The Abortion (1:15)
The natural history of sin as the result of temptation to which one yields is given with scientific accuracy and graphic power: “Then the lust, when it hath conceived, beareth sin: and the sin, when it is fullgrown, bringeth forth death.” Moffatt renders it thus: “Then Desire conceives and breeds Sin, while Sin matures and gives birth to Death.” It is a gruesome picture surely. But who can say that it is overdrawn?
The positivist tries to shut God out of the world and so to banish human responsibility; but alas, he cannot banish human woe and anguish of heart. The agnostic flings up his hands in despair and says he does not know and has nothing to say in the presence of nature, “red in tooth and claw.” The brutal militarist adopts the rule of physical might wrongly claimed by Nietzsche to be the mark of the superman. Spiritual and moral prowess should dominate brute force in man, else he becomes only a brute himself. He drops back to the law of the jungle and rejects the law of love in the kingdom of heaven. The Christian Scientist blandly shuts his eyes to such errors of mortal mind as sin and sickness and sorrow and, ostrich-like, cheerfully denies their reality and seeks to blow them away with a puff. But sin is not to be brushed aside in this way.
The words of this verse call for particular remark. “Then” is here the historical order following the temptation to which one yields. His lust drew him forth to the temptation. He yields, and the result is the conception; the embryo develops into sin. This is the first birth, and sin is the child of desire. Desire is not in itself sinful, but it easily falls into sin. Thus in a true sense desire makes sin where there was no sin and so gives birth to sin. But this is not all. Sin in its turn matures and gives birth to death.[57] This second child is like a child born dead.
When sin is born, death is involved like an embryonic parasite that feeds on sin. Desire, sin, death form the biological line of pedigree. The line is short, for “the wages of sin is death,” as Paul puts it (Rom. 6:23).[58] The picture in James is that of an abnormal birth like a misshapen animal. I have seen a five-legged cow, the fifth leg on the top of the back standing up straight. When sin is born, death begins (conception) and grows in fascinating power till a new birth comes; and lo, this child is death itself. “The birth of death follows of necessity when once sin is fully formed, for sin from its first beginnings carried death within” (Hort, in loco).
The law of death in sin applies to other sins besides the so-called sexual sins which write their history so plainly in the body and the mind and bring a heritage of woe through all the family history. There is here no sowing of wild oats to raise a crop of wheat. The fearful fidelity of modern scientific knowledge throws a lurid light on this passage in James. The sinner makes his bed and lies down in it and drags down with him the helpless ones who are thrown in his care.
As I am writing I receive a copy of Light, a magazine published by the World’s Purity Federation. The issue for November, 1914, contains an article by a woman who has lived “twenty-five years in the underworld.” Her story reads like a commentary on the words of James. She claims to have had the best of that sordid life, but she concludes: “No matter what humiliation a girl has to endure, it is better to endure it than to get into this life. There is nothing in it for any of them. The very best of us get it hard before we die. And, at the best, it is Hell.” The issue of death is seen not merely in the diseases of the body but “also in the deterioration of mind and character which accompanies every kind of sin” (Mayor, in loco). Death and hell then claim their own.