The only serious opponents of the dogma of the Creation are those who maintain that the universe, the earth, the man upon the earth, have existed from all eternity, and, collectively, in the state in which they now are. No one however can hold this language, to which facts are invincibly opposed. How many ages man has existed on the earth, is a question that has been largely discussed, and is still under discussion. The inquiry in no way affects the dogma of the Creation itself: it is a certain and recognized fact, that man has not always existed on the earth, and that the earth has for long periods undergone different changes incompatible with man's existence. Man therefore had a beginning: man has come upon the earth. How has he come there?
Here the opponents of the dogma of Creation are divided: some uphold the theory of spontaneous generation; others, the transformation of species. According to one party, matter possesses, under certain circumstances and by the simple development of its own proper power, the faculty of creating animated beings. According to others, the different species of animated beings which still exist, or have existed at various epochs and in the different conditions of the earth, are derived from a small number of primitive types, which have possessed, through the lapse of millions and thousands of millions of ages, the power of developing and perfecting themselves, so as to gain admission, through transformation, into higher species. Hence they conclude, with more or less hesitation, that the human race is the result of a transformation, or a series of transformations.
The attempt to establish the theory of spontaneous production dates from a remote period. Science has ever baffled it: the more its observations have been exact and profound, the more have they refuted the hypothesis of the innate creative power of matter. This result has been again recently established by the attentive examination of men of eminent scientific attainments, within and without the walls of the Academy of Sciences. But were it even otherwise,—could the advocates of the theory of spontaneous production refer to experiments hitherto irrefutable, these would furnish no better explanation of the first appearance of man upon earth, and I should retain my right to repeat here what I have advanced elsewhere on this subject:[Footnote 3]—
[Footnote 3: L'Eglise et la Société Chrétienne en 1861, p. 27.]
"Such a mode of generation cannot, nor ever could, produce any but infant beings, in the first hour and in the first state of incipient life. It has, I believe, never been asserted, nor will any person ever affirm, that, by spontaneous generation, man— that is to say, man and woman, the human couple—can have issued, or that they have issued at any period, from matter, of full form and stature, in possession of all their powers and faculties, as Greek paganism represented Minerva issuing from the brain of Jupiter. Yet it is only upon this supposition, that man, appearing for the first time upon earth, could have lived there to perpetuate his species and to found the human race. Let any one picture to himself the first man, born in a state of the earliest infancy, alive but inert, devoid of intelligence, powerless, incapable of satisfying his own wants even for a moment, trembling, sobbing, with no mother to listen to or feed him! And yet we have in this a picture of the first man, as presented by the system of spontaneous generation. It is manifestly not thus that the human race first appeared upon earth."
The system of the transformation of species is no less refuted by science than by the instincts of common sense. It rests upon no tangible fact, on no principle of scientific observation or historic tradition.All the facts ascertained, all the monuments collected in different ages and different places, respecting the existence of living species, disprove the hypothesis of their having undergone any transformation, any notable and permanent change: we meet with them a thousand, two thousand, three thousand years ago, the same as they are at the present day. In the same species the races may vary and undergo mutual changes: the species do not change; and all attempts to transform them artificially, by crossings with allied species, have only resulted in modifications, which, after two or three generations, have been struck with barrenness, as if to attest the impotence of man to effect, by the progressive transformation of existing species, a creation of new species. Man is not an ape transformed and perfected by some dim imperceptible fermentation of the elements of nature and by the operation of ages: this assumed explanation of the origin of the human species is a mere vague hypothesis, the fruit of an imagination ill comprehending the spectacle that nature presents, and therefore easily seduced to form ingenious conjectures: these their authors sow in the stream of events unknown and of time infinite, and trust to them for the realization of their dreams.The principle of the fundamental diversity and the permanence of species—firmly upheld by M. Cuvier, M. Flourens, M. Coste, M. Quatrefages, and by all exact observers of facts—remains dominant in science as in reality. [Footnote 4]
[Footnote 4: Cuvier—Discours sur les Révolutions du Globe, pp. 117, 120, 124 (edit. 1825); Flourens—Ontologie Naturelle, pp. 10-87 (1861); Journal des Savants (October, November, and December, 1863); three articles on the work of Ch. Darwin, On the Origin of Species and the Laws of Progress among Organised Beings; Coste—Histoire Générale et Particulière du Développement des Corps Organisés; Discours Préliminaire, vol. i. p. 23; Quatrefages—Metamorphoses de l'Homme et des Animaux, p. 225 (1862); and his articles On the Unity of the Human Species, published in the "Revue des Deux Mondes," in 1860 and 1861, and collected in one volume (1861).]
