It may not be in vain for our theology to hear and receive with patience a sociologist's definition of the "social mind." Upon this point Professor Giddings says explicitly: "There is no reason to suppose that society is a great being which is conscious of itself through some mysterious process of thinking, separate and distinct from the thinking that goes on in the brains of individual men. At any rate, there is no possible way yet known to man of proving that there is any such supreme social consciousness." Nevertheless, he adds: "To the group of facts that may be described as the simultaneous like-mental-activity of two or more individuals in communication with one another, or as a concert of the emotions, thought, and will of two or more communicating individuals, we give the name, the social mind. This name, accordingly, should be regarded as meaning just this group of facts and nothing more. It does not mean that there is any other consciousness than that of individual minds. It does mean that individual minds act simultaneously in like ways and continually influence one another; and that certain mental products result from such combined mental action which could not result from the thinking of an individual who had no communication with fellow-beings."[79] Just so far, it may well be supposed, and no farther may we go, in theology, in moral and spiritual inferences from the unity of the race. We are members one of another for good and for ill, one in the unity of the inevitable, mutual influence of like-minded persons. II. DEEPENING THE SENSE OF SIN And this conviction, in the second place, not only deepens our sense of the real unity of the race, it deepens also the sense of sin. And we can hardly separate here the influence of the third element of the social consciousness--the sense of the value and sacredness of the person. As against a rather wide-spread and often expressed contrary feeling, this deepening sense of sin may yet, it is believed, be truthfully maintained, _so far as the social consciousness is really making itself felt_. There are some disintegrating tendencies here, no doubt, like the tendency under some applications of evolution and evolutionary philosophy to turn all sin into a necessary stage in the evolution. But had not Drummond reason to say: "There is one theological word which has found its way lately into nearly all the newer and finer literature of our country. It is not only _one_ of the words of the literary world at present, it is perhaps _the_ word. Its reality, its certain influence, its universality, have at last been recognized, and in spite of its theological name have forced it into a place which nothing but its felt relation to the wider theology of human life could ever have earned for a religious word. That word, it need scarcely be said, is sin."[80]