obedience incurred
all these penalties of crime.

To whom we must reply[76] that there are three states of man to
envisage: one, that of Adam before his sin, in which, though free from
death and still unstained by any sin, he could yet have within him the
will to sin; the second, that in which he might have suffered change had
he chosen to abide steadfastly in the commands of God, for then it could
have been further granted him not only not to sin or wish to sin, but to
be incapable of sinning or of the will to transgress. The third state is
the state after sin, into which man needs must be pursued by death and
sin and the sinful will. Now the points of extreme divergence between
these states are the following: one state would have been for Adam a
reward if he had chosen to abide in God's laws; the other was his
punishment because he would not abide in them; for in the former state
there would have been no death nor sin nor sinful will, in the latter
there was both death and sin and every desire to transgress, and a
general tendency to ruin and a condition helpless to render possible a
rise after the Fall. But that middle state from which actual death or
sin was absent, but the power for both remained, is situate between the
other two.

Each one, then, of these three states somehow supplied to Christ a cause
for his corporeal nature; thus His assumption of a mortal body in order
to drive death far from the human race belongs properly to that state
which was laid on man by way of punishment after Adam's sin, whereas the
fact that there was in Christ no sinful will is borrowed from that state
which might have been if Adam had not surrendered his will to the frauds
of the tempter. There remains, then, the third or middle state, to wit,
that which was before death had come and while the will to sin might yet
be present. In this state, therefore, Adam was able to eat and drink,
digest the food he took, fall asleep, and perform all the other
functions which always belonged to him as man, though they were allowed
and brought with them no pain of death.

There is no doubt that Christ was in all points thus conditioned; for He
ate and drank and discharged the bodily function of the human body. For
we must not think that Adam was at the first subject to such need that
unless he ate he could not have lived, but rather that, if he had taken
food from every tr