II. Every member of the human race, without exception, possesses a corrupted nature, which is a source of actual sin, and is itself sin.1.Proof from Scripture.A. The sinful acts and dispositions of men are referred to, and explained by, a corrupt nature.By“nature”we mean that which isbornin a man, that which he has by birth. That there is an inborn corrupt state, from which sinful acts and dispositions flow, is evident[pg 578]fromLuke 6:43-45—“there is no good tree that bringeth forth corrupt fruit.... the evil man out of the evil treasure[of his heart]bringeth forth that which is evil”;Mat. 12:34—“Ye offspring of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things?”Ps. 58:3—“The wicked are estranged from the womb: They go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies.”This corrupt nature (a) belongs to man from the first moment of his being; (b) underlies man's consciousness; (c) cannot be changed by man's own power; (d) first constitutes him a sinner before God; (e) is the common heritage of the race.(a)Ps. 51:5—“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me”—here David is confessing, not his mother's sin, but his own sin; and he declares that this sin goes back to the very moment of his conception. Tholuck, quoted by H. B. Smith, System, 281—“David confesses that sin begins with the life of man; that not only his works, but the man himself, is guilty before God.”Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:94—“David mentions the fact that he was born sinful, as an aggravation of his particular act of adultery, and not as an excuse for it.”(b)Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”;51:6, 7—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom. Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”(c)Jer. 13:23—“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil”;Rom. 7:24—“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?”(d)Ps. 51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts”;Jer. 17:9—“The heart is deceitful above all things and it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it? I, Jehovah, search the mind, I try the heart,”—only God can fully know the native and incurable depravity of the human heart; see Annotated Paragraph Bible,in loco, (e)Job 14:4—“Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one”;John 3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh,”i. e., human nature sundered from God. Pope, Theology, 2:53—“Christ, who knew what was in man, says:‘If ye then, being evil’(Mat. 7:11), and‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh’(John 3:6), that is—putting the two together—‘men are evil, because they are born evil.’”Nathaniel Hawthorne's story of The Minister's Black Veil portrays the isolation of every man's deepest life, and the awe which any visible assertion of that isolation inspires. C. P. Cranch:“We are spirits clad in veils; Man by man was never seen; All our deep communing fails To remove the shadowy screen.”In the heart of every one of us is that fearful“black drop,”which the Koran says the angel showed to Mohammed. Sin is like the taint of scrofula in the blood, which shows itself in tumors, in consumption, in cancer, in manifold forms, but is everywhere the same organic evil. Byron spoke truly of“This ineradicable taint of sin, this boundless Upas, this all-blasting tree.”E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theol., 161, 162—“The objection that conscience brings no charge of guilt against inborn depravity, however true it may be of the nature in its passive state, is seen, when the nature is roused to activity, to be unfounded. This faculty, on the contrary, lends support to the doctrine it is supposed to overthrow. When the conscience holds intelligent inquisition upon single acts, it soon discovers that these are mere accessories to crime, while the principal is hidden away beyond the reach of consciousness. In following up its inquisition, it in due time extorts the exclamation of David:Ps. 51:5—‘Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me.’Conscience traces guilt to its seat in the inherited nature.”B. All men are declared to be by nature children of wrath (Eph. 2:3). Here“nature”signifies something inborn and original, as distinguished from that which is subsequently acquired. The text implies that: (a) Sin is a nature, in the sense of a congenital depravity of the will. (b) This nature is guilty and condemnable,—since God's wrath rests only upon that which deserves it. (c) All men participate in this nature and in this consequent guilt and condemnation.Eph. 2:3—“were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.”Shedd:“Nature here is not substance created by God, but corruption of that substance, which corruption is created by man.”“Nature”(fromnascor) may denote anything inborn, and the term may just as properly designate inborn evil tendencies and state, as inborn faculties or substance.“By nature”therefore =“by birth”; compareGal. 2:15—“Jews by nature.”E. G. Robinson:“Nature = not οὐσία, or essence, but only qualification of essence, as something born[pg 579]in us. There is just as much difference in babes, from the beginning of their existence, as there is in adults. If sin is defined as‘voluntary transgression of known law,’the definition of course disposes of original sin.”But if sin is a selfish state of the will, such a state is demonstrably inborn. Aristotle speaks of some men as born to be savages (φύσει βάρβαροι), and of others as destined by nature to be slaves (φύσει δοῦλοι). Here evidently is a congenital aptitude and disposition. Similarly we can interpret Paul's words as declaring nothing less than that men are possessed at birth of an aptitude and disposition which is the object of God's just displeasure.The opposite view can be found in Stevens, Pauline Theology, 152-157. Principal Fairbairn also says that inherited sinfulness“isnottransgression, and iswithoutguilt.”Ritschl, Just. and Recon., 344—“The predicate‘children of wrath’refers to the former actual transgression of those who now as Christians have the right to apply to themselves that divine purpose of grace which is the antithesis of wrath.”Meyer interprets the verse;“Webecomechildren of wrath by following a natural propensity.”He claims the doctrine of the apostle to be, that man incurs the divine wrath by hisactualsin, when he submits his will to the inborn sin principle. So N. W. Taylor, Concio ad Clerum, quoted in H. B. Smith, System, 281—“We were by nature such that we became through our own act children of wrath.”“But,”says Smith,“if the apostle had meant this, he could have said so; there is a proper Greek word for‘became’; the word which is used can only be rendered‘were.’”So1 Cor. 7:14—“else were your children unclean”—implies that, apart from the operations of grace, all men are defiled in virtue of their very birth from a corrupt stock. Cloth is first died in the wool, and then dyed again after the weaving. Man is a“double-dyed villain.”He is corrupted by nature and afterwards by practice. The colored physician in New Orleans advertised that his method was“first to remove the disease, and then to eradicate the system.”The New School method of treating this text is of a similar sort. Beginning with a definition of sin which excludes from that category all inborn states of the will, it proceeds to vacate of their meaning the positive statements of Scripture.For the proper interpretation ofEph. 2:3, see Julius Müller, Doct. of Sin, 2:278, and Commentaries of Harless and Olshausen. See also Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:212sq.; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:289; and an excellent note in the Expositor's Greek N.T.,in loco.Per contra, see Reuss, Christ. Theol. in Apost. Age, 2:29, 79-84; Weiss, Bib. Theol. N.T., 239.C. Death, the penalty of sin, is visited even upon those who have never exercised a personal and conscious choice (Rom. 5:12-14). This text implies that (a) Sin exists in the case of infants prior to moral consciousness, and therefore in the nature, as distinguished from the personal activity. (b) Since infants die, this visitation of the penalty of sin upon them marks the ill-desert of that nature which contains in itself, though undeveloped, the germs of actual transgression. (c) It is therefore certain that a sinful, guilty, and condemnable nature belongs to all mankind.Rom. 5:12-14—“Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned:—for until the law sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression”—that is, over those who, like infants, had never personally and consciously sinned. See a more full treatment of these last words in connection with an exegesis of the whole passage—Rom. 5:12-19—under Imputation of Sin, pages 625-627.N. W. Taylor maintained that infants, prior to moral agency, are not subjects of the moral government of God, any more than are animals. In this he disagreed with Edwards, Bellamy, Hopkins, Dwight, Smalley, Griffin. See Tyler, Letters on N. E. Theol., 8, 132-142—“To say that animals die, and therefore death can be no proof of sin in infants, is to take infidel ground. The infidel has just as good a right to say: Because animals die without being sinners, therefore adults may. If death may reign to such an alarming extent over the human race and yet be no proof of sin, then you adopt the principle that death may reign to any extent over the universe, yet never can be made a proof of sin in any case.”We reserve our full proof that physical death is the penalty of sin to the section on Penalty as one of the Consequences of Sin.2.Proof from Reason.Three facts demand explanation: (a) The universal existence of sinful[pg 580]dispositions in every mind, and of sinful acts in every life. (b) The preponderating tendencies to evil, which necessitate the constant education of good impulses, while the bad grow of themselves. (c) The yielding of the will to temptation, and the actual violation of the divine law, in the case of every human being so soon as he reaches moral consciousness.The fundamental selfishness of man is seen in childhood, when human nature acts itself out spontaneously. It is difficult to develop courtesy in children. There can be no true courtesy without regard for man as man and willingness to accord to each man his place and right as a son of God equal with ourselves. But children wish to please themselves without regard to others. The mother asks the child:“Why don't you do right instead of doing wrong?”and the child answers:“Because it makes me so tired,”or“Because I do wrong without trying.”Nothing runs itself, unless it is going down hill.“No other animal does things habitually that will injure and destroy it, and does them from the love of it. But man does this, and he is born to do it, he does it from birth. As the seedlings of the peach-tree are all peaches, not apples, and those of thorns are all thorns, not grapes, so all the descendants of man are born with evil in their natures. That sin continually comes back to us, like a dog or cat that has been driven away, proves that our hearts are its home.”Mrs. Humphrey Ward's novel, Robert Elsmere, represents the milk-and-water school of philanthropists.“Give man a chance,”they say;“give him good example and favorable environment and he will turn out well. He is more sinned against than sinning. It is the outward presence of evil that drives men to evil courses.”But God's indictment is found inRom. 8:7—“the mind of the flesh is enmity against God.”G. P. Fisher:“Of the ideas of natural religion, Plato, Plutarch and Cicero found in the fact that they are in man'sreason, but not obeyed and realized in man'swill, the most convincing evidence that humanity is at schism with itself, and therefore depraved, fallen, and unable to deliver itself. The reason why many moralists fail and grow bitter and hateful is that they do not take account of this state of sin.”Reason seeks an underlying principle which will reduce these multitudinous phenomena to unity. As we are compelled to refer common physical and intellectual phenomena to a common physical and intellectual nature, so we are compelled to refer these common moral phenomena to a common moral nature, and to find in it the cause of this universal, spontaneous, and all-controlling opposition to God and his law. The only possible solution of the problem is this, that the common nature of mankind is corrupt, or, in other words, that the human will, prior to the single volitions of the individual, is turned away from God and supremely set upon self-gratification. This unconscious and fundamental direction of the will, as the source of actual sin, must itself be sin; and of this sin all mankind are partakers.The greatest thinkers of the world have certified to the correctness of this conclusion. See Aristotle's doctrine of“the slope,”described in Chase's Introduction to Aristotle's Ethics, XXXV and 32—“In regard to moral virtue, man stands on a slope. His appetites and passions gravitate downward; his reason attracts him upward. Conflict occurs. A step upward, and reason gains what passion has lost; but the reverse is the case if he steps downward. The tendency in the former case is to the entire subjection of passion; in the latter case, to the entire suppression of reason. The slope will terminate upwards in a level summit where men's steps will be secure, or downwards in an irretrievable plunge over the precipice. Continual self-control leads to absolute self-mastery; continual failure, to the utter absence of self-control. Butall we can see is the slope. No man is ever at the ἠρεμία of the summit, nor can we say that a man has irretrievably fallen into the abyss. How it is that men constantly act against their own convictions of what is right, and their previous determinations to follow right, is a mystery Which Aristotle discusses, but leaves unexplained.“Compare the passage in the Ethics, 1:11—‘Clearly there is in them [men], besides the Reason, some other Inborn principle (πεφυκός) which fights with and strains against the Reason.... There is in the soul also somewhat besides the Reason which is[pg 581]opposed to this and goes against it.’—Compare this passage with Paul, inRom. 7:23—‘I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members.’But as Aristotle does not explain the cause, so he suggests no cure. Revelation alone can account for the disease, or point out the remedy.”Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:102—“Aristotle makes the significant and almost surprising observation, that the character which has become evil by guilt can just as little be thrown off again at mere volition, as the person who has made himself sick by his own fault can become well again at mere volition; once become evil or sick, it stands no longer within his discretion to cease to be so; a stone, when once cast, cannot be caught back from its flight; and so is it with the character that has become evil.”He does not tell“how a reformation in character is possible,—moreover, he does not concede to evil any other than an individual effect,—knows nothing of any natural solidarity of evil in self-propagating, morally degenerated races”(Nic. Eth., 3:6, 7; 5:12; 7:2, 3; 10:10). The good nature, he says,“is evidently not within our power, but is by some kind of divine causality conferred upon the truly happy.”Plato speaks of“that blind, many-headed wild beast of all that is evil within thee.”He repudiates the idea that men are naturally good, and says that, if this were true, all that would be needed to make them holy would be to shut them up, from their earliest years, so that they might not be corrupted by others. Republic, 4 (Jowett's translation, 11:276)—“There is a rising up of part of the soul against the whole of the soul.”Meno, 89—“The cause of corruption is from our parents, so that we never relinquish their evil way, or escape the blemish of their evil habit.”Horace, Ep., 1:10—“Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.”Latin proverb:“Nemo repente fuit turpissimus.”Pascal:“We are born unrighteous; for each one tends to himself, and the bent toward self is the beginning of all disorder.”Kant, in his Metaphysical Principles of Human Morals, speaks of“the indwelling of an evil principle side by side with the good one, or the radical evil of human nature,”and of“the contest between the good and the evil principles for the control of man.”“Hegel, pantheist as he was, declared that original sin is the nature of every man,—every man begins with it”(H. B. Smith).Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 4:3—“All is oblique: There's nothing level in our cursed natures, But direct villainy.”All's Well, 4:3—“As we are in ourselves, how weak we are! Merely our own traitors.”Measure for Measure, 1:2—“Our natures do pursue, Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, A thirsty evil, and when we drink, we die.”Hamlet, 3:1—“Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it.”Love's Labor Lost, 1:1—“Every man with his affects is born, Not by might mastered, but by special grace.”Winter's Tale, 1:2—“We should have answered Heaven boldly, Not guilty; the imposition cleared Hereditary ours”—that is, provided our hereditary connection with Adam had not made us guilty. On the theology of Shakespeare, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 196-211—“If any think it irrational to believe in man's depravity, guilt, and need of supernatural redemption, they must also be prepared to say that Shakespeare did not understand human nature.”S. T. Coleridge, Omniana, at the end:“It is a fundamental article of Christianity that I am a fallen creature ... that an evil ground existed in my will, previously to any act or assignable moment of time in my consciousness; I am born a child of wrath. This fearful mystery I pretend not to understand. I cannot even conceive the possibility of it; but I know that it is so, ... and what is real must be possible.”A sceptic who gave his children no religious training, with the view of letting them each in mature years choose a faith for himself, reproved Coleridge for letting his garden run to weeds; but Coleridge replied, that he did not think it right to prejudice the soil in favor of roses and strawberries. Van Oosterzee: Rain and sunshine make weeds grow more quickly, but could not draw them out of the soil if the seeds did not lie there already; so evil education and example draw out sin, but do not implant it. Tennyson, Two Voices:“He finds a baseness in his blood, At such strange war with what is good, He cannot do the thing he would.”Robert Browning, Gold Hair: a Legend of Pornic:“The faith that launched point-blank her dart At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin, The corruption of Man's Heart.”Taine, Ancien Régime:“Savage, brigand and madman each of us harbors, in repose or manacled, but always living, in the recesses of his own heart.”Alexander Maclaren:“A great mass of knotted weeds growing in a stagnant pool is dragged toward you as you drag one filament.”Draw out one sin, and it brings with it the whole matted nature of sin.Chief Justice Thompson, of Pennsylvania:“If those who preach had been lawyers previous to entering the ministry, they would know and say far more about the depravity[pg 582]of the human heart than they do. The old doctrine of total depravity is the only thing that can explain the falsehoods, the dishonesties, the licentiousness, and the murders which are so rife in the world. Education, refinement, and even a high order of talent, cannot overcome the inclination to evil which exists in the heart, and has taken possession of the very fibres of our nature.”See Edwards, Original Sin, in Works, 2:309-510; Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:259-307; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:231-238; Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 226-236.
