II. Guilt.1. Nature of guilt.By guilt we mean desert of punishment, or obligation to render satisfaction to God's justice for self-determined violation of law. There is a reaction of holiness against sin, which the Scripture denominates“the wrath of God”(Rom. 1:18). Sin is in us, either as act or state; God's punitive righteousness is over against the sinner, as something to be feared; guilt is a relation of the sinner to that righteousness, namely, the sinner's desert of punishment.Guilt is related to sin as the burnt spot to the blaze. Schiller, Die Braut von Messina:“Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht; Der Uebel grösstes aber ist die Schuld”—“Life is not the highest of possessions; the greatest of ills, however, is guilt.”Delitzsch:“Die Schamröthe ist die Abendröthe der untergegangenen Sonne der ursprünglichen Gerechtigkeit”—“The blush of shame is the evening red after the sun of original righteousness has gone down.”E. G. Robinson:“Pangs of conscience do not arise from the fear of penalty,—they are the penalty itself.”See chapter on Fig-leaves, in McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 142-154—“Spiritual shame for sin sought an outward symbol, and found it in the nakedness of the lower parts of the body.”The following remarks may serve both for proof and for explanation:A. Guilt is incurred only through self-determined transgression either on the part of man's nature or person. We are guilty only of that sin which we have originated or have had part in originating. Guilt is not, therefore, mere liability to punishment, without participation in the transgression for which the punishment is inflicted,—in other words, there is no such thing as constructive guilt under the divine government. We are accounted guilty only for what we have done, either personally or in our first parents, and for what we are, in consequence of such doing.Ez. 18:20—“the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father”—, as Calvin says (Com.in loco):“The son shall not bear the father's iniquity, since he shall receive the reward due to himself, and shall bear his own burden.... All are guilty through their own fault.... Every one perishes through his own iniquity.”In other words, the whole race fell in Adam,[pg 645]and is punished for its own sin in him, not for the sins of immediate ancestors, nor for the sin of Adam as a person foreign to us.John 9:3—“Neither did this man sin, nor his parents”(that he should be born blind)—Do not attribute to any special later sin what is a consequence of the sin of the race—the first sin which“brought death into the world, and all our woe.”Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:195-213.B. Guilt is an objective result of sin, and is not to be confounded with subjective pollution, or depravity. Every sin, whether of nature or person, is an offense against God (Ps. 51:4-6), an act or state of opposition to his will, which has for its effect God's personal wrath (Ps. 7:11; John 3:18, 36), and which must be expiated either by punishment or by atonement (Heb. 9:22). Not only does sin, as unlikeness to the divine purity, involvepollution,—it also, as antagonism to God's holy will, involvesguilt. This guilt, or obligation to satisfy the outraged holiness of God, is explained in the New Testament by the terms“debtor”and“debt”(Mat. 6:12; Luke 13:4; Mat. 5:21; Rom. 3:19; 6:23; Eph. 2:3). Since guilt, the objective result of sin, is entirely distinct from depravity, the subjective result, human nature may, as in Christ, have the guilt without the depravity (2 Cor. 5:21), or may, as in the Christian, have the depravity without the guilt (1 John 1:7, 8).Ps. 51:4-6—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight; That thou mayest be justified when thou speakest, And be clear when thou judgest”;7:11—“God is a righteous judge, Yea, a God that hath indignation every day”;John 3:18—“he that believeth not hath been judged already”;36—“he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him”;Heb. 9:22—“apart from shedding of blood there is no remission”;Mat. 6:12—“debts”;Luke 13:4—“offenders”(marg.“debtors”);Mat. 5:21—“shall be in danger of[exposed to]the judgment”;Rom. 3:19—“that ... all the world may be brought under the judgment of God”;6:23—“the wages of sin is death”—death is sin's desert;Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath”;2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf”;1 John 1:7, 8—“the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin.[Yet]If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”Sin brings in its train not only depravity but guilt, not onlymaculabutreatus. Scripture sets forth thepollutionof sin by its similies of“a cage of unclean birds”and of“wounds, bruises, and putrefying sores”; by leprosy and Levitical uncleanness, under the old dispensation; by death and the corruption of the grave, under both the old and the new. But Scripture sets forth theguiltof sin, with equal vividness, in the fear of Cain and in the remorse of Judas. The revulsion of God's holiness from sin, and its demand for satisfaction, are reflected in the shame and remorse of every awakened conscience. There is an instinctive feeling in the sinner's heart that sin will be punished, and ought to be punished. But the Holy Spirit makes this need of reparation so deeply felt that the soul has no rest until its debt is paid. The offending church member who is truly penitent loves the law and the church which excludes him, and would not think it faithful if it did not. So Jesus, when laden with the guilt of the race, pressed forward to the cross, saying:“I have a baptism to be baptised with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!”(Luke 12:50; Mark 10:32).All sin involves guilt, and the sinful soul itself demands penalty, so that all will ultimately go where they most desire to be. All the great masters in literature have recognized this. The inextinguishable thirst for reparation constitutes the very essence of tragedy. The Greek tragedians are full of it, and Shakespeare is its most impressive teacher: Measure for Measure, 5:1—“I am sorry that such sorrow I procure, And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart That I crave death more willingly than mercy; 'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it”; Cymbeline, 5:4—“and so, great Powers, If you will take this audit, take this life, And cancel these cold bonds!... Desired, more than constrained, to satisfy, ... take No stricter render of me than my all”; that is, settle the account with me by taking my life, for nothing less than that will pay my debt. And later writers follow Shakespeare. Marguerite, in Goethe's Faust, fainting in the great cathedral under the solemn reverberations of the Dies Iræ; Dimmesdale, in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, putting himself side by side with Hester Prynne, his victim, in her place of obloquy; Bulwer's Eugene Aram, coming forward, though unsuspected, to confess the murder he had committed, all these are illustrations of the[pg 646]inner impulse that moves even a sinful soul to satisfy the claims of justice upon it. See A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 215, 216. On Hawthorne, see Hutton, Essays, 2:370-416—“In the Scarlet Letter, the minister gains fresh reverence and popularity as the very fruit of the passionate anguish with which his heart is consumed. Frantic with the stings of unacknowledged guilt, he is yet taught by these very stings to understand the hearts and stir the consciences of others.”See also Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life.Nor are such scenes confined to the pages of romance. In a recent trial at Syracuse, Earl, the wife-murderer, thanked the jury that had convicted him; declared the verdict just; begged that no one would interfere to stay the course of justice; said that the greatest blessing that could be conferred on him would be to let him suffer the penalty of his crime. In Plattsburg, at the close of another trial in which the accused was a life-convict who had struck down a fellow-convict with an axe, the jury, after being out two hours, came in to ask the Judge to explain the difference between murder in the first and second degree. Suddenly the prisoner rose and said:“This was not a murder in the second degree. It was a deliberate and premeditated murder. I know that I have done wrong, that I ought to confess the truth, and that I ought to be hanged.”This left the jury nothing to do but render their verdict, and the Judge sentenced the murderer to be hanged, as he confessed he deserved to be. In 1891, Lars Ostendahl, the most famous preacher of Norway, startled his hearers by publicly confessing that he had been guilty of immorality, and that he could no longer retain his pastorate. He begged his people for the sake of Christ to forgive him and not to desert the poor in his asylums. He was not only preacher, but also head of a great philanthropic work.Such is the movement and demand of the enlightened conscience. The lack of conviction that crime ought to be punished is one of the most certain signs of moral decay in either the individual or the nation (Ps. 97:10—“Ye that love the Lord, hate evil”;149:6—“Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, And a two-edged sword in their hand”—to execute God's judgment upon iniquity).This relation of sin to God shows us how Christ is“made sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). Since Christ is the immanent God, he is also essential humanity, the universal man, the life of the race. All the nerves and sensibilities of humanity meet in him. He is the central brain to which and through which all ideas must pass. He is the central heart to which and through which all pains must be communicated. You cannot telephone to your friend across the town without first ringing up the central office. You cannot injure your neighbor without first injuring Christ. Each one of us can say of him:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4). Because of his central and all-inclusive humanity, Christ can feel all the pangs of shame and suffering which rightfully belong to sinners, but which they cannot feel, because their sin has stupefied and deadened them. The Messiah, if he be truly man, must be a suffering Messiah. For the very reason of his humanity he must bear in his own person all the guilt of humanity and must be“the Lamb of God who”takes, and so“takes away the sin of the world”(John 1:29).Guilt and depravity are not only distinguishable in thought,—they are also separable in fact. The convicted murderer might repent and become pure, yet he might still be under obligation to suffer the punishment of his crime. The Christian is freed from guilt (Rom. 8:1), but he is not yet freed from depravity (Rom. 7:23). Christ, on the other hand, was under obligation to suffer (Luke 24:26;Acts 3:18;26:23), while yet he was without sin (Heb. 7:26). In the book entitled Modern Religious Thought, 3-29, R. J. Campbell has an essay on The Atonement, with which, apart from its view as to the origin of moral evil in God, we are in substantial agreement. He holds that“to relieve men from their sense of guilt, objective atonement is necessary,”—we would say: to relieve men from guilt itself—the obligation to suffer.“If Christ be the eternal Son of God, that side of the divine nature which has gone forth in creation, if he contains humanity and is present in every article and act of human experience, then he is associated with the existence of the primordial evil.... He and only he can sever the entail between man and his responsibility for personal sin. Christ has notsinnedin man, but he takes responsibility for that experience of evil into which humanity is born, and the yielding to which constitutes sin. He goes forth to suffer, and actually does suffer, in man. The eternal Son in whom humanity is contained is therefore a sufferer since creation began. This mysterious passion of Deity must continue until redemption is consummated and humanity restored to God. Thus every consequence of human ill is felt in the experience of Christ. Thus Christ not only assumes the guilt but bears the punishment of every human soul.”We claim however that the necessity of this suffering lies, not in the needs of man, but in the holiness of God.[pg 647]C. Guilt, moreover, as an objective result of sin, is not to be confounded with the subjective consciousness of guilt (Lev. 5:17). In the condemnation of conscience, God's condemnation partially and prophetically manifests itself (1 John 3:20). But guilt is primarily a relation to God, and only secondarily a relation to conscience. Progress in sin is marked by diminished sensitiveness of moral insight and feeling. As“the greatest of sins is to be conscious of none,”so guilt may be great, just in proportion to the absence of consciousness of it (Ps. 19:12; 51:6; Eph. 4:18, 19—ἀπηλγηκότες). There is no evidence, however, that the voice of conscience can be completely or finally silenced. The time for repentance may pass, but not the time for remorse. Progress in holiness, on the other hand, is marked by increasing apprehension of the depth and extent of our sinfulness, while with this apprehension is combined, in a normal Christian experience, the assurance that the guilt of our sin has been taken, and taken away, by Christ (John 1:29).Lev. 5:17—“And if any one sin, and do any of the things which Jehovah hath commanded not to be done; though he knew it not, yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity”;1 John 3:20—“because if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things”;Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”;51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom”;Eph. 4:18, 19—“darkened in their understanding ... being past feeling”;John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away[marg.“beareth”]the sin of the world.”Plato, Republic, 1:330—“When death approaches, cares and alarms awake, especially the fear of hell and its punishments.”Cicero, De Divin., 1:30—“Then comes remorse for evil deeds.”Persius, Satire 3—“His vice benumbs him; his fibre has become fat; he is conscious of no fault; he knows not the loss he suffers; he is so far sunk, that there is not even a bubble on the surface of the deep.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:1—“Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all”; 4:5—“To my sick soul, as sin's true nature is, Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss; So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt”; Richard III, 5:3—“O coward conscience, how thou dost afflict me!... My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain”; Tempest, 3:3—“All three of them are desperate; their great guilt, Like poison given to work a great time after, Now 'gins to bite the spirits”; Ant. and Cleop., 3:9—“When we in our viciousness grow hard (O misery on't!) the wise gods seel our eyes; In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us Adore our errors; laugh at us, while we strut To our confusion.”Dr. Shedd said once to a graduating class of young theologians:“Would that upon the naked, palpitating heart of each one of you might be laid one redhot coal of God Almighty's wrath!”Yes, we add, if only that redhot coal might be quenched by one red drop of Christ's atoning blood. Dr. H. E. Robins:“To the convicted sinner a merely external hell would be a cooling flame, compared with the agony of his remorse.”John Milton represents Satan as saying:“Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.”James Martineau, Life by Jackson, 190—“It is of the essence of guilty declension to administer its own anæsthetics.”But this deadening of conscience cannot last always. Conscience is a mirror of God's holiness. We may cover the mirror with the veil of this world's diversions and deceits. When the veil is removed, and conscience again reflects the sunlike purity of God's demands, we are visited with self-loathing and self-contempt. John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 2:25—“Though it may cast off every other vestige of its divine origin, our nature retains at least this one terrible prerogative of it, the capacity of preying on itself.”Lyttelton in Lux Mundi, 277—“The common fallacy that a self-indulgent sinner is no one's enemy but his own would, were it true, involve the further inference that such a sinner would not feel himself guilty.”If any dislike the doctrine of guilt, let them remember that without wrath there is no pardon, without guilt no forgiveness. See, on the nature of guilt, Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:193-267; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 208-209; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:346; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 461-473; Delitzsch, Bib. Psychologie, 121-148; Thornwell, Theology, 1:400-424.[pg 648]2. Degrees of guilt.The Scriptures recognize different degrees of guilt as attaching to different kinds of sin. The variety of sacrifices under the Mosaic law, and the variety of awards in the judgment, are to be explained upon this principle.Luke 12:47, 48—“shall be beaten with many stripes ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;Rom. 2:6—“who will render to every man according to his works.”See alsoJohn 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Heb. 2:2, 3—if“every transgression ... received a just recompense of reward; how shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”10:28, 29—“A man that hath set at nought Moses' law dieth without compassion on the word of two or three witnesses: of how much sorer punishment, think ye, shall he be judged worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God?”Casuistry, however, has drawn many distinctions which lack Scriptural foundation. Such is the distinction between venial sins and mortal sins in the Roman Catholic Church,—every sin unpardoned being mortal, and all sins being venial, since Christ has died for all. Nor is the common distinction between sins of omission and sins of commission more valid, since the very omission is an act of commission.Mat. 25:45—“Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least”;James 4:17—“To him therefore that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”John Ruskin:“The condemnation given from the Judgment Throne—most solemnly described—is for all the‘undones’and not the‘dones.’People are perpetually afraid of doing wrong; but unless they are doing its reverse energetically, theydo it all day long, and the degree does not matter.”The Roman Catholic Church proceeds upon the supposition that she can determine the precise malignity of every offence, and assign its proper penance at the confessional. Thornwell, Theology, 1:424-441, says that“all sins are venial but one—for there is a sin against the Holy Ghost,”yet“not one is venial in itself—for the least proceeds from an apostate state and nature.”We shall see, however, that the hindrance to pardon, in the case of the sin against the Holy Spirit, is subjective rather than objective.J. Spencer Kennard:“Roman Catholicism in Italy presents the spectacle of the authoritative representatives and teachers of morals and religion themselves living in all forms of deceit, corruption, and tyranny; and, on the other hand, discriminating between venial and mortal sin, classing as venial sins lying, fraud, fornication, marital infidelity, and even murder, all of which may be atoned for and forgiven or even permitted by the mere payment of money; and at the same time classing as mortal sins disrespect and disobedience to the church.”The following distinctions are indicated in Scripture as involving different degrees of guilt:A. Sin of nature, and personal transgression.Sin of nature involves guilt, yet there is greater guilt when this sin of nature reasserts itself in personal transgression; for, while this latter includes in itself the former, it also adds to the former a new element, namely, the conscious exercise of the individual and personal will, by virtue of which a new decision is made against God, special evil habit is induced, and the total condition of the soul is made more depraved. Although we have emphasized the guilt of inborn sin, because this truth is most contested, it is to be remembered that men reach a conviction of their native depravity only through a conviction of their personal transgressions. For this reason, by far the larger part of our preaching upon sin should consist in applications of the law of God to the acts and dispositions of men's lives.Mat. 19:14—“to such belongeth the kingdom of heaven”—relative innocence of childhood;23:32—“Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers”—personal transgression added to inherited depravity. In preaching, we should first treat individual transgressions, and thence proceed to[pg 649]heart-sin, and race-sin. Man is not wholly a spontaneous development of inborn tendencies, a manifestation of original sin. Motives do notdeterminebut theypersuadethe will, and every man is guilty of conscious personal transgressions which may, with the help of the Holy Spirit, be brought under the condemning judgment of conscience. Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 169-174—“Original sin does not do away with the significance of personal transgression. Adam was pardoned: but some of his descendants are unpardonable. The second death is referred, in Scripture, to our own personal guilt.”This is not to say that original sin does not involve as great sin as that of Adam in the first transgression, for original sinisthe sin of the first transgression; it is only to say that personal transgression is original sinplusthe conscious ratification of Adam's act by the individual.“We are guilty for what weare, as much as for what wedo. Oursinis not simply the sum total of all oursins. There is asinfulnesswhich is the common denominator of all our sins.”It is customary to speak lightly of original sin, as if personal sins were all for which man is accountable. But it is only in the light of original sin that personal sins can be explained.Prov. 14:9, marg.—“Fools make a mock at sin.”Simon, Reconciliation, 122—“The sinfulness of individual men varies; the sinfulness of humanity is a constant quantity.”Robert Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies:“Man lumps his kind i' the mass. God singles thence unit by unit. Thou and God exist—So think! for certain: Think the mass—mankind—Disparts, disperses, leaves thyself alone! Ask thy lone soul what laws are plain to thee,—Thou and no other, stand or fall by them! That is the part for thee.”B. Sins of ignorance, and sins of knowledge.Here guilt is measured by the degree of light possessed, or in other words, by the opportunities of knowledge men have enjoyed, and the powers with which they have been naturally endowed. Genius and privilege increase responsibility. The heathen are guilty, but those to whom the oracles of God have been committed are more guilty than they.Mat 10:15—“more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city”;Luke 12:47, 48—“that servant, who knew his Lord's will ... shall be beaten with many stripes; but he that knew not ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;23:34—“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”—complete knowledge would put them beyond the reach of forgiveness.John 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Acts 17:30—“The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked”;Rom. 1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent with them that practise them”;2:12—“For as many as have sinned without the law shall also perish without the law: and as many as have sinned under the law shall be judged by the law”;1 Tim. 1:13, 15, 16—“I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.”Is. 42:19—“Who is blind ... as Jehovah's servant?”It was the Pharisees whom Jesus warned of the sin against the Holy Spirit. The guilt of the crucifixion rested on Jews rather than on Gentiles. Apostate Israel was more guilty than the pagans. The greatest sinners of the present day may be in Christendom, not in heathendom. Satan was an archangel; Judas was an apostle; Alexander Borgia was a pope. Jackson, James Martineau, 362—“Corruptio optimi pessima est, as seen in a drunken Webster, a treacherous Bacon, a licentious Goethe.”Sir Roger de Coverley observed that none but men of fine parts deserve to be hanged. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 317—“The greater sin often involves the lesser guilt; the lesser sin the greater guilt.”Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, 227 (Pope, 1975)—“There's a new tribunal now Higher than God's,—the educated man's! Nice sense of honor in the human breast Supersedes here the old coarse oracle!”Dr. H. E. Robins holds that“palliation of guilt according to light is not possible under a system of pure law, and is possible only because the probation of the sinner is a probation of grace.”C. Sins of infirmity, and sins of presumption.Here the guilt is measured by the energy of the evil will. Sin may be known to be sin, yet may be committed in haste or weakness. Though haste and weakness constitute a palliation of the offence which springs therefrom, yet they are themselves sins, as revealing an unbelieving and disordered heart. But of far greater guilt are those presumptuous choices of evil in which not weakness, but strength of will, is manifest.[pg 650]Ps. 19:12, 13—“Clear thou me from hidden faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins”;Is. 5:18—“Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of falsehood, and sin as it were with a cart-rope”—not led away insensibly by sin, but earnestly, perseveringly, and wilfully working away at it;Gal. 6:1—“overtaken in any trespass”;1 Tim. 5:24—“Some men's sins are evident, going before unto judgment; and some men also they follow after”—some men's sins are so open, that they act as officers to bring to justice those who commit them; whilst others require after-proof (An. Par. Bible). Luther represents one of the former class as saying to himself:“Esto peccator, et pecca fortiter.”On sins of passion and of reflection, see Bittinger, in Princeton Rev., 1873:219.Micah 7:3, marg.—“Both hands are put forth for evil, to do it diligently.”So we ought to do good.“My art is my life,”said Grisi, the prima donna of the opera,“I save myself all day for that one bound upon the stage.”H. Bonar:“Sin worketh,—Let me work too. Busy as sin, my work I ply, Till I rest in the rest of eternity.”German criminal law distinguishes between intentional homicide without deliberation, and intentional homicide with deliberation. There are three grades of sin: 1. Sins of ignorance, like Paul's persecuting; 2. sins of infirmity, like Peter's denial; 3. sins of presumption, like David's murder of Uriah. Sins of presumption were unpardonable under the Jewish law; they are not unpardonable under Christ.D. Sin of incomplete, and sin of final, obduracy.Here the guilt is measured, not by the objective sufficiency or insufficiency of divine grace, but by the degree of unreceptiveness into which sin has brought the soul. As the only sin unto death which is described in Scripture is the sin against the Holy Spirit, we here consider the nature of that sin.Mat 12:31—“Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven”;32—“And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come”;Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”;1 John 5:16, 17—“If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and God will give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin into death: not concerning this do I say that he should make request. All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death”;Heb. 10:26—“if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, then remaineth no more a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries.”Ritschl holds all sin that comes short of definitive rejection of Christ to be ignorance rather than sin, and to be the object of no condemning sentence. This is to make the sin against the Holy Spirit the only real sin. Conscience and Scripture alike contradict this view. There is much incipient hardening of the heart that precedes the sin of final obduracy. See Denney, Studies in Theology, 80. The composure of the criminal is not always a sign of innocence. S. S. Times, April 12, 1902:200—“Sensitiveness of conscience and of feeling, and responsiveness of countenance and bearing, are to be retained by purity of life and freedom from transgression. On the other hand composure of countenance and calmness under suspicion and accusation are likely to be a result of continuance in wrong doing, with consequent hardening of the whole moral nature.”Weismann, Heredity, 2:8—“As soon as any organ falls into disuse, it degenerates, and finally is lost altogether.... In parasites the organs of sense degenerate.”Marconi's wireless telegraphy requires an attuned“receiver.”The“transmitter”sends out countless rays into space: only one capable of corresponding vibrations can understand them. The sinner may so destroy his receptivity, that the whole universe may be uttering God's truth, yet he be unable to hear a word of it. The Outlook:“If a man should put out his eyes, he could not see—nothing could make him see. So if a man should by obstinate wickedness destroy his power to believe in God's forgiveness, he would be in a hopeless state. Though God would still be gracious, the man could not see it, and so could not take God's forgiveness to himself.”The sin against the Holy Spirit is not to be regarded simply as an isolated act, but also as the external symptom of a heart so radically and finally set against God that no power which God can consistently use will ever save it. This sin, therefore, can be only the culmination of a long course of self-hardening and self-depraving. He who has committed it must be[pg 651]either profoundly indifferent to his own condition, or actively and bitterly hostile to God; so that anxiety or fear on account of one's condition is evidence that it has not been committed. The sin against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven, simply because the soul that has committed it has ceased to be receptive of divine influences, even when those influences are exerted in the utmost strength which God has seen fit to employ in his spiritual administration.The commission of this sin is marked by a loss of spiritual sight; the blind fish of the Mammoth Cave left light for darkness, and so in time lost their eyes. It is marked by a loss of religious sensibility; the sensitive-plant loses Its sensitiveness, in proportion to the frequency with which it is touched. It is marked by a loss of power to will the good;“the lava hardens after it has broken from the crater, and in that state cannot return to its source”(Van Oosterzee). The same writer also remarks (Dogmatics, 2:438):“Herod Antipas, after earlier doubt and slavishness, reached such deadness as to be able to mock the Savior, at the mention of whose name he had not long before trembled.”Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:425—“It is not that divine grace is absolutely refused to any one who in true penitence asks forgiveness of this sin; but he who commits it never fulfills the subjective conditions upon which forgiveness is possible, because the aggravation of sin to this ultimatum destroys in him all susceptibility of repentance. The way of return to God is closed against no one who does not close it against himself.”Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 97-120, illustrates the downward progress of the sinner by the law of degeneration in the vegetable and animal world: pigeons, roses, strawberries, all tend to revert to the primitive and wild type.“How shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”(Heb.2:3).Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3:5—“You all know security Is mortals' chiefest enemy.”Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, 90-124—“Richard III is the ideal villain. Villainy has become an end in itself. Richard is an artist in villainy. He lacks the emotions naturally attending crime. He regards villainy with the intellectual enthusiasm of the artist. His villainy is ideal in its success. There is a fascination of irresistibility in him. He is imperturbable in his crime. There is no effort, but rather humor, in it; a recklessness which suggests boundless resources; an inspiration which excludes calculation. Shakespeare relieves the representation from the charge of monstrosity by turning all this villainous history into the unconscious development of Nemesis.”See also A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 188-193. Robert Browning's Guido, in The Ring and the Book, is an example of pure hatred of the good. Guido hates Pompilia for her goodness, and declares that, if he catches her in the next world, he will murder her there, as he murdered her here.Alexander VI, the father of Cæsar and Lucrezia Borgia, the pope of cruelty and lust, wore yet to the day of his death the look of unfailing joyousness and geniality, yes, of even retiring sensitiveness and modesty. No fear or reproach of conscience seemed to throw gloom over his life, as in the cases of Tiberius and Louis XI. He believed himself under the special protection of the Virgin, although he had her painted with the features of his paramour, Julia Farnese. He never scrupled at false witness, adultery, or murder. See Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia, 294, 295. Jeremy Taylor thus describes the progress of sin in the sinner:“First it startles him, then it becomes pleasing, then delightful, then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed; then the man is impenitent, then obstinate, then resolved never to repent, then damned.”There is a state of utter insensibility to emotions of love or fear, and man by his sin may reach that state. The act of blasphemy is only the expression of a hardened or a hateful heart. B. H. Payne:“The calcium flame will char the steel wire so that it is no longer affected by the magnet.... As the blazing cinders and black curling smoke which the volcano spews from its rumbling throat are the accumulation of months and years, so the sin against the Holy Spirit is not a thoughtless expression in a moment of passion or rage, but the giving vent to a state of heart and mind abounding in the accumulations of weeks and months of opposition to the gospel.”Dr. J. P. Thompson:“The unpardonable sin is the knowing, wilful, persistent, contemptuous, malignant spurning of divine truth and grace, as manifested to the soul by the convincing and illuminating power of the Holy Ghost.”Dorner says that“therefore this sin does not belong to Old Testament times, or to the mere revelation of law. It implies the full revelation of the grace in Christ, and the conscious rejection of it by[pg 652]a soul to which the Spirit has made it manifest (Acts 17:30—‘The times of ignorance, therefore, God overlooked’;Rom. 3:25—‘the passing over of the sins done aforetime’).”But was it not under the Old Testament that God said:“My Spirit shall not strive with man forever”(Gen. 6:3), and“Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”(Hosea 4:17)? The sin against the Holy Ghost is a sin against grace, but it does not appear to be limited to New Testament times.It is still true that the unpardonable sin is a sin committed against the Holy Spirit rather than against Christ:Mat. 12:32—“whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come.”Jesus warns the Jews against it,—he does not say they had already committed it. They would seem to have committed it when, after Pentecost, they added to their rejection of Christ the rejection of the Holy Spirit's witness to Christ's resurrection. See Schaff, Sin against the Holy Ghost; Lemme, Sünde wider den Heiligen Geist; Davis, in Bap. Rev., 1862:317-326; Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, 283-289. On the general subject of kinds of sin and degrees of guilt, see Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:284, 298.
