12 So then, just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all people because all sinned— 13 for before the law was given, sin was in the world, but there is no accounting for sin when there is no law. 14 Yet death reigned from Adam until Moses even over those who did not sin in the same way that Adam (who is a type of the coming one) transgressed. 15 But the gracious gift is not like the transgression. For if the many died through the transgression of the one man, how much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one man Jesus Christ multiply to the many! 16 And the gift is not like the one who sinned. For judgment, resulting from the one transgression, led to condemnation, but the gracious gift from the many failures led to justification.

116 I replied, ‘But this is my point, my first point and my last: how much better it would have been if the earth had never produced Adam at all, or, since it has done so, if he had been restrained from sinning! 117 For what good does it do us all to live in misery now and have nothing but punishment to expect after death? 118 O Adam, what have you done? Your sin was not your fall alone; it was ours also, the fall of all your descendants. 119 What good is the promise of immortality to us, when we have committed mortal sins; 120 or the hope of eternity, in the wretched and futile state to which we have come;