Chapter XLVIII: Appendix: II

ON THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF SIN[609].

'Jesus did not commit Himself unto them, because He knew all men,
and needed not that any should testify of man: for He knew what was
in man.'--_S. John_ ii. 24, 25.

'Sin is lawlessness.'--1 _S. John_ iii. 4. [R.V.]

'He knew what was in man.' The words describe our Lord in presence of a fact universally recognized--man's moral unsatisfactoriness. He looks steadily at man's first offer of service, at man's first enthusiasm, when 'many believed in His name,' and He discerns behind it a disqualifying cause; something which prevents Him from trusting man as he is, and from committing to him the great work of His kingdom. He sees sin in man and all that sin involves of moral failure, of refusal to endure, of spiritual blindness, of lawless self-assertion, of passion, of selfishness, of self-will. That there is in human nature this disqualifying taint of sin is, we may say, a fact universally recognized. It is the fact which in slow embittering experience has turned philanthropists into cynics and saddened the wisest. But to our Lord it was a fact present from the first. 'He needed not that any should testify of man.' He reckoned with sin to start with. Therefore He could not use mankind, as it offered itself, for His purposes. It needed a fresh start, a vital re-creation, to fit it for such high ends. 'Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.' 'Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.'

Christ recognizes the fact of sin. All men more or less come to recognize it within them and without. But yet there have been very different ways of explaining it.

For upon the surface it is tempting to interpret the struggle between good and evil, as we know it so sadly well in our narrow experience, as representing a universal conflict between opposite principles. The world is a composite thing, men have supposed, the result of the antagonism of two Principles, two kingdoms, two Gods, one good and the other evil; or they have explained the world as representing the action of a good God upon an intractable material, eternal as Himself, which limits His power and restrains His hand. On either of these cognate theories[610] the soul of man is naturally represented as a creation of the good Principle or a particle of it, embedded in a vile body of material evil which clogs and hinders and impedes it, which is the seat of lusts and passions, defiling the purity of the spiritual element. The spirit is good and the body is evil. This is the theory upon which so much of Oriental asceticism has proceeded. The object of such asceticism is to liberate the pure spirit from the trammels of the corrupting and imprisoning body. That is most spiritual which is least material. Purification is abstraction from the body. The spirit is akin to God, and will one day win its way up to be re-absorbed in God. The body is material and evil, the seat of sin, and to be dealt with as such. Hence the remorseless persecution of the body which has been exhibited by the devotees of Gnosticism or Brahmanism--the denunciation of marriage, of animal flesh and wine. Hence, on the other hand, the wild rebound into licentiousness which has sometimes characterized Gnostic or Manichaean sects. For, after all, when asceticism has done its utmost we are still in the body. If connection with the body is sin, eating and drinking at all is as sinful as excess; marriage the same as licence. Outward acts become indifferent--indifferently bad. This principle explains the reaction from extreme mortification to extreme licence which characterizes Orientalism.

Once more, in modern times, from a different point of view, materialism has again interpreted sin as an essential part of nature. Ignoring the distinction of what is moral and what is physical, the materialistic Positivism, for instance, of Mr. Cotter Morison represents goodness and badness in men as the simple product of natural forces like goodness and badness in fruits of the earth, each class of good and bad men being essentially and inevitably what it shows itself to be. 'Nothing is gained,' he says, 'by disguising the fact that there is no remedy for a bad heart and no substitute for a good one[611].'

It is common to all the anti-Christian views of sin that at the last resort they make sin natural, a part of nature. It is characteristic of Christ's view of sin--of the Scriptural view of it--that it makes it unnatural. It is characteristic, again, of the non-Christian view that it makes the body, the material, the seat of sin. It is essential to the Christian view to find its seat and only source in the _will_[612].