II. Every member of the human race, without exception, possesses a corrupted nature, which is a source of actual sin, and is itself sin.1.Proof from Scripture.A. The sinful acts and dispositions of men are referred to, and explained by, a corrupt nature.By“nature”we mean that which isbornin a man, that which he has by birth. That there is an inborn corrupt state, from which sinful acts and dispositions flow, is evident[pg 578]fromLuke 6:43-45—“there is no good tree that bringeth forth corrupt fruit.... the evil man out of the evil treasure[of his heart]bringeth forth that which is evil”;Mat. 12:34—“Ye offspring of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things?”Ps. 58:3—“The wicked are estranged from the womb: They go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies.”This corrupt nature (a) belongs to man from the first moment of his being; (b) underlies man's consciousness; (c) cannot be changed by man's own power; (d) first constitutes him a sinner before God; (e) is the common heritage of the race.(a)Ps. 51:5—“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me”—here David is confessing, not his mother's sin, but his own sin; and he declares that this sin goes back to the very moment of his conception. Tholuck, quoted by H. B. Smith, System, 281—“David confesses that sin begins with the life of man; that not only his works, but the man himself, is guilty before God.”Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:94—“David mentions the fact that he was born sinful, as an aggravation of his particular act of adultery, and not as an excuse for it.”(b)Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”;51:6, 7—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom. Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”(c)Jer. 13:23—“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil”;Rom. 7:24—“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?”(d)Ps. 51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts”;Jer. 17:9—“The heart is deceitful above all things and it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it? I, Jehovah, search the mind, I try the heart,”—only God can fully know the native and incurable depravity of the human heart; see Annotated Paragraph Bible,in loco, (e)Job 14:4—“Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one”;John 3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh,”i. e., human nature sundered from God. Pope, Theology, 2:53—“Christ, who knew what was in man, says:‘If ye then, being evil’(Mat. 7:11), and‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh’(John 3:6), that is—putting the two together—‘men are evil, because they are born evil.’”Nathaniel Hawthorne's story of The Minister's Black Veil portrays the isolation of every man's deepest life, and the awe which any visible assertion of that isolation inspires. C. P. Cranch:“We are spirits clad in veils; Man by man was never seen; All our deep communing fails To remove the shadowy screen.”In the heart of every one of us is that fearful“black drop,”which the Koran says the angel showed to Mohammed. Sin is like the taint of scrofula in the blood, which shows itself in tumors, in consumption, in cancer, in manifold forms, but is everywhere the same organic evil. Byron spoke truly of“This ineradicable taint of sin, this boundless Upas, this all-blasting tree.”E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theol., 161, 162—“The objection that conscience brings no charge of guilt against inborn depravity, however true it may be of the nature in its passive state, is seen, when the nature is roused to activity, to be unfounded. This faculty, on the contrary, lends support to the doctrine it is supposed to overthrow. When the conscience holds intelligent inquisition upon single acts, it soon discovers that these are mere accessories to crime, while the principal is hidden away beyond the reach of consciousness. In following up its inquisition, it in due time extorts the exclamation of David:Ps. 51:5—‘Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me.’Conscience traces guilt to its seat in the inherited nature.”B. All men are declared to be by nature children of wrath (Eph. 2:3). Here“nature”signifies something inborn and original, as distinguished from that which is subsequently acquired. The text implies that: (a) Sin is a nature, in the sense of a congenital depravity of the will. (b) This nature is guilty and condemnable,—since God's wrath rests only upon that which deserves it. (c) All men participate in this nature and in this consequent guilt and condemnation.Eph. 2:3—“were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.”Shedd:“Nature here is not substance created by God, but corruption of that substance, which corruption is created by man.”“Nature”(fromnascor) may denote anything inborn, and the term may just as properly designate inborn evil tendencies and state, as inborn faculties or substance.“By nature”therefore =“by birth”; compareGal. 2:15—“Jews by nature.”E. G. Robinson:“Nature = not οὐσία, or essence, but only qualification of essence, as something born[pg 579]in us. There is just as much difference in babes, from the beginning of their existence, as there is in adults. If sin is defined as‘voluntary transgression of known law,’the definition of course disposes of original sin.”But if sin is a selfish state of the will, such a state is demonstrably inborn. Aristotle speaks of some men as born to be savages (φύσει βάρβαροι), and of others as destined by nature to be slaves (φύσει δοῦλοι). Here evidently is a congenital aptitude and disposition. Similarly we can interpret Paul's words as declaring nothing less than that men are possessed at birth of an aptitude and disposition which is the object of God's just displeasure.The opposite view can be found in Stevens, Pauline Theology, 152-157. Principal Fairbairn also says that inherited sinfulness“isnottransgression, and iswithoutguilt.”Ritschl, Just. and Recon., 344—“The predicate‘children of wrath’refers to the former actual transgression of those who now as Christians have the right to apply to themselves that divine purpose of grace which is the antithesis of wrath.”Meyer interprets the verse;“Webecomechildren of wrath by following a natural propensity.”He claims the doctrine of the apostle to be, that man incurs the divine wrath by hisactualsin, when he submits his will to the inborn sin principle. So N. W. Taylor, Concio ad Clerum, quoted in H. B. Smith, System, 281—“We were by nature such that we became through our own act children of wrath.”“But,”says Smith,“if the apostle had meant this, he could have said so; there is a proper Greek word for‘became’; the word which is used can only be rendered‘were.’”So1 Cor. 7:14—“else were your children unclean”—implies that, apart from the operations of grace, all men are defiled in virtue of their very birth from a corrupt stock. Cloth is first died in the wool, and then dyed again after the weaving. Man is a“double-dyed villain.”He is corrupted by nature and afterwards by practice. The colored physician in New Orleans advertised that his method was“first to remove the disease, and then to eradicate the system.”The New School method of treating this text is of a similar sort. Beginning with a definition of sin which excludes from that category all inborn states of the will, it proceeds to vacate of their meaning the positive statements of Scripture.For the proper interpretation ofEph. 2:3, see Julius Müller, Doct. of Sin, 2:278, and Commentaries of Harless and Olshausen. See also Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:212sq.; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:289; and an excellent note in the Expositor's Greek N.T.,in loco.Per contra, see Reuss, Christ. Theol. in Apost. Age, 2:29, 79-84; Weiss, Bib. Theol. N.T., 239.C. Death, the penalty of sin, is visited even upon those who have never exercised a personal and conscious choice (Rom. 5:12-14). This text implies that (a) Sin exists in the case of infants prior to moral consciousness, and therefore in the nature, as distinguished from the personal activity. (b) Since infants die, this visitation of the penalty of sin upon them marks the ill-desert of that nature which contains in itself, though undeveloped, the germs of actual transgression. (c) It is therefore certain that a sinful, guilty, and condemnable nature belongs to all mankind.Rom. 5:12-14—“Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned:—for until the law sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression”—that is, over those who, like infants, had never personally and consciously sinned. See a more full treatment of these last words in connection with an exegesis of the whole passage—Rom. 5:12-19—under Imputation of Sin, pages 625-627.N. W. Taylor maintained that infants, prior to moral agency, are not subjects of the moral government of God, any more than are animals. In this he disagreed with Edwards, Bellamy, Hopkins, Dwight, Smalley, Griffin. See Tyler, Letters on N. E. Theol., 8, 132-142—“To say that animals die, and therefore death can be no proof of sin in infants, is to take infidel ground. The infidel has just as good a right to say: Because animals die without being sinners, therefore adults may. If death may reign to such an alarming extent over the human race and yet be no proof of sin, then you adopt the principle that death may reign to any extent over the universe, yet never can be made a proof of sin in any case.”We reserve our full proof that physical death is the penalty of sin to the section on Penalty as one of the Consequences of Sin.2.Proof from Reason.Three facts demand explanation: (a) The universal existence of sinful[pg 580]dispositions in every mind, and of sinful acts in every life. (b) The preponderating tendencies to evil, which necessitate the constant education of good impulses, while the bad grow of themselves. (c) The yielding of the will to temptation, and the actual violation of the divine law, in the case of every human being so soon as he reaches moral consciousness.The fundamental selfishness of man is seen in childhood, when human nature acts itself out spontaneously. It is difficult to develop courtesy in children. There can be no true courtesy without regard for man as man and willingness to accord to each man his place and right as a son of God equal with ourselves. But children wish to please themselves without regard to others. The mother asks the child:“Why don't you do right instead of doing wrong?”and the child answers:“Because it makes me so tired,”or“Because I do wrong without trying.”Nothing runs itself, unless it is going down hill.“No other animal does things habitually that will injure and destroy it, and does them from the love of it. But man does this, and he is born to do it, he does it from birth. As the seedlings of the peach-tree are all peaches, not apples, and those of thorns are all thorns, not grapes, so all the descendants of man are born with evil in their natures. That sin continually comes back to us, like a dog or cat that has been driven away, proves that our hearts are its home.”Mrs. Humphrey Ward's novel, Robert Elsmere, represents the milk-and-water school of philanthropists.“Give man a chance,”they say;“give him good example and favorable environment and he will turn out well. He is more sinned against than sinning. It is the outward presence of evil that drives men to evil courses.”But God's indictment is found inRom. 8:7—“the mind of the flesh is enmity against God.”G. P. Fisher:“Of the ideas of natural religion, Plato, Plutarch and Cicero found in the fact that they are in man'sreason, but not obeyed and realized in man'swill, the most convincing evidence that humanity is at schism with itself, and therefore depraved, fallen, and unable to deliver itself. The reason why many moralists fail and grow bitter and hateful is that they do not take account of this state of sin.”Reason seeks an underlying principle which will reduce these multitudinous phenomena to unity. As we are compelled to refer common physical and intellectual phenomena to a common physical and intellectual nature, so we are compelled to refer these common moral phenomena to a common moral nature, and to find in it the cause of this universal, spontaneous, and all-controlling opposition to God and his law. The only possible solution of the problem is this, that the common nature of mankind is corrupt, or, in other words, that the human will, prior to the single volitions of the individual, is turned away from God and supremely set upon self-gratification. This unconscious and fundamental direction of the will, as the source of actual sin, must itself be sin; and of this sin all mankind are partakers.The greatest thinkers of the world have certified to the correctness of this conclusion. See Aristotle's doctrine of“the slope,”described in Chase's Introduction to Aristotle's Ethics, XXXV and 32—“In regard to moral virtue, man stands on a slope. His appetites and passions gravitate downward; his reason attracts him upward. Conflict occurs. A step upward, and reason gains what passion has lost; but the reverse is the case if he steps downward. The tendency in the former case is to the entire subjection of passion; in the latter case, to the entire suppression of reason. The slope will terminate upwards in a level summit where men's steps will be secure, or downwards in an irretrievable plunge over the precipice. Continual self-control leads to absolute self-mastery; continual failure, to the utter absence of self-control. Butall we can see is the slope. No man is ever at the ἠρεμία of the summit, nor can we say that a man has irretrievably fallen into the abyss. How it is that men constantly act against their own convictions of what is right, and their previous determinations to follow right, is a mystery Which Aristotle discusses, but leaves unexplained.“Compare the passage in the Ethics, 1:11—‘Clearly there is in them [men], besides the Reason, some other Inborn principle (πεφυκός) which fights with and strains against the Reason.... There is in the soul also somewhat besides the Reason which is[pg 581]opposed to this and goes against it.’—Compare this passage with Paul, inRom. 7:23—‘I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members.’But as Aristotle does not explain the cause, so he suggests no cure. Revelation alone can account for the disease, or point out the remedy.”Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:102—“Aristotle makes the significant and almost surprising observation, that the character which has become evil by guilt can just as little be thrown off again at mere volition, as the person who has made himself sick by his own fault can become well again at mere volition; once become evil or sick, it stands no longer within his discretion to cease to be so; a stone, when once cast, cannot be caught back from its flight; and so is it with the character that has become evil.”He does not tell“how a reformation in character is possible,—moreover, he does not concede to evil any other than an individual effect,—knows nothing of any natural solidarity of evil in self-propagating, morally degenerated races”(Nic. Eth., 3:6, 7; 5:12; 7:2, 3; 10:10). The good nature, he says,“is evidently not within our power, but is by some kind of divine causality conferred upon the truly happy.”Plato speaks of“that blind, many-headed wild beast of all that is evil within thee.”He repudiates the idea that men are naturally good, and says that, if this were true, all that would be needed to make them holy would be to shut them up, from their earliest years, so that they might not be corrupted by others. Republic, 4 (Jowett's translation, 11:276)—“There is a rising up of part of the soul against the whole of the soul.”Meno, 89—“The cause of corruption is from our parents, so that we never relinquish their evil way, or escape the blemish of their evil habit.”Horace, Ep., 1:10—“Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.”Latin proverb:“Nemo repente fuit turpissimus.”Pascal:“We are born unrighteous; for each one tends to himself, and the bent toward self is the beginning of all disorder.”Kant, in his Metaphysical Principles of Human Morals, speaks of“the indwelling of an evil principle side by side with the good one, or the radical evil of human nature,”and of“the contest between the good and the evil principles for the control of man.”“Hegel, pantheist as he was, declared that original sin is the nature of every man,—every man begins with it”(H. B. Smith).Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 4:3—“All is oblique: There's nothing level in our cursed natures, But direct villainy.”All's Well, 4:3—“As we are in ourselves, how weak we are! Merely our own traitors.”Measure for Measure, 1:2—“Our natures do pursue, Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, A thirsty evil, and when we drink, we die.”Hamlet, 3:1—“Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it.”Love's Labor Lost, 1:1—“Every man with his affects is born, Not by might mastered, but by special grace.”Winter's Tale, 1:2—“We should have answered Heaven boldly, Not guilty; the imposition cleared Hereditary ours”—that is, provided our hereditary connection with Adam had not made us guilty. On the theology of Shakespeare, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 196-211—“If any think it irrational to believe in man's depravity, guilt, and need of supernatural redemption, they must also be prepared to say that Shakespeare did not understand human nature.”S. T. Coleridge, Omniana, at the end:“It is a fundamental article of Christianity that I am a fallen creature ... that an evil ground existed in my will, previously to any act or assignable moment of time in my consciousness; I am born a child of wrath. This fearful mystery I pretend not to understand. I cannot even conceive the possibility of it; but I know that it is so, ... and what is real must be possible.”A sceptic who gave his children no religious training, with the view of letting them each in mature years choose a faith for himself, reproved Coleridge for letting his garden run to weeds; but Coleridge replied, that he did not think it right to prejudice the soil in favor of roses and strawberries. Van Oosterzee: Rain and sunshine make weeds grow more quickly, but could not draw them out of the soil if the seeds did not lie there already; so evil education and example draw out sin, but do not implant it. Tennyson, Two Voices:“He finds a baseness in his blood, At such strange war with what is good, He cannot do the thing he would.”Robert Browning, Gold Hair: a Legend of Pornic:“The faith that launched point-blank her dart At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin, The corruption of Man's Heart.”Taine, Ancien Régime:“Savage, brigand and madman each of us harbors, in repose or manacled, but always living, in the recesses of his own heart.”Alexander Maclaren:“A great mass of knotted weeds growing in a stagnant pool is dragged toward you as you drag one filament.”Draw out one sin, and it brings with it the whole matted nature of sin.Chief Justice Thompson, of Pennsylvania:“If those who preach had been lawyers previous to entering the ministry, they would know and say far more about the depravity[pg 582]of the human heart than they do. The old doctrine of total depravity is the only thing that can explain the falsehoods, the dishonesties, the licentiousness, and the murders which are so rife in the world. Education, refinement, and even a high order of talent, cannot overcome the inclination to evil which exists in the heart, and has taken possession of the very fibres of our nature.”See Edwards, Original Sin, in Works, 2:309-510; Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:259-307; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:231-238; Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 226-236.
