From a woman was the beginning of sin; and ancient. The Apocalypse of Baruch, which is because of her we all die.' That beginning' is more akin to Rabbinic literature than any of to be interpreted here in a temporal, and not in a the pseudepigrapha, seems to regard the Fall as causal, sense is rendered overwhelmingly probable having brought upon the whole race liability to by the recovered Hebrew text and, more especially, future punishment, and as thereby having affected by other passages of Sirach. In this case Ben the spiritual destiny of all men, while at the same Sira makes no advance upon OT teaching in con- time it asserts, with an emphasis which suggests nexion with original sin; but the latter part of a polemical intention, that ultimately each indithe verse quoted above supplies evidence that invidual is 'the Adam of his own soul." But for a his day the way was being prepared for an inter- difference of emphasis on these two different lines pretation of Gn 3 such as would lead to a doctrine of doctrine, the teaching of pseudo-Baruch is of original sin. similar to that of St. Paul. Similar again to the teaching of both these writers, and probably contemporary, is that of the Apocalypse of Ezra (2 Esdras of the Apocrypha). But, while pseudoBaruch minimizes the effects of the Fall on man's moral state, pseudo-Ezra is full of the sense of human infirmity; his doctrine as to original sin, however, is so greatly qualified by the teaching as to the 'evil heart' (yeşer hara), which follows Rabbinic lines, that he is led practically to repudiate original sin in the sense of inherent corruption, deriving human infirmity not by heredity from fallen Adam, but from the following of Adam' in indulging the evil impulse which was as much in Adam when he was created as in us when we were born. The book of Wisdom affords new instances in Jewish thought of approach towards this doctrine -e.g., in its teaching that sin and (spiritual) death were introduced into humanity from without, in speaking of Adam as the protoplast,' and in affirming the actuality of transmitted depravity (though this is local and derived from the Cainites, not universal and derived from Adam). The data for the doctrine are all present in this book; but they are unconnected, not generalized into a single conception. The last sentence will serve equally well to summarize the more elaborate teaching of Philo and of Alexandrian Judaism generally. But in an apocalyptic writing of the same period largely influenced by Hellenic thought, the Book of the Secrets of Enoch, original sin derived from Adam is plainly taught (see below). (a) Rabbinical literature. In this department of Jewish literature we find much said of the glory of the unfallen state of Adam, and something as to the cosmic effects of the Fall. But the privileges forfeited by Adam for the race are not the dona superaddita of later Christian theology. The idea of the evil inclination, the germ of which is met with early in the OT, is greatly elaborated; but this bias to evil seems never to have been regarded by Rabbis before the Christian era as a consequence of the first sin. A crude legend that Eve was polluted by Satan (or the serpent), and her taint transmitted to her posterity, occurs in several forms in Rabbinic writings; but it does not seem to have served the purpose of an explanation of the universal sinfulness of man. What is most remarkable, in connexion with the antecedents of St. Paul's teaching, is the apparent absence from this department of Jewish literature, until mediæval times, of any reference to the idea of all the race being included in Adam, or identified with Adam, when he sinned. Death, and various supernatural adornments of Adam's life at its beginning, are the only consequences of the Fall which early Rabbinism seems to recognize. We conclude, then, that Judaism, at the beginning of the Christian era, possessed two distinct conceptions of original sin. The one, presumably originating in the Alexandrian school, is stated in terms of the idea of inherited depravity or corruption, and is analogous to an important and characteristic factor of Augustine's doctrine. The other asserts, quite indefinitely, a connexion between Adam's sin and his posterity's liability to punishment, and offers no connecting link between them; if we possess analogy with any later form of the doctrine of original sin, it would seem to be the imputation theory. The passage from this form of the Jewish doctrine to the teaching of St. Paul involves but a slight step. 3. St. Paul's doctrine of original sin.-There is only one passage in his Epistles in which St. Paul deals explicitly with the connexion_of_human sinfulness with Adam's transgression, viz. Ro 512-21. This connexion is plainly affirmed; but no attempt is made to express how the connexion is to be conceived. It is easy to read into St. Paul's statement each of the later ecclesiastical theories as to the nature of this connexion, just because that statement is so indefinite and colourless as to be capable of accommodating them all; but none of them can safely be extracted, for the same reason, (b) Jewish apocalyptic literature.