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[pg 568]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 onlythe bestfor its object, and the best isGod. 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 thehappinessof the self, but for theworthof 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[pg 569]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,[pg 570]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,[pg 571]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. InMark 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,[pg 572]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.”(a)Mat. 22:37-39—the command of love to God and man;Rom. 13:8-10—“love therefore is the fulfilment of the law”;Gal. 5:14—“the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”;James 2:8—“the royal law.”(b)John 5:30—“my judgment is righteous; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me”;7:18—“He that speaketh from himself seeketh his own glory: but he that seeketh the glory of him that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him”;Rom. 15:3—“Christ also pleased not himself.”(c)Rom. 14:7—“none of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself”;2 Cor. 5:15—“he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again”;Gal. 2:20—“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me.”Contrast2 Tim. 3:2—“lovers of self.”(d)Gen. 3:5—“ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.”(e)Luke 15:12, 13—“give me the portion of thy substance ... gathered all together and took his journey into a far country.”(f)2 Thess. 2:3, 4—“the man of sin ... the son of perdition, he that opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God.”Contrast“the man of sin”who“exalteth himself”(2 Thess. 2:3, 4) with the Son of God who“emptied himself”(Phil. 2:7). On“the man of sin”, see Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Bap. Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328-360. Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 24—“We are conscious of sin, because we know that our true self is God, from whom we are severed. No ethics is possible unless we recognize an ideal for all human effort in the presence of the eternal Self which any account of conduct presupposes.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:53-73—“Here, as in all organic life, the individual member or organ has no independent or exclusive life, and the attempt to attain to it is fatal to itself.”Milton describes man as“affecting Godhead, and so losing all.”Of the sinner, we may say with Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 5:4—“He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.... There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger.”No one of us, then, can sign too early“the declaration of dependence.”Both Old School and New School theologians agree that sin is selfishness; see Bellamy, Hopkins, Emmons, the younger Edwards, Finney, Taylor. See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 287-292.Sin, therefore, is not merely a negative thing, or an absence of love to God. It is a fundamental and positive choice or preference of self instead of God, as the object of affection and the supreme end of being. Instead of making God the centre of his life, surrendering himself unconditionally to God and possessing himself only in subordination to God's will, the sinner makes self the centre of his life, sets himself directly against God, and constitutes his own interest the supreme motive and his own will the supreme rule.We may follow Dr. E. G. Robinson in saying that, while sin as a state is unlikeness to God, as a principle is opposition to God, and as an act is transgression of God's law, the essence of it always and everywhere is selfishness. It is therefore not something external, or the result of compulsion from without; it is a depravity of the affections and a perversion of the will, which constitutes man's inmost character.See Harris, in Bib. Sac., 18:148—“Sin is essentially egoism or selfism, putting self in God's place. It has four principal characteristics or manifestations: (1) self-sufficiency, instead of faith; (2) self-will, instead of submission; (3) self-seeking, instead of[pg 573]benevolence; (4) self-righteousness, instead of humility and reverence.”All sin is either explicit or implicit“enmity against God”(Rom. 8:7). All true confessions are like David's (Ps. 51:4)—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight.”Of all sinners it might be said that they“Fight neither with small nor great, save only with the king of Israel”(1 K. 22:31).Not every sinner is conscious of this enmity. Sin is a principle in course of development. It is not yet“full-grown”(James 1:15—“the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death”). Even now, as James Martineau has said:“If it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the streets of London and Paris.”But this indifference easily grows, in the presence of threatening and penalty, into violent hatred to God and positive defiance of his law. If the sin which is now hidden in the sinner's heart were but permitted to develop itself according to its own nature, it would hurl the Almighty from his throne, and would set up its own kingdom upon the ruins of the moral universe. Sin is world-destroying, as well as God-destroying, for it is inconsistent with the conditions which make being as a whole possible; see Royce, World and Individual, 2:366; Dwight, Works, sermon 80.
