Wesleyan Arminianism brought only an amelioration, not a thoroughgoing correction, of the faults of Remonstrantism. The theoretical postulation of original sin and natural inability, corrected by universal justification and the gift to all men of a gracious ability on the basis of universal atonement in Christ, was a great advance. But it left the salvation of infants dying in infancy logically as unaccounted for as had been done by original Remonstrantism. A universal atonement could scarcely bring to these infants more than it brought to such infants as did not die in infancy but grew up to exhibit the corruption of their hearts in appropriate action; and surely this was something short of salvation—at the most an ability to improve the grace given alike to all. But infants, dying such, cannot improve grace; and, therefore, it would seem, cannot be saved, unless we suppose a special gift to them over and above what is given to other men—a supposition subversive at once of the whole Arminian contention. The assertion of the salvation of all infants dying in infancy, although a specially dear tenet of Wesleyan Arminianism, remains, therefore, as with the earlier Remonstrants, unconformable to the system. The Arminian difficulty, indeed, lies one step further back; it does not make clear how any infant dying in infancy is to be saved. This is thrown into startling relief by such sentences as these from a sermon by Dr. Phillips Brooks: “What do we mean by original sin? Not surely that each being comes into the world guilty, already bearing the burden of responsible sin. If that were so, every infant dying before the age of conscious action must go to everlasting punishment, which horrible doctrine, I think, nobody holds to-day.’”³ This “horrible doctrine” probably no one in any age ever avowed;⁴ but the noteworthy point is that Dr. Brooks found it inconceivable that anything deserving the name of salvation could take place “before the age of conscious action.” If “salvation” were needed before that, there would be no hope for those needing it. And this is logically involved in the Arminian principle.

The difficulty which faces Arminian thought at this point is fairly illustrated by the evident embarrassment of Arminian theologians in dealing with the whole question of infant salvation. There are doubtless few who will be willing to follow Dr. James Strong in his admission that the Arminian doctrine of salvation is inapplicable to infants, and his consequent suggestion that those who die in infancy are incapable of salvation; that, like “idiots, lunatics, and other irresponsible human beings” (all of whom present the same difficulty to a type of thought which suspends salvation absolutely on a personal act of rational choice), it may be doubted whether they have souls, since “the existence of an absolutely undeveloped soul is to us inconceivable.”⁵ But it cannot be said that the attempts that have been made to explain, conformably to Arminian principles, the salvation of those who die before reaching the age of responsible action have met with much success. The original Wesleyan position, in its effort to evangelicalize the Arminian scheme, began with allowing the evangelical doctrine of original sin and the consequent guilt of the whole human race, and laid, therefore, the whole weight of infant salvation upon the cancelling grace supposed to come equally to all men on the basis of the atonement in Christ. Though all men are by nature guilty and condemned, yet no one comes into being under mere nature but under grace; and “the condemnation resting upon the race as such is removed by the virtue of the one oblation beginning with the beginning of sin.”’⁶ Every man comes into the world, therefore, in a saved state; and if he departs from the world again before reaching the age of responsible action, he enters at once into the fruition of this salvation. This is essentially the doctrine not only of Wesley, and indeed of Arminius before him,⁷ but hitherto of the leading Wesleyan thinkers—of Fletcher⁸ and Richard Watson,⁹ and, in our own day, of W. B. Pope¹⁰ and T. O. Summers’¹¹ and all who follow the original type of Wesleyan theology.¹² It may, indeed, be looked upon as the official teaching of the great Methodist Episcopal Church, which says in its Discipline: “We hold that all children, by virtue of the unconditional benefits of the atonement, are members of the kingdom of God, and therefore graciously entitled to baptism.”¹³