-If the ground- from the Apostle's vague language. The Apostle work of the Book of Enoch is the earliest extant certainly teaches original sin-more or less after specimen of pseudepigraphic literature, it points one manner in which it was current in the Jewish to a tendency, in the first beginnings of Jewish schools of his day; but in what form he conceived exegesis, to explain the sinfulness of mankind by it it is perhaps for ever impossible for us to deterreference not to the Fall story of Gn 3, but to the mine with certainty. He says that sin 'entered legend of the 'elôhim (or watchers,' as they are into the world by one man, and death through called in Enoch) contained in Gn 61-4. As we pass sin; and so death made its way to all men, because to later apocalypses, we find the emphasis increas- all sinned.' Exegesis of these words involves an ingly shifted to Gn 4, and signs of confusion of answer to two distinct questions. (1) Does St. these two distinct Biblical stories, which seems to Paul mean that death passed to all because all have resulted in detaching the idea of the fall of sinned personally, or because all sinned when the race from the setting in which it first grew up, Adam sinned? The latter interpretation, it may and transplanting it to the history of the first be answered, is to be preferred, because otherwise temptation and the loss of Paradise. Thus the the whole of the parallel between Adam and Fall-story came to be regarded as the explanation Christ, and therefore the whole argument of the of much besides human death. In the A recension context (in which reference to original sin is inciof Slavonic Enoch, or the Book of the Secrets of dental), would be destroyed, and the force of the Enoch, the idea appears that mankind inherits aorist tense (all sinned') would be lost. (2) from Adam, and as a consequence of his sin, moral What did St. Paul conceive to be the mediating infirmity of nature-a much more explicit doctrine link between Adam's sin and the sin and death of of original sin than that taught by St. Paul. his descendants? Is it simply God's appointment Possibly this teaching, which would be very (cf. Apocalypse of Baruch and Apocalypse of unusual for an early Jewish book, is not really | Ezra); or the seminal existence in Adam of his 1 posterity (cf. He 79.); or their identity with, or inclusion in, Adam, in the sense of Augustine's 'realism'? The first two of these alternatives could each be naturally attributed to St. Paul, because we know that they were current at or near his day. It is also possible, however, to interpret St. Paul in terms of his own thought in other contexts, and to suggest that he refers the sins of all mankind to the first sin, not in the sense that all shared in that sin, but in a similar sense to that in which he speaks of believers as being crucified to the world, and having died to sin, when Christ died upon the Cross. Or, again, just as the believer's renewal is conceived by St. Paul as wrought in advance, though he did not suppose it actually to be so wrought, so also he may regard the consequences of Adam's sin as having been wrought simultaneously with it. But, whichever, if any, of these meanings were present to St. Paul's mind, the only certainty that we have is that he states none of them. 4. Development of the doctrine in the Patristic period and the Middle Ages.-We have seen that St. Paul taught a doctrine of original sin, and that he probably (perhaps we should say certainly) imbibed it, along with many other particular views, from his Jewish surroundings. But, when we pass on to consider the writings of the Fathers of the early Church, we find that they did not directly adopt St. Paul's teaching as the basis of their doctrine, nor borrow that presented in Jewish literature. They started afresh to elaborate a doctrine of original sin. The three chief pioneers, before Augustine, in this work were Irenæus, Origen, and Tertullian. And it may be pointed out that each of these Fathers derived his particular contribution to the fabric of future orthodox doctrine from his own reflexion on texts, philosophical tenets, or institutions, none of which had been a source of the similar conclusions previously reached by Jewish thought. Justin Martyr was entirely uninfluenced by St. Paul's teaching on original sin, and practically repeated the doctrine characteristic of Rabbinical, rather than of later Jewish apocalyptic, literature. It is not until the Gnostic controversy had invested the general problem of evil with considerable importance for Christian thought that the doctrines of the original state and of the Fall began to receive definite shape in the Church. By the time of Irenæus, moreover, the Pauline Epistles had come to be accepted as Scripture, and therefore as a guide to doctrine, or a source thereof. Irenæus, however, did not set out from St. Paul's doctrine of original sin as a foundation already laid. It is in working out his idea of recapitulation, according to which Christ is the sum and the representative of restored humanity, that he begins to shape his teaching as to the Fall; and, had it not been for the requirements of the recapitulationdoctrine, it is probable that he would not have been inspired by the Epistle to the Romans to develop any teaching concerning original sin. The teaching which he supplies exhibits no real advance upon that of St. Paul. He merely emphasizes the idea that