Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/190

182 as one of the most important phases in the method of revelation itself. But such faith is wholly inconsistent with the radical idea dominating materialistic conceptions of evolution,—namely, that the process of growth really explains the cause as well as the history of life on the earth,—and also with the radical idea dominating the view of Matthew Arnold and the modern Dutch school of divines,—that there is nothing but an abstract ideal which is higher than man, that religion is only "morality touched with emotion," and God an expression for "a stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," in other words, not the foundation of our life, but its visionary goal. Now with both these conceptions as Dr. Tulloch showed, the Christian teaching as to sin,—a teaching, which, like all other similar lessons of the Church, had its history of gradual growth, and was no more fully developed at first than the doctrine of divine grace,—is entirely inconsistent. If sin represent a fact at all in human experience, it is a fact which cannot be explained on the principle of finding in every new phase of existence nothing but the transformed shape of some antecedent state of existence. If sin were to the previous condition of circumstances and character what the blossom is to the bud, or the fruit to the blossom, then though it might be a morbid growth, a parasitic growth, a growth tending to disfigure and ruin the character out of which it grows, it would no more call for remorse, or penitence, or judgment, than the gall-apple on the oak, or water on the brain. Yet the attempt to eliminate the sense of sin from human consciousness is just as ineffectual as the attempt to eliminate the sense of cause and effect, or the sense of hope and fear. The "historical method," as it is called, which recognizes everything as having some real right to an appropriate commemoration in the life of man which is found alike in all ages, and developed as the life of the race is developed, demands that the sense of sin should be recognized as a constituent part of human history, no less than the feeling for art, or the thirst for knowledge, or the life of imagination. Indeed, it is far more pervading than any of these. While they are developed by only a portion of the community, the moral feeling of deep self-reproach and remorse for voluntary evil is shared by all, not least by the most ignorant who do not participate at all in the life of culture or of abstract thought.

In the early history of every people, it is indeed remarkable how uniformly the nation feels that all its guilt or goodness is shared by all, that the penalty of impiety will light upon all alike, even when it seems to be due only to the acts of a few. As the Jews recognized that Egypt suffered for the tyranny of its king, and themselves expected that, in the long wanderings of the wilderness, all would incur the penalty of acts committed only by a few,—as the Athenians regarded their whole city as liable to a curse for the acts of desecration committed by a few thoughtless youths,—so the early literature of all nations is full of the Nemesis which descends on one member of a family for the sins of his ancestors, a conception of which the earliest dogmatic trace is probably found in the story of the fall and the wide extermination which followed it in the flood. It will be said that this fact only proves that, originally at least, sin is no more distinguished from the antecedent conditions from which it is "evolved," than other human characteristics or qualities; that the peculiar remorse attending it, whatever it may be due to, is not due to any keen sense of personal responsibility. But it might be as well said that because in a dim light we cannot distinguish from each other the shadows of contiguous objects, we have no impression of the true meaning of a shadow. The line of discrimination between the range of the suffering, and the exact range of personal or tribal responsibility for the suffering, is necessarily a delicate line to draw. Society is so constituted, especially in its earlier stages, that it sins and suffers collectively,—that it is often impossible to distinguish who is and who is not responsible for a calamity which overshadows all alike. Early tribes were units, rather than collections of units. What they did was done perhaps by the chief, but then the chief carried the whole tribe with him, and what he did, they consented to. In such cases, the sense of sin was necessarily almost as collective as the suffering which came of it. No one was in the same way separately responsible as in more individualized societies, but no one was in the same way distinctly innocent of the guilt. It is only in later stages of society that it is possible to distinguish effectually between the range of the guilt and the range of the suffering caused by that guilt, which last necessarily spreads far beyond the limits of the guilt itself. When a whole city trembles because one or two of that city have done something impious, as Athens trembled at