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[pg 568]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 onlythe bestfor its object, and the best isGod. 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 thehappinessof the self, but for theworthof 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[pg 569]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,[pg 570]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,[pg 571]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. InMark 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,[pg 572]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.”(a)Mat. 22:37-39—the command of love to God and man;Rom. 13:8-10—“love therefore is the fulfilment of the law”;Gal. 5:14—“the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”;James 2:8—“the royal law.”(b)John 5:30—“my judgment is righteous; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me”;7:18—“He that speaketh from himself seeketh his own glory: but he that seeketh the glory of him that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him”;Rom. 15:3—“Christ also pleased not himself.”(c)Rom. 14:7—“none of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself”;2 Cor. 5:15—“he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again”;Gal. 2:20—“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me.”Contrast2 Tim. 3:2—“lovers of self.”(d)Gen. 3:5—“ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.”(e)Luke 15:12, 13—“give me the portion of thy substance ... gathered all together and took his journey into a far country.”(f)2 Thess. 2:3, 4—“the man of sin ... the son of perdition, he that opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God.”Contrast“the man of sin”who“exalteth himself”(2 Thess. 2:3, 4) with the Son of God who“emptied himself”(Phil. 2:7). On“the man of sin”, see Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Bap. Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328-360. Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 24—“We are conscious of sin, because we know that our true self is God, from whom we are severed. No ethics is possible unless we recognize an ideal for all human effort in the presence of the eternal Self which any account of conduct presupposes.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:53-73—“Here, as in all organic life, the individual member or organ has no independent or exclusive life, and the attempt to attain to it is fatal to itself.”Milton describes man as“affecting Godhead, and so losing all.”Of the sinner, we may say with Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 5:4—“He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.... There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger.”No one of us, then, can sign too early“the declaration of dependence.”Both Old School and New School theologians agree that sin is selfishness; see Bellamy, Hopkins, Emmons, the younger Edwards, Finney, Taylor. See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 287-292.Sin, therefore, is not merely a negative thing, or an absence of love to God. It is a fundamental and positive choice or preference of self instead of God, as the object of affection and the supreme end of being. Instead of making God the centre of his life, surrendering himself unconditionally to God and possessing himself only in subordination to God's will, the sinner makes self the centre of his life, sets himself directly against God, and constitutes his own interest the supreme motive and his own will the supreme rule.We may follow Dr. E. G. Robinson in saying that, while sin as a state is unlikeness to God, as a principle is opposition to God, and as an act is transgression of God's law, the essence of it always and everywhere is selfishness. It is therefore not something external, or the result of compulsion from without; it is a depravity of the affections and a perversion of the will, which constitutes man's inmost character.See Harris, in Bib. Sac., 18:148—“Sin is essentially egoism or selfism, putting self in God's place. It has four principal characteristics or manifestations: (1) self-sufficiency, instead of faith; (2) self-will, instead of submission; (3) self-seeking, instead of[pg 573]benevolence; (4) self-righteousness, instead of humility and reverence.”All sin is either explicit or implicit“enmity against God”(Rom. 8:7). All true confessions are like David's (Ps. 51:4)—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight.”Of all sinners it might be said that they“Fight neither with small nor great, save only with the king of Israel”(1 K. 22:31).Not every sinner is conscious of this enmity. Sin is a principle in course of development. It is not yet“full-grown”(James 1:15—“the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death”). Even now, as James Martineau has said:“If it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the streets of London and Paris.”But this indifference easily grows, in the presence of threatening and penalty, into violent hatred to God and positive defiance of his law. If the sin which is now hidden in the sinner's heart were but permitted to develop itself according to its own nature, it would hurl the Almighty from his throne, and would set up its own kingdom upon the ruins of the moral universe. Sin is world-destroying, as well as God-destroying, for it is inconsistent with the conditions which make being as a whole possible; see Royce, World and Individual, 2:366; Dwight, Works, sermon 80.
