On the Imputation of Adam's First Sin

1Chapter One. The decree of the Synod.

The decree of the Synod runs as follows, Antoine Garissoles — minister of the Word of God and professor of sacred theology in the church and academy of Montauban — turning it from French into Latin speech.

When it had been reported to the Synod that certain writings had come forth, some published in type, others drawn out by hand, which define the whole account of original sin by hereditary corruption alone inhering in all human beings, and deny the imputation of Adam's first sin: the Synod condemned doctrine of that sort, insofar as it so restricts the nature of original sin to the hereditary corruption of Adam's posterity that it excludes the imputation of that first sin by which Adam fell (Genesis 3:6). And therefore it judged that pastors, professors, and any others who, in the discussion of this question, have withdrawn from the common judgment of the Protestant churches — churches which have all hitherto acknowledged both that corruption and this imputation descending upon all Adam's posterity (Romans 5:12) — should be subjected to all censures. But the same Synod also enjoins upon all colloquies and provincial synods that those whom they cause to be advanced as candidates of theology to the sacred ministry are to be ordered to subscribe their own hand to this Decree.

This Decree has also been variously received by the provincial synods themselves. To some it seemed good that it be put into execution. To others it seemed right to hold their judgment in suspense, and to suspend the execution of that Decree until another National Synod. There were among pastors and private persons those who kissed it as necessary, as most equitable, as most true. There were not wanting, on the other side, those who dared to reject it as new, as not necessary, as made too hastily, the matter scarcely weighed enough, and without consulting the provincial synods — indeed, as less agreeable to the Word of God.

2Meanwhile a rumor was scattered through all France, and it even reached foreign nations, that by that Decree Placeus's judgment concerning the imputation of Adam's first sin had been condemned — a rumor which those less well disposed toward the Academy of Saumur seized eagerly, and tore Placeus's reputation to pieces as of an unholy man, convicted and condemned by the National Synod, with various speeches and writings, even books printed in type, and in some of them with his name expressly set down. Hence there arose among many of the weak a grave scandal, and among students of sacred theology a huge disturbance — a great wound that would have been dealt to the Academy of Saumur, had not certain provincial synods applied medicine in time. For Placeus almost failed himself in this cause, and composed nothing beyond that manuscript which Garissoles called the later Manuscript. Relying on a good conscience and on the truth, of which God is the vindicator in due time, he thought the whole matter should be committed to God's providence and to the next National Synod; and at his friends' urging he turned himself rather to confuting the Socinians and to demonstrating the divine essence of our Lord Jesus Christ. But in my judgment he could have done both — to contend for the divine nature of our Lord, and to look after his own reputation and that of the Academy of Saumur, especially among foreign peoples, by publishing some little book. And unless I am mistaken, he ought to have done so: for by explaining his own judgment he could have wiped every stain of reproach from it, while the authority of the Synodical Decree was kept intact. For in truth it does not fight with that Decree; rather it agrees with it more than does the opinion of those who attack it. And therefore, so that it might seem both condemned by the Synod and confuted by them, those who either did not understand it or refused to understand it so changed it that they transformed it into its opposite. Unless I make this clearer than noonday light, I do not refuse to be held a liar and a calumniator.

Since, then, I see both that the National Synod is put off from year to year, and that those who wish it almost flee it, civil war already for some years standing in the way of its being convened; and that meanwhile in certain places students of sacred theology are treated more severely, and foreign nations shrink from Placeus's books as from writings composed by a heretic condemned by the authority of the National Synod, and that very many intensely desire to know what Placeus's judgment is: I thought I would serve the truth and the glory of God, the edification and peace of the Church, the honor of the National Synod, the reputation of the Academy of Saumur and of Placeus, the consolation of students of theology, and also the continuation of the work Placeus began for the divinity of our Lord, if I should show that Placeus's judgment concerning the imputation of Adam's first sin was neither condemned by the Synod, nor is it such as nearly all have hitherto supposed. So, unless I am badly mistaken, this whole controversy about the imputation of Adam's sin will be extinguished even before a National Synod convenes — which I earnestly wish and hope from our Lord Jesus Christ, by whose help I undertake this work.

3Chapter Two. That Placeus's judgment was not condemned by that Decree is shown by seven probable arguments.

That Placeus's judgment was not condemned by that Decree we can prove by many arguments, some of them highly probable, others plainly necessary.

First: before that National Synod no writing of Placeus on the imputation of the first sin by which Adam fell had come out, except the Theses on the state of fallen man before grace, disputed publicly in February 1640 — five years before that Decree was made — and sent the same year to all those pastors who in the neighboring provinces were charged with examining books for publication; and also offered, in Placeus's name, by his most distinguished colleague Amyraut, Anjou's delegate, to the Synod of Poitou held that same year at Châtellerault. Through that whole five years no one had stirred a suit against Placeus over those Theses, no one had accused him, nor had the cause been agitated in any way in the Academy's Senate, or in the church's session, or in the Synod of Anjou to which he himself belongs, or (so far as he could learn before that National Synod) in any other synod. So under the shield of Art. XXXI, Cap. V of the Ecclesiastical Discipline — which twenty-seven national synods had confirmed — and of the Decree of the National Synod of Alençon convened in 1637, which forbids accusations of that kind about doctrine to be carried straight to a National Synod, and orders that the man who seems to need accusing be first admonished, and that the cause be heard and debated in the provincial synod to which he is subject, he slept secure. For he understood that he could not be accused in a National Synod unless those Decrees were violated — Decrees he thought every pastor and provincial synod ought to hold sacrosanct and inviolable. Since, then, it is not likely that anyone, least of all a pastor, would have such a craving — not to say itch — to accuse Placeus (who had never injured him) that he would knowingly and deliberately rather violate such venerable Decrees than keep himself from accusing: it is also not likely that Placeus was accused by anyone; and if he was not accused, he was certainly not condemned.

Someone will object in vain that those who once set an order must sometimes, for necessary causes, depart from the order once constituted. Who, then, had set that order? Who had made those Decrees? National Synods. Was the National Synod itself, then, Placeus's accuser? Or if he was accused, was he not accused either by some provincial synod, or by some delegate of a provincial synod — neither of them the author of that order, both of them subject to the National Synod's authority and Decrees? Next: those who set an order do not leave an order once wisely constituted except for necessary causes. What necessary causes, then, were there for leaving an order so wisely instituted, and for violating Decrees so equitable and so necessary? I look for them in vain. None appear. Perhaps a growing evil had to be met that way. What evil? Placeus's opinion? In it there are two things: what he believes, and what he does not believe. Whatever he believes, everyone who is not a Pelagian or Semi-Pelagian has always believed. What he does not believe has never been established by any public authority, and he rejects it only because it is new, and alien to the Word of God, to the doctrine of the Protestant churches, and to right reason. So nothing evil was to be feared from that rejection.

But grant that there was an evil that had to be met. Did it have to be met by violating those laws and decrees by which National Synods had most wisely prescribed how such an evil, if it ever arose, should be met? What is more: would not that upside-down way of meeting it have been better fitted to increase the evil than to remove it? For since God is a God of order, and wills that everything in the church be done according to order and decently, an accusation of a brother by a brother that violates the order rightly constituted in the church of God could more probably have been ascribed to some human disturbance than to the Spirit of God — and how many opportunities would it have given Placeus to complain, and to defend and spread his opinion, if he had chosen to use the occasion?

What necessary cause, then, could there finally have been for violating an order set with so much authority and wisdom? Someone will perhaps answer that those who brought the matter to the National Synod were shut out by the narrowness of time from being able to obey the constitution once laid down. As if, through the "narrowness" of four or five years, the accusers could not carry their complaints to the Synod of Anjou! But that Synod in Upper Occitania at which this business was first laid out was held only in September, and the national assembly at Charenton was to be convened the following December. Be it so. Yet first: why was that provincial synod nearest the National waited for? Why was this business not laid out in some earlier one? Ignorance of Placeus's theses in that province cannot be excused. For five years earlier, as I said, they had been published, and sent by Placeus himself to Delon, pastor of the church of Montauban. Why, then, was the accusation of those theses so long delayed, if indeed they were accused? Next: why at least through that whole trimester between that provincial synod and the National was nothing written to Placeus, so that he might at least in some measure satisfy the order? Why was he not admonished of error? Why was a clearer explanation of his opinion not asked of him? Why at least was nothing about that coming accusation written to him, or to the Academic Senate, or to the church of Saumur, or made known in some other way? For he can swear in good faith that he had heard nothing whatever of that coming accusation, except I know not what from an uncertain rumor — and that when the National Synod was already said to be dissolved, or about to be dissolved. For neither before it met, nor while it sat, was a single word about that coming accusation written by the delegates of the Upper Occitania Synod either to Placeus himself or to his colleagues then at Saumur. To what could that have tended, except that Placeus, absent, unwarned, and unaware, might be accused and crushed? And is it not a matter of conscience for you, pious reader, even to suspect — much less to believe — that of that provincial synod and of its delegates?

4To this argument I will add another no less probable. If Placeus had been accused before the National Synod, would the Synod not have had him summoned and cited to appear? Who would believe it willing to condemn a living pastor and professor of theology, of unblemished reputation until then, absent, unheard, not previously cited or even warned of the accusation — with great scandal to many of the weak, and harm to his ministry and to the Academy he served? Yet that Synod cited him in no way, neither directly nor indirectly, though the ordinary post could easily have done it two or three times any week.

Someone will perhaps reply that there was no need of a citation, because it was not the person that was put in danger, but only the doctrine that was called to examination. What do I hear? Was not a pastor and theology professor's reputation put in danger — a reputation that ought to be dearer to him than life itself? Was not his ministry put in danger — a ministry whose effectiveness nothing can injure more than the rumor that a National Synod has condemned him for a serious error in religion? Was not his person subjected to every censure, if that decree condemned his doctrine? Was he not judged worthy to be stripped of the pastoral and professorial office, if that decree shut theology students out of the sacred ministry of the Word because of his error?

Someone may also say that among those present there was an outstanding colleague of Placeus, famous for learning and eloquence, who could defend Placeus's judgment before the Synod far better and more eloquently than Placeus himself. That colleague was indeed present; Placeus both admires and honors his gifts, and counts it part of his own happiness to have such a colleague. But Placeus had never conferred with him on that question, and hoped for no other defense from him in the Synod than that, if Placeus were accused, he would intercede so that Placeus would not be condemned absent and unheard. So if he took up Placeus's cause to plead before the Synod, that happened beyond Placeus's intention, and is to be credited to kindness toward a colleague; and it ought not to have kept the Synod from citing Placeus himself, if he was being accused by name. For Placeus, never warned, could not have guessed at an accusation so contrary to the church's settled order; he had neither thought he must come to the Synod nor asked anyone else to answer and defend his cause there. Further: if his most distinguished colleague did take up his cause, why was the defender forced to speak first, in the accuser's place? Why, after the accuser had spoken, was the defender not allowed to answer and clear away the objections, arguments, and testimonies? Who ever heard that the advocate of an accused man (if he can even be called an advocate who takes up the cause of a defendant wholly unaware of the charge) must plead first, and after the accuser has pleaded must not reply?

And yet with his usual subtlety and his usual splendor of speech that colleague pleaded his own and Placeus's cause before the venerable assembly for more than two hours. Whether he pleaded his own cause or not, let him see. Placeus's cause, at least, could not be handled in so little time. For in his own cause he can bring forward so many arguments and testimonies that two hours could scarcely suffice even to touch them lightly, much less to unfold them and fence them from exceptions. Indeed he does not know whether even one argument can be weighed and judged in so short a time as fairness requires. For he himself, in examining a single argument, not rarely spends several hours — even days — taught by his own experience that what seems true at first glance, or on a light examination, is sometimes found false when inspected more carefully.

5But let us go on, and add a third argument. If Placeus's Theses had been accused before the National Synod, should they not have been laid before that Synod, read in its hearing, and all the reasons by which Placeus — briefly, to be sure, but still, as he thinks, invincibly — proved his opinion weighed one by one and carefully? Yet it is entirely certain that was not done in that Synod. So it is not likely that those theses were accused, or at least so accused that they were condemned. Why, after all, would theses have been condemned that vigorously attacked — or rather stormed — the common adversaries, Socinus, Pelagius, and Pighius, both separately in the first fifteen theses and jointly in those that follow?

A fourth argument also comes to hand. For if the Synod had meant to condemn Placeus's opinion by that Decree of theirs, would it — with the prudence it had — have been content to set against the Scripture texts and arguments (contemptible neither in number nor in strength) by which he had confirmed his opinion a bare consensus of Protestants, as if forgetful of Article V of the Confession of Faith which it had itself lately approved by its own vote, and to lay that consensus under its Decree as a rule of faith and a foundation? That, to me at least, is certainly not likely.

Nor does it seem likely to me that a most prudent Synod, without consulting the provincial synods, would have wished to settle in a single session a weighty controversy never before agitated or decided in any other synod. Experience has taught that to be dangerous; and it is also foreign to the custom of national synods, which have often judged it unsafe to pronounce even on matters of far less moment unless all the provinces had first been consulted — so careful are they not to abuse their power, or to use it without circumspection to any weak person's scandal. Yet that is what it did, if it condemned Placeus's judgment by that decree. For it neither consulted the provinces, and the business was finished in one Session, and that imputation of Adam's sin which Placeus had rejected in his theses (for he had not rejected every imputation) had never been established by any synod or by any public authority. Who, then, would believe that a most wise Synod would have wished to define such an imputation with so much haste, and to bind every provincial synod, every colloquy, every pastor and professor, and every candidate for the sacred ministry to believe and teach it, under threat of all censures?

6Would the very man who had accused Placeus — having played the accuser's part vigorously with a prepared speech, great apparatus, much eloquence, and great vehemence, still hot from that accusation and with his blood stirred — also, with no reply and no delay interposed, have sat as judge in that cause and, as moderator, have called for the votes? Would a most equitable Synod have allowed that, if in that trial the issue was a pastor and theology professor's doctrine and reputation — especially one absent, not cited, and never marked by any censure? That is certainly not likely.

Placeus is far from approving, or wishing to imitate, the peevishness of the Remonstrants who refused to answer before a National Synod and demanded that a large part of the delegates be removed on that account. For if the reason of our faith can and ought to be given even before the most hostile judges, and was given by Christ himself and by his apostles and martyrs, how much more can and ought it to be given before a Synod composed of brothers and convened by the lawful authority of the magistrate? If some Remonstrants had previously accused, or had declared their own judgment, they were to be counted, once they had taken the role of delegates to the National Synod and interposed the religion of an oath, as having laid aside affections and prejudices. What Placeus does urge is what that very Synod of Dort solemnly affirmed: that no one can be both defender and judge in the same trial of the same cause.

Would that most prudent Synod, if it had indeed meant Placeus to be condemned for a serious error, also have allowed him, as before, to serve both in the sacred ministry in the church and in the professorship of sacred theology in the Academy of Saumur, with neither censure for the past nor caution for the future? Would it not have arranged for some pastor to admonish him of the error privately or publicly, so that he might, if possible, be called back from it? Would it not at least have ordered the Synod of Anjou to deal with the accused, so that he would not go on troubling the church of God? Would the Synod also have thought that the dogmas of religion were to be measured by its authority alone, and that the Scripture texts and arguments Placeus brought forward were outweighed by it? Far be it from us to believe of that Synod what is rightly condemned in the Roman church by all Protestants as tyrannical. Placeus would think himself unworthy to be counted Reformed if he prized one synod's bare authority above Scripture and the arguments drawn from Scripture, so long as those still seemed insoluble to him. The Synod would therefore certainly have taken care that someone both answer Placeus's arguments and set out those by which the Synod, moved by them, had condemned his judgment — so that both the equity of its decision would be plain, and it would seem to persuade consciences by laying truth open rather than by commanding faith. Since, then, no one who took part in that Synod, and no one at their order or urging, exchanged any word with Placeus, orally or in writing, by which to move him from his judgment, or to dilute his arguments, or to state the contrary: by that it is shown clearly enough that Placeus was not condemned by that synodical Decree.

To this is added that Placeus's name is absent from the Decree. Why, if the doctrine of Placeus, accused by name, was being condemned? For either the Synod wished to seem to have condemned Placeus's judgment, or it did not. If it did: why did it not express his name? If it did not: those for whom it seems to have condemned him depart from the Synod's mind.

7Chapter Three. The same is proved by necessary arguments.

I judged the arguments just given highly probable; what follows is necessary.

First: a Synod cannot condemn Placeus’s view if that view was never proposed or laid out before it. The National Synod that issued the Decree never laid it out. Who would have laid it out, if not the accuser? Should anyone have accused it before the Synod, the accuser would have been Garissolius, the Synod’s president. Yet how could he then have presented the view as it actually is, when even four years afterward he still could not propose it as it is? In his explanation and defense of the Synodical Decree he ascribes to Placeus a view Placeus does not hold — one that openly conflicts with the words in which Placeus had already set out his mind, both in letters to Garissolius and in the manuscript Garissolius later chose to label the later one. I will make this clearer than noon when we reach that place.

Add a second argument from the Synod’s own testimony about what was reported to it: that certain writings had appeared, some in print and some in manuscript, which confine the whole account of original sin to hereditary corruption alone inhering in every human being, and which deny the imputation of Adam’s first sin. Those words either fail to present Placeus’s view or present it badly. He never simply denied the imputation of Adam’s first sin, nor did he wish it denied; he denied only one kind of that imputation. Because he affirms one imputation of that first sin and denies another, his view is not presented when people say, without distinction, that he denies the imputation of Adam’s first sin.

8A third argument is supplied to us by the Synod's condemning judgment: The Synod condemns doctrine of this kind insofar as it so restricts the nature of original sin to the hereditary corruption of Adam's posterity that it excludes the imputation of that first sin by which Adam fell. By those words the Synod does not simply condemn those who restrict the nature of original sin to hereditary corruption; it condemns those who so restrict it that they exclude the imputation of that first sin by which Adam fell. Yet Placeus never so restricted the nature of original sin to that corruption that he excluded the imputation of that first sin by which Adam fell. Placeus, therefore, is not condemned by the Synod's judgment.

This is confirmed by the words in which the distinguished D. Garissolius, in his dedicatory letter to the presidents of the churches and academies of Zurich, Bern, Basel, and Schaffhausen, expressed the Synod's judgment on page 13. He says the Synod's decree was made whereby the judgment of those is condemned who so set the account of original sin in native corruption alone that they acknowledge no imputation of Adam's first disobedience. Yet Placeus does not so constitute the account of original sin in native corruption alone that he acknowledges no imputation of Adam's first disobedience: for he acknowledges some. Since, therefore, to acknowledge none and to acknowledge some are contradictorily opposed, it is plain that by that Synod decree Placeus's judgment is not condemned.

9The same is also sounded by the words of the Extract from the acts of the Synod of Montauban held in the month of October in the year 1645, which D. Garissolius prefixed to his book. The Decree of the National Synod of Charenton was read, whereby the doctrine of those is condemned who teach that Adam's first sin is in no way imputed to posterity. Yet Placeus does not teach that Adam's first sin is in no way imputed to posterity. On the contrary, he teaches that it is imputed — namely by mediate or consequent imputation, which the same Lord Garissolius confesses that he himself acknowledges. Placeus's doctrine, therefore, is not condemned by that Decree.

This very point can be gathered from the National Synod's own testimony. For it testifies that all Protestant churches have acknowledged both that corruption and this imputation descending upon all Adam's posterity. That is truly said of that imputation of Adam's first disobedience which Placeus believes and teaches; of that which he denies, it is not. For from where can the judgment of the Protestant churches be known, if not from the confessions of faith, or from synodical decrees, or from the books of those whose labors God used to reform his Church? Yet from such Confessions, Decrees, and books no imputation universally acknowledged can be gathered except that one which Placeus acknowledges. Those, therefore, who deny that one — not Placeus — the Synod condemns.

Besides, the Synod judges that all pastors and professors who deny this imputation of which it speaks are to be subjected to all censures — whereby it signifies that it understands such an imputation to be a weighty dogma of religion, and necessary to be believed. That cannot truly be said of the imputation Placeus denies, but only of that which he proves and confesses.

Finally, the Synod not obscurely hints that that imputation of Adam's first sin which it wants acknowledged is so openly true that it does not need proof. For I judge it belongs to that point that the Synod thought it needed to be confirmed by no Scripture testimony and by no reason. That fits the imputation Placeus acknowledges; the one he denies, in no way. For as the former seems necessarily and evidently true, so the latter, to one who inspects carefully, does not even appear probable.

10Chapter Four. The Synod's Decree, and so Placeus's judgment, is set forth.

But so that the matter may become clearer, and no scruple may stick in the reader's mind, the Decree must be set forth in a few words, and what Placeus really thinks must be opened. The whole hangs on two distinctions: one of Adam's first sin, the other of its imputation.

And first, Adam's sin can be distinguished into first actual sin and first habitual sin. The former was Adam's act of disobedience, which passed away; the latter was the vice produced from that act, which remained in Adam after the manner of a habit, and was propagated from him, together with human nature, into all his posterity, Christ alone excepted. That this vice is truly sin, all who are not Pelagians acknowledge. That it is also imputed to Adam's posterity, and has the force of condemning unless it is forgiven, all the Protestant churches have hitherto believed with the highest consensus, as is plain from their Confessions. Therefore if the Synod's Decree is taken of the imputation of this first sin of Adam, Placeus holds it for most true and most equitable, and rightly judges the doctrine of those condemned who profess that they acknowledge this sin, yet contend that it is imputed to no one, however unbelieving. That there are those in this age who teach that, and even in published books, the most learned V. Walaeus, while he lived Professor of Theology at Leiden, is witness — in the letter prefixed to his work, written to Heinrich Flocken of Bremen.

But if by Adam's first sin his first actual sin is understood — which seems to me more likely: for that was absolutely first of all, and Adam is more properly said to have fallen by it than by his first habitual sin — then imputation must be distinguished into immediate or antecedent imputation, and mediate or consequent imputation. The former happens immediately — that is, not through the mediation of corruption; the latter happens mediately — that is, through hereditary corruption. The former precedes corruption in the order of nature; the latter follows. The former is held to be the cause of corruption; the latter its effect. Placeus rejects the former; he admits the latter.

11It is asked now whether his judgment was condemned by the Synod's Decree. If it was condemned, it was condemned either because he does not admit both those imputations jointly, or because he rejects immediate or antecedent imputation. The first cannot be said. For they cannot be admitted jointly without involving a contradiction. For whoever says that Adam's first actual sin is imputed to his posterity immediately denies that it is imputed mediately: for immediately means the same as not mediately. To be imputed immediately, and to be imputed not through the mediation of corruption, are plainly the same. Whoever, therefore, would affirm that that first sin is imputed at once immediately and mediately would at once both deny and affirm that it is imputed through corruption — and would so involve himself in contradiction. That, without doubt, the Synod did not wish to require of us. I pass over in silence that it is not agreeable to equity that the same numerical sin be imputed twice to the same person — once before hereditary corruption, and again after that corruption. One imputation certainly suffices. Since, therefore, those two imputations cannot be retained together, and one must be chosen with the other repudiated, either the Synod left in doubt which it understood — the mediate or the immediate — or it did not leave that in doubt. If the former: it also left in doubt whether it condemned Placeus's judgment by its Decree, or not. So it is fitting that its readers suspend their judgment concerning Placeus, and not think him more condemned than uncondemned. But if there is something in the Decree that determines the imputation: if the doctrine of those who deny mediate imputation is condemned, Placeus's doctrine is not condemned — for he acknowledges mediate imputation. If the doctrine of those who deny immediate imputation is condemned, Placeus's doctrine is indeed condemned — but it is not condemned alone, for with it the doctrine of the Apostle Paul himself, and of men of the greatest name, would be condemned.

12And will Aegidius Hunnius, the celebrated theologian of the Augsburg Confession, seem to you, reader, a fit witness? Here is his testimony in the Article on sin: The Apostle Paul therefore shows that Adam's fall is imputed to us his posterity NOT IMMEDIATELY for its own sake, but MEDIATELY and on account of another thing — because, namely, by that fall the nature of the first parents was polluted, so that they could beget children only corrupted and vitiated by sin. For if Adam, then upright in the image of God, could have had such posterity that no proper vice was derived into posterity from the first parents, then that fall, as another's sin, would plainly not be imputed to them. Paul therefore openly shows that that offense does not reach us for condemnation EXCEPT MEDIATELY, insofar as through that offense a horrible corruption is brought into nature, which he propagated by generation into the posterities themselves. Could that be declared more clearly or more expressly? You have in him the distinction of the imputation of Adam's first actual sin into mediate and immediate — the former asserted, the latter rejected — and that the Apostle Paul openly taught that doctrine.

But perhaps the Protestant churches thought otherwise. Hear, then, also Calvin in his Commentary on Romans 5:15 (Romans 5:15): When he teaches that many perished by one man's offense, you will not take it as if we ourselves were outside fault; but because his sin is the cause of our sin, Paul ascribes our ruin to him. I call our sin that which is inborn in us and with which we are born. I will not bring forward other places of Calvin here; for what he thought, I have a rich witness in D. Garissolius, On the Imputation of the First Sin, chapter 9, section 11, page 299: However much, he says, the guilt of the first lapse does NOT reach us EXCEPT THROUGH THE MEDIATION OF CORRUPTION — WHICH WE ACKNOWLEDGE WITH CALVIN, and which was set forth above — that still cannot hinder that guilt from being not only the guilt of our corruption, but also the guilt of Adam's first actual sin: namely, of the former immediately, of the latter mediately. This is Placeus's very judgment; which, if it is condemned, then the doctrine of the Apostle Paul also, of Aegidius Hunnius and of Calvin, and even of D. Garissolius himself — if he faithfully expressed his own judgment in those words — is condemned.

The same D. Garissolius in the same book, chapter 8, section 3, page 206, testifies that the imputation treated in Romans 5 is necessarily joined with native corruption, and even FOLLOWS IT. If it follows it, the imputation is consequent or mediate, which Placeus teaches with the Apostle. I will add here also the testimony of Peter Martyr, Common Places, On Original Sin, section 34, and of the most learned Walaeus, Reply to the Censure of Corvinus, chapter 8, page 238: The guilt of the first sin unto condemnation, as the Apostle speaks in Romans 5:16, CAN IN NO WAY BE IMPUTED to posterity EXCEPT THROUGH the inherent viciousness of that sin.

If, therefore, the Synod had condemned Placeus's doctrine, he would indeed have the comfort of the miserable, and men of the greatest name as partners in this condemnation; but in fact, as I have already proved by many arguments, it did not condemn it. If by that Decree the Synod had condemned the doctrine of those who deny immediate or antecedent imputation, it would certainly also have condemned absolutely the doctrine of those who restrict the nature of original sin to the hereditary corruption of Adam's posterity. Yet the Synod did not simply condemn the doctrine which restricts the nature of original sin to hereditary corruption, but that which so restricts it that it excludes the imputation of that first sin by which Adam fell. Therefore the Synod did not condemn the doctrine of those who deny immediate imputation. Only mediate or consequent imputation can stand with that restriction: that alone, therefore, the Synod understood.

And so with that prudence it wove its Decree, that when it thrice remembered corruption and imputation, it always named corruption before imputation — to hint that the imputation to be understood is the one that follows, not the one that precedes, that hereditary corruption. Finally, the Synod's Decree either agrees with Holy Scripture or it does not. If it does not, Article V of the Confession of Faith, which that very Synod approved, stands in the way of receiving it. If it agrees, then certainly it does not condemn the doctrine of those who, keeping the mediate imputation of Adam's first sin, deny only the immediate or antecedent. To make an end: D. Garissolius himself, than whom no one was less fair to Placeus, approved this distinction of imputation, and thought that once it was well understood the controversy could be finished. Yet with the distinction so understood, consensus could in no way be established if by that Synodical Decree the doctrine had been condemned which, admitting mediate imputation of that act, denies the immediate. There would remain a perfect disagreement between that Decree and Placeus's judgment. It is not, therefore, to be thought that by that Decree that doctrine was condemned.

13For in that Manuscript which D. Garissolius calls the Later, these words had gone before. The question set on foot between us is only about Adam's first sin taken in the first way — that is, about his actual disobedience, about that inward and outward act by which Adam transgressed God's law, cut off from the habitual corruption that followed that act: whether that is imputed to us when we are born. To this question it seems a bare negation does not yet answer; a distinction must again satisfy. For the mind can conceive a double imputation — Immediate and mediate (or, to say the same in other words, Antecedent and Consequent). Could Placeus more openly signify that he understands that distinction of imputation of that act by which Adam first made himself guilty? Next it was added that immediate imputation is that by which that act of Adam — that is, the eating of the forbidden fruit — is thought to be imputed to all his posterity (Christ excepted) proximately, immediately, by this very fact that they are sons of Adam, unto two penalties properly so called: the privation of original righteousness, and eternal death. But of that about which one member of the distinction is understood, the other ought to be understood as well; otherwise there would be no distinction; for one thing would not be distinguished. Finally Placeus added that mediate imputation is that which takes place through hereditary corruption. And of what sin, I ask, can imputation be made through that corruption, unless of Adam's actual sin, which produced that corruption? He also added this reason: For by participation in this corruption we communicate in Adam's sin, and, so to speak, habitually consent to it. By which words he openly distinguished Adam's sin from that corruption. Therefore he did not understand the corruption itself by Adam's sin, but the actual disobedience from which it flowed.

This reason of Placeus D. Garissolius approved and recommended, and even turned back. But upon whom, I do not know; for upon Placeus he could not, as is already plain. But if anyone else known to Placeus denied and refuted the imputation of Adam's actual sin, that must be taken of immediate or antecedent imputation alone, not of the mediate or consequent, which he neither wants denied, nor do his arguments attack.

14The same D. Garissolius silently approves Placeus's judgment when he several times affirms and presses that the guilt from Adam's sin, and from the vice inhering in us, are not two distinct guilts, but one and the same guilt rising from both — chapter 9, section 7, page 190, and section 15, page 306, and chapter 27, section 30, page 809, and so on. For once immediate imputation of Adam's sin is posited, two distinct guilts are necessarily posited, of which one rises from Adam's sin, the other from the vice inhering in us: the former precedes hereditary corruption, the latter follows; the former is prior to the inherent vice, the latter posterior; the former is the cause of corruption, the latter rather its effect; the penalty of the former is the inherent vice, of the latter not so; the former is of another's sin and of a sin seated outside us, the latter of our own sin inhering in us; the former is common to all human beings by numerical identity of the sin, the latter is of many sins in number, and each human being's own; the former hangs on God's will alone, the latter on the very nature of the corruption born in us and on its natural demerit; the former was earlier than those to whom it is imputed, the latter on the contrary was not except afterward. How, then, can they not be two distinct guilts, between which so many and so great differences can be noted?

From this it is plain that Placeus's judgment in no way fights with the Decree of the four evangelical cities among the Swiss, which D. Garissolius appends to the Charenton Decree. For either they praise the Decree of the Charenton Synod, with which Placeus's judgment, as I have already proved, agrees; or they give the reason why they praise it in these very few words: For those who sinned in Adam and with Adam, Adam's sin is justly imputed to them — which proposition Placeus acknowledges to be most true. For it is truly equitable that those who sinned in and with Adam should have imputed to them the sin they committed in him and with him. It is just that a common sin have a common imputation. But what is it that we sinned in and with Adam? That Adam's sin is imputed to us? So D. Garissolius takes it in chapter 8, section 21. For how, he says, could those who existed many ages later have already sinned before in another, unless because he performed that act which is so reckoned of posterity as if they themselves had committed it? And he adds that the theologians, when they teach that we have satisfied in Christ, mean nothing else than that Christ's satisfaction is imputed to us. This interpretation of his fits what he often presses: that Adam's sin is ours only by imputation. From this it follows that we did not sin in and with Adam except imputatively. But then the reasoning of the most learned theologians would turn out trifling. For they would prove the same by the same — the imputation of Adam's sin by the imputation of Adam's sin — which trifling, especially in so grave a Decree, it is wrong to assign to them. What, then, does that phrase mean? It can be understood from a like case. For if someone said that we were in and with Adam, the sense would be not that Adam's being is imputed to us, but that Adam's being was communicated to us by natural propagation. So when we are said to have sinned in and with Adam, the sense is not that Adam's sin is imputed to us (for that would be, as I said, to import a trifling into the Decree of most excellent men), but that Adam's sin was communicated to us by natural propagation. From which it follows that it is justly imputed to us — but by mediate or consequent imputation, which Placeus constantly acknowledges and holds.

15To make an end: those very men who made the Decree of the National Synod assent to my judgment, and by their testimony free Placeus from condemnation — above all the most distinguished and most pious man D. Drelincourt, most faithful pastor of the church of Paris. For when I had progressed this far in this writing, Placeus wished it, before it came into the light, to be shared with certain of his friends, most learned and most prudent men — and especially with the said D. Drelincourt, whose authority he was not unaware had weighed very much in drafting that Decree. And he, having read it through, for his outstanding candor and zeal for the church's peace wrote most kind letters to Placeus from Paris, in the year 1653, on the 10th of December, which, with his good leave, I will not be reluctant to copy here: for it concerns truth, and peace, and the cause I plead, that they go out among the people. They were framed in the French tongue; for the sake of those who do not know French Placeus turned them into Latin: Lord and honored Brother. The writing which you wished to be shared with me I read with singular pleasure; and that I see finished by it that from which I feared some disturbance and division in our churches, I give thanks to God from my whole heart. For I can confirm to you, Lord, and to all others if any doubt, that the counsel of the last National Synod of Charenton was in no way to condemn you, or the doctrine which you propose. That I can testify for certain. For I was counted worthy not only to be present in that famous assembly, but also to be one of those delegates who drafted the Decree of which we speak. It never entered our mind to establish that imputation of Adam's sin which you call antecedent and immediate, but only that which you call consequent and mediate. I for my part have always so thought and taught. So I am filled with great joy and consolation that I see you feel the same with me concerning this most momentous dogma. If occasion offers itself to me of justifying you before those who either do not sufficiently understand these things or labor under adverse prejudices, I confirm to you that I will not fail your cause. It concerns the glory of God and public edification that this truth become known to all, so that there be nothing to hinder the excellent gifts with which God has enriched you from bearing fruit everywhere. I embrace you with my whole heart, and am, etc. What more can you desire, pious reader, for Placeus's full justification?

16Chapter Five. Distribution of what is to be said.

