SIN 437 SINAI the Asiatic Fleet (1900-1902) ; inspector of target practice, Bureau of Navigation, Navy Department (1902-1909); naval aide to the President (1907-1909) ; com- manding officer of the "Minnesota" (1909-1911) ; Naval War College, New- port, R. I. (1911-1913) ; commanding of- ficer of the Atlantic Torpedo Flotilla (1913-15) ; commanding officer of the "Nevada" (1915-1917). During the World War he was in command of the naval operations of the United States in European waters. In 1920 he made an extensive report to the United States Senate sub-committee on Naval Affairs, alleging that grave errors had been com- mitted by the United States Naval Board in connection with the management of the United States Naval operations during the World War. This report resulted in an extensive controversy between Admiral Sims and Secretary of the Navy Daniels. In 1919 Admiral Sims declined the D. S. M. which had been awarded to him. He received the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, was made a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor, and held honorary degrees from Yale and Harvard universities and from Tufts and Juniata colleges. SIN, a condition that is not simply moral evil as recognized by the awakened human conscience, but guilt before God or the gods. Some doctrine of sin, and of the mode of averting the anger of the deity, of reconciling Him, and of escap- ing from the guilt, is accordingly part of most religions, ancient and modern. Zoroastrianism is a conflict < of sin and holiness. The central doctrine of Bud- dhism turns on the demerit of human actions and human life, which must be purged by transmigration. But in no sacred books is the sense of sin so keen and developed as in the Bible — in the writings of the prophets t of the God of holiness, in the Psalms, in the Gospels, and in Paul's epistles. Throughout the Scriptures sin appears as that element in man which puts him at enmity with God, and for his salva- tion requires the work of a Redeemer (see Christianity). The early Greek fathers regarded sin as opposition to the will of God, and as such involving death as its just penalty. But they did not affirm that the guilt of Adam's sin or the corruption of his nature descended to all mankind. Tertullian, in virtue of his doc- trine of Traducianism (q. v.), was bound to hold that sinfulness had been propagated from Adam to his descend- ants. But it was reserved for Augustine to maintain, against Pelagius, that Adam's sin completely corrupted his whole nature; that the corruption of his guilt and its penalty death pass to all his children. Pelagius (q. v.) main- tained contrary doctrines, and semi-pela- gianism insists that in spite of the weaken- ing of his powers through hereditary sin- fulness man is yet not wholly inclined to evil. The Greek Church continued to deny hereditary guilt, and to affirm man's will as free as Adam's before the fall. Thomas Aquinas taught that hereditary sin is truly sin, and the unbaptized infant is damned. At the Reformation both Luther and Calvin asserted what they re- garded as Augustinian and Pauline views. Zwingli looked on hereditary sin as an inherited evil or disease; Arminians and Socinians practically denied hereditary sin altogether. In modern German specu- lation the Hegelians taught that sin was a necessary condition of the development of mankind. The doctrine of the Thirty-nine Arti- cles (Art. ix.) is as follows: "Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk) ; but it is the fault and corruption of the na- ture of every man, that naturally is en- gendered of the offspring of Adam, where- by man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit; and there- fore in every person born into this world it deserveth God's wrath and damnation." The Westminster Confession teaches (chap, vi.) : "By this sin" (i. e., the eat- ing of the forbidden fruit) "they" (i. e., our first parents) "fell from their origi- nal righteousness and communion with God, and so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body. They being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed, and the same death in sin and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity, descending from them by ordinary generation. From this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indis- posed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil, do proceed all actual transgressions." Sins have been divided into categories, as sins of omission and of commission, deliberate voluntary sins and involuntary sins, sins of infirmity, etc. SINAI, a mountain, or mountain range in Arabia Petrsea, in the peninsula formed by the two arms of the Red Sea, and rendered memorable as the spot where, according to the Pentateuch, the law was given to Israel through Moses. This mountain pass is divisible into three groups: a N. W., reaching, in Mount Ser- bal, an elevation of 6,340 feet; an E. and central, attaining, in Jebel Katherin, a height of 8,160 feet; and a S. E., whose
