were of unspeakably greater importance than any interest of a single and separate person. It is no wonder, then, that the sins of individuals were at times lost sight of in the presence of glaring national wrongs, and public calamities were regarded as sure evidences of the wrath of God against the people as a whole. In harmony with this it was also easy to believe that the sins of the fathers were "visited upon the children, and upon the children's children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation" (Exod. xxxiv, 7). Hence, too, the burden of the messages of the prophets had reference mainly to public affairs, to national sins, and to the failure of the people of Israel as a chosen nation to keep the commandments of their God. Hosea bitterly complains that Israel has "played the harlot," and vilely forsaken Jehovah her God by sacrificing and burning incense to other gods (i, 2; iv, 12; ix, 1). Isaiah arraigns Jerusalem and her rulers in language which emphasizes the public character of their wickedness: "How is the faithful city become a harlot! she that was full of judgment! righteousness lodged in her, but now murderers. Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water. Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves; every one loveth gifts and followeth after rewards: they judge not the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them" (Isa. i, 21-23). Amos appears as a great preacher of righteousness, and the sins and cruelties which he condemns are conspicuously such as give infamous character to a people. He will not turn back Jehovah's voice of judgment which roars out of Zion against the many transgressions of Damascus, Gaza, Ammon, Moab, Judah, and Israel, and he specifies such acts of cruelty as crushing helpless prisoners under threshing instruments of iron, and grinding the life out of the poor and needy by heartless oppression.

4. Divorcing Morality and Public Service. This prophetic exposure and condemnation of national sins naturally led to public fasting with its accompanying signs of humiliation and contrition. All this in conjunction with the elaborate ritual of public sacrifice and priestly ministrations had the effect of dulling the individual conscience, and of sinking the sense of personal responsibility into a sort of fusion with that of the people as a corporate solidarity. Individual sins were thus lost sight of when one's valor and wisdom advanced the public weal. David's despicable crimes were thus condoned by reason of his heroic services for the nation. His uniform loyalty to the highest interests of Israel procured for him, in spite of his sins, the title of "the man after Jehovah's heart," and enthroned him as an idol in the hearts of the people. Similarly the wisdom of Solomon and his successful

administration of the kingdom won for him perpetual glory in the history of the nation, notwithstanding all his flagrant sins and idolatry. Such a tendency logically leads to an unconscious divorcing of morality and religion. Worship becomes an outward form rather than a personal matter of the soul; the ministry of a separated priesthood removes the burden of service from one's self to a proxy; religion and ceremony are confounded, and matters involving individual morality become private affairs not amenable to public concern. Under the prevalence of such a discipline the leaven of Pharisaism spread; fine moral distinctions were obliterated; gathering sticks on the sabbath was deemed as great a crime as murder and was punished with the same severity. There was great effort to "cleanse the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they were full from extortion and excess."

5. Collective Idea of Sin and Penalty. This habit of magnifying the outward forms of religion and morality, and of viewing the nation rather than the individual as the unit of responsibility, would quite naturally overlook the matter of rewards and punishments after the present life. Whatever may have been thought by individual writers, very little on this subject can be found in the Old Testament. When the judgment of God upon the wicked is spoken of the language employed is usually of the vague and general kind which contemplates a collective body of sinners. Thus in Psa. ix, 16, 17:

Jehovah hath executed judgment;

Snaring the wicked in the work of his own hands.
The wicked shall be turned back unto Sheol,

Even all the nations that forget God,

Even when the individual sinner is designated, the immediate context will often show that his individuality is confounded with the nation of which he forms a part. Thus in Psa. xliii, 1:

Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation: O deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man.

These psalmists voice that collective and communal idea of national sin and national punishment, which is conspicuous in Hebrew thought. The individual sinner is necessarily included in the concept, and the penal judgment is sometimes expressed as a personal visitation of wrath (comp. Psa. cix, 6-18), but throughout the book of Psalms the more public, national, and collective concept of sinners and their judgment is the most pronounced.

6. Deeper Concepts of Psalms and Prophets. But in the Psalms and the Prophets we also meet with sayings which evince profound conceptions of personal guilt. The so-called penitential psalms

(vi; xxxii; xxxviii; li; cii; cxxx; cxliii) abound in sentiments of deep contrition:

I acknowledge my transgressions,

And my sin is ever before me.

Against thee, thee only, have I sinned,
And done that which is evil in thy sight.

Hide thy face from my sins,

And blot out all mine iniquities.

Create in me a clean heart, O God,

And renew a right spirit within me. Psa. li, 3, 4, 9, 10.

