2. There are two ways of explaining this strange but universal fact in human life ; and there is a third way which more or less combines the two.
(1) The first way is that which till recently was universal among Christian thinkers — that man is a being who was created not only innocent, but in a sense perfect, and that he has dropped into a lower condition which is untrue to his real nature, and which shows itself by this feeling of remorse or sorrow for what he is. Man, in other words, is a fallen creature.
(2) The second way of accounting for the fact of sin is quite a recent one, but it is held by probably the majority of thinking people now. That theory tells us that man is not a fallen being, who began his career in a better or perfect state, but one who has climbed up from a lower stage by a process of evolu- tion. In this respect, he is not different from other creatures, who have all climbed up from some lower form of life to their
26o JUSTIFICATION
present position. But he is different from all other creatures in this, that in virtue of a God-given gift, he is not the mere creature of heredity and circumstances, but has a certain power to assist or retard his own further development in every sense. He is a creature not made, but in the making ; and he has been taken into partnership by his Creator, so that he can help God (or hinder Him) in the work of perfecting his own nature. In other words, there is a lower nature in him derived from his animal origin, strong and vital and full of passionate desires. There is a higher nature in him, which is weak and frail and undeveloped, but of infinite worth. There is thus a conflict ever going on within him between the lower nature and the higher, and because he is within limits free to choose between this and that, he is able to help on or to hinder his higher true self from gaining the victory over his lower.
(3) Now man is certainly a creature in process of develop- ment. He is advancing in a hundred directions ; and the impulse to advance is so powerful that, though it acts fitfully and is often checked and thrown back, it never really ceases to act ; so that when humanity goes back in one direction it tends to recover itself, and to realize in one way what it fails to realize in another. None the less certain is it that there is something more the matter with human nature as it is than a feeling of not having progressed fast enough. The human conscience testifies to a feeling of some moral disaster or calamity that has fallen upon it. It is haunted by a stronger feeling than that of failure to attain. Some poison has mingled with the very blood of the soul, so to speak. We come into the world weighted not only with our animal nature, but with a paralysis or sick- ness in our higher nature itself. We cannot call our animal desires wrong; they are healthy and good in themselves; they conduce to the continuance and vigour of our being ; we cannot dispense with them. The mischief does not seem to be there, but higher up, in the will itself. Now no mere evolutionary theory can account for this fact of our nature; and it is this which the old theory of the Fall attempts to account for, and which, when broadly conceived, it does account for. At some distant period of our history as a race — perhaps at the very
ROMANS in. 23, 24 261
beginning — a wrong turn was taken, and its consequences, passed on through the mysterious law of heredity, continue to this day. Man is a rising creature, with a principle of betterment deeply implanted within his nature which has never been quite up- rooted ; but he is also a fallen creature, whose nature has been thrown out of gear through the effects of habitual sin, which has largely paralysed the power to rise. And so man is a distracted, struggling, tormented creature, dragged in different ways, unable on the one side to sink contentedly into evil, and to forget God and goodness in that evil, and yet on the other unable to shake off the incubus and burden of this sinful nature, which clings to him in spite of all his endeavours to free himself from it, and makes him cry out, "Who shall deliver me from this body of death ? "
^[ Any theory or teaching which in any way blurs the meaning of sin as an awful and devastating mischief, for which there can be no excuse, seems to me to cut at the very root and nerve-centre of the spiritual life. Sin is the one (and perhaps bhe only) thing in the universe which it is impossible to justify; it is by definition the thing that ought not to be. Once we begin to whittle away its meaning, and make it a stage in progress, a fall upward, a necessary or inevitable episode in the experience of an evolving creature, we empty it of its distinctive meaning, and strike at the very heart of every genuine moral effort. I can see that physical evil — i.e. suffering and calamity and limitation and loss — has many helpful functions to fulfil ; but moral evil — sin — is the one thing that has no function to fulfil ; it is a purely destructive, disintegrating force, an essential blight, a backward, downward, stumble of the soul; it ought not to be, or ever to have come into being, at any time in the life of any creature of God's making.1