ion--modern science, and the account
given in the Book of Genesis. To my mind, the enormously impressive
thing is that these two sources, approaching the same subject from
entirely different points of view, find themselves at last in agreement
on the main issue.

(_a_) According to the teaching of science, then, man is the result, the
finished product, of aeons of animal development. He is, in fact, the
crown and so far ultimate achievement of an age-long evolution. He falls
into his natural place in zoological classification as the highest of the
vertebrates. But also, in man we find moral faculties developed to an
immeasurably greater extent than in those animals which stand nearest to
him in physical development. It is the possession of these, above all,
which constitutes the differentia of man. And it is this possession
which makes man, alone of all animals, capable of sin. For sin is simply
the following out of the instincts and desires of the animal, when these
are felt to be in opposition to the dictates of the peculiarly human, the
moral nature. Men have said that the only Fall of Man was a fall
upwards. They have given an entirely new meaning to the medieval
description of the first transgression as the "felix culpa." But this
would seem to involve confusion of thought. The first emergence of man
as man, the appearance on this planet of a moral being, at once involved
the possibility of sin. That, the rise of man did necessarily include.
An animal follows the bent and inclination of its own nature. For it,
sin is for ever impossible. For it, there can be no defeat, no fall, for
the conditions of conflict are absent. But the actual occurrence of sin
is quite a different thing from the appearance of a being so highly
exalted as to be capable of sinning; so constituted as to experience the
dread reality of the internal strife between flesh and spirit, the battle
between the lower and the higher within the same personal experience. I
can never act as the animal does, because I possess what the animal does
not--a moral nature, which I can, if I will, outrage and defy. No animal
can be either innocent or guilty. Moral attributes cannot be assigned to
it.

This result follows. When I sin, I am indeed doing what I alone can do,
because I am a man. But also, I am, by that very act, contradicting my
nature, violating the law of my well-being. The possession of a moral
nature makes me man. Sin is j