To Florus · §2.221

To Florus 2.221

In this sense, then, the offense is rightly said to have abounded: each person’s will committed it both before and after the law, but before the law the will was sinful, while after the law it was also transgressive. Something grows and abounds when it gains increase within its own kind, just as after Moses the additional weight of transgression was added to the sin of free will. For it belonged to the same kind, though at a different time: an evil will which sinned both before and after the law, not through irresistible compulsion, but through blameworthy effort. Since this is so, nothing in the apostle’s words can fit your position. The coming of the law is not shown to have made inherited sin more abundant or greater. Nor can something plainly unrelated to newborn children’s will rightly be said to abound through sins of will. Therefore what the law could neither prohibit nor punish did not abound after the law. ‘But where sin abounded, grace abounded beyond it, so that, just as sin reigned into death, grace might reign through righteousness into eternal life’ (Romans 5:20–21).

Latin source witness