part I

cannot but confess that _to be_, which I feel and groan under, and by which all the world is miserable.

Adam turned his back on the sun, and dwelt in the dark and the shadow. He sinned, and brought evil into his _supernatural_ endowments, and lost the Sacrament and Instrument of Immortality, the Tree of Life in the centre of the garden.[108] He then fell under the evils of a sickly body, and a passionate and ignorant soul. His sin made him sickly, his sickness made him peevish: his sin left him ignorant, his ignorance made him foolish and unreasonable. His sin left him to his _nature_: and by nature, whoever was to be born at all, was to be born a child, and to do before he could understand, and to be bred under laws to which he was always bound, but which could not always be exacted; and he was to choose when he could not reason, and had passions most strong when he had his understanding most weak; and the more need he had of a curb, the less strength he had to use it! And this being the case of all the world, what was _every_ man's evil became _all_ men's greater evil; and though alone it was very bad, yet when they came together it was made much worse. Like ships in a storm, every one alone hath enough to do to outride it; but when they meet, besides the evils of the storm, they find the intolerable calamity of their mutual concussion; and every ship that is ready to be oppressed with the tempest, is a worse tempest to every vessel against which it is violently dashed. So it is in mankind. Every man hath evil enough of his own, and it is hard for a man to live up to the rule of his own reason and conscience. But when he hath parents and children, friends and enemies, buyers and sellers, lawyers and clients, a family and a neighbourhood--then it is that every man dashes against another, and one relation requires what another denies; and when one speaks another will contradict him; and that which is well spoken is sometimes innocently mistaken; and that upon a good cause produces an evil effect; and by these, and ten thousand other concurrent causes, man is made more than most miserable.[109]

COMMENT.

The first question we should put to ourselves, when we have to read a passage that perplexes us in a work of authority, is; What does the writer _mean_ by all this? And the second question should be, What does he intend by all this? In the passage before us, Taylor's _meaning_ is not quite clear. A sin is an evil which has its ground or origin in the agent, and not in the compulsion of circumstances. Circumstances are compulsory from the absence of a power to resist or control them: and if this absence likewise be the effect of Circumstance (that is, if it have been neither directly nor indirectly caused by the agent himself) the evil _derives_ from the circumstances; and therefore (in the Apostle's sense of the word, sin, when he speaks of the exceeding sinfulness of sin) such _evil_ is not _sin_; and the person who suffers it, or who is the compelled instrument of its infliction on others, may feel _regret_, but cannot feel _remorse_. So likewise of the word origin, original, or originant. The re