Here it is plain, that the depravity intended is depravity of construction. For habit, as men use the term, expresses the fact that repetition in the use of any faculty increases its power. It is a change in the constitutional construction of mind induced by use. For example, a child has little constitutional power of mind to reason or to calculate figures. By use, this deficiency of construction is modified.
Habit, then, modifies the constitutional organization of mind.
This mode of describing the depravity of mind teaches the misconstruction of constitutional organization as much as all the others, but it furnishes another mode by which it was induced, so as to make man the author in a way that is comprehensible, and not absurd.[16]
The fourth mode is the claim that the depravity of the human mind consists in the disparities, or varieties, of constitutional organization.
It has been shown that such disparities, as parts of a vast system in which the best good of the whole is the best good of each part, are indispensable to the perfect construction of mind in relation to that system.
But the depravity claimed is, that which is common to every mind, and is so total that not a single mind, however highly endowed, ever, even in one case, acts virtuously till regenerated. Thus the best in mental construction are as totally depraved as the worst. At the same time, it is clear that it is constitutional malformation that is taught, and nothing else.
The fifth mode of describing the depravity of mind is that it consists in the deprivation of God's Spirit.
The result of this deprivation is thus described by Dr. Hodge, of the Princeton Calvinist school of divines:
“In consequence of this withdrawal we begin to exist in moral darkness, destitute of a disposition to delight in God.”
Arminius, the chief theologian of the Methodists, describes it thus: