St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans: A Practical Exposition. Vol. II

by Charles Gore

(2) The Christian assumption may be stated as follows: granted that we cannot increase the sum of force which passes from external sources into our system, and passes out again in manifold forms of human action, yet within certain limits we can direct it for good or evil—i.e. the 'voluntary' part of a man's action may be determined from below, so to speak, by purely animal motives, or by rational and spiritual motives. In the latter case, the action is of the proper human quality, and stamps a rational and spiritual character upon all that falls within its range. In the former case, it may be truly regarded as a survival of the physical instincts of animal progenitors, and no doubt it emerges as a part of the physical order of the world. But, considered as human action, it represents a lapse, a culpable subordination of the higher to the lower in our nature, a violation of the law proper to manhood[[5]]. This is the point. St. John says, 'All sin is lawlessness,' and (by the exact form of expression which he uses) he implies also that all lawlessness is sin. Here, and here only where voluntary action begins, do you see violation of law, and therefore, within limits, a disturbance of the divine order—something which ought to have been otherwise.

(3) The belief that the moral evil of our nature does not properly belong to our nature but is its violation, and that if once the will be set right it can be remedied, has been the secret of the moral strength of Christianity. Christianity has said to all men, However corrupted your nature, the corruption does not essentially belong to you. Give your wills to God, and, if slowly, yet surely, if not fully in this world, then beyond it, all can be set right. 'According to thy faith be it unto thee.' And the practical power of this appeal, shows its agreement with reality.

(4) On the other hand, it cannot be claimed that the theory is contrary to any real scientific knowledge; for biology confesses that it knows very little as to the actual methods by which force is redistributed in human action. It is contrary only to some large and unverifiable assumptions—assumptions which ignore the abstract character of biological psychology, as of other sciences.

Now granted this reality of free voluntary action, it will hardly be denied that history discloses to us a practically universal prevalence of sin[[6]], in the present and in the past; and we can hardly fail to perceive, lying behind actual sins, a tendency to sin—what Shelley calls 'the ineradicable taint of sin,' a perverse inclination inhering in the stock of our manhood, which is what theology calls original sin.

III.—But here a more modern objection occurs. Christianity assumes that this moral flaw or taint, weakness or grossness, in human nature is the outcome of actual transgressions, in other words that original sin is due to actual sin, whereas the tendency of recent biological science is to deny that acquired characters can be inherited, and therefore to deny that any acts of any man or men could have any effect on the congenital moral nature of their descendants; the taint or fault in human nature, must be a taint or fault in that original substance which what is called man derived from his pre-human ancestry. To this I reply:—This is no doubt the view which Professor Weismann has made more or less prevalent. The substance of heredity ('germ-plasm') is taken to be a substance per se, which has always occupied a special 'sphere' of its own, without any contact with that of 'somatoplasm' further than is required for its lodgement or nutrition; hence it can never be in any degree modified as to its hereditary qualities by use-inheritance. It has been absolutely continuous 'since the first origin of life.'

But this doctrine does not appear yet to have assumed a fixed form[[7]]; and in its extreme or absolute form it is highly disputable, and rejected by large sections of biologists. Professor Haeckel[[8]] declares contemptuously that he should feel it more reasonable to accept the Mosaic account of special creations! The late Mr. Romanes, after summing up the evidence on both sides without any contempt, decides: 'No one is thus far entitled to conclude against the possible transmission of acquired characters[[9]].' Again, 'that this substance of heredity is largely continuous and highly stable, I see many and cogent reasons for believing. But that this substance has been uninterruptedly continuous since the origin of life, or absolutely stable since the origin of sexual propagation, I see even more and better reasons for disbelieving[[10]].' And he remarks[[11]], 'I doubt not Weismann himself would be the first to allow that his theory of heredity encounters greater difficulties in the domain of ethics than in any other—unless indeed, it be that of religion.'

I ought to add, in view of the apparently improbable event of the doctrine of Weismann becoming in its absolute form the accepted doctrine of biologists, that of course it only concerns the material organism. No one who is not a materialist would deny the possibility of the character of the parent modifying at its very root that of the child, without even the smallest conceivable modification of the physical organism; because in the origination of a spiritual personality, and in the link which binds it to the antecedent personalities to which it owes its being, there is that which lies outside the purview of biological science. There may be an inheritance of sinful tendencies derived from sinful acts in the region of the spiritual personality, even if no physical transmission is possible.

However it be explained, it appears to be the case that Christianity is bound to maintain the position that in the region of moral character there is, in fact, a solidarity in humanity. We are bound together. Our acts, as they form our own character, do somehow or other, however slightly, modify the characters of our descendants for good or evil. And this modification of the tendencies of the race by the acts of individuals may have been more marked at the beginning than it is to-day.

On the other hand Christianity is not in any way interested in denying that man derives a physical heritage of habits and tendencies from a pre-human ancestry. All I imagine that Christianity is interested in affirming is this—that when the animal organism became the dwelling-place of the human spirit (so to speak) that human spirit might have taken one of two courses. It might have followed the path of the divine will; and in that case human development would have represented a steady and gradual spiritualizing of the animal nature reaching on towards perfection. It might have taken, on the other hand, and did in fact take (more or less), the line of wilful disobedience. And the moral effects of this wilfulness and disobedience from the beginning onwards have been felt from parent to son. So that the springs of human conduct have been weakened and perverted, and no man has started without some bias in the wrong direction which would not have been there if his ancestors for many generations had been true to God.