Infant salvation

Front matter

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INFANT SALVATION.

Preface

The author wrote this little work originally for himself. Its thoughts interested and instructed his own mind, and he indulged the hope they would not fail to interest the minds of others also.

It is his belief that they have done so ; the best evidence is, perhaps, the rapid sale of a very large impression, combined with many requests to republish it. He has doubled its size, strengthened its positions, and appended such practical spiritual truths as he thinks will leave a favourable impression on the hearts of those who weep over the remembrance of their departed infants. "Where they are he would teach them to know, and the way also, and, if possible, to hear their voices from heaven saying, " Come up hither : we are happy. Come in heart, in faith, in hope now, and in due time in person also."

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INFANT SALVATION.

Chapter I

If it be a fact, as the most accurate statistics prove, that at least a third, or not improbably a half, of the human race die in the years of infancy, it must be a question of some interest to all, and of the deepest anxiety to many — what conclusions we may scripturally cherish respecting their eternal state. Reckless and painful assertions have been hazarded by some, doubts have been freely expressed by others, and an anxious desire for a clear and satisfying decision has been felt by all. As our infants die, w r e feel our anxieties about their hereafter multiply. Tender hearts hope the best ; and the aching void created in maternal bosoms is eased by the expectation, of which affection rather than evidence is the source, that one day the bud that was nipped on earth shall be seen in heaven in all the bloom of immortality and glory. All we would attempt in this little work, is to show that these hopes of the heart are sustained by the words of inspiration beyond all cavil or dispute. We assert, therefore, there are solid grounds for

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bright hopes of the future destiny of infants : we are not left, we think, to conjecture; the grave that shrouds them from our sight does not displace them from our surest anticipations. Death severs the parent and the infant only for a season. We are sure that this is not the fond wish of a bereaved spirit, but the clear assertion of the Spirit of God. It is worthy of remark, that infants are referred to in Scripture as peculiarly the protegees of the love of Jesus. The blessed gospel opens an asylum in its bosom to infants, It alone is the nursing-mother of the young. Atheism would treat them with the same freezing apathy wherewith it frowns on the whole family of man. Deism, or infidelity, whether it speaks through the socialist or mere phrenologist, views them as specimens simply of physical organization, and fears to teach a holy lesson, lest there should be communicated what either regards as an unjust and injurious bias. Ancient nations did not hesitate to ofler their little ones either as propitiations for the sins of their parents, or as sacrifices to Moloch. Even the Romans, the domini rerum^ in whose language strangers were known by the name of Barbarians only, were generally accustomed "to expose" their infants. The Chinese are notorious infanticides. Hindooism, dead to maternal instinct, forgets the infant she brings forth, and leaves it to perish in the waters, or on the banks of the Ganges. We require no evidence more significant of the cruelty of superstition than the accounts furnished by Gutzlaff and other missionaries of the treatment experienced by infants, especially female infants, in China.

Numbers are to be seen daily perishing of hunger in the streets of Pekin ; and when the missionary of the cross remonstrated with those who had power to interpose, the only reply he received was, "It is only a female. " Christianity alone looks with sympathy on infants, loves them more than angels, provides for their future state, and plants in the sorrowing hearts of those who have lost them bright hopes of restored union and communion in glory. Christianity takes the infant close to her mother-bosom, spreads over it the warm wing of love, sprinkles on its bright brow waters from that river whose streams make glad the city of our God, and gives utterance to the deep sympathies of her heart in these words, — " Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not : for of such is the kingdom of heaven.' ' Babes are not too insignificant in her thoughts. - Her Incarnate One controls the exalted hierarch beside the throne, and also stoops to teach and bless an orphan child. Never did He w T ho spake as man never spoke breathe a more beautiful or touching thought, or bequeath to mourning mothers bereaved of their infants a more precious legacy, than when he rebuked the stern frowns w T hich his disciples cast on the mothers that crowded round him with their babes, and took up the unconscious infants in his arms, and blessed them, and said, " Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not : for of such is the kingdom of heaven." "Whosoever may undervalue these germs of immortality — these folded buds of promise — these tenants of earth in training for heaven — the Son of God does not.

He spreads over them the shield of his power, and covers them with the feathers of his wing. He saw immortality beam from their countenances — in their bosoms his ear heard the beatings of a life that can never die — and capacities which all the treasures of time and earth cannot fill disclosed themselves to the eye of Him to whom the most secret structure of mind and body is thoroughly unveiled. It is relation to eternity that makes the feeblest strong, and the smallest great. In that scene the Son of God let forth bright beams of his essential glory ; not the glory w T hich the crowd admires, it is true, but that glory which, as its Hebrew synonyme denotes, is "weight when weighed" in those scales wherein human glory is as dust in the balances. True greatness is not necessarily associated with armed battalions, and floating banners, and rolling drums, and laurels and garments rolled in blood, and victories. These in the estimate of higher spirits are childish things in one respect, and demon things in another respect. There is little real glory about war. It is, after all, a little game, even when greatest admired by little men. Real glory is spiritual, not material. Its centre is the soul, and its circumference the universe. Spiritual conflict crowned with spiritual triumphs — souls bursting the chains of sin — hearts dissolving in sympathies, in sacrifices, and in deeds of lofty disinterestedness — these are the elements of that glory which is not little, and does not die.

In the Saviour's embracing infants, the great mass of mankind can see none of the elements of a sublime thing. Physical and earthly glory alone can they applaud, they can see tinsel only ; yet it was a sublime spectacle. The Son of God, in this act, and in expressing the sentiment in which it was set, was really radiant with the greatest glory, just because he was clothed with the greatest humility : the humble alone unbosoms the lofty, and greatness seems greatest when it stoops. In embracing these babes, God shone forth in richer majesty than when He stood on the circle of the heavens and said, " Let there be light : and there was light." God was glorious in the garments of humanity, for as he descended in sufiering, humiliation, and sorrow, he really rose in true majesty, and shed upon the paths he moved in an intenser lustre. God's acts of condescension are God's acts of greatness. Hence it is that the microscope gives us a clearer view of his power, and wisdom, and beneficence, than even the telescope. He is thereby seen to be more wonderful in giving its pulsations to an insect's heart, and in weaving the texture of the ephemera's wing, than in fixing stars in their spheres, or wheeling planets in their orbits. The gospel is the microscope and telescope combined, and both consecrated to loftier fields of vision. It records the discoveries of both. Our blessed Lord o * then was really more glorified when he gathered the poor, barefooted, and ragged infants around him in the streets of Jerusalem, and blessed them, than when the cherubim gathered round Him on the throne of his glory, "high and lifted up," saying, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Hosts." Humility, we have said, is greatness. May we feel it to be so ! Let us pray to have a portion of the same spirit, that w T e may be able to rise above the "vain show" of things, and pierce and calculate their substance. Let us look on all that attracts the vulgar eye as common and poor; but that soul which can commune with God — which can collect in its capacious bosom the moral splendours of heaven — which can find repose nowhere but beside the throne of God — nutriment nowhere but in the trust, and love, and presence of Deity — let us reverence. We may condemn it, we may pity it ; but we dare not scorn it. Its very wreck has still sounding in its depths the voice of God, and its remotest and most guilty aberration from its only centre does not make it part with every trace of its aboriginal grandeur. Be it in an infant's, or in a monarch's bosom, it is too great to be overlooked — -too awful to be despised.

Chapter II

It is a fact, as we have already observed, that nearly half the human race die in the period of infancy and childhood : — whatever may be the causes or the explanation, the fact is beyond dispute. To parents, whose years are counted by these mournful landmarks — blossoms no sooner blown than blasted — tears shed over the infant's bier, that quenched the joys which lighted up the hour of its birth — it must, we repeat, be a very frequent as well as anxious inquiry, What is the fiual destiny of so large a proportion of the human family ? Can we satisfy it ? Each infant visitant seems to have descended from the better land, to have breathed our freezing atmosphere a few weeks, and to have opened its eyes on our dismantled world, and immediately to have left us, as if disappointed. Whither did it flee ? Where is it now ? in weal or woe ? Does it cease to be, or only to suffer? Is it well for eternity with the infant throng, taken from successive millions of weeping mothers — from Rachels without number, sorrowing because they are not ? Was it mercy or vengeance that wafted them away ? Was it God that set the seal of special favour on their infant souls, and repented, and recalled them to more genial climes ? or was it the grim King of Terrors who breathed upon them in his wrath, and numbered them with his victims? Or are they forgotten and forsaken things? Is this possible? Are sparrows counted and infants overlooked? Are ravens heard when they cry for food, and innocents only forgotten ?

