The Second Death

IN Matthew Arnold’s essay on ’St. Paul and Protestanism,’ there is a wellknown passage from which I may quote a few words to serve as a text for the present essay. These words express what many would call a typical modern view of an ancient problem.

I

In this essay, just before the words which I shall quote, Matthew Arnold has been speaking of the relation between Paul’s moral experiences and their religious interpretation, as the Apostle formulates it in the Epistle to the Romans. Referring to a somewhat earlier stage of his own argument, Arnold here says, ’We left Paul in collision with a fact of human nature, but in itself a sterile fact, a fact upon which it is possible to dwell too long, although Puritanism, thinking this impossible, has remained intensely absorbed in the contemplation of it, and, indeed, has never properly got beyond it, — the sense of sin. Sin,’ continues Matthew Arnold, ’is not a monster to be mused on, but an impotence to be got rid of. All thinking about it, beyond what is indispensable for the firm effort to get rid of it, is waste of energy and waste of time. We then enter that element of morbid and subjective brooding, in which so many have perished. This sense of sin, however, it is also possible to have not strongly enough to beget the firm effort to get rid of it; and the Greeks, with all their great gifts, had this sense not strongly enough; its strength in the Hebrew people is one of this people’s mainsprings. And no Hebrew prophet or psalmist felt what sin was more powerfully than Paul.’ In the sequel, Arnold shows how Paul’s experience of the spiritual influence of Jesus enabled the Apostle to solve his own problem of sin without falling into that dangerous brooding which Arnold attributes to the typical Puritan spirit. As a result, Arnold identifies his own view of sin with that of Paul, and counsels us to judge the whole matter in the same way.

We have here nothing to do with the correctness of Matthew Arnold’s criticism of Protestantism; and also nothing to say, at the present moment, about the adequacy of Arnold’s interpretation either of Paul or of Jesus. But we are concerned with that characteristically modern view of the problem of sin which Arnold so clearly states in the words just quoted. What constitutes the moral burden of the individual man — what holds him back from salvation — may be described in terms of his natural heritage, — his inborn defect of character, — or in terms of his training, — or, finally, in terms of whatever he has voluntarily done which has been knowingly unrighteous.

In the present essay I am not intending to deal with man’s original defects of moral nature, nor yet with the faults which his training, through its social vicissitudes, may have bred in him. I am to consider that which we call, in the stricter sense, sin. Whether correctly or incorrectly, a man often views certain of his deeds as in some specially intimate sense his own, and may also believe that, among these his own deeds, some have been willfully counter to what he believes to be right. Such wrongful deeds a man may regard as his own sins. He may decline to plead ignorance, or bad training, or uncontrollable defect of temper, or overwhelming temptation, as the ground and excuse for just these deeds. Before the forum of his own conscience he may say, ’That deed was the result of my own moral choice, and was my sin.'

For the time being I shall not presuppose, for the purpose of this argument, any philosophical theory about free will. I shall not assert that, as a fact, there is any genuinely free will whatever. At the moment, I shall provisionally accept only so much of the verdict of common sense as any man accepts when he says, ’That was my own voluntary deed, and was knowingly and willfully sinful.' Hereupon I shall ask: Is Matthew Arnold’s opinion correct with regard to the way in which the fact and the sense of sin ought to be viewed by a man who believes that he has, by what he calls his own ’free act and deed,’ sinned? Is Arnold’s opinion sound and adequate, when he says, ’Sin is not a monster to be mused on, but an impotence to be got rid of. All thinking about it, beyond what is indispensable for the firm effort to get rid of it, is waste of energy and waste of time — a brooding in which so many have perished.’ Arnold praises Paul for having taken sin seriously enough to get rid of it, but also praises him for not having brooded over sin except to the degree that was ’indispensable to the effort to get rid of it.’ Excessive brooding over sin is, in Arnold’s opinion, an evil characteristic of Puritanism. Is Arnold right in his definition of what constitutes excess in thinking about sin? Is he right when he says, ‘Sin is an impotence to be got rid of’?

’Get rid of your sin,’says Matthew Arnold. Paul did so. He did so through what he called a loving union with the spirit of Christ. As he expressed the matter, he ’died ’ to sin. He ’lived’ henceforth to the righteousness of his Master and of the Christian community. So far as sin is concerned, is not this version heartily acceptable to the modern mind? Is it not sensible, simple, and in spirit strictly normal, as well as moral and religious? Does it not dispose, once for all, both of the religious and of the practical aspect of the problem of sin?

I cannot better state the task of this essay than by taking the opportunity, which Arnold’s clearness of speech gives me, to begin the study of our question in the light of so favorite a modern opinion.

II

It would not be useful for us to consider any further, in this place, Paul’s own actual doctrine about such sin as an individual thinks to have been due to his own voluntary and personal deed. Paul’s view regarding the nature of original sin involves other questions than the one which is at present before us. We speak here not of original sin, but of knowing and voluntary evildoing. Paul’s idea of salvation from original sin through grace and through loving union with the spirit of the Master, is inseparable from his special opinions regarding the church as the body of Christ, and regarding the supernatural existence of the risen Christ as the spirit of the church. These matters also are not now before us. The same may be said of Paul’s views concerning the forgiveness of our voluntary sins. For, in Paul’s mind, the whole doctrine of the sins which the individual has knowingly and willfully committed, is further complicated by the Apostle’s teachings about predestination. And for an inquiry into those teachings there is, in this essay, neither space nor motive. Manifold and impressive though Paul’s dealings with the problem of sin are, we shall therefore do well, upon this occasion, to approach the doctrine of the voluntary sins of the individual from another side than the one which Paul most emphasizes. Let us turn to aspects of the Christian tradition about willful sin for which Paul is not mainly responsible.

We all know, in any case, that Arnold’s own views about the sense and the thought of sin are not the views which have been prevalent in the past history of Christianity. And Arnold’s hostility to the Puritan spirit carries him too far when he seems to attribute to Puritanism the principal responsibility for having made the fact and the sense of sin so prominent as it has been in Christian thought. Long before Puritanism, mediæval Christianity had its own meditations concerning sin. Others than Puritans have brooded too much over their sins. And not all Puritans have cultivated the thought of sin with a morbid intensity.

I have no space for a history of the Christian doctrine of willful sin. But, by way of preparation for my principal argument, I shall next call to mind a few of the more familiar Christian beliefs concerning the perils and the results of voluntary sin, without caring at the moment whether these beliefs are mediæval, or Puritan, or not. Thereafter, I shall try to translate the sense of these traditional beliefs into terms which seem to me to be worthy of the serious consideration of the modern man. After this restatement and interpretation of the Christian doctrine, — not of original sin, but of the voluntary sin of the individual, — we shall have new means of seeing whether Arnold is justified in declaring that no thought about sin is wise except such thought as is indispensable for arousing the effort ’to get rid of sin.’

III

Countless efforts have been made to sum up in a few words the spirit of the ethical teaching of Jesus. I make no new effort, I contribute no novel word or insight, when I now venture to say, simply in passing, that the religion of the founder, as preserved in the sayings, is a religion of Whole-Heartedness. The voluntary good deed is one which, whatever its outward expression may be, carries with it the whole heart of love, both to God and to the neighbor. The special act — whether it be giving the cup of cold water, or whether it be the martyr’s heroism in confessing the name of Jesus in presence of the persecutor — matters less than the inward spirit. The Master gives no elaborate code to be applied to each new situation. The whole heart devoted to the cause of the Kingdom of Heaven, —this is what is needed.

On the other hand, whatever willful deed does not spring from love of God and man, and especially whatever deed breaks with the instinctive dictates of whole-hearted love, is sin. And sin means alienation from the Kingdom and from the Father; and hence, in the end, means destruction. Here the august severity of the teaching is fully manifested. But from this destruction there is indeed an escape. It is the escape by the road of repentance. That is the only road which is emphatically and repeatedly insisted upon in the sayings of Jesus, as we have them. But this repentance must include a whole-hearted willingness to forgive those who trespass against us. Thus repentance means a return both to the Father and to the whole-hearted life of love. Another name for this wholeheartedness, in action as well as in repentance, is faith. For the true lover of God instinctively believes the word of the Son of Man who teaches these things, and is sure that the Kingdom of God will come.

But, like the rest of the reported sayings of Jesus, this simple and august doctrine of the peril of sin, and of the way of escape through repentance, comes to us with many indications that some further and fuller revelation of its meaning is yet to follow. Jesus appears in the Gospel reports as himself formally announcing to individuals that their sins are forgiven. The escape from sin is therefore not always wholly due to the repentant sinner’s own initiative. Assistance is needed. And Jesus appears in the records as assisting. He assists, not only as the teacher who announces the Kingdom, but as the one who has ’power to forgive sins.’ Here again I simply follow the wellknown records. I am no judge as to what sayings are authentic.

I am sure, however, that it was but an inevitable development of tlie original teaching of the founder, and of these early reports about his authority to forgive, when the Christian community later conceived that salvation from personal and voluntary sin had become possible through the work which the departed Lord had done while on earth. How Christ saved from sin became, hereupon, a problem. But that he saved from sin, and that he somehow did so through what he won for men by his death, became a central constituent of the later Christian tradition.

A corollary of this central teaching was a further opinion which tradition also emphasized, and, for centuries, emphasized the more, the further the Apostolic age receded into the past. This further opinion was, that the willful sinner is powerless to return to a whole-hearted union with God through any deed of his own. He could not ’get rid of sin,’ either by means of repentance or otherwise, unless the work of Christ had prepared the way. This, in sum, was long the common tradition of the Christian world. How the saving work of Christ became, or could be made, efficacious for obtaining the forgiveness of the willful sin of an individual, — this question, as we well know, received momentous and conflicting answers as the Christian Church grew, differentiated, and went through its various experiences of heresy, of schism, and of the learned interpretation of its faith. Here, again, the details of the history of dogma, and the practice of the church and of its sects in dealing with the forgiveness of sins, concern us not at all.

We need, however, to remind ourselves, at this point, of one further aspect of the tradition about willful sin. That sin, if unforgiven, leads to ’death,’ was a thought which Judaism had inherited from the religion of the prophets of Israel. It was a grave thought, simple in its origin, essential to the ethical development of the faith of Israel, and capable of vast development in the light both of experience and of imagination. Because of the later growth of the doctrine of the future life, the word ’death’ came to mean, for the Christian mind, what it could not yet have meant for the early prophets of Israel. And, in consequence, Christian tradition gradually developed a teaching that the divinely ordained penalty of unforgiven sin — the doom of the willful sinner — is a ’second death,’ an essentially endless penalty. The Apocalypse imaginatively pictures this doom. When the church came to define its faith as to the future life, it developed a wellknown group of opinions concerning this endless penalty of sin. In its outlines this group of opinions is familiar even to all children who have learned anything of the faith of the fathers. An essentially analogous group of opinions is found in various religions that are not Christian. In its origin this group of opinions goes back to the very beginnings of those forms of ethical religion whose history is at all closely parallel to the history of Judaism or of Christianity. The motives which are here in question lie deeply rooted in human nature; but I have no right and no space to attempt to analyze them here. It is enough for my purpose to state that the idea of the endless penalty of unforgiven sin is by no means peculiar to Puritanism; and that it is certainly an idea which, for those who accept it with any hearty faith, very easily leads to many thoughts about sin which tend to exceed the strictly artistic measure which Matthew Arnold assigns as the only fitting one for all such thoughts.

To think of a supposed ’endless penalty’ as a certain doom for all unforgiven sin, may not lead to morbid brooding. For the man who begins such thoughts may be sedately sure that he is no sinner. Or again, although he confesses himself a sinner, he may be pleasantly convinced that forgiveness is readily and surely attainable, at least for himself. And, as we shall soon see, there are still other reasons why no morbid thought need be connected with the idea of endless penalty. But no doubt such a doctrine of endless penalty tends to awaken thoughts which have a less modern seeming, and which involve a less sure confidence in one’s personal power to ’get rid of sin’ than Matthew Arnold’s words, as we have cited them, convey. If, without any attempt to dwell further, either upon the history or the complications of the traditional Christian doctrine of the willful sin of the individual, we reduce that doctrine to its simplest terms, it consists of two theses, both of which have had a vast and tragic influence upon the fortunes of Christian civilization. The theses are these. First: By no deed of his own, unaided by the supernatural consequences of the work of Christ, can the willful sinner win forgiveness. Second: The penalty of unforgiven sin is the endless second death.

IV

The contrast between these two traditional theses and the modern spirit seems manifest enough, even if we do not make use of Matthew Arnold’s definition of the reasonable attitude toward sin. The old faith held that the very essence of its revelation concerning righteousness was bound up with its conception of the consequences of unforgiven sin. On the other hand, if the education of the human race has taught us any coherent lesson, it has taught us to respect the right of a rational being to be judged by moral standards which he himself can see to be reasonable. Hence the moral dignity of the modern idea of man seems to depend upon declining to regard as just and righteous any penalty which is supposed to be inflicted by the merely arbitrary will of any supernatural power. The just penalty of sin, to the modern mind, must therefore be the penalty, whatever it is, which the enlightened sinner, if fully awake to the nature of his deed, and rational in his estimate of his deed, would voluntarily inflict upon himself. And how can one better express that penalty than by following the spirit of Matthew Arnold’s advice: ‘Get rid of your sin '? This advice, to be sure, has its own deliberate sternness. For ‘the firm effort to get rid of sin,’ may involve long labor and deep grief. But ‘endless penalty,’ a ‘second death,’— what ethically tolerable meaning can a modern mind attach to these words?

