The Sin of Man and the Justification of Man

“Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.”—Romans v. 18.

A few years ago no doctrine was more prevalent among political writers than this, that Self-interest is the motive to all the actions and purposes of men, and that Government exists to make the self-interest of individuals subordinate to a general interest. Such a doctrine had much to recommend it, even if it had not been enforced by very able men, and applied to the solution of a number of problems in morals, œconomics, and jurisprudence. Notorious facts showed that partial interests do clash with the general interest. There had been much talk about virtue and patriotism, which had apparently borne little fruit. Was not this a more practical doctrine than any which gave men credit for better feelings? Was it not a safer course to assume that each would get what he could for himself at the expense of his neighbour, and to regulate the social machine upon that hypothesis?

There has been, as you know, of late, a strong reaction against this system. It has been supposed to ignore some important principles in human beings, of which the statesman, as well as the ordinary man of the world, ought to take account. It has been suspected that the constitution of Society itself may involve principles which cannot be explained either into the triumph of an individual or class selfishness over the majority, or into a combined effort to defeat that selfishness and establish a more comprehensive one. Other facts have forced themselves upon us besides those which procured that scheme such acceptance. Politicians seem now to be hesitating between the two; not quite certain which is the right; alternately adopting the opposite maxims—perhaps somewhat to the confusion of their actual morality.

Those who are busy with the outward business of the world generally trouble themselves little with what is passing in the chambers of men’s hearts. Those who dwell chiefly in these chambers are as contemptuous about common affairs and the persons who manage them. Nevertheless the movements in the two spheres generally correspond, and they greatly affect each other. Notwithstanding the many plausible arguments of those who endeavoured to build the science of Politics upon Self-interest, I do not believe they would have taken hold as they did of public opinion, if it had not been already turned in the same direction by altogether different influences. I do not believe the rebellion against that doctrine of Self-interest would have been as strong and decided as it has been in the political region, if it had not commenced in another.

In the last age, discourses, well composed and sometimes able in themselves, were delivered by clergymen and others on the beauty of Virtue and the ugliness of Vice. The one was shown to be in accordance with the true nature of man, the other to involve endless discords and contradictions. These discourses did not greatly stir the hearts of men. But they were listened to with drowsy respect; those were the words which, no doubt, ought to be spoken in pulpits; perhaps they were true. Other words very different from these were addressed by other speakers to vagabonds and criminals, whom Society had in vain sought to reclaim. They were aroused to the feeling that they had not only done sinful acts, but that they were sinful men. They were told that they might become new men; that God Himself would make them so. These words evidently carried a power with them which the others had not. They reached the ears of respectable members of society, men who had been guilty of no overt acts against its peace, who had believed themselves to be virtuous. A strong suspicion seized some of them that what was true of the outcasts was true of them. They might have done few acts of evil, but they were evil. At the root of their being there was that which resisted God’s Law, which was out of harmony with His Nature. They needed reformation, they must become new creatures.

Language of this sort startled the easy and self-satisfied of the generation to which it was addressed. It startled also some of the humble and sincere. They had been used to a different vocabulary; they could not change it; they could not think all the teaching they had heard was worthless; they suspected something wrong in the new teaching. There was excuse enough in the extravagances of some of the best of those who listened to that new teaching, in the hypocrisies of the worst, for the ridicule of one of these classes, for the fears of the other. But an inward belief can stand such trials, and will very soon show how weak the disputers and the wits are who set themselves against it,—how weak even the good and earnest. Those who had this belief were testifying what they knew, whether they were able to express their knowledge in words or not. They were certain that they were not deceiving themselves about their main proposition. The world could laugh at them, but it could not confute them. Therefore, as always happens in such cases, the world struck its colours and submitted to them. Let us see how this submission has been effected, and what has been the result of it.

