The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

He speaks of no such direct command. Eve was not co-ordinate with
Adam, but represented in him. She sinned, personally, in her own
personal act, but, in the full sense, she fell only when Adam fell.
Adam's body was first formed--the entrance of the breath of God
made man, body and soul. Eve was taken from Adam, but this was no
new inbreathing from God. She was the emanation, so to speak, of the
whole man--the effluence of his body and soul, and the life of the whole
race is that one united life. Eve is called the mother of all living; but Adam
is the source of all living, including Eve. There is then but one human life
in the world--perpetuated and extended through the generations--the
emanation of the first life--that of Adam. Hence the race has not fallen in
Eve as well as in Adam--because her life also was derivative. The one
primal life derived from Adam brings with it the impress of Adam's fallen
nature. Our nature is his very nature in emanation, as our life of body and
soul is his life in emanation--and as the very life and nature are transmitted,
so are the Fall and its penalty transmitted. Adam's life and nature is the
sine qua non of our life and nature--Adam's sin the sine qua non of our
sin.
IV. The Confession teaches that the persons affected by original sin
are all human beings born in the course of nature.
This implies that, without exception, all the children of our race, alike
all the children of the most holy and of the most godless, have original sin.
The character of the parent may, within a certain limit, benefit or injure the
innate tendencies to character in the child; but character is not nature. All
human beings have the same nature. In this nature original sin inheres, and
all alike inherit it. With reference to this inherited character, it is sometimes
called hereditary sin. In German its usual title is "Erbsünde."
In the doctrine that all men (omnes homines), born in the course of
nature, have this sin, is implied the falseness of the Romish figment, in
regard to the sinlessness of the mother of our Lord. It rejects the idea of the
immaculate conception of Mary, which has been established in our own
time as a