which were assembled 214 Bishops, anathematizes[1] those who say that infants brought no original sin into the world, to be expiated by the washing of regeneration, and asserts as a consequence of the mode "in which the Catholic Church everywhere diffused always understood the Apostolic saying, Rom. v. 12. 'By one man sin entered,' &c. that little ones, who could not as yet themselves commit sin, are therefore truly baptized for the remission of sins, that in them what they contracted by their birth might be cleansed by their re-birth."
The universality of the new-birth in infants is on the same principle asserted by our own Hooker[2]. "When the signs and Sacraments of His grace are not either through contempt unreceived, or received with contempt, we are not to doubt, but that they really give what they promise, and are what they signify. For we take not Baptism, nor the Eucharist, for bare resemblances or memorials of things absent, neither for naked signs and testimonies assuring us of grace received before, but (as they are indeed and in verity) for means effectual, whereby God, when we take the Sacraments, delivereth into our hands that grace available unto eternal life, which grace the Sacraments represent or signify." And again[3], "The fruit of Baptism dependeth only upon the covenant which God hath made; God by covenant requireth in the elder sort. Faith and Baptism; in children, the Sacrament of Baptism alone, whereunto he hath also given them right by special privilege of birth within the bosom of the Holy Church: infants, therefore, which have received Baptism complete, as touching the mystical perfection thereof, are by virtue of his own covenant and promise cleansed from all sin."
Such was, for fourteen centuries, the doctrine of the universal Church of God. At the time of the Reformation the English and the Lutheran branches retained the ancient doctrine: the English, upon its acknowledged principle of retaining the truths taught in the early Church; the Lutheran, without perhaps the
