page_title: The Christian Guardian
section_title: Original sin
hierarchical_section_title: The Christian Guardian / Views / Original sin
caption_attribution_description: English: Nathanael Burwash (1839 – 1918), Canadian Methodist minister and university administrator.
context_page_description: The Christian Guardian was a Wesleyan Methodist journal founded in Upper Canada in 1829. The first editor was Egerton Ryerson. It ceased publication in 1925 when the Methodist Church of Canada merged with the Presbyterians and Congregationalists to form the United Church of Canada, and merged their journals to create The New Outlook, later renamed the United Church Observer.
context_section_description: In 1864 The Christian Guardian published the views of Freeborn Garretson Hibbard, a Methodist Episcopal minister in the Genesee Conference, and the similar views of Robert Olin, another American Methodist. They argued that as a result of Christ's death a child was born in a state of innocence. The main concern of the church was therefore Christian nurture to maintain the children in this condition rather than to convert them.
  The editor of the Guardian said, "Unless childhood is nurtured and trained, with the utmost solicitude and by all available means, the religion of Christ can never become universal, or permanently deep, fruitful, and progressive."
  In 1881 an essay on this subject by Nathanael Burwash on "The Moral Condition of Childhood" was published in the paper, causing a lively correspondence.
  According to Burwash, Methodist Arminian theology implied that the child should be taught "conscious repentance, faith, and the new birth of the spirit" from the moment the child showed the effects of original sin with "the first pang of conscience arising from the first awakening of inborn sin." An angry correspondent wrote that in this theology "irresponsible infants are little more than germs of depravity, destined to blossom into sinners at the very outset of their conscious moral life. They are sinful and capable only of sin." Henry Flesher Bland said of Burwash's view, "A somewhat poor lookout for those who die in infancy, idiocy, and heathenism, none of whom can experience the new birth in the way conditioned by the Essayist."
caption: Nathanael Burwash, whose views on original sin caused lively debate among readers
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