Love’s Victory Over Original Sin (Rewritten)

What theologians often call original sin—sometimes described as inbred sin—is the inner condition of the heart from which sinful actions either arise or are always threatening to arise. It is an condition of inner selfishness in which human ego reigns. As long as this inner condition remains unchanged, love has not fully conquered the soul.

Regeneration—the new birth — introduces a real power that restrains original sin from regularly breaking out into actual sin. Still, occasional lapses may occur, often in moments of weakness or inattention, and usually without deliberate intent. These moments deeply grieve the justified believer. They feel humiliating, even condemning — but they are temporary defeats, not final ones. For believers who are well taught, there is always a return to Christ’s atoning blood and to the promise: “But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous....” (I John 2:1 NRSV).

Altitudes Where Christians See Eye to Eye

Above the mists there are altitudes of Christian experience where believers see eye to eye. Intellectual differences which once stood between them like impassable mountains now seem to their downward gaze like molehills. It is possible to dwell amid the Alpine sublimities of truth so long as to drop our small measuring rods and to acquire larger ones commensurate with the grandeurs about us. It is the office of the Holy Spirit to lift aspiring believers to such Pisgah heights as Paul was familiar with when he prayed that the Ephesians "might be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and heighth and depth, and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God." Wherever this prayer is answered there will be Christian unity.

"Plunged in the Godhead's deepest sea,
And lost in its immensity."

Trifles will not unhinge and divide a company of such believers.

— from The Gospel of the Comforter Chapter 20.

The Executive of the Godhead

For several years our mind has been laboring to invent some concise expression for the sum of all the offices of the Third Person of the Trinity, in the transformation, sanctification, and habitation of souls who fully believe in Christ Jesus. At last Dr. Hodge, [President of the Presbyterian Theological Seminary at Princeton, N.J. U.S.A.] has struck out with his die the very coin which our own mint has failed to stamp and contribute to the currency of Christian experience and theological discussion. "The Holy Ghost is the Executive of the Godhead." We telegraph our thanks to Princeton. May Dr. Hodge's mint continue to pour out its golden coin into our religious literature for many years more. This clear cut conception and expression of the work of the Spirit is exceedingly beautiful because it is indisputably true. Law emanates from the Father, and mercy and judgment are committed to the Son, while the Executive of both Persons is the ever blessed Spirit. Here we have the three departments of government: the legislative, the judicial, and the executive. Through the Holy Spirit the Father and the Son operate on human souls, reproving, regenerating, witnessing and sanctifying. We now see how a person may honor the Father, and in a measure the Son, and yet fail of obtaining the highest spiritual grace through a failure to honor the Holy Ghost, the blessed Comforter; just as a man may show all proper respect to the lawmaking and law-interpreting departments of our own government, and secure their action, and then miss his purpose at last by ignoring the last link necessary to its realization — the executive officer, without whose agency statutes and courts are ineffectual. We fear that there are many Christians who inadvertently fail in their tribute of respect, faith, and worship to the Holy Ghost, regarding him as an impersonal emanation or influence streaming from God, or as only another name for the Father, who can just as well without Him reach and transfigure their sin-stained souls, through the blood of the Lamb that taketh away the sin of the world.