I. Those who had found out the secret of the evil which was in themselves, and had found out that it was a common evil,—that other men, who were most unlike them in all outward circumstances, had the same,—proclaimed the depravity of human nature to be the starting-point in practical life, the fundamental truth from which other truths must be derived. This seemed to be a satisfactory generalization from undoubted facts; they were sure that they had read it in the Bible. Was it not written there “that God had concluded all under sin;” that the Jew, who had the Law, and conformed to the letter of it, was not less evil than the Gentile, who had only the light of his conscience,—that St. Paul, who concerning the righteousness of the Law was blameless, was yet the chief of sinners? They indeed found something better in the Bible than these announcements. They found the message of a Redemption. They read of a Saviour who had justified them by His Death and Resurrection, one who was perfectly Righteous, One in whose Righteousness they might trust, and so rise to newness of life. These tidings they heartily embraced. Upon them they felt they could stand in the hour of death and in the Day of Judgment. While they held them fast, they could become actually righteous men, could love God and their brethren, could do right and manly deeds. These tidings they were most glad that other men should hear; they even thrust them, in season and out of season, upon some who were little able to appreciate the force of them,—because, as they said, souls were at stake, and it was impossible to know whom it might please God to convert and save.

II. But these tidings, however widely it might be their duty to proclaim them, had reference to a small minority, who were not indeed in the least to boast of their privilege——who were to ascribe it to the pure, undeserved grace of God,—but who must look upon themselves as exceptions to a rule. The rule was expressed by the assertion that man was a fallen creature. He might become something else; but he was a sinner. Everything that he did or thought had reference to that primary postulate; he could do nothing else till he had admitted that in the length and breadth of it.

It would have surprised those excellent people who had attained to their own sense of evil through the bitterest conflicts, to find how in our day this assertion of theirs has been accepted, apparently in all its fulness,—how it has now become an orthodox shibboleth, recognized as the fundamental dogma of the Bible, even by those who study it least and care least about its contents. The confession of universal depravity which was denounced in the eighteenth century as fanatical, is enforced by the public opinion of the nineteenth. Philosophers may put in a protest for human nature, but that protest they suppose to be also one against the Scriptures. Nor, as I have intimated already, has this been all. The triumph of the convictions which were once set at nought, appears to be ever more complete; it has penetrated into regions which it could never have hoped to reach. The doctrine of universal selfishness in politics—the notion that laws and government should never assume honesty, but always fraud, in their subjects and their officers,—this scheme, though derived from a school not in general reputed religious, has found its support and justification from these religious dogmas, and from the habit of mind which corresponds to them. Whatever you have gained or hope to gain in administrative wisdom and righteousness, from the cultivation of universal suspicion, from the abandonment of trust, may be traced ultimately to the popular belief, mixed indeed with a number of strange contradictions, but still, by the help of divines, sustaining itself in minds wherein all other faith has perished, that sin is the starting-point of our moral being, from which all the conditions and principles of it are to be deduced.

III. Education, like Politics, obeyed for a time this influence. Many can recollect efforts that have been made to awaken the sense of sin in their minds, as the first step to any knowledge of what is right and good,—as the necessary preparation for understanding their Bibles. Much indoctrination of the same kind once prevailed in our schools for the poor. But it is through Education, through practical Education, with all its pains and sorrows, that we have been led into a new train of thought, very unlike indeed that of which I have been tracing the rise and progress. Teachers have discovered,—mothers have discovered,—that they must give children credit for affections and desires which are not selfish, for moral instincts and purposes which they cannot bring under the law of depravity. They have been driven to consider, with doubt and anguish, and yet not without hope, whether depravity would mean anything, whether they could bring it home to their child—if there were not this good, if they might not recognize it in every appeal to the conscience. They may be told by the authorities which they consult about this perplexity, that there are beautiful “columns,” remains of the old unfallen nature, in the midst of its decay. But their work is practical, concerning the life of those dearest to them, and they cannot be put off with metaphors. These columns must somehow be recognized as the substantial part of the building; whatever weakens them or has caused their decay must be treated as strange and monstrous. Every hour brings them more acquainted with evil tendencies in their children; every hour makes it more necessary to treat those tendencies as rebellions against a state in which they ought to be living, their own proper state. Here then has been the beginning of another reaction against a stereotyped opinion. It is strongest in those whose education disposes them to receive that opinion in its strongest form; who would shrink with horror from the rejection of it; who, so far as the sense of their own sinfulness goes, are most inwardly in accordance with their devout ancestors. But the work in which they are engaged, as teachers of the young, as reformers of wrong-doers, obliges them to recognize a noble feeling in both, to make this the fulcrum of their teaching. No optimists about human nature have done equal justice to such feelings; none have made such generous demands for confidence in the most degraded of their fellow-men. And where there is no mixture of mere sentimentalism, the result has justified the experiment.

