then at least hopelessly behind the times.

The form of a story, as in the case of our Lord’s parables, alone ensures that truth thus conveyed shall be intelligible to all men at all times.  To object to the form, to scoff at or deride it, is as unintelligent as it would be, for example, to disparage the sublime teaching of the parable of the Prodigal Son on the ground that we have no evidence for the historical truth of the incidents.

Moreover, when we place this and the similar stories we find in the early chapters of Genesis side by side with the Babylonian myths with which they stand in some sort of historical relationship, we can trace in the lofty moral and spiritual teachings of the former, as contrasted with the grotesque and

polytheistic representations of the latter, the veritable action of the Spirit of God upon the minds of men.  Modern research has, in fact, raised the doctrine of inspiration from a vague and conventional belief to the level of an ascertained fact, evidenced by observation.  Just as a scientific man can watch his facts under his microscope or in his test tubes, so such comparison as has been suggested, between Genesis and the cuneiform tablets, enables us to watch the very fact, to detect the Divine Spirit at work, not superseding, but illuminating and uplifting the natural faculties of the sacred writers.  But we now turn to the spiritual teaching enshrined in this particular story.

(i)  First, we have the fundamental truth that man is made capable of hearing the Divine Voice.  Not once in the distant past, but to-day, and day by day, the Voice of God is heard speaking within the depths of consciousness as clearly and as decisively as of old it sounded among the trees of the garden.

(ii)  But, secondly, other voices make themselves heard by us, and woe to us if we listen to them.

There is the voice which bids us gratify our animal appetite.  The woman “saw that the tree was good for food.”  I am conscious of the strength of bodily desires.  Let me seek nothing, from moment to moment, but the satisfaction of my inclinations.  There is the voice which bids us gratify the desire of the eyes.  She “saw that the tree was pleasant to

the eyes.”  The world is full of beauty.  Let me make that my end, the satisfaction of the æsthetic sense; let me rest in the contemplation of that beauty, which was made for me, and I for it, precisely in order that I might not find repose there, but might be led thereby to Him Who made this scene so fair that His dear children might be drawn to Himself, Who is the eternal and uncreated loveliness.

There is, lastly, the voice which bids us gratify the desire of the mind.  Eve “saw that the tree was to be desired to make one wise.”  I desire to know.  Let me indulge this desire at any cost, even if it mean the filling of my mind with all manner of foul and loathsome images.  It is all “knowing the world.”  We forget, poor fools, that mere knowledge is not wisdom, and that there is a knowledge which brings death.

The desires of the body, the eyes, the mind, are good and healthful and holy in their proper place and sphere.  Through these we reach out to the life and love and knowledge of God.  And yet, if gratified against the dictates of that clear-sounding, inner, Divine Voice, they are precisely the materials of sin and death.  To gratify them against the dictates of the moral and spiritual nature is to exclude oneself from the garden of God’s delight, from the health and joy of the Divine Presence.  We know it.  We have learnt it by saddest experience of our own.  To sin against the voice within is to find oneself separated

from God; the ears of the soul have become deaf to the warnings of conscience, the eyes of the soul blind to the vision of the glory and holiness of God.

Is it wrong to say that such teaching as this can never be outgrown?  That, as time goes on, as the spiritual experience of the race and of the individual grows and broadens, still new lessons may be found to be contained in it?

The Bible adds to the teaching of science that without which that teaching is incomplete.  It bids us know and feel and recognise the Divine Presence within us and, in the light of that ultimate truth of ourselves, realise something of the appalling grandeur of the issues of common life.  But, different as are the forms in which their respective lessons are conveyed, science and the Bible unite their testimony to that of experience and conscience, that the Christian estimate of sin, and not the world’s estimate of it, is the right one.

And the teaching of experience, conscience, science, and the Bible receives its final confirmation in the Cross of Jesus Christ.  Henceforth sin, all sins, our sins, are to be estimated and measured in the light of the fact that sin brought about the death of the sinless Son of Man.  Sin is the real enemy of ourselves and of the race.  It is the destruction of the true self, the Divine Man in every son of man.

We need, for ourselves, to strive to attain to the

genuinely Christian estimate of sin.  “Had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory.”  But we have the Cross lifted up before our eyes and when, in the light of that, we begin to hate and dread sin worse than pain, then we shall have begun to make some real advance towards becoming that which we long to be, and all the time mean and aspire to be—Christians, disciples of the Crucified.

IV
THE MEANING OF SIN, AND THE REVELATION OF THE TRUE SELF

“In this we have come to know what love is, because He laid down His life for us.  And we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.”—1 John iii. 16.

It is important that we should arrive at some clearer understanding of the nature of sin.  Let us approach the question from the side of the Divine Indwelling.  The doctrine of the Divine Immanence, in things and in persons, that doctrine which we are to-day slowly recovering, is rescued from pantheism by holding fast at the same time to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.  God the Transcendent dwells in “all thinking things, all objects of all thoughts” by His Word and Spirit.  The Word, the Logos, of which St. John speaks, is the Eternal Self-Expression of God, standing as it were face to face with Him in the depths of His eternal life.  “In the beginning the Word was with God.”  He is the Eternal Thought of God, Who includes within Himself this and all possible universes.  And the Spirit, One with the Father and the Word, gives to the

Thought of God its realisation and embodiment in what we call things.  And that realisation of the Thought of God by the Spirit of God is a progressive realisation—

1.  In inorganic nature, as power and wisdom and beauty.

2.  In organic beings, as vegetable and animal life.

3.  In men, as the higher reason, including our moral and spiritual nature.

The long process of evolution is thus the progressive realisation of the Thought of God now becoming the Word, the expressed Thought of God.  And this realisation is from within, a growing manifestation of God in created things.  And its climax was reached in the Incarnation when

4.  The Word became flesh; the Thought of God perfectly embodied in our humanity.  And now this same progressive revelation