is absolutely necessary. God and his grace do all, yet only in such a way that the cooperation of man is required. The freedom of the human will cannot be, strictly speaking, demonstrated, but is recognized as true by experience. Sin consists in the violation of the will of God. By it, however, no "real" change takes place in the soul. Sin consists in individual acts; it does not take away freedom nor weaken the soul, but simply destroys the future good, the reward, ordained by God for those who do his will. Since there is no fundamental connection between sin and punishment, God could by his absolute power forgive sin and infuse grace even without repentance. In the same connection appears the relation of original sin to original righteousness. The latter is "an absolute something superadded to man as he is in a state of nature"; the former is "a certain lack of the righteousness which he ought to have." Thus original sin is the result of the divine ordinance; God wills to consider the offender against his law as unworthy of acceptance, together with all his posterity. This explains his view of the immaculate conception of Mary. As a member of the human race, she would have been in the first instant of her conception a debtor to original righteousness. However, it is not inconceivable that God should have chosen to renounce the exaction of that righteousness from her and refused to impute its absence as a fault. By a subtle train of reasoning he concludes that she was not even for an instant in original sin. These are famous arguments, the "five ways", about which much has been written. Let's not spend too much time on them now: you can come back and make a more detailed study later. So just a few points. When we were reading Anselm I suggested that you should be on the look out for words indicating logical structure - e.g. "therefore", which indicates that a conclusion is about to be drawn from premises just stated, and "for" which i...
