Chapter XXIII: Section II: Nature Of Sin (2)

On the development-theory of sin, see W. W. McLane, in New
Englander, 1891: 180-188; A. B. Bruce, Apologetics, 60-62; Lyman
Abbott, Evolution of Christianity, 203-208; Le Conte, Evolution,
330, 365-375; Henry Drummond, Ascent of Man, 1-13, 329, 342; Salem
Wilder, Life, its Nature, 266-273; Wm. Graham, Creed of Science,
38-44; Frank H. Foster, Evolution and the Evangelical System;
Chandler, The Spirit of Man, 45-47.

(_c_) It rests upon an incomplete induction of facts, taking account of sin solely in its aspect of self-degradation, but ignoring the worst aspect of it as self-exaltation. Avarice, envy, pride, ambition, malice, cruelty, revenge, self-righteousness, unbelief, enmity to God, are none of them fleshly sins, and upon this principle are incapable of explanation.

Two historical examples may suffice to show the insufficiency of
the sensuous theory of sin. Goethe was not a markedly sensual man;
yet the spiritual vivisection which he practised on Friederike
Brion, his perfidious misrepresentation of his relations with
Kestner’s wife in the “Sorrows of Werther,” and his flattery of
Napoleon, when a patriot would have scorned the advances of the
invader of his country, show Goethe to have been a very
incarnation of heartlessness and selfishness. The patriot Boerne
said of him: “Not once has he ever advanced a poor solitary word
in his country’s cause—he who from the lofty height he has
attained might speak out what none other but himself would dare
pronounce.” It has been said that Goethe’s first commandment to
genius was: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor and thy neighbor’s
wife.” His biographers count up sixteen women to whom he made love
and who reciprocated his affection, though it is doubtful whether
he contented himself with the doctrine of 16 to 1. As Sainte-Beuve
said of Châteaubriand’s attachments: “They are like the stars in
the sky,—the longer you look, the more of them you discover.”
Christiane Vulpius, after being for seventeen years his mistress,
became at last his wife. But the wife was so slighted that she was
driven to intemperance, and Goethe’s only son inherited her
passion and died of drink. Goethe was the great heathen of modern
Christendom, deriding self-denial, extolling self-confidence,
attention to the present, the seeking of enjoyment, and the
submission of one’s self to the decrees of fate. Hutton calls
Goethe “a Narcissus in love with himself.” Like George Eliot’s
“Dinah,” in Adam Bede, Goethe’s “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,”
in Wilhelm Meister, are the purely artistic delineation of a
character with which he had no inner sympathy. On Goethe, see
Hutton, Essays, 2:1-79; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:490; A. H.
Strong, Great Poets, 279-331; Principal Shairp, Culture and
Religion, 16—“Goethe, the high priest of culture, loathes Luther,
the preacher of righteousness”; S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern
Literature, 149-156.

Napoleon was not a markedly sensual man, but “his self-sufficiency
surpassed the self-sufficiency of common men as the great Sahara
desert surpasses an ordinary sand patch.” He wantonly divulged his
amours to Josephine, with all the details of his ill-conduct, and
when she revolted from them, he only replied: “I have the right to
meet all your complaints with an eternal I.” When his wars had
left almost no able-bodied men in France, he called for the boys,
saying: “A boy can stop a bullet as well as a man,” and so the
French nation lost two inches of stature. Before the battle of
Leipzig, when there was prospect of unexampled slaughter, he
exclaimed: “What are the lives of a million of men, to carry out
the will of a man like me?” His most truthful epitaph was: “The
little butchers of Ghent to Napoleon the Great” [butcher]. Heine
represents Napoleon as saying to the world: “Thou shalt have no
other gods before me.” Memoirs of Madame de Rémusat, 1:225—“At a
fête given by the city of Paris to the Emperor, the repertory of
inscriptions being exhausted, a brilliant device was resorted to.
Over the throne which he was to occupy, were placed, in letters of
gold, the following words from the Holy Scriptures: ‘I am the I
am.’ And no one seemed to be scandalized.” Iago, in Shakespeare’s
Othello, is the greatest villain of all literature; but Coleridge,
Works, 4:180, calls attention to his passionless character. His
sin is, like that of Goethe and of Napoleon, sin not of the flesh
but of the intellect and will.

(_d_) It leads to absurd conclusions,—as, for example, that asceticism, by weakening the power of sense, must weaken the power of sin; that man becomes less sinful as his senses fail with age; that disembodied spirits are necessarily holy; that death is the only Redeemer.

Asceticism only turns the current of sin in other directions.
Spiritual pride and tyranny take the place of fleshly desires. The
miser clutches his gold more closely as he nears death. Satan has
no physical organism, yet he is the prince of evil. Not our own
death, but Christ’s death, saves us. But when Rousseau’s Émile
comes to die, he calmly declares: “I am delivered from the
trammels of the body, and am myself without contradiction.” At the
age of seventy-five Goethe wrote to Eckermann: “I have ever been
esteemed one of fortune’s favorites, nor can I complain of the
course my life has taken. Yet truly there has been nothing but
care and toil, and I may say that I have never had four weeks of
genuine pleasure.” Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:743—“When the
authoritative demand of Jesus Christ, to confess sin and beg
remission through atoning blood, is made to David Hume, or David
Strauss, or John Stuart Mill, none of whom were sensualists, it
wakens intense mental hostility.”

(_e_) It interprets Scripture erroneously. In passages like Rom. 7:18—οὐκ οἰκεῖ ἐν ἐμοί, τοῦτ᾽ ἐστιν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου, ἀγαθόν—σάρξ, or flesh, signifies, not man’s body, but man’s whole being when destitute of the Spirit of God. The Scriptures distinctly recognize the seat of sin as being in the soul itself, not in its physical organism. God does not tempt man, nor has he made man’s nature to tempt him (James 1:13, 14).

