Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/220

From what we have just said may be perceived how great is the error of those who are not astonished at the mysterious analogies and secret affinities which God places between parents and their children, but who are yet surprised that God has placed these same affinities and analogies between the rebel Adam and his unhappy descendants. No understanding may measure, nor reason grasp, nor imagination conceive the strong and close tie which God has himself placed between all men and this only man, who is at the same time unity and collection, singular and plural, individual and species, who dies and who yet survives, who is real and symbolical, type and substance, body and shadow, in whom we all were and who is in us all. This is a fearful enigma which presents under each new aspect a new mystery. And as man cannot comprehend, either by his reason, or by his imagination, or by his understanding, that which is so strangely complex and mysteriously obscure in his nature, neither can he understand (even did he employ every faculty of his soul in the attempt to do so) the immense distance that exists between our sins and the sin of the first man; a sin which like him stands alone and unequaled by its profound malice and its unparalleled enormity. No one since Adam has sinned as Adam sinned, and no one will sin as he did throughout the duration of time. His sin, partaking of the nature of the sinner, was at the same time both one and multiple, because it was in act one sin and in effect all sins. By it Adam marred that which no other sinner could ever deface; for he thereby destroyed the spotless purity of his innocence. We who now sin, multiplying sin upon sin, only add stain upon stain; but Adam alone sullied the spotless whiteness