II. Every member of the human race, without exception, possesses a corrupted nature, which is a source of actual sin, and is itself sin.1.Proof from Scripture.A. The sinful acts and dispositions of men are referred to, and explained by, a corrupt nature.By“nature”we mean that which isbornin a man, that which he has by birth. That there is an inborn corrupt state, from which sinful acts and dispositions flow, is evident[pg 578]fromLuke 6:43-45—“there is no good tree that bringeth forth corrupt fruit.... the evil man out of the evil treasure[of his heart]bringeth forth that which is evil”;Mat. 12:34—“Ye offspring of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things?”Ps. 58:3—“The wicked are estranged from the womb: They go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies.”This corrupt nature (a) belongs to man from the first moment of his being; (b) underlies man's consciousness; (c) cannot be changed by man's own power; (d) first constitutes him a sinner before God; (e) is the common heritage of the race.(a)Ps. 51:5—“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me”—here David is confessing, not his mother's sin, but his own sin; and he declares that this sin goes back to the very moment of his conception. Tholuck, quoted by H. B. Smith, System, 281—“David confesses that sin begins with the life of man; that not only his works, but the man himself, is guilty before God.”Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:94—“David mentions the fact that he was born sinful, as an aggravation of his particular act of adultery, and not as an excuse for it.”(b)Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”;51:6, 7—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom. Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”(c)Jer. 13:23—“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil”;Rom. 7:24—“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?”(d)Ps. 51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts”;Jer. 17:9—“The heart is deceitful above all things and it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it? I, Jehovah, search the mind, I try the heart,”—only God can fully know the native and incurable depravity of the human heart; see Annotated Paragraph Bible,in loco, (e)Job 14:4—“Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one”;John 3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh,”i. e., human nature sundered from God. Pope, Theology, 2:53—“Christ, who knew what was in man, says:‘If ye then, being evil’(Mat. 7:11), and‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh’(John 3:6), that is—putting the two together—‘men are evil, because they are born evil.’”Nathaniel Hawthorne's story of The Minister's Black Veil portrays the isolation of every man's deepest life, and the awe which any visible assertion of that isolation inspires. C. P. Cranch:“We are spirits clad in veils; Man by man was never seen; All our deep communing fails To remove the shadowy screen.”In the heart of every one of us is that fearful“black drop,”which the Koran says the angel showed to Mohammed. Sin is like the taint of scrofula in the blood, which shows itself in tumors, in consumption, in cancer, in manifold forms, but is everywhere the same organic evil. Byron spoke truly of“This ineradicable taint of sin, this boundless Upas, this all-blasting tree.”E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theol., 161, 162—“The objection that conscience brings no charge of guilt against inborn depravity, however true it may be of the nature in its passive state, is seen, when the nature is roused to activity, to be unfounded. This faculty, on the contrary, lends support to the doctrine it is supposed to overthrow. When the conscience holds intelligent inquisition upon single acts, it soon discovers that these are mere accessories to crime, while the principal is hidden away beyond the reach of consciousness. In following up its inquisition, it in due time extorts the exclamation of David:Ps. 51:5—‘Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me.’Conscience traces guilt to its seat in the inherited nature.”B. All men are declared to be by nature children of wrath (Eph. 2:3). Here“nature”signifies something inborn and original, as distinguished from that which is subsequently acquired. The text implies that: (a) Sin is a nature, in the sense of a congenital depravity of the will. (b) This nature is guilty and condemnable,—since God's wrath rests only upon that which deserves it. (c) All men participate in this nature and in this consequent guilt and condemnation.Eph. 2:3—“were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.”Shedd:“Nature here is not substance created by God, but corruption of that substance, which corruption is created by man.”“Nature”(fromnascor) may denote anything inborn, and the term may just as properly designate inborn evil tendencies and state, as inborn faculties or substance.“By nature”therefore =“by birth”; compareGal. 2:15—“Jews by nature.”E. G. Robinson:“Nature = not οὐσία, or essence, but only qualification of essence, as something born[pg 579]in us. There is just as much difference in babes, from the beginning of their existence, as there is in adults. If sin is defined as‘voluntary transgression of known law,’the definition of course disposes of original sin.”But if sin is a selfish state of the will, such a state is demonstrably inborn. Aristotle speaks of some men as born to be savages (φύσει βάρβαροι), and of others as destined by nature to be slaves (φύσει δοῦλοι). Here evidently is a congenital aptitude and disposition. Similarly we can interpret Paul's words as declaring nothing less than that men are possessed at birth of an aptitude and disposition which is the object of God's just displeasure.The opposite view can be found in Stevens, Pauline Theology, 152-157. Principal Fairbairn also says that inherited sinfulness“isnottransgression, and iswithoutguilt.”Ritschl, Just. and Recon., 344—“The predicate‘children of wrath’refers to the former actual transgression of those who now as Christians have the right to apply to themselves that divine purpose of grace which is the antithesis of wrath.”Meyer interprets the verse;“Webecomechildren of wrath by following a natural propensity.”He claims the doctrine of the apostle to be, that man incurs the divine wrath by hisactualsin, when he submits his will to the inborn sin principle. So N. W. Taylor, Concio ad Clerum, quoted in H. B. Smith, System, 281—“We were by nature such that we became through our own act children of wrath.”“But,”says Smith,“if the apostle had meant this, he could have said so; there is a proper Greek word for‘became’; the word which is used can only be rendered‘were.’”So1 Cor. 7:14—“else were your children unclean”—implies that, apart from the operations of grace, all men are defiled in virtue of their very birth from a corrupt stock. Cloth is first died in the wool, and then dyed again after the weaving. Man is a“double-dyed villain.”He is corrupted by nature and afterwards by practice. The colored physician in New Orleans advertised that his method was“first to remove the disease, and then to eradicate the system.”The New School method of treating this text is of a similar sort. Beginning with a definition of sin which excludes from that category all inborn states of the will, it proceeds to vacate of their meaning the positive statements of Scripture.For the proper interpretation ofEph. 2:3, see Julius Müller, Doct. of Sin, 2:278, and Commentaries of Harless and Olshausen. See also Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:212sq.; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:289; and an excellent note in the Expositor's Greek N.T.,in loco.Per contra, see Reuss, Christ. Theol. in Apost. Age, 2:29, 79-84; Weiss, Bib. Theol. N.T., 239.C. Death, the penalty of sin, is visited even upon those who have never exercised a personal and conscious choice (Rom. 5:12-14). This text implies that (a) Sin exists in the case of infants prior to moral consciousness, and therefore in the nature, as distinguished from the personal activity. (b) Since infants die, this visitation of the penalty of sin upon them marks the ill-desert of that nature which contains in itself, though undeveloped, the germs of actual transgression. (c) It is therefore certain that a sinful, guilty, and condemnable nature belongs to all mankind.Rom. 5:12-14—“Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned:—for until the law sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression”—that is, over those who, like infants, had never personally and consciously sinned. See a more full treatment of these last words in connection with an exegesis of the whole passage—Rom. 5:12-19—under Imputation of Sin, pages 625-627.N. W. Taylor maintained that infants, prior to moral agency, are not subjects of the moral government of God, any more than are animals. In this he disagreed with Edwards, Bellamy, Hopkins, Dwight, Smalley, Griffin. See Tyler, Letters on N. E. Theol., 8, 132-142—“To say that animals die, and therefore death can be no proof of sin in infants, is to take infidel ground. The infidel has just as good a right to say: Because animals die without being sinners, therefore adults may. If death may reign to such an alarming extent over the human race and yet be no proof of sin, then you adopt the principle that death may reign to any extent over the universe, yet never can be made a proof of sin in any case.”We reserve our full proof that physical death is the penalty of sin to the section on Penalty as one of the Consequences of Sin.2.Proof from Reason.Three facts demand explanation: (a) The universal existence of sinful[pg 580]dispositions in every mind, and of sinful acts in every life. (b) The preponderating tendencies to evil, which necessitate the constant education of good impulses, while the bad grow of themselves. (c) The yielding of the will to temptation, and the actual violation of the divine law, in the case of every human being so soon as he reaches moral consciousness.The fundamental selfishness of man is seen in childhood, when human nature acts itself out spontaneously. It is difficult to develop courtesy in children. There can be no true courtesy without regard for man as man and willingness to accord to each man his place and right as a son of God equal with ourselves. But children wish to please themselves without regard to others. The mother asks the child:“Why don't you do right instead of doing wrong?”and the child answers:“Because it makes me so tired,”or“Because I do wrong without trying.”Nothing runs itself, unless it is going down hill.“No other animal does things habitually that will injure and destroy it, and does them from the love of it. But man does this, and he is born to do it, he does it from birth. As the seedlings of the peach-tree are all peaches, not apples, and those of thorns are all thorns, not grapes, so all the descendants of man are born with evil in their natures. That sin continually comes back to us, like a dog or cat that has been driven away, proves that our hearts are its home.”Mrs. Humphrey Ward's novel, Robert Elsmere, represents the milk-and-water school of philanthropists.“Give man a chance,”they say;“give him good example and favorable environment and he will turn out well. He is more sinned against than sinning. It is the outward presence of evil that drives men to evil courses.”But God's indictment is found inRom. 8:7—“the mind of the flesh is enmity against God.”G. P. Fisher:“Of the ideas of natural religion, Plato, Plutarch and Cicero found in the fact that they are in man'sreason, but not obeyed and realized in man'swill, the most convincing evidence that humanity is at schism with itself, and therefore depraved, fallen, and unable to deliver itself. The reason why many moralists fail and grow bitter and hateful is that they do not take account of this state of sin.”Reason seeks an underlying principle which will reduce these multitudinous phenomena to unity. As we are compelled to refer common physical and intellectual phenomena to a common physical and intellectual nature, so we are compelled to refer these common moral phenomena to a common moral nature, and to find in it the cause of this universal, spontaneous, and all-controlling opposition to God and his law. The only possible solution of the problem is this, that the common nature of mankind is corrupt, or, in other words, that the human will, prior to the single volitions of the individual, is turned away from God and supremely set upon self-gratification. This unconscious and fundamental direction of the will, as the source of actual sin, must itself be sin; and of this sin all mankind are partakers.The greatest thinkers of the world have certified to the correctness of this conclusion. See Aristotle's doctrine of“the slope,”described in Chase's Introduction to Aristotle's Ethics, XXXV and 32—“In regard to moral virtue, man stands on a slope. His appetites and passions gravitate downward; his reason attracts him upward. Conflict occurs. A step upward, and reason gains what passion has lost; but the reverse is the case if he steps downward. The tendency in the former case is to the entire subjection of passion; in the latter case, to the entire suppression of reason. The slope will terminate upwards in a level summit where men's steps will be secure, or downwards in an irretrievable plunge over the precipice. Continual self-control leads to absolute self-mastery; continual failure, to the utter absence of self-control. Butall we can see is the slope. No man is ever at the ἠρεμία of the summit, nor can we say that a man has irretrievably fallen into the abyss. How it is that men constantly act against their own convictions of what is right, and their previous determinations to follow right, is a mystery Which Aristotle discusses, but leaves unexplained.“Compare the passage in the Ethics, 1:11—‘Clearly there is in them [men], besides the Reason, some other Inborn principle (πεφυκός) which fights with and strains against the Reason.... There is in the soul also somewhat besides the Reason which is[pg 581]opposed to this and goes against it.’—Compare this passage with Paul, inRom. 7:23—‘I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members.’But as Aristotle does not explain the cause, so he suggests no cure. Revelation alone can account for the disease, or point out the remedy.”Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:102—“Aristotle makes the significant and almost surprising observation, that the character which has become evil by guilt can just as little be thrown off again at mere volition, as the person who has made himself sick by his own fault can become well again at mere volition; once become evil or sick, it stands no longer within his discretion to cease to be so; a stone, when once cast, cannot be caught back from its flight; and so is it with the character that has become evil.”He does not tell“how a reformation in character is possible,—moreover, he does not concede to evil any other than an individual effect,—knows nothing of any natural solidarity of evil in self-propagating, morally degenerated races”(Nic. Eth., 3:6, 7; 5:12; 7:2, 3; 10:10). The good nature, he says,“is evidently not within our power, but is by some kind of divine causality conferred upon the truly happy.”Plato speaks of“that blind, many-headed wild beast of all that is evil within thee.”He repudiates the idea that men are naturally good, and says that, if this were true, all that would be needed to make them holy would be to shut them up, from their earliest years, so that they might not be corrupted by others. Republic, 4 (Jowett's translation, 11:276)—“There is a rising up of part of the soul against the whole of the soul.”Meno, 89—“The cause of corruption is from our parents, so that we never relinquish their evil way, or escape the blemish of their evil habit.”Horace, Ep., 1:10—“Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.”Latin proverb:“Nemo repente fuit turpissimus.”Pascal:“We are born unrighteous; for each one tends to himself, and the bent toward self is the beginning of all disorder.”Kant, in his Metaphysical Principles of Human Morals, speaks of“the indwelling of an evil principle side by side with the good one, or the radical evil of human nature,”and of“the contest between the good and the evil principles for the control of man.”“Hegel, pantheist as he was, declared that original sin is the nature of every man,—every man begins with it”(H. B. Smith).Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 4:3—“All is oblique: There's nothing level in our cursed natures, But direct villainy.”All's Well, 4:3—“As we are in ourselves, how weak we are! Merely our own traitors.”Measure for Measure, 1:2—“Our natures do pursue, Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, A thirsty evil, and when we drink, we die.”Hamlet, 3:1—“Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it.”Love's Labor Lost, 1:1—“Every man with his affects is born, Not by might mastered, but by special grace.”Winter's Tale, 1:2—“We should have answered Heaven boldly, Not guilty; the imposition cleared Hereditary ours”—that is, provided our hereditary connection with Adam had not made us guilty. On the theology of Shakespeare, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 196-211—“If any think it irrational to believe in man's depravity, guilt, and need of supernatural redemption, they must also be prepared to say that Shakespeare did not understand human nature.”S. T. Coleridge, Omniana, at the end:“It is a fundamental article of Christianity that I am a fallen creature ... that an evil ground existed in my will, previously to any act or assignable moment of time in my consciousness; I am born a child of wrath. This fearful mystery I pretend not to understand. I cannot even conceive the possibility of it; but I know that it is so, ... and what is real must be possible.”A sceptic who gave his children no religious training, with the view of letting them each in mature years choose a faith for himself, reproved Coleridge for letting his garden run to weeds; but Coleridge replied, that he did not think it right to prejudice the soil in favor of roses and strawberries. Van Oosterzee: Rain and sunshine make weeds grow more quickly, but could not draw them out of the soil if the seeds did not lie there already; so evil education and example draw out sin, but do not implant it. Tennyson, Two Voices:“He finds a baseness in his blood, At such strange war with what is good, He cannot do the thing he would.”Robert Browning, Gold Hair: a Legend of Pornic:“The faith that launched point-blank her dart At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin, The corruption of Man's Heart.”Taine, Ancien Régime:“Savage, brigand and madman each of us harbors, in repose or manacled, but always living, in the recesses of his own heart.”Alexander Maclaren:“A great mass of knotted weeds growing in a stagnant pool is dragged toward you as you drag one filament.”Draw out one sin, and it brings with it the whole matted nature of sin.Chief Justice Thompson, of Pennsylvania:“If those who preach had been lawyers previous to entering the ministry, they would know and say far more about the depravity[pg 582]of the human heart than they do. The old doctrine of total depravity is the only thing that can explain the falsehoods, the dishonesties, the licentiousness, and the murders which are so rife in the world. Education, refinement, and even a high order of talent, cannot overcome the inclination to evil which exists in the heart, and has taken possession of the very fibres of our nature.”See Edwards, Original Sin, in Works, 2:309-510; Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:259-307; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:231-238; Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 226-236.