In the use of the term “_flesh_,” Scripture puts a stigma upon
sin, and intimates that human nature without God is as corruptible
and perishable as the body would be without the soul to inhabit
it. The “carnal mind,” or _“__mind of the flesh__”__ (Rom. 8:7)_,
accordingly means, not the sensual mind, but the mind which is not
under the control of the Holy Spirit, its true life. See Meyer, on
_1 Cor. 1:26_—σάρξ—“the purely human element in man, as opposed to
the divine principle”; Pope, Theology, 2:65—σάρξ—“the whole being
of man, body, soul, and spirit, separated from God and subjected
to the creature”; Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 19—σάρξ—“human
nature as living in and for itself, sundered from God and opposed
to him.” The earliest and best statement of this view of the term
σάρξ is that of Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:295-333,
especially 321. See also Dickson, St. Paul’s Use of the Terms
Flesh and Spirit, 270-271—σάρξ—“human nature without the
πνεῦμα.... man standing by himself, or left to himself, over
against God.... the natural man, conceived as not having yet
received grace, or as not yet wholly under its influence.”

_James 1:14, 15_—“_desire, when it hath conceived, beareth
sin_”—innocent desire—for it comes in before the sin—innocent
constitutional propensity, not yet of the nature of depravity, is
only the _occasion_ of sin. The love of freedom is a part of our
nature; sin arises only when the will determines to indulge this
impulse without regard to the restraints of the divine law.
Luther, Preface to Ep. to Romans: “Thou must not understand
‘flesh’ as though that only were ‘flesh’ which is connected with
unchastity. St. Paul uses ‘flesh’ of the whole man, body and soul,
reason and all his faculties included, because all that is in him
longs and strives after the ‘flesh’.” Melanchthon: “Note that
‘flesh’ signifies the entire nature of man, sense and reason,
without the Holy Spirit.” Gould, Bib. Theol. N. T., 76—“The σάρξ
of Paul corresponds to the κόσμος of John. Paul sees the divine
economy; John the divine nature. That Paul did not hold sin to
consist in the possession of a body appears from his doctrine of a
bodily resurrection (_1 Cor. 15:38-49_). This resurrection of the
body is an integral part of immortality.” On σάρξ, see Thayer, N.
T. Lexicon, 571; Kaftan, Dogmatik, 319.

(_f_) Instead of explaining sin, this theory virtually denies its existence,—for if sin arises from the original constitution of our being, reason may recognize it as misfortune, but conscience cannot attribute to it guilt.

Sin which in its ultimate origin is a necessary thing is no longer
sin. On the whole theory of the sensuous origin of sin, see
Neander, Planting and Training, 386, 428; Ernesti, Ursprung der
Sünde, 1:29-274; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:132-147; Tulloch,
Doctrine of Sin, 144—“That which is an inherent and necessary
power in the creation cannot be a contradiction of its highest
law.” This theory confounds sin with the mere consciousness of
sin. On Schleiermacher, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin,
1:341-349. On the sense-theory of sin in general, see John Caird,
Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:26-52; N. R. Wood, The Witness of
Sin, 79-87.

2. Sin as Finiteness.

This view explains sin as a necessary result of the limitations of man’s finite being. As an incident of imperfect development, the fruit of ignorance and impotence, sin is not absolutely but only relatively evil—an element in human education and a means of progress. This is the view of Leibnitz and of Spinoza. Modern writers, as Schurman and Royce, have maintained that moral evil is the necessary background and condition of moral good.

The theory of Leibnitz may be found in his Théodicée, part 1,
sections 20 and 31; that of Spinoza in his Ethics, part 4,
proposition 20. Upon this view sin is the blundering of
inexperience, the thoughtlessness that takes evil for good, the
ignorance that puts its fingers into the fire, the stumbling
without which one cannot learn to walk. It is a fruit which is
sour and bitter simply because it is immature. It is a means of
discipline and training for something better,—it is holiness in
the germ, good in the making—“Erhebung des Menschen zur freien
Vernunft.” The Fall was a fall up, and not down.

John Fiske, in addition to his sense-theory of sin already
mentioned, seems to hold this theory also. In his Mystery of Evil,
he says: “Its impress upon the human soul is the indispensable
background against which shall be set hereafter the eternal joys
of heaven”; in other words, sin is necessary to holiness, as
darkness is the indispensable contrast and background to light;
without black, we should never be able to know white. Schurman,
Belief in God, 251 _sq._—“The possibility of sin is the
correlative of the free initiative God has vacated on man’s
behalf.... The essence of sin is the enthronement of self.... Yet,
without such self-absorption, there could be no sense of union
with God. For consciousness is possible only through opposition.
To know A, we must know it through not-A. Alienation from God is
the necessary condition of communion with God. And this is the
meaning of the Scripture that ‘where sin abounded, grace shall
much more abound.’... Modern culture protests against the Puritan
enthronement of goodness above truth.... For the decalogue it
would substitute the wider new commandment of Goethe: ‘Live
resolutely in the Whole, in the Good, in the Beautiful.’ The
highest religion can be content with nothing short of the
synthesis demanded by Goethe.... God is the universal life in
which individual activities are included as movements of a single
organism.”