Therefore it is customary among Methodist theologians, in treating of the benefits of the atonement, to separate between the “immediate” or “unconditional” and the “conditional” benefits, and to speak of the salvation of infants under the former and of the salvation of adults under the latter caption. There have naturally arisen minor differences among them as to exactly what is included in these “unconditional benefits” conferred prenatally on all who come into being. The ordinary custom is to identify them with “justifica-” tion,” and to speak, as standing over against the “decree of condemnation” which has been “issued against original sin, irresponsibly derived from the first Adam,” of another “decree of justification” which has “issued from the same court, whose benefits are unconditionally bestowed through the second Adam.”’¹⁴ Others have seen that such a justification must necessarily drag in its train a “regeneration” also, by which the sinful depravity, which otherwise infants would bring with them into the world, is removed. While Richard Watson draws off to himself in his cautious hesitancy to affirm even actual “justification” of all who come into the world, preferring to say that they are “all born under the ‘free gift,’ the effects of the ‘righteousness’ which extended to ‘all men;’ and this free gift is bestowed on them in order to justification of life;” which “justification” follows unconditionally, by a process of which we are not informed, in the case of all who die in infancy.¹⁵ These minor variations of statement, however, while they illustrate the difficulties of its construction, do not affect the common doctrine; which is, briefly, that all men are born into the world, in principle, saved, and it is therefore that they who die in infancy enter into life. Nor do they affect the portentous consequences which flow from this doctrine—fatal, it would seem, to the whole system. For that all men enter the world in a saved state is assuredly not verifiable from experience; those that do not die in infancy certainly do not exhibit the traits of salvation: and, in order to believe that all are born in a saved state, we would seem to be forced to postulate a universal individual apostasy to account for universal sin—a thing which the Wesleyan theologians are naturally somewhat loath to do.¹⁶ Further, if all men enter the world in a saved state, but with the certainty of apostatizing if they live to years of discretion, the difficulty of justifying the ways of God with man is surely vastly increased; for we have now the permission of two universal apostasies to account for instead of one. Moreover, it would look as if, in that case, grace were openly exhibited as hopelessly weaker than nature; and one would seem justified in doubting whether the grace which protects none from sin who live beyond infancy can be depended on to introduce all who die in infancy into certain glory.

It cannot be held strange, therefore, that a strong tendency has recently developed itself among Arminian theologians to discard entirely the assuredly very artificial scheme which postulates a purely theoretical race sin, corrected by an equally theoretical race salvation that cannot be traced in any portion of the race subject to our scrutiny, and to revert to the Pelagianizing anthropology of the Dutch Arminians. From this point of view, which denies the guilt of original sin, infants are thought to enter into the world unfortunates indeed, and soiled by an inherited depravity which will inevitably cause them to sin when responsible action begins, but in the meantime under no condemnation; so that if they die in infancy they are liable to no punishment and must perforce enter into life, for which they are then unconditionally fitted by grace. This is, in general, the doctrine of Drs. Whedon,¹⁷ Raymond,¹⁸ John Miley,¹⁹ C. W. Miller,²⁰ G. W. King,²¹ and a great host of others who are in our day illustrating the inevitable tendency of consistent Arminian thought to find its level in a Pelagian anthropology. The gain to Arminian thought, however, of substituting for the formula, “All infants are born saved,” the simpler one of “All infants are born innocent and need no salvation,” is certainly not apparent enough to justify the price at which it is purchased—which is no less than the denial that Jesus is, in any proper sense, the Saviour of those that die in infancy. For, this account of the “salvation” of infants, no less than that which it would supplant, is fundamentally destructive to the very principle of Arminianism. For, whether the grace of Christ is called in for the pardon of the sin of those who die in infancy or merely for the removal of their uncondemnable depravity, in either case their destiny is determined irrespective of their choice, by an unconditional decree of God, suspended for its execution on no act of their own; and their salvation is wrought by an unconditional application of the grace of Christ to their souls, through the immediate and irresistible operation of the Holy Spirit prior to and apart from any action of their own proper wills. We can scarcely speak of their death in infancy as their own voluntary act, and we are therefore forbidden to say that their salvation is conditioned on their death in infancy—that is no proper condition which depends on God’s providence and not their act. And if death in infancy does depend on God’s providence, it is assuredly God in His providence who selects this vast multitude to be made participants of His unconditional salvation. It would be hard to contend that He did not foreknow those who would die in infancy, when He gave Christ to die for the sin of the world; and it would be inevitable that He should have had them in mind as certainly and unconditionally recipients of the benefits of His atonement, whatever other benefits it might bring conditionally to others. And this is but to say that they were unconditionally predestinated to salvation from the foundation of the world. If only a single infant dying in irresponsible infancy be saved, the whole Arminian principle is traversed. If all infants dying such are saved, not only the majority of the saved, but doubtless the majority of the human race hitherto, have entered into life by a non-Arminian pathway.

