Chapter 51

3. The New School Theory, or Theory of uncondemnable Vitiosity.This theory is called New School, because of its recession from the old Puritan anthropology of which Edwards and Bellamy in the last century were the expounders. The New School theory is a general scheme built up by the successive labors of Hopkins, Emmons, Dwight, Taylor, and Finney. It is held at present by New School Presbyterians, and by the larger part of the Congregational body.According to this theory, all men are born with a physical and moral constitution which predisposes them to sin, and all men do actually sin so soon as they come to moral consciousness. This vitiosity of nature may be called sinful, because it uniformly leads to sin; but it is not itself sin, since nothing is to be properly denominated sin but the voluntary act of transgressing known law.God imputes to men only their own acts of personal transgression; he does not impute to them Adam's sin; neither original vitiosity nor physical[pg 607]death are penal inflictions; they are simply consequences which God has in his sovereignty ordained to mark his displeasure at Adam's transgression, and subject to which evils God immediately creates each human soul. In Rom. 5:12,“death passed unto all men, for that all sinned,”signifies:“spiritual death passed on all men, because all men have actually and personally sinned.”Edwards held that God imputes Adam's sin to his posterity by arbitrarily identifying them with him,—identity, on the theory of continuous creation (see pages 415-418), being only what God appoints. Since this did not furnish sufficient ground for imputation, Edwards joined the Placean doctrine to the other, and showed the justice of the condemnation by the fact that man is depraved. He adds, moreover, the consideration that man ratifies this depravity by his own act. So Edwards tried to combine three views. But all were vitiated by his doctrine of continuous creation, which logically made God the only cause in the universe, and left no freedom, guilt, or responsibility to man. He held that preservation is a continuous series of new divine volitions, personal identity consisting in consciousness or rather memory, with no necessity for identity of substance. He maintained that God could give to an absolutely new creation the consciousness of one just annihilated, and thereby the two would be identical. He maintained this not only as a possibility, but as the actual fact. See Lutheran Quarterly, April, 1901:149-169; and H. N. Gardiner, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.The idealistic philosophy of Edwards enables us to understand his conception of the relation of the race to Adam. He believed in“a real union between the root and the branches of the world of mankind, established by the author of the whole system of the universe ... the full consent of the hearts of Adam's posterity to the first apostasy ... and therefore the sin of the apostasy is not theirs merely because God imputes it to them, but it is truly and properly theirs, andon that groundGod imputes it to them.”Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:435-448, esp. 436, quotes from Edwards:“The guilt a man has upon his soul at his first existence is one and simple,viz.: the guilt of the original apostasy, the guilt of the sin by which the species first rebelled against God.”Interpret this by other words of Edwards:“The child and the acorn, which come into existence in the course of nature, are truly immediately created by God”—i. e., continuously created (quoted by Dodge, Christian Theology, 188). Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 310—“It required but a step from the principle that each individual has an identity of consciousness with Adam, to reach the conclusion that each individual is Adam and repeats his experience. Of every man it might be said that like Adam he comes into the world attended by the divine nature, and like him sins and falls. In this sense the sin of every man becomes original sin.”Adam becomes not the head of humanity but its generic type. Hence arises the New School doctrine of exclusively individual sin and guilt.Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:25, claims Edwards as a Traducianist. But Fisher, Discussions, 240, shows that he was not. As we have seen (Prolegomena, pages 48, 49), Edwards thought too little ofnature. He tended to Berkeleyanism as applied to mind. Hence the chief good was in happiness—a form ofsensibility. Virtue is voluntarychoiceof this good. Hence union ofactsandexerciseswith Adam was sufficient. This God's will might make identity ofbeingwith him. Baird, Elohim Revealed, 250sq., says well, that“Edwards's idea that the character of an act was to be sought somewhere else than in its cause involves the fallacious assumption that acts have a subsistence and moral agency of their own apart from that of the actor.”This divergence from the truth led to the Exercise-system of Hopkins and Emmons, who not only denied moral character prior to individual choices (i. e., denied sin of nature), but attributed all human acts and exercises to the direct efficiency of God. Hopkins declared that Adam's act, in eating the forbidden fruit, was not the act of his posterity; therefore they did not sin at the same time that he did. The sinfulness of that act could not be transferred to them afterwards; because the sinfulness of an act can no more be transferred from one person to another than an act itself. Therefore, though men became sinners by Adam, according to divine constitution, yet they have, and are accountable for, no sins but personal. See Woods, History of Andover Theological Seminary, 33. So the doctrine of continuous creation led to the Exercise-system, and the Exercise-system led to the theology of acts. On Emmons, see Works, 4:502-507, and Bib. Sac., 7:479; 20:317; also H. B. Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 215-263.N. W. Taylor, of New Haven, agreed with Hopkins and Emmons that there is no[pg 608]imputation of Adam's sin or of inborn depravity. He called that depravity physical, not moral. But he repudiated the doctrine of divine efficiency in the production of man's acts and exercises, and made all sin to be personal. He held to the power of contrary choice. Adam had it, and contrary to the belief of Augustinians, he never lost it. Man“not only can if he will, but he can if he won't.”He can, but, without the Spirit, will not. He said:“Man can, whatever the Holy Spirit does or does not do”; but also:“Man will not, unless the Holy Spirit helps”;“If I were as eloquent as the Holy Ghost, I could convert sinners as fast as he.”Yet he did not hold to the Arminian liberty of indifference or contingence. He believed in the certainty of wrong action, yet in power to the contrary. See Moral Government, 2:132—“The error of Pelagius was not in asserting that mancanobey God without grace, but in saying that man doesactuallyobey God without grace.”There is a part of the sinner's nature to which the motives of the gospel may appeal—a part of his nature which is neither holy nor unholy,viz., self-love, or innocent desire for happiness. Greatest happiness is the ground of obligation. Under the influence of motives appealing to happiness, the sinner can suspend his choice of the world as his chief good, and can give his heart to God. He can do this, whatever the Holy Spirit does, or does not do; but themoralinability can be overcome only by the Holy Spirit, who moves the soul, without coercing, by means of the truth. On Dr. Taylor's system, and its connection with prior New England theology, see Fisher, Discussions, 285-354.This form of New School doctrine suggests the following questions: 1. Can the sinner suspend his selfishness before he is subdued by divine grace? 2. Can his choice of God from mere self-love be a holy choice? 3. Since God demands love in every choice, must it not be a positively unholy choice? 4. If it is not itself a holy choice, how can it be a beginning of holiness? 5. If the sinner can become regenerate by preferring God on the ground of self-interest, where is the necessity of the Holy Spirit to renew the heart? 