II. Every member of the human race, without exception, possesses a corrupted nature, which is a source of actual sin, and is itself sin.1.Proof from Scripture.A. The sinful acts and dispositions of men are referred to, and explained by, a corrupt nature.By“nature”we mean that which isbornin a man, that which he has by birth. That there is an inborn corrupt state, from which sinful acts and dispositions flow, is evident[pg 578]fromLuke 6:43-45—“there is no good tree that bringeth forth corrupt fruit.... the evil man out of the evil treasure[of his heart]bringeth forth that which is evil”;Mat. 12:34—“Ye offspring of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things?”Ps. 58:3—“The wicked are estranged from the womb: They go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies.”This corrupt nature (a) belongs to man from the first moment of his being; (b) underlies man's consciousness; (c) cannot be changed by man's own power; (d) first constitutes him a sinner before God; (e) is the common heritage of the race.(a)Ps. 51:5—“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me”—here David is confessing, not his mother's sin, but his own sin; and he declares that this sin goes back to the very moment of his conception. Tholuck, quoted by H. B. Smith, System, 281—“David confesses that sin begins with the life of man; that not only his works, but the man himself, is guilty before God.”Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:94—“David mentions the fact that he was born sinful, as an aggravation of his particular act of adultery, and not as an excuse for it.”(b)Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”;51:6, 7—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom. Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”(c)Jer. 13:23—“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil”;Rom. 7:24—“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?”(d)Ps. 51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts”;Jer. 17:9—“The heart is deceitful above all things and it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it? I, Jehovah, search the mind, I try the heart,”—only God can fully know the native and incurable depravity of the human heart; see Annotated Paragraph Bible,in loco, (e)Job 14:4—“Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one”;John 3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh,”i. e., human nature sundered from God. Pope, Theology, 2:53—“Christ, who knew what was in man, says:‘If ye then, being evil’(Mat. 7:11), and‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh’(John 3:6), that is—putting the two together—‘men are evil, because they are born evil.’”Nathaniel Hawthorne's story of The Minister's Black Veil portrays the isolation of every man's deepest life, and the awe which any visible assertion of that isolation inspires. C. P. Cranch:“We are spirits clad in veils; Man by man was never seen; All our deep communing fails To remove the shadowy screen.”In the heart of every one of us is that fearful“black drop,”which the Koran says the angel showed to Mohammed. Sin is like the taint of scrofula in the blood, which shows itself in tumors, in consumption, in cancer, in manifold forms, but is everywhere the same organic evil. Byron spoke truly of“This ineradicable taint of sin, this boundless Upas, this all-blasting tree.”E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theol., 161, 162—“The objection that conscience brings no charge of guilt against inborn depravity, however true it may be of the nature in its passive state, is seen, when the nature is roused to activity, to be unfounded. This faculty, on the contrary, lends support to the doctrine it is supposed to overthrow. When the conscience holds intelligent inquisition upon single acts, it soon discovers that these are mere accessories to crime, while the principal is hidden away beyond the reach of consciousness. In following up its inquisition, it in due time extorts the exclamation of David:Ps. 51:5—‘Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me.’Conscience traces guilt to its seat in the inherited nature.”B. All men are declared to be by nature children of wrath (Eph. 2:3). Here“nature”signifies something inborn and original, as distinguished from that which is subsequently acquired. The text implies that: (a) Sin is a nature, in the sense of a congenital depravity of the will. (b) This nature is guilty and condemnable,—since God's wrath rests only upon that which deserves it. (c) All men participate in this nature and in this consequent guilt and condemnation.Eph. 2:3—“were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.”Shedd:“Nature here is not substance created by God, but corruption of that substance, which corruption is created by man.”“Nature”(fromnascor) may denote anything inborn, and the term may just as properly designate inborn evil tendencies and state, as inborn faculties or substance.“By nature”therefore =“by birth”; compareGal. 2:15—“Jews by nature.”E. G. Robinson:“Nature = not οὐσία, or essence, but only qualification of essence, as something born[pg 579]in us. There is just as much difference in babes, from the beginning of their existence, as there is in adults. If sin is defined as‘voluntary transgression of known law,’the definition of course disposes of original sin.”But if sin is a selfish state of the will, such a state is demonstrably inborn. Aristotle speaks of some men as born to be savages (φύσει βάρβαροι), and of others as destined by nature to be slaves (φύσει δοῦλοι). Here evidently is a congenital aptitude and disposition. Similarly we can interpret Paul's words as declaring nothing less than that men are possessed at birth of an aptitude and disposition which is the object of God's just displeasure.The opposite view can be found in Stevens, Pauline Theology, 152-157. Principal Fairbairn also says that inherited sinfulness“isnottransgression, and iswithoutguilt.”Ritschl, Just. and Recon., 344—“The predicate‘children of wrath’refers to the former actual transgression of those who now as Christians have the right to apply to themselves that divine purpose of grace which is the antithesis of wrath.”Meyer interprets the verse;“Webecomechildren of wrath by following a natural propensity.”He claims the doctrine of the apostle to be, that man incurs the divine wrath by hisactualsin, when he submits his will to the inborn sin principle. So N. W. Taylor, Concio ad Clerum, quoted in H. B. Smith, System, 281—“We were by nature such that we became through our own act children of wrath.”“But,”says Smith,“if the apostle had meant this, he could have said so; there is a proper Greek word for‘became’; the word which is used can only be rendered‘were.’”So1 Cor. 7:14—“else were your children unclean”—implies that, apart from the operations of grace, all men are defiled in virtue of their very birth from a corrupt stock. Cloth is first died in the wool, and then dyed again after the weaving. Man is a“double-dyed villain.”He is corrupted by nature and afterwards by practice. The colored physician in New Orleans advertised that his method was“first to remove the disease, and then to eradicate the system.”The New School method of treating this text is of a similar sort. Beginning with a definition of sin which excludes from that category all inborn states of the will, it proceeds to vacate of their meaning the positive statements of Scripture.For the proper interpretation ofEph. 2:3, see Julius Müller, Doct. of Sin, 2:278, and Commentaries of Harless and Olshausen. See also Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:212sq.; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:289; and an excellent note in the Expositor's Greek N.T.,in loco.Per contra, see Reuss, Christ. Theol. in Apost. Age, 2:29, 79-84; Weiss, Bib. Theol. N.T., 239.C. Death, the penalty of sin, is visited even upon those who have never exercised a personal and conscious choice (Rom. 5:12-14). This text implies that (a) Sin exists in the case of infants prior to moral consciousness, and therefore in the nature, as distinguished from the personal activity. (b) Since infants die, this visitation of the penalty of sin upon them marks the ill-desert of that nature which contains in itself, though undeveloped, the germs of actual transgression. (c) It is therefore certain that a sinful, guilty, and condemnable nature belongs to all mankind.Rom. 5:12-14—“Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned:—for until the law sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression”—that is, over those who, like infants, had never personally and consciously sinned. See a more full treatment of these last words in connection with an exegesis of the whole passage—Rom. 5:12-19—under Imputation of Sin, pages 625-627.N. W. Taylor maintained that infants, prior to moral agency, are not subjects of the moral government of God, any more than are animals. In this he disagreed with Edwards, Bellamy, Hopkins, Dwight, Smalley, Griffin. See Tyler, Letters on N. E. Theol., 8, 132-142—“To say that animals die, and therefore death can be no proof of sin in infants, is to take infidel ground. The infidel has just as good a right to say: Because animals die without being sinners, therefore adults may. If death may reign to such an alarming extent over the human race and yet be no proof of sin, then you adopt the principle that death may reign to any extent over the universe, yet never can be made a proof of sin in any case.”We reserve our full proof that physical death is the penalty of sin to the section on Penalty as one of the Consequences of Sin.2.Proof from Reason.Three facts demand explanation: (a) The universal existence of sinful[pg 580]dispositions in every mind, and of sinful acts in every life. (b) The preponderating tendencies to evil, which necessitate the constant education of good impulses, while the bad grow of themselves. (c) The yielding of the will to temptation, and the actual violation of the divine law, in the case of every human being so soon as he reaches moral consciousness.The fundamental selfishness of man is seen in childhood, when human nature acts itself out spontaneously. It is difficult to develop courtesy in children. There can be no true courtesy without regard for man as man and willingness to accord to each man his place and right as a son of God equal with ourselves. But children wish to please themselves without regard to others. The mother asks the child:“Why don't you do right instead of doing wrong?”and the child answers:“Because it makes me so tired,”or“Because I do wrong without trying.”Nothing runs itself, unless it is going down hill.“No other animal does things habitually that will injure and destroy it, and does them from the love of it. But man does this, and he is born to do it, he does it from birth. As the seedlings of the peach-tree are all peaches, not apples, and those of thorns are all thorns, not grapes, so all the descendants of man are born with evil in their natures. That sin continually comes back to us, like a dog or cat that has been driven away, proves that our hearts are its home.”Mrs. Humphrey Ward's novel, Robert Elsmere, represents the milk-and-water school of philanthropists.“Give man a chance,”they say;“give him good example and favorable environment and he will turn out well. He is more sinned against than sinning. It is the outward presence of evil that drives men to evil courses.”But God's indictment is found inRom. 8:7—“the mind of the flesh is enmity against God.”G. P. Fisher:“Of the ideas of natural religion, Plato, Plutarch and Cicero found in the fact that they are in man'sreason, but not obeyed and realized in man'swill, the most convincing evidence that humanity is at schism with itself, and therefore depraved, fallen, and unable to deliver itself. The reason why many moralists fail and grow bitter and hateful is that they do not take account of this state of sin.”Reason seeks an underlying principle which will reduce these multitudinous phenomena to unity. As we are compelled to refer common physical and intellectual phenomena to a common physical and intellectual nature, so we are compelled to refer these common moral phenomena to a common moral nature, and to find in it the cause of this universal, spontaneous, and all-controlling opposition to God and his law. The only possible solution of the problem is this, that the common nature of mankind is corrupt, or, in other words, that the human will, prior to the single volitions of the individual, is turned away from God and supremely set upon self-gratification. This unconscious and fundamental direction of the will, as the source of actual sin, must itself be sin; and of this sin all mankind are partakers.The greatest thinkers of the world have certified to the correctness of this conclusion. See Aristotle's doctrine of“the slope,”described in Chase's Introduction to Aristotle's Ethics, XXXV and 32—“In regard to moral virtue, man stands on a slope. His appetites and passions gravitate downward; his reason attracts him upward. Conflict occurs. A step upward, and reason gains what passion has lost; but the reverse is the case if he steps downward. The tendency in the former case is to the entire subjection of passion; in the latter case, to the entire suppression of reason. The slope will terminate upwards in a level summit where men's steps will be secure, or downwards in an irretrievable plunge over the precipice. Continual self-control leads to absolute self-mastery; continual failure, to the utter absence of self-control. Butall we can see is the slope. No man is ever at the ἠρεμία of the summit, nor can we say that a man has irretrievably fallen into the abyss. How it is that men constantly act against their own convictions of what is right, and their previous determinations to follow right, is a mystery Which Aristotle discusses, but leaves unexplained.“Compare the passage in the Ethics, 1:11—‘Clearly there is in them [men], besides the Reason, some other Inborn principle (πεφυκός) which fights with and strains against the Reason.... There is in the soul also somewhat besides the Reason which is[pg 581]opposed to this and goes against it.’—Compare this passage with Paul, inRom. 7:23—‘I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members.’But as Aristotle does not explain the cause, so he suggests no cure. Revelation alone can account for the disease, or point out the remedy.”Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:102—“Aristotle makes the significant and almost surprising observation, that the character which has become evil by guilt can just as little be thrown off again at mere volition, as the person who has made himself sick by his own fault can become well again at mere volition; once become evil or sick, it stands no longer within his discretion to cease to be so; a stone, when once cast, cannot be caught back from its flight; and so is it with the character that has become evil.”He does not tell“how a reformation in character is possible,—moreover, he does not concede to evil any other than an individual effect,—knows nothing of any natural solidarity of evil in self-propagating, morally degenerated races”(Nic. Eth., 3:6, 7; 5:12; 7:2, 3; 10:10). The good nature, he says,“is evidently not within our power, but is by some kind of divine causality conferred upon the truly happy.”Plato speaks of“that blind, many-headed wild beast of all that is evil within thee.”He repudiates the idea that men are naturally good, and says that, if this were true, all that would be needed to make them holy would be to shut them up, from their earliest years, so that they might not be corrupted by others. Republic, 4 (Jowett's translation, 11:276)—“There is a rising up of part of the soul against the whole of the soul.”Meno, 89—“The cause of corruption is from our parents, so that we never relinquish their evil way, or escape the blemish of their evil habit.”Horace, Ep., 1:10—“Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.”Latin proverb:“Nemo repente fuit turpissimus.”Pascal:“We are born unrighteous; for each one tends to himself, and the bent toward self is the beginning of all disorder.”Kant, in his Metaphysical Principles of Human Morals, speaks of“the indwelling of an evil principle side by side with the good one, or the radical evil of human nature,”and of“the contest between the good and the evil principles for the control of man.”“Hegel, pantheist as he was, declared that original sin is the nature of every man,—every man begins with it”(H. B. Smith).Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 4:3—“All is oblique: There's nothing level in our cursed natures, But direct villainy.”All's Well, 4:3—“As we are in ourselves, how weak we are! Merely our own traitors.”Measure for Measure, 1:2—“Our natures do pursue, Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, A thirsty evil, and when we drink, we die.”Hamlet, 3:1—“Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it.”Love's Labor Lost, 1:1—“Every man with his affects is born, Not by might mastered, but by special grace.”Winter's Tale, 1:2—“We should have answered Heaven boldly, Not guilty; the imposition cleared Hereditary ours”—that is, provided our hereditary connection with Adam had not made us guilty. On the theology of Shakespeare, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 196-211—“If any think it irrational to believe in man's depravity, guilt, and need of supernatural redemption, they must also be prepared to say that Shakespeare did not understand human nature.”S. T. Coleridge, Omniana, at the end:“It is a fundamental article of Christianity that I am a fallen creature ... that an evil ground existed in my will, previously to any act or assignable moment of time in my consciousness; I am born a child of wrath. This fearful mystery I pretend not to understand. I cannot even conceive the possibility of it; but I know that it is so, ... and what is real must be possible.”A sceptic who gave his children no religious training, with the view of letting them each in mature years choose a faith for himself, reproved Coleridge for letting his garden run to weeds; but Coleridge replied, that he did not think it right to prejudice the soil in favor of roses and strawberries. Van Oosterzee: Rain and sunshine make weeds grow more quickly, but could not draw them out of the soil if the seeds did not lie there already; so evil education and example draw out sin, but do not implant it. Tennyson, Two Voices:“He finds a baseness in his blood, At such strange war with what is good, He cannot do the thing he would.”Robert Browning, Gold Hair: a Legend of Pornic:“The faith that launched point-blank her dart At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin, The corruption of Man's Heart.”Taine, Ancien Régime:“Savage, brigand and madman each of us harbors, in repose or manacled, but always living, in the recesses of his own heart.”Alexander Maclaren:“A great mass of knotted weeds growing in a stagnant pool is dragged toward you as you drag one filament.”Draw out one sin, and it brings with it the whole matted nature of sin.Chief Justice Thompson, of Pennsylvania:“If those who preach had been lawyers previous to entering the ministry, they would know and say far more about the depravity[pg 582]of the human heart than they do. The old doctrine of total depravity is the only thing that can explain the falsehoods, the dishonesties, the licentiousness, and the murders which are so rife in the world. Education, refinement, and even a high order of talent, cannot overcome the inclination to evil which exists in the heart, and has taken possession of the very fibres of our nature.”See Edwards, Original Sin, in Works, 2:309-510; Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:259-307; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:231-238; Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 226-236.
