(3) And the justification of this Christian theory lies in its success. The moral triumphs of the Church depend upon it. Mr. Herbert Spencer constantly assures us that the fundamental postulates of human experience are assumptions or hypotheses at the bottom, which are continuously verified and justified by the correspondence of the results reached. That is true of the Christian postulate of sin. The hypothesis that sin is not nature, but lack of will, is verified by the victory which follows action upon it. 'According to thy faith be it done to thee'—that is Christ's challenge. Man after man sick of moral paralysis lies at Christ's feet explaining why he cannot get up. 'Take up thy bed and walk,' 'According to thy faith be it unto thee,' is the word of Christ. Claim for your own the morally best. Act on Christ's promise as if it were true and you find it is. This is faith—to act on what transcends experience, to act on what you do not feel possible, to act in faith on a promised strength, and to find it really given only in the using. Faith involves the recognition of our own weakness, the surrender of our own independence into the hands of God; it gains as its reward the promised help; it sets free the 'virtue which goes out' of Christ. Reason can only analyse and rationalise what it already experiences. Faith can do what reason, what understanding, at any rate, cannot do—it can yield life up to higher forces than it has yet known. Only when the forces have become in experience thoroughly familiar can they be subjected to the analysis of reason. Credo ut intelligam. The justification of the Christian view of sin as something which is not nature, but failure or disorder of will—something therefore which faith, that is the right direction and use of will, can overcome, or put in the way to be overcome—the justification of this view is, I say, to be found in experience. Act against sin, in Christ's name, as if you had strength, and you will find you have. Expect and you receive. It finds its justification not in the recovery of our own lives only, but in that of others. The Christian lifts others by believing in them. He sees in each the subject of redemption. Behind heaps of sin, ingrained habits of sin, he sees a man's true self, true nature, as God made it and intended it to grow, and to this he appeals. 'According to thy faith be it unto thee' means not only 'You can be saved, if you believe;' it means also 'You can save others'—save them by believing in them and in God, save them, not according to your own foolish desires, but in accordance with God's intention for them, with the original law of their being. The best modern novel literature is full of this truth. What are the moral recoveries of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, and of Sidney Carton in the Tale of Two Cities, and of the selfish old peer in the child story of the Little Lord Fauntleroy, but so many instances of the redemptive power of Christian love because it 'believeth all things, hopeth all things,' believes past belief, hopes beyond hope. The justification of the Christian view of sin lies, then, in its success; partly in the results it actually produces, partly in the larger promise which it opens out beyond the horizon of what we see. 'There is no remedy for a bad character and no substitute for a good one'—that is the only outcome of the physical view of sin. 'According to thy faith, be it unto thee'—that is the Christian answer; there is for thyself no limit to what thou mayest become, on the lines, that is to say, not of thine own ambition, but of God's purpose, except what thou settest by thine own want of faith, thine own failure of moral appetite; there is in the case of others no limit to what thou mayest help them to become, on the lines, once again, of their fundamental nature—except the limits of their faith and thine.
(4) This Christian view of sin determines in part its whole anthropology. What sin is in us, and now, and in recorded history, sin is also in the whole of humanity. Sin actual is of a piece with sin historical, with sin original. Each man does not start afresh. He inherits the moral conditions from which his life starts. I am aware that a modern school of biologists, headed by Professor Weissmann, is modifying the current doctrine of heredity so far as to deny that acquired character can be transmitted, so far as to deny that the acts or habits of men can physically modify the organisation of their descendants. It is not yet clear that this view, in its extreme form, is at all likely to gain acceptance. But I suppose Christianity can await the result with patience. It may not be in any region to which scientific analysis or investigation can penetrate, but at least in the inner region of man's personality Christianity must maintain that the individual does not start afresh. He starts the subject of sinful tendencies which he did not originate, but which those who went before him did, if not originate, at least let loose from restraint, and so make sinful. Sin is in the race as well as in the individual; stayed more or less by moral effort and resistance here; let loose by self-indulgence or luxury there: in varying force and alterable sway therefore, but everywhere more or less present, everywhere making a man conscious not merely of imperfection, but of inward taint, everywhere needing re-creation, recovery, redemption. And everywhere sin is of a piece. My sins are only fresh specimens of what has been going on all along. They work just the same result upon humanity as a whole as the sins of my predecessors, as the first sin: I am driven logically as well as theologically to extend my theory of sin and to generalise it beyond present experience. Sin, not in the individual, as I know him merely, but in the whole of humanity from the first, has been always rebellion, not nature. At the beginning of human life, properly so called, when first a being truly called a man woke up to consciousness of his relation to God, to nature, to himself, he did not find sin part of his being; he might have obeyed the movement of the Spirit of God and realised his true sonship by keeping his animal nature under the control of the spirit: so he would have fulfilled the law of his destined manhood. Sin at the origin of our human life, as through all its history, was treason to our higher capacity, which made man the slave of the flesh. The 'slave of the flesh,' because he was not meant to be an animal: he was meant to be a spiritual being. And it was the capacity for the higher life which turned to sin his choice of a lower; which tinged it with the colour of 'remorse,' with the bitterness of 'self-contempt[621].'