Besides these vain attempts to supersede God the Creator, and to explain by the inherent and progressive power of matter, the origin of man and of the world, the Christian dogma of Creation has yet other adversaries. One party, to combat it, seizes its arms from the Bible itself, alleging the account there given of the successive facts of the creation, of which the world and man were the result; they cite and enumerate the difficulties of reconciling this account with the observations and the conclusions of science. I shall weigh the force of this class of objections in treating of the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, of their real object and true meaning; but I at once raise the dogma of Creation above this attack,—placing it at its proper height and isolation: it is the general fact, it is the very principle of creation which constitutes the dogma; what ever may be the obscurities or the scientific difficulties presented by the biblical narrative, the principle and the general fact of the Creation remain unaffected: God the Creator does not the less remain in possession of His work. The Christian religion, in its essence, asserts and demands nothing more.
But lastly, the Christian dogma of Creation is met by the general objection raised against all the facts and all the acts which are termed supernatural: that is to say, against the existence of God as well as the dogma of Creation, against all religions in common with Christianity. Such a question requires to be considered, not with reference to any particular dogma, or with a view to defend one side only of the edifice of Christianity. This point, then, I shall presently examine frankly and in all its bearings.
God the Creator is also God the Preserver. He lives, and is at the same time the source of life. The union between Him and his creature does not cease when the creature is brought into existence. The dogma of Providence is consequent upon that of Creation.
Prayer is more than the mere outburst of the desires or sorrows of the soul, seeking that satisfaction, strength, or consolation which it does not find within itself; it is the expression of a faith, instinctive or reflective, obscure or clear, wavering or steadfast, in the existence, the presence, the power, and the sympathy of the Being to whom prayer is addressed. Without a certain measure of faith and trust in God, prayer would not burst forth, or would suddenly be dried up in the soul. If faith everywhere resists, and everywhere outlives all the denials, all the doubts, and all the darkness which oppress mankind, it is that man bears within himself an imperishable consciousness of the enduring bond which connects him with God, and God with him.
Far from destroying this sentiment, experience and the spectacle of life explain and confirm it. In reflecting on his destiny, man recognises in it three different sources, and divides, so to say, into three classes the facts which make up the whole. He is conscious of being subject to events which are the consequence of laws, general, permanent, and independent of his will, but which by his intelligence he observes and comprehends.By the act of his free will he also himself creates events, of which he knows himself to be author, and these have their own consequences and enter too into the tissue of his life. Lastly, he passes through events, in his view, neither the result of those general laws from which nothing can withdraw him, nor the act of his own liberty,—events of which he perceives neither the cause, the reason, nor the author.
Man attributes this last class of events sometimes to a blind cause, which he terms chance; at another, to an intelligent and supreme intention which is in God. His mind at times revolts at the inanity of this wordchance, which explains and defines nothing; and he then pictures to himself a mysterious, impenetrable power, a merely necessary chain of unknown facts, to which he gives the name of fatality, destiny. To account for this obscure and accidental part of human life, which originates neither from any general and conceivable laws, nor from the free will of man himself, we must choose between fatality and Providence, chance and God.
I express my meaning without hesitation. Who ever accepts as a satisfactory explanation the theory of fatality and chance, does not truly believe in God. Whoever believes truly in God, relies upon Providence. God is not an expedient, invented to explain the first link in the chain of causation, an actor called to open by creation the drama of the world, then to relapse into a state of inert uselessness. By the very fact of his existence, God is present with his work, and sustains it. Providence is the natural and necessary development of God's existence; his constant presence and permanent action in creation. The universal and insuperable instinct which leads man to prayer, is in harmony with this great fact; he who believes in God cannot but have recourse to Him and pray to Him.
