itted penalty
hurled on all the descendants of Adam, save those who in some way
avoid it, in consequence of his primal transgression. Language
cannot characterize with too much severity, as it seems to us, the
injustice, the immorality, involved in this scheme. The belief in
a sin, called "original," entailed by one act of one person upon a
whole immortal race of countless millions, dooming vast majorities
of them helplessly to a hopeless torture prison, can rest only on
a sleep of reason and a delirium of

18 Wilson's ed. of Mill's Hist. of British India, vol. i. p. 429,
note.

conscience. Such a "sin" is no sin at all; and any penalty
inflicted on it would not be the necessary severity of a holy God,
but a species of gratuitous vengeance. For sin, by the very
essence of ethics, is the free, intelligent, wilful violation of a
law known to be right; and every punishment, in order to be just,
must be the suffering deserved by the intentional fault, the
personal evil, of the culprit himself. The doctrine before us
reverses all this, and sends untold myriads to hell forever for no
other sin than that of simply having been born children of
humanity. Born totally depraved, hateful to God, helpless through
an irresistible proclivity to sin and an ineradicable aversion to
evangelical truth, and asked to save themselves, asked by a
mockery like that of fettering men hand and foot, clothing them in
leaden straitjackets, and then flinging them overboard, telling
them not to drown! What justice, what justice, is here in this?

Thirdly, the profound injustice of this doctrine is seen in its
making the alternative of so unutterably awful a doom hinge upon
such trivial particulars and upon merely fortuitous circumstances.
One is born of pious, orthodox parents, another of heretics or
infidels: with no difference of merit due to them, one goes to
heaven, the other goes to hell. One happens to form a friendship
with an evangelical believer, another is influenced by a
rationalist companion: the same fearful diversity of fate ensues.
One is converted by a single sermon: if he had been ill that day,
or had been detained from church by any other cause, his fated bed
would have been made in hell, heaven closed against him forever.
One says, "I believe in the Trinity of God, in the Deity of
Christ;" and, dying, he goes to heaven. Another says, "I believe
in the Unity of God and in the humanity of Christ:" he, dying,
goes to hell. Of