As the essential Christian doctrine of sin finds the guarantee of its permanence in the moral consciousness, so it would not appear to involve any conflict with the disclosures of science. Yet it has been sufficiently distorted in statement for a conflict to have arisen. And the points at issue are briefly three.
(a) Broadly, it is said, the Christian religion represents man as starting in a state of perfection and gradually degrading. Science, with all the evidences on its side, represents man as starting in a state of savagery and gradually rising.
This is a most delusive antithesis. It is certainly true that progress has not been uniform. There is such a thing as moral deterioration. A history of the progress of sin from will to intellect, from intellect to heart, till it penetrates the whole nature and plunges it into the lowest depths of denaturalisation represents what has been a fact both in the individual and in society. Such a record of one element in human experience S. Paul gives us in Romans i[622]. Its truth cannot be denied. But so far is this from representing the Christian view of human history as a whole that, on the contrary, the Scriptures stand alone among ancient literatures in presenting the idea of gradual progress, gradual education, movement onwards to a climax. The Bible is the book of development. 'God Who in many parts and many manners spoke of old time ... hath in the end of these days spoken by His Son;' and still we move on in the realisation and appropriation of all that is revealed and given in Christ 'till we all come ... unto the perfect man.' Nor is it the least true to say that this development is only the attempt to regain the platform on which man was first placed. The idea of the first man as a being of developed intellectual and spiritual capacity, perfect in all the range of his faculties—the idea which would admit of our saying with Robert South that 'an Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise'—may be, indeed has been, found in theologians, it may have passed into the imagination of the English nation as part of the debt, theologically very largely a debt of evil, which we owe to the great poem of Milton; but it is not Scriptural, it is not Christian theology at its best[623]. All the fabric of civilisation the Bible represents as being gradually built up, whether by Jabal, 'who was the father of such as dwell in tents and have cattle,' or by Jubal, 'who was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ,' or by Tubal Cain, 'who was the instructor of every artificer of brass and iron.' There is no impression given us that any of the arts or the knowledge of civilisation existed before. All that we are led to believe is that the historical development of man has not been the development simply as God meant it. It has been tainted through its whole fabric by an element of moral disorder, of human wilfulness. We cannot draw a picture of how human nature was intended to fight the battle of progress. We cannot relate the state of the savage to the intention of God, any more than we can relate the present state of our great cities to that intention[624]. All we can say is that the state of things as they were in days of savagery, or as they are in days of civilisation, represents a parody of the Divine intention for the childhood and manhood of the race. Man was made to grow by gradual effort in range and exercise of every faculty of his being. But all this gradual growth might have been conditioned by a conscious fellowship with God, which would have introduced into it an element of nobility and stability which in fact it has lacked. For the historical development of man has been a development with God only too often left out, the development under conditions of merely physical laws of a being meant to be spiritual[625].
(b) 'But no,' the biologist rejoins; 'you will not get off thus easily. Christianity regards even so absolutely natural a fact as death, a fact so inextricably interwoven into the structural growth of the world, as a mere consequence of sin. Christianity is refuted by every evidence of death being a law of physical nature.' So far from this being true, it is the case that the early Christian writers, S. Augustine as well as S. Athanasius, emphasise the truth that death is the law of physical nature; that when man died he was undergoing what belonged to his animal nature. 'Paul,' says Augustine, 'describes man's body as dead, not as mortal, because of sin. Mortal it was by nature, because, as being animal, it was subject to death[626].' In being left to death, Athanasius teaches, man was only left to the law of his physical being[627]. What, in fact, the Christian teachers hold is not that death, but death as it has been known among men, is the penalty of sin, because man's spiritual or supernatural life would have blunted the forces of corruption and lifted him into a higher immortal state. Man would not have died because he would have been spiritual rather than animal. And even here, if we are asked what this means, we must hesitate in our answer. If sin is said to have brought human death, Christ is said to have abolished it. 'This is the bread which cometh down from heaven that a man may eat thereof and not die.' 'If any man eat of this bread he shall live for ever.' 'Whosoever liveth and believeth on Me shall never die.' 'Christ Jesus ... abolished death.' Sin, we may suppose, only introduced death in the sense in which Christ abolished it[628]. Christ has not abolished the physical transition, but it ceases to be what death implies:—
'Henceforth is death
But the gate of life immortal.'
Death as it has borne upon sinful man has been the sad ending of hopes, the rending of his heart-strings, the collapse of his plans, the overshadowing fear, the horrible gulf, the black destruction. In all that makes it death, it has been the result of sin, of the misdirection of his aims and hopes. Had man not sinned there might, indeed, have been a passage from one state to another, a physical dissolution, a moral victory—but it would not have been what men have known as 'death.'