalism and infanticide are unknown among the anthropoid apes. These must be the results of degradation. Pirates and slavetraders are not men of low and abortive intelligence, but men of education who deliberately throw off all restraint, and who use their powers for the destruction of society.”

Keane, Man, Past and Present, 40, quotes Sir H. H. Johnston, an administrator who has had a wider experience of the natives of Africa than any man living, as saying that “the tendency of the negro for several centuries past has been an actual retrograde one—return toward the savage and even the brute. If he had been cut off from the immigration of the Arab and the European, the purely Negroid races, left to themselves, so far from advancing towards a higher type of humanity, might have actually reverted by degrees to a type no longer human.” Ratzel’s History of Mankind: “We assign no great antiquity to Polynesian civilization. In New Zealand it is a matter of only some centuries back. In newly occupied territories, the development of the population began upon a higher level and then fell off. The Maoris’ decadence resulted in the rapid impoverishment of culture, and the character of the people became more savage and cruel. Captain Cook found objects of art worshiped by the descendants of those who produced them.”

Recent researches have entirely discredited L. H. Morgan’s theory of an original brutal promiscuity of the human race. Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel, 6, note—“The theory of an original promiscuity is rendered extremely doubtful by the habits of many of the higher animals.” E. B. Tylor, in 19th Century, July, 1906—“A sort of family life, lasting for the sake of the young, beyond a single pairing season, exists among the higher manlike apes. The male gorilla keeps watch and ward over his progeny. He is the antetype of the house-father. The matriarchal system is a later device for political reasons, to bind together in peace and alliance tribes that would otherwise be hostile. But it is an artificial system introduced as a substitute for and in opposition to the natural paternal system. When the social pressure is removed, the maternalized husband emancipates himself, and paternalism begins.” Westermarck, History of Human Marriage: “Marriage and the family are thus intimately connected with one another; it is for the benefit of the young that male and female continue to live together. Marriage is therefore rooted in the family, rather than the family in marriage.... There is not a shred of genuine evidence for the notion that promiscuity ever formed a general stage in the social history of mankind. The hypothesis of promiscuity, instead of belonging to the class of hypotheses which are scientifically permissible, has no real foundation, and is essentially unscientific.” Howard, History of Matrimonial Institutions: “Marriage or pairing between one man and one woman, though the union be often transitory and the rule often violated, is the typical form of sexual union from the infancy of the human race.”

(d) The well-nigh universal tradition of a golden age of virtue and happiness may be most easily explained upon the Scripture view of an actual creation of the race in holiness and its subsequent apostasy.

For references in classic writers to a golden age, see Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 115; Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:205—“In Hesiod we have the legend of a golden age under the lordship of Chronos, when man was free from cares and toils, in untroubled youth and cheerfulness, with a superabundance of the gifts which the earth furnished of itself; the race was indeed not immortal, but it experienced death even as a soft sleep.” We may add that capacity for religious truth depends upon moral conditions. Very early races therefore have a purer faith than the later ones. Increasing depravity makes it harder for the later generations to exercise faith. The wisdom-literature may have been very early instead of very late, just as monotheistic ideas are clearer the further we go back. Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 171—“Precisely because such tribes [Australian and African savages] have been deficient in average moral quality, have they failed to march upward on the road of civilization with the rest of mankind, and have fallen into these bog holes of savage degradation.” On petrified civilizations, see Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 433-439—“The law of human progress, what is it but the moral law?” On retrogressive development in nature, see Weismann, Heredity, 2:1-30. But see also Mary E. Case, “Did the Romans Degenerate?” in Internat. Journ. Ethics. Jan. 1893:165-182, in which it is maintained that the Romans made constant advances rather. Henry Sumner Maine calls the Bible the most important single document in the history of sociology, because it exhibits authentically the early development of society from the family, through the tribe, into the nation,—a progress learned only by glimpses, intervals, and survivals of old usages in the literature of other nations.

2nd. That the religious history of mankind warrants us in inferring a necessary and universal law of progress, in accordance with which man passes from fetichism to polytheism and monotheism,—this first theological stage, of which fetichism, polytheism, and monotheism are parts, being succeeded by the metaphysical stage, and that in turn by the positive.

This theory is propounded by Comte, in his Positive Philosophy, English transl., 25, 26, 515-636—“Each branch of our knowledge passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive.... The first is the necessary point of departure of the human understanding; and the third is its fixed and definite state. The second is merely a state of transition. In the theological state, the human mind, seeking the essential nature of beings, the first and final causes, the origin and purpose, of all effects—in short, absolute knowledge—supposes all phenomena to be produced by the immediate action of supernatural beings. In the metaphysical state, which is only a modification of the first, the mind supposes, instead of supernatural beings, abstract forces, veritable entities, that is, personified abstractions, inherent in all beings, and capable of producing all phenomena. What is called the explanation of phenomena is, in this stage, a mere reference of each to its proper entity. In the final, the positive state, the mind has given over the vain search after absolute notions, the origin and destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and applies itself to the study of their laws—that is, their invariable relations of succession and resemblance.... The theological system arrived at its highest perfection when it substituted the providential action of a single Being for the varied operations of numerous divinities. In the last stage of the metaphysical system, men substituted one great entity, Nature, as the cause of all phenomena, instead of the multitude of entities at first supposed. In the same way the ultimate perfection of the positive system would be to represent all phenomena as particular aspects of a single general fact—such as Gravitation, for instance.”

This assumed law of progress, however, is contradicted by the following facts:

(a) Not only did the monotheism of the Hebrews precede the great polytheistic systems of antiquity, but even these heathen religions are purer from polytheistic elements, the further back we trace them; so that the facts point to an original monotheistic basis for them all.

The gradual deterioration of all religions, apart from special revelation and influence from God, is proof that the purely evolutionary theory is defective. The most natural supposition is that of a primitive revelation, which little by little receded from human memory. In Japan, Shinto was originally the worship of Heaven. The worship of the dead, the deification of the Mikado, etc., were a corruption and aftergrowth. The Mikado’s ancestors, instead of coming from heaven, came from Korea. Shinto was originally a form of monotheism. Not one of the first emperors was deified after death. Apotheosis of the Mikados dated from the corruption of Shinto through the importation of Buddhism. Andrew Lang, in his Making of Religion, advocates primitive monotheism. T. G. Pinches, of the British Museum, 1894, declares that, as in the earliest Egyptian, so in the early Babylonian records, there is evidence of a primitive monotheism. Nevins, Demon-Possession, 170-173, quotes W. A. P. Martin, President of the Peking University, as follows: “China, India, Egypt and Greece all agree in the monotheistic type of their early religion. The Orphic Hymns, long before the advent of the popular divinities, celebrated the Pantheos, the universal God. The odes compiled by Confucius testify to the early worship of Shangte, the Supreme Ruler. The Vedas speak of ‘one unknown true Being, all-present, all-powerful, the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer of the Universe.’ And in Egypt, as late as the time of Plutarch, there were still vestiges of a monotheistic worship.”

On the evidences of an original monotheism, see Max Müller, Chips, 1:337; Rawlinson, in Present Day Tracts, 2: no. 11; Legge, Religions of China, 8, 11; Diestel, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1860, and vol. 5:669; Philip Smith, Anc. Hist. of East, 65, 195; Warren, on the Earliest Creed of Mankind, in the Meth. Quar. Rev., Jan. 1884.

(b) “There is no proof that the Indo-Germanic or Semitic stocks ever practiced fetich worship, or were ever enslaved by the lowest types of mythological religion, or ascended from them to somewhat higher” (Fisher).

See Fisher, Essays on Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 545; Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 36-115. Herbert Spencer once held that fetichism was primordial. But he afterwards changed his mind, and said that the facts proved to be exactly the opposite when he had become better acquainted with the ideas of savages; see his Principles of Sociology, 1:343. Mr. Spencer finally traced the beginnings of religion to the worship of ancestors. But in China no ancestor has ever become a god; see Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 304-313. And unless man had an inborn sense of divinity, he could deify neither ancestors nor ghosts. Professor Hilprecht of Philadelphia says: “As the attempt has recently been made to trace the pure monotheism of Israel to Babylonian sources, I am bound to declare this an absolute impossibility, on the basis of my fourteen years’ researches in Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions. The faith of Israel’s chosen people is: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.’ And this faith could never have proceeded from the Babylonian mountain of gods, that charnel-house full of corruption and dead men’s bones.”

(c) Some of the earliest remains of man yet found show, by the burial of food and weapons with the dead, that there already existed the idea of spiritual beings and of a future state, and therefore a religion of a higher sort than fetichism.

Idolatry proper regards the idol as the symbol and representative of a spiritual being who exists apart from the material object, though he manifests himself through it. Fetichism, however, identifies the divinity with the material thing, and worships the stock or stone; spirit is not conceived of as existing apart from body. Belief in spiritual beings and a future state is therefore proof of a religion higher in kind than fetichism. See Lyell, Antiquity of Man, quoted in Dawson, Story of Earth and Man, 384; see also 368, 372, 386—“Man’s capacities for degradation are commensurate with his capacities for improvement” (Dawson). Lyell, in his last edition, however, admits the evidence from the Aurignac cave to be doubtful. See art. by Dawkins, in Nature, 4:208.

(d) The theory in question, in making theological thought a merely transient stage of mental evolution, ignores the fact that religion has its root in the intuitions and yearnings of the human soul, and that therefore no philosophical or scientific progress can ever abolish it. While the terms theological, metaphysical, and positive may properly mark the order in which the ideas of the individual and the race are acquired, positivism errs in holding that these three phases of thought are mutually exclusive, and that upon the rise of the later the earlier must of necessity become extinct.

John Stuart Mill suggests that “personifying” would be a much better term than “theological” to designate the earliest efforts to explain physical phenomena. On the fundamental principles of Positivism, see New Englander, 1873:323-386; Diman, Theistic Argument, 338—“Three coëxistent states are here confounded with three successive stages of human thought; three aspects of things with three epochs of time. Theology, metaphysics, and science must always exist side by side, for all positive science rests on metaphysical principles, and theology lies behind both. All are as permanent as human reason itself.” Martineau, Types, 1:487—“Comte sets up mediæval Christianity as the typical example of evolved monotheism, and develops it out of the Greek and Roman polytheism which it overthrew and dissipated. But the religion of modern Europe notoriously does not descend from the same source as its civilization and is no continuation of the ancient culture,”—it comes rather from Hebrew sources; Essays, Philos. and Theol., 1:24, 62—“The Jews were always a disobliging people; what business had they to be up so early in the morning, disturbing the house ever so long before M. Comte’s bell rang to prayers?” See also Gillett, God in Human Thought, 1:17-23; Rawlinson, in Journ. Christ. Philos., April, 1883:353; Nineteenth Century, Oct. 1886:473-490.

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III. Sin, Or Man’s State Of Apostasy

Section I.—The Law Of God.

As preliminary to a treatment of man’s state of apostasy, it becomes necessary to consider the nature of that law of God, the transgression of which is sin. We may best approach the subject by inquiring what is the true conception of

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I. Law in General

1. Law is an expression of will.

The essential idea of law is that of a general expression of will enforced by power. It implies: (a) A lawgiver, or authoritative will. (b) Subjects, or beings upon whom this will terminates. (c) A general command, or expression of this will. (d) A power, enforcing the command.

These elements are found even in what we call natural law. The phrase “law of nature” involves a self-contradiction, when used to denote a mode of action or an order of sequence behind which there is conceived to be no intelligent and ordaining will. Physics derives the term “law” from jurisprudence, instead of jurisprudence deriving it from physics. It is first used of the relations of voluntary agents. Causation in our own wills enables us to see something besides mere antecedence and consequence in the world about us. Physical science, in her very use of the word “law,” implicitly confesses that a supreme Will has set general rules which control the processes of the universe.

