02.19. Original Sin (Peccatum Habituale)

Chapter 19 Original Sin.—( Peccatum Habituale.)

1. How is original sin to be defined?See “Confession of Faith,” Chapter 6.; “Larger Catechism,” Questions 25, 26; “Shorter Catechism,” Question 18. The phrase, original sin, is used sometimes to include the judicial imputation of the guilt of Adam’s sin, as well as the hereditary moral corruption, common to all his descendants, which is one of the consequences of that imputation. More strictly, however, the phrase original sin designates only the hereditary moral corruption common to all men from birth. In the definition of this doctrine WE DENY— That this corruption is in any sense physical, that it inheres in the essence of the soul, or in any of its natural faculties as such.

2nd. That it consists primarily in the mere supremacy of the sensual part of our nature. It is a depraved habit or bias of will.

3rd. That it consists solely in the absence of holy dispositions, because, from the inherent activity of the soul, sin exhibits itself from the beginning in the way of a positive proneness to evil. On the other hand, WE AFFIRM—

1st. That original sin is purely moral, being the innate proneness of the will to evil.

2nd. That having its seat in the will averse to the holy law of God, it biases the understanding, and thus deceives the conscience, leads to erroneous moral judgments, to blindness of mind, to deficient and perverted sensibility in relation to moral objects, to the inordinate action of the sensuous nature, and thus to corruption of the entire soul.

3rd. Thus it presents two aspects:

(l.) The loss of the original righteous habit of will.

(2.) The presence of a positively unrighteous habit.

4th. Yet from the fact that this innate depravity does embrace a positive disposition to evil, it does not follow that a positive evil quality has been infused into the soul. Because, from the essentially active nature of the soul, and from the essential nature of virtue, as that which obliges the will, it evidently follows that moral indifference is impossible; and so that depravity, which President Edwards says “comes from a defective or privative cause,” instantly assumes a positive form. Not to love God is to rebel against him, not to obey virtue is to trample it under foot. Self–love soon brings us to fear, then to hate the vindicator of righteousness.—Edwards on “Original Sin,” Part 4., sec. 2.

2. Why is this sin called original? Not because it belongs to the original constitution of our nature as it came forth from the hand of God, but because, 1st., it is derived by ordinary generation from Adam, the original root of the human race; and 2nd., it is the inward root or origin of all the actual sins that defile our lives. This sin is also technically styled Peccatum Habituale, or the sin which consists in a morally corrupt habit or state of soul, in distinction from imputed sin and actual sin.

3. How may it be proved that the doctrine of original sin does not involve the corruption of the substance of the soul?

It is the universal judgment of men that there are in the soul, besides its essence and its natural faculties, certain habits, innate or acquired, which qualify the action of those faculties, and constitute the character of the man. Those habits, or inherent dispositions which determine the affections and desires of the will, govern a man’s actions, and, when good, are the subjects of moral praise, and, when evil, the subjects of moral disapprobation on the part of all men. An innate moral habit of soul, e. g., original sin, is no more a physical corruption than any acquired habit, intellectual or moral, is a physical change.

Besides this, the Scriptures distinguish between the sin and the agent in a way which proves that the sinful habit is not something consubstantial with the sinner, Romans 7:17; “sin that dwelleth in me,”Hebrews 12:1, etc.

4. How can it be shown that original sin does not consist in disease, or merely in the supremacy of the sensuous part of our nature?

While it is true that many sins have their occasions in the inordinate appetites of the body, yet it is evident the original or root of sin cannot be in them—

1st. From the very nature of sin it must have its seat in the moral state of the voluntary principle. Disease, or any form of physical disorder, is not voluntary, and therefore not an element of moral responsibility. It is, moreover, the obligation of the will to regulate the lower sensuous nature, and sin must originate in the failure of those moral affections which would have been supreme if they still continued to reign in the will.

2nd. From the fact that the most heinous sins are destitute of any sensuous element, e. g., pride, anger, malice, and AVERSION FROM GOD.

