2. Sin as Finiteness…

2. Sin as Finiteness

This view explains sin as a necessary result of the limitations of man’s finite being. As an incident of imperfect development, the fruit of ignorance and impotence, sin is not absolutely but only relatively evil—an element in human education and a means of progress. This is the view of Leibnitz and of Spinoza. Modern writers, as Schurman and Royce, have maintained that moral evil is the necessary background and condition of moral good.

The theory of Leibnitz may be found in his Théodicée, part 1, sections 20 and 31; that of Spinoza in his Ethics, part 4, proposition 20. Upon this view sin is the blundering of inexperience, the thoughtlessness that takes evil for good, the ignorance that puts its fingers into the fire, the stumbling without which one cannot learn to walk. It is a fruit which is sour and bitter simply because it is immature. It is a means of discipline and training for something better,—it is holiness in the germ, good in the making—“Erhebung des Menschen zur freien Vernunft.” The Fall was a fall up, and not down.

John Fiske, in addition to his sense-theory of sin already mentioned, seems to hold this theory also. In his Mystery of Evil, he says: “Its impress upon the human soul is the indispensable background against which shall be set hereafter the eternal joys of heaven”; in other words, sin is necessary to holiness, as darkness is the indispensable contrast and background to light; without black, we should never be able to know white. Schurman, Belief in God, 251 sq.—“The possibility of sin is the correlative of the free initiative God has vacated on man’s behalf.... The essence of sin is the enthronement of self.... Yet, without such self-absorption, there could be no sense of union with God. For consciousness is possible only through opposition. To know A, we must know it through not-A. Alienation from God is the necessary condition of communion with God. And this is the meaning of the Scripture that ‘where sin abounded, grace shall much more abound.’... Modern culture protests against the Puritan enthronement of goodness above truth.... For the decalogue it would substitute the wider new commandment of Goethe: ‘Live resolutely in the Whole, in the Good, in the Beautiful.’ The highest religion can be content with nothing short of the synthesis demanded by Goethe.... God is the universal life in which individual activities are included as movements of a single organism.”

Royce, World and Individual, 2:364-384—“Evil is a discord necessary to perfect harmony. In itself it is evil, but in relation to the whole it has value by showing us its own finiteness and imperfection. It is a sorrow to God as much as to us; indeed, all our sorrow is his sorrow. The evil serves the good only by being overcome, thwarted, overruled. Every evil deed must somewhere and at some time be atoned for, by some other than the agent, if not by the agent himself.... All finite life is a struggle with evil. Yet from the final point of view the Whole is good. The temporal order contains at no moment anything that can satisfy. Yet the eternal order is perfect. We have all sinned and come short of the glory of God. Yet in just our life, viewed in its entirety, the glory of God is completely manifest. These hard sayings are the deepest expressions of the essence of true religion. They are also the most inevitable outcome of philosophy.... Were there no longing in time, there would be no peace in eternity. The prayer that God’s will may be done on earth as it is in heaven is identical with what philosophy regards as simple fact.”

We object to this theory that

(a) It rests upon a pantheistic basis, as the sense-theory rests upon dualism. The moral is confounded with the physical; might is identified with right. Since sin is a necessary incident of finiteness, and creatures can never be infinite, it follows that sin must be everlasting, not only in the universe, but in each individual soul.

Goethe, Carlyle, and Emerson are representatives of this view in literature. Goethe spoke of the “idleness of wishing to jump off from one’s own shadow.” He was a disciple of Spinoza, who believed in one substance with contradictory attributes of thought and extension. Goethe took the pantheistic view of God with the personal view of man. He ignored the fact of sin. Hutton calls him “the wisest man the world has seen who was without humility and faith, and who lacked the wisdom of a child.” Speaking of Goethe’s Faust, Hutton says: “The great drama is radically false in its fundamental philosophy. Its primary notion is that even a spirit of pure evil is an exceedingly useful being, because he stirs into activity those whom he leads into sin, and so prevents them from rusting away in pure indolence. There are other and better means of stimulating the positive affections of men than by tempting them to sin.” On Goethe, see Hutton, Essays, 2:1-79; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:490; A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 279-331.

Carlyle was a Scotch Presbyterian minus Christianity. At the age of twenty-five, he rejected miraculous and historical religion, and thenceforth had no God but natural Law. His worship of objective truth became a worship of subjective sincerity, and his worship of personal will became a worship of impersonal force. He preached truth, service, sacrifice, but all in a mandatory and pessimistic way. He saw in England and Wales “twenty-nine millions—mostly fools.” He had no love, no remedy, no hope. In our civil war, he was upon the side of the slaveholder. He claimed that his philosophy made right to be might, but in practice he made might to be right. Confounding all moral distinctions, as he did in his later writings, he was fit to wear the title which he invented for another: “President of the Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation Society.” Froude calls him “a Calvinist without the theology”—a believer in predestination without grace. On Carlyle, see S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 131-178.

Emerson also is the worshiper of successful force. His pantheism is most manifest in his poems “Cupido” and “Brahma,” and in his Essays on “Spirit” and on “The Over-soul.” Cupido: “The solid, solid universe Is pervious to Love; With bandaged eyes he never errs, Around, below, above. His blinding light He flingeth white On God’s and Satan’s brood, And reconciles by mystic wiles The evil and the good.” Brahma: “If the red slayer thinks he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame or fame. They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings. The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven; But thou, meek lover of the good, Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.”

Emerson taught that man’s imperfection is not sin, and that the cure for it lies in education. “He lets God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a Deity in the concrete, nor a superhuman Person, but rather the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendental cult.” His view of Jesus is found in his Essays, 2:263—“Jesus would absorb the race; but Tom Paine, or the coarsest blasphemer, helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power.” In his Divinity School Address, he banished the person of Jesus from genuine religion. He thought “one could not be a man if he must subordinate his nature to Christ’s nature.” He failed to see that Jesus not only absorbs but transforms, and that we grow only by the impact of nobler souls than our own. Emerson’s essay style is devoid of clear and precise theological statement, and in this vagueness lies its harmfulness. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, xii—“Emerson’s pantheism is not hardened into a consistent creed, for to the end he clung to the belief in personal immortality, and he pronounced the acceptance of this belief ‘the test of mental sanity.’ ” On Emerson, see S. L. Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 97-123.

We may call this theory the “green-apple theory” of sin. Sin is a green apple, which needs only time and sunshine and growth to bring it to ripeness and beauty and usefulness. But we answer that sin is not a green apple, but an apple with a worm at its heart. The evil of it can never be cured by growth. The fall can never be anything else than downward. Upon this theory, sin is an inseparable factor in the nature of finite things. The highest archangel cannot be without it. Man in moral character is “the asymptote of God,”—forever learning, but never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. The throne of iniquity is set up forever in the universe. If this theory were true, Jesus, in virtue of his partaking of our finite humanity, must needs be a sinner. His perfect development, without sin, shows that sin was not a necessity of finite progress. Matthews, in Christianity and Evolution, 137—“It was not necessary for the prodigal to go into the far country and become a swineherd, in order to find out the father’s love.” E. H. Johnson, Syst. Theol., 141—“It is not the privilege of the Infinite alone to be good.” Dorner, System, 1:119, speaks of the moral career which this theory describes, as “a progressus in infinitum, where the constant approach to the goal has as its reverse side an eternal separation from the goal.” In his “Transformation,” Hawthorne hints, though rather hesitatingly, that without sin the higher humanity of man could not be taken up at all, and that sin may be essential to the first conscious awakening of moral freedom and to the possibility of progress; see Hutton, Essays, 2:381.

(b) So far as this theory regards moral evil as a necessary presupposition and condition of moral good, it commits the serious error of confounding the possible with the actual. What is necessary to goodness is not the actuality of evil, but only the possibility of evil.

Since we cannot know white except in contrast to black, it is claimed that without knowing actual evil we could never know actual good. George A. Gordon, New Epoch for Faith, 49, 50, has well shown that in that case the elimination of evil would imply the elimination of good. Sin would need to have place in God’s being in order that he might be holy, and thus he would be divinity and devil in one person. Jesus too must needs be evil as well as good. Not only would it be true, as intimated above, that Christ, since his humanity is finite, must be a sinner, but also that we ourselves, who must always be finite, must always be sinners. We grant that holiness, in either God or man, must involve the abstract possibility of its opposite. But we maintain that, as this possibility in God is only abstract and never realized, so in man it should be only abstract and never realized. Man has power to reject this possible evil. His sin is a turning of the merely possible evil, by the decision of his will, into actual evil. Robert Browning is not free from the error above mentioned; see S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 207-210; A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 433-444.

This theory of sin dates back to Hegel. To him there is no real sin and cannot be. Imperfection there is and must always be, because the relative can never become the absolute. Redemption is only an evolutionary process, indefinitely prolonged, and evil must remain an eternal condition. All finite thought is an element in the infinite thought, and all finite will an element in the infinite will. As good cannot exist without evil as its antithesis, infinite righteousness should have for its counterpart an infinite wickedness. Hegel’s guiding principle was that “What is rational is real, and what is real is rational.” Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, remarks that this principle ignores “the riddle of the painful earth.” The disciples of Hegel thought that nothing remained for history to accomplish, now that the World-spirit had come to know himself in Hegel’s philosophy.

Biedermann’s Dogmatik is based upon the Hegelian philosophy. At page 649 we read: “Evil is the finiteness of the world-being which clings to all individual existences by virtue of their belonging to the immanent world-order. Evil is therefore a necessary element in the divinely willed being of the world.” Bradley follows Hegel in making sin to be no reality, but only a relative appearance. There is no free will, and no antagonism between the will of God and the will of man. Darkness is an evil, a destroying agent. But it is not a positive force, as light is. It cannot be attacked and overcome as an entity. Bring light, and darkness disappears. So evil is not a positive force, as good is. Bring good, and evil disappears. Herbert Spencer’s Evolutionary Ethics fits in with such a system, for he says: “A perfect man in an imperfect race is impossible.” On Hegel’s view of sin, a view which denies holiness even to Christ, see J. Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:390-407; Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of Christ, B. 3:131-162; Stearns, Evidence of Christ. Experience, 92-96; John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 2:1-25; Forrest, Authority of Christ, 13-16.

(c) It is inconsistent with known facts,—as for example, the following: Not all sins are negative sins of ignorance and infirmity; there are acts of positive malignity, conscious transgressions, wilful and presumptuous choices of evil. Increased knowledge of the nature of sin does not of itself give strength to overcome it; but, on the contrary, repeated acts of conscious transgression harden the heart in evil. Men of greatest mental powers are not of necessity the greatest saints, nor are the greatest sinners men of least strength of will and understanding.

Not the weak but the strong are the greatest sinners. We do not pity Nero and Cæsar Borgia for their weakness; we abhor them for their crimes. Judas was an able man, a practical administrator; and Satan is a being of great natural endowments. Sin is not simply a weakness,—it is also a power. A pantheistic philosophy should worship Satan most of all; for he is the truest type of godless intellect and selfish strength.

John 12:6—Judas, “having the bag, made away with what was put therein.” Judas was set by Christ to do the work he was best fitted for, and that was best fitted to interest and save him. Some men may be put into the ministry, because that is the only work that will prevent their destruction. Pastors should find for their members work suited to the aptitudes of each. Judas was tempted, or tried, as all men are, according to his native propensity. While his motive in objecting to Mary’s generosity was really avarice, his pretext was charity, or regard for the poor. Each one of the apostles had his own peculiar gift, and was chosen because of it. The sin of Judas was not a sin of weakness, or ignorance, or infirmity. It was a sin of disappointed ambition, of malice, of hatred for Christ’s self-sacrificing purity.

E. H. Johnson: “Sins are not men’s limitations, but the active expressions of a perverse nature.” M. F. H. Round, Sec. of Nat. Prison Association, on examining the record of a thousand criminals, found that one quarter of them had an exceptionally fine basis of physical life and strength, while the other three quarters fell only a little below the average of ordinary humanity; see The Forum, Sept. 1893. The theory that sin is only holiness in the making reminds us of the view that the most objectionable refuse can by ingenious processes be converted into butter or at least into oleomargarine. It is not true that “tout comprendre est tout pardonner.” Such doctrine obliterates all moral distinctions. Gilbert, Bab Ballads, “My Dream”: “I dreamt that somehow I had come To dwell in Topsy-Turvydom, Where vice is virtue, virtue vice; Where nice is nasty, nasty nice; Where right is wrong, and wrong is right; Where white is black and black is white.”

(d) like the sense-theory of sin, it contradicts both conscience and Scripture by denying human responsibility and by transferring the blame of sin from the creature to the Creator. This is to explain sin, again, by denying its existence.

Œdipus said that his evil deeds had been suffered, not done. Agamemnon, in the Iliad, says the blame belongs, not to himself, but to Jupiter and to fate. So sin blames everything and everybody but self. Gen. 3:12—“The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” But self-vindicating is God-accusing. Made imperfect at the start, man cannot help his sin. By the very fact of his creation he is cut loose from God. That cannot be sin which is a necessary outgrowth of human nature, which is not our act but our fate. To all this, the one answer is found in Conscience. Conscience testifies that sin is not “das Gewordene,” but “das Gemachte,” and that it was his own act when man by transgression fell. The Scriptures refer man’s sin, not to the limitations of his being, but to the free will of man himself. On the theory here combated, see Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:271-295; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:123-131; N. R. Wood, The Witness of Sin, 20-42.