Wayland, Moral Science, 1, unwisely defines law as “a mode of existence or order of sequence,” thus leaving out of his definition all reference to an ordaining will. He subsequently says that law presupposes an establisher, but in his definition there is nothing to indicate this. We insist, on the other hand, that the term “law” itself includes the idea of force and cause. The word “law” is from “lay” (German legen),—something laid down; German Gesetz, from setzen,—something set or established; Greek νόμος, from νέμω,—something assigned or apportioned; Latin lex, from lego,—something said or spoken.

All these derivations show that man’s original conception of law is that of something proceeding from volition. Lewes, in his Problems of Life and Mind, says that the term “law” is so suggestive of a giver and impresser of law, that it ought to be dropped, and the word “method” substituted. The merit of Austin’s treatment of the subject is that he “rigorously limits the term ‘law’ to the commands of a superior”; see John Austin, Province of Jurisprudence, 1:88-93, 220-223. The defects of his treatment we shall note further on.

J. S. Mill: “It is the custom, wherever they [scientific men] can trace regularity of any kind, to call the general proposition which expresses the nature of that regularity, a law; as when in mathematics we speak of the law of the successive terms of a converging series. But the expression ‘law of nature’ is generally employed by scientific men with a sort of tacit reference to the original sense of the word ‘law,’ namely, the expression of the will of a superior—the superior in this case being the Ruler of the universe.” Paley, Nat. Theology, chap. 1—“It is a perversion of language to assign any law as the efficient operative cause of anything. A law presupposes an agent; this is only the mode according to which an agent proceeds; it implies a power, for it is the order according to which that power acts. Without this agent, without this power, which are both distinct from itself, the law does nothing.” “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” “Rules do not fulfill themselves, any more than a statute-book can quell a riot” (Martineau, Types, 1:367).

Charles Darwin got the suggestion of natural selection, not from the study of lower plants and animals, but from Malthus on Population; see his Life and Letters, Vol. I, autobiographical chapter. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 2:248-252—“The conception of natural law rests upon the analogy of civil law.” Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 333—“Laws are only the more or less frequently repeated and uniform modes of the behavior of things”; Philosophy of Mind, 122—“To be, to stand in relation, to be self-active, to act upon other being, to obey law, to be a cause, to be a permanent subject of states, to be the same to-day as yesterday, to be identical, to be one,—all these and all similar conceptions, together with the proofs that they are valid for real beings, are affirmed of physical realities, or projected into them, only on a basis of self-knowledge, envisaging and affirming the reality of mind. Without psychological insight and philosophical training, such terms or their equivalents are meaningless in physics. And because writers on physics do not in general have this insight and this training, in spite of their utmost endeavors to treat physics as an empirical science without metaphysics, they flounder and blunder and contradict themselves hopelessly whenever they touch upon fundamental matters.” See President McGarvey’s Criticism on James Lane Allen’s Reign of Law: “It is not in the nature of law to reign. To reign is an act which can be literally affirmed only of persons. A man may reign; a God may reign; a devil may reign; but a law cannot reign. If a law could reign, we should have no gambling in New York and no open saloons on Sunday. There would be no false swearing in courts of justice, and no dishonesty in politics. It is men who reign in these matters—the judges, the grand jury, the sheriff and the police. They may reign according to law. Law cannot reign even over those who are appointed to execute the law.”

2. Law is a general expression of will.

The characteristic of law is generality. It is addressed to substances or persons in classes. Special legislation is contrary to the true theory of law.

When the Sultan of Zanzibar orders his barber to be beheaded because the latter has cut his master, this order is not properly a law. To be a law it must read: “Every barber who cuts his majesty shall thereupon be decapitated.” Einmal ist keinmal = “Once is no custom.” Dr. Schurman suggests that the word meal (Mahl) means originally time (mal in einmal). The measurement of time among ourselves is astronomical; among our earliest ancestors it was gastronomical, and the reduplication mealtime = the ding-dong of the dinner bell. The Shah of Persia once asked the Prince of Wales to have a man put to death in order that he might see the English method of execution. When the Prince told him that this was beyond his power, the Shah wished to know what was the use of being a king if he could not kill people at his pleasure. Peter the Great suggested a way out of the difficulty. He desired to see keelhauling. When informed that there was no sailor liable to that penalty, he replied: “That does not matter,—take one of my suite.” Amos, Science of Law, 33, 34—“Law eminently deals in general rules.” It knows not persons or personality. It must apply to more than one case. “The characteristic of law is generality, as that of morality is individual application.” Special legislation is the bane of good government; it does not properly fall within the province of the law-making power; it savors of the caprice of despotism, which gives commands to each subject at will. Hence our more advanced political constitutions check lobby influence and bribery, by prohibiting special legislation in all cases where general laws already exist.

3. Law implies power to enforce.

It is essential to the existence of law, that there be power to enforce. Otherwise law becomes the expression of mere wish or advice. Since physical substances and forces have no intelligence and no power to resist, the four elements already mentioned exhaust the implications of the term “law” as applied to nature. In the case of rational and free agents, however, law implies in addition: (e) Duty or obligation to obey; and (f) Sanctions, or pains and penalties for disobedience.

“Law that has no penalty is not law but advice, and the government in which infliction does not follow transgression is the reign of rogues or demons.” On the question whether any of the punishments of civil law are legal sanctions, except the punishment of death, see N. W. Taylor, Moral Govt., 2:367-387. Rewards are motives, but they are not sanctions. Since public opinion may be conceived of as inflicting penalties for violation of her will, we speak figuratively of the laws of society, of fashion, of etiquette, of honor. Only so far as the community of nations can and does by sanctions compel obedience, can we with propriety assert the existence of international law. Even among nations, however, there may be moral as well as physical sanctions. The decision of an international tribunal has the same sanction as a treaty, and if the former is impotent, the latter also is. Fines and imprisonment do not deter decent people from violations of law half so effectively as do the social penalties of ostracism and disgrace, and it will be the same with the findings of an international tribunal. Diplomacy without ships and armies has been said to be law without penalty. But exclusion from civilized society is penalty. “In the unquestioning obedience to fashion’s decrees, to which we all quietly submit, we are simply yielding to the pressure of the persons about us. No one adopts a style of dress because it is reasonable, for the styles are often most unreasonable; but we meekly yield to the most absurd of them rather than resist this force and be called eccentric. So what we call public opinion is the most mighty power to-day known, whether in society or in politics.”

4. Law expresses and demands nature.

The will which thus binds its subjects by commands and penalties is an expression of the nature of the governing power, and reveals the normal relations of the subjects to that power. Finally, therefore, law (g) Is an expression of the nature of the lawgiver; and (h) Sets forth the condition or conduct in the subjects which is requisite for harmony with that nature. Any so-called law which fails to represent the nature of the governing power soon becomes obsolete. All law that is permanent is a transcript of the facts of being, a discovery of what is and must be, in order to harmony between the governing and the governed; in short, positive law is just and lasting only as it is an expression and republication of the law of nature.

Diman, Theistic Argument, 106, 107: John Austin, although he “rigorously limited the term law to the commands of a superior,” yet “rejected Ulpian’s explanation of the law of nature, and ridiculed as fustian the celebrated description in Hooker.” This we conceive to be the radical defect of Austin’s conception. The Will from which natural law proceeds is conceived of after a deistic fashion, instead of being immanent in the universe. Lightwood, in his Nature of Positive Law, 78-90, criticizes Austin’s definition of law as command, and substitutes the idea of law as custom. Sir Henry Maine’s Ancient Law has shown us that the early village communities had customs which only gradually took form as definite laws. But we reply that custom is not the ultimate source of anything. Repeated acts of will are necessary to constitute custom. The first customs are due to the commanding will of the father in the patriarchal family. So Austin’s definition is justified. Collective morals (mores) come from individual duty (due); law originates in will; Martineau, Types, 2:18, 19. Behind this will, however, is something which Austin does not take account of, namely, the nature of things as constituted by God, as revealing the universal Reason, and as furnishing the standard to which all positive law, if it would be permanent, must conform.

See Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, book 1, sec. 14—“Laws are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things.... There is a primitive Reason, and laws are the relations subsisting between it and different beings, and the relations of these to one another.... These rules are a fixed and invariable relation.... Particular intelligent beings may have laws of their own making, but they have some likewise that they never made.... To say that there is nothing just or unjust but what is commanded or forbidden by positive laws, is the same as saying that before the describing of a circle all the radii were not equal. We must therefore acknowledge relations antecedent to the positive law by which they were established.” Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 169-172—“By the science of law is meant systematic knowledge of the principles of the law of nature—from which positive law takes its rise—which is forever the same, and carries its sure and unchanging obligations over all nations and throughout all ages.”

It is true even of a despot’s law, that it reveals his nature, and shows what is requisite in the subject to constitute him in harmony with that nature. A law which does not represent the nature of things, or the real relations of the governor and the governed, has only a nominal existence, and cannot be permanent. On the definition and nature of law, see also Pomeroy, in Johnson’s Encyclopædia, art.: Law; Ahrens, Cours de Droit Naturel, book 1, sec. 14; Lorimer, Institutes of Law, 256, who quotes from Burke: “All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory. They may alter the mode and application, but have no power over the substance of original justice”; Lord Bacon: “Regula enim legem (ut acus nautica polos) indicat, non statuit.” Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law, 64; H. C. Carey, Unity of Law.

Fairbairn, in Contemp. Rev., Apl. 1895:473—“The Roman jurists draw a distinction between jus naturale and jus civile, and they used the former to affect the latter. The jus civile was statutory, established and fixed law, as it were, the actual legal environment; the jus naturale was ideal, the principle of justice and equity immanent in man, yet with the progress of his ethical culture growing ever more articulate.” We add the fact that jus in Latin and Recht in German have ceased to mean merely abstract right, and have come to denote the legal system in which that abstract right is embodied and expressed. Here we have a proof that Christ is gradually moralizing the world and translating law into life. E. G. Robinson: “Never a government on earth made its own laws. Even constitutions simply declare laws already and actually existing. Where society falls into anarchy, the lex talionis becomes the prevailing principle.”

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II. The Law of God in Particular

The law of God is a general expression of the divine will enforced by power. It has two forms: Elemental Law and Positive Enactment.

1. Elemental Law, or law inwrought into the elements, substances, and forces of the rational and irrational creation. This is twofold:

A. The expression of the divine will in the constitution of the material universe;—this we call physical, or natural law. Physical law is not necessary. Another order of things is conceivable. Physical order is not an end in itself; it exists for the sake of moral order. Physical order has therefore only a relative constancy, and God supplements it at times by miracle.

Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 210—“The laws of nature represent no necessity, but are only the orderly forms of procedure of some Being back of them.... Cosmic uniformities are God’s methods in freedom.” Philos. of Theism, 73—“Any of the cosmic laws, from gravitation on, might conceivably have been lacking or altogether different.... No trace of necessity can be found in the Cosmos or in its laws.” Seth, Hegelianism and Personality: “Nature is not necessary. Why put an island where it is, and not a mile east or west? Why connect the smell and shape of the rose, or the taste and color of the orange? Why do H2O form water? No one knows.” William James: “The parts seem shot at us out of a pistol.” Rather, we would say, out of a shotgun. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 33—“Why undulations in one medium should produce sound, and in another light; why one speed of vibration should give red color, and another blue, can be explained by no reason of necessity. Here is selecting will.”

Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy, 126—“So far as the philosophy of evolution involves belief that nature is determinate, or due to a necessary law of universal progress or evolution, it seems to me to be utterly unsupported by evidence and totally unscientific.” There is no power to deduce anything whatever from homogeneity. Press the button and law does the rest? Yes, but what presses the button? The solution crystalises when shaken? Yes, but what shakes it? Ladd, Philos. of Knowledge, 310—“The directions and velocities of the stars fall under no common principles that astronomy can discover. One of the stars—‘1830 Groombridge’—is flying through space at a rate many times as great as it could attain if it had fallen through infinite space through all eternity toward the entire physical universe.... Fluids contract when cooled and expand when heated,—yet there is the well known exception of water at the degree of freezing.” 263—“Things do not appear to be mathematical all the way through. The system of things may be a Life, changing its modes of manifestation according to immanent ideas, rather than a collection of rigid entities, blindly subject in a mechanical way to unchanging laws.”

