out sin. Sin is the murder
spirit in human experience. "Whosoever hateth his brother is a
murderer. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a
liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he
love God whom he hath not seen?" Strong language, but I suppose the
man who first used it must have known what he was talking about.
Pomposity is sin, because it is egoism; self-complacency and
contemptuousness are sin for the same reason. Cupidity is sin whether
in a burglar or a Doctor of Divinity. A bitter, grasping, cruel,
unsympathetic spirit is sin, no matter who shows it. The scribe and
the Pharisee are too much with us, and the religious ideal needs to be
rescued from their blighting grasp to-day as much as ever it did. Of
all forms of sin an arrogant, malignant, self-satisfied assumption of
righteousness is the worst and the hardest to eradicate, as Jesus found
to His cost. The terrible damning lie which is stifling religion
to-day is the lie which crucified Jesus, the lie that spiritual pride
can ever interpret God to a needy world. There is something grimly
amusing in the suggestion that prosperous people should pay for sending
gospel missions to the poor. If sin is selfishness, the poor had
better missionise the rich. Imagine how it would be if things were
reversed in this way, and a mission band of earnest slum dwellers took
their stand in Belgravia and began a house-to-house visitation, with
all the theological terms carefully eliminated from the mission
leaflets they thrust under the doors or handed to the powdered footmen.
Instead of, "Flee from the wrath to come," etc., they might have:
"Don't be selfish! it is hurting you and your neighbours and making you
unhappy. Don't pretend! It is poor business in the end. Try to do as
much as you can for other people and you will know what God is." The
attempt would be startling and unwelcome, but it would be far less
impudent than the religious exhortations of the prosperous to the poor
commonly are. For the truth is that if sin is selfishness,--and it is
nothing else,--the degraded habits of people at the lower end of the
social scale are no more sinful than the ordinary behaviour of most of
their preceptors at the other end. Most of the talk about sin is
unreal; that is the trouble; so verily the publicans and harlots go
into the kingdom of heaven before us. In church a man will profess
himself to be a miserable sinne