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3. Sin as Selfishness

We hold the essential principle of sin to be selfishness. By selfishness we mean not simply the exaggerated self-love which constitutes the antithesis of benevolence, but that choice of self as the supreme end which constitutes the antithesis of supreme love to God. That selfishness is the essence of sin may be shown as follows:

A. Love to God is the essence of all virtue. The opposite to this, the choice of self as the supreme end, must therefore be the essence of sin.

We are to remember, however, that the love to God in which virtue consists is love for that which is most characteristic and fundamental in God, namely, his holiness. It is not to be confounded with supreme regard for God’s interests or for the good of being in general. Not mere benevolence, but love for God as holy, is the principle and source of holiness in man. Since the love of God required by the law is of this sort, it not only does not imply that love, in the sense of benevolence, is the essence of holiness in God,—it implies rather that holiness, or self-loving and self-affirming purity, is fundamental in the divine nature. From this self-loving and self-affirming purity, love properly so-called, or the self-communicating attribute, is to be carefully distinguished (see vol. 1, pages 271-275).

Bossuet, describing heathendom, says: “Every thing was God but God himself.” Sin goes further than this, and says: “I am myself all things,”—not simply as Louis XVI: “I am the state,” but: “I am the world, the universe, God.” Heinrich Heine: “I am no child. I do not want a heavenly Father any more.” A French critic of Fichte’s philosophy said that it was a flight toward the infinite which began with the ego, and never got beyond it. Kidd, Social Evolution, 75—“In Calderon’s tragic story, the unknown figure, which throughout life is everywhere in conflict with the individual whom it haunts, lifts the mask at last to disclose to the opponent his own features.” Caird, Evolution of Religion, 1:78—“Every self, once awakened, is naturally a despot, and ‘bears, like the Turk, no brother near the throne.’ ” Every one has, as Hobbes said, “an infinite desire for gain or glory,” and can be satisfied with nothing but a whole universe for himself. Selfishness—“homo homini lupus.” James Martineau: “We ask Comte to lift the veil from the holy of holies and show us the all-perfect object of worship,—he produces a looking-glass and shows us ourselves.” Comte’s religion is a “synthetic idealization of our existence”—a worship, not of God, but of humanity; and “the festival of humanity” among Positivists—Walt Whitman’s “I celebrate myself.” On Comte, see Martineau, Types, 1:499. The most thorough discussion of the essential principle of sin is that of Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:147-182. He defines sin as “a turning away from the love of God to self-seeking.”

N. W. Taylor holds that self-love is the primary cause of all moral action; that selfishness is a different thing, and consists not in making our own happiness our ultimate end, which we must do if we are moral beings, but in love of the world, and in preferring the world to God as our portion or chief good (see N. W. Taylor, Moral Govt., 1:24-26; 2:20-24, and Rev. Theol., 134-162; Tyler, Letters on the New Haven Theology, 72). We claim, on the contrary, that to make our own happiness our ultimate aim is itself sin, and the essence of sin. As God makes his holiness the central thing, so we are to live for that, loving self only in God and for God’s sake. This love for God as holy is the essence of virtue. The opposite to this, or supreme love for self, is sin. As Richard Lovelace writes: “I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more,” so Christian friends can say: “Our loves in higher love endure.” The sinner raises some lower object of instinct or desire to supremacy, regardless of God and his law, and this he does for no other reason than to gratify self. On the distinction between mere benevolence and the love required by God’s law, see Hovey, God With Us, 187-200; Hopkins, Works, 1:235; F. W. Robertson, Sermon I. Emerson: “Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.” See Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 327-370, on duties toward self as a moral end.

Love to God is the essence of all virtue. We are to love God with all the heart. But what God? Surely, not the false God, the God who is indifferent to moral distinctions and who treats the wicked as he treats the righteous. The love which the law requires is love for the true God, the God of holiness. Such love aims at the reproduction of God’s holiness in ourselves and in others. We are to love ourselves only for God’s sake and for the sake of realizing the divine idea in us. We are to love others only for God’s sake and for the sake of realizing the divine idea in them. In our moral progress we, first, love self for our own sake; secondly, God for our own sake; thirdly, God for his own sake; fourthly, ourselves for God’s sake. The first is our state by nature; the second requires prevenient grace; the third, regenerating grace; and the fourth, sanctifying grace. Only the last is reasonable self-love. Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 27—“Reasonable self-love is a virtue wholly incompatible with what is commonly called selfishness. Society suffers, not from having too much of it, but from having too little.” Altruism is not the whole of duty. Self-realization is equally important. But to care only for self, like Goethe, is to miss the true self-realization, which love to God ensures.

Love desires only the best for its object, and the best is God. The golden rule bids us give, not what others desire, but what they need. Rom. 15:2—“Let each one of us please his neighbor for that which is good, unto edifying.” Deutsche Liebe: “Nicht Liebe die fragt: Willst du mein sein? Sondern Liebe die sagt: Ich muss dein sein.” Sin consists in taking for one’s self alone and apart from God that in one’s self and in others to which one has a right only in God and for God’s sake. Mrs. Humphrey Ward, David Grieve, 403—“How dare a man pluck from the Lord’s hand, for his wild and reckless use, a soul and body for which he died? How dare he, the Lord’s bondsman, steal his joy, carrying it off by himself into the wilderness, like an animal his prey, instead of asking it at the hands and under the blessing of the Master? How dare he, a member of the Lord’s body, forget the whole, in his greed for the one—eternity in his thirst for the present?” Wordsworth, Prelude, 546—“Delight how pitiable, Unless this love by a still higher love Be hallowed, love that breathes not without awe; Love that adores, but on the knees of prayer. By heaven inspired.... This spiritual love acts not nor can exist Without imagination, which in truth Is but another name for absolute power, And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, And reason in her most exalted mood.”

Aristotle says that the wicked have no right to love themselves, but that the good may. So, from a Christian point of view, we may say: No unregenerate man can properly respect himself. Self-respect belongs only to the man who lives in God and who has God’s image restored to him thereby. True self-love is not love for the happiness of the self, but for the worth of the self in God’s sight, and this self-love is the condition of all genuine and worthy love for others. But true self-love is in turn conditioned by love to God as holy, and it seeks primarily, not the happiness, but the holiness, of others. Asquith, Christian Conception of Holiness, 98, 145, 154, 207—“Benevolence or love is not the same with altruism. Altruism is instinctive, and has not its origin in the moral reason. It has utility, and it may even furnish material for reflection on the part of the moral reason. But so far as it is not deliberate, not indulged for the sake of the end, but only for the gratification of the instinct of the moment, it is not moral.... Holiness is dedication to God, the Good, not as an external Ruler, but as an internal controller and transformer of character.... God is a being whose every thought is love, of whose thoughts not one is for himself, save so far as himself is not himself, that is, so far as there is a distinction of persons in the Godhead. Creation is one great unselfish thought—the bringing into being of creatures who can know the happiness that God knows.... To the spiritual man holiness and love are one. Salvation is deliverance from selfishness.” Kaftan, Dogmatik, 319, 320, regards the essence of sin as consisting, not in selfishness, but in turning away from God and so from the love which would cause man to grow in knowledge and likeness to God. But this seems to be nothing else than choosing self instead of God as our object and end.

B. All the different forms of sin can be shown to have their root in selfishness, while selfishness itself, considered as the choice of self as a supreme end, cannot be resolved into any simpler elements.

(a) Selfishness may reveal itself in the elevation to supreme dominion of any one of man’s natural appetites, desires, or affections. Sensuality is selfishness in the form of inordinate appetite. Selfish desire takes the forms respectively of avarice, ambition, vanity, pride, according as it is set upon property, power, esteem, independence. Selfish affection is falsehood or malice, according as it hopes to make others its voluntary servants, or regards them as standing in its way; it is unbelief or enmity to God, according as it simply turns away from the truth and love of God, or conceives of God’s holiness as positively resisting and punishing it.

Augustine and Aquinas held the essence of sin to be pride; Luther and Calvin regarded its essence to be unbelief. Kreibig (Versöhnungslehre) regards it as “world-love”; still others consider it as enmity to God. In opposing the view that sensuality is the essence of sin, Julius Müller says: “Wherever we find sensuality, there we find selfishness, but we do not find that, where there is selfishness, there is always sensuality. Selfishness may embody itself in fleshly lust or inordinate desire for the creature, but this last cannot bring forth spiritual sins which have no element of sensuality in them.”

Covetousness or avarice makes, not sensual gratification itself, but the things that may minister thereto, the object of pursuit, and in this last chase often loses sight of its original aim. Ambition is selfish love of power; vanity is selfish love of esteem. Pride is but the self-complacency, self-sufficiency, and self-isolation of a selfish spirit that desires nothing so much as unrestrained independence. Falsehood originates in selfishness, first as self-deception, and then, since man by sin isolates himself and yet in a thousand ways needs the fellowship of his brethren, as deception of others. Malice, the perversion of natural resentment (together with hatred and revenge), is the reaction of selfishness against those who stand, or are imagined to stand, in its way. Unbelief and enmity to God are effects of sin, rather than its essence; selfishness leads us first to doubt, and then to hate, the Lawgiver and Judge. Tacitus: “Humani generis proprium est odisse quem læseris.” In sin, self-affirmation and self-surrender are not coördinate elements, as Dorner holds, but the former conditions the latter.

As love to God is love to God’s holiness, so love to man is love for holiness in man and desire to impart it. In other words, true love for man is the longing to make man like God. Over against this normal desire which should fill the heart and inspire the life, there stands a hierarchy of lower desires which may be utilized and sanctified by the higher love, but which may assert their independence and may thus be the occasions of sin. Physical gratification, money, esteem, power, knowledge, family, virtue, are proper objects of regard, so long as these are sought for God’s sake and within the limitations of his will. Sin consists in turning our backs on God and in seeking any one of these objects for its own sake; or, which is the same thing, for our own sake. Appetite gratified without regard to God’s law is lust; the love of money becomes avarice; the desire for esteem becomes vanity; the longing for power becomes ambition; the love for knowledge becomes a selfish thirst for intellectual satisfaction; parental affection degenerates into indulgence and nepotism; the seeking of virtue becomes self-righteousness and self-sufficiency. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 323—“Jesus grants that even the heathen and sinners love those who love them. But family love becomes family pride; patriotism comes to stand for country right or wrong; happiness in one’s calling leads to class distinctions.”

Dante, in his Divine Comedy, divides the Inferno into three great sections: those in which are punished, respectively, incontinence, bestiality, and malice. Incontinence—sin of the heart, the emotions, the affections. Lower down is found bestiality—sin of the head, the thoughts, the mind, as infidelity and heresy. Lowest of all is malice—sin of the will, deliberate rebellion, fraud and treachery. So we are taught that the heart carries the intellect with it, and that the sin of unbelief gradually deepens into the intensity of malice. See A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 133—“Dante teaches us that sin is the self-perversion of the will. If there is any thought fundamental to his system, it is the thought of freedom. Man is not a waif swept irresistibly downward on the current; he is a being endowed with power to resist, and therefore guilty if he yields. Sin is not misfortune, or disease, or natural necessity; it is wilfulness, and crime, and self-destruction. The Divine Comedy is, beyond all other poems, the poem of conscience; and this could not be, if it did not recognize man as a free agent, the responsible cause of his own evil acts and his own evil state.” See also Harris, in Jour. Spec. Philos., 21:350-451; Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life, 69-86.

In Greek tragedy, says Prof. Wm. Arnold Stevens, the one sin which the gods hated and would not pardon was ὕβρις—obstinate self-assertion of mind or will, absence of reverence and humility—of which we have an illustration in Ajax. George MacDonald: “A man may be possessed of himself, as of a devil.” Shakespeare depicts this insolence of infatuation in Shylock, Macbeth, and Richard III. Troilus and Cressida, 4:4—“Something may be done that we will not; And sometimes we are devils to ourselves, When we will tempt the frailty of our powers, Presuming on their changeful potency.” Yet Robert G. Ingersoll said that Shakespeare holds crime to be the mistake of ignorance! N. P. Willis, Parrhasius: “How like a mounting devil in the heart Rules unrestrained ambition!”

(b) Even in the nobler forms of unregenerate life, the principle of selfishness is to be regarded as manifesting itself in the preference of lower ends to that of God’s proposing. Others are loved with idolatrous affection because these others are regarded as a part of self. That the selfish element is present even here, is evident upon considering that such affection does not seek the highest interest of its object, that it often ceases when unreturned, and that it sacrifices to its own gratification the claims of God and his law.

Even in the mother’s idolatry of her child, the explorer’s devotion to science, the sailor’s risk of his life to save another’s, the gratification sought may be that of a lower instinct or desire, and any substitution of a lower for the highest object is non-conformity to law, and therefore sin. H. B. Smith, System Theology, 277—“Some lower affection is supreme.” And the underlying motive which leads to this substitution is self-gratification. There is no such thing as disinterested sin, for “every one that loveth is begotten of God” (1 John 4:7). Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ: Much of the heroism of battle is simply “resolution in the actors to have their way, contempt for ease, animal courage which we share with the bulldog and the weasel, intense assertion of individual will and force, avowal of the rough-handed man that he has that in him which enables him to defy pain and danger and death.”