Objections are raised to the name itself of God. He acts, it is said, only by general and permanent laws: how can we implore His interference in favour of our special and exceptional desires? He is immutable, ever perfect, and ever the same: how is it conceivable that He lends Himself to the fickleness of human sentiments and wishes? The prayer which ascends to Him is forgetful of his real nature. Men have treated the attributes of God as furnishing an objection to his Providence.
This objection, so often repeated, never fails to astonish me. The majority of those who urge it, assert at the same time that God is incomprehensible, and that we cannot penetrate the secret of his nature. What then is this but to pretend to comprehend God? and by what right do they oppose his nature to his providence, if his nature is, to us, an impenetrable mystery? I refrain from reproaching them for their ambition; ambition is the privilege and the glory of man; but in retaining it, let them not overlook its legitimate limits. There is only this alternative: either man must cease to believe in God, because he cannot comprehend Him, or in effect admit his incomprehensibility, and still at the same time believe in Him.He cannot pass and repass incessantly from one system to the other, now declaring God to be incomprehensible; now speaking of Him, of his nature and his attributes, as if He were within the province of human science. Great as is the question of Providence, the one I have here to consider is still greater, for it is the question of the very existence of God; and the fundamental inquiry is to know whether He exists, or does not exist. God is at once light and mystery: in intimate relation with man, and yet beyond the limits of his knowledge. I shall presently endeavour to mark the limit at which human knowledge stops, and indicate its proper sphere; but this I at once assume as certain: whoever, believing in God and speaking of Him as incomprehensible, yet persists in endeavouring to define Him scientifically, and seeks to penetrate the mystery, which he has yet admitted, is in great risk of destroying his own belief, and of setting God aside, which is one way of denying Him.
But I leave for a moment these two simultaneous propositions, namely, the impossibility of comprehending God, and the necessity of believing in Him; and I proceed at once to that objection to the special providence of God which is drawn from the general character of the laws of nature. This objection results from confounding very different things, and overlooking a fundamental one,—the fact characteristic indeed of human nature. It is true that the providence of God presides over the order of the world which He governs by general and permanent laws: these laws would be more accurately designated by another name; they are the Will of God, continually acting upon the world, for not only the laws but the Lawgiver are there ever present. But when God created man, He created him different from the physical world; free, and a moral agent; and hence there is a fundamental difference between the action of God on the physical world, and his action on man.I shall subsequently state my opinion as to the full meaning of the expression, "Man is a free being," and as to the nature of the consequences to which it leads; for the present, I assume, as a certain and incontestable fact, this principle of human liberty,—of the free determination of man considered as a moral agent. Admitting this, it cannot be said that God governs mankind at large by general and permanent laws; for what would this be but to ignore or annul the liberty granted to man, that is to say, to misconceive and mutilate the Work of God himself. Man exercises a free determination, and in his own life actually gives birth to events which are not the result of any general and external laws. Divine Providence watches the operations of man's volition, and records the manner in which it has been exercised. It does not treat man as it deals with the stars in heaven and the waves of the ocean, which have neither thought nor will; with man it has other relations than with nature, and employs a different mode of action.
There is little wisdom in instituting comparisons between objects or facts not essentially analogous; and the idea of God has been so often disfigured by representing Him in the image of man, that I mistrust the efficacy of any analogies borrowed from humanity to convey a conception of God. I cannot, however, overlook the fact, that God has created man in his own image, nor can I absolutely refrain from seeking, in nature or the life of man, some type to shadow forth the features of God. Let us consider the human family: the father and mother assist in directing the active development of the child; they watch over it with authority and tenderness; they control its liberty without annulling it, and they listen to its little prayers—now granting them, now refusing them, as their reason dictates, and with a view to the child's main and future interests.The child, without thought or design, by the spontaneous instinct of its nature, recognizes the authority and feels the tenderness of its parents; as it advances in age, it sometimes obeys and sometimes resists their injunctions, using or misusing its natural liberty; but in all the fickleness of its will, it asks, it entreats, full of confidence—joyous and thankful when it obtains from its parents what it desires; yet, when denied, still ready again to ask and to entreat with the same confidence as before.
