children to make bricks without straw; nor does He
deem them guilty for lack of what He Himself has
withheld from them. No more to be accepted is the
view according to which sin, defined by reference to an
absolute standard of perfection, is sin "as it is seen in
the sight of God." The revealed facts from which
Christian theology must take its departure in essaying
to construct a concept and a doctrine of Sin, are irre-
concilable with the view that God measures the moral
worth of all human lives by one and the same code or
ideal. The adoption of such a standard would be to
convict all developement, as such, of sinfulness, and
would reduce sin to a necessity imposed on man by his
Creator. The 'law' of which sin is the transgression
must rather have a different content for different men,
and for the same man at different times. Not the
highest ideal there is to be known, but the highest
that a given individual at a given time can know, must
be the standard by which, at that time, that individual's
acts and character are to be judged as sinful or sinless:
otherwise sin is made a necessity and reduced to the
non-moral. It is generally obvious enough to the
human agent, and even to his neighbour, whether or
not sin has been committed; but it is only God who
can know this in all cases, and with unerring certainty.

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