Mozley on Blanco White, in Essays, 2:143: Truth may be sought in order to absorb truth in self, not for the sake of absorbing self in truth. So Blanco White, in spite of the pain of separating from old views and friends, lived for the selfish pleasure of new discovery, till all his early faith vanished, and even immortality seemed a dream. He falsely thought that the pain he suffered in giving up old beliefs was evidence of self-sacrifice with which God must be pleased, whereas it was the inevitable pain which attends the victory of selfishness. Robert Browning, Paracelsus, 81—“I still must hoard, and heap, and class all truths With one ulterior purpose: I must know! Would God translate me to his throne, believe That I should only listen to his words To further my own ends.” F. W. Robertson on Genesis, 57—“He who sacrifices his sense of right, his conscience, for another, sacrifices the God within him; he is not sacrificing self.... He who prefers his dearest friend or his beloved child to the call of duty, will soon show that he prefers himself to his dearest friend, and would not sacrifice himself for his child.” Ib., 91—“In those who love little, love [for finite beings] is a primary affection,—a secondary, in those who love much.... The only true affection is that which is subordinate to a higher.” True love is love for the soul and its highest, its eternal, interests; love that seeks to make it holy; love for the sake of God and for the accomplishment of God’s idea in his creation.

Although we cannot, with Augustine, call the virtues of the heathen “splendid vices”—for they were relatively good and useful,—they still, except in possible instances where God’s Spirit wrought upon the heart, were illustrations of a morality divorced from love to God, were lacking in the most essential element demanded by the law, were therefore infected with sin. Since the law judges all action by the heart from which it springs, no action of the unregenerate can be other than sin. The ebony-tree is white in its outer circles of woody fibre; at heart it is black as ink. There is no unselfishness in the unregenerate heart, apart from the divine enlightenment and energizing. Self-sacrifice for the sake of self is selfishness after all. Professional burglars and bank-robbers are often carefully abstemious in their personal habits, and they deny themselves the use of liquor and tobacco while in the active practice of their trade. Herron, The Larger Christ, 47—“It is as truly immoral to seek truth out of mere love of knowing it, as it is to seek money out of love to gain. Truth sought for truth’s sake is an intellectual vice; it is spiritual covetousness. It is an idolatry, setting up the worship of abstractions and generalities in place of the living God.”

(c) It must be remembered, however, that side by side with the selfish will, and striving against it, is the power of Christ, the immanent God, imparting aspirations and impulses foreign to unregenerate humanity, and preparing the way for the soul’s surrender to truth and righteousness.

Rom. 8:7—“the mind of the flesh is enmity against God”; Acts 17:27, 28—“he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being”; Rom. 2:4—“the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance”; John 1:9—“the light which lighteth every man.” Many generous traits and acts of self-sacrifice in the unregenerate must be ascribed to the prevenient grace of God and to the enlightening influence of the Spirit of Christ. A mother, during the Russian famine, gave to her children all the little supply of food that came to her in the distribution, and died that they might live. In her decision to sacrifice herself for her offspring she may have found her probation and may have surrendered herself to God. The impulse to make the sacrifice may have been due to the Holy Spirit, and her yielding may have been essentially an act of saving faith. In Mark 10:21, 22—“And Jesus looking upon him loved him ... he went away sorrowful”—our Lord apparently loved the young man, not only for his gifts, his efforts, and his possibilities, but also for the manifest working in him of the divine Spirit, even while in his natural character he was without God and without love, self-ignorant, self-righteous, and self-seeking.

Paul, in like manner, before his conversion, loved and desired righteousness, provided only that this righteousness might be the product and achievement of his own will and might reflect honor on himself; in short, provided only that self might still be uppermost. To be dependent for righteousness upon another was abhorrent to him. And yet this very impulse toward righteousness may have been due to the divine Spirit within him. On Paul’s experience before conversion, see E. D. Burton, Bib. World, Jan. 1893. Peter objected to the washing of his feet by Jesus (John 13:8), not because it humbled the Master too much in the eyes of the disciple, but because it humbled the disciple too much in his own eyes. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:218—“Sin is the violation of the God-willed moral order of the world by the self-will of the individual.” Tophel on the Holy Spirit, 17—“You would deeply wound him [the average sinner] if you told him that his heart, full of sin, is an object of horror to the holiness of God.” The impulse to repentance, as well as the impulse to righteousness, is the product, not of man’s own nature, but of the Christ within him who is moving him to seek salvation.

Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browning after she had accepted his proposal of marriage: “Henceforth I am yours for everything but to do you harm.” George Harris, Moral Evolution, 138—“Love seeks the true good of the person loved. It will not minister in an unworthy way to afford a temporary pleasure. It will not approve or tolerate that which is wrong. It will not encourage the coarse, base passions of the one loved. It condemns impurity, falsehood, selfishness. A parent does not really love his child if he tolerates the self-indulgence, and does not correct or punish the faults, of the child.” Hutton: “You might as well say that it is a fit subject for art to paint the morbid exstasy of cannibals over their horrid feasts, as to paint lust without love. If you are to delineate man at all, you must delineate him with his human nature, and therefore you can never omit from any worthy picture that conscience which is its crown.”

Tennyson, in In Memoriam, speaks of “Fantastic beauty such as lurks In some wild poet when he works Without a conscience or an aim.” Such work may be due to mere human nature. But the lofty work of true creative genius, and the still loftier acts of men still unregenerate but conscientious and self-sacrificing, must be explained by the working in them of the immanent Christ, the life and light of men. James Martineau, Study, 1:20—“Conscience may act as human, before it is discovered to be divine.” See J. D. Stoops, in Jour. Philos., Psych., and Sci. Meth., 2:512—“If there is a divine life over and above the separate streams of individual lives, the welling up of this larger life in the experience of the individual is precisely the point of contact between the individual person and God.” Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:122—“It is this divine element in man, this relationship to God, which gives to sin its darkest and direst complexion. For such a life is the turning of a light brighter than the sun into darkness, the squandering or bartering away of a boundless wealth, the suicidal abasement, to the things that perish, of a nature destined by its very constitution and structure for participation in the very being and blessedness of God.”

On the various forms of sin as manifestations of selfishness, see Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:147-182; Jonathan Edwards, Works, 2:268, 269; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:5, 6; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 243-262; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers, 11-91; Hopkins, Moral Science, 86-156. On the Roman Catholic “Seven Deadly Sins” (Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, Lust), see Wetzer und Welte, Kirchenlexikon, and Orby Shipley, Theory about Sin, preface, xvi-xviii.

C. This view accords best with Scripture.

(a) The law requires love to God as its all-embracing requirement. (b) The holiness of Christ consisted in this, that he sought not his own will or glory, but made God his supreme end. (c) The Christian is one who has ceased to live for self. (d) The tempter’s promise is a promise of selfish independence. (e) The prodigal separates himself from his father, and seeks his own interest and pleasure. (f) The “man of sin” illustrates the nature of sin, in “opposing and exalting himself against all that is called God.”

(a) Mat. 22:37-39—the command of love to God and man; Rom. 13:8-10—“love therefore is the fulfilment of the law”; Gal. 5:14—“the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”; James 2:8—“the royal law.” (b) John 5:30—“my judgment is righteous; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me”; 7:18—“He that speaketh from himself seeketh his own glory: but he that seeketh the glory of him that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him”; Rom. 15:3—“Christ also pleased not himself.” (c) Rom. 14:7—“none of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself”; 2 Cor. 5:15—“he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again”; Gal. 2:20—“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me.” Contrast 2 Tim. 3:2—“lovers of self.” (d) Gen. 3:5—“ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.” (e) Luke 15:12, 13—“give me the portion of thy substance ... gathered all together and took his journey into a far country.” (f) 2 Thess. 2:3, 4—“the man of sin ... the son of perdition, he that opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God.”

Contrast “the man of sin” who “exalteth himself” (2 Thess. 2:3, 4) with the Son of God who “emptied himself” (Phil. 2:7). On “the man of sin”, see Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Bap. Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328-360. Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 24—“We are conscious of sin, because we know that our true self is God, from whom we are severed. No ethics is possible unless we recognize an ideal for all human effort in the presence of the eternal Self which any account of conduct presupposes.” John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:53-73—“Here, as in all organic life, the individual member or organ has no independent or exclusive life, and the attempt to attain to it is fatal to itself.” Milton describes man as “affecting Godhead, and so losing all.” Of the sinner, we may say with Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 5:4—“He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.... There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger.” No one of us, then, can sign too early “the declaration of dependence.” Both Old School and New School theologians agree that sin is selfishness; see Bellamy, Hopkins, Emmons, the younger Edwards, Finney, Taylor. See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 287-292.

Sin, therefore, is not merely a negative thing, or an absence of love to God. It is a fundamental and positive choice or preference of self instead of God, as the object of affection and the supreme end of being. Instead of making God the centre of his life, surrendering himself unconditionally to God and possessing himself only in subordination to God’s will, the sinner makes self the centre of his life, sets himself directly against God, and constitutes his own interest the supreme motive and his own will the supreme rule.

We may follow Dr. E. G. Robinson in saying that, while sin as a state is unlikeness to God, as a principle is opposition to God, and as an act is transgression of God’s law, the essence of it always and everywhere is selfishness. It is therefore not something external, or the result of compulsion from without; it is a depravity of the affections and a perversion of the will, which constitutes man’s inmost character.

See Harris, in Bib. Sac., 18:148—“Sin is essentially egoism or selfism, putting self in God’s place. It has four principal characteristics or manifestations: (1) self-sufficiency, instead of faith; (2) self-will, instead of submission; (3) self-seeking, instead of benevolence; (4) self-righteousness, instead of humility and reverence.” All sin is either explicit or implicit “enmity against God” (Rom. 8:7). All true confessions are like David’s (Ps. 51:4)—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done that which is evil in thy sight.” Of all sinners it might be said that they “Fight neither with small nor great, save only with the king of Israel” (1 K. 22:31).

Not every sinner is conscious of this enmity. Sin is a principle in course of development. It is not yet “full-grown” (James 1:15—“the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death”). Even now, as James Martineau has said: “If it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the streets of London and Paris.” But this indifference easily grows, in the presence of threatening and penalty, into violent hatred to God and positive defiance of his law. If the sin which is now hidden in the sinner’s heart were but permitted to develop itself according to its own nature, it would hurl the Almighty from his throne, and would set up its own kingdom upon the ruins of the moral universe. Sin is world-destroying, as well as God-destroying, for it is inconsistent with the conditions which make being as a whole possible; see Royce, World and Individual, 2:366; Dwight, Works, sermon 80.

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Section III.—Universality Of Sin

We have shown that sin is a state, a state of the will, a selfish state of the will. We now proceed to show that this selfish state of the will is universal. We divide our proof into two parts. In the first, we regard sin in its aspect as conscious violation of law; in the second, in its aspect as a bias of the nature to evil, prior to or underlying consciousness.

I. Every human being who has arrived at moral consciousness has committed acts, or cherished dispositions, contrary to the divine law.

1. Proof from Scripture.

The universality of transgression is:

(a) Set forth in direct statements of Scripture.

1 K. 8:46—“there is no man that sinneth not”; Ps. 143:2—“enter not into judgment with thy servant; For in thy sight no man living is righteous”; Prov. 20:9—“Who can say, I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin?”; Eccl. 7:20—“Surely there is not a righteous man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not”; Luke 11:13—“If ye, then, being evil”; Rom. 3:10, 12—“There is none righteous, no, not one.... There is none that doeth good, no, not so much as one”; 19, 20—“that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may be brought under the judgment of God: because by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified in his sight; for through the law cometh the knowledge of sin”; 23—“for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God”; Gal. 3:22—“the scripture shut up all things under sin”; James 3:2—“For in many things we all stumble”; 1 John 1:8—“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Compare Mat. 6:12—“forgive us our debts”—given as a prayer for all men; 14—“if ye forgive men their trespasses”—the condition of our own forgiveness.

(b) Implied in declarations of the universal need of atonement, regeneration, and repentance.

Universal need of atonement: Mark 16:16—“He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved” (Mark 16:9-20, though probably not written by Mark, is nevertheless of canonical authority); John 3:16—“God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish”; 6:50—“This is the bread which cometh down out of heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die”; 12:47—“I came not to judge the world, but to save the world”; Acts 4:12—“in none other is there salvation: for neither is there any other name under heaven, that is given among men, wherein we must be saved.” Universal need of regeneration: John 3:3, 5—“Except one be born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.... Except one be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” Universal need of repentance: Acts 17:30—“commandeth men that they should all everywhere repent.” Yet Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy, in her “Unity of Good,” speaks of “the illusion which calls sin real and man a sinner needing a Savior.”

(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.

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 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 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 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 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 actual sin, 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 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 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 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.

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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 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 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.

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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 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. 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 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.

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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 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 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.

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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 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 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).”

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2. Positive and formal exclusion from God’s presence

This included:

(a) The cessation of man’s former familiar intercourse with God, and 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.

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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. 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.

We should not permit our use of the term “imputation” to be hindered or prejudiced by the fact that certain schools of theology, notably the Federal school, have attached to it an arbitrary, external, and mechanical meaning—holding that God imputes sin to men, not because they are sinners, but upon the ground of a legal fiction whereby Adam, without their consent, was made their representative. We shall see, on the contrary, that (1) in the case of Adam’s sin imputed to us, (2) in the case of our sins imputed to Christ, and (3) in the case of Christ’s righteousness imputed to the believer, there is always a realistic basis for the imputation, namely, a real union, (1) between Adam and his descendants, (2) between Christ and the race, and (3) between believers and Christ, such as gives in each case community of life, and enables us to say that God imputes to no man what does not properly belong to him.

Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say that “imputed righteousness and imputed sin are as absurd as any notion that ever took possession of human nature.” He had in mind, however, only that constructive guilt and merit which was advocated by Princeton theologians. He did not mean to deny the imputation to men of that which is their own. He recognized the fact that all men are sinners by inheritance as well as by voluntary act, and he found this taught in Scripture, both in the O. T. and in the N. T.; e. g., Neh. 1:6—“I confess the sins of the children of Israel, which we have sinned against thee. Yea, I and my father’s house have sinned”; Jer. 3:25—“Let us lie down in our shame, and let our confusion cover us; for we have sinned against Jehovah our God, we and our fathers”; 14:20—“We acknowledge, O Jehovah, our wickedness, and the iniquity of our fathers; for we have sinned against thee.” The word “imputed” is itself found in the N. T.; e. g., 2 Tim. 4:16—“At my first defence no one took my part: may it not be laid to their account,” or “imputed to them”—μὴ αὐτοῖς λογισθείη. Rom. 5:13—“sin is not imputed when there is no law”—οὐκ ἐλλογᾶται.

Not only the saints of Scripture times, but modern saints also, have imputed to themselves the sins of others, of their people, of their times, of the whole world. Jonathan Edwards, Resolutions, quoted by Allen, 28—“I will take it for granted that no one is so evil as myself; I will identify myself with all men and act as if their evil were my own, as if I had committed the same sins and had the same infirmities, so that the knowledge of their failings will promote in me nothing but a sense of shame.” Frederick Denison Maurice: “I wish to confess the sins of the time as my own.” Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 87—“The phrase ‘solidarity of humanity’ is growing every day in depth and significance. Whatever we do, we do not for ourselves alone. It is not as an individual alone that I can be measured or judged.” Royce, World and Individual, 2:404—“The problem of evil indeed demands the presence of free will in the world; while, on the other hand, it is equally true that no moral world whatever can be made consistent with the realistic thesis according to which free will agents are, in fortune and in penalty, independent of the deeds of other moral agents. It follows that, in our moral world, the righteous can suffer without individually deserving their suffering, just because their lives have no independent being, but are linked with all life—God himself also sharing in their suffering.”

The above quotations illustrate the belief in a human responsibility that goes beyond the bounds of personal sins. What this responsibility is, and what its limits are, we have yet to define. The problem is stated, but not solved, by A. H. Bradford, Heredity, 198, and The Age of Faith, 235—“Stephen prays: ‘Lord, lay not this sin to their charge’ (Acts 7:60). To whose charge then? We all have a share in one another’s sins. We too stood by and consented, as Paul did. ‘My sins gave sharpness to the nails, And pointed every thorn’ that pierced the brow of Jesus.... Yet in England and Wales the severer forms of this teaching [with regard to sin] have almost disappeared; not because of more thorough study of the Scripture, but because the awful congestion of population, with its attendant miseries, has convinced the majority of Christian thinkers that the old interpretations were too small for the near and terrible facts of human life, such as women with babies in their arms at the London gin-shops giving the infants sips of liquor out of their glasses, and a tavern keeper setting his four or five year old boy upon the counter to drink and swear and fight in imitation of his elders.”

(c) There are two fundamental principles which the Scriptures already cited seem clearly to substantiate, and which other Scriptures corroborate. The first is that man’s relations to moral law extend beyond the sphere of conscious and actual transgression, and embrace those moral tendencies and qualities of his being which he has in common with every other member of the race. The second is, that God’s moral government is a government which not only takes account of persons and personal acts, but also recognizes race responsibilities and inflicts race-penalties; or, in other words, judges mankind, not simply as a collection of separate individuals, but also as an organic whole, which can collectively revolt from God and incur the curse of the violated law.

On race-responsibility, see H. R. Smith, System of Theology, 288-302—“No one can apprehend the doctrine of original sin, nor the doctrine of redemption, who insists that the whole moral government of God has respect only to individual desert, who does not allow that the moral government of God, as moral, has a wider scope and larger relations, so that God may dispense suffering and happiness (in his all-wise and inscrutable providence) on other grounds than that of personal merit and demerit. The dilemma here is: the facts connected with native depravity and with the redemption through Christ either belong to the moral government of God, or not. If they do, then that government has to do with other considerations than those of personal merit and demerit (since our disabilities in consequence of sin and the grace offered in Christ are not in any sense the result of our personal choice, though we do choose in our relations to both). If they do not belong to the moral government of God, where shall we assign them? To the physical? That certainly can not be. To the divine sovereignty? But that does not relieve any difficulty; for the question still remains, Is that sovereignty, as thus exercised, just or unjust? We must take one or the other of these. The whole (of sin and grace) is either a mystery of sovereignty—of mere omnipotence—or a proceeding of moral government. The question will arise with respect to grace as well as to sin: How can the theory that all moral government has respect only to the merit or demerit of personal acts be applied to our justification? If all sin is in sinning, with a personal desert of everlasting death, by parity of reasoning all holiness must consist in a holy choice with personal merit of eternal life. We say then, generally, that all definitions of sin which mean a sin are irrelevant here.” Dr. Smith quotes Edwards, 2:309—“Original sin, the innate sinful depravity of the heart, includes not only the depravity of nature but the imputation of Adam’s first sin, or, in other words, the liableness or exposedness of Adam’s posterity, in the divine judgment, to partake of the punishment of that sin.”

The watchword of a large class of theologians—popularly called “New School”—is that “all sin consists in sinning,”—that is, all sin is sin of act. But we have seen that the dispositions and states in which a man is unlike God and his purity are also sin according to the meaning of the law. We have now to add that each man is responsible also for that sin of our first father in which the human race apostatized from God. In other words, we recognize the guilt of race-sin as well as of personal sin. We desire to say at the outset, however, that our view, and, as we believe, the Scriptural view, requires us also to hold to certain qualifications of the doctrine which to some extent alleviate its harshness and furnish its proper explanation. These qualifications we now proceed to mention.

(d) In recognizing the guilt of race-sin, we are to bear in mind: (1) that actual sin, in which the personal agent reaffirms the underlying determination of his will, is more guilty than original sin alone; (2) that no human being is finally condemned solely on account of original sin; but that all who, like infants, do not commit personal transgressions, are saved through the application of Christ’s atonement; (3) that our responsibility for inborn evil dispositions, or for the depravity common to the race, can be maintained only upon the ground that this depravity was caused by an original and conscious act of free will, when the race revolted from God in Adam; (4) that the doctrine of original sin is only the ethical interpretation of biological facts—the facts of heredity and of universal congenital ills, which demand an ethical ground and explanation; and (5) that the idea of original sin has for its correlate the idea of original grace, or the abiding presence and operation of Christ, the immanent God, in every member of the race, in spite of his sin, to counteract the evil and to prepare the way, so far as man will permit, for individual and collective salvation.

Over against the maxim: “All sin consists in sinning,” we put the more correct statement: Personal sin consists in sinning, but in Adam’s first sinning the race also sinned, so that “in Adam all die” (1 Cor. 15:22). Denney, Studies in Theology, 86—“Sin is not only personal but social; not only social but organic; character and all that is involved in character are capable of being attributed not only to individuals but to societies, and eventually to the human race itself; in short, there are not only isolated sins and individual sinners, but what has been called a kingdom of sin upon earth.” Leslie Stephen: “Man not dependent on a race is as meaningless a phrase as an apple that does not grow on a tree.” “Yet Aaron Burr and Abraham Lincoln show how a man may throw away every advantage of the best heredity and environment, while another can triumph over the worst. Man does not take his character from external causes, but shapes it by his own willing submission to influences from beneath or from above.”

Wm. Adams Brown: “The idea of inherited guilt can be accepted only if paralleled by the idea of inherited good. The consequences of sin have often been regarded as social, while the consequences of good have been regarded as only individual. But heredity transmits both good and evil.” Mrs. Lydia Avery Coonley Ward: “Why bowest thou, O soul of mine, Crushed by ancestral sin? Thou hast a noble heritage, That bids thee victory win. The tainted past may bring forth flowers, As blossomed Aaron’s rod: No legacy of sin annuls Heredity from God.” For further statements with regard to race-responsibility, see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:29-39 (System Doctrine, 2:324-333). For the modern view of the Fall, and its reconciliation with the doctrine of evolution, see J. H. Bernard, art.: The Fall, in Hastings’ Dict. of Bible; A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-180; Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ.

(e) There is a race-sin, therefore, as well as a personal sin; and that race-sin was committed by the first father of the race, when he comprised the whole race in himself. All mankind since that time have been born in the state into which he fell—a state of depravity, guilt, and condemnation. To vindicate God’s justice in imputing to us the sin of our first father, many theories have been devised, a part of which must be regarded as only attempts to evade the problem by denying the facts set before us in the Scriptures. Among these attempted explanations of the Scripture statements, we proceed to examine the six theories which seem most worthy of attention.

The first three of the theories which we discuss may be said to be evasions of the problem of original sin; all, in one form or another, deny that God imputes to all men Adam’s sin, in such a sense that all are guilty for it. These theories are the Pelagian, the Arminian, and the New School. The last three of the theories which we are about to treat, namely, the Federal theory, the theory of Mediate Imputation, and the theory of Adam’s Natural Headship, are all Old School theories, and have for their common characteristic that they assert the guilt of inborn depravity. All three, moreover, hold that we are in some way responsible for Adam’s sin, though they differ as to the precise way in which we are related to Adam. We must grant that no one, even of these latter theories, is wholly satisfactory. We hope, however, to show that the last of them—the Augustinian theory, the theory of Adam’s natural headship, the theory that Adam and his descendants are naturally and organically one—explains the largest number of facts, is least open to objection, and is most accordant with Scripture.

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I. Theories of Imputation

1. The Pelagian Theory, or Theory of Man’s natural Innocence.

Pelagius, a British monk, propounded his doctrines at Rome, 409. They were condemned by the Council of Carthage, 418. Pelagianism, however, as opposed to Augustinianism, designates a complete scheme of doctrine with regard to sin, of which Pelagius was the most thorough representative, although every feature of it cannot be ascribed to his authorship. Socinians and Unitarians are the more modern advocates of this general scheme.

According to this theory, every human soul is immediately created by God, and created as innocent, as free from depraved tendencies, and as perfectly able to obey God, as Adam was at his creation. The only effect of Adam’s sin upon his posterity is the effect of evil example; it has in no way corrupted human nature; the only corruption of human nature is that habit of sinning which each individual contracts by persistent transgression of known law.

Adam’s sin therefore injured only himself; the sin of Adam is imputed only to Adam,—it is imputed in no sense to his descendants; God imputes to each of Adam’s descendants only those acts of sin which he has personally and consciously committed. Men can be saved by the law as well as by the gospel; and some have actually obeyed God perfectly, and have thus been saved. Physical death is therefore not the penalty of sin, but an original law of nature; Adam would have died whether he had sinned or not; in Rom. 5:12, “death passed unto all men, for that all sinned,” signifies: “all incurred eternal death by sinning after Adam’s example.”

Wiggers, Augustinism and Pelagianism, 59, states the seven points of the Pelagian doctrine as follows: (1) Adam was created mortal, so that he would have died even if he had not sinned; (2) Adam’s sin injured, not the human race, but only himself; (3) new-born infants are in the same condition as Adam before the Fall; (4) the whole human race neither dies on account of Adam’s sin, nor rises on account of Christ’s resurrection; (5) infants, even though not baptized, attain eternal life; (6) the law is as good a means of salvation as the gospel; (7) even before Christ some men lived who did not commit sin.

In Pelagius’ Com. on Rom. 5:12, published in Jerome’s Works, vol. xi, we learn who these sinless men were, namely, Abel, Enoch, Joseph, Job, and, among the heathen, Socrates, Aristides, Numa. The virtues of the heathen entitle them to reward. Their worthies were not indeed without evil thoughts and inclinations; but, on the view of Pelagius that all sin consists in act, these evil thoughts and inclinations were not sin. “Non pleni nascimur”: we are born, not full, but vacant, of character. Holiness, Pelagius thought, could not be concreated. Adam’s descendants are not weaker, but stronger, than he; since they have fulfilled many commands, while he did not fulfil so much as one. In every man there is a natural conscience; he has an ideal of life; he forms right resolves; he recognizes the claims of law; he accuses himself when he sins,—all these things Pelagius regards as indications of a certain holiness in all men, and misinterpretation of these facts gives rise to his system; he ought to have seen in them evidences of a divine influence opposing man’s bent to evil and leading him to repentance. Grace, on the Pelagian theory, is simply the grace of creation—God’s originally endowing man with his high powers of reason and will. While Augustinianism regards human nature as dead, and Semi-Pelagianism regards it as sick, Pelagianism proper declares it to be well.

Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:43 (Syst. Doct., 2:338)—“Neither the body, man’s surroundings, nor the inward operation of God, have any determining influence upon the will. God reaches man only through external means, such as Christ’s doctrine, example, and promise. This clears God of the charge of evil, but also takes from him the authorship of good. It is Deism, applied to man’s nature. God cannot enter man’s being if he would, and he would not if he could. Free will is everything.” Ib., 1:626 (Syst. Doct., 2:188, 189)—“Pelagianism at one time counts it too great an honor that man should be directly moved upon by God, and at another, too great a dishonor that man should not be able to do without God. In this inconsistent reasoning, it shows its desire to be rid of God as much as possible. The true conception of God requires a living relation to man, as well as to the external universe. The true conception of man requires satisfaction of his longings and powers by reception of impulses and strength from God. Pelagianism, in seeking for man a development only like that of nature, shows that its high estimate of man is only a delusive one; it really degrades him, by ignoring his true dignity and destiny.” See Ib., 1:124, 125 (Syst. Doct., 1:136, 137); 2:43-45 (Syst. Doct., 2:338, 339); 2:148 (Syst. Doct., 3:44). Also Schaff, Church History, 2:783-856; Doctrines of the Early Socinians, in Princeton Essays, 1:194-211; Wörter, Pelagianismus. For substantially Pelagian statements, see Sheldon, Sin and Redemption; Ellis, Half Century of Unitarian Controversy, 76.

Of the Pelagian theory of sin, we may say:

A. It has never been recognized as Scriptural, nor has it been formulated in confessions, by any branch of the Christian church. Held only sporadically and by individuals, it has ever been regarded by the church at large as heresy. This constitutes at least a presumption against its truth.

As slavery was “the sum of all villainy,” so the Pelagian doctrine may be called the sum of all false doctrine. Pelagianism is a survival of paganism, in its majestic egoism and self-complacency. “Cicero, in his Natura Deorum, says that men thank the gods for external advantages, but no man ever thanks the gods for his virtues—that he is honest or pure or merciful. Pelagius was first roused to opposition by hearing a bishop in the public services of the church quote Augustine’s prayer: ‘Da quod jubes, et jube quod vis’—‘Give what thou commandest, and command what thou wilt.’ From this he was led to formulate the gospel according to St. Cicero, so perfectly does the Pelagian doctrine reproduce the Pagan teaching.” The impulse of the Christian, on the other hand, is to refer all gifts and graces to a divine source in Christ and in the Holy Spirit. Eph. 2:10—“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them”; John 15:16—“Ye did not choose me, but I chose you”; 1:13—“who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” H. Auber: “And every virtue we possess, And every victory won, And every thought of holiness, Are his alone.”

Augustine had said that “Man is most free when controlled by God alone”—“[Deo] solo dominante, liberrimus” (De Mor. Eccl., xxi). Gore, in Lux Mundi, 320—“In Christ humanity is perfect, because in him it retains no part of that false independence which, in all its manifold forms, is the secret of sin.” Pelagianism, on the contrary, is man’s declaration of independence. Harnack, Hist. Dogma, 5:200—“The essence of Pelagianism, the key to its whole mode of thought, lies in this proposition of Julian: ‘Homo libero arbitrio emancipatus a Deo’—man, created free, is in his whole being independent of God. He has no longer to do with God, but with himself alone. God reënters man’s life only at the end, at the judgment,—a doctrine of the orphanage of humanity.”

B. It contradicts Scripture in denying: (a) that evil disposition and state, as well as evil acts, are sin; (b) that such evil disposition and state are inborn in all mankind; (c) that men universally are guilty of overt transgression so soon as they come to moral consciousness; (d) that no man is able without divine help to fulfil the law; (e) that all men, without exception, are dependent for salvation upon God’s atoning, regenerating, sanctifying grace; (f) that man’s present state of corruption, condemnation, and death, is the direct effect of Adam’s transgression.

The Westminster Confession, ch. vi. § 4, declares that “we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil.” To Pelagius, on the contrary, sin is a mere incident. He knows only of sins, not of sin. He holds the atomic, or atomistic, theory of sin, which regards it as consisting in isolated volitions. Pelegianism, holding, as it does, that virtue and vice consist only in single decisions, does not account for character at all. There is no such thing as a state of sin, or a self-propagating power of sin. And yet upon these the Scriptures lay greater emphasis than upon mere acts of transgression. John 3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh”—“that which comes of a sinful and guilty stock is itself, from the very beginning, sinful and guilty” (Dorner). Witness the tendency to degradation in families and nations.

Amiel says that the great defect of liberal Christianity is its superficial conception of sin. The tendency dates far back: Tertullian spoke of the soul as naturally Christian—“anima naturaliter Christiana.” The tendency has come down to modern times: Crane, The Religion of To-morrow, 246—“It is only when children grow up, and begin to absorb their environment, that they lose their artless loveliness.” A Rochester Unitarian preacher publicly declared it to be as much a duty to believe in the natural purity of man, as to believe in the natural purity of God. Dr. Lyman Abbott speaks of “the shadow which the Manichæan theology of Augustine, borrowed by Calvin, cast upon all children, in declaring them born to an inheritance of wrath as a viper’s brood.” Dr. Abbott forgets that Augustine was the greatest opponent of Manichæanism, and that his doctrine of inherited guilt may be supplemented by a doctrine of inherited divine influences tending to salvation.

Prof. G. A. Coe tells us that “all children are within the household of God”; that “they are already members of his kingdom”; that “the adolescent change” is “a step not into the Christian life, but within the Christian life.” We are taught that salvation is by education. But education is only a way of presenting truth. It still remains needful that the soul should accept the truth. Pelagianism ignores or denies the presence in every child of a congenital selfishness which hinders acceptance of the truth, and which, without the working of the divine Spirit, will absolutely counteract the influence of the truth. Augustine was taught his guilt and helplessness by transgression, while Pelagius remained ignorant of the evil of his own heart. Pelagius might have said with Wordsworth, Prelude, 534—“I had approached, like other youths, the shield Of human nature from the golden side; And would have fought, even unto the death, to attest The quality of the metal which I saw.”

Schaff, on the Pelagian controversy, in Bib. Sac., 5:205-243—The controversy “resolves itself into the question whether redemption and sanctification are the work of man or of God. Pelagianism in its whole mode of thinking starts from man and seeks to work itself upward gradually, by means of an imaginary good-will, to holiness and communion with God. Augustinianism pursues the opposite way, deriving from God’s unconditioned and all-working grace a new life and all power of working good. The first is led from freedom into a legal, self-righteous piety; the other rises from the slavery of sin to the glorious liberty of the children of God. For the first, revelation is of force only as an outward help, or the power of a high example; for the last, it is the inmost life, the very marrow and blood of the new man. The first involves an Ebionitic view of Christ, as noble man, not high-priest or king; the second finds in him one in whom dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. The first makes conversion a process of gradual moral purification on the ground of original nature; with the last, it is a total change, in which the old passes away and all becomes new.... Rationalism is simply the form in which Pelagianism becomes theoretically complete. The high opinion which the Pelagian holds of the natural will is transferred with equal right by the Rationalist to the natural reason. The one does without grace, as the other does without revelation. Pelagian divinity is rationalistic. Rationalistic morality is Pelagian.” See this Compendium, page 89.

Allen, Religious Progress, 98-100—“Most of the mischief of religious controversy springs from the desire and determination to impute to one’s opponent positions which he does not hold, or to draw inferences from his principles, insisting that he shall be held responsible for them, even though he declares that he does not teach them. We say that he ought to accept them; that he is bound logically to do so; that they are necessary deductions from his system; that the tendency of his teaching is in these directions; and then we denounce and condemn him for what he disowns. It was in this way that Augustine filled out for Pelagius the gaps in his scheme, which he thought it necessary to do, in order to make Pelagius’s teaching consistent and complete; and Pelagius, in his turn, drew inferences from the Augustinian theology, about which Augustine would have preferred to maintain a discreet silence. Neither Augustine nor Calvin was anxious to make prominent the doctrine of the reprobation of the wicked to damnation, but preferred to dwell on the more attractive, more rational tenet of the elect to salvation, as subjects of the divine choice and approbation; substituting for the obnoxious word reprobation the milder, euphemistic word preterition. It was their opponents who were bent on forcing them out of their reserve, pushing them into what seemed the consistent sequence of their attitude, and then holding it up before the world for execration. And the same remark would apply to almost every theological contention that has embittered the church’s experience.”

C. It rests upon false philosophical principles; as, for example: (a) that the human will is simply the faculty of volitions; whereas it is also, and chiefly, the faculty of self-determination to an ultimate end; (b) that the power of a contrary choice is essential to the existence of will; whereas the will fundamentally determined to self-gratification has this power only with respect to subordinate choices, and cannot by a single volition reverse its moral state; (c) that ability is the measure of obligation,—a principle which would diminish the sinner’s responsibility, just in proportion to his progress in sin; (d) that law consists only in positive enactment; whereas it is the demand of perfect harmony with God, inwrought into man’s moral nature; (e) that each human soul is immediately created by God, and holds no other relations to moral law than those which are individual; whereas all human souls are organically connected with each other, and together have a corporate relation to God’s law, by virtue of their derivation from one common stock.

(a) Neander, Church History, 2:564-625, holds one of the fundamental principles of Pelagianism to be “the ability to choose, equally and at any moment, between good and evil.” There is no recognition of the law by which acts produce states; the power which repeated acts of evil possess to give a definite character and tendency to the will itself.—“Volition is an everlasting ‘tick,’ ‘tick,’ and swinging of the pendulum, but no moving forward of the hands of the clock follows.” “There is no continuity of moral life—no character, in man, angel, devil, or God.”—(b) See art. on Power of Contrary Choice, in Princeton Essays, 1:212-233; Pelagianism holds that no confirmation in holiness is possible. Thornwell, Theology: “The sinner is as free as the saint; the devil as the angel.” Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 399—“The theory that indifference is essential to freedom implies that will never acquires character; that voluntary action is atomistic, every act disintegrated from every other; that character, if acquired, would be incompatible with freedom.” “By mere volition the soul now a plenum can become a vacuum, or now a vacuum can become a plenum.” On the Pelagian view of freedom, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 37-44.

(c) Ps. 79:8—“Remember not against us the iniquities of our forefathers”; 106:6—“We have sinned with our fathers.” Notice the analogy of individuals who suffer from the effects of parental mistakes or of national transgression. Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:316, 317—“Neither the atomistic nor the organic view of human nature is the complete truth.” Each must be complemented by the other. For statement of race-responsibility, see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:30-39, 51-64, 161, 162 (System of Doctrine, 2:324-334, 345-359; 3:50-54)—“Among the Scripture proofs of the moral connection of the individual with the race are the visiting of the sins of the fathers upon the children; the obligation of the people to punish the sin of the individual, that the whole land may not incur guilt; the offering of sacrifice for a murder, the perpetrator of which is unknown. Achan’s crime is charged to the whole people. The Jewish race is the better for its parentage, and other nations are the worse for theirs. The Hebrew people become a legal personality.

“Is it said that none are punished for the sins of their fathers unless they are like their fathers? But to be unlike their fathers requires a new heart. They who are not held accountable for the sins of their fathers are those who have recognized their responsibility for them, and have repented for their likeness to their ancestors. Only the self-isolating spirit says: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ (Gen. 4:9), and thinks to construct a constant equation between individual misfortune and individual sin. The calamities of the righteous led to an ethical conception of the relation of the individual to the community. Such sufferings show that men can love God disinterestedly, that the good has unselfish friends. These sufferings are substitutionary, when borne as belonging to the sufferer, not foreign to him, the guilt of others attaching to him by virtue of his national or race-relation to them. So Moses in Ex. 34:9, David in Ps. 51:6, Isaiah in Is. 59:9-16, recognize the connection between personal sin and race-sin.

“Christ restores the bond between man and his fellows, turns the hearts of the fathers to the children. He is the creator of a new race-consciousness. In him as the head we see ourselves bound to, and responsible for others. Love finds it morally impossible to isolate itself. It restores the consciousness of unity and the recognition of common guilt. Does every man stand for himself in the N. T.? This would be so, only if each man became a sinner solely by free and conscious personal decision, either in the present, or in a past state of existence. But this is not Scriptural. Something comes before personal transgression: ‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh’ (John 3:6). Personality is the stronger for recognizing the race-sin. We have common joy in the victories of the good; so in shameful lapses we have sorrow. These are not our worst moments, but our best,—there is something great in them. Original sin must be displeasing to God; for it perverts the reason, destroys likeness to God, excludes from communion with God, makes redemption necessary, leads to actual sin, influences future generations. But to complain of God for permitting its propagation is to complain of his not destroying the race,—that is, to complain of one’s own existence.” See Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:93-110; Hagenbach, Hist. Doctrine, 1:287, 296-310; Martensen, Dogmatics, 354-362; Princeton Essays, 1:74-97; Dabney, Theology, 296-302, 314, 315.

2. The Arminian Theory, or Theory of voluntarily appropriated Depravity.

Arminius (1560-1609), professor in the University of Leyden, in South Holland, while formally accepting the doctrine of the Adamic unity of the race propounded both by Luther and Calvin, gave a very different interpretation to it—an interpretation which verged toward Semi-Pelagianism and the anthropology of the Greek Church. The Methodist body is the modern representative of this view.

According to this theory, all men, as a divinely appointed sequence of Adam’s transgression, are naturally destitute of original righteousness, and are exposed to misery and death. By virtue of the infirmity propagated from Adam to all his descendants, mankind are wholly unable without divine help perfectly to obey God or to attain eternal life. This inability, however, is physical and intellectual, but not voluntary. As matter of justice, therefore, God bestows upon each individual from the first dawn of consciousness a special influence of the Holy Spirit, which is sufficient to counteract the effect of the inherited depravity and to make obedience possible, provided the human will coöperates, which it still has power to do.

