Our treatment of Holiness, as belonging to the nature of God (pages 268-275); of Will, as not only the faculty of volitions, but also a permanent state of the soul (pages [504-513]); and of Law as requiring the conformity of man's nature to God's holiness (pages [537-544]); has prepared us for the definition of sin as a state. The chief psychological defect of New School theology, next to its making holiness to be a mere form of love, is its ignoring of the unconscious and subconscious elements in human character. To help our understanding of sin as an underlying and permanent state of the soul, we subjoin references to recent writers of note upon psychology and its relations to theology.
We may preface our quotations by remarking that mind is always greater than its conscious operations. The man is more than his acts. Only the smallest part of the self is manifested in the thoughts, feelings, and volitions. In counting, to put myself to sleep, I find, when my attention has been diverted by other thoughts, that the counting has gone on all the same. Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 176, speaks of the “dramatic sundering of the ego.” There are dream-conversations. Dr. Johnson was once greatly vexed at being worsted by his opponent in an argument in a dream. M. Maury in a dream corrected the bad English of his real self by the good English of his other unreal self. Spurgeon preached a sermon in his sleep after vainly trying to excogitate one when awake, and his wife gave him the substance of it after he woke. Hegel said that “Life is divided into two realms—a night-life of genius, and a day-life of consciousness.”
Du Prel, Philosophy of Mysticism, propounds the thesis: “The ego is not wholly embraced in self-consciousness,” and claims that there is much of psychical activity within us of which our common waking conception of ourselves takes no account. Thus when “dream dramatizes”—when we engage in a dream-conversation in which our interlocutor's answer comes to us with a shock of surprise—if our own mind is assumed to have furnished that answer, it has done so by a process of unconscious activity. Dwinell, in Bib. Sac., July, 1890:369-389—“The soul is only imperfectly in possession of its organs, and is able to report only a small part of its activities in consciousness.” Thoughts come to us like foundlings laid at our door. We slip in a question to the librarian, Memory, and after leaving it there awhile the answer appears on the bulletin board. Delbœuf, Le Sommeil et les Rêves, 91—“The dreamer is a momentary and involuntary dupe of his own imagination, as the poet is the momentary and voluntary dupe, and the insane man is the permanent and involuntary dupe.” If we are the organs not only of our own past thinking, but, as Herbert Spencer suggests, also the organs of the past thinking of the race, his doctrine may give additional, though unintended, confirmation to a Scriptural view of sin.
William James, Will to Believe, 316, quotes from F. W. H. Myers, in Jour. Psych. Research, who likens our ordinary consciousness to the visible part of the solar spectrum; the total consciousness is like that spectrum prolonged by the inclusion of the ultra-red and the ultra-violet rays—1 to 12 and 96. “Each of us,” he says, “is an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows—an individuality which can never express itself completely through any corporeal manifestation. The self manifests itself through the organism; but there is always some part of the self unmanifested, and always, as it seems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve.”William James himself, in Scribner's Monthly, March, 1890:361-373, sketches the hypnotic investigations of Janet and Binet. There is a secondary, subconscious self. Hysteria is the lack of synthetising power, and consequent disintegration of the field of consciousness into mutually exclusive parts. According to Janet, the secondary and the primary consciousnesses, added together, can never exceed the normally total consciousness of the individual. But Prof. James says: “There are trances which obey another type. I know a non-hysterical woman, who in her trances knows facts which altogether transcend her possible normal consciousness, facts about the lives of people whom she never saw or heard of before.”
Our affections are deeper and stronger than we know. We learn how deep and strong they are, when their current is resisted by affliction or dammed up by death. We know how powerful evil passions are, only when we try to subdue them. Our dreams show us our naked selves. On the morality of dreams, the London Spectator remarks: “Our conscience and power of self-control act as a sort of watchdog over our worse selves during the day, but when the watchdog is off duty, the primitive or natural man is at liberty to act as he pleases; our ‘soul’ has left us at the mercy of our own evil nature, and in our dreams we become what, except for the grace of God, we would always be.”
