"The grace of believing is not truly said to be offered to all men, unless perchance we dream that the grace of faith is, in some internal and extraordinary way, infused into the many infants that die in all parts of the earth, as well as into the myriad of adults who leave this life before they have heard anything of Christ—a dotage," he adds, "which needs no refutation."[1]
And Bellamy says:
"It was at God's sovereign election,—to give every child of Adam born in a Christian land, opportunity, by living, to hear the glad tidings, or only to grant this to some, while others die in infancy, and never hear. Those who die in infancy, may as justly be held under law in the next world, as those that live may in this. God is under no more obligations to save those that die, than he is to save those that live; to grant the regenerating influences of his spirit to them, than he is to these."[2]
Dr. John Edwards, who wrote near the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, who has been styled the Paul, the Augustine, the Calvin of his age, and of whom it is said "that all unbiassed and impartial men voted him by universal consent to be one of the most valuable writers of his time"—this learned divine, referring to the calamities and sufferings to which infants as well as adults are subject in this life, and which he regards as punishments, argues thus:
