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

that baptized infants are pleasing to God, and are saved, without any action
of the Holy Spirit in them. This is certain, that the Holy Spirit is efficacious
in them, so that they can receive the grace of God and the remission of
sins. The Holy Spirit operates in them in His own way, which it is not in
our power to explain. That operation of the Spirit in infants we call faith,
and we affirm that they believe. For that mean, or organ, by which the
kingdom of God, offered in the Word and Sacraments, is received, the
Scripture calls faith, and declares that believers receive the kingdom of
God. And Christ affirms, Mark x. 15, that adults receive the kingdom of
God in the same way that a little child receives it; and, Matt. xviii. 6, He
speaks of the little ones which believe in Him." These are the words of
Chemnitz, 363 and they mark the distinction we make in the term receptive
faith. Faith as an act, like sin as an act, presupposes a condition of mind,
which condition is the essential thing in both cases, to which the act is
merely phenomenal. The act is intermittent, the condition is continuous.
The worst of men does not cease to be a sinner merely because the act of
sinning ceases. He may be in stupor, or in sleep, or his present thoughts
may be absorbed in something morally indifferent, and yet he is a sinner
through the whole. He is not always sinning, but he is always sinful,
because the essence of character lies in the condition of the soul. The
believer may be in stupor, or sleep, or his present thoughts be entirely
absorbed in the necessary cares, or duties, or innocent enjoyments of life,
but he is a believer through the whole. He is not always consciously
exercising faith, but he is a believer always, because the essence of
character is the condition of the soul. In the case of the infant, both on the
side of nature and of grace, there must be, and is, a stronger and more
protracted separation between the essential condition of sin and faith, and
the phenomenon of conscious sin and of conscious faith, than in the case
of the adult, but the condition is as real. By nature the infant is as really a
sinner, and by grace as really a believer, as the adult is, though it can
neither do sin nor exercise faith. It has sin by nature, and has faith by
grace. Working out
363 Examen. Cone. Trid. II. ii. x. 14.