The Propensity to Sin

QUESTION: Opposers to holiness in our town assert that those who have no bent toward sin are incapable of temptation, that Adam before his fall and that Jesus Christ himself had this bent, otherwise they could not be tempted.

ANSWER: If this reasoning is correct, it follows that the devil and his angels had depraved tendencies before they fell into sin, and that they were created with a propensity to sin implanted in them by God. This makes Him the author of sin. If you ask how a perfectly holy soul can sin, we reply that we do not know. How sin got into a holy universe is a question which puzzles all the sages. To give a good reason for sin would justify sin. Sin is unreason. In the Bible the sinner is properly styled a fool. My mind reposes upon a doctrine I cannot explain, that every sinner is the first cause of his own sin, a cause uncaused which no man can explain or comprehend. Every moral intelligences angel, or man is the absolute creator of his own character and destiny.

— from Steele's Answers p. 40.