I ought to add, in view of the apparently improbable event of the doctrine of Weismann becoming in its absolute form the accepted doctrine of biologists, that of course it only concerns the material organism. No one who is not a materialist would deny the _possibility_ of the character of the parent modifying at its very root that of the child, without even the smallest conceivable modification of the physical organism; because in the origination of a spiritual personality, and in the link which binds it to the antecedent personalities to which it owes its being, there is that which lies outside the purview of biological science. There _may_ be an inheritance of sinful tendencies derived from sinful acts in the region of the spiritual personality, even if no physical transmission is possible. However it be explained, it appears to be the case that Christianity is bound to maintain the position that in the region of moral character there is, in fact, a solidarity in humanity. We are bound together. Our acts, as they form our own character, do somehow or other, however slightly, modify the characters of our descendants for good or evil. And this modification of the tendencies of the race by the acts of individuals may have been more marked at the beginning than it is to-day. On the other hand Christianity is not in any way interested in denying that man derives a physical heritage of habits and tendencies from a pre-human ancestry. All I imagine that Christianity is interested in affirming is this--that when the animal organism became the dwelling-place of the human spirit (so to speak) that human spirit might have taken one of two courses. It {228} might have followed the path of the divine will; and in that case human development would have represented a steady and gradual spiritualizing of the animal nature reaching on towards perfection. It might have taken, on the other hand, and did in fact take (more or less), the line of wilful disobedience. And the moral effects of this wilfulness and disobedience from the beginning onwards have been felt from parent to son. So that the springs of human conduct have been weakened and perverted, and no man has started without some bias in the wrong direction which would not have been there if his ancestors for many generations had been true to God. It is worth noticing in passing that 'original sin' is not a fixed quantity derived from one lapse of the original man, but is a moral weakness continually reinforced by every actual transgression, and, on the other hand, reduced in force by moral resistance and self-control. Individuals start at very different levels of depravity. Only it would appear that practically in no man but One is there any reason to believe the fundamental nature immaculate.