in that case, there would have been a parallelism between Christ and Adam, which is here expressly denied."-TERROT. "Just as by Adam's transgression, sin entered into the world and mortality followed."-IDEM. These views correspond, closely, with St. Chrysostom's. "La mort du corps, qui est la peine generale et naturelle du péché : car il ne s'agit pas de celle de l'âme."-DE SACY.

66 'Independently of the reasons already assigned, there are others for confining St. Paul's words here to temporal death. He is speaking not so much of what men incurred, as of what they actually, and visibly, and indisputably underwent. To declare that all men, even infants, perished eternally for Adam's sin, would have been as injurious to the force of his argument as it was far from the apostle's thoughts. He would then have substituted, as the ground of his argument, a position of which no actual proof could have been given—and which would have been in the highest degree at variance with men's views of God's goodness and justice, and with his own declaration, that the benefits of Christ were greater than the evils from Adam-for a palpable and indisputable fact, viz. that all men had actually died or undergone a temporal death.

66

"St. Augustine, although he maintained that infants incurred more than temporal death, qualified the consequences by mitigating their punishment. If we receive a limbo infantum, or separate place, respecting which Scripture gives us no information, then every person may make it what he pleases, and disarm it of all tormenting associations, so that nothing seems to be either gained or lost by such a resource except the invention of a theory. ''Еø' ¿ ñúvτεs žμapтov, Unto which all have sinned. That is, to which ex tent, "quatenus" (Eras.Limborch, et alii). "Auquel tous ont péché."-Rouen F.B. "Porro locum hunc Erasmus ita vertit; quatenus omnes peccaverunt, quod et interpres Chrysostomi secutus est. Quæ versio ita demum tolerari potest, si id non de actualibus peccatis per quæ homines primum hominem imitari dicantur, sed de originali peccato singulorum intelligatur." -Est. All have, without exception, sinned to the extent of incurring temporal death. All the children of Adam have sinned and come short, as inheriting a degeneracy which must, in all, be visited with death. -a leprosy which taints every earthly tabernacle, and requires that it shall be dissolved and taken down preparatory to its final reconstruction and eternal stability. "Mors ergo, seu moriendi necessitas, quæ ob peccatum Adami initium cepit, in omnes homines pertransiit, quatenus omnes peccarunt.”—LIMCompare 8: 10, But if Christ be in you, the body is dead because

BORCH.

of sin.

"I do not think that another instance could be found, in St. Paul's epistles, of such a separation of the relative from its antecedent as is effected by making vрónov the antecedent to ; nor that anything could warrant the rejection of the proximate noun vúvaros as an antecedent, in favor of a noun so far separated from the relative as avoрúrov is, except the impossibility of making any pertinent sense in any other way. But no necessity of this kind occurs for the sense, that all men have sinned, without exception, to such

66

an extent as to incur temporal death, is quite as intelligible as that all men have sinned in Adam- quite as consistent with the meaning of the preposition in quite as pertinent to the argument, and as much in harmony with the context. In Gal. 5: 13 we find π' ¿hɛvvɛpią kкλýnтe,“ ye have been called unto liberty;" in Eph. 2: 10, kπì épуois àɣavois, “unto good works;" in 1 Thess. 4: 7, έkπì ảкavapoia means, “to uncleanness; and 2 Tim. 2: 14, kπì kataσтpodŋ, “unto the subverting." Erasmus, speaking here of the use of the prepositions v and ení, says: "Quoniam autem varius est usus Græcarum præpositionum, non ausim affirmare nusquam inveniri í junctum dandi casui, ubi quid declaratur esse in alio, velut arbor est in semine. Certe mihi non contingit hactenus aliquid invenire simile. Nam ad Hebræos vii. quum Paulus dicit, Levi fuisse in lumbis Abrahæ, non ait éπ' boqúï, sed v boqui. Contra prima Corinth. xv. Sicut in Adam omnes moriuntur, ita in Christo omnes vivificabuntur, non est, ἐπὶ τῷ Ἀδὰμ, ἐπὶ τῷ Χριστῷ, sed ἐν τῷ ̓Αδάμ, ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ.” It seems clear, that the preposition which would have been employed to signify" sinning" in Adam, is iv, and not èí, according to Pauline usage.

