Then will Christ indeed reign on the earth.1 No doubt, this view of what we may term hereditary grace militates against a commonly received doctrine of original sin, which holds that, not merely the consequences, but the guilt or sinfulness of Adam's transgression passes to the entire human race. God is regarded as having entered into a covenant with Adam, as representing, not only himself, but all his posterity in terms of which they were to be made partakers with him in the fruits of his obedience, and, on the other hand, were to be sharers along with him in the

greatest of them.'" 'Many of us have no difficulty in saying that mankind are born sinners. They may just as truly and properly be born saints. It requires the self-active power to be just as far developed to commit sin as it does to choose obedience."-(Dr. BUSHNELL.)

1 "In this view it is to be expected, as the life of Christian piety becomes more extended in the earth, and the Spirit of God obtains a living power in successive generations more and more complete, that finally the race itself will be so thoroughly regenerated as to have a genuinely populating power in faith and godliness.-(Dr. BUSHNELL.)

2" Many writers declare that, since no man can continue in perfect obedience, therefore the whole race, without exception, is labouring under a curse." (E. C. TOPHAM.) "They (our first parents) being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this (their) sin was imputed, and the same death in sin and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity, descending from them by ordinary generation. (Westminster Confession of Faith.) "Every sin, both original and actual, being a transgression of the righteous law of God, and contrary thereto, doth in its own nature bring guilt upon the sinner."-(Ditto.) "This (Adam's) sin of breaking the covenant of works is our sin in the whole compass and extent of it. That sin, with all the ingredients and aggravations of it, as is said, is as really your own sin as the lies ye have made with your own tongue and the profane oaths you have sworn with your own mouth. It is not ours in its effects only; as a father's sin in riotously spending his estate reaches his whole family, reducing them to poverty and want. Though the effects of that riotous spending, the poverty, misery, and want be theirs; yet the riotous spending is the father's only. But so it is not in this case. It is true the effects of it, the sinful and penal evils following this sin, are ours; we see them and feel them, and the most stupid groan under them; but the sin itself is ours too; and the guilt of it is the fault of it is ours."-(Rev. T. BOSTON: Covenant of Works.) 'We know there has been a theory which affirms that we are one with Adam-that we so existed in his loins as to act with him-that our wills concurred with his will; that his action was strictly and properly ours; and that we are held answerable at the bar of justice for that deed, just as A. B. at fifty is responsible for the deed of A. B. at twelve. With this theory we confess we have no sympathy, and we shall dismiss it with saying that, in our view, Christianity never teaches that men are responsible for any sin but their own; nor can they be guilty or held liable to punishment, in the proper sense of that term, for conduct other than that which has grown out of their own wills."-(ALBERT BARNES.)

ours,

guilt of his disobedience.1 In this view every descendant of Adam must of necessity be born in a state of guilt, and his turning to God must be a deliberate act entered into after he has reached the years of discretion, — a new covenant, in fact. Strange as it may seem, they believe in, or at least admit the possibility of, children who die in infancy being regenerated and saved, and yet, if they live to grow up, they cannot be regarded as the family of God till they have undergone some conscious and manifest change.

2

1 "The covenant being made with Adam, not only for himself, but for his posterity, all mankind descending from him by ordinary generation sinned in him and fell with him in his first transgression." (Shorter Catechism.) "The sum of the covenant of works or of the law is this:'If thou do all that is commanded, and not fail in any point, thou shalt be saved; but if thou fail thou shalt die."-(Confession of Faith.) Does not this very statement do away with any idea of guilt attaching to man, merely on account of Adam's sin? "Let none imagine that the covenant of works, being broken by Adam, was laid by as an useless thing which men were no more concerned in. The covenant itself stands firm still in all the parts of it. The promise of it stands still in perfect obedience, so that if any could answer the demands of that covenant, he should have the promised life."-(Rev. T. BOSTON: Covenant of Works.) "While the principle of representation, as lying at the foundation of God's treatment of mankind, first in Adam and then in Christ, is absolutely vital, and while the essential features of a covenant, even in the current sense of the term, are to be found in God's treatment of men under both these heads, there are some respects in which the application of the word 'covenant,' as ordinarily understood, to these divine transactions is apt to mislead; and to shut up all Biblical theology within these two ideas will be found injurious to a natural and unforced interpretation of important portions of Scripture, and to a comprehensive view of Bible truth as a whole."--(Dr. D. BROWN: Life of Prof. Duncan.) "I do not maintain the federal headship of Adam, as it is called, or the imputation of his sin to his posterity, and this doctrine I have always considered, and do still consider, as the foundation of that system. I believe we have received from our first parents, together with various outward ills, a corrupt and irregular bias of mind; but, at the same time, it is my firm opinion that we are liable to condemnation only for our own actions, and that guilt is a personal and individual thing."-(ROBERT HALL.) "It was not possible for Butler, with statements then made of the doctrines of grace, to carry out his argument, and give it its true bearing on those doctrines. When they told of imputing the sin of one man to another, and of holding that other to be personally answerable for it, it is no wonder that such minds as that of Butler recoiled, for there is nothing like this in nature."-(ALBERT BARNES on Butler's Analogy.)

