begat Asa; that is, a bad father begat a good son; 3. Asa begat Josaphat; that is, a good father a good son; 4. Josaphat begat Joram; that is, a good father a bad son. I see, Lord, from hence, that my father's piety cannot be entailed; that is bad news for me. But I see that actual impiety is not always hereditary; that is good news for my son." Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 121 - Among the Greeks, "The popular view was that guilt is inherited; that is, that the children are punished for their fathers' sins. The view of Eschylus, and of Sophocles also, was that a tendency towards guilt was inherited, but that this tendency does not annihilate man's free will. If therefore the children are punished, they are punished for their own sins. But Sophocles saw the further truth that innocent children may suffer for their fathers' sins."

Julius Müller, Doc. Sin, 2:316-"The merely organic theory of sin leads to naturalism, which endangers not only the doctrine of a final judgment, but that of personal immortality generally." In preaching, therefore, we should begin with the known and acknowledged sins of men. We should lay the same stress upon our connection with Adam that the Scripture does, to explain the problem of universal and inveterate sinful tendencies, to enforce our need of salvation from this common ruin, and to illustrate our connection with Christ. Scripture does not, and we need not, make our responsibility for Adam's sin the great theme of preaching. See A. H. Strong, on Christian Individualism, and on The New Theology, in Philosophy and Religion, 156163, 164-179.

H. That the organic unity of the race in the transgression is a thing so remote from common experience that the preaching of it neutralizes all appeals to the conscience.

But whatever of truth there is in this objection is due to the self-isolating nature of sin. Men feel the unity of the family, the profession, the nation to which they belong, and, just in proportion to the breadth of their sympathies and their experience of divine grace, do they enter into Christ's feeling of unity with the race (cf. Is. 6:5; Lam. 3:39-45; Ezra 9:6; Neh. 1:6). The fact that the self-contained and self-seeking recognize themselves as responsible only for their personal acts should not prevent our pressing upon men's attention the more searching standards of the Scriptures. Only thus can the Christian find a solution for the dark problem of a corruption which is inborn yet condemnable; only thus can the unregenerate man be led to a full knowledge of the depth of his ruin and of his absolute dependence upon God for salvation.

Identification of the individual with the nation or the race: Is. 6:5-"Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips"; Lam. 3:42 “We have transgressed and have rebelled"; Ezra 9:6-"I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to thee, my God; for our iniquities are increased over our head"; Neh. 1:6—"I confess the sins of the children of Israel .... Yea, I and my father's house have sinned." So God punishes all Israel for David's sin of pride; so the sins of Reuben, Canaan, Achan, Gehazi, are visited on their children or descendants.

H. B. Smith, System, 296, 297-"Under the moral government of God one man may justly suffer on account of the sins of another. An organic relation of men is regarded in the great judgment of God in history. . . . . There is evil which comes upon individuals, not as punishment for their personal sins, but still as suffering which comes under a moral government. . . . . Jer. 32: 18 reasserts the declaration of the second commandment, that God visits the iniquity of the fathers upon their children. It may be said that all these are merely consequences' of family or tribal or national or race relations,- -Evil becomes cosmical by reason of fastening on relations which were originally adapted to making good cosmical:' but then God's plan must be in the consequences a plan administered by a moral being, over moral beings, according to moral considerations, and for moral ends; and, if that be fully taken into view, the dispute as to consequences' or 'punishment' becomes a merely verbal one."

There is a common conscience over and above the private conscience, and it controls individuals, as appears in great crises like those at which the fall of Fort Sumter summoned men to defend the Union and the Proclamation of Emancipation sounded the death-knell of slavery. Coleridge said that original sin is the one mystery that makes

Bradford,

all things clear; see Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 151-157. Heredity, 34, quotes from Elam, A Physician's Problems, 5-"An acquired and habitual vice will rarely fail to leave its trace upon one or more of the offspring, either in its original form, or one closely allied. The habit of the parent becomes the all but irresistible impulse of the child; .. the organic tendency is excited to the uttermost, and the power of will and of conscience is proportionally weakened..... So the sins of the parents are visited upon the children."

