The light beyond the law.

creed, "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth." When He is hidden, forgotten, denied, the gospel for an age of doubt must prepare the way for the gospel for a world of sin. Over the vague unrest, the inarticulate shame, the uncomprehended fear, of an evil world, the light of God's love and God's law must be poured. Thus only can the evil doer find his way to that place of penitence, where he cries, "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight." 1

The sense of sin, therefore, is not by any means a hopeless thing. It is an evidence of life, in its very pain; of enlightenment, in its very shame; of nearness to God, in its very humiliation before Him.

There is a passage in a recent story of human life that puts the truth very simply and beautifully.2 A woman that was a sinner has come to a minister of Christ to confess her sin. The old man speaks to her as she kneels at his feet, weeping.

"You have sinned, and suffered for your sin. You have asked your Heavenly Father to forgive you, and He has forgiven you. But still

1 Psalm li. 4.

* Margaret Deland, Old Chester Tales, p. 84.

you suffer. Woman, be thankful that you can suffer. The worst trouble in the world is the trouble that does not know God, and so does not suffer. Without such knowledge there is no suffering. The sense of sin in the soul is the apprehension of Almighty God."

Sin a mystery.

IV

The Hopeful Fear

Sin is not a thing to be defined. It is a thing to be felt. Every attempt at a definition comes short of the reality. If it is insisted upon as the full truth, it becomes a guide to error. Every genuine feeling of sin throws some light upon the reality and helps us to perceive that which we can never explain.

One of the inexplicable elements of sin is the connection between its root in the race and its fruits in the individual. We cannot explain how it is that each man should feel himself free enough to be fully responsible for his own evil thoughts and feelings and actions, and yet conscious at the same time that they are joined to a common ground of evil in human nature. Stranger still is the fact that this propensity to evil is felt to be not an excuse but an aggravation. The man who injures his brother in a fit of passion, takes no comfort in the remembrance of his anger. The anger itself is part

of his condemnation.

Who ever excused a foul deed, to his own conscience, with the saying that he had a foul nature? Sin is not only an act it is a condition, a state; and separate

sins are not better, they are worse, because they spring from a common root. "It is of sin," says Boetius, "that we do not love that which is best."

Christ taught the truth of original sin. He Original did not explain it, but He declared it when He sin. said, "Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies."1 Side by side with this truth He proclaimed the guilt of actual sin when He said, "Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart."2 He taught also that all men need to be delivered from both original and actual sin when He said, "Ye must be born again," 3 and "Except ye repent ye shall all likewise perish." But when His disciples pressed Him to explain this mystery of the connection between the root and the fruit of evil, with their question, "Lord, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Christ refused to answer them. He said, "Neither did this man sin nor his parents" (that is, in relation to the point of their question), "but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.”5 Original sin makes originality in sins impos

Every sin a

fall of man.

sible. There is a fatal resemblance and relationship in all the evils that are done under the sun, from the days before the flood even until now.

And yet every sin originates in the heart that commits it. Each individual will that consents to evil chooses for itself. The ground of this choice is hidden in darkness. It may lie in a region beyond the sphere of time and space, an antenatal state.1

But the operation of this choice is manifest in the light. Every sin is a fall of man.

To be really conscious of a single sin is to feel its secret connections and infinite possibilities. It is to catch sight of the bottomless gulf and have a sense of the immeasurable peril of walking beside it with unguarded feet.

In Goethe's Confessions of a Beautiful Soul there is a singular and searching passage which goes very deep into human experi

ence.

"For more than a year," so runs the confession,-"I was forced to feel that if an unseen Hand had not protected me, I might have become a Girard, a Cartouche, a Damiens, or

1 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, pp. 268 ff.; Müller, On the Christian Doctrine of Sin, II., pp. 357 ff.