A. Love to God is the essence of all virtue. The opposite to this, the choice of self as the supreme end, must therefore be the essence of sin.
We are to remember, however, that the love to God in which virtue consists is love for that which is most characteristic and fundamental in God, namely, his holiness. It is not to be confounded with supreme regard for God's interests or for the good of being in general. Not mere benevolence, but love for God as holy, is the principle and source of holiness in man. Since the love of God required by the law is of this sort, it not only does not imply that love, in the sense of benevolence, is the essence of holiness in God,—it implies rather that holiness, or self-loving and self-affirming purity, is fundamental in the divine nature. From this self-loving and self-affirming purity, love properly so-called, or the self-communicating attribute, is to be carefully distinguished (see vol. 1, pages 271-275).
Bossuet, describing heathendom, says: “Every thing was God but God himself.” Sin goes further than this, and says: “I am myself all things,”—not simply as Louis XVI: “I am the state,” but: “I am the world, the universe, God.” Heinrich Heine: “I am no child. I do not want a heavenly Father any more.” A French critic of Fichte's philosophy said that it was a flight toward the infinite which began with the ego, and never got beyond it. Kidd, Social Evolution, 75—“In Calderon's tragic story, the unknown figure, which throughout life is everywhere in conflict with the individual whom it haunts, lifts the mask at last to disclose to the opponent his own features.”Caird, Evolution of Religion, 1:78—“Every self, once awakened, is naturally a despot, and ‘bears, like the Turk, no brother near the throne.’ ” Every one has, as Hobbes said, “an infinite desire for gain or glory,” and can be satisfied with nothing but a whole universe for himself. Selfishness—“homo homini lupus.” James Martineau: “We ask Comte to lift the veil from the holy of holies and show us the all-perfect object of worship,—he produces a looking-glass and shows us ourselves.” Comte's religion is a “synthetic idealization of our existence”—a worship, not of God, but of humanity; and “the festival of humanity” among Positivists—Walt Whitman's “I celebrate myself.” On Comte, see Martineau, Types, 1:499. The most thorough discussion of the essential principle of sin is that of Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:147-182. He defines sin as “a turning away from the love of God to self-seeking.”
N. W. Taylor holds that self-love is the primary cause of all moral action; that selfishness is a different thing, and consists not in making our own happiness our ultimate end, which we must do if we are moral beings, but in love of the world, and in preferring the world to God as our portion or chief good (see N. W. Taylor, Moral Govt., 1:24-26; 2:20-24, and Rev. Theol., 134-162; Tyler, Letters on the New Haven Theology, 72). We claim, on the contrary, that to make our own happiness our ultimate aim is itself sin, and the essence of sin. As God makes his holiness the central thing, so we are to live for that, loving self only in God and for God's sake. This love for God as holy is the essence of virtue. The opposite to this, or supreme love for self, is sin. As Richard Lovelace writes: “I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more,” so Christian friends can say: “Our loves in higher love endure.” The sinner raises some lower object of instinct or desire to supremacy, regardless of God and his law, and this he does for no other reason than to gratify self. On the distinction between mere benevolence and the love required by God's law, see Hovey, God With Us, 187-200; Hopkins, Works, 1:235; F. W. Robertson, Sermon I. Emerson: “Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.” See Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 327-370, on duties toward self as a moral end.
Love to God is the essence of all virtue. We are to love God with all the heart. But what God? Surely, not the false God, the God who is indifferent to moral distinctions [pg 568]and who treats the wicked as he treats the righteous. The love which the law requires is love for the true God, the God of holiness. Such love aims at the reproduction of God's holiness in ourselves and in others. We are to love ourselves only for God's sake and for the sake of realizing the divine idea in us. We are to love others only for God's sake and for the sake of realizing the divine idea in them. In our moral progress we, first, love self for our own sake; secondly, God for our own sake; thirdly, God for his own sake; fourthly, ourselves for God's sake. The first is our state by nature; the second requires prevenient grace; the third, regenerating grace; and the fourth, sanctifying grace. Only the last is reasonable self-love. Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 27—“Reasonable self-love is a virtue wholly incompatible with what is commonly called selfishness. Society suffers, not from having too much of it, but from having too little.” Altruism is not the whole of duty. Self-realization is equally important. But to care only for self, like Goethe, is to miss the true self-realization, which love to God ensures.
