are regenerated, the Spirit of righteousness transfuses into them faith, which of their own will they could not yet have, so the sinful flesh of those by whom they are born, transfers into them guilt, which by their own life they have not yet contracted. And as the Spirit of life in Christ regenerates them as believers, so the body of sin in Adam had generated them as sinners: for that is a carnal birth, this a spiritual: that forms sons of flesh, this, sons of the Spirit; that, sons of the world, this, of God; that, children of wrath, this, of mercy; and thereby that sends them forth bound by original sin, this, freed from every band of sin."
These are but a very few of the passages, in which St. Augustine employs the known Catholic doctrine of the cure universally bestowed upon children at Baptism, as a proof of their need of that cure, and so of their original corruption. They are the more remarkable, not only as being statements of Catholic doctrine, but as being found in him, who, if any of the fathers, might have been expected, on account of his theory of predestination, to have limited it. On the contrary, he adheres uniformly to the teaching of the Church, that all infants, since they could place no obstacle, derived the full benefits of Baptism, and were regenerated. He speaks, moreover, of the inscrutable decrees of God, in respect only, that[1] He admits some children of evil parents to Baptism and to the new-birth, and so (they dying young) certainly to the kingdom of Heaven, while He excluded from Baptism, and so from its blessings, the children of some pious parents; or again[2], that by early death He rescued some from future sin, and yet left others who, He knew, would sin; but the regeneration of all baptized infants he assumes as a known truth.
The Council of Carthage (A.D. 418) held against Pelagius, in