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Pascal: "It is astonishing that the mystery which is furthest removed from our knowledge- I mean the transmission of original sin-should be that without which we have no true knowledge of ourselves. It is in this abyss that the clue to our condition takes its turnings and windings, insomuch that man is more incomprehensible without the mystery than this mystery is incomprehensible to man." Yet Pascal's perplexity was largely due to his holding the Augustinian position that inherited sin is damning and brings eternal death, while not holding to the coördinate Augustinian position of a primary existence and act of the species in Adam; see Shedd, Dogm, Theol., 2:18. Atomism is egotistic. The purest and noblest feel most strongly that humanity is not like a heap of sand-grains or a row of bricks set on end, but that it is an organic unity. So the Christian feels for the family and for the church. So Christ, in Gethsemane, felt for the race. If it be said that the tendency of the Augustinian view is to diminish the sense of guilt for personal sins, we reply that only those who recognize sins as rooted in sin can properly recognize the evil of them. To such they are symptoms of an apostasy from God so deep-seated and universal that nothing but infinite grace can deliver us from it.

I. That a constitution by which the sin of one individual involves in guilt and condemnation the nature of all men who descend from him is contrary to God's justice.

We acknowledge that no human theory can fully solve the mystery of imputation. But we prefer to attribute God's dealings to justice rather than to sovereignty. The following considerations, though partly hypothetical, may throw light upon the subject: (a) A probation of our common nature in Adam, sinless as he was and with full knowledge of God's law, is more consistent with divine justice than a separate probation of each individual, with inexperience, inborn depravity, and evil example, all favoring a decision against God. (b) A constitution which made a common fall possible may have been indispensable to any provision of a common salvation. (c) Our chance for salvation as sinners under grace may be better than it would have been as sinless Adams under law. (d) A constitution which permitted oneness with the first Adam in the transgression cannot be unjust, since a like principle of oneness with Christ, the second Adam, secures our salvation. (e) There is also a physical and natural union with Christ which antedates the fall and which is incident to man's creation. The immanence of Christ in humanity guarantees a continuous divine effort to remedy the disaster caused by man's free will, and to restore the moral union with God which the race has lost by the fall.

Thus our ruin and our redemption were alike wrought out without personal act of ours. As all the natural life of humanity was in Adam, so all the spiritual life of humanity was in Christ. As our old nature was corrupted in Adam and propagated to us by physical generation, so our new nature was restored in Christ and communicated to us by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. If then we are justified upon the ground of our inbeing in Christ, we may in like manner be condemned on the ground of our inbeing in Adam.

Stearns, in N. Eng., Jan. 1882: 95-"The silence of Scripture respecting the precise connection between the first great sin and the sins of the millions of individuals who

have lived since then is a silence that neither science nor philosophy has been, or is, able to break with a satisfactory explanation. Separate the twofold nature of man, corporate and individual. Recognize in the one the region of necessity; in the other the region of freedom. The scientific law of heredity has brought into new currency the doctrine which the old theologians sought to express under the name of original sin, a term which had a meaning as it was at first used by Augustine, but which is an awkward misnomer if we accept any other theory but his."

Dr. Hovey claims that the Augustinian view breaks down when applied to the connection between the justification of believers and the righteousness of Christ; for believers were not in Christ, as to the substance of their souls, when he wrought out redemption for them. But we reply that the life of Christ which makes us Christians is the same life which made atonement upon the cross and which rose from the grave for our justification. The parallel between Adam and Christ is of the nature of analogy, not of identity. With Adam, we have a connection of physical life; with Christ, a connection of spiritual life.

Stahl, Philosophie des Rechts, quoted in Olshausen's Com. on Rom. 5:12-21-"Adam is the original matter of humanity; Christ is its original idea in God; both personally living. Mankind is one in them. Therefore Adam's sin became the sin of all; Christ's sacrifice the atonement for all. Every leaf of a tree may be green or wither by itself; but each suffers by the disease of the root, and recovers only by its healing. The shallower the man, so much more isolated will everything appear to him; for upon the surface all lies apart. He will see in mankind, in the nation, nay, even in the family, mere individuals, where the act of the one has no connection with that of the other. The profounder the man, the more do these inward relations of unity, proceeding from the very centre, force themselves upon him. Yea, the love of our neighbor is itself nothing but the deep feeling of this unity; for we love him only, with whom we feel and acknowledge ourselves to be one. What the Christian love of our neighbor is for the heart, that unity of race is for the understanding. If sin through one, and redemption through one, is not possible, the command to love our neighbor is also unintelligible. Christian ethics and Christian faith are therefore in truth indissolubly united. Christianity effects in history an advance like that from the animal kingdom to man, by its revealing the essential unity of men, the consciousness of which in the ancient world had vanished when the nations were separated."

