What, then, is the business in hand? What is the work to be done? Plainly to tie anew the threads that were broken, to bring it about that the loss, infinitely painful though it be, shall lead to gain, to substitute for the mixed relation of touch and sight the purely spiritual relation.
One more remark must be made in connection with the above. There is at present a tendency to dishonor the past in comparison with the future. Interest seems to lie in what lies ahead. Hence a breathless, forward-urging mood. One consequence of this is that the dead are less honored than of old. Within a single generation, for instance, I have seen not a few eminent persons in the city of New York pass away who up to the time of their death and in their obituaries were greatly and justly praised. I have hardly ever seen their names publicly mentioned since. Already they seem practically forgotten. In our national history likewise only a few of the most eminent are remembered. In like manner in families, the names even of father and mother are seldom mentioned by their surviving adult children, and ancestors at second remove are barely remembered. Now excessive reverence for the past, as in China, is a mark of stationariness. A retrospective point of view is inconsistent with progress. Our face must necessarily be turned toward the future. And yet forgetfulness of those human beings whom we have known, and who represented to us while they lived much of the best that life had to give, seems inhuman and incredible. It is true that I have drawn a sharp distinction between the empirical selves and those spiritual selves which the former for a time enshrined. The empirical selves have now disappeared. The gleam of love in the eye, the luster of beauty, whether of form or of expression, that touched for a season the sacred features, have vanished. On the other hand, the spiritual self as a member of the spiritual universe is confessedly past knowing and past imagining. On what object then shall memory dwell? It may dwell on the empirical self in so far as it was the sign of the thing signified, in so far as the being we knew and loved was to us convincing of the reality of that spiritual world which itself is incognizable by sense or mind. The greatest boon any human being can confer on another is to serve him in attaining the end for which he exists; and the supreme end for us all is the realization of our interrelation with the infinite community of spirits. The woman whom we say we loved, we loved precisely because she revealed to us that spiritual galaxy—because she was a Beatrice, ascending with us, and opening to our sight the eternal expanses.
CHAPTER IV
THE SHADOW OF SIN
If any term in the moral vocabulary stands in need of strict redefinition, it is sin. Three elements combine to complete the idea of sin: first, that the deed was one that ought not to have been done, not so much because of its painful consequences to others or to self, or to both, or, by repercussion on society as a whole; but because it was opposed to what is intrinsically right: in other words, because it contravened the kind of interrelation which would exist in its purity in the ethical manifold.
Secondly, the idea of sin implies that the sinner himself is the doer of the deed, or that there is to this extent freedom of the will. I do not say that he is the cause of which the deed is the effect. Causality appertains to sequent phenomena. As regards freedom of the will, the distinction between the category of interdependence and that of causality is vital. A long series of causes, such as bad heredity, bad environment, etc., may have led A to determine to murder B.[51]
The notion of the freedom of the will as here viewed signifies that no matter what the causal series may have been which leads up to the act, when the act itself is about to be performed, when B is about to experience the effect of A as cause, in that moment the relation of interdependence between A and B ought to arise before the mind of A and withhold him from completing his evil purpose.
Thirdly, it is characteristic of sin that the fuller knowledge that the harmful deed is sinful comes after the act,—that it is the Fruit of the Tree, the enlightenment of the eyes. As the serpent said: “If ye eat of the fruit ye shall be as gods.”
Many a man has done what is called evil, and done it most deliberately, knowing evil as evil. Remember the career of a Cæsar Borgia, the extermination of the Caribbean Indians by the Spaniards, the outrages on women perpetrated during the present war, the exploitation of human labor practiced on a large scale among the civilized nations. That the blackest crimes may be committed with a full knowledge of the horrible consequences to the victims seems hardly to admit of doubt. Evil is known as evil.
But evil in its character as sin cannot be fully recognized prior to the act. In this respect the Greeks had a certain prescience of the truth when they asserted that no one can knowingly commit evil; only they failed to distinguish between evil and sin. A man can knowingly commit evil, but cannot with full consciousness commit sin. The knowledge of the sin is the divine elixir which may be distilled from the evil deed (“Ye shall be as gods”), and the object of every kind of punishment should be to extract that pain-giving but ultimately peace-giving elixir.