6. This consideration will also show the irrele- vance of inquiring into the origin of sin, in so far as this means an empirical investigation of human history. For if sin postulates responsibility, we are no nearer a solution of the problem by a knowledge of the rudimentary forms of what, in its final development, we call conscience. Only if emotions and passions be regarded as sinful, can it be of use to note tliat impulses, the ultimate restraint of whicii becomes imperative, are at certain stages necessary for the preservation of the individual or the propagation of the race. There need be no desire on the part of any Christian theologian to question the premisses on which the scientific evolutionist [)ursues his investigations into the origin of the human species. We may grant, for example, that no chasm separates the appearance of man upon the earth from the development of other and lower forms of life. It is hazardous, and quite unnecessary, to contend for organic and moral life as new departures. Taking a merely external view of man, we may say that the conditions under which sin not only becomes possible but actually takes place, are ' tiie perfectly normal result of a process of development through which the race
has passed previously to the acquisition of full moral personality' (F. K. Tennant, Hidsean Lect. p. 81). But then .sin is a determination of the 'full moral personality.' Even if we accept the story of man's first disobedience as historically a fact, it is no more explicable as a necessary stage in human evolution than the latest instance of wrong done by one man against another. That all men are the enemies of God until reconciled by the mediation of Christ, is a question of personal relationship unaffected by scientific research. The observer can do no more than register, so far as he can discover them, the conditions under which activities have resulted which, in view of the will of God, assumed to be known, are recognized as disloyalty and therefore as sin. No doctrine of sin is possible except on the assumption of a personal experience involving the recognition of God. The universality of the need which it expresses is attested, not by any demonstrative proof, but by the conviction of sin through which each individual has passed to the freedom of the Christian life. Of .such Christian experience the witness of the Church is the summary, and its missionary labours are the measure of its faith that redemption is applicable to all. With this alone is Christianity as such concerned. It does not go behind the activity of a self-determining being, judged by con- science. Its doctrine of the 'Fall,' therefore, is not a pseudo-scientific account of the strength of passion or of the ' survival of habits and tendencies incidental to an earlier stage in development,' which is refuted by the discovery that the story of mankind is that of a continuous progression. It has nothing to do with the material of actual sin, which, though environment may have been vastly modified by corrupt action, cannot rightly be spoken of as 'polluted.' But it is the expression, in the only manner of whicli language admits, of the po.stulate of guilt and slavery involved in preaching the gospel, God's message of free salva- tion, to every creature.
The story of the Fall, recorded in Gn 3, though it shaped the form in which St. Paul stated the universality of sin, does not vitally affect a teach- ing which, in its absence, would have sought another method of expression. Indeed, its essential features are all present in the Epistle to the Romans before it is stated in terms of Adam's transgression. To say that the doctrine is merely illustrated by the story, would be to attribute to the Hebrew Christian mind of the 1st cent, an attitude towards the OT possible only in a critical age. Nor will the use of ' Adam ' as a category for summing up the human race in 1 Co 15^^'- warrant us in believ- ing that St. Paul was led to his characteristic idea of human solidarity otherwise than along the lines natural to a Jewish interpreter of the OT in Apo-stolic times (see Sanday-Headlam, Romans, p. 136, ' Effects of Adam's Fall,' etc. ). But it is equally certain that St. Paul's use of the OT is far removed from a iiard Western literalism, its narratives being the authoritative forms under which spiritual trutiis are apprehended rather than the material of historical science (see Sanday-Headlam, ih. p. 302, ' St. Paul's use of the OT '). The canons of inter- pretation applied to the early narratives of Genesis cannot affect tlieir doctrinal use in the NT. If the first truth which concerns the moral life of man be the Divine origin, and therefore the essential good- ness, i.e. conformity to the Divine intention, of the material world and of his own personality, the .second is that nevertheless he is an alien from God. This interpretation of the facts of life, which escapes the negation of a true morality involved alike in Oriental dualism and philo.sophic monism, is entirely independent of the Genesis stories, and separable from them in the NT. It is, however,
remarkable that even in these early narratives the religious truth is presented with a completeness conspicuously absent from many later theologies. The three personalities of God, Man, and the Evil One, — disobedience, guilt, exclusion from the King- dom, the need of liberation from an external tyranny tyjjitied in the promised bruising of the serpent's head, — all are essential to the reality of sin. It is difficult to understand how this could be better represented than by attributing an act of disobedience against God and of compliance with ' the voice of a stranger ' to a common ancestor of all living. The situation thus expressed is briefly summarized by St. Paul, ' All have sinned, and (therefore) fall short of the glory of God' (Ro 3^^).