Part 17 (2/2)

”e? ?a? e????ae? ?ata sa??a ???st??, even though I have known; granting that I have known” ????s??e?, i e ?ata sa??a, ”henceforth we know hi of this kind had once been [prior, surely, to the ”_henceforth_”] his own state of mind, _not only_ in the time before his conversion,_but since_!”

How then can the ”_henceforth_” serve as the _terminus a quo_, if the same state lies on both sides of it?

[67] Jowett, II 142

SIN: WHAT IT IS, WHAT IT IS NOT

”Now the end of the coood conscience, and of faith unfeigned”--1 Tiives us here a very simple for lists of the virtues, such as the h he does soh a series, it is with a peculiar result Look at any book upon human ethics, and you are astonished at the nuood man: the ramifications of duty seem never to terminate: you scarcely kno a soul like ours can hold so much: the further the author proceeds in his enumeration, the less does he see into subdivisions, and the subdivisions opening new varieties,--till life appears to pulverize itself under his definitions, and become an infinite complexity of moral detail St

Paul's enu down into er than its predecessor; he see his exhortations, as if each had a business of its own, and rather forces thes out soraces with hiarden plants that anisle shrub He felt that in reality the virtues do not add themselves up and subscribe to the final result of a holy soul: but the one simple soul lives itself out into the direction of all the virtues; and there is a certainbeautiful at once, and without which, while one adornment is elaborately nursed, the rest will be apt to droop and die This blessed and productive ht to have _one name_: and the Apostle calls it _Charity_ or _Love_; and presents it soraces, sorace is to have a _triple source_ In the arden of the Lord the Apostle plants but a solitary tree of life,--his divine and fruitful Charity Only it must be nursed by the threefold root, of which should any part be wanting, the beauty of the forone ”Charity out of a pure heart,--and a good conscience,--and faith unfeigned” The Heart, the Conscience, the Faith, ht; and it is no Pauline Charity that is not sustained by concurrence of the its fibres deepest down into the substance of our world, is the _Conscience_, the _Moral_ element of life; and on either side, held to their due balance by its intermediate poe find the _Heart_,--the fresh _human affections_,--and the Faith,--the _heavenly trust and aspirations_,--of our nature Tenderness and pity on the one hand, devotion and hope on the other, are to hold on to the sense of duty in the midst; and there only will a noble andno baneful shade upon the earth, and in its branches giving no shelter but to birds that sing the songs of heaven A charity, therefore, that flows _only_ froenial heart, that looks with kindly cos and persons, and with a sort of aniate;--this is not the ”end of the coious ele: its eye neither flashes in rebuke, nor lifts itself in prayer: it is sensitive to suffering, not to sin: and, if it can but wipe out pain, will do it even upon guilty terms, and charuish of the innocent And, on the other hand, a charity that flows only from the sincerity of faith, and limits itself to the fellowshi+p of belief; that feels perhaps _for_ many, but only _with_ a fehose warmest sympathies are little else than a partnershi+p of antipathies; that transfers to the infinite God the narrowness of its own consecrated circle, reduces the universe to a temple of orthodoxy, and turns the Heaven of I of a sect;--this also misses ”the end of the coion over life, and flings in the branch of faith only to embitter, instead of sweeten, the waters of natural affection; it blinds and bewilders the lorifies not a littleits perverted admiration to the past as well as the present, crowds the statue-gallery of history with ill-favored and questionable saints, whose features have so grown to the mould and pressure of a creed, that they look like casts of an abstract theology,humanity Take away the wisdom of Conscience; and Charity, surrendered to mere affection, will fail to see sin where _it is_; or, constricted by Faith, will suppose it where _it is not_ Both errors will shape the on either side from the simple creed of our moral nature and of Christ Let us look for a few lance from it at the lateral heresies

The central truth may be described under the phrase, _The Personal nature of sin_ In affir this, I _; and that _his sin is his own, and not another's_ If there is anything within the compass of heaven and earth which we can be said to know from ourselves, and to have no need that another should tell us, it is the nature of sin There is no arrogance,--there is only sorrowful confession,--in protesting that _this_ is a matter on which we cannot be s to us; the shadow that follows us where we go, and stays with us e sit; the clinging presence that penetrates the very folds of our nature, and is known only from within, where its fibres strike and draw their nutrih he have the divination of a prophet or the glance of an archangel, can add one iota to our insight into this sad fact, unless by sharpening our sensibility to feel and interpret it better for ourselves; or by any testi of God that burns and flashes on the inner walls of the soul Here at least our apprehensions are first-hand; and to trust them, to cast out as Satan what tampers with them or contradicts them, is not scepticism, but faith,--not infidelity, but faithfulness to the ever-living Word of God

What the finger of Heaven has written, neither the tapestries of ancient theology nor the varnish of the newest philosophy can perh, clearing its everlasting warning and consu our perishable work

What then does this first and last revelation declare human sin to be?

