With these expositions I hasten to contrast the _Scriptural_ article respecting Original Sin, or the corrupt and sinful Nature of the Human Will, and the belief which alone is required of us, as Christians. And here the first thing to be considered, and which will at once remove a world of error, is; that this is no tenet first introduced or imposed by Christianity, and which, should a man see reason to disclaim the authority of the Gospel, would no longer have any claim on his attention. It is no perplexity that a man may get rid of by ceasing to be a Christian, and which has no existence for a philosophic Deist. It is a FACT, affirmed, indeed, in the Christian Scriptures alone with the force and frequency proportioned to its consummate importance; but a fact acknowledged in _every_ religion that retains the least glimmering of the patriarchal faith in a God infinite, yet _personal_--a Fact assumed or implied as the basis of every religion, of which any relics remain of earlier date than the last and total apostacy of the Pagan world, when the faith in the great I AM, the _Creator_, was extinguished in the sensual Polytheism, which is inevitably the final result of Pantheism or the worship of nature; and the only form under which the Pantheistic scheme--that, according to which the world is God, and the material universe itself the one only _absolute_ Being--can exist for a people, or become the popular creed. Thus in the most ancient books of the Brahmins, the deep sense of this Fact, and the doctrines grounded on obscure traditions of the promised remedy, are seen struggling, and now gleaming, now flashing, through the mist of Pantheism, and producing the incongruities and gross contradictions of the Brahmin Mythology: while in the rival sect--in that most strange _phænomenon_, the religious atheism of the Buddhists: with whom God is only universal matter considered abstractedly from all particular forms--the Fact is placed among the delusions natural to man, which, together with other superstitions grounded on a supposed _essential_ difference between right and wrong, _the sage_ is to decompose and precipitate from the _menstruum_ of _his_ more refined apprehensions! Thus in denying the Fact, they virtually acknowledge it.