If the sins of the parents were not visited upon the children, neither could their virtues be; the possibility of the one involves the possibility of the other. If the guilt of our first father could not be transmitted to all who derive their life from him, then the justification of Christ could not be transmitted to all who derive their life from him. We do not, however, see any Scripture warrant for the theory that all men are justified from original sin by virtue of their natural connection with Christ. He who is the life of all men bestows manifold temporal blessings upon the ground of his atonement. But justification from sin is conditioned upon conscious surrender of the human will and trust in the divine mercy. The immanent Christ is ever urging man individually and collectively toward such decision. But the acceptance or rejection of the offered grace is left to man's free will. This principle enables us properly to estimate the view of Dr. Henry E. Robins which follows.

H. E. Robins, Harmony of Ethics with Theology, 51-" All men born of Adam stand in such a relation to Christ that salvation is their birthright under promise—a birthright which can only be forfeited by their intelligent, personal, moral action, as was Esau's." Dr. Robins holds to an inchoate justification of all-a justification which becomes actual and complete only when the soul closes with Christ's offer to the sinner. We prefer to say that humanity in Christ is ideally justified because Christ himself is justified, but that individual men are justified only when they consciously appropriate his offered grace or surrender themselves to his renewing Spirit. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 312—“The grace of God is as organic in its relation to man as is the evil in his nature. Grace also reigns wherever justice reigns." William Ashmore, on the New Trial of the Sinner, in Christian Review, 26: 245-264-"There is a gospel of nature commensurate with the law of nature; Rom. 3: 22-'unto all, and upon all them that believe'; the first 'all' is unlimited; the second 'all' is limited to those who believe."

R. W. Dale, Ephesians, 180-" Our fortunes were identified with the fortunes of Christ; in the divine thought and purpose we were inseparable from him. Had we been true and loyal to the divine idea, the energy of Christ's righteousness would have drawn us upward to height after height of goodness and joy, until we ascended from this earthly life to the larger powers and loftier services and richer delights of other and diviner

worlds; and still, through one golden age of intellectual and ethical and spiritual growth after another, we should have continued to rise towards Christ's transcendent and infinite perfection. But we sinned; and as the union between Christ and us could not be broken without the final and irrevocable defeat of the divine purpose, Christ was drawn down from the serene heavens to the confused and troubled life of our race, to pain, to temptation, to anguish, to the cross and to the grave, and so the mystery of his atonement for our sin was consummated."

For replies to the foregoing and other objections, see Schaff, in Bib. Sac., 5:230; Shedd, Sermons to the Nat. Man, 266-284; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 507-509, 529-544; Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 134–188; Edwards, Original Sin, in Works, 2: 473-510; Atwater, on Calvinism in Doctrine and Life, in Princeton Review, 1875: 73; Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 96-100. Per contra, see Moxom, in Bap. Rev., 1881 : 273-287; Park, Discourses, 210-233; Bradford, Heredity, 237.

SECTION VI.-CONSEQUENCES OF SIN TO ADAM'S POSTERITY.

As the result of Adam's transgression, all his posterity are born in the same state into which he fell. But since law is the all-comprehending demand of harmony with God, all moral consequences flowing from transgression are to be regarded as sanctions of law, or expressions of the divine displeasure through the constitution of things which he has established. Certain of these consequences, however, are earlier recognized than others and are of minor scope; it will therefore be useful to consider them under the three aspects of depravity, guilt, and penalty.

By this we mean, on the one hand, the lack of original righteousness or of holy affection toward God, and, on the other hand, the corruption of the moral nature, or bias toward evil. That such depravity exists has been abundantly shown, both from Scripture and from reason, in our consideration of the universality of sin.

Salvation is twofold: deliverence from the evil-the penalty and the power of sin; and accomplishment of the good-likeness to God and realization of the true idea of humanity. It includes all these for the race as well as for the individual: removal of the barriers that keep men from each other; and the perfecting of society in communion with God; or, in other words, the kingdom of God on earth. It was the nature of man, when he first came from the hand of God, to fear, love, and trust God above all things. This tendency toward God has been lost; sin has altered and corrupted man's innermost nature. In place of this bent toward God there is a fearful bent toward evil. Depravity is both negative-absence of love and of moral likeness to God-and positive - presence of manifold tendencies to evil. Two questions only need detain us :

1. Depravity partial or total?

The Scriptures represent human nature as totally depraved. The phrase "total depravity," however, is liable to misinterpretation, and should not be used without explanation. By the total depravity of universal humanity

we mean:

A. Negatively, not that every sinner is: (a) Destitute of conscience, - for the existence of strong impulses to right, and of remorse for wrongdoing, show that conscience is often keen; (b) devoid of all qualities pleasing to men, and useful when judged by a human standard,- for the

existence of such qualities is recognized by Christ; (c) prone to every form of sin, for certain forms of sin exclude certain others; (d) intense as he can be in his selfishness and opposition to God,- for he becomes worse every day.

