St. Paul’s doctrine is simple and explicit.  Death, he says, reigned over Adam’s children, even over those who had not sinned after the likeness of Adam’s transgression; agreeing with Moses, who declares God to be one who visits the sins of the fathers on the children, to the third and fourth generation of those who hate Him.  But how the sinner will shrink from this message—­and shrink the more, the more feeling he is, the less he is wrapped up in selfishness.  Yes, that message gives us such a view of the sinfulness of sin as none other can.  It tells us why God hates sin with so unextinguishable a hatred, just because He is a God of Love.  It is not that man’s sin injures God, insults God, as the heathen fancy.  Who is God, that man can stir Him up to pride, or wound or disturb His everlasting calm, His self-sufficient perfectness?  ‘God is tempted of no man,’ says St. James.  No.  God hates sin.  He loves all, and sin harms all; and the sinner may be a torment and a curse, not only to himself, not only to those around him, but to children yet unborn.

This is bad news; and yet sinners must hear it.  They must hear it not only put into words by Moses, or by St. Paul, or by any other inspired writer; but they must hear it, likewise, in that perpetual voice of God which we call facts.

Let the sinner who wishes to know what original sin means, and how actual sin in one man breeds original sin in his descendants, look at the world around him, and see.  Let him see how St. Paul’s doctrine and the doctrine of the Ten Commandments are proved true by experience and by fact:  how the past, and how the present likewise, show us whole families, whole tribes, whole aristocracies, whole nations, dwindling down to imbecility, misery, and destruction, because the sins of the fathers are visited on the children.

Physicians, who see children born diseased; born stupid, or even idiotic; born thwart-natured, or passionate, or false, or dishonest, or brutal,—­they know well what original sin means, though they call it by their own name of hereditary tendencies.  And they know, too, how the sins of a parent, or of a grand parent, or even a great-grandparent, are visited on the children to the third and fourth generation; and they say ‘It is a law of nature:’  and so it is.  But the laws of nature are the laws of God who made her:  and His law is the same law by which death reigns even over those who have not sinned after the likeness of Adam; the law by which (even though if Christ be in us, the spirit is life, because of righteousness) the body, nevertheless, is dead, because of sin.

Parents, parents, who hear my words, beware—­if not for your own sakes, at least for the sake of your children, and your children’s children—­lest the wages of your sin should be their death.

And by this time, surely, some of you will be asking, ’What has he said?  That there is no escape; that there is no forgiveness?’