3547. THAT INFANTS, ALTHOUGH THEY GROW UP IN HEAVEN: ARE STILL SINFUL AND IMPURE, AND IN THEMSELVES NOTHING BUT EVIL. It was the perverse opinion of certain spirits, that infants who grew up in heaven were pure, because there was in them no actual evil, as in adults on earth. But there was a certain one who had died an infant and grown up in heaven, who because he thought otherwise, and perhaps because he was ignorant of his own evil, was remitted, like others, among spirits, and then spoke with them on the subject of infants, saying that they were made up, as it were, of hereditary evil, so that they were nothing but evil, yet still with some diversity, according to the evil successively transmitted by descent from parents, which continually bursts forth, and, as being the evil of lusts, continually suggests falsities. Wherefore they can never be perfected to eternity, or an absolute correspondence be given, because the stock of evil incessantly buds, from whence are abundant actual evils in the life of the body, excited by hereditary evils, of which the diversities exist according to the actual evils of the parents successively transmitted. Hence it is that the evils of some families may be distinguished from those of others. Good therefore can never [from this source] be implanted in infants, because they cannot be good and evil at the same time; but all their good is from the Lord. - 1748, October 12.