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court; but as for the decent and re spectable, the church-going and virtu ous, they are not guilty; nor have they fallen and come short of the glory of God.” There is nothing that Culture hates so much as the assertion of the uni versality of sin. And it hates it be cause the very concept of sin, accord ing to the Scriptural ideal, militates so bluntly against the evolution phil osophy. It undermines it. It evacu ates it of meaning. The two are con trary the one to the other. If the one is true the other must be false. IGNORE THE CHRIST. Now, very closely connected with this development is the practical dis appearance from the theory of mod ernism of the Biblical idea of the need and the fact of Salvation. It is the rational corollary of the natural de velopment of man. The later gospel is practically that of a self-salvation and the unnecessary Christ. The in dividual is to save himself; a salva tion by culture and civilization and character-building, with Divine grace thrown in as a kind of sleeping part ner. As to the Synergism of Phil. 2 :12, 13—“Work out your own salva tion —for it is God which worketh in you both to do and to will ”—it is ap parently unconsidered. And the lat est of all gospels, the so-called Hu manistic Scheme of Redemption, is that the individual is to look to so ciety for salvation; or, as one of its foremost advocates has put it, (in fact, it is the concrete creed of anti- Christian Socialism) “The help we once expected from invisible and in corporeal agencies (that is, of course, from God and Christ and the Bible and angels and invisible spiritual in fluences) we are now demanding from man. Society is to save the man.” It is, bluntly speaking, salvation by environment. Culture is apparently
man as a sinner, not so much on account of what he does, but on ac count of what he is, is in these days a hard saying, and who can hear it. Humanity wants to be applauded, and Sunday after Sunday in a thousand pulpits to receive bouquets for its achievements, its progress, its nobil ity, its generosity. In fact, nothing seems to excite the anger of modern ism so much as the frank statement of the actuality of original sin, and the intrinsic guiltiness of sinful man. When it hears, it springs up like a man in wrath, and decries it, denies it, fumes at it. For the modernist estimate of sin is essentially anti- Christian and anti-Scriptural. Sometimes it is as frankly out spoken as Sir Oliver Lodge, who de clares that as a matter of fact the higher man of to-day is not worrying about his sins at all, still less about their punishment, (Man and the Uni verse, p. 220) and roundly denies the existence of original sin. But wheth er as frank as this representative voice, it is certain that modernism would repudiate with strong repudia tion the teaching of the Bible on the subject that Sin is the corruption of our universal nature; that it deserves God’s wrath; for “anything that sug gests an angry God . . . is rejected as falling below the best secular mor ality of today” — (Foundations, p. 278). The modern philosophic spirit is found in the evolution of an age- type, a myriad fine specimens of man hood and womanhood, irreproachable in character, kind-hearted and chari table, but without consciousness of the guilt and death of sin, might be found who say: r “This is our Creed. We believe that there is none under sin; there is none unrighteous, no not one. We know that whatsoever the law saith, it saith to those who flagrantly and openly transgress the law, to the in mate of the prison and the police
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