Part 5 — Chapter III. Sin, Or Man's State Of Apostasy. (continued 3)

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(c) Shown from the condemnation resting upon all who do not accept Christ.

John 3:18—“he that believeth not hath been judged already, because he hath not believed on the name of the only begotten Son of God”; 36—“he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him”; Compare 1 John 5:19—“the whole world lieth in [i. e., in union with] the evil one”; see Annotated Paragraph Bible, in loco. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 318—“Law requires love to God. This implies love to our neighbor, not only abstaining from all injury to him, but righteousness in all our relations, forgiving instead of requiting, help to enemies as well as friends in all salutary ways, self-discipline, avoidance of all sensuous immoderation, subjection of all sensuous activity as means for spiritual ends in the kingdom of God, and all this, not as a matter of outward conduct merely, but from the heart and as the satisfaction of one's own will and desire. This is the will of God respecting us, which Jesus has revealed and of which he is the example in his life. Instead of this, man universally seeks to promote his own life, pleasure, and honor.”

(d) Consistent with those passages which at first sight seem to ascribe to certain men a goodness which renders them acceptable to God, where a closer examination will show that in each case the goodness supposed is a merely imperfect and fancied goodness, a goodness of mere aspiration and impulse due to preliminary workings of God's Spirit, or a goodness resulting from the trust of a conscious sinner in God's method of salvation.

In Mat 9:12—“They that are whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick”—Jesus means those who in their own esteem are whole; cf. 13—“I came not to call the righteous, but sinners”—“if any were truly righteous, they would not need my salvation; if they think themselves so, they will not care to seek it” (An. Par. Bib.). In Luke 10:30-37—the parable of the good Samaritan—Jesus intimates, not that the good Samaritan was not a sinner, but that there were saved sinners outside of the bounds of Israel. In Acts 10:35—“in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is acceptable to him”—Peter declares, not that Cornelius was not a sinner, but that God had accepted him through Christ; Cornelius was already justified, but he needed to know (1) that he was saved, and (2) how he was saved; and Peter was sent to tell him of the fact, and of the method, of his salvation in Christ. In Rom. 2:14—“for when Gentiles that have not the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are a law unto themselves”—it is only said that in certain respects the obedience of these Gentiles shows that they have an unwritten law in their hearts; it is not said that they perfectly obey the law and therefore have no sin—for Paul says immediately after (Rom. 3:9)—“we before laid to the charge both of Jews and Greeks, that they are all under sin.”

So with regard to the words “perfect” and “upright,” as applied to godly men. We shall see, when we come to consider the doctrine of Sanctification, that the word “perfect,” as applied to spiritual conditions already attained, signifies only a relative perfection, equivalent to sincere piety or maturity of Christian judgment, in other words, the perfection of a sinner who has long trusted in Christ, and in whom Christ has overcome his chief defects of character. See 1 Cor. 2:6—“we speak wisdom among the perfect” (Am. Rev.: “among them that are full-grown”); Phil. 3:15—“let us therefore, as many as are perfect, be thus minded”—i. e., to press toward the goal—a goal expressly said by the apostles to be not yet attained (v. 12-14).

“Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo.” God is the “spark that fires our clay.”S. S. Times, Sept. 21, 1901:609—“Humanity is better and worse than men have painted it. There has been a kind of theological pessimism in denouncing human sinfulness, which has been blind to the abounding love and patience and courage and fidelity to duty among men.” A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 287-290—“There is a natural life of Christ, and that life pulses and throbs in all men everywhere. All men are created in Christ, before they are recreated in him. The whole race lives, moves, and has its being in him, for he is the soul of its soul and the life of its life.” To Christ then, and not to unaided human nature, we attribute the noble impulses of unregenerate men. These impulses are drawings of his Spirit, moving men to repentance. But they are influences of his grace which, if resisted, leave the soul in more than its original darkness.

2. Proof from history, observation, and the common judgment of mankind.

(a) History witnesses to the universality of sin, in its accounts of the universal prevalence of priesthood and sacrifice.

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See references in Luthardt, Fund. Truths, 161-172, 335-339. Baptist Review, 1882:343—“Plutarch speaks of the tear-stained eyes, the pallid and woe-begone countenances which he sees at the public altars, men rolling themselves in the mire and confessing their sins. Among the common people the dull feeling of guilt was too real to be shaken off or laughed away.”

(b) Every man knows himself to have come short of moral perfection, and, in proportion to his experience of the world, recognizes the fact that every other man has come short of it also.

Chinese proverb: “There are but two good men; one is dead, and the other is not yet born.” Idaho proverb: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” But the proverb applies to the white man also. Dr. Jacob Chamberlain, the missionary, said: “I never but once in India heard a man deny that he was a sinner. But once a Brahmin interrupted me and said: ‘I deny your premisses. I am not a sinner. I do not need to do better.’ For a moment I was abashed. Then I said: ‘But what do your neighbors say?’ Thereupon one cried out: ‘He cheated me in trading horses’; another: ‘He defrauded a widow of her inheritance.’ The Brahmin went out of the house, and I never saw him again.” A great nephew of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, when a child, wrote in a few lines an “Essay on the Life of Man,” which ran as follows: “A man's life naturally divides itself into three distinct parts: the first when he is contriving and planning all kinds of villainy and rascality,—that is the period of youth and innocence. In the second, he is found putting in practice all the villainy and rascality he has contrived,—that is the flower of mankind and prime of life. The third and last period is that when he is making his soul and preparing for another world,—that is the period of dotage.”

(c) The common judgment of mankind declares that there is an element of selfishness in every human heart, and that every man is prone to some form of sin. This common judgment is expressed in the maxims: “No man is perfect”; “Every man has his weak side”, or “his price”; and every great name in literature has attested its truth.

Seneca, De Ira, 3:26—“We are all wicked. What one blames in another he will find in his own bosom. We live among the wicked, ourselves being wicked”; Ep., 22—“No one has strength of himself to emerge [from this wickedness]; some one must needs hold forth a hand; some one must draw us out.” Ovid, Met., 7:19—“I see the things that are better and I approve them, yet I follow the worse.... We strive even after that which is forbidden, and we desire the things that are denied.” Cicero: “Nature has given us faint sparks of knowledge; we extinguish them by our immoralities.”

Shakespeare, Othello, 3:3—“Where's that palace whereinto foul things Sometimes Intrude not? Who has a breast so pure, But some uncleanly apprehensions keep leets [meetings in court] and law-days, and in sessions sit With meditations lawful?”Henry VI., II:3:3—“Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.” Hamlet, 2:2, compares God's influence to the sun which “breeds maggots in a dead dog, Kissing carrion,”—that is, God is no more responsible for the corruption in man's heart and the evil that comes from it, than the sun is responsible for the maggots which its heat breeds in a dead dog; 3:1—“We are arrant knaves all.” Timon of Athens, 1:2—“Who lives that's not depraved or depraves?”

Goethe: “I see no fault committed which I too might not have committed.” Dr. Johnson: “Every man knows that of himself which he dare not tell to his dearest friend.” Thackeray showed himself a master in fiction by having no heroes; the paragons of virtue belonged to a cruder age of romance. So George Eliot represents life correctly by setting before us no perfect characters; all act from mixed motives. Carlyle, hero-worshiper as he was inclined to be, is said to have become disgusted with each of his heroes before he finished his biography. Emerson said that to understand any crime, he had only to look into his own heart. Robert Burns: “God knows I'm no thing I would be, Nor am I even the thing I could be.” Huxley: “The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.” And he speaks of “the infinite wickedness” which has attended the course of human history. Matthew Arnold: “What mortal, when he saw, Life's voyage done, his heavenly Friend, Could ever yet dare tell him fearlessly:—I have kept uninfringed [pg 576]my nature's law: The inly written chart thou gavest me, to guide me, I have kept by to the end?” Walter Besant, Children of Gibeon: “The men of ability do not desire a system in which they shall not be able to do good to themselves first.” “Ready to offer praise and prayer on Sunday, if on Monday they may go into the market place to skin their fellows and sell their hides.” Yet Confucius declares that “man is born good.” He confounds conscience with will—the sense of right with the love of right. Dean Swift's worthy sought many years for a method of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. Human nature of itself is as little able to bear the fruits of God.

Every man will grant (1) that he is not perfect in moral character; (2) that love to God has not been the constant motive of his actions, i. e., that he has been to some degree selfish; (3) that he has committed at least one known violation of conscience. Shedd, Sermons to the Natural Man, 86, 87—“Those theorists who reject revealed religion, and remand man to the first principles of ethics and morality as the only religion that he needs, send him to a tribunal that damns him”; for it is simple fact that “no human creature, in any country or grade of civilization, has ever glorified God to the extent of his knowledge of God.”

3. Proof from Christian experience.

(a) In proportion to his spiritual progress does the Christian recognize evil dispositions within him, which but for divine grace might germinate and bring forth the most various forms of outward transgression.

