“This innate disease and original sin is truly sin, and condemns under God's eternal wrath all those who are not born again through water and the Holy Ghost.”
The preceding is sufficient to establish the unanimous agreement of Catholic and Protestant creeds and [pg 024] confessions in maintaining the Augustinian theory of the depraved nature of all mankind consequent on the sin of Adam, as it has been set forth in the preceding chapters.
Chapter VI. Modes of Meeting Difficulties by Theologians.
Having presented the Augustinian theory, as it is set forth in both Catholic and Protestant creeds, the next object will be to verify the statements of the preceding chapters as to the modes of meeting difficulties adopted by theologians.
The first extract will show that Augustine taught that all men had a common nature in Adam, so that his choosing to eat the forbidden fruit was the act of each and all human minds which were existing in or with him at that time. And thus that it was man and not God that caused our depravity of nature.
The extract introduced to verify the above was written to St. Jerome, who taught that all minds commenced their first existence at or near the birth of each. This Augustine denied, and the passage shows not only that he taught a common nature which was ruined in Adam, but also that all unbaptized infants go to endless punishment for the sin thus committed in Adam ages before they were born.
Augustine's Mode.
“How can so many thousands of souls which leave the bodies of unbaptized infants be with any equity condemned, if they were [pg 025]newly created and introduced into these bodies for no previous sins of their own, but by the mere will of him who created them to animate these bodies, and foreknew that each of them, for no fault of his own, would die unbaptized? Since, then, we can not say that God either makes souls sinful by compulsion, or punishes them when innocent, and yet are obliged to confess that the souls of the little ones are condemned if they die unbaptized, I beseech you tell me how can this opinion be defended, by which it is believed that souls are not all derived from that one first man, but are newly created for each particular body?”
Thus Augustine supposed that he escaped the charge of making God the author of sin by teaching that God created all the souls of the race in Adam, so that Adam's sin ruined the nature of himself and his posterity all at one stroke, while it made it right and just to send all unbaptized infants to eternal misery.