126 THEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 



support of catholic doctors both East and West; — 

 these truths depending for their confirmation and more 

 adequate understanding upon their inductive verifica- 

 tion by the manifold data which become available 

 when all the Sacred Scriptures are searched and dis- 

 criminatingly compared. 



The time which I can give in these lectures to estab- 

 lishing the catholicity and scripturalness of the doc- 

 trines which I am seeking to test by the evolutionary 

 theory is necessarily very brief. But I trust that what 

 I have said will make it clear to you that what I am 

 concerned to defend is not a new and emasculated 

 theology, developed in order to meet modern difficul- 

 ties, but is what I have by proper methods convinced 

 myself to be the ancient teaching of the Church and 

 of Holy Scripture. 



The acknowledgment that the present moral state 

 and conduct of mankind is not what it ought to be, 

 that no man is able perfectly to conform his conduct 

 to the standard which conscience and his sense of 

 responsibihty places before him, and that this universal 

 moral Hmitation is inherited, is not peculiar to Chris- 

 tian believers, but is very general among those who 

 seriously concern themselves with moral problems. 

 What is distinctive in later Jewish and in Christian 

 thought is the behef that man was originally free from 

 sin and from the power of sinful inchnations; and that 

 his present weakness is due to an unnecessary and 

 wilful violation of righteousness by his first human 

 parents. Distinctive though this doctrine be, it is 



