198 ORIGINAL SIN 



3. Equally pernicious and uncatholic, as well as 

 unscriptural, is the sixteenth-century theory of total 

 depravity. I mean the theory that the fall has made 

 human nature a positive mass of unqualified evil. No 

 doubt many writers have called man totally depraved 

 without meaning more than that he is utterly unable 

 by his unassisted natural powers to save himself, and 

 to attain to the supernatural destiny for which he was 

 made. But the phrase is misleading when thus used, 

 as well as modern, and has certainly meant in certain 

 Calvinistic circles the horrible opinion which I have 

 defined. Rhetorical emphasis upon man's sinfulness 

 may result in the use of language that implies an utter 

 lack of good in human nature; but to assert such total 

 depravity with literal meaning is to go counter to much 

 Scripture and to common knowledge. To say that the 

 seeming virtues of the unregenerate are splendid vices 

 is to contradict experience. Happily for us, believers 

 in catholic doctrine are free to acknowledge thankfully 

 that the unregenerate are not wholly given over to evil. 

 Abundant evidence is continually appearing that, with 

 all their tendency to sin, and their natural incapacity 

 to fulfil the supernatural end for which they were made, 

 the unregenerate have capacity for natural virtues, — 

 for virtues which only need rightly to be related, and 

 to be completed by heavenly grace and virtue, in order 

 to become the foundation and earnest of Christian 

 perfection. It is their inability wholly to avoid sin 

 even as they understand it, and their incapacity in 

 things that directly pertain to man's chief end, that 



