“Would it not be deemed the summit of injustice among men, if any
one should cast an innocent son, for the sin of a father, into
those flames, even if they endured but a short time? How much more
so if eternal? Truly I confess this would be unjust in men,
because they are forbidden to avenge even their own real injuries.
But it is not so in God, who says, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will
repay;’ and again, in another place, ‘I will kill and I will make
alive.’ Now God commits no injustice towards his creature in
whatever way he treats him—whether he assigns him to punishment or
to life.... In whatever way God may wish to treat his creature, he
can be accused of no injustice; nor can any thing be called evil
in any way if it is done according to his will. Nor can we in any
other way distinguish good from evil, except by noticing what is
agreeable to his will.”
Another celebrated Catholic theologian, “the good Pascal,” thus disparages
our natural sense of justice as “wretched,” and of no account before this
awful doctrine.
“What can be more contrary to the rules of our _wretched justice_
than to damn eternally an infant incapable of volition, for an
offense in which he seems to have had no share, and which was
committed six thousand years before he was born? Certainly nothing
strikes us more rudely than this doctrine; and yet without this
mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible
to ourselves.”
Thus it is seen that Pascal concedes it as a truth that infants are to be
eternally damned for offenses in which they “seem to have no share,” and
that our sense of justice, which revolts from it, is “_wretched_.”
The Andover Theological Seminary was the first one established in New
England for educating ministers, and for nearly half a century Dr. Woods
filled the leading theological chair. The following is introduced, from
the CONFLICT OF AGES, to verify the statement that the Catholic mode of
mystery and sovereignty was the method adopted by him in training the
clergy of New England on this subject.
“He [Dr. Woods] expressly teaches that there is in the nature of
man, anterior to knowledge or choice, a proneness or propensity to
sin, which is in its own nature sinful, ‘the essence of moral
evil, the sum of all that is vile and hateful.’ He also teaches
that God inflicts this ‘tremendous calamity’ on all men for the
sin of one man. ‘This,’ he says, ‘has been the belief of the
church in all ages.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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