Augustine: “Dei voluntas rerum natura est.” Joseph Cook: “The laws of nature are the habits of God.” But Campbell, Atonement, Introd., xxvi, says there is this difference between the laws of the moral universe and those of the physical, namely, that we do not trace the existence of the former to an act of will, as we do the latter. “To say that God has given existence to goodness, as he has to the laws of nature, would be equivalent to saying that he has given existence to himself.” Pepper, Outlines of Syst. Theol., 91—“Moral law, unlike natural law, is a standard of action to be adopted or rejected in the exercise of rational freedom, i. e., of moral agency.” See also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:531.

Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Rev., Sept. 1882:190—“In moral law there is enforcement by punishment only—never by power, for this would confound moral law with physical, and obedience can never be produced or secured by power. In physical law, on the contrary, enforcement is wholly by power, and punishment is impossible. So far as man is free, he is not subject to law at all, in its physical sense. Our wills are free from law, as enforced by power; but are free under law, as enforced by punishment. Where law prevails in the same sense as in the material world, there can be no freedom. Law does not prevail when we reach the region of choice. We hold to a power in the mind of man originating a free choice. Two objects or courses of action, between which choice is to be made, are presupposed: (1) A uniformity or set of uniformities implying a force by which the uniformity is produced [physical or natural law]; (2) A command, addressed to free and intelligent beings, that can be obeyed or disobeyed, and that has connected with it rewards or punishments” [moral law]. See also Wm. Arthur, Difference between Physical and Moral Law.

B. The expression of the divine will in the constitution of rational and free agents;—this we call moral law. This elemental law of our moral nature, with which only we are now concerned, has all the characteristics mentioned as belonging to law in general. It implies: (a) A divine Law-giver, or ordaining Will. (b) Subjects, or moral beings upon whom the law terminates. (c) General command, or expression of this will in the moral constitution of the subjects. (d) Power, enforcing the command. (e) Duty, or obligation to obey. (f) Sanctions, or pains and penalties for disobedience.

All these are of a loftier sort than are found in human law. But we need especially to emphasize the fact that this law (g) Is an expression of the moral nature of God, and therefore of God’s holiness, the fundamental attribute of that nature; and that it (h) Sets forth absolute conformity to that holiness, as the normal condition of man. This law is inwrought into man’s rational and moral being. Man fulfills it, only when in his moral as well as his rational being he is the image of God.

Although the will from which the moral law springs is an expression of the nature of God, and a necessary expression of that nature in view of the existence of moral beings, it is none the less a personal will. We should be careful not to attribute to law a personality of its own. When Plutarch says: “Law is king both of mortal and immortal beings,” and when we say: “The law will take hold of you,” “The criminal is in danger of the law,” we are simply substituting the name of the agent for that of the principal. God is not subject to law; God is the source of law; and we may say: “If Jehovah be God, worship him; but if Law, worship it.”

Since moral law merely reflects God, it is not a thing made. Men discover laws, but they do not make them, any more than the chemist makes the laws by which the elements combine. Instance the solidification of hydrogen at Geneva. Utility does not constitute law, although we test law by utility; see Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 58-71. The true nature of the moral law is set forth in the noble though rhetorical description of Hooker (Eccl. Pol., 1:194)—“Of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is in the bosom of God; her voice the harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power; both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever, though each in a different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.” See also Martineau, Types, 2:119, and Study, 1:35.

Curtis, Primitive Semitic Religions, 66, 101—“The Oriental believes that God makes right by edict. Saladin demonstrated to Henry of Champagne the loyalty of his Assassins, by commanding two of them to throw themselves down from a lofty tower to certain and violent death.” H. B. Smith, System, 192—“Will implies personality, and personality adds to abstract truth and duty the element of authority. Law therefore has the force that a person has over and above that of an idea.” Human law forbids only those offences which constitute a breach of public order or of private right. God’s law forbids all that is an offence against the divine order, that is, all that is unlike God. The whole law may be summed up in the words: “Be like God.” Salter, First Steps in Philosophy, 101-126—“The realization of the nature of each being is the end to be striven for. Self-realization is an ideal end, not of one being, but of each being, with due regard to the value of each in the proper scale of worth. The beast can be sacrificed for man. All men are sacred as capable of unlimited progress. It is our duty to realize the capacities of our nature so far as they are consistent with one another and go to make up one whole.” This means that man fulfills the law only as he realizes the divine idea in his character and life, or, in other words, as he becomes a finite image of God’s infinite perfections.

Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 191, 201, 285, 286—“Morality is rooted in the nature of things. There is a universe. We are all parts of an infinite organism. Man is inseparably bound to man [and to God]. All rights and duties arise out of this common life. In the solidarity of social life lies the ground of Kant’s law: So will, that the maxim of thy conduct may apply to all. The planet cannot safely fly away from the sun, and the hand cannot safely separate itself from the heart. It is from the fundamental unity of life that our duties flow.... The infinite world-organism is the body and manifestation of God. And when we recognize the solidarity of our vital being with this divine life and embodiment, we begin to see into the heart of the mystery, the unquestionable authority and supreme sanction of duty. Our moral intuitions are simply the unchanging laws of the universe that have emerged to consciousness in the human heart.... The inherent principles of the universal Reason reflect themselves in the mirror of the moral nature.... The enlightened conscience is the expression in the human soul of the divine Consciousness.... Morality is the victory of the divine Life in us.... Solidarity of our life with the universal Life gives it unconditional sacredness and transcendental authority.... The microcosm must bring itself en rapport with the Macrocosm. Man must bring his spirit into resemblance to the World-essence, and into union with it.”

The law of God, then, is simply an expression of the nature of God in the form of moral requirement, and a necessary expression of that nature in view of the existence of moral beings (Ps. 19:7; cf. 1). To the existence of this law all men bear witness. The consciences even of the heathen testify to it (Rom. 2:14, 15). Those who have the written law recognize this elemental law as of greater compass and penetration (Rom. 7:14; 8:4). The perfect embodiment and fulfillment of this law is seen only in Christ (Rom. 10:4; Phil. 3:8, 9).

Ps. 19:7—“The law of Jehovah is perfect, restoring the soul”; cf. verse 1—“The heavens declare the glory of God”—two revelations of God—one in nature, the other in the moral law. Rom. 2:14, 15—“for when Gentiles that have not the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are the law unto themselves; in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them”—here the “work of the law”—, not the ten commandments, for of these the heathen were ignorant, but rather the work corresponding to them, i. e., the substance of them. Rom. 7:14—“For we know that the law is spiritual”—this, says Meyer, is equivalent to saying “its essence is divine, of like nature with the Holy Spirit who gave it, a holy self-revelation of God.” Rom. 8:4—“that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit”; 10:4—“For Christ is the end of the law unto righteousness to every one that believeth”; Phil. 3:8, 9—“that I may gain Christ, and be found in him, not having a righteousness of mine own, even that which is of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith”; Heb. 10:9—“Lo, I am come to do thy will.” In Christ “the law appears Drawn out in living characters.” Just such as he was and is, we feel that we ought to be. Hence the character of Christ convicts us of sin, as does no other manifestation of God. See, on the passages from Romans, the Commentary of Philippi.

Fleming, Vocab. Philos., 286—“Moral laws are derived from the nature and will of God, and the character and condition of man.” God’s nature is reflected in the laws of our nature. Since law is inwrought into man’s nature, man is a law unto himself. To conform to his own nature, in which conscience is supreme, is to conform to the nature of God. The law is only the revelation of the constitutive principles of being, the declaration of what must be, so long as man is man and God is God. It says in effect: “Be like God, or you cannot be truly man.” So moral law is not simply a test of obedience, but is also a revelation of eternal reality. Man cannot be lost to God, without being lost to himself. “The ‘hands of the living God’ (Heb. 10:31) into which we fall, are the laws of nature.” In the spiritual world “the same wheels revolve, only there is no iron” (Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 27). Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 2:82-92—“The totality of created being is to be in harmony with God and with itself. The idea of this harmony, as active in God under the form of will, is God’s law.” A manuscript of the U. S. Constitution was so written that when held at a little distance the shading of the letters and their position showed the countenance of George Washington. So the law of God is only God’s face disclosed to human sight.

R. W. Emerson, Woodnotes, 57—“Conscious Law is King of kings.” Two centuries ago John Norton wrote a book entitled The Orthodox Evangelist, “designed for the begetting and establishing of the faith which is in Jesus,” in which we find the following: “God doth not will things because they are just, but things are therefore just because God so willeth them. What reasonable man but will yield that the being of the moral law hath no necessary connection with the being of God? That the actions of men not conformable to this law should be sin, that death should be the punishment of sin, these are the constitutions of God, proceeding from him not by way of necessity of nature, but freely, as effects and products of his eternal good pleasure.” This is to make God an arbitrary despot. We should not say that God makes law, nor on the other hand that God is subject to law, but rather that God is law and the source of law.

Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 161—“God’s law is organic—inwrought into the constitution of men and things. The chart however does not make the channel.... A law of nature is never the antecedent but the consequence of reality. What right has this consequence of reality to be personalized and made the ruler and source of reality? Law is only the fixed mode in which reality works. Law therefore can explain nothing. Only God, from whom reality springs, can explain reality.” In other words, law is never an agent but always a method—the method of God, or rather of Christ who is the only Revealer of God. Christ’s life in the flesh is the clearest manifestation of him who is the principle of law in the physical and moral universe. Christ is the Reason of God in expression. It was he who gave the law on Mount Sinai as well as in the Sermon on the Mount. For fuller treatment of the subject, see Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 321-344; Talbot, Ethical Prolegomena, in Bap. Quar., July, 1877:257-274; Whewell, Elements of Morality, 2:35; and especially E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 79-108.

Each of the two last-mentioned characteristics of God’s law is important in its implications. We treat of these in their order.

First, the law of God as a transcript of the divine nature.—If this be the nature of the law, then certain common misconceptions of it are excluded. The law of God is

(a) Not arbitrary, or the product of arbitrary will. Since the will from which the law springs is a revelation of God’s nature, there can be no rashness or unwisdom in the law itself.

E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 193—“No law of God seems ever to have been arbitrarily enacted, or simply with a view to certain ends to be accomplished; it always represented some reality of life which it was inexorably necessary that those who were to be regulated should carefully observe.” The theory that law originates in arbitrary will results in an effeminate type of piety, just as the theory that legislation has for its sole end the greatest happiness results in all manner of compromises of justice. Jones, Robert Browning, 43—“He who cheats his neighbor believes in tortuosity, and, as Carlyle says, has the supreme Quack for his god.”

(b) Not temporary, or ordained simply to meet an exigency. The law is a manifestation, not of temporary moods or desires, but of the essential nature of God.

The great speech of Sophocles’ Antigone gives us this conception of law: “The ordinances of the gods are unwritten, but sure. Not one of them is for to-day or for yesterday alone, but they live forever.” Moses might break the tables of stone upon which the law was inscribed, and Jehoiakim might cut up the scroll and cast it into the fire (Ex. 32:19; Jer. 36:23), but the law remained eternal as before in the nature of God and in the constitution of man. Prof. Walter Rauschenbusch: “The moral laws are just as stable as the law of gravitation. Every fuzzy human chicken that is hatched into this world tries to fool with those laws. Some grow wiser in the process and some do not. We talk about breaking God’s laws. But after those laws have been broken several billion times since Adam first tried to play with them, those laws are still intact and no seam or fracture is visible in them,—not even a scratch on the enamel. But the lawbreakers—that is another story. If you want to find their fragments, go to the ruins of Egypt, of Babylon, of Jerusalem; study statistics; read faces; keep your eyes open; visit Blackwell’s Island; walk through the graveyard and read the invisible inscriptions left by the Angel of Judgment, for instance: ‘Here lie the fragments of John Smith, who contradicted his Maker, played football with the ten commandments, and departed this life at the age of thirty-five. His mother and wife weep for him. Nobody else does. May he rest in peace!’ ”

(c) Not merely negative, or a law of mere prohibition,—since positive conformity to God is the inmost requisition of law.