See Goodwin's experience, in Baird, Elohim Revealed, 409; Goodwin, member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, speaking of his conversion, says: “An abundant discovery was made to me of my inward lusts and concupiscence, and I was amazed to see with what greediness I had sought the gratification of every sin.” Töllner's experience, in Martensen's Dogmatics: Töllner, though inclined to Pelagianism, says: “I look into my own heart and I see with penitent sorrow that I must in God's sight accuse myself of all the offences I have named,”—and he had named only deliberate transgressions;—“he who does not allow that he is similarly guilty, let him look deep into his own heart.” John Newton sees the murderer led to execution, and says: “There, but for the grace of God, goes John Newton.” Count de Maistre: “I do not know what the heart of a villain may be—I only know that of a virtuous man, and that is frightful.”Tholuck, on the fiftieth anniversary of his professorship at Halle, said to his students: “In review of God's manifold blessings, the thing I seem most to thank him for is the conviction of sin.”

Roper Ascham: “By experience we find out a short way, by a long wandering.” Luke 15:25-32 is sometimes referred to as indicating that there are some of God's children who never wander from the Father's house. But there were two prodigals in that family. The elder was a servant in spirit as well as the younger. J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 41, 42—“In the wish of the elder son that he might sometimes feast with his own friends apart from his father, was contained the germ of that desire to escape the wholesome restraints of home which, in its full development, had brought his brother first to riotous living, and afterwards to the service of the stranger and the herding of swine. This root of sin is in us all, but in him it was not so full-grown as to bring death. Yet he says: ‘Lo, these many years do I serve thee’ (δουλεύω—as a bondservant), ‘and I never transgressed a commandment of thine.’ Are the father's commandments grievous? Is service true and sincere, without love from the heart? The elder brother was calculating toward his father and unsympathetic toward his brother.” Sir J. R. Seelye, Ecce Homo: “No virtue can be safe, unless it is enthusiastic.” Wordsworth: “Heaven rejects the love Of nicely calculated less or more.”

(b) Since those most enlightened by the Holy Spirit recognize themselves as guilty of unnumbered violations of the divine law, the absence of any consciousness of sin on the part of unregenerate men must be regarded as proof that they are blinded by persistent transgression.

It is a remarkable fact that, while those who are enlightened by the Holy Spirit and who are actually overcoming their sins see more and more of the evil of their hearts and lives, those who are the slaves of sin see less and less of that evil, and often deny that they are sinners at all. Rousseau, in his Confessions, confesses sin in a spirit which itself needs to be confessed. He glosses over his vices, and magnifies his virtues. “No [pg 577]man,” he says, “can come to the throne of God and say: ‘I am a better man than Rousseau.’... Let the trumpet of the last judgment sound when it will: I will present myself before the Sovereign Judge with this book in my hand, and I will say aloud: ‘Here is what I did, what I thought, and what I was.’ ” “Ah,” said he, just before he expired, “how happy a thing it is to die, when one has no reason for remorse or self-reproach!”And then, addressing himself to the Almighty, he said: “Eternal Being, the soul that I am going to give thee back is as pure at this moment as it was when it proceeded from thee; render it a partaker of thy felicity!” Yet, in his boyhood, Rousseau was a petty thief. In his writings, he advocated adultery and suicide. He lived for more than twenty years in practical licentiousness. His children, most of whom, if not all, were illegitimate, he sent off to the foundling hospital as soon as they were born, thus casting them upon the charity of strangers, yet he inflamed the mothers of France with his eloquent appeals to them to nurse their own babies. He was mean, vacillating, treacherous, hypocritical, and blasphemous. And in his Confessions, he rehearses the exciting scenes of his life in the spirit of the bold adventurer. See N. M. Williams, in Bap. Review, art.: Rousseau, from which the substance of the above is taken.

Edwin Forrest, when accused of being converted in a religious revival, wrote an indignant denial to the public press, saying that he had nothing to regret; his sins were those of omission rather than commission; he had always acted upon the principle of loving his friends and hating his enemies; and trusting in the justice as well as the mercy of God, he hoped, when he left this earthly sphere, to “wrap the drapery of his couch about him, and lie down to pleasant dreams.” And yet no man of his time was more arrogant, self-sufficient, licentious, revengeful. John Y. McCane, when sentenced to Sing Sing prison for six years for violating the election laws by the most highhanded bribery and ballot-stuffing, declared that he had never done anything wrong in his life. He was a Sunday School Superintendent, moreover. A lady who lived to the age of 92, protested that, if she had her whole life to live over again, she would not alter a single thing. Lord Nelson, after he had received his death wound at Trafalgar, said: “I have never been a great sinner.” Yet at that very time he was living in open adultery. Tennyson, Sea Dreams: “With all his conscience and one eye askew, So false, he partly took himself for true.” Contrast the utterance of the apostle Paul: 1 Tim. 1:15—“Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.” It has been well said that “the greatest of sins is to be conscious of none.” Rowland Hill: “The devil makes little of sin, that he may retain the sinner.”

The following reasons may be suggested for men's unconsciousness of their sins: 1. We never know the force of any evil passion or principle within us, until we begin to resist it. 2. God's providential restraints upon sin have hitherto prevented its full development. 3. God's judgments against sin have not yet been made manifest. 4. Sin itself has a blinding influence upon the mind. 5. Only he who has been saved from the penalty of sin is willing to look into the abyss from which he has been rescued.—That a man is unconscious of any sin is therefore only proof that he is a great and hardened transgressor. This is also the most hopeless feature of his case, since for one who never realizes his sin there is no salvation. In the light of this truth, we see the amazing grace of God, not only in the gift of Christ to die for sinners, but in the gift of the Holy Spirit to convince men of their sins and to lead them to accept the Savior. Ps. 90:8—“Thou hast set ... Our secret sins in the light of thy countenance” = man's inner sinfulness is hidden from himself, until it is contrasted with the holiness of God. Light = a luminary or sun, which shines down into the depths of the heart and brings out its hidden evil into painful relief. See Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:248-259; Edwards, Works, 2:326; John Caird, Reasons for Men's Unconsciousness of their Sins, in Sermons, 33.

II. Every member of the human race, without exception, possesses a corrupted nature, which is a source of actual sin, and is itself sin.

1. Proof from Scripture.

A. The sinful acts and dispositions of men are referred to, and explained by, a corrupt nature.

By “nature” we mean that which is born in a man, that which he has by birth. That there is an inborn corrupt state, from which sinful acts and dispositions flow, is evident [pg 578]from Luke 6:43-45—“there is no good tree that bringeth forth corrupt fruit.... the evil man out of the evil treasure [of his heart] bringeth forth that which is evil”; Mat. 12:34—“Ye offspring of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things?” Ps. 58:3—“The wicked are estranged from the womb: They go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies.”

This corrupt nature (a) belongs to man from the first moment of his being; (b) underlies man's consciousness; (c) cannot be changed by man's own power; (d) first constitutes him a sinner before God; (e) is the common heritage of the race.

(a) Ps. 51:5—“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me”—here David is confessing, not his mother's sin, but his own sin; and he declares that this sin goes back to the very moment of his conception. Tholuck, quoted by H. B. Smith, System, 281—“David confesses that sin begins with the life of man; that not only his works, but the man himself, is guilty before God.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:94—“David mentions the fact that he was born sinful, as an aggravation of his particular act of adultery, and not as an excuse for it.” (b) Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”; 51:6, 7—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom. Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” (c) Jer. 13:23—“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil”; Rom. 7:24—“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?” (d) Ps. 51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts”; Jer. 17:9—“The heart is deceitful above all things and it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it? I, Jehovah, search the mind, I try the heart,”—only God can fully know the native and incurable depravity of the human heart; see Annotated Paragraph Bible, in loco, (e) Job 14:4—“Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one”; John 3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh,” i. e., human nature sundered from God. Pope, Theology, 2:53—“Christ, who knew what was in man, says: ‘If ye then, being evil’(Mat. 7:11), and ‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh’ (John 3:6), that is—putting the two together—‘men are evil, because they are born evil.’ ”

Nathaniel Hawthorne's story of The Minister's Black Veil portrays the isolation of every man's deepest life, and the awe which any visible assertion of that isolation inspires. C. P. Cranch: “We are spirits clad in veils; Man by man was never seen; All our deep communing fails To remove the shadowy screen.” In the heart of every one of us is that fearful “black drop,” which the Koran says the angel showed to Mohammed. Sin is like the taint of scrofula in the blood, which shows itself in tumors, in consumption, in cancer, in manifold forms, but is everywhere the same organic evil. Byron spoke truly of “This ineradicable taint of sin, this boundless Upas, this all-blasting tree.”

E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theol., 161, 162—“The objection that conscience brings no charge of guilt against inborn depravity, however true it may be of the nature in its passive state, is seen, when the nature is roused to activity, to be unfounded. This faculty, on the contrary, lends support to the doctrine it is supposed to overthrow. When the conscience holds intelligent inquisition upon single acts, it soon discovers that these are mere accessories to crime, while the principal is hidden away beyond the reach of consciousness. In following up its inquisition, it in due time extorts the exclamation of David: Ps. 51:5—‘Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me.’ Conscience traces guilt to its seat in the inherited nature.”

