Section VI.—Consequences Of Sin To Adam's Posterity.
As the result of Adam's transgression, all his posterity are born in the same state into which he fell. But since law is the all-comprehending demand of harmony with God, all moral consequences flowing from transgression are to be regarded as sanctions of law, or expressions of the divine displeasure through the constitution of things which he has established. Certain of these consequences, however, are earlier recognized than others and are of minor scope; it will therefore be useful to consider them under the three aspects of depravity, guilt, and penalty.
I. Depravity.
By this we mean, on the one hand, the lack of original righteousness or of holy affection toward God, and, on the other hand, the corruption of the moral nature, or bias toward evil. That such depravity exists has been abundantly shown, both from Scripture and from reason, in our consideration of the universality of sin.
Salvation is twofold: deliverance from the evil—the penalty and the power of sin; and accomplishment of the good—likeness to God and realization of the true idea of humanity. It includes all these for the race as well as for the individual: removal of the barriers that keep men from each other; and the perfecting of society in communion with God; or, in other words, the kingdom of God on earth. It was the nature of man, when he first came from the hand of God, to fear, love, and trust God above all things. This tendency toward God has been lost; sin has altered and corrupted man's innermost nature. In place of this bent toward God there is a fearful bent toward evil. Depravity is both negative—absence of love and of moral likeness to God—and positive—presence of manifold tendencies to evil. Two questions only need detain us:
1. Depravity partial or total?
The Scriptures represent human nature as totally depraved. The phrase “total depravity,” however, is liable to misinterpretation, and should not be used without explanation. By the total depravity of universal humanity we mean:
A. Negatively,—not that every sinner is: (a) Destitute of conscience,—for the existence of strong impulses to right, and of remorse for wrong-doing, show that conscience is often keen; (b) devoid of all qualities pleasing to men, and useful when judged by a human standard,—for the [pg 638] existence of such qualities is recognized by Christ; (c) prone to every form of sin,—for certain forms of sin exclude certain others; (d) intense as he can be in his selfishness and opposition to God,—for he becomes worse every day.
(a) John 8:9—“And they, when they heard it, went out one by one, beginning from the eldest, even unto the last” (John 7:53-8:11, though not written by John, is a perfectly true narrative, descended from the apostolic age). The muscles of a dead frog's leg will contract when a current of electricity is sent into them. So the dead soul will thrill at touch of the divine law. Natural conscience, combined with the principle of self-love, may even prompt choice of the good, though no love for God is in the choice. Bengel: “We have lost our likeness to God; but there remains notwithstanding an indelible nobility which we ought to revere both in ourselves and in others. We still have remained men, to be conformed to that likeness, through the divine blessing to which man's will should subscribe. This they forget who speak evil of human nature. Absalom fell out of his father's favor; but the people, for all that, recognized in him the son of the king.”
(b) Mark 10:21—“And Jesus looking upon him loved him.” These very qualities, however, may show that their possessors are sinning against great light and are the more guilty; cf. Mal. 1:6—“A son honoreth his father, and a servant his master: if then I am a father, where is mine honor? and if I am a master, where is my fear?” John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:75—“The assertor of the total depravity of human nature, of its absolute blindness and incapacity, presupposes in himself and in others the presence of a criterion or principle of good, in virtue of which he discerns himself to be wholly evil; yet the very proposition that human nature is wholly evil would be unintelligible unless it were false.... Consciousness of sin is a negative sign of the possibility of restoration. But it is not in itself proof that the possibility will become actuality.” A ruined temple may have beautiful fragments of fluted columns, but it is no proper habitation for the god for whose worship it was built.
(c) Mat. 23:23—“ye tithe mint and anise and cummin, and have left undone the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy, and faith: but these ye ought to have done, and not to have left the other undone”; Rom. 2:14—“when Gentiles that have not the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are the law unto themselves; in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith.”The sin of miserliness may exclude the sin of luxury; the sin of pride may exclude the sin of sensuality. Shakespeare, Othello, 2:3—“It hath pleased the devil Drunkenness to give place to the devil Wrath.” Franklin Carter, Life of Mark Hopkins, 321-323—Dr. Hopkins did not think that the sons of God should describe themselves as once worms or swine or vipers. Yet he held that man could sink to a degradation below the brute: “No brute is any more capable of rebelling against God than of serving him; is any more capable of sinking below the level of its own nature than of rising to the level of man. No brute can be either a fool or a fiend.... In the way that sin and corruption came into the spiritual realm we find one of those analogies to what takes place in the lower forms of being that show the unity of the system throughout. All disintegration and corruption of matter is from the domination of a lower over a higher law. The body begins to return to its original elements as the lower chemical and physical forces begin to gain ascendancy over the higher force of life. In the same way all sin and corruption in man is from his yielding to a lower law or principle of action in opposition to the demands of one that is higher.”