This is what takes place in the government of the human family when ruled according to the dictates of nature and right. An image we have here, imperfect but still true—a shadowing-forth, faint yet faithful—of Divine Providence. Thus it is that the Christian religion qualifies and describes the action of God in the life of man. It exhibits God as ever present and accessible to man, as a father to his child; it exhorts, encourages, invites man to implore, to confide in, to pray to God. It reserves absolutely the answer of God to that prayer; He will grant, or He will refuse: we cannot penetrate his motives—"The ways of God are not our ways."Nevertheless, to prayer, ceaseless and ever renewed, the Christian dogma associates the firm hope that "nothing is impossible with God." This dogma is thus in full and intimate harmony with the nature of man; whilst recognizing his liberty, it does homage to his dignity; in tendering to him the resource of an appeal to God it provides for his weakness. In science, it suppresses not the mystery which cannot be suppressed; but, in man's life, it solves the natural problem which weighs upon the soul.
The dogmas of Creation and Providence bring us into the presence of God; it is the action of God upon the world and man that they proclaim and affirm. The dogma of Original Sin brings us back to man; it is the act of man towards God, which stands at the very beginning of the history of mankind.
In what does this dogma consist? What are the elements and the essential facts which constitute it, and upon which it is founded?
The dogma of Original Sin implies and affirms these propositions:
1. That God, in creating man, has created him an agent, moral, free, and fallible;
2. That the will of God is the moral law of man, and obedience to the will of God is the duty of man, inasmuch as he is a moral and free agent;
3. That, by an act of his own free will, man has knowingly failed in his duty, by disobeying the law of God;
4. That the free man is a responsible being, and that disobedience to the law of God has justly entailed on him punishment;
5. That that responsibility and that punishment are hereditary, and that the fault of the first man has weighed and does weigh upon the human race.
The authority of God, the duty of obedience to the law of God, the liberty and responsibility of man, the heritage of human responsibility are, in their moral chronology, the principles and the facts comprised in the dogma of Original Sin.
I turn away my attention for a moment from the dogma itself, its source, its history, the Biblical and Christian tradition of this first step in evil of the human race. And considering man, his nature, and his destiny in their actual and general state, I investigate and verify the moral facts as they manifest themselves at the present day, to the eyes of good sense, amidst the disputes of the learned.
Man, at his birth, is subjected to the moral authority, as well as the physical power of the parents who, humanly speaking, created him. Obedience is to him a duty, and at the same time a necessity. This physical necessity and this moral obligation, however ultimately connected with each other, are not one and identical; and the child, in its spontaneous development, instinctively feels the moral obligation long before it is conscious of the physical necessity.The instinctive feeling of the obligation is united with the growing sentiment of affection; and the child obeys the look, the voice of its mother, unconscious of its absolute dependence upon her. As the sentiment of affection and the instinct of obligatory obedience are the first dawn of moral good in the development of the child, so the impulse to disobedience is the first symptom, the first appearance of moral evil. It is with the voluntary disobedience of the child to the will of its mother that the moral infraction commences, and it is in disobedience that it resides. It considers neither the motives nor the consequences of its act; it is simply conscious that it disobeys, and regards its mother with a mingled feeling of restlessness and defiance; it tries, with hesitation, the maternal authority; it strives to be, and especially to appear, independent of the natural and legitimate power which rules it, and which it recognises at the very moment when it opposes its own will to that higher law.
As the child, so is the man. As man is born free, so he lives free; and as he is born subject, so he lives subject. Liberty co-exists with authority and resists without annulling it. Authority exists before liberty, and as it does not yield to it, so neither does it supersede it. Man, inasmuch as he knows that he disobeys, renders homage to authority by the very fact of his disobedience. Authority, on its side, recognizes the liberty of man, by the condemnation which it passes on him for having misused it; for he would not be responsible for his acts were he not free. In the co-existence of these two powers, authority and liberty, at one time in accordance, at another in conflict, lies the great secret of nature and of human destiny, the fundamental principle of man and of the world.
Let it be clearly understood that I speak here of the moral world, of the world of thought and of will. In the physical world there is neither authority nor liberty; there are merely certain forces, forces acting inevitably and unequally.If the question concerned the material world, could I do better than repeat what Pascal has admirably said: "Man is but a reed—the weakest in nature—but he is a reed which thinks; the universe need not rise in arms to crush him; a vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But were the universe to crush him, man would still be nobler than the power which killed him, for he knows that he dies; and of the advantage which the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing." When man obeys or disobeys, he knows just as well that authority confronts him, as that liberty of action abides with himself. He knows what he does, and he charges himself with the responsibility. Moral order is here complete.
