Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

CHAP. in. The Pelagian Controversy. 79
condition of man at his first creation as it ever was after
wards. 1
The other and the more common argument, is the
argument of probability,
that it is contrary to the doc
trine of chances, that every one of those innumerable
millions that have lived in the world should have been a
sinner, if such sin had depended on the mere contingency
of every individual s freewill ; such a universal fact evi
the existence of some law of sin in our
dently proving
nature. But the correctness of this argument for original
sin depends on the sense in which we understand sin in the
preliminary statement, that every one of the human race
has been, and is, a sinner.
If by sin is meant here the absence of perfection only
that every man that has ever lived has done something
wrong in the course of , his life, there appears to be nothing,
even in a universal faultiness of the human race, in such a
sense, more than may be accounted for on the principle of
each man s contingent will, or that requires the operation
of a law. For, considering the length of human life, the
constant succession of temptations in it, and their variety,
the multiplicity of relations in which a man stands to others,
all of which have to be fulfilled in order to constitute him
faultless, is there anything very remarkable in the coinci
dence that every man should, on some occasion or other in
his life, have diverged from the strict duty ? If, on the one
hand, it may be said, that out of so great a number of in
dividuals as there have been in the world some few perfect
men might have been calculated upon ; on the other hand,
it may be said that, with so Vast a number of trials, we
could not calculate any one s universal success under them.
The chances in favour of cases of perfection which the
number of individuals in the world presents, are met by
the chances against it, contained in the number of trials
in the life of each individual.
But if by sin we understand not only a loss of perfection,
1 Mr. Coleridge, in his Aids to his usual mixture of obscurity and
Keflection, adopts this rationale of power. See NOTE XII.
original sin, and discusses it with