The Formation of Christendom, Volume IIAllies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Religion
The Formation of Christendom, Volume II
Allies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Christianity; Christianity -- Miscellanea
disobedience of the inferior appetites to the reason, the resistance of
the reason to the law of God, were all punishments, and a remarkable point
of the punishment is to be seen in this. Adam, as the head of his race,
was in virtue of natural propagation to have bestowed on the children of
his flesh, the members of his body, his own supernatural inheritance. Thus
a singular honour was conferred on the fathership of Adam. But now when,
in virtue of this natural propagation, he, continuing to be the head of
his race, transmitted to it the guilt of adoption lost instead of the
blessing of adoption conferred, a peculiar shame was set by God upon this
fathership of Adam, and upon all the circumstances attending it: so that
henceforth in the disinherited race the bride veiled her head, and the act
of being a father became an act of shame.
The condition, therefore, of Adam and his posterity after his fall
differed from the condition which would have been that of simple nature by
the whole extent of the guilt incurred by the nature in its fall from
sonship.
And herein lies one peculiarity, and one strangely distressing condition
of his state, in that while he lost by the fall the grace in which, as an
indwelling gift, his whole supernatural state had been rooted, he yet did
not lose that condition of being formed and intended for a supernatural
end which grace alone could enable him to attain. For the supernatural
vision and love of God he had been created, and in his fall he did not
sink to be merely a natural man; but his original end was still held out
before him as that which he might reach supported by that grace the aids
of which were in a different measure promised to him in order to lead a
life of penance, and as the earnest of a future restoration.
This, however, is far from being a complete statement of his case, and we
must go back to the circumstances of his fall in order to add that further
still more peculiar and remarkable condition which, added to the one just
described, made up the whole of his fall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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