“If it could be well made out that the whole race of mankind are partakers of sinful inclinations, and evil passions, and biases to vice, and also are exposed to many sharp actual sufferings and to death, merely and only by the original divine law of propagation from their parents who had sinned; and, if the justice and goodness of God could be vindicated _in making and maintaining such a dreadful law or order of propagation_ through six thousand years, we have no need of further inquiries, but might here be at rest. But, if the scheme be so injurious to the goodness and equity of God as it seems to be, then we are constrained to seek a little further for a satisfactory account of this universal degeneracy and misery of mankind.” The following was written by an American divine at the time of the commencement of the conflict in this country between the Old and New School Calvinists. At that time this theory of a depraved nature was accompanied, even in pulpit teachings, by the assumption of man’s total inability to do any thing to gain salvation, and that Christ died, not for all men, but only for “the elect.” Dr. Whelpley. “The idea that all the numerous millions of Adam’s posterity deserve the ineffable and endless torments of hell for a single act of his, before any one of them existed, is repugnant to that reason that God has given us, and is subversive of all possible conceptions of justice. I hesitate not to say, that no scheme of religion ever propagated amongst men contains a more monstrous, a more horrible tenet. The atrocity of this doctrine is beyond comparison. The visions of the Koran, the fictions of Sadder, the fables of the Zendavesta, all give place to this; Rabbinical legends, Brahminical vagaries, all vanish before it.” “The whole of their doctrine, then, amounts to this: that a man is in the first place condemned, incapacitated, and eternally reprobated for the sin of Adam; in the next place, that he is condemned over again for not doing what he is totally and in all respects unable to do; and in the third place that he is condemned, doubly and trebly condemned, for not believing in a Saviour who never died for him, and with whom he has no more to do than a fallen angel.” The elder President Adams at first designed to enter the clerical profession, but was deterred by doctrinal difficulties, of which he thus writes: John Adams.