^ Men say they understand that cruelty, treachery, and lust bring their punishment sooner or later. But what they cannot understand is that the mere fact of refusing to believe is the sin of sins. A typical writer of the period says : " Science is but a new way of applying the mind to everything. It has affirmed the right
228 THE SPIRIT AND THE WORLD
and duty of investigation and verification. It has set up a new kind of intellectual morality, which has substituted the duty of inquiry for the duty of belief. The immediate result has been in England a sudden and amazing diminution of intolerance, a wonderful and wholly unexpected increase of mental freedom." In other words, conscience may speak about other sin, but in the case of unbelief the thing forbidden does not appear to be in its own nature wrong, and " Don Worm " refuses to bite.
The appeal must be to what is elemental in human nature and experience. Content to be judged by that appeal, we maintain that the conscience bears witness that unbelief is the sin of sins. If ever conscience speaks out it is when this sin is committed on the levels of human life. As Bunyan puts it, they shut up Mr. Conscience, they blind his windows, they barricade his door, they cut the rope of the great bell on the housetop which he is wont to ring, that the town of Mansoul may not be disturbed. But sometimes Mr. Conscience escapes and rings his bell. For the sin of all sins to which the conscience bears witness is the sin of mis- trusting and despising love. There is so little love in this world, and there is such a hard need of it. Multitudes have to go through life famished for lack of love. Even the most favoured have very few really to love them. If we have no love, human or Divine, then indeed life ceases to be worth living. "I would rather," said one, " be condemned to be led out and hung if I knew one human soul would love me for a week beforehand and honour me afterwards, than live half a century and be nothing to any living creature." ^
3. Unbelief is always seen at last to be want of belief in Christ. The Spirit, says Jesus, will convince the world of sin, " in that they believe not on me." He will show the real nature of sin. " How shall we work the works of God ? " it was asked ; and it was answered by Christ, "This is the work of God, to believe on him whom he hath sent." Sin is not measured by a law, or a nation, or a society of any kind, but by a Person. The right- " eousness of God was not in a requirement, system, book, or Church, but in a Person, and sin is defined by relation to Him./ He came to reveal not only God but sin. The essence of sin is exposed by the touchstone of His presence, by our attitude to Him. He makes explicit what the sinfulness of sin is ; He even aggi'avates it. He rouses the worst as well as the best of human nature. There is nothing that human nature hates like holy
* W. Robertson Nicoll, SundoAj Ex^cning, 21.
ST. JOHN XVI. 8-1 1 229
God. All the world's sin receives its sharpest expression when in contact with Christ ; when, in face of His moral beauty, good- ness, power, and claim. He is first ignored, then discarded, de- nounced, called the agent of Beelzebub, and hustled out of the world in the name of God.
^ What is the belief that saves ? We are asking the question in order that we may discover the unbelief that is sin. The belief that saves is that conviction which produces the abandon- ment of the whole life to the King, When I have believed that He is able to do all that I want, and I have ceded to Him all my life, then have I believed. A man does not believe the truth he holds, to borrow a very popular phrase, but he believes the truth that holds him. You have never yet believed on Jesus until you have abandoned your whole life to His Lordship, and trusted your soul to His Saviourhood, and never a man so believed but He " broke the power of cancelled sin, and set the prisoner free." ^
4. What means does the Holy Spirit use in order to convince
the world of the sin of unbelief in Christ ?
(1) He puts an environment of new ideals "before the mind. — He testifies of Christ, and in so doing makes us see how in His humanity all Divine excellences have come down into the midst of men and made themselves a new law to the conscience. We are not, after all, in a universe dominated by avarice, envy, false- hood, animalism, but by unselfishness, sanctity, truth, spiritual principle.
^ Some little time ago I was passing through a country lane, and saw a flock of sheep feeding on the hillside. They seemed to be milk-white, justifying the Scriptural metaphor, " He scattereth the hoarfrost like wool," and fit to be welcomed as pets into a drawing-room. In comparison with the green pastures in which they were feeding, their fleeces seemed bleached into spotlessness. Not long after, a snowstorm came, and I had occasion to pass by the same field. But the sheep did not seem to be the same creatures at all. The background had changed as if by magic, and they were in a new world, the conditions of which served to bring out their griminess. They looked speckled, dingy, piebald, and anything but clean in comparison with the glittering snows in which they were nestling. The collier, rising out of the pit into the sunshine after a night of toil, scarcely looked grimier than those spotless sheep of yesterday. The stainless and dazzling