IV.
We cannot but accept the very general suggestion of our critics that we ought to have attempted a separate treatment of the problem of sin. Some such treatment is now offered in the second appendix, and offered in the form of a republication of what has previously seen the light, so that it may be plain that the absence of it from earlier editions was not due to lack of conviction or unwillingness to deal with the subject. The appendix is not in fact more than a drawing out of what is involved in some passages of the essays taken together[9]. Thus the fifth essay takes up a very clear position as to the practical aspect which sin bears in human life. The fact is emphasized that sin, as our moral consciousness knows it and Christianity has successfully dealt with it, is a phenomenon unique in the world:—it is what nothing else is, violation of law. Now this is the essence of the Christian doctrine of sin, as S. John states it: 'Sin is lawlessness[10].' Sin and lawlessness are coincident terms. This view of sin is primarily practical; it may be represented in fact as a postulate required for successfully dealing with sin, a postulate justified and verified by its results. But because it is thus verified and justified, it passes like any other hypothesis which explains facts, in proportion to the range and thoroughness of the experience which tests it, out of the region of mere working hypotheses into that of accepted truths. Thus it is to the Christian consciousness an accepted truth, that sin, all down the long history of humanity, has been a violation of the divine order, a refusal of obedience, a corruption of man's true nature. Sin, as such, has always been a source of confusion, not of progress. We can indeed recognise how the movement and development in humanity has frequently[11] been in fact conditioned by sin; but we should still contend that it has never been the sin in itself which has been the spring of force and progress, but the faculties of will and intellect which sin was using. Always the will and intellect would have worked better and more fruitfully in the result if they had been free from the taint of selfishness and rebellion against God. Always sin, as such, has been a lowering and not a raising of human life: a fall and not a rise. Thus sin at the beginning of human life must have been not merely the awakening of moral consciousness, but the obscuring and tainting of it by lawlessness and disobedience. Sin, as all down its history, so in its origin, is a fall; a fall, moreover, entailing consequences on those who come after, in virtue of the inviolable solidarity of the human race. To this view of sin original and actual, Christianity appears to be bound; and it is a view that, as we have now endeavoured to show[12], brings us into no conflict with scientific discovery. For science never attempts to prove that man might not have developed otherwise than as in fact he has, or that the actual development has been the best possible: nor has Christianity ever in its best representatives, certainly not in its patristic representatives, been identified with a denial that human history as a whole has been a development upwards from below[13]. The Old Testament is in fact among ancient literatures, the literature of development, of progress[14].