Page:Sin and Crime.pdf/5

 made by man for the regulation of society, for the prevention of actions deemed seriously injurious to the commonwealth, such actions being made punishable by the civil authority. In addition to these clearly defined kinds of moral law, there is a sub-class of type (a) which deserves a word of notice; it is of very variable nature, consisting of rules which must be classed as "moral" in the wide sense since they deal with conduct, but of rules which are the result of limited and partial experience, breaches of which have attached to them the penalty of social disapprobation. This class belongs to type (a) in so far as its classification of actions rests on a true induction; its laws, often based on mistaken observations and too limited experience, are apt to class wrongly the tendencies of actions, and so to come into conflict with sound morality.

The vices classed as self-regarding come under the head of sins, but not under that of crimes. Although in the social union no act of an individual is ultimately self-regarding only, yet society wisely only inflicts legal penalty on actions committed by one citizen which are directly injurious to the others. Thus a man who chooses to get drunk in the solitude of his own room commits a sin of the self-regarding order, and remains unpunished by law; but if he gets drunk in the street and becomes disorderly and a public nuisance, he then commits a crime, and incurs a legal penalty.

Seeing that in this country the Bible is put forward as an authoritative rule of conduct, it is natural to ask what light it can throw on our enquiry. If we fail in obtaining any satisfactory result from it, we must seek elsewhere for aid. For the moment we will examine what the Bible has to say about sin and crime.

"Sin entered into the world", we are told, by "one man's disobedience" (Rom. v. 12 and 19), and referring to the act of disobedience we find that it consisted in breaking an arbitrary command given by God; an artificial crime was created by the command, and so the first "sin" was committed. Seeking a little further, we find a mass of commandments, in which grave moral duties of universal application are mixed up with rubbish of ceremonial detail; in which a command as to the shape into which a man's beard is to be cut stands side by side as of equal importance with the forbiddal of the prostitution of a daughter