Contrast this modern sense of sin with the almost total lack of it among even so gifted a people of the ancient world as the Greeks, and feel the significance of the phenomenon. But it is particularly to be noted that this sense of sin in literature is largely due to a keener social conscience. In fact, if the social consciousness is not a thoroughly fraudulent phenomenon, it could hardly be otherwise; for the social consciousness, in its very essence, is a sense of what is due a person; and sin is always ultimately against a person, failure to be what one ought to be in some personal relation, including finally all the relations of the kingdom of God. We simply cannot deepen the sense of the meaning and value of personal relations, and not deepen, at the same time, the sense of sin. The meaning of the Golden Rule, and so the sense of sin under it, deepens inevitably with every step into the meaning of the person. If the one great commandment is love, then the sin of which men need most of all to be convicted is lack of love. The self-tormenting and fanciful sins of some of our devotional books very likely are less felt. But the very existence of the social consciousness seems to be proof that there never was so much good, honest, wholesome sense of real sin as to-day--such sin as Christ himself recognizes in his own judgment test. It may be that, in temporary absorption in the human relations, the relation of all this to the All-Father may seem forgotten; even so, we may well remember Christ's "Ye did it unto me." But, in fact, we must go much farther and say, The social consciousness can only be true to itself finally, as it goes on to see its acts in the light, most of all, of that single, personal relation which underlies all others. We have already seen that the social consciousness requires for its own justification its grounding in the manifest trend of the living will of God. With this felt identification of the will of God with love for men, men can still less shake off easily the conviction of sin.