CONTINUITY APPLIED 173 



It may be urged by way of reply that my argument 

 does not allow for differences of degree in human 

 guilt and responsibility. The guilt of an undeveloped 

 child is not equal to that of a full-grown man in com- / 

 mitting the same sins, and we must not estimate the V.^ 

 moral quality of primitive savagery by the standards \ 

 of civilized life. If primitive man did wrong, he did ■ 

 so with a very slight sense of the wrong doing, of its 

 consequences, and of his moral responsibihty.^ Such 

 a reply does not meet the difficulty at all, but obscures 

 its real nature. The fact that sin is something that 

 ought not to be does not depend upon the degree of 

 man's guilt in committing it. There can be no sin 

 without some degree of consciousness of wrong-doing 

 on the part of the sinner, and where such conscious- 

 ness exists at all, there we find what ought not to be. 

 At some moment this consciousness of wrong-doing 

 appeared in man's history. If sin is sin, this ought 

 not to have happened. The ''ought not" constitutes 

 the problem — not the degree of guilt which was at 

 first attendant upon it. If naturalism is true, then 

 what ought not to be had to be. Man had to sin. 

 This means to a believer in God that the almighty 



The real difficulty is not met by such an argument. God does 

 indeed enter into saving relations with fallen men, having mercy 

 upon those who are morally helpless; and this is consistent with 

 divine holiness, which does not condone sin in providing its remedy. 

 But the purely evolutionary view of the origin of sin requires us to 

 believe that our moral helplessness is itself caused by God, instead of 

 being the effect of creaturely wilfulness. 



1 See Tennant, Origin of Sin, pp. 91 et seq. ei passion. 



