wants confirmation. As for those who suppose, with the Papists, that the guilt of original sin is washed away by baptism, as some of the Fathers have also asserted, this has so many absurd consequences attending it, that I need not spend time in opposing it.—
"Others have concluded, that all the infants of believing parents, dying in infancy, are saved, as supposing that they are interested in the covenant of grace, in which God promises, that he will be a God to believers, and their seed. This would be a very comfortable thought, to those who have hope concerning their own state. But I cannot find that this argument is sufficiently maintained, since it seems very evident, that all such-like promises rather respect the external, than the saving blessings of the covenant of grace.—
"All that I shall attempt, at present, is, to prove, that if all, who die in their infancy, are not saved, yet their condemnation is not like that which is due to actual sin, or those habits thereof, which are contracted by men. And here it must be allowed, pursuant to our former method of reasoning, that, if they are not saved, they have the punishment of loss inflicted on them; for the right to the heavenly blessedness, which Adam forfeited and lost, respected not only himself, but all his posterity. Whether they have any further degree of punishment inflicted on them, or how far they are liable to the punishment of sense, I dare not pretend to determine,"[1]And Stapfer, in his Polemical Theology, holds the same doctrine, but in a severer form. In the chapter on Pelagianism, he gives us, among other things, a "Solution of the Principal Objections" to his own doctrine concerning original sin. And the "principal
- ↑ Ridgley's Body of Divinity, vol. i. pp. 345—7.
