The blessed Apostle, when he asks about things known, when he inquires into things manifest, plainly rebukes and chides those who corrupt the divine words by their own interpretation, and thence conceive supports for crimes from that whence they ought to have drawn lessons of virtues. For thus he began today: 'What then shall we say? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?' (Rom. 6). Above he had said, brethren: 'Where sin abounded, grace did more abound'; and therefore he began thus, and, in place of that divine and singular teaching authority, he shares himself with the unlearned as though by way of question, so that he may answer with full erudition the things that belong to heavenly prudence. For if, where sin abounded, grace did more abound — what then shall we say?
Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? If mercy is inclined toward the offenders, if grace is plentiful for sinners, if divine bounty is a friend to the unjust, surely if future goods are acquired by present evils, why for us the arduous path of virtues, why the hard labour of obtaining justice, why the ceaseless torment of preserving innocence among the wicked? Let human crimes be increased, that the heavenly goodness may overflow; let us do evil, as he said, that good may come (Rom. 3); let us continue in sin, that grace may abound. To these things, brethren, the same Apostle who asks himself answers: 'God forbid. For we that are dead to sin, how shall we still live therein?' When he says 'God forbid,' he has thus execrated the understanding and the sense of the unwise:
since the physician profits not the wound but the cure and health; he takes joy not in the rottenness, nor in the diseases, but in health alone. So too God, who according to the greatness of the wound applied the greatness and vigour of the medicine, bestowed grace not upon sin but upon man; He poured out the shower of His mercy not to multiply but to blot out offences. Let no one, no one, so congratulate himself on his disease that he should wish to remain in the wound. He is ungrateful to the physician, an enemy to the cure, who ever burns to be treated and never desires here to be healed; and thus wishes God's grace to overflow through his sins, so that he desires his sins to be heaped up for himself. Wretched is he who by such a will strives to be guilty through pardon.
This madness, brethren, is to be fled, to be fled, which even after the cure is held captive by love of diseases; for relapsing sickness is more often lethal. But as to what he said, 'For we that are dead to sin,' he here speaks a figure of the present time; for he said that we are dead to sin, he did not say that sin is now wholly dead to us; because although sin itself, as to the act of the deed, is dead in the saints and faithful, yet it lives, and still rages unto our death. But then sin itself shall die in us, when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, and the word shall have been fulfilled which is written: 'O death, where is thy sting? O hell, where is thy victory?'
'Now the sting of death is sin' (1 Cor. 15). But he lives to sin who, as he says in what follows, serves its concupiscences; and the wretched man is enslaved to its stings, who yields to vices, who succumbs to crimes in unhappy and continual captivity, who reckons that which is of sin to be of nature, and uses the disease which is an accident as though it were the work and benefit of the Creator. And therefore, to convict the ignorance of such, he added, saying: 'Or know you not, that all we who are baptized in Christ Jesus, are baptized in his death? For we are buried together with him by baptism into death.' Let the faithful hear, and understand: just as the three-day burial of the Lord is figured by the threefold immersion in baptism;
so that they may rejoice to have risen with Christ, and, though not yet in body, yet already in newness of life; and that the whole man may be the dwelling-place of virtues, who before had been the receptacle of vices. That, as he said, 'like as Christ rose from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in newness of life.' Christ refers whatever is of His own virtues to the glory of the Father; and man, whose nothing is his own, labours to claim for himself that he rose through Christ. But as to what he said, 'Let us walk in newness of life,' it confirms what we said above, that though not yet in this body, yet already wholly changed in life he may walk; that he may understand himself, and may have dominion over the elements, who until now through ignorance was serving the elements;
let him bestow his own through glory, who before basely stole what was another's; and let him who practised the unlawful things of the flesh despise even bodily liberties; and let him who until now was impiously striving to extinguish innocence, more gloriously die himself for the sake of innocence. And what more? If from the old man he has now been made new, let him change the whirlpool of vices into the fountain of virtues. And unto the end of the reading the blessed Apostle presses this home, this he demonstrates: that he can live with Christ, he can reign with Christ, who follows the innocence of the risen Christ, imitates His life, and strives to fulfil His holiness. As to what he says: 'That the body of sin may be destroyed' — let it be destroyed, brethren, in act, not in substance;
in deed, not in figure; because he wishes man to perish to sin, not to God, who says: 'Reckon yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God.' And he strives with all mercy, brethren, to restore man to heavenly liberty, who says: 'Let not sin reign in your mortal body.' And again: 'Let not sin have dominion over you.' He did not say, Let it not come to you; he did not say, Let it not provoke, let it not titillate; but, Let it not reign, let it not have dominion. Let it contend unto the glory of the conqueror, let it fight and fall unto the triumph of the victor; and let the impious dominion of sin at last grieve to be trodden down in all security by those who once were its slaves; and let the cruel tyrant groan to be subjected beneath the feet of his own captives;