Placeus having been reconciled with the Synod, nothing remains except that we reconcile with each other the lines of argument standing on either side — the one for imputation, the other against imputation of Adam's first sin — so that, hatreds laid down and dissension removed, with joined strength they may together contribute whatever force they have to defending and confirming the Synod's Decree. And that will happen if we demonstrate that neither the arguments brought forward for the imputation of Adam's first disobedience avail anything toward proving antecedent or immediate imputation, nor the arguments brought against the imputation of that sin have any force against consequent or mediate imputation. For when it has become plain that the former do not prove the imputation which the latter reject, and that the latter do not reject the imputation which the former prove, will it not become manifest that those arguments fight among themselves only in appearance, but in truth conspire amicably to establish mediate imputation, the immediate having been repudiated, and to defend the Synod's Decree as I have set it forth? Unless I accomplish both, that appearance of conflict will perpetually strike terror and will, as it were, threaten war; nor, with prejudices intervening and perhaps some disturbances, will a sure hope of establishing firm peace arise. Therefore I must throw my whole strength into demonstrating both. I ask our Lord Jesus Christ as a suppliant that he grant me to do it so clearly and effectually that every handle for doubting and dissenting about this matter afterward be utterly taken away, and that we all by the power and unity of the same Holy Spirit come into the same judgment and constantly persevere in it. Amen.

And we will proceed in this order. First we will call back to examination the arguments brought forward for the imputation of Adam's first sin, and we will make it plain that if they prove any imputation of that sin, it is only consequent or Mediate. Then we will likewise weigh the arguments that seem to fight against the imputation of that first sin, and we will show that they have no force except against antecedent or immediate imputation. So these will be the two parts of what remains for us to say.

17Chapter Six. That the arguments of the most distinguished D. Maresius prove no other imputation of Adam’s first sin than the consequent or mediate.

After the last National Synod, several most distinguished men wrote in print — at least among the books I have seen — for the imputation of Adam’s first sin: Andreas Rivetus, Samuel Maresius, Antoine Garissoles, Charles Daubuz, and Stephen Blanc. Many others wrote in manuscript. The first of them, the celebrated Rivetus, chose to fight neither by Scripture’s authority nor by reasons, but by testimonies of learned men scraped together from every quarter, including living writers whose names we had never even heard of before. For now, then, set him aside. Hear first those who bring Scripture’s testimonies and arguments. We are not asking what men think; we are asking what we ought to think, and what God has willed us to think. God’s word is the rule of our faith, not men’s opinions. Push those opinion-collectors to the rear, and let us examine the arguments drawn from the Scriptures.

18There came forth at Groningen from John Nicolas in the year of the Lord 1646 A New Synopsis of Elenctic Theology, or Index of the controversies of the faith from the Holy Scriptures compiled by Jacob Tirinus the Jesuit, and enlarged, emended, and refuted with a perpetual Censure, by Samuel Maresius, Doctor of Sacred Theology and ordinary Professor of the same Faculty in the Provincial Academy of Groningen and Omland. In which, Controversy 20, on the state of the first parents and on original sin, number 4, on occasion of certain words of Tirinus, the most distinguished man digresses into that Controversy on the imputation of Adam's first disobedience, and when he had made mention of Socinus, Curcellaeus, and others who deny all imputation of that sin, and also of the Decree of the National Synod of the Churches of France, and of the booklet edited by the distinguished Rivetus, he added: Not only do the opponents attack that imputation, but also (which was the occasion of that Synodical Decree) the Reverend, most learned and most celebrated man, my former most sweet fellow-soldier in studies, D. Josué Placeus, Disputations of Saumur, part I, page 206 and following, entirely rejects it beyond right and law, while he studies well and orthodoxly to defend the hereditary corruption which is in all: since both that ought to be admitted, and this is to be acknowledged, as walking with equal step; yet so that by order of nature, and by the notable reason of the transplant of inborn corruption, the imputation of the first sin should precede.

That he was his fellow-soldier in studies Placeus remembers not without pleasure, and he recognizes the remains of old friendship in those praises with which he sees himself adorned by him though least worthy: yet he would have wished that the most distinguished man, writing against the Jesuit, had not mentioned this controversy, if he thinks there is any between us, and he would not want to be packed by a friend into the same bundle, as it were, with Curcellaeus, from whom he vehemently differs. Hereafter, as I hope, the most learned man will think he should affirm that Placeus was neither condemned by the National Synod, nor does he entirely reject the imputation of Adam's first sin. For I do not think he will judge that God's glory and the church's edification demand that he be held for condemned by all. But as to what he says, that imputation and corruption walk with equal step — if he understood consequent imputation, he would not have me resisting; but since he seems to understand antecedent, I cannot assent to him. For that imputation is in no way, neither by Scripture nor by reason, repugnant to Scripture and reason; but this corruption can most certainly be proved by many testimonies of Scripture, by many reasons, and even by experience itself.

Having prefaced such things, the most distinguished man subjoins these few arguments in very brief words, to which we shall also reply most briefly.

19I. That that fault is judged to be imputed to those who are subject to its guilt and penalty is most certain. But that all Adam's posterity are subjected to the guilt and penalty of the fault which Adam committed, all Scripture cries out, and especially Romans 5:12, 1 Corinthians 15:21–22. I distinguish: it cries that they are subjected by a subjection which precedes hereditary vice by order of nature — I deny; by a subjection which follows that vice — I grant, and I praise as witness D. Garissoles himself, chapter 8, section 3, page 206.

II. He adds, Nor can it happen that Adam's transgression is not imputed to those who incur the penalty, namely death, divinely denounced upon that transgression. For as our sins are well said to be imputed to Christ, because he sustained the penalty due to them, and his righteousness is rightly judged to be imputed to us, because we obtain his merit and eternal reward, so Adam's sin is to be said to be imputed to those who sustain its guilt and penalty. I answer: it indeed cannot happen that Adam's transgression is not imputed to those who incur the penalty denounced upon that transgression, but the question remains entire, whether they incur it immediately, and by order of Nature before they are corrupted, or only consequently and through that corruption? The former I deny, and D. Maresius does not prove it; the latter I affirm. As to what concerns Christ, our sins were imputed to him, not as to an author, but as to the most innocent surety of sinners: and therefore he could not be called a sinner. But to us Adam's sin is imputed, not as to his sureties, but as to his authors, and truly sinners. And so those imputations stand far apart. Add that our sins were not imputed to Christ by antecedent imputation, but only by one consequent upon his consent, without which they could not have been imputed to him. Likewise there is a great difference between the imputation of Christ's righteousness and that of Adam's sin. For the former is imputed to us from grace, the latter from justice: and yet the imputation of righteousness itself is not immediate or antecedent, but follows our consent and faith, without which it would be none. There is only a memorable difference. For faith is not righteousness, nor does it merit eternal life, since hereditary vice is truly a sin sufficient for damning the human race. Namely, as I said, the imputation of righteousness is from grace, of sin from desert.

20III. And this imputation, he says, does not rest on God's right over creatures alone, and on absolute Dominion (as some will have it), but on his most equal justice, and most just judgment. I grant it, if Mediate imputation is understood; for Immediate (as I shall make plain in its place, God granting) fights not a little with divine justice. He continues: For often this also happens in a human court without any appearance of iniquity, but most justly, that by one person's fault sin and vice implicate a whole community or posterity as to the extension of the penalty, which, while it happens, that fault is imputed to the whole community or posterity. First, God condemns this in his Law in express words, Deuteronomy 24:16, even when the crime of injured Majesty is in view, 2 Kings 14:6, and forbids that any such thing be said of his own justice, Ezekiel 18, and Jeremiah 31:29–30. Next, if one person's fault implicates a whole community, that happens because the whole community is supposed to have consented to that fault: otherwise it cannot justly be done. Often, the most distinguished man adds, it happens that whatever Kings rave, the Achaeans are punished — plainly those were raving no less than their Kings.

And a Procurator or Mandatory sins with a sin that belongs to those whose names he bears. Namely because these had consented that he should be their Procurator or Mandatory in that matter. Therefore imputation, if there is any, follows their consent; it does not precede it. But which of us, so long before he existed, ever appointed Adam his Procurator or Mandatory? In many places it obtains that if a Vassal has been unfaithful to his Lord, he sins not only for himself but for his posterity, who thus fall from the fief otherwise about to come to them. To that extent certainly he sins for his posterity, because the fief which he lost, since he no longer has it, he cannot hand over to his children. Which also happened to Adam, who, when he had lost original righteousness, could not propagate it into posterity: for who can give what he does not have? And yet it does not follow on that account that unfaithfulness is imputed to the posterity. For if he had sold the fief, or lost it by a stronger man's force or fraud, the posterity would likewise be deprived of it without any imputation of fault. Among the Macedonians, the learned man adds, the crime of majesty committed by someone was avenged upon his whole kinship. What then? Does the most distinguished man think God imitates men's cruelty condemned by God's own Law? Or that from men's injustice one ought to gather what befits God's justice? I both wish him another mind, and think he has one.

There follow in his book: And although the gentleness of the Laws which obtain among Christians is greater, yet it often happens that injured Majesty or another graver crime is so imputed to the children and posterity of him who committed it, that when their goods have been turned into the treasury they even fall from the grade of nobility. Namely children are heirs of the father's wealth and nobility, if he has any; but if he had none, or had them indeed but lost them either by his own fault or by none, who could be heirs of them? But what can this do toward proving the antecedent imputation of the first man's disobedience? Someone contracts a plague often not for himself alone but also for his household and neighbors. Is there therefore for them any imputation of that man's action or passion by which he contracted the plague, or of the plague itself?

Excellently Chamier, Panstratia, volume 3, book 1, on corrupt man, chapter 8, section 10: But he wounded the whole nature (Adam's sin), says Salmeron: therefore it was made common to all. I deny the consequence. The wounding itself was made common, but not the cause of the wounding. So if one house burns, as often happens, because of the Master's sloth, and thence neighboring houses: the fire will indeed be common; but the sloth is wholly that Master's, not the rest's: for sloth is not itself the fire, but only the cause of the fire which reaches the rest. So the soldier who keeps watch negligently harms the whole army: yet the whole army was not lazy. So Nero's cruelty harmed the Romans: and yet the Romans were not cruel. There are hundreds of this kind.

21IV. To the former the distinguished Maresius joins certain other arguments. And who indeed, he says, would deny that what we have sinned is deservedly and rightly imputed to us? But that that sin is ours also, the Apostle clearly teaches, who asserts that all have sinned in Adam. Romans 5:12. Wholly, what we have sinned is deservedly imputed to us. But that sinning of ours is prior, at least by order of nature, to the imputation itself. Therefore cut away imputation by thought, and show us, if you can, that we have sinned the very first actual sin of the first man. Those who hold antecedent imputation say that that sin is not ours except by imputation. If it is not ours except by imputation, it is ours because it is imputed to us, not on the contrary imputed to us because it is ours. As to what touches the Apostle's place, neither by the word we have sinned is the first actual sin of Adam signified, nor does the Apostle seem to us to say in whom but rather in that, nor if you turn it in whom can any imputation therefore be elicited, unless perhaps consequent or mediate, as in its place, God granting, I am going to demonstrate.

V. He adds, For if in Abraham's loins Levi was tithed, Hebrews 7:9, how much more shall we all be judged to have sinned in Adam's loins, inasmuch as we were in him as branches in a root, a mass in firstfruits, members in a head, Romans 11:16, 1 Corinthians 15:22. If anyone should argue similarly: If in Abraham's loins Levi was tithed, how much more in the loins of Seth, or of Enosh, or of some other of the Patriarchs who lived before the flood, have we all sinned? Would the learned man prove the consequence? Or what could he answer that could not be likewise answered to him? There is therefore no consequence. For by what art will the imputation of the first actual sin be elicited from there rather than of following sins, and of Adam's rather than of Seth's or Noah's, and antecedent rather than consequent? But, that I may act liberally, I confess that we have sinned in Adam's loins: does it therefore follow that his first actual sin is imputed to us by an imputation which precedes hereditary corruption? The contrary rather follows. For we have sinned in Adam, because we were in him. But we were in him as branches in a root. And branches are so in a root that nothing of the root is properly imputed to the branches, but the branches draw from the root their nature and vital sap, such as is in the root, good or bad. So we have drawn a corrupt nature from corrupt Adam. For the rest, neither was the mass properly in the firstfruits, but the firstfruits in the mass, nor other members in the head. And so these comparisons seem foreign from what we are doing, and induce no imputation, much less an immediate or antecedent one.

22VI. But I do not know what proof he subjoins. For he was a public person, and represented the whole human race far more effectually than the high Priest in the sanctuary represented the whole Israelite nation. First, cannot that be denied by me as easily as it is affirmed by the learned man? Next, grant it is so — was therefore some one, and that the first, action of the high Priest imputed to the Israelite nation? If you say yes, give a place of Scripture that teaches it. If you deny, what does this do toward proving the imputation of Adam's first actual sin alone, and that antecedent? The high priest represented the Israelite people by office, as vessel of the legal covenant, and in a manner bore him upon shoulders and heart. Is anything of that kind said of Adam? VII. Nor is it less true, he says, that we have sinned in Adam, and so his sin is justly imputed to us all for punishment, than that afterward we, crucified together with Christ, have satisfied divine justice in him, and so his satisfaction and obedience are deservedly imputed to us before God for righteousness. I confess that we have sinned in Adam, and that his sin is justly imputed to us all for punishment. But that is not now in question between us. The question is only about the mode of imputation, or, so to speak, the species: whether it is imputed antecedently or immediately, or through corruption? This I affirm; that the distinguished man does not even try to prove. He therefore wanders from the state of the question which ought to have been between him and Placeus. For the rest, we are said to have satisfied divine justice in Christ as in our surety, who satisfied in our place, when he ought in no way to satisfy for himself. Shall we say likewise that we have sinned in Adam as in our surety, who would have sinned in our place? To be sure, we were then bound to obey God, Adam not likewise. And he came into our place, that he might violate the law in our place. Does this please the most celebrated man? I do not think so. And I have already observed that Christ's satisfaction is imputed to us through our consent or faith: and so nothing can be made of that comparison, except at most that Adam's sin is imputed to us through our consent, which is habitually included in hereditary vice: which is Placeus's very own judgment. VIII. In the last place he fights with this argument. And this imputation of Adam's sin is so much the fairer, because as he had received the condition and promise of life not for himself only but also for his posterity if he stood, so he ought by his fall to have contracted the guilt of death not for himself only but also for all his: for it is most equal that to whom the advantages belong, to him the burdens and disadvantages also belong. How does he understand that Adam had received the condition and promise of life not for himself only but also for his posterity if he stood? Thus — that Adam's posterity would have been under the same condition and promise of life under which Adam was, that is, would live forever if they had not violated God's law? This is most true. For under whatever covenant the fathers are, under the same their children also are. Or that Adam would have communicated to posterity his original righteousness which he had preserved? Nothing truer; but what is that to the imputation of Adam's sin, especially antecedent? By his sin he deprived himself of original righteousness, and contracted corruption, and propagated that privation and corruption into posterity, and through it his own guilt of death. So, as he was under the law of sin and death, so he begot children likewise under the law of sin and death. For he communicated to them his sin, and through sin death. Or finally does he understand that Adam's righteousness, if he had stood, would have been imputed to all his posterity for eternal life? First D. Garissoles denies this, and refutes it with several arguments, in the book on the Imputation of the first sin, chapter 15, section 14, pages 510–511. Next, whence can that be known? Finally, Adam would have had to beget children unlike himself, that is, immutable or impeccable. For let us suppose they sinned: they would have been at once both righteous by imputation of paternal righteousness and unrighteous by their own sin, and so at once worthy of both life and death. If you say they would have fallen from that imputation by sinning, I shall reply that that imputation would therefore have been superfluous and useless, inasmuch as, if they had sinned, it would have been of no use to them; seeing they would have been no less righteous by their own righteousness than Adam himself had been. This argument therefore avails rather to overturn than to establish the antecedent imputation of Adam's sin. For who would believe that the most equal God set Adam such a law, that if he obeyed, however constantly and perpetually, his obedience would not be imputed to posterity, yet his disobedience would be imputed if he happened even once not to obey; and so (as far as imputation is concerned) obedience and disobedience would stand in a contrary way?

23Chapter Seven. If the Arguments of D. Garissoles prove any imputation of Adam's first sin, that it is only mediate or consequent.

I. So stood the arguments of D. Maresius. There was published at Montauban in the year 1648 An Explanation and Defense of the Synodical Decree of Charenton On the Imputation of Adam's first sin, by Antoine Garissoles, minister of the Word of God in the Church and Academy of Montauban, and Professor of Sacred Theology; dedicated to the most ample Presidents and supreme Scholarchs of the Churches and Academies of Zurich, Bern, Basel, and Schaffhausen, among whom he scattered many things about certain persons whom he does not name, and complains of things which, if I understand anything, rather ought to have been silenced for the sake of truth and peace, and of his own honor. Those who were so publicly accused before such great men would by no means have failed themselves, unless they had preferred to consult the peace and tranquility of the Church rather than their own reputation. But because (which grieves me exceedingly) that great man was snatched from the Church by an early death, I desire that his memory be spared as far as I can.

II. The dedicatory Epistle therefore set aside, he nearly in the whole book studied to refute two certain manuscripts, and Placeus's theses. Of those Manuscripts he calls one prior, the other posterior, I believe because one was written before the National Synod, the other after. The prior, a few months before the National Synod, its author, asked by a pastor friend old enough, had poured out as it were on the spot, and had sent his autograph to him, because the courier was pressing, with no copy retained, nor shared with any colleague or friend, nor afterward seen by himself in any way. And so if any copies of it have been scattered, that must have been done either by him to whom it had been sent, or by D. Garissoles himself, with whom that man had shared it. That manuscript certainly neither its own author has, nor Placeus, and who has any copy of it now wholly escapes me. And so I cannot in any way compare it with D. Garissoles's refutation.

As to the later manuscript, it was written by Placeus with a hastening pen at the beginning of the year 1647, and is nothing but a reply to another manuscript opposed to his own Theses, composed by a certain friend venerable to him for age and doctrine and office, and sent to him that he might reply quickly if he did not rest in it. Placeus obeyed him, and replied. That reply came to D. Garissoles's hands. He thought that that manuscript and private writing, together with that prior manuscript, ought to be refuted by him publicly, in a book printed, and before the Reverend Swiss, who perhaps had not received even by hearsay anything about it: which, if he had published together with his refutation, and had set it before those most ample men to be read, it would have been most easy for them to pass judgment on this whole cause. But it pleased the learned man to keep his Adversary (if yet he is to be called Adversary who desired to offend him not even by a word) shut within private walls, and as it were to restrain him by a dock put in, while outdoors, with all hearing, before most illustrious men, he accused him most heavily, and disputed that whole cause against him.

And he so cites those two manuscripts as if they had been written by the same author, when yet he was not unaware that Placeus was author of the later only; which he also hints not obscurely in one or two places. And when this later manuscript had been distributed into fourteen chapters, he scatters particles extracted from it almost everywhere, with the chapter never marked, so that you do not know from which manuscript, or chapter of the manuscript, that which he cites and refutes has been excerpted: which matter gave me very much trouble when comparing the later manuscript (for that prior one, as I said, I neither have, nor know whence I could have it) with its refutation.

But since in that manuscript Placeus had first constituted the state of the question very accurately, then had dissolved his arguments for the immediate imputation of Adam's sin with whom he was disputing, drawn from Scripture, from reason, from the testimonies of the Fathers and of the Reformers, and had sprinkled his own reply with various reasons against that imputation as occasion offered, D. Garissoles vehemently harassed that constitution and exposition of the state of the question, and when that was neglected attributed to Placeus a judgment which he does not own, and so opposed it with arguments that he everywhere inserted some replies or reasons of Placeus and studied to refute them. But how much force those arguments have to which Placeus was replying can be known from nowhere better than from that later manuscript, in which they have been carefully and with greatest faithfulness recalled to the examination of reason. But D. Garissoles's arguments are either the same as those, or, if they differ from them somehow in words and in the manner of proposing, yet the weight is nearly the same, so that they can scarcely be exempted from a comparison and contention of that Manuscript with D. Garissoles's book. I will nevertheless exempt them as far as I can, and will set them before my reader in this place, that he may see that they help antecedent imputation nothing.

He therefore, having constituted the state of the question not as Placeus wished, but as he himself wished against Placeus's words and mind, without any distinction of imputation, since he understood well enough that antecedent or immediate imputation can in no way be proved by itself, at once digressed through four whole chapters, 4, 5, 6, and 7, to prove in general that the imputation of another's sin is not unjust. Which first is not so much to argue as to answer an Argument by which the antecedent imputation of Adam's first sin is attacked, drawn from this, that it seems to fight with justice. Next he proves what Placeus does not deny. For he who acknowledges a mediate or consequent imputation of another's sin certainly confesses that some imputation of another's sin is not unjust. Therefore that was not to be proved in general concerning the imputation of another's sin; for it is clear that there can be both a just and an unjust one; but in species concerning such an imputation as the antecedent or immediate imputation of Adam's sin is posited to be. Which is indeed altogether impossible to prove. But whatever it be — for now I do not wish to digress with the learned man — this is no consequence: Some imputation of another's sin is not unjust; Therefore Adam's first actual sin is imputed to all his posterity, and that by an imputation preceding hereditary corruption. For from that antecedent there does not follow such an imputation of such a sin, namely Adam's first actual sin, namely an antecedent one, any more than any imputation whatever of any other alien sin, whether of Adam himself or of other Patriarchs.

That digression therefore dismissed, in chapter 8 he brings forth certain Arguments from chapter 5 of the Epistle to the Romans, verses 12 and following. But those arguments prove only an imputation which follows hereditary corruption. First he himself confesses it, chapter 8, section 3, page 206, and elsewhere, as has been observed by us above in chapter 4, page 21, and in the last chapter, page 35.

Next, since they are drawn from the comparison which the Apostle institutes between Christ and Adam, one reply could be set against them all, namely that the likeness is in the thing only, not in the mode of the thing. Which reply Placeus did not learn from Socinus, but from the Apostle, Romans 5:15–16, from Calvin's Commentary on Romans 5:17, and, to omit others, from the most distinguished theologian Andreas Rivetus, whose words these are in the Catholic Orthodox, Tractate IV, Question 2, section 18: There is nothing in this argument, however, that forces us to acknowledge a necessity of inhering qualities. For this only can be proved, that we have righteousness in Christ, just as injustice in Adam. But it will be a comparison of causes, not of the mode by which the thing is communicated to us. For Adam's sin is communicated to us by generation, but Christ's righteousness by imputation.

24Therefore the Apostle does not compare the modes by which righteousness is received, but the causes, effects, and subjects of each. The cause of salvation is the obedience of the second Adam, as the cause of condemnation was the disobedience of the first. The effects are that the one constitutes us unjust, the other just. The subjects are many, made just through the one, unjust through the other. Therefore the Bishop of Deux-Ponts, explaining these words of the same chapter, But not as the offense, so also the gift, concludes from the preceding likeness alone: The likeness, then, is as to the thing between these, but not as to the mode. Which being so, the adversaries' argument limps, because they do not argue well from the thing to the mode of the thing. In the French edition, section 8, these last words are set out more fully: That being so, the adversaries' argument is worth nothing; because they conclude therein that we are justified in Christ in the same fashion that we are made sinners in Adam, which the Apostle does not say.

What could have been said more clearly for this our reply, and against the arguments of D. Garissoles? Yet let us weigh them briefly. I will not report all his words: for they are too prolix; but only those in which the nerve and force of the argument consists.

Arg. I. The Apostle has this proposed to himself in the latter part of chapter 5, which extends from verse 12 to the end, that what he taught concerning justification he may confirm by exposition of a noble type. But he taught in chapter 4 that the reason of our justification consists in this, that through the imputation of Christ's righteousness received by faith we are justified, that is, are held just and are absolved before God, etc. Therefore the Apostle wants to conclude from that comparison of Christ with Adam that justification befalls us from the imputation of Christ's righteousness. And yet this could be concluded by no legitimate reason unless the imputation of Adam's sin were posited, etc. For what is the force or reason of a consequence of that kind? Sin is propagated naturally from Adam into us, without any imputation. Therefore the righteousness of the second Adam, who is Christ, descends to us not by propagation but by imputation.

Reply 1. That first Major proposition — The Apostle confirms by exposition of a noble type what he taught concerning justification in chapter 4 — is taken either universally or particularly; that is, that the Apostle confirms either all things which he taught, or some. If the former, the proposition is false. For he had taught that faith is imputed unto righteousness, that a man is not justified from the works of the law, that the promise is not through the law, what faith that is through which we are justified, etc. Which things, however, he does not properly confirm by arguments drawn from that type: inasmuch as of them he does not even make mention in that comparison. If the latter, the argument is vicious and has no force of concluding: for it is in the first figure of syllogisms. And if it be conceived in the third figure with a universal minor joined, that minor will without doubt be openly false.

25Reply 2. Grant that the Syllogism is free of fault: its conclusion does not hurt Placeus. For he freely grants the imputation of Adam's first sin, provided the consequent or mediate be understood — which that very comparison between Christ and Adam demands to be understood, not the antecedent or immediate. For the imputation of Christ's righteousness received by faith follows our consent, our faith, and is made by that mediating. It is therefore fitting that the imputation of Adam's first sin answering to it should follow some consent of ours — if not an act, at least a habit; if not actual, at least habitual — and be made by that mediating.

Reply 3. To ascribe to the Apostle that conclusion of D. Garissoles which cannot be drawn from that comparison unless the constant doctrine of all the Fathers and of all the Orthodox Churches is overturned. For he wants this to be the Apostle's conclusion: Therefore the righteousness of the second Adam, who is Christ, descends to us not by propagation but by imputation. Which conclusion cannot follow except from this antecedent: Adam's sin descends to us not by propagation but by imputation. For if you posit that Adam's sin descends to us partly by propagation, partly by imputation, by what consequence will you thence make out that Christ's righteousness descends not by propagation but by imputation? Certainly you must likewise deny in the antecedent the propagation of Adam's sin, which all both Fathers and Protestants have constantly taught. What of this — that even with that false and erroneous antecedent posited, that conclusion cannot follow except by force of that greater proposition which he suppressed: In whatever way Adam's sin descends to us, in the same way, and not another, Christ's righteousness descends to us. But now if that proposition is understood so universally, it is openly false. For Adam's sin descends into us not from grace but from justice; naturally, not supernaturally; with us not actually consenting, etc. Does Christ's righteousness descend to us in the same way? But if it is understood particularly, so that there is likeness in a certain mode, not in every, the consequence will be vicious, as from a particular major in the first figure. This argumentation therefore both goes against the Church's doctrine and makes the Apostle reason badly. Which things all fell from the learned man, and that in his very first argument — truly to be lamented — as also that which follows.

27Here D. Garissoles, at the place praised, from the distinguished Amyraut's book On Justification in the Milletus, chapter 3, gathers thus from him. You hear, he says, a condemnation descending into us from Adam's disobedience, which was a single action — a condemnation which is not something inhering, but an obligation to punishment (the distinguished Amyraut had added: or a declaration of that obligation by a superior power). But he who on account of another's disobedience is obligated to punishment sustains the guilt of that disobedience, and so that disobedience is imputed to him.

I do indeed hear condemnation descending into us from that disobedience, but I do not hear it descending immediately and before hereditary corruption: which yet is the one thing controverted between us. The distinguished man said that Adam by his disobedience brought in condemnation and death, namely because he brought in sin into all men, the cause of condemnation and death, as is plain from Romans 5:12. He said that those who have communion with Adam share his condemnation and together with him have been subjected to death. But he understands communion with Adam not insofar as he was man (for even Christ himself had this) but insofar as he was a sinner. And we have communion with Adam insofar as he was man, because we drew our nature from him, and insofar as he was a sinner, because we drew our sin from him. We therefore sustain the guilt of that disobedience, but by the mediating of the corruption derived from him into us.

28From this D. Garissoles seizes an occasion of inveighing against those who contend that by the name of sin in Romans 5:12–13 not Adam's actual sin itself is to be understood, but rather and only the internal corruption inhering in us by propagation of the flesh from Adam. Without doubt he did not want to tax Placeus, forgetful that before this last century, and at the end of the former, this was the common exposition of all, or at least nearly all, who were not Pelagians or Pighians. Meanwhile I do not deny that by the name of fall and of disobedience that first actual sin of Adam also ought to be understood.

But I do not know what argument D. Garissoles subjoins. In whatever way, he says, the Apostle speaks of Christ's righteousness, so also of Adam's sin. But properly he speaks only of that righteousness which is Christ's formally and subjectively, but ours relatively and by imputation. Therefore also properly he speaks only of that sin of Adam which inhered in Adam, but by imputation becomes ours. I pass over a double fault of this syllogism in form — one, that to an affirming major it subsumes a negating in the first figure; another, that in the Major the mode of speaking is treated, but in the minor the thing itself, that is, a certain righteousness: for either could easily be corrected. I also pass over that the Apostle did not mention the righteousness (δικαιοσύνη) of Christ, but the δικαίωμα, the ὑπακοή of the one. This I observe: this argument falls back upon its own author, and that with a doubled blow. For first, the righteousness which was in Christ formally and subjectively was habitual righteousness; for actions are not formally and subjectively in the agent, but from the agent. Whence it follows likewise that the Apostle speaks of Adam's habitual sin: which yet in this very place D. Garissoles denies. Next, by Christ's righteousness D. Garissoles understands a righteousness which embraces the universal obedience of Christ's whole life. Therefore one must also understand by Adam's sin all the disobedience of his whole life. Which all confess to be false, and D. Garissoles himself cries out. But if by Christ's righteousness he wanted only one singular obedience of Christ to be understood, opposed to only one singular sin of Adam, Placeus will indeed acknowledge that the names παράπτωμα and παρακοή in verses 18 and 19 are so taken by the Apostle. But he will deny that thence follows either the immediate imputation of Adam's actual disobedience, or that the Apostle by ἡ ἁμαρτία in verses 12–13 did not designate inhering vice: and nevertheless he will show the vanity of this argumentation of D. Garissoles thus: For he will subsume, And yet the Apostle properly does not speak of Christ's first righteousness or obedience, but of the last. Therefore also properly he does not speak of Adam's first sin, but of the last. What is falser than that conclusion? Yet what stands in the way why it should not seem to be gathered equally rightly and evidently as that of D. Garissoles? Further, what he says — that Christ's righteousness becomes ours by imputation — if it is true, is true for this reason, that that imputation is a gracious donation of it. For Christ's righteousness becomes ours, properly speaking, by the gift of God and of Christ, and by our acceptance through faith; in which way certainly Adam's sin cannot become ours. Which difference the Apostle everywhere inculcates, opposing to the παράπτωμα and κρίμα the χάρισμα, the δωρεά, the δώρημα to the παράβασις, righteousness to sin, and the like. What he subjoins — that the sin which inhered in Adam becomes ours by imputation — seems to me vehemently absurd. For thence it follows that that sin is not imputed to us because it is ours, but on the contrary is ours because it is imputed to us; and so that imputation is the cause why we are sinners and guilty, just as the donation and imputation of Christ's righteousness is the cause why we are just. How foreign that is from the equity of God the judge (for imputation is a judicial action), no pious person fails to see. For the rest, read if you please Calvin's commentary on verse 17. Here also D. Garissoles confesses that imputation follows native corruption — which confessed, what imputation can he prove except the consequent? Imputation, he says, is necessarily joined with native corruption; nay, it follows it.

29He seems in section 6 to bring forward some other argument, but in reality it is the same as the former, if you look to force and weight, so that there is no need of another reply. Yet let us see of what sort it is. But this too, he says, belongs to the aim of this place, that the causes of contrary effects are compared, namely that Adam and Christ, as causes of the same kind, produce their effects in their own. Therefore in whatever way Christ is the cause of justification, so Adam is the cause of condemnation. Namely Christ is the meritorious cause of our justification and reconciliation: Adam likewise the meritorious cause of our condemnation and rejection, etc. From this he gathers: He who by his sin merited guilt and punishment for us — his sin is imputed to us. Just as he who by his righteousness merits reconciliation and life for us — his righteousness is imputed. And yet Adam by his sin merited for us that we be guilty and liable to punishments. Therefore it cannot be doubted that his sin is imputed to us.

Let us weigh the particulars. I confess that Christ and Adam are causes of contrary effects in their own — he of justification, this one of condemnation; I deny that thence it follows that in whatever way Christ is the cause of justification, so Adam is the cause of condemnation, unless "in whatever way" be taken for "as truly." For rather the contrary, as I have already warned, follows from it. For causes of contrary effects do not act in the same mode, except perhaps generally, but rather in a contrary. For what heats does not act in the same special mode as what cools, but rather in an opposite; for that acts by heating, this by cooling. Christ was the cause of justification by obeying; Adam of condemnation by disobeying; he by eating of the forbidden fruit; this one by dying; he by paying what we owed as our surety, this one in a wholly other mode: for he was neither our surety, nor did or paid what we owed — he only did that which he was not bound to do.

30So excellently to Bellarmine's objection from Romans 5 — as sin reigned unto death, so also grace might reign through righteousness unto eternal life — replies the most distinguished man whose hearer Placeus once was, Chamier, in these words (for I will transcribe his whole reply, because it is most worthy of reading). I reply that righteousness in this place cannot be granted to be understood as our internal renovation: but that righteousness of Christ by whose imputation we are just: (Nor do we grant that there is that force in the antithesis which would infer that.) We confess sin to be understood as that which reigned through death-bearing works: or better that very corruption inhering in us whence death-bearing works: but we wholly deny that therefore righteousness is to be understood as inhering in us. For the reason of falling is not altogether the same as of rising again. Man could not fall except through his own sin, never through another's. But in turn, he who fell through his own sin could not rise again except through another's righteousness. Just as a bankrupt cannot be in debt except through his own want: but no one can be freed of the same except through another's wealth — namely of him who pays money for him. Therefore sin is compared to righteousness not as inhering to inhering, by which Bellarmine deceives himself: but as cause to cause — thence of death, hence of life. Thus far Chamier. Since therefore the proposition — In whatever way Christ is the cause of justification, so Adam is the cause of condemnation — is not universally true, this conclusion cannot be drawn from it: Therefore as Christ is the meritorious cause of justification, so Adam is the meritorious cause of condemnation. For in whatever way a syllogism be formed from it, if it be in the first figure the form will be vicious; if in the third, the minor will be openly false. Yet grant that Adam is the meritorious cause of condemnation: will immediate imputation of Adam's sin thence follow? In no way. For he is the meritorious cause of our condemnation not immediately, or by a merit preceding hereditary corruption, but by the mediating of that corruption which he communicated with us. For he merited condemnation for us because he merited condemnation for himself, and propagated his merit or sin into us, and through sin or merit condemnation. For it is settled that we all draw from Adam guilt and condemnation by the mediating of hereditary corruption propagated from him into us. Which cannot likewise be said of Christ — that we draw justification from him by the mediating of an inhering righteousness propagated into us: for not as hereditary corruption is truly sin sufficient for our being condemned does righteousness inhering in us merit eternal life or suffice for justifying us. Those who oppose us, if they acknowledge this difference, see their arguments of this kind fall; if they do not acknowledge it, they depart from the confession of faith which the 28th National Synod confirmed. Which of the two do they choose?