Is not, then, the chasm between the modern ethical view and the ancient faith, at this point, simply impassable? Have the two not parted company altogether, both in letter and, still more, in their inmost spirit?

To this question some representatives of modern liberal Christianity would at once reply that, as I have already pointed out, the early Gospel tradition does not attribute to Jesus himself the more hopeless aspects of the doctrine of sin, as the later tradition was led to define them. Jesus, according to the reports of his teaching in the Gospels, does indeed more than once use a doctrine of the endless penalty of unforgiven sin,—a doctrine with which a portion of the Judaism of his day was more or less familiar. In well-known parables he speaks of the torments of another world. And, in general, he deals with willful sin unsparingly. But he seems to leave the door of repentance always open. The Father waits for the Prodigal Son’s return. And the Prodigal Son returns of his own will. We hear nothing in the parables about his being unable effectively to repent unless some supernatural plan of salvation has first been worked out for him. Is it not possible, then, to reconcile the Christian spirit and the modern man by simply returning to the Christianity of the parables? So, in our day, many assert.

I do not believe that the parables, in the form in which we possess them, present to us any complete view of the essence of the Christian doctrine of sin, or of the sinner’s way of escape. I do not believe that they were intended by the Master to do so. Our reports of the founder’s teachings about sin indicate that these teachings were intended to receive a further interpretation and supplement. Our real problem is whether the interpretation and supplement which later Christian tradition gave, through its doctrine of sin, and of the endless penalty of sin, was, despite its tragedy, its mythical setting, and its arbitrariness, a teaching whose ethical spirit we can still accept or, at least, understand. Is the later teaching, in any sense, a just development of the underlying meaning of the parables? Does any deeper idea inform the traditional doctrine that the willful sinner is powerless to save himself from a just and endless penalty through any repentance, or through any new deed, of his own?

As I undertake to answer these questions, let me ask the reader to bear in mind one general historical consideration. Christianity, even in its most imaginative and in its most tragic teachings, has always been under the influence of very profound ethical motives,— the motives which already inspired the prophets of Israel. The founder’s doctrine of the Kingdom, as we now possess that doctrine, was an outline of an ethical religion. It was also a prologue to a religion that was yet to be more fully revealed, or at least explained. This, as I suppose, was the founder’s personal intention.

When the early church sought to express its own spirit, it was never knowingly false, it was often most fluently, yet faithfully, true, to the deeper meaning of the founder. Its expressions were borrowed from many sources. Its imagination was constructive of many novelties. Only its deeper spirit was marvelously steadfast. Even when, in its darker moods, its imagination dwelt upon the problem of sin, it saw far more than it was able to express in acceptable formulas. Its imagery was often of local, or of heathen, or even of primitive, origin. But the truth is that the imagery, rendered edifying and teachable, often bears, and invites, an interpretation whose message is neither local nor primitive. Such an interpretation, I believe, to be possible in case of the doctrine of sin and of its penalty; and to my own interpretation I must now invite attention.

V

There is one not infrequent thought about sin upon which Matthew Arnold’s rule would surely permit us to dwell; for it is a thought which helps us, if not wholly ‘to get rid of sin,’still, in advance of decisive action, to forestall some temptations to sin which we might otherwise find too insistent for our safety. It is the thought which many a man expresses when he says, of some imagined act, If I were to do that, I should be false to all that I hold most dear; I should throw away my honor; I should violate the fidelity that is to me the very essence of my moral interest in my existence. The thought thus expressed may be sometimes merely conventional; but it may also be very earnest and heartfelt. Every man who has a moral code which he accepts, not merely as the customary and, to him, opaque or senseless verdict of his tribe or of his caste, but as his own chosen, personal ideal of life, has the power to formulate what for him would seem (to borrow the religious phraseology) his ‘sin against the Holy Ghost,’ — his own morally ‘impossible’ choice, so far as he can now predetermine what he really means to do. Different men, no doubt, have different exemplary sins in mind when they use such words. Their various codes may be expressions of quite different and largely accidental social traditions; their diverse examples of what, for each of them, would be his own instance of the unpardonable sin, may be the outcome of the tabus of whatever social order you please. I care for the moment not at all for the objective ethical correctness of any one man’s definition of his own moral code. And I am certainly here formulating no ethical code of my own. I am simply pointing out that, when a man becomes conscious of his own rule of life, of his own ideal of what makes his voluntary life worth while, he tends to arrange his ideas of right and wrong acts so that, for him at least, some acts, when he contemplates the bare possibility of doing them himself, appear to him to be acts such that they would involve for him a kind of moral suicide, — a deliberate wrecking of what makes life, for himself, morally worth while.

One common-sense way of expressing such an individual judgment upon these extreme acts of wrongdoing, is to say, If I were to do that of my own free will, I could thereafter never forgive myself.

Now, in case a man thinks of his own possible actions in this way, he need not be morbidly brooding over sins of which it is well not to think too much. He may be simply surveying his plan of life in a resolute way, and deciding, as well as he can, where he stands, what his leading ideas are, and what makes his voluntary life, from his own point of view, worth living. Such thoughts tend to clear our moral air, if only we think them in terms of our own personal ideals, and do not, as is too often the case, apply them solely to render more dramatic our judgments about our neighbors.

VI

In order to be able to formulate such thoughts, one must have an ‘ideal,’ even if one cannot state it in an abstract form. One must think of one’s voluntary life in terms of fidelity to some such ‘ideal,’ or set of ideals. One must regard one’s self as a creature with a purpose in living. One must have what they call a ‘mission’ in one’s own world. And so, whether one uses philosophical theories or religious beliefs, or does not use them, one must, when one speaks thus, actually have some sort of spiritual realm in which, as one believes, one’s moral life is lived, a realm to whose total order, as one supposes, one could be false if one chose.

One’s mission, one’s business, must ideally extend, in some fashion, to the very boundaries of this spiritual realm, so that, if one actually chose to commit one’s supposed unpardonable sin, one could exist in this entire realm only as, in some sense and degree, an outcast,— estranged, so far as that one unpardonable fault estranged one, from one’s own chosen moral hearth and fireside. At least this is how one resolves, in advance of decisive action, to view the matter, in case one has the precious privilege of being able to make such resolves. And I say that so to find one’s self resolving, is to find not weakness and brooding, but resoluteness and clearness. Life seems simply blurred and dim if one can nowhere find in it such sharp moral outlines. And if one becomes conscious of such sharp outlines, one is not saying, Behold me, the infallible judge of moral values for all mankind. Behold me with the absolute moral code precisely worked out. For one is so far making no laws for one’s neighbors. One is accepting no merely traditional tabus. One is simply making up one’s mind so as to give a more coherent sense to one’s choices. The penalty of not being able to make such resolves regarding what would be one’s own unpardonable sin, is simply the penalty of flabbiness and irresoluteness. To remain unaware of what we propose to do, never helps us to live. To be aware of our coherent plan, to have a moral world and a business that, in ideal, extends to the very boundaries of this world, and to view one’s life, or any part of it, as an expression of one’s own personal will, is to assert one’s genuine freedom, and is not to accept any external bondage. But it is also to bind one’s self, in all the clearness of a calm resolve. It is to view certain at least abstractly possible deeds as moral catastrophes, as creators of chaos, as deeds whereby the self, if it chose them, would, at least in so far, banish itself from its own country.

To be able to view life in this way, to resolve thus deliberately what genuine and thorough-going sin would mean for one’s own vision, requires a certain maturity. Not all ordinary misdeeds are in question when one thinks of the unpardonable sin. Blunders of all sorts fill one’s childhood and youth. What Paul conceived as our original sin may have expressed itself for years in deeds that our social order condemns, and that our later life deeply deplores. And yet, in all this maze of past evil-doing and of folly, we may have been, so far, either helpless victims of our nature and of our training, or blind followers of false gods. What Paul calls sin may have ‘abounded.’ And yet, as we look back, we may now judge that all this was merely a means whereby, henceforth, ‘grace may more abound.’ We may have learned to say — it may be wise, and even our actual duty to say, — I will not brood over these which were either my ignorant or my helpless sins. I will henceforth firmly and simply resolve ‘to get rid of them.’ That is for me the best. Bygones are bygones. Remorse is a waste of time. These ‘confusions of a wasted youth,’ must be henceforth simply ignored. That is the way of cheer. It is also the way of true righteousness. I can live wisely only in case I forget my former follies, except in so far as a memory of these follies helps me not to repeat them.

One may only the more insist upon this cheering doctrine of Lethe and forgiveness for the past, and of ‘grace abounding’ for the future, when there come into one’s life those happenings which Paul viewed as a new birth, and as a ‘dying to sin.’ These ‘ workings of grace,’ if they occur to us, may transform our ‘old man’ of inherited defect, of social waywardness, of contentiousness, and of narrow hatred for our neighbors and for ‘the law,’ into the ‘new life.’ It is a new life to us because we now seem to have found our own cause, and have learned to love our sense of intimate companionship with the universe. Now, for the first time, we have found a life that seems to us to have transparent sense, unity of aim, and an abiding and sustaining inspiration about it.

