Page images
PDF
EPUB

CHAPTER VIII.

ON ORIGINAL SIN.

THE doctrine of Original Sin has always been felt to be one of the most difficult and mysterious in the whole range of Christian theology. The explanations of Divines have been almost as various and conflicting as the objections of unbelievers have been unremitting and zealously sustained. How can millions, themselves innocent, be involved in moral guilt by another's transgression? How can it consist with the justice of God to inflict on them the severest penalty, and even denounce them as worthy of eternal misery, for an act of which multitudes among them never so much as heard, and the breach of a covenant to which they were never consenting parties? And even if such an extension of moral guilt beyond the first agent to millions of his posterity were just in itself, how can that constitution of things agree with the Divine benevolence, which led to such fatal results, and involved a whole race in degradation and moral ruin for a single transgression of their parent, long before their own birth? This is the hard problem, which has exercised the deepest thoughts of reflecting and pious minds, and given birth to various

hypotheses to remove the immense difficulty. There is no subject more fundamental to the present inquiry, since no aspect of Providence has suggested so many gloomy and unwilling doubts, or wilful and open blasphemies, against the wisdom and goodness of the Almighty. It has appeared to multitudes in Christian lands a dark and spectral vision, which has scared them away from the revelation of the Bible, to discover a Deity of purer and higher benevolence in the seducing bye-paths of human speculation.

The views of this doctrine among Christians themselves have varied not a little from each other. At one extreme we find the creed of Pelagius, that the sin of Adam affects his race purely by way of example, and that each individual is born into the world in a state answering almost entirely to that of Adam before he fell. At the other extremity of the scale may be placed the high Augustinian view, or perhaps rather the offshoot from it by Illyricus, who maintained that original sin was a positive substance, transmitted from Adam to all his children. Apart, however, from this gross conception, which has had very few patrons, the view itself is, that Adam and his posterity constitute simply one moral person; that they all existed in him from the first, sinned when he sinned, and fell when he fell; that his crime was committed by each of them, as well as by him; that their birth in a mortal state, and with a corrupt will, is the equitable punishment of a sin they have previously committed, as well as the source of all their later transgressions; and that in virtue of it every one

of them, infants and adults alike, is justly under the sentence of everlasting torment and misery.

This more rigid form of the doctrine, which Augustine applied consistently to prove the eternal damnation of all heathen and unbaptized infants, has found too little response in the conscience either of worldly or pious men, to have passed current without undergoing various modifications. Two or three of these varieties call for a brief notice.

And first, it has been usual, among the Reformed Divines, to conceive the whole transaction between God and our first parents under the light of a formal covenant, to which the name has been given, the covenant of works. The Creator is supposed to have promised to Adam, for himself and his posterity, eternal life in heaven, after a limited period of probation, as the reward of his sinless obedience to the Divine will, including this one positive test of submission in abstaining from the tree of knowledge. On the other hand, the penalty of disobedience was to be the forfeiture of God's favour and image, and of the grace of the Spirit, and immediate exposure to temporal, spiritual, and eternal death, both for himself and all his descendants.

Adam

accepted the covenant, not only on his own behalf, but for the whole race. He sinned, and incurred the penalty, which was exacted according to the full width of the original covenant.

The doctrine has been further modified by some recent authors. The main stress is still laid on the notion of a special and voluntary covenant; and a wide contrast

is set up between Adam's parental and federal character. But the Adamic constitution, like the Gospel, is said to be a covenant of grace, and not of works. It did not refer to a debt of Divine equity, but to gifts of sovereign grace, bestowed conditionally by charter and covenant alone. The promise was continued life in Paradise, so long as he abstained from the forbidden tree, and included also an assurance of Divine help to keep him from falling in any other way. The result of the Fall was subjection to temporal death, and the privation of supernatural grace, with a penal withdrawment of the Holy Spirit, so as to lead to actual transgression in every instance, as soon as the moral faculties begin to reveal themselves. Original Sin, on this hypothesis, is a privation of special gifts, to which man had no claim, superadded to his first state of creation. These were bestowed under covenant, on one simple condition, upon Adam and the whole race, and were lost for ever when Adam fell.

Others, to lessen the moral difficulty, would lower the meaning of the penalty. Some affirm that the death of the body is the sole result of Adam's sin to his posterity; while others include the death of the soul, in the sense of annihilation. On their view, natural immortality is a direct fruit and privilege of redemption only. The Articles of the Church of England make Original Sin consist simply in the fault or corruption of man's nature, derived from Adam by natural generation. But, in the systems of most Reformed Divines, it includes a distinct element, and the imputation of the primal act of

sin is imagined to precede, and account for, this actual participation of a corrupted nature by all mankind.

These varieties, which might easily be multiplied to a great extent, show the obscurity which still rests upon the doctrine in the minds of thoughtful men. St. Augustine, whose writings are occupied with it so largely, and have done so much to fashion it into its popular form, remarks himself that "there is here, perhaps, some secret which is reserved to be made known hereafter, by the grace of God, to holy men." And certainly we may hope, if we follow simply the light of Scripture, and use all the helps that sound reason and an upright conscience can supply, to approach nearer to a just view of the Divine economy, and clear away some of those aspersions which have been so widely cast against the wisdom and goodness of the Judge of all the earth.

I. It will be a first step towards removing the seeming antithesis between the doctrine of Original Sin and ⚫the voice of natural conscience, if we observe attentively the real proportions of revealed truth, which have been often departed from, very widely, in human and artificial systems of theology. Some Divines appear to have thought that the history of Adam's fall supplies a strictly logical and scientific key to all the records of sin and wickedness in the later history of mankind, so that every particular sin might be referred to it, and explained by it, like the motions of the planets by the law of gravitation. Hence the personal element in all transgression, which at once appeals directly to the conscience, has been thrown, in their systems, com

« PreviousContinue »