- gered till its gentle notes grew into billows
and had well-nigh swept me from my firmest footing. So have I seen a heedless youth gazing with a too curious spirit on the sweet motions and gentle approaches of an inviting pleasure, till it has detained his eye, and imprisoned his feet, and swelled upon his soul and swept him to a swift destruction. (Text.)
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SIN, HIDDEN
Donald Sage Mackay, in "The Religion of the Threshold," writes in substance as follows:
Henry Drummond vividly describes the
ravages of the African white ant. One may
never see the insect possibly in the flesh, for
it lives underground. But its ravages confront
one at every turn. You build your
house, perhaps, and for a few months fancy
you have pitched on the one solitary site in
the country where there are no white ants.
But one day suddenly the door-post totters,
and lintel and rafter come down together
with a crash. You look at a section of the
wrecked timbers and discover that the whole
inside is eaten clean away. The apparently
solid logs of which the rest of the house
is built are now mere cylinders of bark, and
through the thickest of them you can push
your little finger. It is a vivid picture of the
way in which concealed sins eat out the pith
of the soul. To the outward eye everything
may remain the same, but the fiber of character
has been punctured through and through,
till the whole nature is corroded.
(2955)
Sin, Ineffaceable—See Consequences, Irreparable.
SIN, ORIGINAL
What a strange misuse of language to
speak of sacred writers as inventing original
sin! Can we say that Jenner invented the
smallpox, or that Pasteur invented the rabies,
or that any of the celebrated physicians invented
the maladies which are known by
their names? What these famous men did
was to successfully diagnose, characterize,
and treat diseases which already existed, and
which proved their malignant power by
carrying thousands of men and women to the
grave. (Text.)—W. L. Watkinson, "The
Transfigured Sackcloth."
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SIN, SENSE OF
It is popular in some quarters to pooh-pooh, the sense of sin, or to smile away the seriousness of sin.
Alfred de Musset, when he was young (the
same fact is told of Merimee), once, being
very much scolded for a childish freak, went
away in tears, deeply penitent, when he heard
his parents say, after the door was shut:
"Poor boy, he thinks himself quite a criminal!"
The thought that his misdeed was
not so very serious, and that his repentance
was mere childishness, wounded him deeply,
and the impression remained engraved on his
memory forever. (Text.)
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SIN, SUBTLETY OF
Our scientists, by the aid of powerful
lenses, intense lights, exquisite adjustments,
have succeeded in rendering visible the
germs of several terrible maladies which
decimate us, and these ardent naturalists
hope ultimately to discover germs still more
minute and obscure. But can any one believe
that a bacteria of immorality will ever
be revealed by the microscope as the germs
of disease have been? Fever and cholera
germs, germs of consumption, hydrophobia,
erysipelas, have been disclosed by the fierce
light of modern research; but no one will
suppose that the germs of intemperance, impurity,
anger, covetousness, deceit, pride,
murder, foolishness, will ever be thrown on
the screen, and an antidote be found for them
in the pharmacopoeia. If it were thus possible
to exhibit the secret of our sins, how we
should shudder at the sight of the naked
human heart, and shrink from the ghastly
things which nestle there! But such a spectacle
is not possible, and we are sure that it
never will be. The germs of moral disease
are in the soul itself; no glass of science
may make them visible, no physician may
deal with them, no medicine may purge them.—W.
L. Watkinson, "The Transfigured
Sackcloth."
(2958)
SIN WITHOUT ATONEMENT
A writer, speaking of the wasteful use of coal in England, and the consequent diminishing of the national store, says:
Our stock of coal is a definite and limited
quantity that was placed in the present storehouse
long before human beings came upon
the earth. Every ton of coal that is wasted
is lost forever, and can not be replaced by
any human effort, while bread is a product
of human industry, and its waste may be
replaced by additional human labor. The
sin of bread-wasting does admit of agricul-
