Thornwell, Selected Writings, 1:543, says the Augustinian doctrine would imply that Adam, penitent and believing, must have begotten penitent and believing children, seeing that the nature as it is in the parent always flows from parent to child. But see Fisher, Discussions, 370, where Aquinas holds that no quality or guilt that is personalis propagated (Thomas Aquinas, 2:629). Anselm (De Concept. Virg. et Origin. Peccato, 98) will not decide the question. “The original nature of the tree is propagated—not the nature of the graft”—when seed from the graft is planted. Burgesse: “Learned parents do not convey learning to their children, but they are born in ignorance as others.” Augustine: “A Jew that was circumcised begat children not circumcised, but uncircumcised; and the seed that was sown without husks, yet produced corn with husks.”
The recent modification of Darwinism by Weismann has confirmed the doctrine of the text. Lamarck's view was that development of each race has taken place through the effort of the individuals,—the giraffe has a long neck because successive giraffes have reached for food on high trees. Darwin held that development has taken place not because of effort, but because of environment, which kills the unfit and permits the fit to survive,—the giraffe has a long neck because among the children of giraffes only the long-necked ones could reach the fruit, and of successive generations of giraffes only the long-necked ones lived to propagate. But Weismann now tells us that even then there would be no development unless there were a spontaneous innate tendency in giraffes to become long-necked,—nothing is of avail after the giraffe is born; all depends upon the germs in the parents. Darwin held to the transmission of acquired characters, so that individual men are affluents of the stream of humanity; Weismann holds, on the contrary, that acquired characters are not transmitted, and that individual men are only effluents of the stream of humanity: the stream gives its characteristics to the individuals, but the individuals do not give their characteristics to the stream: see Howard Ernest Cushman, in The Outlook, Jan. 10, 1897.
Weismann, Heredity, 2:14, 266-270, 482—“Characters only acquired by the operation of external circumstances, acting during the life of the individual, cannot be transmitted.... The loss of a finger is not inherited; increase of an organ by exercise is a purely personal acquirement and is not transmitted; no child of reading parents ever read without being taught; children do not even learn to speak untaught.” Horses with docked tails, Chinese women with cramped feet, do not transmit their peculiarities. The rupture of the hymen in women is not transmitted. Weismann cut off the tails of 66 white mice in five successive generations, but of 901 offspring none were tailless. G. J. Romanes, Life and Letters, 300—“Three additional cases of cats which [pg 632]have lost their tails having tailless kittens afterwards.” In his Weismannism, Romanes writes: “The truly scientific attitude of mind with regard to the problem of heredity is to say with Galton: ‘We might almost reserve our belief that the structural cells can react on the sexual elements at all, and we may be confident that at most they do so in a very faint degree; in other words, that acquired modifications are barely if at all inherited, in the correct sense of that word.’ ” This seems to class both Romanes and Galton on the side of Weismann in the controversy. Burbank, however, says that “acquired characters are transmitted, or I know nothing of plant life.”
A. H. Bradford, Heredity, 19, 20, illustrates the opposing views: “Human life is not a clear stream flowing from the mountains, receiving in its varied course something from a thousand rills and rivulets on the surface and in the soil, so that it is no longer pure as at the first. To this view of Darwin and Spencer, Weismann and Haeckel oppose the view that human life is rather a stream flowing underground from the mountains to the sea, and rising now and then in fountains, some of which are saline, some sulphuric, and some tinctured with iron; and that the differences are due entirely to the soil passed through in breaking forth to the surface, the mother-stream down and beneath all the salt, sulphur and iron, flowing on toward the sea substantially unchanged. If Darwin is correct, then we must change individuals in order to change their posterity. If Weismann is correct, then we must change environment in order that better individuals may be born. That which is born of the Spirit is spirit; but that which is born of spirit tainted by corruptions of the flesh is still tainted.”
