The Relevance of Indwelling Sin

The "Editor's Note" opening John Owen's Sin and Temptation; The Challenge to Personal Godliness has this:

Our times have been called the "me generation" because of the psychological cult of self-fulfillment and its accompanying narcisism. We live in a society that is deaf to a well-known psychologist's question, "Whatever happened to sin?" O Herbert Mowrer has written candidly about this:

"For several decades we psychologists looked upon the whole matter of sin adn moral accountability as a great incubus, and acclaimed our liberation from it as epoch making. But at length we have discovered that to be 'free' in this sense, that is to have the excuse of being 'sick' rather than sinful, is to court the danger of also being lost."

We are beginning to see once more that there can be no recovery of self-realization...without the recovery of moral responsibility.

It feels loving to pronounce the downtrodden victims. But with the effort at compassion we may have stolen the great hope of recovery: repentance and responsibility.