II. Guilt.1. Nature of guilt.By guilt we mean desert of punishment, or obligation to render satisfaction to God's justice for self-determined violation of law. There is a reaction of holiness against sin, which the Scripture denominates“the wrath of God”(Rom. 1:18). Sin is in us, either as act or state; God's punitive righteousness is over against the sinner, as something to be feared; guilt is a relation of the sinner to that righteousness, namely, the sinner's desert of punishment.Guilt is related to sin as the burnt spot to the blaze. Schiller, Die Braut von Messina:“Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht; Der Uebel grösstes aber ist die Schuld”—“Life is not the highest of possessions; the greatest of ills, however, is guilt.”Delitzsch:“Die Schamröthe ist die Abendröthe der untergegangenen Sonne der ursprünglichen Gerechtigkeit”—“The blush of shame is the evening red after the sun of original righteousness has gone down.”E. G. Robinson:“Pangs of conscience do not arise from the fear of penalty,—they are the penalty itself.”See chapter on Fig-leaves, in McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 142-154—“Spiritual shame for sin sought an outward symbol, and found it in the nakedness of the lower parts of the body.”The following remarks may serve both for proof and for explanation:A. Guilt is incurred only through self-determined transgression either on the part of man's nature or person. We are guilty only of that sin which we have originated or have had part in originating. Guilt is not, therefore, mere liability to punishment, without participation in the transgression for which the punishment is inflicted,—in other words, there is no such thing as constructive guilt under the divine government. We are accounted guilty only for what we have done, either personally or in our first parents, and for what we are, in consequence of such doing.Ez. 18:20—“the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father”—, as Calvin says (Com.in loco):“The son shall not bear the father's iniquity, since he shall receive the reward due to himself, and shall bear his own burden.... All are guilty through their own fault.... Every one perishes through his own iniquity.”In other words, the whole race fell in Adam,[pg 645]and is punished for its own sin in him, not for the sins of immediate ancestors, nor for the sin of Adam as a person foreign to us.John 9:3—“Neither did this man sin, nor his parents”(that he should be born blind)—Do not attribute to any special later sin what is a consequence of the sin of the race—the first sin which“brought death into the world, and all our woe.”Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:195-213.B. Guilt is an objective result of sin, and is not to be confounded with subjective pollution, or depravity. Every sin, whether of nature or person, is an offense against God (Ps. 51:4-6), an act or state of opposition to his will, which has for its effect God's personal wrath (Ps. 7:11; John 3:18, 36), and which must be expiated either by punishment or by atonement (Heb. 9:22). Not only does sin, as unlikeness to the divine purity, involvepollution,—it also, as antagonism to God's holy will, involvesguilt. This guilt, or obligation to satisfy the outraged holiness of God, is explained in the New Testament by the terms“debtor”and“debt”(Mat. 6:12; Luke 13:4; Mat. 5:21; Rom. 3:19; 6:23; Eph. 2:3). Since guilt, the objective result of sin, is entirely distinct from depravity, the subjective result, human nature may, as in Christ, have the guilt without the depravity (2 Cor. 5:21), or may, as in the Christian, have the depravity without the guilt (1 John 1:7, 8).Ps. 51:4-6—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight; That thou mayest be justified when thou speakest, And be clear when thou judgest”;7:11—“God is a righteous judge, Yea, a God that hath indignation every day”;John 3:18—“he that believeth not hath been judged already”;36—“he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him”;Heb. 9:22—“apart from shedding of blood there is no remission”;Mat. 6:12—“debts”;Luke 13:4—“offenders”(marg.“debtors”);Mat. 5:21—“shall be in danger of[exposed to]the judgment”;Rom. 3:19—“that ... all the world may be brought under the judgment of God”;6:23—“the wages of sin is death”—death is sin's desert;Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath”;2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf”;1 John 1:7, 8—“the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin.[Yet]If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”Sin brings in its train not only depravity but guilt, not onlymaculabutreatus. Scripture sets forth thepollutionof sin by its similies of“a cage of unclean birds”and of“wounds, bruises, and putrefying sores”; by leprosy and Levitical uncleanness, under the old dispensation; by death and the corruption of the grave, under both the old and the new. But Scripture sets forth theguiltof sin, with equal vividness, in the fear of Cain and in the remorse of Judas. The revulsion of God's holiness from sin, and its demand for satisfaction, are reflected in the shame and remorse of every awakened conscience. There is an instinctive feeling in the sinner's heart that sin will be punished, and ought to be punished. But the Holy Spirit makes this need of reparation so deeply felt that the soul has no rest until its debt is paid. The offending church member who is truly penitent loves the law and the church which excludes him, and would not think it faithful if it did not. So Jesus, when laden with the guilt of the race, pressed forward to the cross, saying:“I have a baptism to be baptised with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!”(Luke 12:50; Mark 10:32).All sin involves guilt, and the sinful soul itself demands penalty, so that all will ultimately go where they most desire to be. All the great masters in literature have recognized this. The inextinguishable thirst for reparation constitutes the very essence of tragedy. The Greek tragedians are full of it, and Shakespeare is its most impressive teacher: Measure for Measure, 5:1—“I am sorry that such sorrow I procure, And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart That I crave death more willingly than mercy; 'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it”; Cymbeline, 5:4—“and so, great Powers, If you will take this audit, take this life, And cancel these cold bonds!... Desired, more than constrained, to satisfy, ... take No stricter render of me than my all”; that is, settle the account with me by taking my life, for nothing less than that will pay my debt. And later writers follow Shakespeare. Marguerite, in Goethe's Faust, fainting in the great cathedral under the solemn reverberations of the Dies Iræ; Dimmesdale, in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, putting himself side by side with Hester Prynne, his victim, in her place of obloquy; Bulwer's Eugene Aram, coming forward, though unsuspected, to confess the murder he had committed, all these are illustrations of the[pg 646]inner impulse that moves even a sinful soul to satisfy the claims of justice upon it. See A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 215, 216. On Hawthorne, see Hutton, Essays, 2:370-416—“In the Scarlet Letter, the minister gains fresh reverence and popularity as the very fruit of the passionate anguish with which his heart is consumed. Frantic with the stings of unacknowledged guilt, he is yet taught by these very stings to understand the hearts and stir the consciences of others.”See also Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life.Nor are such scenes confined to the pages of romance. In a recent trial at Syracuse, Earl, the wife-murderer, thanked the jury that had convicted him; declared the verdict just; begged that no one would interfere to stay the course of justice; said that the greatest blessing that could be conferred on him would be to let him suffer the penalty of his crime. In Plattsburg, at the close of another trial in which the accused was a life-convict who had struck down a fellow-convict with an axe, the jury, after being out two hours, came in to ask the Judge to explain the difference between murder in the first and second degree. Suddenly the prisoner rose and said:“This was not a murder in the second degree. It was a deliberate and premeditated murder. I know that I have done wrong, that I ought to confess the truth, and that I ought to be hanged.”This left the jury nothing to do but render their verdict, and the Judge sentenced the murderer to be hanged, as he confessed he deserved to be. In 1891, Lars Ostendahl, the most famous preacher of Norway, startled his hearers by publicly confessing that he had been guilty of immorality, and that he could no longer retain his pastorate. He begged his people for the sake of Christ to forgive him and not to desert the poor in his asylums. He was not only preacher, but also head of a great philanthropic work.Such is the movement and demand of the enlightened conscience. The lack of conviction that crime ought to be punished is one of the most certain signs of moral decay in either the individual or the nation (Ps. 97:10—“Ye that love the Lord, hate evil”;149:6—“Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, And a two-edged sword in their hand”—to execute God's judgment upon iniquity).This relation of sin to God shows us how Christ is“made sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). Since Christ is the immanent God, he is also essential humanity, the universal man, the life of the race. All the nerves and sensibilities of humanity meet in him. He is the central brain to which and through which all ideas must pass. He is the central heart to which and through which all pains must be communicated. You cannot telephone to your friend across the town without first ringing up the central office. You cannot injure your neighbor without first injuring Christ. Each one of us can say of him:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4). Because of his central and all-inclusive humanity, Christ can feel all the pangs of shame and suffering which rightfully belong to sinners, but which they cannot feel, because their sin has stupefied and deadened them. The Messiah, if he be truly man, must be a suffering Messiah. For the very reason of his humanity he must bear in his own person all the guilt of humanity and must be“the Lamb of God who”takes, and so“takes away the sin of the world”(John 1:29).Guilt and depravity are not only distinguishable in thought,—they are also separable in fact. The convicted murderer might repent and become pure, yet he might still be under obligation to suffer the punishment of his crime. The Christian is freed from guilt (Rom. 8:1), but he is not yet freed from depravity (Rom. 7:23). Christ, on the other hand, was under obligation to suffer (Luke 24:26;Acts 3:18;26:23), while yet he was without sin (Heb. 7:26). In the book entitled Modern Religious Thought, 3-29, R. J. Campbell has an essay on The Atonement, with which, apart from its view as to the origin of moral evil in God, we are in substantial agreement. He holds that“to relieve men from their sense of guilt, objective atonement is necessary,”—we would say: to relieve men from guilt itself—the obligation to suffer.“If Christ be the eternal Son of God, that side of the divine nature which has gone forth in creation, if he contains humanity and is present in every article and act of human experience, then he is associated with the existence of the primordial evil.... He and only he can sever the entail between man and his responsibility for personal sin. Christ has notsinnedin man, but he takes responsibility for that experience of evil into which humanity is born, and the yielding to which constitutes sin. He goes forth to suffer, and actually does suffer, in man. The eternal Son in whom humanity is contained is therefore a sufferer since creation began. This mysterious passion of Deity must continue until redemption is consummated and humanity restored to God. Thus every consequence of human ill is felt in the experience of Christ. Thus Christ not only assumes the guilt but bears the punishment of every human soul.”We claim however that the necessity of this suffering lies, not in the needs of man, but in the holiness of God.[pg 647]C. Guilt, moreover, as an objective result of sin, is not to be confounded with the subjective consciousness of guilt (Lev. 5:17). In the condemnation of conscience, God's condemnation partially and prophetically manifests itself (1 John 3:20). But guilt is primarily a relation to God, and only secondarily a relation to conscience. Progress in sin is marked by diminished sensitiveness of moral insight and feeling. As“the greatest of sins is to be conscious of none,”so guilt may be great, just in proportion to the absence of consciousness of it (Ps. 19:12; 51:6; Eph. 4:18, 19—ἀπηλγηκότες). There is no evidence, however, that the voice of conscience can be completely or finally silenced. The time for repentance may pass, but not the time for remorse. Progress in holiness, on the other hand, is marked by increasing apprehension of the depth and extent of our sinfulness, while with this apprehension is combined, in a normal Christian experience, the assurance that the guilt of our sin has been taken, and taken away, by Christ (John 1:29).Lev. 5:17—“And if any one sin, and do any of the things which Jehovah hath commanded not to be done; though he knew it not, yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity”;1 John 3:20—“because if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things”;Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”;51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom”;Eph. 4:18, 19—“darkened in their understanding ... being past feeling”;John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away[marg.“beareth”]the sin of the world.”Plato, Republic, 1:330—“When death approaches, cares and alarms awake, especially the fear of hell and its punishments.”Cicero, De Divin., 1:30—“Then comes remorse for evil deeds.”Persius, Satire 3—“His vice benumbs him; his fibre has become fat; he is conscious of no fault; he knows not the loss he suffers; he is so far sunk, that there is not even a bubble on the surface of the deep.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:1—“Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all”; 4:5—“To my sick soul, as sin's true nature is, Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss; So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt”; Richard III, 5:3—“O coward conscience, how thou dost afflict me!... My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain”; Tempest, 3:3—“All three of them are desperate; their great guilt, Like poison given to work a great time after, Now 'gins to bite the spirits”; Ant. and Cleop., 3:9—“When we in our viciousness grow hard (O misery on't!) the wise gods seel our eyes; In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us Adore our errors; laugh at us, while we strut To our confusion.”Dr. Shedd said once to a graduating class of young theologians:“Would that upon the naked, palpitating heart of each one of you might be laid one redhot coal of God Almighty's wrath!”Yes, we add, if only that redhot coal might be quenched by one red drop of Christ's atoning blood. Dr. H. E. Robins:“To the convicted sinner a merely external hell would be a cooling flame, compared with the agony of his remorse.”John Milton represents Satan as saying:“Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.”James Martineau, Life by Jackson, 190—“It is of the essence of guilty declension to administer its own anæsthetics.”But this deadening of conscience cannot last always. Conscience is a mirror of God's holiness. We may cover the mirror with the veil of this world's diversions and deceits. When the veil is removed, and conscience again reflects the sunlike purity of God's demands, we are visited with self-loathing and self-contempt. John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 2:25—“Though it may cast off every other vestige of its divine origin, our nature retains at least this one terrible prerogative of it, the capacity of preying on itself.”Lyttelton in Lux Mundi, 277—“The common fallacy that a self-indulgent sinner is no one's enemy but his own would, were it true, involve the further inference that such a sinner would not feel himself guilty.”If any dislike the doctrine of guilt, let them remember that without wrath there is no pardon, without guilt no forgiveness. See, on the nature of guilt, Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:193-267; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 208-209; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:346; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 461-473; Delitzsch, Bib. Psychologie, 121-148; Thornwell, Theology, 1:400-424.[pg 648]2. Degrees of guilt.The Scriptures recognize different degrees of guilt as attaching to different kinds of sin. The variety of sacrifices under the Mosaic law, and the variety of awards in the judgment, are to be explained upon this principle.Luke 12:47, 48—“shall be beaten with many stripes ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;Rom. 2:6—“who will render to every man according to his works.”See alsoJohn 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Heb. 2:2, 3—if“every transgression ... received a just recompense of reward; how shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”10:28, 29—“A man that hath set at nought Moses' law dieth without compassion on the word of two or three witnesses: of how much sorer punishment, think ye, shall he be judged worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God?”Casuistry, however, has drawn many distinctions which lack Scriptural foundation. Such is the distinction between venial sins and mortal sins in the Roman Catholic Church,—every sin unpardoned being mortal, and all sins being venial, since Christ has died for all. Nor is the common distinction between sins of omission and sins of commission more valid, since the very omission is an act of commission.Mat. 25:45—“Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least”;James 4:17—“To him therefore that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”John Ruskin:“The condemnation given from the Judgment Throne—most solemnly described—is for all the‘undones’and not the‘dones.’People are perpetually afraid of doing wrong; but unless they are doing its reverse energetically, theydo it all day long, and the degree does not matter.”The Roman Catholic Church proceeds upon the supposition that she can determine the precise malignity of every offence, and assign its proper penance at the confessional. Thornwell, Theology, 1:424-441, says that“all sins are venial but one—for there is a sin against the Holy Ghost,”yet“not one is venial in itself—for the least proceeds from an apostate state and nature.”We shall see, however, that the hindrance to pardon, in the case of the sin against the Holy Spirit, is subjective rather than objective.J. Spencer Kennard:“Roman Catholicism in Italy presents the spectacle of the authoritative representatives and teachers of morals and religion themselves living in all forms of deceit, corruption, and tyranny; and, on the other hand, discriminating between venial and mortal sin, classing as venial sins lying, fraud, fornication, marital infidelity, and even murder, all of which may be atoned for and forgiven or even permitted by the mere payment of money; and at the same time classing as mortal sins disrespect and disobedience to the church.”The following distinctions are indicated in Scripture as involving different degrees of guilt:A. Sin of nature, and personal transgression.Sin of nature involves guilt, yet there is greater guilt when this sin of nature reasserts itself in personal transgression; for, while this latter includes in itself the former, it also adds to the former a new element, namely, the conscious exercise of the individual and personal will, by virtue of which a new decision is made against God, special evil habit is induced, and the total condition of the soul is made more depraved. Although we have emphasized the guilt of inborn sin, because this truth is most contested, it is to be remembered that men reach a conviction of their native depravity only through a conviction of their personal transgressions. For this reason, by far the larger part of our preaching upon sin should consist in applications of the law of God to the acts and dispositions of men's lives.Mat. 19:14—“to such belongeth the kingdom of heaven”—relative innocence of childhood;23:32—“Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers”—personal transgression added to inherited depravity. In preaching, we should first treat individual transgressions, and thence proceed to[pg 649]heart-sin, and race-sin. Man is not wholly a spontaneous development of inborn tendencies, a manifestation of original sin. Motives do notdeterminebut theypersuadethe will, and every man is guilty of conscious personal transgressions which may, with the help of the Holy Spirit, be brought under the condemning judgment of conscience. Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 169-174—“Original sin does not do away with the significance of personal transgression. Adam was pardoned: but some of his descendants are unpardonable. The second death is referred, in Scripture, to our own personal guilt.”This is not to say that original sin does not involve as great sin as that of Adam in the first transgression, for original sinisthe sin of the first transgression; it is only to say that personal transgression is original sinplusthe conscious ratification of Adam's act by the individual.“We are guilty for what weare, as much as for what wedo. Oursinis not simply the sum total of all oursins. There is asinfulnesswhich is the common denominator of all our sins.”It is customary to speak lightly of original sin, as if personal sins were all for which man is accountable. But it is only in the light of original sin that personal sins can be explained.Prov. 14:9, marg.—“Fools make a mock at sin.”Simon, Reconciliation, 122—“The sinfulness of individual men varies; the sinfulness of humanity is a constant quantity.”Robert Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies:“Man lumps his kind i' the mass. God singles thence unit by unit. Thou and God exist—So think! for certain: Think the mass—mankind—Disparts, disperses, leaves thyself alone! Ask thy lone soul what laws are plain to thee,—Thou and no other, stand or fall by them! That is the part for thee.”B. Sins of ignorance, and sins of knowledge.Here guilt is measured by the degree of light possessed, or in other words, by the opportunities of knowledge men have enjoyed, and the powers with which they have been naturally endowed. Genius and privilege increase responsibility. The heathen are guilty, but those to whom the oracles of God have been committed are more guilty than they.Mat 10:15—“more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city”;Luke 12:47, 48—“that servant, who knew his Lord's will ... shall be beaten with many stripes; but he that knew not ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;23:34—“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”—complete knowledge would put them beyond the reach of forgiveness.John 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Acts 17:30—“The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked”;Rom. 1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent with them that practise them”;2:12—“For as many as have sinned without the law shall also perish without the law: and as many as have sinned under the law shall be judged by the law”;1 Tim. 1:13, 15, 16—“I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.”Is. 42:19—“Who is blind ... as Jehovah's servant?”It was the Pharisees whom Jesus warned of the sin against the Holy Spirit. The guilt of the crucifixion rested on Jews rather than on Gentiles. Apostate Israel was more guilty than the pagans. The greatest sinners of the present day may be in Christendom, not in heathendom. Satan was an archangel; Judas was an apostle; Alexander Borgia was a pope. Jackson, James Martineau, 362—“Corruptio optimi pessima est, as seen in a drunken Webster, a treacherous Bacon, a licentious Goethe.”Sir Roger de Coverley observed that none but men of fine parts deserve to be hanged. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 317—“The greater sin often involves the lesser guilt; the lesser sin the greater guilt.”Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, 227 (Pope, 1975)—“There's a new tribunal now Higher than God's,—the educated man's! Nice sense of honor in the human breast Supersedes here the old coarse oracle!”Dr. H. E. Robins holds that“palliation of guilt according to light is not possible under a system of pure law, and is possible only because the probation of the sinner is a probation of grace.”C. Sins of infirmity, and sins of presumption.Here the guilt is measured by the energy of the evil will. Sin may be known to be sin, yet may be committed in haste or weakness. Though haste and weakness constitute a palliation of the offence which springs therefrom, yet they are themselves sins, as revealing an unbelieving and disordered heart. But of far greater guilt are those presumptuous choices of evil in which not weakness, but strength of will, is manifest.[pg 650]Ps. 19:12, 13—“Clear thou me from hidden faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins”;Is. 5:18—“Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of falsehood, and sin as it were with a cart-rope”—not led away insensibly by sin, but earnestly, perseveringly, and wilfully working away at it;Gal. 6:1—“overtaken in any trespass”;1 Tim. 5:24—“Some men's sins are evident, going before unto judgment; and some men also they follow after”—some men's sins are so open, that they act as officers to bring to justice those who commit them; whilst others require after-proof (An. Par. Bible). Luther represents one of the former class as saying to himself:“Esto peccator, et pecca fortiter.”On sins of passion and of reflection, see Bittinger, in Princeton Rev., 1873:219.Micah 7:3, marg.—“Both hands are put forth for evil, to do it diligently.”So we ought to do good.“My art is my life,”said Grisi, the prima donna of the opera,“I save myself all day for that one bound upon the stage.”H. Bonar:“Sin worketh,—Let me work too. Busy as sin, my work I ply, Till I rest in the rest of eternity.”German criminal law distinguishes between intentional homicide without deliberation, and intentional homicide with deliberation. There are three grades of sin: 1. Sins of ignorance, like Paul's persecuting; 2. sins of infirmity, like Peter's denial; 3. sins of presumption, like David's murder of Uriah. Sins of presumption were unpardonable under the Jewish law; they are not unpardonable under Christ.D. Sin of incomplete, and sin of final, obduracy.Here the guilt is measured, not by the objective sufficiency or insufficiency of divine grace, but by the degree of unreceptiveness into which sin has brought the soul. As the only sin unto death which is described in Scripture is the sin against the Holy Spirit, we here consider the nature of that sin.Mat 12:31—“Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven”;32—“And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come”;Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”;1 John 5:16, 17—“If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and God will give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin into death: not concerning this do I say that he should make request. All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death”;Heb. 10:26—“if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, then remaineth no more a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries.”Ritschl holds all sin that comes short of definitive rejection of Christ to be ignorance rather than sin, and to be the object of no condemning sentence. This is to make the sin against the Holy Spirit the only real sin. Conscience and Scripture alike contradict this view. There is much incipient hardening of the heart that precedes the sin of final obduracy. See Denney, Studies in Theology, 80. The composure of the criminal is not always a sign of innocence. S. S. Times, April 12, 1902:200—“Sensitiveness of conscience and of feeling, and responsiveness of countenance and bearing, are to be retained by purity of life and freedom from transgression. On the other hand composure of countenance and calmness under suspicion and accusation are likely to be a result of continuance in wrong doing, with consequent hardening of the whole moral nature.”Weismann, Heredity, 2:8—“As soon as any organ falls into disuse, it degenerates, and finally is lost altogether.... In parasites the organs of sense degenerate.”Marconi's wireless telegraphy requires an attuned“receiver.”The“transmitter”sends out countless rays into space: only one capable of corresponding vibrations can understand them. The sinner may so destroy his receptivity, that the whole universe may be uttering God's truth, yet he be unable to hear a word of it. The Outlook:“If a man should put out his eyes, he could not see—nothing could make him see. So if a man should by obstinate wickedness destroy his power to believe in God's forgiveness, he would be in a hopeless state. Though God would still be gracious, the man could not see it, and so could not take God's forgiveness to himself.”The sin against the Holy Spirit is not to be regarded simply as an isolated act, but also as the external symptom of a heart so radically and finally set against God that no power which God can consistently use will ever save it. This sin, therefore, can be only the culmination of a long course of self-hardening and self-depraving. He who has committed it must be[pg 651]either profoundly indifferent to his own condition, or actively and bitterly hostile to God; so that anxiety or fear on account of one's condition is evidence that it has not been committed. The sin against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven, simply because the soul that has committed it has ceased to be receptive of divine influences, even when those influences are exerted in the utmost strength which God has seen fit to employ in his spiritual administration.The commission of this sin is marked by a loss of spiritual sight; the blind fish of the Mammoth Cave left light for darkness, and so in time lost their eyes. It is marked by a loss of religious sensibility; the sensitive-plant loses Its sensitiveness, in proportion to the frequency with which it is touched. It is marked by a loss of power to will the good;“the lava hardens after it has broken from the crater, and in that state cannot return to its source”(Van Oosterzee). The same writer also remarks (Dogmatics, 2:438):“Herod Antipas, after earlier doubt and slavishness, reached such deadness as to be able to mock the Savior, at the mention of whose name he had not long before trembled.”Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:425—“It is not that divine grace is absolutely refused to any one who in true penitence asks forgiveness of this sin; but he who commits it never fulfills the subjective conditions upon which forgiveness is possible, because the aggravation of sin to this ultimatum destroys in him all susceptibility of repentance. The way of return to God is closed against no one who does not close it against himself.”Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 97-120, illustrates the downward progress of the sinner by the law of degeneration in the vegetable and animal world: pigeons, roses, strawberries, all tend to revert to the primitive and wild type.“How shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”(Heb.2:3).Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3:5—“You all know security Is mortals' chiefest enemy.”Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, 90-124—“Richard III is the ideal villain. Villainy has become an end in itself. Richard is an artist in villainy. He lacks the emotions naturally attending crime. He regards villainy with the intellectual enthusiasm of the artist. His villainy is ideal in its success. There is a fascination of irresistibility in him. He is imperturbable in his crime. There is no effort, but rather humor, in it; a recklessness which suggests boundless resources; an inspiration which excludes calculation. Shakespeare relieves the representation from the charge of monstrosity by turning all this villainous history into the unconscious development of Nemesis.”See also A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 188-193. Robert Browning's Guido, in The Ring and the Book, is an example of pure hatred of the good. Guido hates Pompilia for her goodness, and declares that, if he catches her in the next world, he will murder her there, as he murdered her here.Alexander VI, the father of Cæsar and Lucrezia Borgia, the pope of cruelty and lust, wore yet to the day of his death the look of unfailing joyousness and geniality, yes, of even retiring sensitiveness and modesty. No fear or reproach of conscience seemed to throw gloom over his life, as in the cases of Tiberius and Louis XI. He believed himself under the special protection of the Virgin, although he had her painted with the features of his paramour, Julia Farnese. He never scrupled at false witness, adultery, or murder. See Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia, 294, 295. Jeremy Taylor thus describes the progress of sin in the sinner:“First it startles him, then it becomes pleasing, then delightful, then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed; then the man is impenitent, then obstinate, then resolved never to repent, then damned.”There is a state of utter insensibility to emotions of love or fear, and man by his sin may reach that state. The act of blasphemy is only the expression of a hardened or a hateful heart. B. H. Payne:“The calcium flame will char the steel wire so that it is no longer affected by the magnet.... As the blazing cinders and black curling smoke which the volcano spews from its rumbling throat are the accumulation of months and years, so the sin against the Holy Spirit is not a thoughtless expression in a moment of passion or rage, but the giving vent to a state of heart and mind abounding in the accumulations of weeks and months of opposition to the gospel.”Dr. J. P. Thompson:“The unpardonable sin is the knowing, wilful, persistent, contemptuous, malignant spurning of divine truth and grace, as manifested to the soul by the convincing and illuminating power of the Holy Ghost.”Dorner says that“therefore this sin does not belong to Old Testament times, or to the mere revelation of law. It implies the full revelation of the grace in Christ, and the conscious rejection of it by[pg 652]a soul to which the Spirit has made it manifest (Acts 17:30—‘The times of ignorance, therefore, God overlooked’;Rom. 3:25—‘the passing over of the sins done aforetime’).”But was it not under the Old Testament that God said:“My Spirit shall not strive with man forever”(Gen. 6:3), and“Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”(Hosea 4:17)? The sin against the Holy Ghost is a sin against grace, but it does not appear to be limited to New Testament times.It is still true that the unpardonable sin is a sin committed against the Holy Spirit rather than against Christ:Mat. 12:32—“whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come.”Jesus warns the Jews against it,—he does not say they had already committed it. They would seem to have committed it when, after Pentecost, they added to their rejection of Christ the rejection of the Holy Spirit's witness to Christ's resurrection. See Schaff, Sin against the Holy Ghost; Lemme, Sünde wider den Heiligen Geist; Davis, in Bap. Rev., 1862:317-326; Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, 283-289. On the general subject of kinds of sin and degrees of guilt, see Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:284, 298.
