Such, I repeat, would be the inevitable conclusion, if Taylor's sense of the term were carried on into its immediate consequences. But the whole of his most eloquent Treatise makes it certain that Taylor did not carry it on: and consequently Original Sin, according to his conception, is a calamity which being common to all men must be supposed to result from their common nature: in other words, the universal Calamity of Human Nature.
Can we wonder, then, that a mind, a heart like Taylor's should reject, that he should strain his faculties to explain away, the belief that this calamity, so dire in itself, should appear to the All-merciful God a rightful cause and motive for inflicting on the wretched sufferers a calamity infinitely more tremendous; nay, that it should be incompatible with Divine Justice not to punish it by everlasting torment? Or need we be surprised if he found nothing that could reconcile his mind to such a belief, in the circumstance that the acts now consequent on this calamity and either directly or indirectly effects of the same, were, five or six thousand years ago in the instance of a certain individual and his accomplice, anterior to the calamity, and the Cause or Occasion of the same;—that what in all other men is disease, in these two persons was guilt;—that what in us is hereditary, and consequently nature, in them was original, and consequently sin? Lastly, might it not be presumed, that so enlightened, and at the same time so affectionate, a divine, would even fervently disclaim and reject the pretended justifications of God grounded on flimsy analogies drawn from the imperfections of human ordinances and human justice-courts—some of very doubtful character even as human institutes, and all of them just only as far as they are necessary, and rendered necessary chiefly by the weakness and wickedness, the limited powers and corrupt passions, of mankind? The more confidently might this be presumed of so acute and practised a logician, as Taylor, in addition to his other extraordinary gifts, is known to have been, when it is demonstrable that the most current of these justifications rests on a palpable equivocation: namely, the gross misuse of the word right.[111] An instance will explain my meaning. In as far as, from the known frequency of dishonest or mischievious persons, it may have been found necessary, in so far is the law justifiable in giving landowners the right of proceeding against a neighbour or fellow-citizen for even a slight trespass on that which the law has made their property:—nay, of proceeding in sundry instances criminally and even capitally. But surely, either there is no religion in the world, and nothing obligatory in the precepts of the Gospel, or there are occasions in which it would be very wrong in the proprietor to exercise the right, which yet it may be highly expedient that he should possess. On this ground it is, that Religion is the sustaining opposite of Law.
That Taylor, therefore, should have striven fervently against the Article so interpreted and so vindicated, is, (for me, at least) a subject neither of surprise nor of complaint. It is the doctrine which he substitutes, it is the weakness and inconsistency betrayed in the defence of this substitute; it is the unfairness with which he blackens the established Article—for to give it, as it has been caricatured by a few Ultra-Calvinists during the fever of the (so called) Quinquarticular controversy, was in effect to blacken it—and then imposes another scheme, to which the same objections apply with even increased force, a scheme which seems to differ from the former only by adding fraud and mockery to injustice; these are the things that excite my wonder; it is of these that I complain. For what does the Bishop's scheme amount to?—God, he tells us, required of Adam a perfect obedience, and made it possible by endowing him "with perfect rectitudes and super-natural heights of grace" proportionate to the obedience which he required. As a consequence of his disobedience, Adam lost this rectitude, this perfect sanity and proportionateness of his intellectual, moral and corporeal state, powers and impulses; and as the penalty of his crime, he was deprived of all super-natural aids and graces. The death, with whatever is comprised in the Scriptural sense of the word, death, began from that moment to work in him, and this consequence he conveyed to his offspring, and through them to all his posterity, that is, to all mankind. They were born diseased in mind, body and will. For what less than disease can we call a necessity of error and a predisposition to sin and sickness? Taylor, indeed, asserts, that though perfect obedience became incomparably more difficult, it was not, however, absolutely impossible. Yet he himself admits that the contrary was universal; that of the countless millions of Adam's posterity, not a single individual ever realized, or approached to the realization of, this possibility; and (if my memory[113] does not deceive me) Taylor himself has elsewhere exposed—and if he has not, yet Common Sense will do it for him—the sophistry in asserting of a whole what may be true of the whole, but—is in fact true only, of each of its component parts. Any one may snap a horse-hair: therefore, any one may perform the same feat with the horse's tail. On a level floor (on the hardened sand, for instance, of a sea-beach) I chalk two parallel straight lines, with a width of eight inches. It is possible for a man, with a bandage over his eyes, to keep within the path for two or three paces: therefore, it is possible for him to walk blindfold for two or three leagues without a single deviation! And this possibility would suffice to acquit me of injustice, though I had placed man-traps within an inch of one line, and knew that there were pit-falls and deep wells beside the other!
