Saint Augustine (354-430)

Of the Grace of Christ and of Original Sin

Translated by Peter Holmes

Book II

Chapter 29

Now, whoever maintains that human nature at any period required not the second Adam for its physician, because it was not corrupted in the first Adam, is convicted as an enemy to the grace of God; not in a question where doubt or error might be compatible with soundness of belief, but in that very rule of faith which makes us Christians. How happens it, then, that the human nature, which first existed, is praised by these men as being so far less tainted with evil manners? How is it that they overlook the fact that men were even then sunk in so many intolerable sins, that, with the exception of one man of God and his wife, and three sons and their wives, the whole world was in God’s just judgment destroyed by the flood, even as the little land of Sodom was afterwards with fire? From the moment, then, when “by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, in whom all sinned,” the entire mass of our nature was ruined beyond doubt, and fell into the possession of its destroyer. And from him no one—no, not one—has been delivered, or is being delivered, or ever will be delivered, except by the grace of the Redeemer.

Book II Chapter 28

Book II Chapter 30