On the other hand, not only is it impossible to maintain that for those baptized by John the recognition of Jesus as the Christ was an insufficient additional step, and a new baptism indispensable, but it is not even clear that so long as the Redeemer lived, baptism was invariably essential for entering into fellowship with Him. It rather appears that when by word He imparted forgiveness to someone, and called him to follow Him, this acceptance was itself the act of Christ, and baptism would have been no more than an utterly meaningless supplement. Indeed, it is impossible to hold that even the Apostles had received the baptism of John, not to say all the disciples of Christ, especially those from Galilee; still less that Christ Himself baptized any single person on whom it would then have been incumbent to baptize others.⁶ Hence we must apply at this point the distinction between the Church as it still awaited institution and the Church as it already existed, and it is no matter for surprise if many of the Christians who had not been won by the already existing Church were unbaptized. The personal choice of Christ as an act of His will must have been completely sufficient of itself to secure both the blessings which our paragraph ascribes to baptism—namely, the application of the divine decree of redemption to the individual, and the placing of the individual in fellowship with all who already believe. This makes it as clear as possible that baptism as Christ’s universal ordinance has taken the place of His particular personal choice.

3. Suppose we hold to this point of view and conceive each act of baptism, if it is to have this effect, as a decision of the whole Church, to which through the action of the Holy Spirit in its fulness there attaches the highest canonical authority; so that the Church could baptize no one who was not as mature and as ready actually to begin a new spiritual life in fellowship with Christ as everyone chosen by Christ Himself must have been. There would in that case be no occasion to raise questions as to the possibility that baptism and regeneration might be separated from each other; we could assert without more ado that everyone is regenerated in baptism, and only so. For since the Holy Spirit was bestowed on the whole body of disciples, it might be held that the divine activity in regeneration and justification was so exclusively attached to the administration of baptism that everyone whom in baptism the Church presents to God not only is acknowledged by Him, subsequently as it were, but in and with baptism itself is given a share in the Holy Spirit and divine sonship. In fact, however, this is not the case; baptism is only granted and administered by a relatively self-contained part of the Church, in a transitional phase of its development, for none of whose particular actions therefore any such canonical perfection can be claimed. Hence no particular act of baptism can do more than approximate more or less to perfect correctness. And if we add that the moment of the individual’s regeneration cannot humanly be exactly determined and still less exactly foreseen, it will appear that the supposed incorrectness in the administration of baptism is traceable to the fact that the Church does not approach the baptism of a catechumen in quite the same way as the soul of the catechumen himself (though all is mediated through the activities of the Church) moves on to regeneration. And thus, what on the formal view of the Church’s action would be an absolutely simple process now falls apart into two series of events, with two different terminations. Now if it were demonstrable that the series of the Church’s actions which lead up to regeneration were, just because derived less personally and more directly from the power of the Word of God, more closely representative than the other series of the influence of the whole body, and that accordingly what would be most perfect in this imperfect state of things would be that the administration of baptism should always be attached to the rightly discerned moment of regeneration, yet it is undeniably in the nature of the case that the inclination of the Church to baptize will sometimes run ahead of the inward workings of the Spirit for regeneration and sometimes lag behind them, according as those whose office it is to baptize lean to one estimate or the other of the catechumen’s inward state. Hence—as if to mitigate our dissatisfaction with this imperfect state of things—already in the Apostolic Age we find both forms of variation: the impartation of the Spirit before baptism and of baptism before the Spirit; it is obvious, besides, that the distance between the one and the other may be greater now than it was then. In every case, however, where the decisive gracious workings of the Spirit precede, there is a peremptory summons to let baptism follow immediately as reception into the fellowship; and, conversely, the priority of baptism is only justified by the assured faith, based on the living activity of the Church, that the regeneration of the person received will now result from the influence of the whole body. Thus taken as a whole, the number of the baptized and of the regenerate should always be identical; yet, owing to the above-mentioned variations, though in an ever-diminishing ratio to the whole as the Church becomes more perfect, there will always be some regenerate persons who are not yet baptized but who might well have claimed to be received earlier into the Church; similarly there will be baptized persons who are not yet regenerate but in the most active way are being commended to divine grace for regeneration by the prayers of the Church. Hence the relation of the two elements is always at bottom essentially the same, and both must be conceived as absolutely correlative, however they may now and then diverge in time.

4. It is easy to see from this how widely opinions about the worth and effects of baptism may differ without our being justified in stigmatizing as unchristian those that diverge farthest on the one side or the other. If we start with the fact that, in the actual state of the Church, baptism and regeneration do not always coincide, it is only giving emphatic expression to this fact if we say that even if they did coincide it would be an accident, and that a man is by no means regenerate simply because he has had baptism administered to him. The same position to which, when rightly understood, there is nothing to object, may also be expressed by saying that baptism of itself produces no inward result, but is only an external sign of entrance into the Church.⁷ This also is true; but only if the external particular action, the exact moment of which is for the most part externally conditioned either by general regulations for public worship or by special circumstances, be viewed as quite independent of the activity of the Spirit in the Church. In other words the statement is true, but only as indicating the imperfection of the Church in the matter of baptism; but if taken as a complete and general description of baptism, it is false. Without the action of the Spirit, baptism with water is certainly no more than an external rite which Christ Himself declares to be insufficient;⁸ but, as was the case with its first administration in the Church proper on the first day of Pentecost, so ever after baptism is meant to be evoked by the action of the Spirit and bound up therewith in the closest possible way. If, however, on the ground that baptism by itself does not produce regeneration, which alone matters, this position be further extended to mean either that baptism is superfluous and were best omitted, or at least that there is no better reason for retaining it than a laudable reverence for ancient institutions, such a view as this last would so entirely reverse the relationship indicated above between the baptism of John and Christian baptism that the latter would seem to be no more than an appendix to the former—an appendix always more meaningless, too, as time went on. But the former view, that baptism is superfluous, by destroying all connexion between the influences of the Christian fellowship (and on these influences baptism sets the crown) and the inward development of the individual up to regeneration, or at least by refusing it any outward expression, really destroys the Church itself, at least as an external institution; and in all outward respects the Christian fellowship takes on as shadowy and all but fortuitous an aspect as in the case of the Society of Friends. Still, even this view cannot be called absolutely unchristian; for it disparages baptism as no more than outward in order to exalt the sole worth of what is inward, namely, regeneration.⁹

On the other hand, if we start from the fact that regeneration and entrance into the fellowship of believers are essentially bound up together and reciprocally conditioned—the more so that it is from this fellowship that all the influences of the Spirit which produce regeneration are derived—the most natural and most original statement of this is to say that one and the same series of Church actions terminates in both things—baptism and regeneration. Now this certainly is also true; but, as has been shown, it is true only as describing a certain ideal perfection of the Church, which is not at any single point really given, and cannot really be manifested in any single action. From this a further inference may be drawn. It may be held that the one termination and goal must be conditioned by the other; but that baptism cannot be conditioned by regeneration (for as regeneration is only recognizable in the facts of the new life, this would presuppose that the influence of the Church acted on the individual prior to his being received into it, which is absurd), therefore regeneration must be conditioned by baptism. Also since the earlier inward states of the individual preparatory to regeneration are evoked by earlier influences and actions of the Church, regeneration itself can only be evoked by the last action of the Church in the series, namely, baptism. This reasoning also is true and accurate if taken in a purely spiritual sense, and if even in the case of baptism as the final item in the series regard is paid solely to an inward reality which is not bound up with any particular moment of time—I mean the self-expanding movement of the Church, which can only attain its goal through the regeneration of new members. If we consider further that the inner fact of regeneration does not become fully certain in time to a man’s own consciousness except through his progressive sanctification,¹⁰ and that for a while it may often be imperilled by whatever interrupts or hinders sanctification, it must be admitted in this reference also that regeneration, as an inner possession, is conditioned by baptism. The personal self-consciousness, if uncertain and vacillating, may be strengthened and confirmed by the common consciousness of the Church expressed in baptism and hallowed by prayer in the name of Christ.¹¹ The statement, however, is false if taken in a temporal sense and related to the outward action, all the more if this action be conceived in abstraction from the motives on which it is based, as well as from their antecedent influence. For then what emerges is the monstrous position that God must necessarily justify the man to whom the Church grants baptism, however little ground there may be for that in his inward condition. Such distortions of the truth we cannot all the same describe as absolutely unchristian, though they come very near to magic and therefore are censurable and dangerous and have done most to provoke the above-cited assertions, which are one-sided in the opposite sense. For the power thus ascribed to the Church is after all traced back to Christ Himself, and the fruit of baptism is represented as being not merely the remission of sin but also living union with Christ.

In the following paragraphs we shall develop what can be put forward as Church doctrine within these limits, allowing for the necessary margin of freedom.