Various theories, or rather imaginations, have been propagated on this subject. Some have ventured to affirm, that infants dying are annihilated. This is alike unscriptural and unphilosophical. Neither on the page of revelation nor on the page of nature is any such word inscribed. Nothing even in the material world is annihilated. Matter changes its form and structure ; but it neither is, nor, as far as our experience goes, can be annihilated. Such a doom revolts the best instincts of our nature, contradicts the clearest intimations of Holy Scripture, and would be utterly inexplicable on any just theory of the existence of a wise and benevolent God. "We do not stop to discuss it. We treat it with unmingled contempt. But if it be true, as revelation fully reveals, and as we have intimated before, that in the feeblest frame there resides a soul indestructible as the God that gave it, then the very idea of extinction is as absurd as it is contemptible. The mighty mind of Newton, that recorded the soundings of the firmament, and grasped celestial systems, and grouped the stars, and unveiled the mysterious ties that bind them into universal harmony, was once circumscribed by an infant's frame. The soul of Milton, the grandeur of whose genius was equalled only by the awful conceptions of which it was prolific, or the sublime and terrible theme which he handled, was once a baby's soul, composed to rest by a mother's lullaby, and amused with toys. Was that mighty spirit that disclosed the primal springs of the motion and harmony of creation, and approached nearest of men to the very throne of wisdom and goodness, capable of destruction in infancy ? "Was the mind that trod the burning floors of hell, or rose on all but unearthly pinions and mapped the realms of unutterable glory, a thing to be crushed by accident, and to be extinguished by death ? The death of either in infancy would not have been the annihilation, but the enfranchisement of those master-spirits, with the full knowledge and unchecked freedom after which they panted, from their prison-houses upon earth. The soul is a fragment of immortality — half time, half eternity is in its nature — its birth indicating its affinity to the former, its incapability of death stamping its relationship to the latter. It asks of the body room only for its expansion — a lodging only for its minority. It asks nothing more.

A second notion is, that the infants of believers only are saved, and those of unbelievers lost. We do not mean to deny that distinctive promises are made to the infants of believers. And these are too precious to be undervalued. It is a holy privilege to be born of Christian parents, as well as a gracious title to federal blessings ; and many will thank God for it in eternity. But there is no evidence in scripture that eternal death is ever visited on the souls of children as the punishment of the sins of their parents ; the idea involves injustice. "Visiting the sins of the fathers on the children" is exhausted in time, and perhaps it relates not so much to children, that is, infants, in natural succession, as to kings and their subjects. "Fathers" and "children" are expressions repeatedly applied in scripture to rulers and subjects, and to previous and succeeding generations. But if these words be construed in their literal sense, they are intended to convey a lesson and warning to the parents ; and therefore the "visiting" of the children must be in this life, that the parents who have neglected their duty may thus see and feel it either as a penalty or a chastisement. Of this, however, we are absolutely certain, that those children only that deliberately transfer to themselves the unholy example of their parents alone shall be punished, while those who deplore and avoid the evil precedent they have witnessed shall not be visited.

Ezek. xviii. 19 : " Ye say, "Why ? cloth not the son bear the iniquity of his* father ? When the son hath done that which is lawful and right, and hath kept all my statutes, and hath done' them, he shall surely live. The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the inquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son ; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him."

Ezek. xviii. 2, 4 : " What mean ye, that ye use this proverb concerning the land of Israel, saying, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge ? As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb in Israel. Behold, all souls are mine ; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die.' ,

These passages of Scripture set at rest all disputes upon this point. I do not believe that one soul will be saved by its parent's virtue, or that one will perish eternally by reason of a parent's sins. " The soul that sinneth, it shall die."

