desires, and sins of the desires led to the outward act of transgression (James 1:15 ).

Baird, Elohim Revealed, 388

James 1: 15-"Then the lust, when it hath conceived, beareth sin." "The law of God had already been violated; man was fallen before the fruit had been plucked, or the rebellion had been thus signalized. The law required not only outward obedience but fealty of the heart, and this was withdrawn before any outward token indicated the change." Would he part company with God, or with his wife? When the Indian asked the missionary where his ancestors were, and was told that they were in hell, he replied that he would go with his ancestors. He preferred hell with his tribe to heaven with God. Sapphira, in like manner, had opportunity given her to part company with her husband, but she preferred him to God; Acts 5:7-11.

Philippi, Glaubenslehre: "So man became like God, a setter of law to himself. Man's self-elevation to godhood was his fall. God's self-humiliation to manhood was man's restoration and elevation. . . . Gen. 3: 22-The man has become as one of us' in his condition of self-centered activity,—thereby losing all real likeness to God, which consists in having the same aim with God himself. De te fabula narratur; it is the condition, not of one alone, but of all the race." Sin once brought into being is self-propagating; its seed is in itself: the centuries of misery and crime that have followed have only shown what endless possibilities of evil were wrapped up in that single sin. Keble: "T was but a little drop of sin We saw this morning enter in, And lo, at eventide a world is drowned!" Farrar, Fall of Man: "The guilty wish of one woman has swollen into the irremediable corruption of a world." See Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:231; Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:381-385; Edwards, on Original Sin, part 4, chap. 2; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2: 168-180.

II. DIFFICULTIES CONNECTED WITH THE FALL CONSIDERED AS THE PERSONAL ACT OF ADAM.

1. How could a holy being fall?

Here we must acknowledge that we cannot understand how the first unholy emotion could have found lodgment in a mind that was set supremely upon God, nor how temptation could have overcome a soul in which there were no unholy propensities to which it could appeal. The mere power of choice does not explain the fact of an unholy choice. The fact of natural desire for sensuous and intellectual gratification does not explain how this desire came to be inordinate. Nor does it throw light upon the matter, to resolve this fall into a deception of our first parents by Satan. Their yielding to such deception presupposes distrust of God and alienation from him. Satan's fall, moreover, since it must have been uncaused by temptation from without, is more difficult to explain than Adam's fall.

We may distinguish six incorrect explanations of the origin of sin: 1. Emmons: Sin is due to God's efficiency - God wrought the sin in man's heart. This is the "exercise system," and is essentially pantheistic. 2. Edwards: Sin is due to God's providenceGod caused the sin indirectly by presenting motives. This explanation has all the difficulties of determinism. 3. Augustine: Sin is the result of God's withdrawal from man's soul. But inevitable sin is not sin, and the blame of it rests on God who withdrew the grace needed for obedience. 4. Pfleiderer: The fall results from man's already existing sinfulness. The fault then belongs, not to man, but to God who made man sinful. 5. Hadley: Sin is due to man's moral insanity. But such concreated ethical defect would render sin impossible. Insanity is the effect of sin, but not its cause. 6. Newman: Sin is due to man's weakness. It is a negative, not a positive, thing, an incident of finiteness. But conscience and Scripture testify that it is positive as well as negative, opposition to God as well as non-conformity to God.

Emmons was really a pantheist: "Since God," he says, "works in all men both to will and to do of his good pleasure, it is as easy to account for the first offence of Adam as for any other sin. . . . . There is no difficulty respecting the fall of Adam from his

....

original state of perfection and purity into a state of sin and guilt, which is in any way peculiar. . . . . It is as consistent with the moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy exercises in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence to make moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as he pleases..... There is but one satisfactory answer to the question Whence came evil? and that is: It came from the great first Cause of all things"; see Nathaniel Emmons, Works, 2:683.

