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Infant Baptism an Open Question.

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' all the divines, bishops and archbishops, doctors and professors, of the Elizabethan age, the age, be it remembered, of the 'present Common Prayer-book in its chief particulars, and of the Book of Homilies, and of the Thirty-nine Articles, - held ' and taught doctrines inconsistent with the [High Church] doc'trine of Baptism.'* The second shall be a quotation from Wall's History of Infant Baptism,'-a book which is, as every one knows, recommended throughout the English Church as the standard work on that subject, and in which the author had every inducement to exaggerate the importance of a topic, to the investigation of which he had devoted the best years of his life: — Baptism itself does, indeed, make an article in several old creeds, as, for example, in the Constantinopolitan, which is ' now received in all Christendom, - "I acknowledge one bap"tism for the remission of sins." But the determination of 'the age or manner of receiving it was never thought fit to make an article of faith." (Vol. ii. p. 549.) And he adds, in a few pages afterwards, with a moderation which would almost seem to be directly aimed at the extraordinary positions maintained by some of our modern writers on the same subject: The sophisters in logic have a way by which, if any man do hold any the least error in philosophy, they will, by a long train of consequences, prove that he denies the first maxims of common sense. And some would bring that spiteful art into religion, 'whereby they will prove him that is mistaken in the least point to be that Antichrist that denieth the Father and the Son. If the Pædobaptist and the Anti-Pædobaptist be mistaken, yet let them not make heathens of one another. The denial of the Quakers to be Christians,- those of them I mean that believe the Scriptures, has such a dreadful consequence with it, that one would not willingly admit it (though they ⚫ deny all baptism), because they, however, possess that which is the chief thing signified and intended by baptism.' (Vol. ii. p. 570.)

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Statements to the same effect might be multiplied indefinitely, but enough has been adduced to show that whatever heresy attaches (as Mr. Denison and his supporters declare that it does attach) to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, for leaving this doctrine an open question, attaches also to the Church of England, as represented in the compilers of its formularies, and in the work which its bishops and archbishops have for the last hundred years recommended as the one complete statement of the whole controversy; and not only to the Church of

* Second Letter, &c., by Rev. W. Maskell, p. 15.

England, but to the Creeds and Councils of the Primitive Church itself; above all to the authors of the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed; and to all Churches, ancient and modern, which accept those confessions as adequate expressions of Christian truth.

II. Such is a brief survey of the view which the Christian Church from the earliest to the latest times has taken of the importance of the doctrines connected with Infant Baptism. It would be a more instructive inquiry had we time to unfold the view which in different ages has been taken of those doctrines themselves; instructive not merely for the purposes of the present controversy, but as illustrating some of the most important features in the history of the Church itself. It would exhibit in striking relief the impassable gulf which exists between all modern views, Catholic and Protestant alike, on the one hand, and those of the ancient Church, to which so many zealots in the recent conflicts profess themselves adherents. It would show the immense elevation of the Apostolic times above those which immediately succeeded, and the long toil by which subsequent ages have laboured, consciously or unconsciously, to work back to that divine original from which the Church so suddenly and sadly fell. It would mark at once the weakness and the strength of that Church through all its later stages, its weakness in allowing the peculiar influences of successive ages to colour and mould its form of belief, -its strength in constantly asserting, even against the most prevalent corruptions and amidst the most painful self-contradictions, the moral and spiritual element, which in any other religion than Christianity would have died away under the weight of heterogeneous materials, but which has always remained, dimly burning, yet never extinguished, and illuminating even the darkest recesses in which it was buried. It would show, lastly, how great is the agreement amongst all serious persons, certainly in this age, and, probably, in most ages, on the only point which really affects their practice, and how needless is the clamour for a precision of statement, which the nature of the subject either precludes or renders superfluous.

To treat such a subject worthily of its interest would fill a volume. Our present limits will only allow us to indicate abruptly and imperfectly its chief landmarks. What, then,

was Baptism in the Apostolic Age? The fewest words will most reverently tell what indeed it requires but few words to describe. We must place before our minds the greatest religious change which the world has seen or can sce. Imagine thousands of men and women seized by one common impulse,―abandoning,

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The History of Baptism in the Apostolic Age. by the irresistible conviction of a day, an hour, a moment, their former habits, friends, associates, to be enrolled in a new society under the banner of a new faith. Conceive what that new society was a society of brothers;' bound by ties closer than any earthly brotherhood-filled with life and energy such as fall to the lot of none but the most ardent enthusiasts, yet tempered by a moderation, a wisdom, and a holiness such as mere enthusiasts have never possessed. Picture that society, swayed by the presence of men whose very names seem too sacred for the converse of ordinary mortals, and by the recent recollections of One, whom 'not seeing they loved with love unspeak'able.' Into this society they passed by an act as natural as it was expressive. The plunge into the bath of purification, long known among the Jewish nation as the symbol of a change of life, was still retained as the pledge of entrance into this new and universal communion-retained under the express sanction of Him, into whose most holy name they were by that solemn rite baptized.' The water in those Eastern regions, so doubly significant of all that was pure and refreshing, closed over the heads of the converts, and they rose into the light of heaven, new and altered beings. Can we wonder if on such an act were lavished all the figures which language could furnish to express the mighty change: Regeneration,' Illumination,' Burial,' Resurrection,' A new creation,' Forgiveness of sins,' Salvation'? Well might the Apostle say, Baptism doth ' even now save us,' even had he left his statement in its unrestricted strength to express what in that age no one could misunderstand. But no less well was he led to add, as if with a divine prescience of coming evils, Not the putting away the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience to'wards God.'