2 "What would we think of Christianity if it resembled a system which, were it consistent with itself, would exclude children dying in infancy from all participation of the blessings of salvation, and would confine these to persons arrived at adult years, and who have personally made a

Christ is the second Adam, and as such comes in the place of the first, and is entitled to the same rights and privileges.1 He too is a federal representative, communicating to his

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profession of faith in Jesus Christ? That our Saviour's doctrine respecting the necessity of regeneration refers to adults and not to infants is assertion, not proof-and assertion which must be regarded as totally inadmissible till it be proved that the original corruption of human nature is confined to Adam's adult posterity, and has no existence in the mind of an infant."—(Rev. Dr. T. BROWN: Sermons.) "Even those who refuse to recognize children as members of the Church of Christ upon earth seem to have no objection to regard them as the proper subjects of Christ's everlasting kingdom in heaven. We shall not pretend to explain, for we do not profess to understand, on what principles of consistency they concede this. We merely state the fact, which is not without its bearing on the general argument."-(Ditto.) "If the Church membership of infants and little children under the patriarchal and Mosaic dispensations cannot be denied or disputed, in what passage of the New Testament is it asserted or implied that children are now deprived of this high privilege ?"-(Ditto.) "Can any be saved except those who voluntarily and intelligently believe in the Lord Jesus Christ? Most assuredly they can! One half the human race die in infancy, before the child knows its right hand from its left; and is the blessed truth of their salvation to be annihilated; or, falling, like sparks, through the lurid air of hell, shall we believe that they burn for ever? Does not universal Christendom believe that they go straight, in the bosom of angels, to their Father's kingdom? " -(H. W. BEECHER.) Elect infants, dying in infancy, are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit, who worketh when, and where, and how He pleaseth."-(Confession of Faith.) The Church of England teaches that "it is certain by God's Word that children which are baptized, dying before they commit actual sin, are undoubtedly saved." "I have always believed in the salvation of infants. . . . I do not believe that on this earth there is a single professing Christian holding the damnation of infants, or if there be, he must be insane, or utterly ignorant of Christianity." -(Rev. C. H. SPURGEON.) "What would we think of Christianity if it had made no provision for those myriads of infants and little children who annually die without ever being capable of a personal faith in the Saviour?"—(Rev. Dr. T. BROWN.) “If he dies in infancy God may, it is true, find some way, possibly, to save him; but if he stays among the living, he cannot be a Christian till he is older."-(Dr. BUSHNELL.) 1"It is the glory of genuine Christianity that it. remedy extensive as the disease of our nature; a salvation of equal extent with the misery which sin has produced. The corruption of our nature is universal. It is coeval with our very existence. It is communicated to us in our formation in the womb. 'We were shapen in iniquity, and in sin did our mothers conceive us.' Now, if Adam was the 'figure of him that was to come,' i.e., of our Lord Jesus Christ, and if the effects of Adam's disobedience extend to infants as well as to adults, to little children as well as to men mature in knowledge and years, every rule of analogy and reasoning must lead us to believe that the salvation of Christ must extend to infants and children equally as the effects of the fall. . . . Why may not parents be the medium of transmitting to their offspring spiritual blessings as well as temporal advantages ?"-(Dr. THOS. BROWN: Sermons.)

announces a

people the fruits of his obedience, even as Adam has communicated to his posterity the results of his disobedience. The effects of Adam's disobedience we know to be communicated by ordinary generation, and if the fruits of the obedience of Christ may not be imparted in the same way, then is the parallelism so frequently drawn in Scripture between the two shorn of its principal features, and, with reverence be it spoken, Christ is placed at an infinite disadvantage.1

Such a view of original sin does not, in our opinion, at all detract from its heinousness in the sight of God, or the injury that it has done to the human race, while it incalculably magnifies the Redeemer's work, and gives it greater clearness, beauty and force.2 We believe that we inherit, in consequence of the sin of Adam, a fallen and corrupt nature, which renders us liable to the wrath of God, and which as soon as we are capable of it produces in us actual transgression.3 But this is by no means the same as rendering