31What is weaker than the foregoing arguments for the imputation of Adam's sin, especially the immediate? Yet their author praises them, and, that they may be repeated without the reader's disgust, reduces them into a short compendium. Causes are compared, he says; the effects of the causes are compared; the modes of the effects are compared. The causes, namely Christ and Adam, are compared because each has the same respect and relation to those effects which they produce in men — namely the respect of merit; because each produces not only by any efficiency whatever, or however named, but by meritorious efficiency — the one justification, the other condemnation. That causes and the effects of causes are compared I confess; I deny the modes of the effects. I deny that each cause has the same respect to those effects which they produce in men: for they have rather a diverse. For the one produces its effect by nature, the other by grace; that by carnal generation, this by free gift; that by propagating into us inhering sin which merits condemnation, this by remitting to us that inhering sin; that has a relation to only one sin and guilt, this to all the guilts of all our sins. How then will it be demonstrated that the respect of each is the same, and that of merit? Christ merited for us remission of sins. For he paid our debts. He satisfied Divine Justice in our place. He suffered the death which we had deserved, and, as the Apostle speaks, was made sin for us, that we might be the righteousness of God in him. He freely gave us his own merit: we receive it offered through faith. This was the Father's mind, this the Son's, this the will, this the counsel, this the aim. Scripture everywhere inculcates it. Does it say such a thing of Adam? Did he want by that disobedience of his to merit death for us? Did he sin in our place? Did he give us that merit of his? Do we receive it through some act of our mind or will? How then is each said to have the same respect, the same relation? Or if an inhering vice sufficient for our being damned was propagated into us from Adam, does it follow that an inhering righteousness sufficient for our being justified was propagated into us from Christ? Yet let those who oppose us in this cause see, I ask, whether this cannot be gathered from D. Garissoles's Arguments equally with the antecedent imputation of Adam's sin. Therefore however great a likeness of merit — not now identity — be said to be between each cause, it must be tightly held that in the mode of communicating merit no small unlikeness ought to be observed.

32D. Garissoles subjoins a Syllogism. That by whose consideration and merit we are either condemned or justified is imputed to us, either unto fault and guilt, or unto righteousness and absolution. And yet by the consideration and merit of Adam's sin we are condemned; by the consideration and merit of Christ's righteousness we are absolved and justified. Therefore both Adam's sin and Christ's righteousness are imputed to us.

The conclusion can be granted. For it proves to be imputed what Placeus does not deny: it does not prove to be imputed immediately or before inhering corruption. Which alone Placeus denies. For he freely grants that both Adam's sin by the mediating of our corruption, and Christ's righteousness by the mediating of our faith, are imputed to us. The minor therefore must be distinguished. For if consideration and merit is understood as preceding hereditary corruption, the minor is denied; but if consequent, it is granted. Or Adam's sin is distinguished: for we are condemned by the consideration and merit of Adam's sin propagated into us — but not of Adam's sin cut off from the propagated vice and looked at immediately before it. For as Christ's righteousness is ours through faith, so Adam's sin is ours through the communicated inhering vice.

33Next, he says, the effects of those causes are compared, namely sin and righteousness. What reaches us from Christ is not only inhering righteousness and ours subjectively, but also righteousness outside us, and another's, and ours only imputatively. Therefore what reaches us from Adam is not only inhering and habitual corruption, but also sin and disobedience outside us, and another's, and ours only by imputation. First there is no such consequence: for it rests on an omitted major proposition which, however conceived, will be — if universal — false; if particular — unfit to effect this conclusion. Next I confess that we have from Christ not only moral but also forensic righteousness, of which that is opposed to inhering corruption, this to the guilt which follows corruption; and so there has reached us from Adam not only moral but also forensic injustice, namely corruption and guilt. So far there is likeness. But D. Garissoles mixes in certain falsehoods. First it is false that Christ's righteousness is not ours except imputatively. For it is ours by the gift of God and of Christ, and also by our acceptance through faith. Therefore gift, donation by grace, overflow of grace, gift of righteousness is what the Apostle calls it. Who does not see that those names set a difference between the righteousness which reaches us from Christ and the sin which reaches us from Adam, in the mode by which they are ours? This gift is offered to us by the preaching of the Gospel and is received through faith. Therefore we are justified by faith. Pareus therefore speaks better: That the gift may be ours, it is received with a bought hand: so the gift of righteousness is ours when by faith we apply it to ourselves.

Next, which righteousness of Christ does he understand? Habitual? Then Adam's habitual injustice will have to be understood, not his actual sin. Actual of the whole life? Then likewise the actual injustice of Adam's whole life will have to be understood — which yet no one has said. The passive, as they call it, which in a moral sense is not righteousness but in a forensic? This is properly opposed only to guilt. But guilt is born from corruption. Therefore from Adam there reaches us a guilt following corruption, which is ours through that corruption, not through imputation only. Whoever denies this will depart from Scripture and from the doctrine of all the Protestant Churches, declared in confessions of faith and in disputations against Pelagius and Pighius. But if anyone not content with that says another guilt reaches us from Adam which precedes corruption and is ours only by imputation, he both posits two guilts — one before, one after corruption — contradicting D. Garissoles in places already noted by me at page 27 of this book, and will make God the author of our sin: inasmuch as by his judicial imputation he makes us sinners who otherwise would not be sinners: and, to be silent about the rest, will bring a new dogma into the Church beyond Scripture and the ancient faith. But let us go on.

34Finally, he says, the mode of the effects which reach us from those causes is compared. We are constituted righteous through Christ: sinners through Adam. How righteous through Christ? By the imputation of his righteousness. How sinners through Adam? By the imputation of his disobedience. Now I and the most distinguished Rivetus have denied that the modes are compared, and rightly: for to one asking, How are we righteous through Christ? if someone answer with the Apostle, By the donation of righteousness through grace, will he be able to answer one asking, How are we sinners through Adam? in like manner, By the donation of righteousness? And that through grace?

35The former arguments were drawn from the aim of the Apostle; those follow which are drawn from his words. Omitting, for brevity's sake, the explanation of verse 12, let us see what he concludes from them. Certainly, he says, of opposites there is the same ratio, and from understanding of the one one easily arrives at knowledge of the other. If we know what the righteousness brought through Christ is, we shall understand also what the sin introduced through Adam is. And yet the righteousness introduced through Christ is twofold, imputed and inhering, yet so that from the reason of the matter and argument which is disputed by Paul, the imputed here properly comes to be understood, since justification is being treated, but the inhering only from the consequence of things, inasmuch as no one is gifted with imputed righteousness to whom God does not also bestow the inhering. Therefore likewise the sin introduced through Adam is indeed twofold, imputed and inhering in us, yet so that from the reason of the business which is here treated the imputed is properly understood; but the inhering only from what follows, because of the tightest and indissoluble conjunction of imputation and original corruption. Let us weigh these things. Certainly, he says, of opposites there is the same ratio: of all, I ask, and of every, or of some only and certain ones? If this, the argumentation is faulty; if that, the proposition is false. Avarice and prodigality are opposed — is the ratio of each throughout the same? If it is the same, is the ratio of liberality, which is opposed to both, also throughout the same?

36But grant it to be so: will the proposition not have to be understood of those things which are opposed formally and adequately and in genus, but not of certain individuals of them? For in genus obedience and disobedience, righteousness and injustice, are opposed, and so when one is known the other is easily known. But in species, or in the individual, a certain obedience of one can be known while a certain disobedience of the other is unknown, and vice versa — this known, that unknown: and that we may not leave the matter subject to this dispute, Adam's disobedience could once be known while Christ's obedience, which heals it, was not known; and this could become known to some of the Gentiles before they were taught anything of Adam's disobedience. For since they differ in subjects and objects and law and time and all other circumstances, they are indeed two certain individuals of opposite genera, but they themselves are not properly opposed per se, except by reason of effects, as disease and remedy. For formally and speaking logically, Adam's disobedience was opposed to the obedience due from him, and Christ's obedience to the disobedience which it excluded from the same subject. But leaving those philosophical propositions, let us come to the theological.

37And yet, he says, the righteousness introduced through Christ is twofold, imputed and inhering. I acknowledge it: for that heals guilt, this heals viciousness; that is righteousness in a forensic sense, this in a moral. I also approve what he adds, that the imputed here properly comes to be understood, since justification is being treated. For the inhering does not justify; and so it is not of this place. Therefore likewise, he says, the sin introduced through Adam is twofold, imputed and inhering in us. It does not follow: for the inhering is opposed to both righteousnesses — to the inhering by its own inherence and viciousness, to the imputed by its own guilt which it pours forth. For inhering sin is at once inhering and imputed: for it both inheres in us, and by desert, unless it be remitted, is imputed to us. Disparate is the ratio of the inhering righteousness derived into us from Christ: for this only inheres; it is not imputed to justification. And so another imputed righteousness is needed, that is, remission of sins, which takes away the guilt of inhering sin, which unless it be taken away, inhering righteousness is not introduced into the place of corruption. Therefore it is not the case that, just as inhering righteousness was not of this place in which justification is treated, so neither is inhering sin or corruption of this place. For it does not follow that if that does not justify, this does not condemn. For that indeed does not justify, but this truly condemns, and makes us guilty in the divine forum, and for that reason is opposed to imputed righteousness. You already see, I think, candid reader, that at least with respect to justification and condemnation the ratio of the inhering righteousness from Christ and of the inhering corruption introduced from Adam is very diverse. That does not merit life; this merits death.

38Here, therefore, that I may use the words of an excellent Zurich theologian: We ought to hold well the distinction which we lately noted between Adam and Christ. For he so propagated sin into all posterity that by nature we are all born sinners, and own sin inheres in us, which makes us liable to eternal punishment: but Christ so communicates his righteousness to us, not that it be in us essentially, or that we be defended in God's judgment by own righteousness, but that it be called ours by free imputation, and that on account of faith alone, which joins us to him, that we may be made his brothers, yes even members of his body. Allow me, I ask, whoever reads these things, warned by so great a man, to hold this distinction well, which by those arguments of his D. Garissoles has tried in vain to take away. So stood his first argument.

39Let us now approach, he says, in the second place to the illustrious words "in that all sinned" (ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον) (Romans 5:12), which alone were able to suffice for establishing the doctrine of imputation. (How false this is will soon be clear.) For so, he says, the Apostle signifies that all men whatsoever who were, are, or are to be unto the end of the age sinned in Adam when he sinned. (Whether he signifies that, we shall soon see.) And so whoever of the ancients or of the more recent who have treated of this imputation have all confirmed that doctrine especially in this place. He prudently added the limitation "whoever have treated of this imputation." For both Calvin and Martyr and other greatest men did not confirm that doctrine in this place — men who would without doubt have confirmed it if they had believed that imputation to be taught by those words. That cloud of witnesses by which he strives to obscure the light of truth we shall, God granting, scatter in its own place. Now let us consider the matter itself with him.

40Namely, he says, the Apostle opposes these two: in Adam all sinned, in Christ all are justified. Is it so, I ask, by those words "in that all sinned" (ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον) (Romans 5:12)? But let him go on. Whether you look at the opposition or at the words by which the opposition is explained, you have imputation rising from it. From the opposition. For as men are justified in Christ, so they are understood to have sinned in Adam. And yet in Christ they are justified by the imputation of his righteousness. Therefore they are also to be understood to have sinned in Adam by the imputation of Adam's sin. First I deny that such an opposition is made in those words. That was not to be supposed, but to be proved. Next, as I have already often impressed (for this argument differs in nothing from the former ones), the proposition is not universally true, and the likeness is rather in the truth of the thing than in the mode. Namely, men are as truly justified in Christ as they truly sinned in Adam; but they are not justified in exactly the same mode in which they sinned: for the thing itself could not bear that; but in a diverse mode. For I will subsume: And yet men are justified in Christ by each one's own faith. Therefore they are also to be understood to have sinned in Adam by each one's own faith — not to say, or by unbelief? Is this minor proposition not true, confirmed by the votes of the Apostle and of all Christians? Either therefore the major is false, or a conclusion must be admitted that is not obscurely opposed to D. Garissoles's conclusion. Which of these do you choose, pious reader?

41From the words he adds: For the force of the aorist "sinned" (ἥμαρτον) is here to be weighed. For this tense, in the use of Scripture, is sometimes absolute from a special signification of time, as when it is said, "All have turned aside, they have become useless; they have sinned" (Romans 3:12, 23). For this contains all times — past, present, and future — so that it may be signified that those who were have sinned, those who are sin, those who will be will sin. Here nevertheless, where the Apostle multiplies aorists, their force ought to be regarded singly: that sin entered, that death entered, that all sinned. But sin entered as soon as Adam sinned, and the guilt of death entered together with that sin. Therefore also, as soon as Adam sinned, we all are understood to have sinned; which surely cannot be better expounded than if we say that Adam's sin is imputed to all. I will not say that this argument sins by ignorance of the elenchus; nor that it does not conclude what was controversial between its author and Placeus: for in this all D. Garissoles's arguments sin: for not even that which it concludes has any force of proving. For if the aorists "all have turned aside, have become useless, have sinned" (Romans 3) are absolute from a special signification of time, what is there why the aorists "sin entered, death entered, all sinned" (Romans 5:12) should not likewise be absolute from that signification? Their multiplication in this place, you will say, stands in the way. But did he not equally there and here count three aorists? And to those three which he praised from Romans 3 he could add two others from verses 13 and 17: "with their tongues they have used deceit," "the way of peace they have not known" (Romans 3:13, 17). Although I do not see why, if two or three aorists ought to be so taken, four or five or six cannot be taken in the same way. For the multiplication of aorists does not change their signification. To one affirming, therefore, and not proving, I oppose negation: I could also oppose the authority of great theologians who lived before us, but for brevity's sake I restrain myself, and reserve it for another place.

42This I observe: that death entered into all men — not one death numerically imputed to all, but each man's own. This cannot be denied. It is also established that through one man sin truly entered into all men — not one numerically, but each one's own and inhering. Is it not so? If you acknowledge these things, why do you not rest in them? If you deny them, you who profess to subscribe the public confession of faith? Shall I recall even the following words to examination? Why not? For it interests the truth that whatever is not right be corrected. "But sin entered," he says, "as soon as Adam sinned." Certainly into Adam, but through Adam into all other men, who then were none — how could it then enter? But the Apostle does not say that sin entered into one man, but through one man into the world, that is, into all men (Romans 5:12). And it is established that through one man there entered into all men, Christ alone excepted, inhering sin constituting us guilty of death in the divine forum. Why then should we not acknowledge that in Paul's words? Who would also believe that the Apostle understands by death the guilt of death rather than by sin? For give a place, if you can, where death signifies not death but only the guilt of death, especially when it is regarded, as it is here, as the effect and wages of sin, and is distinguished from it (Romans 6:23). Did Adam's actual sin enter into all men otherwise than insofar as either its pravity by propagation or its guilt by imputation entered into them? If therefore D. Garissoles understood guilt when it is said that sin entered, how could he understand the same guilt when it is added that through the sin which entered into all men death also entered into the same? For the rest, "as soon as Adam sinned, we all are understood to have sinned" — namely in the way that, as soon as he was or was created, we all are understood to have been or to have been created. Would one therefore be to be borne who should simply say that we all existed from the beginning of the world?

43I hear a learned man confirming this by another argument; let us attend to it. "The same," he says, "those little words ἐφ᾽ ᾧ, 'in which,' confirm. For those who, when they were not yet in the nature of things, are said to have sinned in another are counted without doubt, while he was committing the sin, to have committed it themselves also, which evidently belongs to imputation. And yet all men, when they were not yet, are said to have sinned in Adam. Therefore they are counted, while he was committing the sin, to have committed it themselves also, which manifestly belongs to the imputation of Adam's sin." First this argumentation rests on the hypothesis that the little words ἐφ᾽ ᾧ in this place signify "in which." That we do not grant. For it cannot be denied that they can be rendered "in that," "because," "inasmuch as," and so on. If they can be so rendered, it is not necessary that they be rendered "in which"; if it is not necessary that they be rendered "in which," there is no necessity of the argumentation which rests on that version. How then does D. Garissoles prove that in this place "in which" ought to be rendered rather than "in that," and so on? He brings an index of great men ancient and recent who rendered "in which," but their authority did not hinder others, themselves also great men, from preferring to the version "in which" the version "in that," "inasmuch as," and so on: Theodoret, the Syriac interpreter, Calvin, Martyr, Bucer, Aretius, Piscator, Paraeus, Erasmus, Leo Juda, Vatablus, the authors of the French version which our churches use, and likewise of the English, and so on — for it would be long to enumerate all. Did those greatest men therefore favor the Pelagian heresy? What is there why Placeus ought not to follow their example and rest, answering, on the received version? Does D. Garissoles add nothing besides? He also adds the force of those little words from the use of Scripture: for, he says, it is most frequent that ἐπί be taken for ἐν, which to prove he praises many examples. Namely, he proves what is not denied; but what is denied, that he does not prove. For nobody denied to him that ἐπί is sometimes taken for ἐν. But does it therefore follow that that preposition is used here by enallage, and ἐπί put for ἐν? Nay, if the Apostle had said ἐν ᾧ, nothing would hinder even those words from being rendered "in that" or "since," and so on, as was done by nearly all interpreters at Romans 8:3. And ἐφ᾽ ᾧ exists in that sense at 2 Corinthians 5:4, and is usually taken otherwise whenever there is no antecedent to which ᾧ can conveniently be referred. For the rest, what he says — that he makes Beza the author of the version "in which" for us — whence he has it I do not know. That certainly Placeus never said, nor wrote, nor ever thought. The reasons which he attributes to us are not Placeus's, nor are they needed by one answering according to the version approved by our churches. If you demand of me, Reader, that I prove it: First I will bring two reasons of Placeus, then those five which D. Garissoles objected to himself I will briefly vindicate from his exceptions. First therefore if you render "in which," the relative "which," because it will not be able to be referred to the nearest or neighboring masculine noun but to a remoter one, a trajection will have to be admitted, and that an insolent and very hard one. But now such a trajection ought not to be admitted without necessity, which here appears none, since the little words ἐφ᾽ ᾧ can no less both properly and conveniently be rendered "in that," or "since," or "inasmuch as." Next, the words "all sinned," since they contain the cause of that which immediately preceded, demand to be joined with it: for who can deny that death invaded all because all sinned (Romans 5:12)? Why then should we separate from each other those members of the Apostolic speech which are joined by the Apostle not only by situ and placement, but also by sense and by the indissoluble nexus of the things signified?

44As for the other reasons, would that their own author had undertaken to defend them — by the wisdom and eloquence with which he seems to me to be marked — he would have performed that far better than I. The first stands thus, as D. Garissoles reports it; for I do not have the manuscript from which they were taken. Faith must rest with him. Nobody is ignorant that ἐφ᾽ ᾧ, among good authors, either denotes the end of a thing (τὸ τέλος) or an antecedent cause, as in Synesius, ἐφ᾽ ᾧ γεννάδιον ἔχαρε. Since therefore an end cannot be denoted in this place, it follows that an antecedent cause is designated, and that it be rendered "in that," or "because." What does D. Garissoles answer? This one thing only: that ἐπί joined with the relative ὅς, ἥ, ὅ, although it sometimes marks an end and sometimes an antecedent cause, nevertheless most frequently has the force of the preposition ἐν. Mark 2:4: ἐφ᾽ ᾧ κατέκειτο, "in which he was lying," and so on. But what is this except a wandering from the argument? For in the argument the discussion was of the words ἐφ᾽ ᾧ placed absolutely — that is, without an expressed antecedent to which the pronoun ᾧ is referred. For when there is a near antecedent to which it is referred, who ever thought those words ought to be rendered "in that" or "because"? But here they are placed absolutely: for what immediately precedes is the noun θάνατος used twice, and before that ἁμαρτία; and it is established that they are referred to neither neuter. The genitive ἀνθρώπου, "man," does indeed precede; but intervening nouns — nay, even commas — stand in the way of referring the relative to him (Romans 5:12).

45Second reason. If the Apostle had thought of imputation, this place uniquely demanded that he commemorate it expressly; and he ought to have said ἐν ᾧ, not ἐφ᾽ ᾧ, because the matter is hard and abhorrent from common sense, and therefore he ought to have expressed it clearly, lest anyone doubt concerning it. He answers first: whether the imputing of alien sins abhors from common sense has already been disputed above. Nay, it abhors that they be imputed to some who are altogether innocent, so that on account of alien things imputed these men are punished with a punishment which is truly sin and makes them inheringly sinners, so that by this imputation they become liable to eternal death who otherwise would not be liable. This, I say, from common sense, from Scripture, and from reason, and from the very sense of conscience, seems to me to abhor vehemently. What? If someone should say that other sins of Adam, or of the other Patriarchs, are imputed to us all, would he not seem to say things abhorrent from common sense? Let there be some imputation of an alien sin that is not unjust: has that been proved of every imputation, and namely of this such immediate imputation of the first actual sin, than which none more unjust seems to me able to be feigned?

46Response 2. Here the confession of the learned man is to be noted: that if ἐν ᾧ had been said, the imputation of sin could have been concluded thence manifestly, as expressly commemorated. So he condemns the instance of a later writing against this imputation, where it is pretended that even if you render "in which," still nothing can be gathered thence for the cause of imputation. I marvel at the shrewdness (ἀγχίνοιαν) of the learned man, who does not see that the author of that reason spoke thus not from his own mind but from the mind of those against whom he was disputing. For so it befits one who argues to dispute from the adversaries' hypotheses rather than from his own; otherwise he will advance nothing.

47Response 3. It seems scarcely bearable that it is said: if Paul had wished to teach imputation, he ought rather to have said ἐν ᾧ than ἐφ᾽ ᾧ. For who are we who dare prescribe to the Apostle a manner of speaking and formulas — especially when ἐν and ἐπί so frequently have the same sense and signification? Gently, I ask: without doubt the author of that reason abhors vehemently from arrogance of this kind. He does not prescribe to the Apostle a manner of speaking and formulas; he draws an argument from his wisdom and prudence, which is established to have been the highest. It was asked what the Apostle wished to signify by the words ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον (Romans 5:12). Some say he wished to signify that Adam's first actual sin was imputed to all men, and that immediately. Since therefore they attribute this mind to the Apostle — I will not say they prescribe it, but because it so pleases them — and toward that mind they bend a little his words, less accommodating as they are, affirming that ἐπί is put for ἐν with no reason given. He objects that this less befits Apostolic wisdom. For since a doctrine of this kind is very hard, and abhorrent from common sense, and is not taught elsewhere in Scripture, it was fitting that at least in this one place it be taught openly and in express words — or at least in those words which, though falsely, are nevertheless held as express by those who dissent from us in this cause. If at least he had said ἐν ᾧ, there would have been no need to recur to an enallage of the preposition ἐπί put for ἐν, and the signification of the words ἐν ᾧ would have been less ambiguous: for much more rarely than ἐφ᾽ ᾧ do they signify "in that," "inasmuch as," and so on. Since therefore the Apostle deliberately preferred to say ἐφ᾽ ᾧ rather than ἐν ᾧ, and as much as could be done removed them from those antecedents, and by several things interposed separated the noun ἀνθρώπου, and so hindered the relative ᾧ from being referred to it as antecedent — why without necessity, without reason, do we prefer to force some violence upon his words and upon the collocation of the words, so that they seem somehow to say what cannot be gathered from them, rather than, retaining the propriety of the words ἐφ᾽ ᾧ and the Apostolic situ of the clauses, admit that sense of his words which in itself no one but a Pelagian can deny to be true? But what, he says, will hinder Pelagius or Socinus from objecting by the same reason: if Scripture had wished to teach either that sin is propagated by generation, or that Christ is Mediator by merit and satisfaction, it would have expressed it, or ought to have expressed it, in clear and perspicuous words, since the matter is hard and not enough accommodated to the common sense of men? Altogether nothing will hinder the followers of Pelagius and Socinus from being able to object this if they wish; but nothing will hinder us either from answering those who object — not what D. Garissoles wants, that it is not ours to prescribe to God manners and modes of speaking (for this, when God's mind and sentence is turned in the question, can seem sophistic); but what the fact is: that it neither abhors in any way from the sense of conscience, and is expressed in Scripture in words so express and clear that, unless great force is brought upon them, they cannot be twisted into another sense.

48Third reason. The place does not demand that it be so rendered: for since there is a certain cause why the Apostle said that death pervaded into all men, namely because all sinned (Romans 5:12), what need is there to flee to an uncertain and remote cause, and that against the natural force of the words? He answers four things: but because he had not perceived the force of the argument, he improvises (ἀποσχεδιάζει). The Apostle said that death pervaded into all men: the cause without doubt is because all sinned. But which sin ought to be understood is the question. Some want habitual sin inhering in all to be understood; others Adam's actual sin imputed to all in the order of nature before they are vicious. Habitual inhering sin propagated from Adam into all is a certain cause — that is, confessed by all the orthodox. For concerning that vice — that it exists and is a cause of death, being truly sin and truly making us liable to death — there is no controversy among us. That is confirmed by the common confession of faith in the clearest and most express words. But concerning Adam's actual sin — whether it is imputed before corruption, and whether that imputation is the cause why death has pervaded into all — the matter is not certain and liquid: for that is what is now controverted among us. Again, the vice inhering in each of us is a nearer cause of our death than Adam's first actual sin which is said to be imputed to us — not only earlier in the order of nature than we were corrupted, but even by some thousands of years before we began to be and to live. Therefore when those two causes are compared with each other, that is certain because not controverted, this uncertain because controverted; that is proximate in the same subject with its effect — that is, with death — this remote because in another subject, from us not only by the order of generating nature but also by time very remote, and between which and death a nearer cause is interposed, namely corruption. Now, I think, Reader, you yourself understand through yourself the learned man's aberrant responses. For since it is certain and in no way controverted among us that there inheres in all a sin that merits death and on account of which all die, why concerning that sin do we not take the Apostle's words in which the cause of the death of all men is contained — "all sinned"? Why, that sin being set aside as if it were none, do we flee to another imputed sin, which both is controverted and is remoter from that effect — especially when the Apostle's words and the situ of the words resist?

49Besides the aberration from the argument there are other vices in the three responses of D. Garissoles, which I will point out in a few words. 1. "We," he says, "contend that there was a certain cause why the Apostle should speak of that imputation. For when he had said that by one man's sin death was brought into the world (Romans 5:12), it could be asked whence that force to that sin, that it brought so great an evil not upon one or another but upon all: Paul answers that it came about thence, that by that one sin all were made liable, or that that one sinning, all are to be understood to have sinned in him and with him." This response, besides that it does not touch the nerve of the argument, makes the Apostle trifling: with only the words changed he answers the very thing that was being asked, and brings forward as the cause of the effect the effect itself whose cause was being sought. For what is it, to the author of this response, that sin entered into the world? nothing, except that actual sin was imputed to all men. That is clearest from this very chapter 8, §. 8, p. 217 of his, and from some other places. What again is it to him that all sinned in Adam? that, he says, can certainly not be better expounded than if we say that Adam's sin is imputed to all — the same chapter, §. 10, p. 222. To one asking, therefore, why Adam's actual sin is imputed to all unto death, the Apostle will have answered: because it is imputed to all. To one asking whence that force to that sin, that it is imputed not to one or another but to all, he answers that it came about thence, that it is imputed to all. What is it to trifle, if this is not?

50To those two vices a third also is added. For he contradicts himself. For if that was the mind of the Apostle which this response attributes to him, certainly the words ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον (Romans 5:12) ought to be construed after all the antecedents — "sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death pervaded into all" — for they would answer the question that could arise from those immediately preceding words. That overturns the version "in which." For with that version posited, the words "in which all sinned" ought to be construed before all those: for they cohere immediately with the noun ἀνθρώπου, and there is a transposition. So they ought to be construed: "As through one man, in whom all sinned, sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death pervaded into all men" (Romans 5:12).

51The second response likewise sins by ignorance of the argument, and takes the uncertain cause otherwise than it ought, and besides has some things less rightly said. "Who will have said," he says, "that an uncertain cause is proposed by Paul, when in 1 Corinthians 15:22 he ascends as far as Adam the first-formed, and says that we all die in Adam?" What is the point of this? Does the Apostle there bring forward some cause why all die by the force of the communion they have with Adam? Or are those words, "in Adam all die" (1 Corinthians 15:22), to be understood even imputatively, as they speak? Worse are the things that follow. "Namely," he says, "neither there nor here does the Apostle properly look to particular causes that can reside in each individual of the human race and on account of which it comes about that they die; but he sets out a general cause that looks upon all in the genus equally," and so on. He speaks just as if hereditary corruption were not a general cause looking upon all men equally — when yet that is as common as the death of those who have sinned is common, as human nature is common to them, indeed as imputation is said to be common. So little by little the doctrine of the force and guilt of hereditary corruption, which the first reformers defended with highest zeal, is neglected and nearly blotted out, that it may give place to that imputation which those great men either altogether did not know, or even refuted.

52"Nor is it fair," he adds, "that we should say that cause is remote and far off, because here one must look not to spaces of years and ages, but to the efficacy of the thing." What? is an injustice that did not stick in me, but in Adam alone, dead some thousands of years before I existed, a cause equally immediate and proximate to me or to my death, as that which inheres in me most inwardly and is by the confession of all the cause of my death? Did not corruption also follow Adam's sin, and death this? corruption is therefore a nearer cause of death than the sin that stuck in Adam alone. "Nor indeed," he subjoins, "do those who say corruption is derived from Adam propose Adam on that account as a remote and distant cause of that corruption — namely, because there is for us with him a most near union by reason of blood, though not by reason of person." On the contrary they propose him as a remote and distant cause of that corruption — that is, the first, from which it flowed out to all others. Therefore that blood is here distinguished from person, and that by reason of the former, not of the latter, a most near union with Adam is said to be ours — that for my part I do not understand. For my blood differs from blood, and my nature from nature, as much as person from Adam's person: the difference of each alike is numerical, not specific. And as I drew my person, so also my nature, through all my intermediate parents from Adam. For Adam is our father not nearest but first; and I have received, or could receive, nothing from him except through my nearest parents.

53"But," he says, "since a comparison is here instituted between Christ and Adam, the disobedience committed by Adam is no more to be called a remote cause of our condemnation than the obedience performed by Christ is to be called a remote cause of our justification." As if a comparison could not be instituted between two causes of opposite effects, when they are first in their kind, unless each alike is proximate! Who does not know that Christ's obedience is the adequate and only cause of our justification, but Adam's disobedience only an inadequate and partial cause of our condemnation? for we are condemned not on account of Adam's actual sin alone, but also on account of the hereditary corruption inhering in us, and all our other sins whether actual or habitual; whereas yet we are justified on account of Christ's one obedience, and in no way on account of ours. This cause, therefore, since it is the sole and only cause of justification, is the same both first and proximate; but that, since it is not alone, but together with it there are many other causes of condemnation, is first in such a way that there is no necessity that it be proximate. What? do we not draw sin and, through sin, condemnation from Adam by natural propagation? Did not both the Fathers of old and our first Reformers use to oppose the propagation of sin to Pelagian imitation, with no mention made of imputation? And yet of natural propagation, in its own kind indeed, Adam is the first cause, but of each of us the nearest or immediate cause he certainly is not. Here therefore the greatest difference is seen between Adam and Christ. Adam is the most remote cause of our generation, whereas Christ is the proximate cause of our regeneration. We are sons of Adam not nearest but remote: for between us and Adam many others are interposed; but we are nearest sons of Christ, as many as believe in him. For by faith we are united to Christ straight and immediately, and also by his Spirit, who, since he is only one in number both in Christ and in all of us, couples us to Christ so immediately that between Christ and the believer there is no middle person. Since the learned man was not ignorant of these things, how could he speak so? "Finally in meritorious causes," he says, "of the kind we are dealing with, there is always proximity, because that merit always acts near (ἐγγύς) and efficaciously." A fine argument! as if efficacy, like cause, could not equally be distinguished into remote and proximate! for each cause has its own force, and when the effect follows, that is efficacy; otherwise it would not be a cause. Did not Adam efficaciously propagate his nature and corruption into us? And yet he is only a remote cause of our nature and corruption. But he himself is not the meritorious cause of our condemnation, but the cause of this cause; for from him flowed the hereditary corruption that is the proximate or immediate cause of our condemnation, and of this the cause was Adam's actual sin. Can we likewise say that Christ's obedience was the cause of some virtue or obedience that is the cause of our justification? To that extent, therefore, there is a memorable difference between Christ's obedience and Adam's disobedience, and the former is to be called the proximate cause of justification, the latter the remote cause of our condemnation (for corruption is interposed). Otherwise how could Adam's actual sin be a meritorious and proximate cause of our condemnation? First, if it is not ours except by imputation, it does not merit our condemnation except by the intervention of imputation. It is therefore not a meritorious cause of our condemnation through itself, but only through an accident, by reason of that imputation, which is a divine action, and so supernatural and voluntary: whereas yet Christ's obedience is a meritorious cause of our justification through itself; namely, performed to that end and counsel by our surety in our place. That granted, it follows that our being sinners and being condemned is to be ascribed through itself to that divine action, but to Adam's sin only through an accident — which my conscience will in no way let me be led to believe or do. Next, he who imputes sin to some man presupposes that that man exists; he who condemns to death presupposes that he whom he condemns lives. Since therefore of our existing and living, which by nature precedes our condemnation, Adam is only a remote cause, how can he be the proximate cause of our condemnation?

54The fourth reason follows. The Apostle's scope will not allow them to be turned that way; for the Apostle began at verse 12 (Romans 5:12) to institute a comparison between Christ and Adam in such a manner as to affirm that through one man sin entered, and through sin death, so that death spread abroad upon all men. But because it could seem strange that there was so great force and efficacy in one man's one sin that it should sentence the whole multitude of men to death, lest anyone should suspect anything unworthy of God, he adds that this ought not to seem strange, since all have sinned. As therefore Adam fell into death because he sinned, so also all alike fall into death because all have sinned.

55What does the learned man reply? "First," he says, "let the respondent's confession be noted: for while he acknowledges that that sin which is said to have entered through one man is one sin of one man, namely Adam's, by the same reason he confutes and overthrows all those arguments by which another above was striving to confirm that here by the name of sin not Adam's own sin, but only our inward and original corruption, is to be understood." Does he so confute and overthrow all those arguments? Can another's arguments — many, and strong, and long after that affirmation devised and proposed — be confuted and overthrown by one man's simple affirmation? If it is so, there is no argument so necessary and demonstrative that it cannot by that reason be most easily confuted and overthrown. But those arguments, because they belong to a later manuscript, how valid and invincible they are will then become plain when a comparison of that manuscript with Doctor Garissoles's book is instituted.

