“He then asks, ‘But how is this proceeding just to Adam’s posterity? What have they done, before they commit sin, to merit pain and death? What have they done to merit the evil of existing without original righteousness, and with a nature prone to sin? Here,’ he says, ‘our wisdom fails. We apply in vain to human reason or human consciousness for an answer.’ Nay more; he even admits that such conduct is ‘_contrary to the dictates of our fallible minds_.’ Yet he still insists that we ought not to judge at all in the case, but to believe that it is right because God has done it. ‘God has not made us judges. The case lies wholly out of our province. It is a doctrine which is not to be brought for trial to the bar of human reason. Mere natural reason, mere philosophy or metaphysical sagacity transcends its just bounds, and commits a heinous sacrilege, when it attacks this primary article of our faith, and labors to distort it, to undermine it, or to expose its truth or its importance to distrust.’ ” The preceding serves to establish the correctness of the writer’s statements as to the modes of meeting difficulties adopted by theologians. In the next chapter we shall see that none of these methods prove satisfactory even to theologians themselves. CHAPTER VII. THEOLOGIANS THEMSELVES CONCEDE THE AUGUSTINIAN DOGMAS INDEFENSIBLE. Although each theologian claims that the mode of meeting difficulties adopted by his school is satisfactory, yet as each maintains that all other modes are unavailing, it comes to pass that a _majority_ of theologians declare each attempt to make the Augustinian dogma consistent with the moral sense of humanity an utter failure. It has been shown that the Catholic mode is not to attempt to defend the dogma. It is “decreed” by “the church,” which is the only infallible interpreter of God’s Word, to be in the Bible, and it is to be received, like the doctrine of transubstantiation, as an inscrutable mystery. This is the mode also adopted by Dr. Woods and many other Protestants. The following from the Princeton theologians presents their protest against this Catholic method. They perceive that if they allow it in this case, they have no excuse for denying the validity of the Catholic defense of transubstantiation. And so they proceed to claim that imputing to children sins that they never committed, and thus involving them in endless misery, is the true mode, while the Catholic one is vain. The Princeton Mode against the Catholic Mode. The Princeton Reviewers, in opposing the Catholic mode, as defended by Dr. Woods, say: