These things are altogether excellent, so that satisfaction may be given to those who ask—
—what the condition of the human race is and what its state ought to be judged. For 1), if you refer the human race to Adam and consider within yourself what it is by birth and what inheritance it received from its progenitors, nothing more unhappy will occur to you, and nothing more powerful for stirring mercy. For by its birth it is fallen and cast down and deprived of all the gifts by which it was rendered both immune from corruption, dear to God, and heir of everlasting beatitude. But 2), if you refer it to the benevolent and merciful disposition of God in Christ, and consider within yourself what it recovered in Christ, you will hardly contain a mind exulting with joy. For in Christ and through Christ a) men have in actuality recovered the faculty of conquering sin, of obtaining adoption, and of restoring the divine likeness; while b) in hope they have recovered felicity complete in every respect and full victory over death and corruption.
Hence nothing is truer to say or sweeter to think than that absolutely all men were vindicated into freedom through Christ; that all the losses inflicted by the crime of the earthly Adam were effaced by the aid and protection of the heavenly Adam; and that the first Adam harms only those who have ungratefully contemned the benefits of the second. “God,” says1 Valerian, bishop of Cimiez,
not only called every man to freedom, but also established him in the highest dignity of things. But he imposes servitude upon himself who serves unwillingly. For if you adapt servitude to the will, you will find yourself to be not a servant of God, but a son. For thus says2 the prophet in the voice of the Lord: “I shall be to you as a father, and you shall be to me as sons and daughters, says the Lord almighty.”
What freedom and dignity Christ obtained for us Apollinaris Sidonius signifies when, speaking of him in his eucharistic poem to Faustus, bishop of Riez3, he sings:
At last thou didst approach death, but to rise again,—
—rescuing whatever had passed into the right Of the ancient enemy through our crime, when the first woman, Breaking the command, bound us with perpetual guilt. When he assailed thee with death and found not in thee What he could convict as his own, he lost all That Eve had granted by her fall: that handwriting By which man was seized this recompense ruptured. Free of sin, thou becomest an ample price for sinners, And, the new Adam, in return for the debt, while thou diest, Thou snatchest the old Adam from death: thus death is dead; Thus by the snares which she herself had made she deceived herself. For while she indiscriminately assails the innocent and the guilty, She brought it about that those bound by crime could be absolved.
And certainly the means of obtaining this absolution is withdrawn from no one. “While the grape was still sour and green,” writes4 Avitus of Vienne,
within paradise Adam tasted not wine but poison unto his own ruin and ours; and because the parents had eaten a sour grape, the teeth of the children were set on edge. But Ezekiel, foreseeing that the original debt would be made void when Christ had discharged it, says thus5: “As I live, says the Lord, that proverb shall no longer be in Jerusalem: The fathers ate a sour grape, and the teeth of the children shall be set on edge.” Whatever Adam did no longer harms thee: what he proudly desired, what he illicitly presumed, what he incautiously sought. Fear for thyself the setting on edge of the teeth from thine own eating; restrain the touch of appetite from useless avidity.