"a preference of the greater and higher above the less and lower good"; and still another, "a preference of the world, or of self and the world, above God"; bring Park to the question whether sin may be defined as consisting in selfishness, which he answers in the negative.

Such are Park's definitions of sin. As he defines virtue as consisting in love,-love to God supremely and to our neighbor as ourself, or more abstractly, love to being according to its worth; so he sometimes defines sin as any choice not consisting in such love or intended to carry it into execution. And it is in this sense particularly that the force of his doctrine of "depravity" appears. He makes this universal (all men sin) and total (none of the moral acts of the individual sinner are virtuous prior to regeneration). In a word, only the regenerate exercise Christian love. Stated thus, the principle seems axiomatic.

But so universal and so deep a fact as sin must have an adequate reason. Its cause, properly speaking, is the will of the sinner himself acting efficiently in producing it. But wills are led to choices by motives. Hence the question rises as to the motives leading to universal and total depravity or its occasion. Park specifies two occasions,-the proximate and the remote. Of the former he says: "Total depravity may be referred to a disordered state of man's constitution, existing previously to man's voluntary moral acts and occasioning their uniform sinfulness." He further defines this "disordered state" as consisting in a disproportion in his sensibilities and moral powers. Since universal sin is a fact of man's active life, the cause must be found in his nature, and this cause is his disorder. He is not fitted, in the actual world into which he comes, to lead a perfectly holy life. This disorder of nature being antecedent to every moral act, and oper

ative from the beginning, it is necessary to conclude that man begins to sin as early as he begins any moral action. Thus he never passes through a period of holiness before beginning to sin. But Park carefully avoids various unwarranted extremes into which theologians had sometimes fallen; such as, that infants begin to sin as soon as they are born.

We are thus brought to the doctrine commonly called "original sin." So far as it taught the corruption of human nature, Park thoroughly accepted it. But when corruption was denominated, in the language of Westminster, as "truly and properly sin," he recurred to his definition of sin as consisting in wrong choice, and denied the name sin to that which has come upon man without his own voluntary action. The central point and chief interest of original sin lay, however, in its connection with Adam. Park is thus brought, as well as by the course of his own argument, to the connection of Adam's sin (the fall) and our general depravity. He answered the question as to the proximate occasion of total depravity by saying it was the corruption of man's nature; he now asks the occasion of that corruption, or the remote occasion of depravity, and answers it by the fall of man in Eden.

The fall is thus defined: "That sin of Adam by which it was rendered certain that all the moral agents descended from him should be totally depraved, and necessary that all the members of the race (Christ only excepted) should suffer appropriate evil." The proof of such a connection between Adam's sin and ours is purely biblical, and does not differ from that employed by all other Calvinistic theologians. What, now, is the link that connects Adam's sin and the disorder of nature in all his descendants ? Edwards had made it all a “divine constitution," as he was most naturally led to do by his idealistic philosophy, which makes all connec

tion of things a connection of ideas, and teaches that all ideas arise in us immediately by the operation of deity. It is remarkable that Park adopted the same view, so far as he adopted any. The relation was established by God. Why? We do not know. How? Here he is equally silent. A suggestion at one point that heredity may have had something to do with it, is the only hint pertinent to this question. Of one thing, however, Park is certain,-that it was not by identification with Adam in his sin ("sinning in Adam"), nor by imputation of Adam's sin to us. We are better off to-day under the larger view of heredity given us by evolutionary studies. We now know how necessary it is, in accordance with the very principles which have brought the physical and even the mental nature of man to its present condition, that, when sin has once occurred, every descendant of the sinner should be profoundly affected by it; and how increasing sinning should enlarge the affected area of the soul, how individual sins should become first habitual, then automatic, and then hereditary; so that there should be finally racial tendencies to evil rendering, by the balance of the nature thereby created (“corruption"), actual sins by all the individuals of the race certain.

Park thus set his pupils and successors free from a mass of false reasoning as to imputation and kindred matters. He transferred the matter of sin from the external, the forum, and from the influence of legal methods and analogies, to the inward, ethical nature of the soul. For this service we cannot be too grateful. That he did not furnish us with a philosophy of the universality of sin is the fault of his whole psychology of the will. He depended, when he had once got universal corruption, on the maxim that "the will always is as the greatest apparent good." We shall have to depend on the multiplicity and complexity of temptations. But in his

affirmation of total depravity, he followed both Scripture and daily observation.

The defects of his positions in these portions of the system are nowhere better brought out than in his treatment of the salvation of infants dying in infancy. He should have said, in consistency with his fundamental principle that sin consists in the "voluntary transgression of known law," that infants dying before the age of moral consciousness and responsibility have not sinned and do not need saving in the sense in which we speak of saving sinners. Hence their salvation is as certain as that of angels who have never sinned. But he only ventures to say that infants may sin from the first moment of their birth, and probably do sin at an early period. They need regeneration because of their participation in universal human corruption; and they are saved by the atonement. "The whole impression of reason and of the Bible is that infants begin to sin very early. We have an instinctive hope that infants are saved. We cannot perhaps prove it. The true remark would be: I have an instinctive hope that they will be saved. Yet I cannot prove it, and am willing to leave them in the hands of God."

Yes! so must we all be! But, "shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" And can souls that have not sinned be lost? Certainly Professor Park might have said more at this point! His result falls far below the truth.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

ARTICLE IV.

THE EVOLUTION OF CHASTITY.

BY THE REVEREND HENRY A. STIMSON, D.D.

THIS article has nothing to do with biblical revelation. It raises no question as to God's creating man in his own image. Christian dogmatics as a science detaches itself entirely from the question of how God created man, that it may limit itself to the fact that He did create him, and to the consequent relationship. Man's ultimate moral responsibility unquestionably covers his entire conscious existence, and is to God. Having said this, we are free to study the phenomena of human life and character as they present themselves in the great distinctive groups: the physical phenomena, the moral, and the social.

It is now an accepted truth with the biologist that the embryo, human or animal, reveals in these earliest stages of its history the lines of its subsequent development. It is probable that if we could properly observe we should find in the protoplasmic cell from which the embryo springs an equally clear indication of what the subsequent physical history of the particular organism would be. We could know the man there as definitely as we can in the baby. It seems to be true that no two atoms in the universe are identical, and that each stands related to the group to which it belongs, or to the connection in which its inherent force is to find its subsequent opportunity, in so distinctive a way that its history may be foretold. But whether this be so or not, the important fact is that the line of development of the human embryo is that