This inheritance must take effect, it has done so from the first days of man's existence upon earth, for man has been created complete in his whole nature. And whilst, at the same time as complete, he has been created fallible, I ask, who shall measure the distance between man fallible, but still without fault, and the first transgression? Who shall sound the depth of the fall, and of the change which it brought into the moral condition of its author? Who shall weigh the consequences of this change to the state and the moral dispositions of man's descendants? To appreciate the extent and gravity of this awful fact, of this first appearance and this first heritage of moral evil, we have but one test,—the instinct we still preserve of a state of innocence, and of the immense space which this instinct irresistibly compels us to place between native innocence and man's first transgression; but this test is unexceptionable; it dimly reveals to us, in this fatal transformation, the whole infirmity and responsibility of the human race.
An objection is raised to this as an injustice: how, it is said, can each man be responsible for a fault which he has not himself committed—for the transgression of another man, separated from himself by so many ages? I consider this objection weak and frivolous. Such an objection would attach to all the inequalities which exist among men, to the inequality of the destinies as well as that of the nature of man, to the inequality of his moral disposition as well as to that of his physical powers. The objection would attach to the solidarity of successive generations, and the controlling influence which the ideas, the acts, the destiny of each of them exert on the ideas, the acts, the destiny of those which follow it. The objection would attach to the ties which unite the child with its parents, and which are the cause of its sometimes inheriting their evil dispositions, and sometimes suffering for their faults. It is in short the general order of the world to which such an objection must apply; it is the very existence of evil, and its unequal distribution in a manner wholly independent of individual merit which assumes the character of a monstrous iniquity. And when we come to this point, that we no longer refer the source of evil to the fault and the responsibility of man, placed here on earth in a scene and period of transition and of trial, see to what alternative we are brought. We must either regard evil as natural, eternal, necessary, in the future as in the past, as the normal state of man and of the world; that is to say, we must deny God, the creation, the Divine Providence, human morality, liberty, responsibility and hope; or, on the other hand, it is to God Himself that we must impute evil, and whom we must render accountable.
The dogma of Original Sin alone relieves the human mind from this odious and unacceptable alternative: far from being in contradiction either with the history of humanity, or with the facts and instincts which constitute man's moral nature, this dogma admits, illustrates, and explains them. The fact of original sin presents nothing strange, nothing obscure; it consists essentially in disobedience to the will of God, which will is the moral law of man. This disobedience, the sin of Adam, is an act committed everywhere and every day, arising from the same causes, marked by the same characters, and attended by the same consequences as the Christian dogma assigns to it. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, this act is occasioned by a thirst for absolute independence, the ambitious aspirings of curiosity and pride, or weakness in the face of temptation. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, it produces an immense change in the inmost state of man, a change, the mere idea of which seizes upon the human soul, and disturbs it to its very depths; it transports man from the state of innocence to the state of sin. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, the act which produces this change involves and entails the responsibility not only of its author but of his descendants; sin is contagious in time as in space, it is transmitted, as well as diffused. The Christian dogma exhibits the first man created fallible, but born innocent; innocent at the age of man, proud in the plenitude of his faculties, not the subject of any evil and fatal heritage. All at once, for the first time, of his own will, man disobeys God. Here lies Original Sin, the same in its nature as sin at the present day, for they both consist in disobedience to the law of God, but it is the first in date in the history of man's liberty, and the human source of that evil for which the Christian religion, whilst pointing it out, offers to man the remedy and the cure.
IV. The Incarnation.
All religions have given a prominent place to the problem of existence and the origin of evil; all have attempted its solution. The good and the evil genius, Ormuzd and Ahriman among the Persians; God the Creator, God the Preserver, and God the Destroyer—Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva—in India; the Titans overwhelmed by the thunderbolts of Jove while scaling Olympus; Prometheus chained to the rock for having snatched fire from heaven; all are so many hypotheses to explain the conflict between good and evil, between order and disorder in the world and in man. But all these hypotheses are complicated, confused, and encumbered with chimeras and fables; all attribute the derivation of evil to incongruous causes, none assign any term to the conflict, nor find a remedy for the evil. The Christian religion alone clearly states and effectually solves the question; it alone imputes to man himself, and to him alone, the origin of evil; it alone represents God as intervening to raise man from his fall, and to save him from his peril.
In the course of the sixth and fifth centuries before the Christian era, a great fact appears in history; a breath of reform, religious, moral and social, arises, and spreads from east to west, among all the nations then at all progressing in the path of civilization. Notwithstanding the uncertainties of chronology, it may be said, according to the most recent and accurate researches, that Confucius in China, the Buddha Càkya-Mouni in India, Zoroaster in Persia, Pythagoras and Socrates in Greece, are all included in the limits of this epoch; [Footnote 5] men as dissimilar as they are celebrated, but who have all, in different ways and in unequal degrees, undertaken a great work of reforming both the men and the social institutions of their times.
[Footnote 5: These researches give the following dates:—1. Confucius, from 551 to 478 B.C.; 2. Zoroaster, from 564 to 487, or from 589 to 512 B.C.; 3. Buddha Càkya-Mouni, in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. (he died, according to Burnouf, 543 B.C.); 4. Pythagoras, from 580 to 500 B.C.; 5. Socrates, 470 to 400 or 399 B.C.]