Throughout all times and in all places, in all men, as in the first man, disobedience to legitimate authority is the principle and foundation of moral evil, or, to call it by its religious name, of sin.
Disobedience has various and complicated sources; it may spring from a thirst for independence, from ambition or presumptuous curiosity, or from giving rein to human inclinations and temptations; but, whatever its origin, disobedience is ever the essential characteristic of that free act which constitutes sin, as it is also the source of the responsibility which accompanies it.
Eminent men, eminently pious men, have combated the doctrine of human liberty; unable to reconcile it with what they term the divine prescience, they have denied the fundamental fact of the nature of man, rather than fully acknowledge the mystery of the nature of God. Others, equally eminent and sincere, have limited themselves to raising doubts regarding human liberty, and denying it the value of an absolute and peremptory fact. In my opinion, they have confounded facts essentially different, although intimately blended; they have ignored the special and simple character of the very fact of free will. During a course of lectures which I delivered thirty-five years ago at the Sorbonne, on the history of civilization in France, having occasion to examine the controversy of St. Augustine with Pelagius on free will, predestination, and grace, I explained these subjects in terms which I repeat here, finding no others which appear to me more exact and more complete:—
"The fact which lies at the foundation of the whole dispute," I said in 1829, "is liberty, free will, the human will. To comprehend this fact exactly, we must divest it of every foreign element, and confine it strictly to itself. It is the want of this precaution that has led to such frequent misconception of the thing itself; men have not looked simply at the fact of liberty, and at that alone. It has been viewed and described, so to speak,péle-mélewith other facts, closely connected to it, it is true, in the moral life of man, but which are no less essentially different. For example, human liberty has been said to consist in the act of deliberating upon and choosing between motives; that deliberation, and that choice and judgment consequent upon it, have been regarded as the essence of free will.Not so at all. These are acts of the intellect, not of liberty; it is before the intellect that the various motives of resolution and action, interests, passions, opinions, and such like, present themselves; the intellect considers, compares, estimates, weighs, and judges them. This is a preparatory task, which precedes the act of volition, but which does not in any way constitute it. When, after deliberation, man has taken full cognisance of the motives presented to him, and of their value, there takes place a process entirely new, and wholly different, that of free will; man forms a resolution—that is to say, he commences a series of facts having their source in himself, of which he regards himself as the author; and these are effectuated because he wills them; they would have no existence did he not will it, and would be different if he desired to produce them otherwise. Now, let us imagine all remembrance of this process of intellectual deliberation obliterated, the motives so known and appreciated, forgotten; concentrate your thought, and that of the man who takes a resolution, upon the moment when he says, 'It is my will, therefore I shall do so; and ask yourself, ask too the man, whether he could not will and act otherwise.Without doubt, you will reply, as he will do, 'Assuredly,' and this it is that reveals the fact of liberty; it consists wholly in the resolution which man takes after the deliberation is at an end; it is the resolution that is the proper act of man, which is through him and through him alone; a simple act, independent of all the facts which precede or accompany it, identical in the most varied circumstances, always the same, whatever be its motives or its results."At the same time that man feels himself free, and is conscious of the power of commencing by his own will alone a series of facts, he recognises that his will is subjected to the empire of a certain law, which takes different names, according to the circumstances to which it is applied—moral law, reason, good sense, &c … Man is free, but according even to man's own way of thinking, his will is not arbitrary; he may use it in an absurd, senseless, unjust, and culpable manner, and whenever he uses it a certain rule must govern it. The observance of this rule is his duty, the task assigned to his liberty."
It is that act of a will (that is to say of a will strictly brought back to its central and essential limits) acting freely in the intimate recesses of his being, which, in the case of disobedience to the law of duty, constitutes in man sin, and entails on him its responsibility.
Is this responsibility exclusively personal, and limited to the author of the act, or communicated, so to say, by contagion, and transmitted in a certain measure to his descendants?
I am still considering only actual appreciable acts, such as they produce and manifest themselves in the moral life of the human race.
