Every human being is born into all evil, and thus inclines toward every evil, due to the evil of heredity acquired in succession by parents even from the first, but while this evil does condemn everyone to hell, and this to eternity, yet by the mercy of the Lord they are freed from hell, because the evil is not their own. Such is the case with little children who had not reached adulthood. But those who do evil after that age, when the faculty of thinking and judging has also matured, draw forth an evil out of that ocean of evils that is inborn with them, and make it theirs by actual practice, and thus acquire it. In this way they develop their own natural character agreeing with the evils acquired from the hereditary store and at the same time from their own added to it-those are the evils that torment them in the other life. 1748, 2 July.