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[pg 568]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 onlythe bestfor its object, and the best isGod. 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 thehappinessof the self, but for theworthof 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[pg 569]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,[pg 570]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,[pg 571]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. InMark 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,[pg 572]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.”(a)Mat. 22:37-39—the command of love to God and man;Rom. 13:8-10—“love therefore is the fulfilment of the law”;Gal. 5:14—“the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”;James 2:8—“the royal law.”(b)John 5:30—“my judgment is righteous; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me”;7:18—“He that speaketh from himself seeketh his own glory: but he that seeketh the glory of him that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him”;Rom. 15:3—“Christ also pleased not himself.”(c)Rom. 14:7—“none of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself”;2 Cor. 5:15—“he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again”;Gal. 2:20—“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me.”Contrast2 Tim. 3:2—“lovers of self.”(d)Gen. 3:5—“ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.”(e)Luke 15:12, 13—“give me the portion of thy substance ... gathered all together and took his journey into a far country.”(f)2 Thess. 2:3, 4—“the man of sin ... the son of perdition, he that opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God.”Contrast“the man of sin”who“exalteth himself”(2 Thess. 2:3, 4) with the Son of God who“emptied himself”(Phil. 2:7). On“the man of sin”, see Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Bap. Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328-360. Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 24—“We are conscious of sin, because we know that our true self is God, from whom we are severed. No ethics is possible unless we recognize an ideal for all human effort in the presence of the eternal Self which any account of conduct presupposes.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:53-73—“Here, as in all organic life, the individual member or organ has no independent or exclusive life, and the attempt to attain to it is fatal to itself.”Milton describes man as“affecting Godhead, and so losing all.”Of the sinner, we may say with Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 5:4—“He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.... There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger.”No one of us, then, can sign too early“the declaration of dependence.”Both Old School and New School theologians agree that sin is selfishness; see Bellamy, Hopkins, Emmons, the younger Edwards, Finney, Taylor. See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 287-292.Sin, therefore, is not merely a negative thing, or an absence of love to God. It is a fundamental and positive choice or preference of self instead of God, as the object of affection and the supreme end of being. Instead of making God the centre of his life, surrendering himself unconditionally to God and possessing himself only in subordination to God's will, the sinner makes self the centre of his life, sets himself directly against God, and constitutes his own interest the supreme motive and his own will the supreme rule.We may follow Dr. E. G. Robinson in saying that, while sin as a state is unlikeness to God, as a principle is opposition to God, and as an act is transgression of God's law, the essence of it always and everywhere is selfishness. It is therefore not something external, or the result of compulsion from without; it is a depravity of the affections and a perversion of the will, which constitutes man's inmost character.See Harris, in Bib. Sac., 18:148—“Sin is essentially egoism or selfism, putting self in God's place. It has four principal characteristics or manifestations: (1) self-sufficiency, instead of faith; (2) self-will, instead of submission; (3) self-seeking, instead of[pg 573]benevolence; (4) self-righteousness, instead of humility and reverence.”All sin is either explicit or implicit“enmity against God”(Rom. 8:7). All true confessions are like David's (Ps. 51:4)—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight.”Of all sinners it might be said that they“Fight neither with small nor great, save only with the king of Israel”(1 K. 22:31).Not every sinner is conscious of this enmity. Sin is a principle in course of development. It is not yet“full-grown”(James 1:15—“the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death”). Even now, as James Martineau has said:“If it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the streets of London and Paris.”But this indifference easily grows, in the presence of threatening and penalty, into violent hatred to God and positive defiance of his law. If the sin which is now hidden in the sinner's heart were but permitted to develop itself according to its own nature, it would hurl the Almighty from his throne, and would set up its own kingdom upon the ruins of the moral universe. Sin is world-destroying, as well as God-destroying, for it is inconsistent with the conditions which make being as a whole possible; see Royce, World and Individual, 2:366; Dwight, Works, sermon 80.
