has had a curious history.  The ideas of mankind concerning God and his will have grown and changed as much as have any other ideas.  The rudimentary idea of the good is probably of social origin.  It first emerges in the conflict of men one with another.  As the personalised ideal of conduct, the god then reacts upon conduct, as the conduct reacts upon the notion of the god.  Only slowly has the ideal of the good been clarified.  Only slowly have the gods been ethicised.  ‘An honest God is the noblest work of man.’  The moralising and spiritualising of the idea of Jahve lies right upon the face of the Old Testament.  The ascent of man on his ethical and spiritual side is as certain as is that on his physical side.  Long struggle upward through ignorance, weakness, sin, gradual elevating of the standard of what ought to he, growingly successful effort to conform to that standard—­this is what the history of the race has seen.

Athwart this lies the traditional dogma.  The dogma took up into itself a legend of the childhood of the world.  It elaborated that which in Genesis is vague and poetic into a vast scheme which has passed as a sacred philosophy of history.  It postulated an original revelation.  It affirmed the created state of man as one of holiness before a fall.  To the framers of the dogma, if sin is the transgression of God’s will, then it must be in light of a revelation of that will.  In the Scriptures we have vague intimations concerning God’s will, growingly clearer knowledge of that will, evolving through history to Jesus.  In the dogma we have this grand assumption of a paradisaic state of perfectness in which the will of God was from the beginning perfectly known.

In the Platonic, as in the rabbinic, speculation the idea must precede the fact.  Every step of progress is a defection from that idea.  The dogma suffers from an insoluble contradiction within itself.  It aims to give us the point of departure by which we are to recognise the nature of sin.  At the same moment it would describe the perfection of man at which God has willed that by age-long struggle he should arrive.  Now, if we place this perfection at the beginning of human history, before all human self-determination, we divest it of ethical quality.  Whatever else it may be, it is not character.  On the other hand, if we would make this perfection really that of moral character, then we cannot place it at the beginning of human history, but far down the course of the evolution of the higher human traits, of the consciousness of sin and of the struggle for redemption.  It is not revelation from God, but naive imagination, later giving place to adventurous speculation concerning the origin of the universe, which we have in the doctrine of the primeval perfection of man.  We do not really make earnest with our Christian claim that in Jesus we have our paramount revelation, until we admit this.  It is through Jesus, and not from Adam that we know sin.