Sin: What It Is, What It Is Not
“Now the end of the commandment is Charity, out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned.”—1 Timothy i. 5.
The Apostle gives us here a very simple formula of Christian perfection. He was not fond of long lists of the virtues, such as the moral philosophers draw up; and though he does sometimes pass through a series, it is with a peculiar result. Look at any book upon human ethics, and you are astonished at the number of qualities that go to make up a good man: the ramifications of duty seem never to terminate: you scarcely know how a soul like ours can hold so much: the further the author proceeds in his enumeration, the less does he seem able to stop,—his divisions breaking 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 enumerations, on the contrary, instead of running down into multitude, run up into unity; each term is apt to be larger than its predecessor; he seems impatient of scattering his exhortations, as if each had a business of its own, and rather forces them as he proceeds into denser compression, till he flings out some term of power that holds them all. The graces with him do not present themselves apart, like garden plants that may be tended and watered one by one; but all on the same organism, as the leaves and the blossoms of a single 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 certain mood, a temper, a climate of the soul, which grows everything beautiful at once, and without which, while one adornment is elaborately nursed, the rest will be apt to droop and die. This blessed and productive mood, felt to be one thing, ought to have one name: and the Apostle calls it Charity or Love; and presents it sometimes as the greatest of graces, sometimes as the unity of them all.
But this simple grace is to have a triple source. In the midst of the garden 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 form and the healing of the leaves will soon be gone. “Charity out of a pure heart,—and a good conscience,—and faith unfeigned.” The Heart, the Conscience, the Faith, must all be right; and it is no Pauline Charity that is not sustained by concurrence of them all. And, observe the order. In the centre, striking 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 power, we 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 and majestic Love arise, casting no 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 from the genial heart, that looks with kindly complacency on all things and persons, and with a sort of animal sympathy licks every sore of humanity that lies at its gate;—this is not the “end of the commandment”;—for it has in it no moral, no religious element: it condemns nothing; it worships nothing: 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 charm away a God-sent remorse as freely as it would an anguish of the innocent. And, on the other hand, a charity that flows only from the sincerity of faith, and limits itself to the fellowship of belief; that feels perhaps for many, but only with a few; whose warmest sympathies are little else than a partnership 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 Immortals into the May-meeting of a sect;—this also misses “the end of the commandment”: for it abuses the true power of religion 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 moral discernment, overlooks undeniable nobleness, and glorifies not a little meanness; and, applying its 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, more than emblems of a living 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 themselves into deliberate doctrines, deviating on either side from the simple creed of our moral nature and of Christ. Let us look for a few moments at the central truth on this matter; and then glance from it at the lateral heresies.
The central truth may be described under the phrase, The Personal nature of sin. In affirming this, I mean both that each man is a person, and not a thing; 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 mistaken. It is the nearest of all things to us; the shadow that follows us where we go, and stays with us when we 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 nutriment. No external observer, though 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 testimony, any miracle, take one line away of the handwriting 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 permanently hide; the light is alive, and will eat through, clearing its everlasting warning and consuming our perishable work.
What then does this first and last revelation declare human sin to be? In the moments when we know it best,—when we cover our face because we can hide our transgression no more,—when we cannot bear the placid silence of things, and cry in our agony, “Smite us, O Lord, but tell us what we 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 image of my own, free to realize the good, 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 when we 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 make us guilty in its commission three conditions are required;—(1.) Our mind must be solicited by at least two competing propensities; (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 must not be delivered over by foreign 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 impulse, being its entire stock and constituting its only possibility, affords no scope for good or ill, and leaves the being a mere creature of instinct. Or if, while rival passions struggle at his heart, he knows no difference among them, or only this, that some are pleasanter than others, then also he is blameless, though 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 semblance and a pretence, and the matter is long ago determined outside of him and now only performs the ceremony of passing through him,—then, as before, he is irreproachable: the strife within him is the illusion of mimic passions wrestling for a dreamer’s soul; and while the tragic agony goes 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 remorse and responsibility a dream.
