In the upheaval of the sixteenth century the Church of Rome found her task in harmonizing, under the influence of the scholastic formulas, the inheritance which the somewhat inconsistent past had bequeathed her. Four varieties of opinion sought a place in her teaching. At the one extreme the earlier doctrine of Augustine and Gregory, that infants dying unbaptized suffer eternally the pains of sense, found again advocates, and that especially among the greatest of her scholars, such as Noris, Petau, Driedo, Conry, Berti. At the other extreme, a Pelagianizing doctrine that excluded unbaptized infants from the kingdom of heaven and the life promised to the blessed, and yet accorded to them eternal life and natural happiness in a place between heaven and hell, was advocated by such great leaders as Ambrosius Catharinus, Albertus Pighius, Molina, Sfondrati. The mass, however, followed the schoolmen in the middle path of pœna damni, and, like the schoolmen, differed only as to whether this punishment of loss involved sorrow (as Bellarmine held) or was purely negative.1 The Council of Trent (1547) anathematized those who affirm that the “sacraments of the new law are not necessary to salvation, but superfluous; and that, without them, or without the desire thereof, men obtain of God, through faith alone, the grace of justification;” or, again, that “baptism is free, that is, not necessary to salvation.”2 This is explained by the Tridentine Catechism to mean that “baptism is necessary to every one without qualification,” and that “the law of baptism is prescribed by our Lord to all, insomuch that they, unless they be regenerated to God through the grace of baptism, are born to eternal misery and perdition, whether their parents be Christian or infidel.”3 The Council of Trent thus made it renewedly de fide that infants dying unbaptized incur damnation, though it left the way open for discussion as to the kind and amount of their punishment.4 The ordinary instruction in the Church of Rome has naturally been conformed to this point of view. Thus the Catechism Prepared and Enjoined by Order of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore teaches that “baptism is necessary to salvation, because without it we cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.”5 Müller’s popular Familiar Explanation of Catholic Doctrine teaches that “baptism is the most necessary sacrament, because without it no one can be saved;”6 words which are repeated by Deharbe.7 This is expanded by Schouppe as follows: “This necessity is so absolute that children dying without baptism, though innocent of all actual sin, are excluded forever from heaven, on account of the original stain which they bear upon their souls. Therefore our Lord has permitted them to be baptized as soon as they are born, and has given the utmost facility to the administration of so indispensable a sacrament.”8 “Millions,” says Wenham, “are saved with only this sacrament; but no one is ordinarily saved without it.”9
It is natural to catch at the word “ordinary” in such a deliverance. And the Tridentine declaration, of course, does not exclude the baptism of blood as a substitute for baptism of water, even for infants. Neither does it seem necessarily to exclude the application of a theory of baptism of intention to infants. Even after it, therefore, an alternative development seems to have been possible. The path already opened by Gerson and Biel might have been followed out, and a baptism of intention developed for infants as well as for adults. This might even have been logically pushed on so as to cover the case of all infants dying in infancy. The principle argued by Richard Hooker,10 for example, appears reasonable, that the unavoidable failure of baptism in the case of the children of Christians cannot lose them salvation, because of the presumed desire and purpose of baptism for them in their Christian parents and in the Church of God. And it would be to proceed only a single step farther to have said that the desire and purpose of Mother Church to baptize all is intention of baptism enough for all dying in helpless infancy, or even that what has been called the implicit and interpretative faith11 of their heathen parents may avail for them. Thus on principles agreeable to the general Roman line of thought a salvation for all dying in infancy might have been logically deduced, and infants, as more helpless and less guilty, have been given the preference over adults. On the other hand, it could be argued that as baptism either in re or in voto must mediate salvation, and as infants by reason of their age are incapable of the intention, they cannot be saved except they receive baptism in fact,12 and thus infants be discriminated against in favor of adults. It was this second path which was actually followed by the theologians of the Church of Rome, with the ultimate result that not only are infants discriminated against in favor of adults, but the more recent theologians seem almost ready to discriminate against the infants of Christians as over against those of the heathen.