p. 118 | The Meanness of Sin

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Apr 10, 1879

The Meanness of Sin.

THE meanest thing about sin, and we say it about all kinds of sin, is its selfishness. It stops at nothing and considers nothing.

If the pain, the shame, and the remorse could fall only on the guilty, if a man could bear the penalty of his own wrong-doing alone, it might seem, while in a certain point of view it took nothing from his guilt, as if it left him, at least, some sense of self-respect in that he alone could shoulder all the results.

But the truth is, there is hardly one man living so placed that his wrong-doing affects himself only, while the great mass are so surrounded that their sin brings greater punishment in this world, at least, to others than to themselves. It is a part of God's wise ordering of human life that one should be hedged in from ill-doing by all the relations that are best and dearest. God would restrain us from sin by our earthly loves, by the ties of family and kindred, by the fact that we are parents and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives. He would restrain us by the respect we have for friends and neighbors, as well as love for kinsfolk.

These are all-powerful restraints. How far and deep they work and bind is known when we consider how reckless men become where these ties are not. And when these restraints are broken as man and woman break them, there comes before us this horrible sight of the mean selfishness of the sinner. For he risks not only himself, his own happiness, honor, name, and fame, but those of every one near and dear to him. He inflicts on them a suffering, often which is beyond anything he can feel, no matter how he is punished in this world for his wrongs. He disgraces, shames, and tortures those to whom he is bound by every tie of love and gratitude.

A man commits some sin of dishonesty. He is husband, father, brother, and son. We say nothing of what the feeling ought to be, we take it as it is—the feeling we mean of the world and the sufferers themselves. He has shamed and disgraced all who are connected with him. He has dishonored the gray hairs of his father, disgraced the mother that bore him, left a life-long shame on his children's name. His sin works its black disgrace upward and downward, on the old and the young, and high, honorable hearts will be tortured by it, as they are now, when he is dead and forgotten.

The selfishness of sin comes out nowhere, perhaps, as it does in those sins which in their very nature, involve all other sins, and all shames—lying, perjury, dishonor of parents and friends, murder perhaps, and suicide. And these sins involve all these because they are the most selfish of all sins. A man may steal to share his theft with his family. He may rob to do the same. He may even murder for a purpose not wholly selfish. But he commits the sin of ruining another, soul and body, of breaking up family ties, and disgracing family relationships, and making a life-long misery and agony for innocent people for the selfish and momentary gratification of his own desire or even his own vanity. His whole wretched life cannot atone for the suffering he brings on any one out of a score of innocent people who never did him harm, perhaps always did him good. And he does this in nine cases out of ten where he is received as a friend, with friendship given him, and always under the name of "love"!—Churchman.