"Stuart adduces from the classics, vooɛīv ènì vaváry, “to be sick unto death" (Ælian); and dñoaι kñì Vavúry, "to bind unto death" (Herodotus). His objection to a similar interpretation in the present instance, seems to be without foundation. Neither would it make the apostle "repeat what he had just said,” nor does it necessarily imply that men "might have sinned to a certain extent without incurring such a penalty." On the contrary, it as truly assigns the cause of men's death as his own rendering (because that), since it declares that it is the result of their guilt; and it is also the natural expression to signify, not the greater, but the less guilt; and suggests most naturally, in connection with its being attributed to all without exception, the existence of a greater guilt and condemnation, which some of the all who have incurred the less, have escaped, namely, eternal death. That sin, of which all, even the least sinful, have been guilty, must, it is clear, be attended with the least possible guilt; and, if anything is implied, it is not that less guilt might have been incurred, but that the least guilt possible for any of the human race to incur led to death. Ti dè čotiv ἐφ ̓ ᾧ πάντες ἡμαρτον ; ἐκείνου πεσόντος, καὶ οἱ μὴ φαγόντες ἀπὸ τοῦ ξύλου γεγόvaσiv ¿ž ÉKEívov πúvтes dvηтoí.1 —St. Chrys. The statement of Theodoret: "Because each man, for his own and not the sin of Adam, comes under the decree of death," is correct if understood as it was in all probability intended, of original sin." pp. 246–250.

The Bible never intimates the existence of two kinds of sin, one of which deserves eternal punishment, and the other only temporal death. Our own moral feelings recognize no such distinction. All sin merits an everlasting penalty. We lessen our dread of transgression when we imply that it is, or can be so slight an evil as to be adequately punished by the mere dis

1 But what means, Unto which all have sinned? This he having once fallen, even they that had not eaten of the tree became by him all mortal.

solution of the body. "The derangement of the original equipoise of the soul" is represented by many authors as not only a sin, but as the source of all other sin, and ultimately of all woe, and therefore as more malignant and ill-deserving than any other iniquity. This is consistent, and in our opinion, Mr. Knight is incongruous with himself in affirming that this want of equipoise is real iniquity, and affirming, at the same time, that it would be unjust and cruel to punish it with the evil which the law threatens against all avouía. Sin is sin, and it harms the conscience to represent it as meriting only a slight penalty.

On verse 13, Mr. Knight teaches: "It is not simply said, that sin is not imputed by God, but that it is not reckoned under certain circumstances ; or, in other words, that sin requires the presence of several things, and among these a law, and a possible knowledge of that law, to constitute guilt. That, under certain circumstances, God does not reckon sin to individuals, is clearly proved by the preceding chapter, and the whole epistle; and it would be as unjust to reckon sin to a man who had no law, or possibility of knowing that it was sin, as it would be to reckon it to one in whose case Christ had atoned for it." p. 253.

On the phrase of tσTI TÚños Tov μékhovтos, in verse 14, Mr. Knight says: "The points of contrast which the apostle here adduces, are their respective influences upon the human race. In Adam, all die. By his sin and their participation in it, as in his loins, and inheriting a degeneracy by which they come short of the object of man's creation, all men without exception return to the dust; and this sentence has no reference whatever to their personal character or conduct, to their freedom from all actual transgression, as in the case of infants, or to their relation to God, as in that of faithful believers. Young and old, friends and foes of God, are all involved in this sentence, without any discrimination. But, in Christ, all shall be made alive. By his obedience unto death, he has reversed man's attainder, purchased the resurrection of the whole human family, and completely and universally obviated Adam's sin as to the sentence of dissolution. This resurrection and restoration to primitive existence, in the union of soul and body, has likewise no reference whatever to personal character or conduct; it is shared as indiscriminately as the death entailed by Adam. As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. But this is not the full extent of the antithetical correspondence between Adam and Christ in their influences upon the human race. Its full extent may thus be stated: Whatever penalties the human family has incurred from Adam, without the intervention of any exercise of their own individual wills, and to which they have not individually been consenting parties, are as fully and freely removed without the intervention of their own wills." Temporal death comes upon all men, altogether irrespectively of their own wills or distinctive characters, through Adam, and the inheritance of a corrupt nature entailed upon them by him. Life is, therefore, restored to all men, as universally and irrespectively of their own distinctive characters or wills, by Christ. By Adam's fall, man forfeited the position in which Adam stood in the covenant of obedience;

because Adam was placed in it with an uncorrupt nature, and his descendants would have occupied it with a corrupt nature. By Christ, a more than proportionally favorable result is introduced; and one which vastly counterbalances the loss of the Adamic covenant, even when associated with an uncorrupt nature; since, by the Adamic covenant, one sin would have incurred the penalty, but, by the Christian, provision is made for the forgiveness of many sins." pp. 257, 258.

