SIDE ISSUES ELIMINATED 195 



blame for his sin before they are capable of distin- 

 guishing between right and wrong and of wittingly 

 choosing the wrong. St. Paul, in the fifth chapter of 

 his Epistle to the Romans^ has been understood by 

 many to imply such doctrine, when he says that, "as 

 through one man sin entered into the world, and death 

 through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for 

 that all sinned." ^ The Greek of the last phrase is 

 *€</>' (S TravTcs y/mprov, and by mistakenly rendering 

 *e<^' w as equivalent to in quo, "in whom," the Vul- 

 gate and St. Augustine have helped to give plausi- 

 biHty to such exegesis.^ But the whole context shows 

 that St. Paul is using the terminology of sin in an 

 extended appHcation, which requires us to interpret his 

 language as to some extent symbolical. Sin, strictly 

 taken, means a personal act. St. Paul obviously could 

 not have meant to say that all committed sin in Adam 

 in the sense of personal action. But if he did not mean 

 that, he was plainly using the verb "to sin" in an 

 extended and derivative sense ; ^ and we must, in view 

 of the context, take him to be applying the term sin to 

 describe — not the act of sin itself, but — the conse- 

 quence for us of Adam's act. This consequence is 

 called sin because it not only comes from sin but also 



^ Rom. V. 12. 



2 St Augustine, contra Duas Epp. Pelag., iv. 7, c. 4; c. Jul., vi. 75; 

 Cf. W. Bright, Lessons from the Lives of Three Great Fathers, p. 174, 

 note i; J. F. Bethune-Baker, Early Hist, of Christ. Doctrine, p. 309- 

 note 2. 



3 Cf. p. 145 (esp. note i), above; also F. R. Tennant, Sources, pp. 

 267, 268. 



