Hold thou the good: define it well:
For fear divine philosophy
Should push beyond her mark, and be
Procuress to the lords of hell.
Because philosophy and science have been bringing into prominence the influence of heredity and physical environment on character, we use this consideration, and often with little enough knowledge of real science, to obliterate the sense of sin. We are apt to regard sin as it appears in the world at large as a result of ignorance, or social conditions—as in one way or another a form of misfortune. And so viewing it in the world, we view it in ourselves. We make excuses for ourselves. We have largely lost the sense that sin is wilfulness; that it is an inexcusable offence against God; that it does, and necessarily does, bring us under God's indignation; that necessarily, because God is what He is, the consequences of sin in this life, and much more beyond this life, are inconceivably terrible. It is this sense of sin that St. Paul must help to restore in us. We must believe that God is holy, and we must learn to tremble under His necessary holiness, before we can in any right sense realize that He is loving. We must learn once again to be really penitent; to confess our sins in general and in particular with utter humiliation; to expect the divine judgement upon them; to use with reality the stern language about sin of the Bible and the Prayer Book. And learning this for ourselves with regard to our own personal sins, we must learn also to feel, like Daniel, what our church and nation deserve in God's sight. We must confess our own sins and the sins of church and nation[4]—aye, of the human race. Only through such a restoration of evangelical severity can there be a restoration of evangelical joy. The deepened sense of personal sin is the needful step to spiritual progress. Certainly no more in our case than in that of the Jews will orthodoxy, or ritual accuracy, or frequent services, or superior education, or philanthropic zeal, be accepted as a substitute for moral severity, for the spirit of penitence and the readiness for penance. Let us judge ourselves, brethren, that we be not judged of the Lord.
And it is all-important what our standard of judgement is. The Jews failed because they judged themselves by a mainly external and therefore easy standard. So do most respectable Englishmen. We are satisfied if we do nothing discreditable. But the religious sense of sin, as it is experienced by the psalmists, or St. Paul, or Luther, or John Keble, arises from the intense perception of a personal relation to the All-Holy. The 'falling short,' or rather 'experienced need[5],' of which St. Paul goes on to speak, is the experienced need of something very lofty, to which it is possible for men to be quite insensible—'the glory of God.' God's divine brightness, the eternal light, streams forth into nature. 'The whole earth is full of His glory.' Man also in his natural and moral being is meant to have fellowship with God. He is meant for the divine glory also. It is in proportion as he realizes what he was meant for, and becomes conscious in himself of a capacity for God, that his present actual pollution and sinfulness becomes a reality to his consciousness. It is in the light of God, and in aspiration after the glory of God, that the sense of sin really awakens. 'Thou requirest truth in the inward parts,' says the Psalmist. 'Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned.' 'If thou, Lord, shouldst be extreme to mark what is done amiss, Lord, who may abide it?'[6]
[1] Dr. King (The Psalms in Three Collections, &c.: Cambridge, 1898) has remarked that Ps. xiv. 1-3 closely resembles the general condemnation of 'all flesh upon the earth' in Gen. vi. 5, 12.
[2] Cf. above ver. 4, from Ps. xxxii.
[3] See Ps. li. 4; Job xxxii. 2; Prov. xvii. 15; Isa. v. 23; Matt. xi. 19; Luke vii. 29; x. 29; xvi. 15.
[4] Cf. Dan. ix. 4-20.
[5] The word for 'fall short' in ver. 23 is a 'middle' verb, and apparently implies not only failure in point of fact, but conscious failure. Thus in Luke xv. 14, the prodigal son begins to feel his destitution (middle). But in Matt. xix. 20, the rich young man asks, 'What, as a matter of fact, is wanting to me' (active)? See Gifford, or S. and H. in loc.
[6] Cf. app. note C, on recent reactions from the teaching about hell.
DIVISION II. CHAPTERS III. 21-IV. 25.
Justification by faith only.
§ 1. (III. 21-31.)
Christ our propitiation.
Now we have been brought to recognize the true state of the case as between ourselves and God—the facts about ourselves as we are in God's sight. We were meant for fellowship in the divine glory. 'The glory of God,' says an old Father, 'is the living man: the life of man is the vision of God.' But, meant for fellowship in the divine glory, we have fallen short of it and have come to appreciate our failure. We have sinned, and that universally and wilfully. We are such that God cannot accept us as we are: the 'day of His appearing' could be for us but a 'day of wrath.' And in this dire situation we are helpless. We can supply no remedy. 'Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may ye also do good that are accustomed to do evil[1].' But to acknowledge this—to abandon the claim so dear to the human heart, that we can be independent and manage our own life successfully: to repudiate all our false pride, and to come before God all of us on the same level, confessing our failure and our sin—this is to let man's necessity be God's opportunity, and to open the flood-gates of the divine righteousness. God is righteous in all the richest meaning of that word, and that righteousness of His He is now extending to us and giving us admittance into it. And this He does purely and simply as His gift. On His side it is pure and gratuitous giving, on our side simple and unmeritorious receiving. We contribute nothing. No distinctions are admitted between those inside the law and those outside it. The gift is quite apart from the law, though law and prophets bore witness to it. No questions are admitted as to what we have done or what we have left undone. Purely and simply out of the freedom of His love, who is our Creator and our Father, now, when a bitter experience has taught us again our true attitude towards Him, He offers us admission into His righteousness, all on the same level, if we will simply believe in Jesus Christ His Son, that is, take Him at His word and believe His promises (vers. 21-24).
And what is this offer? It is, first of all, what befits the captives of sin: it is redemption. God, who of old bought His people out of captivity in Egypt, without any co-operation of theirs, by a pure act of His power, has now again, without any co-operation of ours, but by a manifestation this time of self-sacrificing love, in the person of Jesus Christ, bought our freedom from sin. And this redemption He offers to us first of all in the form which befits sinners conscious of sin and guilt, as the mere gift of forgiveness, the mere power to break with the past, the mere right to stand and face the future with a clean record. For as the brazen serpent was lifted up before the eyes of rebellious Israel, bitten of the fiery serpents, and those who looked unto it lived, so upon the open stage of history God set forth Jesus Christ shedding His life-blood—obedient, that is, to God and righteousness unto death, even the death of the cross. And this sacrificial shedding of the life-blood of the Son of God—to which we contributed nothing[2]—is