e Puritan
as a thing out of which he could get a good deal of fun; not the fun of
yielding to it, but the fun of whipping out his sword and getting in
some shrewd blows. When preachers nowadays lament that we have lost the
sense of sin, what they really mean is that we have lost our
combativeness: we no longer believe that we must treat our foes with
open and brutal violence, and we perceive that such conduct is only
pitting one sin against another. There is no warrant in the Gospel for
the combative idea of the Christian life; all such metaphors and
suggestions come from St. Paul and the Apocalypse. The fact is that the
world was not ready for the utter peaceableness of the Gospel, and it
had to be accommodated to the violence of the world.

Now again the Christian idea is coloured by scientific and medical
knowledge, and sin, instead of an enemy which we must fight, has become
a disease which we must try to cure.

Sins, the ordinary sins of ordinary life, are not as a rule instincts
which are evil in themselves, so much as instincts which are selfishly
pursued to the detriment of others; sin is in its essence the
selfishness which will not cooperate, and which secures advantages
unjustly, without any heed to the disadvantage of others. SYMPATHETIC
IMAGINATION is the real foe of sin, the power of putting oneself in the
place of another; and much of the sentiment which is so prevalent
nowadays is the evidence of the growth of sympathy.

The old theory of sin lands one in a horrible dilemma, because it
implies a treacherous enmity on the part of God, to create man weak and
unstable, and to pit his weakness against tyrannous desires; to allow
his will to do evil to be stronger than his power to do right, is a
satanical device. One must not sacrifice the truth to the desire for
simplicity and effective statement. The truth is intricate and obscure,
and to pretend that it is plain and obvious is mere hypocrisy. The
strength of Calvinism is its horrible resemblance to a natural
inference from the facts of life; but if any sort of Calvinism is true,
then it is a mere insult to the intelligence to say that God is loving
or just. The real basis for all deep-seated fear about life is the fear
that one will not be dealt with either lovingly or justly. But we have
to make a simple choice as to what we will believe, and the only hope
is to believe that immediate harshness and injustice is not ultimately
inconsistent with Love. N