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The Fundamentals is extremely doubtful whether any intelligent person whose moral intuitions have not been completely destroyed and whose mental perceptions have not been largely blunted by indulg ence in wickedness, can successfully persuade himself, at least permanently, that sin is a myth, an illusion o f the mind, a creature of the imagination, and not a grim reality. Most men know that sin is in themselves a fact of consciousness they cannot deny, and in others a fact of observation they cannot overlook. As Chesterton expresses it, the fact of sin any one may see in the street: the Bible assumes that any man will discover it who looks into his own heart. Accordingly the Bible devotes its efforts to imparting to mankind reliable knowledge about the nature and universality, the origin and culpability, but also and especially about the removableness of sin; and to set forth these in succession will be the object of the present paper. I. THE NATURE OF SIN It scarcely requires stating that modern ideas about sin receive no countenance from Scripture, which never speaks about sin as “good in the making,” as “the shadow cast by man’s immaturity,” as “a necessity determined by heredity and environment,” as “a stage in the upward development of a finite being,” as a “taint adhering to man’s corporeal frame,” as a “physical disease,” “a mental infirmity,” “a constitutional weakness,” and least of all “as a figment of the imperfectly enlightened, or theologically perverted, imagination,” but always as the free act o f an intelligent, moral and responsible being asserting himself against the will of his Maker, the supreme Ruler of the universe. That will the Bible takes for granted every person may learn, either from the law written on his own heart (Rom. 1:15 ) ; or from the revelation furnished by God to mankind, first to the Hebrew Church in the Old Testament Scriptures, and afterwards to the Christian Church and through it to the whole world in the New Testament
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