The Literal Meaning of Genesis (continued)
BOOK TEN 113 punity? Yet these sins are common in childhood, although it seems that they should not be punished in children as severely as in adults, because one hopes that with the passing years, as reason begins to take hold, these children will be able to understand better the precepts pertaining to salvation and to give them willing obedience.
But I am not now talking about children who summon every effort they can by word and deed to attack truth and justice when they are opposed to their carnal and childish pleasure? of body or soul. And what is in the minds of these children except the thought of the falsehood and sin which seems ready to aid them in obtaining what attracts them or avoiding what repels them? But I am speaking of infants—not because they are frequently born of adulterous parents,>3 for we ought not to find the gifts of nature in the child worthy of blame because of the sins of the parents.°* Similarly, we cannot say that the grain ought not to ripen because it was sown by the hand of a thief; or that the sin of parents is going to plague their lives if they turn to God and mend their ways; and much less that it will plague their children if these children lead upright lives.
CHAPTER 14
Traducianism considered in the light of original sin and the practice of infant baptism.
But the age that poses a puzzling problem is that of infancy, when the soul has committed no sin of its own free will. How can the infant's soul be justified through the obedience of one Man if it is not guilty through the disobedience of another one man>?>> This is the objection of those who say that human souls are created by human parents, not without the action of the Creator, to be sure, but in a manner similar to that in which bodies are created.°° For it is not the parents who create the bodies but rather He who said, Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.°'
24. Others reply to this by saying that God gives new souls individually to human bodies so that, in spite of their being in