Such was the Apostolic baptism. It is startling to witness the abrupt descent from the first century to the third, the fourth, the fifth. The rite was, indeed, still in great measure what in its origin it had been almost universally, the great change from darkness to light, from evil to good; the second birth' of men from the corrupt society of the dying Roman Empire into the purifying and elevating influence of the living Christian Church.

As a general rule in the writings of the later Fathers, there is no doubt that the words which we translate Regeneration,' is used exclusively for Baptism. But it is equally certain that in the earlier Fathers it is used for Repentance, or, as we should now say, Conversion. See Clem. Rom. i. 9. Justin. Dial. in Tryph. p. 231. B. D. Clemens Alex. (apud Eus. H. E. iii. 23.) Strom. lib. ii. 8. 425. A.

Nay, in some respects the deep moral responsibility of the act must have been impressed upon the converts by the severe, sometimes the life-long, preparation for the final pledge, even more than by the sudden and almost instantaneous transition which characterised the baptism of the Apostolic age. But gradually the consciousness of this answer of the good conscience to'wards God' was lost in the stress laid with greater and greater emphasis on the 'putting away the filth of the flesh.' Let us conceive ourselves present at those extraordinary scenes, to which no existing ritual of any European Church offers the slightest likeness; when, between Easter and Pentecost, the crowds of catechumens poured into the baptisteries of the great basilicas; let us figure to our minds the strange ceremonies handed down to us in the minutest details by contemporary documents: the exorcism and exsufflation,-the torch-light of the midnight hour,—the naked figures, plunging into the deep waters of the bath, the bishop, always present to receive them as they emerged, the white robes, the anointing with oil,—the laying on of hands. Among the accompaniments of these scenes there were practices and signs which we have long ago discarded as inexpedient or indifferent, but which were then regarded as essential. Immersion, which is now retained only in the half-civilised churches of the East, or by the insignificant sect of Baptists*, was then, even on death-beds, deemed all but absolutely necessary. The whole modern Church of Western Europe, according to the belief of those times, would be condemned as 'unbaptized: because it has received, without the excuse of a sick bed, nothing but the clinical or sick bed aspersion-Totus orbis miratur se non esse Christianum, sed Clinicum.' It was not the effect of divine grace upon the soul, but of the actual water upon the body, on which those ancient Baptists built their hopes of immortality. Let but the person of a human being be wrapt in the purifying element, and he was redeemed from the uncleanness of his birth. The boy Athanasius throwing water in jest over his playmate on the sea-shore in the name of the Holy Trinity, performed as it was believed a valid baptism: the Apostles in the spray of the storm on the sea of Galilee; the penitent thief in the water that rushed from the wound of the Crucified-(such were the wild excesses to which some ventured without censure to carry the doctrine) received the baptism which had else been withheld from them. And this washing of water' was now deemed absolutely neces

*The cathedral of Milan is the solitary exception in the churches of the West where the old practice still continues.

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sary for salvation. No human being could pass into the presence of God hereafter unless he had passed through the waters of baptism here. This,' says the learned Vossius, is the 'judgment of all antiquity, that they perish everlastingly who will not be baptized when they may. From this belief followed gradually, but surely, the dreadful conclusion that the natural end, not only of all heathens, but of all the patriarchs and saints of the Old Testament, was in the realms of perdition. And, last of all, the Pelagian controversy drew out the mournful doctrine, that infants, dying before baptism, were excluded from the face of Him whose presence we are solemnly told their angels do always behold;'-the doctrine when expressed (as it was expressed) in its darkest form, that they are consigned to the everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his angels. There is no escape from the fact that at the close of the fifth century this belief had become universal, chiefly through the means of the great Augustine. It was the turning point of his contest with Pelagius. It was the dogma from which nothing could induce him to part. It was this which he meant by insisting on the remission of original sin in infant baptism.' In his earlier years he had doubted whether, possibly, he might not leave it an open question; but in his full age, God forbid,' said he, that I should leave the matter so.' The extremest case of a child dying beyond the reach of baptism is put to him, and he decides against it. In the Fifth Council of Carthage, doubtless under his auspices, the milder view is mentioned of those who, reposing on the gracious promise, In my Father's house are many mansions,' trusted that among those many mansions there might still be found, even for those infants who, by want of baptism, were shut out from the Divine presence, some place of shelter. That milder view is anathematised. Happily, this dark doctrine was, as we have already observed, never sanctioned by the universal creeds of the Church. On this, as on every other point connected with the doctrine of Baptism, they preserved a strange, we might almost say a providential silence. But among the individual Fathers we fear that from the time of Augustine the confession of Wall* is but too true: How hard soever this opinion may seem, it is the constant opinion of the ancients.'

It is from no wish to disparage those ancients,' or the noble character of Augustine himself, that we have insisted on this

Wall's History of Infant Baptism,' vol. i. p. 200. In this work, and in Bingham's Antiquities,' will be found most of the authorities for the statements in the text.