THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
under the government of God, the possibility of the involvement of one free agent in the acts of another; they utterly denied, therefore, 3. Pelagian that men either suffer harm from Opposition Adam's sin or profit by Christ's to the merits. By their examples only, they Doctrine, said, can either Adam or Christ affect us; and by free imitation of them alone can we share in their merits or demerits. It is not apparent why Pelagius permitted himself such extremity of denial. What he had at heart to assert was the inadmissibility by the human subject of plenary ability of will to do all righteousness. To safeguard this he had necessarily to deny all subjective injury to men from Adam's sin (and from their own sins too, for that matter), and the need or actuality of subjective grace for their perfecting. But there was no reason growing out of this point of sight why he might not allow that the guilt of Adam's sin had been imputed to his posterity, and had supplied the ground for the infliction upon them of external penalties temporal or eternal; or that the merits of Christ might be imputed to his people as the meritorious ground of their relief from these penalties, as well as of the forgiveness of their own actual sins and of their reception into the favor of God and the heavenly blessedness. Later Pelagianizers found this out; and it became not uncommon (especially after Duns Scotus' strong assertion of the doctrine of " immediate imputation ") for the imputation of Adam's sin to be exploited precisely in the interest of denial or weakening of the idea of the derivation of inherent corruption from Adam. A very good example of this tendency of thought is supplied by the Roman Catholic theologian Ambrosius Catharinus, whose admirable speech to this effect at the Council of Trent is reported by Father Paul (Hist, of the Council of Trent, Eng. transl., London, 1676, p. 165). Even Zwingli was not unaffected by it. He was indeed free from the Pelagianizing attenuation of the corruption of nature which is the subjective effect on his posterity of Adam's sin. With him, " original sin " was both extensively and intensively a total depravity, the fertile source of all evil action. But he looked upon it rather as a misfortune than a fault, a disease than a sin; and he hung the whole weight of our ruin on our direct participation in Adam's guilt. As a slave can beget only a slave, says he, so all the progeny of man under the curse are born under the curse.
In sharp contradiction to the current tendency to
reduce to the vanishing-point the subjective injury
wrought by Adam's sin on his poster-
4. Impor- ity, the churches gave themselves to
tance emphasizing the depth of the injury
of the and especially its sinfulness. Even the
Doctrine. Council of Trent acknowledged the
transfusion into the entire human race
of " sin, which is the death of the soul." The
Protestants, who, as convinced Augustinians, were
free from the Pelagianizing bias of Rome, were
naturally even more strenuous in asserting the evil
and guilt of native depravity. Accordingly they
constantly remark that men's native guilt in the
sight of God rests not merely upon the imputation
to them of Adam's first sin, but also upon the corruption which they derive from him — a mode of statement which meets us, indeed, as early as Peter Lombard (" Sentences," II., xxx.) and for the same reason. The polemic turn given to these statements has been the occasion of a remarkable misapprehension, as if it were intended to subordinate the imputation of Adam's transgression to the transmission of his corrupted nature as the source of human guilt. Precisely the contrary is the fact. The imputation of Adam's transgression was not in dispute; all parties to the great debate of the age fully recognized it; and it is treated therefore as a matter of course. What was important was to make it clear that native depravity was along with it the ground of our guilt before God. Thus it was sought to hold the balance true, and to do justice to both elements in a complete doctrine of original sin. Meanwhile the recovery of the great doctrine of justification by faith threw back its light upon the doctrine of the satisfaction of Christ which had been in the possession of the Church since Anselm; and the better understanding of this doctrine, thus induced, in turn illuminated the doctrine of sin, whose correlative it is. Thus it came about that in the hands of the great Protestant leaders of the sixteenth century, and of their successors, the Protestant systematizers of the seventeenth century, the threefold doctrine of imputation — of Adam's sin to his posterity, of the sins of his people to the Redeemer, and of the righteousness of Christ to his people — at last came to its rights as the core of the three constitutive doctrines of Christianity — the sinfulness of the human race, the satisfaction of Jesus Christ, and justification by faith. The importance of the doctrine of imputation is that it is the hinge on which these three great doctrines turn, and the guardian of their purity.
Of course the Church was not permitted to enjoy in quiet its new understanding of its treasures of doctrine. Radical opponents arose in 5. Socinian, the Reformation age itself, the most Arminian, important of whom were the Socinians and Ra- (see Socinus, Socinianism). By them tionalistic it was pronounced an inanity to speak Opposition, of the transference of either merit or demerit from one person to another: we can be bad' with another's badness, or good with another's goodness, they said, as little as we can be white with another's whiteness. The center of the Socinian assault was upon the doctrine of the satisfaction of Christ: it is not possible, they affirmed, for one person to bear the punishment due to another. But their criticism cut equally deeply into the Protestant doctrines of original sin and justification by faith. The influence of their type of thought, very great from the first, increased as time went on and became a factor of importance both in the Arminian revolt at the beginning of the seventeenth century and in the rationalistic defection a hundred years later. Neither the Arminians (e.g., Limborch, Curcellseus) , nor the Rationalists (e.g., Wegscheider) would hear of an imputation of Adam's sin, and both attacked with arguments very similar to those of the Socinians also the imputation of our sins to Christ or of his righteous-