174 MAN'S PRIMITIVE STATE 



i Source of righteousness made unrighteousness an 

 unavoidable necessity for his creatures/ and holds 

 j them responsible for their helplessness. 



Again, it may be urged that our argument disre- 

 gards the progressiveness of moral development, and 

 the law prevailing everywhere that sin is a necessary 

 stage in men's advance towards perfect righteousness. 

 Sin, it is said, constitutes enlightening experience — 

 a missing the mark which is inevitable in learning to 

 hit the mark, and a necessary condition of moral 

 progress. This is summed up when the fall of man 

 1 is described as a fall upward.^ That earnest moral- 

 I ists should be deceived by such a view of sin constitutes 

 I one of the miracles of modern thinking. Sin is some- 

 ! thing more than missing the mark, for it does not exist 



1 Tennant says, op. cit., p. 113, that if the evolutionary account 

 of sin "sees in it something empirically inevitable for every man, . . . 

 it by no means implies that sin is theoretically, or on a priori grounds, 

 an absolute necessity." It is difficult to see how we reduce the 

 responsibility of the author of our moral helplessness by such a de- 

 scription of it. If our sinning is "inevitable," whoever caused its 

 inevitableness becomes responsible for it. If Tennant's view is 

 correct, God has made us morally helpless. 



*Tennant says, op. cit., p. 118, "What introspection really dis- 

 covers is an internal conflict between nature and nurture, natural 

 desire and moral end; and this is the inevitable condition of human 

 life and the expression of God's purpose." Canon Wilson, address- 

 ing the Church Congress of 1896, said, "But this fall from innocence 

 was in another sense a rise to a higher grade of being. It is in this 

 sense that the theory of evolution teaches us to interpret the story of 

 the fall " — The Guardian, Oct. 7, 1896. Sir O. Lodge says. Life 

 and Matter, p. 79, "A fall it might seem, just as a vicious man some- 

 times seems degraded below the beasts, but in promise and potency, 

 a rise it really was.** 



