THE CHRLSTIAN DOCTRINE OF SIN.*

IT is a truism to say that there is nothing so interesting as reli- gious discussion, and yet it is, at the same time, a paradox, for there is nothing which has been, and often is, so great a weari- ness to the flesh. Sermons are, by their very name, a bugbear to a great portion, and that often the most cultivated portion, of society. We grumble at our weekly share of them, we resent the imposition of an additional five minutes as a grievous personal wrong. There is nothing which we are so anxious to cut short or slip out of by any pretext, and yet, strange contradiction, not even the successful player, whose aim is our amusement, has half so great a hold on us as the preacher, when one happens to come in our way. The art, if we may call it by that name, suffers not from any fault of its own, but from the unspeakable incapacity of the mass of its practitioners. A true Preacher, a man en- dowed with the real faculty of religious exposition or exhortation, wherever he finds himself, will find an interested audience.

• The Crean 14ctures, 1875: the Christian Doctrine a Bin. By John Tulloch, , Principal of St. Mary's College, in the University of St. Andrew's. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood.

Stupidity, wrong-headedness, dull folly, clever levity, every in- tellectual sin which belongs to man, have done their best to blunt the tools of the religious orator, and take his powers from him, but they have been unsuccessful. The fury or the stupor into which we are lashed or lulled every Sunday by our own individual local tormentor floats away like a cloud, whenever the real posses- sor of the gift makes his longed-for appearance. The sermon is the embodiment of everything that is most wearisome and tedious : the sermon is the most highly appreciated of human productions. No two things can be more contradictory or more true.

It is scarcely necessary to .say that Principal Tulloch's last volume belongs to the latter class ; but allowing this to the fullest extent, and granting, what is unquestionably the case, that Principal Tulloch himself is one of the few to whom the gift of preaching has come by nature, it still remains a matter of admiration and wonder that the volume before us, which is no light collection of those popular sermons which are as the blossoms of the theological tree, but rather a close and philosophical statement of a very serious development of doctrine, should have collected crowds to hear the discourses of which it is composed, and held an ordinary audience entranced. The doctrine cannot be called a popular one. Had it been human virtue and valour which were to be expounded and celebrated, one can imagine many lesser motives attracting the crowd; but sin is not popular, as in those sterner days when, whether it could be overcome or not, the ordinary public had a pleasure in acknowledging its enormity, inquiring into its ineradicable and universal nature, and settling its punishment with all the zest of abstract justiciars unassailable in their own persons. But it is a very high testimonial to the intellectual qualities of the in- habitants of Edinburgh that one of their largest churches was crowded night after night, all standing as well as sitting room overthronged with eager listeners, to follow an argument which requires at once close listening and close thinking ; and fond as we are of attributing religious doubt and scepticism to our own age, this is one of the most curious proofs to the contrary that could well be adduced. Principal Tulloch's theological character is not of the kind which gives much satisfaction to the extreme party on either side. He excites the ancient disciples of orthodoxy to unedifying wrath, and he drives the intellectual unbeliever into, if possible, a still wilder fury. This is no bad testimony to a religious thinker, and the fact that he has gathered together almost the largest audience attainable in a town so well educated and intellectually active as Edinburgh, to trace the serious growth of a tenet which is fundamental to every kind of religion, shows not only his own acknowledged power, but the interest which such subjects can still command, when treated as they ought to be treated. The lectures in question lie under the disadvantage of combining the gravest of topics with the most general of audiences. Addressing himself to that which is most un- like a University class, i.e., a section of ordinary society, learned and unlearned, great and small, men and women, the lecturer had to interest minds unaccustomed to any strain of attention, as well as to instruct some of the clearest and keenest intellects of the world; and he managed to do so ; and to the credit of both speaker and hearers, no better thing could be said.

The difficulty of uniting the ease of popular style with the solid, scientific treatment demanded by such a subject must have been great, but we think the reader will acknowledge that the success has been worth the effort. The work is at once grave and graceful, full of flashes of that devout and vivid apprehension of divine and spiritual things without which no preacher can ever reach the heart, while at the same time retaining a steady hold upon the argument which is the speaker's chief object. That it is candid, tolerant, and full of that special intelligence and un- derstanding of the vagaries of thought which is almost entirely a modern attribute, no one will need to be told who knows the author's reputation and previous works. The opening lecture, which discusses the attitude of contemporary thought in respect to this, as to most other branches of the Christian faith, pointing out the one fundamental divergence which makes all reunion im- possible, is especially interesting. On this introductory ground, the question is simple, at least, and deals with primary principles. Here is no difference of special believings, but a disruption so complete that no concessions on either side can bring together those opposite poles of thought. The whole question between the believer and the unbeliever, as Principal 'rulloch ably shows, is centred in the fundamental idea of Man, as of the earth, earthy, or as heaven-born, and made in the image of God. According as men hold the one or the other theory, so all the rest must

follow,—on one hand, moral responsibility, moral aspirations, Sin, and Righteousness ; on the other, a merely material being, more or less happily conditioned, the heir of no lofty past, the expectant of no future, and answerable to no power higher than himself. The consequences of these different starting-points of theory are ably set forth as follows :—