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[pg 568]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 onlythe bestfor its object, and the best isGod. 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 thehappinessof the self, but for theworthof 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[pg 569]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,[pg 570]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,[pg 571]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. InMark 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,[pg 572]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.”(a)Mat. 22:37-39—the command of love to God and man;Rom. 13:8-10—“love therefore is the fulfilment of the law”;Gal. 5:14—“the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”;James 2:8—“the royal law.”(b)John 5:30—“my judgment is righteous; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me”;7:18—“He that speaketh from himself seeketh his own glory: but he that seeketh the glory of him that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him”;Rom. 15:3—“Christ also pleased not himself.”(c)Rom. 14:7—“none of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself”;2 Cor. 5:15—“he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again”;Gal. 2:20—“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me.”Contrast2 Tim. 3:2—“lovers of self.”(d)Gen. 3:5—“ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.”(e)Luke 15:12, 13—“give me the portion of thy substance ... gathered all together and took his journey into a far country.”(f)2 Thess. 2:3, 4—“the man of sin ... the son of perdition, he that opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God.”Contrast“the man of sin”who“exalteth himself”(2 Thess. 2:3, 4) with the Son of God who“emptied himself”(Phil. 2:7). On“the man of sin”, see Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Bap. Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328-360. Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 24—“We are conscious of sin, because we know that our true self is God, from whom we are severed. No ethics is possible unless we recognize an ideal for all human effort in the presence of the eternal Self which any account of conduct presupposes.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:53-73—“Here, as in all organic life, the individual member or organ has no independent or exclusive life, and the attempt to attain to it is fatal to itself.”Milton describes man as“affecting Godhead, and so losing all.”Of the sinner, we may say with Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 5:4—“He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.... There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger.”No one of us, then, can sign too early“the declaration of dependence.”Both Old School and New School theologians agree that sin is selfishness; see Bellamy, Hopkins, Emmons, the younger Edwards, Finney, Taylor. See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 287-292.Sin, therefore, is not merely a negative thing, or an absence of love to God. It is a fundamental and positive choice or preference of self instead of God, as the object of affection and the supreme end of being. Instead of making God the centre of his life, surrendering himself unconditionally to God and possessing himself only in subordination to God's will, the sinner makes self the centre of his life, sets himself directly against God, and constitutes his own interest the supreme motive and his own will the supreme rule.We may follow Dr. E. G. Robinson in saying that, while sin as a state is unlikeness to God, as a principle is opposition to God, and as an act is transgression of God's law, the essence of it always and everywhere is selfishness. It is therefore not something external, or the result of compulsion from without; it is a depravity of the affections and a perversion of the will, which constitutes man's inmost character.See Harris, in Bib. Sac., 18:148—“Sin is essentially egoism or selfism, putting self in God's place. It has four principal characteristics or manifestations: (1) self-sufficiency, instead of faith; (2) self-will, instead of submission; (3) self-seeking, instead of[pg 573]benevolence; (4) self-righteousness, instead of humility and reverence.”All sin is either explicit or implicit“enmity against God”(Rom. 8:7). All true confessions are like David's (Ps. 51:4)—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight.”Of all sinners it might be said that they“Fight neither with small nor great, save only with the king of Israel”(1 K. 22:31).Not every sinner is conscious of this enmity. Sin is a principle in course of development. It is not yet“full-grown”(James 1:15—“the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death”). Even now, as James Martineau has said:“If it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the streets of London and Paris.”But this indifference easily grows, in the presence of threatening and penalty, into violent hatred to God and positive defiance of his law. If the sin which is now hidden in the sinner's heart were but permitted to develop itself according to its own nature, it would hurl the Almighty from his throne, and would set up its own kingdom upon the ruins of the moral universe. Sin is world-destroying, as well as God-destroying, for it is inconsistent with the conditions which make being as a whole possible; see Royce, World and Individual, 2:366; Dwight, Works, sermon 80.
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[pg 568]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 onlythe bestfor its object, and the best isGod. 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 thehappinessof the self, but for theworthof 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[pg 569]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,[pg 570]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,[pg 571]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. InMark 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,[pg 572]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.”(a)Mat. 22:37-39—the command of love to God and man;Rom. 13:8-10—“love therefore is the fulfilment of the law”;Gal. 5:14—“the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”;James 2:8—“the royal law.”(b)John 5:30—“my judgment is righteous; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me”;7:18—“He that speaketh from himself seeketh his own glory: but he that seeketh the glory of him that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him”;Rom. 15:3—“Christ also pleased not himself.”