LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 Theological Seminary, 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 < BT 701 .B535 1871 
 Bersier, Eug T ene, 1831-1889 
 £ The oneness of the race in 
 , its fall and its future 
 

 
 
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 ONENESS OF THE RACE 
 
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 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/onenessofraceiniOObers 
 
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 ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 ‘‘But not as the offence, so also is the free gift. For if 
 through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace 
 of God and the gift by grace, which is by one man Jesus Christ, 
 hath abounded unto many.” —Rom. v. 15. 
 
 On the banks of the Nile and the Euphrates, in the 
 places now solitary and desolate, where once stood 
 famous cities, there are found year by year traces 
 of ancient civilisation. Stones still remain there, 
 covered with inscriptions before which science stands 
 silent, baffled and ignorant; for ages they have kept 
 in their mysterious characters the secret of ancient 
 days, which the future has yet to decipher. Hordes 
 of conquering barbarians have swept by them, looking 
 at them only in dull, savage wonderment. Arabs 
 have pitched their tents around, or slept in their 
 
 B 
 
2 
 
 The Oneness of the Race . 
 
 sheltering shadow, without a thought of the departed 
 greatness of which they are the memorials. But let a 
 few more years pass, and the penetrating eye of some 
 scholar of genius will decipher, in these almost ob¬ 
 literated characters, the history of the first ages of the 
 world. The past will spring in renewed life out of 
 those dark deeps, in which it seemed for ever buried) 
 strange revelations will astonish our descendants; and 
 these stones, mute to-day, will tell to the men of the 
 twentieth century what hopes and thoughts were 
 cherished in the world two thousand years before 
 Christ. 
 
 This idea presented itself to my mind, as I was 
 thinking of those great truths of revelation, which he 
 for ages undiscovered and yet are destined one day to 
 flood the world with light. Such are the truths of 
 the oneness of God, and the oneness of the family of 
 man, written in the first pages of Genesis, and yet 
 ignored through ages of paganism and barbarism, 
 till Jesus Christ came to reveal them anew to the 
 world ; such are some of the grand elements of gospel 
 truth, over which a veil has hung for eighteen cen¬ 
 turies, and which are only now first apprehended by 
 the human conscience, and recognised as the ideal to 
 which its highest aspirations tend. Who dreamed, in 
 the dark days of the middle ages, of the new lights 
 
Original Sin. 3 
 
 which were to arise out of those inspired pages? 
 Who would have thought that in them the modern 
 world would discover not only the charter of spiritual 
 enfranchisement, but the secret of all progress and 
 of all social and political reformation ? 
 
 The subject we are about to treat has suggested 
 this train of reflection. There is a truth which seems 
 to be the discovery of our age, and which, rightly 
 understood, is, we are told, to throw new light on all 
 the problems of philosophy, history, and social order. 
 This is what is called the solidarity of man. By this 
 term is meant that mankind forms one body, not in a 
 figure of speech merely, but as an actual fact; that in 
 his physical, intellectual, and moral nature, man is 
 linked to his fellows by bonds close, intimate, and 
 strong, which need to be clearly recognised. Science 
 affirms that a child who throws a pebble into the 
 ocean produces a vibration which, passing from 
 molecule to molecule, extends to the very ends of 
 the world; and it asserts on good grounds, that the 
 same law of transmission prevails in the domain of 
 intelligence and of will. This is what is meant by 
 the law of solidarity. 
 
 Now this truth, which is spoken of as new, was 
 eighteen centuries ago contained in the writings of 
 St. Paul; it is the doctrine which underlies and ex- 
 
4 
 
 The Oneness of the Race . 
 
 plains the whole epistle to the Romans; it is the very 
 truth which he, the old Jew, old Pharisee, old sectary, 
 placed in the centre of history as the sole explanation 
 possible of the destinies of mankind. 
 
 Let us now enter directly on this great subject, and 
 follow in our study of it the order observed by St. 
 Paul himself. We shall treat first of this truth as 
 we trace it in the fall, by which we may be led, 
 secondly, to see the operation of the same principle 
 
 in REDEMPTION. 
 
 St. Paul in the opening of his epistle to the 
 Romans boldly faces the universal fact of evil evil 
 to which he gives its true, Bible name of sin. He 
 describes it in graphic characters ; he tears asunder 
 all the veils behind which human pride seeks to 
 shelter itself; he shows the presence of evil, not only 
 in those exceptional excesses and monstrous forms, 
 those unnatural crimes which he brands with such 
 holy indignation, but in the very source of the life, 
 deep rooted in the soul, poisoning all the thoughts, 
 desires, and affections of the human creature, and 
 producing its natural fruits—suffering, condemnation, 
 death. 
 
 Whence then, he asks, comes this terrible calamity, 
 this universal evil? Turning to the page of ancient 
 revelation, he does not hesitate to answer that the 
 
Original Sin. 5 
 
 one, first, transgression has brought upon us sin, and 
 death its due reward: “by one man sin entered into 
 
 the world, and death by sin.” 
 
 This is what is called the Scripture doctiine of 
 original sin , a doctrine disputed, ridiculed, attached 
 by every weapon of scorn and satire, but which 
 I, a disciple of St. Paul, accept without shame or 
 hesitation, not blindly, but with a firm and logical 
 conviction, because to me it seems, of all the pro¬ 
 posed solutions of the problems of evil, the only one 
 which recognises all the gravity of the case, which 
 escapes fatalism, which assigns an adequate cause for 
 our misery, while it leaves unshaken that foundation 
 of moral order—human responsibility. 
 
 There may be some who repudiate this doctrine 
 with preconceived disdain or invincible repugnance. 
 I would beg them to consider, first, that Paul has 
 some right to be listened to by them, were it only on 
 this ground, that he was one of the greatest spiritual 
 emancipators of humanity. I would ask them to 
 remember further, that if faith has its prejudices, it is 
 at least possible that incredulity may also be preju¬ 
 diced ; that before allowing themselves to be offended 
 by a word it would be well to examine what that 
 word really signifies; and that those who claim the 
 most unbiassed regard for truth ought to be the 
 
5 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 last to say, “ Can any good thing come out of 
 Nazareth?” 
 
 Let us however start with a right understanding, 
 lest we be arming ourselves to fight with phantoms. 
 The doctrine of original sin is often presented in 
 
 a manner which is widely different from that of 
 
 * 
 
 St. Paul, and against which conscience rebels with 
 reason. It is said—and here I attack a system which, 
 under the name of imputation, has long ruled theo¬ 
 logy—it is said, “ Man is condemned for the sin of 
 Adam. That sin is imputed to him as his own 
 fault. God visits, judges, condemns in us the crime 
 of our first father. See,” it is said, “ that child just 
 born; he bears upon him the seal of the first curse, 
 and if he dies unpurified by the waters of baptism 
 he is destined to suffer, some say in eternal death, 
 others the torments of that place known in Catholic 
 theology as purgatory, where he may hope, in the 
 course of years and ages, to expiate the fault which he 
 committed in being born.” * 
 
 * Rochelle Confession of Faith, Arts, x., xi.—“We believe 
 that the whole race of Adam is infected with this contagion, 
 
 which is original sin and a hereditary vice.We 
 
 believe also that this vice is truly a sin, sufficient to condemn 
 the whole human race, even little children from the womb of 
 their mothers; and that it is so accounted before God.” 
 
7 
 
 Original Sin. 
 
 <o 
 
 If this be indeed that which is intended by the 
 doctrine of original sin, then with all the strength 
 of my convictions I repudiate it. I reject it not in 
 the name of my proud and offended reason, but in 
 the name of my conscience, formed and enlightened 
 by the teaching of Scripture itself. For, if there is 
 one principle which Scripture assumes, and on which 
 it everywhere insists, it is that expressed by the pro¬ 
 phet, “The soul that hath sinned it shall die”; that 
 every one, in the words of St. Paul, shall bear his 
 own burden \ that, as says Ezekiel, the son shall 
 not bear the iniquity of the father before the 
 judgment seat of God, and that the father shall 
 not bear the iniquity of the son ; that, in a 
 
 Augsburg Confession, Art. xi.—“ It is further taught that 
 this evil or original vice is properly a sin, which brings down 
 damnation and eternal death upon those who are not 
 regenerated by baptism and the Holy Ghost.” 
 
 The old confession of sins with which the Calvinist creed 
 commences expresses in a far more just and stiiking mannei 
 the twofold fact of our original corruption and of our re¬ 
 sponsibility. “Lord God, Father almighty and eternal, we 
 acknowledge and confess before Thy sacred majesty that we 
 are poor sinners, conceived and born in corruption, . . ° 
 
 and that we transgress every day, and in divers manners, 
 Thy holy commandments ; by which transgression we draw 
 down upon us, by a just judgment, condemnation, death, 
 etc., etc. 
 
8 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 word, every one shall be judged according to his 
 own works.* 
 
 It is not imputation which Paul teaches; never 
 does he say that we shall be condemned for a fault 
 in which we had no part, and which we have 
 never knowingly and voluntarily ratified. Against 
 such a doctrine, I appeal to that invincible feeling of 
 justice which God has implanted deep in the human 
 conscience ; I appeal to the cry of the Just One 
 on the cross, “ Father, forgive them, for they know 
 not what they do.” I am ready to bow before every 
 mystery too wonderful for me, ready to submit my 
 feeble, faltering reason to the positive teachings of 
 
 * Ezekiel xviii. 20.—In opposition to this text the teaching 
 of the decalogue is often quoted : “ I the Lord thy God am 
 a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the 
 children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate 
 Me, and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love Me 
 and keep My commandments.” I would observe that the 
 decalogue is not addressing individuals but a nation : ‘ ‘ Hear, 
 O Israel,” etc. ; that the sanctions of the decalogue are 
 purely temporal, because a nation has not immortality; that 
 the consequences here spoken of are therefore the temporal con¬ 
 sequences of the sins of the fathers ; and that this declaration 
 is strictly in accordance with experience and fact. Ezekiel, 
 on the contrary, takes his stand directly on the moral ground 
 of individual responsibility. There is no contradiction between 
 him and the author of the decalogue; there is simply a difference 
 of standpoint. 
 
9 
 
 Original Sin. 
 
 revelation; but I cannot admit that God should belie 
 Himself. With Abraham I exclaim, “That be far 
 from Thee to slay the righteous with the wicked; and 
 that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be 
 far from Thee. Shall not the Judge of all the earth 
 do right?” (Gen. xviii. 25.) Take away from me 
 this hope, this faith, this certainty; and I see before 
 me only the arbitrary power of a God who terrifies 
 me; and the gospel, instead of coming as a light to 
 shine around me, good tidings to set my heart at 
 rest, only renders more dense, hopeless, and awful 
 the darkness that weighs upon my soul. 
 
 Let us then dismiss this system, and place in con¬ 
 trast to it the true teaching of St. Paul. Mystery 
 there is and must be in a subject like this, but let 
 
 us not create it where God has made none. 
 
 Where then is the mystery ? Is it in the existence 
 of evil? is it in the fall of man? But if evil had been 
 impossible there would have been no trial; man 
 would have had no power of choice, no gift of 
 liberty. Take away the liberty of the creature, and 
 what remains in creation? The splendours of the sky 
 and the glories of earth. Hark! the voice of worlds 
 filling the infinite expanse with eternal harmony; the 
 sound of many waters mysteriously moved, swelling 
 and subsiding on our shores; the chant of the wind 
 
io The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 in primeval forests; the murmur of life thrilling all 
 animated nature. See! light flashes in the sombre 
 vault of silent night; the innumerable host of stars 
 appear; the sun stretches long fiery fingers on the far 
 horizon, then comes forth in his glory, and sheds 
 floods of light and heat over awakened nature; 
 mountains mirror • themselves in quiet lakes; rivers 
 flow on, carrying freshness and life ; earth becomes a 
 garden of beauty and sweetness. There is all 
 nature endowed with eternal youth and sovereign 
 beauty. Yes: but that nature wants an interpreter, 
 that temple a priest, that concert a voice coming 
 from a free and loving heart, and saying, “ Glory to 
 God in the highest!” This was to be the part of man, 
 made in the Divine image; without man all was pas¬ 
 sive, inert, in nature, and God received only an unrea¬ 
 soning and necessary obedience. There was wanting 
 the intelligent, loving, willing being, who in the full 
 possession of liberty should respond to the love of God. 
 
 But how can we conceive of liberty without an 
 ordeal, without the possibility of a fall? Man in 
 the ordeal fell; being free, it was in his power to do 
 so. The mysteiy is not there. The mystery is here, 
 expressed in the three following questions. How ' 
 could God, who is good, and who knew what would 
 be the issue of the trial, ordain and will it ? 
 
Original Sin. 11 
 
 How could God, who is merciful, after the trial, 
 allow humanity to grow and develop itself? 
 
 How could God, who is just, permit that, in conse¬ 
 quence of the sin of our first father, we all should 
 be born sinners and inclined to evil ? 
 
 These are the questions which I wish to answer \ 
 not indeed that I can pretend to remove all mys¬ 
 tery, but that I believe the Divine word sheds at 
 least light enough upon their darkness, to satisfy our 
 consciences until the day when God will justify His 
 ways to men, and reveal Himself fully to those who, 
 in spite of appearances, have held fast faith in His 
 righteousness and love. 
 
II. 
 
 ONENESS IN THE FALL. 
 