§ 137. First Theorem.—Baptism bestowed according to the institution of Christ confers, along with citizenship in the Christian Church, salvation also as conditioned by the divine grace in regeneration.

Conf. Aug. ix.: De baptismo docent quod sit necessarius ad salutem, quodque per baptismum offeratur gratia dei.—Art. Smalc. v.: Baptismus nihil est aliud quam verbum dei cum mersione in aquam secundum ipsius institutionem et mandatum… . Quare non sentimus cum Thoma qui dicit deum spiritualem virtutem aquae contulisse … quae peccatum per aquam abluat. Non etiam facimus cum Scoto, qui docet baptismo ablui peccatum … et hanc ablutionem fieri tantum per Dei voluntatem, et minime per verbum et aquam.—Conf. Saxon: Ego baptizo te, id est ego testificor hac mersione te ablui a peccatis et recipi iam a vero deo … quem agnoscis … et certo statuis tibi tribui beneficia, quae in evangelio promisit, te esse membrum ecclesiae dei.—Luth. Catech. maj.: Sola fides personam dignam facit, ut hanc salutarem et divinam aquam utiliter suscipiat… . Eo enim quod te aqua perfundi sinis baptismum nondum percepisti aut servasti ut inde aliquod emolumenti ad te redeat… . Deinde hoc quoque dicimus non summam vim in hoc sitam esse, num ille qui baptizetur credat necne; per hoc enim baptismo nihil detrahitur.—Expos. simpl. xix.: In baptismo enim signum est elementum aquae, ablutioque illa visibilis quae fit per ministrum. Res autem significata est regeneratio vel ablutio a peccatis. Baptizari in nomine Christi est inscribi initiari et recipi … in haereditatem filiorum Dei … et donari varia dei gratia ad vitam novam.—Conf. Gallic. xxxv.: Baptismus nobis testificandae nostrae adoptioni datus, quoniam in eo inserimur Christi corpori, ut eius sanguine abluti, simul etiam ipsius spiritu … renovemur … —Conf. Belg. xxxiv.: Mandavit ut omnes qui sui sunt … baptizentur, ut eo significet, quod sicuti aqua in nos infusa … sordes abluit, sic et sanguis Christi per Spir. s. idem praestat interne in anima, adspergens eam et a peccatis suis eam mundans, nosque ex filiis irae in filios dei regenerans.—Colloq. Lips., p. 400: ‘Although the grace of God doth not work salvation through baptism ex opere operato … or through the mere outward washing; yet is it done in virtue of the word of institution and promise by means of baptism.’ 1. In the statements of the two Protestant Churches there is obvious a certain vacillation of opinion, so that if we compare the different passages it is not easy to decide whether in baptism something is given and communicated from the one side and acquired on the other, or whether something is merely indicated and attested or offered. Of this vacillation our paragraph shows no trace; it places itself on the side of those who ascribe most to baptism; hence the greater the effect attributed to baptism, the more important it is to determine how much belongs to the institution of Christ to which such an effect is attached. Here we may first of all distinguish between the action itself and the intention with which it is performed: the first by itself alone is only the external side of baptism, the second the internal; and since the alleged effect is something purely spiritual and inward, this means that the external action simply by itself cannot produce the effect, and the connexion between the two is mediated solely by the intention on which the whole is based. According to the words of Christ Himself¹² and the interpretation of them in act given by His disciples,¹³ this effect is reception into the fellowship of disciples; for only within this fellowship is that ‘teaching them to hold’ all that Christ commanded to be found which differs from the evocation of faith or ‘making disciples.’ Only, the effect of the action does not depend on the intention being pure and unmixed, or on its always being definitely present to the mind of the person by whom baptism is administered.¹⁴ For the action is not the action of any single individual; the individual only performs it in virtue of the authority therefor which he has received from the Church, and thus as an action of the Church. But the intention of the Church in bestowing this authority can have been none other than the right and true intention indicated above. On this assumption, it is a general principle for all ages during which the Church may continue to be divided into a number of relatively antagonistic communions, that baptism which anyone of them causes to be administered is valid not only for the administering Church itself but for all Churches whatsoever, because in baptizing they all have the intention to receive into the Christian Church. Nay, even supposing some one Church were to add to the action something having a special relevance to its own party interest, the other Churches might certainly correct this necessarily improper addition, and deny its value, but they would not on that account challenge the validity of the action as a whole, provided the institution of baptism was not itself challenged. This principle is rightly taken to cover heretical parties also; for they regard themselves as the true Christians, and their intention always is to receive those baptized into Christendom. It is true, in doing so they likewise intend to propagate their heresy; but all the orthodox Church need do is to counteract such heresy strongly in the minds of the persons baptized, without having on that account to destroy the original common Christian foundation that has been laid.

