gested that it may not belong there. That is purely a critical question and need not concern us, though all the external argument is in favor of its retention. But the internal argument seems good also. “In such a world as this, how utterly out of place sin is!" seems to be the thought. One can imagine worlds without the beauty and care of this one, where sin could be excused, but not in this one. A place can be imagined where an oath would be defended, but not in presence of one's mother, surely; how then in presence of one's God? A cesspool somewhere, perhaps, but not in the front lawn of the palace. Sin in a social order which is patterned on God's ideal is vastly more shameful than in an order without such a pattern. You can have garish color in a modernist painting, but you cannot have it in the Sistine Madonna nor in The Last Supper. One of the writers asked to be kept from "the dainties" of the wicked (141: 4), lest his taste be perverted. Social ideals are greatly needed before we can pass fair judgment on the seriousness of sin or of any social wrong.

III

Sin in the social order must be gotten rid of somehow. Chief concern is not for its results, but for itself. These writers are not anxious about what may happen to them because of their sin; they want to be rid of the sin itself. There is no plea for relief from penalties while they keep the sins. They look for redemption from iniquities (130:8) and release from sin (51:2, 7). If those things are gone, penalties will take care of themselves, but there could be no greater calamity than to take away the penalties and leave the sins. Indeed, the fact that that seems sometimes to be done is one of the baffling experiences of these writers. The feeling is inevitable that in a right social order temporal success should go along with right conduct and adversity with wrong conduct. Ultimately, when the purposes of moral character are accomplished, that will doubtless be the case. Just now cases keep rising where it does not follow. They rose in the earlier days as well (94:3-7; 10:4-11) and were just as baffling. A prosperous scoundrel does more than any other single factor to loosen the bonds of morality in a community. A successful college contestant who is crooked is a

tremendous force in vitiating the atmosphere of a campus. We all like success and there are times when it seems worth getting at any cost. Our eyes get fixed on results and we think protests against methods pharisaical. We think that a man cannot be very bad or he would not get on so well, or else we think that it does not matter whether a man is bad or not if only he gets on well enough. That is the result of thinking more of penalties than of sins.

And yet there is something in every decent man that protests against that. "You cannot get golden conduct out of leaden motives." You cannot have a sound social order wherein wrong is done to other people even if some people do prosper by it. Sooner or later right will assert itself. As Charles A. Dinsmore puts it: "About the certainty of retribution there is perfect unanimity" (among writers of great literature). "Nemesis follows hard after every transgressor. The retribution of sin is sure, swift, terrible, casting far its poisoned net and entangling sinner and saint, the mature and the unborn, in its fearful toils. The interpreters of the spiritual world are one in their vision of the reality of the moral order and the certainty of its recoil whenever it is disturbed by sin." ("Atonement in Literature and Life," p. 157.) It has been said that the frontispiece of each of George Eliot's works might fittingly be a pair of scales and a sword. Dr. Dinsmore thinks it would serve for all the world's great masterpieces. "The sure movement of the scales and flash of the sword are seen in them all." William Dean Howells "received some of his most pronounced ideas of the average justice of the universe from Dickens and the way he disposes of his characters." Nothing else than ultimate punishment for sin was credible to men as sure of God as these psalmists were. Sometimes they spoke as though evil carried its own destruction with it (34:21; 140:11) and sometimes they looked to see God himself interpose (139:19), but they had no doubt of the ultimate outcome. The social order in God's world has no place in it for sin.

But, with all this, they believe confidently in forgiveness. They face, as we must, the problem of finding a way of forgiveness which will not encourage men in sin. There have been periods when God's forgiveness was taken for granted. Easy views of his goodness expect him to overlook sin. The social consciousness necessarily raises a question about

that. Can you have a social order that does not care about sin? Can you maintain righteousness if you let righteousness and unrighteousness run along on just the same plane, if honest men and thieves are treated just alike, if liars and truthtellers are undistinguished? And can a moral universe exist if moral distinctions do not run deep enough in it to count?

That is the problem we face in our new penal methods. Will they help to make men hate sin or will they loosen the bonds that hold men back from it? It is the glory of the Christian method of forgiveness that it does not make men think more lightly of sin nor encourage them to go on in it. Rather, it helps forgiven men to a wider sympathy than is revealed in the psalms, except occasionally (51:12-15). Men who know they have done wrong are not therefore estopped from entering into movements for good. That very chapter in their own lives may be used in God's goodness to make them mightier in service. In George Eliot's "Scenes of Clerical Life" is a story called "Janet's Repentance" in which Mr. Tryon, the trusted minister, tells Janet the story of his own early wrong-doing, not boastfully, but humbly, and points out to her so helpfully the way of release from her own sin that Mr. Moody asked the consent of the publishers to print it as a tract for use in his evangelistic meetings. Men maimed by evils in the social life can use their very injuries as arguments in their strife against them. One of the most effective workers for temperance has been Frederick W. Charrington, who renounced great brewery possessions in the East End of London and took the losses, that he might serve the opposite forces and so became "a great spiritual force of this era." On a stone in the old Tennant churchyard in New Jersey is the name of a young man of whom the inscription says that he gave up his worldly gains and prospects "to avoid sin." Such men are challenged by the chance to help in correcting sin in the social order, if they really hate it enough.

Boastful, holier-than-thou men will never supply the correction for social evils, but neither will men who compromise with or minimize such evils. We must have men who hate evil with a deep passion because they love men with an equal passion and cannot abide the things that ruin them. Near the close of "Romola," after Baldasarre grapples Tito and

drags him to his death, George Eliot writes: "Who shall put his finger on the work of justice and say, 'It is there'? Justice is like the kingdom of God-it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning." Men with the great yearning for a corrected social order have their chance today as never before.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT AND STUDY

Can sin be explained as mere defect or delayed development? If so, is a lie a defective truth or stealing delayed development toward honesty? Or, are the men who commit these deeds on the way to righteousness by reason of them?

Work out some of the problems arising from the great increase of modern corporate life. Are stockholders, bond owners, partners in large concerns, responsible for evils that may be there? In a time of economic distress the head of a large corporation laid off 500 men and on the same day subscribed $50,000 personally for relief of distress in the city. Can you justify his action in both points?

CHAPTER XI

The Spirit of Praise Within the

Social Order

DAILY READINGS

Eleventh Week, First Day

It is a good thing to give thanks unto Jehovah,
And to sing praises unto thy name, O Most High;
To show forth thy lovingkindness in the morning,
And thy faithfulness every night,

With an instrument of ten strings, and with the psaltery;
With a solemn sound upon the harp.

For thou, Jehovah, hast made me glad through thy work:
I will triumph in the works of thy hands.
How great are thy works, O Jehovah!
Thy thoughts are very deep.

-Psalm 92: I-5.

You recognize this as the familiar Bonum Est of the church service and of many anthems. The title in our Bibles calls it a song for the Sabbath Day and it was appointed to be used always in the morning service of the temple on the seventh day of the week. That is characteristic of the Hebrew idea of worship. It should contain petition and confession of sin and humble recognition of the divine hand in history, but its dominating note should always be praise. And this psalm starts our thought of the element of praise in the social order just where it should be started. Here is the unfailing ground of praise-God himself and his relation to the world. Surface facts may change, and if our joy is tied to them it may fail as they do. The only note of gladness in the story of Jonah is in 4:6, where the account is given of the sudden growth of the vine that sheltered him