6. Does not this asserted ability of the sinner to turn to God contradict consciousness and Scripture? For Taylor's Views, see his Revealed Theology, 134-309. For criticism of them, see Hodge, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1868:63 sq., and 368-398; also, Tyler, Letters on the New Haven Theology. Neither Hopkins and Emmons on the one hand, nor Taylor on the other, represent most fully the general course of New England theology. Smalley, Dwight, Woods, all held to more conservative views than Taylor, or than Finney, whose system had much resemblance to Taylor's. All three of these denied the power of contrary choice which Dr. Taylor so strenuously maintained, although all agreed with him in denying the imputation of Adam's sin or of our hereditary depravity. These are not sinful, except in the sense of being occasions of actual sin.Dr. Park, of Andover, was understood to teach that the disordered state of the sensibilities and faculties with which we are born is theimmediateoccasion of sin, while Adam's transgression is theremoteoccasion of sin. The will, though influenced by an evil tendency, is still free; the evil tendency itself is not free, and therefore is not sin. The Statement of New School doctrine given in the text is intended to represent the common New England doctrine, as taught by Smalley, Dwight, Woods and Park; although the historical tendency, even among these theologians, has been to emphasize less and less the depraved tendencies prior to actual sin, and to maintain that moral character begins only with individual choice, most of them, however, holding that this individual choice begins at birth. See Bib. Sac., 7:552, 567; 8:607-647; 20:462-471, 576-593; Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 407-412; Foster, Hist. N. E. Theology.Both Ritschl and Pfleiderer lean toward the New School interpretation of sin. Ritschl, Unterricht, 25—“Universal death was the consequence of the sin of the first man, and the death of his posterity proved that they too had sinned.”Thus death is universal, not because of natural generation from Adam, but because of the individual sins of Adam's posterity. Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 122—“Sin is a direction of the will which contradicts the moral Idea. As preceding personal acts of the will, it is not personal guilt but imperfection or evil. When it persists in spite of awaking moral consciousness, and by indulgence become habit, it is guilty abnormity.”To the New School theory we object as follows:A. It contradicts Scripture in maintaining or implying: (a) That sin consists solely in acts, and in the dispositions caused in each case by man's individual acts, and that the state which predisposes to acts of sin is not itself sin. (b) That the vitiosity which predisposes to sin is a part of each man's nature as it proceeds from the creative hand of God. (c) That[pg 609]physical death in the human race is not a penal consequence of Adam's transgression. (d) That infants, before moral consciousness, do not need Christ's sacrifice to save them. Since they are innocent, no penalty rests upon them, and none needs to be removed. (e) That we are neither condemned upon the ground of actual inbeing in Adam, nor justified upon the ground of actual inbeing in Christ.If a child may not be unholy before he voluntarily transgresses, then, by parity of reasoning, Adam could not have been holy before he obeyed the law, nor can a change of heart precede Christian action. New School principles would compel us to assert that right action precedes change of heart, and that obedience in Adam must have preceded his holiness. Emmons held that, if children die before they become moral agents, it is most rational to conclude that they are annihilated. They are mere animals. The common New School doctrine would regard them as saved either on account of their innocence, or because the atonement of Christ avails to remove theconsequencesas well as thepenaltyof sin.But to say that infants are pure contradictsRom. 5:12—“all sinned”;1 Cor. 7:14—“else were your children unclean”;Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath.”That Christ's atonement removes natural consequences of sin is nowhere asserted or implied in Scripture. See,per contra, H. B. Smith, System, 271, where, however, it is only maintained that Christ saves from all thejustconsequences of sin. But alljustconsequences are penalty, and should be so called. The exigencies of New School doctrine compel it to put the beginning of sin in the infant at the very first moment of its separate existence,—in order not to contradict those Scriptures which speak of sin as being universal, and of the atonement as being needed by all. Dr. Park held that infants sin so soon as they are born. He was obliged to hold this, or else to say that some members of the human race exist who are not sinners. But by putting sin thus early in human experience, all meaning is taken out of the New School definition of sin as the“voluntary transgression of known law.”It is difficult to say, upon this theory, what sort of achoicethe infant makes of sin, or what sort of aknown lawit violates.The first need in a theory of sin is that of satisfying the statements of Scripture. The second need is that it should point out an act of man which will justify the infliction of pain, suffering, and death upon the whole human race. Our moral sense refuses to accept the conclusion that all this is a matter of arbitrary sovereignty. We cannot find the act in each man's conscious transgression, nor in sin committed at birth. We do find such a voluntary transgression of known law in Adam; and we claim that the New School definition of sin is much more consistent with this last explanation of sin's origin than is the theory of a multitude of individual transgressions.The final test of every theory, however, is its conformity to Scripture. We claim that a false philosophy prevents the advocates of New School doctrine from understanding the utterances of Paul. Their philosophy is a modified survival of atomistic Pelagianism. They ignore nature in both God and man, and resolve character into transient acts. The unconscious or subconscious state of the will they take little or no account of, and the possibility of another and higher life interpenetrating and transforming our own life is seldom present to their minds. They have no proper idea of the union of the believer with Christ, and so they have no proper idea of the union of the race with Adam. They need to learn that, as all the spiritual life of the race was in Christ, the second Adam, so all the natural life of the race was in the first Adam; as we derive righteousness from the former, so we derive corruption from the latter. Because Christ's life is in them, Paul can say that all believers rose in Christ's resurrection; because Adam's life is in them, he can say that in Adam all die. We should prefer to say with Pfleiderer that Paul teaches this doctrine but that Paul is no authority for us, rather than to profess acceptance of Paul's teaching while we ingeniously evade the force of his argument. We agree with Stevens, Pauline Theology, 135, 136, that all men“sinned in the same sense in which believers were crucified to the world and died unto sin when Christ died upon the cross.”But we protest that to make Christ's death the mereoccasionof the death of the believer, and Adam's sin the mereoccasionof the sins of men, is to ignore the central truths of Paul's teaching—thevital unionof the believer with Christ, and thevital unionof the race with Adam.B. It rests upon false philosophical principles, as for example: (a) That the soul is immediately created by God. (b) That the law of God consists[pg 610]wholly in outward command. (c) That present natural ability to obey the law is the measure of obligation. (d) That man's relations to moral law are exclusively individual. (e) That the will is merely the faculty of individual and personal choices. (f) That the will, at man's birth, has no moral state or character.See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 250sq.—“Personality is inseparable from nature. The one duty is love. Unless any given duty is performed through the activity of a principle of love springing up in the nature, it is not performed at all.The law addresses the nature.The efficient cause of moral action is the proper subject of moral law. It is only in the perversity of unscriptural theology that we find the absurdity of separating the moral character from the substance of the soul, and tying it to the vanishing deeds of life. The idea that responsibility and sin are predicable of actions merely is only consistent with an utter denial that man's nature as such owes anything to God, or has an office to perform in showing forth his glory. It ignores the fact that actions are empty phenomena, which in themselves have no possible value. It is the heart, soul, might, mind, strength, with which we are to love. Christ conformed to the law, by being‘that holy thing’(Luke 1:35, marg.).”Erroneous philosophical principles lie at the basis of New School interpretations of Scripture. The solidarity of the race is ignored, and all moral action is held to be individual. In our discussion of the Augustinian theory of sin, we shall hope to show that underlying Paul's doctrine there is quite another philosophy. Such a philosophy together with a deeper Christian experience would have corrected the following statement of Paul's view of sin, by Orello Cone, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1898:241-267. On the phraseRom. 5:12—“for that all sinned,”he remarks:“If under the new order men do not become righteous simply because of the righteousness of Christ and without their choice, neither under the old order did Paul think them to be subject to death without their own acts of sin. Each representative head is conceived only as the occasion of the results of his work, on the one hand in the tragic order of death, and on the other hand in the blessed order of life—the occasion indispensable to all that follows in either order.... It may be questioned whether Pfleiderer does not state the case too strongly when he says that the sin of Adam's posterity is regarded as‘the necessary consequence’of the sin of Adam. It does not follow from the employment of the aorist ἥμαρτον that the sinning of all is contained in that of Adam, although this sense must be considered as grammatically possible. It is not however the only grammatically defensible sense. InRom. 