(d) Gen. 15:16—“the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full”; 2 Tim. 3:13—“evil men and impostors shall wax worse and worse.” Depravity is not simply being deprived of good. Depravation (de, and pravus, crooked, perverse) is more than deprivation. Left to himself man tends downward, and his sin increases day by day. But there is a divine influence within which quickens conscience and kindles aspiration for better things. The immanent Christ is “the light which lighteth every man” (John 1:9). Prof. Wm. Adams Brown: “In so far as God's Spirit is at work among men and they receive ‘the Light which lighteth every man,’ we must qualify our statement of total depravity. Depravity is not so much a state as a tendency. With growing complexity of life, sin becomes more complex. Adam's sin was not the worst. ‘It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee’ (Mat. 11:24).”
Men are not yet in the condition of demons. Only here and there have they attained to “a disinterested love of evil.” Such men are few, and they were not born so. There are degrees in depravity. E. G. Robinson: “There is a good streak left in the devil yet.” Even Satan will become worse than he now is. The phrase “total depravity”has respect only to relations to God, and it means incapability of doing anything [pg 639]which in the sight of God is a good act. No act is perfectly good that does not proceed from a true heart and constitute an expression of that heart. Yet we have no right to say that every act of an unregenerate man is displeasing to God. Right acts from right motives are good, whether performed by a Christian or by one who is unrenewed in heart. Such acts, however, are always prompted by God, and thanks for them are due to God and not to him who performed them.
B. Positively,—that every sinner is: (a) totally destitute of that love to God which constitutes the fundamental and all-inclusive demand of the law; (b) chargeable with elevating some lower affection or desire above regard for God and his law; (c) supremely determined, in his whole inward and outward life, by a preference of self to God; (d) possessed of an aversion to God which, though sometimes latent, becomes active enmity, so soon as God's will comes into manifest conflict with his own; (e) disordered and corrupted in every faculty, through this substitution of selfishness for supreme affection toward God; (f) credited with no thought, emotion, or act of which divine holiness can fully approve; (g) subject to a law of constant progress in depravity, which he has no recuperative energy to enable him successfully to resist.
(a) John 5:42—“But I know you, that ye have not the love of God in yourselves.” (b) 2 Tim. 3:4—“lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God”; cf. Mal 1:6—“A son honoreth his father, and a servant his master: if then I am a father, where is mine honor? and if I am a master, where is my fear?” (c) 2 Tim. 3:2—“lovers of self”; (d) Rom. 8:7—“the mind of the flesh is enmity against God.” (e) Eph. 4:18—“darkened in their understanding.... hardening of their heart”; Tit. 1:15—“both their mind and their conscience are defiled”; 2 Cor. 7:1—“defilement of flesh and spirit”; Heb. 3:12—“an evil heart of unbelief”; (f) Rom. 3:9—“they are all under sin”; 7:18—“in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.” (g) Rom. 7:18—“to will is present with me, but to do that which is good is not”; 23—“law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members.”
Every sinner would prefer a milder law and a different administration. But whoever does not love God's law does not truly love God. The sinner seeks to secure his own interests rather than God's. Even so-called religious acts he performs with preference of his own good to God's glory. He disobeys, and always has disobeyed, the fundamental law of love. He is like a railway train on a down grade, and the brakes must be applied by God or destruction is sure. There are latent passions in every heart which if let loose would curse the world. Many a man who escaped from the burning Iroquois Theatre in Chicago, proved himself a brute and a demon, by trampling down fugitives who cried for mercy. Denney, Studies in Theology, 83—“The depravity which sin has produced in human nature extends to the whole of it. There is no part of man's nature which is unaffected by it. Man's nature is all of a piece, and what affects it at all affects it altogether. When the conscience is violated by disobedience to the will of God, the moral understanding is darkened, and the will is enfeebled. We are not constructed in water-tight compartments, one of which might be ruined while the others remained intact.” Yet over against total depravity, we must set total redemption; over against original sin, original grace. Christ is in every human heart mitigating the affects of sin, urging to repentance, and “able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him” (Heb. 7:25). Even the unregenerate heathen may “put away ... the old man”and “put on the new man” (Eph. 4:23, 24), being delivered “out of the body of this death ... through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 7:24, 25).
