This certainly sufficiently remarkable result grows out of the development which has been given in later Romanism to the doctrine of ignorance, and especially of “invincible ignorance,” the latter of which was at length authoritatively defined by Pope Pius IX. A very characteristic statement of the nature of this doctrine is to be found in the late Cardinal Newman’s A Letter Addressed to his Grace the Duke of Norfolk on the infallibility of the Pope. He is illustrating the care with which doctrinal statements should be interpreted. “One of the most remarkable instances of what I am insisting on,” he says, “is found in a dogma, which no Catholic can ever think of disputing, viz., that ‘Out of the Church, and out of the faith, is no salvation.’ Not to go to Scripture, it is the doctrine of St. Ignatius, St. Irenæus, St. Cyprian in the first three centuries, as of St. Augustine and his contemporaries in the fourth and fifth. It can never be other than an elementary truth of Christianity; and the present Pope has proclaimed it as all Popes, doctors, and bishops before him. But that truth has two aspects, according as the force of the negative falls upon the ‘Church’ or upon the ‘salvation.’ The main sense is, that there is no other communion or so-called Church but the Catholic, in which are stored the promises, the sacraments and other means of salvation; the other and derived sense is, that no one can be saved who is not in that one and only Church. But it does not follow, because there is no Church but one which has the Evangelical gifts and privileges to bestow, that therefore no one can be saved without the intervention of that one Church. Anglicans quite understand this distinction; for, on the one hand, their article says, ‘They are to be had accursed (anathematizandi) that presume to say, that every man shall be saved by (in) the law or sect which he professeth, so that he be diligent to frame his life by that law and the light of nature;’ while on the other hand they speak of and hold to the doctrine of the ‘uncovenanted mercies of God.’ The latter doctrine in its Catholic form is the doctrine of invincible ignorance—or, that it is possible to belong to the soul of the Church without belonging to its body; and at the end of 1800 years it has been formally and authoritatively put forth by the present Pope (the first Pope, I suppose, who has done so), on the very same occasion on which he has repeated the fundamental principle of exclusive salvation itself. It is to the purpose here to quote his words; they occur in the course of his Encyclical, addressed to the Bishops of Italy, under the date of August 10th, 1863: ‘We and you know that those who lie under invincible ignorance as regards our most Holy Religion, and who, diligently observing the natural law and its precepts, which are engraven by God on the hearts of all, and prepared to obey God, lead a good and upright life, are able, by the operation of the power of divine light and grace, to obtain eternal life.’” ‘¹³ Thus while an absolute necessity for baptism in re is posited for the infants of Christian parents, even though they die in the womb, on the other hand, as the law of baptism is in force only where it is known, and even an ignorance morally invincible (as among sectaries) is counted true ignorance, not even an intention of baptism is demanded of the heathen or of certain sectaries but may be held to be implicit—that is, they may be thought ready to do all that God requires if only they knew it. Among the heathen thus the old remedies for sin are held to be still probably valid, and their “primitive sacraments” are thought to retain their force;¹⁴ and this rule may with some prudence be extended to cover some sectaries. It may be extended also to cover the case of the infants of the heathen, dying such. St. Bernard, for example, is quoted approvingly by Gousset as saying, “Among the Gentiles as many as are found faithful, we believe that the adults are expiated by faith and the sacrifices; but the faith of the parents profits the children, nay, even suffices for them.” If the fathers are saved, in other words, why not the children?

