he common father of mankind:
Adam.[13]

So that Saint Augustine preferred to deny the creation of souls and to
derive them from the soul of Adam, through a successive progeny of
human vehicles, rather than to allow God to be charged with injustice.
We are not called upon to demonstrate the falsity of his hypothesis,
which the Church has been forced to condemn, though without replacing
it with a better theory; all the same, if human souls suffer from a
sin in which they have not individually and consciously
participated--and such is the case, for even granting that translation
be a fact, these souls existed in Adam only potentially, as
unconscious, undeveloped germs, when the sin took place--their
punishment is none the less arbitrary and revolting. Saint Augustine
believed he was justifying Providence; he succeeded only in deceiving
his own reason and revolted sense of justice, but he preferred by
suggestion to deceive himself to such an extent as to believe in the
reality of his desire rather than enrol himself against the Church.

In order to reconcile divine Justice with the injustice of punishing
all for the fault of one alone, the theologians also said: "Adam
sinned, his sin has been distributed over the whole of his race, but
God, by sending down his son, instituted baptism; and the waters of
the sacrament wash the stains of original sin from the souls of men."

This reply is as childish as the former. As a matter of fact,
according to the Church, about four thousand years intervened between
the sin of Adam and the coming of the Redeemer, and so only after that
interval did the souls of the just, who were waiting in the Life
Beyond for the coming of the Messiah, enter Paradise!

Would not this delay in itself be an injustice? Ought not baptism to
have been instituted immediately after the sin, and should it not have
been placed within the reach of all? Besides, do we not see that even
in our days, two thousand years after the coming of the Christ,
millions of human beings are born and die without ever having heard of
the existence of this sacrament. This part of the argument is too
puerile to dwell upon at length, but we will spend a few moments on it
to show definitely how powerless this theory is to explain evil.

Before teaching the doctrine of "Limbo," the Church accepted the idea
of the damnation of children who died without being baptised, as we
have just seen in the case of Saint Augustine.[14] Bossuet