4. Reason, moreover, assures us of the existence of Original Sin. In the first place, we know that God is good, and we cannot understand that a good God should have created man, the noblest of the works of creation, to suffering and misery. We feel assured, if we recognize God as good and loving to all His works, that He did not make man to be what he is, full of infirmities, ignorances, narrownesses, liable to suffering intensely acute, to continuous trouble, to decay, to diseases most painful, distressful in every way, loathsome, and finally to complete dissolution. Again, we have but to look at history, to read the daily records of crime in the papers, to see that there is a frightful amount of evil among men, and always has existed, and this cannot proceed from a good God. We must either deny the goodness of God, and say that man has been created by a capricious Deity--a mixture of benevolence and malevolence, of goodness and of evil--_or else_, we must allow that God created men good, but that His purpose has been hindered, and partially made ineffectual through the introduction into man's nature of something that was alien to it at first. The introduction of this alien element can only be attributable to man himself, who, having a _free-will_, could turn away from the course ordained for Him by His Creator, could deflect from the direct line, could bend from the way of happiness to that of misery. 5. A state of Original Sin is not a condition of guilt for act done, but a condition of impotency or partial impotency towards good; and Baptism affords supernatural assistance towards the undoing of those bad effects produced by the Fall, and transmitted through all generations. It places man in such a condition that little by little he can recover himself, and be restored to the original condition of innocence, vigour, and vitality of the first man as he left the hands of God. [Illustration] Fourth Wednesday in Lent. _ACTUAL SIN._ 1. Having seen what Original Sin is, we come now to Actual Sin. Original Sin, we have seen, was a partial paralysis of man's better nature, a confusion of his faculties, and a rendering him incapable of, by himself, attaining a recovery. It is a passive state of inability towards good, and of subjection to evil. Actual Sin is quite other--it consists in sinning voluntarily. Original Sin is a hereditary condition; Actual Sin is personal. Original Sin is involuntary; Actual Sin is voluntary. Original Sin is a state; Actual Sin is an act which throws us into a state of sin.