The key to what follows is to be found in knowing how to sin. Or again, it is not, for that could suggest that some appropriate advice was going to be given to those with practical difficulties in sinning. Now this is a matter on which advice may well be as undesirable as it is, for most of us, otiose; and in any case no such advice will be given here. No Kama Sutra of barratry, no Teach Yourself Embezzlement will be found in what follows. What will be found is some explanation of what is involved in saying that someone has sinned, which is far from otiose. For though sinning may be as easy as lying, the word ‘sinning’ can conceal a plurality of senses. Once this has been done, ‘forgiving sins’ is more than halfway to being explained. By way of a corollary it will then be shown why ‘forgiven- ness’, much talked of by some sensitive people today in connexion with forgiveness, cannot serve for explaining ‘forgiving sins’.

A first step in the explanation proposed is to distinguish ‘sinning’ as simply designating some particular piece of sinning, some event or process in the world, from ‘sinning’ in its proper sense, as not only designating ... (as before), but in addition also connoting that what is so designated has been held to have been done, or has been done, out of disobedience to God, or whatever. (In medieval innocence I shall speak of ‘disobedience to God’: let theologians or catechists substitute the phrase of their choice.)