the Fall was the collective deed of the race, in virtue of the unity, in some undefined and perhaps mystical sense, of the race with Adam. On original sin as an inherent disease, or as the source of concupiscence, he is quite silent. In a recently recovered work of this Father (Els 'Erideiği Toû 'ATOσToλοû кηρúyμатos, ed. by A. Harnack from the Armenian version, Leipzig, 1908), however, there occurs a somewhat curious doctrine of original sin, or of inherited sinfulness, especially associated with the descendants of Cain. God's curse on Cain is spoken of as handed down by natural heredity to his | posterity. This teaching is, of course, different in important points from that which became general in the Church, and it was obviously adopted by Irenæus from Alexandrian Judaism. It is characteristic of Alexandrian Jewish literature to emphasize the gravity of Cain's sin, and the sinfulness of his descendants, and somewhat to minimize that of Adam; and it is in the book of Wisdom, as was seen above, that we find the first clear conception of hereditary sin. This work of Irenæus serves further to show that in his time the idea of inherited sinfulness was not as yet definitely coupled with that of Adam's fall. Origen's name is generally associated with a theory of the source of inborn sinfulness which is incompatible with the ecclesiastical doctrine of original sin. This Father taught, especially in his earlier years, that the Biblical story of Paradise was an allegory describing the fall of all individual souls in a previous, celestial existence. According to this view, suggested by Plato's myth (Phædrus), original sin is not derived from the first forefather of the race, but is the result of individual free will. The guiltiness of inborn sin is thus secured at the expense of that racial solidarity upon which Irenæus, following St. Paul, had insisted. Naturally this theory never received general sanction in the Church. Quite another line of teaching, however, was adopted by Origen in his later yearsa doctrine of inherited corruption, introduced by Adam's fall; and thus he became the precursor of Augustine. It has been suggested with great probability that Origen's change of view was occasioned by his coming in contact, during his banishment from Alexandria, with the practice of infant baptism at Cæsarea. His writings of this period refer frequently to a stain of sin defiling every man, and requiring to be cleansed away in baptism. Thus it would seem that Origen developed his later teaching as to inborn sin in order to account for the ancient and wide-spread practice of infant baptism. The texts of Scripture which speak of universal and inborn uncleanness (e.g., Job 144, Ps 513), and the Hebrew ceremonial of purification, seem to have suggested to Origen the idea of an inborn taint; and, having become possessed of the idea, he proceeded to associate it with Adam's fall, though express association of the two ideas very rarely occurs in his writings. Of solidarity of the race with Adam, again, Origen offers a very definite conception. He borrows the idea of seminal existence from the Epistle to the Hebrews, and by means of it explains the unity of the race with its first parent in sin. Thus, without revealing any influence from Irenæus or Tertullian, Origen independently supplied the two main conceptions involved in the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. The third early and independent pioneer in the elaboration of the doctrine was Tertullian. On the point of the mode of derivation of universal inborn sin from fallen Adam-a point as to which Irenæus is silent and to which Origen scarcely refers Tertullian lays down full and definite teaching. He does so in terms of the traducianist. doctrine of the origin of the soul, which he adopted from current Stoic philosophy and not from Scripture. This psychological tenet plays for Tertullian the same part as infant baptism played for Origen, and the recapitulation-doctrine for Irenæus. The conception that every human soul is a branch' of Adam's, reproducing its qualities, and therefore its corruption (which Tertullian considered to be in a state of actual sinfulness), readily lent itself to the formulation of a definite theory of original sin. The traducianist explanation of the propagation of original sin was not generally accepted by the Church; but the results attained by its means were permanently retained. From the time of Origen and Tertullian to that of Augustine the doctrine of original sin received no important development, save that, alongside of the view, emphasized by the two founders of the doctrine just mentioned, that original sin consists in a positive corruption of human nature (a view also advocated with varying degrees of clearness and emphasis by Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Macarius of Egypt, Hilary of Poitiers, and Ambrose, and greatly developed by Augustine), we meet frequently with the supplementary conception of original sin as a loss of supernatural graces with which man was endowed at the first. This aspect of original sin, destined to become predominant in Scholastic theology, is presented by Irenæus (with great inconsistencies) and Athanasius, and, along with the more positive aspect, by some other Fathers, including