A Letter From Gerrit Smith to Albert Barnes, 1868 (Classic Reprint)

Angebote / Angebote:

Excerpt from A Letter From Gerrit Smith to Albert Barnes, 1868God is not the author cg sin. You do not say directly that He is, and yet you seem to ascribe to sin a divine as well as mysterious origin. It is true that man is so made that he can sin, but, instead of complaining of this, we should be thankful for it. Instead of lamenting it, we should rejoice in it. How low a being would man be, were he of necessity sinless! How far inferior to what he now is, were he so constituted that he could not sinl He would be aimere machine, and his going right would no more argue wisdom and goodness in him than does the right-going of a clock argue 'wisdom and goodness in it. The brute, shut up to the direction of its instincts, can not err - can not wander from its nature. But Infinite Wisdom, instead of predetermining the steps of man, has left him to judge for himself. Great, indeed, is the hazard of his judging wrongly, but great, also, is the honor of being placed so high in the scale of creation as to be allowed to judge for one's self.Blessed be God that He has made us capable of sinning, or, in other words, capable of transgressing the laws which He has written upon our being! It is not His fault if we transgress them, for He has written them so plain, that he may run that readeth the most essential of them, and honest and persistent study will compass the remainder. It is not His fault if we transgress them, for He has furnished us with abundant mo tives to keep them, and abundant dissuasives from breaking them. Sin is the transgression of the law. This Bible definition of sin is the true one, and, therefore, it is not the Maker, but the breaker of the law who is the sinner, who is the author of sin, and who brings it into the world. By the way, this theological doctrine, that sin is a thing or entity, as is light or heat, and that God brought it, as well as them, into the world, is a great absurdity and a great blasphemy. Sin is Slmply a failure to obey law, and a failure for which man, and man alone, is responsible. I acknowledged the goodness of God In making us capable of smnmg. I might have added, in making us capable of sinning so greatly. For to say that we can sin so greatly is, in effect, to say that we have great powers and advantages for learning and obeying law, it being only in the abuse of such powers and advantages that great sinning is possible. His nature, through the violation of whose laws man has become a great sinner, is the very same sublime nature through the keeping of whose laws he would have been a' saint.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.