origin of evil, partly by their blasphemies against the Old Testament saints. With respect to the person of Christ, their heresy was like that of the Gnostics, or Docetae: worthy children of Simon Magus! They held that the Lord Jesus Christ had no proper humanity; the mere phantasm of a man having glided, as Luther here describes it, through the virgin’s womb, and afterwards expired on the cross.
‘Yet though my ideas were material,’ says Augustine, ‘I could not bear to think of God being flesh. That was too gross and low in my apprehensions. Your only begotten son appeared to me as the most lucid part of you, afforded for our salvation. I concluded that such a nature could not be born of the Virgin Mary without partaking of human flesh, which I thought must pollute it. Hence arose my fantastic ideas of Jesus, so destructive of all piety. Your spiritual children may smile at me with charitable sympathy, if they read these confessions of mine; such, however, were my views.’ —Milner in Augustine’s Confessions, Eccles. Hist. vol. ii. pp. 314-327.
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Æstuat et contendit. Æst., denoting violent heat in general, is especially applied to the boiling and swelling of the sea when it ebbs and flows, or rises in surges and waves. Contend. expresses the full stretch of every nerve and muscle in close conflict.
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Toto mundo totisque viribus. Mundus is properly ‘the stuff of the world’ — the materials of which it is constituted — and it is thus transferred to all kinds of furniture and provision, especially to ‘women’s dress and ornaments;’ ‘instrumentum ornatus muliebris.’ I would not be sure that Luther does not have some allusion to Madam Diatribe’s adornments here.
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Luther has not exactly hit the nail on the head here. He declares that God makes ‘wicked man;’ and that he so makes him, through the faultiness of the materials which he has to work with, being fitly compared to a carpenter who makes statues of rotten wood. Moreover, this faultiness of the materials arose from the sin of the first man, who was created having the Spirit — what he elsewhere calls ‘the firstfruits of the Spirit’ (Part iii. Sect. 18.), which he lost by his sin and fall, thereafter being deserted by God, and left to himself. I deem both these propositions objectionable and false. God neither makes sinners; nor did he withdraw the Spirit from Adam by reason of his sin, and so, through him, from the race which has sprung from him; for Adam never had the Spirit.
When God created man in his own image, he created every man. The substance of every individual man and woman which exists, has existed, and shall exist till the trumpet sounds and the dead are raised, was enclosed in the first man, Adam. No new matter of human kind has been brought into existence since that moment; no human being has been created, therefore, posterior to it. (See Locke’s Essay, book ii. chap. xxvi. sect. 2.)
Nor was this creation the mere production of a mass of human substance, like so much clay in the hands of a potter which was afterwards to be moulded into distinct vessels. Distinctness and individuality of subsistence was given to the several individuals of the human race in that instant. This appears from other considerations which might be stated, as well as from these eminently: 1. Man is spoken of, and spoken to, as plural. (“Let them have dominion.” “Male and female he created them” “God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply.” “And He called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.”) 2. God is declared to have created them male and female: a fact which the Lord Jesus refers to (Mat 19.4, 5; Mar 10.6), as indicative of his Father’s will concerning marriage. (It is clearly not the formation of Eve to which he refers, but that act of creation which distinctly preceded the making of the helpmate) 3. God is said to have chosen his people to be in Christ before the foundation of the world; which implies that the whole race was contemplated as personally and individually subsistent, in a state prior to the exercise of that choice.
Having thus given a distinct personal subsistence to every individual of the human race in Adam, when the Lord God added the procreative power, and gave command to exercise it, he did essentially make every individual: the substance about to come forth in the Lord’s time, into manifest existence and distinct personal agency, was already formed; the power and the authority which would be necessary to its production, were superadded. Then, if this was God’s ‘condidit’ (Luther’s term, ‘made,’ ‘formed,’ ‘built’), has He made wicked man? Is that saying of the Preacher hereby, and hereby only, not shown to be true, “God has made man upright?” (Ecc 7.29) The only consideration which can have any show of involving God in the propagation of the wicked, is that he did not at once destroy the offender and those who had offended in him. But, without suggesting counsel and design here (we are dealing with facts), the living substances were formed; the power and the authority for production had been given; a curse was upon them, which they must be brought out into manifest existence so that they might be seen and known to bear. — I can only remark that these, or some such reasons, which arise out of the reality of their previous distinct subsistence, seem absolutely necessary to the vindication of God from the charge of propagating sin. — If it is asked, then, but how could those who had no eye to see, no ear to hear, no hand to put forth, commit an act of disobedience? The answer is, Adam was the sole personal agent (“By one man sin entered into the world;” “by one man’s offence, death reigned by one;” “by the offence of one judgment condemnation came upon all men to “); but every individual of the race was enclosed in, and was part of his substance, so that he could not do anything in which any one of them was not one with him.
My head offends; but where is my hand and my foot, in the transgression and in its punishment? — This is the Scripture view of the fall — ‘one personal agent, but every human being partaker with him in the offence’ — is decisively shown from Rom 5.12. Whether ef w is rendered in whom (“through him in whom all sinned” — which I greatly prefer), or for that: the words which follow make it plain that all men are dealt with or rather, all men, from Adam to Moses, were dealt with on the ground of the first transgression. I have no other clue to my own character; I have no other clue to my own state. Nor can I othenvise explain what is thus made clear in the spirit and behaviour of other men. And does not the church of England recognise this account of the matter in her baptismal service, when she prays that the infant may receive remission of his sins by spiritual regeneration; and afterwards instructs the priest to speak to the god-fathers and god-mothers in this way: you have prayed that our Lord Jesus Christ would grant to release him from his sins. What sins? — This is the reality of ‘original sin’ from which flowed ‘original guilt,’ from which flowed ‘depravation of nature,’ so commonly mistaken for it. This alone constitutes every son and daughter of fallen Adam a fallen creature; not merely a child of the fallen, but themselves, individually and personally, fallen from their own original uprightness, in him. — I hinted that this is not the place to speak of the counsel and design with which all of this was done. But it is obvious that hereby a way was made for that further and more complete developmcnt of God (by the assumption of new relations), which could not be made by simple creation, but to which creation was the stepping-stone. (See Part iii. Sect. 28. notes l and v .)
Luther is again mistaken (see Part iii. Sect. 18. note t ) about the creation state of man; speaking as though the possession of the Spirit were a part of his endowments. — ‘Desertus a Deo ac sibi relictus… naturam peccato, subtracto spiritu, vitiatam.’ — The Lord God having formed his animal structure out of the dust of the ground— a compound mass — breathed into his nostrils breath of “lifes” and man became a living soul. This continuity of soul and body — simple soul, and compounded body — soul, which was an image of Him that is a Spirit; and body, in which he resembled and was partaker with the brutes — constituted his essential nature; the solution of which continuity constitutes death. So constituted, he had capacities with which to learn, and sources of instruction from which to derive much knowledge of God. The Lord God conversed with him face to face, and he dwelt among the teaching creatures of His hand; even as he was himself the most teaching of all creatures.
But where is the Spirit, meaning the Holy Ghost? Had Adam possessed this, had the Spirit dwelt and walked in Him — that is, been continually present with Him, acting in Him and by Him — he would have possessed union with God: a privilege which was not essential to his condition and relation as the moral creature of God, but