Sometimes a very sweeping application is given to this principle, as may be illustrated by a popular exposition of it made a few years ago in the pages of The London Month.¹⁵ The writer is oppressed by the thought of the millions of unbaptized children who die annually. On the basis of John iii. 5 he declares that our Lord “excludes from the beatific vision all children who die unbaptized and who do not supply for the baptism of water by the baptism of desire, or the baptism of blood.” It may be taken, therefore, as a first principle “that without baptism no little child, under the Christian dispensation, enters the kingdom of heaven.” “But,” he instructs his readers, “we must not omit to notice that we are speaking of the Christian dispensation and of it alone.” God provided for the Jews a sort of anticipation of baptism; and we must suppose that something of the sort existed in the patriarchal age. “How long such traditional offering lasted on outside of the Jewish Covenant we do not know; it may be that during the whole period previous to. the coming of our Lord, those who were believers in the true God had the opportunity of obtaining from Him the deliverance of their little children from original sin, when they offered them to be His, and dedicated them, according to the best of their ability and knowledge, to His service. Nay, we may even hope that in the present day the dwellers in lands where the name of Christ is still unknown may save their children, as they certainly can save themselves, from the eternal loss of God, if they offer their little ones to Him with a recognition of Him as their all-powerful King and Lord.” As over against this “wider hope” for the children of the heathen, however, nothing so comforting can be said of the children of the faithful who die unbaptized. A few Catholic theologians may have indulged hope for them; but on insufficient grounds. “Here and there it may be that God, by an extraordinary intervention in behalf of some one of His faithful servants, may grant such a privilege to some favored little one, but only by a very special miracle of grace, and as a rare exception to the general law.” And even this meagre comfort is disallowed by most writers, as, indeed, on the basis of the Tridentine decrees it must be. Why, however, the baptism of intention should receive so wide an extension to the heathen, so as to give even the infants of the heathen the benefit of it, and be so inflexibly denied to the infants of Christians, is a question which will not easily receive satisfactory answer.

The application of the baptism of intention to the infants of Christians was not abandoned without some protest from the more tender-hearted. Cardinal Cajetan defended in the Council of Trent itself Gerson’s proposition that the desire of godly parents might be taken in lieu of the actual baptism of children dying in the womb.¹⁶ Cassander (1570) encouraged parents to hope and pray for children so dying.¹⁷ Bianchi (1768) holds that such children may be saved per oblationem pueri quam Deo mater extrinsecus faciat.¹⁸ Eusebius Amort (1758) teaches that God may be moved by prayer to grant justification to such extra-sacramentally.¹⁹ Even somewhat bizarre efforts have been made to escape the sad conclusion proclaimed by the Church. Thus Klee holds that a lucid interval is accorded to infants in the article of death, so that they may conceive the wish for baptism.²⁰ An obscure French writer supposes that they may, “shut up in their mother’s womb, know God, love Him, and have the baptism of desire.”²¹ A more obscure German conceives that infants remain eternally in the same state of rational development in which they die, and hence enjoy all they are capable of; if they die in the womb they either fall back into the original force from which they were produced, or enjoy a happiness no greater than that of trees.²² These protests of the heart have awakened, however, no general response in the Church,²³ which has preferred to hold fast to the dogma that the failure of baptism in infants, dying such, excludes ipso facto from heaven. What the Church of Rome, therefore, teaches as to the fate of infants of Christian parents dying such is, briefly, as follows: “Baptism is necessary as a means of salvation for both infants and adults. This necessity is not such as to exclude exceptions as regards the rite, though not as regards the substance and chief effects, in case actual baptism is impossible… . In the case of adults the effect can be obtained by contrition, perfect love of God, with a desire of baptism… . In the case of infants who are dead in sin through sharing in the guilt of Adam, and are incapable of making an act of attrition, the only way they can enter the kingdom of heaven is by baptism… . As infants are incapable of rational sentiments, their sanctification must be the work of a sacrament, that is, a divinely ordained rite that produces its effect while their souls are passive.”²⁴

The comfort which is refused from the application of the principle of baptism of intention to infants, is sought by the Church of Rome by mitigating still farther than the scholastics themselves the nature of that pœna damni which alone it allows as punishment of original sin. And if we may assume that such writers as Perrone, Hurter, Gousset and Kendrick are typical of modern Roman theology throughout the world, certainly that theology may be said to have come, in this pathway of mitigation, as near to positing salvation for all infants dying unbaptized as the rather intractable deliverances of early Popes and later councils permit to them. As the definitions of Florence and Trent require of them, they all teach, of course, (in the words of Perrone,²⁵) “that children of this kind descend into hell, or incur damnation;” but (as Hurter says²⁶), “although all Catholics agree that infants dying without baptism are excluded from the beatific vision, and so suffer loss, are lost (pati damnum, damnari), they yet differ among themselves in their determination of the nature and condition of the state into which such infants pass.” As the idea of “damnation” may thus be softened to a mere failure to attain, so the idea of “hell” may be elevated to that of a natural paradise.²⁷ Hurter himself is inclined to a somewhat severer doctrine. But Perrone (supported by such great lights as Balmes, Berlage, Oswald, Lessius, and followed not afar off by Gousset and Kendrick) reverts to the Pelagianizing view of Catharinus and Molina and Sfondrati—which Petau called a “fabrication” championed indeed by Catharinus but originated “by Pelagius the heretic,” and which Bellarmine contended was contra fidem—and teaches that unbaptized infants enter into a state deprived of all supernatural benefits, to be sure, but endowed with all the happiness of which pure nature is capable. Their state is described as having the nature of penalty and of damnation when conceived of relatively to the supernatural happiness from which they are excluded by original sin; but when conceived of in itself and absolutely, it is a state of pure nature, and accordingly the words of Thomas Aquinas are applied to it: “They are joined to God by participation in natural goods, and so also can rejoice in natural knowledge and love.”²⁸

Thus, after so many ages, the Pelagian conception of a middle state for infants dying unbaptized has obtained its revenge upon the condemnation inflicted upon it by the Church. To be sure, it is not admitted that this is a return to Pelagianism. Perrone, for example, argues that Pelagius held the doctrine of a natural beatitude for infants as one unrelated to sin, while “Catholic theologians hold it with the death of sin; so that the exclusion from the beatific vision has the nature of penalty and of damnation proceeding from sin.”²⁹ It may be doubted whether there is more than a verbal difference here. Both Pelagius and the Church of Rome consign infants dying unbaptized to a natural paradise. In deference to the language of fathers and councils and Popes, this natural paradise is formally assigned by Roman theologians to that portion of the other world designated “hell.” But in its own nature it is precisely what the Pelagians taught should be the state of unbaptized infants after death. By what expedients such teaching is to be reconciled with the other doctrines of the Church of Rome, or with its former teaching on this same subject, or with its boast of semper eadem, is more interesting to its advocates within that communion than to us.³⁰ Our interest as historians of opinion is exhausted in simply noting the fact that the Pelagianizing process, begun in the Middle Ages by ascribing to infants guilty only of original sin liability to pœna damni alone, culminates in our day in their assignment by the most representative theologians of modern Rome to a natural paradise, which has not been purchased for them by Christ but is their natural right. This is of the very essence of Pelagianism, and logically implies the whole Pelagian system.³¹

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Footnotes

1. For this classification see Bellarmine, De Amiss. Gratiæ, etc., vi., 1; and compare Gerhard, Loci (Cotta’s ed.), vol. ix., p. 279; Chamier, Panstrat. Cath. (1626), iii., 159; or Spanheim, Chamierus Contractus (1643), p. 797. ↩

2. Schaff’s Creeds of Christendom, ii., pp. 120, 123 (Seventh Session, March 3, 1547, Canon iv. on the Sacraments, and Canon v. on Baptism). ↩

3. The Catechism of the Council of Trent, Translated into English; with Notes by Theodore Alois Buckley, B.A., pp. 150, 174, 175 (Part II., ch. i., qq. xvi., xxx., xxxiii.); cf. Streitwolf and Klener, Libri Symbolici Eccles. Cath., tom. i., pp. 249, 274, 276. On the other hand, we are credibly informed that the council was near anathematizing as a Lutheran heresy the proposition that the penalty for original sin is the fire of hell (so Father Paul, Hist. of the Council of Trent, c. 2). ↩

