ible, it is hard to justify the ways of a
Creator who slowly developed and matured a race, keeping them
deliberately ignorant of light and truth, in order that they might at
last be exterminated, in blood and pain, by a dominant and righteous
race of invaders.

It would seem, indeed, as though the sense of sin did not reside in the
act at all, but only in the sense that the act is committed in defiance
of light and higher instinct. Even our own morality, on which we pride
ourselves, how confused and topsy-turvy it is in many respects! How
monstrous it is that a hungry man should be punished legally for theft,
while an ill-tempered and unjust parent or schoolmaster should be
allowed, year after year, to make the lives of the children about them
into misery and heaviness. Life is full of such examples, where no
agency whatever is, or can be, brought to bear by society upon a
notorious wrecker of human happiness, so long as he is prudent and
wary.

It is the slowness of it all that is so disheartening; the
impossibility that dogs the efforts of the high-minded, the kind, the
just, of prevailing against tradition and prejudice and stupidity; the
grim acquiescence in sanctioned oppression that characterises a certain
type of respectable virtue; the melancholy ineffectiveness of kindly
persons, the lamentable lack of proportion that mars the work of the
enthusiastic faddist--these things tempt one at times, in moments of
despair and dreariness, to believe that the one lesson of life is meant
to be a hopeless patience, a dull acquiescence in deeply-rooted evil.
It is bewildering to see a world so out of joint, and to feel that the
one force that has worked wonders is the discontent with things as they
are. And even so the lesson is a hard one, because it has been the lot
of so few of the great conquerors of humanity ever to see the hour of
their triumph, which comes long after and late, when they have breathed
out their ardent spirit in agony and despair.

But, after all, however much we may philosophise about sin or attempt
to analyse its essence, there is some dark secret there, of which from
time to time we are grievously conscious. Who does not know the sense
of failure to overcome, of lapsing from a hope or a purpose, the burden
of the thought of some cowardice or unkindness which we cannot undo and
which we need not have committed? No resolute determinism can ever
avail us against the stern verdict of that inner tribu