n a will. An evil common to
all must have a ground common to all. Now, this evil ground cannot
originate in the Divine will; it must, therefore, be referred to the
will of man. And this evil ground we call original sin. It is a
mystery--that is, a fact which we see, but cannot explain; and the
doctrine a truth which we apprehend, but can neither comprehend nor
communicate.

The article on original sin is binding on the Christian only as showing
the antecedent ground and occasion of Christianity, which is the edifice
raised on this ground. The two great moments of the Christian religion
are, original sin and redemption; _that_ the ground, _this_ the
superstructure of our faith. Christianity and redemption are equivalent
terms.

The agent and personal cause of the redemption of mankind is--the
co-eternal word and only begotten Son of the living God. The causation
act is--a spiritual and transcendent mystery, "that passeth all
understanding." The effect caused is--the being born anew, as before in
the flesh to the world, so now born in the spirit to Christ.

Now, albeit the causative act is a transcendent mystery, the fact, or
actual truth, of it having been assured to us by revelation, it is not
impossible, by steadfast meditation on the idea and supernatural
character of a personal will, for a mind spiritually disciplined to
satisfy itself that the redemptive act supposes an agent who can at once
act on the will as an exciting cause, and in the will, as the condition
of its potential, and the ground of its actual, being.

The frequent, not to say ordinary, disproportion between moral worth and
worldly prosperity has at all times led the observant and reflecting few
to a nicer consideration of the current belief, whether instinctive or
traditional. By forcing the soul in upon herself, this enigma of saint
and sage, from Job, David, and Solomon to Claudian and Boetius, this
perplexing disparity of success and desert, has been the occasion of a
steadier and more distinct consciousness of a something in man,
different in kind, which distinguishes and contra-distinguishes him from
animals--at the same time that it has brought into closer view an enigma
of yet harder solution--the fact, I mean, of a contradiction in the
human being, of which no traces are observable elsewhere, in animated or
inanimate nature.

A struggle of jarring impulses; a mysterious division between the
injunctions of the mind and the elections of t