Читать книгу An Appeal to the People in Behalf of Their Rights as Authorized Interpreters of the Bible - Catharine Esther Beecher - Страница 30

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“How can so many thousands of souls which leave the bodies of unbaptized infants be with any equity condemned, if they were [pg 025]newly created and introduced into these bodies for no previous sins of their own, but by the mere will of him who created them to animate these bodies, and foreknew that each of them, for no fault of his own, would die unbaptized? Since, then, we can not say that God either makes souls sinful by compulsion, or punishes them when innocent, and yet are obliged to confess that the souls of the little ones are condemned if they die unbaptized, I beseech you tell me how can this opinion be defended, by which it is believed that souls are not all derived from that one first man, but are newly created for each particular body?”

Thus Augustine supposed that he escaped the charge of making God the author of sin by teaching that God created all the souls of the race in Adam, so that Adam's sin ruined the nature of himself and his posterity all at one stroke, while it made it right and just to send all unbaptized infants to eternal misery.

The next extract is introduced to verify the statement made as to the Princeton mode of making man the author of his own depraved nature. This mode is the one adopted by most theologians of the Old School Presbyterian church. It is thus set forth by Dr. Hodge, of Princeton, in his Commentary on Romans: