reason,
that we were exiled from a happy state, only for the fault and
personal disobedience of our first parents....

"Our Saviour seems to approve the doctrine of pre-existence in his
answer to the disciples, when they interrogate him thus about the man
born blind,[226] 'Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that
he was born blind?' It is clear that this question would have been
ridiculous and impertinent if the disciples had not believed that the
man born blind had sinned before his corporal birth, and consequently
that he had existed in another state long ere he was born on earth.
Our Saviour's answer is remarkable, 'Neither hath this man sinned nor
his parents, but that the works of God might be manifested in him.'
Jesus Christ could not mean that neither this man nor his parents had
ever committed any sin, for this can be said of no mortal; but the
meaning is that it was neither for the sins committed by this man in a
state of pre-existence, nor for those of his parents, that he was born
blind; but that he was deprived of sight from his birth, by a
particular dispensation of Providence, in order to manifest, one day,
the power of God in our Saviour. Our Lord, therefore, far from blaming
and redressing this error in his disciples, as he did those concerning
his temporal kingdom, answers in a way that seems to suppose with
them, and confirm them in the doctrine of pre-existence. If he had
looked upon this opinion as a capital error, would it have been
consonant or compatible with his eternal wisdom to have passed it
over so lightly and thus tacitly authorised it by such silence? On the
contrary, does not his silence manifestly indicate that he looked upon
this doctrine, which was a received maxim of the Jewish Church, as the
true explanation of original sin?

"Since God says that he loved Jacob and detested Esau ere they were
born, and before they had done good or evil in this mortal life, since
God's love and hatred depend upon the moral dispositions of the
creature, ... it follows clearly that if God hated Esau, type of the
reprobate, and loved Jacob, type of the elect, before their natural
birth, they must have pre-existed in another state.

"If it be said that all these texts are obscure, that pre-existence is
largely drawn from them by induction, and that this belief is not
revealed in Scripture by express words, I answer that the doctrines of
the immortality of the soul are nowhere revealed, least