The evil tendency and state may be called sin; but they do not in themselves involve guilt or punishment; still less are mankind accounted guilty of Adam’s sin. God imputes to each man his inborn tendencies to evil, only when he consciously and voluntarily appropriates and ratifies these in spite of the power to the contrary, which, in justice to man, God has specially communicated. In Rom. 5:12, “death passed unto all men, for that all sinned,” signifies that physical and spiritual death is inflicted upon all men, not as the penalty of a common sin in Adam, but because, by divine decree, all suffer the consequences of that sin, and because all personally consent to their inborn sinfulness by acts of transgression.

See Arminius, Works, 1:252-254, 317-324, 325-327, 523-531, 575-583. The description given above is a description of Arminianism proper. The expressions of Arminius himself are so guarded that Moses Stuart (Bib. Repos., 1831) found it possible to construct an argument to prove that Arminius was not an Arminian. But it is plain that by inherited sin Arminius meant only inherited evil, and that it was not of a sort to justify God’s condemnation. He denied any inbeing in Adam, such as made us justly chargeable with Adam’s sin, except in the sense that we are obliged to endure certain consequences of it. This Shedd has shown in his History of Doctrine, 2:178-196. The system of Arminius was more fully expounded by Limborch and Episcopius. See Limborch, Theol. Christ., 3:4:6 (p. 189). The sin with which we are born “does not inhere in the soul, for this [soul] is immediately created by God, and therefore, if it were infected with sin, that sin would be from God.” Many so-called Arminians, such as Whitby and John Taylor, were rather Pelagians.

John Wesley, however, greatly modified and improved the Arminian doctrine. Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:329, 330—“Wesleyanism (1) admits entire moral depravity; (2) denies that men in this state have any power to coöperate with the grace of God; (3) asserts that the guilt of all through Adam was removed by the justification of all through Christ; (4) ability to coöperate is of the Holy Spirit, through the universal influence of the redemption of Christ. The order of the decrees is (1) to permit the fall of man; (2) to send the Son to be a full satisfaction for the sins of the whole world; (3) on that ground to remit all original sin, and to give such grace as would enable all to attain eternal life; (4) those who improve that grace and persevere to the end are ordained to be saved.” We may add that Wesley made the bestowal upon our depraved nature of ability to coöperate with God to be a matter of grace, while Arminius regarded it as a matter of justice, man without it not being accountable.

Wesleyanism was systematized by Watson, who, in his Institutes, 2:53-55, 59, 77, although denying the imputation of Adam’s sin in any proper sense, yet declares that “Limborch and others materially departed from the tenets of Arminius in denying inward lusts and tendencies to be sinful till complied with and augmented by the will. But men universally choose to ratify these tendencies; therefore they are corrupt in heart. If there be a universal depravity of will previous to the actual choice, then it inevitably follows that though infants do not commit actual sin, yet that theirs is a sinful nature....As to infants, they are not indeed born justified and regenerate; so that to say original sin is taken away, as to infants, by Christ, is not the correct view of the case, for the reasons before given; but they are all born under ‘the free gift,’ the effects of the ‘righteousness’ of one, which is extended to all men; and this free gift is bestowed on them in order to justification of life, the adjudging of the condemned to live....Justification in adults is connected with repentance and faith; in infants, we do not know how. The Holy Spirit may be given to children. Divine and effectual influence may be exerted on them, to cure the spiritual death and corrupt tendency of their nature.”

It will be observed that Watson’s Wesleyanism is much more near to Scripture than what we have described, and properly described, as Arminianism proper. Pope, in his Theology, follows Wesley and Watson, and (2:70-86) gives a valuable synopsis of the differences between Arminius and Wesley. Whedon and Raymond, in America, better represent original Arminianism. They hold that God was under obligation to restore man’s ability, and yet they inconsistently speak of this ability as a gracious ability. Two passages from Raymond’s Theology show the inconsistency of calling that “grace,” which God is bound in justice to bestow, in order to make man responsible: 2:84-86—“The race came into existence under grace. Existence and justification are secured for it only through Christ; for, apart from Christ, punishment and destruction would have followed the first sin. So all gifts of the Spirit necessary to qualify him for the putting forth of free moral choices are secured for him through Christ. The Spirit of God is not a bystander, but a quickening power. So man is by grace, not by his fallen nature, a moral being capable of knowing, loving, obeying, and enjoying God. Such he ever will be, if he does not frustrate the grace of God. Not till the Spirit takes his final flight is he in a condition of total depravity.”

Compare with this the following passage of the same work in which this “grace” is called a debt: 2:317—“The relations of the posterity of Adam to God are substantially those of newly created beings. Each individual person is obligated to God, and God to him, precisely the same as if God had created him such as he is. Ability must equal obligation. God was not obligated to provide a Redeemer for the first transgressors, but having provided Redemption for them, and through it having permitted them to propagate a degenerate race, an adequate compensation is due. The gracious influences of the Spirit are then a debt due to man—a compensation for the disabilities of inherited depravity.” McClintock and Strong (Cyclopædia, art.: Arminius) endorse Whedon’s art. in the Bib. Sac., 19:241, as an exhibition of Arminianism, and Whedon himself claims it to be such. See Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:214-216.

With regard to the Arminian theory we remark:

A. We grant that there is a universal gift of the Holy Spirit, if by the Holy Spirit is meant the natural light of reason and conscience, and the manifold impulses to good which struggle against the evil of man’s nature. But we regard as wholly unscriptural the assumptions: (a) that this gift of the Holy Spirit of itself removes the depravity or condemnation derived from Adam’s fall; (b) that without this gift man would not be responsible for being morally imperfect; and (c) that at the beginning of moral life men consciously appropriate their inborn tendencies to evil.

John Wesley adduced in proof of universal grace the text: John 1:9—“the light which lighteth every man”—which refers to the natural light of reason and conscience which the preincarnate Logos bestowed on all men, though in different degrees, before his coming in the flesh. This light can be called the Holy Spirit, because it was “the Spirit of Christ” (1 Pet. 1:11). The Arminian view has a large element of truth in its recognition of an influence of Christ, the immanent God, which mitigates the effects of the Fall and strives to prepare men for salvation. But Arminianism does not fully recognize the evil to be removed, and it therefore exaggerates the effect of this divine working. Universal grace does not remove man’s depravity or man’s condemnation; as is evident from a proper interpretation of Rom. 5:12-19 and of Eph. 2:3; it only puts side by side with that depravity and condemnation influences and impulses which counteract the evil and urge the sinner to repentance: John 1:5—“the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness apprehended it not.” John Wesley also referred to Rom. 5:18—“through one act of righteousness the free gift came unto all men to justification of life”—but here the “all men” is conterminous with “the many” who are “made righteous” in verse 19, and with the “all” who are “made alive” in 1 Cor. 15:22; in other words, the “all” in this case is “all believers”: else the passage teaches, not universal gift of the Spirit, but universal salvation.

Arminianism holds to inherited sin, in the sense of infirmity and evil tendency, but not to inherited guilt. John Wesley, however, by holding also that the giving of ability is a matter of grace and not of justice, seems to imply that there is a common guilt as well as a common sin, before consciousness. American Arminians are more logical, but less Scriptural. Sheldon, Syst. Christian Doctrine, 321, tells us that “guilt cannot possibly be a matter of inheritance, and consequently original sin can be affirmed of the posterity of Adam only in the sense of hereditary corruption, which first becomes an occasion of guilt when it is embraced by the will of the individual.” How little the Arminian means by “sin,” can be inferred from the saying of Bishop Simpson that “Christ inherited sin.” He meant of course only physical and intellectual infirmity, without a tinge of guilt. “A child inherits its parent’s nature,” it is said, “not as a punishment, but by natural law.” But we reply that this natural law is itself an expression of God’s moral nature, and the inheritance of evil can be justified only upon the ground of a common non-conformity to God in both the parent and the child, or a participation of each member in the common guilt of the race.

In the light of our preceding treatment, we can estimate the element of good and the element of evil in Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:232—“It is an exaggeration when original sin is considered as personally imputable guilt; and it is going too far when it is held to be the whole state of the natural man, and yet the actually present good, the ‘original grace,’ is overlooked....We may say, with Schleiermacher, that original sin is the common deed and common guilt of the human race. But the individual always participates in this collective guilt in the measure in which he takes part with his personal doing in the collective act that is directed to the furtherance of the bad.” Dabney, Theology, 315, 316—“Arminianism is orthodox as to the legal consequences of Adam’s sin to his posterity; but what it gives with one hand, it takes back with the other, attributing to grace the restoration of this natural ability lost by the Fall. If the effects of Adam’s Fall on his posterity are such that they would have been unjust if not repaired by a redeeming plan that was to follow it, then God’s act in providing a Redeemer was not an act of pure grace. He was under obligation to do some such thing,—salvation is not grace, but debt.” A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 187 sq., denies the universal gift of the Spirit, quoting John 14:17—“whom the world cannot receive; for it beholdeth him not, neither knoweth him”; 16:7—“if I go, I will send him unto you”; i. e., Christ’s disciples were to be the recipients and distributers of the Holy Spirit, and his church the mediator between the Spirit and the world. Therefore Mark 16:15—“Go ye into all the world, and preach,” implies that the Spirit shall go only with them. Conviction of the Spirit does not go beyond the church’s evangelizing. But we reply that Gen. 6:3 implies a wider striving of the Holy Spirit.

B. It contradicts Scripture in maintaining: (a) that inherited moral evil does not involve guilt; (b) that the gift of the Spirit, and the regeneration of infants, are matters of justice; (c) that the effect of grace is simply to restore man’s natural ability, instead of disposing him to use that ability aright; (d) that election is God’s choice of certain men to be saved upon the ground of their foreseen faith, instead of being God’s choice to make certain men believers; (e) that physical death is not the just penalty of sin, but is a matter of arbitrary decree.

(a) See Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:58 (System of Doctrine, 2:352-359)—“With Arminius, original sin is original evil only, not guilt. He explained the problem of original sin by denying the fact, and turning the native sinfulness into a morally indifferent thing. No sin without consent; no consent at the beginning of human development; therefore, no guilt in evil desire. This is the same as the Romanist doctrine of concupiscence, and like that leads to blaming God for an originally bad constitution of our nature....Original sin is merely an enticement to evil addressed to the free will. All internal disorder and vitiosity is morally indifferent, and becomes sin only through appropriation by free will. But involuntary, loveless, proud thoughts are recognized in Scripture as sin; yet they spring from the heart without our conscious consent. Undeliberate and deliberate sins run into each other, so that it is impossible to draw a line between them. The doctrine that there is no sin without consent implies power to withhold consent. But this contradicts the universal need of redemption and our observation that none have ever thus entirely withheld consent from sin.”

(b) H. B. Smith’s Review of Whedon on the Will, in Faith and Philosophy, 359-399—“A child, upon the old view, needs only growth to make him guilty of actual sin; whereas, upon this view, he needs growth and grace too.” See Bib. Sac., 20:327, 328. According to Whedon, Com. on Rom. 5:12, “the condition of an infant apart from Christ is that of a sinner, as one sure to sin, yet never actually condemned before personal apostasy. This would be its condition, rather, for in Christ the infant is regenerate and justified and endowed with the Holy Spirit. Hence all actual sinners are apostates from a state of grace.” But we ask: 1. Why then do infants die before they have committed actual sin? Surely not on account of Adam’s sin, for they are delivered from all the evils of that, through Christ. It must be because they are still somehow sinners. 2. How can we account for all infants sinning so soon as they begin morally to act, if, before they sin, they are in a state of grace and sanctification? It must be because they were still somehow sinners. In other words, the universal regeneration and justification of infants contradict Scripture and observation.

(c) Notice that this “gracious” ability does not involve saving grace to the recipient, because it is given equally to all men. Nor is it more than a restoring to man of his natural ability lost by Adam’s sin. It is not sufficient to explain why one man who has the gracious ability chooses God, while another who has the same gracious ability chooses self. 1 Cor. 4:7—“who maketh thee to differ?” Not God, but thyself. Over against this doctrine of Arminians, who hold to universal, resistible grace, restoring natural ability, Calvinists and Augustinians hold to particular, irresistible grace, giving moral ability, or, in other words, bestowing the disposition to use natural ability aright. “Grace” is a word much used by Arminians. Methodist Doctrine and Discipline, Articles of Religion, viii—“The condition of man after the fall of Adam is such that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and works, to faith, and calling upon God; wherefore we have no power to do good works, pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.” It is important to understand that, in Arminian usage, grace is simply the restoration of man’s natural ability to act for himself; it never actually saves him, but only enables him to save himself—if he will. Arminian grace is evenly bestowed grace of spiritual endowment, as Pelagian grace is evenly bestowed grace of creation. It regards redemption as a compensation for innate and consequently irresponsible depravity.

