Cap. VI: Maresius arg. III — justice, community analogies, Chamier against Salmeron

III. 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, and 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.