James Freeman Clarke

The Lord's Prayer: Being the Last Eight Discourses James Freeman Clarke

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1891 edition. Excerpt: ... V. FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS. And forgive us our debts.--Matt. vi. 12. THUS far in uttering the Lord's Prayer the soul has been placed in an attitude of faith, reverence, self-dedication, dependence; now another chord is touched,--the sense of sin, the need of pardon. This sense of sin is by a large class of thinkers rejected as a mere superstition, unworthy of the dignity of man. In fact, we may say that the tendency of thought in two schools, opposed in other things, is to reject this sense of sin as an excrescence nowise belonging to the true nature of man. Transcendentalists on one side, like Theodore Parker and Mr. Emerson, join with the whole school of materialists and sensephilosophers on the other in opposing such sentiments as outgrown puerilities, belonging to the childish things which we put away when we became men. Sin with them is only defect, underdevelopment. The school which considers all our actions the result of necessity cannot accept sin in any other sense. Where there is no freedom, there can be no personal responsibility, and therefore no sin. The whole materialistic school and the school of positivists are compelled by their postulates to eliminate sin, and consequently forgiveness of sin, from all sound human experience. The transcendentalists often do the same, and, as it seems to me, with much less consistency; for this sense of sin is transcendental. It is knowledge of a right which transcends all that we are; it is the voice of a tribunal higher than ourselves, seated in our soul, by which we judge and sentence ourselves. It is a wonderful fact, this universal sense of sin. Most religions rest on it, as on a chief corner-stone. All sacrifices for sin, expiatory offerings, attempts to appease the gods by selfinflicted...