Mr. Knight labors earnestly to show that the oft quoted passage, Rom. 9: 9-24, furnishes no support to the Calvinistic creed. He seems to consider that creed as necessarily teaching, that God elects some to eternal life arbitrarily, without any reason, and reprobates the non-elect according to his own pleasure, for which there is no rational ground. He speaks of the Calvinistic interpretations as "founded upon the false theory, that there can be no medium between a discriminating principle involving merit, or rather, involving merit adequate to the reward, and the absence of any discriminating principle whatever. Surely a principle, neither involving merit adequate to the blessing associated with it, nor any merit whatever, may yet draw a distinction between classes, and individuals as belonging to classes, and be perfectly consistent, not only with man's total and complete demerit, but with God's justice and mercy at the same time." p. 440. We are well aware that one class of Calvinists speak of God's will in election and reprobation as arbitrary; but another class explain this word as denoting, not the absence of a reason, but the absence of all reason, known to us. God never acts without a rational ground, although his creatures are unable (all finite minds must be unable) to detect the full reason, sometimes any reason, for his providences; and should unite in the "Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight."

V. THEORY OF THE MORAL SYSTEM.1

prayer:

"SAID a sturdy carpenter, at the close of a preaching service in the ship-yard: If God is so good, why not redeem the angels?'

“And what man, illiterate or educated, if he thinks, is without such and more troublesome inquiries. Why did the angels come to need redemption? Why did the first pair, happy and holy in Eden, sin? If God be infinitely wise, could he not have devised some plan to save his subjects from rebellion? If infinitely powerful, could he not have executed the plan? And if infinitely good, would he not have both devised and executed it? Why then a race of subjects in rebellion? Why is human experience invariably that of sin and suffering? Especially, how is it possible for these and kindred facts, to be comprehended in a harmonious and benevolent system? Who has not thought thus, until thought was anguish? The author of the Conflict of Ages is not alone in his painful experience; and undoubtedly, many minds pressed with his difficulties and others, would hail

1 Theory of the Moral System: including a Possible Reason why Sin exists. Hartford: Published by F. A. Brown. 1855.

with a satisfaction equal to his own, anything which they deemed even a possible solution," pref. pp. vii, viii.

The design of this treatise is to furnish a solution of the question, why sin is suffered to exist. The treatise proceeds on the hypothesis, that the moral system may be now in its infancy; that the motives which the universe furnishes at the commencement of the present system, may be insufficient to restrain the free will from rebellion; that, as the system continues, the character of God will be more and more fully unfolded in his providences, and will therefore constantly furnish an increase of motives to holiness. "It is not at all improbable that the great end at which the entire arrangements of the universe are at present aimed, may be that development of the Divine Character which shall be sufficient, hereafter, to determine the action of all newly created beings, under the trial of Probation, toward obedience and submission," p. 98.

1. The first moral beings "had no conception, either from experience or observation, of the nature of suffering, especially of that fearful form denominated punishment, and which, wherever justly inflicted, is mingled ever with the terrible ingredient of remorse.

"2. They had no such warning before them to deter them from transgression, as the universe now has, in the example of beings sinning and receiving deserved punishment.

"3. They had no palpable evidence like this of the veracity of God, and that he would be true to his threatenings, however dreadful.

"4. They had, therefore, no such reason to fear him, and to look upon him not merely as a benevolent Creator, but as a great and terrible Jehovah, which the universe now has, and which led the Psalmist to exclaim, 'O Lord, who shall not fear thee?'

"5. And furthermore, they had witnessed no manifestation of mercy on the part of God. His compassion for the sinful had never been made known to them, for there had been no occasion for its exhibition, especially his amazing condescension in stooping to raise fallen, guilty creatures from their degradation. That overpowering disclosure of all that is tender, melting, and winning, which has since been made in the death and sufferings of God's only Son for man's redemption, and which furnishes a motive for love and obedience to God, infinitely surpassing all others, had never been made to them. All this vast amount of motive has been created by God's dealings with his moral universe since the creation and fall of the first sinful beings; and the conclusion therefore is, that, at the time of their creation, there may not have been sufficient motives in existence actually to deter them from daring the tremendous experiment of disobedience,” pp. 143—

145.

Still the author of this treatise supposes that the first moral beings must have sufficient knowledge and sufficient motive to render them inexcusable for their sin. He is a firm believer in the freedom of their will. He rejects the theory, that their sin was a necessary means of the greatest good. His concluding chapters on the plan of redemption in its relation to the