The divine life in three treatises

[He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world] And is it not plain then that the whole world are sinners?

I speak all this for the evincing of Original sin only, because that only is denied by such as yet pretend to Christianity; For actual sin is commonly confessed, and shows it self. And truly so doth Original sin in our proneness to actual; and in the earliness and commonness of such evil inclinations; and in the remnants of it which the sanctified feel, though they are such as were sanctified never so early, before actual sin had time to breed those evil habits, which therefore certainly were born with us.

I speak all this for the evincing of Original sin only, because that only is denyed by such as yet pretend to Christianity; For actual sin is commonly confessed, and shews it self. And truly so doth Original sin in our proneness to actual; and in the earliness and commonness of such evil inclinations; and in the remnants of it which the sanctified feel, though they are such as were sanctified never so early, before actual sin had time to breed those evil habits, which therefore certainly were born with us.

And if the Image of God, consisting in true holiness, be not natural, or born in every Infant in the world, then Original sin must needs be born with them: for that sin is either only or chiefly the Privation of that Image or Holiness. He that will say that this Image is not requisite to Infants, and so that the absence of it is a mere negation, doth make them brutes, and not of the race of man, whom God created after his Image, and leaves them uncapable of Heaven or Hell, or any other life then beasts have. And he that thinks so of▪ Infants to day, may think so of himself to morrow. And he that will affirm that this Image or Holiness is born with every Infant into the world, so wilfully contradicteth common evidence which appeareth in the contrary effects, that he is not worthy to be further talked with.