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looked in the investigation of what honor and right demand from God in the perpetuations of depravity. Adam's paternity of the race connects him with all, and has that in it which conditions all in common, and, quite back of the individuality and personal consciousness of each, pours its stream of influence down upon each, and works its modifying results in each, and makes all of a generation not a mere collocation of separate men, but a concretion of existing mankind; and also makes of successive generations, not a mere sequence, but a linked series of being. This fact of generic unity must be regarded in the moral as well as in the physiological history of the human race, and must throw its light upon all our philosophizing.

But this assumption of preexistent sin not merely rejects, but annihilates, all such generic unities. All originally began in complete independence of all other; and all sinned alone under no connections of headship or race; and each had his completed character and confirmed habit before his birth from Adam. So far as depravity is concerned, Adam and all his children stand to each as disjoined as the fallen angels. Such conclusions are neither consonant with Scripture, philosophy, nor fact.

But more than all the above, the hypothesis, if true, could not at all touch the point of perplexity and anxiety. The great difficulty is with such as are finally lost. They will justly complain that their trial has not been fair, nor God's treatment of them honorable and righteous. We now would shut their mouths by letting them know, what they have all along been wholly unconscious of, that they sinned in a preexistent state where they had a fair trial, and that their precedent sin has been the ground of all God's severe conditions in their infant temptations and onward trial. Their old guilt remains upon them, and they have incalculably augmented this in all their subsequent sinning under a dispensation of grace. The penalty of the whole is now to be rigorously executed, and their preëxistence and sin is to make God's whole transaction clear and just when he judges and condemns.

"It would have been just," any one of them might admit, "to have punished me according to my demerit in my former estate, but why put me in the new state of trial with its augmented responsibilities, and under its hard conditions of weakness, ignorance, and surrounding temptation, and with the certainty that in me the trial would wholly fail, and I should sink at last to a deeper doom?" The answer is: "you deserved harder conditions than those you received, and your severities in a mitigated form were in punishment for your former sins." But he answers: "I knew of no former sins when such penalty was inflicted, and it is the same penal enormity as that which should hang the murderer when he has become an idiot." Besides, "I now see that it was the old depravity which wrought out its issues in my new probation, and that what I brought with me. hurried me on in sin when I did not know whence it came, nor that the madness was of my own procuring; and must I now suffer for that?" The answer may be, "yes; it is but holding the drunkard responsible, when sober, for the deeds of his drunken frenzy." But he will reply again: "the drunkard's sin is not in his drunken agency, but in the voluntary pollutions which induced the madness; and here, you yourself have put me into this state of unconscious delirium." Shall he then be told: "but your sin in your new probation was voluntary, and your rejection of offered mercy has been wilful." May he not then answer: "I admit it, so far as sin has wrought out itself in consciousness, and my just desert should follow; but that is cutting off completely all the connections of my preëxistent state, and dealing with me for sins originating entirely within the body."

In conclusion, it may be said, that, if so violent a supposition could be turned to any good account, still it would be unnecessary and undesirable. A better way is more easily opened. The whole difficulty is really in the permission of the first sin, and when we have accounted for the existence of sin at all, we shall be able to meet all consequential difficulties with comparative facility. We cannot regard this hypothesis of preëxistent sin as at all needed; and, more

than this, we would say that it stands out to our apprehension as unnatural, unphilosophical, unscriptural, and even admitting it to have its application, it would be still unsatisfactory.

We turn now to the consideration of what is given to us in the "Problem Solved." Here is nothing of the mental conflict and distressing perplexity which we have witnessed in the former work. Dr. Squier takes at once a position which puts him quite out of the range of such contemplations and conclusions as had disquieted Dr. Beecher. He goes directly and intrepidly to the moral source of all sin, and finds the responsible origination of it ever to be in the finite, and never from the Infinite. He presents God as an Absolute Agent, originating acts unconditioned by anything back and out of himself; and his acts, both of plan and adoption, of purpose and execution, are ever right and worthy of his approbation and acceptance. In his unalloyed holiness he can have no complicity with sin in any way whatever. Sin is altogether separate from, and exclusive of, God's agency, and exists at all only in spite of God's planning, and purposing, and working against it.

