What we name sin is, from the religious point of view, the tragedy of God’s universe. What it is, how it came, why it is permitted to develop itself into the havoc and ruin it surely entails, what is to be the end of it, above all, how its presence and working are to be reconciled with goodness, holiness, love, in the God who has permitted it—these are the crushing questions that press upon the spirit of everyone who thinks deeply on the subject. In its very conception sin is that which ought not to be; which ought never to have been. How, then, or why, is it here, this awful, glaring, deadly, omnipresent reality in human history and experience?