This assertion, therefore, without adverting to its discordance with, if not direct contradiction to, the tenth and thirteenth Articles of our Church, I shall not, I trust, be thought to rate below its true value, if I treat it as an infinitesimal possibility that may be safely dropped in the calculation:—and so proceed with the argument. The consequence then of Adam's crime was, by a natural necessity, inherited by persons who could not (the Bishop affirms) in any sense have been accomplices in the crime or partakers in the guilt: and yet consistently with the divine holiness, it was not possible that the same perfect obedience should not be required of them. Now what would the idea of equity, what would the law inscribed by the Creator in the heart of man, seem to dictate in this case? Surely, that the supplementary aids, the super-natural graces correspondent to a law above nature, should be increased in proportion to the diminished strength of the agents, and the increased resistance to be overcome by them. But no! not only the consequence of Adam's act, but the penalty due to his crime, was perpetuated. His descendants were despoiled or left destitute of these aids and graces, while the obligation to perfect obedience was continued; an obligation too, the non-fulfilment of which brought with it death and the unutterable woe that cleaves to an immortal soul for ever alienated from its Creator.
Observe, that all these results of Adam's fall enter into Bishop Taylor's scheme of Original Sin equally as into that of the first Reformers. In this respect the Bishop's doctrine is the same with that laid down in the Articles and Homilies of the Established Church. The only difference that has hitherto appeared, consists in the aforesaid mathematical possibility of fulfilling the whole law, which in the Bishop's scheme is affirmed to remain still in human nature, or (as it is elsewhere expressed) in the nature of the human Will.[114] But though it were possible to grant this existence of a power in all men, which in no man was ever exemplified, and where the non-actualization of such power is, a priori, so certain, that the belief or imagination of the contrary in any individual is expressly given us by the Holy Spirit as a test, whereby it may be known that the truth is not in him, as an infallible sign of imposture or self-delusion! Though it were possible to grant this, which, consistently with Scripture and the principles of reasoning which we apply in all other cases, it is not possible to grant;—and though it were possible likewise to overlook the glaring sophistry of concluding in relation to a series of indeterminate length, that whoever can do any one, can therefore do all; a conclusion, the futility of which must force itself on the common-sense of every man who understands the proposition;—still the question will arise—Why, and on what principle of equity, were the unoffending sentenced to be born with so fearful a disproportion of their powers to their duties? Why were they subjected to a law, the fulfilment of which was all but impossible, yet the penalty on the failure tremendous? Admit that for those who had never enjoyed a happier lot, it was no punishment to be made to inhabit a ground which the Creator had cursed, and to have been born with a body prone to sickness, and a soul surrounded with temptation, and having the worst temptation within itself in its own temptibility;—to have the duties of a spirit with the wants and appetites of an animal! Yet on such imperfect Creatures, with means so scanty and impediments so numerous, to impose the same task-work that had been required of a Creature with a pure and entire nature, and provided with super-natural aids—if this be not to inflict a penalty;—yet to be placed under a law, the difficulty of obeying which is infinite, and to have momently to struggle with this difficulty, and to live momently in hazard of these consequences—if this be no punishment;—words have no correspondence with thoughts, and thoughts are but shadows of each other, shadows that own no substance for their anti-type!
Of such an outrage on common-sense, Taylor was incapable. He himself calls it a penalty; he admits that in effect it is a punishment: nor does he seek to suppress the question that so naturally arises out of this admission;—on what principle of equity were the innocent offspring of Adam punished at all? He meets it, and puts-in an answer. He states the problem, and gives his solution—namely, that "God on Adam's account was so exasperated with mankind, that being angry he would still continue the punishment"! "The case" (says the Bishop) "is this: Jonathan and Michal were Saul's children. It came to pass, that seven of Saul's issue were to be hanged: all equally innocent, equally culpable." [Before I quote further, I feel myself called on to remind the reader, that these two last words were added by Jeremy Taylor without the least grounds in Scripture, according to which, (2 Samuel, xxi.) no crime was laid to their charge, no blame imputed to them. Without any pretence of culpable conduct on their part, they were arraigned as children of Saul, and sacrificed to a point of state-expedience. In recommencing the quotation, therefore, the reader ought to let the sentence conclude with the words—] "all equally innocent. David took the five sons of Michal, for she had left him unhandsomely. Jonathan was his friend: and therefore he spared his son, Mephibosheth. Here it was indifferent as to the guilt of the persons" (Bear in mind, reader, that no guilt was attached to either of them!) "whether David should take the sons of Michal or of Jonathan; but it is likely that as upon the kindness that David had to Jonathan, he spared his son; so upon the just provocation of Michal, he made that evil fall upon them, which, it may be, they should not have suffered, if their mother had been kind. Adam was to God, as Michal to David."[115]