II. Guilt.1. Nature of guilt.By guilt we mean desert of punishment, or obligation to render satisfaction to God's justice for self-determined violation of law. There is a reaction of holiness against sin, which the Scripture denominates“the wrath of God”(Rom. 1:18). Sin is in us, either as act or state; God's punitive righteousness is over against the sinner, as something to be feared; guilt is a relation of the sinner to that righteousness, namely, the sinner's desert of punishment.Guilt is related to sin as the burnt spot to the blaze. Schiller, Die Braut von Messina:“Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht; Der Uebel grösstes aber ist die Schuld”—“Life is not the highest of possessions; the greatest of ills, however, is guilt.”Delitzsch:“Die Schamröthe ist die Abendröthe der untergegangenen Sonne der ursprünglichen Gerechtigkeit”—“The blush of shame is the evening red after the sun of original righteousness has gone down.”E. G. Robinson:“Pangs of conscience do not arise from the fear of penalty,—they are the penalty itself.”See chapter on Fig-leaves, in McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 142-154—“Spiritual shame for sin sought an outward symbol, and found it in the nakedness of the lower parts of the body.”The following remarks may serve both for proof and for explanation:A. Guilt is incurred only through self-determined transgression either on the part of man's nature or person. We are guilty only of that sin which we have originated or have had part in originating. Guilt is not, therefore, mere liability to punishment, without participation in the transgression for which the punishment is inflicted,—in other words, there is no such thing as constructive guilt under the divine government. We are accounted guilty only for what we have done, either personally or in our first parents, and for what we are, in consequence of such doing.Ez. 18:20—“the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father”—, as Calvin says (Com.in loco):“The son shall not bear the father's iniquity, since he shall receive the reward due to himself, and shall bear his own burden.... All are guilty through their own fault.... Every one perishes through his own iniquity.”In other words, the whole race fell in Adam,[pg 645]and is punished for its own sin in him, not for the sins of immediate ancestors, nor for the sin of Adam as a person foreign to us.John 9:3—“Neither did this man sin, nor his parents”(that he should be born blind)—Do not attribute to any special later sin what is a consequence of the sin of the race—the first sin which“brought death into the world, and all our woe.”Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:195-213.B. Guilt is an objective result of sin, and is not to be confounded with subjective pollution, or depravity. Every sin, whether of nature or person, is an offense against God (Ps. 51:4-6), an act or state of opposition to his will, which has for its effect God's personal wrath (Ps. 7:11; John 3:18, 36), and which must be expiated either by punishment or by atonement (Heb. 9:22). Not only does sin, as unlikeness to the divine purity, involvepollution,—it also, as antagonism to God's holy will, involvesguilt. This guilt, or obligation to satisfy the outraged holiness of God, is explained in the New Testament by the terms“debtor”and“debt”(Mat. 6:12; Luke 13:4; Mat. 5:21; Rom. 3:19; 6:23; Eph. 2:3). Since guilt, the objective result of sin, is entirely distinct from depravity, the subjective result, human nature may, as in Christ, have the guilt without the depravity (2 Cor. 5:21), or may, as in the Christian, have the depravity without the guilt (1 John 1:7, 8).Ps. 51:4-6—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight; That thou mayest be justified when thou speakest, And be clear when thou judgest”;7:11—“God is a righteous judge, Yea, a God that hath indignation every day”;John 3:18—“he that believeth not hath been judged already”;36—“he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him”;Heb. 9:22—“apart from shedding of blood there is no remission”;Mat. 6:12—“debts”;Luke 13:4—“offenders”(marg.“debtors”);Mat. 5:21—“shall be in danger of[exposed to]the judgment”;Rom. 3:19—“that ... all the world may be brought under the judgment of God”;6:23—“the wages of sin is death”—death is sin's desert;Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath”;2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf”;1 John 1:7, 8—“the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin.[Yet]If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”Sin brings in its train not only depravity but guilt, not onlymaculabutreatus. Scripture sets forth thepollutionof sin by its similies of“a cage of unclean birds”and of“wounds, bruises, and putrefying sores”; by leprosy and Levitical uncleanness, under the old dispensation; by death and the corruption of the grave, under both the old and the new. But Scripture sets forth theguiltof sin, with equal vividness, in the fear of Cain and in the remorse of Judas. The revulsion of God's holiness from sin, and its demand for satisfaction, are reflected in the shame and remorse of every awakened conscience. There is an instinctive feeling in the sinner's heart that sin will be punished, and ought to be punished. But the Holy Spirit makes this need of reparation so deeply felt that the soul has no rest until its debt is paid. The offending church member who is truly penitent loves the law and the church which excludes him, and would not think it faithful if it did not. So Jesus, when laden with the guilt of the race, pressed forward to the cross, saying:“I have a baptism to be baptised with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!”(Luke 12:50; Mark 10:32).All sin involves guilt, and the sinful soul itself demands penalty, so that all will ultimately go where they most desire to be. All the great masters in literature have recognized this. The inextinguishable thirst for reparation constitutes the very essence of tragedy. The Greek tragedians are full of it, and Shakespeare is its most impressive teacher: Measure for Measure, 5:1—“I am sorry that such sorrow I procure, And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart That I crave death more willingly than mercy; 'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it”; Cymbeline, 5:4—“and so, great Powers, If you will take this audit, take this life, And cancel these cold bonds!... Desired, more than constrained, to satisfy, ... take No stricter render of me than my all”; that is, settle the account with me by taking my life, for nothing less than that will pay my debt. And later writers follow Shakespeare. Marguerite, in Goethe's Faust, fainting in the great cathedral under the solemn reverberations of the Dies Iræ; Dimmesdale, in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, putting himself side by side with Hester Prynne, his victim, in her place of obloquy; Bulwer's Eugene Aram, coming forward, though unsuspected, to confess the murder he had committed, all these are illustrations of the[pg 646]inner impulse that moves even a sinful soul to satisfy the claims of justice upon it. See A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 215, 216. On Hawthorne, see Hutton, Essays, 2:370-416—“In the Scarlet Letter, the minister gains fresh reverence and popularity as the very fruit of the passionate anguish with which his heart is consumed. Frantic with the stings of unacknowledged guilt, he is yet taught by these very stings to understand the hearts and stir the consciences of others.”See also Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life.Nor are such scenes confined to the pages of romance. In a recent trial at Syracuse, Earl, the wife-murderer, thanked the jury that had convicted him; declared the verdict just; begged that no one would interfere to stay the course of justice; said that the greatest blessing that could be conferred on him would be to let him suffer the penalty of his crime. In Plattsburg, at the close of another trial in which the accused was a life-convict who had struck down a fellow-convict with an axe, the jury, after being out two hours, came in to ask the Judge to explain the difference between murder in the first and second degree. Suddenly the prisoner rose and said:“This was not a murder in the second degree. It was a deliberate and premeditated murder. I know that I have done wrong, that I ought to confess the truth, and that I ought to be hanged.”This left the jury nothing to do but render their verdict, and the Judge sentenced the murderer to be hanged, as he confessed he deserved to be. In 1891, Lars Ostendahl, the most famous preacher of Norway, startled his hearers by publicly confessing that he had been guilty of immorality, and that he could no longer retain his pastorate. He begged his people for the sake of Christ to forgive him and not to desert the poor in his asylums. He was not only preacher, but also head of a great philanthropic work.Such is the movement and demand of the enlightened conscience. The lack of conviction that crime ought to be punished is one of the most certain signs of moral decay in either the individual or the nation (Ps. 97:10—“Ye that love the Lord, hate evil”;149:6—“Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, And a two-edged sword in their hand”—to execute God's judgment upon iniquity).This relation of sin to God shows us how Christ is“made sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). Since Christ is the immanent God, he is also essential humanity, the universal man, the life of the race. All the nerves and sensibilities of humanity meet in him. He is the central brain to which and through which all ideas must pass. He is the central heart to which and through which all pains must be communicated. You cannot telephone to your friend across the town without first ringing up the central office. You cannot injure your neighbor without first injuring Christ. Each one of us can say of him:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4). Because of his central and all-inclusive humanity, Christ can feel all the pangs of shame and suffering which rightfully belong to sinners, but which they cannot feel, because their sin has stupefied and deadened them. The Messiah, if he be truly man, must be a suffering Messiah. For the very reason of his humanity he must bear in his own person all the guilt of humanity and must be“the Lamb of God who”takes, and so“takes away the sin of the world”(John 1:29).Guilt and depravity are not only distinguishable in thought,—they are also separable in fact. The convicted murderer might repent and become pure, yet he might still be under obligation to suffer the punishment of his crime. The Christian is freed from guilt (Rom. 8:1), but he is not yet freed from depravity (Rom. 7:23). Christ, on the other hand, was under obligation to suffer (Luke 24:26;Acts 3:18;26:23), while yet he was without sin (Heb. 7:26). In the book entitled Modern Religious Thought, 3-29, R. J. Campbell has an essay on The Atonement, with which, apart from its view as to the origin of moral evil in God, we are in substantial agreement. He holds that“to relieve men from their sense of guilt, objective atonement is necessary,”—we would say: to relieve men from guilt itself—the obligation to suffer.“If Christ be the eternal Son of God, that side of the divine nature which has gone forth in creation, if he contains humanity and is present in every article and act of human experience, then he is associated with the existence of the primordial evil.... He and only he can sever the entail between man and his responsibility for personal sin. Christ has notsinnedin man, but he takes responsibility for that experience of evil into which humanity is born, and the yielding to which constitutes sin. He goes forth to suffer, and actually does suffer, in man. The eternal Son in whom humanity is contained is therefore a sufferer since creation began. This mysterious passion of Deity must continue until redemption is consummated and humanity restored to God. Thus every consequence of human ill is felt in the experience of Christ. Thus Christ not only assumes the guilt but bears the punishment of every human soul.”We claim however that the necessity of this suffering lies, not in the needs of man, but in the holiness of God.[pg 647]C. Guilt, moreover, as an objective result of sin, is not to be confounded with the subjective consciousness of guilt (Lev. 5:17). In the condemnation of conscience, God's condemnation partially and prophetically manifests itself (1 John 3:20). But guilt is primarily a relation to God, and only secondarily a relation to conscience. Progress in sin is marked by diminished sensitiveness of moral insight and feeling. As“the greatest of sins is to be conscious of none,”so guilt may be great, just in proportion to the absence of consciousness of it (Ps. 19:12; 51:6; Eph. 4:18, 19—ἀπηλγηκότες). There is no evidence, however, that the voice of conscience can be completely or finally silenced. The time for repentance may pass, but not the time for remorse. Progress in holiness, on the other hand, is marked by increasing apprehension of the depth and extent of our sinfulness, while with this apprehension is combined, in a normal Christian experience, the assurance that the guilt of our sin has been taken, and taken away, by Christ (John 1:29).Lev. 5:17—“And if any one sin, and do any of the things which Jehovah hath commanded not to be done; though he knew it not, yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity”;1 John 3:20—“because if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things”;Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”;51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom”;Eph. 4:18, 19—“darkened in their understanding ... being past feeling”;John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away[marg.“beareth”]the sin of the world.”Plato, Republic, 1:330—“When death approaches, cares and alarms awake, especially the fear of hell and its punishments.”Cicero, De Divin., 1:30—“Then comes remorse for evil deeds.”Persius, Satire 3—“His vice benumbs him; his fibre has become fat; he is conscious of no fault; he knows not the loss he suffers; he is so far sunk, that there is not even a bubble on the surface of the deep.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:1—“Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all”; 4:5—“To my sick soul, as sin's true nature is, Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss; So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt”; Richard III, 5:3—“O coward conscience, how thou dost afflict me!... My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain”; Tempest, 3:3—“All three of them are desperate; their great guilt, Like poison given to work a great time after, Now 'gins to bite the spirits”; Ant. and Cleop., 3:9—“When we in our viciousness grow hard (O misery on't!) the wise gods seel our eyes; In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us Adore our errors; laugh at us, while we strut To our confusion.”Dr. Shedd said once to a graduating class of young theologians:“Would that upon the naked, palpitating heart of each one of you might be laid one redhot coal of God Almighty's wrath!”Yes, we add, if only that redhot coal might be quenched by one red drop of Christ's atoning blood. Dr. H. E. Robins:“To the convicted sinner a merely external hell would be a cooling flame, compared with the agony of his remorse.”John Milton represents Satan as saying:“Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.”James Martineau, Life by Jackson, 190—“It is of the essence of guilty declension to administer its own anæsthetics.”But this deadening of conscience cannot last always. Conscience is a mirror of God's holiness. We may cover the mirror with the veil of this world's diversions and deceits. When the veil is removed, and conscience again reflects the sunlike purity of God's demands, we are visited with self-loathing and self-contempt. John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 2:25—“Though it may cast off every other vestige of its divine origin, our nature retains at least this one terrible prerogative of it, the capacity of preying on itself.”Lyttelton in Lux Mundi, 277—“The common fallacy that a self-indulgent sinner is no one's enemy but his own would, were it true, involve the further inference that such a sinner would not feel himself guilty.”If any dislike the doctrine of guilt, let them remember that without wrath there is no pardon, without guilt no forgiveness. See, on the nature of guilt, Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:193-267; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 208-209; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:346; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 461-473; Delitzsch, Bib. Psychologie, 121-148; Thornwell, Theology, 1:400-424.[pg 648]2. Degrees of guilt.The Scriptures recognize different degrees of guilt as attaching to different kinds of sin. The variety of sacrifices under the Mosaic law, and the variety of awards in the judgment, are to be explained upon this principle.Luke 12:47, 48—“shall be beaten with many stripes ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;Rom. 2:6—“who will render to every man according to his works.”See alsoJohn 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Heb. 2:2, 3—if“every transgression ... received a just recompense of reward; how shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”10:28, 29—“A man that hath set at nought Moses' law dieth without compassion on the word of two or three witnesses: of how much sorer punishment, think ye, shall he be judged worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God?”Casuistry, however, has drawn many distinctions which lack Scriptural foundation. Such is the distinction between venial sins and mortal sins in the Roman Catholic Church,—every sin unpardoned being mortal, and all sins being venial, since Christ has died for all. Nor is the common distinction between sins of omission and sins of commission more valid, since the very omission is an act of commission.Mat. 25:45—“Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least”;James 4:17—“To him therefore that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”John Ruskin:“The condemnation given from the Judgment Throne—most solemnly described—is for all the‘undones’and not the‘dones.’People are perpetually afraid of doing wrong; but unless they are doing its reverse energetically, theydo it all day long, and the degree does not matter.”The Roman Catholic Church proceeds upon the supposition that she can determine the precise malignity of every offence, and assign its proper penance at the confessional. Thornwell, Theology, 1:424-441, says that“all sins are venial but one—for there is a sin against the Holy Ghost,”yet“not one is venial in itself—for the least proceeds from an apostate state and nature.”We shall see, however, that the hindrance to pardon, in the case of the sin against the Holy Spirit, is subjective rather than objective.J. Spencer Kennard:“Roman Catholicism in Italy presents the spectacle of the authoritative representatives and teachers of morals and religion themselves living in all forms of deceit, corruption, and tyranny; and, on the other hand, discriminating between venial and mortal sin, classing as venial sins lying, fraud, fornication, marital infidelity, and even murder, all of which may be atoned for and forgiven or even permitted by the mere payment of money; and at the same time classing as mortal sins disrespect and disobedience to the church.”The following distinctions are indicated in Scripture as involving different degrees of guilt:A. Sin of nature, and personal transgression.Sin of nature involves guilt, yet there is greater guilt when this sin of nature reasserts itself in personal transgression; for, while this latter includes in itself the former, it also adds to the former a new element, namely, the conscious exercise of the individual and personal will, by virtue of which a new decision is made against God, special evil habit is induced, and the total condition of the soul is made more depraved. Although we have emphasized the guilt of inborn sin, because this truth is most contested, it is to be remembered that men reach a conviction of their native depravity only through a conviction of their personal transgressions. For this reason, by far the larger part of our preaching upon sin should consist in applications of the law of God to the acts and dispositions of men's lives.Mat. 19:14—“to such belongeth the kingdom of heaven”—relative innocence of childhood;23:32—“Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers”—personal transgression added to inherited depravity. In preaching, we should first treat individual transgressions, and thence proceed to[pg 649]heart-sin, and race-sin. Man is not wholly a spontaneous development of inborn tendencies, a manifestation of original sin. Motives do notdeterminebut theypersuadethe will, and every man is guilty of conscious personal transgressions which may, with the help of the Holy Spirit, be brought under the condemning judgment of conscience. Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 169-174—“Original sin does not do away with the significance of personal transgression. Adam was pardoned: but some of his descendants are unpardonable. The second death is referred, in Scripture, to our own personal guilt.”This is not to say that original sin does not involve as great sin as that of Adam in the first transgression, for original sinisthe sin of the first transgression; it is only to say that personal transgression is original sinplusthe conscious ratification of Adam's act by the individual.“We are guilty for what weare, as much as for what wedo. Oursinis not simply the sum total of all oursins. There is asinfulnesswhich is the common denominator of all our sins.”It is customary to speak lightly of original sin, as if personal sins were all for which man is accountable. But it is only in the light of original sin that personal sins can be explained.Prov. 14:9, marg.—“Fools make a mock at sin.”Simon, Reconciliation, 122—“The sinfulness of individual men varies; the sinfulness of humanity is a constant quantity.”Robert Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies:“Man lumps his kind i' the mass. God singles thence unit by unit. Thou and God exist—So think! for certain: Think the mass—mankind—Disparts, disperses, leaves thyself alone! Ask thy lone soul what laws are plain to thee,—Thou and no other, stand or fall by them! That is the part for thee.”B. Sins of ignorance, and sins of knowledge.Here guilt is measured by the degree of light possessed, or in other words, by the opportunities of knowledge men have enjoyed, and the powers with which they have been naturally endowed. Genius and privilege increase responsibility. The heathen are guilty, but those to whom the oracles of God have been committed are more guilty than they.Mat 10:15—“more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city”;Luke 12:47, 48—“that servant, who knew his Lord's will ... shall be beaten with many stripes; but he that knew not ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;23:34—“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”—complete knowledge would put them beyond the reach of forgiveness.John 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Acts 17:30—“The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked”;Rom. 1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent with them that practise them”;2:12—“For as many as have sinned without the law shall also perish without the law: and as many as have sinned under the law shall be judged by the law”;1 Tim. 1:13, 15, 16—“I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.”Is. 42:19—“Who is blind ... as Jehovah's servant?”It was the Pharisees whom Jesus warned of the sin against the Holy Spirit. The guilt of the crucifixion rested on Jews rather than on Gentiles. Apostate Israel was more guilty than the pagans. The greatest sinners of the present day may be in Christendom, not in heathendom. Satan was an archangel; Judas was an apostle; Alexander Borgia was a pope. Jackson, James Martineau, 362—“Corruptio optimi pessima est, as seen in a drunken Webster, a treacherous Bacon, a licentious Goethe.”Sir Roger de Coverley observed that none but men of fine parts deserve to be hanged. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 317—“The greater sin often involves the lesser guilt; the lesser sin the greater guilt.”Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, 227 (Pope, 1975)—“There's a new tribunal now Higher than God's,—the educated man's! Nice sense of honor in the human breast Supersedes here the old coarse oracle!”Dr. H. E. Robins holds that“palliation of guilt according to light is not possible under a system of pure law, and is possible only because the probation of the sinner is a probation of grace.”C. Sins of infirmity, and sins of presumption.Here the guilt is measured by the energy of the evil will. Sin may be known to be sin, yet may be committed in haste or weakness. Though haste and weakness constitute a palliation of the offence which springs therefrom, yet they are themselves sins, as revealing an unbelieving and disordered heart. But of far greater guilt are those presumptuous choices of evil in which not weakness, but strength of will, is manifest.[pg 650]Ps. 19:12, 13—“Clear thou me from hidden faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins”;Is. 5:18—“Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of falsehood, and sin as it were with a cart-rope”—not led away insensibly by sin, but earnestly, perseveringly, and wilfully working away at it;Gal. 6:1—“overtaken in any trespass”;1 Tim. 5:24—“Some men's sins are evident, going before unto judgment; and some men also they follow after”—some men's sins are so open, that they act as officers to bring to justice those who commit them; whilst others require after-proof (An. Par. Bible). Luther represents one of the former class as saying to himself:“Esto peccator, et pecca fortiter.”On sins of passion and of reflection, see Bittinger, in Princeton Rev., 1873:219.Micah 7:3, marg.—“Both hands are put forth for evil, to do it diligently.”So we ought to do good.“My art is my life,”said Grisi, the prima donna of the opera,“I save myself all day for that one bound upon the stage.”H. Bonar:“Sin worketh,—Let me work too. Busy as sin, my work I ply, Till I rest in the rest of eternity.”German criminal law distinguishes between intentional homicide without deliberation, and intentional homicide with deliberation. There are three grades of sin: 1. Sins of ignorance, like Paul's persecuting; 2. sins of infirmity, like Peter's denial; 3. sins of presumption, like David's murder of Uriah. Sins of presumption were unpardonable under the Jewish law; they are not unpardonable under Christ.D. Sin of incomplete, and sin of final, obduracy.Here the guilt is measured, not by the objective sufficiency or insufficiency of divine grace, but by the degree of unreceptiveness into which sin has brought the soul. As the only sin unto death which is described in Scripture is the sin against the Holy Spirit, we here consider the nature of that sin.Mat 12:31—“Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven”;32—“And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come”;Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”;1 John 5:16, 17—“If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and God will give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin into death: not concerning this do I say that he should make request. All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death”;Heb. 10:26—“if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, then remaineth no more a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries.”Ritschl holds all sin that comes short of definitive rejection of Christ to be ignorance rather than sin, and to be the object of no condemning sentence. This is to make the sin against the Holy Spirit the only real sin. Conscience and Scripture alike contradict this view. There is much incipient hardening of the heart that precedes the sin of final obduracy. See Denney, Studies in Theology, 80. The composure of the criminal is not always a sign of innocence. S. S. Times, April 12, 1902:200—“Sensitiveness of conscience and of feeling, and responsiveness of countenance and bearing, are to be retained by purity of life and freedom from transgression. On the other hand composure of countenance and calmness under suspicion and accusation are likely to be a result of continuance in wrong doing, with consequent hardening of the whole moral nature.”Weismann, Heredity, 2:8—“As soon as any organ falls into disuse, it degenerates, and finally is lost altogether.... In parasites the organs of sense degenerate.”Marconi's wireless telegraphy requires an attuned“receiver.”The“transmitter”sends out countless rays into space: only one capable of corresponding vibrations can understand them. The sinner may so destroy his receptivity, that the whole universe may be uttering God's truth, yet he be unable to hear a word of it. The Outlook:“If a man should put out his eyes, he could not see—nothing could make him see. So if a man should by obstinate wickedness destroy his power to believe in God's forgiveness, he would be in a hopeless state. Though God would still be gracious, the man could not see it, and so could not take God's forgiveness to himself.”The sin against the Holy Spirit is not to be regarded simply as an isolated act, but also as the external symptom of a heart so radically and finally set against God that no power which God can consistently use will ever save it. This sin, therefore, can be only the culmination of a long course of self-hardening and self-depraving. He who has committed it must be[pg 651]either profoundly indifferent to his own condition, or actively and bitterly hostile to God; so that anxiety or fear on account of one's condition is evidence that it has not been committed. The sin against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven, simply because the soul that has committed it has ceased to be receptive of divine influences, even when those influences are exerted in the utmost strength which God has seen fit to employ in his spiritual administration.The commission of this sin is marked by a loss of spiritual sight; the blind fish of the Mammoth Cave left light for darkness, and so in time lost their eyes. It is marked by a loss of religious sensibility; the sensitive-plant loses Its sensitiveness, in proportion to the frequency with which it is touched. It is marked by a loss of power to will the good;“the lava hardens after it has broken from the crater, and in that state cannot return to its source”(Van Oosterzee). The same writer also remarks (Dogmatics, 2:438):“Herod Antipas, after earlier doubt and slavishness, reached such deadness as to be able to mock the Savior, at the mention of whose name he had not long before trembled.”Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:425—“It is not that divine grace is absolutely refused to any one who in true penitence asks forgiveness of this sin; but he who commits it never fulfills the subjective conditions upon which forgiveness is possible, because the aggravation of sin to this ultimatum destroys in him all susceptibility of repentance. The way of return to God is closed against no one who does not close it against himself.”Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 97-120, illustrates the downward progress of the sinner by the law of degeneration in the vegetable and animal world: pigeons, roses, strawberries, all tend to revert to the primitive and wild type.“How shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”(Heb.2:3).Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3:5—“You all know security Is mortals' chiefest enemy.”Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, 90-124—“Richard III is the ideal villain. Villainy has become an end in itself. Richard is an artist in villainy. He lacks the emotions naturally attending crime. He regards villainy with the intellectual enthusiasm of the artist. His villainy is ideal in its success. There is a fascination of irresistibility in him. He is imperturbable in his crime. There is no effort, but rather humor, in it; a recklessness which suggests boundless resources; an inspiration which excludes calculation. Shakespeare relieves the representation from the charge of monstrosity by turning all this villainous history into the unconscious development of Nemesis.”See also A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 188-193. Robert Browning's Guido, in The Ring and the Book, is an example of pure hatred of the good. Guido hates Pompilia for her goodness, and declares that, if he catches her in the next world, he will murder her there, as he murdered her here.Alexander VI, the father of Cæsar and Lucrezia Borgia, the pope of cruelty and lust, wore yet to the day of his death the look of unfailing joyousness and geniality, yes, of even retiring sensitiveness and modesty. No fear or reproach of conscience seemed to throw gloom over his life, as in the cases of Tiberius and Louis XI. He believed himself under the special protection of the Virgin, although he had her painted with the features of his paramour, Julia Farnese. He never scrupled at false witness, adultery, or murder. See Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia, 294, 295. Jeremy Taylor thus describes the progress of sin in the sinner:“First it startles him, then it becomes pleasing, then delightful, then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed; then the man is impenitent, then obstinate, then resolved never to repent, then damned.”There is a state of utter insensibility to emotions of love or fear, and man by his sin may reach that state. The act of blasphemy is only the expression of a hardened or a hateful heart. B. H. Payne:“The calcium flame will char the steel wire so that it is no longer affected by the magnet.... As the blazing cinders and black curling smoke which the volcano spews from its rumbling throat are the accumulation of months and years, so the sin against the Holy Spirit is not a thoughtless expression in a moment of passion or rage, but the giving vent to a state of heart and mind abounding in the accumulations of weeks and months of opposition to the gospel.”Dr. J. P. Thompson:“The unpardonable sin is the knowing, wilful, persistent, contemptuous, malignant spurning of divine truth and grace, as manifested to the soul by the convincing and illuminating power of the Holy Ghost.”Dorner says that“therefore this sin does not belong to Old Testament times, or to the mere revelation of law. It implies the full revelation of the grace in Christ, and the conscious rejection of it by[pg 652]a soul to which the Spirit has made it manifest (Acts 17:30—‘The times of ignorance, therefore, God overlooked’;Rom. 3:25—‘the passing over of the sins done aforetime’).”But was it not under the Old Testament that God said:“My Spirit shall not strive with man forever”(Gen. 6:3), and“Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”(Hosea 4:17)? The sin against the Holy Ghost is a sin against grace, but it does not appear to be limited to New Testament times.It is still true that the unpardonable sin is a sin committed against the Holy Spirit rather than against Christ:Mat. 12:32—“whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come.”Jesus warns the Jews against it,—he does not say they had already committed it. They would seem to have committed it when, after Pentecost, they added to their rejection of Christ the rejection of the Holy Spirit's witness to Christ's resurrection. See Schaff, Sin against the Holy Ghost; Lemme, Sünde wider den Heiligen Geist; Davis, in Bap. Rev., 1862:317-326; Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, 283-289. On the general subject of kinds of sin and degrees of guilt, see Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:284, 298.