Jonathan Edwards also denied power to the contrary even in Adam's first sin. God did not immediately cause that sin. But God was active in the region of motives though his action was not seen. Freedom of the Will, 161-"It was fitting that the transaction should so take place that it might not appear to be from God as the apparent fountain." Yet "God may actually in his providence so dispose and permit things that the event may be certainly and infallibly connected with such disposal and permission": see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 304. Encyc. Britannica, 7:690-" According to Edwards, Adam had two principles,- natural and supernatural. When Adam sinned, the super-. natural or divine principle was withdrawn from him, and thus his nature became corrupt without God infusing any evil thing into it. His posterity came into being entirely under the government of natural and inferior principles. But this solves the difficulty of making God the author of sin only at the expense of denying to sin any real existence, and also destroys Edwards's essential distinction between natural and moral ability." Edwards on Trinity, Fisher's edition, 44-"The sun does not cause darkness and cold, when these follow infallibly upon the withdrawal of his beams. God's disposing the result is not a positive exertion on his part." Shedd, Dogmn. Theol., 2:50-"God did not withdraw the common supporting grace of his Spirit from Adam until after transgression." To us Adam's act was irrational, but not impossible; to a determinist like Edwards, who held that men simply act out their characters, Adam's act should have been not only irrational, but impossible. Edwards nowhere shows how, according to his principles, a holy being could possibly fall.

Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 123—“The account of the fall is the first appearance of an already existing sinfulness, and a typical example of the way in which every individual becomes sinful. Original sin is simply the universality and originality of sin. There is no such thing as indeterminism. The will can lift itself from natural unfreedom, the unfreedom of the natural impulses, to real spiritual freedom, only by distinguishing itself from the law which sets before it its true end of being. The opposition of nature to the law reveals an original nature power which precedes all free self-determination. Sin is the evil bent of lawless self-willed selfishness." Pfleiderer appears to make this sinfulness concreated, and guiltless, because proceeding from God. Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 288-"The wide discrepancy between precept and practice gives rise to the theological conception of sin, which, in low types of religion, is as often a violation of some trivial prescription as it is of an ethical principle. The presence of sin, contrasted with a state of innocence, occasions the idea of a fall, or lapse from a sinless condition. This is not incompatible with man's derivation from an animal ancestry, which prior to the rise of self-consciousness may be regarded as having been in a state of moral innocence, the sense and reality of sin being impossible to the animal. . . . . The existence of sin, both as an inherent disposition, and as a perverted form of action, may be explained as a survival of animal propensity in human life. . . . . Sin is the disturbance of higher life by the intrusion of lower."

Professor James Hadley: "Every man is more or less insane." We prefer to say: Every man, so far as he is apart from God, is morally insane. But we must not make sin the result of insanity. Insanity is the result of sin. Insanity, moreover, is a physical disease,―sin is a perversion of the will. John Henry Newman, Idea of a University, 60-"Evil has no substance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, perversion or corruption of that which has substance." Augustine seems at times to favor this view. He maintains that evil has no origin, inasmuch as it is negative, not positive; that it is merely defect or failure. He illustrates it by the damaged state of a discordant harp; see Moule, Outlines of Theology, 171. So too A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 190, tells us that Adam's will was like a violin in tune, which through mere inattention and neglect got out of tune at last. But here, too, we must say with E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 124-"Sin explained is sin defended." All these explanations fail to explain, and throw the blame of sin upon God, as directly or indirectly its cause.

But sin is an existing fact. God cannot be its author, either by creating man's nature so that sin was a necessary incident of its development, or by withdrawing a supernatural grace which was necessary to keep man holy.

Reason, therefore, has no other recourse than to accept the Scripture doctrine that sin originated in man's free act of revolt from God- the act of a will which, though inclined toward God, was not yet confirmed in virtue and was still capable of a contrary choice. The original possession of such power to the contrary seems to be the necessary condition of probation and moral development. Yet the exercise of this power in a sinful direction can never be explained upon grounds of reason, since sin is essentially unreason. It is an act of wicked arbitrariness, the only motive of which is the desire to depart from God and to render self supreme.

Sin is a "mystery of lawlessness" (2 Thess. 2:7), at the beginning, as well as at the end. Neander, Planting and Training, 388-"Whoever explains sin nullifies it." Man's power at the beginning to choose evil does not prove that, now that he has fallen, he has equal power of himself permanently to choose good. Because man has power to cast himself from the top of a precipice to the bottom, it does not follow that he has equal power to transport himself from the bottom to the top.

Man fell by wilful resistance to the inworking God. Christ is in all men as he was in Adam, and all good impulses are due to him. Since the Holy Spirit is the Christ within, all men are the subjects of his striving. He does not withdraw from them except upon, and in consequence of, their withdrawing from him. John Milton makes the Almighty say of Adam's sin: Whose fault? Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me All he could have; I made him just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. Such I created all the Etherial Powers, And Spirits, both them who stood and them who failed; Freely they stood who stood, and fell who failed." The word "cussedness" has become an apt word here. The Standard Dictionary defines it as "1. Cursedness, meanness, perverseness; 2. resolute courage, endurance: 'Jim Bludsoe's voice was heard, And they all had trust in his cussedness And knowed he would keep his word."" (John Hay, Jim Bludsoe, stanza 6). Not the last, but the first, of these definitions best describes the first sin. The most thorough and satisfactory treatment of the fall of man in connection with the doctrine of evolution is found in Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 73–240.

