Mammon or Covetousness the Sin of the Christian Chruch. By Rev. John Harris; Anti-Mammon, or an Exposure of the Unscriptural Statements of Mammon [pp. 222-239]

Mammon, and Snti-MammorLn.
piness in God. It is the act or habit of a man who so loves
himself as to give himself to God. Selfishness is fallen self'
love." Self-love is not therefore a fallen principle-man
therefore can convert himself-man. can seek and obtain his
supreme happiness-he can do this without God only by
carrying out his self-love-and the influence of the Holy
Spirit is unnecessary, since self-love is the stock of all piety.
This is the concentrated essence of Pelagianism, and it is
pure Pagan theology, as appropriate to the porch of the
academy as to the pulpit.
The dethronement of God, on which this new theory is
founded, and its consequent ungodliness, is further apparent
firom the author's account of sin. Sin, he tells us, is misery,
and involves its perpetrators in ruin and everlasting destruction from the presence of God, not because it is a crime
against the authority, holiness, justice and goodness of God,
but because it is committed against the sinner himself, and is
injurious to his own happiness. "All sin is selfishness"'is
the title of Section III. " Selfishness is the universal form
of human depravity, every sin that can be named is only a
modification of it." Now it is true that all sin is selfish, but
selfishness is not all of sin. It might as well be said that all
sin is pride, since pride enters into it, or is mingled with it;
but is pride therefore all sin? Whence cometh this selfishness, and this pride, and this lust, and this carnality? "Out
of the heart," saith the Saviour. "Enmity to God is ungodliness;" this is the fruitful mother of all sin-this is its
damning guilt. The author himself says, in another place,
that "sin produced selfishness"- the parent therefore cannot
be the child, nor that child all the parent. What then produced sin? Not surely selfishness, which was by it produced. The author contradicts his own fundamental doctrine, according to the custom of errorists, on p. 57 and p.
99. He here says that "every act of wickedness does not
originate in cupidity, but while many sources of sin exist
there is no description of crime which this vice has not
prompted men to commit." As error begets error, and thus
propagates the mischief, the view just given of that spiritual
disease under which fallen humanity labours, leads to an
equally unscriptural representation of the remedy provided
in the gospel. "It must be obvious then that the great want
(his own italics) of fallen humanity, is a specific against selfishness, the epidemic disease of our nature." The salvation
aeeded by sinners is not, it would appear, reconciliation with
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