Royce, World and Individual, 2:364-384—“Evil is a discord
necessary to perfect harmony. In itself it is evil, but in
relation to the whole it has value by showing us its own
finiteness and imperfection. It is a sorrow to God as much as to
us; indeed, all our sorrow is his sorrow. The evil serves the good
only by being overcome, thwarted, overruled. Every evil deed must
somewhere and at some time be atoned for, by some other than the
agent, if not by the agent himself.... All finite life is a
struggle with evil. Yet from the final point of view the Whole is
good. The temporal order contains at no moment anything that can
satisfy. Yet the eternal order is perfect. We have all sinned and
come short of the glory of God. Yet in just our life, viewed in
its entirety, the glory of God is completely manifest. These hard
sayings are the deepest expressions of the essence of true
religion. They are also the most inevitable outcome of
philosophy.... Were there no longing in time, there would be no
peace in eternity. The prayer that God’s will may be done on earth
as it is in heaven is identical with what philosophy regards as
simple fact.”

We object to this theory that

(_a_) It rests upon a pantheistic basis, as the sense-theory rests upon dualism. The moral is confounded with the physical; might is identified with right. Since sin is a necessary incident of finiteness, and creatures can never be infinite, it follows that sin must be everlasting, not only in the universe, but in each individual soul.

Goethe, Carlyle, and Emerson are representatives of this view in
literature. Goethe spoke of the “idleness of wishing to jump off
from one’s own shadow.” He was a disciple of Spinoza, who believed
in one substance with contradictory attributes of thought and
extension. Goethe took the pantheistic view of God with the
personal view of man. He ignored the fact of sin. Hutton calls him
“the wisest man the world has seen who was without humility and
faith, and who lacked the wisdom of a child.” Speaking of Goethe’s
Faust, Hutton says: “The great drama is radically false in its
fundamental philosophy. Its primary notion is that even a spirit
of pure evil is an exceedingly useful being, because he stirs into
activity those whom he leads into sin, and so prevents them from
rusting away in pure indolence. There are other and better means
of stimulating the positive affections of men than by tempting
them to sin.” On Goethe, see Hutton, Essays, 2:1-79; Shedd, Dogm.
Theol., 1:490; A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology,
279-331.

Carlyle was a Scotch Presbyterian _minus_ Christianity. At the age
of twenty-five, he rejected miraculous and historical religion,
and thenceforth had no God but natural Law. His worship of
objective truth became a worship of subjective sincerity, and his
worship of personal will became a worship of impersonal force. He
preached truth, service, sacrifice, but all in a mandatory and
pessimistic way. He saw in England and Wales “twenty-nine
millions—mostly fools.” He had no love, no remedy, no hope. In our
civil war, he was upon the side of the slaveholder. He claimed
that his philosophy made right to be might, but in practice he
made might to be right. Confounding all moral distinctions, as he
did in his later writings, he was fit to wear the title which he
invented for another: “President of the
Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation Society.” Froude calls him “a
Calvinist without the theology”—a believer in predestination
without grace. On Carlyle, see S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern
Literature, 131-178.

Emerson also is the worshiper of successful force. His pantheism
is most manifest in his poems “Cupido” and “Brahma,” and in his
Essays on “Spirit” and on “The Over-soul.” Cupido: “The solid,
solid universe Is pervious to Love; With bandaged eyes he never
errs, Around, below, above. His blinding light He flingeth white
On God’s and Satan’s brood, And reconciles by mystic wiles The
evil and the good.” Brahma: “If the red slayer thinks he slays, Or
if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame or fame. They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings. The strong gods pine for my
abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven; But thou, meek lover of
the good, Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.”

Emerson taught that man’s imperfection is not sin, and that the
cure for it lies in education. “He lets God evaporate into
abstract Ideality. Not a Deity in the concrete, nor a superhuman
Person, but rather the immanent divinity in things, the
essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of
the transcendental cult.” His view of Jesus is found in his
Essays, 2:263—“Jesus would absorb the race; but Tom Paine, or the
coarsest blasphemer, helps humanity by resisting this exuberance
of power.” In his Divinity School Address, he banished the person
of Jesus from genuine religion. He thought “one could not be a man
if he must subordinate his nature to Christ’s nature.” He failed
to see that Jesus not only absorbs but transforms, and that we
grow only by the impact of nobler souls than our own. Emerson’s
essay style is devoid of clear and precise theological statement,
and in this vagueness lies its harmfulness. Fisher, Nature and
Method of Revelation, xii—“Emerson’s pantheism is not hardened
into a consistent creed, for to the end he clung to the belief in
personal immortality, and he pronounced the acceptance of this
belief ‘the test of mental sanity.’ ” On Emerson, see S. L.
Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 97-123.

We may call this theory the “green-apple theory” of sin. Sin is a
green apple, which needs only time and sunshine and growth to
bring it to ripeness and beauty and usefulness. But we answer that
sin is not a green apple, but an apple with a worm at its heart.
The evil of it can never be cured by growth. The fall can never be
anything else than downward. Upon this theory, sin is an
inseparable factor in the nature of finite things. The highest
archangel cannot be without it. Man in moral character is “the
asymptote of God,”—forever learning, but never able to come to the
knowledge of the truth. The throne of iniquity is set up forever
in the universe. If this theory were true, Jesus, in virtue of his
partaking of our finite humanity, must needs be a sinner. His
perfect development, without sin, shows that sin was not a
necessity of finite progress. Matthews, in Christianity and
Evolution, 137—“It was not necessary for the prodigal to go into
the far country and become a swineherd, in order to find out the
father’s love.” E. H. Johnson, Syst. Theol., 141—“It is not the
privilege of the Infinite alone to be good.” Dorner, System,
1:119, speaks of the moral career which this theory describes, as
“a _progressus in infinitum_, where the constant approach to the
goal has as its reverse side an eternal separation from the goal.”
In his “Transformation,” Hawthorne hints, though rather
hesitatingly, that without sin the higher humanity of man could
not be taken up at all, and that sin may be essential to the first
conscious awakening of moral freedom and to the possibility of
progress; see Hutton, Essays, 2:381.

