large sway.1 All that exists is declared to be good. Evil has no being. It is only a deficiency in existence. It is an unreality, an appearance. In modern times this negative conception has assumed various forms, under different explanations offered in the name of philosophy and science. It runs through all the theories of cosmic evolutionism, whether of materialistic, pantheistic, or theistic type. It belongs to Leibnitz (Theodicy). Materialism, voiding the universe of spirit, either divine or human, by nullifying freedom, leaves no place for either moral good or evil. Hegel's philosophy of the cosmic evolution, as the Absolute, self-existent Spirit, self-unfolding, and advancing by opposites in an everlasting becoming, carries both antagonism and incompleteness all through nature and life. In In man, the infinite appears in finiteness. But the finite consciousness, because of its emergence from the infinite, holds a sense of this incompleteness, which it interprets in terms of evil and fault. Even the current theistic evolutionism of Darwinian science and the Synthetic Philosophy identifies it with the imperfections of development, the yet unrevealed in the excellence of humanity. The advancing evolution, as the gospel of hope, is to bring what yet is not. But this negative conception of sin, as being non-existent, in whatever form it appears, is manifestly inadequate, and simply denies the problem instead of explaining it. For, in invincible fact, sin is something positive-not a mere limitation of being or attainment. It is a most real and woeful refusal to accept the good and right as

1 Origen, "De Prin.," I., 4; "Com. on Joan. Tom.," II., 7. So also Athanasius, "De Incarn.," sec. 4; Basil "Hom. Quod Deus," sec. 5, 7; Gregory of Nyssa, "Orat. Catech.," v.-vii.; Augustine, "Enchirid.," xi., and prevalent down through the scholastic age.

provided, an active violation of the moral constitution really given, a willful trampling down of conscious duty, persistent, positive wrong-doing, wickedness, defiance of justice, truth, and good order, an assertive, virulent, and destructive badness. The mystery of sin in the world can neither be set aside nor explained by the euphemism of naming it "that which does not exist," and marking it a synonym of human finitude.'

(b) The theory that is implicit, if not definitely formulated, in the supralapsarian predestination theology. The type of doctrine which represents the primal eternal decree of God to be the twofold glorification of His love and His justice (or severity), covering the creation of man in innocence and his ordained fall into sin, with an election of some to salvation and a preterition or reprobation of the rest, necessarily fixes the origin of sin in the all-embracing, divine fore-ordination and causation. It comes as something required in the divine decreeconstitutive for the world-system. It is unescapable, because predestinated by God. But in this view human freedom, even in primal man, is reduced to a mere semblance, being allowed no choice against the omnipotent decree. This would make God Himself the Author of sin. But, since man's sin, then, was an act of conformity to the divine plan, it could not be sin in him unless

1 This appears as the outcome of Prof. Josiah Royce's monistic explanation of "The World and the Individual," Gifford Lectures before the University of Aberdeen, second series, 1900. See especially Lecture VIII.

So Zwingli, Calvin (“Articles on Predestination," discovered by the Brunswick editors, about which, see "Presbyterian and Reformed Review," January, 1901, p. 64), Beza, Gomar, Maccovius, Voetius, Twisse, Hopkins, Emmons, though this explanation is not adopted in any of the Calvinistic confessions.

it was sin also in the Author of the plan. This connects moral evil with the Divine Will as the determining principle or source, and represents God as invoking sin -bringing it purposely into the world-system as the desired condition for the manifestation of His glorious justice. But how could that be really justice which should punish obedience to the divine plan, an obedience to which there was no human alternative? But, besides thus making God the Author of sin, as decreeing and necessitating it, the theory further confutes itself in the conceded fact that, by very conception, sin is antagonism to the will of God-not a fulfillment of it or submission to it. And still more, since a divine decree is an act of will, the explanation introduces into God a strife of wills-on the one hand to decree sin and on the other to condemn its existence. The only possible avoidance of these contradictions is suggested in the indefensible claim that the distinction of good and evil is not applicable to the divine choices, but is only for created beings as a mere effect of God's absolute will. But this claim would obliterate the ethical from the life or character of God. For the divine choices would not be ethical choices, if God did not choose the good and holy as good and holy. This supralapsarian scheme, which implicitly attaches sin to an infallible divine predestination of it, suggesting, at the same time, that God is so above moral law-instead of being its eternal reality-that He does not sin while working in man the very thing that to man is sin, is abhorrent to the whole Biblical conception of His righteousness, and can never be accepted as the solution of the mystery of sin in the world. That conception forbids us to subordinate His holiness and righteousness to

His omnipotence (will-power), and requires us to hold that He evermore uses His omnipotence for the glorious aims of His holiness and love.

(c) Akin to this theory, if not a part of it, is that which suggests that sin was chosen by God as the necessary means of the greatest good. It alleges that the morally good can be conceived and developed only in relation to moral evil, and that the presence of this is the necessary condition for the highest ethical life. The good can best be reached and established through reaction against the evil. Against this it is enough to remind ourselves of the utter groundlessness of the assumption. Moral law lies in the realm of ideal duty, of rational demand and perceived obligations-not simply of experienced and generalized consequences. The realization of the ethical life, in rational free agency, implies and requires only the possibility of sin, not its actual existence. Nothing but frivolous unreason could so reverse the real order of moral conception as to maintain that actual sin is the foundation of holiness or the necessary condition of its perfection. For, thus, God could not be holyunless by a reaction from existing sin. Moreover, as sin is the greatest evil, God's supposed choice of it as the means of the greatest good involves utter self-contradiction, and violates the fundamental principle of moral life not to "do evil that good may come."

(d) The various forms of theory which ground it in sensuousness, however they may be shaped, are all fatally based in the dualistic notions of the essentially evil nature of matter, and cannot be harmonized with Christian theism or Biblical anthropology. Even that explanation which connects it with the necessary order of development of the human powers, viz.: first, the growth

of the physical; secondly, the unfolding of the intellectual; and, lastly, the appearance of the moral capacities and principles, an order putting from the start the moral life under mastery and bondage of the sensuous nature, involves the notion of a malign influence in material existence, and is vitiated and unsatisfactory from this cause.1

The explanation of the mystery of sin and its reconciliation with the divine goodness, must be found, if found at all, in connection with the principle of free agency as essential to a moral system. God in His supreme holiness and love created the creature-realm of beings in His own image and likeness. In this the creation was lifted above the grade of impersonal things, into that of personality and moral character, the highest and most blessed life conceivable. This realm of life was established in holiness and for holiness and pure happiness, in fellowship with God Himself. But this freedom of personality, designed for obedience, by the very reality of its freedom involved a possibility of misuse, against God's will. Thus, however, only the possibility of sin belongs to a moral system, not at all the necessity of it. And to exclude all possibility of sin would have required the annullment of the real freedom; for freedom means a power of choice between alternatives. To control inevitably the wills of free, responsible beings can no more be an object of God's power than the working of a contradiction-the contradiction of necessity in free-agency. Though God is omnipotent, He could not prevent the possibility of sin in a moral system without violating and destroying the system itself. This goes far toward a solution-finding, according to the Scriptures, the origin 1 As in Schleiermacher, Rothe, etc.