A treatise of original sin ... proving that it is

First, That it is a vain and an absurd thing to give leave to our humane reasonings, that such a thing cannot be, when the event discovers it is so. It is plain, That upon Adam's actual transgression he was deprived of the Image of God he was created in. Adam therefore having lost that spiritual and supernatural life, we need not curiously dispute, how one stab, as it were of sin could kill him; Certainly, even the least sin is present poison, and would kill immediately, if Gods grace did not prevent.

Secondly, That one sin may suddenly deprive the subject of all Grace it hath, appeareth plainly in those Apostate Angels, Did not the first sin? which was in them a thought or an act of the will, (what it was it is disputed) Did not that immediately throw them out of their divine and blessed Habitations? And by that one and first sin, was not a glorious Angel made immediately a black Devil? It is true indeed, We cannot say the Devils have original sin, In this sense, As if because when the first Angel sinned, all the rest sinned in him, as if all their wills were bound up in him; No, They all stood upon their own bottom, they all sinned personally and voluntarily by their own actual transgression, though happily it might be by imitation and consent to him that first sinned; yet for all this, we see plainly, that in every Apostate Angel, one sin was enough to deprive him of all the good he had, and to fill him with such inveterate enmity to all goodness, That the Devil, though of such natural light in his conscience, yet is not able to do one good work, or have the least holy thought.

Secondly, That one sinne may suddenly deprive the subject of all Grace it hath, appeareth plainly in those Apostate Angels, Did not the first sinne? which was in them a thought or an act of the will, (what it was it is disputed) Did not that immediately throw them out of their divine and blessed Habitations? And by that one and first sinne, was not a glorious Angel made immediately a black Devil? It is true indeed, We cannot say the Devils have original sinne, In this sense, As if because when the first Angel sinned, all the rest sinned in him, as if all their wils were bound up in him; No, They all stood upon their own bottom, they all sinned personally and voluntarily by their own actual transgression, though happily it might be by imitation and consent to him that first sinned; yet for all this, we see plainly, that in every Apostate Angel, one sinne was enough to deprive him of all the good he had, and to fill him with such inveterate enmity to all goodness, That the Devil, though of such natural light in his conscience, yet is not able to do one good work, or have the least holy thought.