B. All men are declared to be by nature children of wrath (Eph. 2:3). Here “nature” signifies something inborn and original, as distinguished from that which is subsequently acquired. The text implies that: (a) Sin is a nature, in the sense of a congenital depravity of the will. (b) This nature is guilty and condemnable,—since God's wrath rests only upon that which deserves it. (c) All men participate in this nature and in this consequent guilt and condemnation.

Eph. 2:3—“were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.” Shedd: “Nature here is not substance created by God, but corruption of that substance, which corruption is created by man.” “Nature” (from nascor) may denote anything inborn, and the term may just as properly designate inborn evil tendencies and state, as inborn faculties or substance. “By nature” therefore = “by birth”; compare Gal. 2:15—“Jews by nature.” E. G. Robinson: “Nature = not οὐσία, or essence, but only qualification of essence, as something born [pg 579]in us. There is just as much difference in babes, from the beginning of their existence, as there is in adults. If sin is defined as ‘voluntary transgression of known law,’ the definition of course disposes of original sin.” But if sin is a selfish state of the will, such a state is demonstrably inborn. Aristotle speaks of some men as born to be savages (φύσει βάρβαροι), and of others as destined by nature to be slaves (φύσει δοῦλοι). Here evidently is a congenital aptitude and disposition. Similarly we can interpret Paul's words as declaring nothing less than that men are possessed at birth of an aptitude and disposition which is the object of God's just displeasure.

The opposite view can be found in Stevens, Pauline Theology, 152-157. Principal Fairbairn also says that inherited sinfulness “is not transgression, and is without guilt.”Ritschl, Just. and Recon., 344—“The predicate ‘children of wrath’ refers to the former actual transgression of those who now as Christians have the right to apply to themselves that divine purpose of grace which is the antithesis of wrath.” Meyer interprets the verse; “We become children of wrath by following a natural propensity.” He claims the doctrine of the apostle to be, that man incurs the divine wrath by his actualsin, when he submits his will to the inborn sin principle. So N. W. Taylor, Concio ad Clerum, quoted in H. B. Smith, System, 281—“We were by nature such that we became through our own act children of wrath.” “But,” says Smith, “if the apostle had meant this, he could have said so; there is a proper Greek word for ‘became’; the word which is used can only be rendered ‘were.’ ” So 1 Cor. 7:14—“else were your children unclean”—implies that, apart from the operations of grace, all men are defiled in virtue of their very birth from a corrupt stock. Cloth is first died in the wool, and then dyed again after the weaving. Man is a “double-dyed villain.” He is corrupted by nature and afterwards by practice. The colored physician in New Orleans advertised that his method was “first to remove the disease, and then to eradicate the system.” The New School method of treating this text is of a similar sort. Beginning with a definition of sin which excludes from that category all inborn states of the will, it proceeds to vacate of their meaning the positive statements of Scripture.

For the proper interpretation of Eph. 2:3, see Julius Müller, Doct. of Sin, 2:278, and Commentaries of Harless and Olshausen. See also Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:212 sq.; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:289; and an excellent note in the Expositor's Greek N.T., in loco. Per contra, see Reuss, Christ. Theol. in Apost. Age, 2:29, 79-84; Weiss, Bib. Theol. N.T., 239.

C. Death, the penalty of sin, is visited even upon those who have never exercised a personal and conscious choice (Rom. 5:12-14). This text implies that (a) Sin exists in the case of infants prior to moral consciousness, and therefore in the nature, as distinguished from the personal activity. (b) Since infants die, this visitation of the penalty of sin upon them marks the ill-desert of that nature which contains in itself, though undeveloped, the germs of actual transgression. (c) It is therefore certain that a sinful, guilty, and condemnable nature belongs to all mankind.

Rom. 5:12-14—“Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned:—for until the law sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression”—that is, over those who, like infants, had never personally and consciously sinned. See a more full treatment of these last words in connection with an exegesis of the whole passage—Rom. 5:12-19—under Imputation of Sin, pages 625-627.

N. W. Taylor maintained that infants, prior to moral agency, are not subjects of the moral government of God, any more than are animals. In this he disagreed with Edwards, Bellamy, Hopkins, Dwight, Smalley, Griffin. See Tyler, Letters on N. E. Theol., 8, 132-142—“To say that animals die, and therefore death can be no proof of sin in infants, is to take infidel ground. The infidel has just as good a right to say: Because animals die without being sinners, therefore adults may. If death may reign to such an alarming extent over the human race and yet be no proof of sin, then you adopt the principle that death may reign to any extent over the universe, yet never can be made a proof of sin in any case.” We reserve our full proof that physical death is the penalty of sin to the section on Penalty as one of the Consequences of Sin.

2. Proof from Reason.

Three facts demand explanation: (a) The universal existence of sinful [pg 580] dispositions in every mind, and of sinful acts in every life. (b) The preponderating tendencies to evil, which necessitate the constant education of good impulses, while the bad grow of themselves. (c) The yielding of the will to temptation, and the actual violation of the divine law, in the case of every human being so soon as he reaches moral consciousness.

The fundamental selfishness of man is seen in childhood, when human nature acts itself out spontaneously. It is difficult to develop courtesy in children. There can be no true courtesy without regard for man as man and willingness to accord to each man his place and right as a son of God equal with ourselves. But children wish to please themselves without regard to others. The mother asks the child: “Why don't you do right instead of doing wrong?” and the child answers: “Because it makes me so tired,” or “Because I do wrong without trying.” Nothing runs itself, unless it is going down hill. “No other animal does things habitually that will injure and destroy it, and does them from the love of it. But man does this, and he is born to do it, he does it from birth. As the seedlings of the peach-tree are all peaches, not apples, and those of thorns are all thorns, not grapes, so all the descendants of man are born with evil in their natures. That sin continually comes back to us, like a dog or cat that has been driven away, proves that our hearts are its home.”

Mrs. Humphrey Ward's novel, Robert Elsmere, represents the milk-and-water school of philanthropists. “Give man a chance,” they say; “give him good example and favorable environment and he will turn out well. He is more sinned against than sinning. It is the outward presence of evil that drives men to evil courses.” But God's indictment is found in Rom. 8:7—“the mind of the flesh is enmity against God.” G. P. Fisher: “Of the ideas of natural religion, Plato, Plutarch and Cicero found in the fact that they are in man's reason, but not obeyed and realized in man's will, the most convincing evidence that humanity is at schism with itself, and therefore depraved, fallen, and unable to deliver itself. The reason why many moralists fail and grow bitter and hateful is that they do not take account of this state of sin.”

Reason seeks an underlying principle which will reduce these multitudinous phenomena to unity. As we are compelled to refer common physical and intellectual phenomena to a common physical and intellectual nature, so we are compelled to refer these common moral phenomena to a common moral nature, and to find in it the cause of this universal, spontaneous, and all-controlling opposition to God and his law. The only possible solution of the problem is this, that the common nature of mankind is corrupt, or, in other words, that the human will, prior to the single volitions of the individual, is turned away from God and supremely set upon self-gratification. This unconscious and fundamental direction of the will, as the source of actual sin, must itself be sin; and of this sin all mankind are partakers.

The greatest thinkers of the world have certified to the correctness of this conclusion. See Aristotle's doctrine of “the slope,” described in Chase's Introduction to Aristotle's Ethics, XXXV and 32—“In regard to moral virtue, man stands on a slope. His appetites and passions gravitate downward; his reason attracts him upward. Conflict occurs. A step upward, and reason gains what passion has lost; but the reverse is the case if he steps downward. The tendency in the former case is to the entire subjection of passion; in the latter case, to the entire suppression of reason. The slope will terminate upwards in a level summit where men's steps will be secure, or downwards in an irretrievable plunge over the precipice. Continual self-control leads to absolute self-mastery; continual failure, to the utter absence of self-control. But all we can see is the slope. No man is ever at the ἠρεμία of the summit, nor can we say that a man has irretrievably fallen into the abyss. How it is that men constantly act against their own convictions of what is right, and their previous determinations to follow right, is a mystery Which Aristotle discusses, but leaves unexplained.

“Compare the passage in the Ethics, 1:11—‘Clearly there is in them [men], besides the Reason, some other Inborn principle (πεφυκός) which fights with and strains against the Reason.... There is in the soul also somewhat besides the Reason which is [pg 581]opposed to this and goes against it.’—Compare this passage with Paul, in Rom. 7:23—‘I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members.’ But as Aristotle does not explain the cause, so he suggests no cure. Revelation alone can account for the disease, or point out the remedy.”

Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:102—“Aristotle makes the significant and almost surprising observation, that the character which has become evil by guilt can just as little be thrown off again at mere volition, as the person who has made himself sick by his own fault can become well again at mere volition; once become evil or sick, it stands no longer within his discretion to cease to be so; a stone, when once cast, cannot be caught back from its flight; and so is it with the character that has become evil.” He does not tell “how a reformation in character is possible,—moreover, he does not concede to evil any other than an individual effect,—knows nothing of any natural solidarity of evil in self-propagating, morally degenerated races” (Nic. Eth., 3:6, 7; 5:12; 7:2, 3; 10:10). The good nature, he says, “is evidently not within our power, but is by some kind of divine causality conferred upon the truly happy.”

