fact that the alternative which remains is adopted by the majority of
men. That Degeneration is easy only half accounts for it. Why is it
easy? Why but that already in each man's very nature this principle is
supreme? He feels within his soul a silent drifting motion impelling him
downward with irresistible force. Instead of aspiring to Conversion to a
higher Type he submits by a law of his nature to Reversion to a lower.
This is Degeneration--that principle by which the organism, failing to
develop itself, failing even to keep what it has got, deteriorates, and
becomes more and more adapted to a degraded form of life.
All men who know themselves are conscious that this tendency,
deep-rooted and active, exists within their nature. Theologically it is
described as a gravitation, a bias toward evil. The Bible view is that
man is conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity. And experience tells him
that he will shape himself into further sin and ever deepening iniquity
without the smallest effort, without in the least intending it, and in
the most natural way in the world if he simply let his life run. It is
on this principle that, completing the conception, the wicked are said
further in the Bible to be lost. They are not really lost as yet, but
they are on the sure way to it. The bias of their lives is in full
action. There is no drag on anywhere. The natural tendencies are having
it all their own way; and although the victims may be quite unconscious
that all this is going on, it is patent to every one who considers even
the natural bearings of the case that "the end of these things is
Death." When we see a man fall from the top of a five-story house, we
say the man is lost. We say that before he has fallen a foot; for the
same principle that made him fall the one foot will undoubtedly make him
complete the descent by falling another eighty or ninety feet. So that
he is a dead man, or a lost man from the very first. The gravitation of
sin in a human soul acts precisely in the same way. Gradually, with
gathering momentum it sinks a man further and further from God and
righteousness, and lands him, by the sheer action of a natural law, in
the hell of a neglected life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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