As regards the action itself, what ought principally to be noted in the descriptions given of it in the passages cited is this, that not only does the water not have any importance in itself apart from the action, but even the external action, be it complete or partial immersion—and to the latter type belongs every kind of laving or sprinkling with water—is connected with the intention solely through the accession of the Word of God; without this the action would be incomplete. Obvious as this may be, we would not thereby assert that in His institution Christ gave command that specific words should be pronounced during the outward action, and that a baptism therefore is invalid which is lacking in the words meant to be uttered uniformly, always and everywhere. What we do hold is that along with the action there must go a presentation of the Word of God on which discipleship rests, and this in point of fact is the Word of Father, Son, and Spirit; and through appeal to this Word, as of equally sacred significance for baptizer and baptized, baptism has its higher significance conserved, for that appeal expresses the intention of the Church and the assenting wish of the catechumen. The utterance of the regular formula, however, can only be described as an ancient Church tradition; the only general rule we can state is this, that as no man performs baptism except by the authority of the Church, he ought to perform it in a manner consonant with his authority. Hence it cannot be right to make the validity of baptism administered by different religious parties depend on their keeping the formula unchanged, as though in baptism the formula were the substantial thing.¹⁵ Such a demand would certainly bring us into conflict with baptism as performed by Christ’s disciples during His lifetime, for they cannot at that time have baptized in the name of the Holy Spirit.¹⁶ Nay, it will probably never be possible to make out whether later, from Pentecost onwards, the Apostles themselves used the formula, or felt that Christ’s teaching enjoined them to use it. Occasion has been found in hypothetical cases of extreme urgency, such as could never really occur, to raise the question whether in such a case something else might not be substituted for water; but it might also be asked whether, if a case arose in which for the sake of the baptized person signs had to be substituted for words, such signs would be valid as reproducing not the words themselves but only their meaning, whereas spoken words differing from the formula but the same in meaning would be invalid: What, however, is much the most essential point in the relation to the Word of God that goes to constitute baptism, is just that the Word must be known to the baptized person and acknowledged by him. For obviously this implies that his being made a disciple, which can only take place through the power of the Word, preceded baptism; this is the practice which everywhere we find observed by the Apostles, so far as our information goes. Indeed, apart from this the action cannot be regarded as complete. For just as it is only through the accession of the Word to the external rite that the Church expresses her intention, so, too, it is only through his appropriation of the Word that the baptized person’s assent to this intention is expressed. 2. From what has now been said regarding the nature of the action, and especially from the fact that the baptized person is asked to give a confession of the Word joined to the action, it follows very clearly that the baptized person’s faith is a precondition of the action really being what it is intended to be. So much lies before us in Christ’s two sayings about baptism.¹⁷ For even if in the first saying we seek to combine ‘making disciples’ and baptizing as closely as possible, what we there have is a later elaboration which only reached its final stage in the second saying, and which from the outset could only represent an approximation to faith; and even in baptism this approximation could only be fully realized if the baptized person were prepared to make confession of the Word that accompanies baptism. Similarly, the faith which in the other passage Christ makes an antecedent of baptism must be the very faith of which we have been speaking all along. Peter, indeed, seems to demand merely repentance, not faith, before baptism;¹⁸ still, it was repentance for the part which his hearers, as members of the Jewish nation, had had in the rejection of Christ, a repentance which had only been rendered possible through the acknowledgment of Christ and adoption of His cause which they owed to Peter’s address; and this of itself must involve faith. Peter brings in this demand at the close of his sermon; he must therefore have started with the same assumption as Paul,¹⁹ and been convinced that his preaching had already produced faith in every case where this was a possibility. Similarly, our thought of the Church, as constantly engaged in preaching, must be that it ought to conclude preaching by baptism, but not interrupt preaching to baptize. Now in the quoted credal passages it is also stated that baptism is proper and complete even without faith, and it tallies with this that other thinkers represent faith as the fruit and consequence of baptism, but against both views we must enter a protest. Baptism is received wrongly if it be received without faith, and it is wrongly given so. True, the ordinance loses none of its significance, whether considered as originally an institution of Christ or in its more definite form as an ordinance of the Church; but this is so only because the Church can never have laid down that it is a matter of indifference whether those baptized are believers or not. For the same reason, baptism as an act of the mere individual has never been such that the Church could approve of it and regard it quite as its own; in any case such acts of baptism fall under the head of imperfect Church administration. But if this only means that even in such cases baptism need not be repeated, the point is one which requires to be stated more emphatically, lest we should seem to be ignoring what are manifest imperfections. Baptism, that is to say, is ineffectual only when it is imparted prematurely, before the work of preaching is complete and has awakened faith. It is different with the assertion that faith springs from baptism as its fruit.²⁰ This is obviously in contradiction to the whole practice of the Apostles and the whole experience of the Church as it grew in consequence of mass-baptism; nay, even in the individual case, where one who is still an unbeliever has been baptized too early, the Church does not rely on baptism alone but carries on the work of preaching in the full sense of the word; and if in these circumstances faith arises later, no simple Christian mind will ascribe this to the wrongly administered baptism, but to what subsequently to baptism has been done by the Church.

