Himself, faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the truth than the liberal, popular illusions that babies are all born good, and that the example of corrupt society is responsible for their failure to remain so....  That it is given to everybody to reach the ethical ideal if they will only try; that all partial evil is universal good; and other optimistic figments.”  “I suppose that all men with a clear sense of right and wrong have descended into hell and stopped there quite long enough to know what infinite punishment means.”

[Sidenote:  Transmission of Evil.]

Surely, the established truths of heredity confirm the doctrine that man, if not born depraved, is born deprived of tendencies toward good essential to his own welfare and that of the race.  “Where sin has once taken hold of the race, the natural reproduction of life become reproduction of life morally injured and faulty.  With evil once begun, the race is a succession of tainted individuals; an organism that works toward continuance of evil.  Not but that good is transmitted at the same time, for it goes along with evil.  Any virtue or value which is strong enough to live will pass from generation to generation even while evil is making the same journey."[6]

[Footnote 6:  Outline of Christian Theology.  Clarke, p. 242.]

[Sidenote:  Depravation and Deprivation.]

[Sidenote:  Natural Standards.]

[Sidenote:  The Decalogue.]

While we hold that this tendency, this natural sluggishness in laying hold of the things of the higher nature is not in itself guilt, it becomes so by the voluntary adoption of the lower forces as the guide of life.  Nature has her own decalogue.  There is a law written upon our hearts.  The wasting of power by anger, jealousy, envy, covetousness and the like, and the degradation following their expression in acts of revenge, concupiscence, and mere rapacity, are known without revelation by all races which have not suffered the downward evolution.  The literatures prove this back even to the days of Hamurabi.  Thus natural standards of temper and conduct are seen to exist, below which men may not live without loss, and hence there are natural laws to disobey which is sin.  The table given on Sinai, though given to Moses, was in the world long before Moses.  But higher sanction was given it by the lawgiver, and the highest by the re-enactment of the Decalogue by Jesus Christ.

[Sidenote:  The Heart Law.]

[Sidenote:  Effects of Sin.]

[Sidenote:  Characteristics of Sin.]

[Sidenote:  Results of Sin.]