The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

in an ordinary one, through means instituted by Himself. As, therefore, the
texts of Scripture speak of an ordinary necessity, so also of that same sort
of necessity, and of no other, do Protestants speak in the Augsburg
Confession."
It would be very easy to give evidence on the same point from all
our most eminent Lutheran writers on the doctrine of our Church, but it is
not necessary. No one who has read them will need any citations to
establish a fact with which he is so familiar. They who tell the world that it
is a doctrine of our Church that Baptism is absolutely essential, and that all
unbaptized persons are lost, can only be defended from the charge of
malicious falsehood on the plea of ignorance. But ignorance, if it assume
the responsibilities of knowledge, is not innocent.
Infant salvation in the Lutheran system.
6. The truth is, no system so thoroughly as that of the Lutheran
Church places the salvation of infants on the very highest ground.
The PELAGIAN system would save them on the ground of
personal innocence, but that ground we have seen to be fallacious.
The Calvinistic System.
The CALVINISTIC system places their salvation on the ground of
divine election, and speaks of elect infants, and hence, in its older and more
severely logical shape at least, supposed not only that some unbaptized,
but also that some baptized infants are lost.
1. In the Westminster Assembly's Confession, chap. vi., it is said:
"Our first parents...sinned...The guilt of this sin was imputed, and the same
death, in sin and corrupted nature, conveyed to all their posterity. Every
sin, both original and actual,...doth in its own nature bring guilt upon the
sinner, whereby he is bound over to the wrath of God and curse of the law,
and so made subject to death, with all miseries, spiritual, temporal, and
eternal." The infant, then, Christian or Pagan, is born in "guilt," "bound
over to the wrath of God and the curse of the law, and so made subject to
eternal death." How does Calvinism relieve it from this condition? The
answer to this is given in what follows.
2. The election of God rests upon nothing whatever foreseen in the
creature (ch. iii. 5), "as causes or conditions moving