The New Gospel

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The more enjoyment man [Adam] found in God, the greater was his wickedness in abandoning Him; and he who destroyed in himself a good which might have been eternal, became worthy of eternal evil.&nbsp; Hence the whole mass of the human race is condemned; for he who at first gave entrance to sin has been punished with all his posterity who were in him as a root, so that no one is exempt from this just and due punishment, unless delivered by mercy and undeserved grace [of God] … But many more are left under punishment than are delivered from it, in order that it may thus be shown what was due to all.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">If Christ had not been put to death, death would not have died.&nbsp; The devil was conquered by his own trophy of victory.&nbsp; The devil jumped for joy, when he seduced the first man, and cast him down to death.&nbsp; By seducing the first man, he killed him; by killing the last man [Jesus], he lost the first from his snare.&nbsp; … By the very death of Christ the devil was overcome: he took, as it were, the bait [Jesus] in the mousetrap [the cross].</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">If any one asserts that the disobedience of Adam injured only himself and not his offspring … or that … only death and the pains of the body were transferred to the whole human race, and not the sin also, which is the death of the soul, let him be an anathema … If any one asserts that the sin of Adam — which in origin is one and which has been transmitted to all mankind by propagation, not through imitation, and is in every man and belongs to him — can be removed either by man’s natural powers or by any other remedy than the merit of the one mediator our Lord Jesus Christ [let him be an anathema].&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Born with a fallen nature and tainted by original [inherited] sin, children also have need of the new birth of Baptism to be freed from the power of darkness and brought into the realm of the freedom of the children of God, to which all men are called.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Since infant children have no other means of salvation except Baptism, we may easily understand how grievously those persons sin who permit them to remain without the grace of the Sacrament longer than necessity may require, particularly at an age so tender as to be exposed to numberless dangers of death.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Children who die without baptism go into limbo, where they do not enjoy god but do not suffer, because having Original Sin, and only that, they do not deserve paradise, but neither hell or purgatory.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe, with loss of Eden, till one greater man restore us, and regain the blissful seat, sing heav’nly muse …&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">That space the Evil One abstracted stood from his own evil, and for the time remaind stupidly good, of enmitie disarm’d, of guile, of hate, of envie, of revenge; but the hot Hell that always in him burnes, though in mid Heav’n, soon ended his delight, and tortures him now more, the more he sees of pleasure not for him ordain’d: then soon fierce hate, he recollects, and all his thoughts of mischief, gratulating, this excites.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">He ended, and his words replete with guile into her heart too easie entrance won:&nbsp; fixt on the Fruit she gaz’d, which to behold might tempt alone, and in her ears the sound yet rung of his perwasive words, impregn’d with reason, to her seeming, and with truth ... her rash hand in evil hour forth reaching to the Fruit, she pluck’d, she eat: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat sighing through all her works gave signs of woe, that all was lost.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">She gave him of that fair enticing Fruit with liberal hand: he scrupl’d not to eat against his better knowledge, not deceav’d, but fondly overcome with Femal charm.&nbsp; Earth trembl’d from her entrails, as again in pangs, and Nature gave a second groan.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">They looking back, all th’ Eastern side beheld of Paradise, so late thir happy seat, wav’d over by that flaming brand, the gate with dreadful faces throng’d and fierie Armes: som natural tears they drop’d, but wiped them soon; the world was all before them, where to choose thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide; they hand in hand with wandring steps and slow, through Eden took their solitarie way.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of god.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The basis of your religion is injustice.&nbsp; The Son of God, the pure, the immaculate, the innocent, is sacrificed for the guilty.&nbsp; This proves his heroism, but no more does away with man’s sin than a school boy’s volunteering to be flogged for another would exculpate a dunce from negligence.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality.&nbsp; If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral.&nbsp; To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality.&nbsp; To hold a man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature.&nbsp; To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice.&nbsp; To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason.&nbsp; To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched.&nbsp; Yet that is the root of your code.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means and end.&nbsp; Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice.&nbsp; It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof.&nbsp; It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good; the good is that which he is not … his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts … The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The Christian doctrine of sin in its classical form offends both rationalists and moralists by maintaining the seemingly absurd position that man sins inevitably and by a fateful necessity but that he is nevertheless to be held responsible for actions which are prompted by an ineluctable fate. &nbsp;</em></p>