In this sense of the word Original, and in the sense before given of Sin, it is evident that the phrase, original sin, is a pleonasm, the epithet not adding to the thought, but only enforcing it. For if it be sin, it must be _original_; and a state or act, that has not its origin in the will, may be calamity, deformity, disease, or mischief; but a _sin_ it cannot be. It is not enough that the act appears voluntary, or that it is intentional; or that it has the most hateful passions or debasing appetite for its proximate cause and accompaniment. All these may be found in a mad-house, where neither law nor humanity permit us to condemn the actor of sin. The reason of law declares the maniac not a free-agent; and the verdict follows of course--Not guilty. Now mania, as distinguished from idiocy, frenzy, delirium, hypochondria, and derangement (the last term used specifically to express a suspension or disordered state of the understanding or adaptive power) is the occultation or eclipse of reason, as the power of ultimate ends. The maniac, it is well known, is often found clever and inventive in the selection and adaptation of means to _his_ ends; but his _ends_ are madness. He has lost his reason. For though Reason, in finite Beings, is not the Will--or how could the Will be opposed to the Reason?--yet it is the _condition_, the _sine qua non_ of a _Free_-will.
We will now return to the extract from Jeremy Taylor on a theme of deep interest in itself, and trebly important from its _bearings_. For without just and distinct views respecting the Article of Original Sin, it is impossible to understand aright any one of the peculiar doctrines of Christianity. Now my first complaint is, that the eloquent Bishop, while he admits the _fact_ as established beyond controversy by universal experience, yet leaves us wholly in the dark as to the main point, supplies us with no answer to the principal question--why he names it Original Sin. It cannot be said, We know what the Bishop _means_, and what matters the name? for the _nature_ of the fact, and in what light it should be regarded by us, depends on the nature of our answer to the question, whether Original Sin is or is not the right and proper designation. I can imagine the same quantum of _sufferings_, and yet if I had reason to regard them as symptoms of a commencing change, as pains of growth, the temporary deformity and misproportions of immaturity, or (as in the final sloughing of the caterpillar) the throes and struggles of the waxing or evolving PSYCHE, I should think it no Stoical flight to doubt, how far I was authorized to declare the Circumstance an _evil_ at all. Most assuredly I would not express or describe the fact as an evil having an origin in the sufferers themselves or as sin.