 “ If through the offence of one many be dead, much more the 
 grace of God and the gift by grace which is by one Man, hath 
 abounded unto many.” — Rom. v. 15- 
 
 We have proposed three questions dark and difficult, 
 bearing on the fall of man. In reply to the first 
 two we say, God could undoubtedly have prevented 
 the trial which 'was to be so fatal in its issue. He 
 could after the fall of man have destroyed mankind 
 in the germ. Since He did not do so, what can we 
 conclude but that in His design, and in actual 
 fact, good was ultimately to triumph over evil ? This 
 is the teaching of St. Paul, for placing in the one 
 scale the fall of man with all its consequences, and in 
 the other redemption, he makes the balance incline 
 in favour of the latter. “ If by the sin of one all are 
 dead, much more the grace of God and His free gift 
 shall be bestowed abundantly upon all, by the grace 
 of one Man—Jesus Christ! ”* (Rom. v. 15.) 
 
 # This rendering, while it appears less literal, is really more 
 faithful to the sense. The word many in the authorized 
 
Oneness in the Fall. 
 
 *3 
 
 Is not this the significance of the prophetic 
 declaration given at the gates of Eden, that the seed 
 of the woman should, bruise the serpent s head ? 
 (Gen. iii. 15.) Thus from the beginning God held 
 out to guilty and fallen man the hope of salvation. 
 It is not true then that the curse was final and 
 unconditional. Blessing was still bound up with it. 
 The primeval decree, “ Be fruitful and multiply, and 
 replenish the earth,” received its fulfilment; and the 
 mother beholding her newborn child, and leading 
 in its smile a reflection of the Divine goodness, 
 still said like Eve when Seth was born into the 
 world, “ I have gotten a man from the Lord.” There 
 was blessing in the trial itself, in the weary sweat 
 in which man toiled, in the tears which watered the 
 upturned furrows; and the earth, beautiful still in 
 spite of the thorns and thistles which covered it, 
 spoke to man of the watchful care of God. It is 
 hard, I know, and to mere human reason impossible, 
 to see the greatness of the reparation which is to 
 balance, nay to outweigh, the griefs, iniquities, bur¬ 
 dens under which humanity groans. It is not in the 
 
 version points to a limited number, while the original word 
 (oi ttoWoL) puts the plurality of mankind in contrast to the one 
 
 man. 
 
14 The Oneness of the Race . 
 
 midst of the battle, in the field reeking with the slain, 
 in the smoke of artillery, and among the cries of the 
 wounded and the dying, that the results of victory 
 can be appreciated: but in this conflict victory itself 
 is certain; it will be the sure close of this long 
 drama, of these anxieties, distresses, cruel vicissi¬ 
 tudes under which our souls bleed. Let us remember 
 also that from the depths of our ignorance and little¬ 
 ness we cannot measure the purposes of God. We 
 see only chaos and confusion j He to whom a thou¬ 
 sand years are but as a day sees the final issue. For 
 more than fifty centuries men watched the starlit sky, 
 noted the changes of the planets, and endeavoured to 
 discover the laws which governed their movements; 
 they took careful observations, made elaborate 
 calculations, and yet the law of the harmony of the 
 heavens remained a mystery. The stars were still 
 supposed to follow fantastic circles which no rule of 
 science could explain; their orbits formed a labyrinth 
 of which the most learned failed to find the clue. 
 One day a man of genius said: “ The sun and not 
 the earth is the centre from which the worlds must 
 be regarded.” At once the harmony appeared, 
 planets and their satellites moved in regular orbits, 
 the system of the universe was revealed. God is 
 the sun and the true centre of the spiritual world; 
 
Oneness in the Fall. 
 
 15 
 
 only in the light in which He dwells can the destinies 
 of man be truly read. 
 
 Much has been gained, however, when we can 
 once believe in the final victory of God, in the 
 ultimate triumph of good over evil; but if this 
 suggests a possible solution to the questions why 
 God permitted the possibility of evil, and why He 
 did not at once annihilate sinful humanity, it yet 
 leaves in all its obscurity the third question: why 
 the just God should have allowed us all in conse¬ 
 quence of the first fall to be born sinners and in¬ 
 clined to evil. This is the most terrible mystery of 
 all, one before which reason falters and fails. I have 
 already said that we are not condemned for a sin in 
 which we had no part; that we are called each one 
 to pass through our own personal ordeal j but in that 
 ordeal do we not ourselves fall one by one ? Sin, 
 before it is translated into act, exists as a tendency 
 in us all, we bring with us into life a corrupt and 
 vitiated nature. It is both a false and superficial 
 view of the *case to say, with Pelagius, that we sin 
 only through the force of imitation, and that apart 
 from the influence of example we should remain 
 innocent. Experience, in harmony with Scripture, 
 attests that we have by inheritance a leaning of 
 soul to that which is evil. Before we put our own 
 
16 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 lips to the cup of poison, the poison itself is already 
 in our veins. How is this fact to be reconciled with 
 the righteousness of God ? 
 
 To this question there is one answer ready and 
 easy—the denial of the fact itself. Me?i are born 
 good , say some; metis inclinations are at birth equally 
 balanced between good and evil, say others. We ask, is 
 either assertion true ? 
 
 Man is born good. I can conceive such a state¬ 
 ment flung as a challenge to Christianity in the 
 intoxication of pride, self reliance, blind confidence 
 in the future, which characterised the eighteenth 
 century in France, and which was to be followed by 
 such a fearful disenchantment. I can understand it 
 on the lips of Rousseau, that illustrious and unhappy 
 dreamer, who, while elaborating his theory of human 
 goodness, was ever ready to see an enemy in every 
 brother man. Man is good, it is said; it is society 
 which spoils him; and visionary pictures are drawn of 
 the simple son of nature amid the fair Utopia of the 
 Happy Isles. Society alone is to blame. Strange 
 sophism ! as if society could be something different 
 from the sum of the individuals composing it! as if 
 all the members of the body being sound, disease 
 was explained by attributing it to the body itself as a 
 whole ! I know the reply commonly given. We are 
 
\ 
 
 Oneness in the Fall. 17 
 
 pointed to childhood in all its innocence, simplicity, 
 purity, and asked, where is the evil, the corruption, 
 in such souls as these ? 
 
 There does indeed seem to linger in the uncon¬ 
 scious depths of a child’s eyes some reflection still of 
 a world unstained by sin; and when I look into 
 them I am reminded of the saying of the Master: 
 “ Except ye become as little children, ye cannot 
 enter into the kingdom of heaven.” But did the 
 Lord Himself, who uttered those words to read to us 
 a lesson of childlike trust and humility, ever teach 
 the goodness of human nature ? If the child is good, 
 why is the training of its moral nature accomplished 
 with so much difficulty ? Why does it need so hard a 
 struggle, such persevering efforts to eradicate pride, 
 envy, selfishness, from the heart and life? Where 
 can we find the man who is good? In what un¬ 
 known country has he found a hiding place ? When 
 did he live upon our earth ? I might appeal to the 
 experience of all past ages, and challenge the testi¬ 
 mony of history to the natural goodness of man. But. 
 let us rather turn to the witness of conscience. Man 
 is good! Who says so ? Man himself. Strange 
 verdict, in which the accused constitutes himself his 
 own judge. But for a moment let us accept it. You 
 believe yourself to be good by nature, by instinct; 
 
 c 
 
18 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 but by what law do you judge yourself? Is it by the 
 standard of the world’s morality, made in its own 
 image and satisfied if it can save appearances ? Is it 
 by the holy law of the gospel, to which your con¬ 
 science is forced to subscribe, because you know well 
 that if there be a God He cannot demand of you 
 less than that law demands? You have, we will 
 suppose, studied yourself in this light, and found 
 that you are good. You are prepared to lay open 
 the secrets of your soul, the depths of your inner 
 life, to cast aside every veil, and invite the most 
 searching gaze into your hidden thoughts. You know 
 the law of purity, and your heart spontaneously 
 obeys; the law of love, and your response is prompt 
 and intuitive. To do good is to you as natural as 
 for water to find its level, for the sailing ship to run 
 before the wind. Let all this be granted; but then 
 suffer me to say, You are to me an extraordinary 
 spectacle, a prodigy of humanity; I can scarcely be¬ 
 lieve that you belong to the same race with myself, 
 for in my soul I see the dark reverse of so fair a 
 picture; I discover such depths of misery within, 
 such obstinate resistance to the Divine law, that my 
 spirit can find full and fitting utterance only in a cry 
 for mercy and pardon. 
 
 But of what account is my testimony ? Human- 
 
Oneness in the Fall . 
 
 i9 
 
 ity need not be gauged by the measure of my soul. 
 Let us then look further and higher. Let us leave 
 this region of moral mediocrity, so thickly populated, 
 and seek out the elite of human kind. We will hear 
 on this point the testimony of pure and holy souls, 
 who have left a track of light as they passed through 
 the world, who have wrought miracles of love and self 
 sacrifice among their fellows, and as we look on 
 whom it would seem possible to believe in native 
 goodness. Find me among these one who avows 
 that he has derived from his own nature the heroism 
 which astonishes and humbles us. Do you not know 
 that, on the contrary, the more holy men have been, 
 the more deeply they have felt their misery, their 
 incurable weakness? The deepest, most pathetic 
 confessions of sin have come from those whose lives 
 appeared most completely under the influence of 
 good. From the depths of a heart overflowing with 
 love and self sacrifice, Paul calls himself a miserable 
 man, the chief of sinners ; it is only self complacence, 
 shutting out the all searching light, that can make 
 any pretence to native purity. We are prone to evil. 
 This is the cry of the human conscience. 
 
 I know well that in our day an attempt is made 
 to weaken the force of this admission of the con¬ 
 science, by giving it a natural explanation. Guilt, 
 
20 
 
 The Oneness of the Race . 
 
 it is said, is a generous illusion arising from the 
 following fact. Man is in part of animal nature, 
 but he has within him an ideal law which is one 
 day to be realised. As however it is only possible 
 for him to rise by degrees to the fulfilment of this 
 law, he is painfully conscious of failure, and groans 
 over the distance which yet divides the real from the 
 ideal. This regret he calls repentance. Evil in its 
 essence is only imperfection, not the consequence 
 of a past transgression. Repentance is not the ex¬ 
 pression of real culpability, but the dim and vague 
 presentiment of a vast progress yet to be accom¬ 
 plished. 
 
 This explanation I repudiate in the name of 
 humanity. It contains a sophistical confusion of two 
 moral facts, very distinct from each other, and which 
 we do not in reality confound—the consciousness of 
 a fault committed, and the consciousness of progress 
 yet to be accomplished. It is a mere tiick of argu¬ 
 ment to treat these two as one and the same. Re¬ 
 pentance is something essentially distinct from the 
 simple desire to advance, to attain to a higher degree 
 of progress. The child feels no repentance for his 
 lack of manly strength; the schoolboy is not peni¬ 
 tent because he does not possess the learning of the 
 master. We can conceive of moral progress carried 
 
Oneness in the Fall. 
 
 21 
 
 on without the admixture of evil at any stage. Such 
 was the human development of Jesus Christ. He 
 increased in wisdom, in knowledge, in obedience, 
 and yet never knew either sin or repentance. # 
 
 Our own experience is utterly different. As far 
 back as memory can reach, we are conscious of 
 having violated a righteous law; we are not imperfect 
 only, we are fallen. 
 
 We are born in sin; this is the bitter confession we 
 
 % 
 
 are bound to make, this is the true starting point of 
 all religion. 
 
 And here we reach the very heart of our subject. 
 Why are we born in sin ? St. Paul replies: “ By 
 one man sin entered into the world. He asserts 
 the law of solidarity in the fall—a mysterious, amaz¬ 
 ing law, but one without which the Christian 
 revelation has neither unity nor meaning. 
 
 However repugnant this positive declaration of 
 Christianity may be to human reason, expeiience 
 attests its truth. 
 
 See that newborn child. He is innocent of all 
 
 * “Jesus grew in. wisdom and in stature, and in favour 
 (Luke ii. 52). “ Though He was a son, yet learned He obedi- 
 enc'e by the things which He suffered” (Heb. v. 8). “ For 
 
 their sakes I sanctify Myself” (John xvii. 19). 
 
22 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 our faults; he has never gone astray; he does not 
 even know as yet good from evil. But in that 
 childish frame there is sown the seed of disease; it 
 is there, waiting only to develop itself; and in the 
 consumptive tendency, in the unsound constitution, 
 you recognise a fatal inheritance which he will carry 
 to the grave. 
 
 Sometimes the intellect will show from its first 
 awakening predispositions so strong that nothing 
 can change them. Sometimes there appears the 
 fatal transmission of moral obliquity, and the mother 
 will start as she sees the early development of a 
 tendency to hereditary vice. 
 
 Look at that man ! He was born like yourself, 
 strong for the conflict of life ; possibly a great future 
 opened before him. But from the cradle he has had 
 to carry the burden of a father’s shame. He bears a 
 name not of his own choosing, and the disgrace of 
 that name will so cling to him, by no fault of his, that 
 it will take a whole lifetime of honest struggle to 
 recover the simple right to the respect of his fellows 
 —that first necessity of social intercourse. Look yet 
 again. There is a man whose soul is capable of as 
 noble ambitions, as generous impulses, as your own. 
 But poverty has crushed him with its weight, assailed 
 him on every hand with its temptations to cunning, 
 
Oneness in the Fall. 23 
 
 lying, meanness ; his eyes opened on scenes of sin 
 and immorality, and from his very birth he has 
 breathed a vitiated atmosphere. Am I seeking out 
 exceptional cases to serve my purpose? Would God 
 these were exceptions; but what if we find whole 
 races characterised by peculiar, strongly marked, 
 hereditary features, so powerful in theii influence 
 that they almost inevitably forecast the life of the 
 individual ? Is there not something in the physi¬ 
 cal and moral constitution of the Indian, the Turk, 
 the Arab, which makes their absorption into stronger 
 nations almost a necessity ? How can we then accept 
 that superficial philosophy, which pretends to explain 
 the destiny of the individual apart from the family, 
 the race, to which he belongs. The law of solidarity 
 pervades all history. You may reject it if you will, 
 when it is presented by the Bible \ you cannot efface 
 it from the record of experience. It asserts itself in 
 that complex fact, that strange combination of matter 
 and spirit, which is called temperament, by which 
 races are distinguished. It is plainly to be read in 
 the sufferings under which nations groan age after 
 age, in consequence of the crimes of long buried 
 ancestors. It sets its seal alike on the history of 
 the world and on that of the humblest individual, 
 it is written in the blood in our veins, in our most 
 
24 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 ineradicable and secret instincts. Let us not 
 then charge the God of the Bible with foolishness, 
 since all nature joins in proclaiming the same 
 principle. 
 
