The old scholastic ideas of “total hereditary depravity, and miraculous conversion,” with their correllates, have driven more minds into doubt and skepticism than most of men are apprised of. The reasons are evident. First. Common sense shrinks from them as ideas which are destructive of every principle of human responsibility. Second. They are opposed to the testimony of consciousness which asserts the soul’s freedom. Third. They are opposed to correct ideas of justice as it is administered in all governments, both human and divine. “And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us to know good and evil.” Our fathers, of Calvinistic type of faith, used to tell us that this language only asserted Adam’s experience of conscious guilt; that he knew good before he transgressed, and had experimental knowledge of evil after he transgressed. This was the best they could do and save their Calvinism, and even this would not have saved it in the days of investigation like ours. The Lord did not say, “The man is become as one of us knowing good and evil,” but “the man is become as one of us _to know_ good and evil.” The old view of the subject virtually says, The Lord had experimental knowledge of both good and evil, and that the way in which Adam became Godlike was the way of the transgressor. Then the greatest Godlikeness is the result of the greatest sinning. _What nonsense!_ The Bible says: “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.” The account also asserts that the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” was “a tree to be desired to make one wise.” Total depravity and its correllates could never have been found in this context. This history is not responsible for it, nor for the mischiefs it has produced. The Heavenly Father knew, when he created man, that he would fail upon trial. To have prevented this would have been nothing short of an interference with man’s freedom, and consequently his responsibility, without which he could not have been man. The Lord saw man in his alien state and in his return to holiness. He “made of one blood all nations of men to dwell upon all the face of the earth, and determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation, that they _should seek the Lord_.”—See Acts 17: 26. It was necessary that man should become as God _to know good and evil_ in order that he might be continued upon trial in a world of good and evil. To this end the Divine Ruler placed in the test fruit, the fruit of the tree that was forbidden, a mental lever to endow man with wisdom as God to know good and evil, without which the man’s responsibility in relation to good and evil could never have been.