"unto sin, and a new birth unto righteousness," is hereby conferred upon all who are brought to be engraffed into their Saviour by Baptism.[1] For the question is not, whether Infant Baptism be "most agreeable to the Institution of Christ," but (it being allowed so to be,) whether the full privileges of Baptism be thereby conveyed to all who are brought to Christ in it, or whether some receive the reality, others the empty sign only? And since infants are all alike incapable of opposing the Divine benefits, and the wilfulness which they might hereafter show, has no place there, and God in His Word has given us no ground for making any distinction between them, we must conclude, as the whole Antient Church did, that the benefits of Holy Baptism are by virtue of the Sacrament itself, and of the Divine Institution, imparted to all infants. And herein is a great mercy of God, that this first primary grace, which is the pledge and condition of all the rest, and without which we have no title to them, but should remain "children of wrath and strangers to the covenant of promise," is bestowed upon us at a time when we cannot by our own wilfulness or carelessness fall short of it. It appears also a great charity of our Church, that, whereas we know not when the seeds of evil first spring up in a child, she has ordered Baptism to be administered at the earliest period practicable, that so the spiritual antidote might be infused into its frame before the latent poison of inherited corruption should begin to work. The principle that children are regenerated by virtue of the Sacrament of the Baptism, because they put no bar,
- ↑ Calvin himself admits this principle, when he is writing as an expositor, not as a dogmatist. Thus, on Rom. vi. 4, he says, "In short, St Paul is teaching what is the reality of Baptism rightly received. Thus of the Galatians he attests, 'Whosoever had been baptized into Christ had all put on Christ.' We must namely, thus speak when the Institution of the Lord and the faith of the pious meet together. For we never have naked and empty symbols; except when our ingratitude and perverseness impede the working of the Divine benevolence." Since then infants cannot, "by ingratitude or perverseness, impede the operation of God" through His Sacrament, according to Calvin's own principles they must participate of its grace. This is expressed by the old writers (as by St. Augustine above) by the term "obicem ponere." It is retained by the Lutherans, as Gerhard (Loci, de S. Baptismo, § 125).