4. Perrone, Prælect. Theol. in Compend. Redact., i., p. 494. ↩

5. New York: The Catholic Publication Society—with the imprimatur of Cardinal McCloskey, and the approval of Archbishop (now Cardinal) Gibbons, dated April 6th, 1888: No. 2, Lesson 14 (p. 27). ↩

6. No. IV., improved ed. New York: Benziger Bros. (1888), p. 309. ↩

7. A Full Catechism of the Catholic Religion, Fander’s transla- tion, revised, etc., by Bishop Lynch, of Charleston. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co., 1891, p. 248. ↩

8. Abridged Course of Religious Instruction, etc. By the Rev. Father F. X. Schouppe, S. J., new ed., etc. London: Burns & Oates, p. 188. ↩

9. The Catechumen, etc. By J. G. Wenham, Provost of Southwark. 3d ed. London: St. Anselm’s Society, 1892, p. 293. ↩

10. Ecclesiastical Polity, v., ch. 60, (ed. Dobson, I. 605.) ↩

11. What is meant by this language may be gathered from the following sentences from J. Henry Newman’s Letter Addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk, on the infallibility of the Pope: “I have employed myself, in illustration, in framing a sentence which would be plain enough to any priest, but I think would perplex any Protestant. I hope it is not too light to introduce here. We will suppose then a theologian to write as follows: ‘Holding, as we do, that there is only material sin in those who, being invincibly ignorant, reject the truth, therefore in charity we hope that they have the future portion of formal believers, as considering that by virtue of their good faith, though not of the body of the faithful, they implicitly and interpretatively believe what they seem to deny.’ What sense would this statement convey to the mind of a member of some Reformation Society or Protestant League? He would read it as follows, and consider it all the more insidious and dangerous for its being so very unintelligible: ‘Holding, as we do, that there is only a very considerable sin in those who reject the truth out of contumacious ignorance, therefore in charity we hope that they have the future portion of nominal Christians, as considering, that by the excellence of their living faith, though not in the number of believers, they believe without any hesitation, as interpreters [of Scripture?], what they seem to deny.’” (P. 93.) ↩

12. Thus, e.g., Dominicus de Soto expresses it (De Natura et Gratia, ii. 10): “It is most firmly established in the Church that no infant apart from baptism in re—since he cannot have it in voto—enters the kingdom of heaven.” In a more popular form it is put thus (A Manual of Instruction in Christian Doctrine, etc., 10th ed. London: St. Anselm’s Society. Ed. 3 [1871], p. 282): “Baptism is absolutely necessary to salvation for all infants, at least wherever the Gospel has been promulgated… . Children, therefore, who die unbaptized cannot enter into the beatific vision… . The case of adults is somewhat different. For them, when the actual reception of the sacrament is impossible, an act of perfect charity, which includes the desire of it, will suffice for salvation… . Again, martyrdom, which is the highest act of charity, has always been held to supply the place of baptism.” The book bears the imprimaturs of Cardinals Wiseman and Manning. ↩

13. Op. Cit., p. 122. ↩

14. From the theological point of view, Gousset, Théolog. Dogmat., 10th ed., Paris, 1866, i., 548, 549, 351, ii.,382, may be profitably consulted on this whole subject. How it is popularly presented may be gathered from the following editorial remarks from The Catholic Review, 42, 25 (December 11–17, 1893): “The truth is that God does not demand what is impossible; the heathen who have not heard of the Gospel will be judged by the light and grace given them. If we, with the Sacraments and the Sacrifice, are so apt to fall into sin, how hard it must be for the pagans to be faithful to natural virtue. Yet some of them, no doubt, have been true to the voice of conscience and are today in heaven. Having the disposition to do right, they had the implied desire for baptism, and St. Thomas says that if actual baptism had been essential for their salvation, the Almighty would have sent an angel from heaven to pour the cleansing water on them. They are few, probably, but few or many, they manifest the mercy of God and show that nowhere was salvation made impossible.” ↩