II. Every member of the human race, without exception, possesses a corrupted nature, which is a source of actual sin, and is itself sin.1.Proof from Scripture.A. The sinful acts and dispositions of men are referred to, and explained by, a corrupt nature.By“nature”we mean that which isbornin a man, that which he has by birth. That there is an inborn corrupt state, from which sinful acts and dispositions flow, is evident[pg 578]fromLuke 6:43-45—“there is no good tree that bringeth forth corrupt fruit.... the evil man out of the evil treasure[of his heart]bringeth forth that which is evil”;Mat. 12:34—“Ye offspring of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things?”Ps. 58:3—“The wicked are estranged from the womb: They go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies.”This corrupt nature (a) belongs to man from the first moment of his being; (b) underlies man's consciousness; (c) cannot be changed by man's own power; (d) first constitutes him a sinner before God; (e) is the common heritage of the race.(a)Ps. 51:5—“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me”—here David is confessing, not his mother's sin, but his own sin; and he declares that this sin goes back to the very moment of his conception. Tholuck, quoted by H. B. Smith, System, 281—“David confesses that sin begins with the life of man; that not only his works, but the man himself, is guilty before God.”Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:94—“David mentions the fact that he was born sinful, as an aggravation of his particular act of adultery, and not as an excuse for it.”(b)Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”;51:6, 7—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom. Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”(c)Jer. 13:23—“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil”;Rom. 7:24—“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?”(d)Ps. 51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts”;Jer. 17:9—“The heart is deceitful above all things and it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it? I, Jehovah, search the mind, I try the heart,”—only God can fully know the native and incurable depravity of the human heart; see Annotated Paragraph Bible,in loco, (e)Job 14:4—“Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one”;John 3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh,”i. e., human nature sundered from God. Pope, Theology, 2:53—“Christ, who knew what was in man, says:‘If ye then, being evil’(Mat. 7:11), and‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh’(John 3:6), that is—putting the two together—‘men are evil, because they are born evil.’”Nathaniel Hawthorne's story of The Minister's Black Veil portrays the isolation of every man's deepest life, and the awe which any visible assertion of that isolation inspires. C. P. Cranch:“We are spirits clad in veils; Man by man was never seen; All our deep communing fails To remove the shadowy screen.”In the heart of every one of us is that fearful“black drop,”which the Koran says the angel showed to Mohammed. Sin is like the taint of scrofula in the blood, which shows itself in tumors, in consumption, in cancer, in manifold forms, but is everywhere the same organic evil. Byron spoke truly of“This ineradicable taint of sin, this boundless Upas, this all-blasting tree.”E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theol., 161, 162—“The objection that conscience brings no charge of guilt against inborn depravity, however true it may be of the nature in its passive state, is seen, when the nature is roused to activity, to be unfounded. This faculty, on the contrary, lends support to the doctrine it is supposed to overthrow. When the conscience holds intelligent inquisition upon single acts, it soon discovers that these are mere accessories to crime, while the principal is hidden away beyond the reach of consciousness. In following up its inquisition, it in due time extorts the exclamation of David:Ps. 51:5—‘Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me.’Conscience traces guilt to its seat in the inherited nature.”B. All men are declared to be by nature children of wrath (Eph. 2:3). Here“nature”signifies something inborn and original, as distinguished from that which is subsequently acquired. The text implies that: (a) Sin is a nature, in the sense of a congenital depravity of the will. (b) This nature is guilty and condemnable,—since God's wrath rests only upon that which deserves it. (c) All men participate in this nature and in this consequent guilt and condemnation.Eph. 2:3—“were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.”Shedd:“Nature here is not substance created by God, but corruption of that substance, which corruption is created by man.”“Nature”(fromnascor) may denote anything inborn, and the term may just as properly designate inborn evil tendencies and state, as inborn faculties or substance.“By nature”therefore =“by birth”; compareGal. 2:15—“Jews by nature.”E. G. Robinson:“Nature = not οὐσία, or essence, but only qualification of essence, as something born[pg 579]in us. There is just as much difference in babes, from the beginning of their existence, as there is in adults. If sin is defined as‘voluntary transgression of known law,’the definition of course disposes of original sin.”But if sin is a selfish state of the will, such a state is demonstrably inborn. Aristotle speaks of some men as born to be savages (φύσει βάρβαροι), and of others as destined by nature to be slaves (φύσει δοῦλοι). Here evidently is a congenital aptitude and disposition. Similarly we can interpret Paul's words as declaring nothing less than that men are possessed at birth of an aptitude and disposition which is the object of God's just displeasure.The opposite view can be found in Stevens, Pauline Theology, 152-157. Principal Fairbairn also says that inherited sinfulness“isnottransgression, and iswithoutguilt.”Ritschl, Just. and Recon., 344—“The predicate‘children of wrath’refers to the former actual transgression of those who now as Christians have the right to apply to themselves that divine purpose of grace which is the antithesis of wrath.”Meyer interprets the verse;“Webecomechildren of wrath by following a natural propensity.”He claims the doctrine of the apostle to be, that man incurs the divine wrath by hisactualsin, when he submits his will to the inborn sin principle. So N. W. Taylor, Concio ad Clerum, quoted in H. B. Smith, System, 281—“We were by nature such that we became through our own act children of wrath.”“But,”says Smith,“if the apostle had meant this, he could have said so; there is a proper Greek word for‘became’; the word which is used can only be rendered‘were.’”So1 Cor. 7:14—“else were your children unclean”—implies that, apart from the operations of grace, all men are defiled in virtue of their very birth from a corrupt stock. Cloth is first died in the wool, and then dyed again after the weaving. Man is a“double-dyed villain.”He is corrupted by nature and afterwards by practice. The colored physician in New Orleans advertised that his method was“first to remove the disease, and then to eradicate the system.”The New School method of treating this text is of a similar sort. Beginning with a definition of sin which excludes from that category all inborn states of the will, it proceeds to vacate of their meaning the positive statements of Scripture.For the proper interpretation ofEph. 2:3, see Julius Müller, Doct. of Sin, 2:278, and Commentaries of Harless and Olshausen. See also Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:212sq.; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:289; and an excellent note in the Expositor's Greek N.T.,in loco.Per contra, see Reuss, Christ. Theol. in Apost. Age, 2:29, 79-84; Weiss, Bib. Theol. N.T., 239.C. Death, the penalty of sin, is visited even upon those who have never exercised a personal and conscious choice (Rom. 5:12-14). This text implies that (a) Sin exists in the case of infants prior to moral consciousness, and therefore in the nature, as distinguished from the personal activity. (b) Since infants die, this visitation of the penalty of sin upon them marks the ill-desert of that nature which contains in itself, though undeveloped, the germs of actual transgression. (c) It is therefore certain that a sinful, guilty, and condemnable nature belongs to all mankind.Rom. 5:12-14—“Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned:—for until the law sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression”—that is, over those who, like infants, had never personally and consciously sinned. See a more full treatment of these last words in connection with an exegesis of the whole passage—Rom. 5:12-19—under Imputation of Sin, pages 625-627.N. W. Taylor maintained that infants, prior to moral agency, are not subjects of the moral government of God, any more than are animals. In this he disagreed with Edwards, Bellamy, Hopkins, Dwight, Smalley, Griffin. See Tyler, Letters on N. E. Theol., 8, 132-142—“To say that animals die, and therefore death can be no proof of sin in infants, is to take infidel ground. The infidel has just as good a right to say: Because animals die without being sinners, therefore adults may. If death may reign to such an alarming extent over the human race and yet be no proof of sin, then you adopt the principle that death may reign to any extent over the universe, yet never can be made a proof of sin in any case.”We reserve our full proof that physical death is the penalty of sin to the section on Penalty as one of the Consequences of Sin.2.Proof from Reason.Three facts demand explanation: (a) The universal existence of sinful[pg 580]dispositions in every mind, and of sinful acts in every life. (b) The preponderating tendencies to evil, which necessitate the constant education of good impulses, while the bad grow of themselves. (c) The yielding of the will to temptation, and the actual violation of the divine law, in the case of every human being so soon as he reaches moral consciousness.The fundamental selfishness of man is seen in childhood, when human nature acts itself out spontaneously. It is difficult to develop courtesy in children. There can be no true courtesy without regard for man as man and willingness to accord to each man his place and right as a son of God equal with ourselves. But children wish to please themselves without regard to others. The mother asks the child:“Why don't you do right instead of doing wrong?”and the child answers:“Because it makes me so tired,”or“Because I do wrong without trying.”Nothing runs itself, unless it is going down hill.“No other animal does things habitually that will injure and destroy it, and does them from the love of it. But man does this, and he is born to do it, he does it from birth. As the seedlings of the peach-tree are all peaches, not apples, and those of thorns are all thorns, not grapes, so all the descendants of man are born with evil in their natures. That sin continually comes back to us, like a dog or cat that has been driven away, proves that our hearts are its home.”Mrs. Humphrey Ward's novel, Robert Elsmere, represents the milk-and-water school of philanthropists.“Give man a chance,”they say;“give him good example and favorable environment and he will turn out well. He is more sinned against than sinning. It is the outward presence of evil that drives men to evil courses.”But God's indictment is found inRom. 8:7—“the mind of the flesh is enmity against God.”G. P. Fisher:“Of the ideas of natural religion, Plato, Plutarch and Cicero found in the fact that they are in man'sreason, but not obeyed and realized in man'swill, the most convincing evidence that humanity is at schism with itself, and therefore depraved, fallen, and unable to deliver itself. The reason why many moralists fail and grow bitter and hateful is that they do not take account of this state of sin.”Reason seeks an underlying principle which will reduce these multitudinous phenomena to unity. As we are compelled to refer common physical and intellectual phenomena to a common physical and intellectual nature, so we are compelled to refer these common moral phenomena to a common moral nature, and to find in it the cause of this universal, spontaneous, and all-controlling opposition to God and his law. The only possible solution of the problem is this, that the common nature of mankind is corrupt, or, in other words, that the human will, prior to the single volitions of the individual, is turned away from God and supremely set upon self-gratification. This unconscious and fundamental direction of the will, as the source of actual sin, must itself be sin; and of this sin all mankind are partakers.The greatest thinkers of the world have certified to the correctness of this conclusion. See Aristotle's doctrine of“the slope,”described in Chase's Introduction to Aristotle's Ethics, XXXV and 32—“In regard to moral virtue, man stands on a slope. His appetites and passions gravitate downward; his reason attracts him upward. Conflict occurs. A step upward, and reason gains what passion has lost; but the reverse is the case if he steps downward. The tendency in the former case is to the entire subjection of passion; in the latter case, to the entire suppression of reason. The slope will terminate upwards in a level summit where men's steps will be secure, or downwards in an irretrievable plunge over the precipice. Continual self-control leads to absolute self-mastery; continual failure, to the utter absence of self-control. Butall we can see is the slope. No man is ever at the ἠρεμία of the summit, nor can we say that a man has irretrievably fallen into the abyss. How it is that men constantly act against their own convictions of what is right, and their previous determinations to follow right, is a mystery Which Aristotle discusses, but leaves unexplained.“Compare the passage in the Ethics, 1:11—‘Clearly there is in them [men], besides the Reason, some other Inborn principle (πεφυκός) which fights with and strains against the Reason.... There is in the soul also somewhat besides the Reason which is[pg 581]opposed to this and goes against it.’—Compare this passage with Paul, inRom. 7:23—‘I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members.’But as Aristotle does not explain the cause, so he suggests no cure. Revelation alone can account for the disease, or point out the remedy.”Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:102—“Aristotle makes the significant and almost surprising observation, that the character which has become evil by guilt can just as little be thrown off again at mere volition, as the person who has made himself sick by his own fault can become well again at mere volition; once become evil or sick, it stands no longer within his discretion to cease to be so; a stone, when once cast, cannot be caught back from its flight; and so is it with the character that has become evil.”He does not tell“how a reformation in character is possible,—moreover, he does not concede to evil any other than an individual effect,—knows nothing of any natural solidarity of evil in self-propagating, morally degenerated races”(Nic. Eth., 3:6, 7; 5:12; 7:2, 3; 10:10). The good nature, he says,“is evidently not within our power, but is by some kind of divine causality conferred upon the truly happy.”Plato speaks of“that blind, many-headed wild beast of all that is evil within thee.”He repudiates the idea that men are naturally good, and says that, if this were true, all that would be needed to make them holy would be to shut them up, from their earliest years, so that they might not be corrupted by others. Republic, 4 (Jowett's translation, 11:276)—“There is a rising up of part of the soul against the whole of the soul.”Meno, 89—“The cause of corruption is from our parents, so that we never relinquish their evil way, or escape the blemish of their evil habit.”Horace, Ep., 1:10—“Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.”Latin proverb:“Nemo repente fuit turpissimus.”Pascal:“We are born unrighteous; for each one tends to himself, and the bent toward self is the beginning of all disorder.”Kant, in his Metaphysical Principles of Human Morals, speaks of“the indwelling of an evil principle side by side with the good one, or the radical evil of human nature,”and of“the contest between the good and the evil principles for the control of man.”“Hegel, pantheist as he was, declared that original sin is the nature of every man,—every man begins with it”(H. B. Smith).Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 4:3—“All is oblique: There's nothing level in our cursed natures, But direct villainy.”All's Well, 4:3—“As we are in ourselves, how weak we are! Merely our own traitors.”Measure for Measure, 1:2—“Our natures do pursue, Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, A thirsty evil, and when we drink, we die.”Hamlet, 3:1—“Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it.”Love's Labor Lost, 1:1—“Every man with his affects is born, Not by might mastered, but by special grace.”Winter's Tale, 1:2—“We should have answered Heaven boldly, Not guilty; the imposition cleared Hereditary ours”—that is, provided our hereditary connection with Adam had not made us guilty. On the theology of Shakespeare, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 196-211—“If any think it irrational to believe in man's depravity, guilt, and need of supernatural redemption, they must also be prepared to say that Shakespeare did not understand human nature.”S. T. Coleridge, Omniana, at the end:“It is a fundamental article of Christianity that I am a fallen creature ... that an evil ground existed in my will, previously to any act or assignable moment of time in my consciousness; I am born a child of wrath. This fearful mystery I pretend not to understand. I cannot even conceive the possibility of it; but I know that it is so, ... and what is real must be possible.”A sceptic who gave his children no religious training, with the view of letting them each in mature years choose a faith for himself, reproved Coleridge for letting his garden run to weeds; but Coleridge replied, that he did not think it right to prejudice the soil in favor of roses and strawberries. Van Oosterzee: Rain and sunshine make weeds grow more quickly, but could not draw them out of the soil if the seeds did not lie there already; so evil education and example draw out sin, but do not implant it. Tennyson, Two Voices:“He finds a baseness in his blood, At such strange war with what is good, He cannot do the thing he would.”Robert Browning, Gold Hair: a Legend of Pornic:“The faith that launched point-blank her dart At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin, The corruption of Man's Heart.”Taine, Ancien Régime:“Savage, brigand and madman each of us harbors, in repose or manacled, but always living, in the recesses of his own heart.”Alexander Maclaren:“A great mass of knotted weeds growing in a stagnant pool is dragged toward you as you drag one filament.”Draw out one sin, and it brings with it the whole matted nature of sin.Chief Justice Thompson, of Pennsylvania:“If those who preach had been lawyers previous to entering the ministry, they would know and say far more about the depravity[pg 582]of the human heart than they do. The old doctrine of total depravity is the only thing that can explain the falsehoods, the dishonesties, the licentiousness, and the murders which are so rife in the world. Education, refinement, and even a high order of talent, cannot overcome the inclination to evil which exists in the heart, and has taken possession of the very fibres of our nature.”See Edwards, Original Sin, in Works, 2:309-510; Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:259-307; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:231-238; Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 226-236.