(c)Rom. 14:7—“none of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself”;2 Cor. 5:15—“he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again”;Gal. 2:20—“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me.”Contrast2 Tim. 3:2—“lovers of self.”(d)Gen. 3:5—“ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.”(e)Luke 15:12, 13—“give me the portion of thy substance ... gathered all together and took his journey into a far country.”(f)2 Thess. 2:3, 4—“the man of sin ... the son of perdition, he that opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God.”Contrast“the man of sin”who“exalteth himself”(2 Thess. 2:3, 4) with the Son of God who“emptied himself”(Phil. 2:7). On“the man of sin”, see Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Bap. Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328-360. Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 24—“We are conscious of sin, because we know that our true self is God, from whom we are severed. No ethics is possible unless we recognize an ideal for all human effort in the presence of the eternal Self which any account of conduct presupposes.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:53-73—“Here, as in all organic life, the individual member or organ has no independent or exclusive life, and the attempt to attain to it is fatal to itself.”Milton describes man as“affecting Godhead, and so losing all.”Of the sinner, we may say with Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 5:4—“He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.... There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger.”No one of us, then, can sign too early“the declaration of dependence.”Both Old School and New School theologians agree that sin is selfishness; see Bellamy, Hopkins, Emmons, the younger Edwards, Finney, Taylor. See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 287-292.Sin, therefore, is not merely a negative thing, or an absence of love to God. It is a fundamental and positive choice or preference of self instead of God, as the object of affection and the supreme end of being. Instead of making God the centre of his life, surrendering himself unconditionally to God and possessing himself only in subordination to God's will, the sinner makes self the centre of his life, sets himself directly against God, and constitutes his own interest the supreme motive and his own will the supreme rule.We may follow Dr. E. G. Robinson in saying that, while sin as a state is unlikeness to God, as a principle is opposition to God, and as an act is transgression of God's law, the essence of it always and everywhere is selfishness. It is therefore not something external, or the result of compulsion from without; it is a depravity of the affections and a perversion of the will, which constitutes man's inmost character.See Harris, in Bib. Sac., 18:148—“Sin is essentially egoism or selfism, putting self in God's place. It has four principal characteristics or manifestations: (1) self-sufficiency, instead of faith; (2) self-will, instead of submission; (3) self-seeking, instead of[pg 573]benevolence; (4) self-righteousness, instead of humility and reverence.”All sin is either explicit or implicit“enmity against God”(Rom. 8:7). All true confessions are like David's (Ps. 51:4)—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight.”Of all sinners it might be said that they“Fight neither with small nor great, save only with the king of Israel”(1 K. 22:31).Not every sinner is conscious of this enmity. Sin is a principle in course of development. It is not yet“full-grown”(James 1:15—“the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death”). Even now, as James Martineau has said:“If it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the streets of London and Paris.”But this indifference easily grows, in the presence of threatening and penalty, into violent hatred to God and positive defiance of his law. If the sin which is now hidden in the sinner's heart were but permitted to develop itself according to its own nature, it would hurl the Almighty from his throne, and would set up its own kingdom upon the ruins of the moral universe. Sin is world-destroying, as well as God-destroying, for it is inconsistent with the conditions which make being as a whole possible; see Royce, World and Individual, 2:366; Dwight, Works, sermon 80.
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[pg 568]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 onlythe bestfor its object, and the best isGod. 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 thehappinessof the self, but for theworthof 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[pg 569]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,[pg 570]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,[pg 571]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. InMark 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,[pg 572]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.”(a)Mat. 22:37-39—the command of love to God and man;Rom. 13:8-10—“love therefore is the fulfilment of the law”;Gal. 5:14—“the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”;James 2:8—“the royal law.”(b)John 5:30—“my judgment is righteous; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me”;7:18—“He that speaketh from himself seeketh his own glory: but he that seeketh the glory of him that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him”;Rom. 15:3—“Christ also pleased not himself.”(c)Rom. 14:7—“none of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself”;2 Cor. 5:15—“he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again”;Gal. 2:20—“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me.”Contrast2 Tim. 3:2—“lovers of self.”(d)Gen. 3:5—“ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.”(e)Luke 15:12, 13—“give me the portion of thy substance ... gathered all together and took his journey into a far country.”(f)2 Thess. 2:3, 4—“the man of sin ... the son of perdition, he that opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God.”Contrast“the man of sin”who“exalteth himself”(2 Thess. 2:3, 4) with the Son of God who“emptied himself”(Phil. 2:7). On“the man of sin”, see Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Bap. Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328-360. Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 24—“We are conscious of sin, because we know that our true self is God, from whom we are severed. No ethics is possible unless we recognize an ideal for all human effort in the presence of the eternal Self which any account of conduct presupposes.