Hodge, Essays and Reviews, 30-" There is a broad difference between the commencement of holiness and the commencement of sin, and more is necessary for the former than for the latter. An act of obedience, if it is performed under the mere impulse of self-love, is virtually no act of obedience. It is not performed with any intention to obey, for that is holy, and cannot, according to the theory, precede the act. But an act of disobedience, performed from the desire of happiness, is rebellion. The cases are surely different. If, to please myself, I do what God commands, it is not holiness; but if, to please myself, I do what he forbids, it is sin. Besides, no creature is immutable. Though created holy, the taste for holy enjoyments may be overcome by a temptation sufficiently insidious and powerful, and a selfish motive or feeling excited in the mind. Neither is a sinful character immutable. By the power of the Holy Spirit, the truth may be clearly presented and so effectually applied as to produce that change which is called regeneration; that is, to call into existence a taste for holiness, so that it is chosen for its own sake, and not as a means of happiness."

H. B. Smith, System, 262-"The state of the case, as far as we can enter into Adam's experience, is this: Before the command, there was the state of love without the thought of the opposite: a knowledge of good only, a yet unconscious goodness: there was also the knowledge that the eating of the fruit was against the divine command. The temptation aroused pride; the yielding to that was the sin. The change was there. The change was not in the choice as an executive act, nor in the result of that act-the eating; but in the choice of supreme love to the world and self, rather than supreme devotion to God. It was an immanent preference of the world,-not a love of the world following the choice, but a love of the world which is the choice itself."

263-"We cannot account for Adam's fall, psychologically. In saying this we mean: It is inexplicable by anything outside itself. We must receive the fact as ultimate, and rest there. Of course we do not mean that it was not in accordance with the laws of moral agency - that it was a violation of those laws: but only that we do not see the mode, that we cannot construct it for ourselves in a rational way. It differs from all other similar cases of ultimate preference which we know; viz., the sinner's immanent preference of the world, where we know there is an antecedent ground in the bias to

sin, and the Christian's regeneration, or immanent preference of God, where we know there is an influence from without, the working of the Holy Spirit." 264-"We must leave the whole question with the immanent preference standing forth as the ultimate fact in the case, which is not to be constructed philosophically, as far as the processes of Adam's soul are concerned: we must regard that immanent preference as both a choice and an affection, not an affection the result of a choice, not a choice which is the consequence of an affection, but both together."

In one particular, however, we must differ with H. B. Smith: Since the power of voluntary internal movement is the power of the will, we must regard the change from good to evil as primarily a choice, and only secondarily a state of affection caused thereby. Only by postulating a free and conscious act of transgression on the part of Adam, an act which bears to evil affection the relation not of effect but of cause, do we reach, at the beginning of human development, a proper basis for the responsibility and guilt of Adam and the race. See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:148-167.

2. How could God justly permit Satanic temptation?

We see in this permission not justice but benevolence.

(a) Since Satan fell without external temptation, it is probable that man's trial would have been substantially the same, even though there had been no Satan to tempt him.

Angels had no animal nature to obscure the vision; they could not be influenced through sense; yet they were tempted and they fell. As Satan and Adam sinned under the best possible circumstances, we may conclude that the human race would have sinned with equal certainty. The only question at the time of their creation, therefore, was how to modify the conditions so as best to pave the way for repentance and pardon. These conditions are: 1. a material body—which means confinement, limitation, need of self-restraint; 2. infancy-which means development, deliberation, with no memory of the first sin; 3. the parental relation-repressing the wilfulness of the child, and teaching submission to authority.

(b) In this case, however, man's fall would perhaps have been without what now constitutes its single mitigating circumstance. Self-originated sin would have made man himself a Satan.

Mat. 13: 28" An enemy hath done this." "God permitted Satan to divide the guilt with man, so that man might be saved from despair." See Trench, Studies in the Gospels, 16–29. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 103" Why was not the tree made outwardly repulsive? Because only the abuse of that which was positively good and desirable could have attractiveness for Adam or could constitute a real temptation."

