Project Canterbury

REPORT OF THE SECOND
ANGLO-CATHOLIC CONGRESS
LONDON, JULY 1923

General Subject: The Gospel of God

PUBLISHED FOR THE COMMITTEE OF THE CONGRESS

London, 1923
pp 22-28

God Above Us
II
SIN

By The Revd Father J. O. S. Huntington
Superior of the Order of the Holy Cross, New York.

transcribed by Thomas J. W. Mason
AD 2002

We are now to face a tremendous and appalling fact. We are to face the fact of sin.

And by sin we do not mean only some specially disgraceful or malicious act such as stares at us in the head-lines of the morning paper, and excites in us horror and disgust. No, bad as these things are, they are really often only symptoms or even by-products of the world’s sin. The disorder with which the world is afflicted does not consist only in occasional outward crimes, not even national crimes. The malady is deep within. But that malady is a fact.

How can we arrive at some appreciation of the essential character of sin? Here is one line of reflection which may lead to it. Let any one who reads this sit down "in a calm hour" and ask himself, "Is it true that I am made to know God, to love God, to please God?" The more you consider that question, humbly and prayerfully, the more you will find yourself moved to say "Yes" to it; the more reasonable your assent will seem, the more you will find in that truth the one thing which makes life really worth living, the one charter of human freedom. You were made for truth, God is Truth. You were made for love, God is Love. You were made for right, God is everlasting Righteousness. You were made for God. Were it not so, you would have to say that your final end is falsehood, hatred, and wrong. There is not one of you here who would say that. Take one step more. If God is you End, and your mind and heart and will can find no satisfaction save in him, then what will unite you to him? Love,—the love with which he has loved you from all eternity; the love which he will give you, that by it you may love him, and be his forever.

All that seems very simple and plain. It is so simple and so plain that some of you may even feel a certain impatience, as though I were giving you merely platitudes. These are not platitudes. They are foundation truth. The more you try to build your life upon them, to make ever thought and word and deed an expression of them, the more certain you will be that they are not platitudes but vital principles.

For, now, bring this to the test of practical experience. Rise up from your calm hour and go out into the living world of men and nations. Remember that what is true of you, of your purpose as a man or woman, must be true of other men and women, must be true of all men and women. The purpose of the world itself must be to know God, to love him and to serve him. If that is true, if that were owned as true, then what would you look to find in the world about you? You would expect, would you not, to find that the one supreme motive that is urging men on is a passionate desire to know God better, to love him more, to do more completely and joyously every things, the least thing, that will please him and show forth his glory. Filled with such love for God, men would inevitably love one another in him and for his sake. They would seek each other’s happiness and well-being as instinctively as children on a Christmas morning revel in making one another glad.

Is that what you do find in the world of men and nations? Yes, you do find it—but where? You find it, as gold is found, here and there, in the midst of a mass of alien matter ,earth and mud. You find such love, as gold is found, sometimes in unexpected places, in hidden seams, or in a lode laid bare by some sudden cataclysm.

When the news of the armistice, premature but accepted as true and soon to be proved so, reached New York, men and women poured out of the offices and filled Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street, to fall on their knees in thanksgiving to God, and utter strangers threw their arms round each other in mutual embrace. It was an outburst of love to God and man. It did not last long, on Wall Street or anywhere else; for gold is rare, and the conscious love for God and man, the supernatural love, which brings the joy of Heaven into this world, is pitiably rare. There is only one city where the streets are of pure gold, and it is not New York, or London, or Paris, or Berlin. Nay, as I use those names, what an alien vision comes before you, the vision of a loveless world, not in great cities only but in all places large and small, a vision of a world in sin, the selfishness that separates from God and brings to birth all the crime and misery that dishonours him and vexes mankind.

And so we come back to the dreary fact of sin as that which thwarts and defeats the purpose of God for man, that which takes from a man, so long as he persists in it, the power to please God, or love him, at last to know him. Sin is just that for which man was not made, that which if carried out to the final result must rob the life of any one among us of all meaning, and render it better for him—remember whose words they are:—better for him if he had never been born.

You will see what I have been trying to do. I have been trying to bring before your mind a great contrast,—literally and precisely the greatest of all contrasts,—the contrast between what God meant to do with man, and what man has done and is doing with himself. This concept is fundamental to the whole Christian conception of men and of nations. It is the burden of the Holy Scriptures from beginning to end. There are the two cities, Babylon and Jerusalem,—the City of God and the earthly city; two peoples, the People of God, on pilgrimage, for their home is above with him, and the tribes of earth whose dwelling place is here below. St. John gives the contrast, "If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him." "The world passeth away and the desire of it. . . he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever." St. Augustine follows on: "Good and bad loves make good and bad lives." There are only two loves—the love of God and the love of self. Two loves therefore have given origin to these two cities—self love in contempt of God to the earthly; love of God in contempt of one’s self to the heavenly. The first seeks the glory of men and the latter desires God only as the testimony of conscience, the greatest glory. That glories in itself; this in God. That exalts itself in self-glory; this says to God, "My glory, the lifter up of my head." "The wise man of that follow either the good things of the body or mind or both, living according to the flesh . . . But in this other, the heavenly city, there is no wisdom of man, but only the piety that serves the true God, and expects a reward in the society of the holy angels and men, that God may be all in all."

