Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

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and dost thou teach us ?
Note VII.
"
which phrase and manner of
speaking being plainly a reproach of the poor blind man
and a disparagement of him, did mean only to call him a
very wicked person, not that he had derived his sin origin
ally and from his birth.
p. 27. But even were the text,
In sin hath my mother conceived me, only a phrase
to express the depth and strength of sin in the character
of the person using it, why should that depth and strength
of sin be expressed in that form ? Why does David, on
the first deep perception of his own guilt, and the hold
which sin has had over him, go back to his birth ? Is it
not because he cannot see how he can stop short of it ?
The more he considers the sinfulness of his character the
more rooted it seems, and the further it appears to go back,
till at last he cannot but say, that it is actually coeval with
his existence. The phrase, then, though it may not be a
dogmatic assertion of original sin, is an assertion of a
certain depth and radical position of sin in the human
soul ; upon which, when realised, the doctrine of original
sin naturally arises. Such phrases as this, and the others
in Scripture referred to by Taylor, show that there was
a truth felt respecting sin, which was expressed in this
form as the most appropriate one for it, and that whenever
men perceived the strength of the hold which sin had had
upon them, they went to the idea of its originality,
as an
idea nothing short of which would do justice to that truth
which they felt respecting sin, and which the fuller con
sciousness of their own sins had revealed to them.
So on the text, 6
By nature we were children of wrath,
Taylor remarks : True, we were so when we were dead in
sins, and before we were quickened by the Spirit of life
and grace. We ivere so ; now we are not. We were so
by our own unworthiness and filthy conversation ;
now we
being regenerated by the Spirit of holiness, we are heirs
unto Grod, and no longer heirs of wrath. This, therefore,
as appears by the discourse of S. Paul, relates not to our
original sin, but to the actual; and of this sense of the
word "
nature," in the matter of sinning, we have Justin
Martyr, or whoever is the author of the questions and