Take the vilest crime, and Christianity assures you that throughout the transaction, as you may observe it, there is nothing evil in the natural material which is employed, there is only the lawless misuse of material which is in itself good. The worst passions are but the disorderly exercise of feelings and faculties in themselves good and capable of redemption. Lust is only love uncontrolled by the will, and, therefore, lawless. Take the lowest criminal, and Christianity assures you that, however habituated all his nature to run to evil, if you can once get his will--what Scripture calls his 'heart'--set right and given to God, that right direction of the will, the heart, will after long battle at last carry with it all the nature; the forces of grace are set free to act when the obstacle of the will's rebellion or apathy is removed, and (though it takes ages beyond this mortal life) at last the whole being will be purified, and what began in the surrender of the will will take effect in the illumination of the intellect and the purifying of the affections. Thus it is that Christianity can represent God as justifying the sinner in virtue of faith. Faith is the first movement of the will and heart by which the sinner, from the far-off country of his exile, seeks his true home, from the depth of his sin, claims Christ as his own. At this first movement God welcomes him. He meets him with His acceptance. He claims him as His true son, because in that first movement of the moral being God sees the pledge of all that is to come. He sees the forces let loose which will bring the final victory. He deals with the sinner by a Divine anticipation, not as he is, but as he is on the way to become[613]. 'His faith is reckoned for righteousness.'

Let us dwell on the Christian view of sin, in its essence, in its appeal, in its practical justification, in its anthropological results.

(1) In its essence. It is expressed by S. John, 'Sin is lawlessness:' ἡ ἁμαρτία ἐστὶν ἡ ἀνομία. The two terms are coincident. For God, and God only, made the world, and there is no other Creator, no other creation. He made it, and pronounced it very good in its completeness. The universe, in all its sum of forces and existences, is good, and of God. The very existence of anything is a pledge of its natural goodness. It exists only because God created it and sustains it and dwells in it. It must cease to exist, S. Augustine tells us, if it were simply evil[614]. Positive existence is always, so far, good.

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].'

(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.'

If this be the right way of regarding the matter, as it is certainly permissible, we shall be able to echo in all its breadth Athanasius's teaching, that sin did not directly alter _things_, but only our attitude towards them[629].

(_c_) But, once again, and for the last time, the opponent objects: 'All this theory of original sin is built simply on the supposition that the early chapters of Genesis represent literal history. It falls to the ground if they are myth and not history.' Once again, this is not at all the case. The Christian doctrine of sin finds its chief authorisation in Christ's attitude towards it. Sin (if Christ's witness is true) is not nature; it does not represent God's intention, but something that has baffled for a time God's intention, something that Christ is come to conquer. Moreover, this doctrine of sin is not a mere dogma enunciated on external authority; it finds its verification in experience. The moral experience of Christendom confirms it, and this experience of eighteen centuries reflects itself inevitably on the whole of human life. What interprets sin within this area interprets it through the whole history. With this authority of Christ, verified in the Christian experience, as his firm foundation, the Christian does not hesitate to see in the early chapters of Genesis the action of the inspiring Spirit. It was only the inspiring Spirit Which could assure man that the whole universe was of God's making and very good, that the state in which he found himself represented not his nature, as God meant it to be, but the result of his rebellion, the result, moreover, which God meant to counter-work, nay, which in gradual process He was counter-working. In all the account then of the creation, of the nature of man, of the origin of sin, the Christian sees an action of the inspiring Spirit. He sees it all the more when he compares the record of Genesis with those which are parallel to it in other races. But if an Irenaeus, a Clement, an Athanasius, an Anselm could treat the record or part of it as rather allegorical than historical, we can use the same liberty. This is not our present subject. All I want to make clear is that the Christian doctrine of sin rests on a far broader and far surer foundation than the belief that the early chapters of Genesis belong to one form or stage of inspired literature rather than to another. It rests on the strong foundation of the authority of our Lord, accepted and verified by man's moral consciousness.

[609] A sermon preached before the University of Cambridge, at Great St. Mary's Church, on Sunday, March 17, 1889, by the Rev. Charles Gore, and printed in the _Guardian_, March 27. A paragraph of practical exhortation is omitted at the end. Some apology is no doubt needed for the introduction of a Sermon into a volume of Essays. But it was felt (1) that there was under the circumstances an advantage in producing what was not written in view of the criticisms on _Lux Mundi_; (2) that the sermon was not specially homiletic.

[610] The first is that of the Manichaeans and some Gnostics. The second that of the Platonists and other Gnostics. But both the theories represent tendencies very commonly at work both among Orientals and in Europe. Recently John Stuart Mill was disposed to embrace the latter theory: see _Three Essays on Religion_, 3rd edition, London, 1874, pp. 58, 243.