"The antithesis is not less marked in philosophy. From the earliest dawn of speculation two sides everywhere appear, contrasted by their starting-point, not less than by their results. It is the conception of man as a being not only mundane, but supra-mundane, as drawing his higher life from a higher source, which has alone given rise to a higher philosophy, or a philosophy of Being. The conception of man as merely a consensus of external faculties has never risen above a philosophy of the senses ; nor could it be otherwise. Thought cannot, any more than water, rise higher than its source. And the thought that is solely earth-born, or the inheritance of mundane experiences, and nothing more, however subtilised or aspiring, can never bring any light from beyond its earthly home. We must start from a higher home, from a heaven lying about us in our infancy,' if we would ever roach a spiritual and higher line of thought at all. We cannot climb into an empty heaven. If we are not born with the 'promise and potency of the divine,' the 'image of God' within us, then we shall never reach the divine, earnestly as we may grope for it, and cast forth oar loftiest thoughts to grasp it. The present turn of speculation once more strikingly illustrates the interdependence of thought on these great subjects. The favourite conceptions of modern science involve, if they do not start from, a definite view of human nature at variance with the old Biblical or spiritual view. Man is conceived as developed from lower forms of life by lengthened processes of natural selection. There is nothing necessarily inconsistent with an enlightened Christianity in this idea, so far. The divine mind may work out its plans by pro- cesses of growth or adaptation as readily as by any other way. Nay, as it has been recently admitted by one of the most distinguished advo- cates of the modern idea, the teleological conception, or the conception of design, is prominently suggested rather than excluded by the theory of development as a mere modus operandi. But beyond question, the chief advocates of this theory mean something very different. Nature is supposed by them to be not merely the sphere of operation, but the operating power itself, beyond which there is nothing. Man is not merely, like all other things, a natural

growth, but he is nothing else. There is no higher divine element in him ; material facts and their relations or laws are all that we can ever know. It is this underlying sense of the theory which is at variance with the old Biblical view of human nature. It leaves, for example, no room for the idea of sin. For that which is solely a growth of nature cannot contain anything that is at variance with its own higher laws. It may show more or less perfect stages of growth, but it cannot contradict itself. If the individual and social alike are merely the outcome of natural forces working endlessly forward towards higher and more complex forms, then, whatever man is, he is not and cannot be a sinner I cannot be the mere outcome of natural law, and yet accountable for the fact that I am no better than I am. If I am only a child of nature, I must be entitled to the privileges of nature. If I have come from matter alone, then I cannot dwell within the shadow of a responsibility whose birthplace is elsewhero,—in a differ- ent region altogether. And so the spirit of modern science is consist- ently non-Christian. A man who is nothing more than an aggregate of natural powers can have no true vision transcending the range of those powers. The Unseen, or a law coming forth from the Unseen to rule his spirit, must be a mere superstition to him ; and sin, as the viola- tion of such a law, a mere gloomy phantom, to be got rid of the best way he can."

"The conclusion on one side and the other is everywhere in- volved in the original terms of the question," Principal Tulloch adds. "All depends upon the presupposition as to what man is with which they set out." Thus Professor Hurley's famous out- burst of enthusiasm over his piece of chalk, the history of which he

'declared to be as important and instructive to man as all the his- tories and developments which had taken place on the earth's surface, contains (on what may be called the silly side) the germ of the whole matter, as well as the most solemn discussion of the origin of man could do. For there will always be a great propor- tion of mankind who would not give the story of a certain mad and miserable old king, who once fought wildly with the storm close by those chalk cliffs at Dover, for all the records of all the -volcanoes that ever boiled or bubbled. Few investigators, however,

would like to be so bold as to match a big boulder against King Lear—in words, at least—whatever they might say for the human soul. We cannot follow Principal Tulloch through the primeval indi- cations of something amiss in the world, an uneasy consciousness which suggested evil and harm, if not the finer discrimination of something which was guilt ; but at the risk of exceeding our space, we must endeavour to quote from another passage, in which he describes with touching force and eloquence the idea of man as expounded by Christ :—

"While man is everywhere a sinner before him who was himself holy, harmless, undefiled,' yet he is nowhere represented as nothing but a sinner. There is no man that doeth good and sinneth not' in the Gospels, any more than elsewhere in Scripture. But the Gospels are singularly free from those exaggerated colours in which a later theology has sometimes drawn human nature. Man is a fallen and degraded being. He is at the beat, be he Pharisee or Publican, among the 'lost' whom Christ came to seek and to save. But he is noble, even in his degradation. There is a capacity of divine life in him beneath all the

rain of his nature. He is godlike, even with the image of his divine

original broken and defaced. The very misery of man, as Pascal says, interpreting this aspect of our Lord's teaching, attests his true greatness. He is a king dethroned, but still a king.

The crown has fallen from his head but there is the faint lustre of it still on his brow, and the dignity of having once worn it still lives in his heart. There is nothing more char- acteristic of our Lord's teaching than this recognition of the divine original of humanity, and of the divine potency which still survives in it. This is the only key to his redemptive mission. He came to re- cover the fallen, and to set up that which had been thrown down. Ho saw what was in man more truly than all others. The ersiDof the returning prodigal was heard by him a far way off ; and even while he eat of the husks and grovelled with the swine, the thought of his divine home had not died out of- him, and the capacity for return had not absolutely perished."

Once more, how strange is the paradox, but how certain ! The fallen man who came from Eden, how much loftier is he, in his downfall and wretchedness, how much finer as a type of being, than he without the soul or the sins, who most probably is only an automaton, and who was developed out of mud and pregnant slime, and nothing more !