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satisfactory. Though all selfishness is sin, and there is an element of selfishness in all sin, it
cannot be said that selfishness is the essence of sin. Sin can be properly defined only with
reference to the law of God, a reference that is completely lacking in the definition under
consideration. Moreover, there is a great deal of sin in which selfishness is not at all the
governing principle. When a poverty-stricken father sees his wife and children pine away for
lack of food, and in his desperate desire to help them finally resorts to theft, this can hardly be
called pure selfishness. It may even be that the thought of self was entirely absent. Enmity to
God, hardness of heart, impenitence, and unbelief, are all heinous sins, but cannot simply be
qualified as selfishness. And certainly the view that all virtue is disinterestedness or
benevolence, which seems to be a necessary corollary of the theory under consideration, at
least in one of its forms, does not hold. An act does not cease to be virtuous, when its
performance meets and satisfies some demand of our nature. Moreover, justice, fidelity,
humility, forbearance, patience, and other virtues may be cultivated or practiced, not as forms
of benevolence, but as virtues inherently excellent, not merely as promoting the happiness of
others, but for what they are in themselves.
7. THE THEORY THAT SIN CONSISTS IN THE OPPOSITION OF THE LOWER PROPENSITIES OF
HUMAN NATURE TO A GRADUALLY DEVELOPING MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS.
This view was
developed, as we pointed out in the preceding, by Tennant in his Hulsean Lectures. It is the
doctrine of sin constructed according to the theory of evolution. Natural impulses and inherited
qualities, derived from the brute, form the material of sin, but do not actually become sin until
they are indulged in contrary to the gradually awakening moral sense of mankind. The theories
of McDowall and Fiske move along similar lines. The theory as presented by Tennant halts
somewhat between the Scriptural view of man and that presented by the theory of evolution,
inclining now to the one and anon to the other side. It assumes that man had a free will even
before the awakening of his moral consciousness, so that he was able to choose when he was
placed before a moral ideal; but does not explain how we can conceive of a free and
indeterminate will in a process of evolution. It limits sin to those transgressions of the moral
law, which are committed with a clear consciousness of a moral ideal and are therefore
condemned by conscience as evil. As a matter of fact, it is merely the old Pelagian view of sin
grafted into the theory of evolution, and is therefore open to all the objections with which
Pelagianism is burdened.
The radical defect in all these theories is that they seek to define sin without taking into
consideration that sin is essentially a breaking away from God, opposition to God, and
transgression of the law of God. Sin should always be defined in terms of man’s relation to God
and to His will as expressed in the moral law.