15. London Month, February, 1893. ↩

16. In 3 Part. Thomæ, Q. 68, art. 2, et. ii. ↩

17. De bapt. infant. ↩

18. De Remedio … pro parentis. ↩

19. Theolog. Moral., ii., xi., 3. ↩

20. Dog. iii., 2, § i. ↩

21. De La Marne, Traité métaphysique des Dogmes de la Trinité, etc., Paris, 1826. ↩

22. Hermessius, Zeitschr. f. Phil. u. kath. Theol., Bonn, 1832. ↩

23. Compare Vasquez, in 3 P. s. Th., disp. cli., cap. i; Hurter, op. cit, 1878, iii., 516 sq.; Perrone, Prælect. Theolog. (1839), vi., 55. ↩

24. The Very Rev. William Byrne, D.D., Vicar-General of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, The Catholic Doctrine of Faith and Morals, etc., Boston, 1892, pp. 224, 225. ↩

25. Compend., 1861, i., 494, No. 585. ↩

26. Op. cit., No. 729. ↩

27. What is possible in the Church of Rome in the way of elevating the idea of hell to that of a paradise may be interestingly investigated by reading the notable discussion on The Happiness in Hell by Professor St. George Mivart and others in The Nineteenth Century for December, 1892, and January, February, April, September, and December, 1893. Professor Mivart’s language is such as this: “Hell in its widest sense—namely, as including all those blameless souls who do not enjoy the Beatific Vision—must be considered as, for them, an abode of happiness transcending all our most vivid anticipations, so that man’s natural capacity for happiness is there gratified to the very utmost; nor is it even possible for the Catholic theologian of the most severe and rigid school to deny that, thus considered, there is, and there will for all eternity be, a real and true happiness in hell” (Dec. 1892, p. 919). Professor Mivart’s articles have been placed on the Index, and his language is extreme. But it is language which obviously expresses a widespread conviction among Roman teachers. And, indeed, a hell for “blameless souls” could scarcely be more severe. ↩

28. Compend, 1861, i., 494, cf. ii., 252. ↩

29. Ibid., 1861, i., 494, No. 590. ↩

30. See some of the difficulties very mildly stated in Hurter, loc. cit. ↩

31. It is not necessary to point out, e.g., that such a determination implies a Pelagianizing doctrine of sin. When we make all the happiness of which nature is capable the desert of original sin, there is little to choose between this “doctrine of original sin” and its entire denial. Some Roman writers appear to stand, therefore, on the verge of sending all infants dying such to heaven, despite the explicit teaching of the Church to the contrary. For example, S. J. Hunter, S.J. (Outlines of Dogmatic Theology. New York: Benziger Bros., 1896, vol. iii.) says at p. 229: “We hold then that, after the promulgation of the Gospel, infants who die without baptism of water or of blood are not admitted to the supernatural vision of God, which constitutes the happiness of heaven; that in consequence of the sin of Adam they will remain forever deprived of that happiness for which they were destined. But this privation is no injustice to them, for their nature gave them no claim in justice to a supernatural reward; nor does it imply any unhappiness in them, for they need not be supposed to know what they have lost.” And then he adds: “What little can be said concerning the difficult subject of their state will be found in the closing treatise of this volume.” But when we turn to the closing treatise of the volume, what we find is this (pp. 441, 442): “The Catholic doctrine is that hell is the portion of those who leave this life with the guilt of actual mortal sin. If a sin be such that the punishment of hell is more than is deserved by the malice involved, then that sin is not a mortal sin… . We have already said what was necessary concerning the lot of infants that die without baptism either of water or of blood, and therefore still under the guilt of original sin, but without actual sin.” Thus we are sent back and forth on a fruitless errand—except so far as we gather this: that as hell is for those alone who are burdened with “the guilt of actual mortal sin,” and as infants dying such are “without actual sin,” hell is no place for them. As there is no permanent state of existence between heaven and hell, and infants are excluded from both, where do they go? ↩