heir specific character, against a strong
tendency in the scientifically trained modern mind, and still more in
the general mind as influenced by it, to reduce them to the merely
physical level.

Take, for instance, the consciousness of sin. Evidently the Atonement
becomes incredible if the consciousness of sin is extinguished or
explained away. There is nothing for the Atonement to do; there is
nothing to relate it to; it is as unreal as a rock in the sky. But
many minds at the present time, under the influence of current
conceptions in biology, do explain it away. All life is one, they
argue. It rises from the same spring, it runs the same course, it
comes to the same end. The life of man is rooted in nature, and that
which beats in my veins is an inheritance from an immeasurable past.
It is absurd to speak of my responsibility for it, or of my guilt
because it manifests itself in me, as it inevitably does, in such and
such forms. There is no doubt that this mode of thought is widely
prevalent, and that it is one of the most serious hindrances to the
acceptance of the gospel, and especially of the Atonement. How are we
to appreciate it? We must point out, I think, the consequence to which
it leads. If a man denies that he is responsible for the nature which
he has inherited--denies responsibility for it on the ground that it
_is_ inherited--it is a fair question to ask him for what he _does_
accept responsibility. When he has divested himself of the inherited
nature, what is left? The real meaning of such disowning of
responsibility is that a man asserts that his life is a part of the
physical phenomena of the universe, and nothing else; and he forgets,
in the very act of making the assertion, that if it were true, it could
not be so much as made. The merely physical is transcended in every
such assertion; and the man who has transcended it, rooted though his
life be in nature, and one with the life of the whole and of all the
past, must take the responsibility of living that life out on the high
level of self-consciousness and morality which his very disclaimer
involves. The sense of sin which wakes spontaneously with the
perception that he is not what he ought to have been must not be
explained away; at the level which life has reached in him, this is
unscientific as well as immoral; his sin--for I do not know another
word for it--must be realised as all that it is in the moral world if
he is ever to