Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

Note VII.
avoid, will not so easily throw them into hell for what they
could not avoid. p. 14. To condemn infants to hell for
the fault of another, is to deal worse with them than God
did to the very devils, who did not perish but by an act of
their own most perfect choice. This, besides the formality
of injustice or cruelty, does add and suppose a circumstance
of a strange, ungentle contrivance. For, because it cannot
be supposed that God should damn infants or innocents
without cause, it finds out this way, that God, to bring
His purposes to pass, should create a guilt for them, or
bring them into an inevitable condition of being guilty by
a way of His own inventing. For, if He did not make
such an agreement with Adam, He beforehand knew that
Adam would forfeit all, and therefore that unavoidably all
his
posterity would be surprised. This is to make pretences,
and to invent justifications and reasons of His proceedings,
which are indeed all one as if they were not. p.
l(i.
" Wilt Thou slay the
Abraham was confident with God,
righteous with the wicked ? shall not the Judge of all
"
the earth do right ? And if it be unrighteous to slay the
righteous with the wicked, it is also unjust to slay the
"
righteous for the wicked. Ferretne ulla civitas laborem
istiusmodi legis, ut condemneturfilius aut nepos, si pater
aut avus deliquissent ; It were an intolerable law, and
no community would be governed by it, that the father or
grandfather should sin, and the son or nephew should be
punished." p. 39.
No one can, of course, deny the force of these argu
ments, resting, as they do, upon the simple maxim of
common sense and common justice,
that no man is respon
sible for another s sins. The mistake in s
Jeremy Taylor
mind lies in his conception
of the doctrine which he is at
tacking. He supposes
the doctrine of original
sin to assert
mankind s desert of eternal punishment for Adam s sin, in
an ordinary and matter-of-fact sense and he treats all the
;
consequences of this doctrine the Divine anger with infants
and the like as if they took place
in the literal sense m
which they would take place, supposing a present visible
execution of this sentence, in this present and visible state
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