H. B. Smith, System, 277—“By total depravity is never meant that men are as bad as they can be; nor that they have not, in their natural condition, certain amiable qualities; nor that they may not have virtues in a limited sense (justitia civilis). But it is meant (1) that depravity, or the sinful condition of man, infects the whole man: intellect, feeling, heart and will; (2) that in each unrenewed person some lower affection is supreme; and (3) that each such is destitute of love to God. On these positions: as to (1) the power of depravity over the whole man, we have given proof from Scripture; as to (2) the fact that in every unrenewed man some lower affection is supreme, experience may be always appealed to; men know that their supreme affection is fixed on some lower good—intellect, heart, and will going together in it; or that some form of selfishness is predominant—using selfish in a general sense—self [pg 640]seeks its happiness in some inferior object, giving to that its supreme affection; as to (3) that every unrenewed person is without supreme love to God, it is the point which is of greatest force, and is to be urged with the strongest effect, in setting forth the depth and ‘totality’ of man's sinfulness: unrenewed men have not that supreme love of God which is the substance of the first and great command.” See also Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 248; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 510-522; Chalmers, Institutes, 1:519-542; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 1:516-531; Princeton Review, 1877:470.
2. Ability or inability?
In opposition to the plenary ability taught by the Pelagians, the gracious ability of the Arminians, and the natural ability of the New School theologians, the Scriptures declare the total inability of the sinner to turn himself to God or to do that which is truly good in God's sight (see Scripture proof below). A proper conception also of the law, as reflecting the holiness of God and as expressing the ideal of human nature, leads us to the conclusion that no man whose powers are weakened by either original or actual sin can of himself come up to that perfect standard. Yet there is a certain remnant of freedom left to man. The sinner can (a) avoid the sin against the Holy Ghost; (b) choose the less sin rather than the greater; (c) refuse altogether to yield to certain temptations; (d) do outwardly good acts, though with imperfect motives; (e) seek God from motives of self-interest.
But on the other hand the sinner cannot (a) by a single volition bring his character and life into complete conformity to God's law; (b) change his fundamental preference for self and sin to supreme love for God; nor (c) do any act, however insignificant, which shall meet with God's approval or answer fully to the demands of law.
So long, then, as there are states of intellect, affection and will which man cannot, by any power of volition or of contrary choice remaining to him, bring into subjection to God, it cannot be said that he possesses any sufficient ability of himself to do God's will; and if a basis for man's responsibility and guilt be sought, it must be found, if at all, not in his plenary ability, his gracious ability, or his natural ability, but in his originalability, when he came, in Adam, from the hands of his Maker.
Man's present inability is natural, in the sense of being inborn,—it is not acquired by our personal act, but is congenital. It is not natural, however, as resulting from the original limitations of human nature, or from the subsequent loss of any essential faculty of that nature. Human nature, at its first creation, was endowed with ability perfectly to keep the law of God. Man has not, even by his sin, lost his essential faculties of intellect, affection, or will. He has weakened those faculties, however, so that they are now unable to work up to the normal measure of their powers. But more especially has man given to every faculty a bent away from God which renders him morally unable to render spiritual obedience. The inability to good which now characterizes human nature is an inability that results from sin, and is itself sin.
We hold, therefore, to an inability which is both natural and moral,—moral, as having its source in the self-corruption of man's moral nature and the fundamental aversion of his will to God;—natural, as being inborn, and as affecting with partial paralysis all his natural powers of intellect, affection, conscience, and will. For his inability, in both these aspects of it, man is responsible.