(d) In the Arminian system, the order of salvation is, (1) faith—by an unrenewed but convicted man; (2) justification; (3) regeneration, or a holy heart. God decrees not to originate faith, but to reward it. Hence Wesleyans make faith a work, and regard election as God’s ordaining those who, he foresees, will of their own accord believe. The Augustinian order, on the contrary, is (1) regeneration; (2) faith; (3) justification. Memoir of Adolph Saphir, 255—“My objection to the Arminian or semi-Arminian is not that they make the entrance very wide; but that they do not give you anything definite, safe and real, when you have entered.... Do not believe the devil’s gospel, which is a chance of salvation: chance of salvation is chance of damnation.” Grace is not a reward for good deeds done, but a power enabling us to do them. Francis Rous of Truro, in the Parliament of 1629, spoke as a man nearly frantic with horror at the increase of that “error of Arminianism which makes the grace of God lackey it after the will of man”; see Masson, Life of Milton, 1:277. Arminian converts say: “I gave my heart to the Lord”; Augustinian converts say: “The Holy Spirit convicted me of sin and renewed my heart.” Arminianism tends to self-sufficiency; Augustinianism promotes dependence upon God.

C. It rests upon false philosophical principles, as for example: (a) That the will is simply the faculty of volitions. (b) That the power of contrary choice, in the sense of power by a single act to reverse one’s moral state, is essential to will. (c) That previous certainty of any given moral act is incompatible with its freedom. (d) That ability is the measure of obligation. (e) That law condemns only volitional transgression. (f) That man has no organic moral connection with the race.

(b) Raymond says: “Man is responsible for character, but only so far as that character is self-imposed. We are not responsible for character irrespective of its origin. Freedom from an act is as essential to responsibility as freedom to it. If power to the contrary is impossible, then freedom does not exist in God or man. Sin was a necessity, and God was the author of it.” But this is a denial that there is any such thing as character; that the will can give itself a bent which no single volition can change; that the wicked man can become the slave of sin; that Satan, though without power now in himself to turn to God, is yet responsible for his sin. The power of contrary choice which Adam had exists no longer in its entirety; it is narrowed down to a power to the contrary in temporary and subordinate choices; it no longer is equal to the work of changing the fundamental determination of the being to selfishness as an ultimate end. Yet for this very inability, because originated by will, man is responsible.

Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:28—“Formal freedom leads the way to real freedom. The starting-point is a freedom which does not yet involve an inner necessity, but the possibility of something else; the goal is the freedom which is identical with necessity. The first is a means to the last. When the will has fully and truly chosen, the power of acting otherwise may still be said to exist in a metaphysical sense; but morally, i. e., with reference to the contrast of good and evil, it is entirely done away. Formal freedom is freedom of choice, in the sense of volition with the express consciousness of other possibilities.” Real freedom is freedom to choose the good only, with no remaining possibility that evil will exert a counter attraction. But as the will can reach a “moral necessity” of good, so it can through sin reach a “moral necessity” of evil.

(c) Park: “The great philosophical objection to Arminianism is its denial of the certainty of human action—the idea that a man may act either way without certainty how he will act—power of a contrary choice in the sense of a moral indifference which can choose without motive, or contrary to the strongest motive. The New School view is better than this, for that holds to the certainty of wrong choice, while yet the soul has power to make a right one.... The Arminians believe that it is objectively uncertain whether a man shall act in this way or in that, right or wrong. There is nothing, antecedently to choice, to decide the choice. It was the whole aim of Edwards to refute the idea that man would not certainly sin. The old Calvinists believe that antecedently to the Fall Adam was in this state of objective uncertainty, but that after the Fall it was certain he would sin, and his probation therefore was closed. Edwards affirms that no such objective uncertainty or power to the contrary ever existed, and that man now has all the liberty he ever had or could have. The truth in ‘power to the contrary’ is simply the power of the will to act contrary to the way it does act. President Edwards believed in this, though he is commonly understood as reasoning to the contrary. The false ‘power to the contrary’ is uncertainty how one will act, or a willingness to act otherwise than one does act. This is the Arminian power to the contrary, and it is this that Edwards opposes.”

(e) Whedon, On the Will, 338-360, 388-395—“Prior to free volition, man may be unconformed to law, yet not a subject of retribution. The law has two offices, one judicatory and critical, the other retributive and penal. Hereditary evil may not be visited with retribution, as Adam’s concreated purity was not meritorious. Passive, prevolitional holiness is moral rectitude, but not moral desert. Passive, prevolitional impurity needs concurrence of active will to make it condemnable.”

D. It renders uncertain either the universality of sin or man’s responsibility for it. If man has full power to refuse consent to inborn depravity, then the universality of sin and the universal need of a Savior are merely hypothetical. If sin, however, be universal, there must have been an absence of free consent; and the objective certainty of man’s sinning, according to the theory, destroys his responsibility.

Raymond, Syst. Theol., 2:86-89, holds it “theoretically possible that a child may be so trained and educated in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, as that he will never knowingly and willingly transgress the law of God; in which case he will certainly grow up into regeneration and final salvation. But it is grace that preserves him from sin—[common grace?]. We do not know, either from experience or Scripture, that none have been free from known and wilful transgressions.” J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 26-33—“It is possible to walk from the cradle to the grave, not indeed altogether without sin, but without any period of alienation from God, and with the heavenly life developing along with the earthly, as it did in Christ, from the first.” But, since grace merely restores ability without giving the disposition to use that ability aright, Arminianism does not logically provide for the certain salvation of any infant. Calvinism can provide for the salvation of all dying in infancy, for it knows of a divine power to renew the will, but Arminianism knows of no such power, and so is furthest from a solution of the problem of infant salvation. See Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:320-326; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 479-494; Bib. Sac. 23:206; 28:279; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:56 sq.

3. The New School Theory, or Theory of uncondemnable Vitiosity.

This theory is called New School, because of its recession from the old Puritan anthropology of which Edwards and Bellamy in the last century were the expounders. The New School theory is a general scheme built up by the successive labors of Hopkins, Emmons, Dwight, Taylor, and Finney. It is held at present by New School Presbyterians, and by the larger part of the Congregational body.

According to this theory, all men are born with a physical and moral constitution which predisposes them to sin, and all men do actually sin so soon as they come to moral consciousness. This vitiosity of nature may be called sinful, because it uniformly leads to sin; but it is not itself sin, since nothing is to be properly denominated sin but the voluntary act of transgressing known law.

God imputes to men only their own acts of personal transgression; he does not impute to them Adam’s sin; neither original vitiosity nor physical death are penal inflictions; they are simply consequences which God has in his sovereignty ordained to mark his displeasure at Adam’s transgression, and subject to which evils God immediately creates each human soul. In Rom. 5:12, “death passed unto all men, for that all sinned,” signifies: “spiritual death passed on all men, because all men have actually and personally sinned.”

Edwards held that God imputes Adam’s sin to his posterity by arbitrarily identifying them with him,—identity, on the theory of continuous creation (see pages 415-418), being only what God appoints. Since this did not furnish sufficient ground for imputation, Edwards joined the Placean doctrine to the other, and showed the justice of the condemnation by the fact that man is depraved. He adds, moreover, the consideration that man ratifies this depravity by his own act. So Edwards tried to combine three views. But all were vitiated by his doctrine of continuous creation, which logically made God the only cause in the universe, and left no freedom, guilt, or responsibility to man. He held that preservation is a continuous series of new divine volitions, personal identity consisting in consciousness or rather memory, with no necessity for identity of substance. He maintained that God could give to an absolutely new creation the consciousness of one just annihilated, and thereby the two would be identical. He maintained this not only as a possibility, but as the actual fact. See Lutheran Quarterly, April, 1901:149-169; and H. N. Gardiner, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.

The idealistic philosophy of Edwards enables us to understand his conception of the relation of the race to Adam. He believed in “a real union between the root and the branches of the world of mankind, established by the author of the whole system of the universe ... the full consent of the hearts of Adam’s posterity to the first apostasy ... and therefore the sin of the apostasy is not theirs merely because God imputes it to them, but it is truly and properly theirs, and on that ground God imputes it to them.” Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:435-448, esp. 436, quotes from Edwards: “The guilt a man has upon his soul at his first existence is one and simple, viz.: the guilt of the original apostasy, the guilt of the sin by which the species first rebelled against God.” Interpret this by other words of Edwards: “The child and the acorn, which come into existence in the course of nature, are truly immediately created by God”—i. e., continuously created (quoted by Dodge, Christian Theology, 188). Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 310—“It required but a step from the principle that each individual has an identity of consciousness with Adam, to reach the conclusion that each individual is Adam and repeats his experience. Of every man it might be said that like Adam he comes into the world attended by the divine nature, and like him sins and falls. In this sense the sin of every man becomes original sin.” Adam becomes not the head of humanity but its generic type. Hence arises the New School doctrine of exclusively individual sin and guilt.

Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:25, claims Edwards as a Traducianist. But Fisher, Discussions, 240, shows that he was not. As we have seen (Prolegomena, pages 48, 49), Edwards thought too little of nature. He tended to Berkeleyanism as applied to mind. Hence the chief good was in happiness—a form of sensibility. Virtue is voluntary choice of this good. Hence union of acts and exercises with Adam was sufficient. This God’s will might make identity of being with him. Baird, Elohim Revealed, 250 sq., says well, that “Edwards’s idea that the character of an act was to be sought somewhere else than in its cause involves the fallacious assumption that acts have a subsistence and moral agency of their own apart from that of the actor.” This divergence from the truth led to the Exercise-system of Hopkins and Emmons, who not only denied moral character prior to individual choices (i. e., denied sin of nature), but attributed all human acts and exercises to the direct efficiency of God. Hopkins declared that Adam’s act, in eating the forbidden fruit, was not the act of his posterity; therefore they did not sin at the same time that he did. The sinfulness of that act could not be transferred to them afterwards; because the sinfulness of an act can no more be transferred from one person to another than an act itself. Therefore, though men became sinners by Adam, according to divine constitution, yet they have, and are accountable for, no sins but personal. See Woods, History of Andover Theological Seminary, 33. So the doctrine of continuous creation led to the Exercise-system, and the Exercise-system led to the theology of acts. On Emmons, see Works, 4:502-507, and Bib. Sac., 7:479; 20:317; also H. B. Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 215-263.

N. W. Taylor, of New Haven, agreed with Hopkins and Emmons that there is no imputation of Adam’s sin or of inborn depravity. He called that depravity physical, not moral. But he repudiated the doctrine of divine efficiency in the production of man’s acts and exercises, and made all sin to be personal. He held to the power of contrary choice. Adam had it, and contrary to the belief of Augustinians, he never lost it. Man “not only can if he will, but he can if he won’t.” He can, but, without the Spirit, will not. He said: “Man can, whatever the Holy Spirit does or does not do”; but also: “Man will not, unless the Holy Spirit helps”; “If I were as eloquent as the Holy Ghost, I could convert sinners as fast as he.” Yet he did not hold to the Arminian liberty of indifference or contingence. He believed in the certainty of wrong action, yet in power to the contrary. See Moral Government, 2:132—“The error of Pelagius was not in asserting that man can obey God without grace, but in saying that man does actually obey God without grace.” There is a part of the sinner’s nature to which the motives of the gospel may appeal—a part of his nature which is neither holy nor unholy, viz., self-love, or innocent desire for happiness. Greatest happiness is the ground of obligation. Under the influence of motives appealing to happiness, the sinner can suspend his choice of the world as his chief good, and can give his heart to God. He can do this, whatever the Holy Spirit does, or does not do; but the moral inability can be overcome only by the Holy Spirit, who moves the soul, without coercing, by means of the truth. On Dr. Taylor’s system, and its connection with prior New England theology, see Fisher, Discussions, 285-354.

This form of New School doctrine suggests the following questions: 1. Can the sinner suspend his selfishness before he is subdued by divine grace? 2. Can his choice of God from mere self-love be a holy choice? 3. Since God demands love in every choice, must it not be a positively unholy choice? 4. If it is not itself a holy choice, how can it be a beginning of holiness? 5. If the sinner can become regenerate by preferring God on the ground of self-interest, where is the necessity of the Holy Spirit to renew the heart? 6. Does not this asserted ability of the sinner to turn to God contradict consciousness and Scripture? For Taylor’s Views, see his Revealed Theology, 134-309. For criticism of them, see Hodge, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1868:63 sq., and 368-398; also, Tyler, Letters on the New Haven Theology. Neither Hopkins and Emmons on the one hand, nor Taylor on the other, represent most fully the general course of New England theology. Smalley, Dwight, Woods, all held to more conservative views than Taylor, or than Finney, whose system had much resemblance to Taylor’s. All three of these denied the power of contrary choice which Dr. Taylor so strenuously maintained, although all agreed with him in denying the imputation of Adam’s sin or of our hereditary depravity. These are not sinful, except in the sense of being occasions of actual sin.

Dr. Park, of Andover, was understood to teach that the disordered state of the sensibilities and faculties with which we are born is the immediate occasion of sin, while Adam’s transgression is the remote occasion of sin. The will, though influenced by an evil tendency, is still free; the evil tendency itself is not free, and therefore is not sin. The Statement of New School doctrine given in the text is intended to represent the common New England doctrine, as taught by Smalley, Dwight, Woods and Park; although the historical tendency, even among these theologians, has been to emphasize less and less the depraved tendencies prior to actual sin, and to maintain that moral character begins only with individual choice, most of them, however, holding that this individual choice begins at birth. See Bib. Sac., 7:552, 567; 8:607-647; 20:462-471, 576-593; Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 407-412; Foster, Hist. N. E. Theology.

