the Roman Catholic Church,-every sin unpardoned being mortal, and all sins being venial, since Christ has died for all. Nor is the common distinction between sins of omission and sins of commission more valid, since the very omission is an act of commission.

Mat. 25: 45-"Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least"; James 4: 17-"To him therefore that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin." The Roman Catholic Church proceeds upon the supposition that she can determine the precise malignity of every offence, and assign its proper penance at the confessional. Thornwell, Theology, 1: 424-441, says that "all sins are venial but one-for there is a sin against the Holy Ghost," yet "not one is venial in itself-for the least proceeds from an apostate state and nature." We shall see, however, that the hindrance to pardon, in the case of the sin against the Holy Ghost, is subjective rather than objective.

The following distinctions are indicated in Scripture as involving different degrees of guilt:

A. Sin of nature and personal transgression.

Sin of nature involves guilt, yet there is greater guilt when this sin of nature reässerts itself in personal transgression; for while this latter includes in itself the former, it also adds to the former a new element, namely, the conscious exercise of the individual and personal will, by virtue of which a new decision is made against God, special evil habit is induced, and the total condition of the soul is made more depraved. Although we have emphasized the guilt of inborn sin, because this truth is most contested, it is to be remembered that men reach a conviction of their native depravity only through a conviction of their personal transgressions. For this reason, by far the larger part of our preaching upon sin should consist in applications of the law of God to the acts and dispositions of men's lives.

Mat. 19: 14-"to such belongeth the kingdom of heaven = relative innocence of childhood; 23: 32"Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers" = personal transgression added to inherited depravity. In preaching, we should first treat individual transgressions, and thence proceed to heart-sin, and race-sin. Man is not wholly a spontaneous development of inborn tendencies, a manifestation of original sin. Motives do not determine but they persuade the will, and every man is guilty of conscious personal transgressions which may, with the help of the Holy Spirit, be brought under the condemning judgment of conscience. Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 169-174-" Original sin does not do away with the significance of personal transgression. Adam was pardoned; but some of his descendants are unpardonable. The second death is referred, in Scripture, to our own personal guilt."

B. Sins of ignorance, and sins of knowledge.

Here guilt is measured by the degree of light possessed, or in other words, by the opportunities of knowledge men have enjoyed, and the powers with which they have been naturally endowed. Genius and privilege increase responsibility. The heathen are guilty, but those to whom the oracles of God have been committed are more guilty than they.

Mat. 10: 15-"more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city"; Luke 12: 47, 48-"that servant, which knew his Lord's will.... shall be beaten with many stripes; but he that knew not.... shall be beaten with few stripes"; 23: 34-"Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" = complete knowledge would put them beyond the reach of forgiveness. John 19: 11-"he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin"; Acts 17: 30-"The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked"; Rom. 1 : 32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they who practise such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent with them that practise them"; 2: 12-"for as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and as many as have sinned under the law shall be judged by law"; 1 Tim. 1: 13, 15—“I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief."

C. Sins of infirmity, and sins of presumption.

Here the guilt is measured by the energy of the evil will. Sin may be known to be sin, yet may be committed in haste or weakness. Though haste and weakness constitute a palliation of the offense which springs therefrom, yet they are themselves sins, as revealing an unbelieving and disordered heart. But of far greater guilt are those presumptuous choices of evil in which not weakness, but strength of will, is manifest.

Ps. 19: 12, 13-"Clear thou me from hidden faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins"; Is. 5: 18" Woe to them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart-rope": not led away insensibly by sin, but earnestly, perseveringly, and wilfully working away at it; Gal. 6: 1—“overtaken in any trespass "; 1 Tim. 5: 24-"Some men's sins are evident, going before unto judgment; and some men also they follow after" = some men's sins are so open, that they act as officers to bring to justice those who commit them; whilst others require after-proof (An. Par. Bible). Luther represents one of the former class as saying to himself: "Esto peccator, et pecca fortiter." On sins of passion and of reflection, see Bittinger, in Princeton Rev., 1873: 219.

D. Sin of incomplete, and sin of final, obduracy.

Here the guilt is measured, not by the objective sufficiency or insufficiency of divine grace, but by the degree of unreceptiveness into which sin has brought the soul. As the only sin unto death which is described in Scripture is the sin against the Holy Ghost, we here consider the nature of that sin.

Mat. 12: 31-"Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven"; 32-"And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come"; Mark 3: 29" whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin"; 1 John 5: 16, 17-"If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and God will give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: not concerning this do I say that he should make request. All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death"; Heb. 10: 26-"If we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries."

The sin against the Holy Ghost is not to be regarded as an isolated act, but rather as the external symptom of a heart so radically and finally set against God that no power which God can consistently use will ever save it. The sin, therefore, can be only the culmination of a long course of self-hardening and self-depraving. He who has committed it must be either profoundly indifferent to his own condition, or actively and bitterly hostile to God; so that anxiety or fear on account of one's condition are evidences that it has not been committed. The sin against the Holy Ghost cannot be forgiven, simply because the soul that has committed it has ceased to be receptive of divine influences, even when those influences are exerted in the utmost strength which God has seen fit to employ in his spiritual administration.