And all this becomes unspeakably more sad and shameful when we kneel before the crucifix and ask. "What hast thou done for me?" "What have I done to thee?" It is the Cross which makes sin so dreadful, for there we see how tremendously God cares to save us from sin and bring us to himself. And every wilful, deliberate sin is treachery to Jesus, a stab at the Sacred Heart, a prayer to Satan that Jesus our God may be defeated in seeking, by his life and by his death, to save our souls.

But there is one question which is sure to come up when speech is made of sin. That is "Whence did human nature contract the disease of moral evil? How was human nature weakened and wounded?" "Who introduced the poison?" "Who is to blame?" Or to put it in the most familiar form "How did evil begin?" Now to that question no answer has been found, The Bible does not reveal the origin of evil. The Church does not explain it. One philosophy after another has tried to furnish a solution of the problem but each has failed to do so. Just now there is a fond hope that some one of the "new psychologies" may clear up the mystery. It is said that what we have been wont to call "sin" is simply the surging up of primitive instincts, such as the instinct for self-preservation, of self-assertion, of sex in a very wide sense, of fear, and so forth. To a large extent theses instincts are controlled, directed, "transferred," by the pressure of social standards, by the demands of civilisation, by the enforcement of law, and the influence of the Christian Faith, and so are made to contribute to the welfare and advancement of the family, the nation, and the race. But when these primitive instincts break through the control put upon them, they constitute moral evil. But does this really solve the problem of sin? There very same instincts are present in the animal world beneath us. Why are the results of obeying these instincts so strangely different in the animals and in ourselves? The animal carried on by its instincts, gives no evidence of moral obliquity. But the man who is ruled by his primitive instincts and lives like an animal becomes not bestial but devilish. "The tiger is not cruel because he tears and rends. But what of the tigerish man who has just crushed out the life of the woman he vowed to love and protect?" As Mr. Chesterton said, some time ago: "If I see a man doing what is wrong or disgraceful, I pat him on the shoulder and say: ‘Come, come, be a man, remember your manhood!’ But if I were to see a monkey doing exactly the same thing, I should not pat him on the shoulder and say: ‘Come, come, be a monkey, remember your monkeyhood!’" Why is it that, when man takes his place on this planet, the strange phenomenon of the irrational, unreasonable, anarchic disorder of sin appears, this "heart-bewildering, soul-subduing" fact of moral evil?

But the discovery that we can find no explanation of facts, or trace their origin, does not warrant us in ignoring them. A man who should wake at night to find his home on fire would not be wise if he simply sat down to figure how it started. And sin is a universal fact. Leaving out of account, as St. Augustine bids us when we speak of sin, our Lady, Blessed Mary,

"Our tainted nature’s solitary boast",

of all human beings who have lived we can say: "There is none righteous, no, not one." What can be averred is that the Christian Faith teaches that sin did not originate in human nature; it came by a process of temptation from without. "The Church traces moral evil back beyond this world to some mysterious fall amid the angelic legions and leaves it there."

Yet sin appears at the very dawn of each human life. Why is it so pervaise or contagious? We are thrown back upon the working axiom of the solidarity of mankind. We are not isolated units. We have a common nature, and each human soul that enters the world is an epitome of the race of which it is a part. It must share the fortunes of that race, for good or ill.

An analogy may help us here, and lead to a practical conclusion:

Suppose that a nation, while not committing acts of positive injustice towards other nations, should persistently refuse to take its part in some great movement for the welfare of the world; suppose further that, condemning what seemed ungenerous and self-seeking in such a nation, we were to come into personal relation with on of its citizens. Should we not feel, whatever might be our good-will towards him, that some responsibility for his country rested upon him, that he must needs possess, but his birth and nature, many of the characteristics of his people, must view things largely as his fellow-citizens regard them, and fail to appreciate some of the standard and ideals familiar to more public-spirited nations?

Yet we should not demand of such a man that should forsake his place in his nation, forswear his allegiance, or become "a man without a country." On the contrary, we should hope that, like the prophets in the Old Testament or life St. Paul in the New, he would "bear the reproach" of his people, would blush for the dishonour of his country as for a personal disgrace, and acknowledge the errors of his nation as though they were his own.

Nay, more than this, we should see that only by such vicarious confession and contrition would he be doing his part to bring his country to a better mind; that if a great leader should arise, who would call upon his nation to take its rightful place among the other nations of the world, his chance of lifting his people to a higher level would lie in his call finding response not only in that one citizen but in millions like him, who would not only own the corporate fault but make reparation for it.

Let that illustrate the responsibility that does actually rest upon all nations and all people, upon men and women everywhere, to acknowledge their share in a world’s transgression and disloyalty; let it illustrate the vocation of each soul to strive, in its own life and work, with the help of divine grace, to carry out the divine purpose: to follow the one true Leader of humanity, Jesus the Son of Mary, in love for God, and for all souls in him and for his sake.

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