In the moments e know it best,--e cover our face because we can hide our transgression no s, and cry in our agony, ”Smite us, O Lord, but tell us e have done,”--does He not answer us, ”You have abused your trust; I showed you a better, and you have taken the worse; I drew you by a secret reverence to the nobler, and you have sunk by inclination to the baser; I gave you a will in the iood, and you have yielded yourself captive to the evil; therefore have you a burden now to bear, that none can lift off,--a burden which you will feel it more faithful and wholesome to carry than to lose” This is surely the tone in which the voice of God's Holy Spirit speaks to us e have grieved it: and if we believe it not, I know not whither we should go; it is the highest oracle of truth below the skies, having authority more positive even than the eye that assures us of the sun above us, and the feet that tell us of the earth beneath

According to this oracle, then, the essence of the sin lies in the _conscious free choice of the worse in presence of a better no less possible_ And to uilty in its commission three conditions are required;--(1) Ourpropensities; (2) We must be aware that of these one is worthy and has a claim upon us, and the other not; (3) It must be left to us to determine ourselves to either of these, and we n causes to the one or to the other Take away any of these conditions, and guilt becomes impossible If the mind has _not_ the option of two propensities, but is possessed of only one, that single i its only possibility, affords no scope for good or ill, and leaves the being a gle at his heart, he knows no difference a them, or only this, that some are _pleasanter_ than others, then also he is blah he takes only what he likes If, finally, while he is drawn by conflicting tendencies and taught to regard _some_ as his temptations, and solemnly set in the midst to choose, the whole appearance of option turns out a seo determined outside of hih_ him,--then, as before, he is irreproachable: the strife within hi for a dreaoes on within,--a dance of fiends, a rescue of angels,--he is stretched all the while sleeping on the bed of nature, and cannot wake but to find rely, whenever ant to , the false plea takes the form of a denial of one of these conditions

”Blame me not,” we say, ”for _I knew of no other_ course”; or, ”I did not _think it signified_ which I did”; or, ”I saw it all, but _I could not help it_” Often the gnawings of self-reproach are felt upon the heart at the very instant that these excuses escape the lips But soestions of _sincere_ self-deception, and proceed from men who are their own dupes; and whenever this is the case, the sense of responsibility is entirely dissipated; reuilt is turned into complaint of a misfortune; and the offender considers hiainst God These excuses then must be wholly excluded, if the sanctity of the moral life is to be preserved

They are the various forms under which the personal nature of sin may be denied They all assert that the _person_ either did not contain within him the requisite conditions, or was heation Whoever offers us such pleas is justly regarded as self-conde a sadder spectacle in his defence than in his transgression Nor are they improved in their character when they are expanded from excuses of individuals into doctrines of churches; for they explain away the essence of sin, and leave us without intelligible faith in anything holy in heaven or on earth Thus:--