II. Guilt.1. Nature of guilt.By guilt we mean desert of punishment, or obligation to render satisfaction to God's justice for self-determined violation of law. There is a reaction of holiness against sin, which the Scripture denominates“the wrath of God”(Rom. 1:18). Sin is in us, either as act or state; God's punitive righteousness is over against the sinner, as something to be feared; guilt is a relation of the sinner to that righteousness, namely, the sinner's desert of punishment.Guilt is related to sin as the burnt spot to the blaze. Schiller, Die Braut von Messina:“Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht; Der Uebel grösstes aber ist die Schuld”—“Life is not the highest of possessions; the greatest of ills, however, is guilt.”Delitzsch:“Die Schamröthe ist die Abendröthe der untergegangenen Sonne der ursprünglichen Gerechtigkeit”—“The blush of shame is the evening red after the sun of original righteousness has gone down.”E. G. Robinson:“Pangs of conscience do not arise from the fear of penalty,—they are the penalty itself.”See chapter on Fig-leaves, in McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 142-154—“Spiritual shame for sin sought an outward symbol, and found it in the nakedness of the lower parts of the body.”The following remarks may serve both for proof and for explanation:A. Guilt is incurred only through self-determined transgression either on the part of man's nature or person. We are guilty only of that sin which we have originated or have had part in originating. Guilt is not, therefore, mere liability to punishment, without participation in the transgression for which the punishment is inflicted,—in other words, there is no such thing as constructive guilt under the divine government. We are accounted guilty only for what we have done, either personally or in our first parents, and for what we are, in consequence of such doing.Ez. 18:20—“the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father”—, as Calvin says (Com.in loco):“The son shall not bear the father's iniquity, since he shall receive the reward due to himself, and shall bear his own burden.... All are guilty through their own fault.... Every one perishes through his own iniquity.”In other words, the whole race fell in Adam,[pg 645]and is punished for its own sin in him, not for the sins of immediate ancestors, nor for the sin of Adam as a person foreign to us.John 9:3—“Neither did this man sin, nor his parents”(that he should be born blind)—Do not attribute to any special later sin what is a consequence of the sin of the race—the first sin which“brought death into the world, and all our woe.”Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:195-213.B. Guilt is an objective result of sin, and is not to be confounded with subjective pollution, or depravity. Every sin, whether of nature or person, is an offense against God (Ps. 51:4-6), an act or state of opposition to his will, which has for its effect God's personal wrath (Ps. 7:11; John 3:18, 36), and which must be expiated either by punishment or by atonement (Heb. 9:22). Not only does sin, as unlikeness to the divine purity, involvepollution,—it also, as antagonism to God's holy will, involvesguilt. This guilt, or obligation to satisfy the outraged holiness of God, is explained in the New Testament by the terms“debtor”and“debt”(Mat. 6:12; Luke 13:4; Mat. 5:21; Rom. 3:19; 6:23; Eph. 2:3). Since guilt, the objective result of sin, is entirely distinct from depravity, the subjective result, human nature may, as in Christ, have the guilt without the depravity (2 Cor. 5:21), or may, as in the Christian, have the depravity without the guilt (1 John 1:7, 8).Ps. 51:4-6—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight; That thou mayest be justified when thou speakest, And be clear when thou judgest”;7:11—“God is a righteous judge, Yea, a God that hath indignation every day”;John 3:18—“he that believeth not hath been judged already”;36—“he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him”;Heb. 9:22—“apart from shedding of blood there is no remission”;Mat. 6:12—“debts”;Luke 13:4—“offenders”(marg.“debtors”);Mat. 5:21—“shall be in danger of[exposed to]the judgment”;Rom. 3:19—“that ... all the world may be brought under the judgment of God”;6:23—“the wages of sin is death”—death is sin's desert;Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath”;2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf”;1 John 1:7, 8—“the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin.[Yet]If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”Sin brings in its train not only depravity but guilt, not onlymaculabutreatus. Scripture sets forth thepollutionof sin by its similies of“a cage of unclean birds”and of“wounds, bruises, and putrefying sores”; by leprosy and Levitical uncleanness, under the old dispensation; by death and the corruption of the grave, under both the old and the new. But Scripture sets forth theguiltof sin, with equal vividness, in the fear of Cain and in the remorse of Judas. The revulsion of God's holiness from sin, and its demand for satisfaction, are reflected in the shame and remorse of every awakened conscience. There is an instinctive feeling in the sinner's heart that sin will be punished, and ought to be punished. But the Holy Spirit makes this need of reparation so deeply felt that the soul has no rest until its debt is paid. The offending church member who is truly penitent loves the law and the church which excludes him, and would not think it faithful if it did not. So Jesus, when laden with the guilt of the race, pressed forward to the cross, saying:“I have a baptism to be baptised with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!”(Luke 12:50; Mark 10:32).All sin involves guilt, and the sinful soul itself demands penalty, so that all will ultimately go where they most desire to be. All the great masters in literature have recognized this. The inextinguishable thirst for reparation constitutes the very essence of tragedy. The Greek tragedians are full of it, and Shakespeare is its most impressive teacher: Measure for Measure, 5:1—“I am sorry that such sorrow I procure, And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart That I crave death more willingly than mercy; 'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it”; Cymbeline, 5:4—“and so, great Powers, If you will take this audit, take this life, And cancel these cold bonds!... Desired, more than constrained, to satisfy, ... take No stricter render of me than my all”; that is, settle the account with me by taking my life, for nothing less than that will pay my debt. And later writers follow Shakespeare. Marguerite, in Goethe's Faust, fainting in the great cathedral under the solemn reverberations of the Dies Iræ; Dimmesdale, in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, putting himself side by side with Hester Prynne, his victim, in her place of obloquy; Bulwer's Eugene Aram, coming forward, though unsuspected, to confess the murder he had committed, all these are illustrations of the[pg 646]inner impulse that moves even a sinful soul to satisfy the claims of justice upon it. See A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 215, 216. On Hawthorne, see Hutton, Essays, 2:370-416—“In the Scarlet Letter, the minister gains fresh reverence and popularity as the very fruit of the passionate anguish with which his heart is consumed. Frantic with the stings of unacknowledged guilt, he is yet taught by these very stings to understand the hearts and stir the consciences of others.”See also Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life.Nor are such scenes confined to the pages of romance. In a recent trial at Syracuse, Earl, the wife-murderer, thanked the jury that had convicted him; declared the verdict just; begged that no one would interfere to stay the course of justice; said that the greatest blessing that could be conferred on him would be to let him suffer the penalty of his crime. In Plattsburg, at the close of another trial in which the accused was a life-convict who had struck down a fellow-convict with an axe, the jury, after being out two hours, came in to ask the Judge to explain the difference between murder in the first and second degree. Suddenly the prisoner rose and said:“This was not a murder in the second degree. It was a deliberate and premeditated murder. I know that I have done wrong, that I ought to confess the truth, and that I ought to be hanged.”This left the jury nothing to do but render their verdict, and the Judge sentenced the murderer to be hanged, as he confessed he deserved to be. In 1891, Lars Ostendahl, the most famous preacher of Norway, startled his hearers by publicly confessing that he had been guilty of immorality, and that he could no longer retain his pastorate. He begged his people for the sake of Christ to forgive him and not to desert the poor in his asylums. He was not only preacher, but also head of a great philanthropic work.Such is the movement and demand of the enlightened conscience. The lack of conviction that crime ought to be punished is one of the most certain signs of moral decay in either the individual or the nation (Ps. 97:10—“Ye that love the Lord, hate evil”;149:6—“Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, And a two-edged sword in their hand”—to execute God's judgment upon iniquity).This relation of sin to God shows us how Christ is“made sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). Since Christ is the immanent God, he is also essential humanity, the universal man, the life of the race. All the nerves and sensibilities of humanity meet in him. He is the central brain to which and through which all ideas must pass. He is the central heart to which and through which all pains must be communicated. You cannot telephone to your friend across the town without first ringing up the central office. You cannot injure your neighbor without first injuring Christ. Each one of us can say of him:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4). Because of his central and all-inclusive humanity, Christ can feel all the pangs of shame and suffering which rightfully belong to sinners, but which they cannot feel, because their sin has stupefied and deadened them. The Messiah, if he be truly man, must be a suffering Messiah. For the very reason of his humanity he must bear in his own person all the guilt of humanity and must be“the Lamb of God who”takes, and so“takes away the sin of the world”(John 1:29).Guilt and depravity are not only distinguishable in thought,—they are also separable in fact. The convicted murderer might repent and become pure, yet he might still be under obligation to suffer the punishment of his crime. The Christian is freed from guilt (Rom. 8:1), but he is not yet freed from depravity (Rom. 7:23). Christ, on the other hand, was under obligation to suffer (Luke 24:26;Acts 3:18;26:23), while yet he was without sin (Heb. 7:26). In the book entitled Modern Religious Thought, 3-29, R. J. Campbell has an essay on The Atonement, with which, apart from its view as to the origin of moral evil in God, we are in substantial agreement. He holds that“to relieve men from their sense of guilt, objective atonement is necessary,”—we would say: to relieve men from guilt itself—the obligation to suffer.“If Christ be the eternal Son of God, that side of the divine nature which has gone forth in creation, if he contains humanity and is present in every article and act of human experience, then he is associated with the existence of the primordial evil.... He and only he can sever the entail between man and his responsibility for personal sin. Christ has notsinnedin man, but he takes responsibility for that experience of evil into which humanity is born, and the yielding to which constitutes sin. He goes forth to suffer, and actually does suffer, in man. The eternal Son in whom humanity is contained is therefore a sufferer since creation began. This mysterious passion of Deity must continue until redemption is consummated and humanity restored to God. Thus every consequence of human ill is felt in the experience of Christ. Thus Christ not only assumes the guilt but bears the punishment of every human soul.”We claim however that the necessity of this suffering lies, not in the needs of man, but in the holiness of God.[pg 647]C. Guilt, moreover, as an objective result of sin, is not to be confounded with the subjective consciousness of guilt (Lev. 5:17). In the condemnation of conscience, God's condemnation partially and prophetically manifests itself (1 John 3:20). But guilt is primarily a relation to God, and only secondarily a relation to conscience. Progress in sin is marked by diminished sensitiveness of moral insight and feeling. As“the greatest of sins is to be conscious of none,”so guilt may be great, just in proportion to the absence of consciousness of it (Ps. 19:12; 51:6; Eph. 4:18, 19—ἀπηλγηκότες). There is no evidence, however, that the voice of conscience can be completely or finally silenced. The time for repentance may pass, but not the time for remorse. Progress in holiness, on the other hand, is marked by increasing apprehension of the depth and extent of our sinfulness, while with this apprehension is combined, in a normal Christian experience, the assurance that the guilt of our sin has been taken, and taken away, by Christ (John 1:29).Lev. 5:17—“And if any one sin, and do any of the things which Jehovah hath commanded not to be done; though he knew it not, yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity”;1 John 3:20—“because if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things”;Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”;51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom”;Eph. 4:18, 19—“darkened in their understanding ... being past feeling”;John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away[marg.“beareth”]the sin of the world.”Plato, Republic, 1:330—“When death approaches, cares and alarms awake, especially the fear of hell and its punishments.”Cicero, De Divin., 1:30—“Then comes remorse for evil deeds.”Persius, Satire 3—“His vice benumbs him; his fibre has become fat; he is conscious of no fault; he knows not the loss he suffers; he is so far sunk, that there is not even a bubble on the surface of the deep.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:1—“Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all”; 4:5—“To my sick soul, as sin's true nature is, Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss; So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt”; Richard III, 5:3—“O coward conscience, how thou dost afflict me!... My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain”; Tempest, 3:3—“All three of them are desperate; their great guilt, Like poison given to work a great time after, Now 'gins to bite the spirits”; Ant. and Cleop., 3:9—“When we in our viciousness grow hard (O misery on't!) the wise gods seel our eyes; In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us Adore our errors; laugh at us, while we strut To our confusion.”Dr. Shedd said once to a graduating class of young theologians:“Would that upon the naked, palpitating heart of each one of you might be laid one redhot coal of God Almighty's wrath!”Yes, we add, if only that redhot coal might be quenched by one red drop of Christ's atoning blood. Dr. H. E. Robins:“To the convicted sinner a merely external hell would be a cooling flame, compared with the agony of his remorse.”John Milton represents Satan as saying:“Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.”James Martineau, Life by Jackson, 190—“It is of the essence of guilty declension to administer its own anæsthetics.”But this deadening of conscience cannot last always. Conscience is a mirror of God's holiness. We may cover the mirror with the veil of this world's diversions and deceits. When the veil is removed, and conscience again reflects the sunlike purity of God's demands, we are visited with self-loathing and self-contempt. John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 2:25—“Though it may cast off every other vestige of its divine origin, our nature retains at least this one terrible prerogative of it, the capacity of preying on itself.”Lyttelton in Lux Mundi, 277—“The common fallacy that a self-indulgent sinner is no one's enemy but his own would, were it true, involve the further inference that such a sinner would not feel himself guilty.”If any dislike the doctrine of guilt, let them remember that without wrath there is no pardon, without guilt no forgiveness. See, on the nature of guilt, Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:193-267; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 208-209; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:346; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 461-473; Delitzsch, Bib. Psychologie, 121-148; Thornwell, Theology, 1:400-424.[pg 648]2. Degrees of guilt.The Scriptures recognize different degrees of guilt as attaching to different kinds of sin. The variety of sacrifices under the Mosaic law, and the variety of awards in the judgment, are to be explained upon this principle.Luke 12:47, 48—“shall be beaten with many stripes ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;Rom. 2:6—“who will render to every man according to his works.”See alsoJohn 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Heb. 2:2, 3—if“every transgression ... received a just recompense of reward; how shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”10:28, 29—“A man that hath set at nought Moses' law dieth without compassion on the word of two or three witnesses: of how much sorer punishment, think ye, shall he be judged worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God?”Casuistry, however, has drawn many distinctions which lack Scriptural foundation. Such is the distinction between venial sins and mortal sins in the Roman Catholic Church,—every sin unpardoned being mortal, and all sins being venial, since Christ has died for all. Nor is the common distinction between sins of omission and sins of commission more valid, since the very omission is an act of commission.Mat. 25:45—“Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least”;James 4:17—“To him therefore that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”John Ruskin:“The condemnation given from the Judgment Throne—most solemnly described—is for all the‘undones’and not the‘dones.’People are perpetually afraid of doing wrong; but unless they are doing its reverse energetically, theydo it all day long, and the degree does not matter.”The Roman Catholic Church proceeds upon the supposition that she can determine the precise malignity of every offence, and assign its proper penance at the confessional. Thornwell, Theology, 1:424-441, says that“all sins are venial but one—for there is a sin against the Holy Ghost,”yet“not one is venial in itself—for the least proceeds from an apostate state and nature.”We shall see, however, that the hindrance to pardon, in the case of the sin against the Holy Spirit, is subjective rather than objective.J. Spencer Kennard:“Roman Catholicism in Italy presents the spectacle of the authoritative representatives and teachers of morals and religion themselves living in all forms of deceit, corruption, and tyranny; and, on the other hand, discriminating between venial and mortal sin, classing as venial sins lying, fraud, fornication, marital infidelity, and even murder, all of which may be atoned for and forgiven or even permitted by the mere payment of money; and at the same time classing as mortal sins disrespect and disobedience to the church.”The following distinctions are indicated in Scripture as involving different degrees of guilt:A. Sin of nature, and personal transgression.Sin of nature involves guilt, yet there is greater guilt when this sin of nature reasserts itself in personal transgression; for, while this latter includes in itself the former, it also adds to the former a new element, namely, the conscious exercise of the individual and personal will, by virtue of which a new decision is made against God, special evil habit is induced, and the total condition of the soul is made more depraved. Although we have emphasized the guilt of inborn sin, because this truth is most contested, it is to be remembered that men reach a conviction of their native depravity only through a conviction of their personal transgressions. For this reason, by far the larger part of our preaching upon sin should consist in applications of the law of God to the acts and dispositions of men's lives.Mat. 19:14—“to such belongeth the kingdom of heaven”—relative innocence of childhood;23:32—“Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers”—personal transgression added to inherited depravity. In preaching, we should first treat individual transgressions, and thence proceed to[pg 649]heart-sin, and race-sin. Man is not wholly a spontaneous development of inborn tendencies, a manifestation of original sin. Motives do notdeterminebut theypersuadethe will, and every man is guilty of conscious personal transgressions which may, with the help of the Holy Spirit, be brought under the condemning judgment of conscience. Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 169-174—“Original sin does not do away with the significance of personal transgression. Adam was pardoned: but some of his descendants are unpardonable. The second death is referred, in Scripture, to our own personal guilt.”This is not to say that original sin does not involve as great sin as that of Adam in the first transgression, for original sinisthe sin of the first transgression; it is only to say that personal transgression is original sinplusthe conscious ratification of Adam's act by the individual.“We are guilty for what weare, as much as for what wedo. Oursinis not simply the sum total of all oursins. There is asinfulnesswhich is the common denominator of all our sins.”It is customary to speak lightly of original sin, as if personal sins were all for which man is accountable. But it is only in the light of original sin that personal sins can be explained.Prov. 14:9, marg.—“Fools make a mock at sin.”Simon, Reconciliation, 122—“The sinfulness of individual men varies; the sinfulness of humanity is a constant quantity.”Robert Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies:“Man lumps his kind i' the mass. God singles thence unit by unit. Thou and God exist—So think! for certain: Think the mass—mankind—Disparts, disperses, leaves thyself alone! Ask thy lone soul what laws are plain to thee,—Thou and no other, stand or fall by them! That is the part for thee.”B. Sins of ignorance, and sins of knowledge.Here guilt is measured by the degree of light possessed, or in other words, by the opportunities of knowledge men have enjoyed, and the powers with which they have been naturally endowed. Genius and privilege increase responsibility. The heathen are guilty, but those to whom the oracles of God have been committed are more guilty than they.Mat 10:15—“more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city”;Luke 12:47, 48—“that servant, who knew his Lord's will ... shall be beaten with many stripes; but he that knew not ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;23:34—“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”—complete knowledge would put them beyond the reach of forgiveness.John 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Acts 17:30—“The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked”;Rom. 1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent with them that practise them”;2:12—“For as many as have sinned without the law shall also perish without the law: and as many as have sinned under the law shall be judged by the law”;1 Tim. 1:13, 15, 16—“I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.”Is. 42:19—“Who is blind ... as Jehovah's servant?”It was the Pharisees whom Jesus warned of the sin against the Holy Spirit. The guilt of the crucifixion rested on Jews rather than on Gentiles. Apostate Israel was more guilty than the pagans. The greatest sinners of the present day may be in Christendom, not in heathendom. Satan was an archangel; Judas was an apostle; Alexander Borgia was a pope. Jackson, James Martineau, 362—“Corruptio optimi pessima est, as seen in a drunken Webster, a treacherous Bacon, a licentious Goethe.”Sir Roger de Coverley observed that none but men of fine parts deserve to be hanged. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 317—“The greater sin often involves the lesser guilt; the lesser sin the greater guilt.”Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, 227 (Pope, 1975)—“There's a new tribunal now Higher than God's,—the educated man's! Nice sense of honor in the human breast Supersedes here the old coarse oracle!”Dr. H. E. Robins holds that“palliation of guilt according to light is not possible under a system of pure law, and is possible only because the probation of the sinner is a probation of grace.”C. Sins of infirmity, and sins of presumption.Here the guilt is measured by the energy of the evil will. Sin may be known to be sin, yet may be committed in haste or weakness. Though haste and weakness constitute a palliation of the offence which springs therefrom, yet they are themselves sins, as revealing an unbelieving and disordered heart. But of far greater guilt are those presumptuous choices of evil in which not weakness, but strength of will, is manifest.[pg 650]Ps. 19:12, 13—“Clear thou me from hidden faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins”;Is. 5:18—“Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of falsehood, and sin as it were with a cart-rope”—not led away insensibly by sin, but earnestly, perseveringly, and wilfully working away at it;Gal. 6:1—“overtaken in any trespass”;1 Tim. 5:24—“Some men's sins are evident, going before unto judgment; and some men also they follow after”—some men's sins are so open, that they act as officers to bring to justice those who commit them; whilst others require after-proof (An. Par. Bible). Luther represents one of the former class as saying to himself:“Esto peccator, et pecca fortiter.”On sins of passion and of reflection, see Bittinger, in Princeton Rev., 1873:219.Micah 7:3, marg.—“Both hands are put forth for evil, to do it diligently.”So we ought to do good.“My art is my life,”said Grisi, the prima donna of the opera,“I save myself all day for that one bound upon the stage.”H. Bonar:“Sin worketh,—Let me work too. Busy as sin, my work I ply, Till I rest in the rest of eternity.”German criminal law distinguishes between intentional homicide without deliberation, and intentional homicide with deliberation. There are three grades of sin: 1. Sins of ignorance, like Paul's persecuting; 2. sins of infirmity, like Peter's denial; 3. sins of presumption, like David's murder of Uriah. Sins of presumption were unpardonable under the Jewish law; they are not unpardonable under Christ.D. Sin of incomplete, and sin of final, obduracy.Here the guilt is measured, not by the objective sufficiency or insufficiency of divine grace, but by the degree of unreceptiveness into which sin has brought the soul. As the only sin unto death which is described in Scripture is the sin against the Holy Spirit, we here consider the nature of that sin.Mat 12:31—“Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven”;32—“And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come”;Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”;1 John 5:16, 17—“If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and God will give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin into death: not concerning this do I say that he should make request. All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death”;Heb. 10:26—“if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, then remaineth no more a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries.”Ritschl holds all sin that comes short of definitive rejection of Christ to be ignorance rather than sin, and to be the object of no condemning sentence. This is to make the sin against the Holy Spirit the only real sin. Conscience and Scripture alike contradict this view. There is much incipient hardening of the heart that precedes the sin of final obduracy. See Denney, Studies in Theology, 80. The composure of the criminal is not always a sign of innocence. S. S. Times, April 12, 1902:200—“Sensitiveness of conscience and of feeling, and responsiveness of countenance and bearing, are to be retained by purity of life and freedom from transgression. On the other hand composure of countenance and calmness under suspicion and accusation are likely to be a result of continuance in wrong doing, with consequent hardening of the whole moral nature.”Weismann, Heredity, 2:8—“As soon as any organ falls into disuse, it degenerates, and finally is lost altogether.... In parasites the organs of sense degenerate.”Marconi's wireless telegraphy requires an attuned“receiver.”The“transmitter”sends out countless rays into space: only one capable of corresponding vibrations can understand them. The sinner may so destroy his receptivity, that the whole universe may be uttering God's truth, yet he be unable to hear a word of it. The Outlook:“If a man should put out his eyes, he could not see—nothing could make him see. So if a man should by obstinate wickedness destroy his power to believe in God's forgiveness, he would be in a hopeless state. Though God would still be gracious, the man could not see it, and so could not take God's forgiveness to himself.”The sin against the Holy Spirit is not to be regarded simply as an isolated act, but also as the external symptom of a heart so radically and finally set against God that no power which God can consistently use will ever save it. This sin, therefore, can be only the culmination of a long course of self-hardening and self-depraving. He who has committed it must be[pg 651]either profoundly indifferent to his own condition, or actively and bitterly hostile to God; so that anxiety or fear on account of one's condition is evidence that it has not been committed. The sin against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven, simply because the soul that has committed it has ceased to be receptive of divine influences, even when those influences are exerted in the utmost strength which God has seen fit to employ in his spiritual administration.The commission of this sin is marked by a loss of spiritual sight; the blind fish of the Mammoth Cave left light for darkness, and so in time lost their eyes. It is marked by a loss of religious sensibility; the sensitive-plant loses Its sensitiveness, in proportion to the frequency with which it is touched. It is marked by a loss of power to will the good;“the lava hardens after it has broken from the crater, and in that state cannot return to its source”(Van Oosterzee). The same writer also remarks (Dogmatics, 2:438):“Herod Antipas, after earlier doubt and slavishness, reached such deadness as to be able to mock the Savior, at the mention of whose name he had not long before trembled.”Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:425—“It is not that divine grace is absolutely refused to any one who in true penitence asks forgiveness of this sin; but he who commits it never fulfills the subjective conditions upon which forgiveness is possible, because the aggravation of sin to this ultimatum destroys in him all susceptibility of repentance. The way of return to God is closed against no one who does not close it against himself.”Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 97-120, illustrates the downward progress of the sinner by the law of degeneration in the vegetable and animal world: pigeons, roses, strawberries, all tend to revert to the primitive and wild type.“How shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”(Heb.2:3).Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3:5—“You all know security Is mortals' chiefest enemy.”Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, 90-124—“Richard III is the ideal villain. Villainy has become an end in itself. Richard is an artist in villainy. He lacks the emotions naturally attending crime. He regards villainy with the intellectual enthusiasm of the artist. His villainy is ideal in its success. There is a fascination of irresistibility in him. He is imperturbable in his crime. There is no effort, but rather humor, in it; a recklessness which suggests boundless resources; an inspiration which excludes calculation. Shakespeare relieves the representation from the charge of monstrosity by turning all this villainous history into the unconscious development of Nemesis.”See also A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 188-193. Robert Browning's Guido, in The Ring and the Book, is an example of pure hatred of the good. Guido hates Pompilia for her goodness, and declares that, if he catches her in the next world, he will murder her there, as he murdered her here.Alexander VI, the father of Cæsar and Lucrezia Borgia, the pope of cruelty and lust, wore yet to the day of his death the look of unfailing joyousness and geniality, yes, of even retiring sensitiveness and modesty. No fear or reproach of conscience seemed to throw gloom over his life, as in the cases of Tiberius and Louis XI. He believed himself under the special protection of the Virgin, although he had her painted with the features of his paramour, Julia Farnese. He never scrupled at false witness, adultery, or murder. See Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia, 294, 295. Jeremy Taylor thus describes the progress of sin in the sinner:“First it startles him, then it becomes pleasing, then delightful, then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed; then the man is impenitent, then obstinate, then resolved never to repent, then damned.”There is a state of utter insensibility to emotions of love or fear, and man by his sin may reach that state. The act of blasphemy is only the expression of a hardened or a hateful heart. B. H. Payne:“The calcium flame will char the steel wire so that it is no longer affected by the magnet.... As the blazing cinders and black curling smoke which the volcano spews from its rumbling throat are the accumulation of months and years, so the sin against the Holy Spirit is not a thoughtless expression in a moment of passion or rage, but the giving vent to a state of heart and mind abounding in the accumulations of weeks and months of opposition to the gospel.”Dr. J. P. Thompson:“The unpardonable sin is the knowing, wilful, persistent, contemptuous, malignant spurning of divine truth and grace, as manifested to the soul by the convincing and illuminating power of the Holy Ghost.”Dorner says that“therefore this sin does not belong to Old Testament times, or to the mere revelation of law. It implies the full revelation of the grace in Christ, and the conscious rejection of it by[pg 652]a soul to which the Spirit has made it manifest (Acts 17:30—‘The times of ignorance, therefore, God overlooked’;Rom. 3:25—‘the passing over of the sins done aforetime’).”But was it not under the Old Testament that God said:“My Spirit shall not strive with man forever”(Gen. 6:3), and“Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”(Hosea 4:17)? The sin against the Holy Ghost is a sin against grace, but it does not appear to be limited to New Testament times.It is still true that the unpardonable sin is a sin committed against the Holy Spirit rather than against Christ:Mat. 12:32—“whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come.”Jesus warns the Jews against it,—he does not say they had already committed it. They would seem to have committed it when, after Pentecost, they added to their rejection of Christ the rejection of the Holy Spirit's witness to Christ's resurrection. See Schaff, Sin against the Holy Ghost; Lemme, Sünde wider den Heiligen Geist; Davis, in Bap. Rev., 1862:317-326; Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, 283-289. On the general subject of kinds of sin and degrees of guilt, see Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:284, 298.
II. Guilt.1. Nature of guilt.By guilt we mean desert of punishment, or obligation to render satisfaction to God's justice for self-determined violation of law. There is a reaction of holiness against sin, which the Scripture denominates“the wrath of God”(Rom. 1:18). Sin is in us, either as act or state; God's punitive righteousness is over against the sinner, as something to be feared; guilt is a relation of the sinner to that righteousness, namely, the sinner's desert of punishment.Guilt is related to sin as the burnt spot to the blaze. Schiller, Die Braut von Messina:“Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht; Der Uebel grösstes aber ist die Schuld”—“Life is not the highest of possessions; the greatest of ills, however, is guilt.”Delitzsch:“Die Schamröthe ist die Abendröthe der untergegangenen Sonne der ursprünglichen Gerechtigkeit”—“The blush of shame is the evening red after the sun of original righteousness has gone down.”E. G. Robinson:“Pangs of conscience do not arise from the fear of penalty,—they are the penalty itself.”See chapter on Fig-leaves, in McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 142-154—“Spiritual shame for sin sought an outward symbol, and found it in the nakedness of the lower parts of the body.”The following remarks may serve both for proof and for explanation:A. Guilt is incurred only through self-determined transgression either on the part of man's nature or person. We are guilty only of that sin which we have originated or have had part in originating. Guilt is not, therefore, mere liability to punishment, without participation in the transgression for which the punishment is inflicted,—in other words, there is no such thing as constructive guilt under the divine government. We are accounted guilty only for what we have done, either personally or in our first parents, and for what we are, in consequence of such doing.Ez. 18:20—“the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father”—, as Calvin says (Com.in loco):“The son shall not bear the father's iniquity, since he shall receive the reward due to himself, and shall bear his own burden.... All are guilty through their own fault.... Every one perishes through his own iniquity.”In other words, the whole race fell in Adam,[pg 645]and is punished for its own sin in him, not for the sins of immediate ancestors, nor for the sin of Adam as a person foreign to us.John 9:3—“Neither did this man sin, nor his parents”(that he should be born blind)—Do not attribute to any special later sin what is a consequence of the sin of the race—the first sin which“brought death into the world, and all our woe.”Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:195-213.B. Guilt is an objective result of sin, and is not to be confounded with subjective pollution, or depravity. Every sin, whether of nature or person, is an offense against God (Ps. 51:4-6), an act or state of opposition to his will, which has for its effect God's personal wrath (Ps. 7:11; John 3:18, 36), and which must be expiated either by punishment or by atonement (Heb. 9:22). Not only does sin, as unlikeness to the divine purity, involvepollution,—it also, as antagonism to God's holy will, involvesguilt. This guilt, or obligation to satisfy the outraged holiness of God, is explained in the New Testament by the terms“debtor”and“debt”(Mat. 6:12; Luke 13:4; Mat. 5:21; Rom. 3:19; 6:23; Eph. 2:3). Since guilt, the objective result of sin, is entirely distinct from depravity, the subjective result, human nature may, as in Christ, have the guilt without the depravity (2 Cor. 5:21), or may, as in the Christian, have the depravity without the guilt (1 John 1:7, 8).Ps. 51:4-6—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight; That thou mayest be justified when thou speakest, And be clear when thou judgest”;7:11—“God is a righteous judge, Yea, a God that hath indignation every day”;John 3:18—“he that believeth not hath been judged already”;36—“he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him”;Heb. 9:22—“apart from shedding of blood there is no remission”;Mat. 6:12—“debts”;Luke 13:4—“offenders”(marg.“debtors”);Mat. 5:21—“shall be in danger of[exposed to]the judgment”;Rom. 3:19—“that ... all the world may be brought under the judgment of God”;6:23—“the wages of sin is death”—death is sin's desert;Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath”;2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf”;1 John 1:7, 8—“the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin.[Yet]If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”Sin brings in its train not only depravity but guilt, not onlymaculabutreatus. Scripture sets forth thepollutionof sin by its similies of“a cage of unclean birds”and of“wounds, bruises, and putrefying sores”; by leprosy and Levitical uncleanness, under the old dispensation; by death and the corruption of the grave, under both the old and the new. But Scripture sets forth theguiltof sin, with equal vividness, in the fear of Cain and in the remorse of Judas. The revulsion of God's holiness from sin, and its demand for satisfaction, are reflected in the shame and remorse of every awakened conscience. There is an instinctive feeling in the sinner's heart that sin will be punished, and ought to be punished. But the Holy Spirit makes this need of reparation so deeply felt that the soul has no rest until its debt is paid. The offending church member who is truly penitent loves the law and the church which excludes him, and would not think it faithful if it did not. So Jesus, when laden with the guilt of the race, pressed forward to the cross, saying:“I have a baptism to be baptised with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!”