A third opinion has obtained some popularity, especially in certain quarters, viz., that all baptized infants are saved, and all unbaptized infants lost. However plausible this may appear, it is not true. "We must never magnify even a Christian rite or even a sacrament at the expense of precious truth. No doubt, as I think, it is the sacred duty of every Christian parent to have his child baptized ; and few, I presume, unless from inexcusable and guilty neglect, or from prejudices of early growth and inveterate power, will allow their children to grow up unbaptized. But, surely, to visit throughout the cycles of endless hell the error or the crime of the father on the unoffending offspring, is a retribution from which nature strongly recoils, and to which revelation, I am persuaded, gives no countenance. If baptism were a new heart in every case, and the absence of it the absence of a new nature also, then might this position, severe and awful as it seems, be held with some degree of justice. To have their infants baptized would, in such a case, be the supreme and paramount duty of parents to their offspring. But baptism is not necessarily a new nature.* Neither does nature assert it, nor does experience prove it. The very reverse is capable of proof. While the Holy Scriptures enjoin the administration of baptism as a solemn seal and sign of the covenant of grace, and a channel of unnumbered blessings to them that by faith receive it, they at the same time teach us, with a reiteration and earnestness not to be mistaken, that it is not necessarily a new nature — that " neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature," and this change is the^ personal work of the Holy Spirit — that Abraham received the blessedness of pardon and purity, which are the constituent elements of the new creature, not in circumcision, but in uncircumcision. These illustrations are fatal to this theory. It is too obvious from the whole tone of scripture warning, that the great difficulty lies in raising man's soul above the visible and material symbols to the inward and spiritual truths to which they were intended to point. Now if, under a dispen-

* See " Baptismal Font," in which this is discussed.

sation where the symbol and the substance were throughout so intimately wedded that they were not to be severed, grace nevertheless in one instance preceded its appropriate rite, and if that instance be referred to by the sacred penman not as a beacon, but clearly as a precedent for the establishment of a principle — surely, under the more unfettered and expansive dispensation of the gospel, the outward rite may be regarded neither as so essential that there is no salvation without it, nor so efficacious that in every instance it operates a transference from sin to holiness, or from the power of Satan to the kingdom of God. The Confession of Faith in the Church of Scotland has these words, "Elect infants dying in infancy are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit who worketh when, and where, and how He pleaseth." The expression, "elect," is, in my judgment, co-extensive with "all dying in infancy." I believe none but "elect" infants die in infancy. The wording is rigid, as was characteristic of the divines that drew it up ; but the spirit and design were, no doubt, truly Christian.

I do not enter upon other theories. I proceed rather to vindicate and prove what seems to me to be the verdict of the Holy Spirit in the Scriptures;

viz., that ALL CHILDREN DYING IN INFANCY, OR BEFORE THE YEARS OF RESPONSIBILITY, ARE, WITHOUT ONE EX- CEPTION OR LIMITATION AS TO THE CHARACTER OR THE CONDUCT OF THE PARENTS, SAVED.

CHAPTER in.

The announcement of the proposition in the last chapter will call up objections. It may be well to review some of these objections, and dismiss them before we attempt to prove our proposition and press it. Our way will thus be clearer, and our conclusions less modified or entangled by imaginary difficulties.

It has been objected, for instance, that incontrovertible facts prove that children have been and are involved in the punishment that has been executed on their parents. At the flood, for instance, when the world was destroyed, it is an undoubted fact that millions of infants must have perished in its waters. In the judgment that fell on Sodom and Gomorrah, many infants must have been consumed in the fires. "Hence," says the objector, reasoning from these as analogies, " as we see that infants do suffer because of their parents' transgressions in time, we cannot but consistently infer, or at least j t ou cannot disprove, that infants will suffer for their parents' transgressions in eternity.' ' "We admit the fact, but we dispute the analogy. There is no proportion whatever between suffering temporally and suffering eternally. These states of suffering also differ not only in degree but also in character ; and because the one takes place for one end, it is no fair or legitimate inference that the other must take place also for a totally different end. Such visitations, however outwardly severe, in time may be essential though disguised goodness ; in eternity they could be wrath only. If it be true, though I do not wish to anticipate conclusions, as we have asserted, and shall endeavour to prove, that all infants dying in infancy are saved, then the destruction of the infants of the antediluvian world was not wrath, but mercy ; not cruelty, but kindness. It w 7 as " light affliction for a moment, working out a far more exceeding, even an eternal weight of glory ;" for the wave that overwhelmed the casket bore the jewel upon its bosom to the presence of the Redeemer. It was shortening their pilgrimage in time. It was the translation of their spirits from a world dismantled by the flood, over which they would have looked and wept and wandered many-yeared and miserable pilgrims, to a world where there are —

" No griefs to feel, no fears to beat away ; The past unsigh'd for, and the present sure."

It was really harvest treading on the skirts of spring, the reward of grace without wages, and glory anticipating grace.

