CONTINUITY APPLIED 



171 



strongly intrenched, and called for unrestrained grati- 

 fication whenever occasion should arise. His dawning 

 sense of obligation to restrain himself in obedience to a 

 higher law and purpose was necessarily undeveloped, 

 and doomed to defeat by the beast in him. To permit 

 this anomaly, this unprecedented "missing the mark" ^ 

 in the functioning of the new species, would seem to 

 violate not only the resourceful wisdom of the Creator, 

 but also His infinite justice and righteousness.^ 



The problem of moral evil is too great for us to 

 explain adequately, but to suppose that God created 

 man in such wise that he unavoidably became in ever 

 so small a degree responsible for the impossible appears 

 to make the problem absolutely fatal to belief in divine 

 righteousness. The possibility of sinning appears to 

 be necessary for a development of human righteous- 

 ness; and we perceive that sin, when it takes place, is 

 likely to prove contagious; but to believe that God 

 Himself constituted what would be in effect the neces- 

 sity of sinning appears to be the climax of immoral- 

 ity in beHef. And the difficulty is not lessened by 

 describing the process by which man was made in 

 evolutionary terms. Man is the predetermined goal 

 of the process which built up his organism and con- 

 stituted his original condition; and a process which 



1 One of the Old Testament words for sin, KtSH, means literally, 

 missing the mark. See E. R. Bernard, in Hastings, Die. of the Bible, 

 s. V. "Sin," i. 5. 



2 It will be necessary to recur to this diflSculty, and in some 

 measure to repeat myself, in discussing the doctrine of original sin. 

 See pp. 219-222, below. 



t-' 



