We cannot conceive the glorious state of Adam, nor the nature of his sin, nor the transmission of it to us. These things took place under the conditions of a nature quite different to our own, transcending our present capacity.
The knowledge of all this would be of no use in helping us to escape from it, and all we need know is that we are miserable, corrupt, separate from God, but ransomed by Jesus Christ, and of this we have on earth wonderful proofs.
Thus the two proofs of corruption and redemption are drawn from the wicked, who live indifferent to religion, and from the Jews who are its irreconcilable enemies.
All faith consists in Jesus Christ and in Adam, and all morality in lust and in grace.
Shall he only who knows his nature know it only to his misery? Shall he alone who knows it be alone miserable?
He must not see nothing whatever, nor must he see so much as to believe he possesses it, but he must see enough to know that he has lost it; for to be aware of loss he must see and not see, and that is precisely the state in which he is by nature.
We wish for truth, and find in ourselves only uncertainty.
We seek after happiness, and find only misery and death.
We cannot but wish for truth and happiness, and we are incapable neither of certainty nor of happiness. This desire is left to us, as much to punish us as to make us feel whence we are drawn.
Will it be asserted that because men have spoken of righteousness as having fled from the earth, therefore they knew of original sin?—Nemo ante obitum beatus est.—That therefore they knew death to be the beginning of eternal and essential happiness?