Saint Augustine (354-430)

Of the Grace of Christ and of Original Sin

Translated by Peter Holmes

Book II

Chapter 24

This is, however, in the matter of the two men by one of whom we are sold under sin, by the other redeemed from sins—by the one have been precipitated into death, by the other are liberated unto life; the former of whom has ruined us in himself, by doing his own will instead of His who created him; the latter has saved us in Himself, by not doing His own will, but the will of Him who sent Him: and it is in what concerns these two men that the Christian faith properly consists. For “there is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus”; since “there is none other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved”; and “in Him hath God defined unto all men their faith, in that He hath raised Him from the dead.” Now without this faith, that is to say, without a belief in the one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; without faith, I say, in His resurrection by which God has given assurance to all men and which no man could of course truly believe were it not for His incarnation and death; without faith, therefore, in the incarnation and death and resurrection of Christ, the Christian verity unhesitatingly declares that the ancient saints could not possibly have been cleansed from sin so as to have become holy, and justified by the grace of God. And this is true both of the saints who are mentioned in Holy Scripture, and of those also who are not indeed mentioned therein, but must yet be supposed to have existed,—either before the deluge, or in the interval between that event and the giving of the law, or in the period of the law itself,—not merely among the children of Israel, as the prophets, but even outside that nation, as for instance Job. For it was by the self-same faith. In the one Mediator that the hearts of these, too, were cleansed, and there also was “shed abroad in them the love of God by the Holy Ghost,” “who bloweth where He listeth,” not following men’s merits, but even producing these very merits Himself. For the grace of God will in no wise exist unless it be wholly free.

Death indeed reigned from Adam until Moses, because it was not possible even for the law given through Moses to overcome it: it was not given, in fact, as something able to give life; but as something that ought to show those that were dead and for whom grace was needed to give them life, that they were not only prostrated under the propagation and domination of sin, but also convicted by the additional guilt of breaking the law itself: not in order that any one might perish who in the mercy of God understood this even in that early age; but that, destined though he was to punishment, owing to the dominion of death, and manifested, too, as guilty through his own violation of the law, he might seek God’s help, and so where sin abounded, grace might much more abound, even the grace which alone delivers from the body of this death.

Book II Chapter 23

Book II Chapter 25