labored proof-that "an ethical fact is such only in virtue of one's own self-determination; and therefore it is not so much an occurrence as it is an action." I am aware that many will draw back from such a proposition, because of the conclusions to which it leads. Its maintenance compels serious changes in the systems of Augustine and Calvin. It will be labeled as Pelagianism in ethical theory, and we have not outgrown the dread of being classed with the ancient heretic. But at heart both Augustine and Calvin are in agreement with Rothe. They, too, teach that sin is always voluntary; that sin and guilt are rooted in an act of personal freedom. The Augustinian logic, however, is realistic. It regards the human race as a moral unit, Adam being its natural head, representative, and root, while the later Calvinistic theology substitutes the idea of a covenant for that of natural headship. This leads to the claim that every man was not only involved in the Adamic apostasy, but took part in it and was guilty of it-not personally and consciously, but substantially and implicitly. Moral responsibility and freedom are regarded as co-ordinate and inseparable; the debate turns on the question where free-will takes the tremendous initiative by which guilt is contracted. In the Augustinian system no grades or degrees of responsibility can be admitted. The full guilt of the original apostasy rests upon every soul. The new-born babe is crushed by it. The will has sold itself into absolute moral bondage. Ignorance, faulty training, the force of evil surroundings, cannot in the least mitigate the awful doom. It is inevitable, and yet self-induced.

Here, then, we have the extremes on the question of the relation between environment and character. The Augustinian theology gives to the generic human will in Adam the moral initiative. By that character was determined for all individual souls. The generic apostasy has created the bad environment. It has degraded the home, and gives the reins to the most furious passions. Man has created his own surroundings, and he cannot plead them in excuse for his offenses. No allowances can be made for the most ill-favored, neglected, and degraded individu. als and races. The Spencerian ethics, on the other hand, makes character the product of environment, and so shifts the ground and measure of responsibility from the individual to society, and to the framework of existence in which society is imbedded.

A disciple of Hegel would be inclined to regard these contradictory positions as the thesis and the antithesis, each emphasizing a partial or isolated fact, while the solution of the problem is to be found, not in a compromise, but in a living synthesis of the two, in the formulating of a doctrine that shall give due weight alike to free-will and to environment. In my calmest moments I am neither with Pelagius nor with Augustine; and Paul appears to me above them both. I cannot believe any one to be born sinless; nor can I think of the infant as weighted with the full guilt of the Adamic apostasy. The evidences of the moral unity of the race are many and startling; yet the evidences are no less patent that such unity does not eliminate a present and living freedom of the will in the individual. Every soul is a moral unit, and only in its personal action is the beginning and scope of moral character; but each soul is set in an environment which it has not produced, and for which I do not see how it can be held accountable, any more than it can be blamed for being of Mongolian or Caucasian blood. I am not writing a book; I am not attempting a solution; I am only thinking aloud, and uttering thoughts that cannot be strange to my readers. I have the feeling that the methods both of John Calvin and of Herbert Spencer are too rude and sweeping, and that the problem of human responsibility requires finer discriminations than any with which we are yet familiar. It is quite probable that the solution is beyond the power of created thought, and that an impartial Judge must needs be omniscient, supplied with an infinitely exact as well as comprehensive and exhaustive knowledge. When I remember, however, that Charles Hodge, the ablest representative of Calvinism in modern times, unhesitatingly pronounces in favor of the salvation of all who die in infancy, I feel that the admission cuts the roots of the claim that there are no degrees of guilt. Plainly the new-born child is not a sinner in the same sense as is the hoary and confirmed criminal. This concession brings great relief, but the old Augustinian logic has not been adjusted to it. The theory has been left to stand, with this tremendous exception of infant salvation tacked on as an appendage. Nor can the modification stop here. Why is inherited depravity supposed to be covered by universal forgiveness and redemption? Because it is impersonal to

