The theologian who finds no evidence of death prior to the offence shared by Adam and Eve is laughed to scorn by the geologist, who points to the innumerable petrifactions in the earth’s strata, which with a million tongues declare, more potently than loudest speech, that myriads of myriads of living things ceased their life-struggle incalculable ages before man’s era on our world. Science has so little to offer in support of any religious doctrine, and so much to advance against all purely theologic tenets, that we turn to a point giving the Christian greater vantage ground, and accepting for the moment his scriptures as our guide, we deny that he can maintain the possibility of Adam’s sin, and yet consistently affirm the existence of an all-wise, all-powerful, and all-good God. Did Adam sin? We take the Christian’s Bible in our hands to answer the question, first defining the word sin. What is sin? Samuel Taylor Coleridge says: “A sin is an evil which has its ground or origin in the agent, and not in the compulsion of circumstances. Circumstances are compulsory from the absence of a power to resist or control them, and if this absence be likewise the effect of circumstances (that is, if it have been neither directly nor indirectly caused by the agent himself) the evil derived from the circumstance, and therefore such evil is not sin, and the person who suffers it, or is the compelled actor or instrument of its infliction on others, may feel regret, but not remorse. Let us generalise the word circumstance so as to understand by it all and everything not connected with the will.... Even though it were the warm blood circulating in the chambers of the heart or man’s most inmost sensations, we regard them as circumstantial, extrinsic, or from without.... An act to be sin must be original, and a state or act that has not its origin in the will may be calamity, deformity, or disease, but sin it cannot be. It is not enough that the act appears so voluntary, or that it has the most hateful passions or debasing appetite for its proximate cause and accompaniment. All these may be found in a madhouse, where neither law nor humanity permit us to condemn the actor of sin. The reason of law declared the maniac not a free agent, and the verdict followed of course, _not guilty_.” Did Adam sin?