should yet reside, not in dark caverns and holes
of the earth, but in the sweet light and pure air of the upper world. Well
done, noble Franciscan! we honour thee for thy sweet fancy! Surely thou
wert not, like other monks, made so altogether fierce by dark keeping,
that thou couldest not delight to see in God's blessed, beautiful world, a
smiling infant!

Others insisted, that unbaptized infants would be condemned to become
philosophers, and turn out the authors of great discoveries. This may seem
a terrible damnation to some persons; but, for our part, if we had been of
that famous council, it is likely we should have been in favour of this
decree. As the most agreeable punishment we could imagine, we should have
been for condemning them, like the fallen angels of Paradise Lost, to
torment themselves with reasonings high,--

"Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,
Fix'd fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute."

And if any of them had been found to possess no very great aptitude for
such speculations, then, rather than they should find "no end in wandering
mazes lost," we should have condemned them to turn poets and "build the
lofty rhyme."

So completely did the spirit of a blind exegesis triumph over the light of
reason in the time of Augustine, that even Pelagius and his followers
excluded unbaptized infants from the kingdom of heaven, because our
Saviour had declared that a man could not enter therein, except he be born
of water and of the Spirit. It is true, they did not banish them into "the
fire prepared for the devil and his angels," nor into Limbo, nor into dark
holes of the earth; on the contrary, they admitted them to the joys of
eternal life, but not into the kingdom of heaven.(187) Thus, the Pelagians
brought "poor little infants" as near to the kingdom of heaven as
possible, without doing too great violence to the universal orthodoxy of
their time.

But as we cannot, like the Church of Rome, determine the fate of infants
by a decree, we must take some little pains to ascertain how it has been
determined by the Supreme Ruler of the world. For this purpose we shall
first show, that there is suffering in the world which is not a punishment
for sin, and then declare the great ends, or final causes, of all natural
evil.

Section IV.

The true ends, or final causes, of natural evil.

We have often wondered that grave divines should declare tha