their nature, from being perfect and holy, became at once degenerate and corrupt, and that this degenerate and corrupt nature passed, by ordinary generation, to all their posterity, rendering them obnoxious to the sight of God, and, unless a remedy had been provided, banishing them entirely and for ever from His presence.1 We see abundant or obliquity which inclines him to evil.” "The early fathers did not hold the total corruption of human nature in the Calvinistic sense as the result of the Fall."-(Prof. BLUNT: Early Fathers.) "The theory of a transmitted moral depravity appears to involve the further difficulty of loosening the very foundations of man's accountability; for if the nature we inherit be in any intelligible sense morally depraved-if it actually comes to us inevitably burdened with a debt of personal guilt—the voluntary and the involuntary, the necessary and the free, are confounded in a manner which destroys all our conceptions of moral government.”—(Dr. J. HARRIS: Patriarchy.)

1 "After the heavenly image in man was effaced, he not only was himself punished by a withdrawal of the ornaments in which he had been arrayed—viz., wisdom, virtue, justice, truth, and holiness—and by the substitution in their place of those dire pests, blindness, impotence, vanity, impurity, and unrighteousness; but he involved his posterity also and plunged them in the same wretchedness. This is the hereditary corruption to which early Christian writers gave the name of original sin, meaning by the term the deprivation of a nature formerly good and pure. The commencement of this depravity will not be found until we ascend to the first parent of all as the fountain head. We must therefore hold it for certain that, in regard to human nature, Adam was not merely a progenitor, but, as it were, a root, and that accordingly by his corruption the whole human race was deservedly vitiated.” 'Original sin, then, may be defined a hereditary corruption and depravity of our nature extending to all the parts of the soul which first makes us obnoxious to the wrath of God and then produces in us works which, in Scripture, are termed works of the flesh." Being thus perverted and corrupted in all the parts of our nature we are merely, on account of such corruption, deservedly condemned by God to whom nothing is acceptable but righteousness, innocence, and purity. This is not liability for another's fault.”—(CALVIN: Institutes.) "So long as such a moral condition exists,

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so long will it be a necessary consequence that that Being who is infinitely and unalterably holy should regard it with abhorrence and displacency. . . . We loathe a venomous reptile not only when it wounds, and because it wounds, but because it can wound; we loathe it simply because it carries about with it such a terrible apparatus of mischief; and this, too, even though it may never have been actually mischievous. Nay. we loathe it even before its pernicious energies are sufficiently developed to be injurious at all. . . . It may be said, perhaps, that the representation bears ominiously on the destinies even of those who die in infancy. . . And this, in our opinion, would have been the case (for death, simply considered, has no tendency to work a moral change upon the soul), were it not for that auspicious remedy which the Gospel provides." (HENRY ROGERS.) "As the result of this act of Adam, Christianity affirms that man is depraved. . . . It regards man as so fallen and so helpless that, but for an extraordinary intervention—the appointment of some being that

...

instances of the same kind in ordinary life, children having to bear the consequences of their parents' transgressions in estate, in body, and even in mind; but they cannot be said to be sharers likewise in their guilt.

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When Christ assumed our human nature, He deprived it of its sinfulness in the sight of God.2 Fallen and degraded as it was, He no longer saw in it only the consequences of the fall, but He beheld therein the presence, and the work of His Son, and could contemplate the perfection to which it was again to be raised." Hence, the necessity of Christ taking upon himself a nature fallen and corrupt as ours now is, and not "such as it was in Adam before he sinned and fell." He was "without blemish and without spot in

should interpose to save-it was impossible that any native elasticity in the human powers or will, or any device which human ingenuity might fall on, should raise him up and restore him to the favour of God."(ALBERT BARNES.) "Christianity affirms that there is no hope of salvation but in the Son of God. . . . But the affirmation is not that men are guilty for not being acquainted with that scheme, but that they lie under the curse of the antecedent state, from which Christianity came to deliver."-(Ditto.)

1 "Not merely are the external circumstances of the child affected by the misdeeds of a parent, but there is often a dark suspicion resting upon his very soul, there is felt to be in him a hereditary presumptive tendency to crime which can be removed only by a long course of virtuous conduct, and which, even then, the slightest circumstance re-excites."(ALBERT BARNES.)

2" What He (Christ) did was this: He took your flesh and made it holy, thereby to make you holy; and therefore He will make every one holy who believes in Him."-(EDWARD IRVING: Sermons.)