The negative form of the commandments in the decalogue merely takes for granted the evil inclination in men’s hearts and practically opposes its gratification. In the case of each commandment a whole province of the moral life is taken into the account, although the act expressly forbidden is the acme of evil in that one province. So the decalogue makes itself intelligible: it crosses man’s path just where he most feels inclined to wander. But back of the negative and specific expression in each case lies the whole mass of moral requirement: the thin edge of the wedge has the positive demand of holiness behind it, without obedience to which even the prohibition cannot in spirit be obeyed. Thus “the law is spiritual” (Rom. 7:14), and requires likeness in character and life to the spiritual God; John 4:24—“God is spirit, and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

(d) Not partial, or addressed to one part only of man’s being,—since likeness to God requires purity of substance in man’s soul and body, as well as purity in all the thoughts and acts that proceed therefrom. As law proceeds from the nature of God, so it requires conformity to that nature in the nature of man.

Whatever God gave to man at the beginning he requires of man with interest; cf. Mat. 25:27—“thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the bankers, and at my coming I should have received back mine own with interest.” Whatever comes short of perfect purity in soul or perfect health in body is non-conformity to God and contradicts his law, it being understood that only that perfection is demanded which answers to the creature’s stage of growth and progress, so that of the child there is required only the perfection of the child, of the youth only the perfection of the youth, of the man only the perfection of the man. See Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, chapter 1.

(e) Not outwardly published,—since all positive enactment is only the imperfect expression of this underlying and unwritten law of being.

Much misunderstanding of God’s law results from confounding it with published enactment. Paul takes the larger view that the law is independent of such expression; see Rom. 2:14, 15—“for when Gentiles that have not the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are the law unto themselves; in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them:” see Expositor’s Greek Testament, in loco: “ ‘written on their hearts,’ when contrasted with the law written on the tables of stone, is equal to ‘unwritten’; the Apostle refers to what the Greeks called ἄγραφος νόμος.”

(f) Not inwardly conscious, or limited in its scope by men’s consciousness of it. Like the laws of our physical being, the moral law exists whether we recognize it or not.

Overeating brings its penalty in dyspepsia, whether we are conscious of our fault or not. We cannot by ignorance or by vote repeal the laws of our physical system. Self-will does not secure independence, any more than the stars can by combination abolish gravitation. Man cannot get rid of God’s dominion by denying its existence, nor by refusing submission to it. Psalm 2:1-4—“Why do the nations rage ... against Jehovah ... saying, Let us break their bonds asunder.... He that sitteth in the heavens will laugh.” Salter, First Steps in Philosophy, 94—“The fact that one is not aware of obligation no more affects its reality than ignorance of what is at the centre of the earth affects the nature of what is really discoverable there. We discover obligation, and do not create it by thinking of it, any more than we create the sensible world by thinking of it.”

(g) Not local, or confined to place,—since no moral creature can escape from God, from his own being, or from the natural necessity that unlikeness to God should involve misery and ruin.

“The Dutch auction” was the public offer of property at a price beyond its value, followed by the lowering of the price until some one accepted it as a purchaser. There is no such local exception to the full validity of God’s demands. The moral law has even more necessary and universal sway than the law of gravitation in the physical universe. It is inwrought into the very constitution of man, and of every other moral being. The man who offended the Roman Emperor found the whole empire a prison.

(h) Not changeable, or capable of modification. Since law represents the unchangeable nature of God, it is not a sliding scale of requirements which adapts itself to the ability of the subjects. God himself cannot change it without ceasing to be God.

The law, then, has a deeper foundation than that God merely “said so.” God’s word and God’s will are revelations of his inmost being; every transgression of the law is a stab at the heart of God. Simon, Reconciliation, 141, 142—“God continues to demand loyalty even after man has proved disloyal. Sin changes man, and man’s change involves a change in God. Man now regards God as a ruler and exactor, and God must regard man as a defaulter and a rebel.” God’s requirement is not lessened because man is unable to meet it. This inability is itself non-conformity to law, and is no excuse for sin; see Dr. Bushnell’s sermon on “Duty not measured by Ability.” The man with the withered hand would not have been justified in refusing to stretch it forth at Jesus’ command (Mat. 12:10-13).

The obligation to obey this law and to be conformed to God’s perfect moral character is based upon man’s original ability and the gifts which God bestowed upon him at the beginning. Created in the image of God, it is man’s duty to render back to God that which God first gave, enlarged and improved by growth and culture (Luke 19:23—“wherefore gavest thou not my money into the bank, and I at my coming should have required it with interest”). This obligation is not impaired by sin and the weakening of man’s powers. To let down the standard would be to misrepresent God. Adolphe Monod would not save himself from shame and remorse by lowering the claims of the law: “Save first the holy law of my God,” he says, “after that you shall save me!”

Even salvation is not through violation of law. The moral law is immutable, because it is a transcript of the nature of the immutable God. Shall nature conform to me, or I to nature? If I attempt to resist even physical laws, I am crushed. I can use nature only by obeying her laws. Lord Bacon: “Natura enim non nisi parendo vincitur.” So in the moral realm. We cannot buy off nor escape the moral law of God. God will not, and God can not, change his law by one hair’s breadth, even to save a universe of sinners. Omar Kháyyám, in his Rubáiyát, begs his god to “reconcile the law to my desires.” Marie Corelli says well: “As if a gnat should seek to build a cathedral, and should ask to have the laws of architecture altered to suit its gnat-like capacity.” See Martineau, Types, 2:120.

Secondly, the law of God as the ideal of human nature.—A law thus identical with the eternal and necessary relations of the creature to the Creator, and demanding of the creature nothing less than perfect holiness, as the condition of harmony with the infinite holiness of God, is adapted to man’s finite nature, as needing law; to man’s free nature, as needing moral law; and to man’s progressive nature, as needing ideal law.

Man, as finite, needs law, just as railway cars need a track to guide them—to leap the track is to find, not freedom, but ruin. Railway President: “Our rules are written in blood.” Goethe, Was Wir Bringen, 19 Auftritt: “In vain shall spirits that are all unbound To the pure heights of perfectness aspire; In limitation first the Master shines, And law alone can give us liberty.”—Man, as a free being, needs moral law. He is not an automaton, a creature of necessity, governed only by physical influences. With conscience to command the right, and will to choose or reject it, his true dignity and calling are that he should freely realize the right.—Man, as a progressive being, needs nothing less than an ideal and infinite standard of attainment, a goal which he can never overpass, an end which shall ever attract and urge him forward. This he finds in the holiness of God.

The law is a fence, not only for ownership, but for care. God not only demands, but he protects. Law is the transcript of love as well as of holiness. We may reverse the well-known couplet and say: “I slept, and dreamed that life was Duty; I woke and found that life was Beauty.” “Cui servire regnare est.” Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 56—“In Plato’s Crito, the Laws are made to present themselves in person to Socrates in prison, not only as the guardians of his liberty, but as his lifelong friends, his well-wishers, his equals, with whom he had of his own free will entered into binding compact.” It does not harm the scholar to have before him the ideal of perfect scholarship; nor the teacher to have before him the ideal of a perfect school; nor the legislator to have before him the ideal of perfect law. Gordon, The Christ of To-day, 134—“The moral goal must be a flying goal; the standard to which we are to grow must be ever rising; the type to which we are to be conformed must have in it inexhaustible fulness.”

John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:119—“It is just the best, purest, noblest human souls, who are least satisfied with themselves and their own spiritual attainments; and the reason is that the human is not a nature essentially different from the divine, but a nature which, just because it is in essential affinity with God, can be satisfied with nothing less than a divine perfection.” J. M. Whiton, The Divine Satisfaction: “Law requires being, character, likeness to God. It is automatic, self-operating. Penalty is untransferable. It cannot admit of any other satisfaction than the reëstablishment of the normal relation which it requires. Punishment proclaims that the law has not been satisfied. There is no cancelling of the curse except through the growing up of the normal relation. Blessing and curse ensue upon what we are, not upon what we were. Reparation is within the spirit itself. The atonement is educational, not governmental.” We reply that the atonement is both governmental and educational, and that reparation must first be made to the holiness of God before conscience, the mirror of God’s holiness, can reflect that reparation and be at peace.

The law of God is therefore characterized by:

(a) All-comprehensiveness.—It is over us at all times; it respects our past, our present, our future. It forbids every conceivable sin; it requires every conceivable virtue; omissions as well as commissions are condemned by it.

Ps. 119:96—“I have seen an end of all perfection ... thy commandment is exceeding broad”; Rom. 3:23—“all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God”; James 4:17—“_To him therefore that knoweth to do good, and __ doeth it not, to him it is sin._” Gravitation holds the mote as well as the world. God’s law detects and denounces the least sin, so that without atonement it cannot be pardoned. The law of gravitation may be suspended or abrogated, for it has no necessary ground in God’s being; but God’s moral law cannot be suspended or abrogated, for that would contradict God’s holiness. “About right” is not “all right.” “The giant hexagonal pillars of basalt in the Scottish Staffa are identical in form with the microscopic crystals of the same mineral.” So God is our pattern, and goodness is our likeness to him.

(b) Spirituality.—It demands not only right acts and words, but also right dispositions and states. Perfect obedience requires not only the intense and unremitting reign of love toward God and man, but conformity of the whole inward and outward nature of man to the holiness of God.

Mat. 5:22, 28—the angry word is murder; the sinful look is adultery. Mark 12:30, 31—“thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.... Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”; 2 Cor. 10:5—“bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ”; Eph. 5:1—“Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children”; 1 Pet. 1:16—“Ye shall be holy; for I am holy.” As the brightest electric light, seen through a smoked glass against the sun, appears like a black spot, so the brightest unregenerate character is dark, when compared with the holiness of God. Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 235, remarks on Gal. 6:4—“let each man prove his own work, and then shall he have his glorying in regard of himself alone, and not of his neighbor”—“I have a small candle and I compare it with my brother’s taper and come away rejoicing. Why not compare it with the sun? Then I shall lose my pride and uncharitableness.” The distance to the sun from the top of an ant-hill and from the top of Mount Everest is nearly the same. The African princess praised for her beauty had no way to verify the compliments paid her but by looking in the glassy surface of the pool. But the trader came and sold her a mirror. Then she was so shocked at her own ugliness that she broke the mirror in pieces. So we look into the mirror of God’s law, compare ourselves with the Christ who is reflected there, and hate the mirror which reveals us to ourselves (James 1:23, 24).

(c) Solidarity.—It exhibits in all its parts the nature of the one Lawgiver, and it expresses, in its least command, the one requirement of harmony with him.

Mat. 5:48—“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”; Mark 12:29, 30—“The Lord our God, the Lord is one: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God”; James 2:10—“For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is become guilty of all”; 4:12—“One only is the lawgiver and judge.” Even little rattlesnakes are snakes. One link broken in the chain, and the bucket falls into the well. The least sin separates us from God. The least sin renders us guilty of the whole law, because it shows us to lack the love which is required in all the commandments. Those who send us to the Sermon on the Mount for salvation send us to a tribunal that damns us. The Sermon on the Mount is but a republication of the law given on Sinai, but now in more spiritual and penetrating form. Thunders and lightnings proceed from the N. T., as from the O. T., mount. The Sermon on the Mount is only the introductory lecture of Jesus’ theological course, as John 14-17 is the closing lecture. In it is announced the law, which prepares the way for the gospel. Those who would degrade doctrine by exalting precept will find that they have left men without the motive or the power to keep the precept. Æschylus, Agamemnon: “For there’s no bulwark in man’s wealth to him Who, through a surfeit, kicks—into the dim And disappearing—Right’s great altar.”

