resolve its benefits into the sealing or attesting past promises, or the shadowing forth of subsequent regeneration, and this to be effected by the hearing of the word, not by the influence of Baptism[1]: they declare that by seals they do not
- ↑ Beza. (Coll. Momp. præf. part iv. resp. ad coll. p. 24. ap. Gerh. loci de S. Baptismo § 118). "I never said, simply, that Baptism was the sealing of regeneration in children, but of the adoption according to the covenant, 'I will be thy God, &c.' nor did I say that all, or any children were actually regenerated at the very moment of Baptism, but that the benefit of regeneration, in its own time ordained by God, follows that act of Baptism in infants by the hearing of the word." Beza appears, however, (according to Witsius l.c. § 30.) to have been nearly singular in regarding regeneration as subsequent to Baptism; the general doctrine is that stated Note 2. p. 118. In one point only they all agree, in the anxiety not (as they speak) to bind it to Baptism; whence some say that it is given either before, at, or after Baptism. (See Witsius, § 24. Taylor's Comm. on Titus and others). Very few of this school (with the exception of those English Divines who engrafted part of the system of Calvin upon the doctrines of our Church and those more modern) appear to have thought regeneration generally to accompany Baptism. (Witsius names Le Blanc only.) See also below, p. 145. Note 1. Well might a Predestinarian writer of our own Church say, (though not borne out in claiming the agreement of Calvin,) "If yet they answere, that this follows not by their doctrine, viz. that Baptisme is a bare signe, because they grant it to be also a seale of after grace: I rejoyne, this helps not (unless they grant, as Calvine freely doth, some principle and seed of grace, bestowed ordinarily in Baptisme); because, by their opinion, it is a seale of something absent that is to be expected in reversion only. They deny all present exhibition and collation of any grace in the moment of Baptisme, by virtue of Christ's institution, and so they doe not make it a signe, signifying, but rather prognosticating, only some future effect, which is a new kind of Divinity, that, so farre as I am able to judge, destroys the nature of a Sacrament, by denying to it both the chiefe part of it; viz., the inward grace thereby signified, and, together with the signe exhibited and conferred on those that truly, and, indeed, be within the covenant, as also the vigour and efficacy of the word of institution which makes the union betweene the sign and the thing signified."—Burges' Baptismal Regeneration of Elect Infants, pp. 110, 11.
theologus,") approving of Burges' doctrine of "the regeneration of elect infants," criticizes it so far, that Burges (agreeing with his Church) "subjects this regeneration to Baptism, and binds it thereto, as to a cause sine qua non, or a moral instrument, which it follows." "This," he says, "is not proved by his quotations from the Reformed Theologians. Their opinion of the efficacy of Baptism is known, that it does not produce regeneration, but seals it, which has been already produced." [Wits, prints this last sentence in capitals.]