Plato speaks of “that blind, many-headed wild beast of all that is evil within thee.”He repudiates the idea that men are naturally good, and says that, if this were true, all that would be needed to make them holy would be to shut them up, from their earliest years, so that they might not be corrupted by others. Republic, 4 (Jowett's translation, 11:276)—“There is a rising up of part of the soul against the whole of the soul.”Meno, 89—“The cause of corruption is from our parents, so that we never relinquish their evil way, or escape the blemish of their evil habit.” Horace, Ep., 1:10—“Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.” Latin proverb: “Nemo repente fuit turpissimus.”Pascal: “We are born unrighteous; for each one tends to himself, and the bent toward self is the beginning of all disorder.” Kant, in his Metaphysical Principles of Human Morals, speaks of “the indwelling of an evil principle side by side with the good one, or the radical evil of human nature,” and of “the contest between the good and the evil principles for the control of man.” “Hegel, pantheist as he was, declared that original sin is the nature of every man,—every man begins with it” (H. B. Smith).

Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 4:3—“All is oblique: There's nothing level in our cursed natures, But direct villainy.” All's Well, 4:3—“As we are in ourselves, how weak we are! Merely our own traitors.” Measure for Measure, 1:2—“Our natures do pursue, Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, A thirsty evil, and when we drink, we die.” Hamlet, 3:1—“Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it.” Love's Labor Lost, 1:1—“Every man with his affects is born, Not by might mastered, but by special grace.” Winter's Tale, 1:2—“We should have answered Heaven boldly, Not guilty; the imposition cleared Hereditary ours”—that is, provided our hereditary connection with Adam had not made us guilty. On the theology of Shakespeare, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 196-211—“If any think it irrational to believe in man's depravity, guilt, and need of supernatural redemption, they must also be prepared to say that Shakespeare did not understand human nature.”

S. T. Coleridge, Omniana, at the end: “It is a fundamental article of Christianity that I am a fallen creature ... that an evil ground existed in my will, previously to any act or assignable moment of time in my consciousness; I am born a child of wrath. This fearful mystery I pretend not to understand. I cannot even conceive the possibility of it; but I know that it is so, ... and what is real must be possible.” A sceptic who gave his children no religious training, with the view of letting them each in mature years choose a faith for himself, reproved Coleridge for letting his garden run to weeds; but Coleridge replied, that he did not think it right to prejudice the soil in favor of roses and strawberries. Van Oosterzee: Rain and sunshine make weeds grow more quickly, but could not draw them out of the soil if the seeds did not lie there already; so evil education and example draw out sin, but do not implant it. Tennyson, Two Voices: “He finds a baseness in his blood, At such strange war with what is good, He cannot do the thing he would.” Robert Browning, Gold Hair: a Legend of Pornic: “The faith that launched point-blank her dart At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin, The corruption of Man's Heart.” Taine, Ancien Régime: “Savage, brigand and madman each of us harbors, in repose or manacled, but always living, in the recesses of his own heart.” Alexander Maclaren: “A great mass of knotted weeds growing in a stagnant pool is dragged toward you as you drag one filament.” Draw out one sin, and it brings with it the whole matted nature of sin.

Chief Justice Thompson, of Pennsylvania: “If those who preach had been lawyers previous to entering the ministry, they would know and say far more about the depravity [pg 582]of the human heart than they do. The old doctrine of total depravity is the only thing that can explain the falsehoods, the dishonesties, the licentiousness, and the murders which are so rife in the world. Education, refinement, and even a high order of talent, cannot overcome the inclination to evil which exists in the heart, and has taken possession of the very fibres of our nature.” See Edwards, Original Sin, in Works, 2:309-510; Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:259-307; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:231-238; Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 226-236.

Section IV.—Origin Of Sin In The Personal Act Of Adam.

With regard to the origin of this sinful nature which is common to the race, and which is the occasion of all actual transgressions, reason affords no light. The Scriptures, however, refer the origin of this nature to that free act of our first parents by which they turned away from God, corrupted themselves, and brought themselves under the penalties of the law.

Chandler, Spirit of Man, 76—“It is vain to attempt to sever the moral life of Christianity from the historical fact in which it is rooted. We may cordially assent to the assertion that the whole value of historical events is in their ideal significance. But in many cases, part of that which the idea signifies is the fact that it has been exhibited in history. The value and interest of the conquest of Greece over Persia lie in the significant idea of freedom and intelligence triumphing over despotic force; but surely a part, and a very important part, of the idea, is the fact that this triumph was won in a historical past, and the encouragement for the present which rests upon that fact. So too, the value of Christ's resurrection lies in its immense moral significance as a principle of life; but an essential part of that very significance is the fact that the principle was actually realized by One in whom mankind was summed up and expressed, and by whom, therefore, the power of realizing it is conferred on all who receive him.”

As it is important for us to know that redemption is not only ideal but actual, so it is important for us to know that sin is not an inevitable accompaniment of human nature, but that it had a historical beginning. Yet no a priori theory should prejudice our examination of the facts. We would preface our consideration of the Scriptural account, therefore, by stating that our view of inspiration would permit us to regard that account as inspired, even if it were mythical or allegorical. As God can use all methods of literary composition, so he can use all methods of instructing mankind that are consistent with essential truth. George Adam Smith observes that the myths and legends of primitive folk-lore are the intellectual equivalents of later philosophies and theories of the universe, and that “at no time has revelation refused to employ such human conceptions for the investiture and conveyance of the higher spiritual truths.” Sylvester Burnham: “Fiction and myth have not yet lost their value for the moral and religious teacher. What a knowledge of his own nature has shown man to be good for his own use, God surely may also have found to be good for his use. Nor would it of necessity affect the value of the Bible if the writer, in using for his purpose myth or fiction, supposed that he was using history. Only when the value of the truth of the teaching depends upon the historicity of the alleged fact, does it become impossible to use myth or fiction for the purpose of teaching.” See vol. 1, page 241 of this work, with quotations from Denney, Studies in Theology, 218, and Gore, in Lux Mundi, 356. Euripides: “Thou God of all! infuse light into the souls of men, whereby they may be enabled to know what is the root from which all their evils spring, and by what means they may avoid them!”

I. The Scriptural Account of the Temptation and Fall in Genesis 3:1-7.

1. Its general, character not mythical or allegorical, but historical.

We adopt this view for the following reasons:—(a) There is no intimation in the account itself that it is not historical. (b) As a part of a [pg 583] historical book, the presumption is that it is itself historical. (c) The later Scripture writers refer to it as a veritable history even in its details. (d) Particular features of the narrative, such as the placing of our first parents in a garden and the speaking of the tempter through a serpent-form, are incidents suitable to man's condition of innocent but untried childhood. (e) This view that the narrative is historical does not forbid our assuming that the trees of life and of knowledge were symbols of spiritual truths, while at the same time they were outward realities.

See John 8:44—“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father it is your will to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and standeth not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the father thereof”; 2 Cor. 11:3—“the serpent beguiled Eve in his craftiness”; Rev. 20:2—“the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan.” H. B. Smith, System, 261—“If Christ's temptation and victory over Satan were historical events, there seems to be no ground for supposing that the first temptation was not a historical event.” We believe in the unity and sufficiency of Scripture. We moreover regard the testimony of Christ and the apostles as conclusive with regard to the historicity of the account in Genesis. We assume a divine superintendence in the choice of material by its author, and the fulfilment to the apostles of Christ's promise that they should be guided into the truth. Paul's doctrine of sin is so manifestly based upon the historical character of the Genesis story, that the denial of the one must naturally lead to the denial of the other. John Milton writes, in his Areopagitica: “It was from out of the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into, that is to say, of knowing good by evil.” He should have learned to know evil as God knows it—as a thing possible, hateful, and forever rejected. He actually learned to know evil as Satan knows it—by making it actual and matter of bitter experience.

Infantile and innocent man found his fit place and work in a garden. The language of appearances is doubtless used. Satan might enter into a brute-form, and might appear to speak through it. In all languages, the stories of brutes speaking show that such a temptation is congruous with the condition of early man. Asiatic myths agree in representing the serpent as the emblem of the spirit of evil. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was the symbol of God's right of eminent domain, and indicated that all belonged to him. It is not necessary to suppose that it was known by this name before the Fall. By means of it man came to know good, by the loss of it; to know evil, by bitter experience; C. H. M.: “To know good, without the power to do it; to know evil, without the power to avoid it.” Bible Com., 1:40—The tree of life was symbol of the fact that “life is to be sought, not from within, from himself, in his own powers or faculties; but from that which is without him, even from him who hath life in himself.”

