Why Infants Are Baptized; An Essay (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1900 edition. Excerpt: ... One Baptism T is not proposed at the present time to enumerate the various conflicting views which in the supposed interests of spiritual life have been advanced in our Protestant non-ritualistic churches. It is sufficient to say that both the history and the experience of the Church abundantly prove that any theory that assigns to the sacrament of baptism in the case of infants a different significance from that in the case of adults, or that admits that baptized children are not in the full sense of the words ' members of the Church " will be found unsatisfactory and, if consistently acted upon, will inevitably lead to indifference to the privilege and irrepressible doubt as to the propriety of baptizing infants at all. Us) The reason is obvious. Such a view, making baptism in the case of the infant to mean something other and different from baptism in the case of the adult, and assigning the baptized adult to one position and the baptized child to another, necessarily assumes either that such distinction, which virtually establishes in the Church two baptisms, is enjoined in the Scriptures, or that we have no divinely expressed warrant for administering the sacrament to infants, and must depend upon analogy, tradition, precedent, or an apostolic example, which is in dispute, to justify our practice. As the first position is obviously untenable, the second is to a great extent practically accepted. Indeed, it is frequently admitted, with prompt ingenuousness, that the Bible contains no direct command to baptize infants. After this concession, however ingeniously such baptism may be defended upon the grounds of "time-honored custom," the "authority of the Church," the "edification of parents," or the "beauty of a consecratory rite," the way, ...