The conception of sin implies the two conceptions of God and Man, or at least of Law and Man; and where one or other of these two conceptions is lacking, the conception of sin cannot arise.  In pantheism, the idea of man as a distinct individual is relegated to the region of Maya or Delusion; there cannot therefore be a real sinner.  Does such reasoning appear mere dialectics without practical application, or is it unfair, think you, thus to bind a person down to the logical deductions from his creed?  On the contrary, persons denying that we can sin are easy to find.  Writes the latest British apostle of Hinduism, for the leaders of reaction in India are a few English and Americans:  “There is no longer a vague horrible something called sin:  This has given place to a clearly defined state of ignorance or blindness of the will."[119] I quote again also from Swami Vivekananda, representative of Hinduism in the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893.  It is from his lecture published in 1896, entitled The Real and the Apparent Man.  His statement is unambiguous.  “It is the greatest of all lies,” he says, “that we are mere men; we are the God of the Universe....  The worst lie that you ever told yourself is that you were born a sinner....  The wicked see this universe as a hell; and the partially good see it as heaven; and the perfect beings realise it as God Himself.  By mistake we think that we are impure, that we are limited, that we are separate.  The real man is the One Unit Existence.”  Such is the logical and the actual outcome of pantheism in regard to the idea of sin, and such is the standpoint of Hindu philosophy.

[Sidenote:  Sankarachargya, the pantheist’s, confession of sins.]

Or if further illustration be needed of the incompatibility of the ideas of pantheism and sin, listen to the striking prayer of Sankarachargya, the pantheistic Vedantist of the eighth century A.D., with whom is identified the pantheistic motto, “One only, without a second."[120] It attracts our attention because Sankarachargya is professedly confessing sins.  Thus runs the prayer:  “O Lord, pardon my three sins:  I have in contemplation clothed in form thee who art formless; I have in praise described thee who art ineffable; and in visiting shrines I have ignored thine omnipresence."[121] Beautiful expressions indeed, confessions that finite language and definite acts are inadequate to the Infinite, nay, contradictions of the Infinite, expressions fit to be recited in prayer by any man of any creed who feels that God is a Spirit and omnipresent!  But in a Christian prayer such expressions would only form a preface to confession of one’s own moral sin; after adoration comes confession.  Whether, like Sankarachargya, we think of the Deity objectively, as the formless and literally omnipresent Being, the pure Being which, according to Hegel, equals nothing, or whether like Swami Vivekananda we think of man and God as really one, all differentiation being a delusion within the mind—­there is no second, neither any second to sin against nor any second to commit the sin.