Let it be remembered at once that this is a composite picture of the race.  Many different sorts of men must be put together to get such a view.  Sin works out differently in different persons.  A man’s activities take on the tinge of his personality.  So sin in a man takes on the color and tone of his individuality.

One man has the inner disposition against God, accompanied by no excesses at all.  These things disgust him.  He is refined in his tastes, perhaps scholarly and intellectual in his thinking.  That inner disposition may be a sort of refined ignoring of God either defiant or indifferent.  In another, the animal nature swings to the front, stronger perhaps by heredity, and, yielded to, it runs to the excess of riot.  Then there is the man with the strange yellow fever, whose love for the bright-colored precious metal burns in his blood and controls every impulse and purpose.  And the man with intense love of power, of controlling men and things for the sake of the immense power involved, with himself as the centre of all.

There is every imaginable degree of each of these, and every sort of combination among them.  The lines cross and re-cross at every possible angle in various persons.  A man is apt to get money-drunk then society-drunk (with a special definition for the word society in this connection), then lust-drunk.  Or, he may swing direct from money-intoxication into power-intoxication.  Please notice keenly that each of these four grows up out of a perfectly normal, natural desire.  Sin always follows nature’s grooves.  There is nothing wrong in itself.  The sin is in the wrong motive underneath, or the wrong relationship round about an act.  Or, it is in excess, exaggeration, pushing an act out of its true proportion.  Exaggeration floods the stream out of its channel.  Wrong motive or wrong relationship sends a bad stream into a good channel.

But sift down under the surface and always is found the same thing.  The upper growth is varied by what it finds on the surface to mingle with, but the sub-stuff is ever the same.  The root always is self.  The whole seed of sin is in preferring one’s own way to God’s way; one’s self to God.  The stream of life is turned the wrong way.  It is turned in.  Its true direction is up.  The true centre of gravity for man is not downward, nor inward, but upward and outward.

God’s Treatment of Sin.

God’s treatment of sin lets in a flood of light on the sort of thing it is.  Three times over in this summary Paul says that God “gave them up.” As they cast out all acknowledgment of God, He gave them up to an outcast mind.  When they turned God out-of-doors, God left them indoors to themselves.  It was the worst thing He could do, and the best.  Worst—­to be left alone with sin.  Best, because the sin would get so vile that the man in God’s image would want to turn it out, and get God back.  Man never turns from sin until he feels its vileness to the sickening point.  When things get to the acute stage, and a sharp crisis is on, then as a rule there will be an eager turning to the One who can cleanse and make over new; but usually not until then.