(Luke 12:50; Mark 10:32).All sin involves guilt, and the sinful soul itself demands penalty, so that all will ultimately go where they most desire to be. All the great masters in literature have recognized this. The inextinguishable thirst for reparation constitutes the very essence of tragedy. The Greek tragedians are full of it, and Shakespeare is its most impressive teacher: Measure for Measure, 5:1—“I am sorry that such sorrow I procure, And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart That I crave death more willingly than mercy; 'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it”; Cymbeline, 5:4—“and so, great Powers, If you will take this audit, take this life, And cancel these cold bonds!... Desired, more than constrained, to satisfy, ... take No stricter render of me than my all”; that is, settle the account with me by taking my life, for nothing less than that will pay my debt. And later writers follow Shakespeare. Marguerite, in Goethe's Faust, fainting in the great cathedral under the solemn reverberations of the Dies Iræ; Dimmesdale, in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, putting himself side by side with Hester Prynne, his victim, in her place of obloquy; Bulwer's Eugene Aram, coming forward, though unsuspected, to confess the murder he had committed, all these are illustrations of the[pg 646]inner impulse that moves even a sinful soul to satisfy the claims of justice upon it. See A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 215, 216. On Hawthorne, see Hutton, Essays, 2:370-416—“In the Scarlet Letter, the minister gains fresh reverence and popularity as the very fruit of the passionate anguish with which his heart is consumed. Frantic with the stings of unacknowledged guilt, he is yet taught by these very stings to understand the hearts and stir the consciences of others.”See also Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life.Nor are such scenes confined to the pages of romance. In a recent trial at Syracuse, Earl, the wife-murderer, thanked the jury that had convicted him; declared the verdict just; begged that no one would interfere to stay the course of justice; said that the greatest blessing that could be conferred on him would be to let him suffer the penalty of his crime. In Plattsburg, at the close of another trial in which the accused was a life-convict who had struck down a fellow-convict with an axe, the jury, after being out two hours, came in to ask the Judge to explain the difference between murder in the first and second degree. Suddenly the prisoner rose and said:“This was not a murder in the second degree. It was a deliberate and premeditated murder. I know that I have done wrong, that I ought to confess the truth, and that I ought to be hanged.”This left the jury nothing to do but render their verdict, and the Judge sentenced the murderer to be hanged, as he confessed he deserved to be. In 1891, Lars Ostendahl, the most famous preacher of Norway, startled his hearers by publicly confessing that he had been guilty of immorality, and that he could no longer retain his pastorate. He begged his people for the sake of Christ to forgive him and not to desert the poor in his asylums. He was not only preacher, but also head of a great philanthropic work.Such is the movement and demand of the enlightened conscience. The lack of conviction that crime ought to be punished is one of the most certain signs of moral decay in either the individual or the nation (Ps. 97:10—“Ye that love the Lord, hate evil”;149:6—“Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, And a two-edged sword in their hand”—to execute God's judgment upon iniquity).This relation of sin to God shows us how Christ is“made sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). Since Christ is the immanent God, he is also essential humanity, the universal man, the life of the race. All the nerves and sensibilities of humanity meet in him. He is the central brain to which and through which all ideas must pass. He is the central heart to which and through which all pains must be communicated. You cannot telephone to your friend across the town without first ringing up the central office. You cannot injure your neighbor without first injuring Christ. Each one of us can say of him:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4). Because of his central and all-inclusive humanity, Christ can feel all the pangs of shame and suffering which rightfully belong to sinners, but which they cannot feel, because their sin has stupefied and deadened them. The Messiah, if he be truly man, must be a suffering Messiah. For the very reason of his humanity he must bear in his own person all the guilt of humanity and must be“the Lamb of God who”takes, and so“takes away the sin of the world”(John 1:29).Guilt and depravity are not only distinguishable in thought,—they are also separable in fact. The convicted murderer might repent and become pure, yet he might still be under obligation to suffer the punishment of his crime. The Christian is freed from guilt (Rom. 8:1), but he is not yet freed from depravity (Rom. 7:23). Christ, on the other hand, was under obligation to suffer (Luke 24:26;Acts 3:18;26:23), while yet he was without sin (Heb. 7:26). In the book entitled Modern Religious Thought, 3-29, R. J. Campbell has an essay on The Atonement, with which, apart from its view as to the origin of moral evil in God, we are in substantial agreement. He holds that“to relieve men from their sense of guilt, objective atonement is necessary,”—we would say: to relieve men from guilt itself—the obligation to suffer.“If Christ be the eternal Son of God, that side of the divine nature which has gone forth in creation, if he contains humanity and is present in every article and act of human experience, then he is associated with the existence of the primordial evil.... He and only he can sever the entail between man and his responsibility for personal sin. Christ has notsinnedin man, but he takes responsibility for that experience of evil into which humanity is born, and the yielding to which constitutes sin. He goes forth to suffer, and actually does suffer, in man. The eternal Son in whom humanity is contained is therefore a sufferer since creation began. This mysterious passion of Deity must continue until redemption is consummated and humanity restored to God. Thus every consequence of human ill is felt in the experience of Christ. Thus Christ not only assumes the guilt but bears the punishment of every human soul.”We claim however that the necessity of this suffering lies, not in the needs of man, but in the holiness of God.[pg 647]C. Guilt, moreover, as an objective result of sin, is not to be confounded with the subjective consciousness of guilt (Lev. 5:17). In the condemnation of conscience, God's condemnation partially and prophetically manifests itself (1 John 3:20). But guilt is primarily a relation to God, and only secondarily a relation to conscience. Progress in sin is marked by diminished sensitiveness of moral insight and feeling. As“the greatest of sins is to be conscious of none,”so guilt may be great, just in proportion to the absence of consciousness of it (Ps. 19:12; 51:6; Eph. 4:18, 19—ἀπηλγηκότες). There is no evidence, however, that the voice of conscience can be completely or finally silenced. The time for repentance may pass, but not the time for remorse. Progress in holiness, on the other hand, is marked by increasing apprehension of the depth and extent of our sinfulness, while with this apprehension is combined, in a normal Christian experience, the assurance that the guilt of our sin has been taken, and taken away, by Christ (John 1:29).Lev. 5:17—“And if any one sin, and do any of the things which Jehovah hath commanded not to be done; though he knew it not, yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity”;1 John 3:20—“because if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things”;Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”;51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom”;Eph. 4:18, 19—“darkened in their understanding ... being past feeling”;John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away[marg.“beareth”]the sin of the world.”Plato, Republic, 1:330—“When death approaches, cares and alarms awake, especially the fear of hell and its punishments.”Cicero, De Divin., 1:30—“Then comes remorse for evil deeds.”Persius, Satire 3—“His vice benumbs him; his fibre has become fat; he is conscious of no fault; he knows not the loss he suffers; he is so far sunk, that there is not even a bubble on the surface of the deep.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:1—“Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all”; 4:5—“To my sick soul, as sin's true nature is, Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss; So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt”; Richard III, 5:3—“O coward conscience, how thou dost afflict me!... My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain”; Tempest, 3:3—“All three of them are desperate; their great guilt, Like poison given to work a great time after, Now 'gins to bite the spirits”; Ant. and Cleop., 3:9—“When we in our viciousness grow hard (O misery on't!) the wise gods seel our eyes; In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us Adore our errors; laugh at us, while we strut To our confusion.”Dr. Shedd said once to a graduating class of young theologians:“Would that upon the naked, palpitating heart of each one of you might be laid one redhot coal of God Almighty's wrath!”Yes, we add, if only that redhot coal might be quenched by one red drop of Christ's atoning blood. Dr. H. E. Robins:“To the convicted sinner a merely external hell would be a cooling flame, compared with the agony of his remorse.”John Milton represents Satan as saying:“Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.”James Martineau, Life by Jackson, 190—“It is of the essence of guilty declension to administer its own anæsthetics.”But this deadening of conscience cannot last always. Conscience is a mirror of God's holiness. We may cover the mirror with the veil of this world's diversions and deceits. When the veil is removed, and conscience again reflects the sunlike purity of God's demands, we are visited with self-loathing and self-contempt. John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 2:25—“Though it may cast off every other vestige of its divine origin, our nature retains at least this one terrible prerogative of it, the capacity of preying on itself.”Lyttelton in Lux Mundi, 277—“The common fallacy that a self-indulgent sinner is no one's enemy but his own would, were it true, involve the further inference that such a sinner would not feel himself guilty.”If any dislike the doctrine of guilt, let them remember that without wrath there is no pardon, without guilt no forgiveness. See, on the nature of guilt, Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:193-267; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 208-209; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:346; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 461-473; Delitzsch, Bib. Psychologie, 121-148; Thornwell, Theology, 1:400-424.[pg 648]2. Degrees of guilt.The Scriptures recognize different degrees of guilt as attaching to different kinds of sin. The variety of sacrifices under the Mosaic law, and the variety of awards in the judgment, are to be explained upon this principle.Luke 12:47, 48—“shall be beaten with many stripes ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;Rom. 2:6—“who will render to every man according to his works.”See alsoJohn 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Heb. 2:2, 3—if“every transgression ... received a just recompense of reward; how shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”10:28, 29—“A man that hath set at nought Moses' law dieth without compassion on the word of two or three witnesses: of how much sorer punishment, think ye, shall he be judged worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God?”Casuistry, however, has drawn many distinctions which lack Scriptural foundation. Such is the distinction between venial sins and mortal sins in the Roman Catholic Church,—every sin unpardoned being mortal, and all sins being venial, since Christ has died for all. Nor is the common distinction between sins of omission and sins of commission more valid, since the very omission is an act of commission.Mat. 25:45—“Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least”;James 4:17—“To him therefore that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”John Ruskin:“The condemnation given from the Judgment Throne—most solemnly described—is for all the‘undones’and not the‘dones.’People are perpetually afraid of doing wrong; but unless they are doing its reverse energetically, theydo it all day long, and the degree does not matter.”The Roman Catholic Church proceeds upon the supposition that she can determine the precise malignity of every offence, and assign its proper penance at the confessional. Thornwell, Theology, 1:424-441, says that“all sins are venial but one—for there is a sin against the Holy Ghost,”yet“not one is venial in itself—for the least proceeds from an apostate state and nature.”We shall see, however, that the hindrance to pardon, in the case of the sin against the Holy Spirit, is subjective rather than objective.J. Spencer Kennard:“Roman Catholicism in Italy presents the spectacle of the authoritative representatives and teachers of morals and religion themselves living in all forms of deceit, corruption, and tyranny; and, on the other hand, discriminating between venial and mortal sin, classing as venial sins lying, fraud, fornication, marital infidelity, and even murder, all of which may be atoned for and forgiven or even permitted by the mere payment of money; and at the same time classing as mortal sins disrespect and disobedience to the church.”The following distinctions are indicated in Scripture as involving different degrees of guilt:A. Sin of nature, and personal transgression.Sin of nature involves guilt, yet there is greater guilt when this sin of nature reasserts itself in personal transgression; for, while this latter includes in itself the former, it also adds to the former a new element, namely, the conscious exercise of the individual and personal will, by virtue of which a new decision is made against God, special evil habit is induced, and the total condition of the soul is made more depraved. Although we have emphasized the guilt of inborn sin, because this truth is most contested, it is to be remembered that men reach a conviction of their native depravity only through a conviction of their personal transgressions. For this reason, by far the larger part of our preaching upon sin should consist in applications of the law of God to the acts and dispositions of men's lives.Mat. 19:14—“to such belongeth the kingdom of heaven”—relative innocence of childhood;23:32—“Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers”—personal transgression added to inherited depravity. In preaching, we should first treat individual transgressions, and thence proceed to[pg 649]heart-sin, and race-sin. Man is not wholly a spontaneous development of inborn tendencies, a manifestation of original sin. Motives do notdeterminebut theypersuadethe will, and every man is guilty of conscious personal transgressions which may, with the help of the Holy Spirit, be brought under the condemning judgment of conscience. Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 169-174—“Original sin does not do away with the significance of personal transgression. Adam was pardoned: but some of his descendants are unpardonable. The second death is referred, in Scripture, to our own personal guilt.”This is not to say that original sin does not involve as great sin as that of Adam in the first transgression, for original sinisthe sin of the first transgression; it is only to say that personal transgression is original sinplusthe conscious ratification of Adam's act by the individual.“We are guilty for what weare, as much as for what wedo. Oursinis not simply the sum total of all oursins. There is asinfulnesswhich is the common denominator of all our sins.”It is customary to speak lightly of original sin, as if personal sins were all for which man is accountable. But it is only in the light of original sin that personal sins can be explained.Prov. 14:9, marg.—“Fools make a mock at sin.”Simon, Reconciliation, 122—“The sinfulness of individual men varies; the sinfulness of humanity is a constant quantity.”Robert Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies:“Man lumps his kind i' the mass. God singles thence unit by unit. Thou and God exist—So think! for certain: Think the mass—mankind—Disparts, disperses, leaves thyself alone! Ask thy lone soul what laws are plain to thee,—Thou and no other, stand or fall by them! That is the part for thee.”B. Sins of ignorance, and sins of knowledge.Here guilt is measured by the degree of light possessed, or in other words, by the opportunities of knowledge men have enjoyed, and the powers with which they have been naturally endowed. Genius and privilege increase responsibility. The heathen are guilty, but those to whom the oracles of God have been committed are more guilty than they.Mat 10:15—“more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city”;Luke 12:47, 48—“that servant, who knew his Lord's will ... shall be beaten with many stripes; but he that knew not ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;23:34—“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”—complete knowledge would put them beyond the reach of forgiveness.John 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Acts 17:30—“The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked”;Rom. 1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent with them that practise them”;2:12—“For as many as have sinned without the law shall also perish without the law: and as many as have sinned under the law shall be judged by the law”;1 Tim. 1:13, 15, 16—“I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.”Is. 42:19—“Who is blind ... as Jehovah's servant?”It was the Pharisees whom Jesus warned of the sin against the Holy Spirit. The guilt of the crucifixion rested on Jews rather than on Gentiles. Apostate Israel was more guilty than the pagans. The greatest sinners of the present day may be in Christendom, not in heathendom. Satan was an archangel; Judas was an apostle; Alexander Borgia was a pope. Jackson, James Martineau, 362—“Corruptio optimi pessima est, as seen in a drunken Webster, a treacherous Bacon, a licentious Goethe.”Sir Roger de Coverley observed that none but men of fine parts deserve to be hanged. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 317—“The greater sin often involves the lesser guilt; the lesser sin the greater guilt.”Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, 227 (Pope, 1975)—“There's a new tribunal now Higher than God's,—the educated man's! Nice sense of honor in the human breast Supersedes here the old coarse oracle!”Dr. H. E. Robins holds that“palliation of guilt according to light is not possible under a system of pure law, and is possible only because the probation of the sinner is a probation of grace.”C. Sins of infirmity, and sins of presumption.Here the guilt is measured by the energy of the evil will. Sin may be known to be sin, yet may be committed in haste or weakness. Though haste and weakness constitute a palliation of the offence which springs therefrom, yet they are themselves sins, as revealing an unbelieving and disordered heart. But of far greater guilt are those presumptuous choices of evil in which not weakness, but strength of will, is manifest.[pg 650]Ps. 19:12, 13—“Clear thou me from hidden faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins”;Is. 5:18—“Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of falsehood, and sin as it were with a cart-rope”—not led away insensibly by sin, but earnestly, perseveringly, and wilfully working away at it;Gal. 6:1—“overtaken in any trespass”;1 Tim. 5:24—“Some men's sins are evident, going before unto judgment; and some men also they follow after”—some men's sins are so open, that they act as officers to bring to justice those who commit them; whilst others require after-proof (An. Par. Bible). Luther represents one of the former class as saying to himself:“Esto peccator, et pecca fortiter.”On sins of passion and of reflection, see Bittinger, in Princeton Rev., 1873:219.Micah 7:3, marg.—“Both hands are put forth for evil, to do it diligently.”So we ought to do good.“My art is my life,”said Grisi, the prima donna of the opera,“I save myself all day for that one bound upon the stage.”H. Bonar:“Sin worketh,—Let me work too. Busy as sin, my work I ply, Till I rest in the rest of eternity.”German criminal law distinguishes between intentional homicide without deliberation, and intentional homicide with deliberation. There are three grades of sin: 1. Sins of ignorance, like Paul's persecuting; 2. sins of infirmity, like Peter's denial; 3. sins of presumption, like David's murder of Uriah. Sins of presumption were unpardonable under the Jewish law; they are not unpardonable under Christ.D. Sin of incomplete, and sin of final, obduracy.Here the guilt is measured, not by the objective sufficiency or insufficiency of divine grace, but by the degree of unreceptiveness into which sin has brought the soul. As the only sin unto death which is described in Scripture is the sin against the Holy Spirit, we here consider the nature of that sin.Mat 12:31—“Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven”;32—“And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come”;Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”;1 John 5:16, 17—“If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and God will give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin into death: not concerning this do I say that he should make request. All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death”;Heb. 10:26—“if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, then remaineth no more a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries.”Ritschl holds all sin that comes short of definitive rejection of Christ to be ignorance rather than sin, and to be the object of no condemning sentence. This is to make the sin against the Holy Spirit the only real sin. Conscience and Scripture alike contradict this view. There is much incipient hardening of the heart that precedes the sin of final obduracy. See Denney, Studies in Theology, 80. The composure of the criminal is not always a sign of innocence. S. S. Times, April 12, 1902:200—“Sensitiveness of conscience and of feeling, and responsiveness of countenance and bearing, are to be retained by purity of life and freedom from transgression. On the other hand composure of countenance and calmness under suspicion and accusation are likely to be a result of continuance in wrong doing, with consequent hardening of the whole moral nature.”Weismann, Heredity, 2:8—“As soon as any organ falls into disuse, it degenerates, and finally is lost altogether.... In parasites the organs of sense degenerate.”Marconi's wireless telegraphy requires an attuned“receiver.”The“transmitter”sends out countless rays into space: only one capable of corresponding vibrations can understand them. The sinner may so destroy his receptivity, that the whole universe may be uttering God's truth, yet he be unable to hear a word of it. The Outlook:“If a man should put out his eyes, he could not see—nothing could make him see. So if a man should by obstinate wickedness destroy his power to believe in God's forgiveness, he would be in a hopeless state. Though God would still be gracious, the man could not see it, and so could not take God's forgiveness to himself.”The sin against the Holy Spirit is not to be regarded simply as an isolated act, but also as the external symptom of a heart so radically and finally set against God that no power which God can consistently use will ever save it. This sin, therefore, can be only the culmination of a long course of self-hardening and self-depraving. He who has committed it must be[pg 651]either profoundly indifferent to his own condition, or actively and bitterly hostile to God; so that anxiety or fear on account of one's condition is evidence that it has not been committed. The sin against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven, simply because the soul that has committed it has ceased to be receptive of divine influences, even when those influences are exerted in the utmost strength which God has seen fit to employ in his spiritual administration.The commission of this sin is marked by a loss of spiritual sight; the blind fish of the Mammoth Cave left light for darkness, and so in time lost their eyes. It is marked by a loss of religious sensibility; the sensitive-plant loses Its sensitiveness, in proportion to the frequency with which it is touched. It is marked by a loss of power to will the good;“the lava hardens after it has broken from the crater, and in that state cannot return to its source”(Van Oosterzee). The same writer also remarks (Dogmatics, 2:438):“Herod Antipas, after earlier doubt and slavishness, reached such deadness as to be able to mock the Savior, at the mention of whose name he had not long before trembled.”Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:425—“It is not that divine grace is absolutely refused to any one who in true penitence asks forgiveness of this sin; but he who commits it never fulfills the subjective conditions upon which forgiveness is possible, because the aggravation of sin to this ultimatum destroys in him all susceptibility of repentance. The way of return to God is closed against no one who does not close it against himself.”Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 97-120, illustrates the downward progress of the sinner by the law of degeneration in the vegetable and animal world: pigeons, roses, strawberries, all tend to revert to the primitive and wild type.“How shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”(Heb.2:3).Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3:5—“You all know security Is mortals' chiefest enemy.”Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, 90-124—“Richard III is the ideal villain. Villainy has become an end in itself. Richard is an artist in villainy. He lacks the emotions naturally attending crime. He regards villainy with the intellectual enthusiasm of the artist. His villainy is ideal in its success. There is a fascination of irresistibility in him. He is imperturbable in his crime. There is no effort, but rather humor, in it; a recklessness which suggests boundless resources; an inspiration which excludes calculation. Shakespeare relieves the representation from the charge of monstrosity by turning all this villainous history into the unconscious development of Nemesis.”See also A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 188-193. Robert Browning's Guido, in The Ring and the Book, is an example of pure hatred of the good. Guido hates Pompilia for her goodness, and declares that, if he catches her in the next world, he will murder her there, as he murdered her here.Alexander VI, the father of Cæsar and Lucrezia Borgia, the pope of cruelty and lust, wore yet to the day of his death the look of unfailing joyousness and geniality, yes, of even retiring sensitiveness and modesty. No fear or reproach of conscience seemed to throw gloom over his life, as in the cases of Tiberius and Louis XI. He believed himself under the special protection of the Virgin, although he had her painted with the features of his paramour, Julia Farnese. He never scrupled at false witness, adultery, or murder. See Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia, 294, 295. Jeremy Taylor thus describes the progress of sin in the sinner:“First it startles him, then it becomes pleasing, then delightful, then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed; then the man is impenitent, then obstinate, then resolved never to repent, then damned.”There is a state of utter insensibility to emotions of love or fear, and man by his sin may reach that state. The act of blasphemy is only the expression of a hardened or a hateful heart. B. H. Payne:“The calcium flame will char the steel wire so that it is no longer affected by the magnet.... As the blazing cinders and black curling smoke which the volcano spews from its rumbling throat are the accumulation of months and years, so the sin against the Holy Spirit is not a thoughtless expression in a moment of passion or rage, but the giving vent to a state of heart and mind abounding in the accumulations of weeks and months of opposition to the gospel.”Dr. J. P. Thompson:“The unpardonable sin is the knowing, wilful, persistent, contemptuous, malignant spurning of divine truth and grace, as manifested to the soul by the convincing and illuminating power of the Holy Ghost.”Dorner says that“therefore this sin does not belong to Old Testament times, or to the mere revelation of law. It implies the full revelation of the grace in Christ, and the conscious rejection of it by[pg 652]a soul to which the Spirit has made it manifest (Acts 17:30—‘The times of ignorance, therefore, God overlooked’;Rom. 3:25—‘the passing over of the sins done aforetime’).”But was it not under the Old Testament that God said:“My Spirit shall not strive with man forever”(Gen. 6:3), and“Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”(Hosea 4:17)? The sin against the Holy Ghost is a sin against grace, but it does not appear to be limited to New Testament times.It is still true that the unpardonable sin is a sin committed against the Holy Spirit rather than against Christ:Mat. 12:32—“whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come.”Jesus warns the Jews against it,—he does not say they had already committed it. They would seem to have committed it when, after Pentecost, they added to their rejection of Christ the rejection of the Holy Spirit's witness to Christ's resurrection. See Schaff, Sin against the Holy Ghost; Lemme, Sünde wider den Heiligen Geist; Davis, in Bap. Rev., 1862:317-326; Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, 283-289. On the general subject of kinds of sin and degrees of guilt, see Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:284, 298.
II. Guilt.1. Nature of guilt.By guilt we mean desert of punishment, or obligation to render satisfaction to God's justice for self-determined violation of law. There is a reaction of holiness against sin, which the Scripture denominates“the wrath of God”(Rom. 1:18). Sin is in us, either as act or state; God's punitive righteousness is over against the sinner, as something to be feared; guilt is a relation of the sinner to that righteousness, namely, the sinner's desert of punishment.Guilt is related to sin as the burnt spot to the blaze. Schiller, Die Braut von Messina:“Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht; Der Uebel grösstes aber ist die Schuld”—“Life is not the highest of possessions; the greatest of ills, however, is guilt.”Delitzsch:“Die Schamröthe ist die Abendröthe der untergegangenen Sonne der ursprünglichen Gerechtigkeit”—“The blush of shame is the evening red after the sun of original righteousness has gone down.”E. G. Robinson:“Pangs of conscience do not arise from the fear of penalty,—they are the penalty itself.”See chapter on Fig-leaves, in McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 142-154—“Spiritual shame for sin sought an outward symbol, and found it in the nakedness of the lower parts of the body.”The following remarks may serve both for proof and for explanation:A. Guilt is incurred only through self-determined transgression either on the part of man's nature or person. We are guilty only of that sin which we have originated or have had part in originating. Guilt is not, therefore, mere liability to punishment, without participation in the transgression for which the punishment is inflicted,—in other words, there is no such thing as constructive guilt under the divine government. We are accounted guilty only for what we have done, either personally or in our first parents, and for what we are, in consequence of such doing.Ez. 18:20—“the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father”—, as Calvin says (Com.in loco):“The son shall not bear the father's iniquity, since he shall receive the reward due to himself, and shall bear his own burden.... All are guilty through their own fault.... Every one perishes through his own iniquity.”In other words, the whole race fell in Adam,[pg 645]and is punished for its own sin in him, not for the sins of immediate ancestors, nor for the sin of Adam as a person foreign to us.John 9:3—“Neither did this man sin, nor his parents”(that he should be born blind)—Do not attribute to any special later sin what is a consequence of the sin of the race—the first sin which“brought death into the world, and all our woe.”Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:195-213.B. Guilt is an objective result of sin, and is not to be confounded with subjective pollution, or depravity. Every sin, whether of nature or person, is an offense against God (Ps. 51:4-6), an act or state of opposition to his will, which has for its effect God's personal wrath (Ps. 7:11; John 3:18, 36), and which must be expiated either by punishment or by atonement (Heb. 9:22). Not only does sin, as unlikeness to the divine purity, involvepollution,—it also, as antagonism to God's holy will, involvesguilt. This guilt, or obligation to satisfy the outraged holiness of God, is explained in the New Testament by the terms“debtor”and“debt”(Mat. 6:12; Luke 13:4; Mat. 5:21; Rom. 3:19; 6:23; Eph. 2:3). Since guilt, the objective result of sin, is entirely distinct from depravity, the subjective result, human nature may, as in Christ, have the guilt without the depravity (2 Cor. 5:21), or may, as in the Christian, have the depravity without the guilt (1 John 1:7, 8).Ps. 51:4-6—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight; That thou mayest be justified when thou speakest, And be clear when thou judgest”;7:11—“God is a righteous judge, Yea, a God that hath indignation every day”;John 3:18—“he that believeth not hath been judged already”;36—“he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him”;Heb. 9:22—“apart from shedding of blood there is no remission”;Mat. 6:12—“debts”;Luke 13:4—“offenders”(marg.“debtors”);Mat. 5:21—“shall be in danger of[exposed to]the judgment”;Rom. 3:19—“that ... all the world may be brought under the judgment of God”;6:23—“the wages of sin is death”—death is sin's desert;Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath”;2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf”;1 John 1:7, 8—“the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin.[Yet]If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”Sin brings in its train not only depravity but guilt, not onlymaculabutreatus. Scripture sets forth thepollutionof sin by its similies of“a cage of unclean birds”and of“wounds, bruises, and putrefying sores”; by leprosy and Levitical uncleanness, under the old dispensation; by death and the corruption of the grave, under both the old and the new. But Scripture sets forth theguiltof sin, with equal vividness, in the fear of Cain and in the remorse of Judas. The revulsion of God's holiness from sin, and its demand for satisfaction, are reflected in the shame and remorse of every awakened conscience. There is an instinctive feeling in the sinner's heart that sin will be punished, and ought to be punished. But the Holy Spirit makes this need of reparation so deeply felt that the soul has no rest until its debt is paid. The offending church member who is truly penitent loves the law and the church which excludes him, and would not think it faithful if it did not. So Jesus, when laden with the guilt of the race, pressed forward to the cross, saying:“I have a baptism to be baptised with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!”(Luke 12:50; Mark 10:32).All sin involves guilt, and the sinful soul itself demands penalty, so that all will ultimately go where they most desire to be. All the great masters in literature have recognized this. The inextinguishable thirst for reparation constitutes the very essence of tragedy. The Greek tragedians are full of it, and Shakespeare is its most impressive teacher: Measure for Measure, 5:1—“I am sorry that such sorrow I procure, And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart That I crave death more willingly than mercy; 'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it”; Cymbeline, 5:4—“and so, great Powers, If you will take this audit, take this life, And cancel these cold bonds!... Desired, more than constrained, to satisfy, ... take No stricter render of me than my all”; that is, settle the account with me by taking my life, for nothing less than that will pay my debt. And later writers follow Shakespeare. Marguerite, in Goethe's Faust, fainting in the great cathedral under the solemn reverberations of the Dies Iræ; Dimmesdale, in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, putting himself side by side with Hester Prynne, his victim, in her place of obloquy; Bulwer's Eugene Aram, coming forward, though unsuspected, to confess the murder he had committed, all these are illustrations of the[pg 646]inner impulse that moves even a sinful soul to satisfy the claims of justice upon it. See A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 215, 216. On Hawthorne, see Hutton, Essays, 2:370-416—“In the Scarlet Letter, the minister gains fresh reverence and popularity as the very fruit of the passionate anguish with which his heart is consumed. Frantic with the stings of unacknowledged guilt, he is yet taught by these very stings to understand the hearts and stir the consciences of others.”See also Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life.Nor are such scenes confined to the pages of romance. In a recent trial at Syracuse, Earl, the wife-murderer, thanked the jury that had convicted him; declared the verdict just; begged that no one would interfere to stay the course of justice; said that the greatest blessing that could be conferred on him would be to let him suffer the penalty of his crime. In Plattsburg, at the close of another trial in which the accused was a life-convict who had struck down a fellow-convict with an axe, the jury, after being out two hours, came in to ask the Judge to explain the difference between murder in the first and second degree. Suddenly the prisoner rose and said:“This was not a murder in the second degree. It was a deliberate and premeditated murder. I know that I have done wrong, that I ought to confess the truth, and that I ought to be hanged.”This left the jury nothing to do but render their verdict, and the Judge sentenced the murderer to be hanged, as he confessed he deserved to be. In 1891, Lars Ostendahl, the most famous preacher of Norway, startled his hearers by publicly confessing that he had been guilty of immorality, and that he could no longer retain his pastorate. He begged his people for the sake of Christ to forgive him and not to desert the poor in his asylums. He was not only preacher, but also head of a great philanthropic work.Such is the movement and demand of the enlightened conscience. The lack of conviction that crime ought to be punished is one of the most certain signs of moral decay in either the individual or the nation (Ps. 97:10—“Ye that love the Lord, hate evil”;149:6—“Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, And a two-edged sword in their hand”—to execute God's judgment upon iniquity).This relation of sin to God shows us how Christ is“made sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). Since Christ is the immanent God, he is also essential humanity, the universal man, the life of the race. All the nerves and sensibilities of humanity meet in him. He is the central brain to which and through which all ideas must pass. He is the central heart to which and through which all pains must be communicated. You cannot telephone to your friend across the town without first ringing up the central office. You cannot injure your neighbor without first injuring Christ. Each one of us can say of him:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4). Because of his central and all-inclusive humanity, Christ can feel all the pangs of shame and suffering which rightfully belong to sinners, but which they cannot feel, because their sin has stupefied and deadened them. The Messiah, if he be truly man, must be a suffering Messiah. For the very reason of his humanity he must bear in his own person all the guilt of humanity and must be“the Lamb of God who”takes, and so“takes away the sin of the world”(John 1:29).Guilt and depravity are not only distinguishable in thought,—they are also separable in fact. The convicted murderer might repent and become pure, yet he might still be under obligation to suffer the punishment of his crime. The Christian is freed from guilt (Rom. 8:1), but he is not yet freed from depravity (Rom. 7:23). Christ, on the other hand, was under obligation to suffer (Luke 24:26;Acts 3:18;26:23), while yet he was without sin (Heb. 7:26). In the book entitled Modern Religious Thought, 3-29, R. J. Campbell has an essay on The Atonement, with which, apart from its view as to the origin of moral evil in God, we are in substantial agreement. He holds that“to relieve men from their sense of guilt, objective atonement is necessary,”—we would say: to relieve men from guilt itself—the obligation to suffer.“If Christ be the eternal Son of God, that side of the divine nature which has gone forth in creation, if he contains humanity and is present in every article and act of human experience, then he is associated with the existence of the primordial evil.... He and only he can sever the entail between man and his responsibility for personal sin. Christ has notsinnedin man, but he takes responsibility for that experience of evil into which humanity is born, and the yielding to which constitutes sin. He goes forth to suffer, and actually does suffer, in man. The eternal Son in whom humanity is contained is therefore a sufferer since creation began. This mysterious passion of Deity must continue until redemption is consummated and humanity restored to God. Thus every consequence of human ill is felt in the experience of Christ. Thus Christ not only assumes the guilt but bears the punishment of every human soul.”We claim however that the necessity of this suffering lies, not in the needs of man, but in the holiness of God.[pg 647]C. Guilt, moreover, as an objective result of sin, is not to be confounded with the subjective consciousness of guilt (Lev. 5:17). In the condemnation of conscience, God's condemnation partially and prophetically manifests itself (1 John 3:20). But guilt is primarily a relation to God, and only secondarily a relation to conscience. Progress in sin is marked by diminished sensitiveness of moral insight and feeling. As“the greatest of sins is to be conscious of none,”so guilt may be great, just in proportion to the absence of consciousness of it (Ps. 19:12; 51:6; Eph. 4:18, 19—ἀπηλγηκότες). There is no evidence, however, that the voice of conscience can be completely or finally silenced. The time for repentance may pass, but not the time for remorse. Progress in holiness, on the other hand, is marked by increasing apprehension of the depth and extent of our sinfulness, while with this apprehension is combined, in a normal Christian experience, the assurance that the guilt of our sin has been taken, and taken away, by Christ (John 1:29).Lev. 5:17—“And if any one sin, and do any of the things which Jehovah hath commanded not to be done; though he knew it not, yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity”;1 John 3:20—“because if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things”;Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”;51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom”;Eph. 4:18, 19—“darkened in their understanding ... being past feeling”;John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away[marg.