Chapter XXX: Section V: Imputation Of Adam’s Sin To His Posterity (4)

“But this union differs in several important particulars from that
between Adam and his posterity. It is not natural and substantial,
but moral and spiritual; not generic and universal, but individual
and by election; not caused by the creative act of God, but by his
regenerating act. All men, without exception, are one with Adam;
only believing men are one with Christ. The imputation of Adam’s
sin is not an arbitrary act in the sense that, if God so pleased,
he could reckon it to the account of any beings in the universe,
by a volition. The sin of Adam could not be imputed to the fallen
angels, for example, and punished in them, because they never were
one with Adam by unity of substance and nature. The fact that they
have committed actual transgression of their own will not justify
the imputation of Adam’s sin to them, any more than the fact that
the posterity of Adam have committed actual transgressions of
their own would be a sufficient reason for imputing the first sin
of Adam to them. Nothing but a real union of nature and being can
justify the imputation of Adam’s sin; and, similarly, the
obedience of Christ could no more be imputed to an unbelieving man
than to a lost angel, because neither of these is morally and
spiritually one with Christ” (Shedd). For a different
interpretation (ἡμαρτον—sinned personally and individually), see
Kendrick, in Bap. Rev., 1885:48-72.

No Condemnation Inherited.

Pelagian. Arminian. New School.

I. Origin of Immediate Immediate Immediate the soul. Creation. creation. creation. II. Man’s state Innocent, and Depraved, but Depraved and at birth. able to obey still able to vicious, but God. co-operate with this not sin. the Spirit. III. Effects of Only upon To corrupt his To communicate Adam’s sin. himself. posterity visiosity to the physically and whole race. intellectually. No guilt of Adam’s sin imputed. IV. How did all By following By consciously By voluntary sin? Adam’s example. ratifying Adam’s transgression of own deed, in known law. spite of the Spirit’s aid. V. What is Only of evil Evil tendencies Uncondemnable, corruption? habit, in each kept in spite of but evil case. the Spirit. tendencies. VI. What is Every man’s own Only man’s own Man’s individual imputed? sins. sins and acts of ratifying of transgression. this nature. VII. What is Spiritual and Physical and Spiritual and the death eternal. spiritual death eternal death incurred? by decree. only. VIII. How are By following By co-operating By accepting men saved? Christ’s with the Spirit Christ under example. given to all. influence of truth presented by the Spirit.

Condemnation Inherited.

Federal. Placean. Augustinian.

I. Origin of Immediate Immediate Immediate the soul. creation. creation. creation. II. Man’s state Depraved, Depraved, Depraved, at birth. unable, and unable, and unable, and condemnable. condemnable. condemnable. III. Effects of To insure Natural Guilt of Adam’s Adam’s sin. condemnation of connection of sin, corruption, his fellows in depravity in all and death. covenant, and his descendants. their creation as depraved. IV. How did all By being By possessing a By having part sin? accounted depraved nature. in the sin of sinners in Adam, as seminal Adam’s sin. head of the race. V. What is Condemnable, Condemnable, Condemnable, corruption? evil disposition evil disposition evil disposition and state. and state. and state. VI. What is Adam’s sin, Only depraved Adam’s sin, our imputed? man’s own nature and man’s depravity, and corruption, and own sin. our own sins. man’s own sins. VII. What is Physical, Physical, Physical, the death spiritual, and spiritual, and spiritual, and incurred? eternal. eternal. eternal. VIII. How are By being By becoming By Christ’s men saved? accounted possessors of a work, with whom righteous new nature in we are one. through the act Christ. of Christ.

II.—Objections to the Augustinian Doctrine of Imputation.

The doctrine of Imputation, to which we have thus arrived, is met by its opponents with the following objections. In discussing them, we are to remember that a truth revealed in Scripture may have claims to our belief, in spite of difficulties to us insoluble. Yet it is hoped that examination will show the objections in question to rest either upon false philosophical principles or upon misconception of the doctrine assailed.

A. That there can be no sin apart from and prior to consciousness.

This we deny. The larger part of men’s evil dispositions and acts are imperfectly conscious, and of many such dispositions and acts the evil quality is not discerned at all. The objection rests upon the assumption that law is confined to published statutes or to standards formally recognized by its subjects. A profounder view of law as identical with the constituent principles of being, as binding the nature to conformity with the nature of God, as demanding right volitions only because these are manifestations of a right state, as having claims upon men in their corporate capacity, deprives this objection of all its force.

If our aim is to find a conscious act of transgression upon which
to base God’s charge of guilt and man’s condemnation, we can find
this more easily in Adam’s sin than at the beginning of each man’s
personal history; for no human being can remember his first sin.
The main question at issue is therefore this: Is all sin personal?
We claim that both Scripture and reason answer this question in
the negative. There is such a thing as race-sin and
race-responsibility.

B. That man cannot be responsible for a sinful nature which he did not personally originate.

We reply that the objection ignores the testimony of conscience and of Scripture. These assert that we are responsible for what we are. The sinful nature is not something external to us, but is our inmost selves. If man’s original righteousness and the new affection implanted in regeneration have moral character, then the inborn tendency to evil has moral character; as the former are commendable, so the latter is condemnable.

If it be said that sin is the act of a person, and not of a
nature, we reply that in Adam the whole human nature once
subsisted in the form of a single personality, and the act of the
person could be at the same time the act of the nature. That which
could not be at any subsequent point of time, could be and was, at
that time. Human nature could fall _in Adam_, though that fall
could not be repeated in the case of any one of his descendants.
Hovey, Outlines, 129—“Shall we say that _will_ is the cause of sin
in holy beings, while _wrong desire_ is the cause of sin in unholy
beings? Augustine held this.” Pepper, Outlines, 112—“We do not
fall each one by himself. We were so on probation in Adam, that
his fall was our fall.”

C. That Adam’s sin cannot be imputed to us, since we cannot repent of it.

The objection has plausibility only so long as we fail to distinguish between Adam’s sin as the inward apostasy of the nature from God, and Adam’s sin as the outward act of transgression which followed and manifested that apostasy. We cannot indeed repent of Adam’s sin as our personal act or as Adam’s personal act, but regarding his sin as the apostasy of our common nature—an apostasy which manifests itself in our personal transgressions as it did in his, we can repent of it and do repent of it. In truth it is this nature, as self-corrupted and averse to God, for which the Christian most deeply repents.

God, we know, has not made our nature as we find it. We are
conscious of our depravity and apostasy from God. We know that God
cannot be responsible for this; we know that our nature is
responsible. But this it could not be, unless its corruption were
self-corruption. For this self-corrupted nature we should repent,
and do repent. Anselm, De Concep. Virg., 23—“Adam sinned in one
point of view as a person, in another as man (_i. e._, as human
nature which at that time existed in him alone). But since Adam
and humanity could not be separated, the sin of the person
necessarily affected the _nature_. This nature is what Adam
transmitted to his posterity, and transmitted it such as his sin
had made it, burdened with a debt which it could not pay, robbed
of the righteousness with which God had originally invested it;
and in every one of his descendants this impaired nature makes the
_persons_ sinners. Yet not in the same degree sinners as Adam was,
for the latter sinned both as human nature and as a person, while
new-born infants sin only as they possess the nature.”—more
briefly, in Adam a person made nature sinful; in his posterity,
nature makes persons sinful.

D. That, if we be responsible for Adam’s first sin, we must also be responsible not only for every other sin of Adam, but for the sins of our immediate ancestors.

We reply that the apostasy of human nature could occur but once. It occurred in Adam before the eating of the forbidden fruit, and revealed itself in that eating. The subsequent sins of Adam and of our immediate ancestors are no longer acts which determine or change the nature,—they only show what the nature is. Here is the truth and the limitation of the Scripture declaration that “the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father” (Ez. 18:20; _cf._ Luke 13:2, 3; John 9:2, 3). Man is not responsible for the specifically evil tendencies communicated to him from his immediate ancestors, as distinct from the nature he possesses; nor is he responsible for the sins of those ancestors which originated these tendencies. But he is responsible for that original apostasy which constituted the one and final revolt of the race from God, and for the personal depravity and disobedience which in his own case has resulted therefrom.

Augustine, Encheiridion, 46, 47, leans toward an imputing of the
sins of immediate ancestors, but intimates that, as a matter of
grace, this may be limited to “_the third and fourth generation_”
(_Ex. 20:5_). Aquinas thinks this last is said by God, because
fathers live to see the third and fourth generation of their
descendants, and influence them by their example to become
voluntarily like themselves. Burgesse, Original Sin, 397, adds the
covenant-idea to that of natural generation, in order to prevent
imputation of the sins of immediate ancestors as well as those of
Adam. So also Shedd. But Baird, Elohim Revealed, 508, gives a
better explanation, when he distinguishes between the first sin of
nature when it apostatized, and those subsequent personal actions
which merely manifest the nature but do not change it. Imagine
Adam to have remained innocent, but one of his posterity to have
fallen. Then the descendants of that one would have been guilty
for the change of nature in him, but not guilty for the sins of
ancestors intervening between him and them.

