The dogma of Original Sin alone relieves the human mind from this odious and unacceptable alternative: far from being in contradiction either with the history of humanity, or with the facts and instincts which constitute man's moral nature, this dogma admits, illustrates, and explains them. {54} The fact of original sin presents nothing strange, nothing obscure; it consists essentially in disobedience to the will of God, which will is the moral law of man. This disobedience, the sin of Adam, is an act committed everywhere and every day, arising from the same causes, marked by the same characters, and attended by the same consequences as the Christian dogma assigns to it. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, this act is occasioned by a thirst for absolute independence, the ambitious aspirings of curiosity and pride, or weakness in the face of temptation. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, it produces an immense change in the inmost state of man, a change, the mere idea of which seizes upon the human soul, and disturbs it to its very depths; it transports man from the state of innocence to the state of sin. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, the act which produces this change involves and entails the responsibility not only of its author but of his descendants; sin is contagious in time as in space, it is transmitted, as well as diffused. {55} The Christian dogma exhibits the first man created fallible, but born innocent; innocent at the age of man, proud in the plenitude of his faculties, not the subject of any evil and fatal heritage. All at once, for the first time, of his own will, man disobeys God. Here lies Original Sin, the same in its nature as sin at the present day, for they both consist in disobedience to the law of God, but it is the first in date in the history of man's liberty, and the human source of that evil for which the Christian religion, whilst pointing it out, offers to man the remedy and the cure. IV. The Incarnation.