(e) As, in the conflict with temptation, it is an advantage to objectify evil under the image of corruptible flesh, so it is an advantage to meet it as embodied in a personal and seducing spirit.

Man's body, corruptible and perishable as it is, furnishes him with an illustration and reminder of the condition of soul to which sin has reduced him. The flesh, with its burdens and pains, is thus, under God, a help to the distinct recognition and overcoming of sin. So it was an advantage to man to have temptation confined to a single external voice. We may say of the influence of the tempter, as Birks, in his Difficulties of Belief, 101, says of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: "Temptation did not depend upon the tree. Temptation was certain in any event. The tree was a type into which God contracted the possibilities of evil, so as to strip them of delusive vastness, and connect them with definite and palpable warning,- to show man that it was only one of the many possible activities of his spirit which was forbidden, that God had right to all and could forbid all." The originality of sin was the most fascinating element in it. It afforded boundless range for the imagination. Luther did well to throw his inkstand at the devil. It was an advantage to localize him. The concentration of the human powers upon a definite offer of evil helps our understanding of the evil and increases our disposition to resist it.

(b) Such temptation has in itself no tendency to lead the soul astray. If

the soul be holy, temptation may only confirm it in virtue. Only the evil will, self-determined against God, can turn temptation into an occasion of ruin.

As the sun's heat has no tendency to wither the plant rooted in deep and moist soil, but only causes it to send down its roots the deeper and to fasten itself the more strongly, so temptation has in itself no tendency to pervert the soul. It was only the seeds that "fell upon the rocky places, where they had not much earth" (Mat. 13:5, 6), that "were scorched when "the sun was risen"; and our Lord attributes their failure, not to the sun, but to their lack of root and of soil: "because they had no root," "because they had no deepness of earth." The same temptation which occasions the ruin of the false disciple stimulates to sturdy growth the virtue of the true Christian. Contrast with the temptation of Adam the temptation of Christ. Adam had everything to plead for God, the garden and its delights, while Christ had everything to plead against him, the wilderness and its privations. But Adam had confidence in Satan, while Christ had confidence in God; and the result was in the former case defeat, in the latter victory. See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 385–396. C. H. Spurgeon: "All the sea outside a ship can do it no damage till the water enters and fills the hold. Hence, it is clear, our greatest danger is within. All the devils in hell and tempters on earth could do us no injury, if there were no corruption in our own natures. The sparks will fly harmlessly, if there is no tinder. Alas, our heart is our greatest enemy; this is the little home-born thief. Lord, save me from that evil man, myself!"

Lyman Abbott: "The scorn of goody-goody is justified; for goody-goody is innocence, not virtue; and the boy who never does anything wrong because he never does anything at all is of no use in the world. . . . . Sin is not a help in development; it is a hindrance. But temptation is a help; it is an indispensable means." E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 123-"Temptation in the bad sense and a fall from innocence were no more necessary to the perfection of the first man, than a marring of any one's character is now necessary to its completeness." John Milton, Areopagitica: "Many there be that complain of divine providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions" (puppet shows). Robert Browning, Ring and the Book, 204 (Pope, 1183) — "Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time! Why comes temptation but for man to meet And master and make crouch beneath his foot, And so be pedestaled in triumph? Pray Lead us into no such temptations, Lord'? Yea, but, O thou whose servants are the bold, Lead such temptations by the head and hair, Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight, That so he may do battle and have praise!"

3. How could a penalty so great be justly connected with disobedience to so slight a command?

To this question we may reply:

(a) So slight a command presented the best test of the spirit of obedience.

Cicero: "Parva res est, at magna culpa." The child's persistent disobedience in one single respect to the mother's command shows that in all his other acts of seeming obedience he does nothing for his mother's sake, but all for his own,-shows, in other words, that he does not possess the spirit of of obedience in a single act. S. S. Times: "Trifles are trifles only to triflers. Awake to the significance of the insignificant! for you are in a world that belongs not alone to the God of the infinite, but also to the God of the infinitesimal."

(b) The external command was not arbitrary or insignificant in its substance. It was a concrete presentation to the human will of God's claim

to eminent domain or absolute ownership.

John Hall, Lectures on the Religious Use of Property, 10-"It sometimes happens that owners of land, meaning to give the use of it to others, without alienating it, impose a nominal rent-a quit-rent, the passing of which acknowledges the recipient as owner and the occupier as tenant. This is understood in all lands. In many an old English deed, 'three barley-corns,' 'a fat capon,' or 'a shilling,' is the consideration