the individual subject, and the moment of personal choice is regarded as the turning-point in the soul's moral life. How early that may occur we cannot tell; the time seems to vary, and it probably takes place long before our attention has been arrested by the change; but in that first conscious personal choice the soul has entered upon its moral probation. Thus even the strictest orthodoxy draws a distinction between inherited and personal guilt. I do not see how the logic can stop here. The concession involves other important modifications in the doctrine of moral responsibility. The first conscious ethical choice does not introduce an absolutely new history. The influences of hereditary bias continue to operate in every subsequent choice, and the elimination of the inherited element must be carried through to the very end. Besides, inheritance is only the first, even if the most potent, antecedent of moral action. The conditions into which men are born, the associations into which they are thrown in their earliest years, the occupations into which they drift by force of circumstance, the social and political atmosphere of the time, are as independent of their personal volition as are their inherited peculiaritiés. Heredity and environment belong to the same category of antecedent and impersonal conditions under which men are summoned to make their moral election. They are all potent, but they are not omnipotent. They are woven into all character, but they do not exercise a fatalistic power upon any soul. One cannot plead his weakness as an excuse so long as he voluntarily surrenders to the temptation. He is bound to fight, and the best man is he who makes the best fight, whose resistance to evil is most intense and habitual, however numerous and sad his failures and defeats may be.

It has not escaped the students of history that character assumes varied forms, determined by race temperament, occupation, and forms of political life. There are some races whose besetting sin is licentiousness, and these are mainly located in countries where the necessity of exertion is not great, and where general leisure and a mild climate excite the animal passions. There are others whose frailty is the vice of drunkenness, and these are found to inhabit more rigorous climates, compelled to more exhausting and incessant toil, by which, and the attendant poverty of large classes, the craving for artificial

stimulants is greatly increased. The commercial nations develop a type of character in which veracity holds the first place; in which it is made a maxim that a man's word shall be as good as his bond. Martial states are conspicuous for selfcontrol, simplicity, endurance, and fearlessness. The mountains and the sea have always been the retreats and chosen sanctuaries of brave and liberty-loving communities; and despotism has always intrenched itself in the great and open valleys. The English Channel and the surrounding sea are more useful to the British Empire than a standing army of a million men. The Atlantic and Pacific oceans have been among the mightiest factors of our national development. But it is acknowledged that Buckle's generalization was too sweeping when he tried to make the material environment account for every thing. The personal factor refuses to melt away in this crucible. History, after all, is made, not by inanimate things, but by living men and women. And this, again, conducts us to the conclusion that there is in man a creative force by which he seizes upon his environment and makes it subservient to his own ends.

Here I must leave the subject, inadequate and unsatisfactory as the treatment may appear. Man continues to be the greatest of all riddles. Necessity and freedom, law and choice, time and eternity, meet in him. In that unfolding fabric which we call character there are many threads held in the loom of environment, but the weaver stands behind them all, and the divine pattern is given to every soul in its primitive intuitions of right and wrong. The threads may be coarse or fine, but the weaver may do good work with the rudest, and he may mar the best. Virtue may be difficult in certain circumstances, but it is never impossible; it may be easy in a different environment, but it never can become inevitable. We are bound to do what we can to make the environment as favorable as possible; to secure to every man a fair share in the product of his toil; to check the overcrowding of the poor in tenements; to limit the ravages of intemperance by judicious and effective legislation; to promote universal intelligence; but we are never to forget that the citadel of moral power and the guarantee of permanent improvement are in the human will, whose consent and active co-operation are essential to any hopeful

progress. A nation of righteous men and women will not long live in mud huts; and a community housed in palaces, built for them by other hands, will not be long in squandering their inheritance if they choose the way of wrong-doing. The parable of the prodigal son points a double lesson. It shows how the most favorable environment may be set at naught, and how the deepest degradation may be the cradle of a godly repentance.

AJD. Behrends

INDIVIDUALITY.

We consider, first, the man marked out from the masses of nature by the formation of character; second, the man marked out from the masses of men by the formation of his own character. The first is the question of a man; the second is a question of the man. The first is a product which concerns us chiefly in the capacity for and process of its production; the second is a product which invites us to scrutiny of its distinct and peculiar content.

In the more general sense that is "the concrete entity with which moral science deals," and the questions of that science are about its "elements, its nature, the influences which make or mar it, its perfection and its destiny."* In that sense all history is and is useful because it is-a museum of character. This is the supreme thing in Christian doctrine and precept. It is the sum of our manhood; the measure of our usefulness, and beneficence, and influence; the most difficult of all our attainments; the final aim of our whole education, and of the education of the race. It is our best aid in the cultivation of the mind, since the moral conditions the intellectual, and is visible in all our work. Every effort to attain it is a movement of essential vitality, and even an effort to know it is a response to the wisest oracle of old. Sir Thomas Browne said: "As for the world, I count it not an inn but a hospital, and a place not to live but to dwell in; the world I regard is myself."

* Shairp.