hat will, evolving through history to Jesus. In the dogma
we have this grand assumption of a paradisaic state of perfectness in
which the will of God was from the beginning perfectly known.

In the Platonic, as in the rabbinic, speculation the idea must precede
the fact. Every step of progress is a defection from that idea. The
dogma suffers from an insoluble contradiction within itself. It aims to
give us the point of departure by which we are to recognise the nature
of sin. At the same moment it would describe the perfection of man at
which God has willed that by age-long struggle he should arrive. Now, if
we place this perfection at the beginning of human history, before all
human self-determination, we divest it of ethical quality. Whatever else
it may be, it is not character. On the other hand, if we would make this
perfection really that of moral character, then we cannot place it at
the beginning of human history, but far down the course of the evolution
of the higher human traits, of the consciousness of sin and of the
struggle for redemption. It is not revelation from God, but naive
imagination, later giving place to adventurous speculation concerning
the origin of the universe, which we have in the doctrine of the
primeval perfection of man. We do not really make earnest with our
Christian claim that in Jesus we have our paramount revelation, until we
admit this. It is through Jesus, and not from Adam that we know sin.

So we might go on to say that the dogma of inherited guilt is a
contradiction in terms. Disadvantage may be inherited, weakness,
proclivity to sin, but not guilt, not sin in the sense of that which
entails guilt. What entails guilt is action counter to the will of God
which we know. That is always the act of the individual man myself. It
cannot by any possibility be the act of another. It may be the
consequence of the sins of my ancestors that I do moral evil without
knowing it to be such. Even my fellows view this as a mitigation, if not
as an exculpation. The very same act, however, which up to this point
has been only an occasion for pity, becomes sin and entails guilt, when
it passes through my own mind and will as a defection from a will of God
in which I believe, and as a righteousness which I refuse. The confusion
of guilt and sin in order to the inclusion of all under the need of
salvation, as in the Augustinian scheme, ended in bewilderment and
stultification of the moral sense. It cau