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Nature is cruel, "red in tooth and claw." The deathward tendency is what I may call the self-ward tendency in the upward struggle of all organic forms, that is, one organism only exists at the expense of other organisms.
In such struggles life spends itself fast; an inward wound does not carry one deathward more surely than this worst wound of the soul. God has made us so mercifully that there is no certainty, however dreadful, to which life-forces do not in time adjust themselves, but to uncertainty there is no possible adjustment. Where is he?
Let who will suffer; it is not his concern. What is lifeward for him may be deathward for them; he is willing that it should be so that is the sin. Sin is always a mistake, a soul's mistake; it is the carrying up into the spiritual region of that stern and terrible law of the physical world, the survival of an organism at the expense of its fellow.
Yet I repeat it all men are seeking life, life more abundant, even in their selfishness and wrong-doing, seeking life by the deathward road. "Whatever crazy sorrow saith, No life that breathes with human breath Has ever truly longed for death. 'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, O life, not death, for which we pant, More life and fuller than I want."
The former tendency is what I call the deathward deathward for all else but itself; and the Christ is the lifeward, life for all else but itself. Yet curious inversion of earlier experience the deathward tendency results in death to itself in the spiritual region, and the lifeward tendency results in life to him who gives life. "I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again."
I want you to realise here, then, that the Christ in humanity is the life-giver of the soul. They who are possessed of the Christ spirit are they who have and can give the more abundant life. We have briefly examined the two tendencies of which I have spoken; have you realised that in the things of the spirit the deathward tendency is what we call sin?
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