in, each of the members. This is the basis of native depravity, of hereditary or propagated sinfulness. On this ground, Adam was regarded in the covenant transaction as "a public person," like a corporation in law, as the moral head of his posterity, and their federal representative. They act in him as the represented do in the representative, and are therefore one with him in the covenant and in the consequences of his first sin. This is the covenant part of imputation, which rests on the natural or realistic as the basis. The continuance of a sinful disposition in Adam as a confirmed principle, from the loss of communion with God, was the penalty of his first transgression. God withdrew from him because he had sinned. The propagation of the same disposition in the race was from the same loss of communion with God, and a punishment upon Adam for the same sin. Thus the race became subject to penal evil through the transgression of the first man. Yet no one is actually punished who is innocent, or held as blameworthy directly for any sinfulness but his own.

Thus Edwards avoids the purely "immediate" view which makes the imputation of Adam's sin the ground of the derived evil disposition in his posterity, which charges guilt upon them primarily for his transgression. The evil disposition in them, he says, as it was in him, is first, and the imputation or charge of guilt is after it; and on that ground he also avoids the other extreme, which excludes the representative relation, and explains the moral status of the posterity of Adam solely by their natural connection with him. He combines what is true in both, and thinks the two views should not be separated.

He eschews also that kind of realism which resolves the race into one mystic but real person-a species of monothelitism, in which one generic will serves the purposes alike of Adam and his descendants. The Edwardean theology preserves the broadest distinction of agents. No one performs the acts of another, though Adam acted representatively for all. No one is condemned for another's sin, being innocent. Yet all became sinful, and hence guilty, and hence come under condem-nation, forensically and really, on account of the evil disposition and sin of the first man.

It may be a question whether the natural, in this scheme does not occupy the whole ground, and leave no room for imputation. In strictness of language, mediate and immediate imputation mutually exclude each other, as what is the one cannot be the other. But it is not so plain that the imputation of Adam's sin to his posterity as a judicial transaction may not be as real on the ground, and through means of their natural connection with him, as on the ground of the covenant alone. If the transmission of his sinful disposition or nature is incompatible with the imputation of his sin,-if men are born innocent, save as Adam's personal sin is charged to them, and by this alone they are made guilty, doubtless Edwards discards imputation. But in the sense of a natural and a legal transaction, of a real and a representative relation-of an impartation and an imputation—the former being the ground of the latter, and both the penal consequence of Adam's sin, that is, a just punishment upon him, Edwards, we think, held steadfastly to the doctrine of imputation, both of Adam's sin and of Christ's righteousness-to "the two federal heads." In this sense, Edwards was no more a realist than John Calvin, the Westminster Assembly, and the early New England divines. These all believed that the human race was more than an idea, a name, and that the first of the race was its " root," and that "all mankind descending from him by ordinary generation, sinned in him, and fell with him in his first transgression." And he was also as much of a nominalist as they, when they say that original sin in its common acceptation "consists in the guilt of Adam's first sin, the want of original righteousness, and the corruption of his whole nature." Indeed, he seems not to have been purely a realist, nor wholly a nominalist. He did not confound the abstract and the concrete, nor one man's act with another's. He held to a real oneness of the human race, of which Adam was the head, the veritable unity of that "whole nature" which was corrupted by Adam's first sin. Thus he aimed to place the doctrine of original sin on a solid basis of reason and Scripture, without confining himself to any of the schools in philosophy.

With this view, Woods and Dwight, Backus and Bellamy

were in substantial agreement. Hopkins, who first gave this treatise on original sin to the public, expressed no dissent from it, and regarded President Edwards as having entirely baffled his opponent. At a later period, he dropped the distinction between original sin and actual transgression, which Edwards and the New England theologians have generally held, and resolved all sin into action.

Edwards also stood on the true Calvinistic ground. " Original sin," says the Genevan divine, "appears to be an hereditary pravity and corruption of our nature diffused through all the parts of the soul." Adam's transgression "not only procured misery and ruin for himself, but also precipitated our nature into similar destruction. And that, not by his personal guilt, as an individual, which pertains not to us, but because he infected all his descendants with the corruption into which he had fallen." "And this liableness to punishment arises not from the delinquency of another; for when it is said that the sin of Adam renders us obnoxious to the divine judgment, it is not to be understood as if we, though innocent, were undeservedly loaded with the guilt of his sin, but because we are all subject to a curse on account of his transgression, he is therefore said to have involved us in guilt. Nevertheless we derive from him not only the punishment, but also the pollution to which the punishment is justly due." *

Anselm, before Edwards or Calvin, had taken the same view: "When an infant is condemned for original sin, he is not condemned for Adam's sin, but for his own, for if he had not his own sin, he could not be condemned." Augustine held that "vitium originale" is "vitium hereditarium." And of Tertullian's traducianism, the transmission of a sinful nature was the very essence.