It has been asserted, that if the doctrine I have laid down be true, it must necessarily imply that there is no such doctrine as election ; for if scripture reveals such a doctrine, we cannot but presume that some of half the human race who die in infancy are elect, and that others of the same class are non-elect. "We reply, that whatever be the meaning or the truth of the doctrine of election, it has very little, as far as I can see, to do with this question. If it has, as the Confession of Faith seems to indicate, we may fairly confirm our doctrine by it, and maintain what I have already intimated, that all children who die in infancy are elect children ; that they are not the punished and proscribed, but the peculiar favourites of God — the predestined subjects of glory, to whom He has manifested, without works and without merit, the riches of his grace, remitting the largest proportion of even the temporal consequences of the primeval curse^ and receiving them to the enjoyment of the blessing ere they have even known what it is to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, or to labour for the better bread. In their case election may have its richest illustration, and sovereignty its sublimest victory. Thus the doctrine of election, from which many recoil, may have one aspect at least which every one must hail ; and what is denounced by some as a doctrine wrapped in terror and fraught with w r rath may, after all, be one of mercy and goodness. I believe that it is so. It is in all cases love in its irresistible power, laying hold of the resisting sinner, and transforming him by its power, and leaving him not till it lifts him to glory. It is simply grace. And admit that God's love must visit us before our love can respond to and rest on him, and you admit all that is essential in the doctrine of election.

It has been also objected, that the number of the saved is represented in scripture always as small in comparison with the number of the lost. For instance, it is declared : " Many are called, but few are chosen." Matt. vii. 13: " Enter ye in at the strait gate : for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat : because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life ; and few there be that find it." It is therefore argued, that the fact of so great a proportion of the human race being eventually saved, is, if true, incompatible with these and similar statements. But the text referred to, it will be easily seen, is applicable exclusively to adults, and by no possible stretch of language can it be applied to infants. Infants cannot be "called," because they are incapable of listening or yielding obedience to a call ; they are therefore incapable of rejecting it. Adults only can accept or refuse; they alone are the " called," and of them, it is true, painfully true, the "few are chosen." It is a truth as painful to the heart as it is palpable to the eye, that of the adults the great majority live far from God, "strangers to the covenant of promise." If we take the case of London, for instance, the metropolis of the world, we shall find that perhaps 600,000, or probably nearer a million, out of its two millions, never enter a place of worship at all : 3* and of those who do enter places of worship, how few are there whose hearts are really savingly touched, whose souls are truly renewed, who have felt the gospel not merely in its letter, but in its spirit, — not only as a word, but as the wisdom and power of God !

All this one feels most deeply ; but we must not forget, that, whilst scripture and statistics too represent the number of adults that now reject the gospel as still many, the same scripture represents the sum total of the saved by the gospel, at the close of this present dispensation, as very numerous. Its language is that of " a multitude no man can number.'' It was promised, that Abraham's seed (that is, Christians) should be " like the stars of heaven for multitude ;" that they should be upon the earth as the dew-drops of the morning ; that they should be like the sands upon the sea-shore. And, therefore, while it may seem true that a majority of adults are lost in the present day, and under the present dispensation, it is still not true, and there is no reason for thinking it true, (and this is a delightful fact,) that the majority of the human race as a whole, will be ultimately and finally lost. If half the human race die in infancy, and if infants be universally saved, then will evolve the result that must occasion feelings of joy and holy gratitude to every heart, that the great majority of the human race shall be saved ; and that, instead of a small number only, as some have supposed, eventually reaching glory, "a great multitude, whom no man can number," shall "stand before the throne with palms in their hands, kings and conquerors and priests, through Him that loved them and washed them in his blood, and redeemed them out of every kindred and people and tongue."

"We purposely abstain from even mentioning many other objections to the proposition we intend to demonstrate. A fertile fancy and a repugnance to a truth may invent innumerable objections to it. Abuses also may be appended to it; but for these it is not answerable. Use is God's design; abuse is the perversion of man. Heaven's best blessings have been perverted. Evil men can turn any mercy into means of evil. It is one of the effects of sin, that man has in every instance the secret of that awful chemistry which can transmute a blessing into a bane, and distil deadly poison from precious truths. The tarantula spider extracts noxious venom from the most delicious blossoms. So man can extract poison from the fruits of the tree of life, and death from the very leaves which are for the healing of the nations of the earth. But to object to a doctrine because it may be abused, or to reject it because it may be misapplied or perverted, is just to imitate the man who would cut down a beautiful fruit-tree because caterpillars find food from its leaves, and spiders weave their webs amid its branches. We must test conclusions by "the law and the testimony," and not by the real or anticipated abuses to which they may be open.