sufferings of children," he says,
"believe me, I am in a state of terrible perplexity. I have no wish
whatever to speak only of the punishment inflicted on them after this
life by eternal damnation to which they are of necessity condemned if
they have left their bodies without receiving the sacrament of Christ,
but of the pains they endure in this present life, under our very
eyes. Did I wish to examine these sufferings, time would fail me
rather than instances thereof; they languish in sickness, are torn by
pain, tortured by hunger and thirst, weakened in their organs,
deprived of their senses, and sometimes tormented by unclean beings. I
should have to show how they can with justice be subjected to such
things, at a time when they are yet without sin. It cannot be said
that they suffer unknown to God or that God can do nothing against
their tormentors, nor that He can create or allow unjust punishment.
When men suffer, we say they are being punished for their crimes, but
this can be applied only to adults. As children have in them no sin
capable of meriting so terrible a punishment, tell me what answer can
be given?"

The answer, indeed, cannot be made that original sin is capable of
explaining this unequal retribution; but then, ought not the very
absurdity of the consequences due to such sin to justify one in
refusing to examine this argument? What soul could admit that the
innocent should be punished for the guilty? Does human justice, in
spite of its imperfection, punish the offspring of criminals? Can the
millions of descendants of the mythical Adam have been chastised for a
crime in which they have had no share? And would this chastisement,
multiplied millions of times without the faintest reason, never have
stirred the conscience of the Church? Saint Augustine could not make
up his mind to accuse God of injustice; so, to avoid disputing the
truth of the Christian teaching in which he wholly believed, he
invented his famous theory of "generation," often called
"translation."

Men suffer because of original sin, he says, but it would not be just
of God to punish them for this, had they not shared therein[12];
this, indeed, they have done, for the soul of a man was not created
directly, by God, at the moment of the birth of the body; it is a
branch taken from the soul of his father, as the latter's comes from
that of his parents; thus, ascending the genealogical chain, we see
that all souls issue from that of t