CHAPTER XI.

SIN AS TRANSGRESSION.

"When the commandment came, sin sprang into life and I died." Rom. vii, 9.

"Sin hath broke the world's sweet peace-unstrung Th' harmonious chords to which the angels sung." -Dana.

SIN is the transgression of law; it is the deliberate abandoning of our ethical ideals; it is the conscious violation of some standard, either outward or inward, which conscience recognizes as imposing upon us an obligatory ought. Until such an ideal imposes the duties of such an ought upon us, no sin is possible. This is what Paul means when he says: "When the commandment came sin sprang into life."

This truth is in germ embodied in the narrative given in the third chapter of Genesis. That narrative was originally shaped to explain to early men many other things than the origin of sin,1 but it nevertheless sets forth in a form perpetually

For the other aspects of the story of Eden see the writer's Sketch of Semitic Origins, Social and Religious, p. 93 ff.

valid the real beginnings of sin. It pictures the divine command which the conscience of man recognized; it sets forth vividly the temptation to present indulgence, the reasons which lead man to prefer immediate advantage to the course which conscience approves, and the dire consequences and the disillusionment which sin brings. In this respect it is a mirror of the universal experience of mankind. Ideals, which we have admired and praised, are abandoned in the stress of temptation. We know the fruit is forbidden, but it is pleasant to look upon and promises to be sweet, so we abandon our standard, take the sinful course, the promised joy turns to ashes in our hand, and our Eden is lost.

One of the psalmists recognized that this experience is universal. They are all gone out of the way", he sang, "there is none that doeth good, no, not one." Centuries later Paul, as he looked over the Jewish and Gentile world, could find no better language than that of the psalmist in which to express the oppressive fact, that sin is universal.

The heart of every man and woman recognizes the truth of this Biblical teaching. The imperative demands of our loftiest ideals have laid upon us divine duties. These we have so often abandoned, that it needs no labored proof to convince us that the first men and women did the same. We have inherited from the past weakened moral natures, but we have so often abandoned our ethical standards, that our sins are definitely our own.

It is sometimes thought that there is an irreconcilable contradiction between the evolutionary theory of the origin of man, now universally accepted by thinking men, and the story of man's fall as given in Genesis, but this is a great mistake. The narrative of Genesis, and the traditions of a golden age, which come from many ancient peoples, picture to us one side of a shield, of which the doctrine of evolution gives us the other. If man was developed from the lower orders of life, there must have been a time when he possessed a good degree of intelligence and an overflow of animal spirits, but lacked almost entirely anything that could be called

a conscience. At such a period the world would seem to him a paradise. He would take as much delight in life and be as free from care as a lamb gambolling in the springtime. Soon, however, increasing intelligence would give him a conscience; it would enable him to put himself into the place of another whom his acts might injure; it would enable him to perceive how that other would feel, and to grasp the elements of a moral standard of conduct. The moment when conscience came, and its behests were violated, as they would be sure to be at first, the primitive paradise was gone. The world which had seemed so blissful, and so full of glorious sunshine, began to be haunted with the dark spectres which spring from an uneasy conscience. Man seemed to himself to have fallen; he could tell the story as he recollected it in no other terms. He told, too, his inner experiences truthfully, and we even now find them true. to our own experiences. We are able to see that man's fall was in the end a step in advance, because it became possible only in consequence of powers which opened to him

the possibilities of the highest life, but it was nevertheless a real fall from innocence and from happiness.

In this broad sense the old Hebrew narrative is true as history, while it is also true because it reproduces in parable a part of the inner history of every man. Whenever we deliberately do what we know to be beneath the highest standards which our hearts approve, we live over again the story of Eden, and sadly go forth from peace and from God.