Augustine. As has been shown above, it has no more Scriptural authority than the assertion that the Fall introduced positive derangement into man's nature. It originates apparently in the peculiar and baseless teaching of Tatian, that the communion of the Spirit was withdrawn from Adam (Tatian says nothing as to Adam's posterity) when he sinned, and in the distinction drawn first by Irenæus between the image of God (belonging to man's nature, and never lost) and the likeness of God (generally identified with supernatural endowments, the loss of which was due to the Fall). This is, of course, merely a piece of false exegesis, though upon it is based the whole superstructure of what has been regarded by many theologians, Anglican as well as Roman Catholic, as the most essential and most catholic element in the doctrine of the Fall and original sin. As to its catholicity,' there is no reason to believe that the conception of original sin as loss of dona superaddita was more general among the Fathers than that of original sin as a positive vitium or corruptio of human nature; and in respect of moral consequences it encounters even graver difficulties. Augustine to make a more complete and systematic study of sin than had yet been undertaken in the Church. During the controversy he was led to modify his earlier views, which were practically identical with those of the majority of Eastern and Western Fathers since Irenæus. He expressed the solidarity of the race with Adam sometimes in. terms of Origen's idea of seminal existence in the first parent (c. Julianum, v. 12), and sometimes in terms of the realistic notion that Adam's personality, and not merely his nature, was shared by his posterity: 'Omnes enim fuimus in illo uno, quando omnes fuimus ille unus, qui per feminam lapsus est in peccatum. Nondum erat nobis singillatim creata et distributa forma, in qua singuli viveremus; sed iam natura erat seminalis, ex qua propagaremur' (de Civ. Dei, xiii. 14). In de Vera Religione, 51, he speaks of the sin which our nature committed (in Adam), which implies his adoption from Greek philosophy of the idea that universals or generic concepts exist apart from their individual or particular cases. Being, especially before the Pelagian controversy, a champion of free will, he admits Pelagius's premiss that there can be no sin without willing, but he falsely thought that he could secure our guilt for Adam's sin by incorporating our nature in Adam, whereas our wills would also require to be identical with Adam's, and consequently our personalities and individualities. Augustine was also inconsistent in regarding Adam as at the same time an individual and a generic idea. Original sin, with Augustine, involved guilt. Hence the unbaptized, even unbaptized infants, incurred, and (he taught) would receive, damnation: 'Infans perditione punitur, quia pertinet ad massam perditionis' (de Peccato Originali, 31). The most characteristic feature in Augustine's doctrine of original sin is his exaggeration of the effects upon human nature of Adam's fall. He taught that the depravity thus introduced was complete, so that fallen man is unable even to will what is good. To this belief was chiefly due his teaching concerning grace, and consequently his doctrine of predestination. On passing from the Patristic to the Scholastic age, we find no important changes from the main trend of the teaching of the pre-Augustinian Fathers. Augustine's extreme views were left aside; doubtless they seemed to be provincial rather than catholic. Aquinas held that, on its positive side, original sin was a disordered condition (vulneratio naturæ, dispositio inordinata) consequent upon dissolution of the harmony in which original righteousness essentially consisted; while, on its negative side, it was loss of original righteousness or of superadded graces. Aquinas could not follow Augustine on several important points. He denied that natural goodness was forfeited at the Fall, that free will was more than impaired, that concupiscence is of the nature of sin proper. At the same time he emphasized the positive side of original sin more strongly than Anselm had done, who, while not denying the guiltiness of inborn sin in the infant, was dissatis The development of the doctrine of original sin in the pre-Augustinian period having now been traced, it is necessary to call attention to such instances as may be found of Patristic teaching which deviated from that which was generally accepted. Though Clement of Alexandria was not unfamiliar with the writings of Irenæus, he seems not to have held any doctrine of original sin whatever, as distinct from a doctrine of the Fall. He vaguely identifies Adam with the race, or considers him as its representative; but Adam's sin was to this writer a type of human sin rather than the cause of human sinfulness. His exegesis of Ro 5 even repudiates the idea that death was a consequence of the Fall. Like most Eastern Fathers, Clement insists most strongly on the unimpaired free will of mankind. Athanasius too, in spite of his adoption of the view that the Fall occasioned the withdrawal of Adam's supernatural gifts, deviates from the generally received teaching of the Fathers in regarding the fall of mankind as having been gradually brought about, rather than as