Arminius.
In the same article are the following extracts from the works of Arminius, which, on so good authority, may be received as the views of the Methodist churches on this topic:
“The will of man, with respect to true good, is not only wounded, bruised, crooked and attenuated, but is likewise captivated, destroyed and lost, and has no powers whatever, except such as are excited by grace.
“Adam, by sinning, corrupted himself and all his posterity, and so made them obnoxious to God's wrath.”
“Infants have rejected the grace of the gospel in their parents and forefathers, by which act they have deserved to be deserted by God. For I would like to have proof adduced how all posterity could sin in Adam against law, and yet infants, to whom the gospel is offered in their parents and rejected, have not sinned against the grace of the gospel.”
“For there is a permanent principle in the covenant of God, that children should be comprehended and adjudged in their parents.”
Watson, the leading Arminian theologian, says that in the doctrine of the corruption of our common nature and man's natural incapacity to do good, the Arminians and Calvinists so well agree, “that it is an entire delusion to represent this doctrine, as is often done, as exclusively Calvinistic.”
Various Protestant doctrines.
The following extracts from the creeds of various European bodies of Protestant Christians show the same doctrine. The Synod of Dort was a great council of Protestant divines at the period of the Reformation. It contained representatives from most of the large bodies of Protestants in Europe. The following gives their views on this subject:
Synod of Dort.
“Therefore all men are conceived in sin and born the children of wrath, disqualified for all saving good, propense to evil, dead in sins, the slaves of sin; and without the grace of the regenerating Holy Spirit, they neither are willing nor able to return to God, to correct their depraved nature, or to dispose themselves to the correction of it.”
Confession of Helvetia.
“We take sin to be that natural corruption of man derived or spread from those our parents unto us all; through which we, being not only drowned in evil concupiscences and clean turned away from God, but prone to all evil, full of all wickedness, distrust, contempt and hatred of God, can do no good of ourselves—no, not so much as think of any.”
Confession of Belgia.
“We believe that, through the disobedience of Adam, the sin that is called original hath been spread and poured into all mankind. Now original sin is a corruption of the whole nature, and an hereditary evil wherewith even the very infants in their [pg 023]mother's womb are polluted: the which also, as a most noisome root, doth branch out most abundantly all kinds of sin in men, and is so filthy and abominable in the sight of God, that it alone is sufficient to the condemnation of all mankind.”
Confession of Bohemia.
“Original sin is naturally engendered in us and hereditary, wherein we are all conceived and born into this world.... Let the force of this hereditary destruction be acknowledged and judged of by the guilt and fault involved, by our proneness and declination to evil, by our evil nature, and by the punishment which is laid upon it.
“Actual sins are the fruits of original sin, and do burst out within, without, privily and openly, by the powers of man; that is, by all that ever man is able to do, and by his members, transgressing all those things which God commandeth and forbiddeth, and also running into blindness and errors worthy to be punished with all kinds of damnation.”
French Confession (Protestant).
“Man's nature is become altogether defiled, and being blind in spirit and corrupt in heart, hath utterly lost all his original integrity. We believe that all the offspring of Adam are infected with this contagion, which we call original sin, that is a stain spreading itself by propagation. We believe that this stain is indeed sin, because that it maketh every man (not so much as those little ones excepted which as yet lie hid in their mother's womb) deserving of eternal death before God. We also affirm that this stain, even after baptism, is in nature sin.”
Moravian Confession.
“This innate disease and original sin is truly sin, and condemns under God's eternal wrath all those who are not born again through water and the Holy Ghost.”
The preceding is sufficient to establish the unanimous agreement of Catholic and Protestant creeds and [pg 024] confessions in maintaining the Augustinian theory of the depraved nature of all mankind consequent on the sin of Adam, as it has been set forth in the preceding chapters.
Chapter VI. Modes of Meeting Difficulties by Theologians.
Having presented the Augustinian theory, as it is set forth in both Catholic and Protestant creeds, the next object will be to verify the statements of the preceding chapters as to the modes of meeting difficulties adopted by theologians.
The first extract will show that Augustine taught that all men had a common nature in Adam, so that his choosing to eat the forbidden fruit was the act of each and all human minds which were existing in or with him at that time. And thus that it was man and not God that caused our depravity of nature.
The extract introduced to verify the above was written to St. Jerome, who taught that all minds commenced their first existence at or near the birth of each. This Augustine denied, and the passage shows not only that he taught a common nature which was ruined in Adam, but also that all unbaptized infants go to endless punishment for the sin thus committed in Adam ages before they were born.