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If any one finds a difficulty in understanding why other sins do not
alter human nature as it was altered by the transgression of those first
human beings, so that on account of it this nature is subject to the
great corruption we feel and see, and to death, and is distracted and
tossed with so many furious and contending emotions, and is certainly
far different from what it was before sin, even though it were then
lodged in an animal body, if, I say, any one is moved by this, he
ought not to think that that sin was a small and light one because it
was committed about food, and that not bad nor noxious, except because
it was forbidden; for in that spot of singular felicity God could not
have created and planted any evil thing. But by the precept He gave,
God commended obedience, which is, in a sort, the mother and
guardian of all the virtues in the reasonable creature, which was so
created that submission is advantageous to it, while the fulfillment of
its own will in preference to the Creator's is destruction. And as
this commandment enjoining abstinence from one kind of food in the midst
of great abundance of other kinds was so easy to keep, so light a
burden to the memory, and, above all, found no resistance to its
observance in lust, which only afterwards sprung up as the penal
consequence of sin, the iniquity of violating it was all the greater in
proportion to the ease with which it might have been kept.
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