The truth, indeed, seems to be that there is but one logical outlet for any system of doctrine which suspends the determination of who are to be saved upon any action of man’s own will, whether in the use of gracious or natural ability. That lies in the extension of “the day of grace” for such as die before the age of responsible action, into the other world. Otherwise, there will inevitably be brought in covertly, in the salvation of infants, that very sovereignty of God, “irresistible” grace and passive receptivity, to deny which is the whole raison d’être of these schemes. There are indications that this is being felt increasingly and in ever wider circles among those who are most concerned; we have noted it recently among the Cumberland Presbyterians,²² who, perhaps alone of Christian denominations, have embodied in their confession their conviction that all infants, dying such, are saved.²³ The theory of a probation in the other world for such as have had in this no such probation as to secure from them a decisive choice, has come to us from Germany, and bears accordingly a later Lutheran coloring. Its roots are, however, planted in the earliest Lutheran thinking,²⁴ and are equally visible in the writings of the early Remonstrants; its seeds are present, in fact, wherever man’s salvation is causally suspended on any act of his own, and they are already germinated wherever the Scriptural declaration that none can be saved except through Christ is transmuted into its pseudo-disjunctive that none can be lost except through rejection of Christ—as if from the proposition that none can live without food it followed that none can die who do not reject food. But the outcome offered by this theory certainly affords no good reason for affirming that all infants, dying such, are saved. It is not uncommon, indeed, for its advocates to suppose the present life to be a more favorable opportunity for moral renewal in Christ than the next.²⁵ Some, no doubt, think otherwise. But in either event what can assure us that all whose opportunity comes to them only on the other side of the grave will be so renewed? Surely we must bear constantly in mind that, however the circumstances in that world may differ from those of life here, there will nevertheless always “remain the mystery of that freedom which makes it possible to reject Christ,”²⁶ and therefore a probability less or greater, according to our estimate of the relative favorableness of the opportunity for moral renewal in Christ, offered then and now, that fewer or more of those that die in infancy will use their freedom in rejecting Christ, and so pass to doom.

Efforts enough, no doubt, have been made to show that, even on the so-called “ethical” postulates, it is reasonable to believe that all infants, dying such, will attain blessedness, and that, without the assumption of any proper probation beyond the grave. We are ready to accept the subtle argument in Dr. Kedney’s valuable work, Christian Doctrine Harmonized,²⁷ as the best that can be said in the premises. Dr. Kedney denies the theory of “future probation,” but shares the general “ethical” view on which it is founded, and projects the salvation of infants dying in infancy into the next world on the express ground that they are incapable of choice here. He assures us that they will surely welcome the knowledge of God’s love in Christ there. But we miss the grounds of assurance, on the fundamental postulates of the scheme. He reasons that we may fairly believe “that even in such cases the moral trend is in this life determined, and through mystical influence, as in all cases whatever, such determination sure to issue in self-determination, foreseen by God and the environment adapted accordingly.” “This simply locates the will,” he adds, “back of the point of clear self-consciousness, and uses the word to represent the rudimentary consciousness, which last has spiritual elements.” “Hence the inference,” he concludes, “that infants dying are on the way to perfection, since the knowledge of God’s love in Christ is sure to reach them under the coming environment, and that, not to be possibly rejected, but sure to be welcomed, and to carry them to the blessed end. This supply of the highest possible motive-spring, in every case needful for perfection, is not probation, but elevation.” We certainly rejoice in this conclusion. But as certainly we do not find it possible to view it as a logical corollary from Dr. Kedney’s general principle that every man’s eternal state is determined by a true probation, personally undergone by him under influences and providential provisions for making a holy choice easy. Rather it appears to us to rest on assumptions which stand in flagrant contradiction with this principle; and it is hard for us to see why, if the great majority of those who are saved are saved by a mystical influence of the Holy Spirit’s, acting beneath consciousness, such as makes their choice of Christ certain, we need be so strenuous in denying with reference to the minority the morality of so blessed and sure a salvation.²⁸

