upon all men, is the punishment of sin, even to the good._
But a question not to be shirked arises: Whether in very truth death,
which separates soul and body, is good to the good?[574] For if it
be, how has it come to pass that such a thing should be the punishment
of sin? For the first men would not have suffered death had they not
sinned. How, then, can that be good to the good, which could not have
happened except to the evil? Then, again, if it could only happen to
the evil, to the good it ought not to be good, but non-existent. For
why should there be any punishment where there is nothing to punish?
Wherefore we must say that the first men were indeed so created, that
if they had not sinned, they would not have experienced any kind of
death; but that, having become sinners, they were so punished with
death, that whatsoever sprang from their stock should also be punished
with the same death. For nothing else could be born of them than that
which they themselves had been. Their nature was deteriorated in
proportion to the greatness of the condemnation of their sin, so that
what existed as punishment in those who first sinned, became a natural
consequence in their children. For man is not produced by man, as he
was from the dust. For dust was the material out of which man was made:
man is the parent by whom man is begotten. Wherefore earth and flesh
are not the same thing, though flesh be made of earth. But as man the
parent is, such is man the offspring. In the first man, therefore,
there existed the whole human nature, which was to be transmitted by
the woman to posterity, when that conjugal union received the divine
sentence of its own condemnation; and what man was made, not when
created, but when he sinned and was punished, this he propagated,
so far as the origin of sin and death are concerned. For neither by
sin nor its punishment was he himself reduced to that infantine and
helpless infirmity of body and mind which we see in children. For God
ordained that infants should begin the world as the young of beasts
begin it, since their parents had fallen to the level of the beasts
in the fashion of their life and of their death; as it is written,
"Man when he was in honour understood not; he became like the beasts
that have no understanding."[575] Nay more, infants, we see, are even
feebler in the use and movement of their limbs, and more infirm to
choose and refuse, than the most tender offspring of other animals;
as if the force that dwells in human nature were destined to surpass
all other living things so much the more eminently, as its energy has
been longer restrained, and the time of its exercise delayed, just as
an arrow flies the higher the further back it has been drawn. To this
infantine imbecility[576] the first man did not fall by his lawless
presumption and just sentence; but human nature was in his person
vitiated and altered to such an extent, that he suffered in his members
the warring of disobedient lust, and became subject to the necessity
of dying. And what he himself had become by sin and punishment, such
he generated those whom he begot; that is to say, subject to sin and
death. And if infants are delivered from this bondage of sin by the
Redeemer's grace, they can suffer only this death which separates soul
and body; but being redeemed from the obligation of sin, they do not
pass to that second endless and penal death.