So we might go on to say that the dogma of inherited guilt is a contradiction in terms.  Disadvantage may be inherited, weakness, proclivity to sin, but not guilt, not sin in the sense of that which entails guilt.  What entails guilt is action counter to the will of God which we know.  That is always the act of the individual man myself.  It cannot by any possibility be the act of another.  It may be the consequence of the sins of my ancestors that I do moral evil without knowing it to be such.  Even my fellows view this as a mitigation, if not as an exculpation.  The very same act, however, which up to this point has been only an occasion for pity, becomes sin and entails guilt, when it passes through my own mind and will as a defection from a will of God in which I believe, and as a righteousness which I refuse.  The confusion of guilt and sin in order to the inclusion of all under the need of salvation, as in the Augustinian scheme, ended in bewilderment and stultification of the moral sense.  It caused men to despair of themselves and gravely to misrepresent God.  It is no wonder if in the age of rationalism this dogma was largely done away with.  The religious sense of sin was declared to be an hallucination.  Nothing is more evident in the rationalist theology than its lack of the sense of sin.  This alone is sufficient explanation of the impotency and inadequacy of that theology.  Kant’s doctrine of radical evil testifies to his deep sense that the rationalists were wrong.  He could see also the impossibility of the ancient view.  But he had no substitute.  Hegel, much as he prided himself upon the restoration of dogma, viewed evil as only relative, good in the making.  Schleiermacher made a beginning of construing the thought of sin from the point of view of the Christian consciousness.  Ritschl was the first consistently to carry out Schleiermacher’s idea, placing the Christian consciousness in the centre and claiming that the revelation of the righteousness of God and of the perfection of man is in Jesus.  All men being sinners, there is a vast solidarity, which he describes as the Kingdom of Evil and sets over against the Kingdom of God, yet not so that the freedom or responsibility of man is impaired.  God forgives all sin save that of wilful resistance to the spirit of the good.  That is, Ritschl regards all sin, short of this last, as mainly ignorance and weakness.  It is from Ritschl, and more particularly from Kaftan, that the phrases have been mainly taken which served as introduction to this paragraph.

For the work of God through Christ, in the salvation of men from the guilt and power of sin, various terms have been used.  Different aspects of the work have been described by different names.  Redemption, regeneration, justification, reconciliation and election or predestination—­these are the familiar words.  This is the order in which the conceptions stand, if we take them as they occur in consciousness.  Election then means nothing more than the ultimate