The same ingrained externalism in the conceptions of both Jewish and heathen converts to Christianity wrought, however, in the earliest ages of the Church, more powerfully and permanently another corruption of the Christian idea. The kingdom which Jesus came to found was not of this world, and was not, in its primary idea, an external organization. But it was inevitable that it should soon be identified with the visible Church, and the regeneration which was its door with the baptism by which entrance into the Church was accomplished. Already in Justin and Irenæus the word “regeneration” means “baptism;” and the language of John iii. 5, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a man be born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God,” was from a very early period uniformly understood to suspend salvation upon water-baptism. How early this doctrine of the necessity of baptism for salvation became the settled doctrine of the Church it is difficult to trace in the paucity of very early witnesses. Tertullian already defends it from objection.⁶ The reply of Cyprian and his fellow-bishops to Fidus on the duty of early baptism, and especially his whole argument to Jubianus against the validity of heretical baptism, plainly presuppose it.⁷ By this date clearly it was the accepted Church-doctrine; and although its stringency was mitigated in the case of adults by the admission not only of the baptism of blood, but also of that of intention,⁸ the latter mitigation was not allowed in the case of infants. The watchword of the Church—first spoken in these exact words, perhaps, by Cyprian in his strenuous opposition to the validity of heretical baptism⁹—Extra ecclesiam salus non est, hardened in this sense into an undisputed maxim. The whole Patristic Church thus came to agree that, martyrs excepted, no infant dying unbaptized could enter the kingdom of heaven.

The fairest exponent of the thought of the age on this subject is Augustine, who was called upon to defend it against the Pelagian contention that infants dying unbaptized, while failing of entrance into the kingdom, yet obtain eternal life. His constancy in this controversy has won for him the unenviable title of durus infantum pater—a designation doubly unjust, in that not only did he not originate the obnoxious dogma or teach it in its harshest form, but he was even preparing its destruction by the doctrines of grace, of which he was more truly the father. Augustine expressed the Church-doctrine moderately, teaching, of course, that infants dying unbaptized would be found on Christ’s left hand and be condemned to eternal punishment, but also not forgetting to add that their punishment would be the mildest of all, and indeed that they were to be beaten with so few stripes that he could not say that it would have been better for them not to be born.¹⁰ His zeal in the matter turned on his deepest convictions, and the essence of his argument may be exhibited by putting together two or three sentences from one of his polemic writings against the Pelagians. “We must by no means doubt,” he says, “that all men are under sin, which came into the world by one man and has passed through unto all men, and from which nothing frees us but the grace of God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” “For inasmuch as infants are only able to become His sheep by baptism, it must needs come to pass that they perish if they are not baptized, because they will not have that eternal life which He gives to His sheep.” “Let then there be no eternal salvation promised to infants out of our own opinion, without Christ’s baptism; for none is promised in that Holy Scripture which is to be preferred to all human authority and opinion.”¹¹ The Pelagian, denying original sin, found it an easy matter to assign to infants, born innocent and taken out of life before their own activities could soil their consciences, a place outside of the kingdom of God, indeed, but also free from punishment. The semi-Pelagians, allowing original sin, were in deeper waters, and seem to have tentatively suggested that the fate of each infant was determined by what God knew it would have done had it lived to years of discretion. Augustine, with his profound conviction of the reality of innate sin and of its guilt before God,¹² could not but contend with all his force against these teachings; he was really striving for the essential doctrines of universal sinfulness and of eternal bliss only through the propitiating work of Christ. Because his doctrine was based on such broad grounds no one could surpass him in the strength of his conviction as to the doom of unbaptized children—i.e., in his view, of children unsaved by Christ. But it is not to Augustine, but to Fulgentius († 533),¹³ or to Alcimus Avitus († 523),¹⁴ or to Gregory the Great († 604)¹⁵ that we must go for the strongest expression of the woe of unbaptized infants.

