We are now able to see what sin is more plainly than before. Sin is the tendency to grasp and draw inward, and everything that feeds that tendency makes for death. Sin is the expansion of the individuality at the expense of the race; sin is acting on the belief that the soul can increase at another's cost, can increase by destroying what is another's good. Apply that explanation or definition of sin to what you know about life, and you will soon see when a man is facing the deathward road, and how differently he acts when he is choosing the lifeward road. There are men in this congregation who do not realise, as they should, that lifewardness is God-wardness; but so it is. The soul and the source of all things is God, and, consciously or unconsciously, all men are seeking God in that they are seeking self-expression, seeking life. The man, for instance, who is trying to become rich is a man who is seeking to express himself, seeking power, seeking life, seeking to thrust through the barriers that surround the soul. They are all doing it; the veriest materialist among you is seeking by his daily activities more abundant life. The young man here who feels a burning ambition within his heart, a desire to exploit the world and make a name for himself, to occupy a high station, is not conscious of anything essentially unworthy. It all depends on what he does with the impulse. What you are seeking, young man, is more abundant life, and that is equivalent to seeking God. Life is God. "Every good and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights." And when the tendency goes round and works havoc and ruin in the world, it still remains a quest for God, although a blundering one. It is a misuse of divine energy. The man who got drunk last night and gratified his lower nature in that delirious hour would be surprised if you were to tell him when you see the result that he was really seeking God, but so it is. He wants life, and thinks he can get it this way. This is the reason why morbid excitement and the craving for amusement have such power in human lives to-day. Your roué in Piccadilly who went out to destroy innocence was seeking life while spreading death. It seems almost blasphemy to say it, but he was seeking God and thinking—O woful blunder!—that he would find Him by destroying something that God has made beautiful and fair. So with all acts of selfish gratification of which men are capable—they are the turning of the current of divine energy the wrong way, and seeking self-gratification at the expense of something else that God has made. It is a failure to see that we only obtain life by giving life. When an engine goes off the line there is a smash, as a rule, and the greater the power that was driving the engine, the worse is the wreck when it leaves the line. The lightning directed rightly becomes the luminant by which we look on each other's faces to-night. That same power might have brought havoc and destruction if it had not been harnessed in the service of man. And so with the power that God has given you; all desire for self-expression, all seeking of which you are conscious for larger and better and richer life, is God-given; but it may mean ruin and destruction unless you see that it is yours, not that you may draw inward, but that you may give outward, yours not to keep and hold, but yours wherewith to bless mankind. Sin is the tendency to keep for self that which was meant for the world. "The wages of sin is death," the death of soul. He who is guilty of sin is guilty of soul murder. "All they that hate Me love death," and he that spreads pain and ruin over other lives in the gratification of his own lower instincts is using something which is God-given—yea, which is essentially God's own life—in the wrong way. The only hope for him is to realise that no act of sin was ever yet worth while, that it does punish itself, must punish itself, for it shrivels and fetters the soul. No eleventh-hour repentance will ever save you, and no cowardly cry for relief will ever bring God's forgiveness into your soul, until you have realised that sin and selfishness are one, and that what you have failed to give forth of love and service represents the measure of your soul poverty.
Even at the risk of prolixity and repetition I have thought it right to insert these lengthy extracts from sermons which have been animadverted upon. My readers will be able to judge of the fairness of the criticism which, by abstracting a few lines, strove to make it appear that my teaching denied the reality of sin. Here are the actual words seen in their proper setting. If one were on the lookout for a good illustration of the sinfulness of sin, perhaps the controversial methods of the editor of the British Weekly might furnish it. This kind of criticism is on a par with that of the gentleman who once startled an audience by declaring, "The Bible says there is no God." He was right, of course, if it be legitimate to suppress the former part of the passage, "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God."
It is time we had done with unreal talk about sin. Sin is the murder spirit in human experience. "Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" Strong language, but I suppose the man who first used it must have known what he was talking about. Pomposity is sin, because it is egoism; self-complacency and contemptuousness are sin for the same reason. Cupidity is sin whether in a burglar or a Doctor of Divinity. A bitter, grasping, cruel, unsympathetic spirit is sin, no matter who shows it. The scribe and the Pharisee are too much with us, and the religious ideal needs to be rescued from their blighting grasp to-day as much as ever it did. Of all forms of sin an arrogant, malignant, self-satisfied assumption of righteousness is the worst and the hardest to eradicate, as Jesus found to His cost. The terrible damning lie which is stifling religion to-day is the lie which crucified Jesus, the lie that spiritual pride can ever interpret God to a needy world. There is something grimly amusing in the suggestion that prosperous people should pay for sending gospel missions to the poor. If sin is selfishness, the poor had better missionise the rich. Imagine how it would be if things were reversed in this way, and a mission band of earnest slum dwellers took their stand in Belgravia and began a house-to-house visitation, with all the theological terms carefully eliminated from the mission leaflets they thrust under the doors or handed to the powdered footmen. Instead of, "Flee from the wrath to come," etc., they might have: "Don't be selfish! it is hurting you and your neighbours and making you unhappy. Don't pretend! It is poor business in the end. Try to do as much as you can for other people and you will know what God is." The attempt would be startling and unwelcome, but it would be far less impudent than the religious exhortations of the prosperous to the poor commonly are. For the truth is that if sin is selfishness,—and it is nothing else,—the degraded habits of people at the lower end of the social scale are no more sinful than the ordinary behaviour of most of their preceptors at the other end. Most of the talk about sin is unreal; that is the trouble; so verily the publicans and harlots go into the kingdom of heaven before us. In church a man will profess himself to be a miserable sinner, but if we were to address him in the same way out of church he would sue us for libel—if he thought we meant it. For heaven's sake let us have done with the sham of it all and face the truth. What mankind is suffering from is selfishness. Get rid of that and there would be little left to trouble about.
+Atonement and sin.+—It should now be plain why the doctrine of Atonement has been so closely associated with the doing away of sin; it is because, as we have seen, the root idea of Atonement is the assertion of the fundamental oneness of man with man and all with God. Sin is the divisive separating thing in our relations with one another, and with God the source of all, so the assertion of our oneness involves getting rid of sin. If we ask how this is to be done, the answer is simple enough: the only way to get rid of selfishness is by the ministry of love. What is it that is slowly winning the world from its selfishness to-day and lifting it gradually into the higher, purer atmosphere of universal love? There is but one thing that is doing it, and that is the spirit of self-sacrifice. Wherever you see that, you see the true Atonement at work. There can be no doubt about the final issue, for behind the spirit of love is infinity, whereas the spirit of selfishness is essentially finite. On the field of human history the death of Jesus is the focus and concentrated essence of this age-long atoning process, whereby selfishness is being overcome and the whole race lifted up to its home in God. Until Jesus came no self-offering had been so consistent and so complete. No selfish desire could find lodgment in His pure soul. He showed men the ideal life by living it Himself, the life which was perfectly at one with God and man. In a selfish world that life was sure to end on a Calvary of some kind, but the very fact that it did so demonstrated the completeness of its victory over all considerations of self-interest. Selfishness lost the battle by seeming to gain it. God was behind the life of Jesus just because it was the life of perfect love, the life which was a perfect gift to the whole, therefore that life immediately arose in power in other lives and has gone increasing its benevolent sway over human hearts ever since. This is the Atonement and it is rightly associated with the cross of Jesus in the minds of men, for the cross is the sum and centre of it all.
+The increasing Atonement.+—But the Atonement to be effective has to be repeated on the altar of human hearts, and so it is, to a far greater extent than most people stop to think. The same spirit that was in Jesus and governed His whole career was the spirit of the true humanity, "The light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world." The spirit of Jesus was the spirit of Christ, the ideal or divine manhood as it exists eternally in God. But that ideal or divine manhood, that Christ nature, is also potentially present in every human being. What needs to be done is to get it manifested or brought forth into conscious activity. The immediate effect of the life and death of Jesus upon His followers was to make them more or less like Him, and to fill them with a similar desire to get men to live the life of love which is the life of God. They felt themselves inspired by the same spirit, the Holy Spirit of truth and love, and exalted above all fear for their own safety and all desire to live for themselves alone. They loved their Lord so much that their lives became one with His in the work of saving the world. They could see no difference between serving their Master and serving mankind. This love force of theirs, this intense loyalty to Jesus, was, and still is, the redeeming thing in the life of mankind. There is not and never has been any other Atonement. The divine power that is breaking down selfishness, and transforming human desires in accordance with the eternal truth of things, is the spirit of self-sacrificing love. It is but a step from sinner to saviour. To cease to be a sinner is perforce to be a saviour. To escape from the dominion of selfishness is forthwith to become a power in the hand of God for the uplifting and ingathering of mankind to Himself; this is the Atonement.