The commission of this sin is marked by a loss of spiritual sight; the blind fish of the Mammoth Cave left light for darkness, and so in time lost their eyes. It is marked by a loss of religious sensibility; the sensitive-plant loses its sensitiveness, in proportion to the frequency with which it is touched. It is marked by a loss of power to will the good; "the lava hardens after it has broken from the crater, and in that state cannot return to its source" (Van Oosterzee). The same writer also remarks (Dogmatics, 2: 428): "Herod Antipas, after earlier doubt and slavishness, reached such deadness as to be able to mock the Saviour, at the mention of whose name he had not long before trembled." Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2 : 425—“It is not that divine grace is absolutely

refused to any one who in true penitence asks forgiveness of this sin; but he who commits it never fulfils the subjective conditions upon which forgiveness is possible, because the aggravation of sin to this ultimatum destroys in him all susceptibility of repentance. The way of return to God is closed against no one who does not close it against himself." Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 97–120, illustrates the downward progress of the sinner by the law of degeneration in the vegetable and animal world: pigeons, roses, strawberries, all tend to revert to the primitive and wild type. "How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation?" (Heb. 2:3).

Dr. J. P. Thompson: "The unpardonable sin is the knowing, wilful, persistent, contemptuous, malignant spurning of divine truth and grace, as manifested to the soul by the convincing and illuminating power of the Holy Ghost." Dorner says that "therefore this sin does not belong to Old Testament times, or to the mere revelation of law. It implies the full revelation of the grace in Christ, and the conscious rejection of it by a soul to which the Spirit has made it manifest" (Acts 17: 30-"the times of ignorance, therefore, God overlooked"; Rom. 3: 25-"the passing over of the sins done aforetime"). But was it not under the Old Testament that God said: “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever" (Gen. 6 : 3), and "Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone" (Hosea 4:17)? The sin against the Holy Ghost is a sin against grace, but it does not appear to be limited to New Testament times.

It is still true that the unpardonable sin is a sin committed against the Holy Spirit rather than against Christ: Mat. 12: 32" whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak a word against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come." Jesus warns the Jews against it-he does not say they had already committed it. They would seem to have committed it when, after Pentecost, they added to their rejection of Christ the rejection of the Holy Spirit's witness to Christ's resurrection. See Schaff, Sin against the Holy Ghost; Lemme, Sünde wider den Heiligen Geist; Davis, in Bap. Rev., 1882: 317-326; Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, 283-289. On the general subject of kinds of sin and degrees of guilt, see Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3: 284, 298.

III. PENALTY.

1. Idea of penalty.

By penalty, we mean that pain or loss which is directly or indirectly inflicted by the Lawgiver, in vindication of his justice outraged by the violation of law.

Turretin, 1: 213-"Justice necessarily demands that all sin be punished, but it does not equally demand that it be punished in the very person that sinned, or in just such time and degree." So far as this statement of the great federal theologian is intended to explain our guilt in Adam and our justification in Christ, we can assent to his words; but we must add that the reason, in each case, why we suffer the penalty of Adam's sin, and Christ suffers the penalty of our sins, is not to be found in any covenant-relation, but rather in the fact that the sinner is one with Adam, and Christ is one with the believer in other words, not covenant-unity, but life-unity. The word 'penalty,' like 'pain,' is derived from pœna, Town, and it implies the correlative notion of desert. As under the divine government there can be no constructive guilt, so there can be no penalty inflicted by legal fiction. Christ's sufferings were penalty, not arbitrarily inflicted, nor yet borne to expiate personal guilt, but as the just due of the human nature with which he had united himself, and a part of which he was.

In this definition it is implied that:

A. The natural consequences of transgression, although they constitute a part of the penalty of sin, do not exhaust that penalty. In all penalty there is a personal element - the holy wrath of the Lawgiver - which natural consequences but partially express.

We do not deny, but rather assert, that the natural consequences of transgression are a part of the penalty of sin. Sensual sins are punished, in the determination and corruption of the body; mental and spiritual sins, in the deterioration and corruption of the soul. Prov. 5: 22" His own iniquities shall take the wicked, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sin".

as the hunter is caught in the toils which he has devised for the wild beast. Sin is selfdetecting and self-tormenting. But this is only half the truth. Those who would confine all penalty to the reaction of natural laws are in danger of forgetting that God is not simply immanent in the universe, but is also transcendent, and that "to fall into the hands of the living God" (Heb. 10: 31) is to fall into the hands, not simply of the law, but also of the Lawgiver.

B. The object of penalty is not the reformation of the offender or the ensuring of social or governmental safety. These ends may be incidentally secured through its infliction, but the great end of penalty is the vindication of the character of the Lawgiver. Penalty is essentially a necessary reaction of the divine holiness against sin. Inasmuch, however, as wrong views of the object of penalty have so important a bearing upon our future studies of doctrine, we make fuller mention of the two erroneous theories which have greatest currency.

