Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/218

sin. The collective Adam and human nature are identical, and human nature is therefore perpetually guilty, because it is forever sinful.

Let us now apply these principles to the present question. Every man has a human nature, and therefore Adam, who is this very nature, perpetually lives in each man, and lives in him with that which is become inherent with his life, that is to say, with his sin. This granted, we can understand more readily how sin can exist in the child at his birth. At my birth I am a sinner, although I am but an infant, because through the human nature which I have I am Adam. I am so not because I sin, but because I have sinned when I was Adam and an adult, and before I bore the name that I now bear, and before my birth. When God created Adam I was in Adam, and he was in me at my birth. Not being able to be separated from his person I cannot be separated from his sin. Notwithstanding, I am not Adam in such a way that I am confounded with him in an absolute manner. There is that peculiar to me which is not in him—that by which I am distinguished from him, namely, that inherent quality which constitutes my individual unity, and which distinguishes me from him whom I most closely resemble: and this which constitutes me as an individual, this diversity relatively to a common unity, is what I have received and hold from the father who begot me, and from the mother who bore me. They have not given me human nature, which I receive from God through Adam, but they have placed on this nature the seal of the family, and they have stamped it with their image. They have not given me being, but the manner of my existence; placing the less in the greater, that is to say, placing