=1. Righteousness and Sin.=--Righteousness and sin were not exact or contradictory opposites. The righteous man was not necessarily sinless. Nevertheless, the consciousness of sin, like a dark background, brought out more emphatically the conception of righteousness. This conception had its two aspects, derived from the civil and the religious spheres of life--spheres which were not separate for the Hebrew. On the one hand, the just or righteous respected the moral order in human society. The unrighteous was unjust, extortionate, cruel. He did not respect the rights of others. On the other hand, the righteous man was in "right" relation to God. This right relation might be tested by the divine law; but as God was conceived as a living person, loving his people, "forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin," it might also be measured by an essential harmony of spirit with the divine will. There was the "righteousness of the law," and the "righteousness of faith." The first implies complete obedience; the second implies that in spite of transgressions there is room for atonement[54] or reconciliation. As the first means ethically the testing of conduct by a moral standard, a "moral law," so the second stands for the thought that character is rather a matter of spirit and of constant reconstruction than of exact conformity once for all to a hard and fast rule. Specific acts may fail to conform, but the life is more than a series of specific acts. The measurement of conduct by the law has its value to quicken a sense of shortcoming, but alone it may also lead either to self-righteous complacency or to despair. The possibility of new adjustment, of renewal, of "a new birth," means liberation and life. As such it may be contrasted with the Buddhist doctrine of Karma, the causality from which there is no escape but by the extinction of desire. "Sin" had likewise its various aspects. It stood for missing the mark, for violating the rules of clean and unclean; but it stood also for personal disobedience to the divine will, for violation of the moral order of Israel. In this latter sense, as identified by the prophets with social unrighteousness, it is a significant ethical conception. It brings out the point that evil and wrongdoing are not merely individual matters, not merely failures; they offend against a law which is above the private self, against a moral order which has its rightful demands upon us.