56But what will you say, candid reader, if the most learned author of that reason does not confess what he is here said to confess? Certainly he does not acknowledge that that sin which is said to have entered through one man is one sin of one man, namely Adam's: he does not hold that; he said it neither in so many words nor in equivalent ones. He said only that in one man's one sin there was such force that it should sentence the whole multitude of men to death; but he did not say that that one sin of one man entered into all men as the same in number, and brought death in immediately. Namely, the sin that entered into the world is the effect of one sin of one man; and through one man sin entered into the world, and death by the force of one sin, which diffused and multiplied itself by natural propagation, and propagated with the human nature in which it inheres. Therefore it sentenced the whole multitude of men to death by its propagation into all men, and by multiplication according to number. This is that most excellent man's mind, contradicting neither himself nor Placeus.

57This was Doctor Garissoles's first response. 2. "As to the doubt," he says, "which could arise in readers' minds, there would plainly be no legitimate response of the Apostle if he gave such a one as the learned man wants. For this is the doubt: how there is so great force in one sin of one Adam that it sentences the whole multitude of men to death. The response is said to be that this comes about thence, that all have sinned in their own person. But this is to play, not to satisfy the doubt. For this reason can indeed be why all are sentenced to death, because all have sinned. But here it is not asked why all are sentenced to death, but rather this: why in one sin of one Adam there is so great force that it produces this effect, namely death. The response therefore ought to deal with that sin of Adam, not with each of ours, about which nothing had been said in the doubt proposed. Therefore, for the response to be fitting, it is necessary that we interpret ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον of Adam's own sin, which sentences all to death because its reatus descends upon all, or because through imputation it becomes common to all. This is so clear and evident that here the disputant must have been in a great hurry." The author of this reason may perhaps have hurried, but not too much: for he disputes excellently. But whether Doctor Garissoles hurried, I do not know; this much is certain to me, that he here, as elsewhere throughout, does not dispute rightly.

58The response does not play, but truly satisfies the doubt. For in two ways it could be understood that there was such force in one man's one sin that it should sentence the whole multitude of men to death: in one way, if it is supposed — which Doctor Garissoles does in this place — that God immediately imputed that one sin of one man to the whole multitude of men, and for that imputed sin sentenced it to death. In the other, if it is understood that that sin propagated and multiplied itself by a certain natural contagion from one man into all others, and so, since all have sinned, they were sentenced to death. The Apostle, lest the reader thinking the former way should suspect anything unworthy of God, teaches the latter, affirming that all men were sentenced to death not because one alone sinned, but because all have sinned; not immediately on account of one man's one sin, but on account of each man's own implanted in him, propagated from that one — which propagation is sufficiently hinted by the words ἐφ᾽ ᾧ, pertaining no less to sin than to death. Hear, I ask, most kindly reader, Calvin, from whose doctrine those who accuse us of innovated doctrine must of necessity withdraw — Commentary on Romans 5:12. Observe what order he sets here. For he says that sin preceded: from it death followed. For there are those who contend that we are so lost by Adam's sin as if we perished by no fault of our own, only because he had as it were sinned for us. (Antecedent imputation could scarcely be described more clearly than as that which death of the soul — that is, hereditary corruption — and death of the body and eternal death are thought to follow, as punishments properly so called.) And yet Paul expressly affirms that sin has been propagated to all who undergo its punishment. And then he presses that more closely when a little later he assigns the reason why all Adam's posterity lies under the empire of death. Namely, he says, because we have all sinned. Further, that 'to sin' is to be corrupted and spoiled. For that natural depravity which we bring from the mother's womb, even if it does not so quickly put forth its fruits, is yet sin before the Lord, and deserves his vengeance. And this is the sin which they call Original. And a little later: We have therefore all sinned, because we are all imbued with natural corruption. And again: It follows therefore that depravity inborn and hereditary in us is marked. Nothing could be said more clearly and expressly. Placeus congratulates himself when he sees Calvin struck through his side, and himself attacked together with him, and mourns the lot of the deserted ancient doctrine, or rather of those deserting it. Let it be noted here again the new doctrine — and, as it seems to me, injurious to God — that Adam's sin becomes common to all because of imputation. What therefore is common to all is to be ascribed not to the force or contagion or natural propagation of that sin, but to God, to whom it pleased by imputing to make common to all what otherwise would not have been common. Whence then our perdition, if not from God, who made us sinners by making another's sin ours? And why did he impute that sin to us, and make it ours, and us sinners? No cause is brought, or can be brought, except that it so pleased him. Is your conscience not stirred, pious reader? Does it not shrink from such a doctrine? Does it not shudder? But let us go on.

59The fifth and last reason is framed in these words (§ XI, p. 224): "That interpretation is confirmed by the following verse 13, which is joined to the preceding by the particle γάρ. For someone might doubt whether all men have truly sinned; the Apostle therefore proves it by this argument, that wherever death is, there sin must necessarily be. But death not only existed, but also reigned over all those who lived in the times that flowed between Adam's first sin and the law: all those, therefore, were liable to sin." "I answer," says Doctor Garissoles, "far be it that we should accept such an analysis, which makes of the divine Apostle an inept circular arguer" (§ XVIII). Fine words: an inept circular arguer! Far be so great a crime from us. But how does he prove it? "For," he says, "the Apostle in verse 12 proves that all are sentenced to death because they have sinned; afterward in verse 13 he proves that all have sinned because they are sentenced to death, and death reigns over all. This, of course, is to be an inept circular arguer."

60And yet the most learned author of that reason did not say that the Apostle in verse 12 is proving that all are sentenced to death. Reread, I ask, and consider the reason as it had been recited by Garissoles himself at § XI and copied out by me. Do you notice anything of the kind in it? Or can a sound consequence be drawn from it? Why indeed would the Apostle have set about proving what Scripture, and the experience of every age, and the whole human race besides, forever confess and cry aloud? Who also would believe that the Apostle meant to prove the clearer by the obscurer? For that all die is clearer than that all have sinned. He does not, therefore, prove; but lest all men should seem to die on account of one man's one sin imputed to them, he affirms that through one man death so entered the human race that not death alone invaded all men, but also its cause — sin. And so all die not immediately on account of that one actual sin of one man, but on account of each man's own implanted in him, derived from that one. Doctor Garissoles therefore invents a circular proof where there is none.

61And yet if there were one, it ought to be called not so much a circle condemned by the philosophers as a regress praised by the same: for it would consist of two demonstrations, one τὸ ὅτι, the other τὸ διότι — the former producing a distinct knowledge of the effect, the latter a confused knowledge of the cause. But when Doctor Garissoles had objected this same circularity to himself, he could not extricate himself from it. For he touched only the later reason; the prior one, on which the circle hung, he wrapped in deep silence. I ask, therefore, from his mind: does the Apostle in verse 12 prove that all are sentenced to death because Adam's sin is imputed to them? If you say yes, the circular argumentation remains: for at once in verses 13 and 14 he will prove that Adam's sin is imputed to all, because all are sentenced to death. If you deny it, you do indeed remove the circle; but neither did Doctor Garissoles deny that, nor did he attempt anything of the kind in order to lead himself out of that circle: he therefore did the very thing of which he falsely accused us — he made of the divine Apostle, as he speaks, an inept circular arguer.

62Yet from there he draws out this argument: "To those on whom the penalty of death is inflicted on account of sin, sin is imputed. But before the law the penalty of death on account of Adam's sin was inflicted on infants. Therefore Adam's sin was imputed to them." I answer: Adam's sin is taken in two ways: (1) for that sin which, propagated from him into posterity and multiplied according to the number of men, is called flesh and the old Adam; (2) for the cause of that propagated sin, namely Adam's actual disobedience. If it is taken in the former way, I grant the whole argument. For I confess that that sin, because it is within us, is rightly imputed to us all, even to infants. If in the latter way, I distinguish the preposition "on account of": for it signifies either the near or immediate cause, or only the remote or mediate. If the former, I deny the minor proposition: the penalty of death was inflicted on infants immediately on account of the inherent vice, remotely on account of Adam's actual sin. If the latter, there follows only a mediate imputation of that actual sin, which I freely grant. Calvin taught me this, because, he says, Adam's sin is the cause of our sin, and Paul ascribes our ruin to him (Romans 5). "I call our sin," he says, "that which is inborn in us, and with which we are born." And Bullinger: "Adam's fall would not hurt us unless such perversity or corruption had been inborn in us from it as would deserve God's judgment" (Decades).

63Thus the French version used by our churches is vindicated. But as for what Doctor Garissoles subjoins — that it had been fiercely disputed, and so on, but that from that time the heat cooled, that in later writings the tack was changed, and so on (§ XIX, p. 239) — he is vehemently mistaken. For Placeus's judgment was the same throughout, and the words ἐφ᾽ ᾧ are better rendered "because" than "in whom." And yet not even this version harms his position, for those reasons which he had inserted in his theses published some years before that earlier manuscript was made. He had not seen that manuscript when he made that piece of his which Doctor Garissoles calls later, nor was there any cause why he should change tack, as the learned man speaks. For no one had then objected anything to him by which the received version of the little words ἐφ᾽ ᾧ, which he follows, could be attacked. As for our confession, over which Doctor Garissoles triumphs beyond reason in this place, it is plain from what was said at page 73 of this book. And yet if there had been any, it could not hurt Placeus, since it would have been made without his knowledge or consent. But of that version perhaps already more than enough.

64I return to the argument set out above at page 70 — so proposed that three of its lines were repeated by the typographer and not deleted by the corrector, so hurried was he then, distracted by other business. It runs thus: "Those who, when they were not yet in the nature of things, are said to have sinned in another are doubtless counted, while he was committing the sin, to have committed it themselves also, which plainly pertains to imputation. But all men, when they were not yet, are said to have sinned in Adam. Therefore they are counted, while he was committing the sin, to have committed it themselves, which plainly pertains to the imputation of Adam's sin." First I deny that this plainly pertains to the imputation which I call antecedent or immediate. For why should it not rather pertain to the propagation of inherent sin, which guilt and imputation follow? Next I deny the major. For are those who are said to have been in another, or to have died, counted, while he existed or died, to have existed themselves and to have died? We certainly die in Adam, but each by his own death; just as we rise in Christ, each by his own resurrection. So we sin in Adam, but each by his own sin. Only the first author and fountain of sin and death is marked, from which they flowed out to us all. Finally I deny the minor. For the Apostle did not say that all men, when they were not yet, sinned in Adam. I have already shown that ἐφ᾽ ᾧ does not mean "in whom" in this place. He did say that through one man sin so entered into the world that all men sinned, but he did not say that they sinned in that one man: and much less did he say that they then sinned when they were not yet in the nature of things. For this seems to me to imply a plain contradiction. For who would not see a contradiction implied if someone should say that the accident was before the subject, that men were sinners before they were men, dead before living — indeed, that they sinned before they existed?

65CAPUT VIII. The arguments of D. Garissoles from Romans 5, verses 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19 are examined.

From verse 14 he joins this syllogism: There is this agreement between the type and the antitype (τὸ ἀντίτυπον), that what is exhibited in the thing represented by the type must have gone before in the type. But Adam is proposed as the type of Christ in those things that belong to the account of justification — namely that we should have condemnation in Adam in a like way to that in which we have justification in Christ (Romans 5:14). Therefore, since the account of our justification through Christ is that, his righteousness being communicated to us by imputation, we are justified, or are counted just before God, that must also be the account of our condemnation through Adam: that, his sin being communicated to us by imputation, we are condemned, and are counted sinners and guilty before God. First, whatever force this argument has, only consequent or mediate imputation can be concluded from it. For as the imputation of righteousness follows our faith, so the imputation of sin follows our corruption. If this is enough, let there be peace.

66Next, this argument can be dissolved without any trouble. For as to the major: the proposition "What is exhibited in the thing represented by a type must have preceded in the type" needs this limitation — if, that is, the type was set up to represent that thing. For otherwise often many things have been exhibited in the represented matter which could not be represented by one type; and for that reason several have been employed to sketch the same thing. Then even when that limitation is applied, the proposition is not true except so far as the nature of the thing which is the type can bear, the difference between Type and antitype (τὸ ἀντίτυπον), shadow and body, being kept. Therefore argumentation from the type to the thing shadowed is better than from this latter back to the former.

67But as to the minor: we have already denied several times that the likeness must be pressed in the mode by which we have condemnation from Adam and justification from Christ. And we have confirmed this both by the authority of great men and by several examples. Hear Calvin, if you please: "Further, it is worth noting here two differences between Christ and Adam: which the Apostle did not omit because he judged them negligible, but because it did not serve the present argument to enumerate them. The first is that we are not damned by Adam's sin through imputation alone, as if the penalty of another's sin were being exacted from us: but we therefore bear his penalty because we are also guilty of the fault, inasmuch as our nature, corrupted in him, is bound before God under the guilt of iniquity. But by Christ's righteousness we are restored to salvation in another way: for it is not therefore credited to us because it is within us, but because we possess Christ himself with all his goods, given to us by the Father's bounty. And so the gift of righteousness signifies not a quality with which God imbues us, as some wrongly interpret, but the free imputation of righteousness."

68Does it please you also to hear Rudolph Gualther? "The sense, then, is that Adam and Christ can indeed be compared with each other in this, that each propagated into his own what was his. But in the rest there is a manifold difference, and the account of the offense or sin brought in through Adam is not the same as that of the benefit exhibited to us in Christ," and so on. And a little later: "But a double difference seems to be noted in these words, so that first corrupt Nature and the grace of God are opposed, because Adam indeed, on account of the corruption of nature which he contracted from his fall, propagated sin into all posterity, so that we are born sinners from the very womb of our mother: but Christ was given to us by grace, so that his righteousness or obedience should overflow into the many, that is, into all. Therefore that we are sinners and liable to death because of sin, we have from nature as our own: but that we have been made just and sharers of life is the free benefit of God, who imputes to us the righteousness of his Son because of the faith by which we apprehend him." To these two I will add a third, Peter Martyr, Commentary on Romans 5:14, at the words "who is the type of the one to come" (Romans 5:14): "This likeness is to be taken in the genus, that as all depend on Adam, so all depend on Christ according to their order: and that as the one has merited for all who are his, so also the other. But particularly and as to the species there is a great difference. For Adam brought in sin, death, and damnation: but Christ righteousness, life, and grace. There is also a difference in the propagation. For Adam poured his evils into men by the generation of the flesh. But Christ by faith. Therefore when Paul had said that Adam was the type of the one to come, he subjoins as if by correction: But not as the sin, so also the gift (Romans 5:15). So between Adam and Christ an analogy and proportion of a certain kind, rather than a true likeness, is to be established." You see us defending the teaching of great men against the assault of D. Garissoles. Do not therefore, I ask, candid reader, condemn us for novelty.

69II. From verse 15, "But not as the fall, so also the gift," and so on (Romans 5:15), he gathers thus: Those who have been made liable to death by Adam's actual sin bear the penalty of that sin, and therefore that sin is imputed to them. But all men have been made liable to death by Adam's actual sin. Therefore all men bear the penalty of that sin, and therefore that sin is imputed to them. The reply is easy. Those who have been made liable to death by Adam's actual sin proximately or immediately bear the penalty of that sin proximately or immediately. Those who by that sin have been made liable to death only remotely or mediately — that is, by intervening corruption — bear the penalties of that sin only remotely or mediately, that is, by intervening corruption. But that all men have been made liable to death by Adam's actual sin proximately or immediately — I deny; by intervening corruption — I grant. Therefore that all men bear the penalty of that sin, and therefore that sin is imputed to them, immediately — I deny; by the corruption inhering in us — I grant. Cannot all the arguments of D. Garissoles be whitewashed with this one brush?

70Next, he says, the Apostle sets opposite Adam's παράπτωμα and Christ's χάρισμα (Romans 5:15). But by χάρισμα is understood that righteousness of Christ which becomes ours by gracious imputation, and which necessarily pours forth from itself sanctification, or inhering righteousness. Therefore by παράπτωμα also is understood that sin of Adam which becomes ours by imputation, and which our natural corruption necessarily and infallibly follows. Entirely so: the Apostle does set opposite Adam's παράπτωμα and Christ's χάρισμα. What follows from that? Have we not already met several times an argument drawn from this opposition? For the rest, either this syllogism is irregular and has no force of concluding, or a proposition has been omitted which, if it is conceived universally as it ought to be, will without doubt be false. But the opposition between Adam's παράπτωμα and Christ's χάρισμα warns us that this which is ours is far otherwise than that. For it is not that, as this is ours by the gift of Christ, so that is ours by the gift of Adam. Therefore the Apostle sets the one opposite the other in the mode by which it becomes ours. How then can D. Garissoles conclude from this opposition that both become ours in the same mode? Will he say that imputation, by which something becomes ours which otherwise is not ours, is a kind of donation? Then Adam's sin is a kind of gift — not Adam's, for he does not impute; but, I shudder to pronounce it, God's own.

71Here D. Garissoles turns against himself a distinguished place of Calvin that we already praised at page 20. "What he hands down — that we perished by the offense of one — take thus: because from him corruption was poured across into us. For we do not so perish by his fault as if we ourselves were outside fault; but because his sin is the cause of our sin, Paul ascribes our ruin to him" (Romans 5:15). He could not have marked more openly that Adam's sin is the cause of our ruin not proximate but remote, not immediate but mediate. For the cause of a cause is also a cause of the effect, yet only remote.

72Yet D. Garissoles tries to cast darkness over a place so clear. "By which words," he says, "it is not denied that we perish by Adam's own actual sin" — and Placeus neither denies this nor has ever denied it — "but it is signified that that sin of Adam is not to be parted from our corruption, seeing that from both the same guilt rises together." Whether those words signify that, and whether that reason is brought, let judgment rest with the Reader. This is enough for me:

73that our ruin is ascribed to Adam's sin because it is the cause of our sin. He does not say, because it is imputed to us, or because it is ours by imputation; but he distinguishes that from our sin as cause from effect. Therefore our sin is from Adam's sin, and from this our ruin. So from both the same guilt rises — from our sin proximately, from Adam's sin remotely.

74Elsewhere Calvin unfolds his mind. "Original sin," he says, "is the depravity and corruption of our nature, which first makes us guilty of the wrath of God, then also brings forth in us works which Scripture calls works of the flesh" (Galatians 5:19). Therefore guilt follows corruption as effect follows cause — and indeed, as they say, an adequate cause: for he subjoins at once. "These two things, then, are to be observed distinctly: namely that, being thus spoiled and perverted in all the parts of our nature, we are already held before God justly damned and convicted on account of that corruption alone." Which same words so pleased so great a man that they stand twice in his Institutes — once in book 2, chapter 1, section 8, and again in book 4, chapter 15, section 10.

75He also adds in the earlier place, for fuller explanation, these words. "Nor is this an obligation of another's offense: for what is said — that by Adam's sin we have been made liable to God's judgment — is not to be taken as if we ourselves, innocent and undeserving, were bearing the blame of his offense; but because through his transgression we have all been clothed with the curse, he is said to have bound us. Yet from him not penalty alone has rushed upon us, but a plague poured in from him resides in us, to which penalty is due by right. So Augustine, however often he may call it another's sin (so that he may show more clearly that it is derived into us by propagation), yet at the same time asserts it also as each one's own. And the Apostle himself most expressly testifies that death has wandered through unto all for this reason, that all have sinned — that is, that they have been wrapped in original sin and stained with its spots" (Romans 5:12). And so even infants themselves, while they bring with them their damnation from the mother's womb, are bound not by another's vice but by their own. Therefore guilt and condemnation and death follow hereditary corruption as effect follows cause, and on account of that alone — not, however, on account of Adam's actual sin (except remotely and mediately) — we are sentenced to death.

76III. From verse 16 he reasons thus. Here κρίμα, judgment or guilt from Adam, is set opposite Christ's δώρημα (Romans 5:16). Therefore, as δώρημα does not signify some quality inhering in us, but what is in Christ, and is freely imputed to us in Christ, so κρίμα must signify something outside us — namely the fault committed by Adam, from which we draw guilt and condemnation. Collect: Whose fault is unto the condemnation of all, that fault must be imputed to all. But Adam's fault is unto the condemnation of all. Therefore it must be imputed to all.

77I see no strength in this argument that is not already present in the earlier ones, now amply refuted. For how weak this collection is: Here κρίμα, judgment or guilt from Adam, is set opposite Christ's δώρημα. Therefore, as the one does not signify a quality inhering in us, neither does the other?

78For what forbids an inhering vice, insofar as it makes us guilty and worthy of penalty, from being set opposite that justice which frees us from that guilt and penalty — as we have seen the greatest men judged? Not only does nothing forbid it; that very opposition requires it. For κρίμα is from justice, δώρημα from grace. Justice assigns to each only what is his own; grace gives what was otherwise not ours, but another's.

79I took this from Chamier. "If infants," he says, "have nothing of their own sin, why do they perish by their own death? For divine justice does not bear an alien fault that is only alien. Men may once have had the custom that a father's slavery was hereditary for the sons; but nothing of that kind stood in the people of God under the divine laws — how much less in God, who is angry at those who had in their mouth the proverb, Our fathers ate sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge" (Ezekiel 18:2).

80But if someone objects that the faithful are saved on account of a righteousness not their own but Christ's, and that therefore they can also be damned on account of an alien injustice, he truly does not see that very different things are being compared. For damnation is from justice, but salvation is from grace. For if salvation itself were also from justice, an alien righteousness could not save us; so neither can an alien guilt damn. Nothing, I think, could have been wanted more expressly.

81IV. Let us come, then, to verse 17. From it, says D. Garissoles, a similar argument arises. The one by whose offense and fall death has always reigned and will reign to the end of the age — that one's offense-penalty pervades all. For death is certainly set by the Apostle as the effect of that cause (Romans 5:17). But by one offense of Adam death has so far reigned over all, and will go on reigning to the end of the age. Therefore the penalty of that offense and fall of Adam pervades all.

82I grant the whole argument. Which of us ever denied that the penalty of Adam's fall has pervaded all? We contend only this: between that penalty and Adam's fall, original vice has intervened, and to that vice the penalty is owed proximately.

83So Adam's fall is the first cause of death's reign, but the proximate cause is the sin produced from it and inhering in all; and because that sin reigns, death also reigns. Certainly the sin in human beings not only is, but lives; not only lives but reigns — the sin they serve, the sin they obey, whose law is in their members. That is not Adam's actual sin, but its effect: inhering corruption.

84V. From verse 18 he gathers by a similar reason as above. The one through whose offense condemnation came upon all human beings — on account of that one's offense a penalty is inflicted on all. But through one Adam's offense condemnation came upon all. Therefore on account of one Adam's offense a penalty is inflicted on all his posterity (Romans 5:18). First, the major premise can be denied. For it is one thing for something to be through someone, another for it to be on account of someone: I write with a pen, yet not on account of the pen; condemnation is through a judge, yet not on account of the judge.

85Next I distinguish "on account of" as above. It marks either a remote cause or a proximate one. If the remote, the whole argument is granted; if the proximate, the premise is denied. For, as I have driven home many times, Adam's first actual sin is the cause of our inhering sin, and this is the cause of death; and what is the cause of a cause is also the cause of the effect. Either, with Pelagius, Pighius, and Socinus, inhering sin and its guilt must be denied, or it is impossible from the Apostle's words to force an antecedent or immediate imputation of Adam's actual sin.

86VI. But perhaps that thesis will finally surface from verse 19: "As through one man's disobedience many were constituted sinners, so through one man's obedience many will be constituted righteous" (Romans 5:19). In no way. D. Garissoles argues from it in more than one form, and first thus: the Apostle in this verse is doing what he had pursued more diffusely in those earlier ones; but in this verse he plainly treats imputation; therefore the earlier verses must be understood of the same imputation. I answer the minor: in this verse the Apostle is not treating imputation; or if he is, he is not treating immediate or antecedent imputation — the only kind I deny. For if he is doing in this verse what he did in the earlier ones, where it was plain he was not treating that imputation, it follows that he is not treating that imputation in this verse either.

87Next, he says, the Apostle could scarcely have marked the imputation of Adam's sin more clearly or forcefully than these words do, with their sharp opposition between Adam's disobedience and Christ's obedience. How then did the greatest men, expounding that verse, fail to notice that imputation in the Apostle's words — and rather reject it? But let him go on: it marks Christ's actual obedience, by which Christ became obedient to the Father unto the death of the cross (Philippians 2:8). Therefore it also marks Adam's actual disobedience, by which he violated God's command — so it is strange that the learned man denies that by the word παρακοῆς the Apostle designates Adam's actual sin. As for his addition that it does not designate actual sin cut off from the corruption that sin produced in Adam, I care little. To affirm, in Placeus's own words, that παρακοῆς signifies Adam's sin alone — not as actual cut off from habitual, but together with habitual — is that denying that the word designates Adam's actual sin?

88Why then does he not linger on that? Because, he says, whether cut off from that corruption or joined with it, it is still understood to be designated — and that is enough for our cause. No: if you are defending the cause of immediate imputation, that is not enough. Actual sin must be imputed as cut off from the corruption, if that corruption is properly the penalty of the imputed sin. For the same sin cannot be the penalty of itself — least of all a penalty properly so called.

89From this he thinks he can draw a double argument. First from the force of the opposition: we are constituted sinners in Adam by the same reason we are constituted righteous in Christ; but in Christ we are constituted righteous by the imputation of his righteousness; therefore in Adam we are constituted sinners by the imputation of his sin. Even though the conclusion does not harm those of us who acknowledge mediate imputation, the major premise is false. On the very point in dispute the greatest men marked a difference, as our earlier replies already showed. For we were constituted sinners by inhering sin propagated into us that deserves death; we were not constituted righteous by inhering righteousness that deserves life.

90Next, he says, from the words "through Adam's disobedience we are constituted sinners." For we cannot be constituted sinners through another's actual disobedience except imputatively: what belongs to another personally cannot become ours, nor can we be named from it, without imputation intervening. But through Adam's actual disobedience we are constituted sinners. Therefore imputatively. What is denying the propagation of inhering sin, if this is not?

91Hear rather his predecessor Chamier. "This too must not be omitted: through one man's disobedience many were constituted sinners — ἁμαρτωλούς; which word in the Scriptures is taken for those in whom there truly is sin contrary to God's law." And a little later: "In a word. ἁμαρτωλὸς is never said of bare guilt alone and without any vice or sin. Therefore when Paul said many were constituted sinners through one man's disobedience, he meant nothing else than that by that sin of Adam it was brought about that all human beings were truly sinners in themselves." And elsewhere: that Paul teaches original sin is numerically one in all is strikingly false. For against it stands: "Through one man's disobedience many were constituted sinners." In the same chapter: "A sinner is one who himself has his own sin, not one to whom an alien sin is imputed." Again: "In Adam we all sinned, because Adam first sinned, and from that the beginning of sin was made in all human beings; yet we also sin in ourselves, because by his sin we were constituted sinners — that is, sin was propagated from him into us. And by his disobedience we were all constituted sinners in the same way we are already truly sinners by our own; otherwise it would be false that we were constituted sinners by his disobedience." Elsewhere he says we were constituted sinners through Adam's disobedience not formally but causally, because it is the efficient cause of that quality by which we are formally sinners: "Just as," he says, "a gouty parent, or gout in the parent, is the cause of a gouty child, yet is not the child's gout." Hear also Peter Martyr arguing against them. "Here," he says, "we will note that when the Apostle says, 'Through one man's disobedience many were constituted sinners,' an argument is had from these words against those who think original sin is not each person's own, but that only one existed, and that it was in Adam, by which we are bound and obligated to death and damnation. For when they are said to be constituted sinners, they themselves must have sin, or at least have had it. For no one is called a sinner by an alien vice."

92CAPUT IX. The doctrine of the imputation of the first sin is called to examination from Hebrews 7:9–10, on Levi being tithed in Abraham's loins. I. That the doctrine of antecedent or immediate imputation of the first sin rests on no foundations in Scripture is already, I think, plain. Can it at least be illustrated — for it certainly cannot be proved — from Hebrews 7:9–10, where Levi is said to have been tithed in Abraham's loins? Let us see in a few words. D. Garissoles says it is customary for theologians to declare from this place the nature and reason of original sin as it passes into us from Adam. He said well, "of original sin": for he names certain writers who not only do not teach immediate imputation, but openly condemn it. I could bring forward many places from Augustine, Bucer, Martyr, Gualther, Gerhard, and others; but lest I seem longer than is fair in a clear matter, I will be content with these words of Anselm alone.

93"They do not bear" — infants who are not saved — "Adam's sin, but their own. For Adam's sin was one thing, the infants' another, because they differ as has been said. That was the cause; this is the effect." And a little later: "When the Apostle says what I set down above, that death reigned from Adam to Moses even over those who did not sin in the likeness of Adam's transgression, just as he signifies that the infant's sin is less than Adam's, so he plainly shows that it is another. Therefore when an infant is damned for original sin, he is damned not for Adam's sin, but for his own. For if he himself did not have his own sin, he would not be damned. So then he does not bear Adam's iniquity, but his own — even if he is therefore said to bear it, because that iniquity of that sin was the cause of this."

94II. But what does D. Garissoles gather from Levi's being tithed? "As," he says, "Abraham was the originative principle of the Levitical nation, which was propagated from him according to seminal relation, so also Adam is the material principle of the whole human race as far as natural generation is concerned. Therefore if the Apostle rightly said that the Levitical priests were tithed in Abraham because they were in his loins when Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedek, the priest of God, nothing strange or unusual ought to seem in the saying that all humans sinned in Adam and in him were ruined and damned, insofar as all were in the loins of him while he was sinning." What forbids me to grant this whole comparison, while still denying the immediate imputation of Adam's first actual sin?

95Fayus certainly renders the words ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον "in whom all sinned," so that this, he says, is understood of Adam, whose sin was common to all, just as the penalty or death is common to all. But this is common to all not by imputation, only by propagation. The same, then, must be said of the sin. And so he expounds that "all sinned" of a sin not committed by act, but adhering in us by a certain habit. And again elsewhere: "But they sinned in Adam — yet not in the likeness of Adam the transgressor — because they did not sin on account of their own desires, which they had none of in themselves when they were little children or infants; therefore on account of another sin than Adam's." On which matter the Council of Orange reads thus: "He attributes injustice to God who says that death, which is the penalty of sin, passed to us without sin, which is the desert of death." So let all humans be said to have sinned in Adam, provided that is taken of habitual sin or corruption: what help is that to antecedent imputation? Or what need is there for us to answer such an illustration of original sin, which does us no harm at all?

96Yet Placeus pressed in the Theses on the state of fallen man before grace that one no more gathers from this that Adam's sin is imputed to us than one can gather that Abraham's sins, or his faith and good works, were imputed to the same Levi — which yet nobody will say were imputed to him. D. Garissoles confesses this; but he denies that so many and so great theologians use this Apostolic testimony in the present business for that end. "For," he says, "nobody gathers from it directly that Adam's sin is imputed to us." Placeus therefore has what he wanted: immediate imputation (and from Thesis vii it is plain he is treating that alone) cannot be proved from this place. For he had argued thus: Whatever doctrine belonging to religion cannot be proved from the sacred letters is to be rejected. The doctrine of the immediate imputation of Adam's actual disobedience cannot be proved from the sacred letters. Therefore it is to be rejected. The major cannot be called in doubt by a Reformed man. He proved the minor thus: If there are any sacred letters from which that imputation can be proved, they are sought chiefly from Romans 5:12 and following, and from Hebrews 7:9–10. But from those places that imputation cannot be proved. Therefore it cannot be proved from the sacred letters.

97But perhaps someone can gather indirectly from this place that Adam's actual sin is immediately imputed to us. For, says D. Garissoles, if what Abraham did in giving tithes is reckoned done by Levites born so many ages later, and yet nothing in that kind of imputation is alien to reason or to God's justice, nobody will give a reason why those who assert that Adam's sin is reckoned the posterity's sin — so that in him they are said to have sinned and been damned — should be held for cartloads of absurdities, or for adversaries of right reason and divine justice. Again this whole can be granted without any loss to the cause I am pleading. For I confess that Adam's sin is reckoned the posterity's sin on account of the vice inhering in them, derived from him. I confess that his posterity can be said to have sinned in him and been damned, because from him they drew inherent sin and, through sin, their own damnation. But I deny that Adam's actual sin is so imputed to all of us his posterity that by that imputation it becomes ours — otherwise not ours — and that, being so imputed, it is punished by inflicting hereditary corruption, which truly is sin, as a penalty properly so called, and also the death of the body and eternal death, as though justice were to be done. This is what we heap with absurdities, from which we cannot be freed by Levi's being tithed in Abraham's loins. For from the fact that Levi is said to have been tithed in Abraham's loins, does it follow that that imputation can be proved from the sacred letters, that it does not clash with the oracle "The son shall not bear the father's iniquity," that it does not make God the author of sin and Christ a sinner, and so on? Does it hinder there being good and solid arguments by which we attack that imputation? In no way. What then does this tithing help that imputation? Nothing at all. Shall I show further how badly D. Garissoles reasons?

98If someone throws roses at a passer-by, nothing absurd will follow: for these barely harm. Does it follow likewise that if someone throws stones or mud at a passer-by, nothing absurd will follow? But the payment of tithes stands as a rose that could not harm Levi; Adam's sin, however, stands not only as a stone, but as the supreme evil. It will not therefore have been alien to justice if the payment of tithes made by Abraham is attributed to Levi, because it neither harmed him nor could harm him. Does it follow from that that it is not alien to justice if the sin committed by Adam is attributed to his posterity, and so the greatest evil is inflicted on them? There is not much need of other replies; yet D. Garissoles assigns us four others, which he perhaps drew out of what he calls the Prior Manuscript, and tries at great length to refute — but, after his manner, with an unhappy attempt.

99The second reply, then, as he reports it, is this: the Apostle, foreseeing that what he was about to say about Levi's being tithed in Abraham would seem harsh, forestalled the point by saying, "In Abraham even Levi himself was tithed" — ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν, "so to speak." Softening of that kind is used only where the speech is bolder, or more unusual, than one may press hard, or draw a conclusion from by reasoning. This, then, must not be twisted so that from it one gathers that Adam's sin is imputed to all, or so that it is laid under as a foundation for a matter which, of itself, is either obscure, or altogether takes away its own credit.

100Against this reply he sets many things. First: this place is put forward not as a foundation laid underneath, but as a testimony very apt for declaring and illustrating the doctrine of the imputation of Adam's sin. Whether it is apt for declaring immediate imputation will become plain partly from what stands above, partly from this and the following replies. What he adds — that the foundation of that doctrine from Romans 5 is false — is proved partly from what has already been said, partly from the Later Manuscript. That he says Augustine and Calvin embrace that imputation, I hold without hesitation for false. But let him go on. Second: "In vain," he says, "is refuge sought in the words ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν: for what if they ought to be rendered 'that I may speak briefly,' rather than 'so to speak'? For so that refuge will be strictly shut." It will be shut altogether — if he proves they must be so rendered here. But by what argument will he prove it? For now we only answer: it is his part to argue; and we answer in keeping with the received version, which cannot be overthrown. Who would also believe that the Apostle, who does not speak more briefly here than he does everywhere else, wished in this one place alone to use those words — "that I may speak briefly" — which he never uses elsewhere? For he always speaks briefly. But, he says, he adds ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν in order to say something greater and more marvelous. That escape of the disputant will be shut again. How, I ask, will it be shut, unless it is proved — and that is impossible — that it must be so rendered? And when the Apostles everywhere teach the greatest and most marvelous things, how would it have come about that such a preface was used in this one place only, rather than elsewhere? Is something greater and more marvelous said here than in other places of the chapter or of the Epistle? If it is a prior softening or correction, there is something in the following sentence to be softened or corrected, and it must not be pressed except with that softening or correction applied.