We find the poetry and mythology of nearly all nations expressing the idea of an Utopian state of existence, referred to times remote and primitive, to which they assign different names, as the Golden Age, the Age of the Gods, and which they picture as an epoch when there existed no moral and physical evil in the world,—an era of peace, bliss, and innocence.This is the more remarkable, as it has no foundation, and finds no pretext in any tradition of historical times, however remote; for from the commencement of history, from the time that we can discern any trace of facts at all precise and authentic, it is not the Golden Age, on the contrary, it is the Iron Age which appears—an epoch of violence and ignorance and barbarism, in which war and force are rampant, and which has not in effect the least resemblance to those beautiful dreams of ancient poetry. Without now seeking to establish any relation between these mythological dreams and the Biblical traditions; or, for the moment, drawing from the Golden Age any argument in support of the Garden of Eden; I merely point it out as a great fact, as evidence of a general instinct, so to say, of the human imagination. What is the meaning of this? Whence comes this Utopia of innocence and bliss in the cradle of the human race?To what does this idea of a primal time, without strife, without sin, and without pain, correspond?
But from this cradle of man and this primitive poetry, to revert to the present time, to real life, to the cradle of the infant, why is it that, apart from all personal affection, we so readily term infancy the age of innocence? How is it that we find it so charming to give it this name, and regard it under this aspect? Physical ill is already present, for it begins with the very beginning of life; but moral ill has not yet appeared; life has not yet brought to the soul its trials, nor called forth its failings, and the idea of the soul without spot or stain has for us an inexpressible attraction; we feel a deep joy in witnessing innocence, or at least its image in the child, when we no longer see it around us, nor find it within ourselves.
What means this universal instinct, which in the dreams of the imagination, as well as in the intimate scenes of domestic life, whether we turn in thought to the cradle of the human race or to that of the infant, leads us to regard innocence as the primitive and normal state of man, and makes us place in the spot where innocence resides that which some term Paradise, and others the Golden Age?
Manifestly between the soul without spot and the soul tainted with evil, between the creature who is merely fallible and the creature who has sinned, there is a very great change of state, a distance immense, an abyss. We have a secret feeling of this deplorable change, of the fall into this abyss; and it is without premeditation, by the mere impulse of our nature, that we suffer our thoughts to bear us far—far beyond that abyss, and to pause on the rapturous contemplation of a state anterior to the fall. Hence spring, and thus are explained, the power and the charm which the idea of innocence has for us; absolute innocence we have never seen, but the idea is still vouchsafed to us; and so it appears to us in the cradle of the world, and in the cradle of the infant, and the pleasure is infinite which we derive from the ideal spectacle of purity which they each suggest.
Is this a pleasure foreign to all personal sentiment, to all secret reference to ourselves, the pleasure, that is to say, of a simple spectator? No: these impressions, which the picture of innocence awakens in us, are connected with and carry us back to ourselves; this change in the state of man, that mysterious Past which has thrown him so far from innocence, leaving him, nevertheless, the idea and the worship of it—these were not the lot of the first man alone: the entire human race was, and remains, subject to them. Our present evil does not proceed solely from ourselves; we have received it as a heritage before having brought it upon us as a penalty: we are not merely fallible beings, we are the children of a being who has sinned.
How can we feel surprise at this inheritance of woe! Have we not daily the example and the spectacle before our eyes? It is an incontestable and undisputed fact, that two elements enter into the moral life of man: on the one side, his innate dispositions, his natural and involuntary inclinations,—on the other, his inmost and individual will. The natural inclinations of a man do not destroy his moral liberty nor enslave his will, but they render its exercise more laborious and more difficult to him; it is not a chain which he carries, it is a burden that he bears. Equally incontestable and undisputed is it that the natural dispositions of men are different and unequally distributed; no one is entirely exempt from evil inclinations; every man is not only fallible, but prone to transgress, and prone not only to transgress, but to transgress in some particular direction or other. Nor can the fact be disputed, although appreciable with more difficulty, that the natural and special dispositions of the individual descend to him in a certain measure from his origin, and that parents transmit to their children such or such moral propensities just as they do such or such physical temperament, or such or such features. Hereditary transmission enters into the moral as well as the physical order of the world.
