92 MOEAL CONDITION OF THE CHILD 



sonal fall. Children may become heathen; they 

 are not born heathen. If the facts of life do not 

 prove this, I am unable to interpret them.* 



This question will be complicated somewhat, 

 without doubt, by the question of environment. 

 It will not be true that those converts to Chris- 

 tianity who remain in their native country, sur- 

 rounded by their native people, can in a single 

 generation be lifted out of their heritage. They 

 will have the ways of thinking and the national 

 habits, the prejudices and the moral practices of 

 their people. They can not be lifted entirely out 

 of environmental consequences until their whole 

 race has been lifted out of them. That is another 

 problem. The point, however, is: lift them out 

 of their environment at birth; give them Chris- 

 tian teaching and Christian training, and they 

 will take their place immediately among those of 



* Evolutionary writers speak as if the Fall were an epoch in the history of the 

 race. E. G. Henderson ("God and Man in the Light of To-day") says: "Man had 

 reached a higher stage of development. To him for the first time right and wrong had 

 meaning. To him for the first time belonged freedom of choice. To him for the first 

 time was presented the upward and the downward course. But having reached the 

 new stage in his development, he ought to have taken the upward course, he ought to have 

 chosen the good. He actually took the downward course. He chose evil instead of good. 

 He turned aside from the path of progress. He fell into sin." (p. 113.) A moment's re- 

 flection will show that such a description of a race-act is and can be only a fiction. The 

 above language is highly intelligible as the description of the act of an individual; but 

 an individual in the evolutionary sense does not thus come "for the first time," etc. It 

 is a race that thus emerges from the moral darkness of animal life into the moral light 

 of a human life. The race could not fall into sin by an act. Only such a fall is pos- 

 sible in an individual. Such an account of the fall from an evolutionary point of view 

 is reasonable only if we assume that at some time the race was an individual, as Gen- 

 esis pictures. But that is a somewhat difficult assumption to fit into an evolutionary proc- 

 ess. An attempt to think it through will result, we verily believe, in a rejection of the 

 Fall as a race experience, and will leave the sinful condition of the race as the result of 

 individual sins. 



