Читать книгу An Appeal to the People in Behalf of Their Rights as Authorized Interpreters of the Bible - Catharine Esther Beecher - Страница 17

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The next way in which man is made to be the author of his own nature is called the constitutional transmission mode. It is as follows:

God made Adam with a perfectly holy mind, and then Adam sinned and ruined his own nature. In consequence of this act, God established such a constitution of things that Adam transmitted his depraved nature to all his posterity, just as bodily diseases are transmitted from parents to children.

In this way man is said to be the author of his own depraved nature, meaning, by man, Adam.

In this case it is conceded that God had power to make such a constitution of things as that all human minds would begin existence, as Adam did, with perfectly holy minds, and that instead of this, he chose that such a depraved nature should be transmitted to all as would insure universal sin. And yet it is claimed that by this mode, man, and not God, is shown to be “the author of sin.”

This is the mode adopted by most of the Andover and New Haven theologians.

Dr. Edward Beecher, in his work “The Conflict of Ages,” advocates the idea that man ruined his own nature in a preëxistent state before Adam. But the evidence of this has not yet been presented.

Thus all who do not take the Catholic mode of mystery and sovereignty maintain that man made his own depravity of nature, either in or by or before Adam.