On the
whole, the Latin races have leaned more towards the former way of
looking upon evil, as made up of ills and sins in the plural,
removable in detail; while the Germanic races have tended rather
to think of Sin in the singular, and with a capital S, as of
something ineradicably ingrained in our natural subjectivity, and
never to be removed by any superficial piecemeal operations.[70]
These comparisons of races are always open to exception, but
undoubtedly the northern tone in religion has inclined to the
more intimately pessimistic persuasion, and this way of feeling,
being the more extreme, we shall find by far the more instructive
for our study.
[70] Cf. J. Milsand: Luther et le Serf-Arbitre, 1884, passim.
Recent psychology has found great use for the word "threshold" as
a symbolic designation for the point at which one state of mind
passes into another. Thus we speak of the threshold of a man's
consciousness in general, to indicate the amount of noise,
pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his
attention at all. One with a high threshold will doze through an
amount of racket by which one with a low threshold would be
immediately waked.
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