(b) God is love,
There follow, by a natural and inevitable law, the two results which accompany every act of sin.
(a) The destruction of the true self, the Christ, the Divine Life within man.
(b) Separation from God, which is death. We separate these results in thought; but it will now be sufficiently obvious that they are, in fact, one.
Is this taking too serious a view of sin? I do not think that this can be maintained in view of our whole preceding argument.
But are we taking too serious a view of little sins, of sins which spring from ignorance, of the sins of children?
We have already seen that knowledge and freedom are both necessary to constitute an act of sin. If ignorance is complete, then complete also is the absence of sin. For sin lies not in any material act, but in consciousness and will. The will alone can be sinful, as the will alone can be good. And it is entirely consistent with our standpoint, to admit the existence of an almost infinite number of degrees of sinfulness.
* * * * *
Now we reach this immensely important result. We having sinned, our supreme need is forgiveness. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a Gospel for this precise reason, that it meets, as it claimed from the beginning to meet, this uttermost need of men. Its offer is, always and everywhere, the forgiveness, the remission of sins.
But what are we to understand by forgiveness?