DR. BUSHNELL'S ARGUMENTS FOR INFANT BAPTISM.

VI.

INFANT BAPTISM AND INFANT COMMUNION.

We now request our readers to weigh carefully and candidly the evidence which has been laid before them. The question to be decided is one of no trivial import. Is Infant Baptism a divine institute, established by our Lord? or is it an unauthorized device of men? Was it known and sanctioned in the days of the apostles, or was it introduced afterwards? Is it a part of pure and primitive Christianity, or is it a corruption, a departure from the simplicity that is in Christ, an expedient resorted to under the overpowering influence of erroneous impressions in regard to the efficacy of the baptismal act, and in regard to its necessity in order to any one's being admitted into heaven?

Similar questions might be asked also concerning Infant Communion, which came into use along with Infant Baptism.

From time immemorial, a participation in the Lord's Supper had been regarded as one of the privileges of the baptized. Infant Communion made its first appearance where Infant Baptism first appeared, namely, in the African churches, and the first mention of it occurs in the writings of Cyprian, the zealous and powerful advocate for the baptism of endangered children in their earliest infancy, about the middle of the third century. In his collection of testimonies addressed to Quirinus, he teaches the necessity of being baptized, from John iii: 5; "Except a man be born again, of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God ;" and the necessity of partaking of the Lord's Supper, from John vi: 53; "Except ye eat of the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood, ye shall not have life in you."

*

In his Treatise on the Lapsed, he sets forth the guilt of those who had voluntarily participated in the heathen sacri

*B. III., c. 25 and c. 26.

fices, and says (c. 7): "Many, however, were unsatisfied with doing destruction upon themselves; men were urged to their ruin by mutual encouragements, and the fatal cup of death was offered from mouth to mouth. That nothing might be wanting to their load of guilt, even infants in their parents' arms, carried or led, were deprived while yet tender of what was granted them in the commencement of life.* Will not these children in the day of judgment say, We did no sin; it was not our will to hasten from the bread and cup of the Lord to an unhallowed pollution. We perish through unfaithfulness not our own; and our parents on earth have robbed us of the parentage in heaven; they forfeited for us the Church as a Mother, and God as a Father; and thus while young and unaware, and ignorant of that grievous act, we are included in a league of sin by others, and perish through their deceit."

In c. 16, he makes the following statement: "Listen to an event that took place in my own presence, and on my own testimony. Some parents who made their escape, in the thoughtlessness of terror left behind them at nurse an infant daughter, whom the nurse finding in her hands gave over to the magistrates. Unable through its tender years to eat flesh, they gave it, before an idol to which the orowd assembled, bread mingled with some wine, which, however, was remains of that which had been used in the soul-slaughter of perishing Christians. The mother afterwards got back her child, but the infant was unable to express and make known the act that had been committed, as she had before been to understand or prevent it. Through ignorance, therefore, it arose, that when we were sacrificing the mother brought it in with her. The child, however, mixed with the holy congregation, could not bear our prayers and worship; it was at one moment convulsed with weeping, then became tossed like a wave by throbs of feeling, and the babe's soul, yet in the tender days, confessed a consciousness of what had happened with what

* Infantes quoque parentum manibus, vel impositi vel attracti, amiserunt provuli quod in primo statim nativitatis exordio fuerant consecuti.

signs it could, as if forced to do so by a torturer. When, however, after the solemnities were complete, the Deacon began to offer the cup to those who were there, and in the course of their receiving, its turn came, the little child turned its face away, under the instinct of God's majesty, compressed its lips in resistance, and refused the cup. The Deacon, howevet, persevered, and forced upon her, against her will, of the sacrament of the cup. There followed a sobbing and vomiting. The eucharist was not able to remain in a body and mouth that had been polluted. The draught, which had been consecrated in the blood of the Lord, made its way from a body which had been desecrated. So great is the power of the Lord, so great the majesty. The secrets of the darkness are laid open under his sight, and God's priest could not be deceived in crimes however hidden. Thus much concerning an infant which had not the age to make known a crime which was committed on her by the act of others."

After these singular disclosures, we need not be surprised at the unequivocal statement of the highest authority in ecclesiastical history, that, "as the Church of North Africa was the first to bring prominently into notice the necessity of infant baptism, so in connection with this they introduced also the communion of infants."*

Ages passed away; and, sonetimes in a single age great changes occur. Ages passed away, and, in the meantime, the various influences and pressing considerations which had introduced infant baptism and infant communion, continued to extend and confirm these practices more and more.

After the lapse of nearly two hundred years, Augustine, in one of his works,† says: "Let us hear the Lord, speaking, not indeed concerning the sacrament of the laver, but concerning the sacrament of his holy table, to which no one, unless baptized, rightly approaches: Unless ye eat my flesh,

* De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione, et de Baptismo Parvulorum. Lib. I. cap. xx: 26 and 27. Works, Tom. x: col 15. Ben. ed.

+ Neander's Hist. of the Christ. Rel. and Church, translated by Torrey. Vol. I., p. 333.

and drink my blood, ye shall not have life in you.* Why do we enquire further? What can be replied to this? Will any one dare to say that this sentence does not pertain to children, and that they can have life in themselves without partaking of his body and blood: because he does not say, 'He that has not eaten,' as concerning baptism, 'He that is not born again:' but says, 'If ye shall not eat,' as addressing those who were able to hear and understand, which, undoubtedly, little children are not able to do."

In a sermon he remarks: "Infants they are, but they receive his sacraments; infants they are, but they are made partakers of his table." In the work first quoted, he also says: "Most excellently the Carthaginian Christians call baptism itself nothing else than salvation, and the sacrament of the body of Christ nothing else than life. Whence is this, unless from ancient, as I think, and apostolic tradition, by which the churches of Christ hold, as a fixed fact, that without baptism and participation of the Lord's table, no one of mankind can come either to the kingdom of God or to salvation and eternal life? +

And in one of his epistles he expresses himself in the following decisive manner: "No one who remembers that he is a Christian of the catholic faith, denies, or doubts, that children unbaptized and not having partaken of the Lord's body and blood, have not life in themselves, and thus are exposed to eternal punishment."§

* John vi: 53

+Serm. 174. De Verbis Apostoli, I. Tim. 1. Works, Tom. V., col. 834. Ben. ed.

Optime Punici Christiani baptismum ipsum nihil aliud quam salutem et sacramentum corporis Christi, nihil aliud quam vitam vocant. Unde, nisi ex antiqua, ut existimo, et apostolica traditione, qua ecclesiae Christi insitum tenent, praeter baptismum et participationem mensae Dominicae, non solum ad regnum Dei, sed nec ad salutem et vitam aeternam posse quemquam hominum pervenire? See Lib. I., cap. xxiv, 34. Works, Tom, x., col. 19. Ben. ed.

Epist. 106. Nullus qui meminit Catholicae fidei Christianum negat aut dubitat parvulos, nec recepta gratia regenerationis in Christo, sine cibo carnis ejus et sanguinis potu, non habere in se vitam, ac per hoc poenae sempiternae obnoxios.

Innocent, Bishop of Rome in the time of Augustine, maintained the necessity of infant communion from John vi: 53.* Gelasius, also Bishop of Rome about a century later, did the same.t

About the same time-the end of the fifth century and the beginning of the sixth-the author of the Greek works ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite (mentioned in Acts xvii: 34), speaks of infant communion together with infant baptism, as an established usage. He was supposed to have been ordained Bishop of Athens by the Apostle Paul; and his writings had very great influence. They were translated into Latin; and from the ninth century they were widely circulated in the Latin or Roman Catholic Church. At length, however, about the middle of the fifteenth century, their spuriousness was detected by Laurentius Valla. §

Near the close of the sixth century (590–604) the Pope St. Gregory the Great, in his book of Sacraments, treating of the baptism of infants, says: "Who are not prohibited from nursing before the sacred communion, if it be necessary."

In the seventh century, the Council of Toledo (Concilium Toletanum XI.), A. D. 675, excused from ecclesiastical censure those by whom the bread in the eucharist was rejected through extreme sickness or in infancy, when they knew not what they did.

A few years before the close of the eighth century (A. D. 790), the Emperor Charlemagne speaks of infants washed with the water of baptism, and satiated with the food of the Lord's body and the drinking of his blood. In his Laws,¶ it is ordered that the Presbyter always have the eucharist prepared, so that when any one sickens, or a child is weak, he may administer the sacrament to him immediately, lest he die without the communion.

* In literis ad Patres Synodi Milevitanae.

In Epistola ad Episcopos per Picenum.

De Ecclesiastica Hierarchia, c. VII.

See Gieseler's Ecclesiastical History, Vol. II., p. 80.

|| Lib. II. De Imaginibus, c. 27.

¶ Collected by Ansegisus, Lib. I., c. 161.