Only to the first man, then, was the law proposed as a method of salvation. With the first sin, all hope of obtaining the divine favor by perfect obedience is lost. To sinners the law remains as a means of discovering and developing sin in its true nature, and of compelling a recourse to the mercy provided in Jesus Christ.

2 Chron. 34:19—“And it came to pass, when the king had heard the words of the law, that he rent his clothes”; Job 42:5, 6—“I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; But now mine eye seeth thee; Wherefore I abhor myself, And repent in dust and ashes.” The revelation of God in Is. 6:3, 5—“Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts”—causes the prophet to cry like the leper: “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips.” Rom. 3:20—“_by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified in his sight; for through the law cometh the __ knowledge of sin_”; 5:20—“the law came in besides, that the trespass might abound”; 7:7, 8—“I had not known sin, except through the law: for I had not known coveting, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet: but sin, finding occasion, wrought in me through the commandment all manner of coveting: for apart from the law sin is dead”; Gal. 3:24—“So that the law is become our tutor,” or attendant-slave, “to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith”—the law trains our wayward boyhood and leads it to Christ the Master, as in old times the slave accompanied children to school. Stevens, Pauline Theology, 177, 178—“The law increases sin by increasing the knowledge of sin and by increasing the activity of sin. The law does not add to the inherent energy of the sinful principle which pervades human nature, but it does cause this principle to reveal itself more energetically in sinful act.” The law inspires fear, but it leads to love. The Rabbins said that, if Israel repented but for one day, the Messiah would appear.

No man ever yet drew a straight line or a perfect curve; yet he would be a poor architect who contented himself with anything less. Since men never come up to their ideals, he who aims to live only an average moral life will inevitably fall below the average. The law, then, leads to Christ. He who is the ideal is also the way to attain the ideal. He who is himself the Word and the Law embodied, is also the Spirit of life that makes obedience possible to us (John 14:6—“I am the way, and the truth, and the life”; Rom. 8:2—“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death”). Mrs. Browning, Aurora Leigh: “The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver, Unless he had given the Life too with the Law.” Christ for us upon the Cross, and Christ in us by his Spirit, is the only deliverance from the curse of the law; Gal 3:13—“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us.” We must see the claims of the law satisfied and the law itself written on our hearts. We are “reconciled to God through the death of his Son,” but we are also _“__saved by his life__”__ (Rom. 5:10_).

Robert Browning, in The Ring and the Book, represents Caponsacchi as comparing himself at his best with the new ideal of “perfect as Father in heaven is perfect” suggested by Pompilia’s purity, and as breaking out into the cry: “O great, just, good God! Miserable me!” In the Interpreter’s House of Pilgrim’s Progress, Law only stirred up the dust in the foul room,—the Gospel had to sprinkle water on the floor before it could be cleansed. E. G. Robinson: “It is necessary to smoke a man out, before you can bring a higher motive to bear upon him.” Barnabas said that Christ was the answer to the riddle of the law. Rom. 10:4—“Christ is the end of the law unto righteousness to every one that believeth.” The railroad track opposite Detroit on the St. Clair River runs to the edge of the dock and seems intended to plunge the train into the abyss. But when the ferry boat comes up, rails are seen upon its deck, and the boat is the end of the track, to carry passengers over to Detroit. So the law, which by itself would bring only destruction, finds its end in Christ who ensures our passage to the celestial city.

Law, then, with its picture of spotless innocence, simply reminds man of the heights from which he has fallen. “It is a mirror which reveals derangement, but does not create or remove it.” With its demand of absolute perfection, up to the measure of man’s original endowments and possibilities, it drives us, in despair of ourselves, to Christ as our only righteousness and our only Savior (Rom. 8:3, 4—“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit”; Phil. 3:8, 9—“that I may gain Christ, and be found in him, not having a righteousness of mine own, even that which is of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith”). Thus law must prepare the way for grace, and John the Baptist must precede Christ.

When Sarah Bernhardt was solicited to add an eleventh commandment, she declined upon the ground there were already ten too many. It was an expression of pagan contempt of law. In heathendom, sin and insensibility to sin increased together. In Judaism and Christianity, on the contrary, there has been a growing sense of sin’s guilt and condemnableness. McLaren, in S. S. Times, Sept. 23, 1893:600—“Among the Jews there was a far profounder sense of sin than in any other ancient nation. The law written on men’s hearts evoked a lower consciousness of sin, and there are prayers on the Assyrian and Babylonian tablets which may almost stand beside the 51st Psalm. But, on the whole, the deep sense of sin was the product of the revealed law.” See Fairbairn, Revelation of Law and Scripture; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 187-242; Hovey, God with Us, 187-210; Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:45-50; Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 53-71; Martineau, Types, 2:120-125.

2. Positive Enactment, or the expression of the will of God in published ordinances. This is also two-fold:

A. General moral precepts.—These are written summaries of the elemental law (Mat. 5:48; 22:37-40), or authorized applications of it to special human conditions (Ex. 20:1-17; Mat. chap. 5-8).

Mat. 5:48—“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”; 22:37-40—“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.... Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments the whole law hangeth and the prophets”; Ex. 20:1-17—the Ten Commandments; Mat., chap. 5-8—the Sermon on the Mount. Cf. Augustine, on Ps. 57:1.

Solly, On the Will, 162, gives two illustrations of the fact that positive precepts are merely applications of elemental law or the law of nature: “ ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ is a moral law which may be stated thus: thou shalt not take that for thy own property, which is the property of another. The contradictory of this proposition would be: thou mayest take that for thy own property which is the property of another. But this is a contradiction in terms; for it is the very conception of property, that the owner stands in a peculiar relation to its subject matter; and what is every man’s property is no man’s property, as it is proper to no man. Hence the contradictory of the commandment contains a simple contradiction directly it is made a rule universal; and the commandment itself is established as one of the principles for the harmony of individual wills.

“ ‘Thou shalt not tell a lie,’ as a rule of morality, may be expressed generally: thou shall not by thy outward act make another to believe thy thought to be other than it is. The contradictory made universal is: every man may by his outward act make another to believe his thought to be other than it is. Now this maxim also contains a contradiction, and is self-destructive. It conveys a permission to do that which is rendered impossible by the permission itself. Absolute and universal indifference to truth, or the entire mutual independence of the thought and symbol, makes the symbol cease to be a symbol, and the conveyance of thought by its means, an impossibility.”

Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 48, 90—“Fundamental law of reason: So act, that thy maxims of will might become laws in a system of universal moral legislation.” This is Kant’s categorical imperative. He expresses it in yet another form: “Act from maxims fit to be regarded as universal laws of nature.” For expositions of the Decalogue which bring out its spiritual meaning, see Kurtz, Religionslehre, 9-72; Dick, Theology, 2:513-554; Dwight, Theology, 3:163-560; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 3:259-465.

B. Ceremonial or special injunctions.—These are illustrations of the elemental law, or approximate revelations of it, suited to lower degrees of capacity and to earlier stages of spiritual training (Ez. 20:25; Mat. 19:8; Mark 10:5). Though temporary, only God can say when they cease to be binding upon us in their outward form.

All positive enactments, therefore, whether they be moral or ceremonial, are republications of elemental law. Their forms may change, but the substance is eternal. Certain modes of expression, like the Mosaic system, may be abolished, but the essential demands are unchanging (Mat. 5:17, 18; cf. Eph. 2:15). From the imperfection of human language, no positive enactments are able to express in themselves the whole content and meaning of the elemental law. “It is not the purpose of revelation to disclose the whole of our duties.” Scripture is not a complete code of rules for practical action, but an enunciation of principles, with occasional precepts by way of illustration. Hence we must supplement the positive enactment by the law of being—the moral ideal found in the nature of God.

Ez. 20:25—“Moreover also I gave them statutes that were not good, and ordinances wherein they should not live”; Mat. 19:8—“Moses for your hardness of heart suffered you to put away your wives”; Mark 10:5—“For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment”; Mat. 5:17, 18—“Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law, till all things be accomplished”; cf. Eph. 2:15—“having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances”; Heb. 8:7—“if that first covenant had been faultless, then would no place have been sought for a second.” Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 90—“After the coming of the new covenant, the keeping up of the old was as needless a burden as winter garments in the mild air of summer, or as the attempt of an adult to wear the clothes of a child.”

Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:5-35—“Jesus repudiates for himself and for his disciples absolute subjection to O. T. Sabbath law (Mark 2:27 sq.); to O. T. law as to external defilements (Mark 7:15); to O. T. divorce law (Mark 10:2 sq.). He would ‘fulfil’ law and prophets by complete practical performance of the revealed will of God. He would bring out their inner meaning, not by literal and slavish obedience to every minute requirement of the Mosaic law, but by revealing in himself the perfect life and work toward which they tended. He would perfect the O. T. conceptions of God—not keep them intact in their literal form, but in their essential spirit. Not by quantitative extension, but by qualitative renewal, he would fulfil the law and the prophets. He would bring the imperfect expression in the O. T. to perfection, not by servile letter-worship or allegorizing, but through grasp of the divine idea.”

Scripture is not a series of minute injunctions and prohibitions such as the Pharisees and the Jesuits laid down. The Koran showed its immeasurable inferiority to the Bible by establishing the letter instead of the spirit, by giving permanent, definite, and specific rules of conduct, instead of leaving room for the growth of the free spirit and for the education of conscience. This is not true either of O. T. or of N. T. law. In Miss Fowler’s novel The Farringdons, Mrs. Herbert wishes “that the Bible had been written on the principle of that dreadful little book called ‘Don’t,’ which gives a list of the solecisms you should avoid; she would have understood it so much better than the present system.” Our Savior’s words about giving to him that asketh, and turning the cheek to the smiter (Mat 5:39-42) must be interpreted by the principle of love that lies at the foundation of the law. Giving to every tramp and yielding to every marauder is not pleasing our neighbor “for that which is good unto edifying” (Rom. 15:2). Only by confounding the divine law with Scripture prohibition could one write as in N. Amer. Rev., Feb. 1890:275—“Sin is the transgression of a divine law; but there is no divine law against suicide; therefore suicide is not sin.”

The written law was imperfect because God could, at the time, give no higher to an unenlightened people. “But to say that the scope and design were imperfectly moral, is contradicted by the whole course of the history. We must ask what is the moral standard in which this course of education issues.” And this we find in the life and precepts of Christ. Even the law of repentance and faith does not take the place of the old law of being, but applies the latter to the special conditions of sin. Under the Levitical law, the prohibition of the touching of the dry bone (Num. 19:16), equally with the purifications and sacrifices, the separations and penalties of the Mosaic code, expressed God’s holiness and his repelling from him all that savored of sin or death. The laws with regard to leprosy were symbolic, as well as sanitary. So church polity and the ordinances are not arbitrary requirements, but they publish to dull sense-environed consciences, better than abstract propositions could have done, the fundamental truths of the Christian scheme. Hence they are not to be abrogated “till he come” (1 Cor. 11:26).

The Puritans, however, in reënacting the Mosaic code, made the mistake of confounding the eternal law of God with a partial, temporary, and obsolete expression of it. So we are not to rest in external precepts respecting woman’s hair and dress and speech, but to find the underlying principle of modesty and subordination which alone is of universal and eternal validity. Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, 1:255—“God breathes, not speaks, his verdicts, felt not heard—Passed on successively to each court, I call Man’s conscience, custom, manners, all that make More and more effort to promulgate, mark God’s verdict in determinable words, Till last come human jurists—solidify Fluid results,—what’s fixable lies forged, Statute,—the residue escapes in fume, Yet hangs aloft a cloud, as palpable To the finer sense as word the legist welds. Justinian’s Pandects only make precise What simply sparkled in men’s eyes before, Twitched in their brow or quivered on their lip, Waited the speech they called, but would not come.” See Mozley, Ruling Ideas in Early Ages, 104; Tulloch, Doctrine of Sin, 141-144; Finney, Syst. Theol., 1-40, 135-319; Mansel, Metaphysics, 378, 379; H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 191-195.

Paul’s injunction to women to keep silence in the churches (1 Cor. 14:35; 1 Tim. 2:11,12) is to be interpreted by the larger law of gospel equality and privilege (Col. 3:11). Modesty and subordination once required a seclusion of the female sex which is no longer obligatory. Christianity has emancipated woman and has restored her to the dignity which belonged to her at the beginning. “In the old dispensation Miriam and Deborah and Huldah were recognized as leaders of God’s people, and Anna was a notable prophetess in the temple courts at the time of the coming of Christ. Elizabeth and Mary spoke songs of praise for all generations. A prophecy of Joel 2:28 was that the daughters of the Lord’s people should prophesy, under the guidance of the Spirit, in the new dispensation. Philip the evangelist had ‘four virgin daughters, who prophesied’ (Acts 21:9), and Paul cautioned Christian women to have their heads covered when they prayed or prophesied in public (1 Cor. 11:5), but had no words against the work of such women. He brought Priscilla with him to Ephesus, where she aided in training Apollos into better preaching power (Acts 18:26). He welcomed and was grateful for the work of those women who labored with him in the gospel at Philippi (Phil. 4:3). And it is certainly an inference from the spirit and teachings of Paul that we should rejoice in the efficient service and sound words of Christian women to-day in the Sunday School and in the missionary field.” The command “And he that heareth let him say, Come” (Rev. 22:17) is addressed to women also. See Ellen Batelle Dietrick, Women in the Early Christian Ministry; per contra, see G. F. Wilkin, Prophesying of Women, 183-193.

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III. Relation of the Law to the Grace of God

In human government, while law is an expression of the will of the governing power, and so of the nature lying behind the will, it is by no means an exhaustive expression of that will and nature, since it consists only of general ordinances, and leaves room for particular acts of command through the executive, as well as for “the institution of equity, the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon.”

Amos, Science of Law, 29-46, shows how “the institution of equity, the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon” all involve expressions of will above and beyond what is contained in mere statute. Century Dictionary, on Equity: “English law had once to do only with property in goods, houses and lands. A man who had none of these might have an interest in a salary, a patent, a contract, a copyright, a security, but a creditor could not at common law levy upon these. When the creditor applied to the crown for redress, a chancellor or keeper of the king’s conscience was appointed, who determined what and how the debtor should pay. Often the debtor was required to put his intangible property into the hands of a receiver and could regain possession of it only when the claim against it was satisfied. These chancellors’ courts were called courts of equity, and redressed wrongs which the common law did not provide for. In later times law and equity are administered for the most part by the same courts. The same court sits at one time as a court of law, and at another time as a court of equity.” “Summa lex, summa injuria,” is sometimes true.

Applying now to the divine law this illustration drawn from human law, we remark:

(a) The law of God is a general expression of God’s will, applicable to all moral beings. It therefore does not include the possibility of special injunctions to individuals, and special acts of wisdom and power in creation and providence. The very specialty of these latter expressions of will prevents us from classing them under the category of law.

Lord Bacon, Confession of Faith: “The soul of man was not produced by heaven or earth, but was breathed immediately from God; so the ways and dealings of God with spirits are not included in nature, that is, in the laws of heaven and earth, but are reserved to the law of his secret will and grace.”

(b) The law of God, accordingly, is a partial, not an exhaustive, expression of God’s nature. It constitutes, indeed, a manifestation of that attribute of holiness which is fundamental in God, and which man must possess in order to be in harmony with God. But it does not fully express God’s nature in its aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy.

The chief error of all pantheistic theology is the assumption that law is an exhaustive expression of God: Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:31—“If nature, as the self-realization of the divine essence, is equal to this divine essence, then it is infinite, and there can be nothing above and beyond it.” This is a denial of the transcendence of God (see notes on Pantheism, pages 100-105). Mere law is illustrated by the Buddhist proverb: “As the cartwheel follows the tread of the ox, so punishment follows sin.” Denovan: “Apart from Christ, even if we have never yet broken the law, it is only by steady and perfect obedience for the entire future that we can remain justified. If we have sinned, we can be justified [without Christ] only by suffering and exhausting the whole penalty of the law.”

(c) Mere law, therefore, leaves God’s nature in these aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy, to be expressed toward sinners in another way, namely, through the atoning, regenerating, pardoning, sanctifying work of the gospel of Christ. As creation does not exclude miracles, so law does not exclude grace (Rom. 8:3—“what the law could not do ... God” did).

Murphy, Scientific Bases, 303-327, esp. 315—“To impersonal law, it is indifferent whether its subjects obey or not. But God desires, not the punishment, but the destruction, of sin.” Campbell, Atonement, Introd., 28—“There are two regions of the divine self-manifestation, one the reign of law, the other the kingdom of God.” C. H. M.: “Law is the transcript of the mind of God as to what man ought to be. But God is not merely law, but love. There is more in his heart than could be wrapped up in the ‘ten words.’ Not the law, but only Christ, is the perfect image of God” (John 1:17—“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”). So there is more in man’s heart toward God than exact fulfilment of requirement. The mother who sacrifices herself for her sick child does it, not because she must, but because she loves. To say that we are saved by grace, is to say that we are saved both without merit on our own part, and without necessity on the part of God. Grace is made known in proclamation, offer, command; but in all these it is gospel, or glad-tidings.

(d) Grace is to be regarded, however, not as abrogating law, but as republishing and enforcing it (Rom. 3:31—“we establish the law”). By removing obstacles to pardon in the mind of God, and by enabling man to obey, grace secures the perfect fulfilment of law (Rom. 8:4—“that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us”). Even grace has its law (Rom. 8:2—“the law of the Spirit of life”); another higher law of grace, the operation of individualizing mercy, overbears the “law of sin and of death,”—this last, as in the case of the miracle, not being suspended, annulled, or violated, but being merged in, while it is transcended by, the exertion of personal divine will.

Hooker, Eccl. Polity, 1:155, 185, 194—“Man, having utterly disabled his nature unto those [natural] means, hath had other revealed by God, and hath received from heaven a law to teach him how that which is desired naturally, must now be supernaturally attained. Finally, we see that, because those latter exclude not the former as unnecessary, therefore the law of grace teaches and includes natural duties also, such as are hard to ascertain by the law of nature.” The truth is midway between the Pelagian view, that there is no obstacle to the forgiveness of sins, and the modern rationalistic view, that since law fully expresses God, there can be no forgiveness of sins at all. Greg, Creed of Christendom, 2:217-228—“God is the only being who cannot forgive sins.... Punishment is not the execution of a sentence, but the occurrence of an effect.” Robertson, Lect. on Genesis, 100—“Deeds are irrevocable,—their consequences are knit up with them irrevocably.” So Baden Powell, Law and Gospel, in Noyes’ Theological Essays, 27. All this is true if God be regarded as merely the source of law. But there is such a thing as grace, and grace is more than law. There is no forgiveness in nature, but grace is above and beyond nature.

Bradford, Heredity, 233, quotes from Huxley the terrible utterance: “Nature always checkmates, without haste and without remorse, never overlooking a mistake, or making the slightest allowance for ignorance.” Bradford then remarks: “This is Calvinism with God left out. Christianity does not deny or minimize the law of retribution, but it discloses a Person who is able to deliver in spite of it. There is grace, but grace brings salvation to those who accept the terms of salvation—terms strictly in accord with the laws revealed by science.” God revealed himself, we add, not only in law but in life; see Deut. 1:6, 7—“Ye have dwelt long enough in this mountain”—the mountain of the law; “turn you and take your journey”—i. e., see how God’s law is to be applied to life.

(e) Thus the revelation of grace, while it takes up and includes in itself the revelation of law, adds something different in kind, namely, the manifestation of the personal love of the Lawgiver. Without grace, law has only a demanding aspect. Only in connection with grace does it become “the perfect law, the law of liberty” (James 1:25). In fine, grace is that larger and completer manifestation of the divine nature, of which law constitutes the necessary but preparatory stage.

Law reveals God’s love and mercy, but only in their mandatory aspect; it requires in men conformity to the love and mercy of God; and as love and mercy in God are conditioned by holiness, so law requires that love and mercy should be conditioned by holiness in men. Law is therefore chiefly a revelation of holiness: it is in grace that we find the chief revelation of love; though even love does not save by ignoring holiness, but rather by vicariously satisfying its demands. Robert Browning, Saul: “I spoke as I saw. I report as man may of God’s work—All’s Love, yet all’s Law.”

Dorner, Person of Christ, 1:64, 78—“The law was a word (λόγος), but it was not a λόγος τέλειος, a plastic word, like the words of God that brought forth the world, for it was only imperative, and there was no reality nor willing corresponding to the command (dem Sollen fehlte das Seyn, das Wollen). The Christian λόγος is λόγος ἀληθειας—νόμος τέλειος τῆς ἐλευθερίας—an operative and effective word, as that of creation.” Chaucer, The Persones Tale: “For sothly the lawe of God is the love of God.” S. S. Times, Sept. 14, 1901:595—“Until a man ceases to be an outsider to the kingdom and knows the liberty of the sons of God, he is apt to think of God as the great Exacter, the great Forbidder, who reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he has not strewn.” Burton, in Bap. Rev., July, 1879:261-273, art.: Law and Divine Intervention; Farrar, Science and Theology, 184; Salmon, Reign of Law; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 1:31.

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Section II.—Nature Of Sin

I. Definition of Sin.

Sin is lack of conformity to the moral law of God, either in act, disposition, or state.

In explanation, we remark that (a) This definition regards sin as predicable only of rational and voluntary agents. (b) It assumes, however, that man has a rational nature below consciousness, and a voluntary nature apart from actual volition. (c) It holds that the divine law requires moral likeness to God in the affections and tendencies of the nature, as well as in its outward activities. (d) It therefore considers lack of conformity to the divine holiness in disposition or state as a violation of law, equally with the outward act of transgression.

In our discussion of the Will (pages 504-513), we noticed that there are permanent states of the will, as well as of the intellect and of the sensibilities. It is evident, moreover, that these permanent states, unlike man’s deliberate acts, are always very imperfectly conscious, and in many cases are not conscious at all. Yet it is in these very states that man is most unlike God, and so, as law only reflects God (see pages 537-544), most lacking in conformity to God’s law.

One main difference between Old School and New School views of sin is that the latter constantly tends to limit sin to mere act, while the former finds sin in the states of the soul. We propose what we think to be a valid and proper compromise between the two. We make sin coëxtensive, not with act, but with activity. The Old School and the New School are not so far apart, when we remember that the New School “choice” is elective preference, exercised so soon as the child is born (Park) and reasserting itself in all the subordinate choices of life; while the Old School “state” is not a dead, passive, mechanical thing, but is a state of active movement, or of tendency to move, toward evil. As God’s holiness is not passive purity but purity willing (pages 268-275), so the opposite to this, sin, is not passive impurity but is impurity willing.

The soul may not always be conscious, but it may always be active. At his creation man “became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7), and it may be doubted whether the human spirit ever ceases its activity, any more than the divine Spirit in whose image it is made. There is some reason to believe that even in the deepest sleep the body rests rather than the mind. And when we consider how large a portion of our activity is automatic and continuous, we see the impossibility of limiting the term “sin” to the sphere of momentary act, whether conscious or unconscious.

E. G. Robinson: “Sin is not mere act—something foreign to the being. It is a quality of being. There is no such thing as a sin apart from a sinner, or an act apart from an actor. God punishes sinners, not sins. Sin is a mode of being; as an entity by itself it never existed. God punishes sin as a state, not as an act. Man is not responsible for the consequences of his crimes, nor for the acts themselves, except as they are symptomatic of his personal states.” Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 5:162—“The knowledge of sin has justly been termed the β and ψ of philosophy.”

Our treatment of Holiness, as belonging to the nature of God (pages 268-275); of Will, as not only the faculty of volitions, but also a permanent state of the soul (pages 504-513); and of Law as requiring the conformity of man’s nature to God’s holiness (pages 537-544); has prepared us for the definition of sin as a state. The chief psychological defect of New School theology, next to its making holiness to be a mere form of love, is its ignoring of the unconscious and subconscious elements in human character. To help our understanding of sin as an underlying and permanent state of the soul, we subjoin references to recent writers of note upon psychology and its relations to theology.