3:23, ἥμαρτον certainly does not denote such a definite past act filling only one point of time.”But we reply that the context determines that inRom. 5:12, ἥμαρτον does denote such a definite past act; see our interpretation of the whole passage, under the Augustinian Theory, pages625-627.C. It impugns the justice of God:(a) By regarding him as the direct creator of a vicious nature which infallibly leads every human being into actual transgression. To maintain that, in consequence of Adam's act, God brings it about that all men become sinners, and this, not by virtue of inherent laws of propagation, but by the direct creation in each case of a vicious nature, is to make God indirectly the author of sin.(b) By representing him as the inflicter of suffering and death upon millions of human beings who in the present life do not come to moral consciousness, and who are therefore, according to the theory, perfectly innocent. This is to make him visit Adam's sin on his posterity, while at the same time it denies that moral connection between Adam and his posterity which alone could make such visitation just.(c) By holding that the probation which God appoints to men is a separate probation of each soul, when it first comes to moral consciousness and is least qualified to decide aright. It is much more consonant with our ideas of the divine justice that the decision should have been made by the[pg 611]whole race, in one whose nature was pure and who perfectly understood God's law, than that heaven and hell should have been determined for each of us by a decision made in our own inexperienced childhood, under the influence of a vitiated nature.On this theory, God determines, in his mere sovereignty, that because one man sinned, all men should be called into existence depraved, under a constitution which secures the certainty of their sinning. But we claim that it is unjust that any should suffer without ill-desert. To say that God thus marks his sense of the guilt of Adam's sin is to contradict the main principle of the theory, namely, that men are held responsible only for their own sins. We prefer to justify God by holding that there is a reason for this infliction, and that this reason is the connection of the infant with Adam. If mere tendency to sin is innocent, then Christ might have taken it, when he took our nature. But if he had taken it, it would not explain the fact of the atonement, for upon this theory it would not need to be atoned for. To say that the child inherits a sinful nature, not as penalty, but by natural law, is to ignore the fact that this natural law is simply the regular action of God, the expression of his moral nature, and so is itself penalty.“Man kills a snake,”says Raymond,“because it is a snake, and not because it is to blame for being a snake,”—which seems to us a new proof that the advocates of innocent depravity regard infants, not as moral beings, but as mere animals.“We must distinguish automatic excellence or badness,”says Raymond again,“from moral desert, whether good or ill.”This seems to us a doctrine of punishment without guilt. Princeton Essays, 1:138, quote Coleridge:“It is an outrage on common sense to affirm that it is no evil for men to be placed on their probation under such circumstances that not one of ten thousand millions ever escapes sin and condemnation to eternal death. There is evil inflicted on us, as a consequence of Adam's sin, antecedent to our personal transgressions. It matters not what this evil is, whether temporal death, corruption of nature, certainty of sin, or death in its more extended sense; if the ground of the evil's coming on us is Adam's sin, the principle is the same.”Baird, Elohim Revealed, 488—So, it seems,“if a creature is punished, it implies that some one has sinned, but does not necessarily intimate the sufferer to be the sinner! But this is wholly contrary to the argument of the apostle inRom. 5:12-19, which is based upon the opposite doctrine, and it is also contrary to the justice of God, who punishes only those who deserve it.”See Julius Müller, Doct. Sin. 2:67-74.D. Its limitation of responsibility to the evil choices of the individual and the dispositions caused thereby is inconsistent with the following facts:(a) The first moral choice of each individual is so undeliberate as not to be remembered. Put forth at birth, as the chief advocates of the New School theory maintain, it does not answer to their definition of sin as a voluntary transgression of known law. Responsibility for such choice does not differ from responsibility for the inborn evil state of the will which manifests itself in that choice.(b) The uniformity of sinful action among men cannot be explained by the existence of a mere faculty of choices. That men should uniformly choose may be thus explained; but that men should uniformly choose evil requires us to postulate an evil tendency or state of the will itself, prior to these separate acts of choice. This evil tendency or inborn determination to evil, since it is the real cause of actual sins, must itself be sin, and as such must be guilty and condemnable.(c) Power in the will to prevent the inborn vitiosity from developing itself is upon this theory a necessary condition of responsibility for actual sins. But the absolute uniformity of actual transgression is evidence that the will is practically impotent. If responsibility diminishes as the difficulties in the way of free decision increase, the fact that these difficulties are insuperable[pg 612]shows that there can be no responsibility at all. To deny the guilt of inborn sin is therefore virtually to deny the guilt of the actual sin which springs therefrom.The aim of all the theories is to find a decision of the will which will justify God in condemning men. Where shall we find such a decision? At the age of fifteen, ten, five? Then all who die before this age are not sinners, cannot justly be punished with death, do not need a Savior. Is it at birth? But decision at such a time is not such a conscious decision against God as, according to this theory, would make it the proper determiner of our future destiny. We claim that the theory of Augustine—that of a sin of the race in Adam—is the only one that shows a conscious transgression fit to be the cause and ground of man's guilt and condemnation.Wm. Adams Brown:“Who can tell how far his own acts are caused by his own will, and how far by the nature he has inherited? Men do feel guilty for acts which are largely due to their inherited natures, which inherited corruption is guilt, deserving of punishment and certain to receive it.”H. B. Smith, System, 350, note—“It has been said, in the way of a taunt against the older theology, that men are very willing to speculate about sinning in Adam, so as to have their attention diverted from the sense of personal guilt. But the whole history of theology bears witness that those who have believed most fully in our native and strictly moral corruption—as Augustine, Calvin, and Edwards—have ever had the deepest sense of their personal demerit. We know the full evil of sin only when we know its roots as well as its fruits.”“Causa causæ est causa causati.”Inborn depravity is the cause of the first actual sin. The cause of inborn depravity is the sin of Adam. If there be no guilt in original sin, then the actual sin that springs therefrom cannot be guilty. There are subsequent presumptuous sins in which the personal element overbears the element of race and heredity. But this cannot be said of the first acts which make man a sinner. These are so naturally and uniformly the result of the inborn determination of the will, that they cannot be guilty, unless that inborn determination is also guilty. In short, not all sin is personal. There must be a sin of nature—a race-sin—or the beginnings of actual sin cannot be accounted for or regarded as objects of God's condemnation. Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:320-328, 341—“If the deep-rooted depravity which we bring with us into the world be not our sin, it at once becomes an excuse for our actual sins.”Princeton Essays, 1:138, 139—Alternative: 1. May a man by his own power prevent the development of this hereditary depravity? Then we do not know that all men are sinners, or that Christ's salvation is needed by all. 2. Is actual sin a necessary consequence of hereditary depravity? Then it is, on this theory, a free act no longer, and is not guilty, since guilt is predicable only of voluntary transgression of known law. See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 256 sq.; Hodge, Essays, 571-638; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:61-73; Edwards on the Will, part iii, sec. 4; Bib. Sac., 20:317-320.

