doctrine of the Bible and the testimony of experience that men are born in sin, that they come into the world in a state of guilt and of" moral pollution, that a necessity arises of reconciling; this fact with what they regard as self-evidently true. Two tlieories have been proposed to effect this reconciliation. The first is that of pp. -existence. Origen, and after him here and there one in the liistory of the Church, down to the present day, assumed that men existed in another state of being before their birth in thiri world, and having voluntarily sinned against God in that previous state of being, they come into this world burdened with the guilt and pollution due to their own voluntary act. This view of the subject never having been adopted by any Christian church, it does not pioperly belong to Christian theology. It is sufficient to re- mark concerning it : —
1. That it does not pretend to be taught in the Scriptures, and therefore cannot be an article of faith. Protestants unite in teach- incr tliat *' The wliole counsel of God, concerning all thin2s neces- sary for his own glory, and man's salvation, faith and life, is either expri'ssly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary conse- quence may be deduced from Scripture, unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether bv new revelations of the Spirit, or the traditions of men." As the doctrine of the preexistence of souls is neither expressly set down in the Bible, nor deducible from it, as is admitted, it cannot be received as one of the formative principles of Christian doctrine. All that its Christian advocates claim is that it is not contradicted in Scripture, and therefore that they are free to hold it.
2. But even this cannot be conceded. It is expresslv contrary to the plain teachings of the Word of God. According to the his- tory of the creation, man was formed in the image of God, Hia body was fashioned out of the dust of the earth, and his soul was derived immediately from God, and was pronounced by him "very good." This is utterly inconsistent with the idea that Adam was a fallen snirit. The Bible also teaches that Adam was created in the image of God in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, and fell from that state here hi this life, and not in a previous and higher state of being. The Scriptures also, as we have seen, say that it was by one man that sin entered into the world, and death by sin, because all sinned in that one man. Tiiere is a causal relation be- tween the sin of Adam and the condemnation and sinfulness of his posterity. This contradicts the theoiT which refers the present sinfulness of men, not to the act of Adam, but to the voluntary act of each individual man, in a previous state of existence.
216 PART 11. Ch. VIIL — sin.
3. This doctrine is as cU'stitute of all support from the testimony of" consciousness as from the authority of Scripture. No man has any reminiscences of a previous existence. There is nothing in his present state which connects him with a former state of being. It is a simple, pure assumption, without the slightest evidence from any known facts.
4. The theory, if true, affords no relief. Sins of which we know notiiing ; which were committed by us before we were born ; which cannot be brought home to the conscience as our own sins, can never be the righteous grounds of punishment, any more than the acts of an idiot. It is unnecessary however to pursue this subject further, as tiie objections against the realistic theory, in most in- stances, bear with equal force against the theory of preexistence.
§ 12. Realistic Theory.
Those who reject the untenable doctrine of preexistence and yet hold to the principle that guilt can attach only to what is due to our agency, are driven to assume that Adam and his race are in siich a sense one, that his act of disobedience was literally the act of all mankind. And consequently that they are as truly person- ally guilty on account of it, as Adam himself was ; and that the inherent corruption flowing from that act, belongs to us in the same sense and in the same way, tliat it belonged to him. His sin, it is therefore said, "• Is ours not because it is imputed to us ; but it is imputed to us, because it is truly and properly our own." We have constantly to contend with the ambiguity of terms. There is a sense in which the above j)roposition is perfectly true, and there is a sense in which it is not true. It is true that the right- eousness of Christ is imputed to us because it is ours according to the terms of the covenant of grace ; because it was wrought out for us by our great head and representative, who obeyed and suf- fered in our stead. But it is not true that it is ours in the sense that we were the agents by whom that righteousness was effected, or the persons in whom it inheres. In like manner, Adam's sin may be said to be imputed to us because it is ours, inasmuch as it is the sin of the divinely constituted head and repi'esentative of our race. But it is not oiu's in the same sense in which it was his. It was not our act, i. e., an act in which our reason, will, and con- science were exercised. There is a sense in wiiich the act of an flo;ent is the act of the principal. It binds him in law, as efl'ect- uallv as he could bind himself. But he is not, on that account, the efficient agent of the act. The sense in which many assert