101After this useless skirmish he adds, third: "Yet we do this and follow the more common position — ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν, 'so to speak.' The words are therefore fitted for softening the Apostle's saying." This does our cause no harm at all. For that reason for softening is to be referred not to the matter itself, but rather to the verb of tithing. Persons are not properly tithed, but goods — as everyone knows — when a tenth part is taken out of them. So because there is a certain impropriety in saying that Levi was tithed, for what is meant — that tithes were taken from Levi — therefore, he thinks, the Apostle judged this oddity should be softened by the little words ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν. I marvel that this slipped from a learned man. He does not seem to have looked at the place. For he would have seen the Apostle already twice use that same verb in the same way without any softening: once in verse 5 — ἀποδεκατοῦν τὸν λαόν, "they tithe the people" — and again in verse 6 — δεδεκάτωκεν τὸν Ἀβραάμ, "he tithed Abraham." Therefore the Apostle did not mean to soften the verb of tithing when used that way.

102Fourth: "Granted," he says, "that that phrase also belongs to softening the whole sentence — 'Levi was tithed in Abraham' — what help is that to the adversary's cause? For the payment of tithes was certainly Abraham's own personal act alone. Therefore when it is attributed to the Levites as well, a certain impropriety of speech must be owned: it is attributed to them not properly and personally, but interpretatively and by imputation, insofar as they are reckoned to have done what Abraham alone had done. For what others have performed, and what is imputed to us, is not called properly ours in the same way as what we ourselves did — according to that of the Poet: 'And what we ourselves did not do, I scarcely call ours.'" First, though, he seems to have forgotten what part he ought to play. For he answers when he ought to prove. We certainly do not assert those words of the Apostle; we only answer what has been brought forward and objected, and we make plain that it in no way harms our cause — and that is enough for us. Meanwhile he grants what we want: that there is a certain impropriety of speech that needs softening. It was therefore his to show and prove that such impropriety does not keep the words of that place from being pressed so as to serve those who attack us. But this he does not do at all.

103Besides, from his words I gather this: if the reason of that sentence — "In Adam all sinned" — were equal to the reason of this — "In Abraham Levi was tithed" — the impropriety or hardness of each would be equal, and therefore that softening ought to have been set before either neither of them, or both alike. Either, then, the Apostle did not say that all sinned in Adam, or if he did, the reason of that proposition and of this — "in Abraham Levi was tithed" — is unequal. I gather another point as well. For if the criminal act of the first man was properly his act alone, and ours less properly — namely by an imputation that makes us, equally with Adam, properly guilty and liable to death before God the most just Judge — ought it likewise to make us guilty less properly? Yet he illustrates it by a comparison. Just as our sins were in Christ not properly, but only by imputation, and yet that imputation brought it about that Christ truly and in very deed paid the penalties of our sins: can Christ therefore be said to have sinned in us, as we in Adam? Are our sins so imputed to him as Adam's sin is said to be imputed to us? If you say yes, then — and the mind shudders even to think it — he was a sinner, and more than any other, since more sins were imputed to him. If you deny it, what does that dissimilar example of ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν do? Imputation could indeed suffice for Christ to pay the penalties of our sins as our vessel; but not for him to pay them as the cause of the sins. But here the debate is about an imputation by which we are reckoned causes of a sin that was properly Adam's act alone — and causes so properly and truly that we deserve to be punished no less properly and truly than Adam himself. That, I say, is altogether alien to truth and justice.

104Three other replies remain, which I judge should be passed over, so as not to weary the reader with a prolixity neither too great nor necessary. I will only add that it does not seem one can conclude from the words "In Abraham Levi was tithed" that that act of Abraham was imputed to Levi. For if it was imputed, and proved by the Apostle by that reason which D. Garissoles asserts is either none, or this — "Whoever is in another's loins as in his original principle, to him may not absurdly be attributed what was done by him in whose loins he was. But Levi was in Abraham's loins as in his original principle. Therefore to Levi may rightly be attributed what is said of Abraham paying tithes to the pontiff Melchizedek" — then there will be no act of the father that cannot rightly be imputed to the son. For since the syllogism is in the first figure, it cannot hold unless the major is true universally. That granted, with the same minor standing, I will conclude: therefore to Levi might rightly be attributed what is said of Abraham believing God, or fleeing into Egypt, or saying of his wife, "She is my sister," and so on. Since, then, from those same premises a conclusion can be drawn which even D. Garissoles himself confesses in chapter 10 § 2 to be false, and the minor is agreed to be true, the major must be false, and alien to the Apostle's mind.

105You will ask, then: what is the Apostle's reasoning? The aim is to prove that the dignity of the Levitical priesthood is less than Melchizedek's. He draws the argument from this: that tithes were paid by Abraham to Melchizedek. To explain that and bring it into the light, he sets a comparison between Levi and Melchizedek with an eye to their priestly office. By the name Levi he takes in the Levitical priests and their whole priesthood. If Melchizedek received tithes, the Levitical priests also used to receive tithes. So far, then, they were equals in a way. But the Apostle notes four differences that raise Melchizedek immensely above the Levitical priests. First: to these a command had been given to receive tithes, while of him no such command stands. Second: these received tithes from their brothers, come out of Abraham's loins and therefore equal to them by nature and origin; but he, not being of the same stock, received tithes not from the Levites' brothers, but from their father himself — Abraham, who had the promises. So these received their priesthood and dignity from Abraham as his heirs; he had his from elsewhere. These drew every blessing they gave their brothers from Abraham who had the promises; but he did not receive blessing from Abraham — on the contrary, Abraham received it from him, though Abraham had the promises. Third: these receive tithes as men liable to death, and therefore needing them; but he as one whom Scripture testifies lives continually, or is immortal — so that tithes could not be given him except to declare his dignity. Fourth: even Levi himself, who received tithes, can be said in a way to have been tithed by Melchizedek through Abraham who was tithed. For he was still in his father's loins when Melchizedek met Abraham. This happened before Isaac was begotten. Without doubt that came about not by chance but by God's singular providence, lest, once Levi was separated from him, the dignity of the Levitical priesthood should seem already separated from him then. So God chose that time when, in one Abraham, with no separation of heirs yet made from him, the whole dignity of his posterity according to the flesh was contained as one — which in its time was so distributed among his sons that Levi became heir of the priestly dignity, Judah of the royal. If anyone demands that I cast the Apostle's reason in syllogistic form, it can be framed thus: Whoever by God's singular providence was then tithed when he still contained in himself the whole dignity of the Levitical priesthood, no separation yet made from him — in him, being tithed, the Levitical priesthood itself, or the Levite priests, so to speak, were tithed. But by God's singular providence Abraham was then tithed when he still contained in himself the whole dignity of the Levitical priesthood, no separation yet made from him. Therefore in him, being tithed, the Levite priests, so to speak, were tithed. For this, so to speak, was the homage the Levitical priesthood paid Melchizedek through Abraham, in whom it was contained. For Levi had no other priesthood than what, received from Abraham by hereditary right, God assigning and forming it, was inducted into him. Hence, kind reader, I think you see clearly both that the Apostle's reason is invincible, and that in his words there is no imputation properly so called — unless perhaps a mediate one. For as in Abraham was the Levitical priesthood, and from him it was derived to Levi, so in Adam was sin, and from him it has been propagated to us. Therefore as the same judgment was to be made of Levi the priest and of Abraham the priest as to the dignity of the priesthood, so the same judgment is to be made, as to guilt, of Adam the sinner and of us sinners on account of the inherent vice drawn from him. If someone were said, while still hiding in his father's loins, so to speak, to have paid the lord of a fief the homage they call homage, and so to be that lord's vassal, as they speak: would the argument not proceed rightly? And yet the homage paid by the father would not be imputed to the son: for if it were, it could no more be required of the son that he pay it again himself than it could be required of the parent.

106Chapter X. That the antecedent or immediate imputation of Adam's first actual sin cannot be established by any reasons. Do you think, reader, that this imputation — since it is absent from Scripture — can be established by reasons? Still, let us hear whatever reasons are brought forward. For we are persuaded that right reason always agrees with Scripture. I grant that what God had bestowed on Adam was given not to him alone but also to his whole posterity; and therefore that we, spoiled of all those goods in his person, fell into this whole misery and curse. What reason for that imputation can be drawn from that? Were all the goods God had bestowed on Adam to be imputed to every one of his posterity? Or is the fitting spoliation of all those goods to be imputed to us? Would that this spoliation belonged to us only by imputation!

107Whoever, he says, are deprived of those benefits which those parents had received both for themselves and for their children because of some actual crime of the parents — those people suffer the penalties of the father's crime, and so the father's crime is imputed to them. But all Adam's posterity, because of that first disobedience of his by which he polluted himself, are deprived of those benefits which Adam had received for himself and for his posterity — namely, natural justice and uprightness. Therefore all Adam's natural posterity suffer the penalties of the father's crime, and so that paternal crime is imputed to them. What if I grant this conclusion? For paternal crime is understood either as the hereditary vice, or as the cause of that vice — Adam's actual disobedience. If the former, it is imputed, and indeed immediately. If the latter, that too is imputed, but by means of the inherent vice. We suffer the penalties proximately for our own sin propagated into us, and remotely for the sin once committed by Adam. But if someone says that we are all born liable to Adam's transgression immediately — that is, not because of any vice or fault or depravity that we have in ourselves — let him remember that this was Pighius's error as Peter Martyr explained it, and as it was chiefly confuted by these arguments. Consider them, reader, if you please, and whether they do not fight against D. Garissoles's sentence and arguments.

108But, he says, against this sentence that chiefly tells which we have already said twice: namely, that infants die. For death has no right where there is no sin — unless we would say that God punishes an innocent person. And this reason is confirmed from Paul's argument by which he proved that sin was before the Law: Because death, he says, reigned from Adam until Moses. Yet on Pighius's sentence this reason might seem dullest of all. For someone would say that even if those people died, it still does not follow from that that they had sin. For death came upon them because of Adam, on account of whose sin they were made mortal. You see, reader, that the sin understood is not Adam's actual sin, as D. Garissoles wants, but our habitual sin; and that his arguments fight for Pighius's cause against ours. To make that plainer, I will add another argument of Martyr's. Finally, he says, we have from Paul that by one man's disobedience many were constituted sinners: which indicates that in those who are born of Adam there is a vice because of which they can be called sinners. But Pighius thinks he can evade this, because sinners are sometimes so called because of guilt, even though the act of sinning has passed and no longer exists. Though that is so, he can never show from the Scriptures that anyone is called a sinner unless he either has a vice in himself or has certainly committed one before — unless he would say that God makes people guilty without any sin of theirs. Can your fairness, reader, ask anything more plainly? But let us return to the argument objected against us. Although the conclusion does not hinder our cause, still the minor must be distinguished. For if he wants us deprived of natural justice because of Adam's first disobedience imputed to us, that is begging the question, as they say: for it assumes the very point under dispute; and so the minor is denied. But if he wants us deprived of justice because of that disobedience naturally propagated into us (not indeed according to the act, but according to the habit), that can be granted. For actual disobedience stripped Adam of justice, and once he had lost it he could not communicate it to his posterity: for no one gives what he does not have. We therefore deny that we are deprived of natural justice because of Adam's sin imputed to us; we concede that we are deprived of it because of Adam's sin propagated into us.

109D. Garissoles presses on. Why do I say presses on? I answer, he says — that is, he sets a reply against a reply. But what does he answer? Reply, he says, 1. Even if the propagation of sin and its transmission by natural generation is to be granted, as it most certainly is, it is not therefore fitting that imputation be denied or removed; nor can any legitimate consequence be drawn from affirming the one to denying the other. Rather both are to be joined in the cause of original sin, as it is certain our theologians commonly observe. But I say: our part now is to answer, his to prove. And we lay down what is confessed: that Adam's sin is propagated by natural generation. Whether an imputation of Adamite sin precedes that propagation or not — that itself is what is in controversy between us, and what he seemed to have undertaken to prove. Now, in place of proof, he is content to say that from affirming the one there is no consequence to denying the other. Grant that it is so: has he thereby established that imputation? Let him therefore prove that natural propagation is not enough unless imputation precedes it; otherwise he is beating the air. And that is what he means to prove.

110For he adds: 2. Nor is it enough if you say that Adam could not communicate what he had lost, because no one gives what he does not have — because here a reason must be given why Adam's soul was adorned with the ornaments of original justice; and why the souls of his posterity, which are not traduced by natural propagation but are created by God in infusion and infused in creation, lack those same ornaments from their very creation, and so are brought by God into the body destitute of that first perfection of father Adam — which would nevertheless have been otherwise if Adam had persisted in his integrity. For here one must not simply recur to propagation, since souls are not propagated or traduced; nor to the law of nature by which the diseased generate the diseased, because the soul is not generated, and yet from the beginning of its being it is deprived of those first benefits. 3. Because a physical quality inhering in flesh alone, such as disease or leprosy, is not well compared with a moral quality such as corruption or original sin. Nor does it follow that if it is truly natural for a leper to generate a leper, or an elephantiac an elephantiac, one should think it is from the nature of propagation alone, apart from every respect to imputation, that from morally corrupt Adam morally corrupt people likewise are generated. First, as for what he says — that a reason must be given why Adam's soul was adorned with the ornaments of original justice — that reason is ready to hand: for since it was rational and capable of justice, it could not be created by the best God without justice and holiness — that is, unjust and unclean. But why are the souls of his posterity not adorned with the same justice when they are produced? The answer is ready too: because unclean Adam could not generate a clean one; for he begot like himself. What need is there for me to give you a reason why a wolf begets a wolf? For as Gualther says, as wolves generate wolves, so Adam the sinner generated sinners; and as wolf cubs show wolfish greed by no obscure proofs, so in infants also sin then exerts its forces when by age they can yet perform no work. But you say: here one must not simply recur to propagation, since souls are not propagated or traduced. I for my part am not forgetful of our public confession of faith. Article 10: Nor do we think it necessary to inquire how sin can be propagated from one to another. Peter Martyr's words too are excellent, to omit others: The matter, he says, is obscure and very hard; and for that reason I think less labor should be spent on it. For since the word of God most clearly teaches that original sin itself exists and is transmitted to posterity, although we do not understand the mode and reason by which it is transferred, still we must yield to the truth; but on a mode that can be known only with difficulty and ignored without loss, one should not dispute too anxiously. In truth it is clear that there are many things whose manner of production we do not know. Modest ignorance is better than bold and uncertain knowledge. But since the learned man's reasoning will not let us be so sober, I ask: is hereditary sin propagated naturally, or not? It is propagated, he says, because no one can draw what is clean from what is unclean, because corrupt Adam begot corrupt people, because God permitted that blot contracted by the first parents' sin to cling in the seed and flow out to posterity. So it is; and there will be none of us who will not grant all that at great length. That is most true, and constantly asserted by all the orthodox against the Pelagians.

111Consider then, reader, what you can answer when those very reasons of D. Garissoles by which he attacks us are turned back against that propagation. How is hereditary sin propagated, when the souls in which it inheres are not propagated or traduced? You cannot flee to the law of nature by which the diseased generate the diseased, because the soul is not generated, and yet from the beginning of its being it is deprived of justice and corrupted. How also can that blot cling in the seed, when it is not a physical quality but a moral one? Either I am badly mistaken, or you will not be able to meet those reasons insofar as they simply attack the propagation of sin without by the same stroke leaving us immune from them. For if you recur to imputation, you will gain nothing. For imputation is an action not of the generating man but of God judging. Further, D. Garissoles wants that imputation to have been done when Adam first sinned, long before propagation or generation took place — so how it can be called any part of natural propagation I for my part do not understand. But if by imputation you mean the infliction of a penalty for Adam's sin, that infliction itself is God's action, not nature's or the begetting man's. Then that penalty, which is also sin, is either produced by the begetter or not. If it is produced, the earlier reasons return: for how can sin be produced by the begetting man in a soul that is not begotten by him? If it is not produced, certainly it is not propagated. So you see that by D. Garissoles the name of sin's propagation is kept, but the thing signified is taken away. Since therefore it is confessed that sin is propagated by carnal generation, according to that saying what is born of the flesh is flesh; and those reasons have been objected a hundred times by the Pelagians against the orthodox, there is no need for us to detain the reader in solving them. Augustine, Martyr, Chamier, and many others who have written carefully on the propagation of sin may be consulted. So stood D. Garissoles's first reason.

112I add, he says, a second reason. For unless you take refuge in imputation, and in one that depends on God's will and just judgment, it is scarcely possible to give a suitable account why the blot of original sin has run from the beginning into all Adam's natural sons and is to keep flowing to the end of the age — or why the first parent's corruption descends by propagation into the whole offspring rather than the sins of the remaining parents, to whom we owe our birth no less than to Adam, and whom we even touch more nearly. For if it is nature's own law that the corrupt generate the corrupt, as lepers are generated from lepers, how is it that parents who foul themselves with varied sins do not always transmit those stains of their sins into their children? Why does disobedient Adam generate sons rebellious toward God and stubborn by nature, while idolatrous Ahaz does not generate a Hezekiah like himself? Or why do adulterers, drunkards, and robbers not always bring forth children plunging into the same vices? Or why is so ancient a vice propagated, while more recent ones — and ones that do not stand so far from us in time — are not? Or why, finally, is corruption sprouting from the first sin sown into posterity, while what could have been heaped up from Adam's following sins is not derived to later generations? Reject the doctrine of imputation, and the water will stick; turn wherever you will, you will not give a suitable reason for that difference. Set the doctrine of imputation, and you will have a sure cause of that diversity ready to hand. The discrimination proceeds from this: that God willed the first parent's guilt to pass to all by imputation, and did not will the guilt of other parents to be transmitted that way. Theologians acknowledge that as the true, solid, and unique cause of the matter, and so on.

113What first strikes me is the learned man's sheer absurdity: he never sees that we, no less than he, may fetch the reason of this discrimination from God's will. The easier reply is ready. Every vice carries a contagion able to spread like plague, poison, or leaven — unless providence or grace from God throws a barrier across its path. On that footing the discrimination is plain. God refused to block the first parent's vice from running on through carnal generation; yet He chose to check other parents' other vices so that natural propagation would not multiply them likewise. Thus in Adam what belongs to sin and nature stands out, and in the rest what belongs to God's providence and grace.

114Ask, then, why parents stained by many kinds of sin do not always pass those stains to their children. I answer with Peter Martyr: God fixed a bound so that evil would not rage without measure, and He held this spread of evil in suspension. Why does disobedient Adam still beget sons rebellious toward God and stubborn by nature? Because God willed to permit the fall — which is to say, not to stop Adam's fall or its onward spread. Why does idolatrous Ahaz fail to beget a Hezekiah in his own likeness? Because the God who had chosen Hezekiah loosed him from his father's idolatry by the Holy Spirit's power. And why do adulterers, drunkards, and robbers not always raise children rushing into the same vices? Either providence, watching over the human race's conservation, blocks those vices from spreading, or regenerating grace later strips away what did spread.

115Hence the ancient vice spreads because God refused to stop it; the newer ones do not, because God chose to stop them. One word sums it: He permitted Adam's fall to propagate, not other sins. Fairest reader, you already see that we are not stuck for an answer. Another account of the same discrimination — drawn from the nature of Adam's first sin itself — Placeus had already given in the Theses and again in a later Manuscript; God willing, it will be cleared in its place from D. Garissoles's exceptions. What matters now is only this: the very reason Garissoles offers for the discrimination serves propagation no less than imputation, and our cause is the stronger. Our reply denies nothing agreed between us — that original sin does propagate, that other vices do not always, and that nothing occurs with God wholly unaware and unwilling. His reply, by contrast, quietly assumes the antecedent imputation we deny and that he was bound to prove, and it lays on God a will to impute Adam's first actual sin that neither nature nor Scripture has ever disclosed. That does not look free of sin.

116There is more. If the true, solid, and only cause of that difference is God's will — pleased to charge Adam's first sin to us all, yet not pleased to charge Adam's later sins or the sins of other parents — then we must confess what conscience most fiercely flees: that the true, solid, and only cause of our being sinners and lost is God's will. That runs against the oracle, From you is your destruction, O Israel. I do admit that, where original vice propagates, an imputation hangs together with it unless mercy from God steps in; yet that imputation comes after the propagation, never before it, and never as its cause. But to plant an imputation that makes Adam's actual sin ours, that makes us sinners and debtors to eternal death, that is then treated as the cause of sin's spread, and whose only cause is said to be God's will — if that is not to cast God as the author of our perdition, what is?

117Someone may say justice itself required God to will the imputation of that first sin rather than of other sins. Then why, I ask, was that cause never produced? Why call God's will the unique cause of the matter? And how — while we for now only answer — will anyone prove that justice required it? Flee to our conjunction with Adam, and was that bond stronger at his first sin than later, or stronger with him than with parents nearer to us? Flee to some unknown covenant whose terms were that, if he sinned, his first sin would be charged to all his posterity under those two penalties — inherent sin and eternal death — and that covenant must be proved from Scripture, which cannot be done at all. Above all we must beware of ascribing to God anything Scripture does not give Him, especially anything that clouds His virtues; for that cannot fail to be a grave sin.

118With that argument laid out, Garissoles calls in the theologians' help and names Whitaker, Chamier, Sixtus of Siena, and Bellarmine. That he praises our writers does not surprise me: that is how this debate usually goes when novelty is the charge to be shaken off. But why the Papists? Why Bellarmine? Did he think their authority would move us? I do not think so. He meant to join Bellarmine's reasons to his own against us. He says Bellarmine comes forward on no contemptible grounds for confirming this opinion — book 5 of On the Loss of Grace and the State of Sin, chapter 18. Very well: let us answer those reasons too, and with the more spirit because, if I understand them, they cut plainly against the doctrine of original sin received in our churches.

119Unless we grant, he says, that we truly sinned in Adam and with Adam, there is no way to explain how newborn infants bear any true guilt, and this Catholic dogma will look not merely above reason but against it. Before we go further: what does it mean to sin in and with Adam? The phrase has to be figurative. Perhaps it means Adam's sin is imputed to us. Take that reading, and I deny the proposition.

120Bellarmine's proof runs: whatever we say clings in little children from sin — guilt, aversion, loss of grace, or anything else — cannot be vice in them, cannot even exist, unless it came from a free act in which they somehow shared. Is that not to deny that the hereditary blot in infants is truly sin enough to damn them, as our Confession states in Article XI? Let him continue. First: guilt is a relation that follows an act — how can it stand in someone who had no share in the act? The argument would hold if the only sin were actual sin, and the only guilt what follows an act at once. But there is also habitual sin, and guilt that follows a habit.

121Second — I recite the reasons as they stand in D. Garissoles — habitual aversion cannot even be conceived unless actual aversion went before. That is strikingly false if the actual aversion meant is the infants' own. Who denies that Adam's own actual turning from God preceded the habitual turn in him, and that this was passed down into the little ones? Aversion from God, wherever it is found, is sin simply because it is aversion from God. Third: imagine an infant who has aversion and guilt yet never sinned with Adam — how is he justly blamed and punished? What is his fault in being born so? Could he stop being begotten that way?

122On Garissoles's reading, to have sinned with Adam means the sin is imputed, and imputed ahead of the inherent blot: otherwise those reasons would not touch us. But once that imputation is set aside, can aversion from God, in anyone, fail to deserve rebuke? The child's fault is not that he was born so, but that he is so constitutioned — base, godless, God's enemy. That is a great fault indeed: not actual guilt as they speak of it, yet habitual. From actual disobedience he is called disobedient from without, by the cause that produced it; from habitual disobedience, from within, by the subject that bears it. So the infant is not guilty from a nearby act but from a habit: not because he did some evil deed, but because he himself is evil and set for evil doing.

123Fourth: guilt is said to need more than voluntariness by habitual will; it must also have come from a voluntary act — otherwise that habitual voluntariness would be natural and fit for mercy, not for blame. I say the opposite: that is enough for habitual guilt. Original vice is called voluntary not because it comes from the will, but because it is in the will: the first way makes the act voluntary, the second the habit. That vice is the will's own malice and crookedness, and though natural it is still called evil. The more naturally evil the will, the worse it is, and the more hateful.

124Besides, who cannot see these reasons turned back on themselves? Guilt follows the act of the person whose guilt it is, not someone else's; and habit usually follows that person's act, not another's. Could we — or should we — have stopped Adam from sinning? How is something voluntary with respect to our will if it was done long before we had any will at all? Does the imputation make Adam's actual sin proceed from our voluntary act? Are we any less necessarily guilty than corrupt? Did we earn being born this way? Read our own theologians against Pelagius, Pighius, or Bellarmine himself, especially where they ask whether original sin and concupiscence remain sin even after baptism.

125His last argument remains, drawn from the imputation of Christ’s justice. He puts it this way: anything that overturns or shakes the teaching of Christ’s imputed righteousness must not be allowed or endured, but must be rooted out and cast off entirely. Yet the dogma that Adam’s sin is not imputed, he says, certainly shakes that teaching more than a little — because denying the first makes denying the second an easy slide. Since in Christ, the second Adam, we have a sure remedy against the evils and losses the first Adam brought on the human race, and a remedy ought to match the diseases it is meant to heal, anyone who thinks we inherit from Adam nothing worse than native corruption — and who sets sanctification over against that corruption — will soon conclude that we have no guilt earlier than our original stain from Adam’s disobedience, and that we need no imputation of Christ’s justice ahead of sanctification in nature’s order: where there is no evil, no remedy is needed.

126I deny that refusing antecedent or immediate imputation of Adam’s sin weakens, in any way, the doctrine of Christ’s imputed justice. It pains me to watch a learned man, for the sake of his proof, abandon the teaching that native corruption carries guilt — a teaching the Protestant churches have stated and sealed in their public confessions. Native corruption can be read two ways: forensically, or morally. Forensically it is sin enough to damn us; morally it is a quality that fouls us by clinging in us. As sin that binds us under God’s wrath, justification answers it; as a foul quality inhering in us, sanctification answers it. That quality cannot be removed until its guilt is removed first. So in nature’s order, justification comes before sanctification.

127Corruption therefore wears a double face: forensic — so that unless it is forgiven it is charged to death — and moral or philosophical, making the subject ready to sin. We therefore needed a double cure: Christ’s justice imputed to heal corruption’s guilt, and the Spirit’s power to tear the blot out of the subject. Is this not orthodox teaching, confessed by all the purer churches? I am astonished that D. Garissoles denied it here — though the astonishment should not run deep. Those who press antecedent imputation almost cannot help striking this reef.

128Moreover, the imputation of justice is needed not only to clear us of the guilt of the vice that inheres, but also to justify us from all our other sins. What God freely grants is justification from many falls (Rom. 5:16).

129I can turn the argument on its maker. If no evil means no need of a remedy, and there is no evil unless we carry a guilt earlier than our original stain from Adam’s disobedience, and the sole true cause of that guilt in us is God’s will — then I cannot see why imputed justice is necessary at all. Let God simply withhold imputation of the first Adam’s sin, as He already withholds imputation of other sins — Adam’s own, or our forefathers’ — and there will be no evil and no need of a remedy. On Garissoles’s account there is no reason God should charge us with that sin rather than with Adam’s other sins or other parents’ sins, except His bare will. If imputing or not imputing hangs on that will alone, why did Christ have to suffer such horrors so that this sin might not be charged to us?

130I can also charge Lord Garissoles with a contradiction here. He says that if no guilt precedes corruption, we do not need Christ’s imputed justice; yet elsewhere he admits an imputation and a guilt that follow corruption. What matching remedy answers that later guilt? Sanctification? It does not properly stand against guilt. Christ’s imputed justice? Once consequent or mediate imputation is granted, that justice is what we need. So Placeus does not shake the doctrine of Christ’s imputed righteousness: he owns consequent imputation and guilt, and with them original sin and the need for Christ’s satisfaction — and he shares nothing with Socinian, Arminian, and kindred errors.

131Chapter XI. That Placeus stands apart from the Pelagian, Socinian, and Remonstrant teaching on this question. Garissoles wants to make us hated and crush us under the heaviest prejudices by grieving that we make common cause with Pelagians and Socinians. There is nothing to grieve over. We shrink from the errors of such men as strongly as anyone can. He adds that the oldest heretics — I take him to mean the Marcionites and the Manichees, who with the height of impiety called the old law evil — held that there can be no just imputation of another's sin. What does that have to do with our question?

132Do we agree with those heretics? On the contrary, we contradict them. We believe and teach that some just imputation of another's sin is possible, and we admit the imputation of Adam's first sin as consequent or mediate. Their heresy did not sit in that opinion, but in the absurd dogma they tried to prove from it. So the two witnesses Garissoles cites — Origen's eighth homily on Exodus, and Jerome on Ezekiel 18:1–2 — he cites against himself. When Origen had offered the words Garissoles quotes — how the fathers' sins are said to be visited on the children to the third and fourth generation, a saying heretics use to taunt us as unworthy of a good God who punishes one for another's sins — does Origen answer as Garissoles would, that this is not unjust at all? No. Thinking it unjust and unfit for God, he fled to metaphor: the 'parents' are the Devil and his angels; the first generation, those the Devil seduces directly; the second, those next seduced by them; the third and fourth, those they recruit as partners or servants of sin. Those human sons of the devil are seized and punished in this age so they may be saved; the demons who are their parents have their punishment deferred to the age to come.

133As for Jerome, Garissoles does quote his words — but how does Jerome untie the knot? How does he read the Decalogue's 'I visit the fathers' sins on the children'? Does he take it, as Garissoles does, of immediate imputation? Not at all. In the same place Jerome says they were suffering a hidden scandal: it looked like God's injustice that one should sin and another pay. If God visits the fathers' sins on the children to the third and fourth generation, it seems unjust that one sins and another is punished. But the words that follow — 'to those who hate Me' — clear the scandal. They are not punished in the third and fourth generation because their fathers sinned (the sinful fathers themselves ought to have been punished), but because they became imitators of their fathers and hated God, hereditary evil and impiety growing from the root into the branches as well. What could fit our view more closely? A little later Jerome cites Proverbs: as sour grapes hurt the teeth and smoke the eyes, so iniquity hurts those who use it — so it is plain that not other people's teeth ache, but the teeth of those who ate the sour grapes. The point of the place is: saying 'the fathers ate sour grapes and the sons' teeth went numb' is ridiculous and follows nothing; so it is unjust and twisted that fathers sin and sons and grandsons are tormented. What could be said more plainly against antecedent imputation?

134Setting aside those unhelpful witnesses, Garissoles turns to the Pelagians and marvels at Aegidius Hunnius's ἀτοπία — Hunnius's claim that the Pelagian view was that Adam's sin is imputed to posterity. He also marvels that a learned man (he means Placeus) 'hallucinated' the same way in a private letter. Those who first invented the immediate imputation of Adam's sin — note: immediate; Placeus has always rejected that alone, never the mediate — were Pelagians trying to dodge the anathemas aimed at Pelagius. They denied hereditary corruption, that is, original sin, and to dazzle the Church they gave that name to the guilt of Adam's first sin as imputed. Garissoles cries that this is false; yet he admits that anyone who makes the whole account of original sin nothing but the imputation of Adam's sin belongs with the Pelagians — not because they taught imputation, but because they denied corruption. That confirms Hunnius and Placeus more than it overturns them. They never pinned immediate imputation of the first sin on Pelagius himself or on every Pelagian, but only on those who were truly Pelagians and wanted not to look it — for if Pelagius had openly taught imputed Adam's sin, that dodge would have been useless. Seeing that deniers of original sin were counted heretics, they professed to believe original sin, but meant by it not propagated sin, as all the orthodox do, but Adam's actual sin imputed to everyone. Indeed those who press immediate imputation against Placeus cannot help sliding toward the Pelagians, as I have already noted more than once in Garissoles himself: once a propagated, inherent sin that is truly sin and enough to damn us is granted, what need is there of another sin imputed to us? Once mediate imputation of Adam's first actual sin is granted, what need of the immediate — and how can Scripture prove it?

135Here Garissoles, at length and with several witnesses, confirms that Pelagius believed in no imputation of Adam's sin. To what end? I do not know. Who denies it? Does that make Placeus Pelagius's ally? Placeus's teaching contradicts the Pelagian one as plainly as can be. Pelagius condemned every imputation of Adam's sin; Placeus condemns only the immediate. Pelagius thought no imputation of Adam's sin just; Placeus holds some just — namely the mediate. Pelagius denied original sin; Placeus confesses and proves it. How can people so opposed be said to make common cause? Yes, Pelagius denies immediate imputation, and so does Placeus — but the Pelagian heresy never sat in that denial. Not everything Pelagius denied or affirmed is heresy by that fact alone. Shall I run through all Garissoles pins on the Pelagians in section VI? (1) They denied that original justice was lost; Placeus affirms it was. Pelagius acknowledged no original justice at all; Placeus does. They held we are born without virtue and without vice; Placeus holds we are born steeped in vice. So for them infants stand where Adam stood before the fall; for Placeus infants stand in a far worse state. (2) They denied any corruption in human nature from the start; Placeus affirms it. (3) They took the necessity of dying not as sin's penalty but as nature's sequel and condition — Adam would have died whether he sinned or not; Placeus takes dying as undergoing penalty, and teaches that Adam would not have died had he not sinned. (4) They denied that any infants are damned with eternal penalties, since those come only from each one's own injustice; Placeus does not deny eternal penalties, knowing they also arise from innate injustice. Finally they thought no penalty at all is laid on posterity for Adam's sin; Placeus thinks some is — namely death. So he owns immediate imputation of Adam's habitual sin as propagated and present in us, and mediate imputation of Adam's actual sin once done outside us. Reader, Placeus is no Pelagian. Why then does Garissoles waste the reader's patience proving what no one denies — that Pelagius denied Adam's sin's imputation — and list Pelagius's errors as if Placeus shared them?