As regards complete baptism, which implies the existing faith of the person baptized, what we say is that it effects salvation, but only along with citizenship in the Christian Church; that is to say, only in so far as it mediates reception into the fellowship. To this it might be objected that if baptism presupposes faith, then salvation precedes baptism, for we ourselves have explained faith as the appropriation of the perfection and blessedness of Christ;²¹ and a study of this objection is peculiarly fitted to cast light on the whole problem. It goes back to the relation of this Section to the second Division of the previous Section. Faith as an inward state of the individual is the appropriation just described, but the influence of the appropriated perfection of Christ and the enjoyment of His appropriated blessedness become real only within the fellowship of believers; hence the man in whom faith develops also has the desire to enter the fellowship. In this sense baptism as direct reception into the fellowship of believers is also named the seal of divine grace,²² because the real enjoyment of grace is thereby guaranteed. Hence all such persons can be regarded as seeking baptism which then the Church grants, just as conversely in other cases the Church offers it and those who have become believers receive it. In the same way we called baptism the channel of God’s justifying action, because it is only within the fellowship that an individual can come to have the forgiveness of sins, which is essentially conditioned by the influence of the new communal life, and divine sonship, which is essentially conditioned by fellow-citizenship with the saints. If we want to separate in word what is inseparable in fact, we may on the one hand say that where faith is, conversion must have been; and where complete regeneration is, there too is justification. Hence if faith was there before baptism, all that is ordinarily represented as the fruit of baptism was there also; thus baptism would really effect nothing, but only attest and point to what had been effected already; and thus the one class of credal passages can take the form they do without in the least impairing the true force of baptism. On the other hand, it may be said that even if faith is not yet present at the time of baptism, yet it will arise not merely after baptism but—baptism being the first item in the whole series of influences which the Church brings to bear on the baptized—through baptism. Thus every sort of connexion between personal spiritual life and the perfection and blessedness of Christ would arise out of baptism; the more so that if (to suppose the case) a regenerate person remained unbaptized and hence was not received into the Christian fellowship, we should have to admit that he could have no real share in the perfection and blessedness of Christ because he had neither come under Christ’s fellowship-forming action nor shared in His blessedness as mediated through the communal consciousness. This, it is true, would hold good in a still greater degree if it were the personal desire of the person in question to remain outside the fellowship, and in a less degree if it were only through an ecclesiastical oversight that, although regenerate, he was not yet baptized. Hence the other set of our credal passages is able to ascribe to baptism both faith and all that flows from faith without giving to its mode of operation the least colour of magic. The meaning is not that the outward performance works even in the faintest degree ex opere operato, whether by itself or in conjunction with the utterance of certain words (the utterance would itself in that case be no more than an outward performance), but that it works solely in union with the Word which ordains baptism for the Church and along with the Church, and which is uninterruptedly active in the Church throughout its whole extent. And as our paragraph only asserts the efficacy of baptism in connexion with divine grace in regeneration, and thus links up the act of the Church with what is going on in the individual soul, magical conceptions are very definitely barred out. But it distinctly ascribes a saving efficacy to baptism, as the conferring of Christian citizenship, and this is a rejection of the view according to which baptism is a merely external act. Thus our paragraph lends itself to both readings of the credal phrases, which otherwise mutually impute responsibility for one or other of the misconceptions we have been discussing.

