The task which we set before us in this brief paper is not to unravel the tangled skein of the history of opinion as to the salvation of those who die in infancy. We propose to ourselves only the much more circumscribed undertaking of tracing the development of doctrine on this subject. We hope to show that there has been a doctrine as to the salvation of infants, dying such, common to all ages of the Church. And we hope to show that there has taken place with reference to this, as with reference to other doctrines, a progressive correction of crudities in its conception, by which the true meaning and relations of the common teaching have been more and more freed from deforming accretions and its permanent core brought to ever purer expression. As the result of this process, as we hope to show, the Church has found its way to a tolerably complete understanding of the teaching of the Scriptures upon this important subject. Those portions of the Church which have chosen to sit still in the darkness of mediævalism will have advanced, to be sure, but a little way into this fuller and better apprehension. Those portions of the Church which have elected to light their path more or less by the rush-light of reason, rather than by the sun of revelation, have naturally wandered more or less aside from it. But wherever the Word of God has been the constant study of the Church, the darkness of this problem too has measurably given way before its light; and where the apprehension of scriptural truth in general has become most pure, there the depths of this doctrine too have been most thoroughly sounded and its relations most perfectly perceived.
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