As the water of baptism and the bread of the Lord's supper, though themselves common things, are symbolic of the greatest truths, so the tree of knowledge and the tree of life were sacramental. McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 99-141—“The two trees represented good and evil. The prohibition of the latter was a declaration that man of himself could not distinguish between good and evil, and must trust divine guidance. Satan urged man to discern between good and evil by his own wisdom, and so become independent of God. Sin is the attempt of the creature to exercise God's attribute of discerning and choosing between good and evil by his own wisdom. It is therefore self-conceit, self-trust, self-assertion, the preference of his own wisdom and will to the wisdom and will of God.” McIlvaine refers to Lord Bacon, Works, 1:82, 162. See also Pope, Theology, 2:10, 11; Boston Lectures for 1871:80, 81.

Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 142, on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—“When for the first time man stood face to face with definite conscious temptation to do that which he knew to be wrong, he held in his hand the fruit of that tree, and his destiny as a moral being hung trembling in the balance. And when for the first time he succumbed to temptation and faint dawnings of remorse visited his heart, at that moment he was banished from the Eden of innocence, in which his nature had hitherto dwelt, and he was driven forth from the presence of the Lord.” With the first sin, was started another and a downward course of development. For the mythical or allegorical explanation of the narrative, see also Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 164, 165, and Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, 218.

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2. The course of the temptation, and the resulting fall.

The stages of the temptation appear to have been as follows:

(a) An appeal on the part of Satan to innocent appetites, together with an implied suggestion that God was arbitrarily withholding the means of their gratification (Gen. 3:1). The first sin was in Eve's isolating herself and choosing to seek her own pleasure without regard to God's will. This initial selfishness it was, which led her to listen to the tempter instead of rebuking him or flying from him, and to exaggerate the divine command in her response (Gen. 3:3).

Gen. 3:1—“Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of any tree of the garden?” Satan emphasizes the limitation, but is silent with regard to the generous permission—“Of every tree of the garden [but one] thou mayest freely eat” (2:16). C. H. M., in loco: “To admit the question ‘hath God said?’is already positive infidelity. To add to God's word is as bad as to take from it. ‘Hath God said?’ is quickly followed by ‘Ye shall not surely die.’ Questioning whether God has spoken, results in open contradiction of what God has said. Eve suffered God's word to be contradicted by a creature, only because she had abjured its authority over her conscience and heart.” The command was simply: “thou shalt not eat of it” (Gen. 2:17). In her rising dislike to the authority she had renounced, she exaggerates the command into: “Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it” (Gen. 3:3). Here is already self-isolation, instead of love. Matheson, Messages of the Old Religions, 318—“Ere ever the human soul disobeyed, it had learned to distrust.... Before it violated the existing law, it had come to think of the Lawgiver as one who was jealous of his creatures.” Dr. C. H. Parkhurst: “The first question ever asked in human history was asked by the devil, and the interrogation point still has in it the trail of the serpent.”

(b) A denial of the veracity of God, on the part of the tempter, with a charge against the Almighty of jealousy and fraud in keeping his creatures in a position of ignorance and dependence (Gen. 3:4, 5). This was followed, on the part of the woman, by positive unbelief, and by a conscious and presumptuous cherishing of desire for the forbidden fruit, as a means of independence and knowledge. Thus unbelief, pride, and lust all sprang from the self-isolating, self-seeking spirit, and fastened upon the means of gratifying it (Gen. 3:6).

Gen. 3:4, 5—“And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil”; 3:6—“And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat; and she gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat”—so “taking the word of a Professor of Lying, that he does not lie” (John Henry Newman). Hooker, Eccl. Polity, book I—“To live by one man's will became the cause of all men's misery.” Godet on John 1:4—“In the words ‘life’ and ‘light’ it is natural to see an allusion to the tree of life and to that of knowledge. After having eaten of the former, man would have been called to feed on the second. John initiates us into the real essence of these primordial and mysterious facts and gives us in this verse, as it were, the philosophy of Paradise.” Obedience is the way to knowledge, and the sin of Paradise was the seeking of light without life; cf. John 7:17—“If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or whether I speak from myself.”

(c) The tempter needed no longer to urge his suit. Having poisoned the fountain, the stream would naturally be evil. Since the heart and its desires had become corrupt, the inward disposition manifested itself in act (Gen. 3:6—“did eat; and she gave also unto her husband with her” = who had been with her, and had shared her choice and longing). Thus man fell inwardly, before the outward act of eating the forbidden fruit,—fell in that one fundamental determination whereby he made supreme choice of self instead of God. This sin of the inmost nature gave rise to sins of the [pg 585] desires, and sins of the desires led to the outward act of transgression (James 1:15).

James 1:15—“Then the lust, when it hath conceived, beareth sin.” Baird, Elohim Revealed, 888—“The law of God had already been violated; man was fallen before the fruit had been plucked, or the rebellion had been thus signalized. The law required not only outward obedience but fealty of the heart, and this was withdrawn before any outward token indicated the change.” Would he part company with God, or with his wife? When the Indian asked the missionary where his ancestors were, and was told that they were in hell, he replied that he would go with his ancestors. He preferred hell with his tribe to heaven with God. Sapphira, in like manner, had opportunity given her to part company with her husband, but she preferred him to God; Acts 5:7-11.

Philippi, Glaubenslehre: “So man became like God, a setter of law to himself. Man's self-elevation to godhood was his fall. God's self-humiliation to manhood was man's restoration and elevation.... Gen. 3:22—‘The man has become as one of us’ in his condition of self-centered activity,—thereby losing all real likeness to God, which consists in having the same aim with God himself. De te fabula narratur; it is the condition, not of one alone, but of all the race.” Sin once brought into being is self-propagating; its seed is in itself: the centuries of misery and crime that have followed have only shown what endless possibilities of evil were wrapped up in that single sin. Keble: “'Twas but a little drop of sin We saw this morning enter in, And lo, at eventide a world is drowned!” Farrar, Fall of Man: “The guilty wish of one woman has swollen into the irremediable corruption of a world.” See Oehler, O.T. Theology, 1:231; Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:381-385; Edwards, on Original Sin, part 4, chap. 2; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:168-180.

II. Difficulties connected with the Fall considered as the personal Act of Adam.

1. How could a holy being fall?

Here we must acknowledge that we cannot understand how the first unholy emotion could have found lodgment in a mind that was set supremely upon God, nor how temptation could have overcome a soul in which there were no unholy propensities to which it could appeal. The mere power of choice does not explain the fact of an unholy choice. The fact of natural desire for sensuous and intellectual gratification does not explain how this desire came to be inordinate. Nor does it throw light upon the matter, to resolve this fall into a deception of our first parents by Satan. Their yielding to such deception presupposes distrust of God and alienation from him. Satan's fall, moreover, since it must have been uncaused by temptation from without, is more difficult to explain than Adam's fall.

We may distinguish six incorrect explanations of the origin of sin: 1. Emmons: Sin is due to God's efficiency—God wrought the sin in man's heart. This is the “exercise system,” and is essentially pantheistic. 2. Edwards: Sin is due to God's providence—God caused the sin indirectly by presenting motives. This explanation has all the difficulties of determinism. 3. Augustine: Sin is the result of God's withdrawal from man's soul. But inevitable sin is not sin, and the blame of it rests on God who withdrew the grace needed for obedience, 4. Pfleiderer: The fall results from man's already existing sinfulness. The fault then belongs, not to man, but to God who made man sinful. 5. Hadley: Sin is due to man's moral insanity. But such concreated ethical defect would render sin impossible. Insanity is the effect of sin, but not its cause. 6. Newman: Sin is due to man's weakness. It is a negative, not a positive, thing, an incident of finiteness. But conscience and Scripture testify that it is positive as well as negative, opposition to God as well as non-conformity to God.

Emmons was really a pantheist: “Since God,” he says, “works in all men both to will and to do of his good pleasure, it is as easy to account for the first offence of Adam as for any other sin.... There is no difficulty respecting the fall of Adam from his [pg 586]original state of perfection and purity into a state of sin and guilt, which is in any way peculiar.... It is as consistent with the moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy exercises in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence to make moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as he pleases.... There is but one satisfactory answer to the question Whence came evil? and that is: It came from the great first Cause of all things”; see Nathaniel Emmons, Works, 2:683.

Jonathan Edwards also denied power to the contrary even in Adam's first sin. God did not immediately cause that sin. But God was active in the region of motives though his action was not seen. Freedom of the Will, 161—“It was fitting that the transaction should so take place that it might not appear to be from God as the apparent fountain.” Yet “God may actually in his providence so dispose and permit things that the event may be certainly and infallibly connected with such disposal and permission”; see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 304. Encyc. Britannica, 7:690—“According to Edwards, Adam had two principles,—natural and supernatural. When Adam sinned, the supernatural or divine principle was withdrawn from him, and thus his nature became corrupt without God infusing any evil thing into it. His posterity came into being entirely under the government of natural and inferior principles. But this solves the difficulty of making God the author of sin only at the expense of denying to sin any real existence, and also destroys Edwards's essential distinction between natural and moral ability.” Edwards on Trinity, Fisher's edition, 44—“The sun does not cause darkness and cold, when these follow infallibly upon the withdrawal of his beams. God's disposing the result is not a positive exertion on his part.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:50—“God did not withdraw the common supporting grace of his Spirit from Adam until after transgression.” To us Adam's act was irrational, but not impossible; to a determinist like Edwards, who held that men simply act out their characters, Adam's act should have been not only irrational, but impossible. Edwards nowhere shows how, according to his principles, a holy being could possibly fall.

Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 123—“The account of the fall is the first appearance of an already existing sinfulness, and a typical example of the way in which every individual becomes sinful. Original sin is simply the universality and originality of sin. There is no such thing as indeterminism. The will can lift itself from natural unfreedom, the unfreedom of the natural impulses, to real spiritual freedom, only by distinguishing itself from the law which sets before it its true end of being. The opposition of nature to the law reveals an original nature power which precedes all free self-determination. Sin is the evil bent of lawless self-willed selfishness.” Pfleiderer appears to make this sinfulness concreated, and guiltless, because proceeding from God. Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 288—“The wide discrepancy between precept and practice gives rise to the theological conception of sin, which, in low types of religion, is as often a violation of some trivial prescription as it is of an ethical principle. The presence of sin, contrasted with a state of innocence, occasions the idea of a fall, or lapse from a sinless condition. This is not incompatible with man's derivation from an animal ancestry, which prior to the rise of self-consciousness may be regarded as having been in a state of moral innocence, the sense and reality of sin being impossible to the animal.... The existence of sin, both as an inherent disposition, and as a perverted form of action, may be explained as a survival of animal propensity in human life.... Sin is the disturbance of higher life by the intrusion of lower.”

Professor James Hadley: “Every man is more or less insane.” We prefer to say: Every man, so far as he is apart from God, is morally insane. But we must not make sin the result of insanity. Insanity is the result of sin. Insanity, moreover, is a physical disease,—sin is a perversion of the will. John Henry Newman, Idea of a University, 60—“Evil has no substance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, perversion or corruption of that which has substance.” Augustine seems at times to favor this view. He maintains that evil has no origin, inasmuch as it is negative, not positive; that it is merely defect or failure. He illustrates it by the damaged state of a discordant harp; see Moule, Outlines of Theology, 171. So too A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 190, tells us that Adam's will was like a violin in tune, which through mere inattention and neglect got out of tune at last. But here, too, we must say with E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 124—“Sin explained is sin defended.” All these explanations fail to explain, and throw the blame of sin upon God, as directly or indirectly its cause.

But sin is an existing fact. God cannot be its author, either by creating man's nature so that sin was a necessary incident of its development, or by withdrawing a supernatural grace which was necessary to keep man holy. [pg 587] Reason, therefore, has no other recourse than to accept the Scripture doctrine that sin originated in man's free act of revolt from God—the act of a will which, though inclined toward God, was not yet confirmed in virtue and was still capable of a contrary choice. The original possession of such power to the contrary seems to be the necessary condition of probation and moral development. Yet the exercise of this power in a sinful direction can never be explained upon grounds of reason, since sin is essentially unreason. It is an act of wicked arbitrariness, the only motive of which is the desire to depart from God and to render self supreme.

Sin is a “mystery of lawlessness” (2 Thess. 2:7), at the beginning, as well as at the end. Neander, Planting and Training, 388—“Whoever explains sin nullifies it.” Man's power at the beginning to choose evil does not prove that, now that he has fallen, he has equal power of himself permanently to choose good. Because man has power to cast himself from the top of a precipice to the bottom, it does not follow that he has equal power to transport himself from the bottom to the top.

Man fell by wilful resistance to the inworking God. Christ is in all men as he was in Adam, and all good impulses are due to him. Since the Holy Spirit is the Christ within, all men are the subjects of his striving. He does not withdraw from them except upon, and in consequence of, their withdrawing from him. John Milton makes the Almighty say of Adam's sin: “Whose fault? Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me All he could have; I made him just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. Such I created all the Etherial Powers, And Spirits, both them who stood and them who failed; Freely they stood who stood, and fell who failed.” The word “cussedness”has become an apt word here. The Standard Dictionary defines it as “1. Cursedness, meanness, perverseness; 2. resolute courage, endurance: ‘Jim Bludsoe's voice was heard, And they all had trust in his cussedness And knowed he would keep his word.’ ”(John Hay, Jim Bludsoe, stanza 6). Not the last, but the first, of these definitions best describes the first sin. The most thorough and satisfactory treatment of the fall of man in connection with the doctrine of evolution is found in Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 73-240.

Hodge, Essays and Reviews, 30—“There is a broad difference between the commencement of holiness and the commencement of sin, and more is necessary for the former than for the latter. An act of obedience, if it is performed under the mere impulse of self-love, is virtually no act of obedience. It is not performed with any intention to obey, for that is holy, and cannot, according to the theory, precede the act. But an act of disobedience, performed from the desire of happiness, is rebellion. The cases are surely different. If, to please myself, I do what God commands, it is not holiness; but if, to please myself, I do what he forbids, it is sin. Besides, no creature is immutable. Though created holy, the taste for holy enjoyments may be overcome by a temptation sufficiently insidious and powerful, and a selfish motive or feeling excited in the mind. Neither is a sinful character immutable. By the power of the Holy Spirit, the truth may be clearly presented and so effectually applied as to produce that change which is called regeneration; that is, to call into existence a taste for holiness, so that it is chosen for its own sake, and not as a means of happiness.”

H. B. Smith, System, 262—“The state of the case, as far as we can enter into Adam's experience, is this: Before the command, there was the state of love without the thought of the opposite: a knowledge of good only, a yet unconscious goodness: there was also the knowledge that the eating of the fruit was against the divine command. The temptation aroused pride; the yielding to that was the sin. The change was there. The change was not in the choice as an executive act, nor in the result of that act—the eating; but in the choice of supreme love to the world and self, rather than supreme devotion to God. It was an immanent preference of the world,—not a love of the world following the choice, but a love of the world which is the choice itself.”

263—“We cannot account for Adam's fall, psychologically. In saying this we mean: It is inexplicable by anything outside itself. We must receive the fact as ultimate, and rest there. Of course we do not mean that it was not in accordance with the laws of moral agency—that it was a violation of those laws: but only that we do not see the mode, that we cannot construct it for ourselves in a rational way. It differs from all other similar cases of ultimate preference which we know; viz., the sinner's immanent preference of the world, where we know there is an antecedent ground in the bias to [pg 588]sin, and the Christian's regeneration, or immanent preference of God, where we know there is an influence from without, the working of the Holy Spirit.” 264—“We must leave the whole question with the immanent preference standing forth as the ultimate fact in the case, which is not to be constructed philosophically, as far as the processes of Adam's soul are concerned: we must regard that immanent preference as both a choice and an affection, not an affection the result of a choice, not a choice which is the consequence of an affection, but both together.”

In one particular, however, we must differ with H. B. Smith: Since the power of voluntary internal movement is the power of the will, we must regard the change from good to evil as primarily a choice, and only secondarily a state of affection caused thereby. Only by postulating a free and conscious act of transgression on the part of Adam, an act which bears to evil affection the relation not of effect but of cause, do we reach, at the beginning of human development, a proper basis for the responsibility and guilt of Adam and the race. See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:148-167.

2. How could God justly permit Satanic temptation?

We see in this permission not justice but benevolence.

(a) Since Satan fell without external temptation, it is probable that man's trial would have been substantially the same, even though there had been no Satan to tempt him.

Angels had no animal nature to obscure the vision; they could not be influenced through sense; yet they were tempted and they fell. As Satan and Adam sinned under the best possible circumstances, we may conclude that the human race would have sinned with equal certainty. The only question at the time of their creation, therefore, was how to modify the conditions so as best to pave the way for repentance and pardon. These conditions are: 1. a material body—which means confinement, limitation, need of self-restraint; 2. infancy—which means development, deliberation, with no memory of the first sin; 3. the parental relation—repressing the wilfulness of the child, and teaching submission to authority.

(b) In this case, however, man's fall would perhaps have been without what now constitutes its single mitigating circumstance. Self-originated sin would have made man himself a Satan.

Mat. 13:28—“An enemy hath done this.” “God permitted Satan to divide the guilt with man, so that man might be saved from despair.” See Trench, Studies in the Gospels, 16-29. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 103—“Why was not the tree made outwardly repulsive? Because only the abuse of that which was positively good and desirable could have attractiveness for Adam or could constitute a real temptation.”

(c) As, in the conflict with temptation, it is an advantage to objectify evil under the image of corruptible flesh, so it is an advantage to meet it as embodied in a personal and seducing spirit.

Man's body, corruptible and perishable as it is, furnishes him with an illustration and reminder of the condition of soul to which sin has reduced him. The flesh, with its burdens and pains, is thus, under God, a help to the distinct recognition and overcoming of sin. So it was an advantage to man to have temptation confined to a single external voice. We may say of the influence of the tempter, as Birks, in his Difficulties of Belief, 101, says of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: “Temptation did not depend upon the tree. Temptation was certain in any event. The tree was a type into which God contracted the possibilities of evil, so as to strip them of delusive vastness, and connect them with definite and palpable warning,—to show man that it was only one of the many possible activities of his spirit which was forbidden, that God had right to all and could forbid all.” The originality of sin was the most fascinating element in it. It afforded boundless range for the imagination. Luther did well to throw his inkstand at the devil. It was an advantage to localize him. The concentration of the human powers upon a definite offer of evil helps our understanding of the evil and increases our disposition to resist it.