5. How can it be proved that this innate disposition or habit of soul, which leads to sinful action, is itself sin?

1st. This innate habit of soul is a state of the will, and it is an ultimate principle that all the states as well as acts of the will related to the law of conscience are moral, i. e., either virtuous or vicious.—See above, Chapter 15., Questions 9 and 10.

2nd. These permanent habits or states of the will constitute the moral character of the agent, which all men regard as the proper subject of praise or blame.

3rd. This inherent disposition to sinful action is called “sin” in Scripture.—Romans 6:12; Romans 6:14; Romans 6:17; Romans 7:5-17. It is called “flesh” as opposed to “spiritual,”Galatians 5:17; Galatians 5:24; also “lust,”James 1:14-15; and “old Adam” and “body of sin,”Romans 6:6; also “ignorance,”“blindness of heart,”“alienation from the life of God,” and a condition of “being past feeling,”Ephesians 4:18-19.

6. How can it be shown that original sin does not consist simply in the want of original righteousness?

1st. It follows from the inherent activity of the human soul, and from the inherently obliging power of moral right, that the absence of right dispositions immediately leads to the formation of positively sinful dispositions. Not to love God is to hate him, not to obey him is to disobey. Disobedience leads to fear, to falsehood, and to every form of sin.—See above, Question 1.

2nd. As a matter of fact, innate depravity exhibits its positive character by giving birth to sins, involving positive viciousness in the earliest stages of accountable agency, as pride, malice, etc.

3rd. The Scriptures assign it a positive character, when they apply to it such terms as “flesh,”“concupiscence,”“old man,”“law in the members,”“body of sin,”“body of death,”“sin taking occasion,”“deceived me,” and “wrought all manner of concupiscence.”—Romans 7:1-25.

7. How may it be shown that it affects the entire man?

Original sin has its seat in the will, and primarily consists in that proneness to unlawful dispositions and affections which is the innate habit of the human soul. But the several faculties of the human soul are not separate agents. The one soul acts in each function as an indivisible agent, its several faculties or powers after their kind mutually qualifying one another. When the soul is engaged in understanding an object, or an aspect of any object, e. g., mathematics, with which its affections are not concerned, then its action has no moral element. But when it is engaged in understanding an object with respect to which its depraved affections are perversely interested, its action must be biased. The consequence, therefore, of the sinful bias of the will, in its controlling influence over the exercises of the soul, in all its functions, will be—

1st. The understanding, biased by the perverted affections, acting concurrently with the moral sense in forming moral judgments, will lead to erroneous judgments, to a deceiving conscience, and to general “blindness of mind” as to moral subjects.

2nd. The emotions and sensibilities which accompany the judgments of conscience in approving the good and in condemning the wrong, by repeated outrage and neglect, will be rendered less lively, and thus lead to a seared conscience, and general moral insensibility.

3rd. In a continued course of sinful action the memory will become defiled with its stores of corrupt experiences, from which the imagination also must draw its materials.

4th. The body in its turn will be corrupted.

(1.) Its natural appetites will become inordinate in the absence of proper control.

(2.) Its active powers will be used as “instruments of unrighteousness unto sin.”

5th. The Scriptures teach—

(1.) That the understanding of the “natural man” is depraved as well as his affections.—1 Corinthians 2:14; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 4:18; Colossians 1:21.

(2.) That regeneration involves illumination as well as renewal of the heart.—Acts 26:18; Ephesians 1:18; Ephesians 5:8; 1 Peter 2:9.

(3.) That truth addressed to the understanding is the great instrument of the Spirit in regeneration and sanctification.—John 17:17; James 1:18.

8. What is meant by the affirmation that man by nature is totally depraved? By this orthodox phrase IT IS NOT TO BE UNDERSTOOD,

1st. that the depraved man has not a conscience. The virtuousness of an agent does not consist in his, having a conscience, but in the conformity of the dispositions and affections of his will to the law of which conscience is the organ. Even the devils and lost souls retain their sense of right and wrong and those vindicatory emotions with which conscience is armed.