having been catastrophically effected by Adam.fied with the view that original sin is strictly sin It is in the Antiochene school, however, that we find the most conspicuous instances of heterodox teaching concerning original sin. Chrysostom does not appear to have countenanced this doctrine in any form, or to have regarded natural concupiscence as of the nature of sin, while Theodore of Mopsuestia was practically a Pelagian, denying that baptism removed inherited sinfulness and also the practically universal belief that Adam's transgression was the cause of death. It was the Pelagian controversy that obliged (i.e. personal sin), and compared it with deformity or misery. Duns Scotus represented a standpoint still more remote from Augustinianism than that of Aquinas. He held that the first sin-which he has a tendency to minimize-had not affected man's nature at all, but only his supernatural gifts. He more strongly emphasizes fallen man's freedom of will, and denies that original sin is to be identified with concupiscence, because concupiscence belongs to our unwounded nature. There is indeed little in common between Duns Scotus and Augustine, in so far as Augustine differed from the Fathers who preceded him. If the Thomist and Scotist views sum up the two main tendencies of Scholastic teaching in its maturity, Abelard may be mentioned as the most conspicuous representative of views markedly divergent from the general trend of mediæval doctrine. In some respects he is a precursor of Jeremy Taylor. He revolts somewhat at the idea of Adam's sin being so serious as to be an adequate cause of the condemnation of mankind. Appetite, he teaches, is natural and innocent, and the conflict between sense and reason is characteristic of man as God made him. If it be said that we sinned in Adam, 'sin' is used in an improper sense. For these and other particular views concerning original sin Abelard was censured by Bernard. The Scholastic doctrine of original sin, more especially in the form which it received from Aquinas, became at the Council of Trent the official teaching of the Church of Rome. The decrees of that Council affirm that the Fall caused loss of original righteousness, infection of body and soul, thraldom to the devil, and liability to the wrath of God; that such original sin is transmitted by generation, not by imitation; that all which has the proper nature of sin, and all guilt of original sin, is removed in baptism; that concupiscence remains after baptism, but this, though called 'sin' by St. Paul, is not sin truly, but only metonymically. The Anglican Article diverges from this doctrine in asserting that man is 'far gone from original righteousness,' and in apparently, though not explicitly, sanctioning the Pauline usage of 'sin' to describe concupiscence. In all other essential points it is in agreement with the doctrine of the Roman Church. The various Protestant denominations which formulated their doctrine as to original sin in the 16th cent. inclined rather to the elements in Augustinianism which the Schoolmen rejected. It will not be necessary here to enter into points of difference between the Lutheran, Calvinist, and other symbols. Roughly speaking, these agree in asserting the depravity of human nature to be total, using the strongest and most extravagant language to describe the fallen state; and in explicitly affirming concupiscence to be of the nature of sin. The rest of their positive teaching, in so far as the broader and more important issues are concerned, is similar to that of the Roman and Anglican Churches. 5. The doctrine from the 16th to the 19th century. The chief point of interest in theological thought concerning original sin since the detailed formulation given to the doctrine in the 16th cent. consists in the signs which have appeared from time to time of dissatisfaction with some element of its contents. One or two of the more important of these witnesses may be briefly alluded to here. In the 17th cent. Jeremy Taylor, in his Unum Necessarium, or the Doctrine and Practice of Repentance, chs. vi. and vii., protests strongly against the extremer forms which this doctrine had taken. The sin of Adam, he argued, neither made us heirs of damnation nor rendered us naturally and necessarily vicious. He spurned the idea that un baptized infants are damned, as inconsistent with the goodness of God; denied that the loss, at the Fall, of Adam's graces, in so far as they were indispensable to rectitude, was a punishment of mankind, on the ground that such a belief detracts from the divine justice; and rejected the teaching that the Fall introduced an inheritance of total depravity, as well as various methods by which the mediation of this depravity had been stated to be effected. Original sin, Taylor held, is not an inherent evil, not 'sin' at all in the strict, but only in a metonymical, sense; i.e., it is the effect of one sin and the cause of many-a stain rather than sin. It consists in loss of supernatural endowments (as to the nature of which Scripture gives no information) and in an aggravation of our natural concupiscence. S. T. Coleridge (Aids to Reflection, 'Aphorisms on Spiritual Religion,' x.) endorses Jeremy Taylor's protests, but criticizes the alternative interpretation of original sin which he