3" The death of Christ has obliterated the effects of Adam's transgression, so far as that none shall be left to final depravity or final condemnation for that alone."-(HENRY ROGERS.) "That the sacrifice of Christ had a retrospective efficacy, extending through every age of the world to the very origin of sin and the creation of man upon the earth, appears from Heb. ix., 25-26, where we are told that Christ had not to offer Himself often, as the high priest had to enter into the holy place every year, for then must He have suffered often since the foundation, but that now once in the end of the world hath He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. The effect, therefore, of Christ's own sacrifice, once offered, was understood by the Apostle to be precisely the same as if it had been actually repeated at different intervals from the very creation; and that effect would certainly have been the expiation of sins committed from the time of the creation." (Rev. JAS. FAWCETT.)

"Dr. Candlish, in his work on the Fatherhood of God, says that he cannot " see how, if the human nature of the Son of God had in it anything of the blight or taint which the Fall has entailed on it as transmitted to us--if, when He came into our world in human nature, He had any stain of sin, original or actual, He ever could have stood us in stead

His divine nature, but not in His human, which, like ours, was stamped with the consequences of sin; and hence He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

By taking our human nature upon Him, Christ sanctified, not only His own body, but also the bodies of all who should believe on His name and follow Him. To these also it was given to Him, that in God's sight they should appear without sin, even as He was without sin; and be entitled to all the privileges of sons of God.

Nor is this all. Not only do we believe that the righteousness of Christ may be communicated by ordinary generation to the children of such as believe in and follow after Him ; but that we have been made partakers in the sin of Adam, in order that we may, in like manner, be made partakers in the righteousness of Christ.1 The law was made the means of transmitting sin and death, in order that it might afterwards be the means of transmitting righteousness and eternal life.2 It is to this very law of hereditary

as the Lamb of God offered for us, without blemish and without spot." He adopts the opinion, therefore, that the human nature which Christ took was "such as it was in Adam before he sinned and fell; " while, at the same time, he holds that the relationship which He assumed to God was our present, not our unfallen one. “I maintain,” he says, "that He enters into our relation to God as his subjects and servants in its present, not its original state." But we are unable to see how the human nature of Christ, subject as it was to pain, and suffering and death, and the other weaknesses and infirmities of our nature, could be said to have resembled that of Adam before he fell, or to have differed from ours in any material respect.

"But if, out of all controversy, the righteousness of Christ, and thereby life, is ours by communication, it follows that both of these were lost in Adam, that they might be recovered in Christ.”—(CALVIN: Institutes.)

2"The vindication of God in sin, suffering, punishment, and all evil pertaining to the race probably depends, to a great degree, on just the truth I am here endeavouring to establish. When its propagations cease to be mere propagations of evil or moral damage and disaster, and become propagations of sanctified life and ages of life, they will certainly have a very different opinion of the scheme of existence from that which we most naturally take up now. Our scheme of propagated and derivative life will then appear no longer a scheme of disadvantage, but a mode of induction that gives to every soul the noblest, safest beginning possible." (Dr. BUSHNELL.) "In the work of redemption, this law of our interwoven life which before weighed on us like a heavy curse, shines 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."—(E. BERSIER: Oneness of the Race.)

transmission-this law by which the qualities, whether good or bad, of parents have a tendency to be transmitted to their children-that we are mainly indebted for whatever of progress in civilization has already been made to it that we mainly look for whatever may yet be effected.1