4. Hence we may say that everything that is taught about the efficacy of baptism is perfectly clear if we only assume a correct and sound administration of the sacrament; in that case there is absolutely no reason to ascribe to it magical effects or to depress it into a merely outward usage. It is only the assumption of a wrong administration that raises difficult questions: that is, if our aim is to formulate doctrines which shall be equally valid for both cases. For then one party sets up a principle which obviously isolates the outward aspect, namely, that the effects of divine grace ought not to be made dependent on any external act;²³ the other urges the principle, plainly favourable to magic, that no state of human consciousness can make inoperative divine promises which have been attached to an external act;²⁴ both without sufficiently remembering that God is not a God of disorder in the assemblies of His people. Hence everything depends on a sound rule of administration. Against the Donatists it is rightly taught that the validity of baptism does not depend on the state of heart in him who performs it; but the same cannot be said equally regarding the saving virtue of baptism. If the person baptizing is not a pure organ of the Church in judging of the inward state of the person baptized, the saving virtue of baptism must be impaired in every case. Every such baptism, however, is an act of sin; and the oftener it occurs, the more imperfect the Church is. Hence the first rule is that not only the decision when baptism should take place, but its administration too, ought to rest in the hands of the ministers of the Word in the strict sense;²⁵ for obviously the person who must have the most vivid conviction of the faith evoked in the candidate for baptism is also the best organ of the Church in performing the act itself. And for the same reason baptism is not put at the mercy of some one hour of exalted feeling; it is only performed as a well-considered act at a prearranged time, no exception being permissible except under special circumstances. The rule to follow will always be this, that the administration must be conditioned by the sympathy of the Church (for of those operations of the divine Spirit on the soul which may be trusted to evoke faith there can scarcely be knowledge proper), and that when such sympathy is absent, it is best to wait for the recognizable tokens of faith.

§ 138. Second Theorem.—Infant Baptism is a complete Baptism only when the profession of faith which comes after further instruction is regarded as the act which consummates it.

Conf. Aug. ix.: docent … quod pueri sint baptizandi, qui per baptismum oblati deo recipiantur in gratiam Dei. Damnant Anabaptistas, qui improbant baptismum puerorum et affirmant pueros sine baptismo salvos fieri.—Art. Smalc. v.: … . docemus infantes esse baptizandos. Pertinent enim ad promissam redemtionem per Christum factam; et ecclesia debet illis baptismum et promissionis illius annunciationem.—Expos. simpl. xx.: Cur non per sanctum baptisma initiarentur, qui sunt peculium et in ecclesia Dei. —Conf. Gallic. xxxv.: Praeterea quamvis baptismus sit fidei et resipiscentiae sacramentum, tamen cum una cum parentibus posteritatem etiam illorum in ecclesia Deus recenseat, affirmamus infantes sanctis parentibus natos esse ex Christi auctoritate baptizandos.—Conf. Belg. xxxiv.: … quos (infantes) baptizandos et foederis signo obsignandos esse credimus. Quin etiam revera Christus non minus sanguinem suum profudit ut fidelium infantes quam ut adultos ablueret, ideoque signum seu sacramentum ejus quod Christus pro eis praestitit, suscipere debent.—Decl. Thorun., p. 429: … Quamvis necessitatem illam adeo absolutam non esse statuamus, ut quicunque sine baptismo ex hac vita excesserit sive infans sive adultus … propterea necessario damnandus sit. 1. Thus far we have treated of baptism in general, without even considering the difference between the original institution and the present almost universal practice of the Christian Church, though certainly with the intention that the propositions laid down should not be limited in their application to the baptism of adults but be valid for every baptism that means to be genuinely Christian. Hence we insisted on at least incipient faith and (in line with former paragraphs²⁶ and therefore necessary) repentance also as preconditions of baptism. With this the practice of the Apostolic Age completely agrees, as far as we know; for every trace of infant baptism which people have professed to find in the New Testament must first be inserted there. Similarly, in the absence of definite information it is difficult to explain how such a divergence from the original institution could arise and could prevail over so wide an area. It might be difficult to specify one sufficient reason for the change, but there might well be a multiplicity of reasons which, taken together, were able to win over Christian feeling. First, the desire to be able to include among those who die in the Lord those Christian children who had died before the age of instruction.²⁷ Next, to make the Christian community more definitely responsible for the children of Christian parents in cases where the parents might not themselves be in a position to implement the obligations of the congregation. And finally, in order to separate off Christian children from Jewish and pagan youth. These may from the first have been the strongest motives. When, however, it became an established custom to regard children who had received baptism as for that reason members of the Church, it was felt as being in itself a source of comfort that in this act there should be expressed a firm confidence that children born of Christian parents would not miss the nurturing care of the Holy Spirit. Our credal passages, however, view infant baptism entirely apart from history and undertake to vindicate it in and for itself, but they do so ineffectively and on grounds that are mutually destructive. If the children are already God’s possession, they have no need of baptism in order to be thus offered to God and received by Him to grace; and conversely, if they need baptism for this, the justification of its being administered to them cannot lie in the fact that already they are God’s possession. Similarly it needed to be specially proved (for it does not prove itself) that God reckons offspring along with parents as forming part of the Church; also a certain qualification—which is not mentioned—needs to be attached to the principle that we ought to baptize children because Christ shed His blood for them also. On these grounds we should have to baptize all men whatsoever, as we could lay hold of them. The missing qualification of this last position rests ultimately on the peculiar situation of the children of Christian parents, as the special justification of the former position does also; hence it can be seen that our paragraph is an effort to supply these defects and at the same time to solve the contradictions first alluded to. For while, if we take it in close connexion with the previous paragraph, it gives an inadequate explanation of infant baptism, which here is administered in the absence of repentance and faith in those baptized, yet it tacitly admits that infant baptism cannot produce in those baptized the effects of which repentance and faith are the necessary conditions. And just as we cannot suppose that before baptism children are subject to misery due to a consciousness of sin which is ‘growing into penitence, we cannot after baptism ascribe to them blessedness due to a dawning sense of divine sonship. Hence there need be no talk of proving that even in such children faith can be produced by baptism. Our paragraph shows, nevertheless, why there is occasion to administer baptism in this form, namely, because in the case of such children we have reason to count upon their future faith and their confession of it. With this is bound up the question how far we may consider them as reckoned by God part of the Church; the answer being that it is part of Church order to bring them, as the outer circle most intimately entrusted to us, into direct relation to the Word of God, and to maintain them therein until faith awakens. It is from this point of view that the contradictions referred to are most easily resolved. For we only wish to avoid saying that we baptize children because they are already in the Church and in order to commend them to divine grace; we baptize them rather because already they are marked out for it by their natural connexion with the Christian order in which God has placed them, and with a view to bringing them into the Church. The full truth of both aspects is expressed by saying that for us personal confession of faith is the goal of infant baptism, a goal which it must reach, and by reaching which it has to vindicate itself. On the other hand, it is certain that where this point is not carefully attended to, the ecclesiastical custom of baptizing infants is largely responsible for the fact that some people attribute magical powers to baptism, while others disparage it as a purely external custom.