136Meanwhile Garissoles casually praises a passage from Augustine's unfinished work against Julian's second reply (Paris, in the seventeenth year of this century) — a passage which, he says, even alone would show what Augustine and the Catholic Church thought about this imputation. Let us look at it: if Augustine is consistent, he is wholly ours. What then is this cry — that God cannot both forgive adults their own sins and impute another's to little ones? (The word propter also looks deletable there as useless and awkward, and the sentence has some other fault. Julian was not saying God cannot forgive adults their own sins; he was saying it does not become the God who forgives adults their own to impute another's to little ones.) Nor will you face this: only those reborn in Christ have both forgiven; those not reborn in Christ have neither. The Christian sacraments of grace are hidden from the wise and prudent and revealed to little ones. If you were among them, and did not think yourself great in your own virtue, you would see that the first man's injustice is imputed to little ones as generated, for undergoing punishment, just as the second man's justice is imputed to little ones as regenerated, for obtaining the kingdom of heaven. That place does not hurt us. Augustine means an imputation that follows generation — and so inborn corruption — whereas the imputation we deny is supposed to precede generation as it does corruption, as if it were the cause of our being born corrupt. Nothing stops us taking 'the first man's injustice' as habitual injustice transmitted to little ones by generation. When the Pelagians asked Augustine how God, who in His goodness remits our own sins, could will to impute another's, he answered (Martyr witnesses) that God is supremely good and does not, as they assume, impute another's sin to us in the guilt of origin, but our own iniquity, which already clings to our nature from the origin itself. Martyr adds another witness: in the Enchiridion to Laurentius, chapter 46, Augustine says it is probable that even the nearest parents' sins are shared with the children. To prove it he sets together two Scriptures we already treated: God will pursue the fathers' sins on the children to the third and fourth generation, yet elsewhere the son shall not bear the father's iniquity. If the son does not bear the father's iniquity but his own, and yet God pursues the father's sin in him, the son must have that sin in himself — otherwise the places would not agree. Would Augustine have said that if he had believed an antecedent or immediate imputation of the father's sin, by which a son would be sinner and guilty who otherwise would be neither?

137As for the Socinians, since they differ not at all from the Pelagians, what more is there to say? As for the Arminians, by God's kindness Placeus shrinks from their errors too. The learned Walaeus, answering Corvinus for the distinguished Du Moulin, did not hesitate to deny immediate imputation in plain words — as we noted above at page 22 — and is not for that reason thought to side with the Remonstrants. And those were Lord Garissoles's arguments.

138Chapter XII. That Lord Daubuz's arguments do not prove antecedent or immediate imputation. With Garissoles's book there also appeared a letter and a farewell poem from Charles Daubuz, minister of the Word in the church at Nerac — warm praise for Garissoles, and an attack on Placeus. He urges the same case for imputing Adam's sin, only in slightly different words. He opens from a covenant made with Adam, and he takes that as given rather than proving it. We were with Adam, he says; and as agents and consenters with him and through him we deserve the same penalty. But how, I ask, were we with Adam when we did not yet exist? Existing comes before existing-with-another. How did we act with him? Only what exists acts, and that as a person or subject — for actions belong to subjects. How did we consent with him and through him? Our consent is an act of our own will precisely as we differ from Adam. If by 'consent' he means nothing but the hereditary corruption born in us, he gets only mediate imputation — which Placeus already grants. He adds the lawyers' maxim: whoever acts through another seems to act through himself. That, I say, was not to be assumed but proved: that through Adam we did what Adam did. Did Adam heed his wife in our place? Were we the authors of her sin? Or did he sin as our servant while we were the principal causes?

139Leaving that aside, he turns to Scripture, and first to ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον. We sinned in Adam, he says; therefore we share his sin and stand guilty; therefore the offense is rightly imputable — and imputed. Grant the imputation, so long as it comes by way of corruption: what does that do against us? Next I deny that ἐφ᾽ ᾧ must mean 'in whom.' He leans on translators who so rendered it, names them, and concludes that someone has written rashly or sleepily who said τὸ ἐφ᾽ ᾧ should not be 'in whom' but 'because.' That charge hits Placeus and everyone who preferred 'because,' 'inasmuch as,' 'since,' and the like to 'in whom.' Had they thought 'in whom' required, they would have kept it; had they not thought 'because' right, they would not have written 'because.' For our answer it is enough that 'because' is possible — and that it is the right rendering was already shown above at page 70 and following. Finally, to say we sinned in Adam it is enough that Adam's sin caused ours, just as his being caused ours.

140Grant them that for free, says the learned man: do they still gut the force of the text? Not at all. That 'they sinned' said of infants is most true, he claims, and plainly marks some actual sin. I deny it — and many great men before me did, Calvin and Martyr among them. If I may turn the charge, it was the Pelagians who took that 'they sinned' of an actual sin. What sin has an infant committed while still in the womb, or crying in the cradle? He has sinned not by act but by habit — not actual sin but original. Original, Daubuz says, he does have, but καθ᾽ ἕξιν, subjectively, rather than ἐνεργείᾳ. In other words it is not an action but a quality, standing as a habit stands. Is it therefore less truly a sin, binding us in guilt unless forgiven? So, he adds, we die from tender years, from the fingertips; indeed we scarcely born die again — because, we confess, we have sinned; yet then we could sin only in Adam. What is denying that original vice is truly a sin enough to damn the whole race (as Article XI of the Confession says), if this is not that denial? Without noticing it, this learned man is pleading Pighius's cause. Are we not sinners in ourselves from the maternal womb — wrapped and stained in inherent sin?

141Thoroughly soaked in unbelief, malice, and the rest — and therefore needing the grace of justification and regeneration? If you grant that, how do you deny that we have sinned, that we are sinners in ourselves? If you deny it, one must meet you with the same weapons once used against Pelagius, and in the last age against Pighius. His further claim — that that death at least mediately presupposes an actual fault — is ambiguous. If 'actual' is set against 'habitual,' what follows except that Adam's actual fault is mediately imputed to us? We gladly grant that. If 'actual' is set against 'potential,' even original sin can be called an actual fault: it is in us in act, not in potency, and its guilt in that sense is no less actual than the guilt of an actual sin. So to Daubuz affirming without proving I oppose Theodoret: Death has spread to all inasmuch as all have sinned — not for the first parent's sin, but each has drawn the sentence of death for his own. I also oppose Augustine: For this one vice alone, as I wrote in the book you resist, human nature is condemned, and for that for which it is condemned it is subjected to the damnable devil, for the devil himself is an unclean spirit. To paint so weak an argument he meets a reply of Placeus. Those who take the other side, he says, add something and by deceiving are deceived — and gain nothing. There is no reason, they say, to speak of sinning in Adam otherwise than of being or dying in him. O insoluble knot (ἀδιάλυτον)!

142Yet we were in Adam two ways, Daubuz says — ἁπλῶς and κατὰ μέρος, representatively and naturally. Whole human nature was in Adam without doubt (so Thomas on Romans 5, lecture 3 near the end: we were in Adam by bodily substance and by seminal reason); and in Adam the person sinned, so nature was guilty of the fault then done and of the punishment to come. First: Placeus is not arguing here but answering. Is that answer true or false? If true, they are not 'deceived by deceiving.' If false, the falsehood should have been shown. The learned man does not show it. Inside Placeus's reply there lay a double argument — one from existence, one from death. From existence: we are not said to have sinned in Adam otherwise than to have been in him. But we are not said to have been in him by imputation; his being is not imputed to us — it is only propagated into us. Therefore we are not to be said to have sinned in him by imputation either, but by a real sharing of his sin through natural propagation. Again: we did not sin in Adam otherwise than we were in him. But we were not in him immediately, only through intermediate parents descended from him. Therefore we did not sin in him immediately, only through our parents' original vices descended from him. From death: we are not said to have sinned in Adam otherwise than to die in him. But we die in him not because his death is imputed, but because death is actually propagated into us. Therefore we sinned in him not by imputed sin, but by sin actually propagated into us. Does the learned man prove or answer anything that breaks or even weakens arguments of this kind? Nothing at all.

143Does he deny or admit that we did not sin in Adam otherwise than we were? He only says we were in Adam two ways — representatively and naturally. Does he then affirm or deny that Adam's being is imputed to us? He should at least have explained that distinction — and whether we likewise sinned in Adam both ways, and died in him both ways. Does he prove the double mode? Not at all. A Reformed man speaking to a Reformed man, instead of Scripture or a reason, he cites Thomas: we were in Adam by bodily substance and by seminal reason. Is that 'being in Adam doubly' — representatively and naturally? And did we likewise sin in him? He dresses it with a likeness: if someone once truly said many Mariuses are in one Caesar, how much more truly may we say that in one sinning Adam there were many Adams — indeed all, except Christ the God-man (θεάνθρωπος). What could be less to the point? Does it follow that some act of Caesar is to be imputed to many Mariuses? Were many Mariuses in Caesar representatively and naturally, or by bodily substance and seminal reason? Do you not pity me, prudent reader, stuck in business of this weight with such disputants? Further, he says, let those learned men go who now err only by too high an opinion of their own subtlety and knowledge. Whether we err, let the reader judge. Whether that opinion is in us, he knows who searches hearts; as far as we can we cast it off and hang on him alone. But let him continue: let them consult the judges' tribunals and the lawyers' benches. Do not public actors, ambassadors, notaries, and such who stand for others also report the absent, set them as present, represent them — if I may use that ambiguous word? And how much more in this covenant would the chiefs, father, stock, head, and author of the whole race have represented all posterity in a public common pact? Fine consequence! So Adam was our ambassador — or our notary! He was at least our father, stock, and head — namely after he begot us; before he began to beget he was certainly no father. Better to go to the divine oracles that cry: the father shall not bear the son's iniquity, nor the son the father's.

144As for the covenant — which kind does he mean? Of grace? Legal? I think not. Of nature? Let him tell me what that is supposed to be. I see a double law laid on Adam: one through signs that signify by nature, one through signs that signify by institution — the first planted in nature, the second revealed by the word. Under the first Adam stood as man and world-dweller; under the second, as paradise-dweller. Which was 'that covenant'? Not the second, I think. It was framed in these words: Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day you eat of it you shall surely die. That law does not wear a covenant's face, and it was laid on Adam when, for want of a wife still to be created supernaturally, he could not be a father. You will say it was laid on the whole human race. It was laid on the whole race that then existed — not on a race that did not yet exist and never dwelt in paradise. Grant it was laid on the whole race: must its first actual breach by one man be imputed to all his posterity who did not break it? Was not the Mosaic law laid on all Israel? Yet its first breach is not imputed to all the posterity of those who first received it. Was not a covenant struck with Abraham for himself and his seed? Are one or more of Abraham's acts therefore imputed to all his posterity? Is there anything in that law from which such an imputation can be drawn? So that law is not a covenant that imports such an imputation. Nor is the law or covenant commonly called nature such a covenant. All men are born under it; but nothing in it yields an antecedent or immediate imputation of Adam's first actual sin. Its threats belong to all men no more than its commands; and Adam's posterity are each as bound to keep it for themselves as Adam once was. But perhaps I linger too long refuting bare assertions and, as they say, beggings of the question.

145That learned man moves on to verse 19, and argues from it: we were made sinners by Adam's disobedience, therefore it was imputed to us. Through hereditary corruption—I grant; immediately—I deny. He seems bent on proving the consequence. Who, he asks, could that κατάστασις, that ἁμαρτία, that παράπτωμα make us guilty, or bring the παράπτωμα of Romans 5:18 (a judicial act, God's justice spoken out, and its effect: damnation, condemnation) upon us without actual sin, whether our own or imputed? Away with the delirium. The answer is plain. As Chamier puts it, it can make us guilty causally, by original sin produced and propagated into us. That is no delirium; it is the Church's settled doctrine, which Scripture and experience confirm. How, he adds, can we be constituted sinners in act without sin? Since that cannot be original sin—still only habitual, especially in the newly conceived or newborn—it must be some actual sin. I answer: we are constituted sinners not without sin, for original sin is truly sin. It is not an actual act; it is, in act, habitual sin: in act it inheres in infants; in act it makes us liable to God's wrath. Deny that, and you are scarcely off Pighius's path.

146He also gibes at our reply—that the opposition's likeness lies in the thing, not in its mode—and says we take Socinus's part rather than Calvin's, when in fact he is the one leaving Calvin, to whom we hold fast. How does he refute the reply we already proved by authority and reason? He asks why our people then draw from this text the mode of justification, namely by imputing Christ's righteousness. A fine refutation! Who among ours draws that from here—Calvin, Martyr, Bucer, Bullinger, and the rest? Not at all; only later writers who leave their path on this point. They do not see, he says, how they wound the common cause when they let this supposedly invincible argument be torn from them—and, so far as they can, tear it from us to favor the other side. If we ask why they luxuriate so in this place, we shall find it is done to favor Pelagians, Arminians, Socinians, and Anabaptists. We see the opposite: they wound the common cause who cannot or will not argue well, push forward weak proofs as invincible, and meanwhile bury their brothers under slander. That we both see and lament.

147I leave the rest—bare assertions without reason—and add only this, which both looks like an argument and shows how far our accusers leave our public Confession and drift toward Pighianism. If, he says, the first parent's sin is not imputed, why impute Christ's merits? Had he meant original sin or mediate imputation, he would not contradict our cause; he would only say something false and unfit for a theologian, let alone a Christian. We need Christ's righteousness imputed so we may also be justified from our many other sins. But when he means Adam's actual sin and its immediate imputation, who does not see that he denies original sin's guilt, and treats that sin as nothing for condemnation or justification? Sanctification that removes the disease is enough, he adds. Is it then a disease that is not sin, that does not condemn? Set that teaching beside Confession article XI: we believe this vice is truly sin, which makes every human being—even infants still in the womb—liable to eternal death before God. We also affirm that even after baptism it remains truly sin as to blame, though the sons of God are not therefore condemned, because God of free goodness and mercy does not impute it to them. We add that this perversity always bears some fruits of malice and rebellion.

148You see this vice is truly sin, that it makes every man liable to eternal death before God unless it is forgiven—that it is imputed—and will you still deny we need Christ's merits imputed to be justified from it? So our opponents in this cause are guilty of the very charge they falsely lay on us: they leave the received doctrine. When he adds how excellent and wonderful our whole evangelical justification would look—yet from these φρονημάτα it must either fall wholly or at least become useless—you see, Reader, how false and slanderous that is. The same befell the distinguished D. Stephen Blancus, whose Theological Disputation on the soul's origin and how original sin is propagated appeared in 1648. In Thesis XLII he argues: all sinned by the sin that entered the world through one man; yet not in their own person, for they did not yet exist; therefore they sinned in Adam, for in him they died (1 Cor. 15:22). The conclusion could stand if rightly taken; but the minor looks like nothing but a denial of what article XI asserts in our Churches. He denies that the vice is the sin which entered the world—that is, all men—through one man; yet that article says the vice is truly sin and makes every human being liable to eternal death before God, which it could not do unless it had entered every human being.

149His added words—'inasmuch as in him they died'—confirm our view. When all are said to die in Adam, we do not mean Adam's single death imputed to everyone, but death multiplied by the number of men, each his own. He adds that they died by that one man's offense (Rom. 5:15), and from this thinks it easy to gather that the offense was everyone's by imputation, since divine justice will not let someone share another's punishment without sharing the guilt somehow. If someone likewise said we were produced by that one man's power, would that power therefore be common to all by imputation? If justice forbids sharing another's punishment without sharing guilt, it also forbids making someone a sharer of guilt by the judge's imputation who otherwise would not share it. If a judge already acts unjustly in punishing one who shares no guilt, how much worse if by his own act and judicial imputation he also makes that man a guilty sinner who otherwise was neither? I marvel that pious and learned men miss this. Who that is innocent could not be 'justly' punished, if imputation makes common a sin that was not common, and makes a true sinner of one who otherwise was not?

150At last the learned man says the Pauline word ἁμαρτίαν does not mean the habit of sin—the habitual corruption even in infants—but a past act of sinning, which can mean nothing but Adam's first sin. That contradicts Calvin and the other great men we follow, who take 'they sinned' of original vice. Still he offers reasons. I. Paul speaks of the sin that entered the world, that is all men, through Adam, called one man. So he assumes original vice is either not sin, or did not enter all naturally begotten through that one man. II. Infants too are wrapped in this sin: they count among those into whom death passed, and they die by no other actual sin than an imputed one, since no other actual sin befalls them; and that imputed actual sin is nothing but Adam's first. Yes, infants die by no other actual sin than Adam's first—but why not die proximately by that habitual vice which makes every human being liable to eternal death before God? As I have often said: you cannot build immediate imputation of Adam's first actual sin without denying the guilt of habitual vice. III. When Paul says in verse 17 that death reigned through one offense, and in verse 19 that many were made sinners by one man's disobedience, those phrases can look only to Adam's own deed—the breach of God's command. Grant it—what then? Does it follow that ἁμαρτίαν does not mean the habit of sin, or that Adam's first actual sin is imputed to us immediately, before we are born corrupt? Death reigns through one offense so far as it is propagated by habit into all, so that death reigns in all because sin reigns. By one man's disobedience propagated and multiplied by habit, many are constituted sinners. Why hunt elsewhere for the proximate cause of our death, when that inhering sin shows itself in our body and members—and unless Christ's grace crucifies it, reigns so mightily in us?

151In Thesis XLIII he adds that the death which passed to all through one man includes spiritual death—of the soul—nothing but the loss of original righteousness with the contrary habitual corruption set in its place. What is affirmed so easily can be denied as easily; it needed proof, which he does not even attempt. The Helvetic Confession and every better interpreter take that death of bodily and eternal death alone; that reading will be proved elsewhere. He adds that without imputing Adam's disobedience the derivation of habitual human corruption cannot be just. How can that be true? That derivation is nothing but sin's contagion and the spread of injustice; it is not itself just, nor can it be— for it is not just to multiply injustice. But God's permitting or not hindering that derivation is just and has nothing against justice. His further reason—by what justice would we all bear that sin's penalty, namely spiritual death, if it is not imputed?—first assumes what we dispute: that God inflicts original vice on us as a penalty properly so called. Next, making another's sin ours by imputation does not remove injustice but increases it: as if the most equitable and holy God first imputed another's sin to all, to make them sinners and guilty by imputation, then to punish that imputed sin made them sinners by inherence. So the Devil's temptation would have made only one man a sinner; God's act—imputation—would have made all men sinners and lost. How could a pious conscience not detest such a dogma? I find nothing more in this author not already refuted enough; empty repetition would only weary the Reader. One point I nearly passed: in Thesis XLI he says whatever someone commits as head of a society or multitude is justly imputed to the whole community. If that were true, the Romans were wholly wronged when Nero or Caligula was their head: whatever those wicked emperors did could justly be imputed to each Roman, so that no one in the empire was not a parricide if the head's parricide was justly charged to all.

152Chapter XIV. That no argument in the manuscript pamphlets can prove the immediate or antecedent imputation of Adam's sin. Of the printed arguments I have managed to read, enough has been said, I judge. I have seen many manuscripts, and in them I have noticed almost nothing that is not already in books issued by the printers—save that first piece to which Placeus answered in the manuscript Garissoles later called the later one, and on whose refutation Garissoles spent a great part of his book.

153Nothing therefore seems wiser than to set that Placeus manuscript before you, Reader (why should I spend myself proposing or answering those arguments when Placeus has already done it?), and, since Garissoles chose to refute it and copied its scraps and patches into his own book and answered them as he could, to set under each scrap that man's censures and Placeus's own defenses. So you, most fair Reader, may know the whole cause easily and without risk of error, and judge—which would otherwise be hard, not to say impossible. One can scarcely see with what mind or sense each thing was said when only torn, uprooted, and scattered pieces of the discourse are offered. Let no one take offense at that. If anything in the writing deserves blame, it is chiefly in the parts Garissoles has already published. Placeus did not compose it to be printed, and haste may have left spots he would have polished at leisure; yet we would not drop, add, or change even a word, lest anyone doubt our honesty. Take it, most fair Reader, in good part: we give you the whole to read and the whole controversy to judge—thank us, or at least bear it without ill will.

154THE LATER MANUSCRIPT, that is, an Examination of a singular tractate On original sin, which argues that the first man's first sin is imputed to all, set against Theses on the state of fallen man before grace, disputed at Saumur on 16 March 1640 under Josue de la Place, professor of theology there. Chapter I. Heads of doctrine on original sin on which we agree. Let me address you, reverend Sir, as if we spoke face to face: so your presence before my eyes may wake my dullness and tune me to deeper reverence. By your singular prudence you wished to clear the state of the question by first laying down what we hold in common. I much approve that plan; yet (with your leave) you seem to me to have done neither part with enough care and clearness. Allow me therefore to do both after your example—briefly, yet so that from this friendly conference every confusion and ambiguity may, if possible, be cleared away.

155I hold fast, and carefully defend, whatever the truly Christian Church has defined against old and new Pelagians and Semipelagians on original sin, and what she has professed in these later ages by her public confessions. Daniel Chamier—a man of deserved name among our churches—reduced the whole dispute between us and Pighius and Salmeron to three heads. Catholics (he means Protestants), he says, prove by sure arguments that human nature itself has a corruption or pravity proper to each person, distinct from sinful acts; second, that the same is in each even at birth; third, that it rises from Adam and passes to posterity by propagation. Though he adds that these three contain the whole nature of original sin—so that once proved nothing remains—I still add two points for clearer teaching: first, that this corruption so spoils every faculty of the soul that, unless we are born again of water and the Spirit, we can neither bear any truly good fruit nor turn to God; second, that this corruption is truly sin, and makes all Adam's posterity—Christ alone excepted, in whom it never was—guilty of eternal death.

156GARISSOLES. Chamier clearly divides two things in original sin: that it is the penalty of the first sin, and that it is an inward vice inhering in us. The first was not in dispute with Pighius and the others he answers in that book, so he does not press it here. The only question was whether original sin has the true character of vice and corruption. Chamier affirms and proves it; and taking original sin as vice, he rightly sets its nature in those three heads. PLACEUS. I do not see what that distinction is for. Who ever called original sin twofold—one the penalty of the first actual sin, the other inherent vice—or made two parts of it, penalty and inward sin? Those who teach immediate imputation of Adam's first actual sin do say either that original sin is twofold (imputed and inherent) or that it has two parts—the chief being Adam's imputed actual sin, the lesser hereditary corruption. If Chamier held that, how could he say those three heads contain the whole nature of original sin, or add that once they are proved nothing remains? He would have left out the chief part. And if Pelagian heresy partly lay in denying that imputation, as Garissoles claims, Catholics ought to have proved the imputation first of all, especially since Stapleton and some other Papists openly denied it. Of Chamier, if need be, elsewhere.

157You, observant colleague, hold the points above. But what of this last? It is cast in the words of our Churches' Confession, Article XI, which you yourself praise in chapter VII: We believe this vice is truly sin, which makes every person—even little ones still hidden in the womb—guilty of eternal death before God. We also affirm that after baptism this vice is still truly sin as to guilt. I believe this from the heart as agreeing with Scripture and with reason; overturn it and the very fabric of the theses you attack comes apart. Do you believe it? In chapters I-II of your tract and elsewhere you seem to say so; yet I fear you speak so to hide your view, for in other places you openly deny it, and a large part of your case rests on that denial. Hear your own words. Chapter V: Where death reigns and there is no guilt from one's own actual sin, there must be imputation of the first sin's guilt. Likewise: death reigned over infants; therefore the first sin's guilt was necessarily imputed to them. When you saw the reply that their guilt comes from inherent vice and hereditary depravity, you called it a cavil and concluded: if children in the womb or newly born are sinners, it is either because they have sinned in act or because the first parent's first sin is imputed to them—for no third way can make them sinners. One is called a sinner because of sin; no other sin can be imputed but that first. Read on. In chapter IX you speak more plainly: I do not see what original sin is if such imputation is denied. Could Pighius have put his mind more clearly?

158You add the reason: how then did death reign even over those who did not sin after the likeness of Adam's trespass, if Adam's sin was not imputed to them? Picture a newborn, or a child dying in the womb: what in him can be called sin? His will is idle of every act and cannot sin by its own choice. He has, you will say, seeds of sin—granted—but not yet sin properly, except that origin-sin by which he sinned in Adam. So his sin is sought not in him or from himself but in the first origin, the first parent; and that sin is nothing but Adam's voluntary disobedience, and so on. You therefore own no original sin but Adam's first actual sin imputed to us, and no guilt in infants but what springs immediately from that imputation. With what mind, then, do you call inherent corruption now simply sin, now original sin? So you have poured ambiguity and confusion into your case—harmful to me had I not spotted it and, as I do, cleared it away. I wonder, reverend Sir, that you, so openly leaving our Church's confession, could charge me—who cling to it—as if I had deserted it. It also grieves me that I cannot shield you, whom I love and who outshine others in doctrine and holiness, from inconstancy or from dissimulation: inconstancy, if you have sometimes held and sometimes not held that inherent corruption is truly sin and itself yields eternal death's guilt; dissimulation, if while you steadily held it is not sin you still said and pressed in places that it is, as if you truly believed it, and even claimed we do not disagree—when you could not miss that not only I, whom you set out to refute, but our Churches too hold that vice formally and properly, and, as the confession says, truly sin; and that those who with you urge first-sin imputation usually split original sin into two—imputed and inherent—and give each its own guilt of eternal death. I would cite witnesses if the books were not known to all and worn by every hand. So either you grant that hereditary corruption, apart from Adam's imputed sin, is truly sin enough to damn the human race, or you deny it. If you grant it, take back the reasons and answers you built in this tract on the contrary premise. If you deny it, this will be our one special quarrel, which I will gladly take up to defend our Churches' confession, which seems to me most true.

159Chapter II. The state of the question. I come now to the state of the question. You would not have framed it awkwardly if, in the word penalty that you brought into it, you had either left out the ambiguity or taken it away. For by penalty you either meant to include hereditary corruption, or you did not. If you did not, you should have said so—otherwise the reader will go wrong—since in this first chapter you hint, in the second you cry out, and elsewhere you drum into others, that that corruption is the penalty of the first sin. If you meant, or thought, that that corruption is the first sin's penalty in the proper sense, not only as it was in Adam himself but also as it is in us—or not—then, if the former, I refuse the question. It assumes as settled among us what I refuted in my theses and what is still under dispute: that hereditary corruption is, properly and strictly, the penalty of the first sin not only as it was in Adam but also as it is present in us by propagation. If you meant a penalty, but not properly so called, nor in the strict sense of the word—at least as it is in us—you ought to have explained your mind; for from many places in this treatise of yours it is plain that you take that corruption to be a penalty in the strictest and most proper sense.

160So drop the word penalty, and you could have put the question without ambiguity: Why are we born liable to the miseries of this life, to bodily death, and to eternal death? Because Adam's first actual sin is imputed to us proximately and immediately? Or because, without any such imputation, his viciousness has come down from him into us and been poured through by natural propagation? You affirm the first; I the second. Or put it this way: Why do we draw from Adam that hereditary moral corruption usually called original sin? Because God the Judge imputes Adam's first actual sin to us, and, as the penalty of that imputed sin—so that it may be avenged and justice satisfied—inflicts that moral corruption which is itself sin and the spring of other sins? Or rather because, without such imputation, this was nature's law before the fall: like begets like—man a man, the corrupt the corrupt, the vicious the vicious, the leprous the leprous? Again you assert the first; I the second. Though the state of the question, framed to fit your mind, is not wholly unserviceable, it still does not satisfy me on every side: it states the parts of the question more than the question as a whole.

161So when my own view is at stake, that I may say plainly what I hold, and set the state of the question as clearly as I can, I divide it in two: one part on the imputation of Adam's first sin, the other on the penalty by which the imputed sin is said to be avenged. First: Is Adam's first sin imputed to all his posterity, Christ excepted? Second: Is hereditary corruption inflicted on us by God the Judge so that justice may be done? To the first I cannot answer with a bare yes or no, for the wording is ambiguous. Subject and attribute must both be distinguished. The subject is Adam's first sin, in which two things are to be marked: the act, inward and outward, by which he broke the divine ban, and the moral corruption that act brought into Adam's nature. That corruption itself may be viewed two ways: as it was in Adam, and as it is in us as it came from Adam. Hence Adam's first sin is used in four senses.

1621. For the act by which he broke God's law—the first actual sin. 2. For that same act not taken by itself, but together with the habitual corruption it produced: the two stand as heating to heat, act to habit, actual change to habitual change. So both together sometimes share the one name 'Adam's sin' or 'the first sin.' 3. For the corruption that actual disobedience bred in Adam—his first habitual sin. 4. For that same corruption as transmitted and propagated into us, which is our sin because it inheres in us, affects us, and names us; yet it is called Adam's as of the author, the first as it were possessor, the fountain from which it flowed to us. If Adam's first sin is taken in this last sense, I say it is imputed to all Adam's posterity (Christ alone excepted, in whom it had no place) until they are justified from it through Christ; and I judge rightly condemned by the Synod of Charenton the opinion of those who profess to acknowledge this sin yet deny that it is imputed to anyone, however unbelieving—for that some in this age teach so in print, the learned Walaeus testified and mourned shortly before his death in a letter. Likewise if it is taken in the third sense, I grant that it is imputed to us—not as it clung in Adam, but as it passes into us, and, in Calvin's words, because it is within us: for our hereditary corruption is the same in kind as that which once was in Adam; and Adam shared with us his nature and his moral corruption alike.

163The same holds for the second sense: as truly as Adam's sin is said to have passed into us—derived, transmitted, propagated—so truly it is said to be imputed to us. But it was propagated not as a passing act, but as lasting viciousness; not as the sin of a person, but as the sin of nature; not as something that once ceased to exist, but as what clings to human nature and is multiplied and propagated with it. And as my nature, derived from Adam, differs numerically from Adam's nature, so the sin derived and propagated from Adam differs numerically from Adam's sin. Thus far, unless I am mistaken, we are in full agreement—provided you will not deny that hereditary corruption is truly a sin to be imputed to the unregenerate, or rather to be imputed unto condemnation. If you deny that, a third controversy rises between us; and though it could be settled by its own arguments, they will not be needed: once Socinus's, Pelagius's, and Pighius's exceptions are answered (as I did in the Theses), we must admit that the whole condemnation Paul presses in Romans 5:12 arises proximately from that corruption alone which flowed from Adam's fall. Placeus. Master Garissoles works up these three last senses of Adam's sin strangely—to what end I do not know. It helps neither the state of the question nor the cause he urges, and only wastes the reader's time. What fault does he find in the distinction of the name? That it is false? Not at all. That there is no consensus on the point? By no means. What then is he doing? Hear him.

164Garissoles. First we may congratulate the excellent theologian on his confession: though he denies that Adam's first act, by which he broke God's command, is imputed to posterity if we view it precisely and apart, he still grants that it is imputed when taken together with the corruption it produced. From this it surely follows that Adam's criminal act itself is imputed to posterity: for what is imputed when viewed jointly with something else is not for that reason less imputed. And if Adam's act is imputed not taken precisely but together with the following corruption, anyone can see that all the reasons learned men have used against imputing Adam's act are to be wiped out at a stroke. For if those reasons prove anything, they prove that we cannot be guilty for another's disobedience and unjust act imputed to us—whether taken alone or together with some other act or habit. But if it stands fixed that Adam's act, taken with the corruption it produced, is imputed to each of his posterity, peace will easily be made. Placeus. In the praise with which this excellent theologian honors me—unworthy as I am—I recognize charity's judgment. In the rest of his words four ὀράματα (phantasms) appear to me. First, he pins on me an opinion that is not mine. I never denied that Adam's criminal act itself is imputed to his posterity. I never said we cannot in any way be guilty for Adam's disobedience. I only denied that that act is imputed to posterity immediately, and that we are guilty for it immediately. That it is imputed mediately, and that we are guilty for it mediately—that is, through the corruption descending from it into us—I have said, repeated, and pressed so often that it is strange a learned man should have gone deaf to words so often spoken.

165Next, he not only wastes labor proving against me what I everywhere affirm, but—worse—tries to draw it from a place where it is not hidden. My words may at first glance seem to favor his inference; yet the explanation that follows at once cuts off every handle, the explanation he himself had shortened at page 33 of his book: because, as truly as Adam's sin passes into us, so truly it is said to be imputed to us. But it passes and has been propagated not as a passing act but as lasting viciousness; not as a person's sin but as nature's sin—what clings to human nature and is multiplied and propagated with it. Third, it is false that all our reasons, if they prove anything, prove that we are in no way guilty for Adam's disobedience: for that they do not touch the mediate imputation of that disobedience I showed so clearly in letters to him that I could get no answer from him by any urging. Fourth, and last, it is false that if Adam's act, taken with the corruption it produced, remains imputed to each of the posterity, peace will be easily made. The whole question will still stand: whether that act, taken precisely, is imputed immediately—that is, so that the corruption of the imputed act is a penalty in the proper sense. That alone I have constantly denied, and wished denied. For the act must be imputed cut off from the corruption that clung in Adam and in us, if corruption is to follow that imputation as its penalty.

166Garissoles. Next I notice that no necessity, and no great usefulness, drove the learned man to divide the subject so anxiously and scrupulously into four senses. Everyone who has spoken until now of the imputation of the first sin has meant by that name, as their writings sufficiently show, only that actual transgression of the first man by which he broke God's command not to taste the fruit of the forbidden tree. Why then lead the reader through laborious windings, and speak of sin inhering in us—or our original corruption—and of imputation and the penalty that follows guilt, matters everyone knows are not at issue in this dispute? The question is not whether corruption is planted in us all, for which God may justly exact penalties from us or impute it to us—no Evangelical ever called that back into doubt. What some today delight to bring into question is only this: whether from Adam's first actual sin some guilt and some liability to penalty rests on the posterity.

167Placeus. First grant it: suppose no necessity or great usefulness compelled me to distinguish Adam's sin this way; so long as the distinction is not false, not harmful, and not wholly useless, that is enough for me. Would that nothing less true or less useful appeared in his book! Next, it is not true that everyone who has spoken of imputing Adam's sin meant by that name only his actual transgression. My own words ought to have warned him of that—and Calvin's phrase, "because it is within us," which he deliberately left out because it hindered his case. Those words of Calvin stand in the Commentary on Romans 5.17; you have the whole place above at p. 92. The difference he marks there between Christ and Adam collapses unless Adam's sin, which is imputed to us, is within us and stands as a quality inhering in us. Third, when he adds that inhering sin and its imputation are not treated in this dispute, I say the same here—and I used the distinction so that I could say it. What is not in controversy among us had to be separated from what is, and every ambiguity and confusion cleared from this question. Neglect that, and those who oppose me in this cause do not fight me but their own shadow. Finally, when he says the question raised is whether from Adam's first actual sin some guilt and some liability to penalty rests on the posterity, that is either false or does not touch me: I constantly teach that from that sin some guilt and some liability to penalty—if liability is even the right word—does rest on the posterity. I only insist that it rests not immediately, but through the corruption that sin produced.