(_b_) So far as this theory regards moral evil as a necessary presupposition and condition of moral good, it commits the serious error of confounding the possible with the actual. What is necessary to goodness is not the actuality of evil, but only the possibility of evil.

Since we cannot know white except in contrast to black, it is
claimed that without knowing actual evil we could never know
actual good. George A. Gordon, New Epoch for Faith, 49, 50, has
well shown that in that case the elimination of evil would imply
the elimination of good. Sin would need to have place in God’s
being in order that he might be holy, and thus he would be
divinity and devil in one person. Jesus too must needs be evil as
well as good. Not only would it be true, as intimated above, that
Christ, since his humanity is finite, must be a sinner, but also
that we ourselves, who must always be finite, must always be
sinners. We grant that holiness, in either God or man, must
involve the abstract possibility of its opposite. But we maintain
that, as this possibility in God is only abstract and never
realized, so in man it should be only abstract and never realized.
Man has power to reject this possible evil. His sin is a turning
of the merely possible evil, by the decision of his will, into
actual evil. Robert Browning is not free from the error above
mentioned; see S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature,
207-210; A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 433-444.

This theory of sin dates back to Hegel. To him there is no real
sin and cannot be. Imperfection there is and must always be,
because the relative can never become the absolute. Redemption is
only an evolutionary process, indefinitely prolonged, and evil
must remain an eternal condition. All finite thought is an element
in the infinite thought, and all finite will an element in the
infinite will. As good cannot exist without evil as its
antithesis, infinite righteousness should have for its counterpart
an infinite wickedness. Hegel’s guiding principle was that “What
is rational is real, and what is real is rational.” Seth,
Hegelianism and Personality, remarks that this principle ignores
“the riddle of the painful earth.” The disciples of Hegel thought
that nothing remained for history to accomplish, now that the
World-spirit had come to know himself in Hegel’s philosophy.

Biedermann’s Dogmatik is based upon the Hegelian philosophy. At
page 649 we read: “Evil is the finiteness of the world-being which
clings to all individual existences by virtue of their belonging
to the immanent world-order. Evil is therefore a necessary element
in the divinely willed being of the world.” Bradley follows Hegel
in making sin to be no reality, but only a relative appearance.
There is no free will, and no antagonism between the will of God
and the will of man. Darkness is an evil, a destroying agent. But
it is not a positive force, as light is. It cannot be attacked and
overcome as an entity. Bring light, and darkness disappears. So
evil is not a positive force, as good is. Bring good, and evil
disappears. Herbert Spencer’s Evolutionary Ethics fits in with
such a system, for he says: “A perfect man in an imperfect race is
impossible.” On Hegel’s view of sin, a view which denies holiness
even to Christ, see J. Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:390-407; Dorner, Hist.
Doct. Person of Christ, B. 3:131-162; Stearns, Evidence of Christ.
Experience, 92-96; John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 2:1-25; Forrest,
Authority of Christ, 13-16.

(_c_) It is inconsistent with known facts,—as for example, the following: Not all sins are negative sins of ignorance and infirmity; there are acts of positive malignity, conscious transgressions, wilful and presumptuous choices of evil. Increased knowledge of the nature of sin does not of itself give strength to overcome it; but, on the contrary, repeated acts of conscious transgression harden the heart in evil. Men of greatest mental powers are not of necessity the greatest saints, nor are the greatest sinners men of least strength of will and understanding.

Not the weak but the strong are the greatest sinners. We do not
pity Nero and Cæsar Borgia for their weakness; we abhor them for
their crimes. Judas was an able man, a practical administrator;
and Satan is a being of great natural endowments. Sin is not
simply a weakness,—it is also a power. A pantheistic philosophy
should worship Satan most of all; for he is the truest type of
godless intellect and selfish strength.

_John 12:6_—Judas, “_having the bag, made away with what was put
therein_.” Judas was set by Christ to do the work he was best
fitted for, and that was best fitted to interest and save him.
Some men may be put into the ministry, because that is the only
work that will prevent their destruction. Pastors should find for
their members work suited to the aptitudes of each. Judas was
tempted, or tried, as all men are, according to his native
propensity. While his motive in objecting to Mary’s generosity was
really avarice, his pretext was charity, or regard for the poor.
Each one of the apostles had his own peculiar gift, and was chosen
because of it. The sin of Judas was not a sin of weakness, or
ignorance, or infirmity. It was a sin of disappointed ambition, of
malice, of hatred for Christ’s self-sacrificing purity.

E. H. Johnson: “Sins are not men’s limitations, but the active
expressions of a perverse nature.” M. F. H. Round, Sec. of Nat.
Prison Association, on examining the record of a thousand
criminals, found that one quarter of them had an exceptionally
fine basis of physical life and strength, while the other three
quarters fell only a little below the average of ordinary
humanity; see The Forum, Sept. 1893. The theory that sin is only
holiness in the making reminds us of the view that the most
objectionable refuse can by ingenious processes be converted into
butter or at least into oleomargarine. It is not true that “tout
comprendre est tout pardonner.” Such doctrine obliterates all
moral distinctions. Gilbert, Bab Ballads, “My Dream”: “I dreamt
that somehow I had come To dwell in Topsy-Turvydom, Where vice is
virtue, virtue vice; Where nice is nasty, nasty nice; Where right
is wrong, and wrong is right; Where white is black and black is
white.”

(_d_) like the sense-theory of sin, it contradicts both conscience and Scripture by denying human responsibility and by transferring the blame of sin from the creature to the Creator. This is to explain sin, again, by denying its existence.

