y and with ethics: it seems
to trample on the surest convictions of reason and conscience, and
spurn the clearest principles of nature and religion, to blacken
and load the heart and doom of man with a mountain of gratuitous
horror, and shroud the face and throne of God in a pall of wilful
barbarity. How can men be guilty of a sin committed thousands of
years before they were born, and deserve to be sent to hopeless
hell for it? What justice is there in putting on one sinless head
the demerits of a world of reprobates, and then letting the
criminal go free because the innocent has suffered? A third
objection to this whole view an objection which, if sustained,
will utterly annihilate it is this: It is quite possible that,
momentous as is the part he has played in theology, the Biblical
Adam is not at all a historical personage, but only a significant
figment of poetry. The common belief of the most authoritative men
of science, that the human race has existed on this earth for a
vastly longer period than the Hebrew statement affirms, may yet be
completely established. It may also yet be acknowledged that each
distinct race of men had its own Adam.5 Then the dogmatic
theology, based on the fall of our entire race into perdition in
its primary representative, will, of course, crumble.

The second doctrine of Christian salvation is a modification and
limitation of the previous one. This theory, like the former,
presupposes that a burden of original sin and natural depravity
transmitted from the first man had doomed, and, unless prevented
in some supernatural manner, would forever press, all souls down
to the realms of ruin and woe; also that an infinite graciousness
in the bosom of the Godhead led Christ to offer himself as an
expiation for the sins, an atoning substitute for the condemnation,
of men. But, according to the present view, this interference
of Christ did not by itself save the lost: it only removed
the otherwise insuperable bar to forgiveness, and presented
to a chosen portion of mankind the means of experiencing
a condition upon the realization of which, in each individual
case, the certainty of salvation depends. That condition is a
mysterious conversion, stirring the depths of the soul through an
inspired faith in personal election by the unchanging decree of
God. The difference, then, in a word, between the two methods of
salvation thus far explained, is this: While both assume that
mankind are doomed