We may preface our quotations by remarking that mind is always greater than its conscious operations. The man is more than his acts. Only the smallest part of the self is manifested in the thoughts, feelings, and volitions. In counting, to put myself to sleep, I find, when my attention has been diverted by other thoughts, that the counting has gone on all the same. Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 176, speaks of the “dramatic sundering of the ego.” There are dream-conversations. Dr. Johnson was once greatly vexed at being worsted by his opponent in an argument in a dream. M. Maury in a dream corrected the bad English of his real self by the good English of his other unreal self. Spurgeon preached a sermon in his sleep after vainly trying to excogitate one when awake, and his wife gave him the substance of it after he woke. Hegel said that “Life is divided into two realms—a night-life of genius, and a day-life of consciousness.”

Du Prel, Philosophy of Mysticism, propounds the thesis: “The ego is not wholly embraced in self-consciousness,” and claims that there is much of psychical activity within us of which our common waking conception of ourselves takes no account. Thus when “dream dramatizes”—when we engage in a dream-conversation in which our interlocutor’s answer comes to us with a shock of surprise—if our own mind is assumed to have furnished that answer, it has done so by a process of unconscious activity. Dwinell, in Bib. Sac., July, 1890:369-389—“The soul is only imperfectly in possession of its organs, and is able to report only a small part of its activities in consciousness.” Thoughts come to us like foundlings laid at our door. We slip in a question to the librarian, Memory, and after leaving it there awhile the answer appears on the bulletin board. Delbœuf, Le Sommeil et les Rêves, 91—“The dreamer is a momentary and involuntary dupe of his own imagination, as the poet is the momentary and voluntary dupe, and the insane man is the permanent and involuntary dupe.” If we are the organs not only of our own past thinking, but, as Herbert Spencer suggests, also the organs of the past thinking of the race, his doctrine may give additional, though unintended, confirmation to a Scriptural view of sin.

William James, Will to Believe, 316, quotes from F. W. H. Myers, in Jour. Psych. Research, who likens our ordinary consciousness to the visible part of the solar spectrum; the total consciousness is like that spectrum prolonged by the inclusion of the ultra-red and the ultra-violet rays—1 to 12 and 96. “Each of us,” he says, “is an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows—an individuality which can never express itself completely through any corporeal manifestation. The self manifests itself through the organism; but there is always some part of the self unmanifested, and always, as it seems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve.” William James himself, in Scribner’s Monthly, March, 1890:361-373, sketches the hypnotic investigations of Janet and Binet. There is a secondary, subconscious self. Hysteria is the lack of synthetising power, and consequent disintegration of the field of consciousness into mutually exclusive parts. According to Janet, the secondary and the primary consciousnesses, added together, can never exceed the normally total consciousness of the individual. But Prof. James says: “There are trances which obey another type. I know a non-hysterical woman, who in her trances knows facts which altogether transcend her possible normal consciousness, facts about the lives of people whom she never saw or heard of before.”

Our affections are deeper and stronger than we know. We learn how deep and strong they are, when their current is resisted by affliction or dammed up by death. We know how powerful evil passions are, only when we try to subdue them. Our dreams show us our naked selves. On the morality of dreams, the London Spectator remarks: “Our conscience and power of self-control act as a sort of watchdog over our worse selves during the day, but when the watchdog is off duty, the primitive or natural man is at liberty to act as he pleases; our ‘soul’ has left us at the mercy of our own evil nature, and in our dreams we become what, except for the grace of God, we would always be.”

Both in conscience and in will there is a self-diremption. Kant’s categorical imperative is only one self laying down the law to the other self. The whole Kantian system of ethics is based on this doctrine of double consciousness. Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind, 169 sq., speaks of “psychical automatism.” Yet this automatism is possible only to self-conscious and cognitively remembering minds. It is always the “I” that puts itself into “that other.” We could not conceive of the other self except under the figure of the “I.” All our mental operations are ours, and we are responsible for them, because the subconscious and even the unconscious self is the product of past self-conscious thoughts and volitions. The present settled state of our wills is the result of former decisions. The will is a storage battery, charged by past acts, full of latent power, ready to manifest its energy so soon as the force which confines it is withdrawn. On unconscious mental action, see Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 139, 515-543, and criticism of Carpenter, in Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 226-238; Bramwell, Hypnotism, its History, Practice and Theory, 358-398; Porter, Human Intellect, 333, 334; versus Sir Wm. Hamilton, who adopts the maxim: “Non sentimus, nisi sentiamus nos sentire” (Philosophy, ed. Wight, 171). Observe also that sin may infect the body, as well as the soul, and may bring it into a state of non-conformity to God’s law (see H. B. Smith, Syst. Theol., 267).

In adducing our Scriptural and rational proof of the definition of sin as a state, we desire to obviate the objection that this view leaves the soul wholly given over to the power of evil. While we maintain that this is true of man apart from God, we also insist that side by side with the evil bent of the human will there is always an immanent divine power which greatly counteracts the force of evil, and if not resisted leads the individual soul—even when resisted leads the race at large—toward truth and salvation. This immanent divine power is none other than Christ, the eternal Word, the Light which lighteth every man; see John 1:4, 9.

John 1:4, 9—“In him was life, and the life was the light of men.... There was the true light, even the light which lighteth every man.” See a further statement in A. H. Strong, Cleveland Sermon, May, 1904, with regard to the old and the new view as to sin:—“Our fathers believed in total depravity, and we agree with them that man naturally is devoid of love to God and that every faculty is weakened, disordered, and corrupted by the selfish bent of his will. They held to original sin. The selfish bent of man’s will can be traced back to the apostacy of our first parents; and, on account of that departure of the race from God, all men are by nature children of wrath. And all this is true, if it is regarded as a statement of the facts, apart from their relation to Christ. But our fathers did not see, as we do, that man’s relation to Christ antedated the Fall and constituted an underlying and modifying condition of man’s life. Humanity was naturally in Christ, in whom all things were created and in whom they all consist. Even man’s sin did not prevent Christ from still working in him to counteract the evil and to suggest the good. There was an internal, as well as an external, preparation for man’s redemption. In this sense, of a divine principle in man striving against the selfish and godless will, there was a total redemption, over against man’s total depravity; and an original grace, that was even more powerful than original sin.

“We have become conscious that total depravity alone is not a sufficient or proper expression of the truth; and the phrase has been outgrown. It has been felt that the old view of sin did not take account of the generous and noble aspirations, the unselfish efforts, the strivings after God, of even unregenerate men. For this reason there has been less preaching about sin, and less conviction as to its guilt and condemnation. The good impulses of men outside the Christian pale have been often credited to human nature, when they should have been credited to the indwelling Spirit of Christ. I make no doubt that one of our radical weaknesses at this present time is our more superficial view of sin. Without some sense of sin’s guilt and condemnation, we cannot feel our need of redemption. John the Baptist must go before Christ; the law must prepare the way for the gospel.

“My belief is that the new apprehension of Christ’s relation to the race will enable us to declare, as never before, the lost condition of the sinner; while at the same time we show him that Christ is with him and in him to save. This presence in every man of a power not his own that works for righteousness is a very different doctrine from that ’divinity of man’ which is so often preached. The divinity is not the divinity of man, but the divinity of Christ. And the power that works for righteousness is not the power of man, but the power of Christ. It is a power whose warning, inviting, persuading influence renders only more marked and dreadful the evil will which hampers and resists it. Depravity is all the worse, when we recognize in it the constant antagonist of an ever-present, all-holy, and all-loving Redeemer.”

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1. Proof

As it is readily admitted that the outward act of transgression is properly denominated sin, we here attempt to show only that lack of conformity to the law of God in disposition or state is also and equally to be so denominated.

A. From Scripture.

(a) The words ordinarily translated “sin,” or used as synonyms for it, are as applicable to dispositions and states as to acts (חטאה and ἁμαρτία = a missing, failure, coming short [sc. of God’s will]).

See Num. 15:28—“sinneth unwittingly”; Ps. 51:2—“cleanse me from my sin”; 5—“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me”; Rom. 7:17—“sin which dwelleth in me”; compare Judges 20:16, where the literal meaning of the word appears: “sling stones at a hair-breadth, and not miss” (חטא). In a similar manner, משע [LXX ἀσέβεια] = separation from, rebellion against [sc. God]; see Lev. 16:16, 21; cf. Delitzsch on Ps. 32:1. עון [LXX ἀδικία] = bending, perversion [sc. of what is right], iniquity; see Lev. 5:17; cf. John 7:18. See also the Hebrew רע, רשע, [= ruin, confusion], and the Greek ἀποστασία, ἐπιθυμία, ἔχθρα, κακία, πονηρία, σάρξ. None of these designations of sin limits it to mere act,—most of them more naturally suggest disposition or state. Ἁμαρτία implies that man in sin does not reach what he seeks therein; sin is a state of delusion and deception (Julius Müller). On the words mentioned, see Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms; Cremer, Lexicon N. T. Greek; Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 28, pp. 43-47; Trench, N. T. Synonyms, part 2:61, 73.

(b) The New Testament descriptions of sin bring more distinctly to view the states and dispositions than the outward acts of the soul (1 John 3:4—ἡ ἁμαρτία ἐστὶν ἡ ἀνομία, where ἀνομία =, not “transgression of the law,” but, as both context and etymology show, “lack of conformity to law” or “lawlessness”—Rev. Vers.).

See 1 John 5:17—“All unrighteousness is sin”; Rom. 14:23—“whatsoever is not of faith is sin”; James 4:17—“To him therefore that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.” Where the sin is that of not doing, sin cannot be said to consist in act. It must then at least be a state.

(c) Moral evil is ascribed not only to the thoughts and affections, but to the heart from which they spring (we read of the “evil thoughts” and of the “evil heart”—Mat. 15:19 and Heb. 3:12).

See also Mat. 5:22—anger in the heart is murder; 28—impure desire is adultery. Luke 6:45—“the evil man out of the evil treasure [of his heart] bringeth forth that which is evil.” Heb. 3:12—“an evil heart of unbelief”; cf. Is. 1:5—“the whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint”; Jer. 17:9—“The heart is deceitful above all things, and it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it?”—here the sin that cannot be known is not sin of act, but sin of the heart. “Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say we feel; below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows, With silent current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.”

(d) The state or condition of the soul which gives rise to wrong desires and acts is expressly called sin (Rom. 7:8—“Sin ... wrought in me ... all manner of coveting”).

John 8:34—“Every one that committeth sin is the bondservant of sin”; Rom. 7:11, 13, 14, 17, 20—“sin ... beguiled me ... working death to me ... I am carnal, sold under sin ... sin which dwelleth in me.” These representations of sin as a principle or state of the soul are incompatible with the definition of it as a mere act. John Byrom, 1691-1763: “Think and be careful what thou art within, For there is sin in the desire of sin. Think and be thankful in a different case, For there is grace in the desire of grace.”

Alexander, Theories of the Will, 85—“In the person of Paul is represented the man who has been already justified by faith and who is at peace with God. In the 6th chapter of Romans, the question is discussed whether such a man is obliged to keep the moral law. But in the 7th chapter the question is not, must man keep the moral law? but why is he so incapable of keeping the moral law? The struggle is thus, not in the soul of the unregenerate man who is dead in sin, but in the soul of the regenerate man who has been pardoned and is endeavoring to keep the law.... In a state of sin the will is determined toward the bad; in a state of grace the will is determined toward righteousness; but not wholly so, for the flesh is not at once subdued, and there is a war between the good and bad principles of action in the soul of him who has been pardoned.”

(e) Sin is represented as existing in the soul, prior to the consciousness of it, and as only discovered and awakened by the law (Rom. 7:9, 10—“when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died”—if sin “revived,” it must have had previous existence and life, even though it did not manifest itself in acts of conscious transgression).