Œdipus said that his evil deeds had been suffered, not done.
Agamemnon, in the Iliad, says the blame belongs, not to himself,
but to Jupiter and to fate. So sin blames everything and everybody
but self. _Gen. 3:12_—“_The woman whom thou gavest to be with me,
she gave me of the tree, and I did eat._” But self-vindicating is
God-accusing. Made imperfect at the start, man cannot help his
sin. By the very fact of his creation he is cut loose from God.
That cannot be sin which is a necessary outgrowth of human nature,
which is not our act but our fate. To all this, the one answer is
found in Conscience. Conscience testifies that sin is not “das
Gewordene,” but “das Gemachte,” and that it was his own act when
man by transgression fell. The Scriptures refer man’s sin, not to
the limitations of his being, but to the free will of man himself.
On the theory here combated, see Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:271-295;
Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:123-131; N. R. Wood, The Witness of
Sin, 20-42.

3. Sin as Selfishness.

We hold the essential principle of sin to be selfishness. By selfishness we mean not simply the exaggerated self-love which constitutes the antithesis of benevolence, but that choice of self as the supreme end which constitutes the antithesis of supreme love to God. That selfishness is the essence of sin may be shown as follows:

A. Love to God is the essence of all virtue. The opposite to this, the choice of self as the supreme end, must therefore be the essence of sin.

We are to remember, however, that the love to God in which virtue consists is love for that which is most characteristic and fundamental in God, namely, his holiness. It is not to be confounded with supreme regard for God’s interests or for the good of being in general. Not mere benevolence, but love for God as holy, is the principle and source of holiness in man. Since the love of God required by the law is of this sort, it not only does not imply that love, in the sense of benevolence, is the essence of holiness in God,—it implies rather that holiness, or self-loving and self-affirming purity, is fundamental in the divine nature. From this self-loving and self-affirming purity, love properly so-called, or the self-communicating attribute, is to be carefully distinguished (see vol. 1, pages 271-275).

Bossuet, describing heathendom, says: “Every thing was God but God
himself.” Sin goes further than this, and says: “I am myself all
things,”—not simply as Louis XVI: “I am the state,” but: “I am the
world, the universe, God.” Heinrich Heine: “I am no child. I do
not want a heavenly Father any more.” A French critic of Fichte’s
philosophy said that it was a flight toward the infinite which
began with the ego, and never got beyond it. Kidd, Social
Evolution, 75—“In Calderon’s tragic story, the unknown figure,
which throughout life is everywhere in conflict with the
individual whom it haunts, lifts the mask at last to disclose to
the opponent his own features.” Caird, Evolution of Religion,
1:78—“Every self, once awakened, is naturally a despot, and
‘bears, like the Turk, no brother near the throne.’ ” Every one
has, as Hobbes said, “an infinite desire for gain or glory,” and
can be satisfied with nothing but a whole universe for himself.
Selfishness—“homo homini lupus.” James Martineau: “We ask Comte to
lift the veil from the holy of holies and show us the all-perfect
object of worship,—he produces a looking-glass and shows us
ourselves.” Comte’s religion is a “synthetic idealization of our
existence”—a worship, not of God, but of humanity; and “the
festival of humanity” among Positivists—Walt Whitman’s “I
celebrate myself.” On Comte, see Martineau, Types, 1:499. The most
thorough discussion of the essential principle of sin is that of
Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:147-182. He defines sin as “a turning
away from the love of God to self-seeking.”

N. W. Taylor holds that self-love is the primary cause of all
moral action; that selfishness is a different thing, and consists
not in making our own happiness our ultimate end, which we must do
if we are moral beings, but in love of the world, and in
preferring the world to God as our portion or chief good (see N.
W. Taylor, Moral Govt., 1:24-26; 2:20-24, and Rev. Theol.,
134-162; Tyler, Letters on the New Haven Theology, 72). We claim,
on the contrary, that to make our own happiness our ultimate aim
is itself sin, and the essence of sin. As God makes his holiness
the central thing, so we are to live for that, loving self only in
God and for God’s sake. This love for God as holy is the essence
of virtue. The opposite to this, or supreme love for self, is sin.
As Richard Lovelace writes: “I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more,” so Christian friends can say: “Our loves
in higher love endure.” The sinner raises some lower object of
instinct or desire to supremacy, regardless of God and his law,
and this he does for no other reason than to gratify self. On the
distinction between mere benevolence and the love required by
God’s law, see Hovey, God With Us, 187-200; Hopkins, Works, 1:235;
F. W. Robertson, Sermon I. Emerson: “Your goodness must have some
edge to it, else it is none.” See Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics,
327-370, on duties toward self as a moral end.

Love to God is the essence of all virtue. We are to love God with
all the heart. But what God? Surely, not the false God, the God
who is indifferent to moral distinctions and who treats the wicked
as he treats the righteous. The love which the law requires is
love for the true God, the God of holiness. Such love aims at the
reproduction of God’s holiness in ourselves and in others. We are
to love ourselves only for God’s sake and for the sake of
realizing the divine idea in us. We are to love others only for
God’s sake and for the sake of realizing the divine idea in them.
In our moral progress we, first, love self for our own sake;
secondly, God for our own sake; thirdly, God for his own sake;
fourthly, ourselves for God’s sake. The first is our state by
nature; the second requires prevenient grace; the third,
regenerating grace; and the fourth, sanctifying grace. Only the
last is reasonable self-love. Balfour, Foundations of Belief,
27—“Reasonable self-love is a virtue wholly incompatible with what
is commonly called selfishness. Society suffers, not from having
too much of it, but from having too little.” Altruism is not the
whole of duty. Self-realization is equally important. But to care
only for self, like Goethe, is to miss the true self-realization,
which love to God ensures.

