Meditations on the Essence of Christianity, and on the Religious Questions of the Day.

by François Guizot

3. That, by an act of his own free will, man has knowingly failed in his duty, by disobeying the law of God;

4. That the free man is a responsible being, and that disobedience to the law of God has justly entailed on him punishment;

5. That that responsibility and that punishment are hereditary, and that the fault of the first man has weighed and does weigh upon the human race.

The authority of God, the duty of obedience to the law of God, the liberty and responsibility of man, the heritage of human responsibility are, in their moral chronology, the principles and the facts comprised in the dogma of Original Sin.

I turn away my attention for a moment from the dogma itself, its source, its history, the Biblical and Christian tradition of this first step in evil of the human race. And considering man, his nature, and his destiny in their actual and general state, I investigate and verify the moral facts as they manifest themselves at the present day, to the eyes of good sense, amidst the disputes of the learned.

Man, at his birth, is subjected to the moral authority, as well as the physical power of the parents who, humanly speaking, created him. Obedience is to him a duty, and at the same time a necessity. This physical necessity and this moral obligation, however ultimately connected with each other, are not one and identical; and the child, in its spontaneous development, instinctively feels the moral obligation long before it is conscious of the physical necessity. The instinctive feeling of the obligation is united with the growing sentiment of affection; and the child obeys the look, the voice of its mother, unconscious of its absolute dependence upon her. As the sentiment of affection and the instinct of obligatory obedience are the first dawn of moral good in the development of the child, so the impulse to disobedience is the first symptom, the first appearance of moral evil. It is with the voluntary disobedience of the child to the will of its mother that the moral infraction commences, and it is in disobedience that it resides. It considers neither the motives nor the consequences of its act; it is simply conscious that it disobeys, and regards its mother with a mingled feeling of restlessness and defiance; it tries, with hesitation, the maternal authority; it strives to be, and especially to appear, independent of the natural and legitimate power which rules it, and which it recognises at the very moment when it opposes its own will to that higher law.

As the child, so is the man. As man is born free, so he lives free; and as he is born subject, so he lives subject. Liberty co-exists with authority and resists without annulling it. Authority exists before liberty, and as it does not yield to it, so neither does it supersede it. Man, inasmuch as he knows that he disobeys, renders homage to authority by the very fact of his disobedience. Authority, on its side, recognizes the liberty of man, by the condemnation which it passes on him for having misused it; for he would not be responsible for his acts were he not free. In the co-existence of these two powers, authority and liberty, at one time in accordance, at another in conflict, lies the great secret of nature and of human destiny, the fundamental principle of man and of the world.

Let it be clearly understood that I speak here of the moral world, of the world of thought and of will. In the physical world there is neither authority nor liberty; there are merely certain forces, forces acting inevitably and unequally. If the question concerned the material world, could I do better than repeat what Pascal has admirably said: "Man is but a reed—the weakest in nature—but he is a reed which thinks; the universe need not rise in arms to crush him; a vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But were the universe to crush him, man would still be nobler than the power which killed him, for he knows that he dies; and of the advantage which the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing." When man obeys or disobeys, he knows just as well that authority confronts him, as that liberty of action abides with himself. He knows what he does, and he charges himself with the responsibility. Moral order is here complete.