Cap. IV: Garissoles one reatus; Helvetic cities decree; in et cum Adamo

The same D. Garissolius silently approves Placeus's judgment when he several times affirms and presses that the guilt from Adam's sin, and from the vice inhering in us, are not two distinct guilts, but one and the same guilt rising from both — chapter 9, section 7, page 190, and section 15, page 306, and chapter 27, section 30, page 809, and so on. For once immediate imputation of Adam's sin is posited, two distinct guilts are necessarily posited, of which one rises from Adam's sin, the other from the vice inhering in us: the former precedes hereditary corruption, the latter follows; the former is prior to the inherent vice, the latter posterior; the former is the cause of corruption, the latter rather its effect; the penalty of the former is the inherent vice, of the latter not so; the former is of another's sin and of a sin seated outside us, the latter of our own sin inhering in us; the former is common to all human beings by numerical identity of the sin, the latter is of many sins in number, and each human being's own; the former hangs on God's will alone, the latter on the very nature of the corruption born in us and on its natural demerit; the former was earlier than those to whom it is imputed, the latter on the contrary was not except afterward. How, then, can they not be two distinct guilts, between which so many and so great differences can be noted?

From this it is plain that Placeus's judgment in no way fights with the Decree of the four evangelical cities among the Swiss, which D. Garissolius appends to the Charenton Decree. For either they praise the Decree of the Charenton Synod, with which Placeus's judgment, as I have already proved, agrees; or they give the reason why they praise it in these very few words: For those who sinned in Adam and with Adam, Adam's sin is justly imputed to them — which proposition Placeus acknowledges to be most true. For it is truly equitable that those who sinned in and with Adam should have imputed to them the sin they committed in him and with him. It is just that a common sin have a common imputation. But what is it that we sinned in and with Adam? That Adam's sin is imputed to us? So D. Garissolius takes it in chapter 8, section 21. For how, he says, could those who existed many ages later have already sinned before in another, unless because he performed that act which is so reckoned of posterity as if they themselves had committed it? And he adds that the theologians, when they teach that we have satisfied in Christ, mean nothing else than that Christ's satisfaction is imputed to us. This interpretation of his fits what he often presses: that Adam's sin is ours only by imputation. From this it follows that we did not sin in and with Adam except imputatively. But then the reasoning of the most learned theologians would turn out trifling. For they would prove the same by the same — the imputation of Adam's sin by the imputation of Adam's sin — which trifling, especially in so grave a Decree, it is wrong to assign to them. What, then, does that phrase mean? It can be understood from a like case. For if someone said that we were in and with Adam, the sense would be not that Adam's being is imputed to us, but that Adam's being was communicated to us by natural propagation. So when we are said to have sinned in and with Adam, the sense is not that Adam's sin is imputed to us (for that would be, as I said, to import a trifling into the Decree of most excellent men), but that Adam's sin was communicated to us by natural propagation. From which it follows that it is justly imputed to us — but by mediate or consequent imputation, which Placeus constantly acknowledges and holds.