We add that man may direct the course of a lava-stream, already
flowing downward, into some particular channel, and may even dig a
new channel for it down the mountain. But the stream is constant
in its quantity and quality, and is under the same influence of
gravitation in all stages of its progress. I am responsible for
the downward tendency which my nature gave itself at the
beginning; but I am not responsible for inherited and specifically
evil tendencies as something apart from the nature,—for they are
not apart from it,—they are forms or manifestations of it. These
tendencies run out after a time,—not so with sin of nature. The
declaration of Ezekiel (_18:20_), “_the son shall not bear the
iniquity of the father,_” like Christ’s denial that blindness was
due to the blind man’s individual sins or those of his parents
(_John 9:2, 3_), simply shows that God does not impute to us the
sins of our immediate ancestors; it is not inconsistent with the
doctrine that all the physical and moral evil of the world is the
result of a sin of Adam with which the whole race is chargeable.

Peculiar tendencies to avarice or sensuality inherited from one’s
immediate ancestry are merely wrinkles in native depravity which
add nothing to its amount or its guilt. Shedd, Dogm. Theol.,
2:88-94—“To inherit a temperament is to inherit a secondary
trait.” H. B. Smith, System, 296—“Ezekiel 18 does not deny that
descendants are involved in the evil results of ancestral sins,
under God’s moral government; but simply shows that there is
opportunity for extrication, in personal repentance and
obedience.” Mozley on Predestination, 179—“Augustine says that
Ezekiel’s declarations that the son shall not bear the iniquity of
the father are not a universal law of the divine dealings, but
only a special prophetical one, as alluding to the divine mercy
under the gospel dispensation and the covenant of grace, under
which the effect of original sin and the punishment of mankind for
the sin of their first parent was removed.” See also Dorner,
Glaubenslehre, 2:31 (Syst. Doct., 2:326, 327), where God’s
visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children (Ex. 20:5) is
explained by the fact that the children repeat the sins of the
parents. German proverb: “The apple does not fall far from the
tree.”

E. That if Adam’s sin and condemnation can be ours by propagation, the righteousness and faith of the believer should be propagable also.

We reply that no merely personal qualities, whether of sin or righteousness, are communicated by propagation. Ordinary generation does not transmit _personal_ guilt, but only that guilt which belongs to the whole _species_. So personal faith and righteousness are not propagable. “Original sin is the consequent of man’s _nature_, whereas the parents’ grace is a _personal_ excellence, and cannot be transmitted” (Burgesse).

Thornwell, Selected Writings, 1:543, says the Augustinian doctrine
would imply that Adam, penitent and believing, must have begotten
penitent and believing children, seeing that the nature as it is
in the parent always flows from parent to child. But see Fisher,
Discussions, 370, where Aquinas holds that no quality or guilt
that is _personal_ is propagated (Thomas Aquinas, 2:629). Anselm
(De Concept. Virg. et Origin. Peccato, 98) will not decide the
question. “The original nature of the tree is propagated—not the
nature of the graft”—when seed from the graft is planted.
Burgesse: “Learned parents do not convey learning to their
children, but they are born in ignorance as others.” Augustine: “A
Jew that was circumcised begat children not circumcised, but
uncircumcised; and the seed that was sown without husks, yet
produced corn with husks.”

The recent modification of Darwinism by Weismann has confirmed the
doctrine of the text. Lamarck’s view was that development of each
race has taken place through the _effort_ of the individuals,—the
giraffe has a long neck because successive giraffes have reached
for food on high trees. Darwin held that development has taken
place not because of effort, but because of _environment_, which
kills the unfit and permits the fit to survive,—the giraffe has a
long neck because among the children of giraffes only the
long-necked ones could reach the fruit, and of successive
generations of giraffes only the long-necked ones lived to
propagate. But Weismann now tells us that even then there would be
no development unless there were a spontaneous _innate tendency_
in giraffes to become long-necked,—nothing is of avail after the
giraffe is born; all depends upon the germs in the parents. Darwin
held to the transmission of acquired characters, so that
individual men are _affluents_ of the stream of humanity; Weismann
holds, on the contrary, that acquired characters are not
transmitted, and that individual men are only _effluents_ of the
stream of humanity: the stream gives its characteristics to the
individuals, but the individuals do not give their characteristics
to the stream: see Howard Ernest Cushman, in The Outlook, Jan. 10,
1897.

