The Inveterateness of Sin
Canon Scott Holland. Psalm 41:4 I said, LORD, be merciful to me: heal my soul; for I have sinned against you. Sin, we are told, is a survival; and that reverses and explodes all the traditional Christian theology. It is, they say, the effort of some past condition to assert itself when its day is over. It may be even a belated virtue which was once a true formula, under which we succeeded in securing our existence. For it has become a vice, in that it would hold us down at a lower level than that which lies open to us. It haunts us with strange and awful memories, it imprisons us with instinctive hopes which we should have forgotten and overgrown; it strikes against its own institution. It has old refuges in the blood and tissue, from out of which it refuses to be wrung. It has a dim, end-of-the-world impulse to appeal to. No wonder it is hard to beat it under. It carries on its subterranean war like the pagan deities of old, beneath the surface triumphant still. That is sin, according to this interpretation. Sin is the shadow cast out of the past; it reveals the law, out of which we have climbed to the new day. Still it sucks us down, and menaces, and defiles; but its death is sure; the future is against it; its sentence has gone out. There may be many a disloyal recrudescence of its ancient mischief; there will be strange moments when a sort of atavism will enable it to occupy lost ground; there may be even partial degradations, in which the higher will succumb to the lower. But the whole trend of life is upward, and under this sin will sink and disappear, for life is not a fail, but a rise, sin is that which is for ever being left behind. Now, of course, if this is the true account of sin, we had better wipe out the entire Bible story. Let us consider what that would mean. It would not be merely an abandonment of some obsolete dogma, nor would it be to realize all real living facts over against some blind authority. Rather it would mean the surrender of the widest, and deepest and most prolonged accumulation of human experience in the things of the living spirit that the world has ever known. Is there any statement more completely falsified by every scrap that we know of our own inward life than the one which pronounces that sin is the merest survival? That is just the sort of illusion with which we all begin, and which all further experience explodes. We fancy at first that sin is a misfortune, an accident, a weak surrender, to some invading and hostile attack. We never lived it, we are not of that sort, we know our own rightness of intention, our innate goodness in our best self. We will face and wipe off this wrong which has besmirched us. It is so unworthy of us and so unlike us. And now we have confessed and repented and we are ourselves again. We shall be stronger when next assailed. These will die away of themselves. How futile! how ignorant! how wrong! The old, old story repeats itself; the relapse recurs with strange regularity; the moral strength just breaks at the crisis when it ought to stand. Always the thing, somehow, is too much for it; always we do again that very thing that we had forsworn for ever. Why the strange persistent failure? Why this tremor at the heart? Why is the hand still put out to pluck that which we know to be forbidden? Why do the feet turn again down the paths which lead to death? Again it is the old cause — the thing that I ought to do I do not; the thing that I would not, that I do. And does this mean that we have not got at the root of the matter, that it is not the outside accident which we hope, that it is a monotonous revelation of a wrong that works by a regular law? It is I and not something that is upon me that is responsible for this disorder. Why cannot I do what I want? I, who seem to myself so inherently good, so thoroughly well-meaning, so far above these degradations, so resolute in my determination? I am somehow guilty. O miserable man that I am! O my God, it is I that have sinned against Thee and done this evil in Thy sight. Your sin will not disappear of itself. You will never grow out of it; it is too deep, too intimate, too personal for that. It will reappear within when you have expelled it from without. You are powerless. But you have the witness in yourself that sin and you can never agree. Sin is not your true life, but your death, and in the strength of that inner weakness you have force and right to appeal to; that invincible love that only waits for your appeal to find its entry. "Have mercy upon me, O God, heal my soul, for I have sinned against Thee." Lift that cry, and the answer is in your ears in the Person of Jesus Christ our Saviour: "I will, be thou clean." (Canon Scott Holland.) Parallel Verses KJV: I said, LORD, be merciful unto me: heal my soul; for I have sinned against thee. WEB: I said, "Yahweh, have mercy on me! Heal me, for I have sinned against you."