This answer, this solution proceeding too from a divine so pre-eminently gifted, and occurring (with other passages not less startling) in a vehement refutation of the received doctrine on the express ground of its opposition to the clearest conceptions and best feelings of mankind—this it is that surprises me! It is of this that I complain! The Almighty Father exasperated with those, whom the Bishop has himself in the same treatise described as "innocent and most unfortunate"—the two things best fitted to conciliate love and pity! Or though they did not remain innocent, yet those whose abandonment to a mere nature, while they were left amenable to a law above nature, he affirms to be the irresistible cause, that they one and all did sin! And this decree illustrated and justified by its analogy to one of the worst actions of an imperfect mortal! From such of my readers as will give a thoughtful perusal to these works of Taylor, I dare anticipate a concurrence with the judgment which I here transcribe from the blank space at the end of the Deus Justificatus in my own copy; and which, though twenty years[116] have elapsed since it was written, I have never seen reason to recant or modify. "This most eloquent Treatise may be compared to a statue of Janus, with the one face, which we must suppose fronting the Calvinistic tenet, entire and fresh, as from the master's hand: beaming with life and force, witty scorn on the lip, and a brow at once bright and weighty with satisfying reason:—the other, looking toward the "something to be put in its place," maimed, featureless, and weather-bitten into an almost visionary confusion and indistinctness."[117]
With these expositions I hasten to contrast the Scriptural article respecting Original Sin, or the corrupt and sinful Nature of the Human Will, and the belief which alone is required of us, as Christians. And here the first thing to be considered, and which will at once remove a world of error, is; that this is no tenet first introduced or imposed by Christianity, and which, should a man see reason to disclaim the authority of the Gospel, would no longer have any claim on his attention. It is no perplexity that a man may get rid of by ceasing to be a Christian, and which has no existence for a philosophic Deist. It is a Fact, affirmed, indeed, in the Christian Scriptures alone with the force and frequency proportioned to its consummate importance; but a fact acknowledged in every religion that retains the least glimmering of the patriarchal faith in a God infinite, yet personal—a Fact assumed or implied as the basis of every religion, of which any relics remain of earlier date than the last and total apostacy of the Pagan world, when the faith in the great I am, the Creator, was extinguished in the sensual Polytheism, which is inevitably the final result of Pantheism or the worship of nature; and the only form under which the Pantheistic scheme—that, according to which the world is God, and the material universe itself the one only absolute Being—can exist for a people, or become the popular creed. Thus in the most ancient books of the Brahmins, the deep sense of this Fact, and the doctrines grounded on obscure traditions of the promised remedy, are seen struggling, and now gleaming, now flashing, through the mist of Pantheism, and producing the incongruities and gross contradictions of the Brahmin Mythology: while in the rival sect—in that most strange phænomenon, the religious atheism of the Buddhists: with whom God is only universal matter considered abstractedly from all particular forms—the Fact is placed among the delusions natural to man, which, together with other superstitions grounded on a supposed essential difference between right and wrong, the sage is to decompose and precipitate from the menstruum of his more refined apprehensions! Thus in denying the Fact, they virtually acknowledge it.
From the remote East turn to the mythology of Lesser Asia, to the descendants of Javan who dwelt in the tents of Shem, and possessed the Isles. Here again, and in the usual form of an historic solution we find the same Fact, and as characteristic of the human race, stated in that earliest and most venerable mythus (or symbolic parable) of Prometheus—that truly wonderful Fable, in which the characters of the rebellious Spirit and of the Divine Friend of Mankind (Θεος φιλανθρωπος) are united in the same person; and thus in the most striking manner noting the forced amalgamation of the Patriarchal tradition with the incongruous scheme of Pantheism. This and the connected tale of Io, which is but the sequel of the Prometheus, stand alone in the Greek Mythology, in which elsewhere both gods and men are mere powers and products of nature. And most noticeable it is, that soon after the promulgation and spread of the Gospel had awakened the moral sense, and had opened the eyes even of its wiser enemies to the necessity of providing some solution of this great problem of the Moral World, the beautiful Parable of Cupid and Psyche was brought forward as a rival Fall of Man: and the fact of a moral corruption connatural with the human race was again recognized. In the assertion of Original Sin the Greek Mythology rose and set.
But not only was the fact acknowledged of a law in the nature of man resisting the law of God; (and whatever is placed in active and direct oppugnancy to the good is, ipso facto, positive evil;) it was likewise an acknowledged Mystery, and one which by the nature of the subject must ever remain such—a problem, of which any other solution, than the statement of the Fact itself, was demonstrably impossible. That it is so, the least reflection will suffice to convince every man, who has previously satisfied himself that he is a responsible being. It follows necessarily from the postulate of a responsible Will. Refuse to grant this, and I have not a word to say. Concede this and you concede all. For this is the essential attribute of a Will, and contained in the very idea, that whatever determines the Will acquires this power from a previous determination of the Will itself. The Will is ultimately self-determined, or it is no longer a Will under the law of perfect freedom, but a nature under the mechanism of cause and effect. And if by an act, to which it had determined itself, it has subjected itself to the determination of nature (in the language of St. Paul, to the law of the flesh), it receives a nature into itself, and so far it becomes a nature: and this is a corruption of the Will and a corrupt nature. It is also a Fall of Man, inasmuch as his Will is the condition of his personality; the ground and condition of the attribute which constitutes him man. And the ground work of personal Being is a capacity of acknowledging the Moral Law (the Law of the Spirit, the Law of Freedom, the Divine Will) as that which should, of itself, suffice to determine the Will to a free obedience of the law, the law working therein by its own exceeding lawfulness.[118] This, and this alone, is positive Good; good in itself, and independent of all relations. Whatever resists, and, as a positive force, opposes this in the Will is therefore evil. But an evil in the Will is an evil Will; and as all moral evil (that is, all evil that is evil without reference to its contingent physical consequences) is of the Will, this evil Will must have its source in the Will. And thus we might go back from act to act, from evil to evil, ad infinitum, without advancing a step.