We have no disposition to quarrel with the psychology of this statement. We admit man to be essentially will, in the sense here described. He is essentially activity; an activity limited externally, by special organization and circumstances,—limited internally, by quantity of force, and knowledge.
Nor, again, do we deny that in the unregenerate state the will of man is directed to self rather than to God as its ultimate end; and that this is guilt, and in a certain sense total guilt. No man can serve two masters. If he is obedient to one, he is necessarily disobedient to the other. This disobedience may, or may not, appear in act; but it is there in state. He whose ultimate end is self-gratification is always ready to sacrifice the will of God to his own. He whose ultimate end is God is always ready to sacrifice his own will. In this sense, the unregenerate man may be said to be wholly sinful; and he who is born of God, not to commit sin.
Thus much we grant; and the admission is a large one. But we must now object to the writer, that this is but one side of the question; and that he has omitted to see the other side. The [pg 462] sources of evil are not so simple as he seems to suppose; for man is a very complex being, and the world in which he lives is a very complex world. We therefore would inquire,—
What proof have we that this guilty direction of the will is a nature, in the sense claimed, i.e., something innate or original? Why may not the will have been turned gradually in this direction as we grow up, by enticements of pleasure; and why might not the will, in like manner, by means of wise culture, have been gradually directed to God?
Again: what proof have we that we are so wholly unconscious of this direction of the will, as our author contends? That a great many of the acts of the will are unconscious acts, like the separate movements of the finger in a skilful pianist, or lifting of the feet in walking, we admit; and we are not responsible for these separate acts, but for the preceding choice, by means of which we determine to play the tune, or walk the mile. In like manner, the direction of the soul to self rather than to God may be moral evil; but is not moral guilt, until we become conscious of it, in a greater or less degree. Then, when partially or wholly awakened to the evil direction of the soul, if we allow ourselves to neglect this discovery, to turn away from the fact and forget it, on that conscious act presses the whole burden of guilt, and not on the unconscious volitions which may result from it. We say, therefore, in opposition to the writer, that though there may be depravity without consciousness of the depraved state, there cannot be guilt without consciousness of the evil choice, or, as the apostle says, “Sin is not imputed where there is no law.”
Again: we totally dissent from the statement that this deep-lying will in man is unable to obey the commands, “Turn ye, turn ye from your evil way, for why will ye die?”—“Repent and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out,”—“Make you a new heart and a new spirit,”—“Choose you this day whom you will serve,”—“Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved.” The writer says, that “such a power as this, including so much, and running so deep, which is a determination of the whole soul, cannot, from the very nature of the case, be such a facile and easily managed power as that by which we resolve to do some particular thing in every-day life.” True: not so easily managed; but can it not be managed at all? It may require more self-examination to understand what the direction of the will is, and more concentration of thought and will, and more leaning on God's help; but [pg 463] with all these are we able or not able to turn to God? He says, the great main tendency of the will to self and sin as an ultimate end, though having a free and criminal origin, “is not to be reversed so easily.” True, again; but why not less easily? The writer speaks of the sinful will as a “total determination of itself to self;” and asks “how the power that is to reverse all this process can possibly come out of the will thus shut up, and entirely swallowed in the process. How is the process to destroy itself?” But what! Has man become a process? He is essentially will, but is this will blind mechanism? Has it not, according to our author's own theory, intelligence, conscience, affection, rooted into it? The moment that the writer begins to speak of the will, as unable to change its direction, he is compelled to conceive of it materially and mechanically, and not as the moral, responsible soul. He says, “The human will becomes a current that becomes unmanageable simply because of its own momentum.” And therefore, again, he is obliged to conceive of the whole voluntary power as lost, and lost before man was born; and he reduces all our real freedom to the original act of the will previous to birth, which took place when we were present in Adam's soul, and committed the first transgression with him.
This is plainly the denial of all human freedom since the fall of Adam. We bring into the world, according to the writer, a will wholly and inevitably bent to evil. We have no consciousness of this tendency, and if we were conscious of it we have no power to change it; but we yet are responsible for it, and guilty because of it, inasmuch as we began this state ourselves when all our souls were mystically present in the soul of Adam. Of this theory, we merely say now, that, if it be true, man is not now guilty of any sin which he commits in his mortal life; for he is not now a free being. He is only responsible for the sin which he freely committed in Adam. He is no more responsible when we suppose his sin to proceed from his will, than when we suppose it to proceed from a depraved sensuous nature, or from involuntary ignorance, for he is no more free in the one case than in the other. He may be an infinitely depraved and infinitely miserable being, but he can in no true sense be called a guilty being. Again we say, if this theory be true, it is an awful theory, and one which we cannot possibly reconcile with the justice or goodness, and still less with the fatherly character, of God. That God should so have constituted human nature that all the millions of the human [pg 464] race should have had this fatal opportunity of destroying themselves utterly, by one simultaneous act, in Adam, is, to say the least, an awful theory to propound concerning our heavenly Father. We might put Christ's argument to any man not hardened by theological study, as it seems to us, with irresistible force. “What man is there among you, being a father,” who could do anything of this sort? But we know too well that all such appeals fall harmless from the sevenfold shield of a systematized theology.
Therefore we will only say further, concerning this theory, that, as being apparently in direct conflict with the divine attributes as taught in the New Testament; as making man a mere process deprived of real freedom; as proving man not guilty for any sin committed in this life; and as thereby deadening the sense of responsibility, and showing that we cannot possibly obey the command, “Repent and turn to God,”—this theory of a sin committed in Adam ought to have the amplest proof before we believe it. We admit that it may be true, though opposed to all our ideas of God, man, and duty. But being thus opposed, it ought to be sustained by the most unanswerable arguments. If Jesus and his apostles have told us so plainly, we will believe it if we can. How is it, then? Not a word on the subject in the four Gospels. Not a text from the lips of Jesus which can be pretended to lay down any such theory. He does not even mention the name of Adam once in the Gospels, nor allude to him, except when speaking of marriage. This theory rests, not on anything contained in the Gospels, book of Acts, or Epistles of Peter, James, or John, but on two texts in two Epistles of Paul (Rom. 5:14; 1 Cor. 15:22). In the latter passage Paul says not a word of Adam's sin, but only of his death,—the whole chapter treating, not of sin, but of death and the resurrection. This passage, therefore, can hardly be considered a plain statement of the theory. The other, in Romans, is confessedly so far from plain, that it is difficult to make it agree with any theory; but the most evident meaning, to one who has no theory to support, is, that sin began with Adam, and the consequences of sin, which are moral and physical evil, began also with him; and as he thus set in motion a series of evil tendencies which we find in our organization, and which Paul elsewhere calls the law of the members, and a series of evil circumstances which we find around us in the world, both of which are the occasion of sin, we may trace back [pg 465] to him the commencement of human disobedience. If the passage teaches anything more than this, it certainly does not teach it plainly or explicitly.