(a) History witnesses to the universality of sin, in its accounts of the universal prevalence of priesthood and sacrifice.
See references in Luthardt, Fund. Truths, 161-172, 335-339. Baptist Review, 1882:343—“Plutarch speaks of the tear-stained eyes, the pallid and woe-begone countenances which he sees at the public altars, men rolling themselves in the mire and confessing their sins. Among the common people the dull feeling of guilt was too real to be shaken off or laughed away.”
(b) Every man knows himself to have come short of moral perfection, and, in proportion to his experience of the world, recognizes the fact that every other man has come short of it also.
Chinese proverb: “There are but two good men; one is dead, and the other is not yet born.” Idaho proverb: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” But the proverb applies to the white man also. Dr. Jacob Chamberlain, the missionary, said: “I never but once in India heard a man deny that he was a sinner. But once a Brahmin interrupted me and said: ‘I deny your premisses. I am not a sinner. I do not need to do better.’ For a moment I was abashed. Then I said: ‘But what do your neighbors say?’ Thereupon one cried out: ‘He cheated me in trading horses’; another: ‘He defrauded a widow of her inheritance.’ The Brahmin went out of the house, and I never saw him again.” A great nephew of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, when a child, wrote in a few lines an “Essay on the Life of Man,” which ran as follows: “A man's life naturally divides itself into three distinct parts: the first when he is contriving and planning all kinds of villainy and rascality,—that is the period of youth and innocence. In the second, he is found putting in practice all the villainy and rascality he has contrived,—that is the flower of mankind and prime of life. The third and last period is that when he is making his soul and preparing for another world,—that is the period of dotage.”
(c) The common judgment of mankind declares that there is an element of selfishness in every human heart, and that every man is prone to some form of sin. This common judgment is expressed in the maxims: “No man is perfect”; “Every man has his weak side”, or “his price”; and every great name in literature has attested its truth.
Seneca, De Ira, 3:26—“We are all wicked. What one blames in another he will find in his own bosom. We live among the wicked, ourselves being wicked”; Ep., 22—“No one has strength of himself to emerge [from this wickedness]; some one must needs hold forth a hand; some one must draw us out.” Ovid, Met., 7:19—“I see the things that are better and I approve them, yet I follow the worse.... We strive even after that which is forbidden, and we desire the things that are denied.” Cicero: “Nature has given us faint sparks of knowledge; we extinguish them by our immoralities.”
Shakespeare, Othello, 3:3—“Where's that palace whereinto foul things Sometimes Intrude not? Who has a breast so pure, But some uncleanly apprehensions keep leets [meetings in court] and law-days, and in sessions sit With meditations lawful?”Henry VI., II:3:3—“Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.” Hamlet, 2:2, compares God's influence to the sun which “breeds maggots in a dead dog, Kissing carrion,”—that is, God is no more responsible for the corruption in man's heart and the evil that comes from it, than the sun is responsible for the maggots which its heat breeds in a dead dog; 3:1—“We are arrant knaves all.” Timon of Athens, 1:2—“Who lives that's not depraved or depraves?”
Goethe: “I see no fault committed which I too might not have committed.” Dr. Johnson: “Every man knows that of himself which he dare not tell to his dearest friend.” Thackeray showed himself a master in fiction by having no heroes; the paragons of virtue belonged to a cruder age of romance. So George Eliot represents life correctly by setting before us no perfect characters; all act from mixed motives. Carlyle, hero-worshiper as he was inclined to be, is said to have become disgusted with each of his heroes before he finished his biography. Emerson said that to understand any crime, he had only to look into his own heart. Robert Burns: “God knows I'm no thing I would be, Nor am I even the thing I could be.” Huxley: “The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.” And he speaks of “the infinite wickedness” which has attended the course of human history. Matthew Arnold: “What mortal, when he saw, Life's voyage done, his heavenly Friend, Could ever yet dare tell him fearlessly:—I have kept uninfringed [pg 576]my nature's law: The inly written chart thou gavest me, to guide me, I have kept by to the end?” Walter Besant, Children of Gibeon: “The men of ability do not desire a system in which they shall not be able to do good to themselves first.” “Ready to offer praise and prayer on Sunday, if on Monday they may go into the market place to skin their fellows and sell their hides.” Yet Confucius declares that “man is born good.” He confounds conscience with will—the sense of right with the love of right. Dean Swift's worthy sought many years for a method of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. Human nature of itself is as little able to bear the fruits of God.
Every man will grant (1) that he is not perfect in moral character; (2) that love to God has not been the constant motive of his actions, i. e., that he has been to some degree selfish; (3) that he has committed at least one known violation of conscience. Shedd, Sermons to the Natural Man, 86, 87—“Those theorists who reject revealed religion, and remand man to the first principles of ethics and morality as the only religion that he needs, send him to a tribunal that damns him”; for it is simple fact that “no human creature, in any country or grade of civilization, has ever glorified God to the extent of his knowledge of God.”
3. Proof from Christian experience.