So you see that people can prevent these disorders, and
therefore it must be someone's fault if they come. Now, whose fault
is it? You dare not lay the blame on God. And yet you do lay the
fault on God if you say that it is no MAN'S fault that children die
of fever. But I know what the answer to that will be: "We do not
accuse God--it is the fault of the fall, Adam's curse which brought
death and disease into the world." That is a common answer, and the
very one I want to hear. What? is it just to say, as many do, that
all the diseases which ever tormented poor little innocent children
all over the world, came from Adam's sinning six thousand years ago,
and yet that it is unfair to say that one little child's fever came
from his parents' keeping a filthy house a month ago? That is
swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat--that God should be just
in punishing all mankind for Adam's sin, and yet unjust in punishing
one little child for its parents' sin. If the one is just the other
must be just too, I think. If you believe the one, why not believe
the other? Why? Because Adam's curse and "original" sin, as people
call it, is a good and pleasant excuse for laying our sins and
miseries at Adam's door; but the same rule is not so pleasant in the
case of filth and fever, when it lays other people's miseries at our
door.
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