II. Every member of the human race, without exception, possesses a corrupted nature, which is a source of actual sin, and is itself sin.1.Proof from Scripture.A. The sinful acts and dispositions of men are referred to, and explained by, a corrupt nature.By“nature”we mean that which isbornin a man, that which he has by birth. That there is an inborn corrupt state, from which sinful acts and dispositions flow, is evident[pg 578]fromLuke 6:43-45—“there is no good tree that bringeth forth corrupt fruit.... the evil man out of the evil treasure[of his heart]bringeth forth that which is evil”;Mat. 12:34—“Ye offspring of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things?”Ps. 58:3—“The wicked are estranged from the womb: They go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies.”This corrupt nature (a) belongs to man from the first moment of his being; (b) underlies man's consciousness; (c) cannot be changed by man's own power; (d) first constitutes him a sinner before God; (e) is the common heritage of the race.(a)Ps. 51:5—“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me”—here David is confessing, not his mother's sin, but his own sin; and he declares that this sin goes back to the very moment of his conception. Tholuck, quoted by H. B. Smith, System, 281—“David confesses that sin begins with the life of man; that not only his works, but the man himself, is guilty before God.”Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:94—“David mentions the fact that he was born sinful, as an aggravation of his particular act of adultery, and not as an excuse for it.”(b)Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”;51:6, 7—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom. Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”(c)Jer. 13:23—“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil”;Rom. 7:24—“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?”(d)Ps. 51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts”;Jer. 17:9—“The heart is deceitful above all things and it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it? I, Jehovah, search the mind, I try the heart,”—only God can fully know the native and incurable depravity of the human heart; see Annotated Paragraph Bible,in loco, (e)Job 14:4—“Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one”;John 3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh,”i. e., human nature sundered from God. Pope, Theology, 2:53—“Christ, who knew what was in man, says:‘If ye then, being evil’(Mat. 7:11), and‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh’(John 3:6), that is—putting the two together—‘men are evil, because they are born evil.’”Nathaniel Hawthorne's story of The Minister's Black Veil portrays the isolation of every man's deepest life, and the awe which any visible assertion of that isolation inspires. C. P. Cranch:“We are spirits clad in veils; Man by man was never seen; All our deep communing fails To remove the shadowy screen.”In the heart of every one of us is that fearful“black drop,”which the Koran says the angel showed to Mohammed. Sin is like the taint of scrofula in the blood, which shows itself in tumors, in consumption, in cancer, in manifold forms, but is everywhere the same organic evil. Byron spoke truly of“This ineradicable taint of sin, this boundless Upas, this all-blasting tree.”E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theol., 161, 162—“The objection that conscience brings no charge of guilt against inborn depravity, however true it may be of the nature in its passive state, is seen, when the nature is roused to activity, to be unfounded. This faculty, on the contrary, lends support to the doctrine it is supposed to overthrow. When the conscience holds intelligent inquisition upon single acts, it soon discovers that these are mere accessories to crime, while the principal is hidden away beyond the reach of consciousness. In following up its inquisition, it in due time extorts the exclamation of David:Ps. 51:5—‘Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me.’Conscience traces guilt to its seat in the inherited nature.”B. All men are declared to be by nature children of wrath (Eph. 2:3). Here“nature”signifies something inborn and original, as distinguished from that which is subsequently acquired. The text implies that: (a) Sin is a nature, in the sense of a congenital depravity of the will. (b) This nature is guilty and condemnable,—since God's wrath rests only upon that which deserves it. (c) All men participate in this nature and in this consequent guilt and condemnation.Eph. 2:3—“were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.”Shedd:“Nature here is not substance created by God, but corruption of that substance, which corruption is created by man.”“Nature”(fromnascor) may denote anything inborn, and the term may just as properly designate inborn evil tendencies and state, as inborn faculties or substance.“By nature”therefore =“by birth”; compareGal. 2:15—“Jews by nature.”E. G. Robinson:“Nature = not οὐσία, or essence, but only qualification of essence, as something born[pg 579]in us. There is just as much difference in babes, from the beginning of their existence, as there is in adults. If sin is defined as‘voluntary transgression of known law,’the definition of course disposes of original sin.”But if sin is a selfish state of the will, such a state is demonstrably inborn. Aristotle speaks of some men as born to be savages (φύσει βάρβαροι), and of others as destined by nature to be slaves (φύσει δοῦλοι). Here evidently is a congenital aptitude and disposition. Similarly we can interpret Paul's words as declaring nothing less than that men are possessed at birth of an aptitude and disposition which is the object of God's just displeasure.The opposite view can be found in Stevens, Pauline Theology, 152-157. Principal Fairbairn also says that inherited sinfulness“isnottransgression, and iswithoutguilt.”Ritschl, Just. and Recon., 344—“The predicate‘children of wrath’refers to the former actual transgression of those who now as Christians have the right to apply to themselves that divine purpose of grace which is the antithesis of wrath.”Meyer interprets the verse;“Webecomechildren of wrath by following a natural propensity.”He claims the doctrine of the apostle to be, that man incurs the divine wrath by hisactualsin, when he submits his will to the inborn sin principle. So N. W. Taylor, Concio ad Clerum, quoted in H. B. Smith, System, 281—“We were by nature such that we became through our own act children of wrath.”“But,”says Smith,“if the apostle had meant this, he could have said so; there is a proper Greek word for‘became’; the word which is used can only be rendered‘were.’”So1 Cor. 7:14—“else were your children unclean”—implies that, apart from the operations of grace, all men are defiled in virtue of their very birth from a corrupt stock. Cloth is first died in the wool, and then dyed again after the weaving. Man is a“double-dyed villain.”He is corrupted by nature and afterwards by practice. The colored physician in New Orleans advertised that his method was“first to remove the disease, and then to eradicate the system.”The New School method of treating this text is of a similar sort. Beginning with a definition of sin which excludes from that category all inborn states of the will, it proceeds to vacate of their meaning the positive statements of Scripture.For the proper interpretation ofEph. 2:3, see Julius Müller, Doct. of Sin, 2:278, and Commentaries of Harless and Olshausen. See also Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:212sq.; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:289; and an excellent note in the Expositor's Greek N.T.,in loco.Per contra, see Reuss, Christ. Theol. in Apost. Age, 2:29, 79-84; Weiss, Bib. Theol. N.T., 239.C. Death, the penalty of sin, is visited even upon those who have never exercised a personal and conscious choice (Rom. 5:12-14). This text implies that (a) Sin exists in the case of infants prior to moral consciousness, and therefore in the nature, as distinguished from the personal activity. (b) Since infants die, this visitation of the penalty of sin upon them marks the ill-desert of that nature which contains in itself, though undeveloped, the germs of actual transgression. (c) It is therefore certain that a sinful, guilty, and condemnable nature belongs to all mankind.Rom. 5:12-14—“Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned:—for until the law sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression”—that is, over those who, like infants, had never personally and consciously sinned. See a more full treatment of these last words in connection with an exegesis of the whole passage—Rom. 5:12-19—under Imputation of Sin, pages 625-627.N. W. Taylor maintained that infants, prior to moral agency, are not subjects of the moral government of God, any more than are animals. In this he disagreed with Edwards, Bellamy, Hopkins, Dwight, Smalley, Griffin. See Tyler, Letters on N. E. Theol., 8, 132-142—“To say that animals die, and therefore death can be no proof of sin in infants, is to take infidel ground. The infidel has just as good a right to say: Because animals die without being sinners, therefore adults may. If death may reign to such an alarming extent over the human race and yet be no proof of sin, then you adopt the principle that death may reign to any extent over the universe, yet never can be made a proof of sin in any case.”We reserve our full proof that physical death is the penalty of sin to the section on Penalty as one of the Consequences of Sin.2.Proof from Reason.Three facts demand explanation: (a) The universal existence of sinful[pg 580]dispositions in every mind, and of sinful acts in every life. (b) The preponderating tendencies to evil, which necessitate the constant education of good impulses, while the bad grow of themselves. (c) The yielding of the will to temptation, and the actual violation of the divine law, in the case of every human being so soon as he reaches moral consciousness.The fundamental selfishness of man is seen in childhood, when human nature acts itself out spontaneously. It is difficult to develop courtesy in children. There can be no true courtesy without regard for man as man and willingness to accord to each man his place and right as a son of God equal with ourselves. But children wish to please themselves without regard to others. The mother asks the child:“Why don't you do right instead of doing wrong?”and the child answers:“Because it makes me so tired,”or“Because I do wrong without trying.”Nothing runs itself, unless it is going down hill.“No other animal does things habitually that will injure and destroy it, and does them from the love of it. But man does this, and he is born to do it, he does it from birth. As the seedlings of the peach-tree are all peaches, not apples, and those of thorns are all thorns, not grapes, so all the descendants of man are born with evil in their natures. That sin continually comes back to us, like a dog or cat that has been driven away, proves that our hearts are its home.”Mrs. Humphrey Ward's novel, Robert Elsmere, represents the milk-and-water school of philanthropists.“Give man a chance,”they say;“give him good example and favorable environment and he will turn out well. He is more sinned against than sinning. It is the outward presence of evil that drives men to evil courses.”But God's indictment is found inRom. 8:7—“the mind of the flesh is enmity against God.”G. P. Fisher:“Of the ideas of natural religion, Plato, Plutarch and Cicero found in the fact that they are in man'sreason, but not obeyed and realized in man'swill, the most convincing evidence that humanity is at schism with itself, and therefore depraved, fallen, and unable to deliver itself. The reason why many moralists fail and grow bitter and hateful is that they do not take account of this state of sin.”Reason seeks an underlying principle which will reduce these multitudinous phenomena to unity. As we are compelled to refer common physical and intellectual phenomena to a common physical and intellectual nature, so we are compelled to refer these common moral phenomena to a common moral nature, and to find in it the cause of this universal, spontaneous, and all-controlling opposition to God and his law. The only possible solution of the problem is this, that the common nature of mankind is corrupt, or, in other words, that the human will, prior to the single volitions of the individual, is turned away from God and supremely set upon self-gratification. This unconscious and fundamental direction of the will, as the source of actual sin, must itself be sin; and of this sin all mankind are partakers.The greatest thinkers of the world have certified to the correctness of this conclusion. See Aristotle's doctrine of“the slope,”described in Chase's Introduction to Aristotle's Ethics, XXXV and 32—“In regard to moral virtue, man stands on a slope. His appetites and passions gravitate downward; his reason attracts him upward. Conflict occurs. A step upward, and reason gains what passion has lost; but the reverse is the case if he steps downward. The tendency in the former case is to the entire subjection of passion; in the latter case, to the entire suppression of reason. The slope will terminate upwards in a level summit where men's steps will be secure, or downwards in an irretrievable plunge over the precipice. Continual self-control leads to absolute self-mastery; continual failure, to the utter absence of self-control. Butall we can see is the slope. No man is ever at the ἠρεμία of the summit, nor can we say that a man has irretrievably fallen into the abyss. How it is that men constantly act against their own convictions of what is right, and their previous determinations to follow right, is a mystery Which Aristotle discusses, but leaves unexplained.“Compare the passage in the Ethics, 1:11—‘Clearly there is in them [men], besides the Reason, some other Inborn principle (πεφυκός) which fights with and strains against the Reason.... There is in the soul also somewhat besides the Reason which is[pg 581]opposed to this and goes against it.’—Compare this passage with Paul, inRom. 7:23—‘I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members.’But as Aristotle does not explain the cause, so he suggests no cure. Revelation alone can account for the disease, or point out the remedy.”Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:102—“Aristotle makes the significant and almost surprising observation, that the character which has become evil by guilt can just as little be thrown off again at mere volition, as the person who has made himself sick by his own fault can become well again at mere volition; once become evil or sick, it stands no longer within his discretion to cease to be so; a stone, when once cast, cannot be caught back from its flight; and so is it with the character that has become evil.”He does not tell“how a reformation in character is possible,—moreover, he does not concede to evil any other than an individual effect,—knows nothing of any natural solidarity of evil in self-propagating, morally degenerated races”(Nic. Eth., 3:6, 7; 5:12; 7:2, 3; 10:10). The good nature, he says,“is evidently not within our power, but is by some kind of divine causality conferred upon the truly happy.”Plato speaks of“that blind, many-headed wild beast of all that is evil within thee.”He repudiates the idea that men are naturally good, and says that, if this were true, all that would be needed to make them holy would be to shut them up, from their earliest years, so that they might not be corrupted by others. Republic, 4 (Jowett's translation, 11:276)—“There is a rising up of part of the soul against the whole of the soul.”Meno, 89—“The cause of corruption is from our parents, so that we never relinquish their evil way, or escape the blemish of their evil habit.”Horace, Ep., 1:10—“Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.”Latin proverb:“Nemo repente fuit turpissimus.”Pascal:“We are born unrighteous; for each one tends to himself, and the bent toward self is the beginning of all disorder.”Kant, in his Metaphysical Principles of Human Morals, speaks of“the indwelling of an evil principle side by side with the good one, or the radical evil of human nature,”and of“the contest between the good and the evil principles for the control of man.”“Hegel, pantheist as he was, declared that original sin is the nature of every man,—every man begins with it”(H. B. Smith).Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 4:3—“All is oblique: There's nothing level in our cursed natures, But direct villainy.”All's Well, 4:3—“As we are in ourselves, how weak we are! Merely our own traitors.”Measure for Measure, 1:2—“Our natures do pursue, Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, A thirsty evil, and when we drink, we die.”Hamlet, 3:1—“Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it.”Love's Labor Lost, 1:1—“Every man with his affects is born, Not by might mastered, but by special grace.”Winter's Tale, 1:2—“We should have answered Heaven boldly, Not guilty; the imposition cleared Hereditary ours”—that is, provided our hereditary connection with Adam had not made us guilty. On the theology of Shakespeare, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 196-211—“If any think it irrational to believe in man's depravity, guilt, and need of supernatural redemption, they must also be prepared to say that Shakespeare did not understand human nature.”S. T. Coleridge, Omniana, at the end:“It is a fundamental article of Christianity that I am a fallen creature ... that an evil ground existed in my will, previously to any act or assignable moment of time in my consciousness; I am born a child of wrath. This fearful mystery I pretend not to understand. I cannot even conceive the possibility of it; but I know that it is so, ... and what is real must be possible.”A sceptic who gave his children no religious training, with the view of letting them each in mature years choose a faith for himself, reproved Coleridge for letting his garden run to weeds; but Coleridge replied, that he did not think it right to prejudice the soil in favor of roses and strawberries. Van Oosterzee: Rain and sunshine make weeds grow more quickly, but could not draw them out of the soil if the seeds did not lie there already; so evil education and example draw out sin, but do not implant it. Tennyson, Two Voices:“He finds a baseness in his blood, At such strange war with what is good, He cannot do the thing he would.”Robert Browning, Gold Hair: a Legend of Pornic:“The faith that launched point-blank her dart At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin, The corruption of Man's Heart.”Taine, Ancien Régime:“Savage, brigand and madman each of us harbors, in repose or manacled, but always living, in the recesses of his own heart.”Alexander Maclaren:“A great mass of knotted weeds growing in a stagnant pool is dragged toward you as you drag one filament.”Draw out one sin, and it brings with it the whole matted nature of sin.Chief Justice Thompson, of Pennsylvania:“If those who preach had been lawyers previous to entering the ministry, they would know and say far more about the depravity[pg 582]of the human heart than they do. The old doctrine of total depravity is the only thing that can explain the falsehoods, the dishonesties, the licentiousness, and the murders which are so rife in the world. Education, refinement, and even a high order of talent, cannot overcome the inclination to evil which exists in the heart, and has taken possession of the very fibres of our nature.”See Edwards, Original Sin, in Works, 2:309-510; Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:259-307; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:231-238; Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 226-236.
