the laborious sophistries of such interpretations must be left to
themselves. The point for us is that no matter how sin originated, in
the moral consciousness in which it has its being it is recognised as a
derangement of the vital relations of man, a violation of that universal
order outside of which he has no true good.

In what way, now, let us ask, does the reality of sin come home to the
sinner? How does he recognise it as what it is? What is the reaction
against the sinner, in the moral order under which he lives, which
reveals to him the meaning of his sinful act or state?

In the first place, there is that instantaneous but abiding reaction
which is called the bad conscience--the sense of guilt, of being
answerable to God for sin. The sin may be an act which is committed in a
moment, but in this aspect of it, at least, it does not fade into the
past. An animal may have a past, for anything we can tell, and
naturalistic interpreters of sin may believe that sin dies a natural
death with time, and need not trouble us permanently; but this is not the
voice of conscience, in which alone sin exists, and which alone can tell
us the truth about it. The truth is that the spiritual being has no
past. Just as he is continually with God, his sin is continually with
him. He cannot escape it by not thinking. When he keeps silence, as the
Psalmist says--and that is always his first resource, as though, if he
were to say nothing about it, God might say nothing about it, and the
whole thing blow over--it devours him like a fever within: his bones wax
old with his moaning all day long. This sense of being wrong with God,
under His displeasure, excluded from His fellowship, afraid to meet Him
yet bound to meet Him, is the sense of guilt. Conscience confesses in it
its liability to God, a liability which in the very nature of the case it
can do nothing to meet, and which therefore is nearly akin to despair.

But the bad conscience, real as it is, may be too abstractly interpreted.
Man is not a pure spirit, but a spiritual being whose roots strike to the
very depths of nature, and who is connected by the most intimate and
vital relations not only with his fellow-creatures of the same species,
but with the whole system of nature in which he lives. The moral
constitution in which he has his being comprehends, if we may say so,
nature in itself: the God who has established the moral order in which
man lives, has establis