(d) Such temptation has in itself no tendency to lead the soul astray. If [pg 589] the soul be holy, temptation may only confirm it in virtue. Only the evil will, self-determined against God, can turn temptation into an occasion of ruin.

As the sun's heat has no tendency to wither the plant rooted in deep and moist soil, but only causes it to send down its roots the deeper and to fasten itself the more strongly, so temptation has in itself no tendency to pervert the soul. It was only the seeds that “fell upon the rocky places, where they had not much earth” (Mat. 13:5, 6), that “were scorched”when “the sun was risen”; and our Lord attributes their failure, not to the sun, but to their lack of root and of soil: “because they had no root,” “because they had no deepness of earth.” The same temptation which occasions the ruin of the false disciple stimulates to sturdy growth the virtue of the true Christian. Contrast with the temptation of Adam the temptation of Christ. Adam had everything to plead for God, the garden and its delights, while Christ had everything to plead against him, the wilderness and its privations. But Adam had confidence in Satan, while Christ had confidence in God; and the result was in the former case defeat, in the latter victory. See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 385-396.

C. H. Spurgeon: “All the sea outside a ship can do it no damage till the water enters and fills the hold. Hence, it is clear, our greatest danger is within. All the devils in hell and tempters on earth could do us no injury, if there were no corruption in our own natures. The sparks will fly harmlessly, if there is no tinder. Alas, our heart is our greatest enemy; this is the little home-born thief. Lord, save me from that evil man, myself!”

Lyman Abbott: “The scorn of goody-goody is justified; for goody-goody is innocence, not virtue; and the boy who never does anything wrong because he never does anything at all is of no use in the world.... Sin is not a help in development; it is a hindrance. But temptation is a help; it is an indispensable means.” E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 123—“Temptation in the bad sense and a fall from innocence were no more necessary to the perfection of the first man, than a marring of any one's character is now necessary to its completeness.” John Milton, Areopagitica: “Many there be that complain of divine providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions” (puppet shows). Robert Browning, Ring and the Book, 204 (Pope, 1183)—“Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time! Why comes temptation but for man to meet And master and make crouch beneath his foot, And so be pedestaled in triumph? Pray ‘Lead us into no such temptations. Lord’? Yea, but, O thou whose servants are the bold, Lead such temptations by the head and hair, Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight, That so he may do battle and have praise!”

3. How could a penalty so great be justly connected with disobedience to so slight a command?

To this question we may reply:

(a) So slight a command presented the best test of the spirit of obedience.

Cicero: “Parva res est, at magna culpa.” The child's persistent disobedience in one single respect to the mother's command shows that in all his other acts of seeming obedience he does nothing for his mother's sake, but all for his own,—shows, in other words, that he does not possess the spirit of obedience in a single act. S. S. Times: “Trifles are trifles only to triflers. Awake to the significance of the insignificant! for you are in a world that belongs not alone to the God of the Infinite, but also to the God of the infinitesimal.”

(b) The external command was not arbitrary or insignificant in its substance. It was a concrete presentation to the human will of God's claim to eminent domain or absolute ownership.

John Hall, Lectures on the Religious rise of Property, 10—“It sometimes happens that owners of land, meaning to give the use of it to others, without alienating it, impose a nominal rent—a quit-rent, the passing of which acknowledges the recipient as owner and the occupier as tenant. This is understood in all lands. In many an old English deed, ‘three barley-corns,’ ‘a fat capon,’ or ‘a shilling,’ is the consideration [pg 590]which permanently recognizes the rights of lordship. God taught men by the forbidden tree that he was owner, that man was occupier. He selected the matter of property to be the test of man's obedience, the outward and sensible sign of a right state of heart toward God; and when man put forth his hand and did eat, he denied God's ownership and asserted his own. Nothing remained but to eject him.”

(c) The sanction attached to the command shows that man was not left ignorant of its meaning or importance.

Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Cf. Gen. 3:3—“the tree which is in the midst of the garden”; and see Dodge, Christian Theology, 206, 207—“The tree was central, as the commandment was central. The choice was between the tree of life and the tree of death,—between self and God. Taking the one was rejecting the other.”

(d) The act of disobedience was therefore the revelation of a will thoroughly corrupted and alienated from God—a will given over to ingratitude, unbelief, ambition, and rebellion.

The motive to disobedience was not appetite, but the ambition to be as God. The outward act of eating the forbidden fruit was only the thin edge of the wedge, behind which lay the whole mass—the fundamental determination to isolate self and to seek personal pleasure regardless of God and his law. So the man under conviction for sin commonly clings to some single passion or plan, only half-conscious of the fact that opposition to God in one thing is opposition in all.

III. Consequences of the Fall, so far as respects Adam.

1. Death.

This death was twofold. It was partly:

A. Physical death, or the separation of the soul from the body.—The seeds of death, naturally implanted in man's constitution, began to develop themselves the moment that access to the tree of life was denied him. Man from that moment was a dying creature.

In a true sense death began at once. To it belonged the pains which both man and woman should suffer in their appointed callings. The fact that man's earthly existence did not at once end, was due to God's counsel of redemption. “The law of the Spirit of life”(Rom. 8:2) began to work even then, and grace began to counteract the effects of the Fall. Christ has now “abolished death” (2 Tim. 1:10) by taking its terrors away, and by turning it into the portal of heaven. He will destroy it utterly (1 Cor. 15:26) when by resurrection from the dead, the bodies of the saints shall be made immortal. Dr. William A. Hammond, following a French scientist, declares that there is no reason in a normal physical system why man should not live forever.

That death is not a physical necessity is evident if we once remember that life is, not fuel, but fire. Weismann, Heredity, 8, 24, 72, 159—“The organism must not be looked upon as a heap of combustible material, which is completely reduced to ashes in a certain time, the length of which is determined by its size and by the rate at which it burns; but it should be compared to a fire, to which fresh fuel can be continually added, and which, whether it burns quickly or slowly, can be kept burning as long as necessity demands.... Death is not a primary necessity, but it has been acquired secondarily, as an adaptation.... Unicellular organisms, increasing by means of fission, in a certain sense possess immortality. No Amœba has ever lost an ancestor by death.... Each individual now living is far older than mankind, and is almost as old as life itself.... Death is not an essential attribute of living matter.”

If we regard man as primarily spirit, the possibility of life without death is plain. God lives on eternally, and the future physical organism of the righteous will have in it no seed of death. Man might have been created without being mortal. That he is mortal is due to anticipated sin. Regard body as simply the constant energizing of God, and we see that there is no inherent necessity of death. Denney, Studies in Theology, 98—“Man, it is said, must die because he is a natural being, and what belongs to nature belongs to him. But we assert, on the contrary, that he was created a supernatural being, with a primacy over nature, so related to God as to be immortal. Death is an intrusion, and it is finally to be abolished.” Chandler, The Spirit of Man, 45-47—“The [pg 591]first stage in the fall was the disintegration of spirit into body and mind; and the second was the enslavement of mind to body.”

Some recent writers, however, deny that death is a consequence of the Fall, except in the sense that man's fear of death results from his sin. Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 19-22, indeed, asserts the value and propriety of death as an element of the normal universe. He would oppose to the doctrine of Weismann the conclusions of Maupas, the French biologist, who has followed infusoria through 600 generations. Fission, says Maupas, reproduces for many generations, but the unicellular germ ultimately weakens and dies out. The asexual reproduction must be supplemented by a higher conjugation, the meeting and partial blending of the contents of two cells. This is only occasional, but it is necessary to the permanence of the species. Isolation is ultimate death. Newman Smyth adds that death and sex appear together. When sex enters to enrich and diversify life, all that will not take advantage of it dies out. Survival of the fittest is accompanied by death of that which will not improve. Death is a secondary thing—a consequence of life. A living form acquired the power of giving up its life for another. It died in order that its offspring might survive in a higher form. Death helps life on and up. It does not put a stop to life. It became an advantage to life as a whole that certain primitive forms should be left by the way to perish. We owe our human birth to death in nature. The earth before us has died that we might live. We are the living children of a world that has died for us. Death is a means of life, of increasing specialization of function. Some cells are born to give up their life sacrificially for the organism to which they belong.

While we regard Newman Smyth's view as an ingenious and valuable explanation of the incidental results of death, we do not regard it as an explanation of death's origin. God has overruled death for good, and we can assent to much of Dr. Smyth's exposition. But that this good could be gained only by death seems to us wholly unproved and unprovable. Biology shows us that other methods of reproduction are possible, and that death is an incident and not a primary requisite to development. We regard Dr. Smyth's theory as incompatible with the Scripture representations of death as the consequence of sin, as the sign of God's displeasure, as a means of discipline for the fallen, as destined to complete abolition when sin itself has been done away. We reserve, however, the full proof that physical death is part of the penalty of sin until we discuss the Consequences of Sin to Adam's Posterity.

