The-papacy-its-history-dogmas-genius-and-prospects-wylie

282 OF ORIGINAL SIN.in Ill'scharacter of Mediator, by associating with Him in thataugust office so many of mortal origin ?For if man's naturebe not inferior in its condition to that in which God righteouslymight have made it, the work of mediating betweenGod and m.an is not so pre-eminently onerous and dignified.But, in the second place, if man is not fallen in the Scripturesense, neither does he need to be regenerated in theScripture sense. Our regeneration is likewise the necessarycounterpart of our fall. We have sustamed, say theRomish divines, no radical derangement or injury of natureby the Fall ;* we have been stript merely of those superaddedgifts which God bestowed; and all that we need, in orderto occupy the same vantage ground as before, is just the restorationof these lost accomplishments.Regeneration, then,in the Romish acceptation of the term, must mean a verydifferent thini; indeed from what it does anions Protestants.With us it is a change of nature so thorough, that we canfind no term to express it but that employed in the NewTestament,— " a new creation." We believe that man hasnot only been stript of his raiment,—touse the metaphorwhich Romish rhetoric has supplied;—he has been wounded,he has bled to death, and he needs to be made alive again.But no such regeneration can be necessary in the view ofthose who believe that man has suffered no internal injury,and that he has lost only what he might have wanted fromthe beginning without prejudice to the soundness of his constitution.Now, may not this help us to understand themarvellous efficacy, as it appears to us, which Romanistsascribe to the sacrament of baptism ? We believe them tohold that baptism can regenerate the man ; but we are misledby their abuse of the term haptismal regeneration. Theycannot hold this doctrine, for man needs no regeneration.Their error lies deeper than baptismal regeneration.It is* The following statement is decisive on this point :— " Attamen hsecipsa natura, ctiam post lapsmn, ob amissioncm liujus doni accidentalis,cujusinodi justitiam originalem esse diximus, nihil amisit de suis essentialibus."(PciTone's Prajlectiones Theologiccc, tom. i. \}. I3S6.)