Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

T 24 Different Interpretations
CHAP. IT.
doctrine, upon the sin of Adam. But the corruption of
human nature can only be adequately defined as the loss
of freewill or necessary sinfulness and sin deserves eternal
;
punishment, and deserving it will, according to the Divine
justice, infallibly obtain it, unless it is forgiven. The con
signment, therefore, of heathens and unbaptized infants to
the punishment of hell, extreme result as it was, was but
the result of the true doctrine ; because, in the absence of
the only authorised sign of Divine forgiveness, these lay
under the full guilt of a sin which deserved such punish
ment. There was no authority, indeed, for the positive
assertion of the fact of such punishment ; for the fact im
plies that no forgiveness by any other means has been
obtained, and nobody can know whether Grod may not
choose to employ other means to this end besides those of
which He has informed us ; and if an exception to the
necessity of baptism is allowed in certain cases, it can not
be arbitrarily limited ; nor does the doctrine of original sin
itself at all restrict the means by which its guilt may be
removed. In asserting the fact, then, Augustine plainly
exceeded the premiss which the true doctrine supplied; but,
so far as he left all, who lay under the guilt of original sin,
under desert of eternal punishment, he no more than drew
out the true
scriptural and Catholic doctrine. But, while
he interpreted the revealed doctrine on the whole legiti
mately and faithfully, he failed in not seeing or not allow
ing a place to the counter-truth of natural reason. As
Scripture declares the nature of every man to be corrupt
in consequence of Adam s sin, and from that corruption
sinfulness necessarily follows, and from that sinfulness
desert of eternal punishment, so Scripture and reason
alike declare, that one man is not responsible for another
man s sins ; and from that position it follows that the pos
terity of Adam are not as such sinful ; and from that, that
they do not as such deserve eternal punishment. It was
wrong, then, to draw out a string of consequences from the
doctrine of original sin, and state them as absolute truths,
when they were contradicted at every step by a set of
parallel consequences from another truth, which was equally