But this death was also, and chiefly,

B. Spiritual death, or the separation of the soul from God.—In this are included: (a) Negatively, the loss of man's moral likeness to God, or that underlying tendency of his whole nature toward God which constituted his original righteousness. (b) Positively, the depraving of all those powers which, in their united action with reference to moral and religious truth, we call man's moral and religious nature; or, in other words, the blinding of his intellect, the corruption of his affections, and the enslavement of his will.

Seeking to be a god, man became a slave; seeking independence, he ceased to be master of himself. Once his intellect was pure,—he was supremely conscious of God, and saw all things also in God's light. Now he was supremely conscious of self, and saw all things as they affected self. This self-consciousness—how unlike the objective life of the first apostles, of Christ and of every loving soul! Once man's affections were pure,—he loved God supremely, and other things in subordination to God's will. Now he loved self supremely, and was ruled by inordinate affections toward the creatures which could minister to his selfish gratification. Now man could do nothing pleasing to God, because he lacked the love which is necessary to all true obedience.

G. F. Wilkin, Control in Evolution, shows that the will may initiate a counter-evolution which shall reverse the normal course of man's development. First comes an act, then a habit, of surrender to animalism; then subversion of faith in the true and the good; then active championship of evil; then transmission of evil disposition and tendencies to posterity. This subversion of the rational will by an evil choice took place very early, indeed in the first man. All human history has been a conflict between these two antagonistic evolutions, the upward and the downward. Biological rather than moral phenomena predominate. No human being escapes transgressing [pg 592]the law of his evolutionary nature. There is a moral deadness and torpor resulting. The rational will must be restored before man can go right again. Man must commit himself to a true life; then to the restoration of other men to that same life; then there must be coöperation of society; this work must extend to the limits of the human species. But this will be practicable and rational only as it is shown that the unfolding plan of the universe has destined the righteous to a future incomparably more desirable than that of the wicked; in other words, immortality is necessary to evolution.

“If immortality be necessary to evolution, then immortality becomes scientific. Jesus has the authority and omnipresence of the power behind evolution. He imposes upon his followers the same normal evolutionary mission that sent him into the world. He organizes them into churches. He teaches a moral evolution of society through the united voluntary efforts of his followers. They are ‘the good seed ... the sons of the kingdom’ (Mat. 13:38). Theism makes a definite attempt to counteract the evil of the counter-evolution, and the attempt justifies itself by its results. Christianity is scientific (1) in that it satisfies the conditions of knowledge: the persisting and comprehensive harmony of phenomena, and the interpretation of all the facts; (2) in its aim, the moral regeneration of the world; (3) in its methods, adapting itself to man as an ethical being, capable of endless progress; (4) in its conception of normal society, as of sinners uniting together to help one another to depend on God and conquer self, so recognizing the ethical bond as the most essential. This doctrine harmonizes science and religion, revealing the new species of control which marks the highest stage of evolution; shows that the religion of the N. T. is essentially scientific and its truths capable of practical verification; that Christianity is not any particular church, but the teachings of the Bible; that Christianity is the true system of ethics, and should be taught in public institutions; that cosmic evolution comes at last to depend on the wisdom and will of man, the immanent God working in finite and redeemed humanity.”

In fine, man no longer made God the end of his life, but chose self instead. While he retained the power of self-determination in subordinate things, he lost that freedom which consisted in the power of choosing God as his ultimate aim, and became fettered by a fundamental inclination of his will toward evil. The intuitions of the reason were abnormally obscured, since these intuitions, so far as they are concerned with moral and religious truth, are conditioned upon a right state of the affections; and—as a necessary result of this obscuring of reason—conscience, which, as the normal judiciary of the soul, decides upon the basis of the law given to it by reason, became perverse in its deliverances. Yet this inability to judge or act aright, since it was a moral inability springing ultimately from will, was itself hateful and condemnable.

See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:61-73; Shedd, Sermons to the Natural Man, 202-230, esp. 205—“Whatsoever springs from will we are responsible for. Man's inability to love God supremely results from his intense self-will and self-love, and therefore his impotence is a part and element of his sin, and not an excuse for it.” And yet the question “Adam, where art thou?” (Gen. 3:9), says C. J. Baldwin, “was, (1) a question, not as to Adam's physical locality, but as to his moral condition; (2) a question, not of justice threatening, but of love inviting to repentance and return; (3) a question, not to Adam as an individual only, but to the whole humanity of which he was the representative.”

Dale, Ephesians, 40—“Christ is the eternal Son of God; and it was the first, the primeval purpose of the divine grace that his life and sonship should be shared by all mankind; that through Christ all men should rise to a loftier rank than that which belonged to them by their creation; should be ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Pet. 1:4), and share the divine righteousness and joy. Or rather, the race was actually created in Christ; and it was created that the whole race might in Christ inherit the life and glory of God. The divine purpose has been thwarted and obstructed and partially defeated by human sin. But it is being fulfilled in all who are ‘in Christ’ (Eph. 1:3).”

2. Positive and formal exclusion from God's presence.

This included:

(a) The cessation of man's former familiar intercourse with God, and [pg 593] the setting up of outward barriers between man and his Maker (cherubim and sacrifice).

“In die Welt hinausgestossen, Steht der Mensch verlassen da.” Though God punished Adam and Eve, he did not curse them as he did the serpent. Their exclusion from the tree of life was a matter of benevolence as well as of justice, for it prevented the immortality of sin.

(b) Banishment from the garden, where God had specially manifested his presence.—Eden was perhaps a spot reserved, as Adam's body had been, to show what a sinless world would be. This positive exclusion from God's presence, with the sorrow and pain which it involved, may have been intended to illustrate to man the nature of that eternal death from which he now needed to seek deliverance.

At the gates of Eden, there seems to have been a manifestation of God's presence, in the cherubim, which constituted the place a sanctuary. Both Cain and Abel brought offerings “unto the Lord” (Gen. 4:3, 4), and when Cain fled, he is said to have gone out “from the presence of the Lord” (Gen. 4:16). On the consequences of the Fall to Adam, see Edwards, Works, 2:390-405; Hopkins, Works, 1:206-246; Dwight, Theology, 1:393-434; Watson, Institutes, 2:19-42; Martensen, Dogmatics, 155-173; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 402-412.

Section V.—Imputation Of Adam's Sin To His Posterity.

We have seen that all mankind are sinners; that all men are by nature depraved, guilty, and condemnable; and that the transgression of our first parents, so far as respects the human race, was the first sin. We have still to consider the connection between Adam's sin and the depravity, guilt, and condemnation of the race.

(a) The Scriptures teach that the transgression of our first parents constituted their posterity sinners (Rom. 5:19—“through the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners”), so that Adam's sin is imputed, reckoned, or charged to every member of the race of which he was the germ and head (Rom. 5:16—“the judgment came of one [offence] unto condemnation”). It is because of Adam's sin that we are born depraved and subject to God's penal inflictions (Rom. 5:12—“through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin”; Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath”). Two questions demand answer,—first, how we can be responsible for a depraved nature which we did not personally and consciously originate; and, secondly, how God can justly charge to our account the sin of the first father of the race. These questions are substantially the same, and the Scriptures intimate the true answer to the problem when they declare that “in Adam all die” (1 Cor. 15:22) and “that death passed unto all men, for that all sinned” when “through one man sin entered into the world” (Rom. 5:12). In other words, Adam's sin is the cause and ground of the depravity, guilt, and condemnation of all his posterity, simply because Adam and his posterity are one, and, by virtue of their organic unity, the sin of Adam is the sin of the race.

Amiel says that “the best measure of the profundity of any religious doctrine is given by its conception of sin and of the cure of sin.” We have seen that sin is a state; a state of the will; a selfish state of the will; a selfish state of the will inborn and universal; a selfish state of the will inborn and universal by reason of man's free act. [pg 594]Connecting the present discussion with the preceding doctrines of theology, the steps of our treatment thus far are as follows: 1. God's holiness is purity of nature. 2. God's law demands purity of nature. 3. Sin is impure nature. 4. All men have this impure nature. 5. Adam originated this impure nature. In the present section we expect to add: 6. Adam and we are one; and, in the succeeding section, to complete the doctrine with: 7. The guilt and penalty of Adam's sin are ours.

(b) According as we regard this twofold problem from the point of view of the abnormal human condition, or of the divine treatment of it, we may call it the problem of original sin, or the problem of imputation. Neither of these terms is objectionable when its meaning is defined. By imputation of sin we mean, not the arbitrary and mechanical charging to a man of that for which he is not naturally responsible, but the reckoning to a man of a guilt which is properly his own, whether by virtue of his individual acts, or by virtue of his connection with the race. By original sin we mean that participation in the common sin of the race with which God charges us, in virtue of our descent from Adam, its first father and head.