1.Proof from Scripture.
A. The sinful acts and dispositions of men are referred to, and explained by, a corrupt nature.
By“nature”we mean that which isbornin a man, that which he has by birth. That there is an inborn corrupt state, from which sinful acts and dispositions flow, is evident[pg 578]fromLuke 6:43-45—“there is no good tree that bringeth forth corrupt fruit.... the evil man out of the evil treasure[of his heart]bringeth forth that which is evil”;Mat. 12:34—“Ye offspring of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things?”Ps. 58:3—“The wicked are estranged from the womb: They go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies.”
By“nature”we mean that which isbornin a man, that which he has by birth. That there is an inborn corrupt state, from which sinful acts and dispositions flow, is evident[pg 578]fromLuke 6:43-45—“there is no good tree that bringeth forth corrupt fruit.... the evil man out of the evil treasure[of his heart]bringeth forth that which is evil”;Mat. 12:34—“Ye offspring of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things?”Ps. 58:3—“The wicked are estranged from the womb: They go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies.”
This corrupt nature (a) belongs to man from the first moment of his being; (b) underlies man's consciousness; (c) cannot be changed by man's own power; (d) first constitutes him a sinner before God; (e) is the common heritage of the race.
(a)Ps. 51:5—“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me”—here David is confessing, not his mother's sin, but his own sin; and he declares that this sin goes back to the very moment of his conception. Tholuck, quoted by H. B. Smith, System, 281—“David confesses that sin begins with the life of man; that not only his works, but the man himself, is guilty before God.”Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:94—“David mentions the fact that he was born sinful, as an aggravation of his particular act of adultery, and not as an excuse for it.”(b)Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”;51:6, 7—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom. Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”(c)Jer. 13:23—“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil”;Rom. 7:24—“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?”(d)Ps. 51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts”;Jer. 17:9—“The heart is deceitful above all things and it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it? I, Jehovah, search the mind, I try the heart,”—only God can fully know the native and incurable depravity of the human heart; see Annotated Paragraph Bible,in loco, (e)Job 14:4—“Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one”;John 3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh,”i. e., human nature sundered from God. Pope, Theology, 2:53—“Christ, who knew what was in man, says:‘If ye then, being evil’(Mat. 7:11), and‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh’(John 3:6), that is—putting the two together—‘men are evil, because they are born evil.’”Nathaniel Hawthorne's story of The Minister's Black Veil portrays the isolation of every man's deepest life, and the awe which any visible assertion of that isolation inspires. C. P. Cranch:“We are spirits clad in veils; Man by man was never seen; All our deep communing fails To remove the shadowy screen.”In the heart of every one of us is that fearful“black drop,”which the Koran says the angel showed to Mohammed. Sin is like the taint of scrofula in the blood, which shows itself in tumors, in consumption, in cancer, in manifold forms, but is everywhere the same organic evil. Byron spoke truly of“This ineradicable taint of sin, this boundless Upas, this all-blasting tree.”E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theol., 161, 162—“The objection that conscience brings no charge of guilt against inborn depravity, however true it may be of the nature in its passive state, is seen, when the nature is roused to activity, to be unfounded. This faculty, on the contrary, lends support to the doctrine it is supposed to overthrow. When the conscience holds intelligent inquisition upon single acts, it soon discovers that these are mere accessories to crime, while the principal is hidden away beyond the reach of consciousness. In following up its inquisition, it in due time extorts the exclamation of David:Ps. 51:5—‘Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me.’Conscience traces guilt to its seat in the inherited nature.”
(a)Ps. 51:5—“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me”—here David is confessing, not his mother's sin, but his own sin; and he declares that this sin goes back to the very moment of his conception. Tholuck, quoted by H. B. Smith, System, 281—“David confesses that sin begins with the life of man; that not only his works, but the man himself, is guilty before God.”Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:94—“David mentions the fact that he was born sinful, as an aggravation of his particular act of adultery, and not as an excuse for it.”(b)Ps. 19:12—“Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults”;51:6, 7—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom. Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”(c)Jer. 13:23—“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil”;Rom. 7:24—“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?”(d)Ps. 51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts”;Jer. 17:9—“The heart is deceitful above all things and it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it? I, Jehovah, search the mind, I try the heart,”—only God can fully know the native and incurable depravity of the human heart; see Annotated Paragraph Bible,in loco, (e)Job 14:4—“Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one”;John 3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh,”i. e., human nature sundered from God. Pope, Theology, 2:53—“Christ, who knew what was in man, says:‘If ye then, being evil’(Mat. 7:11), and‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh’(John 3:6), that is—putting the two together—‘men are evil, because they are born evil.’”
Nathaniel Hawthorne's story of The Minister's Black Veil portrays the isolation of every man's deepest life, and the awe which any visible assertion of that isolation inspires. C. P. Cranch:“We are spirits clad in veils; Man by man was never seen; All our deep communing fails To remove the shadowy screen.”In the heart of every one of us is that fearful“black drop,”which the Koran says the angel showed to Mohammed. Sin is like the taint of scrofula in the blood, which shows itself in tumors, in consumption, in cancer, in manifold forms, but is everywhere the same organic evil. Byron spoke truly of“This ineradicable taint of sin, this boundless Upas, this all-blasting tree.”
E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theol., 161, 162—“The objection that conscience brings no charge of guilt against inborn depravity, however true it may be of the nature in its passive state, is seen, when the nature is roused to activity, to be unfounded. This faculty, on the contrary, lends support to the doctrine it is supposed to overthrow. When the conscience holds intelligent inquisition upon single acts, it soon discovers that these are mere accessories to crime, while the principal is hidden away beyond the reach of consciousness. In following up its inquisition, it in due time extorts the exclamation of David:Ps. 51:5—‘Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me.’Conscience traces guilt to its seat in the inherited nature.”
B. All men are declared to be by nature children of wrath (Eph. 2:3). Here“nature”signifies something inborn and original, as distinguished from that which is subsequently acquired. The text implies that: (a) Sin is a nature, in the sense of a congenital depravity of the will. (b) This nature is guilty and condemnable,—since God's wrath rests only upon that which deserves it. (c) All men participate in this nature and in this consequent guilt and condemnation.
Eph. 2:3—“were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.”Shedd:“Nature here is not substance created by God, but corruption of that substance, which corruption is created by man.”“Nature”(fromnascor) may denote anything inborn, and the term may just as properly designate inborn evil tendencies and state, as inborn faculties or substance.“By nature”therefore =“by birth”; compareGal. 2:15—“Jews by nature.”E. G. Robinson:“Nature = not οὐσία, or essence, but only qualification of essence, as something born[pg 579]in us. There is just as much difference in babes, from the beginning of their existence, as there is in adults. If sin is defined as‘voluntary transgression of known law,’the definition of course disposes of original sin.”But if sin is a selfish state of the will, such a state is demonstrably inborn. Aristotle speaks of some men as born to be savages (φύσει βάρβαροι), and of others as destined by nature to be slaves (φύσει δοῦλοι). Here evidently is a congenital aptitude and disposition. Similarly we can interpret Paul's words as declaring nothing less than that men are possessed at birth of an aptitude and disposition which is the object of God's just displeasure.The opposite view can be found in Stevens, Pauline Theology, 152-157. Principal Fairbairn also says that inherited sinfulness“isnottransgression, and iswithoutguilt.”Ritschl, Just. and Recon., 344—“The predicate‘children of wrath’refers to the former actual transgression of those who now as Christians have the right to apply to themselves that divine purpose of grace which is the antithesis of wrath.”Meyer interprets the verse;“Webecomechildren of wrath by following a natural propensity.”He claims the doctrine of the apostle to be, that man incurs the divine wrath by hisactualsin, when he submits his will to the inborn sin principle. So N. W. Taylor, Concio ad Clerum, quoted in H. B. Smith, System, 281—“We were by nature such that we became through our own act children of wrath.”“But,”says Smith,“if the apostle had meant this, he could have said so; there is a proper Greek word for‘became’; the word which is used can only be rendered‘were.’”So1 Cor. 7:14—“else were your children unclean”—implies that, apart from the operations of grace, all men are defiled in virtue of their very birth from a corrupt stock. Cloth is first died in the wool, and then dyed again after the weaving. Man is a“double-dyed villain.”He is corrupted by nature and afterwards by practice. The colored physician in New Orleans advertised that his method was“first to remove the disease, and then to eradicate the system.”The New School method of treating this text is of a similar sort. Beginning with a definition of sin which excludes from that category all inborn states of the will, it proceeds to vacate of their meaning the positive statements of Scripture.For the proper interpretation ofEph. 2:3, see Julius Müller, Doct. of Sin, 2:278, and Commentaries of Harless and Olshausen. See also Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:212sq.; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:289; and an excellent note in the Expositor's Greek N.T.,in loco.Per contra, see Reuss, Christ. Theol. in Apost. Age, 2:29, 79-84; Weiss, Bib. Theol. N.T., 239.
Eph. 2:3—“were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.”Shedd:“Nature here is not substance created by God, but corruption of that substance, which corruption is created by man.”“Nature”(fromnascor) may denote anything inborn, and the term may just as properly designate inborn evil tendencies and state, as inborn faculties or substance.“By nature”therefore =“by birth”; compareGal. 2:15—“Jews by nature.”E. G. Robinson:“Nature = not οὐσία, or essence, but only qualification of essence, as something born[pg 579]in us. There is just as much difference in babes, from the beginning of their existence, as there is in adults. If sin is defined as‘voluntary transgression of known law,’the definition of course disposes of original sin.”But if sin is a selfish state of the will, such a state is demonstrably inborn. Aristotle speaks of some men as born to be savages (φύσει βάρβαροι), and of others as destined by nature to be slaves (φύσει δοῦλοι). Here evidently is a congenital aptitude and disposition. Similarly we can interpret Paul's words as declaring nothing less than that men are possessed at birth of an aptitude and disposition which is the object of God's just displeasure.
The opposite view can be found in Stevens, Pauline Theology, 152-157. Principal Fairbairn also says that inherited sinfulness“isnottransgression, and iswithoutguilt.”Ritschl, Just. and Recon., 344—“The predicate‘children of wrath’refers to the former actual transgression of those who now as Christians have the right to apply to themselves that divine purpose of grace which is the antithesis of wrath.”Meyer interprets the verse;“Webecomechildren of wrath by following a natural propensity.”He claims the doctrine of the apostle to be, that man incurs the divine wrath by hisactualsin, when he submits his will to the inborn sin principle. So N. W. Taylor, Concio ad Clerum, quoted in H. B. Smith, System, 281—“We were by nature such that we became through our own act children of wrath.”“But,”says Smith,“if the apostle had meant this, he could have said so; there is a proper Greek word for‘became’; the word which is used can only be rendered‘were.’”So1 Cor. 7:14—“else were your children unclean”—implies that, apart from the operations of grace, all men are defiled in virtue of their very birth from a corrupt stock. Cloth is first died in the wool, and then dyed again after the weaving. Man is a“double-dyed villain.”He is corrupted by nature and afterwards by practice. The colored physician in New Orleans advertised that his method was“first to remove the disease, and then to eradicate the system.”The New School method of treating this text is of a similar sort. Beginning with a definition of sin which excludes from that category all inborn states of the will, it proceeds to vacate of their meaning the positive statements of Scripture.
For the proper interpretation ofEph. 2:3, see Julius Müller, Doct. of Sin, 2:278, and Commentaries of Harless and Olshausen. See also Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:212sq.; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:289; and an excellent note in the Expositor's Greek N.T.,in loco.Per contra, see Reuss, Christ. Theol. in Apost. Age, 2:29, 79-84; Weiss, Bib. Theol. N.T., 239.
C. Death, the penalty of sin, is visited even upon those who have never exercised a personal and conscious choice (Rom. 5:12-14). This text implies that (a) Sin exists in the case of infants prior to moral consciousness, and therefore in the nature, as distinguished from the personal activity. (b) Since infants die, this visitation of the penalty of sin upon them marks the ill-desert of that nature which contains in itself, though undeveloped, the germs of actual transgression. (c) It is therefore certain that a sinful, guilty, and condemnable nature belongs to all mankind.
Rom. 5:12-14—“Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned:—for until the law sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression”—that is, over those who, like infants, had never personally and consciously sinned. See a more full treatment of these last words in connection with an exegesis of the whole passage—Rom. 5:12-19—under Imputation of Sin, pages 625-627.N. W. Taylor maintained that infants, prior to moral agency, are not subjects of the moral government of God, any more than are animals. In this he disagreed with Edwards, Bellamy, Hopkins, Dwight, Smalley, Griffin. See Tyler, Letters on N. E. Theol., 8, 132-142—“To say that animals die, and therefore death can be no proof of sin in infants, is to take infidel ground. The infidel has just as good a right to say: Because animals die without being sinners, therefore adults may. If death may reign to such an alarming extent over the human race and yet be no proof of sin, then you adopt the principle that death may reign to any extent over the universe, yet never can be made a proof of sin in any case.”We reserve our full proof that physical death is the penalty of sin to the section on Penalty as one of the Consequences of Sin.
Rom. 5:12-14—“Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned:—for until the law sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression”—that is, over those who, like infants, had never personally and consciously sinned. See a more full treatment of these last words in connection with an exegesis of the whole passage—Rom. 5:12-19—under Imputation of Sin, pages 625-627.
N. W. Taylor maintained that infants, prior to moral agency, are not subjects of the moral government of God, any more than are animals. In this he disagreed with Edwards, Bellamy, Hopkins, Dwight, Smalley, Griffin. See Tyler, Letters on N. E. Theol., 8, 132-142—“To say that animals die, and therefore death can be no proof of sin in infants, is to take infidel ground. The infidel has just as good a right to say: Because animals die without being sinners, therefore adults may. If death may reign to such an alarming extent over the human race and yet be no proof of sin, then you adopt the principle that death may reign to any extent over the universe, yet never can be made a proof of sin in any case.”We reserve our full proof that physical death is the penalty of sin to the section on Penalty as one of the Consequences of Sin.
