Augustine of Hippo

For what is more fruitful or more filled with the truest confession than that passage in one of your letters in which you humbly bewail the fact that our nature did not remain as it was created but was debased by the father of the human race? In your letter you said, "But I am poor and sorrowful," I, that am still hardened in the filth of an earthly image, having in me more of the first Adam than of the second, still give my attention to the senses of the flesh and to earthly acts. How shall I dare to depict myself when earthly corruption proves that I deny my heavenly image? I blush to paint what I am, I do not dare to paint what I am not. But what good will it do me, wretched as I am, "to hate iniquity and to love virtue," when I do rather what I hate and am too sluggish to strive to do what I love? I am torn apart, fighting with myself in an interior warfare, while "the spirit lusts against the flesh and the flesh against the spirit," and "the law of my body under the law of sin fights against the law of my mind." Unhappy am I who have absorbed the poisonous taste of that hateful tree, not the wood of the cross! The ancestral poison hardens in me, from Adam the father, who by his fall has undone the whole race. These and many other things you said, groaning over your misery and expecting the redemption of your body, knowing yourself saved by hope, if not yet in fact.