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The Fundamentals is history. I t is treated as such by our Lord Jesus Christ, who surely would not mistake a myth for history, and by St Paul, who hardly built Rom. 5, and 1 Cor. IS, on cleverly com- posed fables. I t is the only satisfactory explanation of the corruption of the race. From Adam’s time death has reigned. This story of the fall stands, moreover, as a barrier against all Manicheism, and against that Pelagianism which declares that man is not so bad after all, and derides the doctrine of original sin which in all our Church confessions distinctly de- clares the possession by every one from birth of this sinful nature. (See, e. g., Art. IX of “Anglican Church.”) The pen-, alty and horror of sin, the corruption of our human nature, and the hopelessness o f our sinful estate are things definitely set forth in the Holy Scripture, and are St. Paul’s divinely- inspired deductions from this fact of the incoming of sin and death through the disobedience and fall of Adam, the original head of the human race. The race is in a sinful condition. (Rom. 5:12.) Mankind is a solidarity. As the root of a tree lives in stem, branch, leaf and fruit; so in Adam, as Anselm says, a person made nature sinful, in his posterity nature made persons sinful. Or, as Pascal finely puts it, original sm 1S folIy m the sight of man, but this folly is wiser than all the wisdom of man. For without it, who could have said what man is. His whole condition depends upon this imper- ceptible point. ( “Thoughts,” ch. xiii-11.) This Genesis story further is the foundation of the Scripture doctrine of all hu- man responsiblity, and accountability to God. A lowered anthropology always means a lowered theology, for if man was not a direct creation of God, if he was a mere indirect development, through slow and painful process, of no one knows what, or how, or why, or when, or where, the main spring of moral accountability is gone. The fatalistic con- ception of man’s personal and moral life is the deadly gift of naturalistic evolution to our age, said Prof. D. A. Curtis re- cently.
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