2.Proof from Reason.
Three facts demand explanation: (a) The universal existence of sinful[pg 580]dispositions in every mind, and of sinful acts in every life. (b) The preponderating tendencies to evil, which necessitate the constant education of good impulses, while the bad grow of themselves. (c) The yielding of the will to temptation, and the actual violation of the divine law, in the case of every human being so soon as he reaches moral consciousness.
The fundamental selfishness of man is seen in childhood, when human nature acts itself out spontaneously. It is difficult to develop courtesy in children. There can be no true courtesy without regard for man as man and willingness to accord to each man his place and right as a son of God equal with ourselves. But children wish to please themselves without regard to others. The mother asks the child:“Why don't you do right instead of doing wrong?”and the child answers:“Because it makes me so tired,”or“Because I do wrong without trying.”Nothing runs itself, unless it is going down hill.“No other animal does things habitually that will injure and destroy it, and does them from the love of it. But man does this, and he is born to do it, he does it from birth. As the seedlings of the peach-tree are all peaches, not apples, and those of thorns are all thorns, not grapes, so all the descendants of man are born with evil in their natures. That sin continually comes back to us, like a dog or cat that has been driven away, proves that our hearts are its home.”Mrs. Humphrey Ward's novel, Robert Elsmere, represents the milk-and-water school of philanthropists.“Give man a chance,”they say;“give him good example and favorable environment and he will turn out well. He is more sinned against than sinning. It is the outward presence of evil that drives men to evil courses.”But God's indictment is found inRom. 8:7—“the mind of the flesh is enmity against God.”G. P. Fisher:“Of the ideas of natural religion, Plato, Plutarch and Cicero found in the fact that they are in man'sreason, but not obeyed and realized in man'swill, the most convincing evidence that humanity is at schism with itself, and therefore depraved, fallen, and unable to deliver itself. The reason why many moralists fail and grow bitter and hateful is that they do not take account of this state of sin.”
The fundamental selfishness of man is seen in childhood, when human nature acts itself out spontaneously. It is difficult to develop courtesy in children. There can be no true courtesy without regard for man as man and willingness to accord to each man his place and right as a son of God equal with ourselves. But children wish to please themselves without regard to others. The mother asks the child:“Why don't you do right instead of doing wrong?”and the child answers:“Because it makes me so tired,”or“Because I do wrong without trying.”Nothing runs itself, unless it is going down hill.“No other animal does things habitually that will injure and destroy it, and does them from the love of it. But man does this, and he is born to do it, he does it from birth. As the seedlings of the peach-tree are all peaches, not apples, and those of thorns are all thorns, not grapes, so all the descendants of man are born with evil in their natures. That sin continually comes back to us, like a dog or cat that has been driven away, proves that our hearts are its home.”
Mrs. Humphrey Ward's novel, Robert Elsmere, represents the milk-and-water school of philanthropists.“Give man a chance,”they say;“give him good example and favorable environment and he will turn out well. He is more sinned against than sinning. It is the outward presence of evil that drives men to evil courses.”But God's indictment is found inRom. 8:7—“the mind of the flesh is enmity against God.”G. P. Fisher:“Of the ideas of natural religion, Plato, Plutarch and Cicero found in the fact that they are in man'sreason, but not obeyed and realized in man'swill, the most convincing evidence that humanity is at schism with itself, and therefore depraved, fallen, and unable to deliver itself. The reason why many moralists fail and grow bitter and hateful is that they do not take account of this state of sin.”
Reason seeks an underlying principle which will reduce these multitudinous phenomena to unity. As we are compelled to refer common physical and intellectual phenomena to a common physical and intellectual nature, so we are compelled to refer these common moral phenomena to a common moral nature, and to find in it the cause of this universal, spontaneous, and all-controlling opposition to God and his law. The only possible solution of the problem is this, that the common nature of mankind is corrupt, or, in other words, that the human will, prior to the single volitions of the individual, is turned away from God and supremely set upon self-gratification. This unconscious and fundamental direction of the will, as the source of actual sin, must itself be sin; and of this sin all mankind are partakers.
The greatest thinkers of the world have certified to the correctness of this conclusion. See Aristotle's doctrine of“the slope,”described in Chase's Introduction to Aristotle's Ethics, XXXV and 32—“In regard to moral virtue, man stands on a slope. His appetites and passions gravitate downward; his reason attracts him upward. Conflict occurs. A step upward, and reason gains what passion has lost; but the reverse is the case if he steps downward. The tendency in the former case is to the entire subjection of passion; in the latter case, to the entire suppression of reason. The slope will terminate upwards in a level summit where men's steps will be secure, or downwards in an irretrievable plunge over the precipice. Continual self-control leads to absolute self-mastery; continual failure, to the utter absence of self-control. Butall we can see is the slope. No man is ever at the ἠρεμία of the summit, nor can we say that a man has irretrievably fallen into the abyss. How it is that men constantly act against their own convictions of what is right, and their previous determinations to follow right, is a mystery Which Aristotle discusses, but leaves unexplained.“Compare the passage in the Ethics, 1:11—‘Clearly there is in them [men], besides the Reason, some other Inborn principle (πεφυκός) which fights with and strains against the Reason.... There is in the soul also somewhat besides the Reason which is[pg 581]opposed to this and goes against it.’—Compare this passage with Paul, inRom. 7:23—‘I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members.’But as Aristotle does not explain the cause, so he suggests no cure. Revelation alone can account for the disease, or point out the remedy.”Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:102—“Aristotle makes the significant and almost surprising observation, that the character which has become evil by guilt can just as little be thrown off again at mere volition, as the person who has made himself sick by his own fault can become well again at mere volition; once become evil or sick, it stands no longer within his discretion to cease to be so; a stone, when once cast, cannot be caught back from its flight; and so is it with the character that has become evil.”He does not tell“how a reformation in character is possible,—moreover, he does not concede to evil any other than an individual effect,—knows nothing of any natural solidarity of evil in self-propagating, morally degenerated races”(Nic. Eth., 3:6, 7; 5:12; 7:2, 3; 10:10). The good nature, he says,“is evidently not within our power, but is by some kind of divine causality conferred upon the truly happy.”Plato speaks of“that blind, many-headed wild beast of all that is evil within thee.”He repudiates the idea that men are naturally good, and says that, if this were true, all that would be needed to make them holy would be to shut them up, from their earliest years, so that they might not be corrupted by others. Republic, 4 (Jowett's translation, 11:276)—“There is a rising up of part of the soul against the whole of the soul.”Meno, 89—“The cause of corruption is from our parents, so that we never relinquish their evil way, or escape the blemish of their evil habit.”Horace, Ep., 1:10—“Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.”Latin proverb:“Nemo repente fuit turpissimus.”Pascal:“We are born unrighteous; for each one tends to himself, and the bent toward self is the beginning of all disorder.”Kant, in his Metaphysical Principles of Human Morals, speaks of“the indwelling of an evil principle side by side with the good one, or the radical evil of human nature,”and of“the contest between the good and the evil principles for the control of man.”“Hegel, pantheist as he was, declared that original sin is the nature of every man,—every man begins with it”(H. B. Smith).Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 4:3—“All is oblique: There's nothing level in our cursed natures, But direct villainy.”All's Well, 4:3—“As we are in ourselves, how weak we are! Merely our own traitors.”Measure for Measure, 1:2—“Our natures do pursue, Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, A thirsty evil, and when we drink, we die.”Hamlet, 3:1—“Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it.”Love's Labor Lost, 1:1—“Every man with his affects is born, Not by might mastered, but by special grace.”Winter's Tale, 1:2—“We should have answered Heaven boldly, Not guilty; the imposition cleared Hereditary ours”—that is, provided our hereditary connection with Adam had not made us guilty. On the theology of Shakespeare, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 196-211—“If any think it irrational to believe in man's depravity, guilt, and need of supernatural redemption, they must also be prepared to say that Shakespeare did not understand human nature.”S. T. Coleridge, Omniana, at the end:“It is a fundamental article of Christianity that I am a fallen creature ... that an evil ground existed in my will, previously to any act or assignable moment of time in my consciousness; I am born a child of wrath. This fearful mystery I pretend not to understand. I cannot even conceive the possibility of it; but I know that it is so, ... and what is real must be possible.”A sceptic who gave his children no religious training, with the view of letting them each in mature years choose a faith for himself, reproved Coleridge for letting his garden run to weeds; but Coleridge replied, that he did not think it right to prejudice the soil in favor of roses and strawberries. Van Oosterzee: Rain and sunshine make weeds grow more quickly, but could not draw them out of the soil if the seeds did not lie there already; so evil education and example draw out sin, but do not implant it. Tennyson, Two Voices:“He finds a baseness in his blood, At such strange war with what is good, He cannot do the thing he would.”Robert Browning, Gold Hair: a Legend of Pornic:“The faith that launched point-blank her dart At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin, The corruption of Man's Heart.”Taine, Ancien Régime:“Savage, brigand and madman each of us harbors, in repose or manacled, but always living, in the recesses of his own heart.”Alexander Maclaren:“A great mass of knotted weeds growing in a stagnant pool is dragged toward you as you drag one filament.”Draw out one sin, and it brings with it the whole matted nature of sin.Chief Justice Thompson, of Pennsylvania:“If those who preach had been lawyers previous to entering the ministry, they would know and say far more about the depravity[pg 582]of the human heart than they do. The old doctrine of total depravity is the only thing that can explain the falsehoods, the dishonesties, the licentiousness, and the murders which are so rife in the world. Education, refinement, and even a high order of talent, cannot overcome the inclination to evil which exists in the heart, and has taken possession of the very fibres of our nature.”See Edwards, Original Sin, in Works, 2:309-510; Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:259-307; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:231-238; Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 226-236.
The greatest thinkers of the world have certified to the correctness of this conclusion. See Aristotle's doctrine of“the slope,”described in Chase's Introduction to Aristotle's Ethics, XXXV and 32—“In regard to moral virtue, man stands on a slope. His appetites and passions gravitate downward; his reason attracts him upward. Conflict occurs. A step upward, and reason gains what passion has lost; but the reverse is the case if he steps downward. The tendency in the former case is to the entire subjection of passion; in the latter case, to the entire suppression of reason. The slope will terminate upwards in a level summit where men's steps will be secure, or downwards in an irretrievable plunge over the precipice. Continual self-control leads to absolute self-mastery; continual failure, to the utter absence of self-control. Butall we can see is the slope. No man is ever at the ἠρεμία of the summit, nor can we say that a man has irretrievably fallen into the abyss. How it is that men constantly act against their own convictions of what is right, and their previous determinations to follow right, is a mystery Which Aristotle discusses, but leaves unexplained.
“Compare the passage in the Ethics, 1:11—‘Clearly there is in them [men], besides the Reason, some other Inborn principle (πεφυκός) which fights with and strains against the Reason.... There is in the soul also somewhat besides the Reason which is[pg 581]opposed to this and goes against it.’—Compare this passage with Paul, inRom. 7:23—‘I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members.’But as Aristotle does not explain the cause, so he suggests no cure. Revelation alone can account for the disease, or point out the remedy.”
Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:102—“Aristotle makes the significant and almost surprising observation, that the character which has become evil by guilt can just as little be thrown off again at mere volition, as the person who has made himself sick by his own fault can become well again at mere volition; once become evil or sick, it stands no longer within his discretion to cease to be so; a stone, when once cast, cannot be caught back from its flight; and so is it with the character that has become evil.”He does not tell“how a reformation in character is possible,—moreover, he does not concede to evil any other than an individual effect,—knows nothing of any natural solidarity of evil in self-propagating, morally degenerated races”(Nic. Eth., 3:6, 7; 5:12; 7:2, 3; 10:10). The good nature, he says,“is evidently not within our power, but is by some kind of divine causality conferred upon the truly happy.”
Plato speaks of“that blind, many-headed wild beast of all that is evil within thee.”He repudiates the idea that men are naturally good, and says that, if this were true, all that would be needed to make them holy would be to shut them up, from their earliest years, so that they might not be corrupted by others. Republic, 4 (Jowett's translation, 11:276)—“There is a rising up of part of the soul against the whole of the soul.”Meno, 89—“The cause of corruption is from our parents, so that we never relinquish their evil way, or escape the blemish of their evil habit.”Horace, Ep., 1:10—“Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.”Latin proverb:“Nemo repente fuit turpissimus.”Pascal:“We are born unrighteous; for each one tends to himself, and the bent toward self is the beginning of all disorder.”Kant, in his Metaphysical Principles of Human Morals, speaks of“the indwelling of an evil principle side by side with the good one, or the radical evil of human nature,”and of“the contest between the good and the evil principles for the control of man.”“Hegel, pantheist as he was, declared that original sin is the nature of every man,—every man begins with it”(H. B. Smith).
Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 4:3—“All is oblique: There's nothing level in our cursed natures, But direct villainy.”All's Well, 4:3—“As we are in ourselves, how weak we are! Merely our own traitors.”Measure for Measure, 1:2—“Our natures do pursue, Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, A thirsty evil, and when we drink, we die.”Hamlet, 3:1—“Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it.”Love's Labor Lost, 1:1—“Every man with his affects is born, Not by might mastered, but by special grace.”Winter's Tale, 1:2—“We should have answered Heaven boldly, Not guilty; the imposition cleared Hereditary ours”—that is, provided our hereditary connection with Adam had not made us guilty. On the theology of Shakespeare, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 196-211—“If any think it irrational to believe in man's depravity, guilt, and need of supernatural redemption, they must also be prepared to say that Shakespeare did not understand human nature.”
S. T. Coleridge, Omniana, at the end:“It is a fundamental article of Christianity that I am a fallen creature ... that an evil ground existed in my will, previously to any act or assignable moment of time in my consciousness; I am born a child of wrath. This fearful mystery I pretend not to understand. I cannot even conceive the possibility of it; but I know that it is so, ... and what is real must be possible.”A sceptic who gave his children no religious training, with the view of letting them each in mature years choose a faith for himself, reproved Coleridge for letting his garden run to weeds; but Coleridge replied, that he did not think it right to prejudice the soil in favor of roses and strawberries. Van Oosterzee: Rain and sunshine make weeds grow more quickly, but could not draw them out of the soil if the seeds did not lie there already; so evil education and example draw out sin, but do not implant it. Tennyson, Two Voices:“He finds a baseness in his blood, At such strange war with what is good, He cannot do the thing he would.”Robert Browning, Gold Hair: a Legend of Pornic:“The faith that launched point-blank her dart At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin, The corruption of Man's Heart.”Taine, Ancien Régime:“Savage, brigand and madman each of us harbors, in repose or manacled, but always living, in the recesses of his own heart.”Alexander Maclaren:“A great mass of knotted weeds growing in a stagnant pool is dragged toward you as you drag one filament.”Draw out one sin, and it brings with it the whole matted nature of sin.
Chief Justice Thompson, of Pennsylvania:“If those who preach had been lawyers previous to entering the ministry, they would know and say far more about the depravity[pg 582]of the human heart than they do. The old doctrine of total depravity is the only thing that can explain the falsehoods, the dishonesties, the licentiousness, and the murders which are so rife in the world. Education, refinement, and even a high order of talent, cannot overcome the inclination to evil which exists in the heart, and has taken possession of the very fibres of our nature.”See Edwards, Original Sin, in Works, 2:309-510; Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:259-307; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:231-238; Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 226-236.