This theory is called New School, because of its recession from the old Puritan anthropology of which Edwards and Bellamy in the last century were the expounders. The New School theory is a general scheme built up by the successive labors of Hopkins, Emmons, Dwight, Taylor, and Finney. It is held at present by New School Presbyterians, and by the larger part of the Congregational body.

According to this theory, all men are born with a physical and moral constitution which predisposes them to sin, and all men do actually sin so soon as they come to moral consciousness. This vitiosity of nature may be called sinful, because it uniformly leads to sin; but it is not itself sin, since nothing is to be properly denominated sin but the voluntary act of transgressing known law.

God imputes to men only their own acts of personal transgression; he does not impute to them Adam's sin; neither original vitiosity nor physical[pg 607]death are penal inflictions; they are simply consequences which God has in his sovereignty ordained to mark his displeasure at Adam's transgression, and subject to which evils God immediately creates each human soul. In Rom. 5:12,“death passed unto all men, for that all sinned,”signifies:“spiritual death passed on all men, because all men have actually and personally sinned.”

Edwards held that God imputes Adam's sin to his posterity by arbitrarily identifying them with him,—identity, on the theory of continuous creation (see pages 415-418), being only what God appoints. Since this did not furnish sufficient ground for imputation, Edwards joined the Placean doctrine to the other, and showed the justice of the condemnation by the fact that man is depraved. He adds, moreover, the consideration that man ratifies this depravity by his own act. So Edwards tried to combine three views. But all were vitiated by his doctrine of continuous creation, which logically made God the only cause in the universe, and left no freedom, guilt, or responsibility to man. He held that preservation is a continuous series of new divine volitions, personal identity consisting in consciousness or rather memory, with no necessity for identity of substance. He maintained that God could give to an absolutely new creation the consciousness of one just annihilated, and thereby the two would be identical. He maintained this not only as a possibility, but as the actual fact. See Lutheran Quarterly, April, 1901:149-169; and H. N. Gardiner, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.The idealistic philosophy of Edwards enables us to understand his conception of the relation of the race to Adam. He believed in“a real union between the root and the branches of the world of mankind, established by the author of the whole system of the universe ... the full consent of the hearts of Adam's posterity to the first apostasy ... and therefore the sin of the apostasy is not theirs merely because God imputes it to them, but it is truly and properly theirs, andon that groundGod imputes it to them.”Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:435-448, esp. 436, quotes from Edwards:“The guilt a man has upon his soul at his first existence is one and simple,viz.: the guilt of the original apostasy, the guilt of the sin by which the species first rebelled against God.”Interpret this by other words of Edwards:“The child and the acorn, which come into existence in the course of nature, are truly immediately created by God”—i. e., continuously created (quoted by Dodge, Christian Theology, 188). Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 310—“It required but a step from the principle that each individual has an identity of consciousness with Adam, to reach the conclusion that each individual is Adam and repeats his experience. Of every man it might be said that like Adam he comes into the world attended by the divine nature, and like him sins and falls. In this sense the sin of every man becomes original sin.”Adam becomes not the head of humanity but its generic type. Hence arises the New School doctrine of exclusively individual sin and guilt.Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:25, claims Edwards as a Traducianist. But Fisher, Discussions, 240, shows that he was not. As we have seen (Prolegomena, pages 48, 49), Edwards thought too little ofnature. He tended to Berkeleyanism as applied to mind. Hence the chief good was in happiness—a form ofsensibility. Virtue is voluntarychoiceof this good. Hence union ofactsandexerciseswith Adam was sufficient. This God's will might make identity ofbeingwith him. Baird, Elohim Revealed, 250sq., says well, that“Edwards's idea that the character of an act was to be sought somewhere else than in its cause involves the fallacious assumption that acts have a subsistence and moral agency of their own apart from that of the actor.”This divergence from the truth led to the Exercise-system of Hopkins and Emmons, who not only denied moral character prior to individual choices (i. e., denied sin of nature), but attributed all human acts and exercises to the direct efficiency of God. Hopkins declared that Adam's act, in eating the forbidden fruit, was not the act of his posterity; therefore they did not sin at the same time that he did. The sinfulness of that act could not be transferred to them afterwards; because the sinfulness of an act can no more be transferred from one person to another than an act itself. Therefore, though men became sinners by Adam, according to divine constitution, yet they have, and are accountable for, no sins but personal. See Woods, History of Andover Theological Seminary, 33. So the doctrine of continuous creation led to the Exercise-system, and the Exercise-system led to the theology of acts. On Emmons, see Works, 4:502-507, and Bib. Sac., 7:479; 20:317; also H. B. Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 215-263.N. W. Taylor, of New Haven, agreed with Hopkins and Emmons that there is no[pg 608]imputation of Adam's sin or of inborn depravity. He called that depravity physical, not moral. But he repudiated the doctrine of divine efficiency in the production of man's acts and exercises, and made all sin to be personal. He held to the power of contrary choice. Adam had it, and contrary to the belief of Augustinians, he never lost it. Man“not only can if he will, but he can if he won't.”He can, but, without the Spirit, will not. He said:“Man can, whatever the Holy Spirit does or does not do”; but also:“Man will not, unless the Holy Spirit helps”;“If I were as eloquent as the Holy Ghost, I could convert sinners as fast as he.”Yet he did not hold to the Arminian liberty of indifference or contingence. He believed in the certainty of wrong action, yet in power to the contrary. See Moral Government, 2:132—“The error of Pelagius was not in asserting that mancanobey God without grace, but in saying that man doesactuallyobey God without grace.”There is a part of the sinner's nature to which the motives of the gospel may appeal—a part of his nature which is neither holy nor unholy,viz., self-love, or innocent desire for happiness. Greatest happiness is the ground of obligation. Under the influence of motives appealing to happiness, the sinner can suspend his choice of the world as his chief good, and can give his heart to God. He can do this, whatever the Holy Spirit does, or does not do; but themoralinability can be overcome only by the Holy Spirit, who moves the soul, without coercing, by means of the truth. On Dr. Taylor's system, and its connection with prior New England theology, see Fisher, Discussions, 285-354.This form of New School doctrine suggests the following questions: 1. Can the sinner suspend his selfishness before he is subdued by divine grace? 2. Can his choice of God from mere self-love be a holy choice? 3. Since God demands love in every choice, must it not be a positively unholy choice? 4. If it is not itself a holy choice, how can it be a beginning of holiness? 5. If the sinner can become regenerate by preferring God on the ground of self-interest, where is the necessity of the Holy Spirit to renew the heart? 6. Does not this asserted ability of the sinner to turn to God contradict consciousness and Scripture? For Taylor's Views, see his Revealed Theology, 134-309. For criticism of them, see Hodge, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1868:63 sq., and 368-398; also, Tyler, Letters on the New Haven Theology. Neither Hopkins and Emmons on the one hand, nor Taylor on the other, represent most fully the general course of New England theology. Smalley, Dwight, Woods, all held to more conservative views than Taylor, or than Finney, whose system had much resemblance to Taylor's. All three of these denied the power of contrary choice which Dr. Taylor so strenuously maintained, although all agreed with him in denying the imputation of Adam's sin or of our hereditary depravity. These are not sinful, except in the sense of being occasions of actual sin.Dr. Park, of Andover, was understood to teach that the disordered state of the sensibilities and faculties with which we are born is theimmediateoccasion of sin, while Adam's transgression is theremoteoccasion of sin. The will, though influenced by an evil tendency, is still free; the evil tendency itself is not free, and therefore is not sin. The Statement of New School doctrine given in the text is intended to represent the common New England doctrine, as taught by Smalley, Dwight, Woods and Park; although the historical tendency, even among these theologians, has been to emphasize less and less the depraved tendencies prior to actual sin, and to maintain that moral character begins only with individual choice, most of them, however, holding that this individual choice begins at birth. See Bib. Sac., 7:552, 567; 8:607-647; 20:462-471, 576-593; Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 407-412; Foster, Hist. N. E. Theology.Both Ritschl and Pfleiderer lean toward the New School interpretation of sin. Ritschl, Unterricht, 25—“Universal death was the consequence of the sin of the first man, and the death of his posterity proved that they too had sinned.”Thus death is universal, not because of natural generation from Adam, but because of the individual sins of Adam's posterity. Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 122—“Sin is a direction of the will which contradicts the moral Idea. As preceding personal acts of the will, it is not personal guilt but imperfection or evil. When it persists in spite of awaking moral consciousness, and by indulgence become habit, it is guilty abnormity.”

The idealistic philosophy of Edwards enables us to understand his conception of the relation of the race to Adam. He believed in“a real union between the root and the branches of the world of mankind, established by the author of the whole system of the universe ... the full consent of the hearts of Adam's posterity to the first apostasy ... and therefore the sin of the apostasy is not theirs merely because God imputes it to them, but it is truly and properly theirs, andon that groundGod imputes it to them.”Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:435-448, esp. 436, quotes from Edwards:“The guilt a man has upon his soul at his first existence is one and simple,viz.: the guilt of the original apostasy, the guilt of the sin by which the species first rebelled against God.”Interpret this by other words of Edwards:“The child and the acorn, which come into existence in the course of nature, are truly immediately created by God”—i. e., continuously created (quoted by Dodge, Christian Theology, 188). Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 310—“It required but a step from the principle that each individual has an identity of consciousness with Adam, to reach the conclusion that each individual is Adam and repeats his experience. Of every man it might be said that like Adam he comes into the world attended by the divine nature, and like him sins and falls. In this sense the sin of every man becomes original sin.”Adam becomes not the head of humanity but its generic type. Hence arises the New School doctrine of exclusively individual sin and guilt.

Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:25, claims Edwards as a Traducianist. But Fisher, Discussions, 240, shows that he was not. As we have seen (Prolegomena, pages 48, 49), Edwards thought too little ofnature. He tended to Berkeleyanism as applied to mind. Hence the chief good was in happiness—a form ofsensibility. Virtue is voluntarychoiceof this good. Hence union ofactsandexerciseswith Adam was sufficient. This God's will might make identity ofbeingwith him. Baird, Elohim Revealed, 250sq., says well, that“Edwards's idea that the character of an act was to be sought somewhere else than in its cause involves the fallacious assumption that acts have a subsistence and moral agency of their own apart from that of the actor.”This divergence from the truth led to the Exercise-system of Hopkins and Emmons, who not only denied moral character prior to individual choices (i. e., denied sin of nature), but attributed all human acts and exercises to the direct efficiency of God. Hopkins declared that Adam's act, in eating the forbidden fruit, was not the act of his posterity; therefore they did not sin at the same time that he did. The sinfulness of that act could not be transferred to them afterwards; because the sinfulness of an act can no more be transferred from one person to another than an act itself. Therefore, though men became sinners by Adam, according to divine constitution, yet they have, and are accountable for, no sins but personal. See Woods, History of Andover Theological Seminary, 33. So the doctrine of continuous creation led to the Exercise-system, and the Exercise-system led to the theology of acts. On Emmons, see Works, 4:502-507, and Bib. Sac., 7:479; 20:317; also H. B. Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 215-263.

N. W. Taylor, of New Haven, agreed with Hopkins and Emmons that there is no[pg 608]imputation of Adam's sin or of inborn depravity. He called that depravity physical, not moral. But he repudiated the doctrine of divine efficiency in the production of man's acts and exercises, and made all sin to be personal. He held to the power of contrary choice. Adam had it, and contrary to the belief of Augustinians, he never lost it. Man“not only can if he will, but he can if he won't.”He can, but, without the Spirit, will not. He said:“Man can, whatever the Holy Spirit does or does not do”; but also:“Man will not, unless the Holy Spirit helps”;“If I were as eloquent as the Holy Ghost, I could convert sinners as fast as he.”Yet he did not hold to the Arminian liberty of indifference or contingence. He believed in the certainty of wrong action, yet in power to the contrary. See Moral Government, 2:132—“The error of Pelagius was not in asserting that mancanobey God without grace, but in saying that man doesactuallyobey God without grace.”There is a part of the sinner's nature to which the motives of the gospel may appeal—a part of his nature which is neither holy nor unholy,viz., self-love, or innocent desire for happiness. Greatest happiness is the ground of obligation. Under the influence of motives appealing to happiness, the sinner can suspend his choice of the world as his chief good, and can give his heart to God. He can do this, whatever the Holy Spirit does, or does not do; but themoralinability can be overcome only by the Holy Spirit, who moves the soul, without coercing, by means of the truth. On Dr. Taylor's system, and its connection with prior New England theology, see Fisher, Discussions, 285-354.

This form of New School doctrine suggests the following questions: 1. Can the sinner suspend his selfishness before he is subdued by divine grace? 2. Can his choice of God from mere self-love be a holy choice? 3. Since God demands love in every choice, must it not be a positively unholy choice? 4. If it is not itself a holy choice, how can it be a beginning of holiness? 5. If the sinner can become regenerate by preferring God on the ground of self-interest, where is the necessity of the Holy Spirit to renew the heart? 6. Does not this asserted ability of the sinner to turn to God contradict consciousness and Scripture? For Taylor's Views, see his Revealed Theology, 134-309. For criticism of them, see Hodge, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1868:63 sq., and 368-398; also, Tyler, Letters on the New Haven Theology. Neither Hopkins and Emmons on the one hand, nor Taylor on the other, represent most fully the general course of New England theology. Smalley, Dwight, Woods, all held to more conservative views than Taylor, or than Finney, whose system had much resemblance to Taylor's. All three of these denied the power of contrary choice which Dr. Taylor so strenuously maintained, although all agreed with him in denying the imputation of Adam's sin or of our hereditary depravity. These are not sinful, except in the sense of being occasions of actual sin.