Or,

2nd., that unregenerate men, possessing a natural conscience, do not often admire virtuous character and actions in others.

Or, 3rd., that they are incapable of disinterested affections and actions in their various relations with their fellow men.

Or, 4th, that any man is as thoroughly depraved as it is possible for him to become, or that each man has a disposition inclined to every form of sin. But IT IS MEANT—

1st. That virtue consisting in the conformity of the dispositions of the will, with the law of God, and the very soul of virtue consisting in the allegiance of the soul to God, every man by nature is totally alienated in his governing disposition from God, and consequently his every act, whether morally indifferent, or conformed to subordinate principles of right, is vitiated by the condition of the agent as a rebel.

2nd. That this state of will, leads to a schism in the soul, and to the moral perversion of all the faculties of soul and body (see preceding question).

3rd. The tendency of this condition is to further corruption in endless progression in every department of our nature, and this deterioration would, in every case, be incalculably more rapid than it is, if it were not for the supernatural restraints of the Holy Ghost.

4th. There remains no recuperative element in the soul. Man can only and forever become worse, without a miraculous recreation.

9. What proof of the doctrine of original sin may be derived from the history of the Fall?

God created man in his own image, and pronounced him as a moral agent to be very good. He threatened him with death in the very day that he should eat the forbidden fruit, and only in the sense of spiritual death was that threat literally fulfilled. The spiritual life of man depends upon communion with God; but God drove him at once forth in anger from his presence. Consequently the present spiritual state of man is declared to be “death,” the very penalty threatened.—Ephesians 2:1; 1 John 3:14.

10. What is the account which the Scriptures give of human nature, and how can the existence of an innate hereditary depravity be thence inferred? The Scriptures represent all men as totally alienated from God, and morally depraved in their understandings, hearts, wills, consciences, bodies, and actions.—Romans 3:10-23; Romans 8:7; Job 14:4; Job 15:14; Genesis 6:5; Genesis 8:21; Matthew 15:19; Jeremiah 7:9; Is. 1:5,6. This depravity of man is declared to be, 1st., of the act, 2nd., of the heart,

3rd., from birth and by nature, 4th, of all men without exception.—Psalms 51:5; John 3:6; Ephesians 2:3; Psalms 58:3.

11. State the evidence for the truth of this doctrine afforded by Romans 5:12-21.

Paul here proves that the guilt—legal obligation to suffer the penalty—of Adam’s sin is imputed to us, by the unquestionable fact that the penalty of the law which Adam broke has been inflicted upon all. But that penalty was all penal evil, death physical, spiritual, eternal. Original sin, therefore, together with natural death, is in this passage assumed as an undeniable fact, upon which the apostle constructs his argument for the imputation of Adam’s sin.

12. How is the truth of this doctrine established by the fact of the general prevalence of sin?

All men, under all circumstances, in every age of the world, and under whatever educational influences they may be brought up, begin to sin uniformly as soon as they enter upon moral agency. A universal effect must have a universal cause. Just as we judge that a man is by nature an intelligence, because the actions of all men involve an element of intelligence, so we as certainly judge that man is by nature depraved, because all men act sinfully.

13. If Adam sinned, though free from any corruption of nature, how does the fact that his posterity sin prove that their nature is corrupt? The fact that Adam sinned proves that a moral agent may be at once sinless and fallible, and that such a being, left to himself, may sin, but with respect to his posterity the question is, what is the universal and uniform cause that every individual always certainly begins to sin as soon as he begins to act as a moral agent? The question in the one case is, How could such an one sin? but in the other, Why do all certainly sin from the beginning?

14. By what other objections do Pelagians and others attempt to avoid the force of the argument from the universality of sin?

1st. Those who maintain that the liberty of indifference its essential to responsible agency, and that volitions are not determined by the precedent moral state of the mind, attribute all sinful actions to the fact that the will of man is unconditioned, and insist that his acting as he acts is an ultimate fact. In answer, we acknowledge that a man always wills as he pleases, but the question is, Why he always certainly please to will wrong? An indifferent cause cannot account of a uniform fact. The doctrine of original sin merely assigns the depraved character of the will itself as the uniform cause of the uniform fact.

