The most serious peril which the orderly development of the Christian doctrine of the salvation of infants has had to encounter, as men strove age after age more purely and thoroughly to apprehend it, has arisen from the intrusion into Christian thought of what we may without lack of charity call the unchristian conception of man’s natural innocence. For the task which was set to Christian thinking was to obtain a clear understanding of God’s revealed purpose of mercy to the infants of a guilty and wrath-deserving race. And the Pelagianizing conception of the innocence of human infancy, in however subtle a form it may be presented, puts the solution of the problem in jeopardy by suggesting that no such problem exists and no solution is needed. We have seen how some Greek Fathers cut the knot with the facile formula that infantile innocence, while not deserving of supernatural reward, was yet in no danger of being adjudged to punishment. We have seen how, in the more active hands of Pelagius and his companions, as part of a great unchristian scheme, the assertion that there has been no such thing as a “fall” and that every human being comes into the world in the same condition as Adam when he came from his Maker’s hands, menaced Christianity itself and was repelled only by the vigor and greatness of an Augustine. We have seen how the same conception, creeping gradually into the Latin Church in the modified form of semi-Pelagianism, lulled her heart to sleep with suggestions of less and less ill-desert for original sin, until she neglected the problem of infant salvation altogether and comforted herself with a constantly attenuating doctrine of infant punishment. If infants are so well off without Christ, there is little impulse to consider whether they may not be in Christ.
The Reformed churches could not hope to work out the problem free from menace from the perennial enemy. From the very beginning of their history, of course, they were continually called upon to meet the assaults of individuals who found that the most telling form they could give their Pelagian attack was to charge the Reformed with dishonoring God by attributing to Him cruel treatment of “innocent infants.”1 The crisis came, however, with the Remonstrant controversy, which marked the first considerable Pelagianizing defection from the Reformed ranks. Like all their predecessors, the Remonstrants put themselves forward as the defenders of “innocent infancy” against the “barbarity” of the Reformed doctrine, which represented them as born, on account of original sin, under the condemnation of God; and they accordingly passionately asserted the “salvation” of all that die in infancy. “Neither does it matter,” said Episcopius,2 “whether these infants are the children of believers or of heathen, for the innocence is just the same in infants as infants.” The anthropology of the Remonstrants, however, was distinctly semi-Pelagian, and on that basis no solid advance was possible toward a sound doctrine of infant salvation. Nor was the matter helped by their postulation of a universal atonement, which lost in intention as much as it gained in extension. Infants may have very little to be saved from, but their salvation from even that cannot be wrought by an atonement which only purchases for them the opportunity for salvation. Of this opportunity they cannot avail themselves, however uninjured by the fall the natural power of free choice may be, for the simple reason that they die infants. Nor can God be held to make them, without their free choice, partakers in the atonement without an admission of that sovereign discrimination among men which it was the very object of the whole Remonstrant theory to exclude. It is not strange that the Remonstrants looked with some favor on the Romish theory of pœna damni, which would have been more conformable to their Pelagianizing standpoint. Though the doctrine of the salvation of all infants dying in infancy became one of their characteristic tenets, therefore, it had no logical basis in their scheme of faith, and their proclamation of it could have no direct effect in working out the problem. Indirectly it had, however, a twofold effect. On the one hand, it retarded the true course of the development of doctrine, by leading those who held fast to biblical teaching on original sin and particular election to oppose the doctrine of the salvation of all dying in infancy, as if it were necessarily inconsistent with those teachings. Probably Calvinists were never so united in affirming that some infants, dying such, are reprobates, as in the height of the Remonstrant controversy. On the other hand, so far as the doctrine of the salvation of all infants, dying such, was accepted by the anti-Remonstrants, it tended to bring in with it, in more or less measure, the other tenets with which it was associated in the teaching of the Remonstrants, and thus to lead men away from the direct path along which alone the solution was to be found.