once and forever how his posterity must begin their spiritual agency, and under what conditions they must form their permanent disposition; and now no other act of his can reverse the first trial, or begin any new trial for them.

2. Fallen humanity will perpetuate depravity through the race. Man's trial has been the most favorable for virtuous integrity possible, and the fact of his fall has left no other way open for a rising posterity but through a gracious provision of redemption, which puts man upon a new probation, where each person must be held liable for his own spiritual disposing. In all this there has been nothing arbitrary, but it is just what it should be to satisfy reason. To neither God nor man can any other way be so well, and yet in just this moral arrangement for the race, it will occur that, through human perversion of the best and most gracious provisions, depravity will be propagated through all generations. The first sinners, left to their own way, though with capacities and under obligation to reform and restore the spirit to its rightful rule over sense, yet will never accomplish it. In their lapsed disposition is the will reluctating against the return to spirituality, and which perpetuates the depravity in them; and such lapse of the spirit under the dominion of the flesh has given the sense an ascendency and advantage, and has so aggravated and intensified its habitual control, that the physical propagation of the sense in the descendants will carry its inordinate carnal influences along

with it. These will be of sufficient prevalent impulse in every descendant, on the first originating of moral agency, to induce the spirit to yield to the sense, and fix the assenting disposition on the ends of the fleshly gratification, to the rejection of spiritual integrity. The first agency in moral personality will thus be as certainly perverse in the posterity, as the subsequent acts of the first sinner in the fallen ancestor will continue carnally apostate. The moving impulses of the vitiated sensibility will be alike in the sinning progenitor and the new offspring, the state of the spirit alone being different.

With the sinning parent, the flesh has its aggra vated lusts, and moreover the spirit has already consented and bowed beneath its bondage, and the disposed will has nothing in it for reversing the depraved disposition; with the propagated descendant, the flesh has all the aggravated lusting impulses of the fallen parent, but the superinduced reason, as personal spirit, has not yet succumbed to the domination of appetite, and become perverted spirit. This spiritual disposition the child must first set within itself ere it shall take the sinful character of the fallen parent; and thus it is true of every descendant of fallen Adam, that it is his own disposing which fixes in him the carnal disposition of Adam, while his intensated sense impulses follow the law of social liabilities in physical propagation. The appetites have the aggravations of the fallen parent, but the

rational spirit must consent to be in servitude to them, before the character can become sinfully apostate, as is that of the sinning parent.

In this way it is true that every descendant of Adam has his own trial, and fixes his own disposition in his own consent to carnal servitude; yet the necessary consequences of the trial and fall of the first sinner of the race make this free and responsible disposing a matter of certainty, that it will be a perverse disposing. The aggravated appetites follow natural law in physical generation, and the spiritual disposing which might be, and ought to be, in subjecting sense with all its aggravated lusting, yet certainly will be in basely yielding to sensual indulgence. A vitiated constitutional propensity to pilfer, known as kleptomania, sometimes manifests itself as with great difficulty restrained and subjected; a child of a confirmed inebriate sometimes inherits the vitiated impulse known as oinomania, which makes a life of sobriety hardly attainable; still in each case the propensity can be restrained by a virtuous resolution; so the vitiated sensibility diffused from Adam through humanity goes down to the children through the flesh, and not through the rational spirit, and in this case we learn both from revelation and experience, that all begotten of Adam, to a certainty, give the spirit over in bondage to this carnal lusting, if left of God to their own disposing.

This sense-pravity is vitium, and not peccatum; but

as it originated in the personal disposing of the spirit in bondage to sense by our first parents, and the vitiation beginning in them is perpetuated through their posterity, and is now in human nature, not as created, but as perverted in the first transgression, it is truly originale vitium; while the original sinning act, from which the vitium sprang, is originale peccatum. When, in theology, we speak of original sin, we must distinguish between vitium and peccatum, and apply sinful desert to the forming disposition which in each descendant follows his originally vitiated sensibility. While, then, a natural ability for disposing the spirit to the firm suppression and control of the vitiated sense, is still with the spirit itself, and the obligation rests upon every descendant of Adam so to do, yet the pravity of sense following the first sin gives certainty, that what might be and should be done will yet not be done, in any case, by self-movement. All are naturally liable to the necessary consequences of the progenitor's vitiated sensuality, but each is responsible morally only for his perversion of his own spirit. Here is no semi-pelagianism, as if the connection of the first sin and all subsequent sin were cut half in twain; nor any necessity for action in a pre-existing state to save personal freedom; but a connection of certainty in freedom, that as Adam vitiated sense, so all his posterity will deprave their disposition, and "go astray as soon as they be born.

3. Redemption assumes this universal certainty of a sinning race. What the plan of Redemption is we shall further on better see; but we can here know that all prospective dealing in mercy with the race is on the assured ground that all will need the gracious interposition. To God, at the first, this was certain so soon as Adam sinned, and that the recovery of none could be effected but by grace, and their allegiance confirmed anew but by a divine redemption. The first Promise that the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent's head, while the seed of the serpent should bruise the heel only of humanity, was applicable to all, and carried in it the divine testimony that the consequences of the fall went down to coming ages, parallel with that deliverance which was designed to reach all ages. And so, also, the curses upon man and woman, spoken originally to Adam and Eve, were yet inclusive of all their descendants, inasmuch as the certainty of their sinning would involve their certain desert as truly as in the case of the first transgressors. The posterity did not actually sin in Adam's sin, but they take naturally and necessarily Adam's vitiated sensibility, and under this comes the certain voluntary disposing of the spirit in subjection to the flesh. They have no personal responsibilities for his act, but as natural descendants they have all the liabilities to the nat ural consequences of such act, and must of necessity dispose their spirit and fix their own character under the consequent conditions of Adam's act. The as