224 ORIGINAL SIN 



places the responsibility for our slavery to sin upon 

 human shoulders. It is this difference that justifies 

 our contention that the purely evolutionary view must 

 result in minimizing the awfulness of sin. If sin is the 

 inevitable fruit of natural incapacity, and this natural 

 inheritance constitutes the sum of the resources af- 

 forded to primitive man by the Creator, it is difficult 

 to justify any serious estimate of human guilt, so long 

 as sinlessness remains an unattainable ideal. Catholic 

 doctrine justifies the fearful condemnations of sin which 

 we find in Scripture, as no other doctrine does. It 

 relieves God of all responsibility for the inevitableness of 

 sin, and by its doctrine of redeeming grace shows that, 

 without the slightest change in His condemnatory atti- 

 tude towards sin, God has found a way of showing 

 mercy to the victims of the sin of our first parents and 

 of gradually saving us from its consequences. The 

 experience of mankind bears out what I am saying. 

 Wherever men have referred their inability to avoid 

 sin entirely to the original and necessary constitution of 

 things human, they have been tempted to abandon 

 the struggle, and to minimize the witness of conscience 

 to human responsibility and guilt. 



It has been denied by Pelagians and others that sin 

 is an inevitable result of the natural condition in 

 which we are born. One fact alone shows the purely 

 abstract and unconvincing nature of such a denial. 

 All men sin. The only sinless man known to history 

 is One who, because of His sinlessness as well as for 

 other reasons, is known to be the eternal Son of God. 