(a) Penalty is not essentially reformatory. By this we mean that the reformation of the offender is not its primary design-as penalty, it is not intended to reform. Penalty, in itself, proceeds not from the love and mercy of the Lawgiver, but from his justice. Whatever reforming influences may in any given instance be connected with it are not parts of the penalty, but are mitigations of it, and they are added not in justice but in grace. If reformation follows the infliction of penalty, it is not the effect of the penalty, but the effect of certain benevolent agencies which have been provided to turn into a means of good what naturally would be to the offender only a source of harm.

That the object of penalty is not reformation appears from Scripture, where punishment is often referred to God's justice, but never to God's love; from the intrinsic ill-desert of sin, to which penalty is correlative; from the fact that upon this theory punishment would not be just when the sinner was already reformed or could not be reformed, so that the greater the sin the less the punishment must be.

Punishment is essentially different from chastisement. The latter proceeds from love (Jer. 10: 24" Correct me, but with judgment; not in thine anger"; Heb. 12: 6-"whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.") Punishment proceeds not from love but from justice see Ez. 28: 22-"I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her "; 36: 21, 22—in judgment, "I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name "; Heb. 12: 29-"Our God is a consuming fire"; Rev. 15: 1, 4—"wrath of God... thou only art holy.... thy righteous acts have been made manifest"; 19: 5-"Righteous art thou...... thou Holy One, because thou didst thus judge "; 19: 2-"true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot." So untrue is the saying of Sir Thomas More's Utopia: "The end of all punishment is the destruction of vice, and the saving of men." Luther: "God has two rods: one of mercy and goodness; another of anger and fury." Chastisement is the former; penalty the latter.

If the reform-theory of penalty is correct, then to punish crime, without asking about reformation, makes the state the transgressor; its punishments should be proportioned, not to the greatness of the crime, but to the sinner's state; the death-penalty should be abolished, upon the ground that it will preclude all hope of reformation. But the same theory would abolish any final judgment, or eternal punishment; for, when the soul becomes so wicked that there is no more hope of reform, there is no longer any justice in punishing it. The greater the sin, the less the punishment; and Satan, the greatest sinner, should have no punishment at all. See Julius Müller, Lehre von der Sünde, 1:334; Thornton, Old Fashioned Ethics, 70-73; see also references on Holiness, A. (d) page 129.

(b) Penalty is not essentially deterrent and preventive. By this we mean that its primary design is not to protect society, by deterring men

from the commission of like offences. We grant that this end is often secured in connection with punishment, both in family and civil government and under the government of God. But we claim that this is a merely incidental result, which God's wisdom and goodness have connected with the infliction of penalty-it cannot be the reason and ground for penalty itself. Some of the objections to the preceding theory apply also to this. But in addition to what has been said, we urge:

Penalty cannot be primarily designed to secure social and governmental safety, for the reason that it is never right to punish the individual simply for the good of society. No punishment, moreover, will or can do good to others that is not just and right in itself. Punishment does good, only when the person punished deserves punishment; and that desert of punishment, and not the good effects that will follow it, must be the ground and reason why it is inflicted. The contrary theory would imply that the criminal might go free but for the effect of his punishment on others, and that man might rightly commit crime if only he were willing to bear the penalty.

A certain English judge, in sentencing a criminal, said that he punished him, not for stealing sheep, but that sheep might not be stolen. But it is the greatest injustice to punish a man for the mere sake of example. Society cannot be benefited by such injustice. The theory can give no reason why one should be punished rather than another, nor why a second offence should be punished more heavily than the first. On this theory, moreover, if there were but one creature in the universe, and none existed beside himself to be affected by his suffering, he could not justly be punished, however great might be his sin. The only principle that can explain punishment is the principle of desert.

"Crime is most prevented by the conviction that crime deserves punishment; the greatest deterrent agency is conscience." So in the government of God "there is no hint that future punishment works good to the lost or to the universe. The integrity of the redeemed is not to be maintained by subjecting the lost to a punishment they do not deserve. The wrong merits punishment, and God is bound to punish it, whether good comes of it or not. Sin is intrinsically ill-deserving. Impurity must be banished from God. God must vindicate himself, or cease to be holy" (see art. on the Philosophy of Punishment, by F. L. Patton, in Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan., 1878: 126–139).

F. W. Robertson: "Does not the element of vengeance exist in all punishment, and does not the feeling exist, not as a sinful, but as an essential, part of human nature? If so, there must be wrath in God." Lord Bacon: "Revenge is a wild sort of justice." Stephens: "Criminal law provides legitimate satisfaction of the passions of revenge." Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1: 287. Per contra, see Bib. Sac., Apr., 1881: 286-302; H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 46, 47.

2. The actual penalty of sin.

The one word in Scripture which designates the total penalty of sin is death. Death, however, is twofold:

A. Physical death, or the separation of the soul from the body, including all those temporal evils and sufferings which result from disturbance of the original harmony between body and soul, and which are the working of death in us. That physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, appears :

(a) From Scripture.

This is the most obvious import of the threatening in Gen. 2:17-"thou shalt surely die"; cf. 3 : 19 — “unto dust shalt thou return." Allusions to