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and religion. Likewise inadequate is (2) the theory of sensation, which would find the source of sin altogether in the sensuous nature of man. As the child grows out of infancy into selfconscious life and activity, the sensational appetites make their demands, and external stimuli compel action in certain ways impossible to be long resisted. Hence all men have become more or less slaves of sensuous instincts and desires. The large element of fact and truth in these statements should be at once conceded. Man has a strong and conspicuous sensuous element in his nature, and that element is the occasion and stimulant of a large proportion of his misdeeds and immoralities. His contact and constant intercourse with the world are realized by means of the senses of touch, taste, sight, hearing, and smelling. In fact, his entire knowledge of the universe is mainly dependent upon the operation of these powers and organs of sensation. But the facts of sensation do not comprehend all the facts of moral action in man, for many of the worst forms of human sinfulness are in no way connected with sensuousness. The blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, which we found to be the most aggravated form of sin, is not a matter of sensuality. All sins of pride and ambition, of hatred and malice and envy, and, especially, deep malignant concentration of bitterness and hostility and scorn toward all that is called God or is an object of religious worship-all these are facts for which the sensuous theory of the origin of sin fails to furnish any adequate explanation. (3) Another theory essays to find the origin of sin in the essential limitations and imperfection of man. It assumes and affirms that, as God is alone the supreme and absolutely good One in the universe, all that is less than he must needs be negatively evil. It must follow that the only real freedom from sin and evil is in a removal of all limitation. The one sufficient reply to this theory is the fact that sin is not the limitation of any natural or normal being. There are, indeed, some sins and infirmities which are called sins of weakness. Limitation and imperfection may involve conditions of sinful action, but sin itself is a willful and needless doing what is wrong, and the selfcondemnation of our conscience is inexplicable if such crimes as murder and theft and perjury are only necessary phases of finite being. (4) The same reply fits also that other theory which holds sin to be one of the essential phases of life which appear in the process of human development. All growth and progress in the world, we are told, require the continuous operation of the laws of action and reaction. Life in all its variegated forms is developed by contrasts, and so the spiritual life of man becomes strong by means of struggle for its highest good. So the good

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that is in us acquires its most admirable elements by contrast with the evil with which it has had to contend for the mastery. But the very statement of this theory ought to show its weakness and insufficiency to account for the origin and persistent cause of sin. The question is not whether struggle against sin develops strength and virtues in the man who contends and triumphs over the evil. That is a simple platitude of the moral life; but is participation in sin an essential part of the struggle? The righteous man, like God himself, may make the wrath of the wicked eventuate in the furtherance of some great good, but not by originating the wrath and the wickedness. This theory tends to destroy all moral distinctions: evil becomes a good thing, and the good cannot attain its goodness without the help of the evil. Truth thus may be primordially indebted to falsehood, and love to hatred and malice. The theory also may be charged with offering a final rather than the originating cause of human sinfulness. It is presumed that its manifestation is to work some highest good of the world and of man, and, so far as this thought is entertained, attention is diverted from the real cause of its origin. Thus the real nature of sin, as willful violation of the right, is ignored, and it is conceived as a mere contrast to what is good, not as bitter and malignant enmity toward truth and righteousness. (5) The hypothesis of dualism affirms the existence of an eternal principle of evil, and has passed through various historic phases. It calls for no further notice here than the observation that it transcends the limits of knowledge so far as to deny that evil ever had a beginning, and it virtually resolves sin into a kind of physical evil inherent in the nature of things. All these theories are invalidated and seen to be inadequate by attention to the two fundamental fallacies common to them all, namely, (a) that of confounding the cause of sin with the finite conditions of human life which furnish the possibility, occasions and motives for sinning, and (b) that of ignoring the real nature of sin and guilt as witnessed by the Scriptures and the universal moral sense of man.

3. Adequate and Actual Cause in Man's Personality. No adequate cause of the sinfulness of man can be shown without due attention to the facts of his moral nature and his bearing the image of God. Whatever is now found to be the cause of man's persistent sinfulness, age after age, that same cause will probably best account for the first sin that ever disturbed the moral world. The real cause of the first sin as of every other subsequent act of sin, is to be sought in the sinner himself. The free, self-conscious, intelligent, deliberate evil-doer is the author of his own wicked deed. The personality of every normal human being consists in the self

conscious unity of intelligence, sensibility, and the power of volition. These are the qualities, as we have previously shown, which exalt man above all other living creatures on the earth, and they stamp him with the image and likeness of God. But he is a finite being, subject to many well-known limitations and conditions. He cannot avoid perceiving things that are presented to his intellectual vision, nor can his sensitive nature help feeling the actual pressure of external stimuli. Perception and sensation furnish numerous motives to action, but the deliberate willing of an evil deed is not a matter of compulsion. It is in the power of every intelligent and sensitive person, with temptations and motives for a wrong course of action making powerful impression upon him, to choose the good and refuse the evil. The first sin and all sins that have followed it in human history are traceable to this free and godlike personality in man. He possesses the volitional power of originating moral evil. The universal conscience of mankind affirms this all-important fact, and we must deal with it as one of the necessary truths never to be lost sight of. Our study of the nature of sin and guilt, as presented in the Scriptures, brought us everywhere face to face with the facts of moral obligation and personal responsibility. Not in metaphysical speculation, but in the field of personal consciousness and actual experience, where we can appeal to facts that are beyond controversy, do we find the responsible authorship and origin of sin.

