if Eastet is to have its meaning for us, we must refresh our wnderstanding of the cross in which its victory and glory are rooted and the cross does not get into perspective as part of a Gospel except from the standpoint of the conscience of sin.
It is widely said that sin is no longer preached in the Churches, and a great modern teacher has been quoted as saying that "the higher type of man no longer worries about sin." We should be certain to begin with that it is the higher type of man.
To say of sin. What is it?
Of virtue, we can miss it, Of sin we can but kiss it And tis no longer sin, To say what is suggested by hundreds of novels and scores of films is only a proof of moral insensibility. "If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is; not in us. But certainly there are.conceptions of sin that have been outgrown because they do not cor respond to the Christian conscience, they do not seem to fall into line with the mind of Christ.
The higher type of man may have ceased to worry about sin if it hag been represented to him in an unreal or unworthy way, if it seems to belong to a system of thought or habit of life that comes short of what he feels to be the highest standard.
Now the conscience of sin is a double one. There is the sense of sin that we share, and the sense of sin that we cannot share. The first is a social conscience, the second is a personal one, and it is of the first that I want to speak this morning, to show that we have grown out of one standpoint, because we have grown up to another.
THE FALL OF ADAM, The old standpoint may be called theological. It is the view that we are sinners because of Adam's fall, that we come under the ban of God's displeasure and deserve the pains of hell because of an incident of long ago that can be both dated and located. The first thing that strikes the Christian conscience concerning such a doctrine is the lack of authority for it in the Christian scriptures. Christ himself hag nothing to say about it.
In the second place it hurts our reason, for if men are already damned by Adam's sin, how can they be responsible themselves? In the third place it hurts our sense of justice, for why should those whose moral prospects are foreclosed by Adam's fall be subject to punishment at all? Life itself ie that case is a sufficient penalty.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.