It being granted, then, that the mind of our race is depraved in its nature, of course the Author of this nature is responsible for this inconceivable and wholesale wrong. This forces us to the inevitable conclusion that the Creator of mind is a being guilty of the highest conceivable folly, injustice, and malignity. For reason and common sense teach that "the nature of a contrivance is proof of the character and intention of its author." Therefore, if mind is depraved in construction, the Author of it is a depraved being, and totally unworthy of our trust, respect, or love. This is the argument which, in all ages, has been pressed on those theologians who maintain the dogma of the depraved nature of man, and there have been these various methods by which this difficulty has been evaded: One class openly avow that the Creator had power to make the mind of man perfect in all respects, and that he has proved that he has this power by making the minds of angels and of our first parents thus perfect. But, in consequence of our first parents eating the forbidden fruit, every mind created since that time has been ruined in the making, so as to be totally depraved. This, it is maintained, it was right for God to do. _How_ it was right we have no business to inquire. It is an awful mystery; but it was so done that God "is in no way the author of sin." This amounts simply to a denial of the principle of reason, "that the nature of a contrivance is proof of the intention and character of the contriver." It is saying that the author of sin is not the author of sin. This will be still farther apparent if we refer to page 158, where is exhibited the only conceivable modes in which one being can be the cause of sin or of wrong action in others. God is undisputably the author of all the _outward_ circumstances that surround us. If, then, he has made our susceptibilities wrong, or combined them wrong, he is the author of sin in every conceivable sense. Whoever, therefore, affirms that God is the author of a depraved mental organization of the human mind, affirms that he is "the author of sin" in every conceivable sense. To assert such a fact, and then deny that God is the author of sin, is simply a contradiction in terms. To avoid this dilemma, theologians have instituted the following theories: The first class teach that the first pair of the human race were made with perfect minds, and then stood as representatives of the race and sinned for the whole. The first part of the penalty came on the actual sinners in the ruin of their own mental constitution, and then, all men being _represented_ in Adam and Eve, the Creator "imputed" this sin to all their posterity, and, as a penalty, all receive a depraved mental constitution.