author to do. The will, indeed, makes this dark force, which lies in our nature, sinful by adopting it and linking it, through itself, to moral law. But it did not create it. There it lay a dark potency of evil, which, as it breaks into life, the will does not resist, but takes for its own law. Sin is in the will still-that is true-but so are there currents towards wrong in every human nature, traceable as far back as we can go, against which the will, allying with it reason, conscience, and all energies of God's grace, ought to set itself. This also is true. This perverse quality in human nature manifests itself early, too early and too spontaneously, not to be inherent. It shows itself to observation in our consciousness. For, allowing Dr. Sheldon's plea for the perversities of childhood, as in the nerves and sensibilities, and therefore no sign of a nature in which wrong is already rooted, do we not see in childhood perversities of temper, hate, deceit, selfishness, which are not of the nerves but of the soul, and which differ from the same things in manhood only as the blossom, and the apple-the one the beginning, the other the elongation of the same thing, only with a larger sphere and a further unfolding. Says Tholuck, "Let us not deceive ourselves by the narrowness and childishness of the sphere in which the heart of a child moves. That boy who snatches away the meal of his young companions, when he becomes a man, would seize on countries and trample on the rights of nations."* And then, when we go into consciousness, far back as we go, we never find the transition-point where purity ceases and wrong begins. For what Müller says of the will is true of the whole nature, voluntary and involuntary. "If there were at the very porta of our conscious existence, such an individual sin-fall as the stepping forth of the will out of a state of pure indecision into a sinful decision, as a subversion of the course of development which up to that point had been normal, this dark deed with the nightly shadow in which it envelopes our entire life, would form the irremovable background of our memory. But who is able to say definitely when, and how, he,

Guido and Julius, p. 121. Boston, 1854.

for the first time, acted in contradiction to his awakening moral consciousness?" "Sin does not first of all originate in him, it only steps forth." *

And so we go back of consciousness and out of it, out of the individual, and it seems to us that this fact of moral perversity, a crook of the normal rectitude of nature, a potency for evil, native and anterior to conscious sin, in which it is developed and prolonged, is involved not only in the universality of sin and its spontaneous eruption as from a latent disease, but also in the continuity, solidarity of the race, its organic life, whether by natural generation or spiritual transmission, in virtue of which one generation runs into another, the sin of one becomes the sin of many: idolatries, sensualities, lies are posthumous and reproductive. Moral qualities, like any others, are inlaid in this organic life. Not the color of the Malay's skin alone, but his Malay temper descends. Physiologic qualities, language, which is both physical and spiritual, and far as we go into the inmost nature, all human qualities survive the individual, and continue and spread. The elements of character are transmissible, and all personal qualities, through this organic connection of man with man and generation with generation. Now, it seems to us, absurd to expect each creature to derive bare existence from its ancestry, from natures deathstruck and out of all moral harmony, and yet take no color or taint of moral obliquity with it. Says Dr. Sheldon -(p. 119):

Whatever is propagated, begotten and born, is mere being or nature, never moral character, which results from moral action.

"Mere being or nature," without qualities, capacities, inneities of good and evil, is absurd.

"Moral character results" from many causes prior to consent or choice, and among them the inherent and derived dispositions towards evil within as they concur with similar objective tendencies. In an honorable anxiety to vindicate the personal responsibility of each individual for his own sin (which is clear enough), it is not necessary to dismiss the facts which.

* II., 77, 290.

† Innèitè, Leroux Encyclopedie Nouvelle.

seem almost as clear of the moral damage humanity has suffered, and that her damaged nature reproduces itself. To conciliate pravity of nature with entire personal responsibility for individual character and sin, may not be easy; but relief is not to be found in saying with Dr. Sheldon

We certainly know no sufficient reason for affirming such a disordered constitution.

He can by no means agree then with our author in his doctrine in regard to the connection between the fall of Adam. and the moral condition of his posterity. Into his interpretation of Romans v. 12-19, we cannot and need not enter. As Olshausen says: "each man interprets it according to one of two theories which he holds-the dynamic or atomic."

Adam fell, and therefore in the very nature of things we begin at a moral disadvantage. We begin, not as he did, but on a lower plane, where he sunk. No nature is insulated from the race. The first moral development of each man is a wrong one, for it is in the line of the descent which Adam begun. "In Adam all die." In no unintelligible sense, we were in Adam. Adam "the old man" is in us, a corrupt part, an imminent "body of death." Consciousness, analogy, history, Scripture declare it.†

Regeneration, by E. H. Sears, American Unitarian Association, Boston, 1853, pp. 13, 64. A book which read in connection with Dr. Sheldon's, rather confuses one's ideas of theological geography.

