Hence in result I did _not_ attribute to man any great essential depravity, in the popular and moral sense of the word; and the doctrine amounted only to this, that "_spiritually_, man is paralyzed, until the grace of God comes freely upon him." How to reconcile this with the condemnation, and punishment of man for being unspiritual, I knew not.

I saw, and did not dissemble, the difficulty; but received it as a mystery hereafter to be cleared up.
But it gradually broke upon me, that when Paul said nothing stronger than heathen moralists had said about human wickedness, it was absurd to quote his words, any more than theirs, in proof of a _Fall_,--that is, of a permanent degeneracy induced by the first sin of the first man: and when I studied the 5th chapter of the Romans, I found it was _death_, not _corruption_, which Adam was said to have entailed.

In short, I could scarcely find the modern doctrine of the "Fall" any where in the Bible.

I then remembered that Calvin, in his Institutes, complains that all the Fathers are heterodox on this point; the Greek Fathers being grievously overweening in their estimate of human power; while of the Latin Fathers even Augustine is not always up to Calvin's mark of orthodoxy.

This confirmed my rising conviction that the tenet is of rather recent origin.