If this result, has taken place, then, whatever our cause, or our moral opinions, or our religion, may be, we shall tend to rejoice with Paul that we have now ‘died’ to the old life of ignorance and of evil-working distractions. Hereupon we may be ready to say, with him, and joyously, ‘There is no condemnation’ for us who are ready to walk after what we now take to be ‘the spirit.’ The past is dead. Grace has served us. Forgiveness covers the evil deeds that were gone. For those deeds, as we now see, were not done by our awakened selves. They were not our own ‘free acts’ at all. They were the workings of what Paul called ‘the flesh.’ ‘Grace’ has blotted them out.

I am still speaking not of any one faith about the grace that saves, or about the ideal of life. Let a man find his salvation as it may happen to him to find it. But the main point that I have further to insist upon is this: Whenever and however we have become morally mature enough to get life all colored through and through by what seems to us a genuinely illuminating moral faith, so that it seems to us as if, in every deed, we could serve, despite our weakness, our one highest cause, and be faithful to all our moral world at every moment, — then this inspiration has to be paid for. The abundance of grace means, henceforth, a new gravity of life. For we have now to face the further fact that, if we have thus won vast ideals, and a will that is now inspired to serve them, we can imagine ourselves becoming false to this our own will, to this which gives our life its genuine value. We can imagine ourselves breaking faith with our own world-wide cause and inspiration. One who has found his cause, if he has a will of his own, can become a conscious and deliberate traitor. One who has found his loyalty is indeed, at first, under the obsession of the new spirit of grace. But if, henceforth, he lives with a will of his own, he can, by a willful closing of his eyes to the light, become disloyal. Our actual voluntary life does not bear out any theory as to the fatally predestined perseverance of the saints. For our voluntary life seems to us as if it were free either to persevere or not to persevere. The more precious the light that has seemed to come to me, the deeper is the disgrace to which, in my own eyes, I can condemn myself, if I voluntarily become false to this light. Now, it is indeed not well to brood over such chances of falsity. But it is manly to face the fact that they are present.

In all this statement, I have presupposed no philosophical theory of freewill, and have not assumed the truth of any one ethical code or doctrine. I have been speaking simply in terms of moral experience, and have been pointing out how the world seems to a man who reaches sufficient moral maturity to possess, even if but for a season, a pervasive and practically coherent ideal of life, and to value himself as a possible servant of his cause, but a servant whose freedom to choose is still his own.

What I point out is that, if a man has won practically a free and conscious view of what his honor requires of him, the reverse side of this view is also present. This reverse side takes the form of knowing what, for this man himself, it would mean to be willfully false to his honor. One who knows that he freely serves his cause, knows that he could, if he chose, become a traitor. And if indeed he freely serves his cause, he knows whether or no he could forgive himself if he willfully became a traitor. Whoever, through grace, has found the beloved of his life, and now freely lives the life of love, knows that he could, if he chose, betray his beloved. And he knows what estimate his own free choice now requires him to put upon such betrayal. Choose your cause, your beloved, and your moral ideal, as you please. What I now point out is that so to choose is to imply your power to define what, for you, would be the unpardonable sin if you committed it. This unpardonable sin would be betrayal.

VII

So far I have discussed the moral possibility of treason. We seem to be free. Therefore, it seems to us as if treason were possible. But now, do any of us ever actually thus betray our own chosen cause? Do we ever actually turn traitor to our own flag, — to the flag that we have sworn to serve,— after taking our oath, not as unto men, but as unto ourselves and our cause? Do any of us ever really commit that which, in our own eyes, is the unpardonable sin?

Here, again, let every one of us judge for himself. And let him also judge rather himself than his neighbor. For we are here considering not customary codes, or outward seeming, but how a man who knows his ideal and knows his own will finds that his inward deed appears to himself. Still, apart from all evil-speaking, the common experience of mankind seems to show that such actual and deliberate sin against the light, such conscious and willful treason, occasionally takes place. So far as we know of such treason at all, or reasonably believe in its existence, it. appears to us to be, on the whole, the worst evil with which man afflicts his fellows and his social order in this distracted world of human doings. The blindness and the naïve cruelty of crude passion, the strife and hatred with which the natural social order is filled, often seem to us mild when we compare them with the spiritual harm that follows the intent ional betrayal of great causes once fully accepted, but then willfully forsaken, by those to whom they have been intrusted. ’If the light, that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness.’ This is the word which seems especially fitted for the traitor’s own case; for he has seen the great light. The realm of the spirit has been graciously opened to him. He has willingly entered. He has chosen to serve. And then he has closed his eyes; and, by his own free choice, a darkness, far worse than that of man’s primal savagery, has come upon him. And the social world, the unity of brotherhood, the beloved life which he has betrayed, — how desolate he has left what was fairest in it! He has brought back again to its primal chaos the fair order of those who trusted and who lived and loved together in one spirit.

