of Him than as possessing it. It would only weaken the testimony of the whole New Testament in the matter to appeal to particular texts. Any one acquainted with the fully self-revealed consciousness of our Lord Himself, or on the other hand with the entire manifold record concerning Him, will know that in neither is there the thought of any, the least, trace of sin in Him. We are so accustomed to this human anomaly of the perfection of humility and the utter sense of personal perfection combined in one, that we do not sufficiently question it or look as deeply as we ought into its explanation. To deny it is to give up Christianity, or else to make of it something totally different and opposite from itself. To admit it is to recognize in it such an exception to and transcendence of human experience as to amount to the spiritual cataclysm of which we spoke. I will anticipate here what lies some way before us to make the following explanation. The coexistence in Jesus of a perfect human humility, with the entire absence in Him of what is in us the chief ground of humility, the sin that none but He has ever surmounted on this earth, is explicable in this way: While we cannot say that the holiness of Jesus was only on the continuous or unbroken line of all other human holiness, because in fact it transcended or passed beyond the limits of that, - yet also we must say that it was a human holiness, identical with ours in kind, and identical with it in what we might call its natural history, or the conditions and law of its origin and growth. Now all human or creature holiness comes through the one only law of the submission of nature and self, as deficient and insufficient for holiness, to the one only sufficient source and cause of holiness. Consequently, the holier one becomes the more one passes out of all dependence upon mere nature and all conceit of mere self. These are left behind in the growing experience of that which, while it is our ever growing selves, is ever more and more consciously not of ourselves. The humility in the holiness of Jesus is the humanness in it; it is the memory and mark of its earthly history. The human spirit that becomes more selfless and humble as it grows more divine will be most so when it has attained its divine perfection. One of the most beautiful of the many anomalies of Christian character is that the more righteous it becomes the less self-righteous it becomes; the greater it grows the more modest it grows. In what I have called the cataclysmic fact of our Lord's humanly acquired and yet perfectly acquired holiness, we have already all the spiritual side of the mighty truth of the Resurrection. Humanity was already in Him dead to sin and alive to God. There was more, but there was nothing greater, to follow. The sinlessness, or more properly the holiness, of Jesus was every whit as great a miracle, — if we please to call it so, it just as much transcended ordinary but for Him, universal - human experience, as His resurrection from the dead was or did. Indeed, they were one and the same act, though separable and separated parts of it. The Conqueror of sin was the Conqueror of death. XII SIN AND ITS TREATMENT WE will assume a sufficient knowledge of what sin means, to begin with. If any more exact definition is needed, it will come out of itself in the discussion. If sin is not itself a definite and definable thing, at least its contrary or contradictory, holiness, is so; it may therefore be defined by its opposite. There is one other point upon which I desire to be understood at the start. In studying the problem of sin and its treatment, we shall probably find ourselves treading in the footsteps of New Testament and traditional thought on that subject. Immediately we shall find ourselves using the language of St. Paul, the first Christian thinker and interpreter of the matter in hand. If so, it will be only because we cannot help it. I think that the Christian doctrine of sin and its treatment was developed in the New Testament, and primarily by St. Paul, on the only possible line and in the only possible way. I find myself, therefore, unable to depart from it, but let it be understood that we are following it not upon the ground of its authority, but from the necessity of its truth. Let the discussion itself show whether that necessity really exists. Sin is of all things in the world a personal matter. It is the thing in the world the most independent of God Himself, and it is independent of Him to the point of contradiction. Sin, in order to be sin, must be so, in the language of scholasticism, not only in its matter but in its form. We might say that sin is a violation of the spirit of holiness, or of the law of righteousness. But there may be a material violation of these which is not a formal violation of them, and which therefore is not sin. The material definition of sin would be the transgression of the law; the formal definition is that it is the personal, the conscious and voluntary, transgression of the law. An animal or an infant or an idiot might perform an act materially identical with what would be in a responsible person the worst of crimes. But there would be no guilt or sin because that is lacking which not only defines but constitutes these, viz.: consciousness and purpose or choice. This is what St. Paul means when he says that sin was always in the world, even prior to the law; but that sin is not imputed where or when there is no law. By law we mean that which in any way expresses or conveys to our consciousness or our knowledge the distinction and difference between what we ought and what we ought not. Until that distinction is born in us there can be no actual or real sin. The matter of it may and will be present, but it is not imputed, it cannot be by ourselves and it is not by God, accounted or regarded as sin, because the essential condition and constituent of sin is not yet there. When the law, in any form or manner, has once expressed and actually conveyed to us the opposition of ought and ought not, the differen tiation of sin and holiness has begun. So by the law is the knowledge of sin; but where is the knowledge of sin there is equally the knowledge of holiness, for each can be known only through its opposite. Sin and holiness as opposites are a matter of personal attitude toward one and the same thing. Let us recall the profound saying of Aristotle, that opposite habits, virtues and vices, spring and grow out of opposite attitudes or responses to the same things—what we might call opposite reactions upon the same stimuli. Precisely what, yielded to and overcome by, creates in us a vice, resisted and overcome develops in us the opposite virtue. So far as what we are or become personally may be said to be due to external causes, we might say truly that vice and virtue, sin and holiness, proceed from identically the same causes. That is so because what we are personally cannot properly be said to proceed from causes without ourselves; they must proceed from ourselves. Different personalities are not produced by different circumstances or conditions, but by different attitudes and actions under identical conditions. What is necessary to make a sinner is equally necessary to make a saint, and so each may be said to have been produced by the same causes. We may pause to remark that there is nothing in what has been just said that contradicts the patent fact that men are actually for the most part what their times and circumstances make them. No one can deny that taken in the mass or by the average men for the most part are overcome by, rather than overcome, |