IT is a constant doctrine of the so-called orthodox church, that our first parents, by their sin in eating the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden, not only incurred the wrath of God, but justly made themselves liable to endless damnation. This was the proper penalty of the law.
When referring to the forbidden fruit, God said, “In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die,” the words carried the terrific import that in case of disobedience they should suffer the torments of hell throughout eternity. “This,” says President Edwards, “was the death threatened in the law. This is to die, in the highest sense of the word. This is to die sensibly, to die and know it; to be sensible of the gloom of death.” The Westminster Confession expresses the penalty of that law in the same manner, saying that by it man is “made subject to death, with all miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal.”
But this represents, after all, only the very smallest part of the consequences of that primal sin. True, to consign two human beings to hell and an eternity of such torments as we have been taught make up its punishment, is not a matter of trifling import in any view we are pleased to take of it. Lost and sinful as the world is, or may be thought to be, the story of one man—and he the greatest criminal on earth—suffering hell-torments for one year or one month, would excite the sympathies of the whole human family, and call forth their united prayers for his release or his death. Such sufferings for one day would shock all mankind. The hardest and most cruel would stand aghast with horror. It would be something so strange, so contrary to all experience and observation, that none could fail to be struck with amazement.
Here, if suffering is carried beyond a certain point, nature gives way, and insensibility ensues. It is a benevolent arrangement of divine Providence. Excessive sufferings, too, are generally short. God has kindly ordered that one shall not live long in fire. Severe as the agony may be, it is soon over. Such a spectacle as here supposed would, therefore, amaze the world.
But, as I have said before, the damnation of our first parents, terrible as it must be in itself considered, is as nothing to the wide-spread ruin their sin occasioned. It is the doctrine of the orthodox church in all its branches that, by a special and most remarkable as well as disastrous arrangement,—as arbitrary as it is unaccountable,—this sin of Adam and Eve is imputed by our wise and gracious Creator to their children and children’s children, throughout all the generations of the human race; so that we are all born under the same “wrath of God and curse of the law” as they brought upon themselves, and therefore deserve, and may justly suffer, the same intolerable and eternal damnation! The doctrine is not a pleasant one, and even those who profess to believe it are obliged to confess that it is mysterious, and surrounded by difficulties. Calvin and his school of divines boldly resolve it into the will of God. “The loss of salvation by the whole race, through the guilt of one parent,” he says, “was an event that did not happen by nature;” that is, it was the result of a special divine ordinance.
Again he says: “The Scripture proclaims that all men were, in the person of their father, sentenced to eternal death. This, not being attributable to nature, it is evident must have proceeded from the wonderful counsel of God.” The meaning obviously is that there is no natural law by which the sins of parents are imputed to their children, and their children punished for these sins as if they had themselves committed them. No one ever dared to urge the doctrine of “heredity” so far as this. Then, if the Scriptures affirm what Calvin ascribes to them, “that all men were, in the person of their father, sentenced to eternal death,”—which I have failed to find in their pages,—they very plainly contradict themselves, which, if it does not destroy the authority of the Bible, certainly demands that we should adopt the doctrine that is clear instead of one that is doubtful, and that which is in harmony with nature and the dictates of common-sense rather than one that outrages both.
There is no principle of ethics more determinate and universally acknowledged than that the innocent cannot be punished for the guilty; and Moses made it a law among the ancient people of God that “the fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers every man shall be put to death for his own sin.” Ages subsequent to the time of Moses, the Hebrews had adopted a saying, that “the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” The falsehood and moral mischiefs of this proverb were so gross that God instructed his prophet to reprove the people, and call them back to wholesome opinions. “Behold,” he said, “all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth it shall die. . . . The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him; and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.”
In other words, sin and its punishment are strictly personal affairs, which admit of no substitution. No man can sin for another, or be punished for another. That all are liable to suffering as a consequence of the sins of others is matter of every-day observation. We are so linked together by the ties of blood, affection, or interest, that the conduct of one naturally affects the happiness of others. The family of a drunkard, a thief, a murderer, cannot avoid the suffering which his guilt and disgrace occasion them, but to confound this suffering with punishment is a flagrant violation of right thinking and an offence to good morals.
Instead of teaching, as the orthodox world declares, that “all men were, in the person of their father, sentenced to eternal death,” the Holy Scriptures are express and emphatic everywhere in inculcating, what the universal conscience of mankind approves, that God “renders to every man according to his works,” and that “he that doeth wrong shall receive for the wrong which he hath done, and there is no respect of persons.” In its immoderate zeal to maintain the doctrine of endless punishment, orthodoxy has invented a new kind of sin,— a kind of which the Bible makes no mention, and which no human conscience ever yet acknowledged,—which it calls “original” or “birth” sin. It is not anything we have done, nor anything we could avoid, but something inflicted upon us by the will of God, and for which we are held responsible, and, as Calvin says, “sentenced to eternal death.”
In other words, we are, unfortunately, born sinners, born guilty of offending God, born heirs of damnation! And orthodoxy ascribes this fearful doom, this intolerable curse, this awful injustice, to the Creator! “I inquire,” says Calvin, “how it came, to pass that the fall of Adam, independent of any remedy, should involve so many nations and their infant children in eternal death, but because such was the will of God. . . . It is an awful decree, I confess; but no one can deny that God foreknew the future final fate of man before he created him, and that he did foreknow it because it was appointed by his own decree.”
That we cannot see the moral beauty and justice of this transaction, Augustine tells us, is because we have lost “the perception of that most exalted and purest wisdom by which we could apprehend how great a sin was committed in that first transgression.” But whatever we may think of the validity of Augustine’s reasoning, he still maintained it as a fact that, on account of this first sin of Adam and Eve, “the whole mass of the human race is damned;” and in this the whole orthodox church practically agrees. “It is an awful decree,” they are all obliged to confess; but what can orthodoxy do without it?