For the further explication of which it is observable that the word 'sinner' and 'sin' in Scripture is used for any person, that hath a fault or a legal impurky, a debt, a vitiosity, defect, or imposition, &c.
These facts, instead of explaining away Original Sin, are unintelligible, nay, absurd and immoral, except as shadows, types, and symbols of it, and of the Redemption from it. Observe, too, that Taylor never dares explain what he means by "Adam was mortal of himself and we are mortal from him:" he did not dare affirm that soul and body are alike material and perishable, even as the lute and the potentiality of music in the lute. And yet if he believed the contrary, then, in his construction of the doctrine of Original Sin, what has Christ done? St. John died in the same sense as Abel died: and in the sense of the Church of England neither died, but only slept in the Lord.
This same system forced Taylor into the same error which Warburton afterwards dressed up with such trappings and trammels of erudition, in direct contempt of the plain meaning of the Church's article; and he takes it for granted, in many places, that the Jews under Moses knew only of temporal life and the death of the body. Lastly, he greatly degrades the mind of man by causelessly representing death as an evil in itself, which, if it be considered as a crisis, or phenomenal change, incident to a progressive being, ought as little to be thought so, as the casting of the caterpillar's skin to make room for the wings of the butterfly. It is the unveiling of the Psyche.
I do not affirm this as an article of Christian faith; but I say that no candid writer ought to hide himself in double meanings. Either he should have used the term 'death' (
ex Adamo
) as loss of body, or as change of mode of being and of its circumstances; and again this latter as either evil for all, or as evil or good according to the moral habits of each individual.
Observe, however, once for all, that I do not pretend to account for Original Sin. I declare it to be an unaccountable fact. How can we explain a
species
, when we are wholly in the dark as to the
genus