Ask yourself whether this is not so. What other force for good is there in the world to-day than the spirit which governed the whole life of Jesus and rendered Him willing to brave the worst that evil could do in His desire to get men to realise the true life? There is no other. If you want to see the Atonement at work, go wherever love is ministering to human necessity and you see the very same spirit which was in Jesus, the spirit which heals and saves. Dogma is doing nothing to save the world; the gospel of self-sacrifice is doing everything. Show me a Christlike life and I will show you a part of the Atonement of Christ. Show me a noble deed and I will show you something worthy of Jesus. His self-offering, and the love and devotion it awoke in human hearts, are a perpetual sacrifice, a cumulative assertion that in the presence of need love can never do anything other than give itself until the need is supplied and love is all in all. There is even a possibility of substitution here. Vicarious suffering willingly accepted becomes irresistible in the long run as a means of lifting a transgressor out of the mire of selfishness. Many a noble wife has saved her husband by remaining at his side and patiently accepting the disabilities caused by his wrong-doing. It is even possible in such a case for the saviour to bear more than the sinner, and for the sinner to be relieved of some of the consequences of his sin; he would have to suffer more if there were no loving helper to stand by him. But to speak of one as bearing another's punishment is untrue; such a thing cannot be. All that love can do is to share to the uttermost in the painful consequences of sin and by so doing break their power What other Atonement is needed than this? It requires no defence, and a child could understand it. Everyone already believes in it, whether he stops to think about it or not. While I am writing these words a fierce storm is raging outside. This is the second day we have had of it, and there seems likely to be some loss of life on the dangerous rocks outside the bar which forms the entrance to the bay below. A visitor has just been telling me of a wilder storm in this same bay some years ago, and of which he says to-day's gale reminds him. On that previous occasion three ships were wrecked together within a few yards of this house. It must have been a dreadful, awe-inspiring scene. No boat could live on the surf, so every survivor had to be dragged ashore with ropes fastened to the cliffs and hauled by willing hands. Hundreds of townspeople and fisher folk came pouring over from St. Ives and all the hamlets round about in order to take part in the work of rescue. According to my informant the scene was enough to stir any heart, and even grown men were crying with excitement and compassion as some of the poor fellows in the rigging of the doomed vessels were washed away before they could be got ashore. The few who were actually snatched from the jaws of death found no lack of willing helpers as one by one they were passed insensible into the kind keeping of the many who stood waiting for an opportunity to be of service. No one grudged anything; every home and every bed would have been cheerfully placed at the disposal of the shipwrecked mariners if they had been wanted. Brave women, the wives and daughters of men who were risking their lives on the sea every day, willingly encouraged their husbands and sons in battling against the tempest in the endeavour to save other husbands and sons whom they had never seen or heard of until that hour of distress and need. And what a fight it was to be sure! Never was a braver. Again and again these humble Cornish heroes dashed into the raging billows to grasp and guide the ropes that bore a flickering human life, and every time they returned with their helpless burden a cheer went up from the watchers that drowned for a moment the violence of the blast. No one thought of enquiring into the theology of saviours or survivors. No doubt there were some among the former who were oftener to be found at the public-house bar than at church, but no one could have distinguished them from the orthodox Christians who fought the waves shoulder to shoulder beside them; they were there to save life, and in doing so their deeper manhood shone out with divine splendour. But the most of the rescuers were good sound, earnest Methodists who perhaps believed, or thought they believed, in the eternal damnation of the unregenerate. But what became of their doctrine in the face of an urgent human need and the call for self-sacrifice to supply that need? It was utterly forgotten. There is both humour and pathos in the fact that these convinced believers tugged and tore at the ropes, and freely jeopardised their own lives in a magnificent endeavour to save perishing bodies from temporal water. There is the truth for you, the real Atonement. The heart creed is usually better than the head creed, and in great moments buries the latter out of sight. Here was the spirit of Christ, the true and eternal manhood, the spirit that seeks to save at its own cost. Here was the instinctive perception of the fundamental oneness of all life and the recognition that the godlike thing is to seek to deliver life from the clutch of death.
