iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation 125 



its pure Weissmannian form or some modification of 

 that. But surely it is a very glorious and uplifting 

 thing to realise that Christ's Manhood took into itself 

 all the past history of life; that He was one with the 

 creation not only in His conscious, but in His pre-con- 

 scious existence upon earth. It lends much meaning to 

 St Paul's phrase "The whole creation groaneth and 

 travaileth together until now, waiting for the adoption, to 

 wit the redemption of their bodies "^bodies ; the means of 

 winning personality as well as of manifesting it to others. 



At this point it clearly becomes necessary to consider 

 briefly the difficult questions involved in the doctrines 

 of Original Sin, and of the Virgin Birth. The two are 

 closely linked. 



In a previous volume we discussed the problem of 

 original sin from the biological standpoint, and came to 

 certain definite conclusions 1 . We there saw reason to 

 believe that the whole human race was imbued with a 

 taint of positive evil, less by inheritance of the acquired 

 character of sin, which is to the biologist a questionable 

 proposition, than by a cessation of selection of the higher 

 moral type. Possibly also development in response to 

 a sinful environment, created by the evil doings of men, 

 has something to do with the unquestionable obliquity 

 of man's moral nature. As Wendell Holmes said long 

 ago, "For one man that squints with his eyes there are 

 twenty that squint with their brains" and we may add 

 20,000 that squint with their souls. The human race, 

 through this taint, was developing along wrong lines, 

 and, by analogy, one is inclined to say that of itself it 

 could not get on the right lines again. Certainly the 

 impossibility of retracing developmental steps made in 

 a wrong direction is a fact in the evolution of the body, 

 and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the same is 

 true of the spiritual evolution of the race, since in other 



1 Evolution and the Need of Atonement, 2nd edn. pp. 143 seqq. 



