Her charge is an infant soul; her vow is to be faithful to it; her promise is to train it up for God; and her’s will be the lasting glory or the lasting shame! These very engagements and trusts elevate the pious parents; diffuse a tenderness and sympathy over all the domestic relations, and make better husbands, better wives, better parents, and better children, by the deep insight which is given to their faith in those mysterious relations and mutual obligations which bind them together. As the consecrated water falls upon the face of the devoted child, the parents feel the solemn vow sink deep into the soul, and realize the weight of that responsibility which God lays upon them.
God commands us not only to dedicate our children to Him, but to do so in the way He has appointed, viz., in and through Christian baptism. In this way we bring our children into the church, and train them up in a churchly way. We bring them to God through the church. In their baptism we have, as it were, a confirmation of their dedication by "the mighty Master’s seal." It is the link which binds our children to the church, the rite of their initiation into the kingdom of Christ, the sign and seal of their saving relation to the covenant of grace. By it they are solemnly set apart to the service of God, enrolled among the members of His kingdom, entitled to its privileges and guardian care, and placed in the appointed way of salvation and eternal life, receiving the seal and superscription of the Son of God. This is indispensable to the demands of the Christian faith. To deny that infants are thus included in the covenant of grace, destroys the purity and spiritual unity of the Christian compact, and subverts the foundations and harmony of the Christian home.
It is revolting to the parent’s faith to forbid his little ones the privilege of the church, and to treat them as aliens from the covenant of promise. Does the gospel place them under such a ban of proscription? Surely not! He who instituted the family relation had special regard to the family in all the appointments of his grace. His command is like that of Noah, "Come thou and all thy house into the ark." "The promise is unto you and your children." This is the comfort of the parent, that his children are planted by the ordinance of God into the soil of grace, where they may grow up as a tender plant in the likeness of His death, and be "like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that shall bring forth his fruit in his season; his leaf shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper."
Baptism in the Christian home is eminently infant baptism. Take this away, and you sever the strongest cord that binds church and home. As the Jew was commanded to circumcise his child, and thus bring it into proper relations to the theocratical covenant, so the Christian has a similar command from Christ to bring his children, through the holy sacrament of baptism, to Him. It is not our purpose to discuss the baptistic question. When we shall have thrown sufficient light upon it to convince the Christian parent, that it is a duty to have little children dedicated to God in baptism, our plan shall be fully executed. We must either admit infant baptism, or deny that the Christian covenant includes children, and that the parent is bound to dedicate them to God. Hence the objection brought against infant baptism can, with equal propriety, be urged against circumcision; for the latter is the type of the former. In baptism Christ places Himself in true organic relations to the child, and thus opens up to it the sources from which alone the Christian life can proceed and develop itself.
The baptism of our children is grounded in their need of salvation at every age and stage of development. It is also based upon the very idea of Christ Himself; upon primitive christianity; upon the extent and compass of the Christian covenant; and upon those vital relations which believing parents sustain to their offspring. It might be proven from the commission given by Christ to His disciples to "preach the gospel to every creature;" from His language and conduct in reference to children; from the usage of the Apostles and of the apostolic church. The idea and mission of Christ Himself, we think, would be a sufficient argument in favor of infant baptism. He included in His life the stage of childhood, and came to save the child as well as the man. His own infancy and childhood are securities for this. He entered into and passed through all the various states and stages of man’s development on earth, and thus became adapted to the wants of every period of our life,—man’s infancy as well as man’s maturity. Ireneus says, "Christ Jesus became a child to children, a youth to youth, and a man to man." The fact, too, that the blessings of the covenant of grace are extended to the children of believing parents, is sufficient to prove the validity of infant baptism. Peter said on the day of Pentecost, when he called upon his hearers to be baptized: "for the promise is to you, and your children, and all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call."
Thus His gospel excludes none, neither is it restricted to a certain age or capacity. As the child, as well as the man, fell and died in the first Adam, so the child, as well as the man, can be made alive in the second Adam. As infants, therefore, are subjects of grace, why not subjects also of baptism? As they are included in the covenant, why not enter it by the divinely constituted sacrament of initiation? As they are included in the plan of salvation, why not receive it in a churchly way? If Christ is the Saviour of infants, why not bring them to Him through baptism?
Besides, the idea of following Christ reaches its full meaning only through infant baptism. His own infancy, as we have already seen, is a warrant of this. Without it He cannot penetrate and rule in every natural stage of human life. Hence a denial of infant baptism is a subversion of the fundamentals of Christian doctrine. The very constitution of the Christian family, its unity and mission must be overthrown; for infant baptism is incorporated with the nature of christianity itself, with the conception and necessities of the individual Christian life, and of the Christian family life.
And yet with the plainest teachings of the gospel before them, is it not strange that there are so many virulent enemies to infant baptism? Their rejection of it seems to rest mainly upon the untenable position that baptism has meaning and force only when it is the fruit of an antecedent, self-conscious faith on the part of the subject, and that it is but the outward demonstration of a separate and prior participation of some inward grace. As infants have not a self-conscious faith, it is believed, therefore, that they are not, of course, fit subjects of baptism.
There is a cunning sophistry in all this. It goes upon the supposition that faith necessarily demands the prior development of self-consciousness. It assumes that faith is bound to a particular age, and can be exercised only after the full and complete development of the logical consciousness, and is dependent upon it; it also assumes that this faith must necessarily be exercised by the subject of Christian baptism.
Now this is all mere assumption. There is no scripture for it. In all this, the distinction is not made between faith in its first bud, and faith in its ripe fruit. The first may exist in the unconscious infant, just as undeveloped reason exists there; because natural powers do not generate supernatural faith. Faith is the gift of God; and its existence does not depend upon any particular stage of mental development. The enemies of infant baptism can see nothing in baptism. They can see no objective force in that holy sacrament; but regard it as something merely external, extraneous, unproductive,—a mere unmeaning form in which a prior faith is pleased to express itself, as the conclusion of a work already accomplished. The great error here lies just in this, that they mistake it as an act of faith, whereas it is an act of Christ. They think it is the formal rite through which they elect and receive Christ; whereas it is the sacrament in which Christ elects and receives them.