2nd. Others attempt to explain the facts by the universal influence of sinful example.

We answer:

(1.) Children uniformly manifest depraved dispositions at too early a period to admit of that sin being rationally attributed to the influence of example.

(2.) Children manifest depraved dispositions who have been brought up from birth in contact with such influences only as would incline them to holiness.

3rd. Others, again, attempt to explain the facts by referring to the natural order in the development of our faculties, e. g., first the animal, then the intellectual, then the moral:thus the lower, by anticipating, subverts the higher. For answer, see above, Question 4. Besides, while this is an imperfect explanation, it is yet a virtual admission of the fact of innate hereditary depravity. Such an order of development, leading to such uniform consequences, is itself a total corruption of nature.

15. What argument for the doctrine of original sin may be derived from the universality of death? The penalty of the law was death, including death spiritual physical, and moral. Physical death is universal; eternal death, temporarily suspended for Christ’s sake, is denounced upon all the impenitent. As one part of the penalty has taken effect, even upon infants, who have never been guilty of actual transgression, we must believe the other part to have taken effect likewise. Brutes, who also suffer and die, are not moral agents, nor were they ever embraced in a covenant of life, and therefore their case, although it has its own peculiar difficulties, is not analogous to that of man. Geology affirms that brutes suffered and died in successive generations before the creation and apostasy of man. This is at present one of the unsolved questions of God’s providence.—See Hugh Miller’s “Testimonies of the Rocks.”

16. How may it be proved by what the Scriptures say concerning regeneration? The Scriptures declare—

1st. That regeneration is a radical change of the moral character, wrought by the Holy Ghost in the exercise of supernatural power. It is called “a new creation;” the regenerated are called “God’s workmanship, created unto good works,” etc. Ezekiel 36:26; Ephesians 1:19; Ephesians 2:5; Ephesians 2:10; Ephesians 4:24; 1 Peter 1:23; James 1:18.

2nd. Regeneration is declared to be necessary absolutely and universally.—John 3:3; 2 Corinthians 5:17.

17. How may it be proved from what the Scriptures say of redemption? The Scriptures assert of redemption—

1st. As to its nature, that the design and effect of Christ’s sacrifice is to deliver, by means of an atonement, all his people from the power as well as from the guilt of sin.—Ephesians 5:25-27; Titus 2:14; Hebrews 9:12-14; Hebrews 13:12.

2nd. As to its necessity, that it was absolutely necessary for all—for infants who never have committed actual sin, as well as for adults.—Acts 4:12; Romans 3:25-26; Galatians 2:21; Galatians 3:21-22; Matthew 19:14; Revelation 1:5; Revelation 5:9.

Some have essayed to answer, that Christ only redeemed infants from the “liability to sin.” But redemption being an atonement by blood, the “just for the unjust,” if infants be not sinners they cannot be redeemed. A sinless liability to sin is only a misfortune, and can admit of no redemption.

18. State the evidence afforded by infant baptism.

Baptism, as circumcision, is an outward rite, signifying the inward grace of spiritual regeneration and purification.—Mark 1:4; John 3:5; Titus 3:5; Deuteronomy 10:16; Romans 2:28-29. Both of these rites were designed to be applied to infants. The application of the sign would be both senseless and profane if infants did not need, and were not capable of the thing signified.

19. If God is the author of our nature, and our nature is sinful, how can we avoid the conclusion that God is the author of sin? That conclusion would be unavoidable if, 1st., sin was an essential element of our nature, or if;

2nd., it inhered in that nature originally, as it came from God. But we know, 1st., that sin originated in the free act of man, created holy, yet fallible;

2nd., that entire corruption of nature sprang from that sin; and,

3rd., that in consequence of sin God has justly withdrawn the conservative influences of his Holy Spirit, and left men to the natural and penal consequences of their sin.—See Calvin’s “Institutes,” Lib. 2., Chap. 1., secs. 6 and 11.

