bound together.
Our acts, as they form our own character, do somehow or other, however
slightly, modify the characters of our descendants for good or evil.
And this modification of the tendencies of the race by the acts of
individuals may have been more marked at the beginning than it is
to-day.

On the other hand Christianity is not in any way interested in denying
that man derives a physical heritage of habits and tendencies from a
pre-human ancestry. All I imagine that Christianity is interested in
affirming is this--that when the animal organism became the
dwelling-place of the human spirit (so to speak) that human spirit
might have taken one of two courses. It {228} might have followed the
path of the divine will; and in that case human development would have
represented a steady and gradual spiritualizing of the animal nature
reaching on towards perfection. It might have taken, on the other
hand, and did in fact take (more or less), the line of wilful
disobedience. And the moral effects of this wilfulness and
disobedience from the beginning onwards have been felt from parent to
son. So that the springs of human conduct have been weakened and
perverted, and no man has started without some bias in the wrong
direction which would not have been there if his ancestors for many
generations had been true to God.

It is worth noticing in passing that 'original sin' is not a fixed
quantity derived from one lapse of the original man, but is a moral
weakness continually reinforced by every actual transgression, and, on
the other hand, reduced in force by moral resistance and self-control.
Individuals start at very different levels of depravity. Only it would
appear that practically in no man but One is there any reason to
believe the fundamental nature immaculate.

IV.--But it will be said 'You have not yet touched upon a big central
contradiction between religion and science. According to the Christian
doctrine mankind is derived from a single specifically human pair, made
human by a special inspiration of the Divine Spirit. According to the
theory of evolution, a certain species of apes under specially
favourable conditions gradually advanced to become what might be called
man, though of a very low type.' To this I am inclined to make reply
thus: Christianity is really bound up with maintaining four
positions--(1) the reality of moral freedom; (2) the fact of sin,
properly so called as distinct from imperfecti