And if without this faith there seems no foothold for intellect, still less is there for morals. To be men in all that hitherto has stood for manhood at its best, we must believe that our moral life is related to a moral law which is rooted in the very nature of things; we must believe that man is so related to God that the will of God, the law of God, is the law of our own life, and that to miss this, to sin against this, is to destroy ourselves. This is why, according to the Bible, sin is among other things foolishness, insensate folly, a mad choice of death. To break the commandments is not merely to break a system of rules arbitrarily imposed on us from without, but is to sin against ourselves, and to ruin our own true happiness, to dim the radiance of our own souls, and to desecrate our own life.
^ Ruskin was never weary of telling that, whatever faults an artist may have, they are always reproduced in his work. He declares that the fumes of wine and the stain of sensuality mentally leave dark shadows upon the artist's masterpiece. He cannot indulge his lower nature without in some degree clouding and marring his genius. But if everybody can see that in a man's physique and in a man's genius, is it not just as certain that sin will spoil a man's lordlier self, his moral and spiritual being ? A man can never commit a transgression but it has blinded the eyes of his spiritual understanding. A man never violates a command- ment of God but he has done an injustice to his conscience.^
1. Sin introduces an element of disorder, of discord, and of disease into our life. It is a violation of our nature, a refusal to follow the light and to obey the highest. It destroys the inner harmony. It throws us out of accord with the central music of the universe. We pray, " Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven." Heaven is heaven because that highest will is done there. Heaven is begun below when the will of God is done.
1 W. L. Watkinson.
262 WRONGING THE SOUL
The religion of Jesus Christ holds as its chief power the secret of making duty a delight. Man finds his highest and noblest sphere of activity in doing the will of God ; and love for that will trans- forms the man, gives all his powers their proper outlet, and makes for their perfection. To stand outside that central will is to wrong our souls and to mar our lives. Christ is seeking to gather all into Himself, and to stand outside that Divine unity is to stultify ourselves and thwart God. To dash into the rapids above the falls is to court inevitable destruction, and to throw ourselves athwart the known will of God is self-murder.
^ Even our narrow experience of the universe presented one obtrusive fact which seemed to contradict the theistic presup- position of Omnipotent Goodness. The contingently presented universe of experience, which philosophy tries to reduce to rational unity, consists of unconscious things and self-conscious persons. Things are believed to evolve in natural order, which is thus virtually divine language ; and this divine language of things is (so far) scientifically interpretable by persons. But persons them- selves— at least on this planet — seem to be naturally evolved in moral disorder, and to live in a chaos of suffering. Pain, the supposed consequence of moral disorder, seems to be unfairly dis- tributed. The constant order of insentient things is in striking contrast to the moral disorder that appears among living persons. What ought not to be, is commonly found in them. Analogous irregularity is not seen among things ; which are all found punctu- ally obeying their natural, yet supernatural, laws — and they are not expected to involve us at last in intellectual disorder. The material world of things does not put us to final confusion, although most of its phenomena remain uninterpreted, or inadequately inter- preted. But the world of persons seems to be continually putting us to moral confusion, by its strangely chaotic appearances.^
2. Sin impairs the moral sense, and relaxes the spiritual fibre, taking away with it the bloom of the soul. All observation and all experience prove that this is its immediate, unvarying, inevit- able effect. He who once yields to do wrong will find it harder the next time to do right, until he speedily becomes powerless to choose good and resist evil. The moral sense, which at first is quick to discriminate, begins under the pressure of sin, to lose the keenness of perception. The high sense of honour and of truthful-
^ A. Campbell Fraser, Biographia Philosophica, 306,
PROVERBS VIII. 2>^ 26
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ness is dulled. The good seems to be less good, and the evil does not seem to be so very evil, until at last that soul calls evil good and good evil. Such a desperate degradation is not reached all at once, — not till years of sin, it may be, and of indulgence have passed by. But let the soul remember that the first sin is the first step, and that the next will be easier, and that with each succeeding sin the momentum increases at a fearful rate until its speed shall hurl it down to ruin.