There is still another passage in this sensible and truly Christian letter, which we must be allowed to present to our readers.
“It may be assumed that I have come to a wrong conclusion; but, I presume, it will be admitted to be desirable that the question I have considered should be more satisfactorily settled than it is at present, and if, as I trust it will appear, that I have examined it under no influence but the love of truth, it may be allowed that the work may be useful in assisting others to come to a right conclusion. Every man who treats a subject honestly, does something to put it in a right point of view. I confess, I cannot now hope that, if I am wrong, I shall live to be convinced of it; but truly I feel no interest in error, and I take no pleasure in differing from ministers and brethren in Christ; so that, if I were convinced of being wrong, I could renounce my present opinions with more ease than I can now divest myself of a garment.”
Whether the able writer to whom these respectful and impressive appeals are made, will so far resist their influence as to make no reply, and attempt no vindication from the charge of a destructive error, so distinctly brought against the church of which he is a member, remains to be seen; yet, after reading the powerful pages to which the preceding extracts are prefixed, if it be expected that the Scriptures exclusively are to be admitted as evidence in repelling the accusation, we must confess ourselves utterly at a loss to conceive how it is possible that any satisfactory answer should be given. But if our author cannot be answered, let him at least be heard. He says:—
“In the present day, no intelligent evangelical writer would think of advancing such things as Hooker and some other eminent and good men have said on the subject of baptism. Men of reflection and genuine Christian character now perceive themselves here to be but in cloudy regions, where mighty minds have strangely bewildered themselves, and refrain from venturing distinct speculations and positive assertions. They do not come forward with anything like the confidence of their predecessors. They speak strongly against the opus operatum of Papists, and papistical Protestants; and though they would not be thought to deny that grace is, in some way, connected with baptism in the case of infants, yet they frequently make it evident that they would rather escape from close discussion. There is a remarkable instance of this in the Bampton Lectures of the late Dr. Heber, Bishop of Calcutta. He says: ‘Both grace and comfort, if they are not necessarily inherent in the washing of regeneration, and the eucharistic bread and wine, may at least be attained by a proper use of those means.’ Surely this obscure and doubtful passage, on a subject simple and apprehensible enough in Holy Scripture, is something different to what ought to be expected from a profoundly learned ruler of the church. What Christian ever thought of denying that grace and comfort might be attained by a proper use of these ordinances? On the other hand, are we to be driven to the mortification of supposing that, in the present day, others beside Papists can be induced to suppose that grace and comfort can be necessarily inherent in any thing material? Upon the whole, I think it is evident to an observer, that there is some hesitation and want of confidence among thinking members of the church with regard to this view of baptism: yet the idea of a mysterious connexion between the materiel (if I may use the word) of the ordinances and divine grace, has by no means lost its hold of the mind; which is in a great measure owing to the magic influence of imaginary sacred words. Such terms as ‘elements,’ ‘holy mysteries,’ have a strange effect in causing men to feel as though it would be sacrilegious and presumptuous to open their eyes, and view those divine institutions in the light of Scripture.
“But the imagination, that the application of the ordinance of baptism to unconscious infants is a divinely appointed medium of grace to them, is so incompatible with real facts, that a philanthropic Christian, who looks around, and has his heart affected by the real state of society, even in this country, if he could at that moment be brought closely to reconsider this opinion, which, at other moments, when facts are forgotten, raise delightful feelings in his mind, could not but have his eyes open to the fallacy:—the illusion would vanish at once. If baptism were a divinely appointed medium of spiritual good to the minds of infants, then its beneficial tendency must appear in the development of children in Christian countries. If this manifestly appeared to be the case, all controversy would be at an end. But do the instructors of youth discover it? Has the warmest advocate for the practice of baptizing children ever ventured such an assertion? And if infants grow up, believe, and are baptized, is it conceivable that their heavenly lot will be at all worse than that of those who were baptized in their infancy; or that, if they die unbaptized, without any fault of their own, they will in any wise suffer for the omission? Now if all these questions be answered in the negative, as undoubtedly they must, what becomes of the imaginary paradise of blessings and privileges to which baptism is to introduce the millions of our infants? Why should the holy Lord God, our Saviour, be represented as mocking his church by promises of mysterious, pompous nothings?” pp. 65-69.
Thus it is that this author remonstrates with the members of his own communion. But does he neglect to extend the application of the argument to other Pædobaptists? The reader shall be put in possession of the means of judging.
“But if the Church of England rests this practice on such insufficient grounds, how do the Pædobaptist Congregationalists support the practice? They appear to me to have scarcely any ground at all which they can acknowledge, consistently with their fundamental principles as Congregationalists. They are supported in the practice wholly by clinging to custom, and by borrowing the arguments of the advocates of national churches just for an occasion. It is quite inconsistent with their principles to acknowledge such a visible church as infants are professedly introduced to by baptism. They recognise no such church, except on the occasion of baptizing their children. They admit of no officers, and allow no government, for such a church. They consider all apparently unconnected persons as belonging only to the world, and admit their own children to become members of their churches exactly in the same way as they would a stranger coming from a country not professing Christianity; except that, in their case, they are saved the ceremony of baptizing, which is the divinely appointed way of admission into a visible church. National ecclesiastical establishments, which yet unavoidably resulted from the practice of infant baptism, they hold to be altogether anti-scriptural, and founded upon an anti-christian union of church and state. They have, therefore, no reasonable pretence for arguing for the practice from the appointment of circumcision, which can with consistency be used only by those who think that Christianity was designed to have a secular, external character. Some of them, indeed, seem ashamed of this obvious inconsistency, and have recourse to an imaginary distinction between the covenant of redemption and the covenant of grace; and instead of professing that by baptism they make their children members of the visible church, they assert that by doing so they place them visibly within the one covenant, though not within the other. But a serious refutation of such a notion can hardly be necessary; it may be classed with other unintelligible and unauthorized imaginations.
“The members of the church, retaining their veneration for the notions respecting the sacraments established as catholic in the primitive ages, have some specious ground of hope that the administration of the ordinance to their infants will be accompanied with a communication of grace, in consequence of the imagined occult connexion between the ‘elements’ and the grace of the ordinance, they have, with something like a pretence of reason, expected that their children might thereby be made members of Christ, children of God, and heirs of the kingdom of heaven. They are persuaded that it is consistent with truth to speak of baptism for infants as ‘the washing of regeneration,’ the laver of regeneration—the well-spring of divine life, &c., &c., and that in this matter they rightly exercise Christian submission in following ‘the sacramental host of God's elect.’ But the Independents have no pretence of the kind for this application of a holy ordinance to infants. They expect their children to derive no benefit from it, other than what they would derive through their prayers, and from the blessing of God in bringing them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. They renounce all deference to catholic authority in matters of religion and conscience, and profess to believe that all the light which the case requires is to be found in the Scriptures, and that it is dangerous to follow any other. They have also no more right to use the argument drawn from the baptism of households, than they have that drawn from circumcision: they are both founded on the same principle—an assumption that the doors of the Christian visible church have been opened by our Lord himself to the unconscious and unconverted, in diametrical opposition to the principles on which they found their opposition to the established church. Surely it cannot be, that wise master-builders should much longer employ themselves in daubing this papal wall with untempered mortar.” p. 39-92.
We are decidedly of opinion that whoever may take upon himself to reply seriously to these statements, will find the undertaking to be neither quite easy nor very agreeable. It may not be improper to state that this is a new and somewhat enlarged edition of a work, published several years ago, by the same author.
Dr. Judson’s sermon, which is also a reprint, is perspicuous, elaborate, and irrefragable.