428 The Unitarian Movement [April,
do or say anything that is not kind and benevolent, still we find it quite beyond our power to keep ourselves wholly from feelings, which, unresisted, would lead us to be un- kind and selfish. There will still be a fountain of evil within us; and, although we may possibly dam the current that flows from it, so that nothing wrong shall appear in our conduct, we can never'remove the fountain itself. But this must be done; else our wills must run counter to the will of God, and we cannot be at one with Him.”
Such is the Trinitarian view of evil. It is' not our ob- ject here to prove it either true or false. We only seek to know what it is, that so we may have the point from which they take their departure,—the stand-point from which their system may be fairly seen and rightly un- derstood. The fact, that there is this current setting to- wards evil in the human heart,——that every one is born into the world with a fountain of sin and corruption welling up in his soul, and to all appearance forming a part of it, is all that is necessary to the Trinitarian scheme. Other questions arise, and will be differently answered by differ- ent persons. But the discussion of these questions belongs to another place. The spiritual philosophy, by removing the enclosures that sunder soul from soul, and make a com- mon humanity impossible, removes the difficulty lying in the way of the doctrine, that this common humanity, which is the basis and substratum of all individual souls, might have been not only represented by, but actually and substantial- ly, embodied in Adam; and that as our bodies were formed from his, and partook of the diseases that were in it, so also our souls are formed of the essence of his. On this supposition, the corruption he introduced into his soul by transgression was introduced into all humanity, and in so far as each of us partakes of humanity we partake of this corruption. Divisions and enclosures which make many of one belong to matter. Spirit knows them not. Hence there is no presumption against the Adamic theory of the origin of sin. But the universal prevalence of sinful prac- tices among the children of men seems to indicate a cause coextensive with the effect. A cause that resides in all men must reside in that which is common to them all. This is what we call humanity or human nature. It cannot reside in the freewill, for in that case its manifes-
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