offered. The assertion that to man, since the Fall, obedience was possible, though incomparably more difficult, he regards as inconsistent with the admission that sin is universal; hence Taylor has not succeeded in vindicating the divine justice, i.c. in explaining why the unoffending sons of Adam were sentenced to be born with so fearful a disproportion of their powers to their duties. The difficulty of reconciling the traditional doctrine of original sin with theodicy was thus beginning to be felt, and Coleridge himself can find relief from it only by adopting the view, opposed to Taylor's, that original sin is truly sin, i.e. personal or volitional. In order to advocate this view, he relies on the teaching of Kant (see below), but introduces a further obscurity into it by substituting for its individualism the notion that the Fall was the collective voluntary deed of humanity. Assuming that original sin is a fact, recognized by all religions, he indeed also, like Kant, asserts it to be a mystery for ever inscrutable. But, again following Kant, he teaches that moral evil can have its seat in the will alone. Original sin must therefore be the ground of evil in the will. It is a consequence, but not an effect, of Adam's sin. The first evil will in time is selected as 'the diagram,' and Adam means the race rather than the individual. The resort by Coleridge to conceptions so obscure, in order to escape the moral difficulties which the problem of original sin, as apprehended down to his time, presented, is a witness to the intractability of the problem as it had as yet been stated. Another witness, even more interesting and striking, is supplied by the work of Julius Müller (The Christian Doctrine of Sin, 2 vols., tr. W. Urwick, Edinburgh, 1877-85), which contains a more exhaustive and able treatment of the theology of sin than had previously been written. Müller was led, perhaps reluctantly, to find the Augustinian, or any similar ecclesiastical, theory insufficient to solve the great antithesis which Kant had emphasized, between individual responsibility for sin and the fact that sin seems inborn and prior to sinful action. He therefore supplements it by resorting to a view which is apparently intermediate between Kant's theory of the timeless origin of sin and Origen's theory of an ante-natal origin. He postulates an individual fall, which he calls extra-temporal, but which is nevertheless prior to birth. This would seem to him to be the only possible solution-a last resort. That Kant, Coleridge, and Müller should all be driven in the same direction bespeaks that a solution of the problem was perhaps impossible, from their presuppositions, along any other lines; and yet all these thinkers, avowedly or not, only banish the problem to the realm of mystery. Müller's fundamental assumption is that there is in us already when moral consciousness dawns an abiding 'root of sin,' so that sin does not then originate in us, but rather 'steps forth.' Like Kant, he also endeavours to see the source of sin in the will abstracted from the appetitive factors of human nature. It will later be argued that it is in virtue of these two assumptions, both false, that Müller's and similar attempts to explain the origin and universality of sin necessarily fail, and that with their abandonment satisfactory explanation is for the first time rendered possible. IN II. THE PROBLEM OF ORIGINAL SIN PHILOSOPHY.-Modern philosophy first attacked the problem of evil in independence of ecclesiastical doctrine when Spinoza unfolded his pantheistic system. It is true that, in so far as he taught that evil is of negative character (privation or defect), Spinoza was in agreement with many of the Fathers, notably Augustine, who had adopted this view from ancient Greek philosophy and the Neo-Platonists, and had endeavoured to assimilate it with Christian theology. But Spinoza, in virtue of his intellectualism, identified evil with defect of knowledge, and, in virtue of his pantheism, with non-being. Evil, for him, was mere appearance, and the conception of it, he affirms, would be impossible if we saw things sub specie æternitatis. For Spinoza, then, inquiry into the problem of the origin of sin was superfluous. Leibniz distinguished 'moral' evil from 'metaphysical' evil, or the necessary imperfection of all things finite. The latter alone he held to be necessary, and he did not regard it as the source of sin. But it is only lack of self-consistency that prevents Leibniz from denying, like Spinoza, that evil is real. Nor is it easy to find a place in Leibniz's philosophical system for the orthodox doctrine of original sin. He adopted this doctrine in a form similar to that developed by Tertullian, and regarded all souls as existing (germinally) in that of Adam. If he had been consistent, he would have been compelled to identify original sin with the imperfection of human nature as it was created. The doctrine of original sin received its most serious treatment, at the hands of philosophy, from Kant, who, while rejecting Augustinianism, developed a remarkable theory of radical badness.' Kant set out from the Christian view that the ultimate seat of sin is in the will alone, and, taking this premiss more seriously than the Fathers of the Church had done, was compelled (like Origen in his earlier years) to seek for a purely individualistic explanation of inborn sinfulness. His overlooking of the fact that the will does not work in vacuo, or in abstraction from appetitive elements common to all mankind in virtue of heredity, led him both to exaggerate the volitional factor in sinful activity and to ignore the real solidarity of the race. Another presupposition of Kant's doctrine of moral evil is the dualism of the phenomenal and the noumenal in man, which is a consequence of his general theory of knowledge. Sin, he teaches, is brought about when a man adopts the impulses of sense rather than the dictates of his reason into the maxims,' or subjective ruling principles, which his will appoints to itself for the exercise of its freedom. The subjective condition of the possibility of adopting evil maxims, however, is what especially needs to be accounted for. This cannot be due to any determining act in time; for the temporal, empirical world, according to Kant, is governed by necessity, whereas necessary moral evil is a contradiction in terms. It is therefore an innate propensity, in force before free activity is (sensibly) experienced. Its origin must be in our freedom-else it could not be called evil; and it must belong to the noumenal sphere, i.e. must be a timeless, 'intelligible,' act, which cannot be traced further without indefinite regress, and which, in the last resort, is quite inscrutable. The intelligible act' and the division of man into the phenomenal and the noumenal are in themselves obscure conceptions, which, when worked out in the subsequent development of the Kantian teaching, proved futile. And other difficulties inhere in his doctrine of radical evil. In the first place, the evil maxim is one of those pieces of ingenious mental machinery of which Kant was so surpassingly inventive. It has no meaning for actual experience, and is superfluous. Further, it is difficult to conceive how the supersensible essence of man which gives him the categorical imperative could also give him the evil maxim. Similar difficulties might be multiplied; but it will be more profitable to inquire why it is that Kant's investigation of the origin of sin avows that it leads only to inscrutable mystery. It is surprising that Kant should set out from the statement that sinfulness is absolutely universal among mankind, as if this were an a priori principle, whereas the universality of sin is but an empirical generalization-and not an exceptionless one-unless original sin be first proved on independent grounds to be a fact. The one side of the antithesis which it is his intention to resolve is therefore not an absolute or necessary truth, but an approximate generalization based on necessarily inadequate knowledge; it does not therefore require for its adequate explanation, as Kant seems to assume, to be derived with logical necessity from an universal or a priori principle. Kant's quest in supersensible realms is, in fact, from the outset unnecessary. That he failed to take the right road saves us from concluding the non-existence of the goal that he never reached. Again, that there is an evil bias (in Kant's sense of the word 'evil') in us at birth is by no means an unchallengeable premiss. Kant must call our propensity evil if he is to enjoy the right to call it blamable; but he merely assumes after the manner of uncritical common sense-that it is morally blamable, in order to deduce its volitional character. This is to argue the wrong way round. The propensities inborn in human nature are now known to be existent before will has emerged into actuality, much more before will is capable of moral choice. If we do not assume volition to exist until we empirically find it, and impute guilt only where we see volition, we avoid the necessity for resort to the supersensible; for the possibilities of the phenomenal have not been exhausted. Such are the radical errors in Kant's procedure. He assumes that conduct below the standard of moral perfection is blamable or guilty; consequently he has to prove such conduct to be volitional. To make it volitional he has to assume volition where experience tells us there is none, and morally evil propensity where as yet there cannot be any. Julius Müller arrived practically at the same negative result as Kant, because he too set out from some of the same presuppositions. Hegel is another of the greater philosophers who have devoted considerable attention to the subject of original sin, though his references to it are scattered, and perhaps somewhat desultory. He regards the natural (unmoralized) state as inherently evil, because not morally good, or something which ought not to be'; and it is thus that he interprets the Christian doctrine of original sin. Original sin, in fact, is a defect of nature, and simply expresses the truth that the natural man is at first only potentially good. Of course, the Christian doctrine means much more than this; otherwise it would be well to substitute for 'original sin' some other name, wholly unsuggestive of strictly moral implications, and to declare roundly that original sin' is not sin. Schleiermacher's tendency, in spirit though not in letter, is in this direction. He retains the term Erbsünde not at all in the old sense of inherited |