ist (Matt. 11:3):
"Art Thou He that art to come, or look we for another?" Therefore
even the teachers were not bound to explicit faith in Christ.

Obj. 3: Further, many gentiles obtained salvation through the
ministry of the angels, as Dionysius states (Coel. Hier. ix). Now it
would seem that the gentiles had neither explicit nor implicit faith
in Christ, since they received no revelation. Therefore it seems that
it was not necessary for the salvation of all to believe explicitly
in the mystery of Christ.

_On the contrary,_ Augustine says (De Corr. et Gratia vii; Ep. cxc):
"Our faith is sound if we believe that no man, old or young is
delivered from the contagion of death and the bonds of sin, except
by the one Mediator of God and men, Jesus Christ."

_I answer that,_ As stated above (A. 5; Q. 1, A. 8), the object of
faith includes, properly and directly, that thing through which man
obtains beatitude. Now the mystery of Christ's Incarnation and
Passion is the way by which men obtain beatitude; for it is written
(Acts 4:12): "There is no other name under heaven given to men,
whereby we must be saved." Therefore belief of some kind in the
mystery of Christ's Incarnation was necessary at all times and for
all persons, but this belief differed according to differences of
times and persons. The reason of this is that before the state of
sin, man believed, explicitly in Christ's Incarnation, in so far as
it was intended for the consummation of glory, but not as it was
intended to deliver man from sin by the Passion and Resurrection,
since man had no foreknowledge of his future sin. He does, however,
seem to have had foreknowledge of the Incarnation of Christ, from the
fact that he said (Gen. 2:24): "Wherefore a man shall leave father
and mother, and shall cleave to his wife," of which the Apostle says
(Eph. 5:32) that "this is a great sacrament . . . in Christ and the
Church," and it is incredible that the first man was ignorant about
this sacrament.

But after sin, man believed explicitly in Christ, not only as to the
Incarnation, but also as to the Passion and Resurrection, whereby the
human race is delivered from sin and death: for they would not, else,
have foreshadowed Christ's Passion by certain sacrifices both before
and after the Law, the meaning of which sacrifices was known by the
learned explicitly, while the simple folk, under the veil of those
sacrifices, believed them to be ordained by God in reference to