To Florus 2.35

But let us now examine the words of the apostle, whom you said answers everything I set out above. You write: ‘The apostle answers all these points for him. He accuses neither the infant’s will, which does not yet exist in the infant as a personal will capable of sin; nor marriage, insofar as it is marriage, which has not only its institution but also its blessing from God; nor the parents, insofar as they are parents, lawfully and legitimately joined to one another to produce children. Instead he says: “Through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin; and so it passed into all human beings, in whom all sinned” (Romans 5:12). If these people received this with catholic ears and minds, they would not have hearts rebelling against Christ’s faith and grace. Nor would they vainly try to twist these completely clear and evident apostolic words into their own peculiar, heretical meaning. They claim that this was said because Adam sinned first, and thereafter anyone who wished to sin found in him an example of sinning. Thus, they say, sin passed from that one man into all human beings, not by generation but by imitation of that one man. Yet surely, if the apostle had meant imitation here, he would have said that sin entered this world and passed through all human beings through the devil, rather than through one man. For Scripture says of the devil: “Those who belong to his party imitate him” (Wisdom 2:24; Latin numbering 2:25). But he said “through one man,” from whom the generation of human beings certainly began, precisely to teach that original sin passed through all people by generation’ (Augustine, Marriage and Desire 2.45).