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:53-73—“Here, as in all organic life, the individual member or organ has no independent or exclusive life, and the attempt to attain to it is fatal to itself.”Milton describes man as“affecting Godhead, and so losing all.”Of the sinner, we may say with Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 5:4—“He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.... There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger.”No one of us, then, can sign too early“the declaration of dependence.”Both Old School and New School theologians agree that sin is selfishness; see Bellamy, Hopkins, Emmons, the younger Edwards, Finney, Taylor. See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 287-292.Sin, therefore, is not merely a negative thing, or an absence of love to God. It is a fundamental and positive choice or preference of self instead of God, as the object of affection and the supreme end of being. Instead of making God the centre of his life, surrendering himself unconditionally to God and possessing himself only in subordination to God's will, the sinner makes self the centre of his life, sets himself directly against God, and constitutes his own interest the supreme motive and his own will the supreme rule.We may follow Dr. E. G. Robinson in saying that, while sin as a state is unlikeness to God, as a principle is opposition to God, and as an act is transgression of God's law, the essence of it always and everywhere is selfishness. It is therefore not something external, or the result of compulsion from without; it is a depravity of the affections and a perversion of the will, which constitutes man's inmost character.See Harris, in Bib. Sac., 18:148—“Sin is essentially egoism or selfism, putting self in God's place. It has four principal characteristics or manifestations: (1) self-sufficiency, instead of faith; (2) self-will, instead of submission; (3) self-seeking, instead of[pg 573]benevolence; (4) self-righteousness, instead of humility and reverence.”All sin is either explicit or implicit“enmity against God”(Rom. 8:7). All true confessions are like David's (Ps. 51:4)—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight.”Of all sinners it might be said that they“Fight neither with small nor great, save only with the king of Israel”(1 K. 22:31).Not every sinner is conscious of this enmity. Sin is a principle in course of development. It is not yet“full-grown”(James 1:15—“the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death”). Even now, as James Martineau has said:“If it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the streets of London and Paris.”But this indifference easily grows, in the presence of threatening and penalty, into violent hatred to God and positive defiance of his law. If the sin which is now hidden in the sinner's heart were but permitted to develop itself according to its own nature, it would hurl the Almighty from his throne, and would set up its own kingdom upon the ruins of the moral universe. Sin is world-destroying, as well as God-destroying, for it is inconsistent with the conditions which make being as a whole possible; see Royce, World and Individual, 2:366; Dwight, Works, sermon 80.
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[pg 568]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 onlythe bestfor its object, and the best isGod. 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 thehappinessof the self, but for theworthof 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[pg 569]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,[pg 570]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,[pg 571]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. InMark 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,[pg 572]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.”(a)Mat. 22:37-39—the command of love to God and man;Rom. 13:8-10—“love therefore is the fulfilment of the law”;Gal. 5:14—“the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”;James 2:8—“the royal law.”(b)John 5:30—“my judgment is righteous; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me”;7:18—“He that speaketh from himself seeketh his own glory: but he that seeketh the glory of him that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him”;Rom. 15:3—“Christ also pleased not himself.”(c)Rom. 14:7—“none of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself”;2 Cor. 5:15—“he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again”;Gal. 2:20—“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me.”Contrast2 Tim. 3:2—“lovers of self.”(d)Gen. 3:5—“ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.”(e)Luke 15:12, 13—“give me the portion of thy substance ... gathered all together and took his journey into a far country.”(f)2 Thess. 2:3, 4—“the man of sin ... the son of perdition, he that opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God.”Contrast“the man of sin”who“exalteth himself”(2 Thess. 2:3, 4) with the Son of God who“emptied himself”(Phil. 2:7). On“the man of sin”, see Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Bap. Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328-360. Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 24—“We are conscious of sin, because we know that our true self is God, from whom we are severed. No ethics is possible unless we recognize an ideal for all human effort in the presence of the eternal Self which any account of conduct presupposes.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:53-73—“Here, as in all organic life, the individual member or organ has no independent or exclusive life, and the attempt to attain to it is fatal to itself.”Milton describes man as“affecting Godhead, and so losing all.”Of the sinner, we may say with Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 5:4—“He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.... There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger.”No one of us, then, can sign too early“the declaration of dependence.”Both Old School and New School theologians agree that sin is selfishness; see Bellamy, Hopkins, Emmons, the younger Edwards, Finney, Taylor. See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 287-292.Sin, therefore, is not merely a negative thing, or an absence of love to God. It is a fundamental and positive choice or preference of self instead of God, as the object of affection and the supreme end of being. Instead of making God the centre of his life, surrendering himself unconditionally to God and possessing himself only in subordination to God's will, the sinner makes self the centre of his life, sets himself directly against God, and constitutes his own interest the supreme motive and his own will the supreme rule.We may follow Dr. E. G. Robinson in saying that, while sin as a state is unlikeness to God, as a principle is