Now, when religion of any kind becomes a part of the definite social life of the world, there must of course be an order of ministers whose business it is to preach it, and to bring it home to the minds of men.  Such men will be set apart by a solemn initiation to their office; the more solemn the initiation is, the more faithful they will be.  The question rather is what extent of spiritual power such ministers may claim.  The essence of religious liberty is that men should feel that there is nothing whatever that stands between themselves and God; that they can approach God with perfect and simple access; that they can speak to Him without concealment of their sins, and receive from Him the comforting sense of the possibility of forgiveness.  Of course the sense of sin is a terribly complicated one, because it seems to be made up partly of an inner sense of transgression, a sense of failure, a consciousness that we have acted unworthily, meanly, miserably.  Yet the sense of sin follows many acts that are not in themselves necessarily disastrous either to oneself or the community.  Then there is a further sense of sin, perhaps developed by long inheritance of instinct, which seems to attend acts not in themselves sinful, but which menace the security of society.  For instance, there is nothing sinful in a man’s desiring to save himself, and in fact saving himself, from a sudden danger.  If a man leaps out of the way of a runaway cart, or throws himself on the ground to avoid the accidental discharge of a gun, he would never be blamed, nor would he blame himself, for any want of courage.  Yet if a man in a battle saves himself from death by flight, he would regard himself, and be regarded by others, as having failed in his duty, and he would be apt to feel a lifelong shame and remorse for having yielded to the impulse.  Again, the deliberate killing of another human being in a fit of anger, however just, would be regarded by the offender as a deeply sinful act, and he would not quarrel with the justice of the sentence of death which would be meted out to him; but when we transfer the same act to the region of war, which is consecrated by the usage of society, a man who had slain a hundred enemies would regard the fact with a certain complacency, and would not be even encouraged by a minister of religion to repent of his hundred heinous crimes upon his deathbed.

The sense, then, of sin is in a certain degree an artificial sense, and would seem to consist partly of a deep and divine instinct which arraigns the soul for acts, which may be in themselves trifling, but which seem to possess the sinful quality; and partly of a conventional instinct which considers certain things to be abominable, which are not necessarily in themselves sinful, because it is the custom of the world to consider them so.

And then to the philosopher there falls a darker tinge upon the whole matter, when he considers that the evil impulses, to yield to which is sin, are in themselves deliberately implanted in man by his Creator, or at least not apparently eradicated; and that many of those whose whole life has been darkened, embittered, and wrecked by sin, have incurred their misery by yielding to tendencies which in themselves are, by inheritance, practically irresistible.