Finite creatures are dependent upon God for their being and their natural attributes. They are wholly of his constituting; but as moral beings they have their existence and attributes in such a manner that they themselves are competent to originate actions and events. A moral agent, though dependent in his being, is yet a complete cause, competent from himself to go out in effects without being caused to do so. Such produced effects, or originated events, as come from such agents, are their own, and wholly at their responsibility. Here, and here only, sin originates. It comes from the creature, and is wholly at his responsibility, and there is no occasion to go back of this finite agent and make any inquiries about other responsibilities. The absolute agent only creates and upholds the finite moral agent, while this moral creature as thus upheld puts forth sinful acts in which God has no share, and his character needs no defence from any difficulties or contradictions

which have seemed to grow out of the introduction of moral evil. The tares are in the field with the wheat, but an enemy sowed them while the Lord of the field sowed only good seed; keep, then, this enemy solely responsible for the evil of the existing tares, and give to the lord of the field all the credit for the wheat.

Every sinner is thus viewed as himself the sole author of his sin, and the only responsible actor in anything that has demerit, and there is, therefore, no opportunity to raise the question: How is sin, or infant depravity, consistent with honor and right in God? The question is wholly dispensed with by dissolving all connection between its terms. The problem is solved by altogether separating God from the sin; or rather, by this previous solution, the whole problem is annihilated. Such is a very summary presentation of what we find to be the substance of the " Problem Solved."

Now we admit the truth of the general principle contended for by Dr. S., that sin is wholly from the finite, and not from the Infinite, so far at least as any participation of agency is concerned in that which has any demerit. We recognize the force and admire the clearness with which he sometimes puts his conclusions to our convictions that God is an originating cause; that he is not the only cause, but that finite agents are also causes competent to originate, and actually do originate sin from themselves.. We have also been interested in the manner of putting objections to opposite conclusions, and the point with which he sometimes hits an adversary; but it is wholly a mistake to assume that in all this the real Problem is solved. God is not so wholly disconnected with sin, as to leave no occasion for the question of consistency between its existence and his integrity of character. To go the length to which Dr. S. would seem to carry it, would eliminate sin, not merely from the sphere of his direct agency, but also from his sovereignty and his universal purposes altogether. God is not the actor and originator of sin; but yet the creature who does sin is from God, upheld in being by God when he sins and after he is a sinner, and the conditions under which he sins are

within God's directing agency; and we need some further solution than any which is effected by merely referring the direct origination of sin to the finite. There must be reasons for creating and so creating and conditioning the finite agent who does sin, that, in their light, the Creator shall stand, to himself and all other intelligent beings, justified and honored.

Sin is in the system of which God is the Author and Governor. He must be the author of very much misery, and inflict grievous suffering on its account. He must have much to do with sin, and endure much from it, and in many ways have circumstantial complicity with it, and hence the question must remain to be settled: How can this be, and his attributes not be impeached by it? An Enemy sowed the tares while men slept; but why did the Lord of the field suffer it? Did he, too, sleep? or was he awake, and, knowing what this Enemy was doing, did he connive at it?

Dr. S. himself sometimes betrays that he feels the necessity for this further solution. He says that which implies that, after all, the Problem is yet to be solved: "Certain it is that God will vindicate himself to all goodness and righteousness in the matter of wrong in the finite, and do all that infinite wisdom and benevolence suggest in the premises, if not all indeed that the inherent relations of the subject admit." (p. 178). And he goes on to suggest that "he may let it work out its own problems;" "let sin work for instruction to others;" "for warning to the universe to stand in awe of it," etc; thereby hinting at modes of solution to a question still remaining, which regards God's integrity, though sin be from the finite. We know, indeed, from clear distinctions repeatedly given in his work, that Dr. S. would attempt no justification on grounds of mere prudential expediency, or considerations of highest happiness, for he lays the basis of all morality in ultimate principles of intrinsic excellency and dignity; but just how he would make such complete solution, he has not told us. He indeed assumes that the Problem is solved in showing that sin is wholly from the finite, but unconsciously admits, at times, that there both needs, and may be, this higher solution. He has gone over

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