of the word, sin, as a disturbance of the personal relations
between God and man, is a violence done to the constitution under which
God and man form one moral community, share, as we may reverently express
it, one life, have in view the same moral ends.

It is no more necessary in connection with the Atonement than in any
other connection that we should have a doctrine of the origin of sin. We
do not know its origin, we only know that it is here. We cannot observe
the genesis of the bad conscience any more than we can observe the
genesis of consciousness in general. We see that consciousness does
stand in relief against the background of natural life; but though we
believe that, as it exists in us, it has emerged from that background, we
cannot see it emerge; it is an ultimate fact, and is assumed in all that
we can ever regard as its physical antecedents and presuppositions. In
the same way, the moral consciousness is an ultimate fact, and
irreducible. The physical theory of evolution must not be allowed to
mislead us here, and in particular it must not be allowed to discredit
the conception of moral responsibility for sin which is embodied in the
story of the Fall. Each of us individually has risen into moral life
from a mode of being which was purely natural; in other words, each of
us, individually, has been a subject of evolution; but each of us also
has fallen--fallen, presumably, in ways determined by his natural
constitution, yet certainly, as conscience assures us, in ways for which
we are morally answerable, and to which, in the moral constitution of the
world, consequences attach which we must recognise as our due. They are
not only results of our action, but results which that action has
merited, and there is no moral hope for us unless we accept them as such.
Now what is true of any, or rather of all, of us, without compromise of
the moral consciousness, may be true of the race, or of the first man, if
there was a first man. Evolution and a Fall cannot be inconsistent, for
both enter into every moral experience of which we know anything; and no
opinion we hold about the origin of sin can make it anything else than it
is in conscience, or give its results any character other than that which
they have to conscience. Of course when one tries to interpret sin
outside of conscience, as though it were purely physical, and did not
have its being in personality, consciousness, and will, it disappears;
and