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and purity of the pious. Ceremonial shortcomings are sinful (Ezek. xxii. 26). However, the sense of sin did not lose in subjective keenness, if it did in ethical depth. The strictness of the positive prescriptions impelled to supplication for grace. The consciousness of sin became superficial with the period of the Wisdom literature. Although the presumption remained that sin is against God (Prov. iii. 32-34), yet the idea is more current that it is offense against the wisdom of life, and on this account leads to misfortune (i. 24 aqq.). These tones reverberate in the post-canonical literature, until the belief in the future life, judgment, and reward afford a deeper insight. The Old Testament treats sin as universal in a great many instances. Often it is the correlate of human weakness and frailty (Job iv. 18). There are just ones who walk. with God like Enoch and Noah, but such are models of piety, not of sinlessness. The latter vanishes in the light of God's majesty (Job ix. 2). The prophets called of God are not excepted (Isa. vi. 5). The law distinguishes between thoughtless sins (Lev. iv. 2), which may be atoned for by sacrifice, and presumptuous sins dishonoring Yahweh and entailing destruction (Nom. xv. 30). As thoughtless may be reckoned the sins of youth (Job xiii. 26) and the unconscious errors of man (Ps. xix. 12); but they, too, oppress a tender conscience and cause a craving for forgiveness, if fellowship with God is not to be forfeited (Ps. xc. 8, xxxii. 6). Only those may be comforted by the presence of God, who are of a broken heart and a contrite spirit (Ps. xxxiv. 18). Thought on the universality of sin led to the conclusion of the inclination to evil in every man. The doctrine of an evil tendency is in the later Jewish literature, but analogous conceptions are found in the canonical Old Testament. Sin lies in wait for man (Gen. iv. ?); man's heart is naturally evil (Jer. xvii. 9). More frequently is there mention of individual responsibility for the sin of the community. Pre-exilic prophets speak of the common guilt of the people (Isa. i. 3-4; Mic. vii. 1 sqq.). In earlier times the individual shared the burden of the sin of the environment (Gen. xix. 15); later generations are punished for the sin of the earlier (Ex. xx. 5). Later this was to be reconciled with the consciousness of the independence and the worth of the individual. As it had become the rule not to inflict punishment on the children for the offenses of their fathers (Dent. xxiv. 16), it became recognized as the divine norm that each was to suffer for his own sin (Jer. xxxi. 29 sqq.). However, the theory of individual earthly requital encountered great difficulties in the face of the facts, due not only to the limitation of .view to an external and temporal course of events, but to the overlooking of the moral solidarity. How torturing and hopeless the problem proved to be is shown not only in Ps. Ixxiii. and the book of Job, but also in the attempt of late Judaism at an equation of sins and merits, and in this way to understand man's earthly destiny, without the aid of the later Jewish foreglimpse of the other world. For a long time Israel did not feel called upon to investigate the origin of sin. That it lay in the common nature of mankind seemed patent, and there was a, general conviction of the power

tation of a permanent state of the human person transcending the individual act, which disturbs the relation to deity. The word sin involves a religious and a moral judgment of acts and of persons. The two are more or less inseparable. Natural religion considers as sins transgressions of the cult and the religious customs. In the ethical religions the positive standard appears as a sacred legal order, and sin assumes the character of legalistic violation. In the highest ethical religions, which, with H. Siebeck, may be called religions of salvation, there emerges, with an inward perception of the ethical life, the consciousness of a more intimate relation with deity. God leads his people -with fatherly long-suffering and faithfulness, and expects in return not only obedience, but also gratitude and trust. He gives norms of religious life in the community, which transcend the ordinances of law, and aim at the mutual exercise of mercy and love. Where God's will is recognized, there -the comprehensive norm of the good is disclosed. Where this standard is transgressed, God's personal will is violated and fellowship with him is interrupted. Christianity, the perfected ethical faith, understands by sin apostasy from God, which at the same time is inseparably the violation of the absolute ethical norm of his will. Both phases condition the nature of the Christian consciousness of sin, the first its permanent activity, the second its seriousness.

The Jewish faith attained a vitality and depth in the consciousness of sin not met with in any other pre-Christian religion. The general Semitic conception of sin as revolt against the divinity is not only followed to its issue, but also modified.

Old Testa- significance not exhausted in the conment. sequent results of disaster. In the Babylonian penitential psalms, it is the external stress that awakens the thought of sin, followed by the cry for help and forgiveness. This coalescing of the stress of salvation with natural eudemonistic motives of an elementary religiousness is also manifest in the Psalms of the Old Testament (vi., x., lxxxviii., cii., cvii.); but in the upper stages of Israelitic piety the religious-ethical idea gains due prominence (xxxii., li.), and the certainty of the nearness of God overshadows the outer event (lxxiii. 23 sqq.). Hence by the time of the prophets it came to be recognized that the favor of Yahweh could not be secured by cultic zeal (I Sam. xv. 22; Hos. vi. 6). Among sins are reckoned, besides worship of idols (Hoc. ii. 13; Isa. ii. 8; Ezek. vi. 13) and magic (Dent. xviii. 10-11), unbelief in Yahweh's power ;Isa. vii. 9), trust in human help (Isa. xxii. 8 aqq.), unrighteousness in judgment and conduct (II Sam. xii. 9 sqq.), avarice (Isa. v. 8 sqq.), and extravagance (Amos vi. 4 aqq.). Yahweh's will is conceived as moral, and the requirements of his will as law, but this is presently exceeded. Insensibility to God's love (Hoses), ingratitude (Isa. v.; Jer. ii. 5), and hard-heartedness (Isa. xlvi. 12; Dent. ix. 6, 13) are conceived to be sins. The ceremonial law of the post-exilic period produced a change which affected rather the content than the intensity of the sense of sin. Attention is mainly directed to particular precepts for the maintenance of the obedience x. a8