22 MORAL CONDITION OF THE CHILD 



words may indicate. At any rate we are not to 

 disavow what is now evident, just because the 

 form of words was once pronounced heretical. 

 The words no longer convey the same conceptions 

 that they did as used by Augustin. The whole 

 point of view has been changed. It is no longer 

 enlightening or helpful to affirm or deny some 

 of the old points of controversy; e. g., it is ap- 

 proaching the subject under a wrong presupposi- 

 tion to affirm or deny that infants should be re- 

 generated in order to be admitted into the King- 

 dom of God. It is not illuminating to affirm or 

 deny that * ' children are in the same state in which 

 the first man was before transgression ; ' ' and yet 

 this was precisely the point of the Pelagian con- 

 troversy. The whole subject of the moral con- 

 dition of the child has to be restudied from the 

 point of view of modern biology and psychology. 



THE TRADITIONAL, VIEW WAS Too MATERIALISTIC. 



Harnack points out that one of the early de- 

 velopments of Christianity, a contribution of 

 Orientalism on the soil of Hellenism, was the 

 "depreciation of the world, the contention that 

 it were better never to have existed, that it was 

 the result of a blunder, and that it was a prison, 

 or at least a penitentiary for the spirit." An- 

 other development was "the conviction that the 

 connection with the flesh ('that soiled robe') 

 depreciated and stained tine spirit; in fact that 

 the latter would inevitably be ruined unless the 