20. How can this doctrine be reconciled with the liberty of man and his responsibility of his acts?

1st. Consciousness affirms that a man is always responsible for his free actions, and that his act is always free when he wills as, upon the whole, he prefers to will.

2nd. Original sin consists in corrupt dispositions, and, therefore, in every sin a man acts freely, because he acts precisely as he is disposed to act.

3rd. Consciousness affirms that inability is not inconsistent with responsibility. The inherent habit or disposition of the will determines his action, but no man, by a mere choice or volition, can change his disposition.—See Chap. 18., Questions 4 and 25.

21. How is this corruption of nature propagated?

See below, under Chapter 21.

22. In what sense may sin be the punishment of sin?

1st. In the way of natural consequence (1) in the interior working of the soul itself; in the derangement of its powers; (2) in the entangled relations of the sinner with God and his fellowmen.

2nd. In the way of judicial abandonment Because of sin God withdraws his Holy Spirit, and further sin is the consequence.—Romans 1:24-28.

23. What do the Scriptures teach concerning the sin against the Holy Ghost?

See Matthew 12:31-32; Mark 3:29-30; Hebrews 6:4-6; Hebrews 10:26-27; 1 John 5:16.

These passages appear to teach that this sin consists in the malicious rejection of the blood of Christ, and of the testimony of the Holy Ghost against evidence and conviction. It is called the sin against the Holy Ghost because he is immediately present in the heart of the sinner, and his testimony and influence is directly rejected and contemptuously resisted. It is unpardonable, not because its guilt transcends the merit of Christ, or the state of the sinner transcends the renewing power of the Holy Ghost, but because it consists in the final rejection of these, and because at this limit God has sovereignly staid his grace.

24. What are the main positions involved in the Pelagian doctrine of original sin? The system called Pelagian originated with Pelagius in his controversies with St. Augustine in the beginning of the fifth century, and was afterwards completely developed by the disciples of Faustus and Laelius Socinus in the sixteenth century, is embodied in the Racovian Catechism, and prevails among the English and American Unitarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It embraces the following points:

1st. Adam’s sin affected himself alone.

2nd. Infants are born in the same moral state in which Adam was created.

3rd. Every man possesses ability to sin or to repent and obey whenever he will.

4th. Responsibility is in exact proportion to ability; and God’s demands are adjusted to the various capacities (moral as well as constitutional) and circumstances of men.

25. What are the main positions involved in the Semipelagian doctrine?

According to the critical estimate of Wiggers in his “Hist. Present. of Augustinianism and Pelagianism,” Pelagianism regards man as morally and spiritually well. Semipelagianism regards him as sick. Augustinianism regards him as dead. The current positions of Semipelagianism during the middle ages were—

1st. Denial of the imputation of the guilt of Adam’s sin.

2nd. Acknowledgment of a morbid condition of man’s moral nature from birth by inheritance from Adam.

3rd. Which morbid condition is not itself sin but the certain cause of sin.

4th. It involves the moral powers of the soul to such an extent that no man can fulfill the requirements either of the law or of the gospel without divine assistance. Man, however, has the power to begin to act aright, when God seeing his effort, and knowing that otherwise it would be fruitless, gives him the gracious help he needs. The doctrine of the Arminians, and the “Synergism” of Melanchthon amount practically to very much the same thing with the statements just made. The main difference is that the Semipelagians held that man can and must begin the work of repentance and obedience when God instantly cooperates with him. While the Arminians and Synergists held that man is so far depraved that he needs grace to dispose and enable him to begin as well as to continue and to succeed in the work, but that all men as a matter of fact have the same common grace acting upon them, which grace effects nothing until the man voluntarily cooperates with it, when it becomes efficacious through that cooperation. The Greek Church, which occupies the same general position as to original sin and grace, holds—

1st. Original sin is not voluntary and therefore not true sin.

