SIDE ISSUES ELIMINATED 203 



he deserves to be excluded from receiving more — not 

 because guilty of wrong-doing, but because, in his 

 existing condition, he is unfit for more. 



Now it is this secondary sense that must be given to 

 our ninth article, if we are to avoid making it teach 

 something abhorrent to our sense of justice, as well as 

 foreign to cathoHc doctrine. Because in his fallen 

 state every man is unfit for his supernatural destiny, 

 he deserveth exclusion from that destiny so long as 

 such unfitness continues.^ Official language, in any 

 case, cannot be imposed in an indefensible meaning, 

 when its terms are ambiguous and susceptible of a 

 more tolerable construction. What the sixteenth-cen- 

 tury framers of the ninth article beheved on the subject 

 has official weight only so far as they succeeded in secur- 

 ing its unambiguous expression by the Church. But 

 even could it be shown that our Articles teach that God 

 is angry with all the unregenerate because of their 

 inherited natural impulses, and that He will everlast- 

 ingly punish all who die unregenerate, whether they 

 commit personal sins or not, such teaching would have 

 no ecumenical authority. It would be provincial only. 

 We can accept the cathoHc doctrine of original sin 

 without being committed to it. 



^ The fact that this unfitness ought not to be gives a moral sense to 

 the negative deserving, and a penal quality to the result — that is, 

 in the abstract and in relation to the sin of Adam by which it is caused. 

 But inasmuch as the new-born child has no part in producing his 

 unfitness, we may not regard it either as involving personal guilt, 

 or as imparting to its results the quality of personal punishment, 

 which has no meaning except in relation to personal guilt 



