The prevalent view of “Nature” has been akin to that which long reigned with reference to disease.  This used to be considered as a distinct entity apart from the processes of life, of which it is one of the manifestations.  It was a kind of demon to be attacked with things of odious taste and smell; to be fumigated out of the system as the evil spirit was driven from the bridal-chamber in the story of Tobit.  The Doctor of earlier days, even as I can remember him, used to exorcise the demon of disease with recipes of odor as potent as that of the angel’s diabolifuge,—­the smoke from a fish’s heart and liver, duly burned,—­“the which smell when the evil spirit had smelled he fled into the uttermost parts of Egypt.”  The very moment that disease passes into the category of vital processes, and is recognized as an occurrence absolutely necessary, inevitable, and as one may say, normal under certain given conditions of constitution and circumstance, the medicine-man loses his half-miraculous endowments.  The mythical serpent is untwined from the staff of Esculapius, which thenceforth becomes a useful walking-stick, and does not pretend to be anything more.

Sin, like disease, is a vital process.  It is a function, and not an entity.  It must be studied as a section of anthropology.  No preconceived idea must be allowed to interfere with our investigation of the deranged spiritual function, any more than the old ideas of demoniacal possession must be allowed to interfere with our study of epilepsy.  Spiritual pathology is a proper subject for direct observation and analysis, like any other subject involving a series of living actions.

In these living actions everything is progressive.  There are sudden changes of character in what is called “conversion” which, at first, hardly seem to come into line with the common laws of evolution.  But these changes have been long preparing, and it is just as much in the order of nature that certain characters should burst all at once from the rule of evil propensities, as it is that the evening primrose should explode, as it were, into bloom with audible sound, as you may read in Keats’s Endymion, or observe in your own garden.

There is a continual tendency in men to fence in themselves and a few of their neighbors who agree with them in their ideas, as if they were an exception to their race.  We must not allow any creed or religion whatsoever to confiscate to its own private use and benefit the virtues which belong to our common humanity.  The Good Samaritan helped his wounded neighbor simply because he was a suffering fellow-creature.  Do you think your charitable act is more acceptable than the Good Samaritan’s, because you do it in the name of Him who made the memory of that kind man immortal?  Do you mean that you would not give the cup of cold water for the sake simply and solely of the poor, suffering fellow-mortal, as willingly as you now do, professing to give it for the sake of Him who is not thirsty or in need of any help of yours?  We must ask questions like this, if we are to claim for our common nature what belongs to it.