Whoever maintains that the huht and prompt no act, except such as are odious to God, ation, and virtually excludes it fros Confront this assertion with the facts of life, and ask what it really means Do you mean, I would say to its defender, that, whenever two principles contend for the mastery in a man's mind, he always abandons himself to the lower?--that no one, in short, was ever known to resist a temptation? Such a position is surely too bold for the paradox of cynicism itself, in a world where there arethat do not complain; where a Pericles could ad added to his little patrimony; and a Socrates could live pure amid corruption, and truthful amid lies, and die the martyr of injustice rather than offend his reverence for lahere not a school nor a family can be found that has not its annals and anecdotes of conscience You allow, therefore, that victors there have been in many a temptation Did itthem whether they were victors or vanquished? Was it neutral to him whether they nobly held their post, or basely betrayed it? Then you sireatest contrasts of character on earth, with no responsive feeling, no variety of estimate, in heaven; and make our human discernment, our natural admirations, more susceptible as moral barometers than the Oh men differ in rees, and the Infinite Eye sees through the whole history with unerring exactitude, yet the entire scale of human character lies below the point of Divine acceptableness, and in the view of perfect purity is equivalent to ain, only with a change of form, the personal nature of sin; for you try the soul by the law of _another_ nature, and not her own,--by a law beyond her ken or beyond her power; and while she is striving to be faithful to her best thought against the seductions of the worse,--in which alone the essence of all goodness dwells,--you tell her that her God despises a conflict so far down, and that ”this people that knoweth not his law,” however true to their own, ”is cursed” What is this but toquite different in heaven and on earth?--not veracity, not justice, not purity of thought, not self-sacrificing love; nothing that here makes our hearts burn within us as we look at the dear face of long-tried friends or saintly strangers, or leaving the Jerusale by the ith the saviours of nations and the prophets of a world;--not this, but some hidden charm that finds neither place nor answer in our souls; so that the God who loves it leaves us herein without a point of sympathy with hi without moral perfection; for, however you s you denote by the no relation to our types of thought Or, finally, do you allege that the distinctions of character are not entirely different in heaven and on earth; only that through all their varieties in the natural man there is interfused a certain invariable taint, an irreht of _pride_, a want of _faith_? Even were it so, still, if this be the constant coloring of the soul, pervading it by nature and not personally incurred, it is but a sad condition under which it is given us to work out our proble with it as it comes: it is an inherent incapacity, which, however unlike the beauty of God's holiness, he can no ard with penal disapproval, than he can hate the deforain, whoever teaches that h, the creatures of circumstance, with no more voice as to their character than as to their birth, but are the predestined products of nature, working partly within them and partly without,--no less surely insults all moral convictions, and denies the reality of duty For he abolishes entirely the distinction between a person and a thing; and conceives of every y of the universe, no more responsible for his place in the scale of excellence, than the plant which, according to its seed and soil, becomes the hyssop of the wall, the lily of the field, or the stately cedar of Lebanon All moral ideas vanish instantly at the touch of this doctrine; and the solee on which Law and Conscience have sta the nations ”by the grace of God,” is defaced in the revolutionary mint of fatalism, and made current with the superscription of a pretended equality where all are low, and liberty where none is free It is quite clear, that, if the soul has no originating causality, but in every step she takes is siencies provided and set in train, without any question asked of her, she can have no _duties_, she can win no _deserts_; she can incur no _guilt_, merit no _punishment_; she is deluded in her _re herself an _alien from God_ All that remains is this: that by natural laws there may be pain consequent, and known to be consequent, on some of the directions which we may take; and it is at our peril that we enter on these paths But so is it at our peril if we go up in a balloon, or put to sea in a s out of this consideration but more or less of _Prudence_; hope of happiness, fear of suffering, can consecrate nothing as a _Duty_, but only present it as _interest_; and if a ard his interest and risk the result, I know not who, in heaven or earth, can tell hiht to do it, or can say more to him than that he is a fool in his folly Who on these terms could cast himself, in tears of penitence, upon the bosoht be reconciled to God? Who would ever tremble beneath the lash of a fiery reproach, and own, as it quivered over him, that there was justice in the terror of its look? Rather must the sinner feel himself the victim of a cruel doom; whom it is as little suitable to punish, as to chastise the patient in fever, or torture the cripple in the street A doctrine which reduces duty to interest, retribution to discipline, guilt to disease, holiness to syood health, and God to the neutral source of all things good and ill;--which frightens us with fears we may defy, but awes us with no authority we can revere; which pities iniquity and soodness, but only in order to patronize enjoyment;--whose faith in human nature is a reliance on the ultimate docility of the wild animalwalk, for the sake of exercise;--is so alien froion, and such an affront to the first instincts of conscience, that it can only escape indignant condeether into the sphere of natural history, and quitting as a foreign province the doe it corrupts--of Morals and of Faith

Finally, those who teach that guilt and merit, with their penalties and rewards, can be transferred, deny in the directest way the personal nature of Sin That n _re than that they should trace it to a foreign _source_ If they knohat it is at all, they feel it to be inalienably their ohich none could give the than that good Christians, who seem truly cast down in hus, penetrated with the sadness of baffled aspiration,--and who therefore, one would think, must really have a consciousness of the personality of sin, and kno it is chargeable only on their individual will,--can yet obtain relief by flying, as it is said, to the cross, and persuading themselves that the evil has been stayed and cured by transactions wholly outside the What can possibly be meant by the statehteen hundred years ago, of your sins and mine,--of people non-existent then, and therefore non-sinful? Can the punishh before it is even determined whether the sin will be perpetrated at all? Or can merely _potential_ sin, which es distant, and its accounts be settled ere it arise?