The sinner can do one very important thing, viz.: give attention to divine truth. Ps. 119:59—“I thought on my ways, And turned my feet unto thy testimonies.” G. W. Northrup: “The sinner can seek God from: (a) self-love, regard for his own interest; (b) feeling of duty, sense of obligation, awakened conscience; (c) gratitude for blessings already received; (d) aspiration after the infinite and satisfying.” Denney, Studies in Theology, 85—“A witty French moralist has said that God does not need to grudge to his enemies even what they call their virtues; and neither do God's ministers.... But there is onething which man cannot do alone,—he cannot bring his state into harmony with his nature. When a man has been discovered who has been able, without Christ, to reconcile [pg 641]himself to God and to obtain dominion over the world and over sin, then the doctrine of inability, or of the bondage due to sin, may be denied; then, but not till then.” The Free Church of Scotland, in the Declaratory Act of 1892, says “that, in holding and teaching, according to the Confession of Faith, the corruption of man's whole nature as fallen, this church also maintains that there remain tokens of his greatness as created in the image of God; that he possesses a knowledge of God and of duty; that he is responsible for compliance with the moral law and with the gospel; and that, although unable without the aid of the Holy Spirit to return to God, he is yet capable of affections and actions which in themselves are virtuous and praiseworthy.”
To the use of the term “natural ability” to designate merely the sinner's possession of all the constituent faculties of human nature, we object upon the following grounds:
A. Quantitative lack.—The phrase “natural ability” is misleading, since it seems to imply that the existence of the mere powers of intellect, affection, and will is a sufficient quantitative qualification for obedience to God's law, whereas these powers have been weakened by sin, and are naturally unable, instead of naturally able, to render back to God with interest the talent first bestowed. Even if the moral direction of man's faculties were a normal one, the effect of hereditary and of personal sin would render naturally impossible that large likeness to God which the law of absolute perfection demands. Man has not therefore the natural ability perfectly to obey God. He had it once, but he lost it with the first sin.
When Jean Paul Richter says of himself: “I have made of myself all that could be made out of the stuff,” he evinces a self-complacency which is due to self-ignorance and lack of moral insight. When a man realizes the extent of the law's demands, he sees that without divine help obedience is impossible. John B. Gough represented the confirmed drunkard's efforts at reformation as a man's walking up Mount Etna knee-deep in burning lava, or as one's rowing against the rapids of Niagara.
B. Qualitative lack.—Since the law of God requires of men not so much right single volitions as conformity to God in the whole inward state of the affections and will, the power of contrary choice in single volitions does not constitute a natural ability to obey God, unless man can by those single volitions change the underlying state of the affections and will. But this power man does not possess. Since God judges all moral action in connection with the general state of the heart and life, natural ability to good involves not only a full complement of faculties but also a bias of the affections and will toward God. Without this bias there is no possibility of right moral action, and where there is no such possibility, there can be no ability either natural or moral.
Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 21—“Hatred is like love Herein, that it, by only being, grows. Until at last usurping quite the man, It overgrows him like a polypus.” John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 1:53—“The ideal is the revelation in me of a power that is mightier than my own. The supreme command ‘Thou oughtest’ is the utterance, only different in form, of the same voice in my spirit which says ‘Thou canst’; and my highest spiritual attainments are achieved, not by self-assertion, but by self-renunciation and self-surrender to the infinite life of truth and righteousness that is living and reigning within me.” This conscious inability in one's self, together with reception of “the strength which God supplieth” (1 Pet. 4:11), is the secret of Paul's courage; 2 Cor. 12:10—“when I am weak, then am I strong”; Phil. 2:12, 13—“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure.”
C. No such ability known.—In addition to the psychological argument just mentioned, we may urge another from experience and observation. [pg 642] These testify that man is cognizant of no such ability. Since no man has ever yet, by the exercise of his natural powers, turned himself to God or done an act truly good in God's sight, the existence of a natural ability to do good is a pure assumption. There is no scientific warrant for inferring the existence of an ability which has never manifested itself in a single instance since history began.
