The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum Choosen and Children

Since God declared, that if there had been found but then righteous in Sodom, he would have spared the whole city for their sakes, may we not well suppose, if infants are perfectly innocent, that he would have spared the old world, in which there were, without doubt, many hundred thousand infants, and in general, one in every family, whose perfect innocence pleaded for its preservation? Especially when such vast care was taken to save Noah and his family (some of whom, one at least, seem to have been none of the best), that they might not be involved in that destruction. If the perfect sinlessness of infants had been a notion entertained among the people of God, in the ages next following the flood — handed down from Noah and his children, who well knew that vast multitudes of infants perished in the flood — is it likely that Eliphaz, who lived within a few generations of Shem and Noah, would have said to Job (Job 4:7), “Who ever perished, being innocent? and when were the righteous cut off? Especially, since in the same discourse (Job 5:1) he appeals to the tradition of the ancients for a confirmation of this very point (also in Job 15:7-10, and 22:15, 16.) and he mentions the destruction of the wicked by the flood, as an instance of that perishing of the wicked, which he supposes to be peculiar to them, for Job’s conviction; in which the wicked were cut down out of time, their foundation being overflown with a flood. Where it is also observable, that he speaks of such an untimeliness of death as they suffered by the flood, as one evidence of guilt; as he also does, Job 15:32, 33, “It shall be accomplished before his time; and his branch shall not be green.” But those who were destroyed by the flood in infancy, above all the rest, were cut down out of time; when instead of living above nine hundred years, according to the common period of man’s life, at that time, many were cut down before they were one year old.