IMPORTANCE OF THE DOCTRINE 223 



inherit guilt as well as incapacity to avoid sin; but it 

 has none whatever in relation to catholic doctrine, 

 which borrows St. Paul's secondary use of the word 

 sin to describe our inherited moral weakness, but im- 

 putes personal guilt to those only who have actually 

 sinned. In tracing to natural heredity the internal 

 conflict which inevitably issues in acts of sin, catholic 

 doctrine does not conflict with Dr. Tennant's view, 

 that we can "assign the rise of evil itself ... to the 

 difficulty of the task which has to be encountered by 

 every individual person alike, the task of enforcing his 

 inherited organic nature to obey a moral law which he 

 has only gradually been enabled to discern.'' ^ 



The evolutionary and cathoHc views of sin differ in 

 their methods of accounting for our sin-producing in- 

 heritance rather than in their definitions of its nature 

 and their estimates of the responsibility of children. 

 The evolutionary view that our inheritance is wholly 

 due to the laws of natural development compels us 

 to regard the Creator as responsible for our inability 

 to avoid sin and guilt. The catholic explanation, that 

 it has been caused by an unnecessary human act of 

 wilfulness which has nullified divinely provided means 

 for transcending our naturally inherited weakness,^ 



1 Op. cit., p. 81. 



2 We should not overstate the supernatural factors of man's orig- 

 inal righteousness. All that is required by catholic doctrine is that 

 our first parents should have been sufficiently endowed with grace 

 to make them really free and responsible under the conditions of 

 their beginnings of human experience — really capable of avoiding 

 conscious sin. 