Weismann, Heredity, 2:14, 266-270, 482—“Characters only acquired
by the operation of external circumstances, acting during the life
of the individual, cannot be transmitted.... The loss of a finger
is not inherited; increase of an organ by exercise is a purely
personal acquirement and is not transmitted; no child of reading
parents ever read without being taught; children do not even learn
to speak untaught.” Horses with docked tails, Chinese women with
cramped feet, do not transmit their peculiarities. The rupture of
the hymen in women is not transmitted. Weismann cut off the tails
of 66 white mice in five successive generations, but of 901
offspring none were tailless. G. J. Romanes, Life and Letters,
300—“Three additional cases of cats which have lost their tails
having tailless kittens afterwards.” In his Weismannism, Romanes
writes: “The truly scientific attitude of mind with regard to the
problem of heredity is to say with Galton: ‘We might almost
reserve our belief that the structural cells can react on the
sexual elements at all, and we may be confident that at most they
do so in a very faint degree; in other words, that acquired
modifications are barely if at all _inherited_, in the correct
sense of that word.’ ” This seems to class both Romanes and Galton
on the side of Weismann in the controversy. Burbank, however, says
that “acquired characters are transmitted, or I know nothing of
plant life.”

A. H. Bradford, Heredity, 19, 20, illustrates the opposing views:
“Human life is not a clear stream flowing from the mountains,
receiving in its varied course something from a thousand rills and
rivulets on the surface and in the soil, so that it is no longer
pure as at the first. To this view of Darwin and Spencer, Weismann
and Haeckel oppose the view that human life is rather a stream
flowing underground from the mountains to the sea, and rising now
and then in fountains, some of which are saline, some sulphuric,
and some tinctured with iron; and that the differences are due
entirely to the soil passed through in breaking forth to the
surface, the mother-stream down and beneath all the salt, sulphur
and iron, flowing on toward the sea substantially unchanged. If
Darwin is correct, then we must change individuals in order to
change their posterity. If Weismann is correct, then we must
change environment in order that better individuals may be born.
That which is born of the Spirit is spirit; but that which is born
of spirit tainted by corruptions of the flesh is still tainted.”

The conclusion best warranted by science seems to be that of
Wallace, in the Forum, August, 1890, namely, that there is always
a _tendency_ to transmit acquired characters, but that only those
which affect the blood and nervous system, like drunkenness and
syphilis, overcome the fixed habit of the organism and make
themselves permanent. Applying this principle now to the
connection of Adam with the race, we regard the sin of Adam as a
radical one, comparable only to the act of faith which merges the
soul in Christ. It was a turning away of the whole being from the
light and love of God, and a setting of the face toward darkness
and death. Every subsequent act was an act in the same direction,
but an act which manifested, not altered, the nature. This first
act of sin deprived the nature of all moral sustenance and growth,
except so far as the still immanent God counteracted the inherent
tendencies to evil. Adam’s posterity inherited his corrupt nature,
but they do not inherit any subsequently acquired characters,
either those of their first father or of their immediate
ancestors.

Bascom, Comparative Psychology, chap. VII—“Modifications, however
great, like artificial disablement, that do not work into
physiological structure, do not transmit themselves. The more
conscious and voluntary our acquisitions are, the less are they
transmitted by inheritance.” Shaler, Interpretation of Nature,
88—“Heredity and individual action may combine their forces and so
intensify one or more of the inherited motives that the form is
affected by it and the effect may be transmitted to the offspring.
So conflict of inheritances may lead to the institution of
variety. Accumulation of impulses may lead to sudden revolution,
and the species may be changed, not by environment, but by contest
between the host of inheritances.” Visiting the sins of the
fathers upon the children was thought to be outrageous doctrine,
so long as it was taught only in Scripture. It is now vigorously
applauded, since it takes the name of heredity. _Dale, Ephesians,
189_—“When we were young, we fought with certain sins and killed
them; they trouble us no more; but their ghosts seem to rise from
their graves in the distant years and to clothe themselves in the
flesh and blood of our children.” See A. M. Marshall, Biological
Lectures, 273; Mivart, in Harper’s Magazine, March, 1895:682;
Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 176.

F. That, if all moral consequences are properly penalties, sin, considered as a sinful nature, must be the punishment of sin, considered as the act of our first parents.

