her than to human guilt. When famines or
pestilences came, our fathers thought them God's punishment for sin.
When earthquakes shook the earth or comets hung threateningly in the
sky, our fathers saw in them a divine demand for human penitence. Such
events, referred now to their scientific causes, do not quicken in us a
sense of sin. _New democracy_ also has helped in this development of
self-complacency. Under autocratic kings the common people were common
people and they knew it well. Their dependent commonality was enforced
on them by the constant pressure of their social life. Accustomed to
call themselves miserable worms before an earthly king, they had no
qualms about so estimating themselves before the King of Heaven.
Democracy, however, elevates us into self-esteem. The genius of
democracy is to believe in men, their worth, their possibilities, their
capacities for self-direction. Once the dominant political ideas
depressed men into self-contempt; now they lift men into
self-exaltation. _New excuses for sin_ have aided in creating our mood
of self-content. We know more than our fathers did about the effect of
heredity and environment on character, and we see more clearly that
some souls are not born but damned into the world. Criminals, in
consequence, have come not to be so much condemned as pitied, their
perversion of character is regarded not so much in terms of iniquity as
of disease, and as we thus condone transgression in others, so in
ourselves we palliate our wrong. We regard it as the unfortunate but
hardly blamable consequence of temperament or training. Our fathers,
who thought that the trouble was the devil in them, used to deal
sternly with themselves. Like Chinese Gordon, fighting a besetting sin
in private prayer, they used to come out from their inward struggles
saying, "I hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord." But we are softer
with ourselves; we find in lack of eugenics or in cruel circumstance a
good excuse.

Undoubtedly, the _new theology_ has helped to encourage this modern
mood of self-complacency. Jonathan Edwards' Enfield sermon pictured
sinners held over the blazing abyss of hell in the hands of a wrathful
deity who at any moment was likely to let go, and so terrific was that
discourse in its delivery that women fainted and strong men clung in
agony to the pillars of the church. Obviously, we do not believe in
that kind of God any more, and as always in reaction we swing