But what of infants? Gospel salvation, or the salvation of the commission, is salvation from sin, or remission of sins. Infants have never sinned, and need no remission of sins. They need nothing only precisely what a saint needs—to be raised from the dead, changed, immortalized and glorified.
[RECOGNITION OF, BY SECTS.]
WHAT do we want recognition of any sects for? What do we want to come on a level with them for? Not one of them has a creed that is indorsed by any party but his own. There is not a party in Christendom that receives or believes the Methodist creed except the Methodist party. The same is true of every other party. Their creeds are not even popular, only as they agree in the human-creed idea that they must have a human creed. What a coming down, for a man that has a creed that they all believe—the Bible—to come down on a level with a man, standing on a little side platform, discarded by every religious party, in the world, except his own. We do not want his recognition and do not intend to recognize him till he abandons his side platform. The Evangelical Alliance have been trying, twenty-five years or more, to make a platform and are as far from making one that these parties can stand on as they were at the beginning. What use have we for tampering in this way? We have a creed that every party in Christendom admits to be right. The Bible is that creed. We have a doctrine that they all admit to be right—“all Scripture given by inspiration of God,” as Paul says, “is profitable for doctrine.” There is no doubt about it. We have “the faith once for all delivered to the saints”—the belief “that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God,” and not a party among all the contending parties doubt or denies this faith. The doubts are not about what we hold, but about what these others hold. We hold and practice no doubtful baptism. The burial of a penitent believer in baptism is valid baptism with all the parties of any note.
We can take down the books from their own libraries and show from their standard works that all we hold, teach and practice, is found in their main works, indorsed and sanctioned in numerous ways. We are not standing upon any doubtful ground. We know we are right, and what remains for us to do is to make every possible effort to attain to a more perfect practice of what we know to be right, and not be trying to get recognition from any of these modern parties. They will never indorse us till we abandon our ground, and this, many among us will never do.