Love desires only _the best_ for its object, and the best is
_God_. The golden rule bids us give, not what others desire, but
what they need. _Rom. 15:2_—“_Let each one of us please his
neighbor for that which is good, unto edifying._” Deutsche Liebe:
“Nicht Liebe die fragt: Willst du mein sein? Sondern Liebe die
sagt: Ich muss dein sein.” Sin consists in taking for one’s self
alone and apart from God that in one’s self and in others to which
one has a right only in God and for God’s sake. Mrs. Humphrey
Ward, David Grieve, 403—“How dare a man pluck from the Lord’s
hand, for his wild and reckless use, a soul and body for which he
died? How dare he, the Lord’s bondsman, steal his joy, carrying it
off by himself into the wilderness, like an animal his prey,
instead of asking it at the hands and under the blessing of the
Master? How dare he, a member of the Lord’s body, forget the
whole, in his greed for the one—eternity in his thirst for the
present?” Wordsworth, Prelude, 546—“Delight how pitiable, Unless
this love by a still higher love Be hallowed, love that breathes
not without awe; Love that adores, but on the knees of prayer. By
heaven inspired.... This spiritual love acts not nor can exist
Without imagination, which in truth Is but another name for
absolute power, And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, And
reason in her most exalted mood.”

Aristotle says that the wicked have no right to love themselves,
but that the good may. So, from a Christian point of view, we may
say: No unregenerate man can properly respect himself.
Self-respect belongs only to the man who lives in God and who has
God’s image restored to him thereby. True self-love is not love
for the _happiness_ of the self, but for the _worth_ of the self
in God’s sight, and this self-love is the condition of all genuine
and worthy love for others. But true self-love is in turn
conditioned by love to God as holy, and it seeks primarily, not
the happiness, but the holiness, of others. Asquith, Christian
Conception of Holiness, 98, 145, 154, 207—“Benevolence or love is
not the same with altruism. Altruism is instinctive, and has not
its origin in the moral reason. It has utility, and it may even
furnish material for reflection on the part of the moral reason.
But so far as it is not deliberate, not indulged for the sake of
the end, but only for the gratification of the instinct of the
moment, it is not moral.... Holiness is dedication to God, the
Good, not as an external Ruler, but as an internal controller and
transformer of character.... God is a being whose every thought is
love, of whose thoughts not one is for himself, save so far as
himself is not himself, that is, so far as there is a distinction
of persons in the Godhead. Creation is one great unselfish
thought—the bringing into being of creatures who can know the
happiness that God knows.... To the spiritual man holiness and
love are one. Salvation is deliverance from selfishness.” Kaftan,
Dogmatik, 319, 320, regards the essence of sin as consisting, not
in selfishness, but in turning away from God and so from the love
which would cause man to grow in knowledge and likeness to God.
But this seems to be nothing else than choosing self instead of
God as our object and end.

B. All the different forms of sin can be shown to have their root in selfishness, while selfishness itself, considered as the choice of self as a supreme end, cannot be resolved into any simpler elements.

(_a_) Selfishness may reveal itself in the elevation to supreme dominion of any one of man’s natural appetites, desires, or affections. Sensuality is selfishness in the form of inordinate appetite. Selfish desire takes the forms respectively of avarice, ambition, vanity, pride, according as it is set upon property, power, esteem, independence. Selfish affection is falsehood or malice, according as it hopes to make others its voluntary servants, or regards them as standing in its way; it is unbelief or enmity to God, according as it simply turns away from the truth and love of God, or conceives of God’s holiness as positively resisting and punishing it.

Augustine and Aquinas held the essence of sin to be pride; Luther
and Calvin regarded its essence to be unbelief. Kreibig
(Versöhnungslehre) regards it as “world-love”; still others
consider it as enmity to God. In opposing the view that sensuality
is the essence of sin, Julius Müller says: “Wherever we find
sensuality, there we find selfishness, but we do not find that,
where there is selfishness, there is always sensuality.
Selfishness may embody itself in fleshly lust or inordinate desire
for the creature, but this last cannot bring forth spiritual sins
which have no element of sensuality in them.”

Covetousness or avarice makes, not sensual gratification itself,
but the things that may minister thereto, the object of pursuit,
and in this last chase often loses sight of its original aim.
Ambition is selfish love of power; vanity is selfish love of
esteem. Pride is but the self-complacency, self-sufficiency, and
self-isolation of a selfish spirit that desires nothing so much as
unrestrained independence. Falsehood originates in selfishness,
first as self-deception, and then, since man by sin isolates
himself and yet in a thousand ways needs the fellowship of his
brethren, as deception of others. Malice, the perversion of
natural resentment (together with hatred and revenge), is the
reaction of selfishness against those who stand, or are imagined
to stand, in its way. Unbelief and enmity to God are effects of
sin, rather than its essence; selfishness leads us first to doubt,
and then to hate, the Lawgiver and Judge. Tacitus: “Humani generis
proprium est odisse quem læseris.” In sin, self-affirmation and
self-surrender are not coördinate elements, as Dorner holds, but
the former conditions the latter.