“Solomon could not keep the Proverbs,—so he wrote them.” The book of Proverbs needs for its complement the New Testament explanation of helplessness and offer of help: John 15:5—“apart from me ye can do nothing”; 6:37—“him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” The palsied man's inability to walk is very different from his indisposition to accept a remedy. The paralytic cannot climb the cliff, but by a rope let down to him he may be lifted up, provided he will permit himself to be tied to it. Darling, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., July, 1901:505—“If bidden, we can stretch out a withered arm; but God does not require this of one born armless. We may ‘hear the voice of the Son of God’ and ‘live’ (John 5:25), but we shall not bring out of the tomb faculties not possessed before death.”
D. Practical evil of the belief.—The practical evil attending the preaching of natural ability furnishes a strong argument against it. The Scriptures, in their declarations of the sinner's inability and helplessness, aim to shut him up to sole dependence upon God for salvation. The doctrine of natural ability, assuring him that he is able at once to repent and turn to God, encourages delay by putting salvation at all times within his reach. If a single volition will secure it, he may be saved as easily to-morrow as to-day. The doctrine of inability presses men to immediate acceptance of God's offers, lest the day of grace for them pass by.
Those who care most for self are those in whom self becomes thoroughly subjected and enslaved to external influences. Mat. 16:25—“whosoever would save his life shall lose it.” The selfish man is a straw on the surface of a rushing stream. He becomes more and more a victim of circumstance, until at last he has no more freedom than the brute. Ps. 49:20—“Man that is in honor, and understandeth not, Is like the beasts that perish;” see R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 121. Robert Browning, unpublished poem: “ ‘Would a man 'scape the rod?’ Rabbi Ben Karshook saith, ‘See that he turn to God The day before his death.’ ‘Aye, could a man inquire When it shall come?’ I say. The Rabbi's eye shoots fire—‘Then let him turn to-day.’ ”
Let us repeat, however, that the denial to man of all ability, whether natural or moral, to turn himself to God or to do that which is truly good in God's sight, does not imply a denial of man's power to order his external life in many particulars conformably to moral rules, or even to attain the praise of men for virtue. Man has still a range of freedom in acting out his nature, and he may to a certain limited extent act down upon that nature, and modify it, by isolated volitions externally conformed to God's law. He may choose higher or lower forms of selfish action, and may pursue these chosen courses with various degrees of selfish energy. Freedom of choice, within this limit, is by no means incompatible with complete bondage of the will in spiritual things.
John 1:13—“born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”; 3:5—“Except one be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God”; 6:44—“No man can come to me, except the Father that sent me draw him”; 8:34—“Every one that committeth sin is the bondservant of sin”; 15:4, 5—“the branch cannot bear fruit of itself ... apart from me ye can do nothing”; Rom. 7:18—“in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing; for to will is present with me, but to do that which it good is not”; 24—“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?” 8:7, 8—“the mind of the flesh is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can it be: and they that are is the flesh cannot please God”; 1 Cor. 2:14—“the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; [pg 643]and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged”; 2 Cor. 3:5—“not that we are sufficient of ourselves, to account anything as from ourselves”; Eph. 2:1—“dead through your trespasses and sins”; 8-10—“by grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not of works, that no man should glory. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works”; Heb. 11:6—“without faith it is impossible to be well-pleasing unto him.”
Kant's “I ought, therefore I can” is the relic of man's original consciousness of freedom—the freedom with which man was endowed at his creation—a freedom, now, alas! destroyed by sin. Or it may be the courage of the soul in which God is working anew by his Spirit. For Kant's “Ich soll, also Ich kann,” Julius Müller would substitute: “Ich sollte freilich können, aber Ich kann nicht”—“I ought indeed to be able, but I am not able.” Man truly repents only when he learns that his sin has made him unable to repent without the renewing grace of God. Emerson, in his poem entitled “Voluntariness,” says: “So near is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.” But, apart from special grace, all the ability which man at present possesses comes far short of fulfilling the spiritual demands of God's law. Parental and civil law implies a certain kind of power. Puritan theology called man “free among the dead” (Ps. 88:5, A. V.). There was a range of freedom inside of slavery,—the will was “a drop of water imprisoned in a solid crystal” (Oliver Wendell Holmes). The man who kills himself is as dead as if he had been killed by another (Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:106).
