Man

This will make more sense if you read part one first.

In the Christian religion, in the second place, we find man; we regain that birthright of freedom which had been taken from us by the modern mind. It is a dreadful birthright indeed. For with freedom goes responsibility, and with responsibility, for us, there goes the awful guilt of sin. That conscience awakens which makes cowards of us all. Gone, for us Christians, is the complacency of the modern mind; gone is the lax, comforting notion that crime is only a disease; gone is the notion that strips the ermine from the judge and makes him but the agent of a utilitarian society; gone is the blindness that refuses to face the moral facts.

The Christian world, unlike the modern world, is a world of nameless terrors; the Christian views man as standing over a bottomless abyss. Such a view will find little sympathy from the experts of the present day; they will doubtless apply to it their usual method of dealing with a thing which they do not understand; they will attach a long name to it and let it go. But is their judgment really to be trusted? There are some of us who think not. There are some of us who think that the moral judgments of us sinners are not always to be trusted, and that the real pathway of advance for humanity lies through a rediscovery of the law of God. (J. Gresham Machen, The Gospel and the Modern World)