cal and spiritual
causes, is (i) the revelation of the malignity of sin. There we see our
favourite sins stripped of all pleasing disguise, and revealed in their
true horror, and cruelty, and selfishness. The Incarnate Son of God put
Himself at the disposal of sinful men, and His violent and shameful death
was the result. There is the true meaning of the sins in which we
delight. (ii) It reveals the disastrous result of sin, the death of the
Divine Man within each one of us. There is no sin which is not an act of
spiritual suicide.

It will not then be altogether in vain, that we have now considered the
causes of the Death of Christ if, in the "solemn hour of temptation," we,
remembering the Cross, and Him Who died thereon, and why He died, "stand
in awe, and sin not."

III
THE CHRISTIAN AND THE SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE OF SIN

"Christ died for our sins."--I COR. XV. 3.

Nothing is more characteristic of Christianity than its estimate of human
sin. Historically, no doubt, this is due to the fact that the Lord and
Master of Christians died "on account of sins." His death was due, as we
have seen, both to the actual, definite sins of His contemporaries, and
also to the irreconcilable opposition between His sinless life and the
universal presence of sin in the world into which He came. But it is
with the Christian estimate of sin, and with the facts which justify it,
that we are now concerned.

Briefly put, Christianity regards sin as the one thing in the world which
is radically and hopelessly evil. Pain, physical and mental, is evil no
doubt, but in a different sense. Without going deeply into the intensely
difficult problem of animal and human suffering, we may at least say
this: that he would be a bold man who would undertake to say, viewing the
moral results of suffering in human lives, that all, or the majority of
the instances of pain which we observe, come under the head of those
things "which ought not to be," that is, are, without qualification or
extenuation, evil. But this is precisely the statement which
Christianity makes with regard to sin. Of one thing only in the universe
can we say that it "ought not to be," and that one thing is moral evil.
Perhaps then, broadly and roughly, the Christian standpoint may be summed
up in four words, "sin worse than pain."

Of old, St. John wrote that "if any man love the world, the love of the
Father is not in him." In its outward aspect, the world