"The evil is admitted to be communicable. The sin of the parents brings disorder into the moral constitution of the child. . . . Is the law, then, partial and hard? Does it necessitate that the taint of evil in the parent should impart an evil bias to the nature of the child; and has it no force at all in providing that the holiness wrought by the divine Spirit into the character of the parent should affect the inherited tendencies of the child's nature? Who will believe that the divine law of transmission, as it acts in the moral sphere, is thus one-sided, capricious, all against us ?"-(Rev. D. THOMAS,) "I think it may not appear heterodox to say that, as all men sinned in Adam without their personal knowledge or consent, so some may be saved in Christ without a particular or personal belief in Him, of whom, perhaps, they never so much as heard.”—(PALMER: Aphorisms.) "It cannot, I suppose, be imagined, even by the most cursory reader, that it is in any sort affirmed or implied in anything said in this chapter, that none can have the benefit of the general redemption but such as have the advantage of being made acquainted with it in the present life.' -(BUTLER: Analogy.)

2 "What higher ground of supernaturalism can be taken than that which supposes a capacity in the incarnate Word and sanctifying Spirit to penetrate our fallen nature at a point so deep as to cover the whole spread of the fall and be a grace of life travelling outward from the earliest, most latent germs of our human development."-(Dr. BUSHNELL.)

3 "In our view, Christianity never teaches that men are responsible for any sin but their own. . . . But that the consequences or results of an action may pass over from one individual to another and affect the condition of unborn generations we hold to be a doctrine of the sacred Scriptures, and to be fully sustained by the analogy of nature."-(ALBERT BARNES.) Speaking of the terms "original sin" and the "imputation of

us responsible or liable for his sin, or making us participators in his guilt.1

We can easily believe that when our first parents sinned,

Adam's sin," Henry Rogers says, "We dislike the first because the word 'sin' is generally used to designate some act of transgression in thought, word, or deed, of some precept of the moral law, and this ordinary use of it gives opportunity to theologians, who may be either deficient in candour or strong in prejudice, to talk of the absurdity of supposing sin in those who have never actually committed transgression. All this would be avoided if it were always borne in mind that what is meant by original sin is principally that depraved bias of our nature which predisposes us to sin, and which (as the Calvinists maintain) we have derived from our first parents, a bias which, so long as it is found in us, necessarily exposes us to suffering. We dislike the second term, 'imputation of Adam's sin,' because the word imputation is apt to suggest the idea of an arbitrary transfer of the guilt and consequent punishment of one moral agent to another moral agent, whose moral condition is essentially different. But this is not what is meant by it. If we could suppose one of the descendants of Adam born without this depraved bias, and actually, when master of his own actions, persevering in unbroken obedience to the law of God, then the imputation of Adam's guilt would be considered by Calvinists quite as absurd and as unjust as our opponents profess now to consider it. All that is meant by the imputation of Adam's sin is that, as in the original constitution of things, Adam and his posterity were linked together by an inseparable union as the root of a tree and its branches; and as the moral state of the latter (as well as their state in every other respect) was affected by that of the former, so it is reasonable that Adam should be treated as the federal head of his race. They are so far one as to warrant similarity of treatment. In this hypothesis the moral state of his descendants is not the consequence of the imputation of Adam's sin, but pre-supposed as the reason of such imputation and as prior to it in the order of nature: they are treated as he is because they are pre-supposed to be, and are really, morally like him." "According to this doctrine, therefore, the real difficulty is not to reconcile the imputation of sin and guilt where there is no sin and guilt at all, but to vindicate the reasonableness of a constitution by which one being becomes depraved by his dependence on another who is so, or by which the moral condition of one being is remotely determined by the moral condition of another."— (Introduction to J. Edwards' Works.) "I believe it (original sin) to consist of defect, or rather degeneracy. . . . I regard the evil as transmitted, as negative, reserving the term depravity for that positive evil into which it grows. That the change is of a nature which invariably leads to moral depravity, if the subject of it live to the point of moral agency, that it then assumes the second and positive form of the first sin-selfassertion as opposed to the divine will, I not only admit, but contend for." -(Dr. HARRIS: Patriarchy.) "No man is now condemned for original sin alone, though it is pardoned to no man till he perform the condition of the pardoning covenant. For God having brought all men under terms of mercy, tending to recovery, they shall be judged as they use that recovering mercy."-(RICHARD BAXTER.)

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1 "It is not sin," says Dr. Bushnell, which the child "derives from his parents, at least not in any sense which imports blame, but only some prejudice to the perfect harmony of his nature, some kind of pravity