The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained/Chapter4
IV.—Sin: Its Nature.
According to the teachings of Swedenborg, a broad distinction is to be made between hereditary or transmitted evil, and sin. Every one, he says, inherits from foregone ancestry certain propensities of greater or less degrees of strength, which incline him to seek his own ease, pleasure, profit or personal gratification, regardless of the wishes, rights, profit or welfare of others. He insists that the merely natural man is supremely selfish. But we are not sinners because of this natural selfishness, or these inherited proclivities to evil. Sin, he says, consists in the conscious violation of some acknowledged law or rule of right—in acting contrary to some known moral precept, or some perceived and acknowledged moral obligation.
A man may inherit a strong propensity to lie or steal; but he is not a sinner because of this inheritance, any more than he is a liar or a thief before he commits these offences. He sins only when he ultimates this evil propensity, and actually lies or steals, knowing that to do so is to act contrary to a divine command. The propensity may be very strong in him; but if he regards its indulgence as wicked—as something contrary to the will and Word of God—and therefore shuns it, he does not sin. We sin only when we do evil, with the knowledge at the time that it is evil. The selfish or evil desire may be very strong in us; but if we regard and shun its indulgence as a sin, we are then free from guilt;—free from sin, though the evil inclination may still remain.
And not only so, but by continuing to do this, and at the same time acknowledging that it is the Lord alone who gives us the disposition and the power to resist the vicious propensity, we gradually weaken and overcome the evil inclination, and lose, at last, all desire to transgress. And in this consists the great work of regeneration. It is that thorough mastery over all inherited vicious proclivities, which the Lord gives to every one who acknowledges Him and humbly strives to obey his precepts.