2nd. The influence of Adam extends only to the sensuous, and not to the rational nor moral nature of his descendants, and hence it extends to their will only through the sensuous nature.

3rd. Infants are guiltless because they possess only a physical propagated nature.

4th. The human will takes the initiative in regeneration but needs divine assistance. This is Semipelagianism. While the corresponding Arminian position is that grace takes the initiative in regeneration but depends for its effect upon human cooperation.

26. What is the New Haven view on this subject?

Dr. Nathaniel W. Taylor, of New Haven, the prince of American new school theology, taught that sin consists solely in acts of the will; that “original sin is man’s own act, consisting in a free choice of some object rather than God as his chief good.” He includes in this definition the permanent governing preference of the will, which determines special and transient acts of choice; which preference is formed by each human being as soon as he becomes a moral agent, and is uniformly a preference of some lesser good in place of God. He maintains also that the nature of man, in the condition in which it comes into being, in consequence of Adam’s fall, is the occasion, not the cause, of all men invariably making a wrong moral preference, and consequently original sin is by nature in the sense that the will enacts it freely though uniformly as occasioned by nature, yet that the nature itself; or its inherent tendency to occasion sin, is not itself sin, or illdeserving.—See “Concio ad Clerum,” New Haven, 1828, and Harvey’s Review thereof 27. What is the Romish doctrine as to the change effected In the moral nature of man by the fall?

See below the public statements of the various churches.

28. What distinction do the Romanists make between mortal and venial sins? By mortal sins they mean those that turn away the soul from God, and forfeit baptismal grace. By venial sins they mean those which only impede the course of the soul to God. See below Bellarmin, quoted under “Authoritative Statement of Church Doctrine,” etc. The objections are—

1st. This distinction is never made in the Scriptures.

2nd. Except for the sacrifice of Christ, every sin is mortal.—James 2:10; Galatians 3:10. THE AUTHORITATIVE STATEMENTS OF CHURCH DOCTRINE.

ROMISH DOCTRINE.—“Council of Trent,” Sess. 5. Song of Solomon 2:1-17.—“If any one shall assert that the apostasy of Adam injured himself alone and not his posterity; and that he lost the sanctity and righteousness received from God, for himself alone and not also for us, his posterity, or that the stain which results from the sin of disobedience, death, and physical evils only have overflowed over the whole human race, and not also sin which is the disease of the soul— anathema sit.”Ib., Sess. and Cap. 1. “The Holy Synod declares that in order properly to understand the doctrine of justification it is necessary that every one should acknowledge and confess that since all men lost their innocence in the apostasy of Adam, so that . . . . they are servants of sin, under the power of the devil and of death . . . nevertheless in them free will is by no means extinct although it is weakened as to its strength and biased.”Ib., Sess. 6., Song of Solomon 5:1-16.—“If any one shall say that the free will of man has been lost and extinguished in consequence of the sin of Adam. . . . anathema sit.” Song of Solomon 7:1-13.—“If any one shall say that all works performed by a man anterior to justification (regeneration), from whatever reason performed, are true sins which merit the hatred of God, or that the more vehemently one may strive to dispose himself to grace, only the more grievously he sins— anathema sit.”

Bellarmin, “Amiss. Gratia,” 3. 1.—“The penalty which properly stands over against the first sin, is the loss of original righteousness and of the supernatural gifts with which God had furnished our nature. ”De Gratia primi hom., 1.—“They (the Catholics) teach that, through the sin of Adam the whole man was truly deteriorated, but that he has not lost free will nor any other of the dona naturalia, but only the dona supernaturalia.” Ib., e. 5.—“Wherefore the state of man since the fall of Adam does not differ more from his state in purls naturalibus (i. e., as created and antecedent to his endowment with the dona supernaturalia, see Statement of Romish Doctrine end of Ch. 16.) than a man robbed of his clothes differs from one originally naked, neither is human nature any worse (if you subtract original guilt) nor does it labor under greater ignorance and infirmity, than it was and did as created in puris natural ibus. Whence it follows that corruption of nature does not result from the loss of any gift, nor from the accession of any evil quality, but only from the loss of the supernatural gift because of the sin of Adam. ”

“Amiss. Gra.,” 5. 5.—“The question between us and our adversaries is not whether human nature has been grievously depraved through the sin of Adam. For that we freely confess. Neither is the question whether this depravity pertains in any manner to original sin, so that it may be spoken of as the material of that sin. But the whole controversy is whether that corruption of nature and especially concupiscence per se and of its own nature, as it is found in the baptized and justified, is properly original sin. This the Catholics deny.”