Dr. Kedney’s inconsistency²⁹ appears to us happy indeed when we consider what the more consistent solution of the problem would be, as it is offered, say, by 1890). His conception of Christianity is the so-called “ethical” one (pp. 59, 150), and his central idea is that the world is “the wilderness” or trial-ground necessary for fitting men for heaven. In the middle of a chapter the very object of which is to show that the sons of God must needs be trained by tests and trials, attempts and temptations, and that the law that “resistance is the measure of advance” is universal, he needs to stop suddenly and say: “And it does not change the law that myriads of the children of our race are spared this trial. The majority of those born into the wilderness are taken out of it before temptation begins.” “There is no sense in this,” he adds justly, “if we look at our ‘science ‘only. The death of infants is absolutely irrational in the face of the law of survival, if we confine that law only to time and the world. I dare say there is nothing more preposterously senseless than the death, at a year old, of a child who in head and hand, in health and intellect, was the perfect flower of his race! But the great Father has other schools besides this. He is not confined to one curriculum for the training of His sons, and those He takes away need other discipline than this wilderness affords. He trains some here. He need not train all” (p. 96). It certainly is interesting to learn that a “universal” law is not affected by its inapplicability to “the majority” of those over whom it was to rule. It is equally worthy of note that Dr. Thompson’s “ethical” theory of the necessity of “probation” forces him to assume that children departing this life must enter, not a place of bliss, but a new trial place in the same sense in which this life is a trial-place, and equally including likewise the risk and certainty of many failures. There is, in other words, no pathway open along this road for belief in the salvation of all who die in infancy, nor even for the immediate salvation of any who die in infancy. All who are saved must be saved through trial, here or hereafter. Whether Dr. Thompson would assent to this or not, we do not know; his theory involves it. Compare the following words of Dr. E. H. Plumptre (The Wider Hope, edited by James Hogg, London, 1890, p. 132): “I dwelt … on the fact that for a large number of human souls, whom the great mass of Christians recognize as heirs of immortality, there has been absolutely no possibility of any action that could test or develop character. ‘As yet I am compelled to believe that where there has been no adequate probation or none at all, there must be some extension of the possibility of development or change beyond the limits of this present life. Take the case of unbaptized children. Shall we close the gates of Paradise against them and satisfy ourselves with the levissima damnatio which gained for Augustine the repute of the durus pater infantum? And if we are forced in such a case to admit the law of progress, is it not legitimate to infer that it extends beyond them to those whose state is more or less analogous?’ ”Dr. Plumptre does not once think of the possibility of infants passing at once to bliss,—“unbaptized children,” he says out of his Anglican consciousness; the best he can hope for is that they “may have a chance” under probation: and that is certainly the best that can be hoped under his “ethical” view. Dr. Emory Miller.³⁰ Because his theory forces him to consider that the racial and social life existent in this world affords the lowest and easiest conditions which “all-conditioning love” can prepare for the rise, progress and perfection of finite personalities, Dr. Miller can find nothing better to say of “infants of days,” dying such, than that, along with idiots, as they have “never exercised self-determination, they have not attained to individual self-consciousness,” and are persons “only in the sense of a bundle of personal conditions;” and hence “physical death, which is merely racial retribution, the dissolution of race conditions, must, so far as we can determine without a revelation on the subject, end their being.” Even for children of a somewhat larger growth, “who have passed from human conditions without human temptation or probation into the conditions and associations of the blessed,” though he is forced to allow that their new conditions are those of “overwhelming motives to love and entire absence of temptation,” he yet, because he is required to contend that any conceivable conditions are less easy for attaining perfection than those provided in this world, can only promise relatively low attainments and doubtful advance toward perfection. These new conditions, after all, are not such as will afford opportunity of “self-determined conquest of natural susceptibilities to selfishness,” or of the attainment “of the consciousness of moral security as against supposable temptation to sin.” By them alone, therefore, perfect personality or the highest order of moral character cannot be reached; though it must be admitted that through association with the “faithful” who have determined their own security (and whom Dr. Miller strangely speaks of as constituting the “main body” of the perfect universe, as if the number of these conquering “faithful” could possibly exceed the combined numbers of “angels, infants, and innocent heathen”) they too may eventually acquire a like transcendent security. From such speculations one turns with the sense of a great relief to the simplicity of the Word, which does not suspend salvation upon man’s action, but solely upon the loving act of God, for whom nothing is “too hard;” and with a deepened conviction that it is better to fall into the hands of God than in those of men, however well-intentioned.

