evils; yet probably were inevitable in some other shape, if they had not come in this shape. From her more than millennial agony Christendom emerges far stronger and far wiser. We now discern what has been the error. True religion ought to consecrate all our worldly action, not to disparage, to decry, and to desecrate the world. Herein is the pivot of our new departure. We need to revert to an older wisdom, which taught that "God hath granted to us on this earth a small plot; and this is that which we must cultivate and glorify." Religious action does not consist in propagating religious opinions, nor even in cherishing religious emotions; but in being good and doing good. To desecrate the word secular, is akin to desecrating marriage; each should be ennobled, not disparaged. This world is not to be abandoned to men selfishly greedy and ambitious, but is to be defended and rescued from them by the concordant efforts of God's true servants. Unjust and corrupting institutions, evil laws, reckless government, are not to be left unmolested. Since bad law is of all bad things most widely and deeply efficacious for evil, while good law is of all good influences the mildest and most effective for good; therefore, to purify laws and institutions is a primary mode of establishing the kingdom of God on earth. In no other way can the roots of moral evil be torn up. It has often been said, that three days' drunkenness, fostered by ambition to aid electioneering intrigues, undo the work of three years' preaching. This is but one illustration out of fifty, and not at all the strongest, denoting how futile is a moral crusade, if it will not attack political villainies. Hitherto, among Protestants, all national progress in morals has been retarded, just in proportion as they have recalled from the first Christian ages the doctrine that the saint is not a citizen of this world; that the kingdoms of this world are incurably wicked; that the devil and his angels are to be left in possession of political principality; that Christians have nothing to do with making the national institutions just, and the law moral. The doctrine of Geneva, of Scotland and of the English Puritans, took a course which avoided this rock of offence, but ran upon another, nearly as Rome has done, a rock which we misname Theocracy: but the Lutherans, and the Anglican Evangelicals, the Moravians, the Quietists, and other sects, with many estimable persons, in striving to recover the original position of the Christian Church, overlooked both our * Σπάρτην έλαχες · ταύτην κόσμει. vast differences of circumstance, and the glaring fact that that Church erred in expecting the speedy overthrow of political wrong by a miraculous intervention. Without full self-consciousness or clear knowledge of the past, all the Churches of England are now waking to their duty of purifying the fountains of our daily life. Herein lies the germ of a new religion; new to us, if in some sense old. They are those who believe that this new religion is what Jesus meant to teach (but his words, say they, have been garbled), -that when from human sympathy one man relieves another, who is a captive, or sick, or hungry, or naked, though he do it without dreaming to serve God or thinking of God at all, yet the Supreme Judge recognizes it as service done to himself. This is neither place nor time for inquiring into the truth of the interpretation. Suffice it to say, that goodness is amiable, with or without religious thought; that man needs our services, and God does not need our love any more than our flattery, and that in affectionate, dutiful or merciful acts towards our fellow-men we best become joint-workers with God. This is the earliest religion possible to childhood, the only religion which can commend itself to the barbarian conscience. Will any one call it a poetical fiction, that all the universe, inorganic, brute or barbarian, is doing the work of God, obeying his command, fulfilling his service? alike the suns and planets, the elements and seasons, the beasts and birds, tribes of savages and ignorant masses of men ? God makes the very wrath of man to praise him, out of discord bringing harmony. How much more ought we to recognize as his servants that vast army of mute toilers, the poor of every nation, prevalently simple and ignorant, and despised as "the herd of mankind," though often nobly unselfish and gloriously heroic? The same may be said of the patient inventors and perfecters of mechanical and other civilizing art. Let no man despise man; for we are all of one blood, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Adam acknowledge us not. The love of God embraces us all; therefore it is very fit, right, and our bounden duty, to study the benefit of this human family as our highest service to the common Father. Serving man we best serve God; he that will be greatest among us, let him be the servant of all. In that service is love and joy: love, which is forgetful of self; joy, in the lofty faith, which is sure that Right must triumph. SIN AGAINST GOD. [1875.] "How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?" GEN. XXXIX 9. IN N popular speech we often distinguish four kinds of evil action; 1. Legal offences of greater or less gravity, whether called crime, or misdemeanour, or injury; 2. Social offence, such as ingratitude, rudeness, stinginess; 8. Offences against oneself, often called vice; 4. Offence against God, called sin. It is convenient to have these distinctive words, but we must not suppose that an action which belongs to one of these four classes cannot also belong to another. The same wrong deed may be crime and also ingratitude; or may be crime and also vice; perhaps every vice justly viewed, is a social offence, and some vices are legal offences. Nothing therefore hinders the same act from being at once a crime and a sin, or a vice and a sin. To speak more generally, the same deed may be an offence against the law, an offence against society, an offence against oneself, and an offence against God. Therefore we find nothing incongruous in treating all immorality as sin. Nevertheless, because extreme, painful, cruel inferences have been drawn from