“beareth”]the sin of the world.”Plato, Republic, 1:330—“When death approaches, cares and alarms awake, especially the fear of hell and its punishments.”Cicero, De Divin., 1:30—“Then comes remorse for evil deeds.”Persius, Satire 3—“His vice benumbs him; his fibre has become fat; he is conscious of no fault; he knows not the loss he suffers; he is so far sunk, that there is not even a bubble on the surface of the deep.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:1—“Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all”; 4:5—“To my sick soul, as sin's true nature is, Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss; So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt”; Richard III, 5:3—“O coward conscience, how thou dost afflict me!... My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain”; Tempest, 3:3—“All three of them are desperate; their great guilt, Like poison given to work a great time after, Now 'gins to bite the spirits”; Ant. and Cleop., 3:9—“When we in our viciousness grow hard (O misery on't!) the wise gods seel our eyes; In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us Adore our errors; laugh at us, while we strut To our confusion.”Dr. Shedd said once to a graduating class of young theologians:“Would that upon the naked, palpitating heart of each one of you might be laid one redhot coal of God Almighty's wrath!”Yes, we add, if only that redhot coal might be quenched by one red drop of Christ's atoning blood. Dr. H. E. Robins:“To the convicted sinner a merely external hell would be a cooling flame, compared with the agony of his remorse.”John Milton represents Satan as saying:“Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.”James Martineau, Life by Jackson, 190—“It is of the essence of guilty declension to administer its own anæsthetics.”But this deadening of conscience cannot last always. Conscience is a mirror of God's holiness. We may cover the mirror with the veil of this world's diversions and deceits. When the veil is removed, and conscience again reflects the sunlike purity of God's demands, we are visited with self-loathing and self-contempt. John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 2:25—“Though it may cast off every other vestige of its divine origin, our nature retains at least this one terrible prerogative of it, the capacity of preying on itself.”Lyttelton in Lux Mundi, 277—“The common fallacy that a self-indulgent sinner is no one's enemy but his own would, were it true, involve the further inference that such a sinner would not feel himself guilty.”If any dislike the doctrine of guilt, let them remember that without wrath there is no pardon, without guilt no forgiveness. See, on the nature of guilt, Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:193-267; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 208-209; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:346; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 461-473; Delitzsch, Bib. Psychologie, 121-148; Thornwell, Theology, 1:400-424.[pg 648]2. Degrees of guilt.The Scriptures recognize different degrees of guilt as attaching to different kinds of sin. The variety of sacrifices under the Mosaic law, and the variety of awards in the judgment, are to be explained upon this principle.Luke 12:47, 48—“shall be beaten with many stripes ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;Rom. 2:6—“who will render to every man according to his works.”See alsoJohn 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Heb. 2:2, 3—if“every transgression ... received a just recompense of reward; how shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”10:28, 29—“A man that hath set at nought Moses' law dieth without compassion on the word of two or three witnesses: of how much sorer punishment, think ye, shall he be judged worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God?”Casuistry, however, has drawn many distinctions which lack Scriptural foundation. Such is the distinction between venial sins and mortal sins in the Roman Catholic Church,—every sin unpardoned being mortal, and all sins being venial, since Christ has died for all. Nor is the common distinction between sins of omission and sins of commission more valid, since the very omission is an act of commission.Mat. 25:45—“Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least”;James 4:17—“To him therefore that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”John Ruskin:“The condemnation given from the Judgment Throne—most solemnly described—is for all the‘undones’and not the‘dones.’People are perpetually afraid of doing wrong; but unless they are doing its reverse energetically, theydo it all day long, and the degree does not matter.”The Roman Catholic Church proceeds upon the supposition that she can determine the precise malignity of every offence, and assign its proper penance at the confessional. Thornwell, Theology, 1:424-441, says that“all sins are venial but one—for there is a sin against the Holy Ghost,”yet“not one is venial in itself—for the least proceeds from an apostate state and nature.”We shall see, however, that the hindrance to pardon, in the case of the sin against the Holy Spirit, is subjective rather than objective.J. Spencer Kennard:“Roman Catholicism in Italy presents the spectacle of the authoritative representatives and teachers of morals and religion themselves living in all forms of deceit, corruption, and tyranny; and, on the other hand, discriminating between venial and mortal sin, classing as venial sins lying, fraud, fornication, marital infidelity, and even murder, all of which may be atoned for and forgiven or even permitted by the mere payment of money; and at the same time classing as mortal sins disrespect and disobedience to the church.”The following distinctions are indicated in Scripture as involving different degrees of guilt:A. Sin of nature, and personal transgression.Sin of nature involves guilt, yet there is greater guilt when this sin of nature reasserts itself in personal transgression; for, while this latter includes in itself the former, it also adds to the former a new element, namely, the conscious exercise of the individual and personal will, by virtue of which a new decision is made against God, special evil habit is induced, and the total condition of the soul is made more depraved. Although we have emphasized the guilt of inborn sin, because this truth is most contested, it is to be remembered that men reach a conviction of their native depravity only through a conviction of their personal transgressions. For this reason, by far the larger part of our preaching upon sin should consist in applications of the law of God to the acts and dispositions of men's lives.Mat. 19:14—“to such belongeth the kingdom of heaven”—relative innocence of childhood;23:32—“Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers”—personal transgression added to inherited depravity. In preaching, we should first treat individual transgressions, and thence proceed to[pg 649]heart-sin, and race-sin. Man is not wholly a spontaneous development of inborn tendencies, a manifestation of original sin. Motives do notdeterminebut theypersuadethe will, and every man is guilty of conscious personal transgressions which may, with the help of the Holy Spirit, be brought under the condemning judgment of conscience. Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 169-174—“Original sin does not do away with the significance of personal transgression. Adam was pardoned: but some of his descendants are unpardonable. The second death is referred, in Scripture, to our own personal guilt.”This is not to say that original sin does not involve as great sin as that of Adam in the first transgression, for original sinisthe sin of the first transgression; it is only to say that personal transgression is original sinplusthe conscious ratification of Adam's act by the individual.“We are guilty for what weare, as much as for what wedo. Oursinis not simply the sum total of all oursins. There is asinfulnesswhich is the common denominator of all our sins.”It is customary to speak lightly of original sin, as if personal sins were all for which man is accountable. But it is only in the light of original sin that personal sins can be explained.Prov. 14:9, marg.—“Fools make a mock at sin.”Simon, Reconciliation, 122—“The sinfulness of individual men varies; the sinfulness of humanity is a constant quantity.”Robert Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies:“Man lumps his kind i' the mass. God singles thence unit by unit. Thou and God exist—So think! for certain: Think the mass—mankind—Disparts, disperses, leaves thyself alone! Ask thy lone soul what laws are plain to thee,—Thou and no other, stand or fall by them! That is the part for thee.”B. Sins of ignorance, and sins of knowledge.Here guilt is measured by the degree of light possessed, or in other words, by the opportunities of knowledge men have enjoyed, and the powers with which they have been naturally endowed. Genius and privilege increase responsibility. The heathen are guilty, but those to whom the oracles of God have been committed are more guilty than they.Mat 10:15—“more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city”;Luke 12:47, 48—“that servant, who knew his Lord's will ... shall be beaten with many stripes; but he that knew not ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;23:34—“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”—complete knowledge would put them beyond the reach of forgiveness.John 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Acts 17:30—“The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked”;Rom. 1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent with them that practise them”;2:12—“For as many as have sinned without the law shall also perish without the law: and as many as have sinned under the law shall be judged by the law”;1 Tim. 1:13, 15, 16—“I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.”Is. 42:19—“Who is blind ... as Jehovah's servant?”It was the Pharisees whom Jesus warned of the sin against the Holy Spirit. The guilt of the crucifixion rested on Jews rather than on Gentiles. Apostate Israel was more guilty than the pagans. The greatest sinners of the present day may be in Christendom, not in heathendom. Satan was an archangel; Judas was an apostle; Alexander Borgia was a pope. Jackson, James Martineau, 362—“Corruptio optimi pessima est, as seen in a drunken Webster, a treacherous Bacon, a licentious Goethe.”Sir Roger de Coverley observed that none but men of fine parts deserve to be hanged. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 317—“The greater sin often involves the lesser guilt; the lesser sin the greater guilt.”Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, 227 (Pope, 1975)—“There's a new tribunal now Higher than God's,—the educated man's! Nice sense of honor in the human breast Supersedes here the old coarse oracle!”Dr. H. E. Robins holds that“palliation of guilt according to light is not possible under a system of pure law, and is possible only because the probation of the sinner is a probation of grace.”C. Sins of infirmity, and sins of presumption.Here the guilt is measured by the energy of the evil will. Sin may be known to be sin, yet may be committed in haste or weakness. Though haste and weakness constitute a palliation of the offence which springs therefrom, yet they are themselves sins, as revealing an unbelieving and disordered heart. But of far greater guilt are those presumptuous choices of evil in which not weakness, but strength of will, is manifest.[pg 650]Ps. 19:12, 13—“Clear thou me from hidden faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins”;Is. 5:18—“Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of falsehood, and sin as it were with a cart-rope”—not led away insensibly by sin, but earnestly, perseveringly, and wilfully working away at it;Gal. 6:1—“overtaken in any trespass”;1 Tim. 5:24—“Some men's sins are evident, going before unto judgment; and some men also they follow after”—some men's sins are so open, that they act as officers to bring to justice those who commit them; whilst others require after-proof (An. Par. Bible). Luther represents one of the former class as saying to himself:“Esto peccator, et pecca fortiter.”On sins of passion and of reflection, see Bittinger, in Princeton Rev., 1873:219.Micah 7:3, marg.—“Both hands are put forth for evil, to do it diligently.”So we ought to do good.“My art is my life,”said Grisi, the prima donna of the opera,“I save myself all day for that one bound upon the stage.”H. Bonar:“Sin worketh,—Let me work too. Busy as sin, my work I ply, Till I rest in the rest of eternity.”German criminal law distinguishes between intentional homicide without deliberation, and intentional homicide with deliberation. There are three grades of sin: 1. Sins of ignorance, like Paul's persecuting; 2. sins of infirmity, like Peter's denial; 3. sins of presumption, like David's murder of Uriah. Sins of presumption were unpardonable under the Jewish law; they are not unpardonable under Christ.D. Sin of incomplete, and sin of final, obduracy.Here the guilt is measured, not by the objective sufficiency or insufficiency of divine grace, but by the degree of unreceptiveness into which sin has brought the soul. As the only sin unto death which is described in Scripture is the sin against the Holy Spirit, we here consider the nature of that sin.Mat 12:31—“Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven”;32—“And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come”;Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”;1 John 5:16, 17—“If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and God will give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin into death: not concerning this do I say that he should make request. All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death”;Heb. 10:26—“if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, then remaineth no more a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries.”Ritschl holds all sin that comes short of definitive rejection of Christ to be ignorance rather than sin, and to be the object of no condemning sentence. This is to make the sin against the Holy Spirit the only real sin. Conscience and Scripture alike contradict this view. There is much incipient hardening of the heart that precedes the sin of final obduracy. See Denney, Studies in Theology, 80. The composure of the criminal is not always a sign of innocence. S. S. Times, April 12, 1902:200—“Sensitiveness of conscience and of feeling, and responsiveness of countenance and bearing, are to be retained by purity of life and freedom from transgression. On the other hand composure of countenance and calmness under suspicion and accusation are likely to be a result of continuance in wrong doing, with consequent hardening of the whole moral nature.”Weismann, Heredity, 2:8—“As soon as any organ falls into disuse, it degenerates, and finally is lost altogether.... In parasites the organs of sense degenerate.”Marconi's wireless telegraphy requires an attuned“receiver.”The“transmitter”sends out countless rays into space: only one capable of corresponding vibrations can understand them. The sinner may so destroy his receptivity, that the whole universe may be uttering God's truth, yet he be unable to hear a word of it. The Outlook:“If a man should put out his eyes, he could not see—nothing could make him see. So if a man should by obstinate wickedness destroy his power to believe in God's forgiveness, he would be in a hopeless state. Though God would still be gracious, the man could not see it, and so could not take God's forgiveness to himself.”The sin against the Holy Spirit is not to be regarded simply as an isolated act, but also as the external symptom of a heart so radically and finally set against God that no power which God can consistently use will ever save it. This sin, therefore, can be only the culmination of a long course of self-hardening and self-depraving. He who has committed it must be[pg 651]either profoundly indifferent to his own condition, or actively and bitterly hostile to God; so that anxiety or fear on account of one's condition is evidence that it has not been committed. The sin against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven, simply because the soul that has committed it has ceased to be receptive of divine influences, even when those influences are exerted in the utmost strength which God has seen fit to employ in his spiritual administration.The commission of this sin is marked by a loss of spiritual sight; the blind fish of the Mammoth Cave left light for darkness, and so in time lost their eyes. It is marked by a loss of religious sensibility; the sensitive-plant loses Its sensitiveness, in proportion to the frequency with which it is touched. It is marked by a loss of power to will the good;“the lava hardens after it has broken from the crater, and in that state cannot return to its source”(Van Oosterzee). The same writer also remarks (Dogmatics, 2:438):“Herod Antipas, after earlier doubt and slavishness, reached such deadness as to be able to mock the Savior, at the mention of whose name he had not long before trembled.”Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:425—“It is not that divine grace is absolutely refused to any one who in true penitence asks forgiveness of this sin; but he who commits it never fulfills the subjective conditions upon which forgiveness is possible, because the aggravation of sin to this ultimatum destroys in him all susceptibility of repentance. The way of return to God is closed against no one who does not close it against himself.”Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 97-120, illustrates the downward progress of the sinner by the law of degeneration in the vegetable and animal world: pigeons, roses, strawberries, all tend to revert to the primitive and wild type.“How shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”(Heb.2:3).Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3:5—“You all know security Is mortals' chiefest enemy.”Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, 90-124—“Richard III is the ideal villain. Villainy has become an end in itself. Richard is an artist in villainy. He lacks the emotions naturally attending crime. He regards villainy with the intellectual enthusiasm of the artist. His villainy is ideal in its success. There is a fascination of irresistibility in him. He is imperturbable in his crime. There is no effort, but rather humor, in it; a recklessness which suggests boundless resources; an inspiration which excludes calculation. Shakespeare relieves the representation from the charge of monstrosity by turning all this villainous history into the unconscious development of Nemesis.”See also A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 188-193. Robert Browning's Guido, in The Ring and the Book, is an example of pure hatred of the good. Guido hates Pompilia for her goodness, and declares that, if he catches her in the next world, he will murder her there, as he murdered her here.Alexander VI, the father of Cæsar and Lucrezia Borgia, the pope of cruelty and lust, wore yet to the day of his death the look of unfailing joyousness and geniality, yes, of even retiring sensitiveness and modesty. No fear or reproach of conscience seemed to throw gloom over his life, as in the cases of Tiberius and Louis XI. He believed himself under the special protection of the Virgin, although he had her painted with the features of his paramour, Julia Farnese. He never scrupled at false witness, adultery, or murder. See Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia, 294, 295. Jeremy Taylor thus describes the progress of sin in the sinner:“First it startles him, then it becomes pleasing, then delightful, then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed; then the man is impenitent, then obstinate, then resolved never to repent, then damned.”There is a state of utter insensibility to emotions of love or fear, and man by his sin may reach that state. The act of blasphemy is only the expression of a hardened or a hateful heart. B. H. Payne:“The calcium flame will char the steel wire so that it is no longer affected by the magnet.... As the blazing cinders and black curling smoke which the volcano spews from its rumbling throat are the accumulation of months and years, so the sin against the Holy Spirit is not a thoughtless expression in a moment of passion or rage, but the giving vent to a state of heart and mind abounding in the accumulations of weeks and months of opposition to the gospel.”Dr. J. P. Thompson:“The unpardonable sin is the knowing, wilful, persistent, contemptuous, malignant spurning of divine truth and grace, as manifested to the soul by the convincing and illuminating power of the Holy Ghost.”Dorner says that“therefore this sin does not belong to Old Testament times, or to the mere revelation of law. It implies the full revelation of the grace in Christ, and the conscious rejection of it by[pg 652]a soul to which the Spirit has made it manifest (Acts 17:30—‘The times of ignorance, therefore, God overlooked’;Rom. 3:25—‘the passing over of the sins done aforetime’).”But was it not under the Old Testament that God said:“My Spirit shall not strive with man forever”(Gen. 6:3), and“Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”(Hosea 4:17)? The sin against the Holy Ghost is a sin against grace, but it does not appear to be limited to New Testament times.It is still true that the unpardonable sin is a sin committed against the Holy Spirit rather than against Christ:Mat. 12:32—“whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come.”Jesus warns the Jews against it,—he does not say they had already committed it. They would seem to have committed it when, after Pentecost, they added to their rejection of Christ the rejection of the Holy Spirit's witness to Christ's resurrection. See Schaff, Sin against the Holy Ghost; Lemme, Sünde wider den Heiligen Geist; Davis, in Bap. Rev., 1862:317-326; Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, 283-289. On the general subject of kinds of sin and degrees of guilt, see Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:284, 298.
1. Nature of guilt.By guilt we mean desert of punishment, or obligation to render satisfaction to God's justice for self-determined violation of law. There is a reaction of holiness against sin, which the Scripture denominates“the wrath of God”(Rom. 1:18). Sin is in us, either as act or state; God's punitive righteousness is over against the sinner, as something to be feared; guilt is a relation of the sinner to that righteousness, namely, the sinner's desert of punishment.Guilt is related to sin as the burnt spot to the blaze. Schiller, Die Braut von Messina:“Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht; Der Uebel grösstes aber ist die Schuld”—“Life is not the highest of possessions; the greatest of ills, however, is guilt.”Delitzsch:“Die Schamröthe ist die Abendröthe der untergegangenen Sonne der ursprünglichen Gerechtigkeit”—“The blush of shame is the evening red after the sun of original righteousness has gone down.”E. G. Robinson:“Pangs of conscience do not arise from the fear of penalty,—they are the penalty itself.”See chapter on Fig-leaves, in McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 142-154—“Spiritual shame for sin sought an outward symbol, and found it in the nakedness of the lower parts of the body.”The following remarks may serve both for proof and for explanation:A. Guilt is incurred only through self-determined transgression either on the part of man's nature or person. We are guilty only of that sin which we have originated or have had part in originating. Guilt is not, therefore, mere liability to punishment, without participation in the transgression for which the punishment is inflicted,—in other words, there is no such thing as constructive guilt under the divine government. We are accounted guilty only for what we have done, either personally or in our first parents, and for what we are, in consequence of such doing.Ez. 18:20—“the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father”—, as Calvin says (Com.in loco):“The son shall not bear the father's iniquity, since he shall receive the reward due to himself, and shall bear his own burden.... All are guilty through their own fault.... Every one perishes through his own iniquity.”In other words, the whole race fell in Adam,[pg 645]and is punished for its own sin in him, not for the sins of immediate ancestors, nor for the sin of Adam as a person foreign to us.John 9:3—“Neither did this man sin, nor his parents”(that he should be born blind)—Do not attribute to any special later sin what is a consequence of the sin of the race—the first sin which“brought death into the world, and all our woe.”Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:195-213.B. Guilt is an objective result of sin, and is not to be confounded with subjective pollution, or depravity. Every sin, whether of nature or person, is an offense against God (Ps. 51:4-6), an act or state of opposition to his will, which has for its effect God's personal wrath (Ps. 7:11; John 3:18, 36), and which must be expiated either by punishment or by atonement (Heb. 9:22). Not only does sin, as unlikeness to the divine purity, involvepollution,—it also, as antagonism to God's holy will, involvesguilt. This guilt, or obligation to satisfy the outraged holiness of God, is explained in the New Testament by the terms“debtor”and“debt”(Mat. 6:12; Luke 13:4; Mat. 5:21; Rom. 3:19; 6:23; Eph. 2:3). Since guilt, the objective result of sin, is entirely distinct from depravity, the subjective result, human nature may, as in Christ, have the guilt without the depravity (2 Cor. 5:21), or may, as in the Christian, have the depravity without the guilt (1 John 1:7, 8).Ps. 51:4-6—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight; That thou mayest be justified when thou speakest, And be clear when thou judgest”;7:11—“God is a righteous judge, Yea, a God that hath indignation every day”;John 3:18—“he that believeth not hath been judged already”;36—“he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him”;Heb. 9:22—“apart from shedding of blood there is no remission”;Mat. 6:12—“debts”;Luke 13:4—“offenders”(marg.“debtors”);Mat. 5:21—“shall be in danger of[exposed to]the judgment”;Rom. 3:19—“that ... all the world may be brought under the judgment of God”;6:23—“the wages of sin is death”—death is sin's desert;Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath”;2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf”;1 John 1:7, 8—“the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin.[Yet]If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”Sin brings in its train not only depravity but guilt, not onlymaculabutreatus. Scripture sets forth thepollutionof sin by its similies of“a cage of unclean birds”and of“wounds, bruises, and putrefying sores”; by leprosy and Levitical uncleanness, under the old dispensation; by death and the corruption of the grave, under both the old and the new. But Scripture sets forth theguiltof sin, with equal vividness, in the fear of Cain and in the remorse of Judas. The revulsion of God's holiness from sin, and its demand for satisfaction, are reflected in the shame and remorse of every awakened conscience. There is an instinctive feeling in the sinner's heart that sin will be punished, and ought to be punished. But the Holy Spirit makes this need of reparation so deeply felt that the soul has no rest until its debt is paid. The offending church member who is truly penitent loves the law and the church which excludes him, and would not think it faithful if it did not. So Jesus, when laden with the guilt of the race, pressed forward to the cross, saying:“I have a baptism to be baptised with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!”(Luke 12:50; Mark 10:32).All sin involves guilt, and the sinful soul itself demands penalty, so that all will ultimately go where they most desire to be. All the great masters in literature have recognized this. The inextinguishable thirst for reparation constitutes the very essence of tragedy. The Greek tragedians are full of it, and Shakespeare is its most impressive teacher: Measure for Measure, 5:1—“I am sorry that such sorrow I procure, And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart That I crave death more willingly than mercy; 'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it”; Cymbeline, 5:4—“and so, great Powers, If you will take this audit, take this life, And cancel these cold bonds!... Desired, more than constrained, to satisfy, ... take No stricter render of me than my all”; that is, settle the account with me by taking my life, for nothing less than that will pay my debt. And later writers follow Shakespeare. Marguerite, in Goethe's Faust, fainting in the great cathedral under the solemn reverberations of the Dies Iræ; Dimmesdale, in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, putting himself side by side with Hester Prynne, his victim, in her place of obloquy; Bulwer's Eugene Aram, coming forward, though unsuspected, to confess the murder he had committed, all these are illustrations of the[pg 646]inner impulse that moves even a sinful soul to satisfy the claims of justice upon it. See A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 215, 216. On Hawthorne, see Hutton, Essays, 2:370-416—“In the Scarlet Letter, the minister gains fresh reverence and popularity as the very fruit of the passionate anguish with which his heart is consumed. Frantic with the stings of unacknowledged guilt, he is yet taught by these very stings to understand the hearts and stir the consciences of others.”See also Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life.Nor are such scenes confined to the pages of romance. In a recent trial at Syracuse, Earl, the wife-murderer, thanked the jury that had convicted him; declared the verdict just; begged that no one would interfere to stay the course of justice; said that the greatest blessing that could be conferred on him would be to let him suffer the penalty of his crime. In Plattsburg, at the close of another trial in which the accused was a life-convict who had struck down a fellow-convict with an axe, the jury, after being out two hours, came in to ask the Judge to explain the difference between murder in the first and second degree. Suddenly the prisoner rose and said:“This was not a murder in the second degree. It was a deliberate and premeditated murder. I know that I have done wrong, that I ought to confess the truth, and that I ought to be hanged.”This left the jury nothing to do but render their verdict, and the Judge sentenced the murderer to be hanged, as he confessed he deserved to be. In 1891, Lars Ostendahl, the most famous preacher of Norway, startled his hearers by publicly confessing that he had been guilty of immorality, and that he could no longer retain his pastorate. He begged his people for the sake of Christ to forgive him and not to desert the poor in his asylums. He was not only preacher, but also head of a great philanthropic work.Such is the movement and demand of the enlightened conscience. The lack of conviction that crime ought to be punished is one of the most certain signs of moral decay in either the individual or the nation (Ps. 97:10—“Ye that love the Lord, hate evil”;149:6—“Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, And a two-edged sword in their hand”—to execute God's judgment upon iniquity).This relation of sin to God shows us how Christ is“made sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). Since Christ is the immanent God, he is also essential humanity, the universal man, the life of the race. All the nerves and sensibilities of humanity meet in him. He is the central brain to which and through which all ideas must pass. He is the central heart to which and through which all pains must be communicated. You cannot telephone to your friend across the town without first ringing up the central office. You cannot injure your neighbor without first injuring Christ. Each one of us can say of him:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4). Because of his central and all-inclusive humanity, Christ can feel all the pangs of shame and suffering which rightfully belong to sinners, but which they cannot feel, because their sin has stupefied and deadened them. The Messiah, if he be truly man, must be a suffering Messiah. For the very reason of his humanity he must bear in his own person all the guilt of humanity and must be“the Lamb of God who”takes, and so“takes away the sin of the world”(John 1:29).Guilt and depravity are not only distinguishable in thought,—they are also separable in fact. The convicted murderer might repent and become pure, yet he might still be under obligation to suffer the punishment of his crime. The Christian is freed from guilt (Rom. 8:1), but he is not yet freed from depravity (Rom. 7:23). Christ, on the other hand, was under obligation to suffer (Luke 24:26;Acts 3:18;26:23), while yet he was without sin (Heb. 7:26). In the book entitled Modern Religious Thought, 3-29, R. J. Campbell has an essay on The Atonement, with which, apart from its view as to the origin of moral evil in God, we are in substantial agreement. He holds that“to relieve men from their sense of guilt, objective atonement is necessary,”—we would say: to relieve men from guilt itself—the obligation to suffer.“If Christ be the eternal Son of God, that side of the divine nature which has gone forth in creation, if he contains humanity and is present in every article and act of human experience, then he is associated with the existence of the primordial evil.... He and only he can sever the entail between man and his responsibility for personal sin. Christ has notsinnedin man, but he takes responsibility for that experience of evil into which humanity is born, and the yielding to which constitutes sin. He goes forth to suffer, and actually does suffer, in man. The eternal Son in whom humanity is contained is therefore a sufferer since creation began. This mysterious passion of Deity must continue until redemption is consummated and humanity restored to God. Thus every consequence of human ill is felt in the experience of Christ. Thus Christ not only assumes the guilt but bears the punishment of every human soul.”We claim however that the necessity of this suffering lies, not in the needs of man, but in the holiness of God.[pg 647]C. Guilt, moreover, as an objective result of sin, is not to be confounded with the subjective consciousness of guilt (Lev. 5:17). In the condemnation of conscience, God's condemnation partially and prophetically manifests itself (1 John 3:20). But guilt is primarily a relation to God, and only secondarily a relation to conscience. Progress in sin is marked by diminished sensitiveness of moral insight and feeling. As“the greatest of sins is to be conscious of none,”so guilt may be great, just in proportion to the absence of consciousness of it (Ps. 19:12; 51:6; Eph. 4:18, 19—ἀπηλγηκότες). There is no evidence, however, that the voice of conscience can be completely or finally silenced. The time for repentance may pass, but not the time for remorse. Progress in holiness, on the other hand, is marked by increasing apprehension of the depth and extent of our sinfulness, while with this apprehension is combined, in a normal Christian experience, the assurance that the guilt of our sin has been taken, and taken away, by Christ (John 1:29).Lev. 5:17—“And if any one sin, and do any of the things which Jehovah hath commanded not to be done; though he knew it not, yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity”;1 John 3:20—“because if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things”;Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”;51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom”;Eph. 4:18, 19—“darkened in their understanding ... being past feeling”;John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away[marg.“beareth”]the sin of the world.”Plato, Republic, 1:330—“When death approaches, cares and alarms awake, especially the fear of hell and its punishments.”Cicero, De Divin., 1:30—“Then comes remorse for evil deeds.”Persius, Satire 3—“His vice benumbs him; his fibre has become fat; he is conscious of no fault; he knows not the loss he suffers; he is so far sunk, that there is not even a bubble on the surface of the deep.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:1—“Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all”; 4:5—“To my sick soul, as sin's true nature is, Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss; So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt”; Richard III, 5:3—“O coward conscience, how thou dost afflict me!... My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain”; Tempest, 3:3—“All three of them are desperate; their great guilt, Like poison given to work a great time after, Now 'gins to bite the spirits”; Ant. and Cleop., 3:9—“When we in our viciousness grow hard (O misery on't!) the wise gods seel our eyes; In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us Adore our errors; laugh at us, while we strut To our confusion.”Dr. Shedd said once to a graduating class of young theologians:“Would that upon the naked, palpitating heart of each one of you might be laid one redhot coal of God Almighty's wrath!”Yes, we add, if only that redhot coal might be quenched by one red drop of Christ's atoning blood. Dr. H. E. Robins:“To the convicted sinner a merely external hell would be a cooling flame, compared with the agony of his remorse.”John Milton represents Satan as saying:“Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.”James Martineau, Life by Jackson, 190—“It is of the essence of guilty declension to administer its own anæsthetics.”But this deadening of conscience cannot last always. Conscience is a mirror of God's holiness. We may cover the mirror with the veil of this world's diversions and deceits. When the veil is removed, and conscience again reflects the sunlike purity of God's demands, we are visited with self-loathing and self-contempt. John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 2:25—“Though it may cast off every other vestige of its divine origin, our nature retains at least this one terrible prerogative of it, the capacity of preying on itself.”Lyttelton in Lux Mundi, 277—“The common fallacy that a self-indulgent sinner is no one's enemy but his own would, were it true, involve the further inference that such a sinner would not feel himself guilty.”If any dislike the doctrine of guilt, let them remember that without wrath there is no pardon, without guilt no forgiveness. See, on the nature of guilt, Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:193-267; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 208-209; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:346; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 461-473; Delitzsch, Bib. Psychologie, 121-148; Thornwell, Theology, 1:400-424.
By guilt we mean desert of punishment, or obligation to render satisfaction to God's justice for self-determined violation of law. There is a reaction of holiness against sin, which the Scripture denominates“the wrath of God”(Rom. 1:18). Sin is in us, either as act or state; God's punitive righteousness is over against the sinner, as something to be feared; guilt is a relation of the sinner to that righteousness, namely, the sinner's desert of punishment.
Guilt is related to sin as the burnt spot to the blaze. Schiller, Die Braut von Messina:“Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht; Der Uebel grösstes aber ist die Schuld”—“Life is not the highest of possessions; the greatest of ills, however, is guilt.”Delitzsch:“Die Schamröthe ist die Abendröthe der untergegangenen Sonne der ursprünglichen Gerechtigkeit”—“The blush of shame is the evening red after the sun of original righteousness has gone down.”E. G. Robinson:“Pangs of conscience do not arise from the fear of penalty,—they are the penalty itself.”See chapter on Fig-leaves, in McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 142-154—“Spiritual shame for sin sought an outward symbol, and found it in the nakedness of the lower parts of the body.”
Guilt is related to sin as the burnt spot to the blaze. Schiller, Die Braut von Messina:“Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht; Der Uebel grösstes aber ist die Schuld”—“Life is not the highest of possessions; the greatest of ills, however, is guilt.”Delitzsch:“Die Schamröthe ist die Abendröthe der untergegangenen Sonne der ursprünglichen Gerechtigkeit”—“The blush of shame is the evening red after the sun of original righteousness has gone down.”E. G. Robinson:“Pangs of conscience do not arise from the fear of penalty,—they are the penalty itself.”See chapter on Fig-leaves, in McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 142-154—“Spiritual shame for sin sought an outward symbol, and found it in the nakedness of the lower parts of the body.”
The following remarks may serve both for proof and for explanation:
A. Guilt is incurred only through self-determined transgression either on the part of man's nature or person. We are guilty only of that sin which we have originated or have had part in originating. Guilt is not, therefore, mere liability to punishment, without participation in the transgression for which the punishment is inflicted,—in other words, there is no such thing as constructive guilt under the divine government. We are accounted guilty only for what we have done, either personally or in our first parents, and for what we are, in consequence of such doing.
Ez. 18:20—“the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father”—, as Calvin says (Com.in loco):“The son shall not bear the father's iniquity, since he shall receive the reward due to himself, and shall bear his own burden.... All are guilty through their own fault.... Every one perishes through his own iniquity.”In other words, the whole race fell in Adam,[pg 645]and is punished for its own sin in him, not for the sins of immediate ancestors, nor for the sin of Adam as a person foreign to us.John 9:3—“Neither did this man sin, nor his parents”(that he should be born blind)—Do not attribute to any special later sin what is a consequence of the sin of the race—the first sin which“brought death into the world, and all our woe.”Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:195-213.
Ez. 18:20—“the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father”—, as Calvin says (Com.in loco):“The son shall not bear the father's iniquity, since he shall receive the reward due to himself, and shall bear his own burden.... All are guilty through their own fault.... Every one perishes through his own iniquity.”In other words, the whole race fell in Adam,[pg 645]and is punished for its own sin in him, not for the sins of immediate ancestors, nor for the sin of Adam as a person foreign to us.John 9:3—“Neither did this man sin, nor his parents”(that he should be born blind)—Do not attribute to any special later sin what is a consequence of the sin of the race—the first sin which“brought death into the world, and all our woe.”Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:195-213.