I 
 
 III. 
 
 FATALISM OR FREEDOM . 
 
 “If through the offence of one many be dead, much more 
 the grace of God and the gift by grace which is by one Man hath 
 abounded unto many.”— Rom. v. 15. 
 
 In view of the grave and undeniable evidences of 
 the oneness of mankind, in its fall and in its future, 
 baffled reason has but one resource, namely, to 
 embrace a system which shall relieve man 01 his 
 responsibility. To arrive at this result, two ex 
 planations are proposed, both of which admit the 
 facts we have adduced, but absolve man by denying 
 his culpability. 
 
 One party tells us that the moral ideal is a mere 
 illusion ; that morality here below is not absolute, but 
 relative, and contingent on time and place. Such is 
 the view maintained by such writers as Renan, 
 Scherer, and Sainte Beuve, and advocated by them 
 in very specious and attractive language. If this idea 
 be true, if, as M. Sainte Beuve says, morality is in 
 
 * M. Renan makes large use of this theory, in his estimate 
 of the character of Jesus Christ. 
 
26 
 
 The Oneness of the Race . 
 
 course of development and gradual renovation, and 
 that which Christianity speaks of as human corruption 
 is only the normal and necessary elementary con¬ 
 dition, then doubtless human responsibility has nG 
 reality or meaning. 
 
 Popular as this idea has become in some quarters, I 
 confess myself unable to grasp it. It is easy to talk 
 vaguely of an expansion of morality; but when we 
 come to apply the notion to definite duties, it proves 
 a fallacy. Will the time ever come, I ask, when we 
 shall have risen to a higher morality than is con¬ 
 tained in the law of God ? or can any change of 
 place or condition so alter our moral obligations, 
 that it will be lawful for us to love God or our 
 neighbour less than the gospel enjoins ? Can any 
 lapse of ages make truth and justice other or less 
 obligatory than they are? To me, the ideal of 
 justice, holiness, and love, of which the gospel is the 
 highest expression, appears unalterable and eternal. 
 
 I may be tempted to lower its standard, so as to 
 render my life more easy and conscience more com¬ 
 pliant ; and judging from the laxity of public morals, 
 such a course cannot be unfamiliar to our age. 
 But in the interests of truth, I would rather say, with 
 Adolphe Monod : “ Save first the holy law of my 
 
 God, after that you shall save me.” This is the true 
 
Fatalism or Freedom . 
 
 27 
 
 language of an upright conscience. Let the law of 
 God be upheld, though I be condemned; for in the 
 day when that high ideal shall be impaired, the 
 hopes of humanity will perish. 
 
 We have yet another hypothesis to examine. 
 The fall of man is declared to have been a fatal 
 necessity. The facts we have mentioned are re¬ 
 ceived, and a system is built up upon them. Man, 
 we are told, is not free; he is born with strong 
 predispositions; innumerable hereditary influences 
 combine to make him what he is; he must not 
 therefore be condemned, for he is not responsible. 
 
 In this fatalism we have the explanation of evil 
 given by all antiquity, and which Plato himself ex¬ 
 pressed in magnificent language, when he taught that 
 the soul, fallen from a higher sphere, is enslaved to 
 matter in a bondage which cannot be broken. But 
 Plato’s theory has been refuted long ago. It is false, 
 that evil has its source in the senses only; it is false, 
 that the misery we suffer rises wholly from those 
 inferior portions of our nature to which Plato 
 assigned it; it often proceeds from the higher regions 
 of the intellect and the heart. Envy, hatred, pride, 
 are not the fatal productions of matter. Christianity, 
 with a more piercing eye than ancient philosophy, 
 has penetrated into the depths of our moral nature, 
 
28 
 
 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 and shown us all the elements composing it equally 
 inclined to evil. Far from representing the body as 
 the fatal cause of all our ills, and teaching, like all 
 Oriental religions, that the annihilation of the body is 
 the condition of the enfranchisement of the soul, the 
 Gospel holds out the promise of salvation, sanctifi¬ 
 cation, and immortality to the body as well as the 
 soul.* 
 
 Fatalism in our day assumes a more exact and 
 scientific form than in the Platonic philosophy. 
 There exists among us a numerous, enlightened, and 
 influential school, whose severely scientific methods 
 attract many minds, not prepared to acquiesce in 
 its conclusions. This is the positivist school, which 
 affirms that moral freedom is a mere illusion. In 
 order to prove this assertion, it employs the arguments 
 
 * It is by a perversion of the Christian idea, that that false 
 asceticism has crept into the Church which condemns, or at any 
 rate contemns, the body. Christianity proclaims the sanctifi¬ 
 cation and resurrection of the body; it speaks of it as the 
 temple of the Holy Ghost. The apostles vigorously opposed 
 Oriental asceticism. It is true that the gospel everywhere con¬ 
 demns the flesh; but all who are familiar with the language of 
 the New Testament, know that this word there signifies, not the 
 body exclusively, but the whole nature subject to sin ; thus sin¬ 
 ful dispositions, though purely spiritual, such as envy, hatred, 
 pride, and malice, are there spoken of as the fruits of the flesh. 
 
Fatalism or Freedom ♦ 
 
 29 
 
 of another school—the materialistic—with which it is 
 often confounded. It says: Positive science recog¬ 
 nises only matter, the movement of which produces 
 successively life, reason, volition. What we call 
 volition is therefore the result of a motive force. At 
 all events, in this concatenation of causes and effects, 
 there can be no place for that metaphysical hypothesis 
 which is called moral freedom. Moral freedom, 
 therefore, like other transcendental hypotheses, must 
 be consigned by science to the limbo of philosophy. 
 
 The positivist school ignores all freedom of action, 
 and by the mouth of one of its most eminent apostles 
 (M. Littre) declares that man acts always under the 
 influence of a determining cause. Unquestionably 
 this is true ; we are far from asserting that man’s will 
 acts without motive cause, but we draw a distinction 
 between these motive powers \ there are some 
 which constrain us, others which we are consciously 
 able to resist, so that if the balance inclines to their 
 side it is our will that so inclines it. The positivist 
 school admits no such distinction; it recognises no 
 measure of freedom in human will or action. i Man, ’ 
 says M. Scherer, “ forms part of -a vast system; he 
 is the subject of influences, which he in his turn 
 transmits. He is conscious of the influence of which 
 he is the agent, not of that of which he is the object. 
 
30 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 He is conscious of being a cause, not conscious of 
 being an effect. Hence arises in his mind the illusion 
 of freedom. 
 
 The positivist school treats with great contempt 
 that which it calls the Utopia of moral liberty. It 
 regards it as contrary both to science and history. 
 
 Science, which recognises only matter and force, 
 cannot admit into its domain an exceptional, unique, 
 eccentric phenomenon, which asserts for itself inde¬ 
 pendent action. History itself is made to demonstrate 
 that there is no such thing as liberty. Mr. Buckle, in a 
 book of which Stuart Mill says that it has produced a 
 complete revolution in the science of history, brings 
 forward abundant statistics to establish this fact. 
 Here, for example, is a murderer. You, the moralist, 
 look into the soul of the man; you see him led on 
 by vengeance or greed of gain, then arrested by 
 the fear of discovery, or by horror of the crime; you 
 watch this spiritual drama, this tempest of the brain, 
 as it has been called. In the reluctance, remorse, 
 terror, anguish of the criminal, you find proof of his 
 freedom of action. Pure imagination! replies Mr. 
 Buckle. Every year, in every country, there are so 
 many murders. They may be counted upon as 
 regularly as the seasons and the tides. Not only 
 can the number of murders be exactly computed in 
 
Fatalism or Freedom . 31 
 
 advance, but the mode of their execution. So many 
 victims will fall under the hatchet, so many by the 
 knife, so many by pistol shots, so many by poison. 
 Every one of those determinations, which seem to us 
 spontaneous, is thus the result of causes which can 
 be tabulated with mathematical precision. 
 
 On these premises Mr. Buckle has written a History 
 of Civilization in England, in which he proves that it 
 owes nothing to so-called moral causes, and that the 
 transformation of warfare by the invention of fire¬ 
 arms, the development of commerce, the creation of 
 means of communication, steam, electricity, have 
 done more for the amelioration of the race than 
 all religious or humanitarian principles and systems. 
 This assertion is not new to those who are acquainted 
 with the writings of Auguste Comte, the father of 
 positivism. We know in what contempt he held the 
 theory of moral freedom ; but he was consistent 
 enough to treat political liberty in the same sum¬ 
 mary manner, and his dream was of a new theocracy 
 which, in the name of science, should govern human¬ 
 ity, and hold in check the dangerous freaks of indi¬ 
 vidual freedom. On this point M. Littre differs from 
 him; but while this inconsistency does honour to his 
 nobility of soul, it is fatal to his logic. To me nothing 
 appears more dubious and untrustworthy than the 
 
32 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 political liberalism, which is based upon the deniai 
 of moral freedom. Of what avail is it to break my 
 chains, if you still leave me the wretched slave of 
 fatality ? 
 
 But what becomes of morality on this system? 
 M. Littre assures us that it is in no danger, and 
 makes good his position by the following reasoning i 
 The essence of morality consists in the idea of good 
 and evil; now this idea can exist apart from freedom 
 of action. Animals possess no freedom, and yet we 
 pass moral judgments upon them. We speak of the 
 goodness and faithfulness of the dog, the cunning of 
 the fox, the ferocity of the tiger. Men are good and 
 evil in the same way; they are so by instinct, and by 
 no choice of their own. Is education then impos¬ 
 sible? No, says M. Littre; we educate the animal 
 races, we cultivate plants. Now, to discover the 
 true method of educating man is the problem for 
 positive science, which will then proceed by sure 
 steps, repudiating all the fallacies known as moral 
 freedom, repentance, conversion, and so forth. 
 
 Here then is a new system of morality. It is not 
 wanting in clearness; nevertheless, we may not be 
 prepared at once to accept it. We must however at 
 least admit that it teaches modesty. The positivist 
 school has more than once ridiculed that Christian 
 
Fatalism or Freedom. 
 
 virtue known as humility, as unworthy of man’s 
 dignity. To us it seems that not a little humility is 
 needed, before we can accept the position assigned to 
 us in this philosophy. To place the vicious man on 
 a par with the tiger or the viper, and the good man 
 on a level with the faithful dog; to affirm that between 
 the two species there is no difference of respon¬ 
 sibility, is certainly to assume bold and original 
 ground, but ground which all experience, all true 
 knowledge of human nature, proves to be unsound. 
 Do not all great moralists, all true readers of the 
 human heart, give the lie to such a theory ? When 
 Shakspeare represents Macbeth yielding to the spirit 
 that haunts him, opening his heart to temptation, 
 admitting the thought of perfidy and murder, then 
 seeking in vain the slumber that flees his guilty couch, 
 visited’in ghostly visions by the shade of his victims; 
 when Lady Macbeth, the terrible type of criminal 
 ambition, passes before us, trying in vain with 
 convulsive movement to efface the blood-stain from 
 her hand that all the water of ocean cannot wash 
 away; when Racine reveals to us in Nero the 
 terrible progression of sin in the human heart: do 
 we feel that this is all idle declamation, that the 
 actors in these tragedies are only wild beasts who 
 have no power to change their nature? When, 
 
 D 
 
34 
 
 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 rising yet a step higher, we listen to a voice choked 
 with the sobs of agonizing repentance, when we see 
 a man’s whole soul shaken in the tempest of 
 conversion and emerging from it a new creature, 
 hating that which once he loved, loving that which 
 for a whole lifetime he had hated j is this illusion, 
 a baseless dream ? But why do I ask ? repentance, 
 regeneration, a new life—science ignores them all. 
 Humanity has been deluded, and positivism will 
 undertake its education upon new principles. 
 
 Can we read such declarations as those of the 
 positivists without being struck with the fanatic 
 determination with which science of this order sets 
 itself in our day to abase humanity ? Once men were 
 intoxicated with pride, and no anathema could be 
 terrible enough for Christianity, when it dared to 
 speak of moral servitude, of the slavery of sin. ’ Chris¬ 
 tianity, which never flatters, did indeed so speak, 
 sounding unshrinkingly the depths of our misery, 
 showing the terrible power of evil over man; but 
 did it ever quash the feeling of responsibility ? did it 
 not, even while it condemned, call rft to repentance, 
 and set before us the royal dignity with which God 
 invests His redeemed ? I cannot see the youth of 
 our schools applauding these degrading theories of 
 positivism, without quailing at heart for the future. 
 
Fatalism or Freedom . 35 
 
 These then are the rising educators of humanity; these 
 the champions of progress and emancipation ! I call 
 to mind the fathers of modem freedom, the obscure 
 men who awoke to the consciousness of something 
 within, greater than the might of Caesar, something 
 called conscience, over which brute force had no 
 power. But if this liberty has now to be surrendered, 
 if science and morals are alike to recognise but the 
 one law of force, what are we preparing for ourselves 
 but a return of despotism in theory and practice ? 
 