The idea expressed in verse 4 of this psalm, that the sin is against God only, is worthy of note. That which gives it its awful guiltiness and curse is not so much the evil it has caused others as the thought that it was done in the very face and eyes of God himself. The "manifold transgressions and mighty sins" (Amos v, 12) of which the prophets speak in detail are in the specifications given necessarily of a personal character, and while they are charged against the "house of Israel" as a whole, they must needs have been often considered in their individual and personal aspects. Moreover, in the great prophets of the eighth century before Christ we find some of the most notable distinctions made between the outward forms of worship and the true devotion of the heart. Hosea thus expresses Jehovah's judgment (vi, 6):

I desire goodness, and not sacrifice;

And the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings.

In Amos v, 21-24, we read the following remarkable deliverance:

I hate, I despise your feasts,

And I will take no delight in your solemn assemblies,

Yea, though ye offer me your burnt-offerings and meal-offerings.

I will not accept them;

Neither will I regard the peace-offerings of your fatlings.

Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs;

For I will not hear the melody of thy viols.

But let judgment roll down as waters,

And righteousness as a perennial stream.

The prophet Micah speaks (vi, 6-8) in a similar way:

Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah,
And bow myself before the high God?

Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings,
With calves a year old?

Will Jehovah be pleased with thousands of rams,
With ten thousands of rivers of oil?

Shall I give my first-born for my transgression,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

He hath showed thee, O man, what is good;
And what doth Jehovah require of thee,
But to do justly, and to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with thy God?

A still more sweeping word of Jehovah is found in Isa. i, 10-17; and in 1 Sam. xv, 22, is a prophetic utterance which sets the subject in brief yet striking style:

Hath Jehovah as great delight in burnt-offerings and sacrifices,
As in obeying the voice of Jehovah?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,
And to hearken than the fat of rams.

7. Individual Responsibility in Ezekiel and Jeremiah. But in Ezekiel, and briefly in Jeremiah, we observe an advance in doctrine touching individual responsibility for sins. Jeremiah foretold a coming day when "they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth the sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge" (xxxi, 29, 30). Ezekiel (xviii) is much more positive and explicit: "As I live, saith the Lord Jehovah, ye shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb in Israel. Behold, all souls are mine. The soul that sinneth, it shall die: the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him." This appears as the result of the Deuteronomic teaching (Deut. xxiv, 16), and is recognized in 2 Kings xiv, 6, and 2 Chron. xxv, 4. But although this doctrine of individual responsibility found an emphatic utterance in these Scriptures, it did not supersede the concept of collective and national guiltiness which was so thoroughly inwrought into the religious thought of the Jewish people.

8. Sin as Represented in the Wisdom Books. In the wisdom literature of the Old Testament we meet with detailed portraitures of sin made from the standpoint of the practical observer of men and things. The voice of the accumulated wisdom, understanding, intelligence, knowledge, reflection, and counsel of the good may naturally be expected to express sound doctrine touching human sinfulness and its mischievous workings in private and public life.

(1) In Proverbs. In the book of Proverbs wisdom speaks with the authority of God (comp. i, 20-33), and is conceived as the companion of Jehovah before the foundation of the world, and as a master workman, coöperating with him when he constructed the

heavens and the earth (viii, 22-31). When this divine wisdom contemplates the various forms of wickedness which prevail among men and gives judgment as to their real character, we find in her proverbial teaching that all sin is from her point of observation the veriest quintessence of folly. It is an evil which sets on fire the course of nature, and proves itself a noisome bane of human society and civil government.

His own iniquities shall take the wicked,

And he shall be holden with the cords of his sin.

He shall die for lack of instruction;

And in the greatness of his folly he shall

go astray. Prov. v, 22, 23.

From every point of view the wicked are virtually the enemies of true wisdom. They are foolish souls, "simple ones," silly, shortsighted, and culpably lacking in discretion and moral sense; they delight in mischief and in forbidden courses of conduct; they become scoffers and take delight in evil counsels; they follow the seductions of the adulterous woman, whose "house is the way to Sheol, going down to the chambers of death" (vii, 27). Such are compelled to confess, when "flesh and body are consumed,

How have I hated instruction,

And my heart despised reproof!

I obeyed not the voice of my teachers,

Nor inclined mine ear to them that instructed me. Prov. v, 12, 13.

The man who thus despises correction and hates reproof is spoken of as a brutish soul (ya xii, 1), and the evil-doer "is loathsome and bringeth shame" (xiii, 5). His wisdom, if one call it such, is as we read in the epistle of James (iii, 15), "not that which cometh down from above, but is earthly, sensual, demoniacal." In the more public form of its working, "sin is a reproach to peoples" (xiv, 34); and when a wicked man is in power the people groan (xxix, 2). "He that turneth away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination" (xxviii, 9).

The following passage from Prov. vi, 12-19, is a characteristic example of human sinfulness as set forth in this gnomic poetry:

A worthless person (man of Belial), a man of iniquity,

Is he that walketh with perversity of mouth:

Winking with his eyes, talking with his feet,

Teaching with his fingers;

Perverseness is in his heart;

He is devising evil continually;

He sendeth forth discords.

Therefore suddenly shall his calamity come;

On a sudden shall he be broken without remedy.