B. Guilt is an objective result of sin, and is not to be confounded with subjective pollution, or depravity. Every sin, whether of nature or person, is an offense against God (Ps. 51:4-6), an act or state of opposition to his will, which has for its effect God's personal wrath (Ps. 7:11; John 3:18, 36), and which must be expiated either by punishment or by atonement (Heb. 9:22). Not only does sin, as unlikeness to the divine purity, involvepollution,—it also, as antagonism to God's holy will, involvesguilt. This guilt, or obligation to satisfy the outraged holiness of God, is explained in the New Testament by the terms“debtor”and“debt”(Mat. 6:12; Luke 13:4; Mat. 5:21; Rom. 3:19; 6:23; Eph. 2:3). Since guilt, the objective result of sin, is entirely distinct from depravity, the subjective result, human nature may, as in Christ, have the guilt without the depravity (2 Cor. 5:21), or may, as in the Christian, have the depravity without the guilt (1 John 1:7, 8).
Ps. 51:4-6—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight; That thou mayest be justified when thou speakest, And be clear when thou judgest”;7:11—“God is a righteous judge, Yea, a God that hath indignation every day”;John 3:18—“he that believeth not hath been judged already”;36—“he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him”;Heb. 9:22—“apart from shedding of blood there is no remission”;Mat. 6:12—“debts”;Luke 13:4—“offenders”(marg.“debtors”);Mat. 5:21—“shall be in danger of[exposed to]the judgment”;Rom. 3:19—“that ... all the world may be brought under the judgment of God”;6:23—“the wages of sin is death”—death is sin's desert;Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath”;2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf”;1 John 1:7, 8—“the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin.[Yet]If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”Sin brings in its train not only depravity but guilt, not onlymaculabutreatus. Scripture sets forth thepollutionof sin by its similies of“a cage of unclean birds”and of“wounds, bruises, and putrefying sores”; by leprosy and Levitical uncleanness, under the old dispensation; by death and the corruption of the grave, under both the old and the new. But Scripture sets forth theguiltof sin, with equal vividness, in the fear of Cain and in the remorse of Judas. The revulsion of God's holiness from sin, and its demand for satisfaction, are reflected in the shame and remorse of every awakened conscience. There is an instinctive feeling in the sinner's heart that sin will be punished, and ought to be punished. But the Holy Spirit makes this need of reparation so deeply felt that the soul has no rest until its debt is paid. The offending church member who is truly penitent loves the law and the church which excludes him, and would not think it faithful if it did not. So Jesus, when laden with the guilt of the race, pressed forward to the cross, saying:“I have a baptism to be baptised with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!”(Luke 12:50; Mark 10:32).All sin involves guilt, and the sinful soul itself demands penalty, so that all will ultimately go where they most desire to be. All the great masters in literature have recognized this. The inextinguishable thirst for reparation constitutes the very essence of tragedy. The Greek tragedians are full of it, and Shakespeare is its most impressive teacher: Measure for Measure, 5:1—“I am sorry that such sorrow I procure, And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart That I crave death more willingly than mercy; 'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it”; Cymbeline, 5:4—“and so, great Powers, If you will take this audit, take this life, And cancel these cold bonds!... Desired, more than constrained, to satisfy, ... take No stricter render of me than my all”; that is, settle the account with me by taking my life, for nothing less than that will pay my debt. And later writers follow Shakespeare. Marguerite, in Goethe's Faust, fainting in the great cathedral under the solemn reverberations of the Dies Iræ; Dimmesdale, in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, putting himself side by side with Hester Prynne, his victim, in her place of obloquy; Bulwer's Eugene Aram, coming forward, though unsuspected, to confess the murder he had committed, all these are illustrations of the[pg 646]inner impulse that moves even a sinful soul to satisfy the claims of justice upon it. See A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 215, 216. On Hawthorne, see Hutton, Essays, 2:370-416—“In the Scarlet Letter, the minister gains fresh reverence and popularity as the very fruit of the passionate anguish with which his heart is consumed. Frantic with the stings of unacknowledged guilt, he is yet taught by these very stings to understand the hearts and stir the consciences of others.”See also Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life.Nor are such scenes confined to the pages of romance. In a recent trial at Syracuse, Earl, the wife-murderer, thanked the jury that had convicted him; declared the verdict just; begged that no one would interfere to stay the course of justice; said that the greatest blessing that could be conferred on him would be to let him suffer the penalty of his crime. In Plattsburg, at the close of another trial in which the accused was a life-convict who had struck down a fellow-convict with an axe, the jury, after being out two hours, came in to ask the Judge to explain the difference between murder in the first and second degree. Suddenly the prisoner rose and said:“This was not a murder in the second degree. It was a deliberate and premeditated murder. I know that I have done wrong, that I ought to confess the truth, and that I ought to be hanged.”This left the jury nothing to do but render their verdict, and the Judge sentenced the murderer to be hanged, as he confessed he deserved to be. In 1891, Lars Ostendahl, the most famous preacher of Norway, startled his hearers by publicly confessing that he had been guilty of immorality, and that he could no longer retain his pastorate. He begged his people for the sake of Christ to forgive him and not to desert the poor in his asylums. He was not only preacher, but also head of a great philanthropic work.Such is the movement and demand of the enlightened conscience. The lack of conviction that crime ought to be punished is one of the most certain signs of moral decay in either the individual or the nation (Ps. 97:10—“Ye that love the Lord, hate evil”;149:6—“Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, And a two-edged sword in their hand”—to execute God's judgment upon iniquity).This relation of sin to God shows us how Christ is“made sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). Since Christ is the immanent God, he is also essential humanity, the universal man, the life of the race. All the nerves and sensibilities of humanity meet in him. He is the central brain to which and through which all ideas must pass. He is the central heart to which and through which all pains must be communicated. You cannot telephone to your friend across the town without first ringing up the central office. You cannot injure your neighbor without first injuring Christ. Each one of us can say of him:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4). Because of his central and all-inclusive humanity, Christ can feel all the pangs of shame and suffering which rightfully belong to sinners, but which they cannot feel, because their sin has stupefied and deadened them. The Messiah, if he be truly man, must be a suffering Messiah. For the very reason of his humanity he must bear in his own person all the guilt of humanity and must be“the Lamb of God who”takes, and so“takes away the sin of the world”(John 1:29).Guilt and depravity are not only distinguishable in thought,—they are also separable in fact. The convicted murderer might repent and become pure, yet he might still be under obligation to suffer the punishment of his crime. The Christian is freed from guilt (Rom. 8:1), but he is not yet freed from depravity (Rom. 7:23). Christ, on the other hand, was under obligation to suffer (Luke 24:26;Acts 3:18;26:23), while yet he was without sin (Heb. 7:26). In the book entitled Modern Religious Thought, 3-29, R. J. Campbell has an essay on The Atonement, with which, apart from its view as to the origin of moral evil in God, we are in substantial agreement. He holds that“to relieve men from their sense of guilt, objective atonement is necessary,”—we would say: to relieve men from guilt itself—the obligation to suffer.“If Christ be the eternal Son of God, that side of the divine nature which has gone forth in creation, if he contains humanity and is present in every article and act of human experience, then he is associated with the existence of the primordial evil.... He and only he can sever the entail between man and his responsibility for personal sin. Christ has notsinnedin man, but he takes responsibility for that experience of evil into which humanity is born, and the yielding to which constitutes sin. He goes forth to suffer, and actually does suffer, in man. The eternal Son in whom humanity is contained is therefore a sufferer since creation began. This mysterious passion of Deity must continue until redemption is consummated and humanity restored to God. Thus every consequence of human ill is felt in the experience of Christ. Thus Christ not only assumes the guilt but bears the punishment of every human soul.”We claim however that the necessity of this suffering lies, not in the needs of man, but in the holiness of God.
Ps. 51:4-6—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight; That thou mayest be justified when thou speakest, And be clear when thou judgest”;7:11—“God is a righteous judge, Yea, a God that hath indignation every day”;John 3:18—“he that believeth not hath been judged already”;36—“he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him”;Heb. 9:22—“apart from shedding of blood there is no remission”;Mat. 6:12—“debts”;Luke 13:4—“offenders”(marg.“debtors”);Mat. 5:21—“shall be in danger of[exposed to]the judgment”;Rom. 3:19—“that ... all the world may be brought under the judgment of God”;6:23—“the wages of sin is death”—death is sin's desert;Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath”;2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf”;1 John 1:7, 8—“the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin.[Yet]If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”
Sin brings in its train not only depravity but guilt, not onlymaculabutreatus. Scripture sets forth thepollutionof sin by its similies of“a cage of unclean birds”and of“wounds, bruises, and putrefying sores”; by leprosy and Levitical uncleanness, under the old dispensation; by death and the corruption of the grave, under both the old and the new. But Scripture sets forth theguiltof sin, with equal vividness, in the fear of Cain and in the remorse of Judas. The revulsion of God's holiness from sin, and its demand for satisfaction, are reflected in the shame and remorse of every awakened conscience. There is an instinctive feeling in the sinner's heart that sin will be punished, and ought to be punished. But the Holy Spirit makes this need of reparation so deeply felt that the soul has no rest until its debt is paid. The offending church member who is truly penitent loves the law and the church which excludes him, and would not think it faithful if it did not. So Jesus, when laden with the guilt of the race, pressed forward to the cross, saying:“I have a baptism to be baptised with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!”(Luke 12:50; Mark 10:32).
All sin involves guilt, and the sinful soul itself demands penalty, so that all will ultimately go where they most desire to be. All the great masters in literature have recognized this. The inextinguishable thirst for reparation constitutes the very essence of tragedy. The Greek tragedians are full of it, and Shakespeare is its most impressive teacher: Measure for Measure, 5:1—“I am sorry that such sorrow I procure, And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart That I crave death more willingly than mercy; 'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it”; Cymbeline, 5:4—“and so, great Powers, If you will take this audit, take this life, And cancel these cold bonds!... Desired, more than constrained, to satisfy, ... take No stricter render of me than my all”; that is, settle the account with me by taking my life, for nothing less than that will pay my debt. And later writers follow Shakespeare. Marguerite, in Goethe's Faust, fainting in the great cathedral under the solemn reverberations of the Dies Iræ; Dimmesdale, in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, putting himself side by side with Hester Prynne, his victim, in her place of obloquy; Bulwer's Eugene Aram, coming forward, though unsuspected, to confess the murder he had committed, all these are illustrations of the[pg 646]inner impulse that moves even a sinful soul to satisfy the claims of justice upon it. See A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 215, 216. On Hawthorne, see Hutton, Essays, 2:370-416—“In the Scarlet Letter, the minister gains fresh reverence and popularity as the very fruit of the passionate anguish with which his heart is consumed. Frantic with the stings of unacknowledged guilt, he is yet taught by these very stings to understand the hearts and stir the consciences of others.”See also Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life.
Nor are such scenes confined to the pages of romance. In a recent trial at Syracuse, Earl, the wife-murderer, thanked the jury that had convicted him; declared the verdict just; begged that no one would interfere to stay the course of justice; said that the greatest blessing that could be conferred on him would be to let him suffer the penalty of his crime. In Plattsburg, at the close of another trial in which the accused was a life-convict who had struck down a fellow-convict with an axe, the jury, after being out two hours, came in to ask the Judge to explain the difference between murder in the first and second degree. Suddenly the prisoner rose and said:“This was not a murder in the second degree. It was a deliberate and premeditated murder. I know that I have done wrong, that I ought to confess the truth, and that I ought to be hanged.”This left the jury nothing to do but render their verdict, and the Judge sentenced the murderer to be hanged, as he confessed he deserved to be. In 1891, Lars Ostendahl, the most famous preacher of Norway, startled his hearers by publicly confessing that he had been guilty of immorality, and that he could no longer retain his pastorate. He begged his people for the sake of Christ to forgive him and not to desert the poor in his asylums. He was not only preacher, but also head of a great philanthropic work.
Such is the movement and demand of the enlightened conscience. The lack of conviction that crime ought to be punished is one of the most certain signs of moral decay in either the individual or the nation (Ps. 97:10—“Ye that love the Lord, hate evil”;149:6—“Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, And a two-edged sword in their hand”—to execute God's judgment upon iniquity).
This relation of sin to God shows us how Christ is“made sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). Since Christ is the immanent God, he is also essential humanity, the universal man, the life of the race. All the nerves and sensibilities of humanity meet in him. He is the central brain to which and through which all ideas must pass. He is the central heart to which and through which all pains must be communicated. You cannot telephone to your friend across the town without first ringing up the central office. You cannot injure your neighbor without first injuring Christ. Each one of us can say of him:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4). Because of his central and all-inclusive humanity, Christ can feel all the pangs of shame and suffering which rightfully belong to sinners, but which they cannot feel, because their sin has stupefied and deadened them. The Messiah, if he be truly man, must be a suffering Messiah. For the very reason of his humanity he must bear in his own person all the guilt of humanity and must be“the Lamb of God who”takes, and so“takes away the sin of the world”(John 1:29).
Guilt and depravity are not only distinguishable in thought,—they are also separable in fact. The convicted murderer might repent and become pure, yet he might still be under obligation to suffer the punishment of his crime. The Christian is freed from guilt (Rom. 8:1), but he is not yet freed from depravity (Rom. 7:23). Christ, on the other hand, was under obligation to suffer (Luke 24:26;Acts 3:18;26:23), while yet he was without sin (Heb. 7:26). In the book entitled Modern Religious Thought, 3-29, R. J. Campbell has an essay on The Atonement, with which, apart from its view as to the origin of moral evil in God, we are in substantial agreement. He holds that“to relieve men from their sense of guilt, objective atonement is necessary,”—we would say: to relieve men from guilt itself—the obligation to suffer.“If Christ be the eternal Son of God, that side of the divine nature which has gone forth in creation, if he contains humanity and is present in every article and act of human experience, then he is associated with the existence of the primordial evil.... He and only he can sever the entail between man and his responsibility for personal sin. Christ has notsinnedin man, but he takes responsibility for that experience of evil into which humanity is born, and the yielding to which constitutes sin. He goes forth to suffer, and actually does suffer, in man. The eternal Son in whom humanity is contained is therefore a sufferer since creation began. This mysterious passion of Deity must continue until redemption is consummated and humanity restored to God. Thus every consequence of human ill is felt in the experience of Christ. Thus Christ not only assumes the guilt but bears the punishment of every human soul.”We claim however that the necessity of this suffering lies, not in the needs of man, but in the holiness of God.
C. Guilt, moreover, as an objective result of sin, is not to be confounded with the subjective consciousness of guilt (Lev. 5:17). In the condemnation of conscience, God's condemnation partially and prophetically manifests itself (1 John 3:20). But guilt is primarily a relation to God, and only secondarily a relation to conscience. Progress in sin is marked by diminished sensitiveness of moral insight and feeling. As“the greatest of sins is to be conscious of none,”so guilt may be great, just in proportion to the absence of consciousness of it (Ps. 19:12; 51:6; Eph. 4:18, 19—ἀπηλγηκότες). There is no evidence, however, that the voice of conscience can be completely or finally silenced. The time for repentance may pass, but not the time for remorse. Progress in holiness, on the other hand, is marked by increasing apprehension of the depth and extent of our sinfulness, while with this apprehension is combined, in a normal Christian experience, the assurance that the guilt of our sin has been taken, and taken away, by Christ (John 1:29).
Lev. 5:17—“And if any one sin, and do any of the things which Jehovah hath commanded not to be done; though he knew it not, yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity”;1 John 3:20—“because if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things”;Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”;51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom”;Eph. 4:18, 19—“darkened in their understanding ... being past feeling”;John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away[marg.“beareth”]the sin of the world.”Plato, Republic, 1:330—“When death approaches, cares and alarms awake, especially the fear of hell and its punishments.”Cicero, De Divin., 1:30—“Then comes remorse for evil deeds.”Persius, Satire 3—“His vice benumbs him; his fibre has become fat; he is conscious of no fault; he knows not the loss he suffers; he is so far sunk, that there is not even a bubble on the surface of the deep.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:1—“Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all”; 4:5—“To my sick soul, as sin's true nature is, Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss; So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt”; Richard III, 5:3—“O coward conscience, how thou dost afflict me!... My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain”; Tempest, 3:3—“All three of them are desperate; their great guilt, Like poison given to work a great time after, Now 'gins to bite the spirits”; Ant. and Cleop., 3:9—“When we in our viciousness grow hard (O misery on't!) the wise gods seel our eyes; In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us Adore our errors; laugh at us, while we strut To our confusion.”Dr. Shedd said once to a graduating class of young theologians:“Would that upon the naked, palpitating heart of each one of you might be laid one redhot coal of God Almighty's wrath!”Yes, we add, if only that redhot coal might be quenched by one red drop of Christ's atoning blood. Dr. H. E. Robins:“To the convicted sinner a merely external hell would be a cooling flame, compared with the agony of his remorse.”John Milton represents Satan as saying:“Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.”James Martineau, Life by Jackson, 190—“It is of the essence of guilty declension to administer its own anæsthetics.”But this deadening of conscience cannot last always. Conscience is a mirror of God's holiness. We may cover the mirror with the veil of this world's diversions and deceits. When the veil is removed, and conscience again reflects the sunlike purity of God's demands, we are visited with self-loathing and self-contempt. John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 2:25—“Though it may cast off every other vestige of its divine origin, our nature retains at least this one terrible prerogative of it, the capacity of preying on itself.”Lyttelton in Lux Mundi, 277—“The common fallacy that a self-indulgent sinner is no one's enemy but his own would, were it true, involve the further inference that such a sinner would not feel himself guilty.”If any dislike the doctrine of guilt, let them remember that without wrath there is no pardon, without guilt no forgiveness. See, on the nature of guilt, Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:193-267; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 208-209; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:346; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 461-473; Delitzsch, Bib. Psychologie, 121-148; Thornwell, Theology, 1:400-424.
Lev. 5:17—“And if any one sin, and do any of the things which Jehovah hath commanded not to be done; though he knew it not, yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity”;1 John 3:20—“because if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things”;Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”;51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom”;Eph. 4:18, 19—“darkened in their understanding ... being past feeling”;John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away[marg.“beareth”]the sin of the world.”
Plato, Republic, 1:330—“When death approaches, cares and alarms awake, especially the fear of hell and its punishments.”Cicero, De Divin., 1:30—“Then comes remorse for evil deeds.”Persius, Satire 3—“His vice benumbs him; his fibre has become fat; he is conscious of no fault; he knows not the loss he suffers; he is so far sunk, that there is not even a bubble on the surface of the deep.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:1—“Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all”; 4:5—“To my sick soul, as sin's true nature is, Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss; So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt”; Richard III, 5:3—“O coward conscience, how thou dost afflict me!... My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain”; Tempest, 3:3—“All three of them are desperate; their great guilt, Like poison given to work a great time after, Now 'gins to bite the spirits”; Ant. and Cleop., 3:9—“When we in our viciousness grow hard (O misery on't!) the wise gods seel our eyes; In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us Adore our errors; laugh at us, while we strut To our confusion.”
Dr. Shedd said once to a graduating class of young theologians:“Would that upon the naked, palpitating heart of each one of you might be laid one redhot coal of God Almighty's wrath!”Yes, we add, if only that redhot coal might be quenched by one red drop of Christ's atoning blood. Dr. H. E. Robins:“To the convicted sinner a merely external hell would be a cooling flame, compared with the agony of his remorse.”John Milton represents Satan as saying:“Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.”James Martineau, Life by Jackson, 190—“It is of the essence of guilty declension to administer its own anæsthetics.”But this deadening of conscience cannot last always. Conscience is a mirror of God's holiness. We may cover the mirror with the veil of this world's diversions and deceits. When the veil is removed, and conscience again reflects the sunlike purity of God's demands, we are visited with self-loathing and self-contempt. John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 2:25—“Though it may cast off every other vestige of its divine origin, our nature retains at least this one terrible prerogative of it, the capacity of preying on itself.”Lyttelton in Lux Mundi, 277—“The common fallacy that a self-indulgent sinner is no one's enemy but his own would, were it true, involve the further inference that such a sinner would not feel himself guilty.”If any dislike the doctrine of guilt, let them remember that without wrath there is no pardon, without guilt no forgiveness. See, on the nature of guilt, Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:193-267; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 208-209; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:346; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 461-473; Delitzsch, Bib. Psychologie, 121-148; Thornwell, Theology, 1:400-424.
2. Degrees of guilt.The Scriptures recognize different degrees of guilt as attaching to different kinds of sin. The variety of sacrifices under the Mosaic law, and the variety of awards in the judgment, are to be explained upon this principle.Luke 12:47, 48—“shall be beaten with many stripes ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;Rom. 2:6—“who will render to every man according to his works.”See alsoJohn 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Heb. 2:2, 3—if“every transgression ... received a just recompense of reward; how shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”10:28, 29—“A man that hath set at nought Moses' law dieth without compassion on the word of two or three witnesses: of how much sorer punishment, think ye, shall he be judged worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God?”Casuistry, however, has drawn many distinctions which lack Scriptural foundation. Such is the distinction between venial sins and mortal sins in the Roman Catholic Church,—every sin unpardoned being mortal, and all sins being venial, since Christ has died for all. Nor is the common distinction between sins of omission and sins of commission more valid, since the very omission is an act of commission.Mat. 25:45—“Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least”;James 4:17—“To him therefore that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”John Ruskin:“The condemnation given from the Judgment Throne—most solemnly described—is for all the‘undones’and not the‘dones.’People are perpetually afraid of doing wrong; but unless they are doing its reverse energetically, theydo it all day long, and the degree does not matter.”The Roman Catholic Church proceeds upon the supposition that she can determine the precise malignity of every offence, and assign its proper penance at the confessional. Thornwell, Theology, 1:424-441, says that“all sins are venial but one—for there is a sin against the Holy Ghost,”yet“not one is venial in itself—for the least proceeds from an apostate state and nature.”We shall see, however, that the hindrance to pardon, in the case of the sin against the Holy Spirit, is subjective rather than objective.J. Spencer Kennard:“Roman Catholicism in Italy presents the spectacle of the authoritative representatives and teachers of morals and religion themselves living in all forms of deceit, corruption, and tyranny; and, on the other hand, discriminating between venial and mortal sin, classing as venial sins lying, fraud, fornication, marital infidelity, and even murder, all of which may be atoned for and forgiven or even permitted by the mere payment of money; and at the same time classing as mortal sins disrespect and disobedience to the church.”The following distinctions are indicated in Scripture as involving different degrees of guilt:A. Sin of nature, and personal transgression.Sin of nature involves guilt, yet there is greater guilt when this sin of nature reasserts itself in personal transgression; for, while this latter includes in itself the former, it also adds to the former a new element, namely, the conscious exercise of the individual and personal will, by virtue of which a new decision is made against God, special evil habit is induced, and the total condition of the soul is made more depraved. Although we have emphasized the guilt of inborn sin, because this truth is most contested, it is to be remembered that men reach a conviction of their native depravity only through a conviction of their personal transgressions. For this reason, by far the larger part of our preaching upon sin should consist in applications of the law of God to the acts and dispositions of men's lives.Mat. 19:14—“to such belongeth the kingdom of heaven”—relative innocence of childhood;23:32—“Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers”—personal transgression added to inherited depravity. In preaching, we should first treat individual transgressions, and thence proceed to[pg 649]heart-sin, and race-sin. Man is not wholly a spontaneous development of inborn tendencies, a manifestation of original sin. Motives do notdeterminebut theypersuadethe will, and every man is guilty of conscious personal transgressions which may, with the help of the Holy Spirit, be brought under the condemning judgment of conscience. Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 169-174—“Original sin does not do away with the significance of personal transgression. Adam was pardoned: but some of his descendants are unpardonable. The second death is referred, in Scripture, to our own personal guilt.”This is not to say that original sin does not involve as great sin as that of Adam in the first transgression, for original sinisthe sin of the first transgression; it is only to say that personal transgression is original sinplusthe conscious ratification of Adam's act by the individual.“We are guilty for what weare, as much as for what wedo. Oursinis not simply the sum total of all oursins. There is asinfulnesswhich is the common denominator of all our sins.”It is customary to speak lightly of original sin, as if personal sins were all for which man is accountable. But it is only in the light of original sin that personal sins can be explained.Prov. 14:9, marg.—“Fools make a mock at sin.”Simon, Reconciliation, 122—“The sinfulness of individual men varies; the sinfulness of humanity is a constant quantity.”Robert Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies:“Man lumps his kind i' the mass. God singles thence unit by unit. Thou and God exist—So think! for certain: Think the mass—mankind—Disparts, disperses, leaves thyself alone! Ask thy lone soul what laws are plain to thee,—Thou and no other, stand or fall by them! That is the part for thee.”B. Sins of ignorance, and sins of knowledge.Here guilt is measured by the degree of light possessed, or in other words, by the opportunities of knowledge men have enjoyed, and the powers with which they have been naturally endowed. Genius and privilege increase responsibility. The heathen are guilty, but those to whom the oracles of God have been committed are more guilty than they.Mat 10:15—“more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city”;Luke 12:47, 48—“that servant, who knew his Lord's will ... shall be beaten with many stripes; but he that knew not ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;23:34—“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”—complete knowledge would put them beyond the reach of forgiveness.John 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Acts 17:30—“The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked”;Rom. 1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent with them that practise them”;2:12—“For as many as have sinned without the law shall also perish without the law: and as many as have sinned under the law shall be judged by the law”;1 Tim. 1:13, 15, 16—“I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.”Is. 42:19—“Who is blind ... as Jehovah's servant?”It was the Pharisees whom Jesus warned of the sin against the Holy Spirit. The guilt of the crucifixion rested on Jews rather than on Gentiles. Apostate Israel was more guilty than the pagans. The greatest sinners of the present day may be in Christendom, not in heathendom. Satan was an archangel; Judas was an apostle; Alexander Borgia was a pope. Jackson, James Martineau, 362—“Corruptio optimi pessima est, as seen in a drunken Webster, a treacherous Bacon, a licentious Goethe.”Sir Roger de Coverley observed that none but men of fine parts deserve to be hanged. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 317—“The greater sin often involves the lesser guilt; the lesser sin the greater guilt.”Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, 227 (Pope, 1975)—“There's a new tribunal now Higher than God's,—the educated man's! Nice sense of honor in the human breast Supersedes here the old coarse oracle!”Dr. H. E. Robins holds that“palliation of guilt according to light is not possible under a system of pure law, and is possible only because the probation of the sinner is a probation of grace.”C. Sins of infirmity, and sins of presumption.Here the guilt is measured by the energy of the evil will. Sin may be known to be sin, yet may be committed in haste or weakness. Though haste and weakness constitute a palliation of the offence which springs therefrom, yet they are themselves sins, as revealing an unbelieving and disordered heart. But of far greater guilt are those presumptuous choices of evil in which not weakness, but strength of will, is manifest.[pg 650]Ps. 19:12, 13—“Clear thou me from hidden faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins”;Is. 5:18—“Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of falsehood, and sin as it were with a cart-rope”—not led away insensibly by sin, but earnestly, perseveringly, and wilfully working away at it;Gal. 6:1—“overtaken in any trespass”;1 Tim. 5:24—“Some men's sins are evident, going before unto judgment; and some men also they follow after”—some men's sins are so open, that they act as officers to bring to justice those who commit them; whilst others require after-proof (An. Par. Bible). Luther represents one of the former class as saying to himself:“Esto peccator, et pecca fortiter.”On sins of passion and of reflection, see Bittinger, in Princeton Rev., 1873:219.Micah 7:3, marg.—“Both hands are put forth for evil, to do it diligently.”So we ought to do good.“My art is my life,”said Grisi, the prima donna of the opera,“I save myself all day for that one bound upon the stage.”H. Bonar:“Sin worketh,—Let me work too. Busy as sin, my work I ply, Till I rest in the rest of eternity.”German criminal law distinguishes between intentional homicide without deliberation, and intentional homicide with deliberation. There are three grades of sin: 1. Sins of ignorance, like Paul's persecuting; 2. sins of infirmity, like Peter's denial; 3. sins of presumption, like David's murder of Uriah. Sins of presumption were unpardonable under the Jewish law; they are not unpardonable under Christ.D. Sin of incomplete, and sin of final, obduracy.Here the guilt is measured, not by the objective sufficiency or insufficiency of divine grace, but by the degree of unreceptiveness into which sin has brought the soul. As the only sin unto death which is described in Scripture is the sin against the Holy Spirit, we here consider the nature of that sin.Mat 12:31—“Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven”;32—“And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come”;Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”;1 John 5:16, 17—“If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and God will give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin into death: not concerning this do I say that he should make request. All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death”;Heb. 10:26—“if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, then remaineth no more a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries.”Ritschl holds all sin that comes short of definitive rejection of Christ to be ignorance rather than sin, and to be the object of no condemning sentence. This is to make the sin against the Holy Spirit the only real sin. Conscience and Scripture alike contradict this view. There is much incipient hardening of the heart that precedes the sin of final obduracy. See Denney, Studies in Theology, 80. The composure of the criminal is not always a sign of innocence. S. S. Times, April 12, 1902:200—“Sensitiveness of conscience and of feeling, and responsiveness of countenance and bearing, are to be retained by purity of life and freedom from transgression. On the other hand composure of countenance and calmness under suspicion and accusation are likely to be a result of continuance in wrong doing, with consequent hardening of the whole moral nature.”Weismann, Heredity, 2:8—“As soon as any organ falls into disuse, it degenerates, and finally is lost altogether.... In parasites the organs of sense degenerate.”Marconi's wireless telegraphy requires an attuned“receiver.”The“transmitter”sends out countless rays into space: only one capable of corresponding vibrations can understand them. The sinner may so destroy his receptivity, that the whole universe may be uttering God's truth, yet he be unable to hear a word of it. The Outlook:“If a man should put out his eyes, he could not see—nothing could make him see. So if a man should by obstinate wickedness destroy his power to believe in God's forgiveness, he would be in a hopeless state. Though God would still be gracious, the man could not see it, and so could not take God's forgiveness to himself.”The sin against the Holy Spirit is not to be regarded simply as an isolated act, but also as the external symptom of a heart so radically and finally set against God that no power which God can consistently use will ever save it. This sin, therefore, can be only the culmination of a long course of self-hardening and self-depraving. He who has committed it must be[pg 651]either profoundly indifferent to his own condition, or actively and bitterly hostile to God; so that anxiety or fear on account of one's condition is evidence that it has not been committed. The sin against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven, simply because the soul that has committed it has ceased to be receptive of divine influences, even when those influences are exerted in the utmost strength which God has seen fit to employ in his spiritual administration.The commission of this sin is marked by a loss of spiritual sight; the blind fish of the Mammoth Cave left light for darkness, and so in time lost their eyes. It is marked by a loss of religious sensibility; the sensitive-plant loses Its sensitiveness, in proportion to the frequency with which it is touched. It is marked by a loss of power to will the good;“the lava hardens after it has broken from the crater, and in that state cannot return to its source”(Van Oosterzee). The same writer also remarks (Dogmatics, 2:438):“Herod Antipas, after earlier doubt and slavishness, reached such deadness as to be able to mock the Savior, at the mention of whose name he had not long before trembled.”Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:425—“It is not that divine grace is absolutely refused to any one who in true penitence asks forgiveness of this sin; but he who commits it never fulfills the subjective conditions upon which forgiveness is possible, because the aggravation of sin to this ultimatum destroys in him all susceptibility of repentance. The way of return to God is closed against no one who does not close it against himself.”Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 97-120, illustrates the downward progress of the sinner by the law of degeneration in the vegetable and animal world: pigeons, roses, strawberries, all tend to revert to the primitive and wild type.“How shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”(Heb.2:3).Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3:5—“You all know security Is mortals' chiefest enemy.”Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, 90-124—“Richard III is the ideal villain. Villainy has become an end in itself. Richard is an artist in villainy. He lacks the emotions naturally attending crime. He regards villainy with the intellectual enthusiasm of the artist. His villainy is ideal in its success. There is a fascination of irresistibility in him. He is imperturbable in his crime. There is no effort, but rather humor, in it; a recklessness which suggests boundless resources; an inspiration which excludes calculation. Shakespeare relieves the representation from the charge of monstrosity by turning all this villainous history into the unconscious development of Nemesis.”See also A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 188-193. Robert Browning's Guido, in The Ring and the Book, is an example of pure hatred of the good. Guido hates Pompilia for her goodness, and declares that, if he catches her in the next world, he will murder her there, as he murdered her here.Alexander VI, the father of Cæsar and Lucrezia Borgia, the pope of cruelty and lust, wore yet to the day of his death the look of unfailing joyousness and geniality, yes, of even retiring sensitiveness and modesty. No fear or reproach of conscience seemed to throw gloom over his life, as in the cases of Tiberius and Louis XI. He believed himself under the special protection of the Virgin, although he had her painted with the features of his paramour, Julia Farnese. He never scrupled at false witness, adultery, or murder. See Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia, 294, 295. Jeremy Taylor thus describes the progress of sin in the sinner:“First it startles him, then it becomes pleasing, then delightful, then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed; then the man is impenitent, then obstinate, then resolved never to repent, then damned.”There is a state of utter insensibility to emotions of love or fear, and man by his sin may reach that state. The act of blasphemy is only the expression of a hardened or a hateful heart. B. H. Payne:“The calcium flame will char the steel wire so that it is no longer affected by the magnet.... As the blazing cinders and black curling smoke which the volcano spews from its rumbling throat are the accumulation of months and years, so the sin against the Holy Spirit is not a thoughtless expression in a moment of passion or rage, but the giving vent to a state of heart and mind abounding in the accumulations of weeks and months of opposition to the gospel.”Dr. J. P. Thompson:“The unpardonable sin is the knowing, wilful, persistent, contemptuous, malignant spurning of divine truth and grace, as manifested to the soul by the convincing and illuminating power of the Holy Ghost.”Dorner says that“therefore this sin does not belong to Old Testament times, or to the mere revelation of law. It implies the full revelation of the grace in Christ, and the conscious rejection of it by[pg 652]a soul to which the Spirit has made it manifest (Acts 17:30—‘The times of ignorance, therefore, God overlooked’;Rom. 3:25—‘the passing over of the sins done aforetime’).”But was it not under the Old Testament that God said:“My Spirit shall not strive with man forever”(Gen. 6:3), and“Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”(Hosea 4:17)? The sin against the Holy Ghost is a sin against grace, but it does not appear to be limited to New Testament times.It is still true that the unpardonable sin is a sin committed against the Holy Spirit rather than against Christ:Mat. 12:32—“whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come.”Jesus warns the Jews against it,—he does not say they had already committed it. They would seem to have committed it when, after Pentecost, they added to their rejection of Christ the rejection of the Holy Spirit's witness to Christ's resurrection. See Schaff, Sin against the Holy Ghost; Lemme, Sünde wider den Heiligen Geist; Davis, in Bap. Rev., 1862:317-326; Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, 283-289. On the general subject of kinds of sin and degrees of guilt, see Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:284, 298.