The drifts of doctrine which have come before us in this rapid sketch may be reduced to three generic views. 1. There is what may be called the ecclesiastical doctrine. According to this the Church, in the sense of an outwardly organized body, is set as the sole fountain of salvation in the midst of a lost world; the Spirit of God and eternal life are its peculiar endowments, of which none can partake save through communion with it. Accordingly to all those departing this life in infancy, baptism, the gateway to the Church, is the condition of salvation. 2. There is what may be called the gracious doctrine. According to this the visible Church is not set in the world to determine by the gift of its ordinances who are to be saved, but, as the harbor of refuge for the saints, to gather into its bosom those whom God Himself in His infinite love has selected in Christ Jesus before the foundation of the world in whom to show the wonders of His grace. Men accordingly are not saved because they are baptized, but they are baptized because they are saved; and the failure of the ordinance does not argue the failure of the grace. Accordingly to all those departing this life in infancy, inclusion in God’s saving purpose alone is the condition of salvation: we may be able to infer this purpose from manifest signs, or we may not be able to infer it, but in any case it cannot fail. 3. There is what may be called the humanitarian doctrine. According to this the determining cause of man’s salvation is his own free choice, under whatever variety of theories as to the source of his power to exercise this choice, or the manner in which it is exercised. Accordingly whether one is saved or not is dependent not on inclusion by baptism in the Church, the God-endowed institution of salvation, nor on inclusion by grace in God’s hidden purpose of mercy, but on the decisive activity of the individual soul itself.

The first of these doctrines is characteristic of the early, the mediæval, and the Roman churches, and is not without echoes in those sections of Protestantism which love to think of themselves as “more historical” or less radically reformed than the rest. The second is the doctrine of the Reformed churches. These two are not opposed to one another in their most fundamental conception, but are related rather as an earlier misapprehension and a later correction of the same basal doctrine. The phrase extra ecclesiam nulla salus is the common property of both; they differ only in their understanding of what is meant by the “ecclesia” outside of which is no salvation, whether the visible or the invisible church, whether the externally organized institution or the true “body of Christ” bound to Him by the indwelling Spirit. The third doctrine, on the other hand, has cropped out ever and again in every age of the Church, has dominated the thought of whole sections of it and of whole ages, but has never, in its purity, found expression in any great historic confession or exclusively characterized any age. It is, in fact, not a development of Christian doctrine at all, but an intrusion into Christian thought from without. In its purity it has always and in all communions been recognized as deadly heresy; and only as it has been more or less modified and concealed among distinctively Christian adjuncts has it ever made a position for itself in the Church. Its fundamental conception is the antipodes of that of the other doctrines, inasmuch as it looks to man and not to God as the decisive actor in the saving of the soul.