IV. A sense of this contrast between our best practice and some of our expressed opinions, is becoming very strong in the minds of those who have just arrived at the power of comparing them. The issue of the discovery will assuredly be a contemptuous rejection of a principle which it cost the last age many bitter tears and struggles to secure for us and transmit to us, if we cannot find some way of reconciling it with another truth which has become evidently indispensable to us, without which we can gain no step of future progress and accomplish no reform of that which has fallen into decay. Yet how can we hope for such a reconciliation? I have said already that we gain nothing by partial admissions, such as the possibility that some reminiscences or fragments of a better state may survive in our ruin. These admissions are such as earnest men who have learnt to say, with St. Paul, “In ourselves, that is, in our flesh, dwelleth no good thing,” would revolt from as utterly insincere; they are the feeble compromises of those who have inherited a principle, not won it. And how could such a compromise ever satisfy any who have found, in their dealings with the most opposite classes of society,—with the inexperienced child, with the hardened ruffian,—that the good which is in both must be appealed to as if it were beneath the evil, as if it were more fundamental than that? There must be some better way than this of bringing two opposite experiences into harmony, or we shall deny both, and suppose that the clearest evidence is to be distrusted. What perplexity that scepticism must introduce into our actions I need scarcely point out to you.

V. The Scripture has been appealed to as the great witness in support of the doctrine of universal depravity; the Scripture is the favourite book, the dearest treasure, of those who are appealing to the hearts and consciences of little children and of corrupt men in favour of truth and righteousness. No writer in the Scriptures is oftener quoted in defence of the doctrine than St. Paul; the whole practice of his life is the best and highest example of the practice which seems to be inconsistent with it. Let us hear whether he can himself reconcile the one with the other. “Therefore, as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.” It is not often that St. Paul alludes to Adam or to the effect of his act upon his posterity. If you look through his Epistles, you will be startled by the exceeding rarity of such allusions. You will be inclined to say, “What! can this be the doctrine which is said to underlie the whole Gospel, this which the great preacher of the Gospel throws so much into the background?” But it is more important to observe the cases in which he does dwell upon the transgression of the first man, and to see how he speaks of its relation to us. Here is the most conspicuous instance of all. Our translators have, perhaps inevitably, filled up the sentence with words of their own. St. Paul’s statement is pointed and elliptical. He takes especial pains to present the clauses of the sentence in their exact balance and parallelism. By the offence of one, or by one offence—to all men to condemnation; by the righteousness of one, or by one act of righteousness to all men to justification.

It is an obvious remark, that whatever is affirmed of the race of men in one of these clauses, is also affirmed of that same race in the other. It is not said that all were condemned and some were justified, but that all were condemned and all were justified. However much we may be surprised by the assertion, it stands written in the passage which is the authoritative one upon the subject: if we accept the teaching of the Bible, we accept this teaching.

And St. Paul does not leave us in doubt about the meaning of his words, Condemnation and Justification. His Epistle is written to expound them. The man is condemned, when he is treated as being under a law of death. He is condemned, when he is treated as having all appetites and inclinations towards evil. He is justified, when he is declared to be under a law of life. He is justified, when he is declared to be capable of all righteousness and good. He is condemned in Adam; he is justified in Christ. According to St. Paul’s statement, the Resurrection of Christ was no less a vindication of the position of men as being under a law of life, than the death of Adam was a proof that they were under a law of death. According to him, that resurrection just as much asserted that God judges the race to be righteous, as the expulsion of Adam from Paradise proved that He judges them to be sinners. The assertion puzzles and baffles us if we determine that Adam is the Head of our race, if we deny that Christ is the Head of it. The assertion puzzles and baffles us, if we suppose that Christ only became the Head of it when He was shown by His death and resurrection to be the Head of it. But if that was the manifestation of an eternal truth,—if that showed Who holds the race in one, while the act of Adam showed what rends it in pieces,—we must be wrong when we speak of a universal Fall without speaking also of a universal Justification. We must be departing from the lesson of Scriptures, if we teach that each man comes into the world with a nature that is ready to sink into selfishness and death, without adding that he is related to a righteous and living Lord who would raise him to righteousness and life.

