The Fundamentals
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11:3; Eph. 2 : 2 ) . Whatever view may be taken of the origin and authorship, literary form and documentary source of the Genesis story of the fall (on these points this paper does not enter) its teaching unmistakably is, to this effect: That the first m an ’s lapse from a state of innocence entailed disastrous con sequences upon himself and his descendants. Upon himself it wrought immediate disturbance of his whole nature (as already explained), implanting in it the seeds of degeneration, bodily, mental, moral and spiritual, filling him with fear of his Maker, laying upon his conscience a burden of guilt, dark ening his perceptions of right and wrong, (as was seen in his unmanly attempt to excuse himself by blaming his wife,) and interrupting the hitherto peaceful relations which had sub sisted between himself and the Author of his being. Upon his descendants it opened the floodgates of corruption by which their natures even from birth fell beneath the power of evil, as was soon witnessed in the dark tragedy of fratricide with which the tale of human history began, and in the rapid spread of violence through the pre-diluvian world. This is what theologians call the doctrine of “Original Sin,” by which they mean that the results of Adam’s sin, both legal and moral, have been transmitted to Adam’s posterity, so that now each individual comes into the world, not like his first father, in a state of moral equilibrium—“born good,” as Lord Palmerston of England used to say, or in the words of Pelagius—“born without virtue' and without vice, but capable of both” (capaces utriusque rei, non pleni nascimur, et sine virtute ita et sine vitio procreamur), but as the inheritor of a nature that has been disempowered by sin. That this doctrine, though frequently opposed, has a basis in science and philosophy, as well as in Scripture, is becoming every day more apparent. The scientific law of heredity by which not only physical but mental and moral characteristics are transmitted from parent to child seems to justify the Scripture statement, that “by one man’s disobedience sin en-
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