The conclusion best warranted by science seems to be that of Wallace, in the Forum, August, 1890, namely, that there is always a tendency to transmit acquired characters, but that only those which affect the blood and nervous system, like drunkenness and syphilis, overcome the fixed habit of the organism and make themselves permanent. Applying this principle now to the connection of Adam with the race, we regard the sin of Adam as a radical one, comparable only to the act of faith which merges the soul in Christ. It was a turning away of the whole being from the light and love of God, and a setting of the face toward darkness and death. Every subsequent act was an act in the same direction, but an act which manifested, not altered, the nature. This first act of sin deprived the nature of all moral sustenance and growth, except so far as the still immanent God counteracted the inherent tendencies to evil. Adam's posterity inherited his corrupt nature, but they do not inherit any subsequently acquired characters, either those of their first father or of their immediate ancestors.
Bascom, Comparative Psychology, chap. VII—“Modifications, however great, like artificial disablement, that do not work into physiological structure, do not transmit themselves. The more conscious and voluntary our acquisitions are, the less are they transmitted by inheritance.” Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 88—“Heredity and individual action may combine their forces and so intensify one or more of the inherited motives that the form is affected by it and the effect may be transmitted to the offspring. So conflict of inheritances may lead to the institution of variety. Accumulation of impulses may lead to sudden revolution, and the species may be changed, not by environment, but by contest between the host of inheritances.”Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children was thought to be outrageous doctrine, so long as it was taught only in Scripture. It is now vigorously applauded, since it takes the name of heredity. Dale, Ephesians, 189—“When we were young, we fought with certain sins and killed them; they trouble us no more; but their ghosts seem to rise from their graves in the distant years and to clothe themselves in the flesh and blood of our children.” See A. M. Marshall, Biological Lectures, 273; Mivart, in Harper's Magazine, March, 1895:682; Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 176.
F. That, if all moral consequences are properly penalties, sin, considered as a sinful nature, must be the punishment of sin, considered as the act of our first parents.
But we reply that the impropriety of punishing sin with sin vanishes when we consider that the sin which is punished is our own, equally with the sin with which we are punished. The objection is valid as against the Federal theory or the theory of Mediate Imputation, but not as against the theory of Adam's Natural Headship. To deny that God, through the operation of second causes, may punish the act of transgression by the habit and [pg 633] tendency which result from it, is to ignore the facts of every-day life, as well as the statements of Scripture in which sin is represented as ever reproducing itself, and with each reproduction increasing its guilt and punishment (Rom. 6:19; James 1:15.)
Rom. 6:19—“as ye presented your members as servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity, even so now present your members as servants to righteousness unto sanctification”; Eph. 4:22—“waxeth corrupt after the lusts of deceit”; James 1:15—“Then the lust, when it hath conceived, beareth sin: and the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death”; 2 Tim. 3:13—“evil men and impostors shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived.” See Meyer on Rom. 1:24—“Wherefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness.” All effects become in their turn causes. Schiller: “This is the very curse of evil deed, That of new evil it becomes the seed.” Tennyson, Vision of Sin: “Behold it was a crime Of sense, avenged by sense that wore with time. Another said: The crime of sense became The crime of malice, and is equal blame.” Whiton, Is Eternal Punishment Endless, 52—“The punishment of sin essentially consists in the wider spread and stronger hold of the malady of the soul. Prov. 5:22—‘His own iniquities shall take the wicked.’The habit of sinning holds the wicked ‘with the cords of his sin.’ Sin is self-perpetuating. The sinner gravitates from worse to worse, in an ever-deepening fall.” The least of our sins has in it a power of infinite expansion,—left to itself it would flood a world with misery and destruction.
Wisdom, 11:16—“Wherewithal a man sinneth, by the same also he shall be punished.”Shakespeare, Richard II, 5:5—“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me”; Richard III, 4:2—“I am in so far in blood, that sin will pluck on sin”; Pericles, 1:1—“One sin I know another doth provoke; Murder's as near to lust as flame to smoke;” King Lear, 5:3—“The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to scourge us.” “Marlowe's Faustus typifies the continuous degradation of a soul that has renounced its ideal, and the drawing on of one vice by another, for they go hand in hand like the Hours” (James Russell Lowell). Mrs. Humphrey Ward, David Grieve, 410—“After all, there's not much hope when the craving returns on a man of his age, especially after some years' interval.”