2 22 ORIGINAL SIN 



plain our moral incapacity as coming from God.^ It 

 teaches, on the contrary, that God imparted to man 

 such supernatural endowments that he could have 

 avoided sin, in spite of the handicap of inherited car- 

 nal impulses. It also teaches that, when creaturely 

 wilfulness nullified these endowments, and caused man- 

 kind to revert to the moral incapacity of his unassisted 

 nature, God provided a dispensation of redeeming grace 

 which enables men to meet their responsibility for sin 

 and ultimately to escape from its power.^ 



An exclusively evolutionary view of sin certainly has 

 a tendency to lower men's sense of its seriousness. This 

 has been denied, and it has been urged "that the sin- 

 fulness of sin is really more stoutly maintained by a 

 theory which makes all sin actual and a matter of 

 personal accountability, however less guilty its earlier 

 stages may be than its later, than by a theory which 

 finds the source of sinfulness in a supposed hereditary 

 state for which no man is responsible." ^ Such a reply 

 appears to have some force as against the view that we 



1 We are not committed, for instance, to the supralapsarian theory 

 that God predestined man's fall. Yet that horrible theory is the 

 theological counterpart of the evolutionary view that our moral help- 

 lessness is "the expression of God's purpose." 



2 The catholic doctrine of justification does not mean that our faith 

 in Christ's death exempts us from responsibility for sin; but that such 

 faith initiates in us a state in which, by repentance and sacramental 

 grace, we are enabled to suffer with Christ in such wise as to satisfy 

 through Him the justice of God and attain to holiness and eternal life. 



3 Tennant, Origin of Sin, Pref . of 2d ed., p. xx. The context, 

 pp. xix-xxvii, constitutes Dr. Tennant's reply at large to the charge 

 that his view logically involves a minimizing of sin. 



