Respuesta a un tratado que escrivio un docto predicante de la religion reformada (Response to a Treatise Written by an Erudite Preacher of the Reformed Religion)

The main foundation that you propose for your doctrine consists of the sin of Adam, in which you believe sin was perpetrated by all of the human species, which was contained in Adam, and of the sole principle that human nature, ever since the posterity of Adam, was always corrupted and could never use the liberty which Adam lost (to choose the good) but as a result of the corruption, all its inclination tends to dishonesty, so that all that it can do is no less than to sin with a natural inability to obey God, our Lord, and give satisfaction to Divine Justice. [ . . . ]

Monsieur, these things are sufficiently good for the Christians, but the Jews do not accept them, because the sin of Adam did not corrupt anyone else except Adam, so that the sin is a personal act which only will be committed by the one who does it against the commandment of God, and the children of Adam at the time when he committed the sin were still not present in the world, and consequently they could not sin with him, and just as grace is not hereditary, disgrace cannot be inherited, if the sons of Adam did not persist with the sins of Adam.

But you will say that all men were in Adam, as their origin, because at that time Adam represented the whole of the human species. But this subtlety has no real substance, nor any solid basis in the sacred scripture, nor in natural reasoning. It is quite certain that the rational soul, which is the principal constituent part of man, could not be contained in Adam because it was a spirit created out of nothing by the Lord who infused it into the body at the moment of generation. Hence the impossibility of it having been contained in Adam who did not have the capacity of producing the rational soul, so that it could not participate in the corruption of Adam, by virtue of the generation since it does not come from Adam but from God who created it pure and clean without sin or blemish.

Human flesh, as we well know, had its origin in Adam, but the flesh before being animated is not capable of involvement in sin, because sin can only be connected with the rational creature, and the flesh, before being animated, was not a rational creature, and consequently it was impossible for it to be involved in the sin of Adam nor in the corruption either of the soul or the body.