Theological Theses · §1738 · Louis Le Blanc de Beaulieu

Many in Rome grant the Reformed that God could not create man without it, so pure nature is a fiction

Again, as can be gathered from what has been said, a good many in the Roman Church grant the Reformed that original righteousness, whatever it should finally be called, natural or supernatural, was a perfection so owed to innocent man that God could not have created him without it without compromising his wisdom and goodness.

They grant too that the state of man in a purely natural condition, as the ordinary run of the Roman school describes it, in which man is supposed to be no sinner and yet empty of righteousness, prone to vice and struggling with a concupiscence that fights right reason, is a mere fiction, something God's goodness, justice and wisdom forbid ever to exist in reality.

Latin

XLV. Praeterea, ut ex dictis colligere est, in Ecclesia Romana non pauci Reformatis concedunt justitiam Originalem, qualiscunque tandem dicenda sit, seu naturalis, seu supernaturalis, fuisse perfectionem ita homini innocenti debitam, ut salva sapientia & bonitate divina, non potuerit absque illa creari: adeoque statum hominis in puris naturalibus, qualem describit Scholae Romanae vulgus, & in quo supponitur homo non peccator, & tamen justitia vacuus, & in vitia pronus, ac concupiscentia rationi rectae repugnanti laborans, esse aliquid mere fictitium; & quod bonitas, justitia, & sapientia divina in rerum natura unquam dari prohibent.

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