may be said to have begun and ended with Orlgen, as it was rejected botii by the Greeks and Latins, and has only been advo- cated by individual writers from that day to this. It does not pre- tv>nd to be a Scriptural doctrine, and therefore cannot be an object of faith. The Bible never speaks of a creation of men before Adam, or of any apostasy anterior to his fall, and it never refers the sinfulness of our present condition to any higher source than the sin of our first parent. The assumption that all human souls were created at the same time that the soul of Adam was created, and remain in a dormant, unconscious state until united to the bodies for which they were designed, has been adopted by so few as hardly to merit a place in the history of theological opinion.
It is a far more important question, whether the soul of each man is immediately created, or, whether it is generated by the parents. The former is known, in theology, as "Creationism," the latter as "- Traducianism." The Greek Church from the first took ground in favour of creationism as alone consistent with the true nature of the soul. Tertullian in the Latin Church was almost a materialist, at least he used the language of materialism, and held that the soul was as much begotten as the body. Jerome opposed ,that doctrine. Augustine was also very adverse to it ; but in his controversy with Pelagius on the propagation of sin, he was tempted to favour the theory of traduction as affording an easier explanation of the fact that we derive a corrupt nature from Adam. He never, however, could bring himself fully to adopt it. Cre- ationism became subsequently the almost universally received doc- trine of the Latin, as it had always been of the Greek, Church. At the time of the Reformation the Protestants as a body adhered to the same view. Even the Form of Concord, the authoritative symbol of the Luthei'an Church, favours creationism. The body of the Lutheran theologians of the seventeenth century, however, adopted the theory of traduction. Among the Reformed the reverse was true. Calvin, Beza, Turrettin, and the great majority of the Reformed theologians were creationists, only here and there one adopted the ex traduce theory. In modern times discussion on this point has been renewed. Many of the recent German theo- logians, and such as are inclined to realism in any form, have become more or less zealously the advocates of traducianism. This, however, is far from being the universal opinion of the Ger- mans. Perhaps the majority of the German philosophers agree with Giinther : ^ " Traducianism has its functions in respect to the
1 Vorschule dcr specuhtiven Theologie, 2d edit. Vienna, 1840, 1848, 2d part, p. 181.
68 PART I. Ch. m. — origin of the soul.
animal life of man ; on the other hand, the province of Creation- isi?! is with the soul ; and it would travel out of its province if it extended the immediate creative action of God to that animal life, which is the principle of his body's existence."
§ 2. Traducianism.
What is meant by the term traduction is in general suf^ciently clear from the signification of the word. Traducianists on the one hand deny that the soul is created ; and on the other hand, they affirm that it is produced by the law of generation, being as truly derived from the parents as the body. The whole man, soul and body, is begotten. The whole man is derived ^-om the substance of his progenitors. Some go further than others in their assertions on this subject. Some affirm that the soul is susceptible of " ab- scission and division," so that a portion of the soul of the parents is communicated to the child. Others shrink from such ex- pressions, and yet maintain that there is a true derivation of the one from the other. Both classes, however, insist on the numer- ical identity of essence in Adam and all his posterity both as to soul and as to body. The more enlightened and candid advocates of traducianism admit that the Scriptures are silent on the subject. Augustine had said the same thing a thousand years ago. " De re obscurissima disputatur, non adjuvantibus divinarum scriptura- rum certis clarisque documentis." The passages cited in support of the doctrine teach nothing decisive on the subject. That Adam begat a son in his own likeness, and after his own image, and called his name Seth, only assei'ts that Seth was like his father. It sheds no liglit on tlie m3^sterious process of generation, and does not teach how the likeness of the child to the parent is secured by physical causes. When Job asks, " Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean ? " and when our Lord says, " That which is born of the flesh is flesh," the fact is asserted that like begets like ; that a corrupt nature is transmitted from parent to cliild. But that this can be done only by the transmission of numerically the same substance is a gratuitous assumption. More stress is laid on certain facts of Scripture which are assumed to favour this theory. That in the creation of the woman no mention is made of God's having breathed into her the breath of life, is said to imply that her soul as well as her body was derived from Adam. Silence, however, proves nothing. In Gen. i. 27, it is simply said, " God created man in his own image," just as it is said that He created