LUTHERAN DOCTRINE.—“Formula Concordioe,” p. 640.—“(It is to be believed)—

1st. That this hereditary evil is fault or guilt (ill–desert) by which on account of the disobedience of Adam and Eve, we all are made subject to the wrath of God, and are by nature children of wrath as the Apostle testified (Romans 5:12 ff, Ephesians 2:3).

2nd. That there is through all a total want, defect, and privation of that original righteousness concreated in Paradise, or of that image of God in which man in the beginning was created in truth, holiness, and righteousness; and there is at the same time that impotency and incapacity, that weakness and stupidity, by which man is rendered utterly incapable of all things divine or spiritual. . . .

3rd. Moreover that original sin in human nature does not only involve the total loss and absence of all good in matters spiritual and pertaining to God; but that also in the place of the lost likeness to God there is in man an inward, most evil, profound (like an abyss), inscrutable, and ineffable corruption of the whole nature and of all the powers, and primarily in the principle and superior faculties of the soul, in the mind, intellect, heart, and will.”

Ib., p. 645.—“But although this original sin infects and corrupts the whole nature of man, as a kind of spiritual poison and leprosy (as Dr. Luther says), so that now in our corrupted nature it is not possible to show to the eye these two apart, the nature alone, or the original sin alone; nevertheless that corrupt nature, or substance of the corrupt man, the body and soul, or the man himself as created by God in whom the original sin dwells, is not one and the same with that original sin which dwells in the nature or essence of man and corrupts it, just as in the body of a leper, the leprous body and the leprosy itself which is in the body, are not one and the same.”

REFORMED DOCTRINE.—“Belgic Confession,” Art. 15.—“( Peccatum originis) is that corruption of the whole nature and that hereditary vice, by which even themselves in their mothers’ wombs are polluted, and which, as a root, produces every kind of sin in man, and is therefore so base and execrable in the sight of God, that it suffices to the condemnation of the human race.”

“Gallic Confession,” Art. 11.—“We believe that this vice ( originis) is true sin, which makes all and every man, not even excepting little infants, hitherto hiding in the womb of their mothers, deserving (reos) before God, of eternal death. ”

“Thirty–Nine Articles of Ch. of Eng.,” Art. 9.—“(Original or birth sin) is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God’s wrath and damnation.”

REMONSTRANT DOCTRINE.—“Apol. Confession Remonstrant., p. 84.—”They (the Remonstrants) do not regard original sin as sin properly so called, nor as an evil which as a penalty, in the strict sense of that word, passes over from Adam upon his posterity, but as an evil, infirmity, or vice, or whatever name it may be designated by, which is propagated from Adam, deprived of original righteousness, to his posterity.

Limborch“Theol. Christ.,” 3. 3, 4.—“We confess also that infants are born less pure than Adam was created, and with & certain propensity to sinning, but this they receive not so much from Adam, as from their immediate parents, since if it were from Adam, it ought to be equal in all men. But now it is in the highest degree unequal, and ordinarily children are inclined to the sins of their parents.”

SOCINIAN DOCTRINE.—“Racovian Catechism,” p. 294.—“And the fall of Adam, since it was one act, could not have had the power of corrupting the nature of Adam himself, much less that of his posterity. We do not deny, however, that from the constant habit of sinning, the nature of man has become infected with a certain fall and excessive proclivity to sinning. But we deny that this is per se sin, or of that nature.”