The Scriptures recognize different degrees of guilt as attaching to different kinds of sin. The variety of sacrifices under the Mosaic law, and the variety of awards in the judgment, are to be explained upon this principle.
Luke 12:47, 48—“shall be beaten with many stripes ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;Rom. 2:6—“who will render to every man according to his works.”See alsoJohn 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Heb. 2:2, 3—if“every transgression ... received a just recompense of reward; how shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”10:28, 29—“A man that hath set at nought Moses' law dieth without compassion on the word of two or three witnesses: of how much sorer punishment, think ye, shall he be judged worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God?”
Luke 12:47, 48—“shall be beaten with many stripes ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;Rom. 2:6—“who will render to every man according to his works.”See alsoJohn 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Heb. 2:2, 3—if“every transgression ... received a just recompense of reward; how shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”10:28, 29—“A man that hath set at nought Moses' law dieth without compassion on the word of two or three witnesses: of how much sorer punishment, think ye, shall he be judged worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God?”
Casuistry, however, has drawn many distinctions which lack Scriptural foundation. Such is the distinction between venial sins and mortal sins in the Roman Catholic Church,—every sin unpardoned being mortal, and all sins being venial, since Christ has died for all. Nor is the common distinction between sins of omission and sins of commission more valid, since the very omission is an act of commission.
Mat. 25:45—“Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least”;James 4:17—“To him therefore that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”John Ruskin:“The condemnation given from the Judgment Throne—most solemnly described—is for all the‘undones’and not the‘dones.’People are perpetually afraid of doing wrong; but unless they are doing its reverse energetically, theydo it all day long, and the degree does not matter.”The Roman Catholic Church proceeds upon the supposition that she can determine the precise malignity of every offence, and assign its proper penance at the confessional. Thornwell, Theology, 1:424-441, says that“all sins are venial but one—for there is a sin against the Holy Ghost,”yet“not one is venial in itself—for the least proceeds from an apostate state and nature.”We shall see, however, that the hindrance to pardon, in the case of the sin against the Holy Spirit, is subjective rather than objective.J. Spencer Kennard:“Roman Catholicism in Italy presents the spectacle of the authoritative representatives and teachers of morals and religion themselves living in all forms of deceit, corruption, and tyranny; and, on the other hand, discriminating between venial and mortal sin, classing as venial sins lying, fraud, fornication, marital infidelity, and even murder, all of which may be atoned for and forgiven or even permitted by the mere payment of money; and at the same time classing as mortal sins disrespect and disobedience to the church.”
Mat. 25:45—“Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least”;James 4:17—“To him therefore that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”John Ruskin:“The condemnation given from the Judgment Throne—most solemnly described—is for all the‘undones’and not the‘dones.’People are perpetually afraid of doing wrong; but unless they are doing its reverse energetically, theydo it all day long, and the degree does not matter.”The Roman Catholic Church proceeds upon the supposition that she can determine the precise malignity of every offence, and assign its proper penance at the confessional. Thornwell, Theology, 1:424-441, says that“all sins are venial but one—for there is a sin against the Holy Ghost,”yet“not one is venial in itself—for the least proceeds from an apostate state and nature.”We shall see, however, that the hindrance to pardon, in the case of the sin against the Holy Spirit, is subjective rather than objective.
J. Spencer Kennard:“Roman Catholicism in Italy presents the spectacle of the authoritative representatives and teachers of morals and religion themselves living in all forms of deceit, corruption, and tyranny; and, on the other hand, discriminating between venial and mortal sin, classing as venial sins lying, fraud, fornication, marital infidelity, and even murder, all of which may be atoned for and forgiven or even permitted by the mere payment of money; and at the same time classing as mortal sins disrespect and disobedience to the church.”
The following distinctions are indicated in Scripture as involving different degrees of guilt:
A. Sin of nature, and personal transgression.
Sin of nature involves guilt, yet there is greater guilt when this sin of nature reasserts itself in personal transgression; for, while this latter includes in itself the former, it also adds to the former a new element, namely, the conscious exercise of the individual and personal will, by virtue of which a new decision is made against God, special evil habit is induced, and the total condition of the soul is made more depraved. Although we have emphasized the guilt of inborn sin, because this truth is most contested, it is to be remembered that men reach a conviction of their native depravity only through a conviction of their personal transgressions. For this reason, by far the larger part of our preaching upon sin should consist in applications of the law of God to the acts and dispositions of men's lives.
Mat. 19:14—“to such belongeth the kingdom of heaven”—relative innocence of childhood;23:32—“Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers”—personal transgression added to inherited depravity. In preaching, we should first treat individual transgressions, and thence proceed to[pg 649]heart-sin, and race-sin. Man is not wholly a spontaneous development of inborn tendencies, a manifestation of original sin. Motives do notdeterminebut theypersuadethe will, and every man is guilty of conscious personal transgressions which may, with the help of the Holy Spirit, be brought under the condemning judgment of conscience. Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 169-174—“Original sin does not do away with the significance of personal transgression. Adam was pardoned: but some of his descendants are unpardonable. The second death is referred, in Scripture, to our own personal guilt.”This is not to say that original sin does not involve as great sin as that of Adam in the first transgression, for original sinisthe sin of the first transgression; it is only to say that personal transgression is original sinplusthe conscious ratification of Adam's act by the individual.“We are guilty for what weare, as much as for what wedo. Oursinis not simply the sum total of all oursins. There is asinfulnesswhich is the common denominator of all our sins.”It is customary to speak lightly of original sin, as if personal sins were all for which man is accountable. But it is only in the light of original sin that personal sins can be explained.Prov. 14:9, marg.—“Fools make a mock at sin.”Simon, Reconciliation, 122—“The sinfulness of individual men varies; the sinfulness of humanity is a constant quantity.”Robert Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies:“Man lumps his kind i' the mass. God singles thence unit by unit. Thou and God exist—So think! for certain: Think the mass—mankind—Disparts, disperses, leaves thyself alone! Ask thy lone soul what laws are plain to thee,—Thou and no other, stand or fall by them! That is the part for thee.”
Mat. 19:14—“to such belongeth the kingdom of heaven”—relative innocence of childhood;23:32—“Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers”—personal transgression added to inherited depravity. In preaching, we should first treat individual transgressions, and thence proceed to[pg 649]heart-sin, and race-sin. Man is not wholly a spontaneous development of inborn tendencies, a manifestation of original sin. Motives do notdeterminebut theypersuadethe will, and every man is guilty of conscious personal transgressions which may, with the help of the Holy Spirit, be brought under the condemning judgment of conscience. Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 169-174—“Original sin does not do away with the significance of personal transgression. Adam was pardoned: but some of his descendants are unpardonable. The second death is referred, in Scripture, to our own personal guilt.”
This is not to say that original sin does not involve as great sin as that of Adam in the first transgression, for original sinisthe sin of the first transgression; it is only to say that personal transgression is original sinplusthe conscious ratification of Adam's act by the individual.“We are guilty for what weare, as much as for what wedo. Oursinis not simply the sum total of all oursins. There is asinfulnesswhich is the common denominator of all our sins.”It is customary to speak lightly of original sin, as if personal sins were all for which man is accountable. But it is only in the light of original sin that personal sins can be explained.Prov. 14:9, marg.—“Fools make a mock at sin.”Simon, Reconciliation, 122—“The sinfulness of individual men varies; the sinfulness of humanity is a constant quantity.”Robert Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies:“Man lumps his kind i' the mass. God singles thence unit by unit. Thou and God exist—So think! for certain: Think the mass—mankind—Disparts, disperses, leaves thyself alone! Ask thy lone soul what laws are plain to thee,—Thou and no other, stand or fall by them! That is the part for thee.”
B. Sins of ignorance, and sins of knowledge.
Here guilt is measured by the degree of light possessed, or in other words, by the opportunities of knowledge men have enjoyed, and the powers with which they have been naturally endowed. Genius and privilege increase responsibility. The heathen are guilty, but those to whom the oracles of God have been committed are more guilty than they.
Mat 10:15—“more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city”;Luke 12:47, 48—“that servant, who knew his Lord's will ... shall be beaten with many stripes; but he that knew not ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;23:34—“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”—complete knowledge would put them beyond the reach of forgiveness.John 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Acts 17:30—“The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked”;Rom. 1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent with them that practise them”;2:12—“For as many as have sinned without the law shall also perish without the law: and as many as have sinned under the law shall be judged by the law”;1 Tim. 1:13, 15, 16—“I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.”Is. 42:19—“Who is blind ... as Jehovah's servant?”It was the Pharisees whom Jesus warned of the sin against the Holy Spirit. The guilt of the crucifixion rested on Jews rather than on Gentiles. Apostate Israel was more guilty than the pagans. The greatest sinners of the present day may be in Christendom, not in heathendom. Satan was an archangel; Judas was an apostle; Alexander Borgia was a pope. Jackson, James Martineau, 362—“Corruptio optimi pessima est, as seen in a drunken Webster, a treacherous Bacon, a licentious Goethe.”Sir Roger de Coverley observed that none but men of fine parts deserve to be hanged. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 317—“The greater sin often involves the lesser guilt; the lesser sin the greater guilt.”Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, 227 (Pope, 1975)—“There's a new tribunal now Higher than God's,—the educated man's! Nice sense of honor in the human breast Supersedes here the old coarse oracle!”Dr. H. E. Robins holds that“palliation of guilt according to light is not possible under a system of pure law, and is possible only because the probation of the sinner is a probation of grace.”
Mat 10:15—“more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city”;Luke 12:47, 48—“that servant, who knew his Lord's will ... shall be beaten with many stripes; but he that knew not ... shall be beaten with few stripes”;23:34—“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”—complete knowledge would put them beyond the reach of forgiveness.John 19:11—“he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin”;Acts 17:30—“The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked”;Rom. 1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent with them that practise them”;2:12—“For as many as have sinned without the law shall also perish without the law: and as many as have sinned under the law shall be judged by the law”;1 Tim. 1:13, 15, 16—“I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.”
Is. 42:19—“Who is blind ... as Jehovah's servant?”It was the Pharisees whom Jesus warned of the sin against the Holy Spirit. The guilt of the crucifixion rested on Jews rather than on Gentiles. Apostate Israel was more guilty than the pagans. The greatest sinners of the present day may be in Christendom, not in heathendom. Satan was an archangel; Judas was an apostle; Alexander Borgia was a pope. Jackson, James Martineau, 362—“Corruptio optimi pessima est, as seen in a drunken Webster, a treacherous Bacon, a licentious Goethe.”Sir Roger de Coverley observed that none but men of fine parts deserve to be hanged. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 317—“The greater sin often involves the lesser guilt; the lesser sin the greater guilt.”Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, 227 (Pope, 1975)—“There's a new tribunal now Higher than God's,—the educated man's! Nice sense of honor in the human breast Supersedes here the old coarse oracle!”Dr. H. E. Robins holds that“palliation of guilt according to light is not possible under a system of pure law, and is possible only because the probation of the sinner is a probation of grace.”
C. Sins of infirmity, and sins of presumption.
Here the guilt is measured by the energy of the evil will. Sin may be known to be sin, yet may be committed in haste or weakness. Though haste and weakness constitute a palliation of the offence which springs therefrom, yet they are themselves sins, as revealing an unbelieving and disordered heart. But of far greater guilt are those presumptuous choices of evil in which not weakness, but strength of will, is manifest.
Ps. 19:12, 13—“Clear thou me from hidden faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins”;Is. 5:18—“Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of falsehood, and sin as it were with a cart-rope”—not led away insensibly by sin, but earnestly, perseveringly, and wilfully working away at it;Gal. 6:1—“overtaken in any trespass”;1 Tim. 5:24—“Some men's sins are evident, going before unto judgment; and some men also they follow after”—some men's sins are so open, that they act as officers to bring to justice those who commit them; whilst others require after-proof (An. Par. Bible). Luther represents one of the former class as saying to himself:“Esto peccator, et pecca fortiter.”On sins of passion and of reflection, see Bittinger, in Princeton Rev., 1873:219.Micah 7:3, marg.—“Both hands are put forth for evil, to do it diligently.”So we ought to do good.“My art is my life,”said Grisi, the prima donna of the opera,“I save myself all day for that one bound upon the stage.”H. Bonar:“Sin worketh,—Let me work too. Busy as sin, my work I ply, Till I rest in the rest of eternity.”German criminal law distinguishes between intentional homicide without deliberation, and intentional homicide with deliberation. There are three grades of sin: 1. Sins of ignorance, like Paul's persecuting; 2. sins of infirmity, like Peter's denial; 3. sins of presumption, like David's murder of Uriah. Sins of presumption were unpardonable under the Jewish law; they are not unpardonable under Christ.
Ps. 19:12, 13—“Clear thou me from hidden faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins”;Is. 5:18—“Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of falsehood, and sin as it were with a cart-rope”—not led away insensibly by sin, but earnestly, perseveringly, and wilfully working away at it;Gal. 6:1—“overtaken in any trespass”;1 Tim. 5:24—“Some men's sins are evident, going before unto judgment; and some men also they follow after”—some men's sins are so open, that they act as officers to bring to justice those who commit them; whilst others require after-proof (An. Par. Bible). Luther represents one of the former class as saying to himself:“Esto peccator, et pecca fortiter.”On sins of passion and of reflection, see Bittinger, in Princeton Rev., 1873:219.
Micah 7:3, marg.—“Both hands are put forth for evil, to do it diligently.”So we ought to do good.“My art is my life,”said Grisi, the prima donna of the opera,“I save myself all day for that one bound upon the stage.”H. Bonar:“Sin worketh,—Let me work too. Busy as sin, my work I ply, Till I rest in the rest of eternity.”German criminal law distinguishes between intentional homicide without deliberation, and intentional homicide with deliberation. There are three grades of sin: 1. Sins of ignorance, like Paul's persecuting; 2. sins of infirmity, like Peter's denial; 3. sins of presumption, like David's murder of Uriah. Sins of presumption were unpardonable under the Jewish law; they are not unpardonable under Christ.
D. Sin of incomplete, and sin of final, obduracy.
Here the guilt is measured, not by the objective sufficiency or insufficiency of divine grace, but by the degree of unreceptiveness into which sin has brought the soul. As the only sin unto death which is described in Scripture is the sin against the Holy Spirit, we here consider the nature of that sin.
Mat 12:31—“Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven”;32—“And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come”;Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”;1 John 5:16, 17—“If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and God will give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin into death: not concerning this do I say that he should make request. All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death”;Heb. 10:26—“if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, then remaineth no more a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries.”Ritschl holds all sin that comes short of definitive rejection of Christ to be ignorance rather than sin, and to be the object of no condemning sentence. This is to make the sin against the Holy Spirit the only real sin. Conscience and Scripture alike contradict this view. There is much incipient hardening of the heart that precedes the sin of final obduracy. See Denney, Studies in Theology, 80. The composure of the criminal is not always a sign of innocence. S. S. Times, April 12, 1902:200—“Sensitiveness of conscience and of feeling, and responsiveness of countenance and bearing, are to be retained by purity of life and freedom from transgression. On the other hand composure of countenance and calmness under suspicion and accusation are likely to be a result of continuance in wrong doing, with consequent hardening of the whole moral nature.”Weismann, Heredity, 2:8—“As soon as any organ falls into disuse, it degenerates, and finally is lost altogether.... In parasites the organs of sense degenerate.”Marconi's wireless telegraphy requires an attuned“receiver.”The“transmitter”sends out countless rays into space: only one capable of corresponding vibrations can understand them. The sinner may so destroy his receptivity, that the whole universe may be uttering God's truth, yet he be unable to hear a word of it. The Outlook:“If a man should put out his eyes, he could not see—nothing could make him see. So if a man should by obstinate wickedness destroy his power to believe in God's forgiveness, he would be in a hopeless state. Though God would still be gracious, the man could not see it, and so could not take God's forgiveness to himself.”
Mat 12:31—“Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven”;32—“And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come”;Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”;1 John 5:16, 17—“If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and God will give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin into death: not concerning this do I say that he should make request. All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death”;Heb. 10:26—“if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, then remaineth no more a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries.”
Ritschl holds all sin that comes short of definitive rejection of Christ to be ignorance rather than sin, and to be the object of no condemning sentence. This is to make the sin against the Holy Spirit the only real sin. Conscience and Scripture alike contradict this view. There is much incipient hardening of the heart that precedes the sin of final obduracy. See Denney, Studies in Theology, 80. The composure of the criminal is not always a sign of innocence. S. S. Times, April 12, 1902:200—“Sensitiveness of conscience and of feeling, and responsiveness of countenance and bearing, are to be retained by purity of life and freedom from transgression. On the other hand composure of countenance and calmness under suspicion and accusation are likely to be a result of continuance in wrong doing, with consequent hardening of the whole moral nature.”
Weismann, Heredity, 2:8—“As soon as any organ falls into disuse, it degenerates, and finally is lost altogether.... In parasites the organs of sense degenerate.”Marconi's wireless telegraphy requires an attuned“receiver.”The“transmitter”sends out countless rays into space: only one capable of corresponding vibrations can understand them. The sinner may so destroy his receptivity, that the whole universe may be uttering God's truth, yet he be unable to hear a word of it. The Outlook:“If a man should put out his eyes, he could not see—nothing could make him see. So if a man should by obstinate wickedness destroy his power to believe in God's forgiveness, he would be in a hopeless state. Though God would still be gracious, the man could not see it, and so could not take God's forgiveness to himself.”
The sin against the Holy Spirit is not to be regarded simply as an isolated act, but also as the external symptom of a heart so radically and finally set against God that no power which God can consistently use will ever save it. This sin, therefore, can be only the culmination of a long course of self-hardening and self-depraving. He who has committed it must be[pg 651]either profoundly indifferent to his own condition, or actively and bitterly hostile to God; so that anxiety or fear on account of one's condition is evidence that it has not been committed. The sin against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven, simply because the soul that has committed it has ceased to be receptive of divine influences, even when those influences are exerted in the utmost strength which God has seen fit to employ in his spiritual administration.
The commission of this sin is marked by a loss of spiritual sight; the blind fish of the Mammoth Cave left light for darkness, and so in time lost their eyes. It is marked by a loss of religious sensibility; the sensitive-plant loses Its sensitiveness, in proportion to the frequency with which it is touched. It is marked by a loss of power to will the good;“the lava hardens after it has broken from the crater, and in that state cannot return to its source”(Van Oosterzee). The same writer also remarks (Dogmatics, 2:438):“Herod Antipas, after earlier doubt and slavishness, reached such deadness as to be able to mock the Savior, at the mention of whose name he had not long before trembled.”Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:425—“It is not that divine grace is absolutely refused to any one who in true penitence asks forgiveness of this sin; but he who commits it never fulfills the subjective conditions upon which forgiveness is possible, because the aggravation of sin to this ultimatum destroys in him all susceptibility of repentance. The way of return to God is closed against no one who does not close it against himself.”Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 97-120, illustrates the downward progress of the sinner by the law of degeneration in the vegetable and animal world: pigeons, roses, strawberries, all tend to revert to the primitive and wild type.“How shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”(Heb.2:3).Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3:5—“You all know security Is mortals' chiefest enemy.”Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, 90-124—“Richard III is the ideal villain. Villainy has become an end in itself. Richard is an artist in villainy. He lacks the emotions naturally attending crime. He regards villainy with the intellectual enthusiasm of the artist. His villainy is ideal in its success. There is a fascination of irresistibility in him. He is imperturbable in his crime. There is no effort, but rather humor, in it; a recklessness which suggests boundless resources; an inspiration which excludes calculation. Shakespeare relieves the representation from the charge of monstrosity by turning all this villainous history into the unconscious development of Nemesis.”See also A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 188-193. Robert Browning's Guido, in The Ring and the Book, is an example of pure hatred of the good. Guido hates Pompilia for her goodness, and declares that, if he catches her in the next world, he will murder her there, as he murdered her here.Alexander VI, the father of Cæsar and Lucrezia Borgia, the pope of cruelty and lust, wore yet to the day of his death the look of unfailing joyousness and geniality, yes, of even retiring sensitiveness and modesty. No fear or reproach of conscience seemed to throw gloom over his life, as in the cases of Tiberius and Louis XI. He believed himself under the special protection of the Virgin, although he had her painted with the features of his paramour, Julia Farnese. He never scrupled at false witness, adultery, or murder. See Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia, 294, 295. Jeremy Taylor thus describes the progress of sin in the sinner:“First it startles him, then it becomes pleasing, then delightful, then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed; then the man is impenitent, then obstinate, then resolved never to repent, then damned.”There is a state of utter insensibility to emotions of love or fear, and man by his sin may reach that state. The act of blasphemy is only the expression of a hardened or a hateful heart. B. H. Payne:“The calcium flame will char the steel wire so that it is no longer affected by the magnet.... As the blazing cinders and black curling smoke which the volcano spews from its rumbling throat are the accumulation of months and years, so the sin against the Holy Spirit is not a thoughtless expression in a moment of passion or rage, but the giving vent to a state of heart and mind abounding in the accumulations of weeks and months of opposition to the gospel.”Dr. J. P. Thompson:“The unpardonable sin is the knowing, wilful, persistent, contemptuous, malignant spurning of divine truth and grace, as manifested to the soul by the convincing and illuminating power of the Holy Ghost.”Dorner says that“therefore this sin does not belong to Old Testament times, or to the mere revelation of law. It implies the full revelation of the grace in Christ, and the conscious rejection of it by[pg 652]a soul to which the Spirit has made it manifest (Acts 17:30—‘The times of ignorance, therefore, God overlooked’;Rom. 3:25—‘the passing over of the sins done aforetime’).”But was it not under the Old Testament that God said:“My Spirit shall not strive with man forever”(Gen. 6:3), and“Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”(Hosea 4:17)? The sin against the Holy Ghost is a sin against grace, but it does not appear to be limited to New Testament times.It is still true that the unpardonable sin is a sin committed against the Holy Spirit rather than against Christ:Mat. 12:32—“whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come.”Jesus warns the Jews against it,—he does not say they had already committed it. They would seem to have committed it when, after Pentecost, they added to their rejection of Christ the rejection of the Holy Spirit's witness to Christ's resurrection. See Schaff, Sin against the Holy Ghost; Lemme, Sünde wider den Heiligen Geist; Davis, in Bap. Rev., 1862:317-326; Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, 283-289. On the general subject of kinds of sin and degrees of guilt, see Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:284, 298.
The commission of this sin is marked by a loss of spiritual sight; the blind fish of the Mammoth Cave left light for darkness, and so in time lost their eyes. It is marked by a loss of religious sensibility; the sensitive-plant loses Its sensitiveness, in proportion to the frequency with which it is touched. It is marked by a loss of power to will the good;“the lava hardens after it has broken from the crater, and in that state cannot return to its source”(Van Oosterzee). The same writer also remarks (Dogmatics, 2:438):“Herod Antipas, after earlier doubt and slavishness, reached such deadness as to be able to mock the Savior, at the mention of whose name he had not long before trembled.”Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:425—“It is not that divine grace is absolutely refused to any one who in true penitence asks forgiveness of this sin; but he who commits it never fulfills the subjective conditions upon which forgiveness is possible, because the aggravation of sin to this ultimatum destroys in him all susceptibility of repentance. The way of return to God is closed against no one who does not close it against himself.”Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 97-120, illustrates the downward progress of the sinner by the law of degeneration in the vegetable and animal world: pigeons, roses, strawberries, all tend to revert to the primitive and wild type.“How shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?”(Heb.2:3).
Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3:5—“You all know security Is mortals' chiefest enemy.”Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, 90-124—“Richard III is the ideal villain. Villainy has become an end in itself. Richard is an artist in villainy. He lacks the emotions naturally attending crime. He regards villainy with the intellectual enthusiasm of the artist. His villainy is ideal in its success. There is a fascination of irresistibility in him. He is imperturbable in his crime. There is no effort, but rather humor, in it; a recklessness which suggests boundless resources; an inspiration which excludes calculation. Shakespeare relieves the representation from the charge of monstrosity by turning all this villainous history into the unconscious development of Nemesis.”See also A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 188-193. Robert Browning's Guido, in The Ring and the Book, is an example of pure hatred of the good. Guido hates Pompilia for her goodness, and declares that, if he catches her in the next world, he will murder her there, as he murdered her here.
Alexander VI, the father of Cæsar and Lucrezia Borgia, the pope of cruelty and lust, wore yet to the day of his death the look of unfailing joyousness and geniality, yes, of even retiring sensitiveness and modesty. No fear or reproach of conscience seemed to throw gloom over his life, as in the cases of Tiberius and Louis XI. He believed himself under the special protection of the Virgin, although he had her painted with the features of his paramour, Julia Farnese. He never scrupled at false witness, adultery, or murder. See Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia, 294, 295. Jeremy Taylor thus describes the progress of sin in the sinner:“First it startles him, then it becomes pleasing, then delightful, then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed; then the man is impenitent, then obstinate, then resolved never to repent, then damned.”
There is a state of utter insensibility to emotions of love or fear, and man by his sin may reach that state. The act of blasphemy is only the expression of a hardened or a hateful heart. B. H. Payne:“The calcium flame will char the steel wire so that it is no longer affected by the magnet.... As the blazing cinders and black curling smoke which the volcano spews from its rumbling throat are the accumulation of months and years, so the sin against the Holy Spirit is not a thoughtless expression in a moment of passion or rage, but the giving vent to a state of heart and mind abounding in the accumulations of weeks and months of opposition to the gospel.”
Dr. J. P. Thompson:“The unpardonable sin is the knowing, wilful, persistent, contemptuous, malignant spurning of divine truth and grace, as manifested to the soul by the convincing and illuminating power of the Holy Ghost.”Dorner says that“therefore this sin does not belong to Old Testament times, or to the mere revelation of law. It implies the full revelation of the grace in Christ, and the conscious rejection of it by[pg 652]a soul to which the Spirit has made it manifest (Acts 17:30—‘The times of ignorance, therefore, God overlooked’;Rom. 3:25—‘the passing over of the sins done aforetime’).”But was it not under the Old Testament that God said:“My Spirit shall not strive with man forever”(Gen. 6:3), and“Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”(Hosea 4:17)? The sin against the Holy Ghost is a sin against grace, but it does not appear to be limited to New Testament times.
It is still true that the unpardonable sin is a sin committed against the Holy Spirit rather than against Christ:Mat. 12:32—“whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come.”Jesus warns the Jews against it,—he does not say they had already committed it. They would seem to have committed it when, after Pentecost, they added to their rejection of Christ the rejection of the Holy Spirit's witness to Christ's resurrection. See Schaff, Sin against the Holy Ghost; Lemme, Sünde wider den Heiligen Geist; Davis, in Bap. Rev., 1862:317-326; Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, 283-289. On the general subject of kinds of sin and degrees of guilt, see Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:284, 298.