They are liable to wasting disease, to racking pain, to the agonies of thirst and hunger, to feebleness of limbs, to privation of bodily senses, and to vexing assaults of unclean spirits. Surely it is incumbent on us to show how it is compatible with justice that infants suffer all these things without any evil of their own as the procuring cause. For it would be impious to say, either that these things take place without God's knowledge, or that He cannot resist those who cause them, or that He unrighteously does these things, or permits them to be done.
Man is, indeed, an animal, but an animal endowed with reason, though mortal.
In his members dwells a reasonable soul, which in these severe afflictions is enduring a penalty. Perhaps I am told, in answer to this, that the bodies are the cause of these imperfections. We, of course, cannot say and ought not to believe such things. Tell us, therefore, what we ought to believe and to say in order to vindicate from this difficulty the theory that for each individual body a new soul is specially created. In my books on Free Will, already referred to, I have said something, not in regard to the variety of capacities in different souls, but, at least in regard to the pains which infant children suffer in this life.