 We are responsible. Such is the second confes¬ 
 sion of the human conscience. We may try to stifle 
 it, but in vain. In vain I attempt to deny the evil I 
 have done ; in vain I throw the blame on circum¬ 
 stances ; in vain I seek, like the first sinner, to charge 
 God Himself as its cause. An inexorable voice 
 confounds my sophisms, and stamps my crime the act 
 of my own will. 
 
 What shall we say then ? On the one hand, 
 experience, that cannot be denied, declares that I am 
 by nature a sinner and inclined to evil. On the 
 other, conscience, not to be silenced, tells me that 
 I am responsible. What can be done but accept 
 these two facts, follow these converging lines, 
 though their meeting-point be hidden in depths 
 beyond our sight, and, remitting to God the explana- 
 
36 The Oneness of the Race . 
 
 tion of the mystery, remain at least faithful to the 
 truth we know ? This is the one safe position for the 
 Christian; it is to this the teaching of revelation 
 points. Can we go beyond it ? Has human reason 
 discovered the solution of this problem ? I think not ; 
 but I may say a word here of the systems which have 
 attempted its solution. 
 
 These systems may be reduced to two. The one 
 assumes the pre-existence of individual souls.* The 
 other supposes that, before entering upon our 
 personal existence here, we shared a sort of collective 
 life in Adam , and that in him we actually fell. 
 
 Some proceed then on the theory that, before 
 entering on our earthly life, we have passed through 
 an individual ordeal in an anterior state of existence, 
 and that this ordeal having issued in a fall, accounts 
 
 * The former of these systems was in the first instance 
 maintained by Origen. In our day it has been again brought 
 forward in M. Julius Muller’s remarkable book upon sin. The 
 latter theory, expounded by M. Charles Secretan, one of the 
 deepest and most original thinkers of our day, in his work 
 on liberty, has been brilliantly discussed by M. E. Naville 
 in his treatise on the problem of evil. This system is 
 the reproduction in a philosophical form of an idea which, 
 from the time of St. Augustine, has been embodied in the 
 theology of the church. St. Augustine, misled by an erroneous 
 translation of Romans v. 12 {in quo , translation of icp’ £), 
 assumes that we have all sinned in Adam. 
 
Fatalism or Freedom . 37 
 
 for the condition in which we are born into the 
 world. 
 
 I am fully conscious of the grand and earnest 
 elements in this theory. But I may remark that 
 it only removes the difficulty a stage further back, 
 without resolving it. If all the individuals composing 
 humanity have fallen in a previous state of existence, 
 we are constrained to ask what led to such an 
 issue. It could only have been that they all yielded 
 to an evil inclination; and the question at once 
 arises, why did they so yield? The real problem 
 then remains obscure as ever. 
 
 Of this difficulty one only solution is possible. It 
 may be said that in the anterior ordeal all did not 
 fall; that those who passed through it victoriously 
 have, entered on a higher sphere, and earth has 
 become the abode of the fallen only. This was the 
 teaching of Origen, but so bold a speculation is 
 unsupported by any statement of Christian revelation, 
 and is opposed by one decisive fact. The humanity 
 with which we are familiar here on earth is not a 
 fortuitous association of individual souls, which, 
 having passed through their ordeal elsewhere, are 
 here met as in a place of expiation. It is one family 
 indissolubly bound together, every member of which 
 is the heir of all who have gone before. Origen’s 
 
38 The Oneness of the Race, 
 
 theory is in truth the negation of the fact of the 
 oneness of the race. This is a sufficient argument 
 against it. 
 
 The second system is sustained by the greatest 
 names of theology—St. Augustine, St. Thomas, 
 Calvin, and Bossuet. It asserts that, before entering 
 on our existence as individuals, we really lived in 
 Adam by a collective life, that in him we underwent 
 our trial, and in him we voluntarily fell. 
 
 What does this mean? Is it the assertion of the 
 collective life of humanity? Does it signify that 
 solidarity is a fact, and that we cannot as individuals 
 separate ourselves from our race ? If so, I accept 
 it fully, and all that I say here tends to establish its 
 truth. But if it is meant to maintain that, before 
 entering on our existence as individuals, we had a 
 conscious and moral existence in a collective and 
 specific form, I hesitate; and before admitting or 
 refuting the hypothesis, examine if there is anything 
 within me which justifies it. What is meant by this 
 fall to which I was a consenting party, before I had 
 entered on the possession of a free and individual life 
 on earth? What is that collective and vague ex¬ 
 istence, in which I am said to have performed, with 
 knowledge and consent, an act which determines all 
 my destiny ? Hard questions these, which, so far 
 
Fatalism or Freedom . 39 
 
 from throwing light on the problem of tne origin of 
 evil, themselves require to be rendered intelligible. 
 Without casting any slur on the adventurous re¬ 
 searches of others in this mysterious domain, I revert 
 rather to the two undeniable facts of individual 
 responsibility, and the oneness of the race in the fall, 
 which Scripture and experience alike attest. I know 
 not if we were in Adcim , but I know well that Adam 
 is in us , and that no son of his race can repudiate 
 the inheritance derived from him. I accept the State¬ 
 ment, of the Christian revelation, that one transgression 
 has involved us all in a common fall, and that this fall 
 does not cancel our responsibility. 
 
 But this is the very conclusion declared to be 
 inadmissible by reason. It is this law of solidarity , 
 which so many regard as immoral and objectionable. 
 It is this law we are called upon to explain. Is 
 such an explanation, it may fairly be asked, possible 
 to such minds as ours ? But if I am able to show 
 you aspects of the law of solidarity which you have 
 not perceived; if I am able to prove to you that 
 without this law there is nothing grand, nothing 
 beautiful, in society or humanity—that without it 
 neither society nor humanity would be possible I 
 may at least succeed in silencing some objections and 
 
40 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 lessening some prejudices, which keep you from the 
 faith. 
 
 We have looked long enough at the dark and 
 sorrowful side of the problem before us ; let us now 
 turn to its bright and consoling aspect 
 
IV. 
 
 ONENESS IN REDEMPTION 
 
 I affirm once again that it is impossible for us to 
 conceive of the life of society or of humanity apart 
 from the law of solidarity. Let us take a few illustra¬ 
 tions, and first from the most simple and primitive 
 
 form of social life—the family. 
 
 We will suppose two men, both born to sorrow, 
 inheriting from their parents unsound constitutions, 
 a sullied name, and the results of years of sin and 
 improvidence. Arrived at man s estate, the one 
 says, “ Why should I be responsible for a position 
 in which I never placed myself? Why should I bear 
 the burden of faults in which I had no part ? Why 
 should I not have my due of freedom and independ¬ 
 ence ?” Acting out these principles, he casts off 
 his family and repudiates his name. The other ac¬ 
 cepts his lot j and bowing under the burden laid 
 upon him, he shares with those belonging to him the 
 hard-won fruits of his honourable toil. Now I appeal 
 to the judgment of my readers : Which is the no¬ 
 bler man? Unquestionably, he who obeys without 
 cavilling the law of solidarity. If our hearts could 
 
4 2 The Oneness of the Race . 
 
 hesitate a moment, mere reason would tell us, that 
 without this law families could not exist ; for the 
 family is not a collection of persons who agree to sit 
 round one hearth and eat at one table; it is not a 
 commercial company, which may become bankrupt or 
 dissolve partnership in critical times; it is a moral fact 
 that cannot be repudiated, a living body, every 
 member of which is bound to guard the life and 
 honour of the whole. 
 
 Let us rise a step higher. Above family is country; 
 I picture to myself a country compromised by a 
 rash and wrongful policy. The hour of peril has 
 struck; the land is invaded by foreign armies. Here 
 again are two men. One says, “ What have I to do 
 with this cause, which is none of mine ? I did not 
 choose my fatherland ; and even if I had chosen it, I 
 have had no part in making it what it is.” And, con¬ 
 sistent with his principles, he renounces, under the 
 lire of the enemy, the national standard. The 
 other, while he deplores the errors against which he 
 had vainly striven, rushes unhesitatingly to the frontier 
 and falls for his country. Which of the two do you 
 esteem the true man ? The very question seems an 
 insult. Here again, were it possible for the heart 
 to keep back its utterance, common sense would say, 
 The tie of country is not a bond to be broken, a 
 
43 
 
 Oneness in Redemption. 
 
 factitious compact which may be dissolved at will; 
 and could it be so regarded, the guarantee of national 
 freedom and self-respect would be withdrawn. 
 
 We have before us yet a higher step. Above 
 country is humanity. Let us place ourselves in 
 England in the year 1780. Already it is England, 
 wealthy and victorious, sending out her vessels ovei 
 all seas to return laden with the treasures of the 
 Avorld. But a whisper is heard, that at the base of this 
 opulence there is an iniquity known as the slave 
 trade. At first no one heeds the muttered words. 
 Why listen? It is true that five hundred leagues 
 away, under the flag of a free and Christian nation, 
 negroes are captured and caged like wild beasts; it 
 is true that they are shut down under hatchways like 
 so much vile merchandise, and in such numbers that 
 a third of them die of suffocation in every voyage ; it 
 is true that their blood flows under the planter’s lash, 
 and their wives and children are sold in open market. 
 But what is that to us? Are we charged with the 
 interests of a race not our own ? If it is enslaved, 
 is that our fault ? Has it not itself to blame ? Can 
 we be expected to sacrifice our interests, our pros¬ 
 perity, our greatness to a cause so chimerical as its 
 elevation ? Are we to commence a radical revolution, 
 which will overturn the whole fabric of society ? 
 
44 The Oneness oj the Race. 
 
 So spoke the sages and the politicians. But there 
 was a man in the land, young, influential rich, who 
 might have been as eagerly bent as others on the 
 pursuit of his own fortune, but who saw ever before 
 his eyes the fearful scenes enacted in the slave coun¬ 
 tries. He could not rest. The voice of the oppressor 
 rang day and night in his ears, and moved his Chris¬ 
 tian heart. The cause of the slaves became his own. 
 Standing at first alone in the midst of ridicule, he 
 consecrated his life to it; and on his death bed, 
 after forty years of strong endeavour, he learned 
 that not only the slave trade but slavery itself was to 
 cease in every land over which floated the banner of 
 England. We ask, Was Wilberforce, the Christian, 
 the Methodist, as he was contemptuously called, in 
 error when he affirmed that the whole family of man 
 is one, and that a wrong done at the ends of the earth 
 concerns us all more or less nearly ? 
 
 These illustrations suffice to show that the law of 
 solidarity lies at the foundation of all society. Re¬ 
 move it, and progress, education, the family, the race 
 together cease. 
 
 If it were indeed possible for us to accept nothing 
 but the consequences of our own acts, what would be 
 the result? We are born into the midst of a society 
 already formed around us. Nature has been subdued 
 
45 
 
 Oneness in Redemption. 
 
 and made to minister to our wants. We find fields 
 tilled, harvests gathered in, paths everywhere pre¬ 
 pared for our feet; the walls of home shelter us from 
 the winter frosts. As intellect awakens, we find 
 books waiting to enrich us with the discoveiies of 
 sixty centuries j protected from violence and des¬ 
 potism, we are free to seek truth for ourselves, to 
 
 embrace and proclaim it at will. 
 
 All these benefits have, as it were, anticipated 
 our coming. What have we done to deserve them ? 
 Were we by, when the first pioneers of humanity 
 hollowed the furrows out of which life was to spring ? 
 Had we any part in the stern, stiff battles with hostile 
 nature ? Have we shared in the sufferings through 
 which all progress, all freedom, has had to be won ? 
 Have we agonized with the mighty spirits which have 
 bent over the mysteries of science till they have 
 wrested its secrets from it ? Have we passed through 
 their days of toil and wakeful midnight watches? 
 Were we among the witnesses of truth when these 
 had to drink the cup of bitterness and bear the 
 insults and scoffing of the world ? or in those silent 
 decisive hours when they had to choose between 
 wrong and death ? Has our flesh quivered on the 
 rack? Have we groaned in the dark, poisonous 
 dungeons, alone, rigid with cold, faint, famished, 
 
46 The Oneness of the Race . 
 
 and with nothing before us but a death of shame 
 c-.nd horror? No; but we are the heirs of sixty 
 centuries of such toils and heroic endurance. Every 
 libeity we enjoy has sprung out of ground watered 
 with human life-blood; every blessing we possess 
 is the price of the sacrifice of others. By these 
 terms alone we hold our life, our faith, all that we 
 have, all that we hope for. This solidarity, deemed 
 so repulsive, is the parent of all our good. It is 
 inscribed on every grace and joy of life. Renouncing 
 it, we must needs renounce our place in human 
 kind. 
 
 Let us carry our argument still further. In the 
 three examples cited just now, we saw men taking 
 upon themselves the consequences of a condition of 
 things not created by themselves, and we admired 
 them. But in a large and generous heart, one in 
 which love is strong enough for sacrifice, even 
 this is not all. Solidarity in such a heart goes 
 further still. It unites itself to the guilty by a sym¬ 
 pathy as real as it is mysterious. It bears the shame 
 of the sinner’s sin; it repents with him and for him. 
 Do not all mothers worthy of the name endorse what 
 I say ? Does not the fault, the disorderly conduct, 
 the disgrace of a son press upon them with all its 
 weight? Do they even attempt to throw off the load? 
 
47 
 
 Oneness in Redemption . 
 
 Pure as they may be, they feel themselves bound to 
 the guilty one by a link which death alone avails to 
 break. Would they be mothers, indeed, if such 
 sorrow did not abide to the last heart-throb ? 
 
