baptistical Articles which cannot be tolerated in the Church," we find the following:
"That infants not baptised, are not sinners in the sight of God, but just and innocent; and that in this innocence of theirs, when as yet without the use of reason, they obtain salvation without baptism, (which indeed in their opinion they have no need of.) And in this manner they reject the whole doctrine of origin sin, and all that depends upon it besides."
Thus we see that Melanchthon, and the German Lutheran churches generally, believed and taught that children, dying unbaptized, could not possibly be saved. And a doctrine which taught that they might "obtain salvation without baptism," was "not to be tolerated in the church."
TESTIMONY OF THE ENGLISH CONFESSION.
Passing now from the German Lutheran to the English Confession, we find abundant reasons for believing that the framers of the Articles and Liturgy of the English church held the common doctrine of that period, viz., that baptism was essential to salvation; and that all who died without it, wither heathen, infidel or infants, must certainly be damned. In a work by the Rev. Henry John Todd, Chaplain in Ordinary to his Majesty, we are presented, from authentic documents, with the "Doctrines of our [the English] Reformers, which are the groundwork of certain of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion." On the sacrament of Baptism, we have the following passage
