modern
age, long tickled by the amiable idiocies of evolution popularly
misinterpreted, this generation's deepest need is not these dithyrambic
songs about inevitable progress, but a fresh sense of personal and
social sin.

What the scientific doctrine of evolution really implies is something
much more weighty and sinister than frothy optimism. When a preacher
now quotes Paul, "as in Adam all die," not many of the younger
generation understand him, but when we are told that we came out of
low, sub-human beginnings, that we carry with us yet the bestial
leftovers of an animal heritage to be fought against and overcome and
left behind, well-instructed members of this generation ought to
comprehend. Yet in saying that, we are dealing with the same
fundamental fact which Paul was facing when he said, "as in Adam all
die"; we are handling the same unescapable experience out of which the
old doctrine of original sin first came; we are facing a truth which it
will not pay us to forget: that humanity's sinful nature is not
something which you and I alone make up by individual deeds of wrong,
but that it is an inherited mortgage and handicap on the whole human
family. Why is it that if we let a field run wild it goes to weeds,
while if we wish wheat we must fight for every grain of it? Why is it
that if we let human nature run loose it goes to evil, while he who
would be virtuous must struggle to achieve character? It is because,
in spite of our optimisms and evasions, that fact still is here, which
our fathers often appraised more truly than we, that human nature, with
all its magnificent possibilities, is like the earth's soil filled with
age-long seeds and roots of evil growth, and that progress in goodness,
whether personal or social, must be achieved by grace of some power
which can give us the victory over our evil nature.

In past generations it was the preachers who talked most about sin and
thundered against it from their pulpits, but now for years they have
been very reticent about it. Others, however, have not been still.
Scientists have made us feel the ancient heritage that must be fought
against; novelists have written no great novel that does not swirl
around some central sin; the work of the dramatists from Shakespeare
until Ibsen is centrally concerned with the problem of human evil; and
now the psycho-analysts are digging down into the unremembered thoughts
of men to bring up into the light of day the o