Love desires only the best for its object, and the best is God. The golden rule bids us give, not what others desire, but what they need. Rom. 15:2—“Let each one of us please his neighbor for that which is good, unto edifying.” Deutsche Liebe: “Nicht Liebe die fragt: Willst du mein sein? Sondern Liebe die sagt: Ich muss dein sein.” Sin consists in taking for one's self alone and apart from God that in one's self and in others to which one has a right only in God and for God's sake. Mrs. Humphrey Ward, David Grieve, 403—“How dare a man pluck from the Lord's hand, for his wild and reckless use, a soul and body for which he died? How dare he, the Lord's bondsman, steal his joy, carrying it off by himself into the wilderness, like an animal his prey, instead of asking it at the hands and under the blessing of the Master? How dare he, a member of the Lord's body, forget the whole, in his greed for the one—eternity in his thirst for the present?”Wordsworth, Prelude, 546—“Delight how pitiable, Unless this love by a still higher love Be hallowed, love that breathes not without awe; Love that adores, but on the knees of prayer. By heaven inspired.... This spiritual love acts not nor can exist Without imagination, which in truth Is but another name for absolute power, And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, And reason in her most exalted mood.”
Aristotle says that the wicked have no right to love themselves, but that the good may. So, from a Christian point of view, we may say: No unregenerate man can properly respect himself. Self-respect belongs only to the man who lives in God and who has God's image restored to him thereby. True self-love is not love for the happinessof the self, but for the worth of the self in God's sight, and this self-love is the condition of all genuine and worthy love for others. But true self-love is in turn conditioned by love to God as holy, and it seeks primarily, not the happiness, but the holiness, of others. Asquith, Christian Conception of Holiness, 98, 145, 154, 207—“Benevolence or love is not the same with altruism. Altruism is instinctive, and has not its origin in the moral reason. It has utility, and it may even furnish material for reflection on the part of the moral reason. But so far as it is not deliberate, not indulged for the sake of the end, but only for the gratification of the instinct of the moment, it is not moral.... Holiness is dedication to God, the Good, not as an external Ruler, but as an internal controller and transformer of character.... God is a being whose every thought is love, of whose thoughts not one is for himself, save so far as himself is not himself, that is, so far as there is a distinction of persons in the Godhead. Creation is one great unselfish thought—the bringing into being of creatures who can know the happiness that God knows.... To the spiritual man holiness and love are one. Salvation is deliverance from selfishness.” Kaftan, Dogmatik, 319, 320, regards the essence of sin as consisting, not in selfishness, but in turning away from God and so from the love which would cause man to grow in knowledge and likeness to God. But this seems to be nothing else than choosing self instead of God as our object and end.
B. All the different forms of sin can be shown to have their root in selfishness, while selfishness itself, considered as the choice of self as a supreme end, cannot be resolved into any simpler elements.
(a) Selfishness may reveal itself in the elevation to supreme dominion of any one of man's natural appetites, desires, or affections. Sensuality is selfishness in the form of inordinate appetite. Selfish desire takes the forms respectively of avarice, ambition, vanity, pride, according as it is set upon property, power, esteem, independence. Selfish affection is falsehood or [pg 569] malice, according as it hopes to make others its voluntary servants, or regards them as standing in its way; it is unbelief or enmity to God, according as it simply turns away from the truth and love of God, or conceives of God's holiness as positively resisting and punishing it.
Augustine and Aquinas held the essence of sin to be pride; Luther and Calvin regarded its essence to be unbelief. Kreibig (Versöhnungslehre) regards it as “world-love”; still others consider it as enmity to God. In opposing the view that sensuality is the essence of sin, Julius Müller says: “Wherever we find sensuality, there we find selfishness, but we do not find that, where there is selfishness, there is always sensuality. Selfishness may embody itself in fleshly lust or inordinate desire for the creature, but this last cannot bring forth spiritual sins which have no element of sensuality in them.”