As love to God is love to God’s holiness, so love to man is love
for holiness in man and desire to impart it. In other words, true
love for man is the longing to make man like God. Over against
this normal desire which should fill the heart and inspire the
life, there stands a hierarchy of lower desires which may be
utilized and sanctified by the higher love, but which may assert
their independence and may thus be the occasions of sin. Physical
gratification, money, esteem, power, knowledge, family, virtue,
are proper objects of regard, so long as these are sought for
God’s sake and within the limitations of his will. Sin consists in
turning our backs on God and in seeking any one of these objects
for its own sake; or, which is the same thing, for our own sake.
Appetite gratified without regard to God’s law is lust; the love
of money becomes avarice; the desire for esteem becomes vanity;
the longing for power becomes ambition; the love for knowledge
becomes a selfish thirst for intellectual satisfaction; parental
affection degenerates into indulgence and nepotism; the seeking of
virtue becomes self-righteousness and self-sufficiency. Kaftan,
Dogmatik, 323—“Jesus grants that even the heathen and sinners love
those who love them. But family love becomes family pride;
patriotism comes to stand for country right or wrong; happiness in
one’s calling leads to class distinctions.”

Dante, in his Divine Comedy, divides the Inferno into three great
sections: those in which are punished, respectively, incontinence,
bestiality, and malice. Incontinence—sin of the heart, the
emotions, the affections. Lower down is found bestiality—sin of
the head, the thoughts, the mind, as infidelity and heresy. Lowest
of all is malice—sin of the will, deliberate rebellion, fraud and
treachery. So we are taught that the heart carries the intellect
with it, and that the sin of unbelief gradually deepens into the
intensity of malice. See A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their
Theology, 133—“Dante teaches us that sin is the self-perversion of
the will. If there is any thought fundamental to his system, it is
the thought of freedom. Man is not a waif swept irresistibly
downward on the current; he is a being endowed with power to
resist, and therefore guilty if he yields. Sin is not misfortune,
or disease, or natural necessity; it is wilfulness, and crime, and
self-destruction. The Divine Comedy is, beyond all other poems,
the poem of conscience; and this could not be, if it did not
recognize man as a free agent, the responsible cause of his own
evil acts and his own evil state.” See also Harris, in Jour. Spec.
Philos., 21:350-451; Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life,
69-86.

In Greek tragedy, says Prof. Wm. Arnold Stevens, the one sin which
the gods hated and would not pardon was ὕβρις—obstinate
self-assertion of mind or will, absence of reverence and
humility—of which we have an illustration in Ajax. George
MacDonald: “A man may be possessed of himself, as of a devil.”
Shakespeare depicts this insolence of infatuation in Shylock,
Macbeth, and Richard III. Troilus and Cressida, 4:4—“Something may
be done that we will not; And sometimes we are devils to
ourselves, When we will tempt the frailty of our powers, Presuming
on their changeful potency.” Yet Robert G. Ingersoll said that
Shakespeare holds crime to be the mistake of ignorance! N. P.
Willis, Parrhasius: “How like a mounting devil in the heart Rules
unrestrained ambition!”

(_b_) Even in the nobler forms of unregenerate life, the principle of selfishness is to be regarded as manifesting itself in the preference of lower ends to that of God’s proposing. Others are loved with idolatrous affection because these others are regarded as a part of self. That the selfish element is present even here, is evident upon considering that such affection does not seek the highest interest of its object, that it often ceases when unreturned, and that it sacrifices to its own gratification the claims of God and his law.

Even in the mother’s idolatry of her child, the explorer’s
devotion to science, the sailor’s risk of his life to save
another’s, the gratification sought may be that of a lower
instinct or desire, and any substitution of a lower for the
highest object is non-conformity to law, and therefore sin. H. B.
Smith, System Theology, 277—“Some lower affection is supreme.” And
the underlying motive which leads to this substitution is
self-gratification. There is no such thing as disinterested sin,
for “_every one that loveth is begotten of God_” (_1 John 4:7_).
Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ: Much of the heroism of
battle is simply “resolution in the actors to have their way,
contempt for ease, animal courage which we share with the bulldog
and the weasel, intense assertion of individual will and force,
avowal of the rough-handed man that he has that in him which
enables him to defy pain and danger and death.”

Mozley on Blanco White, in Essays, 2:143: Truth may be sought in
order to absorb truth in self, not for the sake of absorbing self
in truth. So Blanco White, in spite of the pain of separating from
old views and friends, lived for the selfish pleasure of new
discovery, till all his early faith vanished, and even immortality
seemed a dream. He falsely thought that the pain he suffered in
giving up old beliefs was evidence of self-sacrifice with which
God must be pleased, whereas it was the inevitable pain which
attends the victory of selfishness. Robert Browning, Paracelsus,
81—“I still must hoard, and heap, and class all truths With one
ulterior purpose: I must know! Would God translate me to his
throne, believe That I should only listen to his words To further
my own ends.” F. W. Robertson on Genesis, 57—“He who sacrifices
his sense of right, his conscience, for another, sacrifices the
God within him; he is not sacrificing self.... He who prefers his
dearest friend or his beloved child to the call of duty, will soon
show that he prefers himself to his dearest friend, and would not
sacrifice himself for his child.” _Ib._, 91—“In those who love
little, love [for finite beings] is a primary affection,—a
secondary, in those who love much.... The only true affection is
that which is subordinate to a higher.” True love is love for the
soul and its highest, its eternal, interests; love that seeks to
make it holy; love for the sake of God and for the accomplishment
of God’s idea in his creation.

Although we cannot, with Augustine, call the virtues of the
heathen “splendid vices”—for they were relatively good and
useful,—they still, except in possible instances where God’s
Spirit wrought upon the heart, were illustrations of a morality
divorced from love to God, were lacking in the most essential
element demanded by the law, were therefore infected with sin.
Since the law judges all action by the heart from which it
springs, no action of the unregenerate can be other than sin. The
ebony-tree is white in its outer circles of woody fibre; at heart
it is black as ink. There is no unselfishness in the unregenerate
heart, apart from the divine enlightenment and energizing.
Self-sacrifice for the sake of self is selfishness after all.
Professional burglars and bank-robbers are often carefully
abstemious in their personal habits, and they deny themselves the
use of liquor and tobacco while in the active practice of their
trade. Herron, The Larger Christ, 47—“It is as truly immoral to
seek truth out of mere love of knowing it, as it is to seek money
out of love to gain. Truth sought for truth’s sake is an
intellectual vice; it is spiritual covetousness. It is an
idolatry, setting up the worship of abstractions and generalities
in place of the living God.”