This inheritance must take effect, it has done so from the first days of man's existence upon earth, for man has been created complete in his whole nature. And whilst, at the same time as complete, he has been created fallible, I ask, who shall measure the distance between man fallible, but still without fault, and the first transgression? Who shall sound the depth of the fall, and of the change which it brought into the moral condition of its author? Who shall weigh the consequences of this change to the state and the moral dispositions of man's descendants? To appreciate the extent and gravity of this awful fact, of this first appearance and this first heritage of moral evil, we have but one test,—the instinct we still preserve of a state of innocence, and of the immense space which this instinct irresistibly compels us to place between native innocence and man's first transgression; but this test is unexceptionable; it dimly reveals to us, in this fatal transformation, the whole infirmity and responsibility of the human race.
An objection is raised to this as an injustice: how, it is said, can each man be responsible for a fault which he has not himself committed—for the transgression of another man, separated from himself by so many ages? I consider this objection weak and frivolous. Such an objection would attach to all the inequalities which exist among men, to the inequality of the destinies as well as that of the nature of man, to the inequality of his moral disposition as well as to that of his physical powers. The objection would attach to the solidarity of successive generations, and the controlling influence which the ideas, the acts, the destiny of each of them exert on the ideas, the acts, the destiny of those which follow it. The objection would attach to the ties which unite the child with its parents, and which are the cause of its sometimes inheriting their evil dispositions, and sometimes suffering for their faults. It is in short the general order of the world to which such an objection must apply; it is the very existence of evil, and its unequal distribution in a manner wholly independent of individual merit which assumes the character of a monstrous iniquity.And when we come to this point, that we no longer refer the source of evil to the fault and the responsibility of man, placed here on earth in a scene and period of transition and of trial, see to what alternative we are brought. We must either regard evil as natural, eternal, necessary, in the future as in the past, as the normal state of man and of the world; that is to say, we must deny God, the creation, the Divine Providence, human morality, liberty, responsibility and hope; or, on the other hand, it is to God Himself that we must impute evil, and whom we must render accountable.
The dogma of Original Sin alone relieves the human mind from this odious and unacceptable alternative: far from being in contradiction either with the history of humanity, or with the facts and instincts which constitute man's moral nature, this dogma admits, illustrates, and explains them.The fact of original sin presents nothing strange, nothing obscure; it consists essentially in disobedience to the will of God, which will is the moral law of man. This disobedience, the sin of Adam, is an act committed everywhere and every day, arising from the same causes, marked by the same characters, and attended by the same consequences as the Christian dogma assigns to it. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, this act is occasioned by a thirst for absolute independence, the ambitious aspirings of curiosity and pride, or weakness in the face of temptation. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, it produces an immense change in the inmost state of man, a change, the mere idea of which seizes upon the human soul, and disturbs it to its very depths; it transports man from the state of innocence to the state of sin. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, the act which produces this change involves and entails the responsibility not only of its author but of his descendants; sin is contagious in time as in space, it is transmitted, as well as diffused.The Christian dogma exhibits the first man created fallible, but born innocent; innocent at the age of man, proud in the plenitude of his faculties, not the subject of any evil and fatal heritage. All at once, for the first time, of his own will, man disobeys God. Here lies Original Sin, the same in its nature as sin at the present day, for they both consist in disobedience to the law of God, but it is the first in date in the history of man's liberty, and the human source of that evil for which the Christian religion, whilst pointing it out, offers to man the remedy and the cure.
All religions have given a prominent place to the problem of existence and the origin of evil; all have attempted its solution.The good and the evil genius, Ormuzd and Ahriman among the Persians; God the Creator, God the Preserver, and God the Destroyer—Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva—in India; the Titans overwhelmed by the thunderbolts of Jove while scaling Olympus; Prometheus chained to the rock for having snatched fire from heaven; all are so many hypotheses to explain the conflict between good and evil, between order and disorder in the world and in man. But all these hypotheses are complicated, confused, and encumbered with chimeras and fables; all attribute the derivation of evil to incongruous causes, none assign any term to the conflict, nor find a remedy for the evil. The Christian religion alone clearly states and effectually solves the question; it alone imputes to man himself, and to him alone, the origin of evil; it alone represents God as intervening to raise man from his fall, and to save him from his peril.
