Saint Augustine (354-430)

Of the Merits and Remission of Sins,
and of the Baptism of Infants

Translated by Peter Holmes

Book III

Chapter 3

But we must not indeed omit to observe that this good and praiseworthy man (as they who know him describe him to be) has not advanced this argument against the natural transmission of sin in his own person, but has reproduced what is alleged by those persons who disapprove of the doctrine, and this, not merely so far as I have just quoted and confuted the allegation, but also as to those other points on which I have now further undertaken to furnish a reply. Now, after saying, “If (they say) Adam’s sin injured even those who do not sin, therefore Christ’s righteousness also profits even those who do not believe,”—which sentence, you will perceive from what I have said in answer to it, is not only not repugnant to what we hold, but even reminds us what we ought to hold,—he at once goes on to add, “Then they contend, if baptism cleanses away that old sin, those children who are born of two baptized parents must needs be free from this sin, for they could not have transmitted to their children what they did not possess themselves. Besides,” says he, “if the soul is not of transmission, but only the flesh, then only the latter has the transmission of sin, and it alone deserves punishment; for they allege that it would be unjust for the soul, which is only now born, and comes not of the lump of Adam, to bear the burden of so old an alien sin. They say, likewise,” says Pelagius, “that it cannot by any means be conceded that God, who remits to a man his own sins, should impute to him another’s.”

Pray, don’t you see how Pelagius has inserted the whole of this paragraph in his writings, not in his own person, but in that of others, knowing so well the novelty of this unheard-of doctrine, which is now beginning to raise its voice against the ancient ingrafted opinion of the Church, that he was ashamed or afraid to acknowledge it himself? And perhaps he does not himself think that a man is born without sin for whom he confesses that baptism to be necessary by which comes the remission of sins; or that the man is condemned without sin who must be reckoned, when unbaptized, in the class of non-believers, since the gospel of course cannot deceive us, when it most clearly asserts, “He that believeth not shall be damned”; or, lastly, that the image of God, when without sin, is not admitted into the kingdom of God, forasmuch as “except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God,”—and so must either be precipitated into eternal death without sin, or, what is still more absurd, must have eternal life outside the kingdom of God; for the Lord, when foretelling what He should say to His people at last,—“Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world,”—also clearly indicated what the kingdom was of which He was speaking, by concluding thus: “So these shall go away into everlasting punishment; but the righteous into life eternal.” These opinions, then, and others which spring from the central error, I believe so worthy a man, and so good a Christian, does not at all accept, as being too perverse and repugnant to Christian truth. But it is quite possible that he may, by the very arguments of those who deny the transmission of sin, be still so far distressed as to be anxious to hear or know what can be said in reply to them; and on this account he was both unwilling to keep silent the tenets propounded by them who deny the transmission of sin, in order that he might get the question in due time discussed, and, at the same time, declined to report the opinions in his own person, lest he should be supposed to entertain them himself.

Book III Chapter 2

Book III Chapter 4