I have already noticed the fiction by which what is true of morality at any stage whatever is transferred to a supposed stage of ultimate development. Because all morality involves a cycle of conduct in mobile equilibrium, it is imagined there is a final stage of mobile equilibrium.1 The same fiction seems to be employed here. The theory unconsciously represents a truth (one which is not accepted by its author), that morality at no time implies in itself the compulsion of duty, and this truth it expresses by the fiction that in the evolutionary Utopia it will disappear.

It

5. In its strict and proper sense, obligation, expressing as it does nothing more than that moral action is the function required from the members of the moral organism, is and must always be true: the fact which makes obligation is always there. At the same time, it may cease to be the natural or highest principle of morality, and may give place to a higher conception. This will not diminish its claims upon our respect and reverence. will do so only in the eyes of those whose absorption in the present leaves them no sense for ideals and principles which have done service in the past. A great truth may become antiquated, and we are bound to declare it to be no longer true for ourselves; but it is always true so far as it goes, and it has served its purpose before the data became too complex for it to reconcile, and it was replaced.

The sense of duty is in this position. It is not the highest moral principle, and not only does it seem that it will undergo purification or such modification as will replace it by a higher conception, but the process has already begun. The ground of the defect of duty lies in what has been noticed already, that it conceals the spontaneity of morality. Obligation is always negative, always implies subjection to authority. It leaves out of sight that morality is the direction in which the individual

1 See above, pp. 266, foll.

naturally moves, what is the natural direction having been determined by eliminating all other ideals. And besides this inherent negativity, duty has gathered round it the idea of antagonism to inclination, which, though not belonging to it of right, is inseparable from it in fact. This result has been aided by another influence. Religion and theology have cast over duty the shadow of sin.

6. Sin is primarily a religious, not a moral idea. But just as religion, though not identical with the practice of morality, is based upon it, so the sense of sin is based upon facts which belong to ethics. It is worth while to trace these facts, because the sense of sin lies deep at the roots of human nature, and it is intimately bound up with progress, though it may become inimical to the highest progress. In general, sin is described as a wrong committed against God, rather than as guilt or crime against man, and the term is loosely used without any distinction from wrong. But this description merely emphasises its connection with religion, and is of itself quite vague and obscure, until it can be explained in what sense it is possible to commit a wrong against God. The chief difficulty is to distinguish the sense of sin from the reproaches of conscience. Conscience and sin run parallel. Both are connected with progress; if the sense of sin points the way to a further advance, conscience, we have seen, changes with each new ideal and directs the way. Both of them depend on the presence of goodness: if the reproaches of conscience are heard only through the revival of good sentiments, the sense of sin is felt only with the knowledge of the right: "the strength of sin is the law." But a man may have the sense of sin when his conscience approves, and if we are to see the real nature of sin, we must not take the cases where wrong has been committed, and where the sense of sin is consequently not easily distinguishable from the sense of wrong-doing; but we must begin with

those most striking cases where a man has done right, but in doing so becomes aware of the interval which separates his natural inclination from his virtuous performance. The sense of sin measures the struggle between the passions which suggest wrong-doing and the good ideas which prevail. Hence the greater the merit in good action, and the less the demerit in bad, the keener is the sense of sin. Conscience, therefore, when it condemns, condemns wrong: sin fastens upon imperfection. It thinks not of the right which has been done, but of the passions which made the right so hard to do. We may conclude that when wrong has been committed, the sense of sin regards not so much the wrong itself as the shame of the passions which led to it: it is the feeling, 'How imperfect I must be before I could do such an act!' Just because sin is the sense of imperfection, is it so closely bound up with progress; for progress means the attainment of goodness, and the consequent appearance of fresh demands which make the former goodness bad. No sooner is a passion repressed than a new ideal comes into view, and the resistance of the passion is felt more acutely still. Hence it is that the saint than the average

sense of sin is felt more by the man. 'Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" is the cry of the strong man, not of the weak. Whatever view we take of his ideal, the ascetic who truly lived up to it is only the more impressed with his sinfulness.

