Romans 5:19 For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous. Why should children, born with tainted constitutions and damaged prospects, suffer blamelessly for their father's iniquity? Precisely as, on the contrary, children benefit gratuitously through the goodness of their parent. For the marvellous mechanism of heredity does not merely transmit evil. It is also, and indeed preponderantly, the machinery by which the physical, mental, and spiritual acquisitions of bygone generations — the accumulated and stored wealth of the ages — are conveyed to the future and preserved for posterity. There is an inheritance of strength and intellect, grace and goodness, as well as of disease and vice and evil. Nay, this last is but a misuse and perversion of God's beneficent and stupendous contrivance of heredity. To escape the entail of ill, you must snap the mechanism of transmission, and so forfeit the entail of blessing. It is as if you should propose that each generation's acquisition of property, tools, inventions, arts, and appliances should be destroyed, and the next generation compelled to begin afresh on the bare, barren soil. Progress were impossible, civilisation but the rolling of a Sisyphus' stone, the human race no longer an organic unity, without continuity, without history, without moral solidarity. Take from my life and actions this awful prerogative of the transmission of good and evil, and you rob it of all dignity and depth of perspective; you degrade it to the narrowest dimensions of self-centred insignificance; you divest my actions of all far-reaching influence and unselfish consequence; you isolate my being from all impersonal interests and ennobling sympathies. Cut asunder the fine meshes of heredity, and you dissolve the ties of affection that bind the generations together, and reduce humanity to a chaos of trivial atoms, without roots in the past, without part in futurity, devoid of large possibilities of achievement, and therefore destitute of strong moral motive. Heredity ordained by Heaven for blessing, through sin becomes a vehicle of evil. (Prof. Elmslie, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous. |
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