In the course of the sixth and fifth centuries before the Christian era, a great fact appears in history; a breath of reform, religious, moral and social, arises, and spreads from east to west, among all the nations then at all progressing in the path of civilization. Notwithstanding the uncertainties of chronology, it may be said, according to the most recent and accurate researches, that Confucius in China, the Buddha Càkya-Mouni in India, Zoroaster in Persia, Pythagoras and Socrates in Greece, are all included in the limits of this epoch; [Footnote 5] men as dissimilar as they are celebrated, but who have all, in different ways and in unequal degrees, undertaken a great work of reforming both the men and the social institutions of their times.
[Footnote 5: These researches give the following dates:—1. Confucius, from 551 to 478 B.C.; 2. Zoroaster, from 564 to 487, or from 589 to 512 B.C.; 3. Buddha Càkya-Mouni, in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. (he died, according to Burnouf, 543 B.C.); 4. Pythagoras, from 580 to 500 B.C.; 5. Socrates, 470 to 400 or 399 B.C.]
Confucius was above all a practical moralist, skilled in observation, counsel, and discipline; Buddha Càkya-Mouni, a dreamer, and a mystical and popular preacher; Zoroaster, a legislator, religious and political; Pythagoras and Socrates, philosophers, bent upon instructing the distinguished bands of disciples whom they gathered around them. There is no doubt, notwithstanding the trials of their life, that neither power nor glory amongst their contemporaries was wanting to them. Confucius and Zoroaster were the favourites and counsellors of kings. Buddha Càkya-Mouni, himself the son of a king, became the idol of innumerable multitudes. Pythagoras and Socrates formed schools and pupils who were an honour to the human mind. By their personal genius and by the excellence of some of their ideas and actions, these men have ensured themselves the admiration of all posterity. Did they act up to their teachings, and accomplish what they attempted? Did they really change the moral and social condition of nations? Did they cause humanity to make any great progress, and open to it horizons which it had not before known?By no means. Whatever fame attaches to the names of these men, whatever influence they may have exerted, what ever trace of their passage may have remained, they rather appeared to have power than really to possess it; they agitated the surface far more than they stirred the depths; they did not draw nations out of the beaten tracks in which they had lived. They did not transform souls. In considering the facts at large, and notwithstanding the political and material revolutions which they underwent, China after Confucius, India after Buddha, Persia after Zoroaster, Greece after Pythagoras and Socrates, followed in the same ways, retained the same propensities, as before. Still more, among these very different nations, stagnation was only be succeeded by decay. Where are these nations at the present day, more than two thousand years after the appearance of these glorious characters in their history? What great progress, what salutary changes, have been effected? What are they in comparison and in contact with Christian nations?Outside of Christianity there have been grand spectacles of activity and force, brilliant phenomena of genius and virtue, generous attempts at reform, learned philosophical systems, and beautiful mythological poems; no real profound or fruitful regeneration of humanity and of society.
A few ages only after these barren efforts among the great nations of the world, Jesus Christ appears among a small, obscure people, weak and despised. He Himself is weak and despised in the midst of his people; He neither possesses nor seeks any social power, any temporal means of action and of success; He collects around Him only disciples weak and despised as Himself. Not only are they weak and despised, they proclaim it themselves, and, far from being troubled at this, they glory in it, and derive from it confidence. St. Paul writes to the Corinthians: "And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. … Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong." [Footnote 6]
[Footnote 6: 1 Corinthians ii. 13; 2 Corinthians xii. 10.]
And in truth, Jesus Christ, the Master of St. Paul, is strong in his sufferings, and imparts his strength to his disciples; from his cross, He accomplishes what erewhile, in Asia and Europe, princes and philosophers, the powerful of the earth, and sages, attempted without success; He changes the moral state and the social state of the world; He pours into the souls of men new enlightenment and new powers; for all classes, for all human conditions, He prepares destinies before his advent unknown; He liberates them at the same time that He lays down rules for their guidance; He quickens them and stills them; He places the divine law and human liberty face to face, and yet still in harmony; He offers an effectual remedy for the evil which weighs upon humanity; to sin He opens the path of salvation, to unhappiness the door of hope.