The first sure step in the development of the doctrine of infant salvation was taken when the Church drew from the Scriptures that foundation which from the beginning has stood firm, Infants too are lost members of a lost race, and only those savingly united to Christ are saved. It was only in its definition of what infants are thus savingly united to Christ that the early Church missed the path. All that are brought to Him in baptism, was its answer. And long ages needed to pass before a second step in the development of the doctrine was taken in a corrected definition. The way for a truer apprehension was prepared indeed by Augustine’s doctrine of grace, by which salvation was made dependent on the dealings of God with the individual heart, and thus in principle all ecclesiastical bonds were broken. But his own eyes were holden that he should not see it. It was thus reserved to Zwingli to proclaim the true answer clearly, All the elect children of God, who are regenerated by the Spirit, who works when, and where, and how He pleases. The sole question that remains is, Who of those that die in infancy are the elect children of God? Tentative answers have been given. The children of God’s people, some have said. Others have said, The children of God’s people, with such others as His love has set upon to call. All those that die in infancy, others still have said. And it is to this reply that Reformed thinking and not Reformed thinking only, but in one way or another, logically or illogically, the thinking of the Christian world has been converging. Is it the Scriptural answer? If it be really conformable to the Word of God it will stand; and the third step in the development of the doctrine of infant salvation is already taken.

But if this answer stand, it must be clearly understood that it can stand on no other theological basis than that of the Reformed theology. If all infants dying in infancy are saved, it is certain that they are not saved by or through the ordinances of the visible Church; for they have not received them. It is equally certain that they are not saved through their own improvement of a grace common to all men; for, just because they die in infancy, they are incapable of personal activity. It is equally certain that they are not saved through the granting to them of a bare opportunity of salvation in the next world; for a bare opportunity indubitably falls short of salvation. If all that die in infancy are saved, it can only be through the almighty operation of the Holy Spirit, who works when, and where, and how He pleases, through whose ineffable grace the Father gathers these little ones to the home He has prepared for them. If, then, the salvation of all that die in infancy be held to be a certain or probable fact, this fact will powerfully react on the whole complex of our theological conceptions, and no system of theological thought can live in which it cannot find a natural and logical place. It can find such a place in the Reformed theology. It can find such a place in no other system of theological thought.

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Footnotes

1. Outstanding instances may be found in Castellio and Servetus. The latter taught that infants are born with hereditary disease (morbus) of sin, indeed, but without guilt, which comes only with responsibility, i.e., with the knowledge of good and evil, the age for which he sets at about twenty. Those who die before that age go, like all men, to the purifying pains of Hades—a sort of purgatory: whence they are released by Christ at the resurrection. They are soiled by the serpent of original sin; but they are guilty of no impiety, and hence the merciful and pitiful Master who gave His blessing to unbaptized babes in this life will not condemn them, but will raise them up at the last day and convey them to heavenly bliss. These tenets may be veri- fied from the extracts given from the Christianismi Restitutio by Dr. Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vii., pp. 748 sq. Dr. Schaff is wrong, however, in paralleling Servetus’s doctrine of original sin with Zwingli’s. Zwingli taught the universality of the guilt of Adam’s first sin, only denying that hereditary corruption is the source of guilt; while Servetus makes no more of adherent than he does of inherent guilt, denying guilt altogether to infants. On the other hand, Servetus’s doctrine is curiously similar to that of our modern Pelagianizing Arminians, as represented, say, by Drs. Whedon, Miner Raymond and John Miley. ↩

2. Opera Theologica, ed. Curcellæus, altera pars. Goudæ, 1665, p. 153a. ↩

3. Sermons, vol. vi., Sermon i, on The Mystery of Iniquity. ↩

4. Something similar to it has occasionally been held; see above, p. 145. ↩

5. The Doctrine of a Future Life (New York, 1891), p. 94, note. The text is speaking of probation and of the fact of reprobation found- ed on it; and the note adds: “All this is, of course, inapplicable to infants, idiots, lunatics and other irresponsible human beings who can hardly be called persons in the strict sense. Their case has its peculiar difficulties… . We may be permitted, however, to venture the suggestion that where the moral disability is congenital and total there is grave reason to doubt the existence of an immortal spirit; and perhaps we may be forced to believe that immortality itself is developed rather than innate. Certain it is that the soul, as a thinking, moral substance, is itself at least developed at some point of embryonic life, and why may not its immortality be likewise a stage in its progress? The perpetuity or even the existence of an absolutely undeveloped soul is to us inconceivable.” ↩