Accordingly, whenever we want to make excuse for our wrong-doing, 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 sometimes they are the suggestions 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; remorse is extinguished; the confession of guilt is turned into complaint of a misfortune; and the offender considers himself rather as the injured of nature than the insurgent against 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 hemmed in by natural preventives, of true obligation. Whoever offers us such pleas is justly regarded as self-condemned, and indeed as presenting 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 human heart is invariably wicked, and can think no thought and prompt no act, except such as are odious to God, mistakes the whole nature of moral obligation, and virtually excludes it from the entire system of things. 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 are many in want that do not steal, and in suffering that do not complain; where a Pericles could administer the revenues of a state, yet die without having 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 law; where 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 it make then no difference to the sentiments of God respecting them whether they were victors or vanquished? Was it neutral to him whether they nobly held their post, or basely betrayed it? Then you simply deny the holiness of God; for you allow the greatest 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 Omniscient Perception. Or will you say that, although men differ in moral effort, and withstand temptation in various degrees, 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 mere variety of guilt? Then do you deny again, 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 to make Moral Excellence something quite 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 Jerusalem of the noisy present pace the quiet road of history, talking by the way with 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 him, or a possibility of approach. In that case, he is a Being without moral perfection; for, however you may apply to him a circle of holy names, the things you denote by them are a set of unknown quantities bearing 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 irremovable tinge of guilt,—a stain of self, a thought 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 problem, and not any unfaithfulness in dealing with it as it comes: it is an inherent incapacity, which, however unlike the beauty of God’s holiness, he can no more regard with penal disapproval, than he can hate the deformed or persecute the blind.
Again, whoever teaches that men are, through and through, 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 man as a mere growth or development from the physiology 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 solemn language on which Law and Conscience have stamped their venerable impress, and ruled among 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 simply disposed of and bespoken by agencies 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 remorse, and suffers a vain torture in esteeming 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 small boat to save a drowning crew. You can get nothing 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 man chooses to disregard his interest and risk the result, I know not who, in heaven or earth, can tell him with authority that he has no right 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 bosom of Infinite Mercy, and sob out his prayer that he might 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 symmetry and good 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 smiles on goodness, but only in order to patronize enjoyment;—whose faith in human nature is a reliance on the ultimate docility of the wild animal man; and whose worship of God is taken, like a morning walk, for the sake of exercise;—is so alien from the whole spirit of religion, and such an affront to the first instincts of conscience, that it can only escape indignant condemnation by withdrawing altogether into the sphere of natural history, and quitting as a foreign province the domain—whose language 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 men should find a foreign remedy for their perpetrated wickedness, is not less shocking than that they should trace it to a foreign source. If they know what it is at all, they feel it to be inalienably their own; which none could give them and which none can take away. And nothing is more amazing than that good Christians, who seem truly cast down in humiliation, oppressed with the sense of their short-comings, penetrated with the sadness of baffled aspiration,—and who therefore, one would think, must really have a consciousness of the personality of sin, and know how 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 themselves, and belonging to the history of another being. What can possibly be meant by the statement that Christ has borne the punishment, some eighteen hundred years ago, of your sins and mine,—of people non-existent then, and therefore non-sinful? Can the punishment precede the sin? Can it be inflicted and gone through before it is even determined whether the sin will be perpetrated at all? Or can merely potential sin, which may never become actual, be dealt with at ages 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 more fearful charge could you bring against any government, than to say that its penalties may be bought off? A judge 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 imitate. A law that does not care whether the right persons feel its retribution, provided it gets an equivalent suffering elsewhere, is an affront to the most elementary notions of right. And an offender who can welcome his escape by such device, permits his moral perceptions to be blinded by personal gratitude, 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 may personally rise before me with a purity and greatness so unique as to give me faith in diviner things than I had known before, and by his higher image turn my eye towards the Highest 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, in my returning sympathy with goodness, all abject and deterring fears are swept away. He may direct upon me, from the hall of trial or the cross of self-sacrifice, the loving look that prostrates the impulses of passion and the power of self, and awakens the repentant enthusiasm of nobler affections. He may renew my future; but he cannot change my past. He may sprinkle my immediate soul with the wave of regeneration; but he cannot drown the deeds that are gone. From present sinfulness he may recover me; but the perpetrated sins—though 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 from them with infallible certainty. The outward sufferings by which God has stamped into the nature of things his disapprobation of sin, and made it grievous 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 must be paid to the utmost farthing; by penitent and impenitent, by the reconciled and the unreconciled alike: miracle cannot cancel, nor mediator discharge 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 making them an eternal vengeance; and so created a necessity for again rescinding the fierce enactments of their fancy, that hope and return might 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 promise, is Yea and Amen; and his great 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 may still have to bear; but once brought by Divine conversion to an inner sympathy with God, and seeing by his light rather than our own, we can suffer our wounds with a patient shame, and scarcely feel their anguish more. The averted face of the Infinite has turned round upon us again; and the pure eyes look into us with a mild and loving gaze, which we can meet with answering glance, and feel that we are at one with the universe and reconciled with God.