MEN NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE SIN OF THEIR PROGENITORS.

I. The first that I notice is the position, that creatures are now held responsible, even as “deserving God’s wrath and curse, not only in this life, but in that which is to come,” not merely for their own voluntary acts of disobedience, nor for their involuntary exercises, but for the act of a progenitor, performed when they had no existence. If God holds creatures responsible for such an act, we may safely affirm that it is absolutely impossible for them to conceive of the justice of such a principle; and that God has so constituted them, as to render it impossible for them to form such a conception. Can a being who is not a moral agent sin? Is not existence necessary to moral agency? How then can creatures “sin in and through another” six thousand years before their own existence commenced? We cannot conceive of creatures as guilty for the involuntary and necessary exercises of their own minds. How can we conceive of them as guilty for the act of another being,—an act of which they had, and could have, no knowledge, choice, or agency whatever? How can intelligent beings hold such a dogma, and hold it as a revelation from Him who has declared with an oath, that the “son shall not bear the iniquity of the father,” but that “every man shall die for his own sins?”