Dr. Park, of Andover, was understood to teach that the disordered state of the sensibilities and faculties with which we are born is theimmediateoccasion of sin, while Adam's transgression is theremoteoccasion of sin. The will, though influenced by an evil tendency, is still free; the evil tendency itself is not free, and therefore is not sin. The Statement of New School doctrine given in the text is intended to represent the common New England doctrine, as taught by Smalley, Dwight, Woods and Park; although the historical tendency, even among these theologians, has been to emphasize less and less the depraved tendencies prior to actual sin, and to maintain that moral character begins only with individual choice, most of them, however, holding that this individual choice begins at birth. See Bib. Sac., 7:552, 567; 8:607-647; 20:462-471, 576-593; Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 407-412; Foster, Hist. N. E. Theology.

Both Ritschl and Pfleiderer lean toward the New School interpretation of sin. Ritschl, Unterricht, 25—“Universal death was the consequence of the sin of the first man, and the death of his posterity proved that they too had sinned.”Thus death is universal, not because of natural generation from Adam, but because of the individual sins of Adam's posterity. Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 122—“Sin is a direction of the will which contradicts the moral Idea. As preceding personal acts of the will, it is not personal guilt but imperfection or evil. When it persists in spite of awaking moral consciousness, and by indulgence become habit, it is guilty abnormity.”

To the New School theory we object as follows:

A. It contradicts Scripture in maintaining or implying: (a) That sin consists solely in acts, and in the dispositions caused in each case by man's individual acts, and that the state which predisposes to acts of sin is not itself sin. (b) That the vitiosity which predisposes to sin is a part of each man's nature as it proceeds from the creative hand of God. (c) That[pg 609]physical death in the human race is not a penal consequence of Adam's transgression. (d) That infants, before moral consciousness, do not need Christ's sacrifice to save them. Since they are innocent, no penalty rests upon them, and none needs to be removed. (e) That we are neither condemned upon the ground of actual inbeing in Adam, nor justified upon the ground of actual inbeing in Christ.

If a child may not be unholy before he voluntarily transgresses, then, by parity of reasoning, Adam could not have been holy before he obeyed the law, nor can a change of heart precede Christian action. New School principles would compel us to assert that right action precedes change of heart, and that obedience in Adam must have preceded his holiness. Emmons held that, if children die before they become moral agents, it is most rational to conclude that they are annihilated. They are mere animals. The common New School doctrine would regard them as saved either on account of their innocence, or because the atonement of Christ avails to remove theconsequencesas well as thepenaltyof sin.But to say that infants are pure contradictsRom. 5:12—“all sinned”;1 Cor. 7:14—“else were your children unclean”;Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath.”That Christ's atonement removes natural consequences of sin is nowhere asserted or implied in Scripture. See,per contra, H. B. Smith, System, 271, where, however, it is only maintained that Christ saves from all thejustconsequences of sin. But alljustconsequences are penalty, and should be so called. The exigencies of New School doctrine compel it to put the beginning of sin in the infant at the very first moment of its separate existence,—in order not to contradict those Scriptures which speak of sin as being universal, and of the atonement as being needed by all. Dr. Park held that infants sin so soon as they are born. He was obliged to hold this, or else to say that some members of the human race exist who are not sinners. But by putting sin thus early in human experience, all meaning is taken out of the New School definition of sin as the“voluntary transgression of known law.”It is difficult to say, upon this theory, what sort of achoicethe infant makes of sin, or what sort of aknown lawit violates.The first need in a theory of sin is that of satisfying the statements of Scripture. The second need is that it should point out an act of man which will justify the infliction of pain, suffering, and death upon the whole human race. Our moral sense refuses to accept the conclusion that all this is a matter of arbitrary sovereignty. We cannot find the act in each man's conscious transgression, nor in sin committed at birth. We do find such a voluntary transgression of known law in Adam; and we claim that the New School definition of sin is much more consistent with this last explanation of sin's origin than is the theory of a multitude of individual transgressions.The final test of every theory, however, is its conformity to Scripture. We claim that a false philosophy prevents the advocates of New School doctrine from understanding the utterances of Paul. Their philosophy is a modified survival of atomistic Pelagianism. They ignore nature in both God and man, and resolve character into transient acts. The unconscious or subconscious state of the will they take little or no account of, and the possibility of another and higher life interpenetrating and transforming our own life is seldom present to their minds. They have no proper idea of the union of the believer with Christ, and so they have no proper idea of the union of the race with Adam. They need to learn that, as all the spiritual life of the race was in Christ, the second Adam, so all the natural life of the race was in the first Adam; as we derive righteousness from the former, so we derive corruption from the latter. Because Christ's life is in them, Paul can say that all believers rose in Christ's resurrection; because Adam's life is in them, he can say that in Adam all die. We should prefer to say with Pfleiderer that Paul teaches this doctrine but that Paul is no authority for us, rather than to profess acceptance of Paul's teaching while we ingeniously evade the force of his argument. We agree with Stevens, Pauline Theology, 135, 136, that all men“sinned in the same sense in which believers were crucified to the world and died unto sin when Christ died upon the cross.”But we protest that to make Christ's death the mereoccasionof the death of the believer, and Adam's sin the mereoccasionof the sins of men, is to ignore the central truths of Paul's teaching—thevital unionof the believer with Christ, and thevital unionof the race with Adam.

But to say that infants are pure contradictsRom. 5:12—“all sinned”;1 Cor. 7:14—“else were your children unclean”;Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath.”That Christ's atonement removes natural consequences of sin is nowhere asserted or implied in Scripture. See,per contra, H. B. Smith, System, 271, where, however, it is only maintained that Christ saves from all thejustconsequences of sin. But alljustconsequences are penalty, and should be so called. The exigencies of New School doctrine compel it to put the beginning of sin in the infant at the very first moment of its separate existence,—in order not to contradict those Scriptures which speak of sin as being universal, and of the atonement as being needed by all. Dr. Park held that infants sin so soon as they are born. He was obliged to hold this, or else to say that some members of the human race exist who are not sinners. But by putting sin thus early in human experience, all meaning is taken out of the New School definition of sin as the“voluntary transgression of known law.”It is difficult to say, upon this theory, what sort of achoicethe infant makes of sin, or what sort of aknown lawit violates.

The first need in a theory of sin is that of satisfying the statements of Scripture. The second need is that it should point out an act of man which will justify the infliction of pain, suffering, and death upon the whole human race. Our moral sense refuses to accept the conclusion that all this is a matter of arbitrary sovereignty. We cannot find the act in each man's conscious transgression, nor in sin committed at birth. We do find such a voluntary transgression of known law in Adam; and we claim that the New School definition of sin is much more consistent with this last explanation of sin's origin than is the theory of a multitude of individual transgressions.

The final test of every theory, however, is its conformity to Scripture. We claim that a false philosophy prevents the advocates of New School doctrine from understanding the utterances of Paul. Their philosophy is a modified survival of atomistic Pelagianism. They ignore nature in both God and man, and resolve character into transient acts. The unconscious or subconscious state of the will they take little or no account of, and the possibility of another and higher life interpenetrating and transforming our own life is seldom present to their minds. They have no proper idea of the union of the believer with Christ, and so they have no proper idea of the union of the race with Adam. They need to learn that, as all the spiritual life of the race was in Christ, the second Adam, so all the natural life of the race was in the first Adam; as we derive righteousness from the former, so we derive corruption from the latter. Because Christ's life is in them, Paul can say that all believers rose in Christ's resurrection; because Adam's life is in them, he can say that in Adam all die. We should prefer to say with Pfleiderer that Paul teaches this doctrine but that Paul is no authority for us, rather than to profess acceptance of Paul's teaching while we ingeniously evade the force of his argument. We agree with Stevens, Pauline Theology, 135, 136, that all men“sinned in the same sense in which believers were crucified to the world and died unto sin when Christ died upon the cross.”But we protest that to make Christ's death the mereoccasionof the death of the believer, and Adam's sin the mereoccasionof the sins of men, is to ignore the central truths of Paul's teaching—thevital unionof the believer with Christ, and thevital unionof the race with Adam.