VI. Now St. Paul had been affirming at the beginning of his Epistle that the judgments of God are according to truth; that whatever fictions there may be in men’s thoughts or acts, there can be none in His. If He pronounces or adjudges us sinners, it is because we are sinners; if He justifies or pronounces us righteous, it is because we are righteous. St. Paul declares both facts as facts for all men, just as we have discovered them to be in our own experience. But he does not leave us in the bewilderment in which that experience leaves us. He clears the contradiction; he shows how that which is true if we look upon Man in one aspect, is false if we look upon him in another. He is depraved, utterly depraved, in himself. Find me the man who is utterly shut up in himself, who never rises out of himself, and I say, “In that man is no good thing; he is buried in his lost Adam-nature; by the conditions of the universe, by the eternal law of God, he is simply, nakedly evil.” Find me such a man. But those who converse with the reprobates of the earth say, “We never did find him; we cannot find him. In every one we perceive a struggle to get out of this selfish Adam-nature, a repudiation of it, an acknowledgment of some other law and standard than that which it gives. We speak as if there were a man hidden in that nature, wallowing in that depth, and out of the depth there comes an answer. We speak to him as a brother, and he admits the claim. We tell him of a Love deeper than that of a brother, and there is that in him which says, ‘Verily there must be that.’” Is it hard to reconcile these results of actual trial with what we suppose to be the doctrines of Scripture? Very hard indeed if we will not let Scripture tell us its whole meaning, if we read ourselves into it, if we bring half our own experience to it, and insist that it shall confirm just that half. But I am not afraid of those who are true to their own convictions, even if those convictions be ever so partial and narrow. If they will work on from them faithfully and manfully, they will be obliged to recognize facts which they have been hitherto unable to see, and the Bible will interpret both. I am afraid of those who have no convictions at all, who profess themselves believers in the depravity of human nature now, when that belief is in fashion, as they would have denied it half a century ago, when it was out of fashion. Such men will never come to any truth, though they be always learning. The opinions of the day pass with them for truth. They hold to these as fast as they can hold to anything. A few years hence they may be drifted away no one knows where, fighting perhaps for just the opposite theory to that which they are defending now, like in nothing but that in all these changes they will be always opposing that which encounters the corruptions and abuses of the time, and therefore nearly always that which is for the glory of God and the well-being of Man.

VII. Brethren, the lesson I would draw from what I have said is this:—It is far better, safer, truer language to speak of individual depravity than of universal depravity. By individual depravity I mean my own. I find it out in myself; or rather, He who searcheth me and trieth my ways, finds it out in me. That sense of depravity implies the recognition of a law which I have violated, of an order from which I have broken loose, of a Divine image which my character has not resembled. It is the law and the order which are universal. It is this character of Christ which is the true human character. It is easy enough to own a general depravity; under cover of it you and I escape. We are only just what we take everybody to be, what we suppose a certain necessity of our position compels us to be. It is hard to remember, it is hard to believe, that we are members of a justified and redeemed race. It is hard to say, “When we are best we are only what is involved in the very principle of our constitution; we are only acting as if we were what we say in our catechism that we are.” And it is hard, very hard, to do justice to other people; hard not to suspect them of always obeying some low, mean instinct; hard to give them credit for ever obeying a high and noble inspiration. The effort to treat them fairly becomes a thousandfold greater when we think it is doing God service, and recognizing His truth, to libel our fellows. Let us, at all events, cast away that delusion. Fault-finding and suspicion are not religious acts; to be thinking evil is not to be following the doctrine of St. Paul. The doctrine of the Fall will be fully recognized by us when we say, “Lord! I have sinned; by Thee I stand; Thou only canst raise me.” When we seek to explain away the righteous deeds of others, when we impute to them all bad purposes, we deny the doctrine of Redemption. God looks upon us in His Son; we must look upon each other and upon ourselves as He does. No other way can be right. To assume selfishness as the ground of society is to say that society is impossible, and to become what we suppose Mankind is. To assume Justice and Truth as the foundation of it, is simply to say that when Christ wrestled with the Devil, we believe that the Devil was not the conqueror.