Now this is the true faith of Christ which the apostle commends: faith that works through love. And what it yet lacks in love it asks that it may receive, it seeks that it may find, and knocks that it may be opened unto it. For faith achieves what the law commands. And, without the gift of God — that is, without the Holy Spirit, through whom love is shed abroad in our hearts — the law may bid but it cannot aid. Moreover, it can make of man a transgressor, who cannot then excuse himself by pleading ignorance. For appetite reigns where the love of God does not.

When, in the deepest shadows of ignorance, he lives according to the flesh with no restraint of reason — this is the primal state of man. Afterward, when “through the law the knowledge of sin” has come to man, and the Holy Spirit has not yet come to his aid — so that even if he wishes to live according to the law, he is vanquished — man sins knowingly and is brought under the spell and made the slave of sin, “for by whatever a man is vanquished, of this master he is the slave.” The effect of the knowledge of the law is that sin works in man the whole round of concupiscence, which adds to the guilt of the first transgression. And thus it is that what was written is fulfilled: “The law entered in, that the offense might abound.” This is the second state of man. — Chapter XXXI.