Anselm's second reply is to argue that the strictness of God's judgment is actually not out of line with our own moral judgments. He invites us to consider an analogy: "Suppose a man and his wife who have been promoted moted to some great dignity and possession, not by their own merit but by grace alone, together commit some serious crime for which there is no excuse, and because of this crime they are justly dispossessed and reduced to servitude. Who would say that the children they have after their condemnation demnation do not deserve to be subjected to servitude as well, but rather should by grace be restored to those good things that their parents justly lost?"¹ One can imagine that this analogy would have been more persuasive sive in Anselm's day than it is in ours, since many of us will have meritocratic itocratic and individualistic intuitions that undercut its force. We might agree that the children should not be restored to the rank and possessions that their parents justly lost-certainly in practice we would not restore them-but we would not think it fair to subject the children to servitude (or imprisonment, or the denial of the franchise, or whatever the analogous gous punishment in the current day might be). Even if, as would certainly happen in practice, the children grew up in the poverty resulting from their parents' deprivation, their poverty would not be permanent-not, at least, as a matter of law. They would be allowed to work their way back into prosperity and respectability. And if their parents died in debt, and without the means to satisfy the creditors, the children would not inherit that indebtedness.