What then is sin in men or in devils? In one word, lawlessness—the violation of nature, the misuse of good by rebellion of the will. Physical decay, death, dissolution, change, these are of nature; sin, on the other hand, is contrary to nature. It is simply misuse, disorder. It has no positive substance. A sinful man is not the man as God made him with something else introduced called sin. He is simply the man as God made him, disordered by ignoring God, by claiming independence of God, by lawlessness. The same act may constitute either the sin of murder or the heroism of a soldier fighting in his country's defence; either the sin of adultery or Christian marriage, because in the one case the act is done in accordance with the God-given law of our being; in the other case in defiance of it. The humanity of Christ and the humanity of the greatest criminal are consubstantial the one with the other. All that the criminal sins with belongs to Christ's nature; He has all the faculties that are used for sin. 'He could sin if He could will to sin,' the Fathers tell us, 'but God forbid that we should think of His willing it[615].' What is disordered, ungoverned in the criminal is in Christ perfectly subordinated to a will, itself controlled in loving harmony by the Divine Spirit. If it sounds preposterous to say that the nature of the criminal is not of itself sinful, to make the statement reasonable and true we have only to bear in mind the results of sin which have taken slow effect upon his nature in the sequence of generations of bad habit. The body may have become so accustomed to sin, so moulded to sin by forces within and without as to justify S. Paul calling it a 'body of sin[616],' but only in the sense in which our Lord calls money or mammon 'the mammon of unrighteousness[617].' Money, our Lord meant, has become so accustomed, so to speak, to lend itself to the purposes of unrighteousness that it requires attention as alert, wisdom as far-sighted, as that of the unjust steward, in the children of light, to divert it again to its true uses. The body in the same way has been so moulded to sin, accustomed to sin, that it requires the strong hand of an asceticism, rightly motived, to 'keep it under,' to lead it as a slave, to wrest it to good uses. It requires the cutting off of the right hand or the plucking out of the right eye—the disuse for a time, that is, by doing violence to oneself of what has become so misused, so lawless. The bow must be bent violently back, if it is to be made straight. But the end of all this Christian asceticism is the restoration of our whole nature to its true law. We mortify our bodies only to offer them at last a living sacrifice of rational service. At last all the impulses and passions and parts of even the criminal nature shall be subjugated again to the law of the Spirit. Christ shall purify the impure and harmonise the disorderly. Thus down the vista of an endless future Christianity forces us to see the nature of the criminal, if he will but turn Godwards, only reconstituted, not substantially changed, one with Christ in glory. This is the Christian doctrine of sin, the doctrine that Athanasius and Augustine and Anselm, the Christian Fathers as a whole, repeat and reiterate; that sin has no substance; that there is no positively sinful nature; that sin lies not in things, but in our relation to things; that the introduction of sin is simply the privation of order; that moral recovery waits for nothing but the conversion of will[618].
(2) This is the Christian doctrine, and its appeal is to moral experience. Looking at the world from the point of view of physical science, it may appear as if goodness and badness were like good and bad fruit; but to suppose this is to leave out of sight the whole witness of moral experience. It was not Christian belief but inextinguishable consciousness that made Byron cry—
'Our life is a false nature—'tis not in
The harmony of things.'
Or Shelley:—
'The universe
In Nature's silent eloquence declares
That all fulfil the works of love and joy,
All but the outcast man[619].'
In proportion as the moral consciousness is keen and active, in that proportion men know that sin is not nature, but its violation; that they are not what they are meant to be in sinning; that sin has no analogy in the failures of nature, because it is what they are not, avoidable and morally wrong; that it violates what they fulfil, the law of the world. Natural failure is part of the world's fruitfulness. The seeds that fail supply material for the seeds that grow. Moral failure—sin, that is, as distinguished from mere imperfection—is never fruitful. Sins are always the 'unfruitful works of darkness[620].'