This rather blind tension of traditional religion appears quite clearly in the conception of sin. The setting of this idea has been monarchic and terroristic. It has exhaled an atmosphere of sharp, mystic contrasts which were as unreal as they were vicious. To set a goal too high is almost as bad psychologically as to set it too low. Christianity vaguely felt this flaw in its dramatic ethical scheme and was led to bring the doctrine of God's saving grace to the front to bridge the fearful gulf caused by the opposition of God's perfection to man's imperfection. But the man of to-day who is sincere with himself knows that this religious world-ethics is a meaningless fiction. He can understand why it arose in the olden days, with its supernaturalism and juridical ethics, yet he feels that this absolutism is a product of monarchism and pre-evolutionary thinking. Goodness is a human ideal whose content is always undergoing change, while it hovers just beyond man's reach. I must confess, then, that I have little sympathy with the gross exaggerations associated with this word sin. I know that I often fall short of my better moral judgment and, at such moments of moral insight, I experience a keen regret and try to strengthen those tendencies and activities which will aid me to do better next time. But I know too { 182} much of personality on its biological, psychological and social sides, too much of its complexity and its foundations to retain the old notion of the self as an entity which, having the ability to be godlike, chooses evil. Paul's God was an oriental monarch; to the modern, he is a cad. Why, no sensible teacher asks the impossible of his pupils! Yet this strange relation conceived to exist between an omnipotent deity and his frail creatures, when intensified by the horizon of another and eternal world, was bound to develop the tensest and most paralyzing of attitudes. No novel has been able to unfold a plot which has such psychological possibilities. And the morbid and exalted religious imagination has done more than justice to them. While I do not for a moment deny the strength and leverage this ensemble of ideas possesses when faith is present, I do contend that the whole creation is unhealthy and blinding and involves inefficiency as regards the real and pressing problems of personal and social development. The ecclesiastic seldom has a normal perspective. Take Cardinal Newman, for instance. Can one deny that this subtle personality, for all his gifts, brought distorting values into the current of life? Such a man is certain to misread movements and activities and to magnify the subjective at the expense of the social. The individual who identifies himself with social projects, able to elicit his energy and enthusiasm, is more apt to forget the pettier interests of the moment in the broad sweep of creative endeavor than is the person who morbidly catechizes his conscience. A formal morality which looks inward and never outward is bound to be inefficient. Tension is no fit substitute for intelligent insight.