[611] _The Service of Man_, London, 1887, p. 295. Cf. p. 293, 'It will perhaps be said that this view does away with moral responsibility.... To which the answer is, that the sooner the idea of moral responsibility is got rid of, the better it will be for society and moral education.'

[612] See, for instance, Tertullian, _de paenit._ 3; Anselm, _Cur Deus Homo_, i. 11.

[613] Augustine, _de Trin._ i. 10. 21.

[614] Aug. _de mor. Man._ ii. 3, 'Ut ab essentia deficiant et ad non esse tendant? quod malum generale esse clamat verissima ratio.' _Op. imp. c. Jul._ i. 114, 'Non enim potest esse ullum malum nisi in aliquo bono; quia non potest esse nisi in aliqua natura; omnis autem natura, in quantum natura est, bonum est.'

[615] For references, see p. 290, note.

[616] Rom. v. 6: see Godet's _Commentary_ in loc. Clark's _Foreign Theol. Libr._ i. p. 416; and cf. Col. ii. 11, τὸ σῶμα τῆς σαρκός.

[617] S. Luke xvi. 9.

[618] See Origen, _C. Cels._ iv. 65-66; Athan. _C. Gentes_, 6-7; and cf. the index to S. Augustine _s. v._ malum. So far, however, as each individual identifies himself with sin, it becomes 'his nature': a false nature, obscuring the true, but never annihilating it; cf. Tertullian, _de An._ 41, 'Naturae corruptio alia natura est,' etc.; and Bernard, _in Cant. Serm._ 82. 2,--admirable passages.

[619] See in Mozley, _Lectures_, etc., x. p. 159.

[620] Cf. in explanation of this, the Preface, p. xviii.

[621] There is a fundamental mistake in the popular excuse for sensual sin--that it is 'natural.' The mistake lies in the idea that man's animal and spiritual natures are separable, that he can live as pure animal in one part of his life, and pure spirit in another. But as a fact man's life is only lived 'according to nature,' where every part of it is lived 'in flesh and in spirit': the spiritual motive must control the bodily organ. Only so are his acts really human. If he tries to act as a mere animal he becomes sinful. The evidence of this lies in the fact that while the physical nature of animals contains within itself the check on sensual indulgence, the check in man's case lies in his spiritual faculties. You can have a 'dissipated' man, i.e. a man whose bodily impulses are uncontrolled by will or spirit; you cannot have a 'dissipated' animal.

[622] It is not intended as a _complete_ account, cf. Rom. ii. 14-15.

[623] In answer to the question whether Adam was formed perfect or imperfect τέλειος ἤ ἀτελής, Clement replies: 'They shall learn from us that he was not perfect [i.e. complete in development, τέλειος] in respect of his creation, but in a fit condition to receive virtue.' Clem. Alex. _Strom._ vi. 12. 96. Cp. Iren. _c. haer._ iv. 38.

[624] But we can recognize that before civilisation had developed the checks which society supplies against abrupt deterioration, collapse into savagery would have been much more rapid than it can be in a more developed state.

[625] Cf. Aubrey Moore's _Evolution and Christianity_ (Oxford House Papers), pp. 32-3. 'The change which took place at the Fall was a change in the moral region; but it could not be without its effect elsewhere. Even the knowledge of nature becomes confused, without the governing truth of the relation of man to God. The evolution which should have been the harmonious development of the whole man, is checked and impeded in one part, and that the highest part of his nature. And therefore, in spite of all the physical and intellectual advance which man has made, he is always and everywhere the worse for the Fall. However great his development has been, it is still a retarded development, a development slower than it need have been, less regular and less sure than God meant it to be.'

[626] Aug. _De gen. ad litt._ vi. 36, 'Mortalis erat conditione corporis animalis.'

[627] Athan. _de Incarn._ 4.

[628] Cf. Westcott's _Ep. to the Hebrews_, p. 54 (on Hebr. ii. 16).

[629] Athan. _C. Gentes_ 7; cf. Aug. on Gen. iii. 18 (_De Gen. ad litt._ iii. 18, 28), where it is said that it is difficult to suppose that 'thorns and thistles' were first produced on the occasion of sin: but we may understand that they then first began to be obstacles to man in the cultivation of the ground: 'spinas et tribulos pariet _tibi_.'