Both in conscience and in will there is a self-diremption. Kant's categorical imperative is only one self laying down the law to the other self. The whole Kantian system of ethics is based on this doctrine of double consciousness. Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind, 169 sq., speaks of “psychical automatism.” Yet this automatism is possible only to self-conscious and cognitively remembering minds. It is always the “I” that puts itself into “that other.” We could not conceive of the other self except under the figure of the “I.” All our mental operations are ours, and we are responsible for them, because the subconscious and even the unconscious self is the product of past self-conscious thoughts and volitions. The present settled state of our wills is the result of former decisions. The will is a storage battery, charged by past acts, full of latent power, ready to manifest its energy so soon as the force which confines it is withdrawn. On unconscious mental action, see Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 139, 515-543, and criticism of Carpenter, in Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 226-238; Bramwell, Hypnotism, its History, Practice and Theory, 358-398; Porter, Human Intellect, 333, 334; versus Sir Wm. Hamilton, who adopts the maxim: “Non sentimus, nisi sentiamus nos sentire”(Philosophy, ed. Wight, 171). Observe also that sin may infect the body, as well as the soul, and may bring it into a state of non-conformity to God's law (see H. B. Smith, Syst. Theol., 267).
In adducing our Scriptural and rational proof of the definition of sin as a state, we desire to obviate the objection that this view leaves the soul wholly given over to the power of evil. While we maintain that this is true of man apart from God, we also insist that side by side with the evil bent of the human will there is always an immanent divine power which greatly counteracts the force of evil, and if not resisted leads the individual soul—even when resisted leads the race at large—toward truth and salvation. This immanent divine power is none other than Christ, the eternal Word, the Light which lighteth every man; see John 1:4, 9.
John 1:4, 9—“In him was life, and the life was the light of men.... There was the true light, even the light which lighteth every man.” See a further statement in A. H. Strong, Cleveland Sermon, May, 1904, with regard to the old and the new view as to sin:—“Our fathers believed in total depravity, and we agree with them that man naturally is devoid of love to God and that every faculty is weakened, disordered, and corrupted by the selfish bent of his will. They held to original sin. The selfish bent of man's will can be traced back to the apostacy of our first parents; and, on account of that departure of the race from God, [pg 552]all men are by nature children of wrath. And all this is true, if it is regarded as a statement of the facts, apart from their relation to Christ. But our fathers did not see, as we do, that man's relation to Christ antedated the Fall and constituted an underlying and modifying condition of man's life. Humanity was naturally in Christ, in whom all things were created and in whom they all consist. Even man's sin did not prevent Christ from still working in him to counteract the evil and to suggest the good. There was an internal, as well as an external, preparation for man's redemption. In this sense, of a divine principle in man striving against the selfish and godless will, there was a total redemption, over against man's total depravity; and an original grace, that was even more powerful than original sin.
“We have become conscious that total depravity alone is not a sufficient or proper expression of the truth; and the phrase has been outgrown. It has been felt that the old view of sin did not take account of the generous and noble aspirations, the unselfish efforts, the strivings after God, of even unregenerate men. For this reason there has been less preaching about sin, and less conviction as to its guilt and condemnation. The good impulses of men outside the Christian pale have been often credited to human nature, when they should have been credited to the indwelling Spirit of Christ. I make no doubt that one of our radical weaknesses at this present time is our more superficial view of sin. Without some sense of sin's guilt and condemnation, we cannot feel our need of redemption. John the Baptist must go before Christ; the law must prepare the way for the gospel.
“My belief is that the new apprehension of Christ's relation to the race will enable us to declare, as never before, the lost condition of the sinner; while at the same time we show him that Christ is with him and in him to save. This presence in every man of a power not his own that works for righteousness is a very different doctrine from that 'divinity of man' which is so often preached. The divinity is not the divinity of man, but the divinity of Christ. And the power that works for righteousness is not the power of man, but the power of Christ. It is a power whose warning, inviting, persuading influence renders only more marked and dreadful the evil will which hampers and resists it. Depravity is all the worse, when we recognize in it the constant antagonist of an ever-present, all-holy, and all-loving Redeemer.”