168Garissoles. But let those who parade such care in explaining the Question say whether they will not count it a mockery and a piece of prestidigitation if one of those new Pontifical doctors—who wish to be thought to tour provinces and cities in the zeal of pacification—comes on blandly and, in a weighty cause (say the business of justification), professes agreement with the Evangelicals: that he willingly embraces justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ our Lord, provided he may explain the matter by a distinction. For Christ's righteousness, he would say, can be taken in several ways. (1) For those acts most exact to the rule of God's law, by which Christ living and dying rendered fullest obedience to his Father's commands. (2) For that habitual, inhering righteousness by which Christ's soul shone most splendidly. (3) For the inward, habitual righteousness that is subjectively in each of the faithful, yet may rightly be called Christ's, because it flows into us from Christ and Christ's Spirit as its author. In this last sense, then, he would acknowledge, in the justification controversy, the imputation of Christ's righteousness; but if we take Christ's righteousness in the first and second senses, he would acknowledge no such imputation and reject it as absurd. A consensus in this business so explained—no one fails to complain—is a mockery rather than a consensus. And so on.

169Placeus. This likeness is not a parallel but an opposite. To that bland prestidigitator I am as unlike as white to black. First, he would pretend to have listed every sense of Christ's righteousness, yet omit the one most decisive in justification: that singular obedience he rendered by suffering death—death, I say, of the cross—which is commonly called passive righteousness and which all Protestants without hesitation believe is imputed to believers, while about imputing active righteousness (the only sense D. Garissoles mentioned) there is some difference of opinion that does not disturb the Church's peace. I, by contrast, reviewed every sense of Adam's first sin and omitted none. Second, he would say that Christ's righteousness, taken in a sense in which all Protestants constantly deny it is imputed, is imputed; whereas I affirmed that Adam's sin is imputed to posterity in the sense in which all Protestants constantly hold it is. So he would invent a plainly false consensus with the Evangelicals: for who among them ever taught that the inhering righteousness we have from Christ is imputed to us for justification? The consensus I profess is true, and no one who is not a Pelagian denies it or can deny it.

170Third and last: he would pretend that that third sense of Christ's righteousness—as righteousness inhering in us—is what is meant when we ask whether Christ's righteousness is imputed to us or not. That is false. In that question Christ's righteousness is set over against our righteousness implanted in us. I, on the contrary, removed from the state of the question we are debating among ourselves those senses of Adamic sin concerning which I said there is consensus that it is imputed—and I did so in the clearest words. So I stand wholly alien to every mockery.

171Garissoles: But if there were any homonymy or ambiguity in the word "Adam's sin," it is wholly removed once we name the imputation of Adam's first sin. Anyone can see for himself that, though Adam had many sins, the question concerns the one that was first among them—nothing earlier in the human race. Where number or order is in view, everyone understands by "first" that from which the series begins, and before which nothing stands in that order. So the reader did not need to be tangled in these subtleties of distinction—that is, more disturbed than taught.

172Placeus: I am nearly sure this distinction of Adam's first sin stirred the learned man's bile: he attacks and worries it from every side. What does he mean to prove? That it was unnecessary. Grant that; so long as it is not false, not absurd, and not harmful to my cause, I see no reason why it should be so fiercely chased. "But it distinguishes and confuses the reader." It distinguishes, perhaps—but not for long. It confuses no one unless someone wants me condemned and refuted. Light distinguishes and refreshes; darkness confounds and unsettles. Besides, I deny that the distinction was unnecessary. Once subject and attribute of the question are distinguished, the labor of those who batter my view with such effort is wasted—which seems why these distinctions so greatly displeased them. "But," he says, "anyone can easily see for himself that, though Adam had many sins, the question concerns the one that was first among them." So I stated what anyone can easily see for himself: a grave crime indeed, and one that deserves sharp rebuke!

173But that, I say, is not enough. We must go further. Adam's first sin among all embraces two things: actual sin and habitual sin—the first of all actual sins, and the first of all habitual ones. The former passed; the latter remained and was propagated to posterity; and that it is imputed to us proximately or immediately, since it is within us, no non-Pelagian doubts. About the other—whether it is imputed immediately—the whole controversy among us has been raised. Because that distinction did not leap to mind as soon as a hearer heard "Adam's first sin" named, and because it mattered much for deciding the question, it had to be set before the reader's eyes.

174Garissoles: But in this distinction of the subject as well there are points that, well weighed, can scarcely be approved. For (1) what is gained by distinguishing the second sense of Adam's sin from the third, when whatever is said here of Adam's sin in the second sense is claimed to fit it in reality not as a passing act but as habitual, lasting corruption? So Adam's sin in the second and third modes really coincides in the same thing.

175Placeus: I thank the learned man for allowing nothing I say to go without fruit. Still, I hope this distinction will not lack its fruit in due time and place. The second and third senses do coincide in the same imputation, but they differ in manner of speaking and are diverse senses of the same name. I meant to distinguish the name, not the thing itself. If one says—what is true—that Adam's sin can be divided into the first actual sin and the first habitual sin, then Adam's sin taken in the second sense must be divided: the first member of the division will be Adam's sin taken in the first sense, and the second member Adam's sin in the third. Add the corruption propagated into us, commonly called old Adam and able to be called Adam's sin as well, and you have all the senses I listed—so there is no reason to reject them with such zeal.

176Garissoles: (2) How can these be reconciled? "Adam's sin is imputed to us not as it stuck in him," and "Adam's sin is imputed to us as it was lasting viciousness in him"—for what difference is there here between "sticking in Adam" and "being lasting in Adam"? I do not see. Placeus: The proposition "Adam's sin is imputed to us not as it stuck in him" is mine; the opposite, "Adam's sin is imputed to us as it was lasting viciousness in him," is not. The words "in him," which create the contradiction, he did not find in my writings; the learned man added them here from his own stock. Nor do they appear in the exposition of my view that he himself had set out earlier in §x. So he made and invented that contradiction and falsely pinned it on me.

177Garissoles: (3) When our first parent's corruption is said to be imputed to us his posterity not as it stuck in Adam himself but as it passed into us, what is that reason instantly offered—namely that our hereditary corruption is of the same species as the corruption that was in Adam? Does that specific identity of the two corruptions make the former imputed to us? If so, nothing can explain why the corruption of all our ancestors should not likewise be said to be imputed to us, and so on. Placeus: Here too he invents a monster to slay. He both truncates my reason and misreads it. He truncates: he omits the words immediately before—and, to use Calvin's phrasing, "because it is within us"—and what follows: that Adam shared with us both his nature and his moral corruption. He misreads: by those words "For our hereditary corruption is the same in species as that which once was in Adam" I did not mean to explain why Adam's sin in the third sense is imputed to us, but why it is said to be within us. Why it is imputed I showed when I said, again with Calvin, "because it is within us"—a causal "because" that could have warned him had he cared to listen. So with Calvin on Romans 5:17 I said it is imputed because it is within us; and that it can be called within us because our hereditary corruption is the same in species as that which was in Adam. I illustrated that by a likeness from our very nature: since it is the same in species as Adam's and propagated from him, Adam can be said to have shared his nature with us—and no less his corruption, or sin. So Adam's sin can be said to have been propagated into us, to have entered us, to be within us. That is the force of my reasoning; from it, reader, you see how far Dr. Garissoles strays.

178So the question between us concerns only Adam's first sin in the first sense—his actual disobedience, that inward and outward act by which he broke God's law, cut off from the habitual corruption that followed it: is that act imputed to us at birth? A bare no will not settle it; the attribute of the question must again be distinguished. One may conceive a twofold imputation: Immediate and Mediate, or—same point in other words—Antecedent and Consequent. By Immediate I mean the only imputation I meant to deny in the theses you undertook to refute: the view that Adam's act itself—his eating the forbidden fruit—is charged to all his posterity (Christ excepted) immediately, simply because they are Adam's children, unto the two punishments properly so called: loss of original righteousness (which you call spiritual death) and eternal death. That alone I have denied—because Scripture, the adequate rule of our faith, does not teach it; because it clashes with Scripture; because it makes God the author of sin; because it dishonors God's justice; because it would make Christ a sinner by nature; and because it drags other absurdities that cloud the purity and glory of the Christian religion. Would that our brothers and fellow servants, warned by those theses, had neither wholly scorned them nor weighed them with contempt!

179By Mediate or consequential I mean the imputation that follows upon hereditary corruption derived into us from Adam and is wrought through that corruption as means. By sharing that corruption we share Adam's sin and, so to speak, consent to it habitually—and so deserve to be numbered with Adam the sinner. Chamier taught me this in Panstratia, tome 3, book 6, chapter 4, on the punishments of sin, sections XVI–XVII. Look up the place and read it; I would have copied it here—it is striking—had I not been watching length. I cannot, though, refrain from adding the words of Aegidius Hunnius, the noted Augsburg Confession theologian, by which he teaches and explains this mediate imputation. "Paul therefore shows that Adam's fall is imputed to us his posterity not immediately and of itself, but mediately and on account of something else—namely because by that fall the first parents' nature was so polluted that they can beget only children corrupted and spoiled by sin, as it is written, Adam begat a son in his own likeness (Genesis 5). Had it been possible that their own vice was not passed to posterity, that fall as another's sin would plainly not have been imputed to them. So Paul clearly shows that that one offense yields to our condemnation only mediately, insofar as through that actual offense a horrible corruption entered nature, which he spread by carnal generation into his posterity. Thus from the fall comes corruption of nature; from that corruption derived into us come death and damnation—inasmuch as all have sinned, he says, that is, inasmuch as we ourselves have come into hereditary possession of it."

180To put it in a word: the question is whether Adam's first actual sin, taken precisely, is imputed to us his posterity by God the Just Judge immediately and in the order of nature before we are inherently corrupt. You, venerable brother, say yes. I say no. Which of us is right, the disputation that follows will, I hope in the Lord, make plain.

181Garissoles (§XVI): Sin's imputation is divided into prior—or antecedent, or immediate—and posterior—or consequent, or mediate. Not a bad division; and I do not doubt that if only it were explained rightly, agreement here could easily be reached—namely if both imputations were referred to the same thing, that is, to Adam's sin in the same sense, or to the act by which Adam first made himself guilty of offending the Divine Majesty. Placeus: Why then is agreement not reached? Why am I attacked? I did refer both imputations to the same thing, and understood them only of the act by which Adam first sinned. That is clearer than noon, and I wonder it could be doubted. The distinction itself, to say nothing else, makes this plain: it cannot be taken of imputing habitual sin or corruption. Who would say corruption is imputed before corruption, or after it—through corruption as means, or without it?

182Garissoles (§XVII): For that would nearly match the distinction we already set out into common and singular imputation: taking the prior and immediate as that common imputation we named, and the posterior and mediate as what we called proper or singular. That common or immediate imputation, though later than Adam's first actual transgression, was earlier than each person sprung from Adam's personal existence—and earlier also than the corruption that descends on each by natural generation—insofar as from the beginning all were commonly in Adam. In that sense Bernard said Adam and Eve were our destroyers before they were our parents. But singular, proper, personal, mediate imputation may rightly be called later than the corruption inherent in us, since that sin can be charged to no one personally unless he is Adam's son and so exists as a person; and no one exists as a person and counts as Adam's son until soul and body have coalesced into one person—which union of the essential parts of man is without doubt later than conception, and so on. Therefore at first conception the soul is not yet present; there is not yet a man, not yet a son of Adam; and yet from the very moment of conception viciousness is in the seed, which has that tinder of sin they define as a disordered quality of the flesh drawn from the first parents' sin into their posterity, and so on.

183Placeus: If the two distinctions match, why invent a new and awkward one instead of resting in the received, convenient one? The split into immediate and mediate is better than into common and singular. First, Hunnius and Walaeus had already used the former; who had used the latter? Second, the former divides into members opposed not only in the thing but in the name—the mark of a good distinction, missing here. For that singular imputation can be called common, and the common singular. Are not human nature, hereditary corruption, existence, and the rest common to all men? Yet singular, proper, personal imputation is no less common than human nature, corruption, or existence (Christ always excepted)—so how is it the opposite of common imputation? Opposed members each negate the other. Again, common imputation can itself be called singular, proper, and personal if common is taken distributively: it is said of each of Adam's posterity one by one. If common is taken collectively, both should have been called common—one collectively, one distributively. What is common to Adam's posterity collectively can be said of the whole collection, but of each member not at all—just as it was common to the Apostles collectively to be twelve, and therefore none of them was twelve. Further, since by imputation the learned man means either a Judge's act declaring someone guilty and worthy of punishment, or the infliction of punishment itself, the infliction is plainly singular: whether corruption, bodily death, or eternal death, it falls on individuals. If common imputation is infliction of punishment, it is singular. To that infliction answers condemnation—the Judge's declaration that someone is guilty and worthy of punishment. In what sense, then, is imputation called common and opposed to singular? In the sense in which common or universal is opposed to singular? Then common imputation differs from singular only as species from its individual. But a species exists only in some individual; outside or before its individuals it is sought in vain. Yet the learned man wants common imputation to have existed long before—and outside—the singular. I pass other differences. If he opposed common to singular in some sense usage does not bear, he affected singularity and obscurity, and wrote for himself rather than the reader. Add that the common ought to be more common than the singular—why else oppose that name to this?—yet it is not more common unless you make it common even to men who never were and never will be. One more point must not be skipped. From his proof that singular, proper, personal imputation is later than the corruption inherent in us, it follows that Adam's sin is imputed to the posterity by that common imputation before they are sons of Adam or counted as such. How that can be true and just I leave you, prudent reader, to weigh.

184Garissoles: I take that to have been the mind of those theologians who teach that Adam's sin is imputed to us mediately—through our corruption and viciousness as means (Aegidius Hunnius, article on sin, Question 7; Walaeus, Defense of Molinaeus, chapter 8). But the learned men who use this prior/posterior imputation distinction mean something quite different. (1) They absolutely deny what we called the common, prior, immediate imputation, and so on. (2) They explain the posterior, mediate, or singular far otherwise—claiming it in no way looks to Adam's actual personal sin, but must be referred only to our own original vice and native hereditary corruption. Placeus: Both differences are plainly false. First: Hunnius and Walaeus denied immediate imputation as expressly as speech allows. Hunnius says Adam's fall is imputed to us his posterity not immediately and of itself, but mediately and on account of something else—and that that one offense yields to condemnation only mediately. What does not immediately and of itself mean? What does the exclusive only mediately mean? If that is not denying immediate imputation, what is? As for this writer, he denies even the possibility of that imputation and props the denial with an argument from God's justice; see above, page 22 (and earlier, page 20). The second difference is so openly false I cannot wonder enough how the learned man brought himself to say it. On the contrary I maintain that mediate imputation looks to Adam's actual personal sin itself; I have never used it of another sin, nor—what is more—could it be so used.

185Garissoles: Next, people play various games with the very name of imputing sin (§ XIX). At the start of the dispute we had agreed that in this business 'imputation' means either a judge's act declaring someone guilty and worthy of punishment, or the infliction of the punishment itself. Now everything is shifted. The question is whether Adam's own actual sin is imputed to his posterity. The learned men grant it in words—but hear their gloss: that transgression is 'imputed,' they say, in the same sense in which the Apostle said foreskin is imputed for circumcision (Romans 2:26)—that is, counted as if circumcised. So we, because of the sin that inheres in us from birth, are worthy to be treated as if we ourselves had committed that actual disobedience. Someone might fairly call that tergiversation. We had agreed that to impute sin here is nothing but so to ascribe a sin to someone that, for its sake and in view of it, he comes under guilt and either suffers punishment or is at least judged worthy of it. How far their proposed sense is from that meaning, anyone can see.

186Placeus: He says I played variously with the name of imputation. I was nowhere near that. I treated the matter as seriously as I could, as one who cares for truth and peace. I also shrank from every evasion. My first aim was to clear the state of the question of every obstacle and make it plain and liquid, so that there would be no room left for tergiversation, dissimulation, or side-stepping. That he charges me with breaking agreements I can scarcely believe. How had we 'agreed' at the opening of the Dispute, or settled between us the sense of the word imputation, when we had never disputed that point with each other? I was never allowed even to see the learned man or speak with him face to face, and I could by no means get him to confer with me on this question. When he says 'Now everything is shifted,' you may think, Reader, that he means this later manuscript of mine, or at least the time when it was written. Not so. The words of mine he quotes are not taken from this Manuscript, but partly from my Theses on the state of fallen man before grace—published five years before this controversy began—and partly from the later of the only two letters I wrote him, two or three months after the last National Synod. In the first letter I disputed nothing; I only asked him modestly how the Synod's Decree on imputation was to be understood—of the Mediate, or of the Immediate? In the second I briefly showed that the reasons I had given in the theses do not attack mediate imputation, and that great theologians have not been lacking who deny the immediate while confessing the mediate. He had written back that both points must be shown; when I had done so, he for some time refused to answer; at last, in a second letter, he protested that he would not answer me on the matter, nor dispute it with me or with anyone else, except in the next National Synod. And so we ended writing letters to each other.

187Where or when, then, that agreement between us was made, I cannot guess. Grant it was made: what did I say that contradicts that sense of the word imputation? I wrote in the Theses just named, § VII, that Adam's actual disobedience can be said to be imputed to us in this sense: because of the sin that inheres in us from birth we are worthy to be held in the same place as if we had committed that disobedience. Is that true or false? If false, he ought to have shown the falsehood. If true, it cannot clash with mediate imputation, which the learned man himself does not deny is true—for truth does not clash with truth. It is nothing but a description of mediate imputation, which I set against Pighius's view that the sole guilt of origin is Adam's transgression. 'Cumni,' says Martyr, 'wants us all born liable—not because of any vice, fault, or depravity we have in ourselves.' I said in the Epistle that when hereditary vice makes us as worthy of death as Adam, nothing prevents Adam's sin from being said to be imputed to us in the sense in which the Apostle said that if someone has kept the law, his foreskin is imputed for circumcision (Romans 2:26). Is that true or not? D. Garissoles neither affirms nor denies. What does he do, then? Hear him. Garissoles: So Paul will have said foreskin is imputed for circumcision because it is counted as if circumcised. But here we are not dealing with the imputation of any thing whatever, but with the imputation of another's sin. Who has ever taught, or persuaded himself, that by that imputation of sin one must understand a comparison of different sins done by different persons, or a parity among different sins as to punishment or guilt? Neither Scripture nor ordinary speech allows that.

188Placeus: Did I take 'impute' as Paul took it when he said foreskin is imputed for circumcision (Romans 2:26)—yes or no? The learned man will not deny it. Then I was not gaming the word, unless he wants Paul gaming it too. I used Paul's sense; he is my heaviest warrant. But here, says he, we speak not of imputing just any thing, but of imputing another's sin. So what? May a word used of some other matter not also be used, in that same sense, of sin? He adds that imputing sin must not mean lining up different sins by different persons, or a parity of sins for punishment or guilt. How does that touch me? Did I mean by Adam's-disobedience imputation such a lineup or parity? No. Different persons' different sins are both actual; the vice born into us is not actual but only habitual. Neither of those different sins causes the other—yet Adam's actual disobedience caused the habitual vice in us. So those sins sit side by side (coordinated, if I may say so); these disobediences sit under one another. Adam's disobedience causes our inhering vice; that vice causes our guilt; therefore Adam's disobedience causes our guilt—at least as a mediate cause. We are guilty at once for the vice in us, and through that medium for Adam's actual disobedience—of which the inhering vice is a kind of habitual consent, approval, and share. That is why it may more properly be said imputed to us unto sin than foreskin unto circumcision for the Law's kept δικαιώματα.

189As for the complaint that Scripture nowhere uses 'imputation of sin' in this sense: that need not unsettle us. The wording 'impute / be imputed' of sin is scarce in Scripture, and may never appear except with a negation. Kind Reader, look instead at the equivalent phrasing our Lord Jesus Christ himself used (Matthew 23:34): he sends prophets, wise men, and scribes; some will be killed and crucified, some scourged in the synagogues and hunted from city to city, so that all the righteous blood shed on earth comes upon that generation—from righteous Abel to Zechariah son of Barachiah, murdered between temple and altar. Luke puts the same point (Luke 11:50): that generation must answer for every prophet's blood shed since the world's foundation. Those words plainly signify sin's imputation. Calvin comments: Abel was not slain by the Jews, yet Christ charges them with his death because a kinship of impiety bound them to Cain. The vice that sticks in us does more still—it sets between us and sinning Adam not a loose kinship of sin but blood-relation. Our inhering vice is Adam's sin under the form of habit poured into us, like plague or poison by natural contagion. Why then may it not be said to be imputed to us for that vice's sake? Ask whether the learned man is striking at me here—or at the Lord himself.

190Garissoles: Last, the Socinians flatly deny that Adam's sin is imputed, yet still say that because of our own sin we stand where we would stand if we had done Adam's actual disobedience—because they treat that sort of 'imputation' as no real imputation at all. Placeus: Again the urge to blacken us has fogged the learned man's mind. He claims the Socinians admit we are held, because of our sin, as if we had done Adam's actual disobedience. False. They do put us in Adam's place—but not for our sin (they grant no birth-inhering sin). They do it because we were begotten by him, and children get the father's judgment. Heaven and earth lie between that and our view. For the rest: Socinus denies Adam's sin-imputation in speech and installs it in substance. If son and Father share one judgment, and the father is judged a sinner worthy of punishment, the son is judged worthy too—the one for his own sin, the other for his father's. On the learned man's own showing, that imputes the father's sin to the son, and immediately—because Socinus denies hereditary corruption, without which mediate imputation cannot stand. The same death falls on Adam and on his posterity; and for the learned man, inflicting punishment is itself imputing sin. So in fact Socinus denies the mediate imputation I grant, and only verbally denies the immediate imputation I oppose—while affirming it in the deed.

191Garissoles: They next dress this later imputation in fresh paint: nothing, they say, blocks calling Adam's sin imputed to us inasmuch as our hereditary vice is a habit the first actual sin left in Adam's soul; next, an inclination toward like sins; third, habitual consent to that sin. He lifted those words from my second letter to him—then slipped in of his own 'inasmuch as,' 'next,' and 'third,' carving one joined reason into three against my sense. Here is the whole French-letter place. Adam's sin may be said imputed to us his posterity three ways. First: as Calvin hints (naming Adam's sin the vice that flowed from him into us), it is inside us. Second: hereditary vice makes us as worthy of eternal death as Adam, so nothing stops saying Adam's sin is imputed in the Apostle's sense—if someone has kept the law, his foreskin is imputed for circumcision (Romans 2:26), i.e. he is counted as circumcised. Third: hereditary corruption is the habit the first sin left in Adam's soul, plus a bent toward a like sin, and so habitual consent to that sin—I see no bar to saying it is imputed to us. That last mode, that last reason, the learned man has shredded into three and warped with 'inasmuch as.' Hear him. Garissoles: First wonder: they grant Adam's sin imputed inasmuch as our corruption is a habit left in Adam's soul. The wording seems to favor imputing Adam's habitual sin itself. What could be worse—when we speak of imputing Adam's actual sin—than confessing by these words that a habitual sin is imputed? Especially when imputation looks to acts, not habits.

192Placeus: First, I never said Adam's sin is imputed inasmuch as our corruption is a habit left in his soul. My point was only this: hereditary corruption is that habit the first sin left there, plus a bent toward such sin, and so habitual consent to it—and I see no reason we may not say the first sin is imputed to us, namely the sin that left what we call hereditary corruption in Adam's soul. That can only be Adam's first actual sin; nothing else planted that depravity in him. So, Reader: the imputation I name mediate I refer to Adam's actual sin, and I explain why hereditary corruption lets us say it is imputed to us. But if the learned man proves the corruption as it stood in Adam's soul is imputed to us, watch what follows. First, that corruption becomes ours as an actual sin by imputation—his own view requires it. Does he then want Adam's posterity corrupt 'interpretatively' or 'imputatively'? Next: is the corruption as it inheres in us also imputed to us? Deny it, and it is not truly sin and does not make us guilty. Affirm it, and corruption is charged twice—once as it was in Adam, again as it is in us—so we are guiltier than Adam. Who believes that? Last: is Adam-stuck corruption imputed to us immediately, or through corruption as a means? If through a means, why not say the same of the actual sin? If immediately, then our corruption is the punishment of Adam's—for why should an imputed habitual not draw punishment as an imputed actual does? If so, Adam's habitual sin is punished harder in us than it was in him: in us, on his showing, by inflicted corruption, whereas that was not how Adam's own corruption was punished in Adam. Finally, if Adam's-as-was corruption is imputed to us, it comes with his actual sin, or before it, or after. Before or after has no cause. If together with us, it was together with Adam too—else why would those two sins not equally have hit him and us at once? If they hit Adam together, his corruption was not the punishment of the actual: it would be earlier than itself, since imputation precedes punishment, and it would be charged to him before it existed in him. That is open contradiction. But let him go on.

193Garissoles: Next—by what account can that habit left in Adam's soul be called our hereditary sin? Has that habit in Adam's soul not long since ceased to exist? How then can it still be, or inhere in us as in a subject? How can one single habit—one and the same accident in number—pass into so many different subjects, nearly infinite?

194Placeus: In general I said hereditary corruption is the habit the first sin left in Adam's soul—namely as in its fountain, from which it flowed to us all by natural propagation. Is that not true? Yes, it has long ceased to be—in Adam. But it has not yet ceased in Adam's posterity. How then can a habit left in Adam's soul be called our sin? In the same way Calvin says Adam's sin is within us; hereditary sin is called old Adam; Adam's nature is called our nature; and what is sown is what is reaped. That habit left in Adam was propagated from him into us. So our sin differs from Adam's in number, but is the same in kind—and more: it draws its origin from his by a kind of natural contagion. If I say human nature is the nature created in Adam, does it follow that Adam's human nature and ours do not differ in number?

195Garissoles: It is an inclination to sins like Adam's first. True enough—but also to Adam's other sins. Shall we therefore say those other sins of Adam are likewise imputed to us? No: it is nowhere near enough, as a cause for imputing another's sin, that our sin bends our mind the same way. Many people have an inclination and a kind of natural push toward sins like other people's, with no imputation of those sins at all. And so on.

196Placeus: First he pins on me an argument that is not mine. As I said, I joined this with the prior point so that from those two I could draw a third, where the reason for imputation chiefly sits. That is plain from the third reason he says he gathered from my letters in this same chapter 2 section x, pp. 35-36. There those three points are linked; here he split them so you can mark a double change. First, for hereditary corruption he put a vice that does not exist in us. Next he dropped the causal link—'therefore,' 'so,' or the like—matching the French par consequent I had used in that letter, from which it is clear I take the reason of imputation from habitual consent to that sin as included in hereditary corruption, and that I gather this consent because that corruption is nothing but the habitual depravity of that first actual sin, which it left in Adam's soul and which, propagated into us, inclines us to like sin. I am not sure he is not also arguing here against the Lord's own words in Matthew 23:34 and Luke 11:50-51. Why, for example, could Nero's cruel deeds not somehow be charged to someone equally cruel and savage in mind, when it is not by his will that he fails to do the same—being equally cruel?

197Garissoles: What is said last about habitual consent bears more on the present point—yet it overturns the Doctors' cause more than it secures it. They press hard that Adam's own actual disobedience is imputed to none of his posterity, that no one bears its penalties, that no one can be held guilty for it—and yet they admit that in all Adam's posterity there is habitual consent to that sin. Who does not see the sequel: that first parent's disobedience can therefore justly be imputed to the posterity? For consent to another's sin can be a just cause for imputing that sin, by the Apostle's word that they are worthy of death not only who do evils themselves, but also who consent to those who do them (Romans 1:32). Hence this argument: Every consent to another's sin can be a just cause for imputing that sin. But the habitual consent of all Adam's posterity is some consent to Adam's first actual sin. Therefore habitual consent can be a just reason and cause why Adam's first sin is imputed to all his posterity.

198Placeus: Is my own argument suddenly against me? Am I the one insisting that Adam's actual disobedience is imputed to none of his posterity, that nobody bears its penalties, that nobody can be held guilty for it? The opposite is clearer: I insist that it is imputed to Adam's posterity, that they bear its penalties, that they are held guilty for it. If not, why peel hereditary corruption out of the state of the question? Why introduce immediate versus mediate imputation? Why frame the question's attribute as Whether Adam's actual disobedience is imputed to us as we are born? Why, when I fixed the controversy's state, attach a limit drawn from that distinction? And why do the reasons I had set out together—and the Learned Man tore apart—matter at all? I was giving a reason why some sin is imputed to us. The wording is too open to allow denial. Which sin? Only Adam's first actual. When I called hereditary corruption the habit the first sin left in Adam's soul, I could not mean any other first sin than that first actual. When I called it a bent toward like sins, I meant like that first actual—nothing else fits. When I called it habitual consent to that sin, I meant by that sin not the corruption itself, but the first actual act by which Adam corrupted himself.

199In this very Manuscript I gave the same account of mediate imputation: by sharing this corruption we communicate with Adam's sin, and we consent to it habitually, so to speak. I am plainly distinguishing Adam's sin—the one we share and habitually consent to—from the corruption through which that sharing and consent happen. That sin can only be Adam's first actual. That is what I wanted charged to us, and for that habitual consent. So the Learned Man pits me not against myself but against a fiction of his own making.

200Before we go further, the later question on the penalty tied to this imputed sin needs clearing. Two moves first: sort out what penalty means, and keep Adam distinct from us. Penalty can be named properly or improperly, and even the proper sense branches many ways. I will not catalogue every species you already know—that would be long and beside our point. Hold only the sense in which you and the other brothers whose case you defend against me call hereditary corruption a penalty.

201On your account this is penalty in the tightest proper sense, and you put three marks on it. The Law must threaten it. Justice must demand that the Judge lay it on. The Judge must lay it on so justice is done—or so justice is satisfied. Ursinus, in the Catechetical Explanation, faced the objection that God should not have punished Adam with such a penalty, and answered: Let justice be done, though the world perish.

202In the Theses I refused to count it that sort of penalty, and conscience still will not let me reverse that denial. The Fathers do call this corruption—or concupiscence—a penalty, and Calvin does in places; I do not deny the word, only the so-proper, so-strict sense. The name rides on likeness. Penalty tracks fault and clings to it; hereditary corruption likewise tracked Adam's fault and sprang from it.

203A punished person cannot choose to take the penalty, refuse it, or cast it off. We are hit by this corruption from another in the same way: refusing or casting it off is not in our power. A penalty also worsens the state of the one it strikes. Stained by this corruption, Adam became worse—more ignoble, fouler, more wretched—than he would have been without it.

204Last likeness: whoever feels a penalty laid on groans and longs for release. Those who seriously find and own this corruption in themselves likewise grieve hard and hate being chained by that evil. For such likenesses many writers have rightly named—and still name—that foul, dreadful evil a penalty.

205Among us the sole live question is whether it is penalty in that most proper, strict sense I just marked out. You did not keep the two questions apart. God willing, I will take them up in turn as the chance comes, following your own steps.

206Chapter III. Certain observations on the first and second chapters of the Treatise—some praised, some refuted.

In your first chapter you set the state of the question. With that settled, chapter two digresses to prove that every human being is infected with original sin and so stands exposed to this life's miseries and to death. To what end, I do not see. You yourself admit, in the closing words of chapter 2, that we have no quarrel on that point. I had already proved the same in the Theses you attack—briefly, yes, but with many sound arguments, strong and numerous; you polished some of them and skipped others. Reading through, I marked several things worth notice: some true, yet hostile to the case you are pressing; others that seem to me to clash both with the truth and with my own view.

207I praise first what you wrote near the end of chapter 2: Adam's sin, the spring of every evil, was actual and PERSONAL in him, yet it infected nature; and all are infected by it because they come from him in nature's order, and so on. Tell me, please: if that sin was personal in Adam, by what right is the very same numerical act that was in him imputed to us all?

In chapter 1 you say God, in Ezekiel's words "the son shall not bear the father's iniquity," speaks only of outward, actual sins, and that such personal sins regard the person alone. Here you affirm Adam's sin was actual and personal. Who would not conclude that it therefore regarded Adam's person only, and that his children ought not to bear it?

What do those words "in him" mean either? Are they set against "in his posterity," or "in us"? In us Adam's sin is not personal; it is common to the whole human race (Christ alone excepted). In us it is nothing but that hereditary vice with which we are all born infected, and which is imputed to everyone unless Christ has forgiven it.

208You had put the same point less happily in chapter 1: this guilt belonged to one man, but the penalty is common to all. You mark a split between Adam's guilt and the penalty—guilt of one, penalty of all. Do you not see what follows? The penalty then fails to match the guilt: a guilt that is not common is avenged by a common penalty, and punishment falls on people who have no guilt.

If the penalty is everyone's and the guilt only one man's, then all but one are guiltless—how are they justly punished? If the guilt is one man's and not common, why impute it to all? Say that though it is one man's, imputation makes it common to all, and you still do not escape. What is not my guilt ought not to be imputed to me. Imputation does not make it mine so that it can then be charged; rather, because it is mine, it is charged. Otherwise the charge is false and unjust.

And if Adam's guilt is mine only by imputation, then God the Judge—I shudder to think it—made me a sinner by His act of imputing; He did not find me one. Imputation is the judge's act, not mine. Strip away imputation and I am free of that guilt; it is not mine, but was Adam's alone. So the judge—that is, God—made me sinner and guilty (see where this imputation leads, and shudder with me), and becomes the cause of my first sin and first reatus. In law Adam's penalty belongs to me no more than his guilt. If his guilt is not mine in the thing itself, but only by imputation, the same must be said of the penalty.

209These absurdities do not press me. I hold that the guilt is as common to all as the penalty—common in the thing itself, not by imputation but by propagation—and that it is imputed to us because it is within us. That guilt is the original vice inhering in each of us. I refuse to call that vice a penalty in the proper sense, for reasons I will open in the next chapter.

210I also praise these words of yours: just as a polluted spring pollutes its streams, and as a root puts out shoots after its own kind—bad shoots if the root is bad—IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY the first man, corrupted and a sinner, begot and brought forth corrupted, sinful children.

I take that up. A polluted spring infects its streams, and a bad root yields bad shoots, only by nature's law that each thing begets its like. Why not say the same of the first man, if corrupted he begot us corrupted in exactly that way? If that natural law, already set and sanctioned before the sin, is enough to propagate original sin, why charge it to God's justice and to the sentence of God the Judge—to my great scandal, who complain that God's justice is deeply wronged? The very word "propagation" could have warned you: propagation is nature's work, following nature's laws, while God, as nature's author and conserver, keeps those laws in force by His concurrence. They hang on a decree that, in nature's order, seems to me to have come before the decree permitting the fall. A later decree neither could nor should undo them.

211I am also very glad you affirm we are clearly taught that this stain and corruption was poured and passed into all people (Rom. 5:12, 14–16, 19). From those verses, cited in Greek and Latin as is your way, you conclude they plainly prove that man's first sin, transfused into all, infected them all and bound them over to death.

If those verses clearly teach that corruption was transfused into all, I contend the same verses cannot by any art prove that Adam's first actual sin is imputed to all his posterity proximately and immediately. God willing, this disputation will make that plain.

Meanwhile, what is that first sin of the first man poured and passed into all, if not the stain and corruption that inheres in each from birth, differing in number from the corruption that was in Adam? His act ceased as soon as it was done, so it could not be poured into us; an imputation made outside us in God's mind is not a transfusion or transmission into us; and Adam's inherent corruption could not migrate, the same in number, from one subject into another. Remember, then: under the name of Adam's first sin you yourself marked hereditary corruption.

