AND DAMNATION

1. THE BIOLOGICAL EQUIVALENT OF SIN

If the reader who is unfamiliar with scientific things will obtain and
read Metchnikoff's "Nature of Man," he will find there an interesting
summary of the biological facts that bear upon and destroy the delusion
that there is such a thing as individual perfection, that there is even
ideal perfection for humanity. With an abundance of convincing
instances Professor Metchnikoff demonstrates that life is a system of
"disharmonies," capable of no perfect way, that there is no "perfect"
dieting, no "perfect" sexual life, no "perfect" happiness, no "perfect"
conduct. He releases one from the arbitrary but all too easy assumption
that there is even an ideal "perfection" in organic life. He sweeps out
of the mind with all the confidence and conviction of a physiological
specialist, any idea that there is a perfect man or a conceivable
perfect man. It is in the nature of every man to fall short at every
point from perfection. From the biological point of view we are as
individuals a series of involuntary "tries" on the part of an imperfect
species towards an unknown end.

Our spiritual nature follows our bodily as a glove follows a hand.
We are disharmonious beings and salvation no more makes an end to the
defects of our souls than it makes an end to the decay of our teeth or
to those vestigial structures of our body that endanger our physical
welfare. Salvation leaves us still disharmonious, and adds not an inch
to our spiritual and moral stature.

2. WHAT IS DAMNATION?

Let us now take up the question of what is Sin? and what we mean by the
term "damnation," in the light of this view of human reality. Most of
the great world religions are as clear as Professor Metchnikoff that
life in the world is a tangle of disharmonies, and in most cases they
supply a more or less myth-like explanation, they declare that evil is
one side of the conflict between Ahriman and Ormazd, or that it is the
punishment of an act of disobedience, of the fall of man and world alike
from a state of harmony. Their case, like his, is that THIS world is
damned.

We do not find the belief that superposed upon the miseries of this
world there are the still bitterer miseries of punishments after death,
so nearly universal. The endless punishments of hell appear to be
an exploit of theory; they have a superadded appearance even in the
Christian system; the same common tendency to superlati