Both Ritschl and Pfleiderer lean toward the New School interpretation of sin. Ritschl, Unterricht, 25—“Universal death was the consequence of the sin of the first man, and the death of his posterity proved that they too had sinned.” Thus death is universal, not because of natural generation from Adam, but because of the individual sins of Adam’s posterity. Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 122—“Sin is a direction of the will which contradicts the moral Idea. As preceding personal acts of the will, it is not personal guilt but imperfection or evil. When it persists in spite of awaking moral consciousness, and by indulgence become habit, it is guilty abnormity.”

To the New School theory we object as follows:

A. It contradicts Scripture in maintaining or implying: (a) That sin consists solely in acts, and in the dispositions caused in each case by man’s individual acts, and that the state which predisposes to acts of sin is not itself sin. (b) That the vitiosity which predisposes to sin is a part of each man’s nature as it proceeds from the creative hand of God. (c) That physical death in the human race is not a penal consequence of Adam’s transgression. (d) That infants, before moral consciousness, do not need Christ’s sacrifice to save them. Since they are innocent, no penalty rests upon them, and none needs to be removed. (e) That we are neither condemned upon the ground of actual inbeing in Adam, nor justified upon the ground of actual inbeing in Christ.

If a child may not be unholy before he voluntarily transgresses, then, by parity of reasoning, Adam could not have been holy before he obeyed the law, nor can a change of heart precede Christian action. New School principles would compel us to assert that right action precedes change of heart, and that obedience in Adam must have preceded his holiness. Emmons held that, if children die before they become moral agents, it is most rational to conclude that they are annihilated. They are mere animals. The common New School doctrine would regard them as saved either on account of their innocence, or because the atonement of Christ avails to remove the consequences as well as the penalty of sin.

But to say that infants are pure contradicts Rom. 5:12—“all sinned”; 1 Cor. 7:14—“else were your children unclean”; Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath.” That Christ’s atonement removes natural consequences of sin is nowhere asserted or implied in Scripture. See, per contra, H. B. Smith, System, 271, where, however, it is only maintained that Christ saves from all the just consequences of sin. But all just consequences are penalty, and should be so called. The exigencies of New School doctrine compel it to put the beginning of sin in the infant at the very first moment of its separate existence,—in order not to contradict those Scriptures which speak of sin as being universal, and of the atonement as being needed by all. Dr. Park held that infants sin so soon as they are born. He was obliged to hold this, or else to say that some members of the human race exist who are not sinners. But by putting sin thus early in human experience, all meaning is taken out of the New School definition of sin as the “voluntary transgression of known law.” It is difficult to say, upon this theory, what sort of a choice the infant makes of sin, or what sort of a known law it violates.

The first need in a theory of sin is that of satisfying the statements of Scripture. The second need is that it should point out an act of man which will justify the infliction of pain, suffering, and death upon the whole human race. Our moral sense refuses to accept the conclusion that all this is a matter of arbitrary sovereignty. We cannot find the act in each man’s conscious transgression, nor in sin committed at birth. We do find such a voluntary transgression of known law in Adam; and we claim that the New School definition of sin is much more consistent with this last explanation of sin’s origin than is the theory of a multitude of individual transgressions.

The final test of every theory, however, is its conformity to Scripture. We claim that a false philosophy prevents the advocates of New School doctrine from understanding the utterances of Paul. Their philosophy is a modified survival of atomistic Pelagianism. They ignore nature in both God and man, and resolve character into transient acts. The unconscious or subconscious state of the will they take little or no account of, and the possibility of another and higher life interpenetrating and transforming our own life is seldom present to their minds. They have no proper idea of the union of the believer with Christ, and so they have no proper idea of the union of the race with Adam. They need to learn that, as all the spiritual life of the race was in Christ, the second Adam, so all the natural life of the race was in the first Adam; as we derive righteousness from the former, so we derive corruption from the latter. Because Christ’s life is in them, Paul can say that all believers rose in Christ’s resurrection; because Adam’s life is in them, he can say that in Adam all die. We should prefer to say with Pfleiderer that Paul teaches this doctrine but that Paul is no authority for us, rather than to profess acceptance of Paul’s teaching while we ingeniously evade the force of his argument. We agree with Stevens, Pauline Theology, 135, 136, that all men “sinned in the same sense in which believers were crucified to the world and died unto sin when Christ died upon the cross.” But we protest that to make Christ’s death the mere occasion of the death of the believer, and Adam’s sin the mere occasion of the sins of men, is to ignore the central truths of Paul’s teaching—the vital union of the believer with Christ, and the vital union of the race with Adam.

B. It rests upon false philosophical principles, as for example: (a) That the soul is immediately created by God. (b) That the law of God consists wholly in outward command. (c) That present natural ability to obey the law is the measure of obligation. (d) That man’s relations to moral law are exclusively individual. (e) That the will is merely the faculty of individual and personal choices. (f) That the will, at man’s birth, has no moral state or character.

See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 250 sq.—“Personality is inseparable from nature. The one duty is love. Unless any given duty is performed through the activity of a principle of love springing up in the nature, it is not performed at all. The law addresses the nature. The efficient cause of moral action is the proper subject of moral law. It is only in the perversity of unscriptural theology that we find the absurdity of separating the moral character from the substance of the soul, and tying it to the vanishing deeds of life. The idea that responsibility and sin are predicable of actions merely is only consistent with an utter denial that man’s nature as such owes anything to God, or has an office to perform in showing forth his glory. It ignores the fact that actions are empty phenomena, which in themselves have no possible value. It is the heart, soul, might, mind, strength, with which we are to love. Christ conformed to the law, by being ‘that holy thing’ (Luke 1:35, marg.).”

Erroneous philosophical principles lie at the basis of New School interpretations of Scripture. The solidarity of the race is ignored, and all moral action is held to be individual. In our discussion of the Augustinian theory of sin, we shall hope to show that underlying Paul’s doctrine there is quite another philosophy. Such a philosophy together with a deeper Christian experience would have corrected the following statement of Paul’s view of sin, by Orello Cone, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1898:241-267. On the phrase Rom. 5:12—“for that all sinned,” he remarks: “If under the new order men do not become righteous simply because of the righteousness of Christ and without their choice, neither under the old order did Paul think them to be subject to death without their own acts of sin. Each representative head is conceived only as the occasion of the results of his work, on the one hand in the tragic order of death, and on the other hand in the blessed order of life—the occasion indispensable to all that follows in either order.... It may be questioned whether Pfleiderer does not state the case too strongly when he says that the sin of Adam’s posterity is regarded as ‘the necessary consequence’ of the sin of Adam. It does not follow from the employment of the aorist ἥμαρτον that the sinning of all is contained in that of Adam, although this sense must be considered as grammatically possible. It is not however the only grammatically defensible sense. In Rom. 3:23, ἥμαρτον certainly does not denote such a definite past act filling only one point of time.” But we reply that the context determines that in Rom. 5:12, ἥμαρτον does denote such a definite past act; see our interpretation of the whole passage, under the Augustinian Theory, pages 625-627.

C. It impugns the justice of God:

(a) By regarding him as the direct creator of a vicious nature which infallibly leads every human being into actual transgression. To maintain that, in consequence of Adam’s act, God brings it about that all men become sinners, and this, not by virtue of inherent laws of propagation, but by the direct creation in each case of a vicious nature, is to make God indirectly the author of sin.

(b) By representing him as the inflicter of suffering and death upon millions of human beings who in the present life do not come to moral consciousness, and who are therefore, according to the theory, perfectly innocent. This is to make him visit Adam’s sin on his posterity, while at the same time it denies that moral connection between Adam and his posterity which alone could make such visitation just.

(c) By holding that the probation which God appoints to men is a separate probation of each soul, when it first comes to moral consciousness and is least qualified to decide aright. It is much more consonant with our ideas of the divine justice that the decision should have been made by the whole race, in one whose nature was pure and who perfectly understood God’s law, than that heaven and hell should have been determined for each of us by a decision made in our own inexperienced childhood, under the influence of a vitiated nature.

On this theory, God determines, in his mere sovereignty, that because one man sinned, all men should be called into existence depraved, under a constitution which secures the certainty of their sinning. But we claim that it is unjust that any should suffer without ill-desert. To say that God thus marks his sense of the guilt of Adam’s sin is to contradict the main principle of the theory, namely, that men are held responsible only for their own sins. We prefer to justify God by holding that there is a reason for this infliction, and that this reason is the connection of the infant with Adam. If mere tendency to sin is innocent, then Christ might have taken it, when he took our nature. But if he had taken it, it would not explain the fact of the atonement, for upon this theory it would not need to be atoned for. To say that the child inherits a sinful nature, not as penalty, but by natural law, is to ignore the fact that this natural law is simply the regular action of God, the expression of his moral nature, and so is itself penalty.

“Man kills a snake,” says Raymond, “because it is a snake, and not because it is to blame for being a snake,”—which seems to us a new proof that the advocates of innocent depravity regard infants, not as moral beings, but as mere animals. “We must distinguish automatic excellence or badness,” says Raymond again, “from moral desert, whether good or ill.” This seems to us a doctrine of punishment without guilt. Princeton Essays, 1:138, quote Coleridge: “It is an outrage on common sense to affirm that it is no evil for men to be placed on their probation under such circumstances that not one of ten thousand millions ever escapes sin and condemnation to eternal death. There is evil inflicted on us, as a consequence of Adam’s sin, antecedent to our personal transgressions. It matters not what this evil is, whether temporal death, corruption of nature, certainty of sin, or death in its more extended sense; if the ground of the evil’s coming on us is Adam’s sin, the principle is the same.” Baird, Elohim Revealed, 488—So, it seems, “if a creature is punished, it implies that some one has sinned, but does not necessarily intimate the sufferer to be the sinner! But this is wholly contrary to the argument of the apostle in Rom. 5:12-19, which is based upon the opposite doctrine, and it is also contrary to the justice of God, who punishes only those who deserve it.” See Julius Müller, Doct. Sin. 2:67-74.

D. Its limitation of responsibility to the evil choices of the individual and the dispositions caused thereby is inconsistent with the following facts:

(a) The first moral choice of each individual is so undeliberate as not to be remembered. Put forth at birth, as the chief advocates of the New School theory maintain, it does not answer to their definition of sin as a voluntary transgression of known law. Responsibility for such choice does not differ from responsibility for the inborn evil state of the will which manifests itself in that choice.

(b) The uniformity of sinful action among men cannot be explained by the existence of a mere faculty of choices. That men should uniformly choose may be thus explained; but that men should uniformly choose evil requires us to postulate an evil tendency or state of the will itself, prior to these separate acts of choice. This evil tendency or inborn determination to evil, since it is the real cause of actual sins, must itself be sin, and as such must be guilty and condemnable.

(c) Power in the will to prevent the inborn vitiosity from developing itself is upon this theory a necessary condition of responsibility for actual sins. But the absolute uniformity of actual transgression is evidence that the will is practically impotent. If responsibility diminishes as the difficulties in the way of free decision increase, the fact that these difficulties are insuperable shows that there can be no responsibility at all. To deny the guilt of inborn sin is therefore virtually to deny the guilt of the actual sin which springs therefrom.

The aim of all the theories is to find a decision of the will which will justify God in condemning men. Where shall we find such a decision? At the age of fifteen, ten, five? Then all who die before this age are not sinners, cannot justly be punished with death, do not need a Savior. Is it at birth? But decision at such a time is not such a conscious decision against God as, according to this theory, would make it the proper determiner of our future destiny. We claim that the theory of Augustine—that of a sin of the race in Adam—is the only one that shows a conscious transgression fit to be the cause and ground of man’s guilt and condemnation.

Wm. Adams Brown: “Who can tell how far his own acts are caused by his own will, and how far by the nature he has inherited? Men do feel guilty for acts which are largely due to their inherited natures, which inherited corruption is guilt, deserving of punishment and certain to receive it.” H. B. Smith, System, 350, note—“It has been said, in the way of a taunt against the older theology, that men are very willing to speculate about sinning in Adam, so as to have their attention diverted from the sense of personal guilt. But the whole history of theology bears witness that those who have believed most fully in our native and strictly moral corruption—as Augustine, Calvin, and Edwards—have ever had the deepest sense of their personal demerit. We know the full evil of sin only when we know its roots as well as its fruits.”

“Causa causæ est causa causati.” Inborn depravity is the cause of the first actual sin. The cause of inborn depravity is the sin of Adam. If there be no guilt in original sin, then the actual sin that springs therefrom cannot be guilty. There are subsequent presumptuous sins in which the personal element overbears the element of race and heredity. But this cannot be said of the first acts which make man a sinner. These are so naturally and uniformly the result of the inborn determination of the will, that they cannot be guilty, unless that inborn determination is also guilty. In short, not all sin is personal. There must be a sin of nature—a race-sin—or the beginnings of actual sin cannot be accounted for or regarded as objects of God’s condemnation. Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:320-328, 341—“If the deep-rooted depravity which we bring with us into the world be not our sin, it at once becomes an excuse for our actual sins.” Princeton Essays, 1:138, 139—Alternative: 1. May a man by his own power prevent the development of this hereditary depravity? Then we do not know that all men are sinners, or that Christ’s salvation is needed by all. 2. Is actual sin a necessary consequence of hereditary depravity? Then it is, on this theory, a free act no longer, and is not guilty, since guilt is predicable only of voluntary transgression of known law. See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 256 sq.; Hodge, Essays, 571-638; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:61-73; Edwards on the Will, part iii, sec. 4; Bib. Sac., 20:317-320.

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