Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

Note XII. 367
aliquando Deus ut discas superbus non esse. Quidam
traduntur SatanaB ut discant non blasphernare. - -De Nat.
et Grat. n. 32. Pelagius ridicules the idea that peccatis
peccata curantur.
NOTE XII. p. 79.
ME. COLERIDGE, in his Aids to Reflection, p. 272, strongly
objects to the received doctrine of original sin, as involv
ing the injustice of punishing one man on account of the
sin of another ; in the place of which, he substitutes
(p. 278) a rationale of original sin,
in which he rests that
doctrine, upon the principle of cause and effect ; asserting
that all evil action implies an evil in the will as the cause
of it, which anterior evil, when pushed backward and back
ward indefinitely, becomes original evil in the will, or
original sin. Whatever resists and, as a positive power,
opposes this (the moral law) in the will, is evil. But an
evil in the will is an evil will ; and as all moral evil is of
the will, this evil will must have its source in the will.
And thus we might go back from act to act, from evil to
evil, ad infinitum, without advancing a step. This an
terior evil in the will, then, regarded as mysterious,
inde
pendent of time and intelligible succession, is, he argues,
original sin. Let the evil be supposed such as to imply
the impossibility
of an individual referring it to any par
ticular time at which it might be conceived to have com
menced, or to any period of his existence at which it was
Let it be supposed,
in short, that the subject
not existing.
stands in no relation whatever to time, can neither be
called in time or out of time, but that all relations to
time are as alien and in this
heterogeneous question
as the
relations and attributes of space (north
or south, round or
square, thick or thin)
are to our affections and moral feel
ings. Let the reader suppose this, and he will have before
him the precise import of the scriptural
doctrine of original
si YI
"it is evident that, according to this rationale, Adam
as first created had original sin, and had a corrupt nature
as truly as any of his For the first sinful act
posterity.