 Such we conceive to be the sentiment of moral 
 solidarity manifest in the lives of the great heroes 
 of the Bible. The more eminent they themselves 
 are for holiness of life, the more intensely do they 
 realize their oneness with the people whose pastors 
 and priests they are, and take upon themselves the 
 burden of their nation’s transgressions and sins. 
 Listen to Abraham interceding on the plains of 
 Mamre for the guilty inhabitants of Sodom and 
 Gomorrah ;* * to Moses pleading the cause of re¬ 
 bellious Israel;*!* to Jeremiah, J Nehemiah,§ Daniel,|| 
 all identifying themselves in their sublime prayers 
 with their sinning countrymen, and charging them¬ 
 selves with their iniquities. Themselves blameless 
 in the midst of an idolatrous race, they forget thei r 
 own righteousness while they accept for themselv es 
 
 * Gen. xviii. 23. 
 
 *f* Exod. xxxii. 31, 32.—“And Moses returned unto the Lord, 
 and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have 
 made them gods of gold. Yet now, if Thou wilt forgive their 
 sin— ; and if not, blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book.” 
 
 + Lam. iii. 42. § Neh. i. 5-11. |j Dan. ix. 20. 
 
48 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 the consequences of the falls and sins of Israel. 
 “We have sinned,” they exclaim, “we have trans¬ 
 gressed, we have rebelled against Thee; to us be¬ 
 longed! confusion of face because we have sinned 
 against Thee.” And St. Paul, last of the heroic line 
 of Scripture heroes, “ could wish that he himself 
 were accursed from Christ, for his brethren, his kins¬ 
 men according to the flesh.” * 
 
 If all this be true,—and who can deny it ?—I 
 affirm that these special examples of solidarity 
 establish it as a universal fact. If it is possible and 
 right that one should suffer for another, then it is 
 possible that one should suffer for all. If we are 
 bound to love our neighbour as ourself, it is that, in 
 a sense, our neighbour is ourself. -j- Humanity is not 
 an agglomeration of individual atoms, each possessing 
 an independent life; it is not a mosaic which can 
 be taken to pieces at will ; it is not an aggregation 
 of individuals, each of whom may, if he please, 
 isolate himself from the rest and say, “ I stand for 
 
 * Rom. ix. 3. 
 
 + Monsell, “ The Religion of Redemption.” 
 
 I embrace this opportunity to draw attention to this book, 
 from which I have borrowed many of the ideas here worked out. 
 The death of the author prevented him from finishing this re¬ 
 markable work, of which we have only the first volume. 
 
49 
 
 Oneness in Redemption. 
 
 myself alone.” It is a huge tree, and we all are the 
 branches, along which flows the common sap; it is a 
 living body, of which we are truly the members. In 
 my individual life I feel the life of humanity; in my 
 blood, the life-stream of the race. In the history of 
 mankind, the strange secret of my destiny is wrapped 
 up; and as I am involved in its fall, I can be fully 
 raised again only in its restoration. 
 
 From the stand-point to which we have now risen, 
 it seems to me we can get a better view of the 
 Christian doctrine of Redemption. A better view, 
 I say, but still imperfect; for, in relation to this, as to 
 the Fall, we have to use the words of St. Paul, “ We 
 know but in part,” and see only “ through a glass 
 darkly.” But the dimness is the dimness of the 
 dawn; the faint light will grow into the brightness of 
 the eternal day. Let us then try by it to scan the 
 fact of Redemption. 
 
 Eighteen centuries ago a cross was set up, one 
 Friday, on a hill in Judaea; a man was nailed to it, 
 and on it died. At first sight, this is an ordinary 
 event, the like of which history records by thousands. 
 Yet we Christians believe that that day is the central 
 point of history, and to that cross we attach all our 
 hopes of pardon and eternal happiness. And this, 
 be it observed, is not some subtle doctrine, pain- 
 
 E 
 
50 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 fully forged by theologic brains ) it is a truth which 
 the most simple and unlearned grasp by an irre¬ 
 sistible instinct, which they cling to, whence they 
 derive their strength ; and in the hour of utmost 
 agony, when reason totters on its failing throne, 
 when the shadows of death deepen momently, and 
 the gaze of the soul wanders round for one bright 
 central spot on which to rest, it is enough, as the 
 experience of centuries attests, that the cross of the 
 Saviour be held before the closing eyes. 
 
 Philosophy is bewildered. What relation can there 
 be, it asks, between that suffering and our salvation ? 
 By what factitious convention can the death of the 
 just save the guilty? By what judicial fiction can the 
 innocent bear the penalty of the transgressors ? By 
 what further fiction can the transgressors claim a 
 part in the holiness of the innocent ? 
 
 Such are the objections raised, to which I reply,— 
 
 We are guilty, and God desires to reconcile us to 
 Himself. The point is, Plow can that reconciliation 
 be effected ? We are told, “ God pardons, and that 
 is enough.” And I, on the ground of Scripture, 
 answer, “Yes; but how does He pardon?” In 
 order that the reconciliation may be real, worthy of 
 God, who is holy, and of man, whose conscience 
 comprehends what holiness is, two conditions are 
 
Oneness in Redemption . 51 
 
 essential. First, there must have been reparation on 
 the part of the guilty; next, there must be a change 
 in him. I say, that without these two conditions 
 pardon is impossible. I ask if God can deny Him¬ 
 self, can alter, or lower the law He has given, if He 
 can make our relation to Himself other than a 
 relation of dependence, of obedience, of holiness and 
 love. Now, where that law has been not only 
 violated in its precepts, but utterly forgotten and 
 despised in its very essence; where the creature has 
 treated the Creator as if He had no existence, has 
 lived towards Him in a state of indifference, of 
 forgetfulness, of ingratitude, is it possible that God 
 should just take him back again into His friendship 
 without any reparation of the evil, without any 
 vindication of the holiness of the divine law? No; 
 there must be reparation, and as, by a divine 
 necessity implanted in the conscience, suffering must 
 follow sin, this reparation must be made in suffering. 
 
 Reparation! this is the deep need, the constant cry 
 of the soul of man. Of a thousand illustrations 
 which present themselves of the fact, I select only one. 
 When the Archbishop Cranmer was in the power of 
 his enemies, he had the cowardice, in the hope of 
 saving his life, to sign a recantation of his true con¬ 
 victions. After the act was done, he was filled with 
 
52 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 penitent remorse; and when, at length, he stood at 
 the fatal stake, and saw the flames leaping around, 
 though they had not yet reached him, he thrust out 
 the hand which had signed the false recantation and 
 held it in the fire till it was consumed, exclaiming, 
 ‘‘This hand hath offended; this hand hath offended!” 
 Will any say that the instinct which led him to do so 
 was false? Does not the act rather contain the 
 instinctive avowal, that where the offence has been, 
 there the reparation is due ? 
 
 In the world, we have face to face God and guilty 
 man; man, I say—not you alone, or I, or any other; 
 it is the whole human race which stands guilty before 
 God. God will proclaim pardon to humanity, but in 
 order that He may do so, humanity must retract its 
 rebellion, and, accepting all the legitimate con¬ 
 sequences of evil, must expiate and repudiate it at 
 once. This *vas done by Jesus Christ, and therefore 
 it is through Him the proclamation of pardon comes. 
 Jesus Christ is, as St. Paul declares, the second Adam. 
 He came to earth that a new race of men might 
 be bom to the true life, which consists in commu¬ 
 nion with God; and as the first condition of this new 
 life must be reparation, He offered reparation for us. 
 Let no one say this was not possible. We showed 
 awhile ago, that no limit could be put to the solidarity 
 
Oneness in Redemption. 53 
 
 of love. The Eternal Son chose to become the Son 
 of man, bound indissolubly to the destinies of the 
 human race, that He might bring back mankind 
 into the way of life : He chose to become the head, 
 the high priest, the moral centre, and representative 
 of mankind. In Him, to borrow the language of a 
 Christian thinker,* in Him I see the Son of man 
 indeed, one able to feel, to act, to suffer in our 
 stead, as the eye sees, the ear hears, the hand acts for 
 the whole body. Here was a man who fully realized 
 that solidarity which the sublimest sacrifices had till 
 then only faintly set forth. Here was a man who 
 loved every human being as Himself, who sought 
 the happiness, the moral dignity, the holiness of every 
 member of the human family, as He sought His 
 own. Here was a man who realized perfectly the 
 unity and the culpability of the human race, so that 
 the outward ignominy He endured and the anguish 
 of the physical death were but a feeble type of the 
 
 * Monsell.—This point of view was admirably presented by 
 Irenaeus. He says, “Jesus Christ recapitulated in Himself as it 
 were the whole human race; He was its true head, the represent¬ 
 ative, not only of all generations, but of all ages.” See the 
 Exposition of the doctrine of Irenaeus on Redemption in Vol. V. 
 of “ L’Histoire des trois premiers siecles de l’Eglise,” by Dr. E. 
 de Pressense. 
 
54 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 anguish of His soul. He made our sin His own; 
 He took it upon Himself while His holy soul recoiled 
 from it in horror. He does not look on us with the 
 pitying but powerless sympathy of a stranger; He 
 truly descended into our hell; felt all that our sins 
 deserve, and at once confessed and repudiated human 
 sin. He passed through the condition of soul which 
 we all ought to pass through; He truly bore our 
 whole humanity in His person. In the name of 
 humanity He bowed in humble acquiescence under 
 the condemning stroke ; in the name of humanity 
 He drank the cup of bitterness; in its name He 
 proved what is meant by separation from God. His 
 dying cry “ My God, my God, why hast Thou for¬ 
 saken me ? ” reveals a depth of agony before which 
 we are amazed and tremble. It is the cry of a holy 
 heart, broken for our sins, alike incapable of for¬ 
 saking us or of suffering itself to be forsaken of God. 
 In the close clasp of love He holds His brethren; He 
 will not let them go, and with them He sinks into the 
 deep mysterious gulf of condemnation. 
 
 Such appears to me the sublimity of the sacrifice, 
 the kingliness of the love of Christ. To the depths 
 of our misery He stooped to seek and win His 
 mediatorial crown. The kings of the earth glory in 
 their lofty isolation; He found His glory in the 
 
55 
 
 Oneness in Redemption . 
 
 sacrifice of Himself. “ Quo non ascendant ? ” whither 
 shall I not rise ? exclaimed the greatest ministei 
 of modern kings in an hour of intoxication. 
 
 “Whither shall I not stoop?” says the Lord Jesus; 
 and giving Himself without reserve, He humbled 
 Himself, says St. Paul, even to the death of the cross 
 and to the unimagined bitterness of the curse. 
 
 Have we all thus understood the sufferings of our 
 Saviour ? If so, what force is there in the objections 
 urged against our redemption by Him ? Where is the 
 injustice of the judge punishing the innocent for tne 
 guilty? Where the judicial fiction, the factitious 
 convention, of which we hear so much ? It was of 
 .His own will Jesus suffered. If Plis sufferings remain 
 a mystery, it is a mysteiy of love. We should 
 comprehend it, my brethren, if our hearto weie large 
 enough to take it in. 
 
 One question yet remains to be answered. If 1 
 can see how Christ may put Himself in the pla^e 
 of sinful man, I have yet to understand how my 
 salvation is derived from His sufferings and death. 
 
 The answer is, By faith. What then is faith ? Is it 
 a simple intellectual belief? Is it an operation of 
 the mind ? Does salvation by faith mean that we are 
 saved because we believe we are saved ? Every one 
 of these questions would probably receive from some 
 
5 6 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 an affirmative answer; but according to St. Paul, 
 the faith which saves is that act of the soul by which 
 we unite ourselves to Christ, so that, to use another 
 expression of the same apostle, we “grow up into 
 Him in all things.” To unite myself to Christ, is to 
 accept His work, so to embrace it with heart and will 
 that that work becomes mine. Is not this in truth, 
 the faith of the Christian ? What will it avail me, that 
 Christ shall have made reparation for all our rebellion, 
 satisfied all the claims of Divine justice, atoned for 
 all our transgressions, if I remain a stranger to 
 Him ? By faith I give in my adherence to the truth 
 embodied in His life and death; by faith I join 
 myself to the new Adam, the head of a new hu¬ 
 manity ; with Him I cancel the fault of our first father, 
 obedience takes the place of rebellion, love of aliena¬ 
 tion ; with Him and by Him I enter again into fellow¬ 
 ship with God. Faith in Christ subdues the pride of 
 my heart, the independent spirit which kept me far 
 from God. It places me towards Him in the attitude 
 of the sinner awaiting all from His forgiving love. 
 
 If this be indeed the faith which saves, I ask again: 
 What is there arbitrary in it ? All is moral, all is 
 true, all worthy of God; and here again, as in the 
 
 Fall, we find the twofold truth of solidarity and 
 responsibility. 
 
57 
 
 Oneness m Redemption . 
 
 We share in the benefits of that work of expiation 
 which saves us, though we ourselves had no part in it. 
 Were we by, when the Holy and Just One groaned 
 in His soul-anguish in Gethsemane? Had we any 
 part in His final conflict ? Did we drink one drop 
 of His cup of agony ? Have we felt the burden of 
 the sins of the whole world, and passed through the 
 awful darkness of the Divine indignation against 
 sin? Yet that finished work, that cross, that shed 
 blood, is ours and for us; every Christian feels and 
 owns it to be so. Here then is solidarity. 
 
 And yet this work will not profit, will not save us, 
 unless it be accepted by faith; here then is respon¬ 
 sibility. It is God who saves; but He does not save 
 us without ourselves. I said, in speaking of the Fall: 
 “We are not condemned for the sin of our first 
 father, except in so far as we have ourselves know¬ 
 ingly and voluntarily ratified it by our own rebellion. 
 In the same manner, in reference to Redemption, I 
 say, We shall not be saved by Jesus Christ, except 
 as we unite ourselves by faith to His redemptive 
 work. 
 
