173. Pelagianism.
Our modern latitudinarians will find it difficult to suppose, that any thing could have been said in the defence of pelagianism equally absurd with the facts and arguments which have been adduced in favour of original sin (taking sin as guilt; i.e. observes a socinian wit, the crime of being born): But in the comment of Rabbi Akibah on Ecclesiastes, xii, 1, we have a story of a mother, who must have been a most determined believer in the uninheritability of sin. For having a sickly and deformed child, and resolved that it should not be thought to have been punished for any fault of its parents or ancestors, and yet having nothing else to blame the child for, she seriously and earnestly accused it before the Judge of having kicked her unmercifully during her pregnancy!!
I am firmly persuaded, that no doctrine was ever widely diffused, among various nations through successive ages, and under different religions, (such as is the doctrine of original sin, and redemption, those fundamental articles of every known religion professing to be revealed) which is not founded either in the nature of things or in the necessities of our nature. In the language of the schools, it carries with it presumptive evidence, that it is either objectively or subjectively true. And the more strange and contradictory such a doctrine may appear to the understanding, or discursive faculty, the stronger is the presumption in its favour:for whatever satirists may say, and sciolists imagine, the human mind has no predilection for absurdity. I do not however mean, that such a doctrine shall be always the best possible representation of the truth, on which it is founded, for the same body casts strangely different shadows in different places and different degrees of light; but that it always does shadow out some such truth and derives its influence over our faith from our obscure perception of that truth. Yea, even where the person himself attributes his belief of it to the miracles, with which it was announced by the founder of his religion.