Schaff - History of the Christian Church Vol. 8 - Media Sabda Org

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This does credit to his heart, but does not relieve the matter; for
“damnatio,” though “levissima” and “mitissima,” is still damnatio.
The scholastic divines made a distinction between poena damni, which
involves no active suffering, and poena sensus, and assigned to infants
dying unbaptized the former but not the latter. They invented the fiction of
a special department for infants in the future world, namely, the Limbus
Infantum, on the border region of hell at some distance from fire and
brimstone. Dante describes their condition as one of “sorrow without
torment.” f835 Roman divines usually describe their condition as a
deprivation of the vision of God. The Roman Church maintains the
necessity of baptism for salvation, but admits the baptism of blood
(martyrdom) and the baptism of intention, as equivalent to actual baptism.
These exceptions, however, are not applicable to infants, unless the
vicarious desire of Christian parents be accepted as sufficient.
Calvin offers an escape from the horrible dogma of infant damnation by
denying the necessity of water baptism for salvation, and by making
salvation dependent on sovereign election alone, which may work
regeneration without baptism, as in the case of the Old Testament saints
and the thief on the cross. We are made children of God by faith and not by
baptism, which only recognizes the fact. Calvin makes sure the salvation of
all elect children, whether baptized or not. This is a great gain. In order to
extend election beyond the limits of the visible means of grace, he departed
from the patristic and scholastic interpretation of John 3:5, that “water”
means the sacrament of baptism, as a necessary condition of entrance into
the kingdom of God. He thinks that a reference to Christian baptism before
it was instituted would have been untimely and unintelligible to
Nicodemus. He, therefore, connects water and Spirit into one idea of
purification and regeneration by the Spirit. f836
Whatever be the meaning of “water,” Christ cannot here refer to infants,
nor to such adults as are beyond the reach of the baptismal ordinance. He
said of children, as a class, without any reference to baptism or
circumcision: “Of such is the kingdom of God.” A word of unspeakable
comfort to bereaved parents. And to make it still stronger, he said: “It is
not the will of your Father, who is in heaven, that one of these little ones
should perish” (Matt. 18:14). These declarations of our Saviour, which
must decide the whole question, seem to justify the inference that all
children who die before having committed any actual transgression, are