IT The fact that the only perfect being, the only typical man whom the world has ever seen, was made perfect through suffering, yet without sin, shows how essentially different the problems of suffering and sin are, inextricably as they are interwoven in human experience. Suffering is one of the needful conditions of our physical life, preserving us from danger, stimulating us into a larger life in virtue of our efforts to overcome it, and sweetening our proud and self-indulgent nature by its discipline. But sin is the mortal enemy of our highest, our spiritual life ; and as such
1 E. Griffith-Jones.
262 JUSTIFICATION
alone are we justified in dealing with it. That is the Christian view from the beginning; and it is the only view that can safeguard the soul in its perilous journey through this world.1
ii. All have sinned.
1. From the first man that breathed in Eden to the last man that will look on the sun, we are one family, under the rule and protection of one Providence, borne down by the same burden and looking for the same "better land." We are a living and unbroken unity — past, present, and to be. We are all conscious of the same bias to wrong-doing. We are all sinners. " There is none righteous, no, not one ; there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one." It is not simply that our nature bears an inherited taint and fault, called " original sin " ; but we have yielded ourselves to voluntary sinfulness. Our last condemnation comes not from our inheritance of original infirmity, but from that "personal estate " of sins we have wilfully committed. It is the presence of the individual will in sin that renders it an object of punishment. " All have sinned."
IT The Apostle does not assert that there are not degrees of wickedness and lower depths of guilt; he only declares, with uncompromising assurance, that all have come short of the standard. It is one thing for human nature to possess some beautiful remainders of good ; it is another question whether human nature, even at its best, has enough good to save and restore itself. A famous temple of Eome, or of Greece, or of India, lying in ruins, may have fragments of splendid sculpture buried among the rubbish ; but the splendid fragments cannot build once more the splendid temple. A young woman on her death-bed may have a face as lovely as a poet's fancy, with
The gleam Of far-off summers in her tresses bright.
She is dying, nevertheless ! The sinful heart may have tender passions and noble impulses ; but they are only soiled fragments — beautiful things hiding the horror of death.2
1 E. Griffith-Jones. 3 H. E. Lewis.
ROMANS in. 23, 24 263
2. But how does St. Paul prove it ? You will see the answer in the first two chapters of the Epistle to the Komans. He proves it, not speculatively, but historically ; not by logic, but by experience; not by development of a theory, but by an appeal to fact. Mankind in his days was divided into two great sections — Jews and Gentiles — with no consciousness as yet that the middle wall of partition which separated them from each other had been finally broken down. Each section hated, each de- spised, the other. The Jew despised the Gentile as a shameful reprobate; the Gentile hated the Jew as a grovelling impostor. But neither realized his true condition ; neither was at all awake to the fact that he had sinned.
(1) Certainly the Gentiles were not. Paul begins with them. They were, as a class, dead to all sense of sin ; they were in that meridian of evil which St. Paul calls "past feeling." A stage there may have been in the national as in the individual life, in which they felt their guiltiness; early in their career, before the love of innocence was dead, before the tenderness of conscience was seared ; and later, too, the stage came to them, as it comes to all, when " the Furies took their seats upon the midnight pillow." But from the soul of their youth the sense of wounded innocence was too often swept away like the dew from the green grass; and from the social life it vanished in universal corruption. The life of Greece, for which some writers sigh as having been so infinite in fascination, was bright, no doubt, in its first gaiety, in its ideal freshness. But when youth was gone; when strength failed; when health was shattered; when on the dead flowers of life age shed its snows ; when Death came nearer and nearer with the dull monotony of his echoing footfall, and they saw no life beyond — life in Hellas was not gay then. Take her at her most brilliant period, when her most immortal temples were built, her most immortal songs written, her most immortal statues carved, and we see the seamy side and ragged edges of the life of Greece revealed in the sensual wicked- ness of Aristophanes ; we see its fierce, untamed, soul-rending passions recorded in the stern pages of Thucydides. Her own poets, her own satirists, her own historians will teach us that to have been naked and not ashamed was to have been expelled from Paradise; to be past feeling for sin was to be removed