But it gradually broke upon me, that when Paul said nothing stronger than heathen moralists had said about human wickedness, it was absurd to quote his words, any more than theirs, in proof of a Fall,—­that is, of a permanent degeneracy induced by the first sin of the first man:  and when I studied the 5th chapter of the Romans, I found it was death, not corruption, which Adam was said to have entailed.  In short, I could scarcely find the modern doctrine of the “Fall” any where in the Bible.  I then remembered that Calvin, in his Institutes, complains that all the Fathers are heterodox on this point; the Greek Fathers being grievously overweening in their estimate of human power; while of the Latin Fathers even Augustine is not always up to Calvin’s mark of orthodoxy.  This confirmed my rising conviction that the tenet is of rather recent origin.  I afterwards heard, that both it and the doctrine of compensatory misery were first systematized by Archbishop Anselm, in the reign of our William Rufus:  but I never took the pains to verify this.

For meanwhile I had been forcibly impressed with the following thought.  Suppose a youth to have been carefully brought up at home, and every temptation kept out of his way:  suppose him to have been in appearance virtuous, amiable, religious:  suppose, farther, that at the age of twenty-one he goes out into the world, and falls into sin by the first temptation:—­how will a Calvinistic teacher moralize over such a youth?  Will he not say:  “Behold a proof of the essential depravity of human nature!  See the affinity of man for sin!  How fair and deceptive was this young man’s virtue, while he was sheltered from temptation; but oh! how rotten has it proved itself!”—­Undoubtedly, the Calvinist would and must so moralize.  But it struck me, that if I substituted the name of Adam for the youth, the argument proved the primitive corruption of Adam’s nature.  Adam fell by the first temptation:  what greater proof of a fallen nature have I ever given? or what is it possible for any one to give?—­I thus discerned that there was a priori impossibility of fixing on myself the imputation of degeneracy, without fixing the same on Adam.  In short, Adam undeniably proved his primitive nature to be frail; so do we all:  but as he was nevertheless not primitively corrupt, why should we call ourselves so?  Frailty, then, is not corruption, and does not prove degeneracy.

“Original sin” (says one of the 39 Articles) “standeth not in the following of Adam, as the Pelagians do vainly talk,” &c.  Alas, then! was I become a Pelagian? certainly I could no longer see that Adam’s first sin affected me more than his second or third, or so much as the sins of my immediate parents.  A father who, for instance, indulges in furious passions and exciting liquors, may (I suppose) transmit violent passions to his son.  In this sense I could not wholly reject the possibility