See Harris, in Bib. Sac., 18:148—“Sin is essentially egoism or selfism, putting self in God's place. It has four principal characteristics or manifestations: (1) self-sufficiency, instead of faith; (2) self-will, instead of submission; (3) self-seeking, instead of [pg 573]benevolence; (4) self-righteousness, instead of humility and reverence.” All sin is either explicit or implicit “enmity against God” (Rom. 8:7). All true confessions are like David's (Ps. 51:4)—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight.” Of all sinners it might be said that they “Fight neither with small nor great, save only with the king of Israel”(1 K. 22:31).
Not every sinner is conscious of this enmity. Sin is a principle in course of development. It is not yet “full-grown” (James 1:15—“the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death”). Even now, as James Martineau has said: “If it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the streets of London and Paris.” But this indifference easily grows, in the presence of threatening and penalty, into violent hatred to God and positive defiance of his law. If the sin which is now hidden in the sinner's heart were but permitted to develop itself according to its own nature, it would hurl the Almighty from his throne, and would set up its own kingdom upon the ruins of the moral universe. Sin is world-destroying, as well as God-destroying, for it is inconsistent with the conditions which make being as a whole possible; see Royce, World and Individual, 2:366; Dwight, Works, sermon 80.
Section III.—Universality Of Sin.
We have shown that sin is a state, a state of the will, a selfish state of the will. We now proceed to show that this selfish state of the will is universal. We divide our proof into two parts. In the first, we regard sin in its aspect as conscious violation of law; in the second, in its aspect as a bias of the nature to evil, prior to or underlying consciousness.
I. Every human being who has arrived at moral consciousness has committed acts, or cherished dispositions, contrary to the divine law.
1. Proof from Scripture.
The universality of transgression is:
(a) Set forth in direct statements of Scripture.