"My sin!" the low despairing sigh; " My sin ! " the exceeding bitter cry. Out of those depths is heard on high:
Glad angels hear it where they stand. And wait — a ministering band — Their Lord's permission and command ;
It comes — and swiftly, down from heaven
A light whereby the gloom is riven !
A voice of power and peace, " Forgiven ! " ^
(2) The recognition of the moral evil that sin is. — The second stage is the full acknowledgment of the true moral character of a sin. Suppose that the sin is simply selfishness. Once convinced that he is selfish, a man, with more or less consciousness of the sophistry that he is using, almost always sets to work to feel that selfishness is not wrong, but right. " Very well," he says, " I am selfish, I do live for myself; but what then? Whom should I live for ? Is not my own interest and good my first care ? Who will take care of me if I do not take care of myself ? Must not charity begin at home ? Is not this the way the world is meant to work, that every man should nurse his own interests, and so, by the development of each, they all should grow ? " Unstated, vaguely felt, this is the acted theory of thousands. No man can possibly confess till first he casts this fallacy entirely away. " It is wrong to live to myself ; it is not the design of life." Around him he must hear a great long wail of human suffering, rising and
' A. Maclaixu. - S. J. Stouc, Poom and Hymns, 102.
2 SAMUEL XII. 13, 14 335
falling, now wilder and now weaker, but never dying utterly away — the ceaseless claim of needy humanity to be helped by the humanity that has abundance. More quiet, but not less pathetic, he must also hear the longing appeal of what seem the happiest and fullest hearts for sympathy in their joy as others seek it in their sorrow. Let his ears open to the appeals, and his conscience must open too. He will see that no man has a right to shut himself away from those whose life is one with his ; nay, that no man has a right to do any act unless he sees that some one else will be the better or the happier for it as well as he. He will see that selfishness is wicked, and begin to be disgusted at his life, so full of it. He will add to the acknowledgment of the act the acknowledgment of the act's moral character, and his confession will be, not merely " I have been selfish," but " I have sinned."
^ To follow the leading of the ideal was Thoreau's religion ; and sin, whatever it might mean for other people, was to him simply the failure in this course. "Sin, I am sure, is not in overt act, or indeed in acts of any kind, but is in proportion to the time which has come behind us and displaced eternity, to the degree in which our elements are mixed with the elements of the world. The whole duty of life is impHed in the question, bow to respire and aspire both at once." So he wrote in his journal when he was a young man of twenty-four, and the remainder of his life and the manner of his death alike bear witness to the absolute sincerity of his convictions.^
(3) The discovery that sin is always and above all an offeTice against God. — Here is the first place where religion necessarily begins. All up to this point may be wholly unreligious. But the confession must be made to some one. What is the authority that has been violated by our acts which we have decided against as being selfish ? Is it just the natural authority of the rights of our fellow-men — some human claim which they have upon our sympathy and help ? Or is it some abstract law or principle of the mutual harmonies of universal life against which the selfish man sins, to which he must confess ? Surely no obedience to such an abstraction — which, after all, is only a generalization, an induc- tion of the man's own mind — can bind a man's hot passions from their self-indulgence, or bend his proud head in penitent confession
1 H. S. Salt, Henry David Thoreau, 227.
336 REPENTANCE AND RETRIBUTION
of wrong-doing. What then? The law must come from God. "We must be deeply, keenly conscious that every time we have done a selfish act we have broken His distinct commandment. We must have so entire a sense of how utterly He is love that we shall see every unloving thing that we have ever done to be a direct insult to His nature.
^ No one knows till he has really thus confessed how great the relief is of a recognition of this sole responsibility to God. We mount above our fellow-men, and their judgment-seats. We leave their puny criticisms far below us. They may be right in blaming us — no doubt they are. But past their blame the very magnitude of our guilt exalts us to a higher judgment-seat. The soul, full of God's power and love at once, is not satisfied to utter itself to less than Him. It must cry as David did in that 51st Psalm, which he wrote about this same crime touching Uriah: "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight." In one word, it must be able to complete the whole confession of our text, and say, not merely, " I have sinned," but " I have sinned against the Lord." ^