the crime of being born): But in the comment of Rabbi Akibah on Ecclesiastes, xii, 1, we have a story of a mother, who must have been a most determined believer in the uninheritability of sin. For having a sickly and deformed child, and resolved that it should not be thought to have been punished for any fault of its parents or ancestors, and yet having nothing else to blame the child for, she seriously and earnestly accused it before the Judge of having kicked her unmercifully during her pregnancy!!
I am firmly persuaded, that no doctrine was ever widely diffused, among various nations through successive ages, and under different religions, (such as is the doctrine of original sin, and redemption, those fundamental articles of every known religion professing to be revealed) which is not founded either in the nature of things or in the necessities of our nature. In the language of the schools,