But we are here little concerned with what others think of the traitor, if such traitor there be. We are interested in what (if the light against which he has sinned returns to him) the traitor is henceforth to think of himself. Arnold would say, Let him think of his sin, — that is, in this case, of his treason, — only in so far as is indispensable to the ‘firm resolve to get rid of it.' We ask whether Arnold’s rule seems any longer quite adequate to meet the situation. Of course I am not venturing to assign to the supposed traitor any penalties except those which his own will really intends to assign to him. I am not acting in the least as his providence. I am leaving him quite free to decide his own fate. I am certainly not counseling him to feel any particular kind or degree of the mere emotion called remorse. For all that I now shall say, he is quite free, if that is his desire, to forget his treason once for all, and to begin business afresh with a new moral ideal, or with no ideal at all, as he may choose.

What I ask is simply this: If he resumes his former position of knowing and choosing an ideal, if he also remembers what ideal he formerly chose, and what and how and how deliberately he betrayed, and knows himself for what he is, what does he judge regarding t he now inevitable and endless consequences of his deed? And what answer will he now make to Matthew Arnold’s kind advice, ’Get rid of your sin '? He need not answer in a brooding way. He need be no Puritan. He may remain as cheerful in his passing feelings as you please. He may quite calmly rehearse the facts. He may decline to shed any tear, either of repentance or of terror. My only hypothesis is that he sees the facts as they are and confesses, however coolly and dispassionately, the moral value which, as a matter of simple coherence of view and opinion, he now assigns to himself.

VIII

He will answer Matthew Arnold’s advice, as I think, thus: Get rid of my sin? How can I get rid of it? It is done. It is past. It is as irrevocable as the Archæan geological period, or as the collision of stellar masses, the light of whose result we saw here on earth a few years ago, in the constellation Perseus. I am the one who, at such a time, with such a light of the spirit shining before me, with my eyes thus and thus open to my business and to the moral universe, first, so far as I could freely act at all, freely closed my eyes, and then committed what my own will had already defined to be my unpardonable sin. So far as in me lay, in all my weakness, but yet with all the wit and the strength that just then were mine, I was a traitor. That fact, that event, that deed, is irrevocable. The fact that I am the one who then did thus and so, not ignorantly, but knowingly, — that fact will outlast the ages. That fact is as endless as time. And, in so far as I continue to value myself as a being whose life is coherent in its meaning, this fact that then and there I was a traitor, will always constitute a genuine penalty, — my own penalty, a penalty that no god assigns to me, but that I, simply because I am myself, and take an interest in knowing myself, assign to myself, precisely in so far as, and whenever, I am awake to the meaning of my own life. I can never undo that deed. If I ever say, I have undone that deed, I shall be both a fool and a liar. Counsel me, if you will, to forget that deed. Counsel me to do good deeds without number to set over against that treason. Counsel me to be cheerful, and to despise Puritanism. Counsel me to plunge into Lethe. All such counsel may be, in its way and time, good. Only do not counsel me ‘to get rid of’ just that sin. That, so far as the real facts are concerned, cannot be done. For I am, and to the end of endless time shall remain, the doer of that willfully traitorous deed. Whatever other value I may get, that value I retain forever. My guilt is as enduring as time.

But hereupon a bystander will naturally invite our supposed traitor to repent, and to repent thoroughly, of his treason. The traitor, now cool and reasonable once more, can only apply to his own case Fitzgerald’s word in the stanza from Omar Khayyam: —

These very familiar lines are sometimes viewed as oriental fatalism. But they are, in fact, fully applicable to the freest of deeds when once that deed is done.

We need not further pursue any supposed colloquy between the traitor and those who comment upon the situation. The simple fact is that each deed is ipso facto irrevocable; that our hypothetical traitor, in his own deed, has been false to whatever light he then and there had, and to whatever ideal he then viewed as his highest good. Hereupon, no new deed, however good or however faithful, and however much of worthy consequences it introduces into the future life of the traitor, or of his world, can annul the fact that the one traitorous deed was actually done. No question as to whether the traitor, when he first chose the cause which he later betrayed, was then ethically correct in his choice, aids us to estimate just the one matter which is here in question, — namely, the value of the traitor as the doer of that one traitorous deed. For his treason consists not in his blunders in the choice of his cause, but in his sinning against such light as he then and there had. The question is, furthermore, not one as to his general moral character, apart from this one act of treason. To condemn at one stroke the whole man for the one deed is, of course, absurd. But it is the one deed which is now in question.

This man may also be the doer of countless good deeds. But our present question is solely as to his value as the doer of that one traitorous deed. This value he has through his own irrevocable choice. Whatever other values his other deeds may give him, this one value remains, never to be removed. By no deed of his own can he ever escape from that penalty which consists in his having introduced into the moral world the one evil which was, at the time, as great an evil as he could, then, of his own will, introduce.

In brief, by his own deed of treason, the traitor has consigned himself — not indeed his whole self, but his self as the doer of this deed — to what one may call the hell of the irrevocable. All deeds are indeed irrevocable. But only the traitorous sin against the light is such that, in advance, the traitor’s own free acceptance of a cause has stamped it with the character of being what his own will had defined as his own unpardonable sin. Whatever else the traitor may hereafter do, — however much he may later become, and remain, through his life, in this or any other world, a saint, the fact will remain: there was a moment when he freely did whatever he could to wreck the cause that he had sworn to serve. The traitor can henceforth do nothing that will give to himself, precisely in so far as he was the doer of that one deed, any character which is essentially different from the one determined by his treason.

The hell of the irrevocable: all of us know what it is to come to the border of it when we contemplate our own past mistakes or mischances. But we can enter it and dwell there only when the fact, ’This deed is irrevocable,’ is combined with the further fact, ’This deed is one that, unless I call treason my good, and moral suicide my life, I cannot forgive myself for having done.’

Now to use these expressions is not to condemn the traitor, or any one else, to endless emotional horrors of remorse, or to any sensuous pangs of penalty or grief, or to any one set of emotions whatever. It is simply to say, If I morally value myself at all, it remains for me a genuine and irrevocable evil in my world, that ever I was, even if for but that one moment, and in that one deed, with all my mind and my soul and my heart and my strength, a traitor. And if I ever had any cause, and then betrayed it, — such an evil not only was my deed, but such an evil forever remains, so far as that one deed was done, the only value that I can attribute to myself precisely as the doer of that deed at that time.

What the pungency of the odors, what the remorseful griefs, of the hell of the irrevocable may be, for a given individual, we need not attempt to determine, and I have not the least right or desire to imagine. Certainly remorse is a poor companion for an active life; and I do not counsel any one, traitor or not traitor, to cultivate remorse. Our question is not one about one’s feelings, but about one’s genuine value as a moral agent. Certainly forgetfulness is often useful when one looks forward to new deeds. I do not counsel any one uselessly to dwell upon the past. Still the fact remains, that the more I come to the large and coherent views of my life and of its meaning, the more will the fact that, by my own traitorous deed, I have banished myself to the hell of the irrevocable, appear to me both a vast and a grave fact in my world. I shall learn, if I wisely grow into new life, neither to be crushed by any sort of facing of that fact, nor to brood unduly over its everlasting presence as a fact in my life. But so long as I remain awake to the real values of my life, and to the coherence of my meaning, I shall know that while no god shuts me, or could possibly shut me, if he would, into this hell, it is my own will to say that, for this treason, just in so far as I willfully and knowingly committed this treason, I shall permit none of the gods to forgive me. For it is my precious privilege to assert my own reasonable will, by freely accepting my place in the hell of the irrevocable, and by never forgiving myself for this sin against the light.

If any new deed can assign to just that one traitorous deed of mine any essentially novel and reconciling meaning, that new deed will in any case certainly not be mine. I can do good deeds in future; but I cannot revoke my individual past deed. If it ever comes to appear as anything but what I myself then and there made it, that change will be due to no deed of mine. Nothing that I myself can do will ever really reconcile me to my own deed, so far as it was that treason.

This, then, as I suppose, is the essential meaning which underlies the traditional doctrine of the endless penalty of willful sin. This deeper meaning is that, quite apart from the judgment of any of the gods, and wholly in accordance with the true rational will of the one who has done the deed of betrayal, the guilt of a free act of betrayal is as enduring as time. This doctrine so interpreted is, I insist, not cheerless. It is simply resolute. It is the word of one who is ready to say to himself, Such was my deed, and I did it. No repentance, no pardoning power can deprive us of the duty and — as I repeat — the precious privilege of saying that of our own deed.