There is a curious conflict going on at the present time in English life between light-mindedness and solemnity; there is a great appetite for living, a love of amusement, a tendency to subordinate the interests of the future to the pleasure of the moment, and to think that the one serious evil is boredom; that is a healthy manifestation enough in its way, because it stands for interest and delight in life; but there is another strain in our nature, that of a rather heavy pietism, inherited from our Puritan ancestors.  It must not be forgotten that the Puritan got a good deal of interest out of his sense of sin; as the old combative elements of feudal ages disappeared, the soldierly blood retained the fighting instinct, and turned it into moral regions.  The sense of adventure is impelled to satiate itself, and the Pilgrim’s Progress is a clear enough proof that the old combativeness was all there, revelling in danger, and exulting in the thought that the human being was in the midst of foes.  Sin represented itself to the Puritan as a thing out of which he could get a good deal of fun; not the fun of yielding to it, but the fun of whipping out his sword and getting in some shrewd blows.  When preachers nowadays lament that we have lost the sense of sin, what they really mean is that we have lost our combativeness:  we no longer believe that we must treat our foes with open and brutal violence, and we perceive that such conduct is only pitting one sin against another.  There is no warrant in the Gospel for the combative idea of the Christian life; all such metaphors and suggestions come from St. Paul and the Apocalypse.  The fact is that the world was not ready for the utter peaceableness of the Gospel, and it had to be accommodated to the violence of the world.

Now again the Christian idea is coloured by scientific and medical knowledge, and sin, instead of an enemy which we must fight, has become a disease which we must try to cure.

Sins, the ordinary sins of ordinary life, are not as a rule instincts which are evil in themselves, so much as instincts which are selfishly pursued to the detriment of others; sin is in its essence the selfishness which will not cooperate, and which secures advantages unjustly, without any heed to the disadvantage of others.  Sympathetic imagination is the real foe of sin, the power of putting oneself in the place of another; and much of the sentiment which is so prevalent nowadays is the evidence of the growth of sympathy.

The old theory of sin lands one in a horrible dilemma, because it implies a treacherous enmity on the part of God, to create man weak and unstable, and to pit his weakness against tyrannous desires; to allow his will to do evil to be stronger than his power to do right, is a satanical device.  One must not sacrifice the truth to the desire for simplicity and effective statement.  The truth is intricate and obscure, and to pretend that it is plain and obvious is mere