Conscience and Sin: Daily Meditations for Lent, Including Week-days and Sundays

by S. Baring-Gould

Third Monday in Lent.

ON ORIGINAL SIN.

1. The subject for meditation to-day shall be the nature and effects of Original Sin, which is that Sin committed by our first parents, and of which we inherit, not the guilt of the act of Sin, but the consequences of the act.

God is just, and God would not condemn to everlasting death men because their first parents had broken His commandment. But the consequences of Adam’s sin passed on all his descendants. By his disobedience he had disturbed the Divine Order, lost his original innocence, introduced a dislocation into his nature. We will now consider what the results of that transgression were.

(a) It disturbed the direct relation of the soul to God. It obscured its vision of God, and all certainty as to God’s Nature and Will. This we see from the history of mankind. We find that the vision of God by the soul was so clouded that men fell into ignorance of God, and into false conceptions relative to the Nature of God and the Will of God. All the wanderings of the human mind in idolatries and mythologies are the result of the loss of clear perception of God’s Nature. Not only so, but the mistakes men made relative to the law of God, so that they did many things that were evil, believing them to be good, was the result of the obscuration of the spiritual vision so that it could not see what was the Will of God.

Again, all the errors and uncertainties into which men fell relative to the future state was due to the clouding of the spiritual eye, so that it could no longer see what was the Purpose of God relative to man.

(b) The intelligence was darkened. Adam and Eve saw what was before them, Death the consequence of Transgression, but allowed themselves to be confused by the pleadings of the serpent, disputing the consequences. Ever since, a confusion of the intelligence as to consequences resulting from acts has existed in men; a lack of sharp and decisive vision as to the relation of effect to cause, as to the relation of result to act.

The confusion and obfuscation of the intelligence is removed to a large extent by education, but only by such education as broadens the mind. A narrow, illiberal education may do much harm by throwing partial lights which tend the rather to confuse.

(c) The weakening of the human will. The will is not only inherently weakened by having given way to evil, but it is continuously weakened by the uncertainty it is in how to decide, by the darkening of the understanding, so that duties are not always clear, nor consequences certain. The will to do what is right is by no means strong, since Adam and Eve turned their will away from God; the human will has acquired a bent that inclines it not always to follow the right.

(d) And the undue elevation of sensuality tends to deceive the will and induce it to follow the appetites of the body instead of the promptings of the understanding. Adam and Eve went against Reason when they partook of the fruit of the tree to satisfy a carnal curiosity and gratify an animal appetite. Ever since then carnal curiosity and animal appetite have obtained a dominating power in man, composed of body, soul, and mind, quite out of proportion to what was purposed. This undue elevation of Sensuality leads man to seek the gratification of those appetites he shares with the beasts, at the expense of his intellectual and spiritual powers.