But we reply that the impropriety of punishing sin with sin vanishes when we consider that the sin which is punished is our own, equally with the sin with which we are punished. The objection is valid as against the Federal theory or the theory of Mediate Imputation, but not as against the theory of Adam’s Natural Headship. To deny that God, through the operation of second causes, may punish the act of transgression by the habit and tendency which result from it, is to ignore the facts of every-day life, as well as the statements of Scripture in which sin is represented as ever reproducing itself, and with each reproduction increasing its guilt and punishment (Rom. 6:19; James 1:15.)

_Rom. 6:19_—“_as ye presented your members as servants to
uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity, even so now present
your members as servants to righteousness unto sanctification_”;
_Eph. 4:22_—“_waxeth corrupt after the lusts of deceit_”; _James
1:15_—“_Then the lust, when it hath conceived, beareth sin: and
the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death_”; _2 Tim.
3:13_—“_evil men and impostors shall wax worse and worse,
deceiving and being deceived._” See Meyer on _Rom.
1:24_—“_Wherefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts
unto uncleanness._” All effects become in their turn causes.
Schiller: “This is the very curse of evil deed, That of new evil
it becomes the seed.” Tennyson, Vision of Sin: “Behold it was a
crime Of sense, avenged by sense that wore with time. Another
said: The crime of sense became The crime of malice, and is equal
blame.” Whiton, Is Eternal Punishment Endless, 52—“The punishment
of sin essentially consists in the wider spread and stronger hold
of the malady of the soul. _Prov. 5:22_—‘_His own iniquities shall
take the wicked._’ The habit of sinning holds the wicked ‘_with
the cords of his sin_.’ Sin is self-perpetuating. The sinner
gravitates from worse to worse, in an ever-deepening fall.” The
least of our sins has in it a power of infinite expansion,—left to
itself it would flood a world with misery and destruction.

Wisdom, 11:16—“Wherewithal a man sinneth, by the same also he
shall be punished.” Shakespeare, Richard II, 5:5—“I wasted time,
and now doth time waste me”; Richard III, 4:2—“I am in so far in
blood, that sin will pluck on sin”; Pericles, 1:1—“One sin I know
another doth provoke; Murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke;”
King Lear, 5:3—“The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make
instruments to scourge us.” “Marlowe’s Faustus typifies the
continuous degradation of a soul that has renounced its ideal, and
the drawing on of one vice by another, for they go hand in hand
like the Hours” (James Russell Lowell). Mrs. Humphrey Ward, David
Grieve, 410—“After all, there’s not much hope when the craving
returns on a man of his age, especially after some years’
interval.”

G. That the doctrine excludes all separate probation of individuals since Adam, by making their moral life a mere manifestation of tendencies received from him.

We reply that the objection takes into view only our connection with the race, and ignores the complementary and equally important fact of each man’s personal will. That personal will does more than simply express the nature; it may to a certain extent curb the nature, or it may, on the other hand, add a sinful character and influence of its own. There is, in other words, a remainder of freedom, which leaves room for personal probation, in addition to the race-probation in Adam.

Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, objects to the Augustinian view that if
personal sin proceeds from original, the only thing men are guilty
for is Adam’s sin; all subsequent sin is a spontaneous
development; the individual will can only manifest its inborn
character. But we reply that this is a misrepresentation of
Augustine. He does not thus lose sight of the remainders of
freedom in man (see references on page 620, in the statement of
Augustine’s view, and in the section following this, on Ability,
640-644). He says that the corrupt tree may produce the wild fruit
of morality, though not the divine fruit of grace. It is not true
that the will is absolutely as the character. Though character is
the surest index as to what the decisions of the will may be, it
is not an infallible one. Adam’s first sin, and the sins of men
after regeneration, prove this. Irregular, spontaneous,
exceptional though these decisions are, they are still acts of the
will, and they show that the agent is not _bound_ by motives nor
by character.

Here is our answer to the question whether it be not a sin to
propagate the race and produce offspring. Each child has a
personal will which may have a probation of its own and a chance
for deliverance. Denney, Studies in Theology, 87-99—“What we
inherit may be said to fix our trial, but not our fate. We belong
to God as well as to the past.” “_All souls are mine_” (_Ez.
18:4_); “_Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice_” (_John
18:37_). Thomas Fuller: “1. Roboam begat Abia; that is, a bad
father begat a bad son; 2. Abia begat Asa; that is, a bad father
begat a good son; & 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 Æschylus, 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, 156-163, 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 all things clear; see Fisher, Nature and
Method of Revelation, 151-157. Bradford, 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.”

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.