34. [XXIX.]—No Man Ever Saved Save by Christ.

Now, whoever maintains that human nature at any period required not the second Adam for its physician, because it was not corrupted in the first Adam, is convicted as an enemy to the grace of God; not in a question where doubt or error might be compatible with soundness of belief, but in that very rule of faith which makes us Christians. How happens it, then, that the human nature, which first existed, is praised by these men as being so far less tainted with evil manners? How is it that they overlook the fact that men were even then sunk in so many intolerable sins, that, with the exception of one man of God and his wife, and three sons and their wives, the whole world was in God’s just judgment destroyed by the flood, even as the little land of Sodom was afterwards with fire?214    See Gen. vii. and xix. From the moment, then, when “by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, in whom all sinned,”215    Rom. v. 12. the entire mass of our nature was ruined beyond doubt, and fell into the possession of its destroyer. And from him no one—no, not one—has been delivered, or is being delivered, or ever will be delivered, except by the grace of the Redeemer.

CAPUT XXIX.

34. Quapropter quisquis humanam contendit in qualibet aetate naturam non indigere medico secundo Adam, quia non est vitiata in primo Adam, non in aliqua quaestione, in qua dubitari vel errari salva fide potest, sed in ipsa regula fidei qua christiani sumus, gratiae Dei convincitur inimicus. Quale est autem, quod ab istis illa quae ante fuit, velut adhuc minus malis moribus vitiata, hominum laudatur natura; neque respiciunt tantis tanquam intolerabilibus peccatis homines tunc fuisse submersos, ut excepto uno homine Dei et ejus conjuge, tribusque filiis et totidem nuribus, justo judicio Dei, sicut igne postea terra exigua Sodomorum, ita totus mundus diluvio deleretur (Gen. VII et XIX)? Ex quo tempore igitur per unum hominem peccatum intravit in mundum, et per peccatum mors, et ita in omnes homines pertransiit, in quo omnes peccaverunt (Rom. V, 12), profecto universa massa perditionis facta est possessio perditoris. Nemo itaque, nemo prorsus inde liberatus est, aut liberatur, aut liberabitur nisi gratia Redemptoris.