SIMPLE CONTRACT debts are those which are contracted with out any eugagement under the seal of the debtor or of his ancestor [DEED], and which are not of record by any judgment of a court. Money duo for goods bought by the debtor is the most usual of simple contract debts; and the declaration against a defendant, in an action for goods sold, usually alleges that the defendant undertook (or contracted) to pay the plaintiff the sum due. Simple contract debts are the last which are payable out of a deceased person's estate, when the assets are insufficient.
SIN. One of the few passages of Scripture in which we have some thing which approaches to the character of a definition relates to this word : " Sin is the transgression of the law." (1 John iii. 4.) Within this definition would be comprehended all actual sins, when the word law is interpreted to mean the Christian law, the rule by which the minds of all who profess Christianity are bound ; not merely open palpable offences against the law, such as murder, theft, lying, and the like, but sinful omissions of duty, and those sins which are only those of contemplation and thought : since the Christian rule commands us not to neglect the performance of our duties, and to keep a watch over the thoughts as well as over the actions and words.
It was this comprehensive and most excellent law which was in the mind of the Apostle when he said that "sin was transgression of the law," or at least that other divine law which bound the conscience of the Jews. But the expression may be taken to express more generally any law which a person bolds in his conscieuce to be binding upon him, whether it be a law of nature only, or a law in which the natural perception of right and wrong is modified by and mixed with what is received as the will of God concerning us by direct revelation from him.
When the word sin is applied to any act, it is always, among correct writers or speakers, used with reference to religious obligation, and to the responsibility in which we stand to God, and the liability in which we are to future punishment. " To do wrong" would express the same act as "to commit sin;" but we use the former phrase without thinking of the offence which is done against God in any act of the kind ; notee when we use the other phrase.
Under this definition it is evident that there may be degrees in sin : and we mention this to remove what,we deem an erroneous opinion on this subject, which goes the length of saying that there is really no difference between the slightest violation of any moral obligation and the more heinous transgressions. The error on this point arises out of one of the commonest mistakes in respect of language—confounding words in their abstract with words in their concrete state. It is true that sin in the abstract is one and indivisible, and there are no degrees in it ; it expresses that which is most offensive in the sight of a pure, holy, and judging God. But when we say " a sin," we refer to some particular act ; and common sense tells us that in all acts in which the law is trangreseed there is not the same amount of moral turpitude, not the same amount of defiance to the Divine Power, nor the same injury to society or to our neighbour, and consequently not the same amount of offence in the sight of God. But a watchful guard should be kept ; for nothing Is more certain in the philosophy of mind, than that small offences lead imperceptibly to the toleration of greater, so that the man who thinks little of small offences may become, before he is aware, guilty of those of the most heinous nature.
There is also what divines call Original Sin ; a phrase which is differently interpreted by different persons. By some it is considered as being the act of sin committed by our first parents when they trans greased the law which had bound them not to eat of the fruit of a certain tree ; and this act of sin is regarded as partaken in by all the posterity of Adam, fixing upon them all the guilt of his sin, and exposing them to punishment which would be inflicted for this par ticular eln, to say nothing of their own sin, but for the great redemp tion. There are many modifications of this notion and many shades of opinion ; and some classes of professing Christians do not use the phrase original sin, though they admit the proneness of man to sin ; attributing it to his ignorance and Imperfection, to the violence of his appetites and passions, and in general referring it to that state of pro bation in which it seems to them to have been the intention of the Creator to place us.