objections" which he undertakes to solve, are drawn from a treatise "On the Imputation of Adam's Sin," by Daniel Whitby, published in London in 1711, and which he says contains "whatever sophistry can be urged against original sin." The ninth of these "objections" is this: "To subject infants to eternal punishment for Adam's sin, is to treat them worse than the devil himself, or than Adam, who himself committed the sin." To this Stapfer replies:
"That infants, being corrupt by nature, and therefore obnoxious to condemnation, contain within themselves the root of all sins and so of all the evils which flow from it, so that guilt and punishment cannot but be naturally and necessarily connected with that sin. And then that the infants of believers are punished with eternal punishment we by no means hold, since they are considered as standing in the faith of their parents. As to the infants of unbelievers, we believe that they are separated from the communion of God, and thus that they, as being children of wrath and condemnation, will be damned by the very act by which they are excluded from the blessed communion of God. But there are various degrees of that punishment and damnation, so that the punishment of infants and their sense of it will be least of any, and will therefore differ much from that of the devil, or of adults who voluntarily persevere in sin. So here too the ways of God are justified."[1]
We have already quoted from Dr. Manton's sermons to show that the doctrine of infant damnation not only entered into and made a part of the sys-
- ↑ Stapfer, Theol. Polem. vol. iv. p. 518, Ed. 1756.
