Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: (Dn tfye (Essential nature of Sin jSr'HE realization of sin?of our wrong doing and unworthiness before God?is one of the most persistent experiences in our moral and spiritual natures: we naturally wish to be happy, to be free from cafe, and self satisfied; and yet, in spite of these powerful interests to the contrary, we are incessantly distressed by this sense of culpability?by this testimony of our consciences that ve have repeatedly broken the laws of our deepest nature, and of our God.?The question, then, as to why we are sinners, and what, in its essential nature is sin, this question, I say, has ever possessed an absorbing and vital interest to earnest and thoughtful men. The earliest attempt to solve this problem consisted in the theory that sin, in its essence, was simply sensuousness or in other words, the deference of a man to the merely animal guidance of his appetites. This theory, while fundamentally false, as I will show, in its ultimate analysis, yet contains enough superficial verity to be readily accepted by primitive thought: for the most obvious sins? those whose evil effects were most evident,?were precisely those that partook of this sensual character; gluttony, drunkenness, debauchery, all such sinkings as these of the man in his animal nature, were so evidently wrong, both in themselves, and in their effects, that it was easy to think of these alone as sins, and to overlook the far more heinous, and entirely nonsensual evils of dishonesty, envy, and malice. Tracing onward this idea of sin as sensuousness ?the swaying of a man by his animal instincts and passions,?we may say that its logical outcome was Gnostic and Manichaean Dualism, and ultimately also the Nihilism of the Buddhist. Thus, taking up Gnosticism in the first place, we may s…
