society. And if
psychological science is inclined to deny the very existence of any
faculty of free choice such as makes sin possible, it will be found on
examination to be going very far beyond what it can prove. For the
reality of guilt and sin, and the degradation which results from it, we
have the human consciousness; against it we have no positive evidence:
nothing in fact but the habitual unwillingness of specialist science,
physical or theological, to recognize its limits.

3. St. Paul finds the root of sin in the refusal {82} of man in
general to recognize God. He asserts that they might have known Him,
or rather did know Him, but declined to act on that knowledge. Now it
is noticeable that he does not ascribe this knowledge of God, which he
declares to have been possible to man everywhere, to an original
revelation, nor even in this place to the moral conscience, but to the
evidence of nature. In this, as in his ridicule of idolatry, he is in
accordance, not only with Jewish thought, but with contemporary Greek
philosophy. The argument from design had become habitual in the
schools, having been stated first of all with transparent simplicity by
Xenophon in his account of the reasoning of Socrates. St. Paul then
finds in this instinctive inference from nature up to nature's God, 'a
testimony of the soul naturally Christian.' He is able, at Lystra and
Athens, to assume that men will respond to it.

It is another question, into which St. Paul does not specifically
enter, how far back in human history the appreciation of this reasoning
goes. But it is worth noticing that among our contemporary
investigators of the history of religion, some at least of the most
acute have been coming back to what we may call a modified {83} form of
the doctrine of an original monotheism[17]. They think that even
savage religions generally bear traces, that are plainly independent,
of a belief in one great and mostly good God; and that there is no
evidence that this higher belief was developed out of the lower belief
in manifold spirits of more ambiguous characters. They see no reason
to suppose that the higher belief has been gradually arrived at within
any period into which the human mind can penetrate with its
investigations or its well-grounded conjectures. Humanity appears to
them to have been haunted from its origins with this belief in the one
God; and they regard all the higher religious movements as attempts no