[211] Abbot, loc. cit. p. 863.
[212] Wilson, Charity Mistaken, with the Want whereof Catholickes are unjustly charged, for affirming … that Protestancy unrepented destroys Salvation.
[213] Abbot, loc. cit. p. 860.
[214] Emmons, Works, iv. 336.
Besides the heathen there is another large class of people whom Christian theology has condemned to hell for no fault of theirs, namely, infants who have died unbaptised. From a very early age the water of baptism was believed by the Christians to possess a magic power to wipe away sin,[215] and since the days of St. Augustine it was deemed so indispensable for salvation that any child dying without “the bath of regeneration” was regarded as lost for ever.[216] St. Augustine admitted that the punishment of such children was of the mildest sort,[217] but other writers were more severe; St. Fulgentius condemned to “everlasting punishment in eternal fire” even infants who died in their mother’s womb.[218] However, the notion that unbaptised children will be tormented, gradually gave way to a more humane opinion. In the middle of the twelfth century Peter Lombard determined that the proper punishment of original sin, when no actual sin is added to it, is “the punishment of loss,” that is, loss of heaven and the sight of God, but not “the punishment of sense,” that is, positive torment. This doctrine was confirmed by Innocentius III. and shared by the large majority of the schoolmen, who assumed the existence of a place called limbus, or infernus puerorum, where unbaptised infants will dwell without being subject to torture.[219] But the older view was again set up by the Protestants, who generally maintained that the due punishment of original sin is, in strictness, damnation in hell, although many of them were inclined to think that if a child dies by misfortune before it is baptised the parents’ sincere intention of baptising it, together with their prayers, will be accepted with God for the deed.[220] In the Confession of Augsburg the Anabaptistic doctrine is emphatically condemned;[221] and although Zwingli rejected the dogma that infants dying without baptism are lost, and Calvin, in harmony with his theory of election, refused to tie the salvation of infants to an outward rite, the necessity of baptism as the ordinary channel of receiving grace appears to have been a general belief in the Reformed churches throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[222] The damnation of infants was in fact an acknowledged doctrine of Calvinism,[223] though an exception was made for the children of pious parents.[224] But in the latter part of the eighteenth century Toplady, who was a vehement Calvinist, avowed his belief in the universal salvation of all departed infants, whether baptised or unbaptised.[225] And a hundred years later Dr. Hodge thought he was justified in stating that the common opinion of evangelical Protestants was that “all who die in infancy are saved.”[226] The accuracy of this statement, however, seems somewhat doubtful. In 1883 Mr. Prentiss wrote of the doctrine of infant salvation independently of baptism:—“My own impression is that, had it been taught as unequivocally in the Presbyterian Church even a third of a century ago, by a theologian less eminent than Dr. Hodge for orthodoxy, piety, and weight of character, it would have called forth an immediate protest from some of the more conservative, old-fashioned Calvinists.”[227]
[215] Tertullian, De baptismo, 1 sqq. (Migne, Patrologiæ cursus, i. 1197 sqq.). Harnack, History of Dogma, i. 206 sq.; ii. 227. Stanley, Christian Institutions, p. 16. Lewis, Paganism surviving in Christianity, pp. 72, 73, 129, 144 sq.
[216] Bingham, Works, iii. 488 sqq. Prentiss, loc. cit. p. 549.
[217] St. Augustine, De peccatorum meritis et remissione, i. 16 (Migne, op. cit. xliv. 16).
[218] St. Fulgentius, De fide, 27 (Migne, op. cit. lxv. 701).
[219] Wall, History of Infant-Baptism, i. 460 sq.