We are in our generation rightly anxious if we are asked to accept any professedly historical statement for which we feel the evidence is doubtful. We know that from the point of view of history the origin of our human species is lost in dense obscurity and uncertainty. And it relieves many consciences to realize that, if St. Paul states his argument in a form which implies the historical character of the narrative in Genesis iii, all that is necessary for his argument is to assume (1) that the human race is organically one, and can be dealt with as one; (2) that sin is universal in our race; (3) that at least the sting or curse or bondage of death is due to sin. If we realize that this is all that {196} need be allowed in order to give us full fellowship in St. Paul's religious teaching, we shall be able to investigate the further truth of his teaching, from a scientific and historical point of view, with a free mind. And the three propositions stated above are not reasonably open to doubt, (1) That our race is one species, and derived from one source, is the conclusion of the modern ethnologist as much as of St. Paul[17]. The general theory of evolution has effectively counteracted the previous tendency to postulate the existence of various independent races of men. (2) There are many professors of psychology who deny the existence of moral freedom and consequently of sin in St. Paul's sense at all. As I have already pointed out, this is the real battle-ground between theology and science. But granted the reality of moral freedom and of {197} sin, i.e. of something which need not and ought not to have been committed, it is impossible to deny that, below the innumerable sins of which human history is full, there exists deep in our nature an 'ineradicable taint'--a morbid tendency to do wrong--a bias or propensity to evil--which is the heritage of our race; which indeed men may become unconscious of by acquiescing in sin, but of which they become painfully conscious again as soon as they are awakened to a moral ideal. The late Dr. Mozley collected a remarkable series of passages from what he calls 'worldly philosophers and poets'--notably Byron and Shelley--testifying to the belief in universal sin[18]. This of course we may say is only the inheritance of animal tendencies from an animal ancestry; but if so, it is exactly what our higher spiritual nature might and ought to have subdued long ago and brought into subjection. Its presence with us and in us now is the result of sins innumerable--innumerable wilful preferences of the lower to the higher nature, which have let it loose and given it force. It is, in the strictest sense, the inheritance of sin in the race.