II. To the Principal Arguments

16. To the first [n.2] I say that when a man adopts he does so through a new act of will, and so ‘adopting’ is ‘opting into inheritance’ by a new willing; but God does not adopt by a new willing; he does so by producing a new effect, namely grace. Therefore although divine predestining is a certain pre-ordaining to inheritance by act of will and a certain adopting into it, yet predestination is not properly called an adopting; only the conferring of grace (which corresponds to a new willing in someone adopted) is called adoption. So the inference ‘God predestines, therefore God adopts’ does not hold, but one must add that he confers grace on the one predestined (as on one who was sometime foreign).

17. To the second [n.3] I say that a lack of dignity is a mark of the supplying of dignity; because he who is foreign cannot receive a dignity unless he is adopted into an inheritance, and his being sometime foreign is a mark of his lack of dignity.

18. To the third [n.4] I concede that a property, when consequent to nature, is predicated of Christ, for he is natural son of Mary as well as just and pleasing to God. But ‘being adopted’ does not state a property of Christ’s created nature, because Christ was never foreign in that nature to his paternal inheritance; it states rather a property of a damned and crooked nature.

19. To the contrary [n.18]: foreignness in Christ is only denied because of the habitual grace of Christ, for by it alone, and not because of personal union, does he have a right to his paternal inheritance; for if that union were to lack habitual grace, Christ could fail, in his human nature, to have a right to the inheritance.

20. But [contra n.19], if this habitual grace were conferred on Christ’s human nature in the first moment of existence, then the supposit would truly be an adoptive son by paternal inheritance; therefore in this case too [n.19] he will not, by reason of not being foreign, be denied to be an adoptive son, because the lack that would then have existed of a right to the inheritance would now exist, though in the proper supposit.