produced by his actual transgressions, so we are responsible for the character with which we come into the world, because it is the result of our voluntary apostasy from God. To this it is an obvious objV'ction, -r—
1. That admitting realism to be true ; admitting that humanity is numerically one and the same substance, of which individual men are the modes of manifestation ; and admitting that this generic humanity sinned in Adam, this affords no satisfactory solution of either of the facts above stated. Two things are necessarv in order to vindicate the infliction of punishment for actual sin on the ground of personal res])onsibility. First, that the sin be an act of conscious selF-detei'mination. Otherwise it cannot be brought home upon the conscience so as to produce the sense of criminality. And suffering without the sense of criminality or blameworthiness, so far as the sufferer is concerned, is not ])unishment, but wanton cruelty. And, secondly, to vindicate punishment in the eye of justice, in the case supposed, there must be personal criminality manifest to all intelligent beings cognizant of the case. If a man should commit an offence in a state of somnambulism or of insanity, when he did not know what he did, and all recognition of which on his restoration to a normal condition is impossible, it is plain that such an offence could not justly be the ground of punishment. Suffering inflicted on such ground would not be punishment in the view of the sufferer, or righteous in the view of others. It is no less plain that if a man should commit a- crime in a sound state of mind, and afterwards become insane, he could not justly be pun- ished so long as he continued insane. The execution of a maniac or idiot for any offence committed prior to the insanity or idiocy would be an outrage. If these principles are correct then it is plain that, even admitting all that realists claim, it affords no relief It gives no satisfactory solution either of our being punished for Adam's sin or for the guilt which attaches to our inherent hereditary deprav- ity. A sin of which it is impossible that we should be conscious as our voluntary act, can no more be the ground of punishment as our act, than the sin of an idiot, of a madman, or of a corpse. When the body of Cromwell was exhumed and gibbeted, Cromwell was not punished ; and the act was, in the sight of all mankind, merely a manifestation of impotent revenge.
2. But the realistic theory cannot be admitted. The assumption that we acted thousands of years before we were born, so as to be personally responsible for such act, is a monstrous assumption. It is, as Baur says, an unthinkable proposition ; that is, one to which
224 PART II. ch. vni. — sin.
no intelligible meaning can be attached. We can understand how it may be said tiiat we died in Christ and rose with Him ; that his death was our death and his resurrection our resurrection, in the sense tiiat He acted for us as our substitute, head, and representative. But to say that we actually and reall}^ died and rose in Him ; tlial we were the agents of his acts, conveys no idea to the mind. In like manner we can understand how it may be said that we sinned in Adam and fell with him in so far as he was the divineIvapj)oint(^d head and representative of his race. But the proposition that wc j)erformed his act of disobedience is to our ears a sound without any meaning. It is jiiet as nuich an impossibility as that a nonentitv should act. We did not then exist. We had no being before our existence in this world ; and that we should have acted before we existed is an absolute impossibility. It is to be remembered that an act implies an agent; and the agent of a responsible voluntary act must be a person. Before the existence of the personality of a man that man cannot perform any voluntary action. Actual sin is an act of voluntary self-determination ; and therefore before the existence of the self, such, determination is an impossibility. The stuff or sub- stance out of which a man is made may have existed before he came into being, but not the oan himself. Admitting that the souls of men are formed out of the generic substance of humanity, that substance is no more the man than the dust of the earth out of which the body of Adam was fashioned was his body. Voluntary agency, responsible action, moral character, and guilt can be pred- icated only of persons, and cannot by possibility be predicable of th'.'m, or really belong to them before they exist. The doctrine, therefore, which sapjioses that we are personally guilty of the sin of Adam on the ground that we were the agents of that act, that oui' will and reason were so exercised in that action as to make us personally responsible for it and for its consequences, is absolutely inconceivable.
3. It is a further objection to this theory that it assigns no reason why we are responsible for Adam's first sin and not for his sub- sequent transgressions. If his sin is ours because the whole of humanity, as a generic nature, acted in him, this reason applies as well to all his other sins as to his first act of disobedience, at least prior to the birth of his children. The genus was no more individualized and concentrated in Adam when he was in the gar- den, than after he was expelled from it. Besides, why is it the sin of Adam rather than, or more than the sin of Eve for which we are responsible ? That mankind do bear a relation to the sin of Adam