B. It rests upon false philosophical principles, as for example: (a) That the soul is immediately created by God. (b) That the law of God consists[pg 610]wholly in outward command. (c) That present natural ability to obey the law is the measure of obligation. (d) That man's relations to moral law are exclusively individual. (e) That the will is merely the faculty of individual and personal choices. (f) That the will, at man's birth, has no moral state or character.

See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 250sq.—“Personality is inseparable from nature. The one duty is love. Unless any given duty is performed through the activity of a principle of love springing up in the nature, it is not performed at all.The law addresses the nature.The efficient cause of moral action is the proper subject of moral law. It is only in the perversity of unscriptural theology that we find the absurdity of separating the moral character from the substance of the soul, and tying it to the vanishing deeds of life. The idea that responsibility and sin are predicable of actions merely is only consistent with an utter denial that man's nature as such owes anything to God, or has an office to perform in showing forth his glory. It ignores the fact that actions are empty phenomena, which in themselves have no possible value. It is the heart, soul, might, mind, strength, with which we are to love. Christ conformed to the law, by being‘that holy thing’(Luke 1:35, marg.).”Erroneous philosophical principles lie at the basis of New School interpretations of Scripture. The solidarity of the race is ignored, and all moral action is held to be individual. In our discussion of the Augustinian theory of sin, we shall hope to show that underlying Paul's doctrine there is quite another philosophy. Such a philosophy together with a deeper Christian experience would have corrected the following statement of Paul's view of sin, by Orello Cone, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1898:241-267. On the phraseRom. 5:12—“for that all sinned,”he remarks:“If under the new order men do not become righteous simply because of the righteousness of Christ and without their choice, neither under the old order did Paul think them to be subject to death without their own acts of sin. Each representative head is conceived only as the occasion of the results of his work, on the one hand in the tragic order of death, and on the other hand in the blessed order of life—the occasion indispensable to all that follows in either order.... It may be questioned whether Pfleiderer does not state the case too strongly when he says that the sin of Adam's posterity is regarded as‘the necessary consequence’of the sin of Adam. It does not follow from the employment of the aorist ἥμαρτον that the sinning of all is contained in that of Adam, although this sense must be considered as grammatically possible. It is not however the only grammatically defensible sense. InRom. 3:23, ἥμαρτον certainly does not denote such a definite past act filling only one point of time.”But we reply that the context determines that inRom. 5:12, ἥμαρτον does denote such a definite past act; see our interpretation of the whole passage, under the Augustinian Theory, pages625-627.

Erroneous philosophical principles lie at the basis of New School interpretations of Scripture. The solidarity of the race is ignored, and all moral action is held to be individual. In our discussion of the Augustinian theory of sin, we shall hope to show that underlying Paul's doctrine there is quite another philosophy. Such a philosophy together with a deeper Christian experience would have corrected the following statement of Paul's view of sin, by Orello Cone, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1898:241-267. On the phraseRom. 5:12—“for that all sinned,”he remarks:“If under the new order men do not become righteous simply because of the righteousness of Christ and without their choice, neither under the old order did Paul think them to be subject to death without their own acts of sin. Each representative head is conceived only as the occasion of the results of his work, on the one hand in the tragic order of death, and on the other hand in the blessed order of life—the occasion indispensable to all that follows in either order.... It may be questioned whether Pfleiderer does not state the case too strongly when he says that the sin of Adam's posterity is regarded as‘the necessary consequence’of the sin of Adam. It does not follow from the employment of the aorist ἥμαρτον that the sinning of all is contained in that of Adam, although this sense must be considered as grammatically possible. It is not however the only grammatically defensible sense. InRom. 3:23, ἥμαρτον certainly does not denote such a definite past act filling only one point of time.”But we reply that the context determines that inRom. 5:12, ἥμαρτον does denote such a definite past act; see our interpretation of the whole passage, under the Augustinian Theory, pages625-627.

C. It impugns the justice of God:

(a) By regarding him as the direct creator of a vicious nature which infallibly leads every human being into actual transgression. To maintain that, in consequence of Adam's act, God brings it about that all men become sinners, and this, not by virtue of inherent laws of propagation, but by the direct creation in each case of a vicious nature, is to make God indirectly the author of sin.

(b) By representing him as the inflicter of suffering and death upon millions of human beings who in the present life do not come to moral consciousness, and who are therefore, according to the theory, perfectly innocent. This is to make him visit Adam's sin on his posterity, while at the same time it denies that moral connection between Adam and his posterity which alone could make such visitation just.

(c) By holding that the probation which God appoints to men is a separate probation of each soul, when it first comes to moral consciousness and is least qualified to decide aright. It is much more consonant with our ideas of the divine justice that the decision should have been made by the[pg 611]whole race, in one whose nature was pure and who perfectly understood God's law, than that heaven and hell should have been determined for each of us by a decision made in our own inexperienced childhood, under the influence of a vitiated nature.

On this theory, God determines, in his mere sovereignty, that because one man sinned, all men should be called into existence depraved, under a constitution which secures the certainty of their sinning. But we claim that it is unjust that any should suffer without ill-desert. To say that God thus marks his sense of the guilt of Adam's sin is to contradict the main principle of the theory, namely, that men are held responsible only for their own sins. We prefer to justify God by holding that there is a reason for this infliction, and that this reason is the connection of the infant with Adam. If mere tendency to sin is innocent, then Christ might have taken it, when he took our nature. But if he had taken it, it would not explain the fact of the atonement, for upon this theory it would not need to be atoned for. To say that the child inherits a sinful nature, not as penalty, but by natural law, is to ignore the fact that this natural law is simply the regular action of God, the expression of his moral nature, and so is itself penalty.“Man kills a snake,”says Raymond,“because it is a snake, and not because it is to blame for being a snake,”—which seems to us a new proof that the advocates of innocent depravity regard infants, not as moral beings, but as mere animals.“We must distinguish automatic excellence or badness,”says Raymond again,“from moral desert, whether good or ill.”This seems to us a doctrine of punishment without guilt. Princeton Essays, 1:138, quote Coleridge:“It is an outrage on common sense to affirm that it is no evil for men to be placed on their probation under such circumstances that not one of ten thousand millions ever escapes sin and condemnation to eternal death. There is evil inflicted on us, as a consequence of Adam's sin, antecedent to our personal transgressions. It matters not what this evil is, whether temporal death, corruption of nature, certainty of sin, or death in its more extended sense; if the ground of the evil's coming on us is Adam's sin, the principle is the same.”Baird, Elohim Revealed, 488—So, it seems,“if a creature is punished, it implies that some one has sinned, but does not necessarily intimate the sufferer to be the sinner! But this is wholly contrary to the argument of the apostle inRom. 5:12-19, which is based upon the opposite doctrine, and it is also contrary to the justice of God, who punishes only those who deserve it.”See Julius Müller, Doct. Sin. 2:67-74.