Westminster Confession, 9:3—“Man by his fall into a state of sin hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation; so, as a natural man, being altogether averse from that good and dead in sin, he is not able by his own strength to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.” Hopkins, Works, 1:233-235—“So long as the sinner's opposition of heart and will continues, he cannot come to Christ. It is impossible, and will continue so, until his unwillingness and opposition be removed by a change and renovation of his heart by divine grace, and he be made willing in the day of God's power.” Hopkins speaks of “utter inability to obey the law of God, yea, utter impossibility.”
Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:257-277—“Inability consists, not in the loss of any faculty of the soul, nor in the loss of free agency, for the sinner determines his own acts, nor in mere disinclination to what is good. It arises from want of spiritual discernment, and hence want of proper affections. Inability belongs only to the things of the Spirit. What man cannot do is to repent, believe, regenerate himself. He cannot put forth any act which merits the approbation of God. Sin cleaves to all he does, and from its dominion he cannot free himself. The distinction between natural and moral ability is of no value. Shall we say that the uneducated man can understand and appreciate the Iliad, because he has all the faculties that the scholar has? Shall we say that man can love God, if he will? This is false, if will means volition. It is a truism, if will means affection. The Scriptures never thus address men and tell them that they have power to do all that God requires. It is dangerous to teach a man this, for until a man feels that he can do nothing, God never saves him. Inability is involved in the doctrine of original sin; in the necessity of the Spirit's influence in regeneration. Inability is consistent with obligation, when inability arises from sin and is removed by the removal of sin.”
Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:213-257, and in South Church Sermons, 33-59—“The origin of this helplessness lies, not in creation, but in sin. God can command the ten talents or the five which he originally committed to us, together with a diligent and faithful improvement of them. Because the servant has lost the talents, is he discharged from obligation to return them with interest? Sin contains in itself the element of servitude. In the very act of transgressing the law of God, there is a reflex action of the human will upon itself, whereby it becomes less able than before to keep that law. Sin is the suicidal action of the human will. To do wrong destroys the power to do right. Total depravity carries with it total impotence. The voluntary faculty may be ruined from within; may be made impotent to holiness, by its own action; may surrender itself to appetite and selfishness with such an intensity and earnestness, that it becomes unable to convert itself and overcome its wrong inclination.” See Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,—noticed in Andover Rev., June, 1886:664. We can merge ourselves in the life of another—either bad or good; can almost transform ourselves into Satan or into Christ, so as to say with Paul, in Gal 2:20—“it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me”; or be minions of “the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience” (Eph. 2:2). But if we yield ourselves to the influence of Satan, the recovery of our true personality becomes increasingly difficult, and at last impossible.
[pg 644]There is nothing in literature sadder or more significant than the self-bewailing of Charles Lamb, the gentle Elia, who writes in his Last Essays, 214—“Could the youth to whom the flavor of the first wine is delicious as the opening scenes of life or the entering of some newly discovered paradise, look into my desolation, and be made to understand what a dreary thing it is when he shall feel himself going down a precipice with open eyes and a passive will; to see his destruction, and have no power to stop it; to see all goodness emptied out of him, and yet not be able to forget a time when it was otherwise; to bear about the piteous spectacle of his own ruin,—could he see my fevered eye, fevered with the last night's drinking, and feverishly looking for to-night's repetition of the folly; could he but feel the body of this death out of which I cry hourly, with feebler outcry, to be delivered, it were enough to make him dash the sparkling beverage to the earth, in all the pride of its mantling temptation.”
For the Arminian “gracious ability,” see Raymond, Syst. Theol., 2:130; McClintock & Strong, Cyclopædia, 10:990. Per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, bk. 2, chap. 2 (1:282); Edwards, Works, 2:464 (Orig. Sin, 3:1); Bennet Tyler, Works, 73; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 523-528; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 1:567-639; Turretin, 10:4:19; A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 260-269; Thornwell, Theology, 1:394-399; Alexander, Moral Science, 89-208; Princeton Essays, 1:224-239; Richards, Lectures on Theology. On real as distinguished from formal freedom, see Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:1-225. On Augustine's lineamenta extrema (of the divine image in man), see Wiggers, Augustinism and Pelagianism, 119, note. See also art. by A. H. Strong, on Modified Calvinism, or Remainders of Freedom in Man, in Bap. Rev., 1883:219-242; and reprinted in the author's Philosophy and Religion, 114-128.