Meanwhile, however, whether through the vigor of Augustine’s advocacy or out of the natural and indeed inevitable revulsion of the Christian consciousness in the presence of Pelagian error, the Church had come at length to a fully reasoned reassertion of its primitive and essential faith, that infants, too, need salvation, and none of any age enters life save through the saving work of Christ. This is the fundamental thought of the patristic age in the matter, to which only a form was given by its belief that saving grace came only through baptism. There were some outside Pelagian circles, like Gregory of Nazianzus, who sought for those who die in infancy unbaptized an intermediate place, neither salvation nor retribution. But probably, with the exception of Gregory of Nyssa, only such anonymous objectors as those whom Tertullian confutes,¹⁶ or such obscure and erratic individuals as Vincentius Victor whom Augustine convicts, in the whole patristic age, doubted that the kingdom of heaven was closed to all infants departing this life without the sacrament of baptism. And now Augustine’s scourge had driven out the folly of imaging an eternity of bliss for men outside the kingdom of heaven and apart from the salvation of Christ.

---

← II. The Development of the Doctrine of Infant Salvation · Contents · The Mediæval Mitigation →

Footnotes

1. Helen B. Harris, The Newly Discovered Apology of Aristides, London, 1891, p. 108. ↩

2. Irenæus, Haer., ii., 22, 4, and iii., 18, 7. ↩

3. Cf. Wall, Hist. of Infant Baptism. Ed. 2, 1707, p. 365. ↩

4. See Epiphanius, Haer., 67; August., Haer., 47; and compare Smith and Wace, Dictionary of Christian Biography, iii., 24. It is possible that this heresy extended itself among the sectaries of the Middle Ages, and that it is some such notion as this that Peter the Venerable intends when he accuses “the heretics” (i.e., Peter de Bruys and his friends) of “denying that children who have not reached the age of intelligence can be saved by baptism, nor that another person’s faith can profit those who cannot use their own, since our Lord says, ‘Whosoever shall have believed and shall have been baptized shall be saved.’” Cf. A. H. Newman, A History of Anti-Pedobaptism, p. 31. ↩

5. The whole discussion can be conveniently read in vol. v. of The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Second series. New York, 1893, pp. 372-381. ↩

6. De Bapt., c. 12. ↩

7. Epistles lviii. (lxiv.) and lxiii. (lxxii.). ↩

8. With what limitations may be conveniently read in Wall, Hist. of Infant Baptism, ed. 2, 1707, pp. 359 sq. ↩

9. Epistle lxiii. (lxxii.), § 21. ↩

10. Augustine’s doctrine is most strongly expressed in Sermo xiv. In De Peccat. Merit., c, 21 (xvi.), and Contra Julian., v., ii, he speaks of the comparative mildness of the punishment. ↩

11. De Peccat. Merit., c. 33 (xxii.), c. 40 (xxvii.). ↩

12. Mr. H. C. Lea, in his History of Auricular Confession, I., 97, adduces a curious instance of the perversity of Monkish thought from St. Odo of Cluny. Augustine bases the condemnability of infants on their original sin, and he sometimes accounts for the transmission of sin by the presence of concupiscence in the act of procreation. Odo, without more ado, traces the condemnability of infants to the sinfulness of conjugal intercourse! Since such infants are certainly not punished for guilt of their own, he argues, it is clear that they are punished for that sin by which they are conceived; “if, therefore,” he continues, “the sin in conjugal intercourse is so great that an infant for that alone ought to be punished …” ↩

13. E.g., De Fide ad Petr., c. 27: “It is to be most firmly held, and by no means doubted, that not only men already in the use of reason, but also children, whether they begin to live in their mother’s womb and there die, or pass from this world after being born from their mothers without the sacrament of baptism, are to be punished with the everlasting penalty of eternal fire; because although they had no sin of their own committing, they nevertheless incurred by their carnal conception and nativity the damnation of original sin.” ↩

14. E.g., Ad Fuscinam Sororem: “Omnibus id vero gravius, si forte lavacri Divini expertem tenerum mors invidia natum Præpitat, dura generatum sorte Gehennæ. Qui mox, ut matris cessavit filius esse, Perditionis erit; tristes tunc edita nolunt Quæ flammis tantum genuerunt pignora matres.” ↩

15. E.g., Expos. in Job, i. 16. Such phrases as these meet us in Gregory’s writings: “Those who have done nothing here of themselves, but have not been freed by the sacraments of salvation, enter there into torments;” “It is perpetual torment which those receive who have not sinned of their own proper will at all.” (Moralium, ix., xii.). ↩

16. De Bapt., c. 12. ↩