I'm sure some have Barnes even though the Logos edition hasn't yet been released. Could you check to see whether this depiction of his views is correct? (Please report back)
The doctrine of original sin has been insidiously attacked by Albert Barnes, a Presbyterian minister of this city, in his Notes on the Epistle to the Romans, which occasioned his suspension from the ministry, to which, however, he was subsequently restored, when the New School prevailed in the General Assembly. On the pretence that the Apostle did not mean to deliver any theory, but from admitted facts extolled the benefit of the atonement, Barnes bends to his own views the clear and strong testimonies which declare that all had sinned, and thus incurred the penalty of death. Gratuitously assuming that the doctrine of original sin is a metaphysical speculation of later ages, he explains what is said of the effects of Adam’s sin on the human race, as indicating its influence, but not any communication of guilt or punishment. Yet by the same rule of interpretation every revealed doctrine may be rejected as a theory which the sacred writers did not deliver. The Apostle testifies a fact when he declares: "By one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death; and so death passed upon all men in whom all have sinned."* If the sin of Adam did not directly and as a cause induce the guilt of the human race, there was no ground for stating that "so death passed upon all men;" for in many of them it would not be the effect of sin, since a vast portion of our race die before the age of reason, and consequently without any actual sin. In this theory, which may be traced to the days of Pelagius, death is not the effect of Adam’s sin, even as to the adult, but it is caused by personal sins, to which Adam contributed no further than by the perverse p 63 example of his disobedience. The connexion then between Adam’s sin, and the necessity of death which embraces all, adults and infants, is destroyed by this interpretation, which further contradicts the positive testimony: "in whom all have sinned."* Whether this version be admitted, or the text be rendered, as some will have it, "inasmuch as all have sinned," the fact of sin being common to all who die, equally results from it, death being in all caused by sin: wherefore, as infants are manifestly incapable of actual sin, it must be admitted that they are sinners, in consequence of the act of the first man, whereby he and his posterity fell from original justice and innocence. "Death," says the Apostle, "reigned from Adam unto Moses even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of the transgression of Adam."† Before the promulgation of the law on Sinai, and the transgressions consequent thereon, death held its sway over the whole human race, even over infants who had not sinned actually, as Adam sinned. There must be a cause for this universal necessity: there must be a sin common to all, of which death is the punishment. Barnes endeavours to confine the Apostle’s words to actual transgressors of the natural law; but the empire of death was not confined to them. It extended to the tender infant, because it entered into the world by the sin of the father of the human family, in whom all sinned, being all involved in the guilt and punishment of his transgression. But how can this be? Is it not a manifest absurdity to say that those sinned who had no existence? It were absurd to assert it in its ordinary meaning, because it implies actual prevarication: but it is not absurd to say that all fell from the unmerited elevation p 64 which Adam forfeited by his disobedience: that all lost, through his act, the gratuitous gifts which had been bestowed on him, as the head of his race: that all were thenceforth estranged from God, children of wrath, stained with sin, which is the death of the soul. There is indeed much that is mysterious in this economy of Divine Providence, but nothing absurd: of it we have a faint image in some legal enactments, which subject to penal disabilities the descendants of traitors even to the twentieth generation.* It behoves us to recognize and adore a truth of which the evidence presents itself constantly to us in the moral infirmities which we suffer. The gloomy reign of death over all men, for which so many evils prepare us, is as inexplicable without the admission of a general sin, of which it is the punishment, as the communication of the sin of Adam to the whole human race. Let those who say that the Apostle means only that death is universal, because men generally prove transgressors, show how this accounts for the pains, and sufferings, and death of millions of children before the use of reason.
Basil of Caesarea. A Treatise on Baptism and A Treatise on Confirmation, pp 62-64. Translated by Francis Patrick Kenrick. Philadelphia: M. Fithian, 1843.
