To Florus · §2.145

To Florus 2.145

Consequently, they teach us to deny that anyone can be condemned for another’s sin, and to deny that any sin passes to descendants as a condition of nature. They teach us to believe and assert that a human being born through the fertility God instituted is addressed by the just laws of free will: to avoid everything evil and practice everything good. Such a person should not suppose, as you do, that a love and necessity of crimes clings to the causes of his substance—to the seed itself. Nor should he accept that so foolish, insane, and impious a statement, insulting nature, reason, and God, is contained in the apostle’s book merely because he said sin entered this world through one man and death passed into all human beings (Romans 5:12). For he did not allow this to remain obscure for long, but added that those he had called ‘all’ should be understood as ‘many,’ who sinned through imitation, not generation (Romans 5:19).

Latin source witness