The doctrine of original sin as taught by evangelical Protestants generally is a legitimate inference from the universality of actual transgression. But this is not the sole source of proof. The Scriptures are full of it and no fair interpretation can void the doctrine from the numerous passages we might adduce. Redemption too by Christ, and Regeneration by the spirit supposeit. These latter doctrines, as expressed in the symbols of Christ's churches must fall with original sin. The denial of this leads to the denial of them. If man has not lost original righteousness and inherited a tendency to evil we need no Christ-we need no Holy Ghost. Hence, as Dr. Sheldon denies original sin we are not surprised to hear him say," that all men need, not a Divine regeneration, but much and careful instruction." Such denials and substitutes as these of the author under review, we cannot receive. They contradict our views of Scripture, our reason, our experience, the voice of God, people in all ages, and render null that which is our only solace. True, the doctrine of original sin is attended with difficulties: but not perhaps insuperable ones. Yet, if it were, the fact is too legible to be rejected. Our doctrine was developed by Augustine; but it is older than he. It is native in the Scriptures. It was held and taught by the "angelical Doctor" in the thirteenth century. It was the doctrine too, of the Reformers. Nor is it now, nor do we believe it ever will be, an exploded dogma. The following is the subscribed view of Luther, Melancthon, Zwingle and others "Credimus quod peccatum originale sit nobis innatum, et ab Adamo in nos propagatum. Et quod sit tale peccatum, quod omnes homines damna

It seems to us that Dr. Sheldon in refusing the extravaganzas, -as Coleridge calls them-of Dr. South and many other writers in regard to the exalted state and angelic faculties of our first parents has really reduced them very low, so that the fall is a very common and every-day affair. He says:

They began with nothing but their bare nature. They had in their own nature, in spite of its well-adjusted state, all that was needed to draw them into sin. pp. 64, 66.

But what is "bare nature?" It is "well-adjusted"—an imperium in which sense, reason and will have their right places and work harmoniously, and the tendency of the whole nature is right. Certainly it will require some force to shake it out of joint, and revolutionize its Divine adjustments.

But is it certain that Adam started with "bare nature," an undeveloped germ of infancy, cast out upon nature just as bare? Is it quite conceivable that there was no maturity of body and mind? The use of the senses, language, judgment, the power already developed of labor and self-sustenance, are there denied? or did he begin from "bare nature" and acquire them through years of experiment?

Again, is there any evidence that he fell at the start out of "bare nature," and not out of a life that had run on indefinitely in the course and habit of virtue?

And, again, is "bare nature" all? There was the Adamic nature, but did not a grand spiritual objective surround it, and flow in with unobstructed current of influence?

God was there in light and love; "a presence that could not be put by." And if He exerted no supernatural constraint, was there not in the natural dependence and communion of Adam's sinless condition, something to fortify his virtuous beginnings, and hold him from that fatal fall? But what followed the fall, into what condition was Adam brought? Already we have seen what has followed in the race. Neither in him or us, as Dr. Sheldon maintains, is there any es

tioni obnoxios, faciat. Ita, quidem, ut nisi Jesum Christum nobis sua morte et vita subvenisset, omnes homines propter originale peccatum damnati fuissent, nec in regnum Dei, et ad æternam felicitatem pervenire potuissent." The Augsburg confession on this point is Peccatum originis habet privationem originalis justitiæ, et cum hoc inordinatam dispositionem partium animæ ; unde non est privatio, sed quidam habitus corruptus." These are the views of Baptists in the present day.-EDs.

sential change, any numerical loss of faculty. He carried out of Paradise the capacities he carried in. Therefore he lost the Divine Image only as he broke its harmony. It lost its proportion, but not its parts. The flesh and the spirit, sense, reason, conscience, will remain; but the relation of each is so distorted, inverted, that God looking down into human nature, if he sees through the breaks and faults his Image, sees not his likeness, but often that of the demon.* Regeneration is not the insertion of any new substance. Indeed, as we have seen, a dark and heritable potency for evil lying in human nature, and getting the start in its moral development, so may there lie by its side the capability, the potency of redemption waiting for the touch of Divine Power to quicken it, and through it the whole soul "into newness of life?"

From the death in which the Bible sums the consequence of sin, our author eliminates that which is corporeal, and denies that the present law of mortality has any connection with sin. Against it he urges the immediacy of the penalty;† that all other physical conditions of their life were apparently the same as now; that it was implied in the very sentence of labor and sorrow for life, that life was limited; and that Christ did not come in an immortal body, or to save men from corporeal death, and yet he strangely qualifies his doctrine in one sentence, by saying:

In the text of the Second Sermon-" And God said, Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness," the Early Fathers maintained a distinction between ɛìkov and óμolworç for which see Synonyms of the New Testament, by R. C. French, p. 77.

In accounting for the fall of Adam, Dr. Sheldon says, (p. 67.)

"A first sin would not necessarily draw after it a second, a third and others; but as it would involve a triumph of appetite and a weakening of conscience, and thus an impairing of the defence against future sins, these might easily follow."

On this ground when did Adam fall? Was not the fall in the will, in its first deflection from God? Did not one sin answer the ends of the trial, and show a will dissevered from God? Yet the author urges as against natural death being in the penalty, that the Divine veracity would be compromised if the sentence were not literally and instantaneously executed, and says: "There was a general truth in the original penalty, though individual in its form and application. This truth is, that every transgressor of Gods law shall die, in the day and hour of his transgression. His sin at once changes his condition, and so avenges itself upon him. A part of the punishment may be delayed; but the beginnings of it in the soul take their date from the sin.' The last sentence is not far different from the position our author so strongly impugns, that physical death began to take effect with the sin, and that the rest of life was mortal and a process towards death.

Is there no sense in which Christ "abolished death?''