this seems ridiculous; nevertheless
it corresponds to something actually existent not only in Paul's
consciousness but in our own. The original sin was not the eating of the
forbidden fruit, but the consciousness of sin which the fruit produced.
The moment Adam and Eve tasted the apple they found themselves ashamed
of their sexual relation, which until then had seemed quite innocent
to them; and there is no getting over the hard fact that this shame, or
state of sin, has persisted to this day, and is one of the strongest
of our instincts. Thus Paul's postulate of Adam as the natural man was
pragmatically true: it worked. But the weakness of Pragmatism is that
most theories will work if you put your back into making them work,
provided they have some point of contact with human nature. Hedonism
will pass the pragmatic test as well as Stoicism. Up to a certain point
every social principle that is not absolutely idiotic works: Autocracy
works in Russia and Democracy in America; Atheism works in France,
Polytheism in India, Monotheism throughout Islam, and Pragmatism, or
No-ism, in England. Paul's fantastic conception of the damned Adam,
represented by Bunyan as a pilgrim with a great burden of sins on his
back, corresponded to the fundamental condition of evolution, which
is, that life, including human life, is continually evolving, and must
therefore be continually ashamed of itself and its present and past.
Bunyan's pilgrim wants to get rid of his bundle of sins; but he also
wants to reach "yonder shining light;" and when at last his bundle falls
off him into the sepulchre of Christ, his pilgrimage is still unfinished
and his hardest trials still ahead of him. His conscience remains
uneasy; "original sin" still torments him; and his adventure with Giant
Despair, who throws him into the dungeon of Doubting Castle, from which
he escapes by the use of a skeleton key, is more terrible than any he
met whilst the bundle was still on his back. Thus Bunyan's allegory of
human nature breaks through the Pauline theology at a hundred points.
His theological allegory, The Holy War, with its troops of Election
Doubters, and its cavalry of "those that rode Reformadoes," is, as a
whole, absurd, impossible, and, except in passages where the artistic
old Adam momentarily got the better of the Salvationist theologian,
hardly readable.

Paul's theory of original sin was to some extent idiosyncratic. He
tells us definitely that he finds hi