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1 "The facts of the transmission of acquired physical or mental qualities to the offspring present very interesting psychological phases in the progressive transformation and development of a people." (Dr. WAITZ: Anthropology.) It is "a general principle that powers or habits acquired by cultivation are transmitted to the next generation and exalted or perpetuated. The history of particular races of men affords distinct proof of this."-(Sir H. DAVY.) Acquired habits, in several successive generations, become permanent, and assume the character of instincts."(Sir B. BRODIE.) "All confirmed habits, which become a part of the animal nature, seem to be imparted by hereditary descent; and thus, what seems to be an original instinct, may after all, be but the accumulated growth and experience of many generations."-(J. D. MORELL: Mental Philosophy.) Men have yet to learn "that every vicious habit and chronic disease communicates itself by descent; and that by purity of birth the entire system of the human body and soul may be gradually elevated, or, by recklessness of birth, degraded; until there shall be as much difference between the well-bred and ill-bred human creature (whatever pains be taken with their education) as between a wolf-hound and the vilest mongrel cur. And the knowledge of this great fact ought to regulate the education of our youth, and the entire conduct of the nation." (RUSKIN.) "There is a great deal more in genealogies than is generally believed at present. I never heard tell of any clever man that came out of entirely stupid people. If you look around the families of your acquaintance you will see such cases in all directions. I know that it has been the case in mine. I can trace the father, and the son, and the grandson, and the stamp is quite distinctly legible upon each of them." -(T. CARLYLE.) "The history of artists, scholars, and of reigning houses shows that great mental power, energy, and a capacity for mental development continues in the same family, sometimes for several generations; whilst others exhibit just the contrary, which is proved by the histories of families in common life."- (Dr. WAITZ: Anthropology.) "The effects of the most uniform and frequent of these experiences (of mankind) have been successively bequeathed, principal and interest; and have slowly amounted to that high intelligence which lies latent in the brain of the infant-which the infant in after life exercises, and, perhaps, strengthens or further complicates and which, with minute additions, it bequeaths to future generations. And thus it happens that the European inherits from twenty to thirty inches more brain than the Papuan," and "that out of savages unable to count up to the number of their fingers, and speaking a language containing only nouns and verbs, arise at length our Newtons and our Shakspeares. Scientific and artistic progress

is due, not simply to the accumulation of knowledge and of appliances: the impressibilities and the activities have themselves grown to higher complications."(H. SPENCER: Principles of Psychology.) "There is no reason, per se, why every man in an advanced state of civilization should not be as sensitive to harmony as was Mozart, as intuitive of beauty as

From this we draw our faith in the future—our hope in education.1 We believe that as men become better, their children will be better, until at length they will cease to be born with tendencies to evil, but only to what is good and right; and until sin and its consequences are at length banished from the earth.2 Such is the bright and glorious future that presents itself to the eye of the educator. The perfection of humanity is the goal towards which he is to

was Raphael, as readily apprehensive of poetic imagery as Shakspeare, as instinct with nature as Goethe, as open to moral and religious influences as Paul and John."-(J. D. MORELL: Psychology.)

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1 "We have only to bestir ourselves, and use the resources which God has especially placed in our hands, and then... we shall see all the visions of revelation realized in the intellectual and moral glories of an enlightened and regenerated world."—(Rev. B. PARSONS.) 'By means of good education, of proper instruction, of persuasion, of good example, and of the discipline of laws and government: what happy effects they might have, if applied universally with the skill and address that is within the reach of human wisdom and power, is not easily conceived, or to what pitch the happiness of human society and the improvement of the species might be carried. What a noble, what a divine employment of human power is here assigned us! How it ought to raise the ambition of parents, of instructors, of lawgivers, of magistrates, of every man in his station, to contribute his part towards the accomplishment of so glorious an end." -(Dr. THOS. REID: Active Powers.) "I am persuaded that the extreme profligacy, improvidence, and misery which are so prevalent among the labouring classes in many countries are chiefly to be ascribed to the want of education." (RQBT. HALL.)

2 "The individual, rightly developing in his generation, is, by virtue of the laws of hereditary action, ordaining or determining what shall be preordained or pre-determined in the original nature of the individual of a future age."—(Dr. H. MAUDSLEY.) Dr. Farr, in a paper read before the Social Science Association, said that, in the course of ages, man will improve so as to become only a little lower than the angels.

3"Secundum propositum nostrum est cursus profectus nostri."-(De Imitatione Christi.) "With high and pure ideas of the style in which all his duties may be discharged, life becomes to him a perpetual source of enjoyment, because he finds continual occupation for his daily powers, and has, at the same time, a high standard in his mind of the future results towards which his most familiar duties may be made to conspire." -(Manual of Conduct.) "First of all, let us, as scholars, have faith in the future. No man was ever inspired through his memory: The eye of genius is not behind. Nor was there ever a truly great man whose ideal was in the past."-(HORACE BUSHNELL.) "To how great a degree of perfection the intellectual and moral nature of man is capable of being raised by cultivation it is difficult to conceive. The effects of early, continued, and systematical education, in the case of those children who are trained for the sake of gain to feats of strength and agility, justify, perhaps, the most sanguine views which it is possible for a philosopher to form with respect to the improvement of the species."-(DUGALD STEWART: Human Mind.)