 Such is the meaning of salvation by faith, of that 
 doctrine so misapprehended when faith is regarded 
 merely as an act of the reason, but which proves to 
 be the most moral and most sanctifying of all 
 
58 The Oneness of the Race . 
 
 doctrines, when apprehended as a regenerative act 
 which joins us to Christ; for wherever this faith is 
 real and earnest, the new life is in the germ, the heart 
 is touched, the will changed, and the words of the 
 apostle become a truthful description, “ If any man 
 be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are 
 passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 
 Cor. v. 17). 
 
 Thus, in the work of redemption, the law of our 
 interwoven life, which before weighed on us like a 
 heavy curse, shifies out in brightness and blessing. 
 Jesus Christ has sent streams of life and hope flowing 
 through those arteries of humanity which seemed 
 made to transmit only corruption and death. He has 
 shed the light of love on the oneness of our race, 
 revealing to humanity that it is one family, with one 
 Father in heaven. Before the coming of Christ, 
 men had no such conception. The ancient world 
 was parcelled out among hostile peoples, who re¬ 
 garded all but themselves as barbarians; even in the 
 same nation, the slave and the citizen, the poor and 
 the rich, looked upon each other as irreconcilable 
 enemies. The Indian slept his sleep of death, 
 surrounded by the immutable barriers of caste; none 
 dreamed of a day when, looking round on the whole 
 human family, men would learn to say, “ All we are 
 
59 
 
 Oneness in Redemption. 
 
 brethren.” I know indeed, that some me leady to cite 
 the noble words of Terence : u I am a man, and 
 nothing that is human is strange to me, as a pi oof 
 that the idea of the oneness of humanity had 
 dawned upon the earth before the day of Christ ) but 
 I appeal to all who are familiar with these words in 
 their connection, whether they can fairly bear the 
 large and lofty meaning which in Christian times has 
 been put upon them. Seneca, Pliny the Younger, 
 Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius are also quoted to 
 prove that the love of humanity existed in the 
 heathen world. But let it be observed, there is a 
 marked and wide difference between these and 
 earlier philosophers, even Cicero himself. As we 
 read Seneca, the most ancient of those I have named 
 (he wrote about a.d. 6o), we feel at once the pie- 
 sence of a new principle. Do we then suppose 
 Seneca to have been acquainted with Christianity: 
 By no means, and we reject the ingenious fable of 
 his relations with St. Paul; but without knowing 
 Christianity, Seneca has unquestionably come largely 
 under the influence of the Christian spirit. We 
 cannot forget that thirty years before he wrote, the 
 cross had been lifted up on Calvary \ the Chuich 
 had by this time representatives in every great nation, 
 and the Greek language, which was universally known. 
 
6o 
 
 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 greatly facilitated the propagation of its doctrines. 
 We cannot but suppose, under these circumstances, 
 that men of elevated and thoughtful mind, like 
 Seneca and Pliny, must have marked the nature and 
 progress of the new ideas. Only in this way can 
 we explain some passages in Seneca and Plutarch, 
 and certain biblical expressions which they employ. 
 Cicero would have marvelled greatly at the humane 
 tone in which Pliny the younger speaks about slaves ; 
 and it was assuredly not from mere pagan philo¬ 
 sophy that Marcus Aurelius derived his conception 
 of a universal city, of which we are all the inha¬ 
 bitants, of one family whose members are all mankind. 
 For twenty years before he thus wrote, Christians 
 in Rome had embodied this doctrine in their faith 
 and in their lives. 
 
 We hold, then, that the truth of the oneness of 
 the great human family was revealed at the cross, and 
 that it was absolutely unknown to the ancient world. 
 It had to assert itself at first amid the scoffs and 
 rebukes of the adversaries of Christianity; and even 
 in our own day it is but faintly and imperfectly 
 lecognised as a practical power. Humiliating it is to 
 confess, that men, refusing to listen to the voice of 
 love, have had to be taught this lesson by the 
 voice of self-interest, the only voice to which the 
 
Oneness in Redemption. 61 
 
 ear never remains persistently closed. In old times, 
 the life of a nation was confined almost entirely 
 within its own borders; if famine or pestilence came 
 to a land, its inhabitants suffered; but if desolation 
 spread over some remote country, it was nothing 
 to them, unless in the spirit of the old pagans, who 
 imagined that Rome or Athens was the favourite city 
 of the gods, they might bless Providence that their 
 own land was spared. But in our day it is impossible 
 for any people to be unconcerned even in events 
 transpiring at the ends of the earth. Let the 
 Mohammedans in Arabian deserts leave the bodies 
 of the victims offered in sacrifice to rot upon the soil, 
 and lo ! the cholera comes to our shores and deci¬ 
 mates our cities. Let the question of slavery rend a 
 republic in the New World, and we see our work¬ 
 shops closed, our artisans perishing of hunger. Let 
 there be seasons of exceptional rigour a thousand 
 leagues away, and the price of our corn is raised, and 
 famine threatens our poor. In a word, the whole 
 course of events in our time witnesses to the solidarity 
 of man; and prudent selfishness teaches successfully 
 where charity had failed. Would that the truth thus 
 realized in the practical life of the world, could 
 penetrate the Church, and, in view of its widened 
 and ever widening work, inspire it with a love that 
 
62 
 
 The Oneness of the Race . 
 
 should know no limit, succumb to no obstacle, but 
 steadily pursue its work wherever there is wrong to 
 be righted, misery to be assuaged, a soul to be saved 
 from sin and death ! 
 
 As men, we have a corporate life, and are bound 
 indissolubly to each other by a law of our very 
 nature. Let us pause a moment over this suggestive 
 thought. Let us catch what it conveys of admoni¬ 
 tion and comfort. 
 
 We have all felt, in days of special joy or sadness, 
 the bond of family life silently drawing our hearts 
 together as we sat round the same fireside ; we have 
 all felt the thrill passing through a vast assembly, 
 when every soul has caught the inspiration of a sub¬ 
 lime truth or a grand artistic achievement; the sense 
 of isolation is lost in that of a community of life; 
 floods of sympathy overflow the heart and fill it with 
 a mighty joy. Such is the feeling of which I am 
 conscious, when, rising above time and space, I think 
 of the chain which links me to the past. I call to 
 mind all the patient labours, all the heroic sacrifices, 
 which have enlightened, animated, ennobled hu¬ 
 manity, since Christ first infused into its languid 
 veins the new life-current of redeeming love. Every 
 blessing I possess, every social and religious liberty, 
 becomes doubly precious as a heritage received from 
 
63 
 
 Oneness in Redemption. 
 
 brethren who bought it with their blood. Let me 
 instance only the Bible, which bears to us the words 
 of eternal life. When I think at what a price of 
 suffering these precious truths have come down 
 through the ages, how many unknown martyrs have 
 held them with dying hands above the flood that would 
 have swept them into oblivion, feelings too big for 
 utterance fill my heart. I see, in the dim dawn of 
 the world, men whose souls bowed like our own 
 before the majesty of Jehovah’s name, and who, in 
 an age of corruption and universal idolatry, stood 
 forth as the faithful witnesses of the one living and 
 true God; I catch the mournful accents of the 
 prophets, men of sorrows always, because right¬ 
 eousness had perished from the earth; I mark the 
 inward conflict they sustained, and see them turning 
 their eager gaze to the future, seeking the light 
 they lacked; I follow from age to age the footsteps 
 of those who trod in the track they had marked with* 
 blood. At last, I see the cross uplifted, the promise 
 fulfilled, the kingdom of love set up, the salvation 
 of mankind made sure; then I watch the apostles 
 going forth in the power of the cross; I see St. Paul, 
 that great captain of the missionary band, the first 
 to carry the gospel to our pagan forefathers, to 
 proclaim to them the words of freedom and life; I 
 
64 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 listen to the worship of the primitive Church, in that 
 spring-time of the Christian life, blossoming in the 
 midst of an accursed world ; I hear the hymns of 
 faith and hope rising from the lips of the first martyrs, 
 to be soon drowned in the roaring of the wild 
 beasts of the amphitheatre, then silenced in the dust 
 of death. Ages pass on, and missionaries pierce 
 the dense primeval forests where stand our cities of 
 to-day; I find myself in the Middle Ages, so dark 
 and yet traversed with such luminous shafts of simple, 
 mighty faith, that from the cell of an unknown monk 
 there came forth the holy accents of the “Imitation 
 of Jesus Christ” Then comes the heroic age of the 
 Reformation, when Bible words stir the hearts of the 
 people with a new life, and noble songs of faith 
 arise from new confessors, and the.battle for the 
 simple truth is fought again by men grand in the 
 singleness and severity of their lives; these are 
 again the days of great tribulation and of the faith 
 and patience of the saints. Still following down the 
 stream of time, I come to the revival of religion in 
 the last century and in our own; and last of all I 
 find myself, the inheritor of all this glorious past, 
 and bound to it by all that is deepest, holiest, noblest 
 in my being. It is one great spiritual body of which 
 I am truly a member. This unity is no idle dream ; 
 
65 
 
 Oneness in Redemption. 
 
 it is a grand reality. Believers of all ages, we are 
 one in our fall and common sufferings, in our repen 
 tance and burning tears; one also in our faith and 
 hopes. All that you have thought, felt, suffered, 
 enters into my soul; we have all one life—one in its 
 source, one in its end, one in its ceaseless aspiration 
 after God. 
 
 Again I look around me in the present. My 
 thoughts embrace all the children of God scattered 
 abroad over the whole earth ; I lose sight of all that 
 divides, to remember only that which makes them 
 one. I think of all believing souls, and of all that 
 would believe, if the truth, as it really is, could pierce 
 the mists of ignorance and prejudice which hang 
 around them. I see those who worship with me in 
 the Father’s house, those who are already on their 
 way thither, and those whom the yearning eye of the 
 universal Father discerns coming to Him, though yet 
 afar off. I think of all those honest and true hearts 
 that are turning to God, though as yet they know 
 Him not; of the many who, could they but meet 
 the Christ of the Gospels, would love and serve 
 and worship Him more worthily than we; and 
 between all these souls and my own I feel a bond 
 that cannot be broken. Yes, we are one; my life 
 depends on that of my brethren ; and their humblest, 
 
 F 
 
66 
 
 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 most unobtrusive actions tell with an animating or 
 depressing influence upon me. A missionary breathes 
 out his life in vain, it seems, among the fever swamps 
 of Africa. In vain ? Nay, he has by his example 
 shaken me out of my sleep of slothfulness; he has 
 shown me how vain an offering is a ministry of 
 ease and self-indulgence. A poor widow, or a 
 servant, brings me her humble contribution for God's 
 service. I know that she has given, not of her super¬ 
 fluity, but of her necessity ; and while she apologizes 
 for the smallness of her gift, I feel she has preached 
 to me that unreserved surrender, which I am so apt to 
 withhold from God. Sometimes even a smaller thing 
 than this,—a word of forgiveness caught in passing, 
 an act of love of which no one will ever hear, or 
 only a look of tender, human kindness, will make 
 sunshine in my soul, darkened by selfishness and 
 worldliness. Who can set limits to the operation of 
 this mysterious law of human inter-action ? Can we 
 unveil the secrets of the invisible world? Can we 
 measure the silent but real influences of prayer and 
 a holy life ? Do we know by what secret suasion a 
 soul is won for God, or what we owe to those who, 
 far away from us in body, plead for us with many 
 prayers and tears ? “ The wind bloweth where it 
 
 listeth,” says the Scripture \ on its wings it bears 
 
6 ; 
 
 Oneness in Redemption . 
 
 and scatters invisible seeds, which nestle in the earth 
 and blossom in the spring-time. Thus is it with the 
 wind - of Grace j none knows all the elements of life 
 and salvation which it brings; none knows what 
 heaven-born flowers may unfold in the eternal 
 spring. 
 
 Yet once again I gaze into the future, and think 
 of the law which binds it to the present. I remember 
 that those who will come after us depend on us, 
 that we are preparing their destiny—a law of awful 
 mystery, from which the past, the present, the future, 
 offers no escape ! The future is in my hands. 
 There are souls which I may help to save, may 
 help to lose. Ay, w r hich of us has not helped to 
 destroy souls? What came of those old sins of 
 ours? What has been the effect of our ill-gotten 
 wealth, of our unscrupulous dealings with our fellows ? 
 Our long years of selfishness, vanity, frivolity, which, 
 the world calls charming, what lessons of fruitless 
 living have they taught to others! Hard, bitter 
 words, refusals of kindness, failures in charity, how 
 have these told upon sore and sorrowing hearts? 
 There is something grand in the thought of saving 
 souls; but what influence have we exerted, what les¬ 
 sons have we taught on our passage through life ? 
 To what account have we turned the bond between 
 
68 
 
 The Oneness of the Race . 
 
 those souls and ours, which may perhaps have 
 made their eternal destiny dependent upon us ? 
 
 Strange and solemn thoughts are these, yet only 
 too rapidly effaced from the minds of men by life s 
 striving current. Lest, however, some tender, self¬ 
 reproachful consciences should be almost over¬ 
 whelmed with the sense of their responsibility, I 
 would say to them : “ Be of good courage ; strengthen 
 your hearts.” Failure cannot be the ultimate issue 
 of your feeble attempts at good; for all your works, 
 all your sufferings, all your prayers, enter as living 
 stones into the structure of that vast edifice, which is 
 called the Church or saved humanity. Take courage 
 then, members of the body of Christ; you are build¬ 
 ing for eternity. I see in the future, souls which shall 
 be saved by the devoted service God asks of you to- 
 
 t 
 
 day; I see the Church built up by your strong and 
 faithful testimony; 1 see a spiritual harvest springing 
 out of the furrow which now you are watering with 
 drops of sweat and sorrow. Last of all, I see you 
 yourselves, surrounded by happy souls that poui- 
 blessings upon you, received into the fellowship of 
 God, and tasting in His presence the fulness of that 
 life of love, of which, even on earth, you were the 
 witnesses and messengers. 
 
V. 
 
 NOTES ON THE SCRIPTURE DOCTRINE 
 OF ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 A. OLD TESTAMENT. 
 
 The Old Testament nowhere treats systematically 
 the question of the origin and nature of evil. But 
 on every page it represents moral evil or sin as a 
 universal fact, as innate in man, and yet contrary 
 to the Divine will. The historical books (Gen. vi. 5 
 and xi. 3 ; i Kings viii. 46), the Psalms and the 
 Prophets (Ps. xiv. 2, 3; li. 6 and 7; xliii. 2; Jer. 
 xvii. 9), Job (iv. 17-19; ix. 2 ; xiv. 4; xv. 14; xxv. 
 4-6), the Proverbs (xx. 9), and Ecclesiastes (vii. 21) 
 all agree on this point. 
 
 Some passages in which God is spoken of as 
 urging man on to evil, have been made the basis 
 of a theory, that, in the primitive religious concep¬ 
 tions of the Hebrews, God was the author alike of 
 evil and of good. Such a notion places the primi¬ 
 tive religion of Israel lower even than Manicheeism, 
 which at least recognised two eternal principles in 
 the world. Let us pass the texts referred to rapidly 
 under review. In Exodus x. 27 we read; “ God 
 
70 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 hardened Pharaoh’s heart;” in Numbers xxii. 20, 
 God is represented as inciting Balaam to disobe¬ 
 dience ; in 2 Samuel xxiv. 1, God is said to move 
 David to number Israel (in the same narrative, as 
 given in 1 Chrori. xxi. 1, this influence is ascribed 
 to Satan). Now on these passages I make the fol¬ 
 lowing remarks :—First. In all three cases, Pharaoh, 
 Balaam, and David are held responsible for their 
 sin, and God rebukes and punishes them for it; which, 
 in a psychological point of view, is absolutely in¬ 
 compatible with the notion that He Himself was 
 the determining cause of their fault. Second. In 
 the New Testament, and in the teaching of Christ 
 Himself, we meet with many similar passages, which 
 seem to attribute to God the hardening of men’s 
 hearts (Matt. xiii. 13 ; John xii. 40; Rom. ix. ; 
 1 Peter ii. 8), and yet we are not aware that any 
 are found to maintain that, in the view of Jesus 
 Christ or His Apostles, God is in any degree the 
 author of evil. The explanation of these passages 
 is found in the fact that, according to the Divine plan, 
 evil necessarily produces evil; that one wrong deter¬ 
 mination gives birth to another; and that, to a sinner 
 walking in the path of transgression, the will of God, 
 which was his good and salvation, is finally ful¬ 
 filled in his hardening and perdition. The harden- 
 
Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin. 71 
 
 ing the heart against God is, in the first instance, 
 the act of man’s own will; and it is only ultimately 
 that he is made, even by his wilful resistance, to sub¬ 
 serve the purposes of God. Pharaoh, in the com¬ 
 mencement, hardens himself; subsequently, he is 
 spoken of in Scripture as hardened by God (Exod. 
 viL 13, 22; viii. 15, 32; compared with ix. 2; 
 x. 20, 27). It is impossible, moreover, for a few 
 isolated passages like these—even could we find no 
 explanation of them—to contradict or enfeeble the 
 one ruling idea of the Bible, which is, that the will 
 of God is the expression of His very nature, and 
 that God, being good, can will only that which is 
 good. “ Be ye holy, for I am holy,” etc. 
 
 In the third chapter of Genesis we have an ac¬ 
 count of the entrance of evil into humanity. From 
 this narrative, some of the details of which are 
 clearly symbolical, but which, as a whole, is deeply 
 instructive and suggestive, we derive the following 
 lessons :— 
 
 I. God is not the author of sin. 
 
 II. Matter is not the source of evil, as was believed 
 by all antiquity. 
 
 III. Man is not a development of the lower 
 animals, and evil is not a necessary consequence of 
 the idea of progress. 
 
72 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 IV. Man was subjected to an ordeal through which 
 he was designed to rise from a state of innocence to 
 one of voluntary and conscious holiness. 
 
 V. Evil already existed outside the human race; a 
 fall had taken place in the angelic world, and its 
 consequences were felt in the animal kingdom—the 
 serpent was the instrument of the Tempter. This 
 fact explains to us the existence of disorder and 
 death upon earth prior to man’s appearance, as it is 
 in our day recorded by science. 
 
 VI. The fall of the first pair entails the following 
 consequences upon their posterity: The curse of the 
 earth, work changed into weary toil; upon woman, 
 the pains and perils of child-birth; upon all, death. 
 
 VII. Death is not the normal condition of humanity; 
 man was primarily destined for eternal life. 
 
 VIII. Evil is to be overcome by the seed of the 
 woman (Gen. iii. 15). 
 
 Surprise has been expressed that the canonical 
 books of the Old Testament make no allusion to the 
 narrative of the Creation and the Fall; and the con¬ 
 clusion has been drawn, that this “ myth ” of the first 
 three chapters of Genesis was an after-production of 
 the Jewish mind. But it may be observed on this 
 point, that the later books of the Old Testament 
 very rarely allude to those of earlier date. There do 
 
Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin . 73 
 
 occur, however, in the Old Testament, passages which 
 necessarily carry us back to the teaching contained 
 in the commencement of Genesis. 
 
 Psalm viii., speaking of man, the child of Adam, 
 uses this expression : “Thou hast made him a little 
 lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with 
 glory and honour; thou hast set him over the works 
 of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his 
 feet—all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of 
 the field, the fowl of the air, and the fish of the 
 sea.” Here there is an evident allusion to the nar¬ 
 rative in Genesis of the creation of man. “ Let us 
 make man in our image, after our likeness : and let 
 them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and 
 over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over 
 all the earth” (Gen. i. 26). 
 
 Job exclaims (x. 9), “ Remember that thou hast 
 made me as the clay; and wilt thou bring me into 
 dust again?” (allusion to Gen. ii. 7 : “And the Lord 
 formed man of the dust of the ground ;” and iii. 19 : 
 “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.”) 
 Again in Job xxxiii. 4-6 we read : “ The Spirit of 
 God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty 
 hath given me life” (allusion to Gen. ii. 7: “The 
 Lord breadied into man’s nostrils the breath of life ”). 
 Isaiah lxiv. 8 contains a parallel allusion : “ But now, 
 
74 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and 
 thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand/’ 
 See also Psalm civ. 30. In Isaiah lxv. 25 we read : 
 “Dust shall be the serpent’s meat,” alluding, doubt¬ 
 less, to Gen. iii. 14. 
 
 In Ecclesiastes iii. 20 we find : “ All are of the 
 dust, and all turn to dust again and in xii. 7 : “ Then 
 shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the 
 spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” 
 
 Again, in Job xxxi. 33, we have an allusion to the 
 story of the Fall : “ Have I covered my transgression 
 as Adam?” And in Hosea vi. 7 : “But they like 
 Adam have transgressed the covenant.”* It has also 
 been justly observed, that the stereotyped expression 
 of the law of Moses, “ dying thou shalt die,” is the 
 same as that in Genesis ii. 17. 
 
 B. NEW TESTAMENT. 
 
 The Teaching of Christ on Original Sin. 
 
 Sufficient prominence has not been given to the 
 
 * Both these two verses contain the same expression 
 like Adam. Ostervald translates literally the passage in Job, 
 while in that in Hosea he inserts a faulty paraphrase : “They 
 have transgressed my covenant, as if it were a man’s.” On the 
 other hand, Perret Gentil translates literally the passage in 
 Hosea, and renders Job’s words : “ Have I covered my faults 
 after the manner of men 
 
Teaching of Christ on Original Sin. 75 
 
 teaching of Jesus Christ on the subject of sin. Ac¬ 
 cording to the opinion current in a certain theology, 
 St. Paul was the true creator of the doctrine of 
 original sin \ and on this point stands in opposition 
 to his Master, who is said to have taught emphati¬ 
 cally the doctrine of the Divine sonship of man. A 
 deeper study of the teaching of Jesus Christ shows 
 how arbitrary and false is this distinction. 
 
 Jesus Christ brought out, with a power unknown 
 before, the misery and guilt of man. He shows it 
 thus :— 
 
 1. He teaches that man is made to reproduce 
 the moral image of God, and that perfection is his 
 true end. 
 
 2. He reveals to the world by His life a type of 
 purity and charity, which conscience acknowledges 
 as its true ideal. All greatness that the earth has 
 seen before, is abased in presence of this new glory 
 of holiness. But the very loftiness of the ideal, by 
 marking the distance which separates us from it, casts 
 a flood of light on our low and fallen state. 
 
 3. He shows that moral good or evil consists 
 primarily in the will and intention of the individual j 
 and He thus destroys the Pharisaic casuistry, which, 
 like every other system of casuistry, attached pre¬ 
 eminent importance to acts. Christ teaches that 
 
76 The Oneness of the Race . 
 
 there is adultery in a look of lust, murder in a 
 motion of hatred. 
 
 4. To isolated acts He attaches importance only as 
 manifestations of the inward and spiritual condition 
 of the man (comparison of a tree bearing fruit—Matt, 
 vii. 17, 18 ; xii. 33-35; Luke vi. 43). 
 
 5. Now, this inward state is evil. Man, not this or 
 that man, but man as such, is diseased (Matt. ix. 12) 
 and evil (vii. 11); he is the slave of sin (John viii. 
 34) ; he cannot enter the kingdom of heaven un¬ 
 less born again (ch. iii. 3). 
 
 6. The guilt of man is then universal. But it 
 grows with the degree of light enjoyed (Luke xii. 48). 
 He who has beheld the Divine light in its fulness,— 
 that is, he who has looked upon the Son of God, the 
 living image of the Father,—and has rejected Him, 
 has brought himself into condemnation (Matt. x. 15 ; 
 xi. 24 ; Mark vi. iij Luke x. 12; and John iii. 18 ; 
 viii. 24) j and, finally, he who is false to the inner 
 witness of the truth, and who sins against the 
 Holy Ghost, is lost beyond hope (Matt. xii. 31, 32 ; 
 Luke xii. 10). 
 
 7. Jesus Christ constantly represents His work 
 as one of salvation designed for all men; those who 
 feel no need of it are, in His view, blindly self- 
 righteous, knowing nothing of themselves. 
 
Teaching of Paul on Original Sin. 7 7 
 
 8. On the origin of evil, Jesus Christ says nothing 
 directly. But on two points He lends the weight of 
 His authority to the teaching of Genesis. He 
 speaks of the tempter as having exercised from the 
 beginning an empire over souls, which constitutes 
 him the prince of this world (John viii. 44 and else¬ 
 where) ; and of physical death as the consequence of 
 sin and the manifestation of the judgments of God. 
 
 On St. Paul's Exposition of the Doctrine of Original 
 
 Sin. 
 
 Although St. Paul expounds the doctrine of ori¬ 
 ginal sin with a systematic vigour peculiar to himself, 
 it is to be observed that the other apostolic writers 
 affirm with equal clearness the universality of sin. 
 St. James, for example, who has been represented 
 by some as merely a doctor of the synagogue (see 
 M. Renan), entertains an eminently spiritual idea of 
 the Divine law, and one altogether opposed to Phari¬ 
 saism. It is James who says: “Whosoever shall 
 keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, 
 he is guilty of all (ch. ii. 10). This statement clearly 
 implies that, in the view of St. James, individual acts 
 of sin are only the manifestations of a general ten¬ 
 dency, which is sin. This is precisely the main 
 idea of St. Paul. St. Peter, though he does not 
 
7 8 The Oneness of the Race . 
 
 distinctly state the doctrine of sin, everywhere sup¬ 
 poses it as the very condition of the work of redemp¬ 
 tion, which he presents so clearly in his first Epistle; 
 •finally, in St. John, we find not only the clearest 
 allusion to the account of the Fall (i John ii. 16), 
 but the idea of the universality of sin (id. i. 8, i o), of 
 the bondage which it brings with it, and of the 
 absolute necessity of redemption. 
 
 Let us now proceed to sum up as briefly as 
 possible the teaching of St. Paul on this subject, as it 
 appears in its fullest development in the Epistle to 
 the Romans. 
 
 St. Paul looks first at sin as a fact. He shows how 
 Jews and Gentiles are equally involved in it, and 
 how both are alike guilty, the one of doing violence 
 to the law written in their conscience, the other to 
 the revealed law. All then are responsible. Sin and 
 guilt are universal facts. 
 
 But Paul does not (Rom. iii. 9-19) confine himself 
 to this general view of the outward life of humanity. 
 He demonstrates the fact of sin by the most searching 
 analysis ever made of human nature. 
 
 Man, he says, is incapable of righteousness. What 
 is to be understood by this word righteousness? 
 Righteousness is the expression of the normal relation 
 between the will of man and the will of God. Sub- 
 
Teaching of Paid on Original Sin. 79 
 
 lime thought, which restores to God His central 
 place in the sphere of morality! Ancient philosophers 
 conceived of justice, or righteousness, only as the 
 normal relation of man to man. Paul demonstrates, 
 that by himself man cannot realize perfect righteous¬ 
 ness ; the law, which should be his rule, serves only 
 to reveal his moral powerlessness and guilt. Man 
 is then incapable of fulfilling his destiny. He pos¬ 
 sesses no true liberty; he is the slave of sin. [This 
 is the true idea caught in after ages by St. Augustine 
 and by the Reformers, which gives so much power to 
 their theology. The Pauline theology does not, as 
 we shall presently show, absolutely deny free will and 
 liberty of choice. Man has always the will, the 
 choice; but he will not choose that which is good, 
 and is in reality incapable of fulfilling his true voca¬ 
 tion; for liberty, in the highest sense, consists in the 
 possibility of realizing the true end of life.] 
 