“Man kills a snake,”says Raymond,“because it is a snake, and not because it is to blame for being a snake,”—which seems to us a new proof that the advocates of innocent depravity regard infants, not as moral beings, but as mere animals.“We must distinguish automatic excellence or badness,”says Raymond again,“from moral desert, whether good or ill.”This seems to us a doctrine of punishment without guilt. Princeton Essays, 1:138, quote Coleridge:“It is an outrage on common sense to affirm that it is no evil for men to be placed on their probation under such circumstances that not one of ten thousand millions ever escapes sin and condemnation to eternal death. There is evil inflicted on us, as a consequence of Adam's sin, antecedent to our personal transgressions. It matters not what this evil is, whether temporal death, corruption of nature, certainty of sin, or death in its more extended sense; if the ground of the evil's coming on us is Adam's sin, the principle is the same.”Baird, Elohim Revealed, 488—So, it seems,“if a creature is punished, it implies that some one has sinned, but does not necessarily intimate the sufferer to be the sinner! But this is wholly contrary to the argument of the apostle inRom. 5:12-19, which is based upon the opposite doctrine, and it is also contrary to the justice of God, who punishes only those who deserve it.”See Julius Müller, Doct. Sin. 2:67-74.

D. Its limitation of responsibility to the evil choices of the individual and the dispositions caused thereby is inconsistent with the following facts:

(a) The first moral choice of each individual is so undeliberate as not to be remembered. Put forth at birth, as the chief advocates of the New School theory maintain, it does not answer to their definition of sin as a voluntary transgression of known law. Responsibility for such choice does not differ from responsibility for the inborn evil state of the will which manifests itself in that choice.

(b) The uniformity of sinful action among men cannot be explained by the existence of a mere faculty of choices. That men should uniformly choose may be thus explained; but that men should uniformly choose evil requires us to postulate an evil tendency or state of the will itself, prior to these separate acts of choice. This evil tendency or inborn determination to evil, since it is the real cause of actual sins, must itself be sin, and as such must be guilty and condemnable.

(c) Power in the will to prevent the inborn vitiosity from developing itself is upon this theory a necessary condition of responsibility for actual sins. But the absolute uniformity of actual transgression is evidence that the will is practically impotent. If responsibility diminishes as the difficulties in the way of free decision increase, the fact that these difficulties are insuperable[pg 612]shows that there can be no responsibility at all. To deny the guilt of inborn sin is therefore virtually to deny the guilt of the actual sin which springs therefrom.

The aim of all the theories is to find a decision of the will which will justify God in condemning men. Where shall we find such a decision? At the age of fifteen, ten, five? Then all who die before this age are not sinners, cannot justly be punished with death, do not need a Savior. Is it at birth? But decision at such a time is not such a conscious decision against God as, according to this theory, would make it the proper determiner of our future destiny. We claim that the theory of Augustine—that of a sin of the race in Adam—is the only one that shows a conscious transgression fit to be the cause and ground of man's guilt and condemnation.Wm. Adams Brown:“Who can tell how far his own acts are caused by his own will, and how far by the nature he has inherited? Men do feel guilty for acts which are largely due to their inherited natures, which inherited corruption is guilt, deserving of punishment and certain to receive it.”H. B. Smith, System, 350, note—“It has been said, in the way of a taunt against the older theology, that men are very willing to speculate about sinning in Adam, so as to have their attention diverted from the sense of personal guilt. But the whole history of theology bears witness that those who have believed most fully in our native and strictly moral corruption—as Augustine, Calvin, and Edwards—have ever had the deepest sense of their personal demerit. We know the full evil of sin only when we know its roots as well as its fruits.”“Causa causæ est causa causati.”Inborn depravity is the cause of the first actual sin. The cause of inborn depravity is the sin of Adam. If there be no guilt in original sin, then the actual sin that springs therefrom cannot be guilty. There are subsequent presumptuous sins in which the personal element overbears the element of race and heredity. But this cannot be said of the first acts which make man a sinner. These are so naturally and uniformly the result of the inborn determination of the will, that they cannot be guilty, unless that inborn determination is also guilty. In short, not all sin is personal. There must be a sin of nature—a race-sin—or the beginnings of actual sin cannot be accounted for or regarded as objects of God's condemnation. Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:320-328, 341—“If the deep-rooted depravity which we bring with us into the world be not our sin, it at once becomes an excuse for our actual sins.”Princeton Essays, 1:138, 139—Alternative: 1. May a man by his own power prevent the development of this hereditary depravity? Then we do not know that all men are sinners, or that Christ's salvation is needed by all. 2. Is actual sin a necessary consequence of hereditary depravity? Then it is, on this theory, a free act no longer, and is not guilty, since guilt is predicable only of voluntary transgression of known law. See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 256 sq.; Hodge, Essays, 571-638; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:61-73; Edwards on the Will, part iii, sec. 4; Bib. Sac., 20:317-320.

Wm. Adams Brown:“Who can tell how far his own acts are caused by his own will, and how far by the nature he has inherited? Men do feel guilty for acts which are largely due to their inherited natures, which inherited corruption is guilt, deserving of punishment and certain to receive it.”H. B. Smith, System, 350, note—“It has been said, in the way of a taunt against the older theology, that men are very willing to speculate about sinning in Adam, so as to have their attention diverted from the sense of personal guilt. But the whole history of theology bears witness that those who have believed most fully in our native and strictly moral corruption—as Augustine, Calvin, and Edwards—have ever had the deepest sense of their personal demerit. We know the full evil of sin only when we know its roots as well as its fruits.”

“Causa causæ est causa causati.”Inborn depravity is the cause of the first actual sin. The cause of inborn depravity is the sin of Adam. If there be no guilt in original sin, then the actual sin that springs therefrom cannot be guilty. There are subsequent presumptuous sins in which the personal element overbears the element of race and heredity. But this cannot be said of the first acts which make man a sinner. These are so naturally and uniformly the result of the inborn determination of the will, that they cannot be guilty, unless that inborn determination is also guilty. In short, not all sin is personal. There must be a sin of nature—a race-sin—or the beginnings of actual sin cannot be accounted for or regarded as objects of God's condemnation. Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:320-328, 341—“If the deep-rooted depravity which we bring with us into the world be not our sin, it at once becomes an excuse for our actual sins.”Princeton Essays, 1:138, 139—Alternative: 1. May a man by his own power prevent the development of this hereditary depravity? Then we do not know that all men are sinners, or that Christ's salvation is needed by all. 2. Is actual sin a necessary consequence of hereditary depravity? Then it is, on this theory, a free act no longer, and is not guilty, since guilt is predicable only of voluntary transgression of known law. See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 256 sq.; Hodge, Essays, 571-638; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:61-73; Edwards on the Will, part iii, sec. 4; Bib. Sac., 20:317-320.

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