212Finally I praise that you call this vice a sin, acknowledge the Apostle so names it, and confess it bound the whole race over to death. I urge you to hold fast to that doctrine which Scripture teaches, and which, following Scripture, all the Protestant churches teach with one consent.

213Chapter IV. Further observations and censures on the same chapter II.

I marked several points, Reverend and most beloved Brother in Christ, in the second chapter of your treatise. Allow me to answer some of them as well. You say things about the breath of life, the tree of life, and the death threatened to Adam. I neither approve those claims, nor see what they do for the thesis you set out to prove in that chapter—but once answered, they can help my case.

214Starting from the beginning, as they say, you hold that God breathed into man the breath of a threefold life: animal life of the body through the soul's union that keeps it alive; spiritual life of the soul through the Holy Spirit's union that sanctifies it; and blessed life of soul and body through union with God that beats both. Your one proof is that the Hebrew text has the plural חַיִּים, "lives."

That seems to me a very weak prop. The plural is used everywhere for the singular—for that one life you call animal. The examples lie ready: Gen. 3:14; 23:1; 25:7, 17; 27:45; Ps. 17:14; 31:11; Eccles. 2:17; 9:9; and many more. Indeed Gen. 7:15, 22 give even brute animals נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים, the "breath of lives" as you would say—and yet, I think, no life but the animal one, and that without reason.

215So every interpreter I have seen rendered "life," not "lives." Either they found no mystery in the plural חַיִּים, or they took it to hint at the lives strictly needed for human essence and nature—vegetative, sensitive, and rational—which is Zanchius's and Pareus's view, and not to be scorned.

As the body's formation belonged to making and composing the human being, so did this inspiring of נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים. To that same constitution I gladly also refer sanctity and blessedness, increased when Adam, after he was made, was brought into paradise. Sanctity stood to the soul as health stands to the body.

216Just as the body did not have a double life with one part seated in health, so I do not think the soul's sanctity adds to the tally of lives Adam had. I see a great gap between Adam's sanctity and ours in Christ. His was natural, created with human nature, and—had it not been lost—would have been passed on by nature's laws, and so was changeable. Ours hangs on the supernatural gift of the Holy Spirit come down from Christ the head into us his members, by which we are regenerated, made alive, and as it were animated and ruled.

Adam's sanctity was a condition of that animal life of his, as you call it—without which the most just and holy God could not have made him, and by which he was well fitted to natural objects. Ours hangs wholly on supernatural revelation, aims wholly at a supernatural object, and lifts us far above Adam's natural, animal, changeable state. So Peter calls it divine nature, and Paul the image of Christ's glory. But this is by the way; it does not touch the point in hand.

217On the same plural חַיִּים you would have the tree of life give Adam a sure hope of continuing these lives. It could not give a sure hope of continuing the sanctity in which you place spiritual life. God was requiring that continuance from Adam, not promising it to him. Had He promised it, He would beyond doubt have made Adam unable to sin—for the promise would have been absurd: I will make you persevere in sanctity and justice, provided you do not sin.

218Against this threefold life you set a threefold privation or death, denounced by God to Adam as penalty in the words "you shall die the death," and you claim that man was dead just as God had threatened. For my part (with leave of you and of those who think with you) I cannot shift those words onto spiritual death—the loss of justice and sanctity. Hear my reasons, if you will, and weigh them; unless I am mistaken, they are not empty.

First reason. A threat answers a tacit promise, penalty answers reward, the death denounced answers the life promised. But the life tacitly promised to Adam was not justice or sanctity—unless you confuse the condition of the promise with the thing promised. Therefore the death denounced was not the privation of justice.

219GAR. Reply. The minor is not simply true, if one hears Cameron, Lectures on the Word of God, chapter 7: "Man's highest good is a perfect state of soul and body—of the whole man—complete in every respect, so that nothing further can or ought to be asked. This state and condition is the image of God. The image of God sits in two things: sanctity, and the blessed immortality that follows sanctity." If the life promised to Adam was his perfect state, and that life consists in sanctity, then the promised life consisted in sanctity.

Nor does the most illustrious Amyraut speak otherwise, On the Three Covenants, Thesis II: "The promise of that first covenant had to consist in perpetual life, abounding in every kind of good that could belong to man's mind and body." But ought not justice and sanctity to be counted among the goods of the mind?

220PLAC. Who does not see that the most excellent Cameron is describing there not the life promised to Adam under the condition of perfect obedience, but absolutely man's highest good as the Word of God—or the Gospel—promises it? What the covenant of grace promises differs sharply from what the covenant of nature was promising Adam.

Who also does not see that our most illustrious colleague Amyraut means, so to speak, physical goods—not the merely moral ones whose continuance God was requiring of Adam?

221So Amyraut had inserted the words "constituted in the state of integral nature," and had added "and those things to be enjoyed in the earthly paradise"—why the learned man omitted them I leave others to judge. They clearly presuppose conservation of nature's moral integrity and promise continuance of the remaining goods to be enjoyed in the earthly paradise.

To prove the denied minor: if God threatened Adam, as penalty, with loss or privation of original justice, then as reward He was promising non-loss—conservation—of that justice. How then could Adam lose it? "He promised under a condition," you say. Which? If he persevered in integrity and justice? Remained obedient to God? Did not sin? Call it what you will: it is the same as the thing promised, and the condition of the promise is confused with the thing promised.

222GAR. We deny this again. Adam's justice and sanctity admit a twofold account: natural versus supernatural; of the way versus of the homeland; of created man versus of glorified man.

Natural justice—created man's justice of the way—was only the condition of the promise. Supernatural justice—glorified man's justice of the homeland—was the thing promised.

223PLAC. This answer openly contradicts the learned man himself. He seems to reply, yet does not—he yields. We were arguing about original justice, as my case shows. Of the two justices he split apart, which is original? The supernatural homeland justice of glorified man? No. Adam lacked that before the fall and was never going to hand it down.

So original justice in the argument is natural justice—of the way, of created man. But Garissoles admits that justice was the condition of the promise. He therefore admits it was not promised—the very point I meant to prove, which he had denied. If it was not promised, losing it was not the death the threat denounced. That is what I had to establish.

224Beyond that I would gladly know Garissoles' source for saying the covenant of nature—conditioned on natural justice—promised supernatural justice. Where does Scripture say so? Can bare contemplation of nature prove it by reasoning?

And where did he get the claim that Adam—earthly, from the earth, with an earthly paradise—did not have earth for his homeland? That erases the line between nature's covenant and grace's, between the first man and the second, and invents a divine will and promise beyond Scripture. No Christian—least of all a Reformed professor of theology—may risk that.

225Second proof. The legal covenant's own promise and threat make the same point. Life was pledged under the formula "do this and you will live." Was that the spiritual life grounded in righteousness and holiness? Far from it. The law never promised the start, growth, or continuance of that life; it demanded them. Legal-covenant promises were conditional, and the condition was perfect righteousness kept without break. Life was promised only under that condition—so the thing promised cannot have been identical with righteousness itself already present. And the death the law threatened stood formally over against the promised life, not against the condition. Hence that death was not the absence or stripping-away of righteousness.

226Placeus. Garissoles met this second argument with total silence.

227Third proof: breaking the condition or precept is not itself the penalty announced against the breaker. But loss of righteousness is breaking the condition or precept. Therefore that loss is not the announced penalty. The major is obvious; I prove the minor as follows. Whatever the law forbids is a breach of the law. The law forbids righteousness being absent from a man as firmly as it commands righteousness to be in him. Therefore that absence—which you call spiritual death—is a breach of the law.

228Garissoles replies. I will not contest the major here; later we can ask whether breaking a divine precept (which is sin) can also be sin's penalty. On the minor I distinguish two privations of righteousness: active and passive. Active is the man's own bad acting by which he strips himself of the righteousness God had given him. Passive is God's stripping the man of that righteousness and of the gifts heaped on him. Grant that the active privation is the same as law-breaking; the passive still is not.

229Placeus. He is wise not to fight the major here. Besides three further Manuscript reasons he never answered, the first breach of the condition cannot be the penalty of some earlier sin—because it is the first sin—nor the penalty of itself, since nothing is later than itself. It would be absurd to attach to a precept a threat that the precept will be broken if it is broken. I had already confirmed the minor by an argument he preferred to bury in silence rather than face. Another proof: sin is law-breaking; privation of righteousness in a man is sin; therefore that privation is law-breaking. Clearer still? Yet he splits privation into active and passive—the man's self-stripping versus God's stripping—and admits only the first as law-breaking. So on his view the threatened law-penalty is the second, not the first. Look harder at that split. "Active" rightly names privation from the agent's side—the man who strips himself. Why then is "passive" not named from the patient's side—the man stripped? Privating answers to privated, agent to patient, action to passion; so active privation belongs to the one who strips, passive to the one stripped. How then is the "passive" assigned to God, who strips the man and is never himself stripped? That is the first point.

230Second: if the man has already stripped himself of righteousness, is that not enough for him to be without it? Why must God strip him again afterward? The divine stripping would have to come later than the self-stripping, if the latter is the law-breach and the former its following penalty. Third I ask what sort of privation original righteousness is, in Adam and in us. If active, I win: it is law-breaking, not a legally announced penalty. If only passive, it is neither law-breaking nor sin but bare penalty—and that denies original sin. Fourth: does any Scripture say God stripped Adam of righteousness? How then dare the learned man assert it? Reverence for God will not let my conscience bear that claim. Whoever strips a man of righteousness makes him unjust and causes his injustice—an idea I may not even entertain of God. But now he offers a second reply that retracts what he just gave; let us hear it.

231Garissoles' second reply. Attend carefully and active privation of righteousness—losing it and stripping oneself of it—is not formally identical with breaking the divine precept. Causally one may say precept-breaking is privation of righteousness, because the privation follows the breach (as pain is called a dissolving of continuity because it follows that dissolving). Formally they are not one thing under two names.

Placeus. I take privation to track the form of which it is the privation. Righteousness itself is twofold: actual and habitual. Moral evil, or sin, is usually formalized as privation of a good. So privation of actual righteousness is formally actual sin, and privation of habitual righteousness is formally habitual evil or sin. Is that not so? Actual law-breaking stands formally opposite actual righteousness—disobedience opposite obedience—so actual law-breaking is formally actual privation of righteousness. Likewise habitual disobedience stands formally opposite habitual righteousness, so it too is formally privation of habitual righteousness, that is, habitual sin. Against this the learned man brings three arguments.

232Garissoles' first reason. Things are not one and the same if a man can at once will the one and refuse the other. So here: Adam, eating the forbidden fruit, meant to break God's command, yet did not mean to lose his righteousness and privileges.

233Placeus. Both premises fail. On the major: one and the same person can, for different reasons, will and refuse the same thing at once—hence hesitation, deliberation, and the clash among our thoughts and choices. There is a will aligned with right reason and a will that errs against it; the erring will sometimes fights itself. No one formally wills evil as evil—as privation of a good—so it is no wonder Adam did not formally will the loss of righteousness; that would have been to will his sin under the aspect of evil.

What Garissoles says in the minor—that Adam willed to break the precept only materialiter, not formaliter—is right. Adam willed what was in fact a breach of God's command, but under the guise of some great apparent good, not under the aspect "breach of divine law." If he had formally meant to break the precept and yet refused to lose righteousness, he would have been a fool, imagining inseparable things could be parted.

234Garissoles' second reason. Things that can really be separated are not one and the same. Someone may break the law and still not, in the act, lose habitual righteousness—as the faithful show, who sin from time to time yet keep the righteousness God works in their hearts by his Spirit.

235Placeus. He never states the conclusion; those two premises cannot yield what he needs to prove. The question is not every law-breaking, but Adam's first; not any loss of righteousness, but the loss of the righteousness Adam had before the fall. My minor is about that breach and that loss. Garissoles' minor must either be universal or name that case; neither done, nothing against me follows.

The same pattern would overturn endless true propositions—even "man is an animal." Things that can really be separated are not identical; something can be an animal and yet not a man.

236I still distinguish, as before, privation of righteousness: actual and habitual—actual law-breaking and habitual. Righteousness itself must be split again: forensic or moral; and each either legal or evangelical. Forensic legal righteousness is perfect lifelong conformity to the law, so a single breach loses it—one is enough for condemnation. Evangelical forensic righteousness rests on remission of sins, so breaking the law does not shut out forgiveness.

Moral righteousness stands opposite injustice—actual to actual, habitual to habitual. Does an actual breach necessarily strip habitual righteousness? Distinguish. Natural or legal habit (as in Adam) neither hopes for remission nor rests on anything but natural faculty, so law-breaking loses it. Supernatural or evangelical habit includes faith and hope of remission and hangs on the regenerating Spirit and the decree of election, so a mere breach does not shake it off.

Law-breaking itself is twofold: universal ἀποστασία from God—a change of the last end—or any particular sin. The first destroys the habit of righteousness; the second wounds it but does not wreck it. Adam's righteousness was legal and natural, and his sin a universal apostasy, a turn of the last end; so the moment he sinned he lost righteousness, and God needed no separate judicial act to strip him of it.

237Garissoles' third reason. Acts that build a habit are not themselves the acquiring of the habit—acquisition follows them. Likewise acts that shake a habit off are not themselves the privation—privation follows them. So Placeus boasts in vain in his Theses on fallen man before grace (Th. 24): that we lose righteousness by the very fact that we break the law, and that the change which brought corruption into Adam itself expelled righteousness from him.

If he means law-breaking is the meritorious cause of losing righteousness, we grant it. If he thinks law-breaking and privation of righteousness differ not at all, we refuse: breaking the law is an action; privation is a passion; acting and suffering differ more than in words. God creates souls without the ornament of original righteousness yet does not, by creating, make them law-breakers. Expulsion of righteousness precedes corruption; corruption follows expulsion—antecedent and consequent differ. God stripped man of creation's gifts yet did not corrupt him.

238Placeus. This answer also misses my minor. When I said privation of righteousness is breach of the condition or precept, I meant actual privation as actual breach, habitual privation as habitual breach. Garissoles scarcely allows habitual sin a place. Calling my Theses "boasting" I cannot see what handle I gave him. I split what he joined and used this dilemma.

If righteousness is forensic, do we not lose it by the very fact of breaking the law? I see nothing to fault there. If moral: was righteousness not expelled from Adam by the very change that introduced the contrary corruption—as darkening drives out light, or cooling heat? If he takes me to mean law-breaking is only the meritorious cause of privation, he grants it; were that all I meant I would contradict myself, since I argue that privation of original righteousness is not punishment properly so called. Law-breaking is injustice—privation of righteousness—actual if act or omission, habitual if habit; we break the law by habit as well as by act.

He does not prove they differ "not at all." I only need my proposition true whether subject and attribute are identical or differ somewhat—as "man is an animal" and "man is risible" remain true though subject and attribute differ more than in names. "Law-breaking is an action"—every breach? Not habitual; nor actual omission. He says privation is a passion, yet had just split privation into active and passive. Is active privation a passion? Unlikely. Is "passive" a passion when said of God, who suffers nothing? Formally privation is not passion but reduces to the predicament of the form it negates—so the logicians. Passion passes with action; privation remains. Passion is a real being in a predicament; privation is rather a negation, in a predicament only reductively.

As for God creating souls bare of original righteousness without making them transgressors: he creates them without righteousness, yet is not author of that privation—they contract it from the body; else by stripping them he would make them unjust, and in a capable subject there is no middle between just and unjust. "Expulsion precedes corruption"? Expulsion presupposes righteousness already in the subject; original righteousness was only in Adam, so only from him was it expelled. Who believes God expels righteousness and then is angry because it is gone—or causes the privation yet not the corruption? That is like saying who takes straightness from a body does not cause crookedness, or who takes health does not cause disease. Moral corruption and privation of righteousness cannot stand or be thought apart. Whether they oppose privatively or contrarily, they drive each other out of the same capable subject at once; there is no middle between justice and injustice, virtue and vice, straight and crooked, in a capable subject.

239Do not tell me that sin is sometimes the punishment of sin. First, sin as sin is not punishment—unless you mean to smash together two opposite kinds of evil and erase the line between penalty and guilt. Privation of righteousness in us, as such, is formally sin; it clashes with the law.

Second, that claim is not about punishment properly and strictly so called—the kind the law threatens and justice must have satisfied. Who believes justice demands that justice be broken? that justice is paid by wounding justice? that the penalty-debt is settled by making the debt larger? that a threat whose penalty is the very breach of the precept should be tacked onto the precept "do not break it"? I go on.

240Fourth proof. Proper punishment—the death the law named—has to come after God has examined and judged the breach. Loss of righteousness, spiritual death, did not wait for that examination and judgment; it arrived first. Therefore it was neither proper punishment nor the death the law was threatening.

241Fifth proof (I put the rest off for another place). If the law threatened Adam with death as privation of righteousness, then—on your view—Adam died just as God had threatened. That looks false to me. First, you yourself, I take it, grant that Adam's first sin was forgiven; otherwise he would be counted among the damned. So he did not die just as God had threatened. Forgiveness of sin and punishment according to the law cannot both stand.

Second, by the death named in the threat you mean bodily death and eternal death as well as spiritual. Truth and justice in the threat would then require that on the very day he broke the law he die bodily, eternally, and spiritually. Yet that day he suffered neither bodily nor eternal death, and eternal death he never underwent and never will. Why could spiritual death's penalty not be forgiven Adam as eternal death's was—or at least deferred?

242Add Scripture's witness. When Genesis 5:5 totals Adam's years, it is not content with the words it always uses alone in like reckonings; it inserts these two, וַיְחִי—surely neither for nothing nor by chance. I see no point for them except to hint that Adam, as the divine threat would have it, had not died but had lived—and that life could come only from God's grace and our Lord Jesus Christ's satisfaction.

The same follows from the paradise sentence: it was not definitive but, as it were, interlocutory—giving the man room to repent, deferring the last judgment until after death, and meanwhile setting his state somehow between the damned and the acquitted. Hence God did not call the man cursed as he did the serpent, but only the ground. And though the sentence bound him to bodily death, it spoke by circumlocution and would not name it "death," lest it look like executing the Law's threat. So that judgment was not the last (Adam must face that after death, per the Apostle: it is appointed for men to die once, and after that judgment—Heb. 9) but a preliminary to the last, deferred to another time. See the last of my Theses on Adam's fall.

243If then God in supreme mercy and wisdom deferred executing that threat, hanging it on another judgment after soul and body part, we must grant Adam was not Dead as the law's threat required. So the threat of spiritual death as privation of righteousness is not to be read as I take that threat—which I judge a worse evil than eternal death itself.

Garissoles. A "third" reason is added. If the law threatened Adam with death as privation of righteousness, he would have died as God threatened—which is false, since he is not to be counted among the damned. And since that death covers eternal, bodily, and spiritual: he who never felt eternal death, nor at once felt temporal, how did he at once incur spiritual death—privation of righteousness? Reply 1. Whoever dies the death of privation of righteousness and stays in it to the end is counted among the damned. Not so Adam: by faith in the blessed seed he was raised from that spiritual death into spiritual life, as with all the elect whom God is pleased to make alive in Christ when dead in sins (Eph. 2).

244Placeus. Why call this the third reason when it is the fifth? I see no cause except that, having skipped the second and fourth, he still did not want to seem to have skipped any. I had backed this fifth argument's minor with four reasons; he takes up only the first two, so compressed—especially the first—that I scarcely know them. His two replies seem to shore the argument up more than tear it down.

The first explains why Adam was not damned—and so grants what confirmed my minor: he was not damned. My argument ran: If the law threatened Adam with death as privation of righteousness, Adam was punished as the law threatened. But he was not. Therefore the Law did not threaten him with that death. What does Garissoles say to the major? Deny? Distinguish? Limit? Nothing at all—so he concedes it.

One might limit: besides that privation the law also threatened bodily and eternal death, so Adam would have been partly punished (by spiritual death) and partly not (by bodily and eternal). The limit does not hurt the argument. He would still have been hit by some punishment properly so called—judicial, and the greatest—which the Law threatened. That is false. God granted him grace for the sin. The one whose sin is remitted, not imputed, who is justified from sin, is not punished. Partial punishment would mean partial remission and partial justification—an imperfect justification no evangelical would own. So, reader, this first reply shakes neither major nor minor. Let him go on.

245Garissoles. 2. No wonder Adam at once lost righteousness by the sin, and yet was not damned to eternal death, nor felt bodily death at once. He fell into spiritual death at once—God willing it—lest, if no kind of death had struck him at once, Satan's promise (you will not die at all) should look truer to Adam than God's threat (you will die the death); and lest Adam, growing old in sin, should never think of serious repentance and return to God. The sting of present punishment pricked him so that he might repent and come back to the God he had left by rebellion.

Bodily death he did not meet at once, so that time to repent might be given him—there is none after death. He would have paid that penalty the very day he sinned, had God not, for Christ's coming Satisfaction, chosen to give the human race space for repentance (so the Learned Man says in his Disputation on Adam's fall, last thesis). Eternal death he never met at all, because he was among God's elect, over whom hell has no claim. (Apocalypse.)

246Placeus. This later reply seems aimed at the second support of my minor. First it never touches that support. Then it contradicts itself. Finally it turns silly.

The support ran thus: Whoever, on the day he sinned, was not hit with bodily death or eternal death, did not die that day as God had threatened. But Adam, the day he sinned, was not hit with bodily death or eternal death. Therefore Adam did not die that day as God had threatened.

247The only way out is to say: bodily and eternal death were not laid on him, yet the soul's death—privation of righteousness—was. I press against that. If the soul's death was laid on him, it was laid on him because the threat required it. But it was not laid on him because the threat required it. So that death was not laid on him.

The major stands. For the minor: if the soul's death was laid on him because the threat required it, then bodily and eternal death were laid on him too, for the threat required those no less. Yet those deaths were not laid on him. So the soul's death was not laid on him because the threat required it. The minor is beyond dispute. The major, already plain, is confirmed because God had threatened bodily and eternal death no less than spiritual. If God's truth and justice required the spiritual death that day, the same truth and justice required those other deaths the same day—the reason is the same. I see nothing in the Learned Man's reply that dissolves this.

248His second point wraps itself in contradiction. How could Adam, still keeping original righteousness—which is the opposite of unrighteousness and sin—grow old in sin, stay turned from God, desert God, rebel against God? What was that righteousness but a heart turned to God, habitual obedience to his commands, a steady will to obey him and give him his due—the very thing that made Adam righteous while it was in him? Who believes Adam would have grown old in sin unless he had lost righteousness? He would have grown old in righteousness if he had kept it.

The reply also turns silly when it pretends righteousness was stripped from Adam so he might repent and return to God. Spiritual death is so far from being a path to repentance and conversion that it makes them impossible and drives the man farthest from God. And it is silly to say the 'sense' of that present penalty pricked Adam.

249Habits are not sensible qualities. We neither feel nor understand them except as we infer them from acts that go before or follow. Add this: spiritual death, for true piety, strips a man of sense and of the power to do well. It makes him unfit for every good work, ready for every evil, turned from God, and turned to the flesh and to what God hates.

250I cannot help adding a sixth reason to the ones above, drawn first from the phrase 'you shall die the death.' I know no place in Scripture where 'to die the death' is taken of that figured death which is only absence of holiness in the soul. Next, from the name 'death' itself: I do not find that sense in the Old Testament, and not even in the New used absolutely and without addition—unless perhaps Luke 9:60, 'let the dead bury their dead,' where the Lord seems to mean unbelief and stubbornness, not the privation of original righteousness common to all. For whoever does not believe is already condemned (John 3:18), and God's wrath remains on him (John 3:36)—so an unbeliever may well be called dead.

Grant that he meant that privation: it is his way to shift words from their proper, common sense to a spiritual, metaphorical one, to veil the Gospel light for a time—and the Apostles should not have copied him there. Who then believes God's first law and threat, set in the most ordinary words 'you shall die the death,' must be read in a sense wholly unused—and so that the same word, used once and to be taken once, is taken both properly and metaphorically at once? I could bury you with further arguments, but not everything must be poured out at once.

251GAR. Finally he argues thus. Spiritual death is death said metaphorically; bodily death, properly. But who would think that in a law that had to be framed in the most ordinary words, one and the same term should be taken both properly and metaphorically at once—especially when I would not know 'to die the death' in a figured sense except perhaps at Luke 9:60?

252PLAC. See how he shrinks that reason of mine, cuts away a large part of it, and credits me with what I never said—that 'to die the death' is used at Luke 9:60. Still, let him go on.

253GAR. Reply. The learned man grants that 'death' covers both bodily death and the eternal torment of hell, as we have heard. What then will he say if someone turns his own argument back on him: the same word in a law that should use ordinary language cannot be taken properly and metaphorically together; hell's torment is death only metaphorically, since only bodily death is death properly so called; therefore those words cannot mean that torment.

254PLAC. I answer: before God's court no death is more properly called death than eternal death. If you split bodily death off from it, even that no longer deserves the name 'death,' by Christ's own teaching. The law threatens eternal death only as the loss of all this life's goods—and that is no loss when better goods take their place. Add that eternal death includes the bodily—the loss of this life—so the law could not threaten the one without also threatening the other.

255GAR. 2. Since God here threatened every death Adam's sin deserved, why not say he threatened bodily, spiritual, and eternal death, when the sinner deserves to lie under them all?

PLAC. Every death that sin deserves is a death other than sin. Spiritual death is itself sin, and it merits death.

GAR. 3. Nor is it unusual in Scripture to call spiritual death by the name 'death'; the opposite is clear not only from Luke 9:60 but from many other texts we have already cited.

PLAC. I did not say Scripture never uses 'death' for spiritual death. I said only that that sense is unused in the Old Testament, and that the phrase 'you shall die the death' in that sense is unused in Scripture as a whole. That is what my reason needs. He had already appealed to Ezek. 3:18 and Hos. 13:1—but in vain. Even without opposing interpreters who take neither place of spiritual death, the subject itself objects: those texts treat a death not common to all, but a death some incur for particular actual sins, whereas spiritual death belongs to all from birth and precedes every actual sin. So those places cannot mean spiritual death as the privation of original righteousness.

256GAR. 4. We grant that laws should be framed in ordinary, commonly known words. But who says metaphorical or improper words are not ordinary? Metaphors are nowhere more common than in framing laws, which often pack many and very different things into one word that cannot be reduced to a single proper sense—as the Decalogue's precepts show.

PLAC. Did I say metaphorical and improper words are unused? I said only that 'death' in the metaphorical, improper sense that means spiritual death—or the privation of original righteousness—is unused in the Old Testament. I never denied that laws sometimes use metaphors; I denied using metaphors that were unusual when the laws were made, and I denied that the same word, used once in the same law, must be read both properly and metaphorically at once. Metaphor comes in only when something blocks taking the word properly. That does not make me deny Scripture's double sense, literal and mystical: the first belongs to the words, the second rather to the things. In the Decalogue I see no word that must be read both properly and improperly—or metaphorically—together.

257GAR. Finally the Papists use a like argument to prove that the words 'this is my body' must not be taken figuratively, because a covenant, a sacrament, and a law require proper—not figurative—speech: so Bellarmine and Coster. Our writers deny it in reply, as you may see in Chamier, book 10 on the Eucharist, chapter 15, §§60–61.

258PLAC. If the Papists said that in 'this is my body' there is no unusual metaphor, or that the same word is not to be taken both properly and improperly at once—because a covenant, sacrament, or law would not bear that—the comparison would run straight, and they would not find our men opposing them. But when they shut every metaphor out of those words and out of every covenant, sacrament, and law—even a worn, clear metaphor—what do they share with me? I answered them in my Examination of reasons for and against the Mass sacrifice, part I, chapter xiv, p. 429ff. It cannot be denied that 'you shall die the death' named death properly so called. So I defended my reasons. The learned man also has reasons of his own to prove that the death God threatened by that law is not only bodily death but also death of the soul—that is, loss of original righteousness and privation of God's image. Those reasons ought to be weighed.

259GAR. We bring a threefold reason. First: man incurs by his rebellion no other evils and harms than those God had threatened by the sanction of His law. For if God meant to scare him from disobedience and law-breaking, why would He not have set before his eyes the precipices into which violation of the divine law would cast him? Yet by refusing obedience man drew on himself not only bodily death and outward calamities, but also the loss of spiritual gifts, the perversion of every faculty, and guilt of eternal damnation. Therefore God had threatened all of that by His declaration of death.

260PL. I distinguish evils. Some are of fault, others of penalty. God had forbidden the former by His law; He had not threatened them. He had threatened the latter; He had not forbidden them. Spiritual death—or privation of original righteousness—is an evil of fault, not a penalty properly so called. So the major is denied if it means evils of fault. And even of penalty-evils it is not universally true. Penalty-evils must be split into those that are, as they say, satisfactory penalties, and those that stand somehow as prison pains and troubles, or as a father's chastisements. The law threatened only the former. Man falls into the latter by his sin because, for Christ's satisfaction, space was given him to repent, and God treats him as a father treats a boy.

261GAR. 2. Adam, if he had persevered in integrity, was to be given continuance and increase of bodily and spiritual goods. Therefore, falling from that integrity, it was fitting he should lie under bodily and spiritual evils: why then should God not have meant those by the name of death?

PLAC. But perseverance in integrity and continuance of integrity are the same thing. And how do original integrity and original righteousness differ? So he was to be given continuance—not of original righteousness (for that continuance was required as the condition), but of all other goods. Integrity is opposed immediately to corruption: to fall from integrity is to be corrupted; to lose integrity is to gain corruption. So the learned man confounds the condition of the promise with the thing promised; and his antecedent is true only of physical goods, or goods other than integrity or righteousness itself.

262GAR. 3. No reason can be given why 'death' should not be taken here in its full breadth; and Scripture plainly refers the name of death not only to the body but also to the soul and to spiritual things—see Ezekiel 3:18; Hosea 13:1; Matthew 8:22; Luke 9:60 and 15:24; Ephesians 2:1; 1 Timothy 5:6; Revelation 3:1, and so on.

PLAC. The reason is ready: spiritual death is sin, not—properly speaking—the penalty of sin. The Law threatens not sin, but only the penalty of sin properly so called. As for authorities of weighty men not being wanting—authorities of men no less weighty are not wanting to me either, and I already cited the Helvetic Confession, article 8. But why fight with human witnesses where far stronger reasons are at hand? For the rest, see what follows: if privation of righteousness is not a penalty the law denounced, it is certainly not a penalty properly so called. Therefore that actual sin of Adam is not to be ascribed to us by justice's avenger as He imputes it.

263CAPUT V. Examination of Cap. III, in which it is asked what it is for sin to be imputed or not imputed. In the third chapter you again set the state of the controversy, and once that is set you digress again, and take it upon yourself to illustrate what it is to impute and to be imputed, and you weigh first the Hebrew word, then the Greek, citing some places of Scripture to that end—to what purpose, or with what design, I do not know, unless perhaps so that you might swell the bulk of your treatise and cover the scantiness of your arguments. Useful enough, perhaps, your illustration would be for the controversy on justification—since Scripture is wont to describe that now by the imputation of faith and righteousness, now by the non-imputation of sin—but for this question which is between us I do not see what it is worth: for there is no place in all of Scripture in which Adam's sin is said to be imputed to us.

264Therefore it is not asked between us in what sense Scripture employs the word 'to impute' in this question—for it never employs it—but in what sense in my theses (seeing that you have set out to refute them) I denied that Adam's sin is imputed to us, so that that negation of mine may be known whether true or false, and παραλογισμός avoided. At length you conclude that sin is imputed when it is attributed, considered, and held for sin and punished as sin; on the opposite side, that sin is not imputed when it is not considered as sin, but is covered, pardoned, and remitted. Which certainly is not fitted to our question.

265For when I affirm that Adam's actual sin is not imputed to us, I do not mean by this that that sin is not considered as sin, but that it is covered, pardoned, and remitted to us. (You see that this explanation of yours of 'not imputing' is alien from my mind and from this question.) It is not asked between us whether Adam's sin is forgiven us: such non-imputation is from mercy; but it is asked between us whether of right, from justice, it is imputed to us or not. You doubtless hold that it is not imputed—that is, that it is remitted to the faithful—and yet the same you contend against me is imputed to all men, and indeed so imputed that in all it is punished in act. I do not ask in this place how that punishment consists with justification or remission and the non-imputation of that sin.

266But, whatever the case, I contend that that actual sin of Adam is not our sin. Therefore it cannot justly be imputed to us. I grant that to impute is to ascribe, to attribute, to write to one's account: but certain things are to be observed in this place—first of all that distinction of imputation into antecedent and consequent, or immediate and mediate, which, when I was setting the state of the question, I explained in Cap. 2, and do not repeat here: I ask you to remember it. Next this also ought to meet our thought: that what is in dispute between us is not any imputation whatever, but a judicial one, which just punishment follows.

267Now such an imputation of sin is the act of a judge ascribing sin to someone by his sentence—that is, pronouncing someone guilty of a certain sin, and therefore to be visited with punishment. But sin is ascribed to someone either as to a sinner, or as to one who voluntarily sustains the sinner's person, as a surety: to the former as his own, to the latter as another's. If Adam's actual sin is imputed to us, it is ascribed not as another's, but as ours: for each of us, when he is conceived and born, bears his own person, not Adam's, whose surety he is not.

268Consider with me, then, I ask, and weigh how that first actual sin can be imputed to us truly or falsely, justly or unjustly. It was a certain singular action, which could not make a man guilty except as one commanding, or executing, or consenting. But we neither commanded it, nor advised Adam to it, nor ourselves—who did not yet exist—committed it, nor consented to it in act, either before we were, or while we lay hidden in the mother's womb. Tell me, then, I beg you, how it is truly and justly attributed and ascribed to each of us? If you answer that that hereditary vice, which flowed into us as produced from that action, is as it were the remnants and seed of that sin, and a habitual—so to speak—consent of our will, and that therefore it is justly imputed to us, you will come down to my opinion, who freely acknowledge and teach mediate imputation, which follows hereditary corruption and is founded in it.

269CAPUT VI. Examination of Cap. IV. Again in Cap. IV of your treatise you set your hand to constituting, polishing, and illustrating the state of the question; and on that matter you spend the whole of Cap. IV. I am sorry that we are detained so long by you in the vestibule, hungry and eager for your reasons, to the perceiving of which Cap. I of your treatise had invited us. Yet here it becomes me to linger with you a little and converse. It is asked, you say, how that actual sin, which was of a person, suffices for the condemnation of all. But first that point must be presupposed by a distinction: for on it turns the very hinge of this controversy. If you mean that that one actual sin by itself immediately suffices for the condemnation of all men, you presuppose what is in question, and what I deny. But if you mean it suffices for that condemnation by means of the corruption which it produced, propagated into all men, I assent to you.