6. W. B. Pope, Christian Theology, ii., 59. ↩

7. He is defending his friend Borrius, and denies that Borrius would have infants saved without the intervention of Christ; and affirms that Borrius’s doctrine of infant salvation rested on the conception that “God has taken the whole human race into the grace of reconciliation, and has entered into a covenant of grace with Adam and with the whole of his posterity in him.” (Works, Nichols’s translation, ii., 10, 11.) ↩

8. Works, i., 283, 284. ↩

9. Theological Institutes, ii., 57 sq. ↩

10. As above. ↩

11. Systematic Theology, ii. 39. ↩

12. This includes very explicitly the late Dr. Henry J. Van Dyke, who wrote: “We believe that the satisfaction which He [Christ] as the seed of the woman and Saviour of the world, rendered to God’s broken law, takes away the guilt and condemnation of Adam’s sin from the whole human race. We do not say the inherited corruption and depravity of our nature, which is commonly called original sin; but we say the guilt and condemnation of original sin; so that the multitude of the redeemed which no man can number will include not only all believers, but ‘all who have not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression,’ that is to say, who die in infancy” (The Presbyterian Review for January, 1885, vol. vi., p. 58; cf. The Church: Her Ministry and Sacraments, p. 106, where the middle clause of the above is omitted, but without change of sense). So also Dr. Henry Van Dyke (God and Little Children, N. Y., 1890, p. 62 sq.): “The obedience of Christ countervails the disobedience of Adam and blots it out completely… . Original sin is all atoned for; the guilt of it is taken away from the race by the Lamb of God.” Perhaps a shade less clearly assertory of the fundamental Arminian soteriologic principle is Dr. Henry E. Robins (The Harmony of Ethics with Theology, 1891, p. 63 sq.): “The sentence of acquittal is the first indispensable step in the process of redemption which will go on to its consummation unless thwarted by personal moral resistance. Now, since infants dying in infancy, idiots, the congenitally insane, and all who in the infallible judgment of God have not reached the stature of moral personality, are incapable of such intelligent moral resistance, incapable of resisting the new terms of salvation proposed under the grace system, they become, we believe, on that account, subjects of regeneration by the Holy Spirit.” ↩

13. Methodist Discipline, § 43 (1892). ↩

14. The words quoted here are Dr. John J. Tigert’s in Summers’s Systematic Theology, ii., 39. ↩

15. Theological Institutes, ii., 59. ↩

16. Dr. Pope, for example, says: “We do not assume a second personal fall in the case of each individual reaching the crisis of responsibility” (Comp. Christ. Theology, ii., 59.) ↩

17. The Methodist Quarterly Review, 1883, p. 757. Commentary on Eph. ii. 3 et al. ↩

18. Systematic Theology, ii., 311 sq. Dr. Raymond is not without some little hesitation in his rejection of the older Wesleyan view. “The doctrine of inherited depravity,” he says, “involves the idea of inherited disqualification for eternal life. The salvation of infants, then, has primary regard to a preparation for the blessedness of heaven—it may have a regard to a title thereto; not all newly created beings, nor those sustaining similar relations, are by any natural right entitled to a place among holy angels and glorified saints. The salvation of infants cannot be regarded as a salvation from the peril of eternal death. They have not committed sin, the only thing that incurs such a peril. The idea that they are in danger of eternal death because of Adam’s transgression, is at most nothing more than the idea of a theoretic peril. But if it be insisted that ‘by the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to [a literal and actual] condemnation,’ we insist that, from that condemnation, be it what it may, theoretic or literal, all men are saved; for ‘by the righteousness of one, the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life,’ so that the conditions and relations of the race in infancy differ from those of newly created beings solely in that, by the natural law of propagation, a corrupted nature is inherited. As no unclean thing or unholy person can be admitted to the presence of God … it follows that if infants are taken to heaven, some power, justifying, sanctifying their souls, must be vouchsafed unto them; the saving influence of the Holy Spirit must be, for Christ’s sake, unconditionally bestowed. Not only their preparation for, but also their title to, and enjoyment of, the blessedness of heaven comes, as came their existence, through the shed blood of our Lord Jesus Christ… . Our Lord’s assurance of infant salvation is sufficient; that, if saved, they are saved by His blood, admits of no doubt; hence we catalogue among the unconditional benefits of atonement the secured salvation of those dying in infancy.” ↩

