Before Adam Was, We Are?

I found the following at Prophezei:

By the hypostatical union of the two natures in the person of Jesus Christ, our humanity as fallen in Adam was exalted again to a new and imperishable divine life. That the race might be saved, it was necessary that a work should be wrought not beyond it, but in it; and this inward salvation to be effective must lay hold of the race itself in its organic, universal character, before it could extend to individuals, since in no other form was it possible for it to cover fully the breadth and depth of the ruin that lay in its way. Such an inward salvation of the race required that it should be joined in a living way with the divine nature itself, as represented by the everlasting Word or Logos, the fountain of all created light and life. The Word accordingly became flesh, that is assumed humanity into union with itself. It was not an act, whose force was to stop in the person of one man himself to be transplanted soon afterwards to heaven. Nor was it intended merely to serve as the necessary basis of the great work of atonement, the power of which might be applied to the world subsequently in the way of outward imputation. It has this use indeed, but not as its first and most comprehensive necessity. The object of the incarnation was to couple the human nature in real union with the Logos, as a permanent source of life. It resulted from the presence of sin only… that the union thus formed called the Saviour to suffer. As the bearer of a fallen humanity he must descend with it to the lowest depths of sorrow and pain, in order that he might triumph with it again in the power of his own imperishable life. In all this, he acted for himself and for the race he represented at the same time. For it was no external relation simply, that he sustained to this last. He was himself the race. Humanity dwelt in his person as the second Adam, under a higher form than ever it carried in the first. — John Williamson Nevin