7. Sin is thus correlative to wrong, but it is not the same thing. It is the imperfection which may or may not lead to wrong, and it is felt equally whatever the result. I have spoken indifferently of sin and the sense of sin. After the proof that has been given of the identity between goodness and approbation, it is perhaps unnecessary to justify this at any length. It has often been supposed that St. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans was confusing sin with the consciousness of it. In truth,

he made no confusion at all: the two are identical. So far as the sense of sin is not present in any individual, his act is sin only from the view of another person who has that consciousness. As the badness of the bad man consists in his disapprobation by the good, the sinfulness of the sinner resides in the consciousness of the man who knows the law. And it is common in our experience to find persons who feel the imperfections of others as sin. They go further: they feel the sins of others as their own personal sins. With many philanthropists it would seem that the misery of their fellows is felt as a sin in which they themselves share. Though a man may feel that he has by his own conduct contributed nothing to the crimes or the imperfections of others, he must be more than a Pharisee who can divest himself of the painful sense that he himself is imperfect while his fellow-men are. And perhaps it is this reflection of the sins of others upon ourselves which lies at the base of the religious conception of vicarious sin,

We have seen that evil or wrong in the general sense is that which is defeated in the struggle with the good. But there is a special part of it which consists of a survival of former goodness.1 Sin has two corresponding forms-one general, one special. In general, it arises from the tension of the passions against the law; in this general sense every law creates sin. In particular, it arises from the tension of an old law, which was once good, against a new and higher law. The difference between the two may be sometimes expressed by declaring the one to be a law of works or a formal law, the other a law of faith or of grace. To those who live under the new ideal, the men who obey the old law will seem to be living under sin.2

1 See above, Book III. ch. ii. p. 307.

2 Any discussion of the nature of sin must be based upon the Epistle to the Romans; and I could have lengthened the treatment by reference to passages. E.g., the passage "For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when there is no law" (ch. v., 3), explains, with all the

8. The profound truth of sin lies in its thus being bound up with progress, and it has been fixed in men's minds by that moral system which, being itself the most progressive the world has known, has familiarised us also with the idea of progress. But just as we have seen conscience to have its dangers, so the sense of sin has another and less salutary side. It turns the individual back upon himself to lament his imperfections, and envelopes the performance of right conduct with gloom. and discontent. In its shadow morality appears as the struggle against some primary wickedness: man's nature is bad, and goodness is the sad conquest over this evil. And in a second way it may impede progress, because, absorbing the individual in the idea of his present imperfection, it may divert him from effort for the future. But the temper which is most effectual for progress is not that which stops to look behind and lament, but that

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ambiguity of common language, the identity of sin and the consciousness of it. That sin was in the world before the law seems contradictory, but it merely expresses that before the law acts were done which under the law would be sins; just as the contract theories say that man in the state of nature is just or unjust, though those terms are strictly speaking unmeaning as applied to a state anterior to society. I may observe that the great difficulty of the argument of the Epistle arises from the crossing and confusion between the general and the special forms of sins. There are two contrasts on which the Apostle insists. One is that of law and sin in general, especially in chap. vii., "I had not known sin but by the law." The other is the contrast of the law and the spirit, the one formal and ceremonial, the other a new principle of life (iii. 20). At the same time, the new law of faith is itself declared to be law (iii. 31), and to be in fact fulfilment of the old. [There is a third sense of law natural law, in vii. 21. "I find there a law that, when I would do good, evil is present with me."] When St. Paul is contrasting the law of the Jews with Christianity, he thinks of the law as bad. Hence Jews and Gentiles are "all under sin : as it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one (ch. iii. 9, 10); and in a special sense the Jews, who had the new law offered to them. This he confuses by asserting their wickedness in the ordinary sense of crimes against common moral laws, which is the other and more general sense of sin. Conversely, after chap. vii., when speaking of the conflict between law and sin, or right and wrong, he treats faith as redemption, not from the old law, but from wrong-doing: sin is dead by faith. But St. Paul cannot mean that under the new law of faith sin is impossible, any more than that under the old law every one must have been a wicked man. He must mean that faith overpowers all the inducements to wrong, and this is the language which has always been employed, and is employed to-day, by persons of enthu siastic and emotional natures.