19. Systematic Theology, i., 518, 532; ii., 247, 408, 505 sq. Dr. Miley is very decided in his Pelagianizing construction and controverts at length the earlier Wesleyan view. We are indebted to him for a number of references. ↩

20. The Conflict of Centuries (Nashville, Tenn., Southern Meth. Pub. House, 1884,) pp. 115 sq., 166, 208. “The fundamental truth is here affirmed ‘that there is no corruption in children which is truly and properly sin,’ ”etc. ↩

21. Future Retribution (New York, 1891): “This is not the place to discuss the question of the relation of children to the atonement, and we need only say that, not being sinners in any true definition of sin, their relation to Christ must be wholly peculiar, as is their relation to probation and the new birth” (p. 159 note). ↩

22. Cumberland Presbyterian Review, July, 1890, p. 369; cf. January, 1890, p. 113. ↩

23. “All infants dying in infancy are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit, who worketh when, and where, and how He pleaseth; so also are others who have never had the exercise of reason, and who are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the Word.”—The Confession of Faith of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, revised and adopted by the General Assembly at Princeton, Ky., May, 1829 (Nashville, Tenn., Board of Publication C. P. Church, 1880, ch. x., § 3). In the revision of 1883, this runs: “All infants dying in infancy, and all persons who have never had the faculty of reason, are regenerated and saved.”—Confession of Faith and Government of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. (Nashville, etc., 1893, § 54, p. 34.) ↩

24. Cf. e.g., Andreæ (Actis Colloq. Montisbelligart, p. 447, 448), who argues that those who are adjudicated to eternal punishment are not condemned for the reason that they have sinned, but because they have refused to embrace Christ in true faith. Beza very appropriately replied: “This that you say, ‘these are not therefore damned because they have sinned,’ is something wholly new to me and hitherto unheard of, since sin is the sole cause of eternal damnation, why the wicked are left in their wickedness and condemned.” ↩

25. Cf. Progressive Orthodoxy, p. 76: “There is much reason also, in the nature of the case, to believe that the present life is the most favorable opportunity for moral renewal in Christ.” ↩

26. Progressive Orthodoxy, p. 93. ↩

27. Vol. ii., pp. 91 sq. ↩

28. It is a view not essentially differing from Dr. Kedney’s that the Rev. D. Fisk Harris, himself a Congregational minister (Calvinism Contrary to God’s Word and Man’s Moral Nature, p. 107), tells us “seems to be the prevailing view of Congregationalists.” This he states thus: “All infants become moral agents after death. Exercising a holy choice, they ‘are saved on the ground of the atonement and by regeneration.’ ”Suppose they do not exercise a “holy choice”? What is to assure us that they will all “exercise a holy choice”? If the choice of these infants while it remains free can be made certain there, why not the same for adults here? And if their choice is made certain, by what is it that their destiny is determined—by their choice, or by the Divine act which makes it certain? Assuredly, no thoroughfare is open along this path for a consistent doctrine of the salvation of all that die in infancy, unless the whole principle of the theory is given up and the Reformed doctrine of the sovereign and irresistible grace of God sub-introduced. ↩

29. This inconsistency naturally appears in all writers of similar tendencies, and the popular religious literature of the day is accordingly full of it. An example may be found in Bishop Hugh Miller Thompson’s Baldwin Lectures on The World and the Man (New York, ↩

30. The Evolution of Love. By Emory Miller, D.D., LL.D. (Chicago, 1892), p. 330; cf. pp. 254 and 336, which speak of children and not merely infants. ↩