SIMSON, WILLIAM (1800-1847), Scottish portrait, land scape and subject painter, was born at Dundee in 1800. He studied under Andrew Wilson at the Trustees' Academy, Edinburgh, and his early landscape and marine subjects found a ready sale. He next turned his attention to figure painting, and in 183o was elected a member of the Scottish Academy. On the proceeds of his portrait-painting, he spent three years in Italy, and on his return in 1838 settled in London, where he died on Aug. 29, 1847. Simson is greatest as a landscapist ; his "Solway Moss—Sunset," exhibited in the Royal Scottish Academy of 1831 and now in the National Gallery, Edinburgh, ranks as one of the finest examples of the early Scottish school of landscape.
His subject pictures include the "Twelfth of August" (1829), the "Highland Deerstalker" (183o) ; and among later works the "Camal dolese monk showing relics," "Cimabue and Giotto," the "Dutch Family," and "Columbus and his Child." SIN is the name given to moral evil, when regarded from the point of view of religion, as distinguished from that of civic law or that of ethics. The Christian's ideal is to do all things as unto the Lord ; and he looks upon his shortcomings as offences against a divinely given law or as grieving the Holy Spirit. But if this aspect of sin, or the religious associations with which moral evil is tinged, be of high significance for religious life, the nature of sin as moral evil correlated with responsibility and guilt, is funda mentally a question for ethics and psychology. That "sin is law lessness," even when the law transgressed is regarded as divine, is a description which needs amplification, in order to fulfil the requirements of theological doctrine.
Of the several conditions of accountable moral conduct, the one just indicated may be treated first ; the forthcomingness of a law, of which sin is transgression; or of a mark, of which sin is the missing. Moral law is a social acquisition; and knowledge of it is socially mediated, not innate to the individual. It is only when we begin to find certain kinds of behaviour expected of us, as what we owe, and become spectators of our conduct from the point of view from which others see us, that conscience emerges in us. It
is not inborn, like instinct ; nor does the soul possess it, before embodiment. We are born non-moral, not sinners. Further, St. Paul's teaching, that where no law is, sin cannot be imputed, needs to be supplemented. This brings us to the second condition of the possibility of sin. In order that an individual be accountable, it is not enough that there is moral law forthcoming, whether primitive customs or unconditional standards of Christian ethic; he must be aware of them as binding on himself, and must be in a position to perceive his act to be a shortcoming at the time of its occurrence. This reference to time is also essential. For instance, a heathen who may be blameless as to such law as he knows, is no sinner against Christian law that, as yet, he cannot know; and if he become a Christian and learn a higher ethic, he cannot then rightly accuse himself of guilt, in that, in his heathen past, he left undone what, had he been a Christian he should have done. The conduct of the infant that knows no law, or that of the adult heathen who obeys some law but knows not the highest, cannot even from the Christian standpoint, be deemed sinners. Else we should have to attribute sin to snakes and volcanoes. For the only relevant difference between the moral and the non-moral agent, is that the former can, and the latter cannot, be aware of law having dominion over it. We cannot assert sin to be non-compliance with moral law, as distinct from known moral law, without destroying the ethical significance of sin. All sin is imperfection; not all im perfection is sin. Thus it follows that there cannot be one abso lute standard of perfection, to fall short of which, in any condi tions and at any stage of moral enlightenment, convicts of sin. The only relevant standard is comparable to a sliding scale : it is what, to the all-seeing eye of God, is the highest that a given agent can recognize, at the time of his activity that is in question. Hence the wisdom of the counsel ; "then at the balance let's be mute." Development is incompatible with perfection ; the Christian, of all men, cannot say it is incompatible with sinlessness.