ORIGINAL SIN. According to this theological tenet, when stated in its extremest form, men conic into the world with the reason and will utterly corrupt. This corrup tion originated in the fall of Adam, and has been inherited equally by all his posterity, so that the natural man is not only incapable of knowing and loving God and goodness, but is inclined to contemn God and pursue evil; on which account the auger of God has subjected him to temporal death, and destined him to everlasting punishment in hell. The doctrine is founded on the account of the fall given in Genesis, and on sonic pas sages in Paul's epistle to the Galatians, and in that to the Romans; which passages, however, are held by others to contain no such doctrine; and indeed nearly every point in the history of the doctrine is the subject of as much controversy as the details of the doctrine itself. The early church, it is maintained by one school, was unacquainted with it; and the most orthodox admit that the doctrine had not at that time been fully developed. The Christian fathers; Justin Martyr, Clemens Alexaridrinus, Irenmus, and others, ascribe to the natural man a certain ability to know God and choose the good, they are said to reject diAtinctly all propagation of sin and guilt, and even to refer human mortality not to Adam's sin, but solely to the constitution of the body. Origen, on the other hand, in opposition to the Gnostics and .Manieliees, who grounded the sin fulness of men on the connection of the soul with a material body, asserted that the sinfulness was in existence at birth, but ascribed the development of actual sins and their consequences not to propagation, but to the moral operation of precept and example. He accordingly found the cause of sin to be in the freedom of the will, the abuse of 'which he explained partly by the operation of evil powers, partly by the predominance of the sensuous part of man's nature over the rational mind. The orthodox teachers of the Greek church, again, held that Adam, by the fall, rendered himself and all his posterity mortal, but, according to the less rigid schools, they looked for the origin of sin in the freedom of the will acted upon by the flesh, a'nd by demoniacal influences, and ascribed to man the power of resisting every evil if he chose. These views, it is
alleged, continued to be held, in substance, by the Christian teachers in the east, and were fully developed by Chrysostom; but Catholic writers maintain that in all this Chrysostom and the other Greek fathers are speaking not of the natural powers of the will, but of the will as assisted by divine grace.
The doctrine took another shape in the Latin church. Tertullian, following up his dogma of Traducianism, according to which the child derives not only its body but its soul from its parents, maintained that sinfulness had been propagated, along with mor tality, from Adam to all mankind; he thus defended an originis ritiurn, without con ceiving it as actual sin and denying all capacity for good in man. This view was fol lowed by Cyprian, Ambrose, and even by Augustine in his earlier writings. It was only during his controversy with Pelagius and Cwlestius that Augustine came to develop the doctrine of original sin into the full form given above. His great influence in the western churches procured the condemnation of his opponents, the Pelagians (q.v.), as heretics at the councils of Carthage (412, 416, 418), although the councils of Jerusalem and Diospolis (415) decided in their favor. Building upon the foundation of Traducian ism, Augustine laid down that every natural man is in the power of the devil, and upheld the justice of this as a punishment for the share which the individual had in Adam's transgression; for as all men existed in the loins of Adam, all sinned with him. Pelagius, on the other hand, who rejected the Traducian theory, denied that sin is pro pagated physically, or that the fall of Adam has exercised any prejudicial influence on the moral constitution of the posterity; and maintained that all men are born in a state of innocence, possess the power of free-will, and may therefore live without sin. He and his followers objected to Augustine, that his doctrine was in direct contradiction to clear passages of Scripture, and that it made God the originator of evil and an unright eous judge.