opposition to God, and as an act is transgression of God's law, the essence of it always and everywhere is selfishness. It is therefore not something external, or the result of compulsion from without; it is a depravity of the affections and a perversion of the will, which constitutes man's inmost character.See Harris, in Bib. Sac., 18:148—“Sin is essentially egoism or selfism, putting self in God's place. It has four principal characteristics or manifestations: (1) self-sufficiency, instead of faith; (2) self-will, instead of submission; (3) self-seeking, instead of[pg 573]benevolence; (4) self-righteousness, instead of humility and reverence.”All sin is either explicit or implicit“enmity against God”(Rom. 8:7). All true confessions are like David's (Ps. 51:4)—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight.”Of all sinners it might be said that they“Fight neither with small nor great, save only with the king of Israel”(1 K. 22:31).Not every sinner is conscious of this enmity. Sin is a principle in course of development. It is not yet“full-grown”(James 1:15—“the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death”). Even now, as James Martineau has said:“If it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the streets of London and Paris.”But this indifference easily grows, in the presence of threatening and penalty, into violent hatred to God and positive defiance of his law. If the sin which is now hidden in the sinner's heart were but permitted to develop itself according to its own nature, it would hurl the Almighty from his throne, and would set up its own kingdom upon the ruins of the moral universe. Sin is world-destroying, as well as God-destroying, for it is inconsistent with the conditions which make being as a whole possible; see Royce, World and Individual, 2:366; Dwight, Works, sermon 80.
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[pg 568]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 onlythe bestfor its object, and the best isGod. 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 thehappinessof the self, but for theworthof 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.
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[pg 568]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 onlythe bestfor its object, and the best isGod. 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 thehappinessof the self, but for theworthof 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[pg 569]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,[pg 570]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!”
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,[pg 570]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.”
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,[pg 571]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. InMark 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,[pg 572]Anger, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, Lust), see Wetzer und Welte, Kirchenlexikon, and Orby Shipley, Theory about Sin, preface, xvi-xviii.
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. InMark 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,[pg 572]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.”
(a)Mat. 22:37-39—the command of love to God and man;Rom. 13:8-10—“love therefore is the fulfilment of the law”;Gal. 5:14—“the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”;James 2:8—“the royal law.”(b)John 5:30—“my judgment is righteous; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me”;7:18—“He that speaketh from himself seeketh his own glory: but he that seeketh the glory of him that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him”;Rom. 15:3—“Christ also pleased not himself.”(c)Rom. 14:7—“none of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself”;2 Cor. 5:15—“he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again”;Gal. 2:20—“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me.”Contrast2 Tim. 3:2—“lovers of self.”(d)Gen. 3:5—“ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.”(e)Luke 15:12, 13—“give me the portion of thy substance ... gathered all together and took his journey into a far country.”(f)2 Thess. 2:3, 4—“the man of sin ... the son of perdition, he that opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God.”Contrast“the man of sin”who“exalteth himself”(2 Thess. 2:3, 4) with the Son of God who“emptied himself”(Phil. 2:7). On“the man of sin”, see Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Bap. Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328-360. Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 24—“We are conscious of sin, because we know that our true self is God, from whom we are severed. No ethics is possible unless we recognize an ideal for all human effort in the presence of the eternal Self which any account of conduct presupposes.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:53-73—“Here, as in all organic life, the individual member or organ has no independent or exclusive life, and the attempt to attain to it is fatal to itself.”Milton describes man as“affecting Godhead, and so losing all.”Of the sinner, we may say with Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 5:4—“He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.... There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger.”No one of us, then, can sign too early“the declaration of dependence.”Both Old School and New School theologians agree that sin is selfishness; see Bellamy, Hopkins, Emmons, the younger Edwards, Finney, Taylor. See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 287-292.
(a)Mat. 22:37-39—the command of love to God and man;Rom. 13:8-10—“love therefore is the fulfilment of the law”;Gal. 5:14—“the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”;James 2:8—“the royal law.”(b)John 5:30—“my judgment is righteous; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me”;7:18—“He that speaketh from himself seeketh his own glory: but he that seeketh the glory of him that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him”;Rom. 15:3—“Christ also pleased not himself.”(c)Rom. 14:7—“none of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself”;2 Cor. 5:15—“he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again”;Gal. 2:20—“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me.”Contrast2 Tim. 3:2—“lovers of self.”(d)Gen. 3:5—“ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.”(e)Luke 15:12, 13—“give me the portion of thy substance ... gathered all together and took his journey into a far country.”(f)2 Thess. 2:3, 4—“the man of sin ... the son of perdition, he that opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God.”