+All men instinctively believe in the Atonement.+—This is the deepest and truest impulse of the human heart, as all men already know if they would only trust their better nature to tell them what God wants from his children. Here is an explosion in a coal-mine, and forthwith every mother's son above ground volunteers to go down into the choke-damp to snatch his buried comrades from the sleep of death. A few months ago one such disaster took place in a Durham colliery. Most of my readers will remember that in the newspaper reports of the incidents that took place at the pit mouth were the following: A father who was brought to the surface was asked whether he lost hope during the long hours of his imprisonment below without food or light. "No," was the reply, "for I knew my boy would be in the rescue party, and that nothing would turn him back until he found his father, dead or alive." The suffragan bishop of the diocese, along with a number of other clergymen and nonconformist ministers, remained all night amid the scene of sorrow at the pit mouth, doing his best to comfort the mourners as their loved ones were brought up dead. As morning broke he mounted a heap of cinders and, without making any attempt to conceal his emotion, spoke a few manly words of brotherly exhortation and Christian love to his deeply moved congregation of toilers and sufferers. One poor woman, with unconscious irony, exclaimed to the bystanders: "He doesn't seem like a bishop! He is just like one of ourselves." That servant of God has never preached the Atonement more effectually in all his life—by getting together of man and man, and man and God, through the spirit of self-sacrifice. He stands in the true apostolic succession, the succession of men like Saul of Tarsus, the erstwhile persecutor, who, under the inspiration of the love of Jesus, lived to say, "Who is weak and I am not weak? Who is offended and I burn not?"
Go into any home where the spirit of self-sacrificing love is trying to do anything to supply a need or save a transgressor, and you see the Atonement. Follow that Salvation lassie to the slums, and listen to her as she tries to persuade a drunken husband and father to give up the soul-destroying habit which is such a curse to wife and child, and you see the Atonement. Go with J. Keir Hardie to the House of Commons and listen to his pleading for justice to his order and you see the Atonement. Hear the prayer of mother-love for the erring, wandering son, and you have the Atonement. See that grey-haired father patiently pleading with selfish, hot-headed youth, or yielding up his own hard-won possessions to pay the gambler's debts and save the family name, and you have the Atonement. Nothing can stir the human heart so much. All the great deeds of history derived their inspiration from it; all the little heroisms of our common everyday life are the declaration of it. There is not a single one of all our thoughts and activities but has some relation to it; we are either living for ourselves individually and separately or we are living for the whole. If the former, we are the servants of sin; if the latter, our lives are already part of the Atonement.
+Jesus and the Atonement.+—It is easy to see how much the world owes to Jesus in this regard. I cannot tell what the world might have been if there had never been a Jesus, but certain it is that the sacrificial life and death of Jesus have meant the inpouring of a spirit into human affairs such as had never been known in the same degree before. Here for the first time men saw a perfect manifestation of the life that is life indeed, the life that pleased not itself, the life that entered into and shared human disabilities as though they were its very own, the life that in the presence of selfishness must inevitably become sacrifice, the life of Atonement. In a sinful world that life had to come to a Calvary, but in so doing in refusing to shield and save itself it became the greatest moral power and the greatest revelation of God that the world has ever known. What we succeed in doing some of the time, Jesus did all the time; when all men are able to do it all the time the Atonement will have become complete and love divine shall be all in all. "Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!" cried Julian the apostate; and Christian faith can reverently add—
"Jesus is worthy to receive
Honour and power divine;
And blessings more than we can give
Be, Lord, forever thine."