Romans 6:21

What are the fruits of sin? Learning from them what a good life is we are ashamed by the way we lived so wickedly before. And it is not only that the opinion of the pagans is wicked but also the heresy which is found most of all in Phrygia, to which only a morally corrupt person would belong, in which there is no sacrament and Christian piety has died out. Behold a freedom full of sins and bound by wickedness, whose deeds have only shame as their reward and whose end is death! Our departure is the end of this life and its deeds, and either death or life will succeed it. But here the word death has a double meaning, for it shifts from one kind of death to another.

So great was the slavery, that even the recollection of it now makes you ashamed; but if the recollection makes one ashamed, the reality would much more. And so you gained now in two ways, in having been freed from the shame; and also in having come to know the condition you were in; just as then ye were injured in two ways, in doing things deserving shame, and in not even knowing to be ashamed. And this is worse than the former. Yet still ye kept in a state of servitude. Having then proved most abundantly the harm of what took place then from the shame of it, he comes to the thing in question. Now what is this thing? "For the end of those things is death." Since then shame seems to be no such serious evil, he comes to what is very fearful, I mean death; though in good truth what he had before mentioned were enough. For consider how exceeding great the mischief must be, inasmuch as, even when freed from the vengeance due to it, they could not get free of the shame. What wages then, he says, do you expect from the reality, when from the bare recollection, and that too when you are freed from the vengeance, you hide your face and blush, though under such grace as you are! But God's side is far otherwise.

"What fruit, therefore," he says, "did you have then in those things of which you are now ashamed? For their end is death." Divine Scripture teaches that there is fruit both of good things and of evil, as the Savior himself says in the Gospels: "Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree evil, and its fruit evil. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruits, nor an evil tree good fruits." In these words the purpose and will of a man seems to be called the tree, either good or evil, while his works are the fruit. If anyone turns his mind and purpose to righteousness, he is without doubt ashamed, and he himself brands himself for his former deeds which he did while placed under sin, because "their end is death." But I ask, what death? It is certain that it is not this common death. For no one is converted to righteousness after death, or is ashamed for past deeds done badly. What then is it? Does he perhaps seem to be speaking of the death of sin, since "the soul that sins, it shall die"? Or can it rather be understood that he is speaking of that death by which we die with Christ to sin, and put an end to vices and crimes, so that on this account he seems to have said that "their end is death"?