Contrast“the man of sin”who“exalteth himself”(2 Thess. 2:3, 4) with the Son of God who“emptied himself”(Phil. 2:7). On“the man of sin”, see Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Bap. Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328-360. Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 24—“We are conscious of sin, because we know that our true self is God, from whom we are severed. No ethics is possible unless we recognize an ideal for all human effort in the presence of the eternal Self which any account of conduct presupposes.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:53-73—“Here, as in all organic life, the individual member or organ has no independent or exclusive life, and the attempt to attain to it is fatal to itself.”Milton describes man as“affecting Godhead, and so losing all.”Of the sinner, we may say with Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 5:4—“He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.... There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger.”No one of us, then, can sign too early“the declaration of dependence.”Both Old School and New School theologians agree that sin is selfishness; see Bellamy, Hopkins, Emmons, the younger Edwards, Finney, Taylor. See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 287-292.
Sin, therefore, is not merely a negative thing, or an absence of love to God. It is a fundamental and positive choice or preference of self instead of God, as the object of affection and the supreme end of being. Instead of making God the centre of his life, surrendering himself unconditionally to God and possessing himself only in subordination to God's will, the sinner makes self the centre of his life, sets himself directly against God, and constitutes his own interest the supreme motive and his own will the supreme rule.
We may follow Dr. E. G. Robinson in saying that, while sin as a state is unlikeness to God, as a principle is opposition to God, and as an act is transgression of God's law, the essence of it always and everywhere is selfishness. It is therefore not something external, or the result of compulsion from without; it is a depravity of the affections and a perversion of the will, which constitutes man's inmost character.
See Harris, in Bib. Sac., 18:148—“Sin is essentially egoism or selfism, putting self in God's place. It has four principal characteristics or manifestations: (1) self-sufficiency, instead of faith; (2) self-will, instead of submission; (3) self-seeking, instead of[pg 573]benevolence; (4) self-righteousness, instead of humility and reverence.”All sin is either explicit or implicit“enmity against God”(Rom. 8:7). All true confessions are like David's (Ps. 51:4)—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight.”Of all sinners it might be said that they“Fight neither with small nor great, save only with the king of Israel”(1 K. 22:31).Not every sinner is conscious of this enmity. Sin is a principle in course of development. It is not yet“full-grown”(James 1:15—“the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death”). Even now, as James Martineau has said:“If it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the streets of London and Paris.”But this indifference easily grows, in the presence of threatening and penalty, into violent hatred to God and positive defiance of his law. If the sin which is now hidden in the sinner's heart were but permitted to develop itself according to its own nature, it would hurl the Almighty from his throne, and would set up its own kingdom upon the ruins of the moral universe. Sin is world-destroying, as well as God-destroying, for it is inconsistent with the conditions which make being as a whole possible; see Royce, World and Individual, 2:366; Dwight, Works, sermon 80.
See Harris, in Bib. Sac., 18:148—“Sin is essentially egoism or selfism, putting self in God's place. It has four principal characteristics or manifestations: (1) self-sufficiency, instead of faith; (2) self-will, instead of submission; (3) self-seeking, instead of[pg 573]benevolence; (4) self-righteousness, instead of humility and reverence.”All sin is either explicit or implicit“enmity against God”(Rom. 8:7). All true confessions are like David's (Ps. 51:4)—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight.”Of all sinners it might be said that they“Fight neither with small nor great, save only with the king of Israel”(1 K. 22:31).
Not every sinner is conscious of this enmity. Sin is a principle in course of development. It is not yet“full-grown”(James 1:15—“the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death”). Even now, as James Martineau has said:“If it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the streets of London and Paris.”But this indifference easily grows, in the presence of threatening and penalty, into violent hatred to God and positive defiance of his law. If the sin which is now hidden in the sinner's heart were but permitted to develop itself according to its own nature, it would hurl the Almighty from his throne, and would set up its own kingdom upon the ruins of the moral universe. Sin is world-destroying, as well as God-destroying, for it is inconsistent with the conditions which make being as a whole possible; see Royce, World and Individual, 2:366; Dwight, Works, sermon 80.