112 MORAL CONDITION OF THE CHILD 



of divine judgment, by which God visited moral 

 calamity not only upon Adam, who had sinned, 

 but upon the individuals who constitute his pos- 

 terity, who had not sinned. To say that "in 

 Adam's fall we sinned all," is a moral and meta- 

 physical confusion of thought no longer permis- 

 sible. The belief, then, has no foundation in any 

 known law; it is held in the face of our estimate 

 of justice, and attributes to God what the uni- 

 versal consciousness of mankind condemns in 

 men; we must say it is arbitrarily held, with no 

 support save the inertia of a past credulity. 



That God should have lowered the physical 

 efficiency of the race is a possible conception, 

 based upon the law of heredity, whose justice we 

 shall in a moment consider; but even this does 

 not imply that into the constitution of this fallen 

 race an active principle of sin was injected which 

 made inevitable all the acts of sin committed by 

 men in all history. To go so far as that is a seri- 

 ous charge against Deity : for such a fiat is some- 

 thing more than a negative act something more 

 than withdrawing from man some power or effi- 

 ciency which he had before. It is the creation 

 and implantation of an active principle of evil, 

 and in making man a sinner served not the ends 

 of divine justice, but the purposes of his Satanic 

 Majesty. In so far as it transcended Adam's per- 

 sonality in its effects, it was no corrective of evil 

 in him, while it worked an indisputable injustice 

 to all other men. 