this belief, pious as it is in itself and wholesome, therefore in recent times a strong current of objection has set in; and it is maintained by some, that no wickedness ought to be regarded as committed against God. Perhaps this may seem to you too strange and perverse an error to deserve refutation: but we cannot afford to neglect it, for it has been provoked, as I said, by extreme religious doctrine. A very large school of Christians has alledged, that, God being an infinite Being, sin against Him is an infinite evil, deserving infinite punishment; and that every moral failure, however trifling, as the peevishness or anger of a child, is a sin, and is therefore an infinite evil. Surely it suffices to disown the extravagance of measuring the evil of sin by the greatness of God, whom it certainly cannot harm. But this very fact, that He is too great to be harmed by us, or to be in any respect impaired as to blessedness and glory, is adduced to prove that sin is nothing to Him, and that He cannot rightly be said to be ever sinned against. Hereby, honest reasoners think, they best lay the axe to many false pernicious doctrines, and to the morbid state of conscience into which not a few religious persons fall, while groaning under the sense of sin and demerit. Once allow, they say, that murder is a sin against God, and it will follow, so is the intent to murder, and all the more, since an intent can hardly be called a sin against man; so then also is malice a sin against God, so is anger, so is peevishness; and if in an adult, so also in a young person; then where shall we stop? Not only must we say with the nursery rhyme, "It is a sin to steal a pin," but every childish fault of temper is brought under reprehension far too grave and really pernicious. Such argument is plausible and now widespread. All the old received notions of religion are now exposed to severe criticism, for which reason I think it not amiss to attempt examining this topic to the bottom. I entirely admit and maintain, that our moral advancement is the proper end of religion, and that moral conduct presupposes social relations between finite and mutually dependent beings. Most of our virtues imply human weakness; hence they cannot be attributed to the Most High. No one can praise God for his bravery, for his modesty, for his candour; for honesty or chastity or temperance; for circumspection or prudence. These qualities are accounted virtues by reason of their fitness and importance to human life, and because of our essential weakness. They express our best state, and religion ought to aid us towards that best state, which in its highest development we call righteousness and holiness. But if we are conscious of failure, if we confess to our inmost hearts and to God that we have done wrong, we must not let the thought enter, that we have lessened God's honour or bliss,-which would absurdly magnify our importance; nor must we imagine that He can feel resentment at our neglect, -an idea which in a manner reduces him to our level. Thus, no breach of morality can be an offence against God in the very same sense in which it is an offence against an individual man, who may be wronged and justly indignant with us, and need to be appeased or compensated. In no case can God need compensation from us, in no case can He be angry and require to be soothed and propitiated. If we have wronged a brother man, then so soon as we discern and confess our fault, and are eager to redress the wrong, no further process is required for wiping out sin against God. So far then it may be conceded, that those who would blot the word Sin from our vocabulary are more right, or perhaps I ought to say, they are less wrong, than those who talk of propitiation, of atonement, of infinite demerit, and of Divine wrath. Nevertheless it is most fit and necessary that the word and idea SIN, should be sedulously retained and applied in all our familiar thoughts. It remains true as ever, that crime and vice, and wilful folly, are sins against God. On this I proceed to insist. Certain great crimes are by the voice of mankind entitled unnatural. If a woman destroy her infant, she is held not only to commit wrong against the child and to break the law of the land, but to offend against nature; or, as we often express it, to violate the law of nature; because all easily perceive that on such a matter nature has a law. Whenever we say that a deed is wrong in itself, whether it be or be not forbidden in a particular national code, we virtually pronounce that there is a law of nature against it. To be ungrateful to a benefactor who has made great sacrifices for us, is not forbidden, for instance, by English law, because the offence is too hard to define; but we all see that it is intrinsically wrong. And the same may be said, not of actions only, but also of inward movements of the heart. To hate a man because we have injured him, and therefore the very sight of him seems to reproach us; or to hate him because he has benefited us, and therefore the remembrance of his benefit humiliates us,-each of these is an offence, not against any artificial or local law, yet against nature herself. Surely then, one who believes in God at all, must discern that every movement of the human soul which is out of harmony with nature is out of harmony with God, who pervades, guides, enforces nature, and thereby both creates and rules. But the weakness and frailty of a mere child, so far from being against nature, is calculated on by every parent, and may rather be said to be according to nature. Hence, to entitle the anger of an infant, disappointed in some petty hope or expectation, a sin against God, has no propriety whatever. As we gradually grow up into moral beings, so do we gradually assume moral responsibility, with all the high capacity of joy and sorrow, nobleness or baseness, holiness or sin. This is true manhood, or, as the oldest of Greek poets calls it, glorious manhood. Good sense is needed in our judgments of human character and action, not to apply a high and severe rule to persons and cases who do not rightly fall under it. And on those who are morbid in conscience, and reprove themselves too |