4. Illustrated in Genesis iii. This subject of the originating cause of sin is set forth and illustrated with remarkable clearness in the story of man's first disobedience as recorded in Genesis. That which is written of the woman as being first beguiled and falling into transgression is equally true of the man, and, in all essential elements of temptation and sin, is a most vivid picture of the operation of the emotions, the intellect, and the will. The goodly sight of the forbidden fruit was a stimulus to fleshly appetite, but the external stimulus had no power to compel or determine the action. Its power of stimulation, however, became more intense as the woman saw that the tree was also "a delight to

1 The possibility of evil lies open in any moral beginning which we can conceive. For a moral beginning is a transcendence of the necessity of natural order. Moral freedom is within finite limits a delegation to created being of something of God's power to have life in himself. A life which is thus divine in its essence, although finite in its range, may be a gift of the Creator beyond recall. Moral creation is in a sense a self-limitation of the Creator. Once having trusted nature with this divine gift of self-conscious will, the faithful Creator will keep his trust. Moral personality may fall from its idea, may alienate itself from its source, may possibly sink even in self-degradation beneath the level of conscious intelligence, becoming dead in sin; but it is not a gift of life to be annihilated by a fiat of omnipotence, or to be put back at God's will into its unmoral preexistence.-Newman Smyth. Christian Ethics, p. 148. New York, 1892.

the eyes, and to be desired to make one wise." Thus the pressure of temptation deepened both upon the senses and upon the intellectual powers, and supplied the motives and conditions of sinful action. There was no sin in the perception that the fruit was good for food and delightful to the eyes. But there was the commandment of God, "Thou shalt not eat of it." Here was an opposite motive and a warning, and there was no power in either class of motives to determine the choice. Another faculty of the soul must decide which motive shall prevail, and that faculty is the free self-determining power of the will. The woman and the man chose the way of transgression and so sinned against God, and the sense of guilt and shame that ensued evinced the fact that they were the responsible authors of their own fall. Whatever the relative intensity of the motive influences brought to bear on each, they both alike transgressed, fell under condemnation of sin, and suffered the penal consequences. In this graphic outline of temptation and failure to resist we may perceive the possibility of sinning in a being who is at the time without moral spot or blemish. The cause, reasons, and conditions of such initial transgression can be clearly apprehended only by the light of an accurate analysis of the constituent elements of man's personality.

5. Same Efficient Cause Apparent in all Sinning. In the continuous experiences of human life we observe innumerable illustrations of man's free and responsible activity. Every separate act of sin in human life and history is explicable after the manner illustrated by the example of the first transgressor. It is noteworthy that in the temptation of Jesus, as recorded in Matt. iv, 1-11, and Luke iv, 1-13, the same threefold manner of motive influences appears which we observe in the record of the woman's temptation in Gen. iii, 6. There were the same appeals to "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the vainglory of life" (1 John ii, 16). These forms of temptation may be so defined as to be in a general way comprehensive of all the motives to evil which appeal to man. No one commits a deliberate act of sin without some motive, but the motive is not the efficient or sufficient cause of the sinful act. It is rather the object, the reason, the occasion, or the condition which prepares the way for volition; the efficient and sole determining cause is in every instance the will of man. His power of volition is proven to be that constituent faculty of his spiritual nature by which he can be lord over all appeals of sensuous appetite or of mental stimulation. 6. Nature of Volitional Freedom. In the nature and activity of the will we observe something notably different and easily distinguishable from desire, inclination, appetite, emotion, and

passion'; different also from mental perception, thoughi, reason, judgment, and knowledge. In most cases of personal experience we cannot help feeling and thinking as we do, for there is usually something in the object presented to us that compels us to particular emotion or thought. But such compulsion is not true of the will. In the self-conscious act of volition we observe a power to choose or to refuse, to obey or to disobey. We are conscious of ability to will and to do in a different manner from that to which even a mighty motive may incline us. The intellect and the feelings are subordinate. Sight, hearing, any possible sensation, may necessarily produce conditions of impulse and desire for that which is not good; the moral sense discerns and approves the good, and the intellect perceives, deliberates, estimates. Neither the sensations nor the intelligent perceptions, so far as they supply motives for a possible choice one way or another, are necessarily evil in themselves. They furnish the requisite conditions for the self-determining activity of the will. To refuse the evil and to choose the good is the specific function of volition, and to this self-conscious power of the human soul we trace the originating and the persistent cause of sin. Any supposed compulsion from without or within which destroys this freedom of will and determines its action in one direction with no power to the contrary, reduces moral conduct to a series of mechanical sequences and is inconsistent and irreconcilable with the facts of personal obligation.

7. Other Resultant Facts of Sin. Having fairly traced the origin and cause of sin to the godlike power of volition inherent in man's personality, we should not fail to notice, further, how evil character once formed, miserable conditions of social life, and communal aggregations of vice and criminal depravity become in turn a fearful source of evil. We can not presume to say precisely when, where, and under what formal or actual conditions sin first made its appearance in the world. Omniscience only could make that known. But the facts of sin are very present for our study and we find them to accord most closely with the facts and teachings of the Scriptures on the subject. Probably the origin of sin in the world was facilitated by reason of the comparative imperfection and ignorance of the first generations of The once prevalent notion that the first man was perfect in wisdom and knowledge is now quite obsolete. It arose from the assumption that every creation of God must needs have been every

men.

1 See Whedon's masterly statement of these distinctions, and his definition of the will as against the fallacies of Edwards and others, in his work entitled, The Freedom of the Will as a Basis of Human Responsibility and a Divine Government, pp. 16-20. New York, 1864. Reprint, 1892.

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