If so, what is the death of Christ but the provisory accumulation of a fund beforehand, ready to be drawn upon as the everlasting ”treasure of the Church,” for the free discharge of guilty debts and the release of divine obligations? And in what respect does this differ from the Roman Catholic doctrine,--except that the treasure is at the discretion of no chartered sacerdotal company, but is open on more popular and looser terms?

Moral relations, by their very nature, exclude all vicarious agency; you cannot fall, you cannot recover, by deputy: the ill that haunts you is the insult you have put on the divine spirit in your heart, and it is as if you were alone with God An interposing medium can as little divert the retribution, as it can intercept the complacency of the Infinite and Holy Mind What overne who accepts the voluntary sufferings of innocence in acquittance of the liabilities of guilt, shocks every sentiment of justice, and does that which the worst judicial caprice would never dare to iht persons feel its retribution, provided it gets an equivalent suffering elsewhere, is an affront to the ht And an offender who can welcome his escape by such device, perratitude, and is content to profit by a transaction which it would fill him with remorse to repeat upon his own children

A Mediator may do much indeed to reconcile my alienated mind to God

He reatness so unique as to give s than I had known before, and by his higher ihest of all He may show me how, in the sublimest natures, sanctity and tenderness ever blend, and so touch the springs of inward reverence that, infears are swept away

He may direct upon me, fro look that prostrates the impulses of passion and the power of self, and awakens the repentant enthusiasm of nobler affections He e my past He eneration; but he cannot drown the deeds that are gone From _present sinfulness_ he h he be God himself in power, unless he be other than God in holiness--he cannot redeem These have become realized facts; and none can cut off the entail of their consequences: whatever the Divine Law has avowedly annexed to them will develop itself fros by which God has stas his disapprobation of sin, and rievous here and hereafter, stand irrevocably fast, clinging to guilt as shadow to body, as effect to cause This debt of natural penalty is one which ; by penitent and impenitent, by the reconciled and the unreconciled alike: e it In this sense,--of rescue from the penal laws of God,--I know of no remission of sins; nor would Christians have retained so heathenish a notion, had they not frightfully exaggerated, in the first instance, the retributions of God by eance_; and so created a necessity for again rescinding the fierce enactht not be quite shut out It is only in man, however, and not in God, thus to do and undo His word, whether of warning or of proreat realities will march serenely on, and, heedless of our passionate deprecations and fictitious triumphs, rebuke our unbelief of their veracity

But while the past can never be as though it were not, the present may lie in the shelter of reconciliation, and the future in the light of boundless hope The outer burden we have incurred we ht by Divine conversion to an inner syht rather than our oe can suffer our wounds with a patient shauish more The averted face of the Infinite has turned round upon us again; and the pure eyes look into us with a lance, and feel that we are at one with the universe and reconciled with God

PEACE IN DIVISION: THE DUTIES OF CHRISTIANS IN AN AGE OF CONTROVERSY

”Suppose ye that I aive peace on earth? I tell you, nay, but rather division”--Luke xii 51

Such was the account which the Saviour hiels as an occasion, not only of ”glory to God in the highest,” but of ”peace on earth, and good-will to es is so obviously merely of a verbal nature, that it can perplex only the blind interpreter who penetrates no further than the letter of the sacred volu utterance to your own spontaneous reflections, my friends, were I to tell you that n, but of the consequence, of the dissemination of the Gospel; and that it indicates no e on the part of Christ of the diversities of senti froe, however, it does clearly indicate; and this is a fact of no mean importance The unbeliever objects to Christianity, and the Roue of discordant opinions which have resulted from their prevalence; and to both we are furnished with one reply This infinite diversity indicates no failure in our system; it is not an unexpected effect which startles and alarion, and announced by hi of his Apostles And though he had this evil (if such it be) full in view, he did not retreat from the office he had assumed, nor feel it at variance with his deep and tender philanthropy, to i mankind a faith that should break up their united roups