 Sin, then, Paul represents as a principle immanent 
 in human nature, and particular sins are but its out¬ 
 ward manifestations (Rom. vii. 8). This principle 
 has its seat in the flesh. This does not signify that 
 Paul looks upon matter as the fatal cause of sin; the 
 flesh, in the sense in which he uses it, stands for 
 human nature as a whole, in its state of subserviency 
 to sin. As has been well said, it is not the physical 
 
8 o The Oneness of the Race . 
 
 law of the flesh which becomes sin; on the contrary, 
 it is the law of sin which has become, and which 
 remains, the law of the flesh. Sin precedes in us 
 the moral will. Man has become carnal. It is by the 
 flesh sin still reigns and holds all men in captivity 
 (Rom. vi. 19). Let none be tempted to regard 
 this slavery as a natural, necessary fact. Man has 
 an inward consciousness that it is a malady; he can¬ 
 not acquiesce in it. The spirit ,, or the Divine 
 principle within him, struggles against the flesh; 
 man is not absolutely evil, for he never loses the 
 sense of his misery. The law, according to Paul’s 
 teaching, is designed to give prominence to that 
 misery, by proving to man his own incapacity to attain 
 to righteousness. Thus, unable to justify himself by 
 the law, he may be justified by grace through faith. 
 It is by this truly unanswerable argument St. Paul 
 arrives at the necessity of redemption. This system, 
 founded on the deepest knowledge of human nature, 
 remains eternally true. It rests upon psychological 
 facts, which moral superficiality alone can deny. 
 
 Now, it is in the course of this demonstration St. 
 Paul shows how sin entered into the world; and here 
 occurs that famous passage which was the first dogmatic 
 formula of original sin—Rom. v. 12-21. 
 
 Perhaps there is scarcely on record an instance of 
 
Teaching of Paid on Original Sin. 81 
 
 mistranslation productive of such serious consequences 
 as have arisen out of a false rendering of v. 12. The 
 Vulgate, instead of giving “because or for that all 
 have sinned,” has translated, in quo omnes peccaverunt, 
 “by him in whom all have sinned”; and it is upon 
 this clearly erroneous rendering that Augustine has 
 constructed his peculiar theory of original sin, as an 
 act to be imputed to each one of us. The original 
 e(f> $ cannot grammatically be translated, in quo. It 
 signifies literally, eo quod , propterea quod, quia, “be¬ 
 cause or “ since 
 
 It is true that St. Paul seems to contradict himself. 
 On the one. hand he teaches clearly that death has 
 passed upon all men in consequence of Adam’s fall; 
 on the other hand, he would seem to say that all 
 die because all sin. In order to escape this contradic¬ 
 tion, Hoffmann has offered a new, very ingenious, 
 and grammatically justifiable rendering. He connects 
 <£, with Odvaros, and translates: “ And thus death 
 is transmitted to all men, for under the dominion of 
 death, that is this death, all have sinned.” My ob¬ 
 jection to this rendering of Hoffmann’s is, that it is 
 too ingenious and too far-fetched. I prefer leaving 
 icf) y in its ordinary sense, which sense, I may observe, 
 is rather one of correlation than of causality. St. 
 Paul does not teach that the death of each individual 
 
 G 
 
82 The Oneness of the Race . 
 
 is the consequence of his own sin, since he establishes 
 precisely the contrary; he simply says, that the death 
 brought on by Adam, and passing upon all men, 
 proves that all are sinners, even when they do not sin 
 (children, for example) knowingly and consciously as 
 Adam did. 
 
 Let us attempt to state briefly and clearly the teach¬ 
 ing really conveyed in this famous passage. 
 
 We may observe first, that this is not the only place 
 in which St. Paul establishes a parallel between Adam 
 and Jesus Christ. The same idea occurs again in 
 i Cor. xv. 45. In the latter passage, however, the 
 contrasts which the Apostle marks between the two 
 Adams, refer to other points—the body, terrestrial in 
 the one, celestial in the other; the principle of life, 
 purely psychical in the one, spiritual in the other, etc. 
 
 In the passage of the Epistle to the Romans of 
 which we are now treating, St. Paul establishes a 
 double relation, moral and teleological, between Adam 
 and natural humanity on the one hand, and Jesus 
 Christ and redeemed humanity on the other. Adam 
 sinned; by him sin entered into the world; all the 
 men who came after him alike sinned. Jesus Christ 
 sinned not; and those who attach themselves to Him 
 become partakers of His righteousness. Such is the 
 moral relation. 
 
Teaching of Paid on Original Sin. 83 
 
 The consequence of Adam’s sin was death, which 
 passed with sin upon all his descendants. The death 
 which the first man had merited by the transgression 
 of a positive commandment, he transmitted to all his 
 descendants, since (Ifi $) all were involved in a 
 community of sin with him. The second Adam is 
 exempted from death by the absolute absence of sin. 
 This life, which is His due possession, He transmits 
 to those who by faith enter into a community of 
 righteousness with Him. 
 
 That which the passage clearly enunciates, there¬ 
 fore, is the fact of a close and intimate solidarity 
 between Adam and natural humanity on the one hand, 
 and Jesus Christ and redeemed humanity on the 
 other. Solidarity , I say, not imputation. The theology 
 of imputation pays no regard to the parallelism here 
 established by the Apostle. When St. Paul says ( 'y . 
 18) that “ by one righteousness, justification unto 
 life came upon all men,” it is obvious that he 
 does not intend to affirm that by the righteous¬ 
 ness of Jesus Christ all men are actually justified. 
 He means, as M. Reuss justly observes, that they 
 are so virtually or conditionally, that is to say, 
 if they have faith. In the same manner, the other 
 member of the sentence, “as by one offence judg¬ 
 ment came upon all men unto condemnation,” cannot 
 
84 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 signify simply that all men are condemned for the 
 sin of one, but rather that this sin entails upon them 
 all a similar penalty, inasmuch as they are all ac¬ 
 tually associated in the sin ( v . 12). We make the 
 same observation on v. 19. When it is there 
 said, that by the obedience of one all shall be made 
 righteous, it is evident that they will be so only as 
 they enter by faith into fellowship with the obedi¬ 
 ence of their head; and the same sense must at¬ 
 tach to the first member of the sentence, “ by one 
 offence all are made sinners.” They are declared * 
 or made sinners only in so far as by their acts they 
 have entered into fellowship with the disobedience 
 of Adam. The declaration is in both these cases a 
 judicial act of God, as the word Kadlcrravai so well 
 expresses.— Reuss. 
 
 I hope I have thus shown that the point of view 
 given in my treatise on Solidarity is strictly scrip¬ 
 tural. Let me now add a few remarks on the his¬ 
 torical formation of the dogma of original sin. 
 
 * Ostervald translates “have been rendered sinners ” “have 
 been rendered just.” KaOlarrjixL has both senses: to constitute, 
 in the declarative sense (to declare innocent or guilty), and to 
 constitute, in the actual sense, to render. In the latter sense it 
 is employed in 2 Peter i. 18 ; the former sense is, however, 
 preferable. 
 
History of Dogma of Original Sin. 85 
 
 The most ancient Fathers of the Church are 
 unanimous in representing sin, which they regard as 
 opposition to the will of God, as a universal fact, 
 having, as a consequence, the universality of death, 
 which has reigned ever since the fall of Adam. As 
 to the relation subsisting between the sinful state of 
 man and the fall of Adam, they insist upon the fact 
 that sin is a free act, and a simple repetition of 
 the deed of Adam. Justin Martyr, Tatian, Athe- 
 nagoras, Theophilus of Antioch, Irenseus, Clement of 
 Alexandria, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory 
 Nazianzen, Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusalem, and 
 Methodius, all expressed this view. They speak 
 repeatedly of the evil tendency inherent in man, of 
 the power which the devil exercises over him, of a 
 hereditary predisposition to evil; but none of these 
 things nullify, in their view, man’s power of free 
 choice. It is evident that none of them had grasped 
 St. Paul’s idea in its full depth and breadth. Tertul- 
 lian teaches more clearly, that there is in man a sinful 
 disposition which is transmitted by generation ( corpus 
 tradtix animce); but this disposition in no way de¬ 
 prives man of his capacity to do good; it does not 
 make the nature of children corrupt, as he declares in 
 his well-known words with reference to baptism: “ Quid 
 festinat innocens cetas ad remissionetn peccatorum 
 
86 
 
 The Oneness of the Race . 
 
 At the same period Origen sustains the Platonic 
 notion, that individual souls, having sinned in a 
 former life, have been for that sin imprisoned in a 
 body and made subject to the corrupting influence 
 of matter. 
 
 We note the presence of two ideas in the Christian 
 theology of the first three centuries; in the one, sin 
 is regarded as primarily the result of individual free¬ 
 dom ; in the other, as an hereditary fact; and the 
 former view is plainly in the ascendant. This was a 
 natural reaction from the teaching of the Gnostic 
 sects and of Platonic philosophy, which asserted 
 that matter was the source of evil. The Fathers of 
 the Church, in controversion of this view, brought 
 into almost exclusive prominence the responsibility 
 and free agency of man. Moreover minds were not 
 yet much occupied with the problem of evil and of 
 redemption. The Arian disputes were the occasion 
 of the first great theological controversy in the 
 Church. With Pelagius and Augustine a new era 
 commenced. 
 
 The Pelagians (Pelagius, Caelestius, and Julian of 
 Ectanum) taught that sin is a free act; man is by 
 nature equally inclined to evil or good; like Adam, 
 he has absolute freedom of choice. If the sin of 
 Adam has any influence over us, it can only be 
 
History of Dogma of Original Sin. 87 
 
 that of example. Lust ( concupiscentia ) and death are 
 simple natural facts. The only relation subsisting be¬ 
 tween Adam and ourselves is the relation between the 
 pattern and the copy; the power which sin exerts 
 over us is merely the power of habit. 
 
 It was in opposition to Pelagianism that Augustine 
 was led to formulate a complete theory of original sin. 
 The principal points of his system were the following ; 
 I. The fall of Adam corrupted his own nature and 
 that of his posterity. II. This corruption (_peccatum 
 originis ) consists essentially in lust—that is to say, in 
 the predominance of the lower, sensual instincts over 
 the spiritual; in the impotence to do good; and in 
 mortality. III. The sinner has lost his liberty, in the 
 higher sense of that word; he has no longer even 
 freedom of choice, since he invariably chooses evil. 
 IV. The state of sin transmitted by birth is not simply 
 evil, but it is imputable to man; it entails the con¬ 
 demnation of all the race, even of children; hence 
 the absolute necessity of the baptism of infants. V. 
 Sin is thus transmitted by generation; and yet Au¬ 
 gustine does not, like Tertullian, hold that the soul as 
 well as the body is transmitted by means of generation. 
 He believes that every soul is directly created of God. 
 Hence it follows that original sin is transmitted by the 
 body. VI. He concludes that we all sinned in Adam 
 
88 The Oneness of the Race. 
 
 (, onines fuerunt ratione semmis in lumbis Adami ); a 
 conclusion which he justifies by his false translation 
 of Rom. v. 12 —in quo onines peccaverunt. 
 
 Such is the system which gave rise to the ecclesi¬ 
 astical doctrine of original sin. The Catholic Church, 
 however, must not be supposed to have continued 
 faithful to the teachings of St. Augustine. The three 
 greatest representatives of Scholasticism Anselm, 
 Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas—did, it is true, 
 accept his views, though they modified his idea of 
 the total corruption of man, and allowed greater scope 
 to free will. But the Church shows a gradual 
 tendency towards semi-Pelagianism, after condemning 
 it in the two Councils of Orange and of Valence. 
 According to this system, man inherits original sin, 
 and is thus made subject to death; but this sin does 
 not destroy,’ though it weakens, his power for good; 
 he retains his free will, and he has power to call in 
 to his aid the grace which alone can save lnm. Duns 
 Scotus went still further, and reduced original sin 
 simply to the loss of original righteousness, which was 
 a superadded gift of God ( donum supet addituni ) ; it 
 follows, therefore, that the nature of man was not 
 changed by original sin, but remains in its integrity. 
 The doctrine of Duns Scotus became, at the Council 
 of Trent, the official doctrine of the Church. “ Between 
 
History of Dogma of Original Sin . 89 
 
 Adam fallen and Adam before the fall,” Cardinal 
 Bellarmine distinctly says, “ there is no other difference 
 than between a naked man and a man who has been 
 deprived of his clothing.” 
 
 The Reformation returned to the doctrine of St. 
 Augustine. That doctrine is found in all the con¬ 
 fessions of faith of the sixteenth century; it is that 
 which Jansenius tried to re-establish, and which was 
 solemnly condemned by the Bull Unigenitus. 
 
 THE EHD. 
 
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 M.A. Third Edition, small crown 8vo, 3-r. 6d. , cloth. 
 
 '‘The simple, nervous, lucid style, the clear discrimination, the pointed, 
 practical faithfulness, and especially the manly, fearless honesty of Mr. Dale’s 
 expositions, demand the very highest eulogy.”— British Qtmrterly Review. 
 
 By the same Author. 
 
 THE JEWISH TEMPLE AND THE CHRISTIAN 
 
 CHURCH. A series of Discourses on the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews. Second Edition, crown 8vo, 6 s., cloth. 
 
 London: IIODDER & STOUGHTON, 27, Paternoster Row- 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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