But
although end, cause, and effect successively advance as three things,
still in the love of procreating, and inwardly in all the causes, and in
the effect itself, they make a one. They are the efficient causes only,
which advance through times, because in nature; while the end or will,
or love, remains continually the same: for ends advance in nature
through times without time; but they cannot come forth and manifest
themselves, until the effect or use exists and becomes a subject; before
this, the love could love only the advance, but could not secure and fix
itself. That there are periods of such progressions, and that creation
is thereby preserved in the state foreseen and provided for, is well
known. But the series of the love of infants from its greatest to its
least, thus to the boundary in which it subsists or ceases, is
retrograde; since it is according to the decrease of innocence in the
subject, and also on account of the periods.
402. XIII. THE LOVE OF INFANTS DESCENDS, AND DOES NOT ASCEND. That it
descends from generation to generation, or from sons and daughters to
grandsons and granddaughters, and does not ascend from these to fathers
and mothers of families, is well known.
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