manages to reconcile such conduct with his
other attributes." Yet, I remembered, this was Bishop Beveridge's
sufficient refutation of Mohammedism, which teaches no atonement.

* * * * *

At the same time great progress had been made in my mind towards the
overthrow of the correlative dogma of the Fall of man and his total
corruption. Probably for years I had been unawares anti-Calvinistic
on this topic. Even at Oxford, I had held that human depravity is
a _fact_, which it is absurd to argue against; a fact, attested by
Thucydides, Polybius, Horace, and Tacitus, almost as strongly as by
St. Paul. Yet in admitting man's total corruption, I interpreted this
of _spiritual_, not of _moral_, perversion: for that there were kindly
and amiable qualities even in the unregenerate, was quite as clear a
fact as any other. Hence in result I did _not_ attribute to man any
great essential depravity, in the popular and moral sense of the word;
and the doctrine amounted only to this, that "_spiritually_, man
is paralyzed, until the grace of God comes freely upon him." How to
reconcile this with the condemnation, and punishment of man for being
unspiritual, I knew not. I saw, and did not dissemble, the difficulty;
but received it as a mystery hereafter to be cleared up.

But it gradually broke upon me, that when Paul said nothing stronger
than heathen moralists had said about human wickedness, it was absurd
to quote his words, any more than theirs, in proof of a _Fall_,--that
is, of a permanent degeneracy induced by the first sin of the first
man: and when I studied the 5th chapter of the Romans, I found it was
_death_, not _corruption_, which Adam was said to have entailed. In
short, I could scarcely find the modern doctrine of the "Fall" any
where in the Bible. I then remembered that Calvin, in his Institutes,
complains that all the Fathers are heterodox on this point; the Greek
Fathers being grievously overweening in their estimate of human power;
while of the Latin Fathers even Augustine is not always up to Calvin's
mark of orthodoxy. This confirmed my rising conviction that the tenet
is of rather recent origin. I afterwards heard, that both it and the
doctrine of compensatory misery were first systematized by Archbishop
Anselm, in the reign of our William Rufus: but I never took the pains
to verify this.

For meanwhile I had been forcibly impressed with the following
thought. Suppose a youth to hav