lawlessness,' and (by the exact form of expression which he
uses) he implies also that all lawlessness is sin. Here, and here only
where voluntary action begins, do you see violation of law, and
therefore, within limits, a disturbance of the divine order--something
which ought to have been otherwise.

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(3) The belief that the moral evil of our nature does not properly
belong to our nature but is its violation, and that if once the will be
set right it can be remedied, has been the secret of the moral strength
of Christianity. Christianity has said to all men, However corrupted
your nature, the corruption does not essentially belong to you. Give
your wills to God, and, if slowly, yet surely, if not fully in this
world, then beyond it, all can be set right. 'According to thy faith
be it unto thee.' And the practical power of this appeal, shows its
agreement with reality.

(4) On the other hand, it cannot be claimed that the theory is contrary
to any real scientific _knowledge_; for biology confesses that it knows
very little as to the actual methods by which force is redistributed in
human action. It is contrary only to some large and unverifiable
assumptions--assumptions which ignore the abstract character of
biological psychology, as of other sciences.

Now granted this reality of free voluntary action, it will hardly be
denied that history discloses to us a practically universal prevalence
of sin[6], in the present and in the past; and we can hardly fail to
perceive, lying behind actual sins, a tendency to sin--what Shelley
calls 'the ineradicable taint of sin,' a perverse inclination inhering
in the stock of our manhood, which is what theology calls original sin.

III.--But here a more modern objection occurs. Christianity assumes
that this moral flaw or taint, weakness or grossness, in human nature
is the outcome of actual transgressions, in other words that original
sin is due to actual sin, whereas the tendency of recent biological
science is to deny that acquired characters can be inherited, and
therefore to deny that any acts of any man or men could have any effect
on the congenital moral nature of their descendants; the taint or fault
in {226} human nature, must be a taint or fault in that original
substance which what is called man derived from his pre-human ancestry.
To this I reply:--This is no doubt the view which Professor Weismann
has made more or less prevalent. The substance of heredit