Rom. 7:8—“apart from the law sin is dead”—here is sin which is not yet sin of act. Dead or unconscious sin is still sin. The fire in a cave discovers reptiles and stirs them, but they were there before; the light and heat do not create them. Let a beam of light, says Jean Paul Richter, through your window-shutter into a darkened room, and you reveal a thousand motes floating in the air whose existence was before unsuspected. So the law of God reveals our “hidden faults” (Ps. 19:12)—infirmities, imperfections, evil tendencies and desires—which also cannot all be classed as acts of transgression.

(f) The allusions to sin as a permanent power or reigning principle, not only in the individual but in humanity at large, forbid us to define it as a momentary act, and compel us to regard it as being primarily a settled depravity of nature, of which individual sins or acts of transgression are the workings and fruits (Rom. 5:21—“sin reigned in death”; 6:12—“let not therefore sin reign in your mortal body”).

In Rom. 5:21, the reign of sin is compared to the reign of grace. As grace is not an act but a principle, so sin is not an act but a principle. As the poisonous exhalations from a well indicate that there is corruption and death at the bottom, so the ever-recurring thoughts and acts of sin are evidence that there is a principle of sin in the heart,—in other words, that sin exists as a permanent disposition or state. A momentary act cannot “reign” nor “dwell”; a disposition or state can. Maudsley, Sleep, its Psychology, makes the damaging confession: “If we were held responsible for our dreams, there is no living man who would not deserve to be hanged.”

(g) The Mosaic sacrifices for sins of ignorance and of omission, and especially for general sinfulness, are evidence that sin is not to be limited to mere act, but that it includes something deeper and more permanent in the heart and the life (Lev. 1:3; 5:11; 12:8; cf. Luke 2:24).

The sin-offering for sins of ignorance (Lev. 4:14, 20, 31), the trespass-offering for sins of omission (Lev. 5:5, 6), and the burnt offering to expiate general sinfulness (Lev. 1:3; cf. Luke 2:22-24), all witness that sin is not confined to mere act. John 1:29—“the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin,” not the sins, “of the world”. See Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:233; Schmid, Bib. Theol. N. T., 194, 381, 442, 448, 492, 604; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:210-217; Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:259-306; Edwards, Works. 3:16-18. For the New School definition of sin, see Fitch, Nature of Sin, and Park, in Bib. Sac., 7:551.

B. From the common judgment of mankind.

(a) Men universally attribute vice as well as virtue not only to conscious and deliberate acts, but also to dispositions and states. Belief in something more permanently evil than acts of transgression is indicated in the common phrases, “hateful temper,” “wicked pride,” “bad character.”

As the beatitudes (Mat. 5:1-12) are pronounced, not upon acts, but upon dispositions of the soul, so the curses of the law are uttered not so much against single acts of transgression as against the evil affections from which they spring. Compare the “works of the flesh” (Gal. 5:19) with the “fruit of the Spirit” (5:22). In both, dispositions and states predominate.

(b) Outward acts, indeed, are condemned only when they are regarded as originating in, and as symptomatic of, evil dispositions. Civil law proceeds upon this principle in holding crime to consist, not alone in the external act, but also in the evil motive or intent with which it is performed.

The mens rea is essential to the idea of crime. The “idle-word” (Mat 12:36) shall be brought into the judgment, not because it is so important in itself, but because it is a floating straw that indicates the direction of the whole current of the heart and life. Murder differs from homicide, not in any outward respect, but simply because of the motive that prompts it,—and that motive is always, in the last analysis, an evil disposition or state.

(c) The stronger an evil disposition, or in other words, the more it connects itself with, or resolves itself into, a settled state or condition of the soul, the more blameworthy is it felt to be. This is shown by the distinction drawn between crimes of passion and crimes of deliberation.

Edwards: “Guilt consists in having one’s heart wrong, and in doing wrong from the heart.” There is guilt in evil desires, even when the will combats them. But there is greater guilt when the will consents. The outward act may be in each case the same, but the guilt of it is proportioned to the extent to which the evil disposition is settled and strong.

(d) This condemning sentence remains the same, even although the origin of the evil disposition or state cannot be traced back to any conscious act of the individual. Neither the general sense of mankind, nor the civil law in which this general sense is expressed, goes behind the fact of an existing evil will. Whether this evil will is the result of personal transgression or is a hereditary bias derived from generations passed, this evil will is the man himself, and upon him terminates the blame. We do not excuse arrogance or sensuality upon the ground that they are family traits.

The young murderer in Boston was not excused upon the ground of a congenitally cruel disposition. We repent in later years of sins of boyhood, which we only now see to be sins; and converted cannibals repent, after becoming Christians, of the sins of heathendom which they once committed without a thought of their wickedness. The peacock cannot escape from his feet by flying, nor can we absolve ourselves from blame for an evil state of will by tracing its origin to a remote ancestry. We are responsible for what we are. How this can be, when we have not personally and consciously originated it, is the problem of original sin, which we have yet to discuss.

(e) When any evil disposition has such strength in itself, or is so combined with others, as to indicate a settled moral corruption in which no power to do good remains, this state is regarded with the deepest disapprobation of all. Sin weakens man’s power of obedience, but the can-not is a will-not, and is therefore condemnable. The opposite principle would lead to the conclusion that, the more a man weakened his powers by transgression, the less guilty he would be, until absolute depravity became absolute innocence.

The boy who hates his father cannot change his hatred into love by a single act of will; but he is not therefore innocent. Spontaneous and uncontrollable profanity is the worst profanity of all. It is a sign that the whole will, like a subterranean Kentucky river, is moving away from God, and that no recuperative power is left in the soul which can reach into the depths to reverse its course. See Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:110-114; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:79-92, 152-157; Richards, Lectures on Theology, 256-301; Edwards, Works, 2:134; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 243-262; Princeton Essays, 2:224-239; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 394.

C. From the experience of the Christian.

Christian experience is a testing of Scripture truth, and therefore is not an independent source of knowledge. It may, however, corroborate conclusions drawn from the word of God. Since the judgment of the Christian is formed under the influence of the Holy Spirit, we may trust this more implicitly than the general sense of the world. We affirm, then, that just in proportion to his spiritual enlightenment and self-knowledge, the Christian

(a) Regards his outward deviations from God’s law, and his evil inclinations and desires, as outgrowths and revelations of a depravity of nature which lies below his consciousness; and

(b) Repents more deeply for this depravity of nature, which constitutes his inmost character and is inseparable from himself, than for what he merely feels or does.

In proof of these statements we appeal to the biographies and writings of those in all ages who have been by general consent regarded as most advanced in spiritual culture and discernment.

“Intelligentia prima est, ut te noris peccatorem.” Compare David’s experience, Ps. 51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom”—with Paul’s experience in Rom. 7:24—“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?”—with Isaiah’s experience (6:5), when in the presence of God’s glory he uses the words of the leper (Lev. 13:45) and calls himself “unclean,” and with Peter’s experience (Luke 5:8) when at the manifestation of Christ’s miraculous power he “_fell down at Jesus’ __ knees, saying, Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord._” So the publican cries: _“__God, be thou merciful to me the sinner__”__ (Luke 18:13)_, and Paul calls himself the “chief” of sinners (1 Tim. 1:15). It is evident that in none of these cases were there merely single acts of transgression in view; the humiliation and self-abhorrence were in view of permanent states of depravity. Van Oosterzee: “What we do outwardly is only the revelation of our inner nature.” The outcropping and visible rock is but small in extent compared with the rock that is underlying and invisible. The iceberg has eight-ninths of its mass below the surface of the sea, yet icebergs have been seen near Cape Horn from 700 to 800 feet high above the water.

It may be doubted whether any repentance is genuine which is not repentance for sin rather than for sins; compare John 16:8—the Holy Spirit “will convict the world in respect of sin/” On the difference between conviction of sins and conviction of sin, see Hare, Mission of the Comforter. Dr. A. J. Gordon, just before his death, desired to be left alone. He was then overheard confessing his sins in such seemingly extravagant terms as to excite fear that he was in delirium. Martensen, Dogmatics, 389—Luther during his early experience “often wrote to Staupitz: ‘Oh, my sins, my sins!’ and yet in the confessional he could name no sins in particular which he had to confess; so that it was clearly a sense of the general depravity of his nature which filled his soul with deep sorrow and pain.” Luther’s conscience would not accept the comfort that he wished to be without sin, and therefore had no real sin. When he thought himself too great a sinner to be saved, Staupitz replied: “Would you have the semblance of a sinner and the semblance of a Savior?”

After twenty years of religious experience, Jonathan Edwards wrote (Works 1:22, 23; also 3:16-18): “Often since I have lived in this town I have had very affecting views of my own sinfulness and vileness, very frequently to such a degree as to hold me in a kind of loud weeping, sometimes for a considerable time together, so that I have been often obliged to shut myself up. I have had a vastly greater sense of my own wickedness and the badness of my heart than ever I had before my conversion. It has often appeared to me that if God should mark iniquity against me, I should appear the very worst of all mankind, of all that have been since the beginning of the world to this time; and that I should have by far the lowest place in hell. When others that have come to talk with me about their soul’s concerns have expressed the sense they have had of their own wickedness, by saying that it seemed to them they were as bad as the devil himself; I thought their expressions seemed exceeding faint and feeble to represent my wickedness.”

Edwards continues: “My wickedness, as I am in myself, has long appeared to me perfectly ineffable and swallowing up all thought and imagination—like an infinite deluge, or mountains over my head. I know not how to express better what my sins appear to me to be, than by heaping infinite on infinite and multiplying infinite by infinite. Very often for these many years, these expressions are in my mind and in my mouth: ‘Infinite upon infinite—infinite upon infinite!’ When I look into my heart and take a view of my wickedness, it looks like an abyss infinitely deeper than hell. And it appears to me that were it not for free grace, exalted and raised up to the infinite height of all the fulness and glory of the great Jehovah, and the arm of his power and grace stretched forth in all the majesty of his power and in all the glory of his sovereignty, I should appear sunk down in my sins below hell itself, far beyond the sight of everything but the eye of sovereign grace that can pierce even down to such a depth. And yet it seems to me that my conviction of sin is exceeding small and faint; it is enough to amaze me that I have no more sense of my sin. I know certainly that I have very little sense of my sinfulness. When I have had turns of weeping for my sins, I thought I knew at the time that my repentance was nothing to my sin.... It is affecting to think how ignorant I was, when a young Christian, of the bottomless, infinite depths of wickedness, pride, hypocrisy, and deceit left in my heart.”

Jonathan Edwards was not an ungodly man, but the holiest man of his time. He was not an enthusiast, but a man of acute, philosophic mind. He was not a man who indulged in exaggerated or random statements, for with his power of introspection and analysis he combined a faculty and habit of exact expression unsurpassed among the sons of men. If the maxim “cuique in arte sua credendum est” is of any value, Edwards’s statements in a matter of religious experience are to be taken as correct interpretations of the facts. H. B. Smith (System. Theol., 275) quotes Thomasius as saying: “It is a striking fact in Scripture that statements of the depth and power of sin are chiefly from the regenerate.” Another has said that “a serpent is never seen at its whole length until it is dead.” Thomas à Kempis (ed. Gould and Lincoln, 142)—“Do 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.

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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 then “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 (θέλημα, voluntas, Wille) as well as volition (βουλή, 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 knew 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., 25:30-48; 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.

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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.

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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 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.

(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 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 cause—he 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 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 ill-conduct, 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 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᾽ ἐστιν 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—σάρξ—“the purely human element in man, as opposed to the divine principle”; Pope, Theology, 2:65—σάρξ—“the whole being of man, body, soul, and spirit, separated from God and subjected to the creature”; Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 19—σάρξ—“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 σάρξ 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—σάρξ—“human nature without the πνεῦμα.... 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 σάρξ of Paul corresponds to the κόσμος 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 σάρξ, 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.

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