(a) John 8:9-"And they, when they heard it, went out one by one, beginning from the eldest, even unto the last" (John 7:53-8:11, though not written by John, is a perfectly true narrative, descended from the apostolic age). The muscles of a dead frog's leg will contract when a current of electricity is sent into them. So the dead soul will thrill at touch of the divine law. Natural conscience, combined with the principle of self-love, may even prompt choice of the good, though no love for God is in the choice. Bengel: "We have lost our likeness to God; but there remains notwithstanding an indelible nobility which we ought to revere both in ourselves and in others. We still have remained men, to be conformed to that likeness, through the divine blessing to which man's will should subscribe. This they forget who speak evil of human nature. Absalom fell out of his father's favor; but the people, for all that, recognized in him the son of the king." (b) Mark 10:21 -"And Jesus looking upon him loved him." These very qualities, however, may show that their possessors are sinning against great light and are the more guilty; cf. Mal. 1: 6-"A son honoreth his father, and a servant his master: if then I am a father, where is mine honor? and if I am a master, where is my fear?" John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2: 75—“The assertor of the total depravity of human nature, of its absolute blindness and incapacity, presupposes in himself and in others the presence of a criterion or principle of good, in virtue of which he discerns himself to be wholly evil; yet the very proposition that human nature is wholly evil would be unintelligible unless it were false.... Consciousness of sin is a negative sign of the possibility of restoration. But it is not in itself proof that the possibility will become actuality." A ruined temple may have beautiful fragments of fluted columns, but it is no proper habitation for the god for whose worship it was built.

(c) Mat. 23:23-"ye tithe mint and anise and cummin, and have left undone the weightier matters of the law, justice, and mercy, and faith: but these ye ought to have done, and not to have left the other undone"; Rom. 2:14 -"when Gentiles that have not the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are the law unto themselves; in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith." The sin of miserliness may exclude the sin of luxury; the sin of pride may exclude the sin of sensuality. Shakespeare, Othello, 2:3-"It hath pleased the devil Drunkenness to give place to the devil Wrath." Franklin Carter, Life of Mark Hopkins, 321-323— Dr. Hopkins did not think that the sons of God should describe themselves as once worms or swine or vipers. Yet he held that man could sink to a degradation below the brute: "No brute is any more capable of rebelling against God than of serving him; is any more capable of sinking below the level of its own nature than of rising to the level of man. No brute can be either a fool or a fiend. . . . In the way that sin and corruption came into the spiritual realm we find one of those analogies to what takes place in the lower forms of being that show the unity of the system throughout. All disintegration and corruption of matter is from the domination of a lower over a higher law. The body begins to return to its original elements as the lower chemical and physical forces begin to gain ascendency over the higher force of life. In the same way all sin and corruption in man is from his yielding to a lower law or principle of action in opposition to the demands of one that is higher."

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(d) Gen. 15:16 "the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full "; 2 Tim. 3: 13-"evil men and impostors shall wax worse and worse." Depravity is not simply being deprived of good. Depravation (de, and pravus, crooked, perverse) is more than deprivation. Left to himself man tends downward, and his sin increases day by day. But there is a divine influence within which quickens conscience and kindles aspiration for better things. The immanent Christ is 'the light which lighteth every man" (John 1:9). Prof. Wm. Adams Brown: "In so far as God's Spirit is at work among men and they receive the Light which lighteth every man,' we must qualify our statement of total depravity. Depravity is not so much a state as a tendency. With growing complexity of life, sin becomes more complex. Adam's sin was not the worst. 'It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee' (Mat. 11:24 )."

Men are not yet in the condition of demons. Only here and there have they attained to "a disinterested love of evil." Such men are few, and they were not born so. There are degrees in depravity. E. G. Robinson: "There is a good streak left in the devil yet." Even Satan will become worse than he now is. The phrase "total depravity" has respect only to relations to God, and it means incapability of doing anything