(_c_) It must be remembered, however, that side by side with the selfish will, and striving against it, is the power of Christ, the immanent God, imparting aspirations and impulses foreign to unregenerate humanity, and preparing the way for the soul’s surrender to truth and righteousness.

_Rom. 8:7_—“_the mind of the flesh is enmity against God_”; _Acts
17:27, 28_—“_he is not far from each one of us: for in him we
live, and move, and have our being_”; _Rom. 2:4_—“_the goodness of
God leadeth thee to repentance_”; _John 1:9_—“_the light which
lighteth every man._” Many generous traits and acts of
self-sacrifice in the unregenerate must be ascribed to the
prevenient grace of God and to the enlightening influence of the
Spirit of Christ. A mother, during the Russian famine, gave to her
children all the little supply of food that came to her in the
distribution, and died that they might live. In her decision to
sacrifice herself for her offspring she may have found her
probation and may have surrendered herself to God. The impulse to
make the sacrifice may have been due to the Holy Spirit, and her
yielding may have been essentially an act of saving faith. In
_Mark 10:21, 22_—“_And Jesus looking upon him loved him ... he
went away sorrowful_”—our Lord apparently loved the young man, not
only for his gifts, his efforts, and his possibilities, but also
for the manifest working in him of the divine Spirit, even while
in his natural character he was without God and without love,
self-ignorant, self-righteous, and self-seeking.

Paul, in like manner, before his conversion, loved and desired
righteousness, provided only that this righteousness might be the
product and achievement of his own will and might reflect honor on
himself; in short, provided only that self might still be
uppermost. To be dependent for righteousness upon another was
abhorrent to him. And yet this very impulse toward righteousness
may have been due to the divine Spirit within him. On Paul’s
experience before conversion, see E. D. Burton, Bib. World, Jan.
1893. Peter objected to the washing of his feet by Jesus (_John
13:8_), not because it humbled the Master too much in the eyes of
the disciple, but because it humbled the disciple too much in his
own eyes. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:218—“Sin is the
violation of the God-willed moral order of the world by the
self-will of the individual.” Tophel on the Holy Spirit, 17—“You
would deeply wound him [the average sinner] if you told him that
his heart, full of sin, is an object of horror to the holiness of
God.” The impulse to repentance, as well as the impulse to
righteousness, is the product, not of man’s own nature, but of the
Christ within him who is moving him to seek salvation.

Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browning after she had accepted
his proposal of marriage: “Henceforth I am yours for everything
but to do you harm.” George Harris, Moral Evolution, 138—“Love
seeks the true good of the person loved. It will not minister in
an unworthy way to afford a temporary pleasure. It will not
approve or tolerate that which is wrong. It will not encourage the
coarse, base passions of the one loved. It condemns impurity,
falsehood, selfishness. A parent does not really love his child if
he tolerates the self-indulgence, and does not correct or punish
the faults, of the child.” Hutton: “You might as well say that it
is a fit subject for art to paint the morbid exstasy of cannibals
over their horrid feasts, as to paint lust without love. If you
are to delineate man at all, you must delineate him with his human
nature, and therefore you can never omit from any worthy picture
that conscience which is its crown.”

Tennyson, in In Memoriam, speaks of “Fantastic beauty such as
lurks In some wild poet when he works Without a conscience or an
aim.” Such work may be due to mere human nature. But the lofty
work of true creative genius, and the still loftier acts of men
still unregenerate but conscientious and self-sacrificing, must be
explained by the working in them of the immanent Christ, the life
and light of men. James Martineau, Study, 1:20—“Conscience may act
as human, before it is discovered to be divine.” See J. D. Stoops,
in Jour. Philos., Psych., and Sci. Meth., 2:512—“If there is a
divine life over and above the separate streams of individual
lives, the welling up of this larger life in the experience of the
individual is precisely the point of contact between the
individual person and God.” Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity,
2:122—“It is this divine element in man, this relationship to God,
which gives to sin its darkest and direst complexion. For such a
life is the turning of a light brighter than the sun into
darkness, the squandering or bartering away of a boundless wealth,
the suicidal abasement, to the things that perish, of a nature
destined by its very constitution and structure for participation
in the very being and blessedness of God.”

On the various forms of sin as manifestations of selfishness, see
Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:147-182; Jonathan Edwards, Works,
2:268, 269; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:5, 6; Baird, Elohim
Revealed, 243-262; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers, 11-91;
Hopkins, Moral Science, 86-156. On the Roman Catholic “Seven
Deadly Sins” (Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, Lust),
see Wetzer und Welte, Kirchenlexikon, and Orby Shipley, Theory
about Sin, preface, xvi-xviii.

C. This view accords best with Scripture.

(_a_) The law requires love to God as its all-embracing requirement. (_b_) The holiness of Christ consisted in this, that he sought not his own will or glory, but made God his supreme end. (_c_) The Christian is one who has ceased to live for self. (_d_) The tempter’s promise is a promise of selfish independence. (_e_) The prodigal separates himself from his father, and seeks his own interest and pleasure. (_f_) The “man of sin” illustrates the nature of sin, in “opposing and exalting himself against all that is called God.”