IQO ORIGINAL SIN 



Our question then reduces itself to this: Does evo- 

 lutionary science permit us to believe that our first 

 parents transmitted their fallen condition to their 

 posterity? It is a question, you will observe, of 

 transmission of characters; ^ and we have to consider 

 what biological science teaches on that subject. In 



freedom to choose between sin and sinlessness, and sufficient discern- 

 ment of the wrongfulness of sin. The disposition of our first parents, 

 in the ordinary sense of that word, was not a prius of temptation, 

 but was yet to be determined by his conduct. Originally he was by 

 nature open to sinful inducements and by grace sufficiently supplied 

 with inducements to avoid sin. He possessed both the motives and 

 the power of either good or evil choice. But when he sinned, grace 

 was alienated, and the natural predominance of his inherited animal 

 instincts asserted itself. 



{h) The other objection is that human experience affords no anal- 

 ogy of so serious a subversion of the balance of man's faculties by 

 one act of sin as is implied in the doctrine of Adam's fall. The want 

 of an analogy is easily explained. Our experience in this regard is 

 concerned wholly with fallen man. The consequences of sin on the 

 part of a previously sinless man — that sinlessness being made pos- 

 sible by grace — could be realized but once in history; because when 

 the first sin occurred, the conditions under which it was committed 

 permanently disappeared. Moreover, the consequences of that sin 

 need not be thought to be sudden in their full actualization. WTiat 

 was the immediate result? It was no such subversive disturbance 

 of man's natural faculties as is hypothecated in Dr. Tennant's objec- 

 tion. It consisted simply in an alienation of grace and a loss of all 

 moral resources that were not afforded by his unassisted nature. 

 But, Dr. Tennant being witness, man's natural state involves a con- 

 flict "between nature and nurture," and all the moral evils which are 

 in fact actualized in human history. That they have been actualized 

 under the laws of natural development, and gradually, does not 

 militate against the catholic doctrine of the fall. Cf. Tennant, Origin 

 of Sin, pp. gi et seq. 



^ Whether of acquired characters remains to be seen. 



