It is fundamental to the very conception of Christianity that it is a remedial scheme. Christ Jesus came to save sinners. The first Christians had no difficulty in understanding and confessing that Christ had come into a world lost in sin to establish a kingdom of righteousness, citizenship in which is the condition of salvation. That infants were admitted into this citizenship they did not question. When the Apologist Aristides, for example, would make known to the heathen how Christians looked upon death, he did not confine himself to saying that “if any righteous person of their number passes away from the world, they rejoice and give thanks to God and follow his body as if he were moving from one place to another,” but adds of the infant, for whose birth they (unlike many of the heathen) praised God, “if, again, it chance to die in its infancy, they praise God mightily, as for one who has passed through the world without sins.”1 Nor did those early Christians doubt that the sole gateway into this heavenly citizenship, for infants too, was not the natural birth of the flesh, but the new birth of the Spirit. Communion with God and the inheritance of life had been lost for all alike, and to infants too were restored only in Christ. To Irenæus, for example, it seems appropriate that Christ was born an infant and grew by natural stages into manhood, since, as he says, “He came to save all by Himself—all, I say, who by Him are born again unto God, infants and children, and boys and young men, and old men,” and accordingly passed through every age that He might sanctify all.2
Less pure elements, however, entered inevitably into their thought. The ingrained legalism of both Jewish and heathen conceptions of religion, when brought into the Church, quite obscured for a time the doctrines of grace. It seemed for a season almost as if Christ had died in vain, and as if Paul’s whole proclamation of a free salvation had borne no fruit. Men persisted in looking for salvation by the works of the law, and found no ground of trust save in their own virtues. In this atmosphere the problem of the death of little children became an insoluble one. Dying before they had acquired merit, either good or bad, it seemed equally impossible to assign to them reward or punishment. Even a Gregory Nazianzen affirmed that they could be “neither glorified nor punished”3—that is, probably, that they went into a middle state similar to that taught by Pelagius. A heretical sect arose, called the Hieracitæ from their master Hierax, who, arguing that if one who strives cannot be crowned unless he strives lawfully it would be absurd to crown one who had not striven at all, consigned apparently all children dying before the use of reason to annihilation.4 Gregory of Nyssa seems to have some such notion floating before his mind, when, at the opening of his treatise, On Infants’ Early Death, he speaks of such children as passing out of the world before they even become human.
This treatise, which is probably the most extended discussion of the question from this general point of view which has come down to us from the patristic age, is full of interest. It was written in Gregory’s old age, at the request of Hierius, the governor of Cappadocia, and undertakes to solve, for the instruction of that official, the problem of justice which the early death of children raised under the legalistic viewpoint. Gregory begins by asserting the incongruity of imagining such an infant as standing before the judgment-seat of God, and the equal injustice of supposing him to pass at once into the lot of the blessed, without having acquired any merit. With apparently entire unconsciousness of the existence of anything like race-sin, he frankly proceeds in his argument on the assumption that future blessedness belongs of right to human beings who have not forfeited it by personally sinning, and that the infant, dying such, is therefore entitled to its natural happiness. The point of difficulty arises only from the consideration that then those are unjustly dealt with who are required to grow up in this earthly arena and to earn bliss only with difficulty or to lose it through their transgressions. This he attempts to meet by two suggestions. On the one hand, he suggests that though infants enter at once into happiness, they do not at once enter into all the happiness that rewards him who is victor here. “But the soul that has never felt the taste of virtue,” he says, “while it may, indeed, remain perfectly free from the sufferings which flow from wickedness, having never caught the disease of evil at all, does nevertheless in the first instance partake only so far in that life beyond as this nurseling can receive; until the time comes that it has thriven on the contemplation of the truly Existent as on a congenial diet, and, becoming capable of receiving more, takes at will more from that abundant supply of the truly Existent which is offered.” By this only gradual participation in bliss he would avoid the injustice of placing one that had acquired no virtue on the same level with him who had borne the heat and burden of the day. On the other hand, he suggests that the reason why God takes some away from the chance of failure here, removing them to certain bliss in their infancy, may be that He owes a debt to their parents’ virtue, or that He foresees that the evil to which they would give themselves if left on earth would far exceed that wrought by any actually permitted to remain; or, at all events, he argues, it may be needful to leave some men on earth to sin, that their evil may serve as a foil for the virtue of the righteous, since it is beyond doubt an addition and intensification to the felicity of the good “to have its contrary set against it.” We are in little danger of judging Gregory’s theodicy successful;5 but it is doubtless as successful a theodicy as could be wrought out on his premises. If the awards of the future life are to be conceived as distributed strictly according to personal merit, and infants, dying such, are to be esteemed free from sin, it would seem logically unavoidable that we should either suppose them to pass out of existence at death, or, like Pelagius, invent for them a middle place of natural felicity, neither heaven nor hell—or, at the best, like Gregory, less logically but more genially, fancy the Divine Father fitting them gradually for higher things “beyond the veil.”