2. Clearly then this sort of baptism merely by itself, while a bond between the individual and the Kingdom of God, does not straightway imply the possession and enjoyment of salvation but only a normal preparatory operation of the Holy Spirit. Hence any such act taken by itself is in no sense to be equated with baptism according to Christ’s original institution, where a personal confession of faith is included in the act itself. Yet this defect does not render the act invalid, as though it were positively wrong; and the Anabaptist assertion that, in the case of persons baptized so, baptism must be repeated, has rightly been felt to give offence. On such terms no baptism at all would be secure except such as in the early Church—and it was certainly not a laudable custom—was administered shortly before death; for there can be no surer sign of real regeneration than steady progress in Christian sanctification. Thus infant baptism is the same as any other baptism which has erroneously been imparted prior to the full faith of the person baptized and yet is valid; only, its proper efficacy is suspended until the person baptized has really become a believer. Our paragraph, however, has still to vindicate itself on the point that we made these imperfect baptisms in detail a reproach to the Church, whereas we now are seeking to find a legitimate place for them as a whole. But this is one of those cases in which conscious divergence must be judged more leniently than unconscious. The latter is at all events overhasty, and on the other hand, it represents as a believing Christian one who as yet is not so; the former, on the contrary, is a Church rule, and by its forward reference to the personal profession of faith it definitely marks off those baptized in this way from those who already believe. It is therefore unjust to infant baptism when confirmation—which for us is simply the depositing and acceptance of a personal profession of faith, and thus supplies a lack in baptism—is regarded as non-essential; for it is only as combined with confirmation that infant baptism answers to Christ’s institution. Hence our paragraph, by making confirmation a part of the administration of baptism, lays it as a duty on the Church to give confirmation very close attention, in order that, so far as the Church can secure it, the later rite may approve itself the true and worthy consummation of infant baptism. It is equally unjust when confirmation is torn away from this context and represented as a sacrament by itself. Whatever we ought to think otherwise of the importance and benefit of confirmation, to isolate it is to render infant baptism incomplete and ineffectual.

