But as humanity and common sense have gained ground this hideous tenet has passed away, and few are now found who do not sacrifice consistency to humanity, and allow that in spite of their total depravity, all infants go directly to heaven and are forever blessed. Formerly some would confine this favor to the “elect infants,” others to the infants of “elect parents,” but few are found at this day who venture to teach that God sends even one new-born being to eternal misery for Adam's sin.
The difficulties not removed but rather increased by these methods.
But the difficulties involved in the Augustine theory do not lie in the mode by which it came to pass that all men begin existence with depraved natures, but in the fact, that God, having power to create all minds as perfect as Adam's, and also the power to regenerate all, has chosen not to do so, and thus has preferred the consequent sin and misery to the happiness resulting from making perfect minds.
This grand difficulty stands entirely unrelieved by the above methods. Nay more, they all serve but to increase a sense of the folly and enormity of the awful result, and to present our Maker as the cruel cause of [pg 017] all our miseries, and the fullest and most awful realization of our idea of a perfectly malevolent being.[2]
Illustration of the Augustinian Theory.
The following illustrates the case, though but very imperfectly, inasmuch as any finite temporal evils are as nothing compared to the eternal torments to which are assigned all of our race, whose ruined nature is not regenerated before death.
A father places a poison in the way of his wife, forbids her to taste it, but knows she will do so and that the consequence will be that all his children will be born blind.
Then he places the children thus deprived of sight, in a dreadful morass filled with savage beasts and awful pitfalls, with a narrow and difficult path of escape, which it is certain no one will ever find without sight. The consequence is, that a large part of his children sink into the pitfalls and perish.
Then he justifies himself in these ways. To some he says, I have a right to treat my children as I please, and I allow no one to question me on the matter. All that I do is right and benevolent, and you must not inquire how or why.
To all the rest he says, I am not the author of this evil, it is the mother of the children who took the poison when I forbade her to do so. She either made herself blind by taking the poison, and then transmitted the evil to her children as a hereditary boon, or she had “a common nature” with her children and ruined all together, or they all “sinned in her” and [pg 018] became blind before they were born. And so I am not “the author of sin” in this matter.