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

God wishes to renew and save children, and what so powerfully as this
prompts the blessed assurance that if God fails to reach the child in His
ordinary way, He will reach it in some other? The Calvinist might have
doubts as to the salvation of a dying child, for to him Baptism is not a sure
guaranty, and its grace is meant only for the elect; the Baptist ought
logically to have doubts on his system as to whether an infant can be
saved, for his system supposes that God has no appointed means for
conferring grace on it, and as we are confessedly under a system of grace
and providence which ordinarily works by means, the presumption is
almost irresistible, that where God has no mean to do a thing He does not
intend to do it. But the conservative Protestant cannot doubt on this point
of such tender and vital interest. The baptized child, he feels assured, is
actually accepted of the Saviour, and under the benignant power of the
Holy Ghost. In infant Baptism is the gracious pledge that God means to
save little children; that they have a distinct place in His plan of mercy, and
that He has a distinct mode of putting them in that place. When, then, in
the mysterious providence of this Lover of these precious little ones, they
are cut off from the reception of His grace by its ordinary channel, our
Church still cherishes the most blessed assurance, wrought by the very
existence of infant Baptism, that in some other way God's wisdom and
tenderness will reach and redeem them. Our confidence in the
uncovenanted mercy of God is strong in proportion to the tenacity with
which we cling to Baptism as an ordinary mean most necessary on our
part, if we may possibly have it, or have it given. Because in the green
valley, and along the still waters of the visible Church, God has made rich
provision for these poor sin-stricken lambs,--because He has a fold into
which He gathers them out of the bleak world, therefore do we the more
firmly believe that if one of them faint ere the earthly hands which act for
Christ can bring it to the fold and pasture, the great Shepherd, in His own
blessed person, will bear to it the food and the water necessary to nurture
its undying life, and will take it into the fold on high, for which the earthly
fold is meant; at best, but as a safeguard for a little while. But the