Upon this ancient and honorable platform, the Methodist theology upon this subject fairly and fully places itself. It is an interesting fact that Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley were occupied at the same time in elaborate replies to Dr. Taylor. Edwards finished his treatise in May, 1757, and Wes

*Institutes, B. II, Chap. I. Sec. 6-8.

On the main questions

ley his in August of the same year. at issue, the moral corruption of man's nature, and the imputation of Adam's sin,-the total fall of the race in the first man, and inability to good in that state except by grace,—they were in essential agreement, and substantially Calvinistic. Their illustrations of the subject and modes of vindicating the divine government, though original, are, in some cases, strikingly similar. The Congregationalist is the more philosophical and profound, the Methodist the more laconic, pithy and practical. Both wrote from a deep Christian experience, from spiritual conflicts, and a breadth of religious consciousness, which carried them far above cold speculation into the warm life of things.

"Original sin," says Wesley, "is that sinful impurity which every man brings into the world," a "nature tinted with sin." "We came into the world with sinful propensities, sinful dispositions derived from Adam." "God does not look upon infants as innocent, but as involved in the guilt of Adam's sin, otherwise death, the punishment denounced against that sin, could not be inflicted upon them.”

Wesley's treatise contains a minute defence of the Westminster propositions respecting original sin. His letter to Dr. Taylor a year or two after he published his reply, is graphic and

characteristic:

...

"REVEREND SIR: I esteem you as a person of uncommon sense and learning; but your doctrine I cannot esteem. . . . Either you or I mistake the whole of Christianity, from the beginning to the end! Either my scheme or yours is as contrary to the Scripture as the Koran is. Is it mine or yours? Yours has gone through all England, and made numerous converts. I attack it from end to end. Let England judge whether it can be defended or not." *

In this view of the derivative character of the Edwardean theology, it is something more than a provincialism. Nor can it properly be regarded as an improvement, except in its modes of statement and defence. Its affiliations are clearly with the genuine Calvinistic school. It brings nothing essentially

* Wesley's Works, Vol. 5, p. 669.

new to that school, and excludes from it nothing of substantial doctrine that is old. If we do not mistake, it is in substance identical with it, and with it the Augustinian and Pauline theology which preceded it.

Prof. Fisher, in a compact and instructive article in the New Englander* appears to class Edwards and Calvin with the immediate imputationists. But these men, on the subject of original sin, we believe do not admit this classification. In respect to President Edwards, they regard it as one of his very few mistakes that he held the mediate doctrine. Historic fairness is leading them to relinquish Calvin also, and to place him. in the same category with Edwards. The history of the immediate imputation doctrine, which includes the workings of some of the noblest minds of the Reformed Church, is for the most part, post-Calvinistic, and seems to have been brought forward against the Arminian movement. We submit that both Calvin and Edwards belong more exactly to Prof. Fisher's second class than to the fourth ;-to those whose doctrine rests on the assumption "that moral evil, like physical evil, is hereditary.” Both adopt the doctrine of an "inherited corruption of character which is culpable." Both deny that the descendants of Adam, being innocent, are accounted guilty for his transgression, and teach that, inheriting an evil disposition from him as a penal consequence of his sin, they are accountable for their own sin.

It is not our object to inquire whether this Edwardo Calvinian doctrine of Imputation and Original Sin is true or false, but to indicate our belief that it is much older and has a more honorable progenitor than Joshua Placaeus, or any theologian of the 17th century. As the radix of New England Theology it is not an exotic. It has struck deep into the native soil of the church, and borne in all climes branches of the tree of life, as they have been grafted into it and made fruitful by the supernatural culture of the divine husbandman. It may not furnish a solution of the difficult problem satisfactory to all. Nor does any other theory. But it has the advantage of a solid basis in the following generally admitted facts.

*Vol. 18, No. 3, p. 698.