Still, we cannot affirm the necessary character of a baptism thus divided into two parts, as is done when the Anabaptists or Baptists are condemned on the ground that they believe that children dying unbaptized may be saved. In this matter we take sides unhesitatingly with the last credal passage quoted above. It is certainly the case that as soon as large numbers of children born of Christian parents had to be nurtured in the Christian Church, a situation emerged which previously had been unknown; and it seems as if it were in the highest degree natural to mark this by a symbolic act, the more so that nearly everywhere just such acts are performed to indicate that the newly-born do not belong exclusively to their parents, but corporately to the whole fellowship. Besides, nothing was more natural than to select baptism for this purpose. Hence it would have been quite intelligible if, to recover touch with Christ’s institution, infant baptism had been abolished at the Reformation; and this we might do even yet, without thereby losing continuity with a fellowship in whose history there was a period when nothing prevailed except infant baptism—provided only we did not declare infant baptism to be invalid. And we might equally well give up the practice altogether without doing our children any injury. For it is only if we ascribe magical powers to baptism that we can believe that it confers a claim relating to the life after death, quite irrespectively of its influence on this life. Hence no one who does not believe in such magical powers can suppose that there is any difference between children who have been baptized but die before renewing their baptismal covenant, and children who pass out of time without any baptism at all. It would therefore be a natural thing to leave it to each Evangelical household to decide whether it will present its children for baptism in the ordinary way or only when they make a personal profession of faith; and we ought to make it known that in regard to this point we cancel the sentence of condemnation passed on the Anabaptists, and that on our side we are prepared to enter into Church fellowship with the Baptists of to-day, if only they will not pronounce our infant baptism absolutely invalid, even when supplemented by confirmation. On this point it should easily be possible to reach an understanding.

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Footnotes

1. 114, 2. ↩

2. 124, 3. ↩

3. See Gerhard, Loc. ix. p. 101 f. ↩

4. Cf. John 3²²ff. and Acts 19³⁻⁵. ↩

5. As Zwingli does, de ver. relig. p. 208: Quid vero distent Joannis baptismus et Christi multa tum olim tum nunc est quaestio, sed inutilis plane, nam discrimen omnino nullum est… . Nihil efficiebat Joannis tinctio … nihil efficit Christi tinctio, etc. ↩

6. John 4². ↩

7. Zwingli, l.c. p. 220: Externa vero res est quum tinguntur … ac verae rei signum ac ceremonia… . Sic sunt ceremoniae exteriora signa, quae accipientem aliis probant, eum se ad novam vitam obligavisse, etc. ↩

8. And that, as is shown by the connexion in which John 3² occurs, even when it is a confession of repentance. ↩

9. The attitude to the Church which this view represents is revealed in the classical passage in Robert Barclay’s Apolog. Theol. xii. p. 269: Ea hac in re sicut in plerisque aliis inter nos et adversarios stat differentia, quod frequenter nedum formam et umbram substantiae et virtuti praeponunt, sed umbram saepe opposite ad substantiam stabiliunt. ↩

10. Cf. § 108, 3. ↩

11. Ita baptismus intuendus est et nobis fructuosus faciendus, ut in hoc freti corroboremur et confirmemur, quoties peccatis aut conscientiâ gravamur. Luther, Catech. maj. ↩

12. Matt. 28¹⁹. ²⁰. ↩

13. Acts 2⁴¹. ⁴⁷. ↩

14. Here the canon is applicable: Licet uti sacramentis quae per malos administrantur. Conf. Aug. vii. and elsewhere. ↩

15. Cf. Gerhard, Loc. Theol. ix. p. 90. ↩

16. John 4²; cf. 7³⁹. ↩

17. Matt. 28¹⁹·²⁰ and Mark 16¹⁶. ↩

18. Acts 2³⁸. ↩

19. Rom. 10¹⁷. ↩

20. See Gerhard, Loc. Theol. ix. p. 152, where the statement is made that baptism kindles faith in the heart of the person baptized, but not the slightest proof is given of the connexion between the two things. ↩

21. See § 108. ↩

22. Heidelb. Catech., Quest. 69–72. ↩

23. Zwingli, de ver. relig., p. 200: Nam hac ratione libertas divini spiritus alligata esset, qui dividit singulis ut vult. ↩

24. Catech. Rom. ii. de bapt. 58. ↩

25. Expos. simpl. xx.: Baptismus autem pertinet ad officia ecclesiastica. ↩

26. Those referring to regeneration, §§ 107–109. ↩

27. 1 Thess. 4¹⁶. ↩