St Paul confronts us with a difficult teaching but also great hope.  A baby seems innocent.  How can it be that sooner or later we all go off the rails by committing sin – choosing to do something we know to be wrong?  St Paul explains this in terms of ‘original sin’.  Our first ancestors chose to disobey God. That was their own choice and responsibility – what we call ‘actual’ or ‘personal’ sin.  However, it had unintended consequences – a weakening, to use today’s terminology, in the human genome.  This is what we call ‘original sin’.  It means that however innocent we may seem as babies, our resistance to temptation is weakened so that once we reach an age to know the difference between right and wrong all of us eventually make the wrong choice – only Our Lord and his Blessed Mother excepted.  The hope St Paul offers us is that just as sin came into the world through one man, so salvation comes through one person – Jesus Christ.  By granting us a share in the life of God through the gift of grace in baptism Our Lord frees us from original sin (and actual sin if we are old enough) and renews this gift through the sacrament of penance as often as we ask him.