Sin is short-coming, missing the mark of our true being, which is to be found only in union with God.—Sin is the attempt to live apart from God, or as if there were no God. It is transgression of his laws. It is the attempt to make a world of our own, from which in whole or in part we try to exclude God, and escape the jurisdiction of his laws. All wrong-doing, all vice, all neglect of duty, is in reality a violation of the divine will. But not until the individual comes to recognize the divine will, and in spite of this recognition that all duty is divine, deliberately turns aside from God and duty together, does vice become sin.
THE VICE OF EXCESS.
Devotion to God as distinct from or in opposition to devotion to those concrete duties and human relationship wherein the divine will is expressed, is hypocrisy.—"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, cannot love God whom he hath not seen."
Pure religion begins in faith and ends in works. It draws from God the inspiration to serve in righteousness and love our fellow-men. If faith stop short of God, and rest in church, or creed, or priest; if work stop short of actual service of our fellow-men, and rest in splendor of ritual or glow of pious feeling, or orthodoxy of belief; then our religion becomes a vain and hollow thing, and we become Pharisees and hypocrites.
THE PENALTY.
The wages of sin is death.—The penalty of each particular vice we have seen to be the dwarfing, stunting, decay, and deadening of that particular side of our nature that is effected by it. Intemperance brings disease; wastefulness brings want; cruelty brings brutality; ugliness brings coarseness; exclusiveness brings isolation; treason brings anarchy. Just in so far as one cuts himself off from the moral order which is the expression of God's will; just in so far as there is sin, there is privation, deadening, and decay. As long as we live in this world it is impossible to live an utterly vicious life; to cut ourselves off completely from God and his order and his laws. To do that would be instant death. The man who should embody all the vices and none of the virtues, would be intolerable to others, unendurable even to himself. The penalty of an all-round life of vice and sin would be greater than man could endure and live. This fearful end is seldom reached in this life. Some redeeming virtues save even the worst of men from this full and final penalty of sin. The man, however, who deliberately rejects God as his friend and guide to righteous living; the man who deliberately makes self-will and sin the ruling principle of his life, is started on a road, which, if followed to the end, leads inevitably to death. He is excluding himself from that sphere of good, that career of service and devotion, wherein alone true life is to be found. He is banishing himself to that outer darkness which is our figurative expression for the absence of all those rewards of virtue and the presence of all those penalties of vice which our previous studies have brought to our attention. "Sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death." "The wages of sin is death."
THE END.
