It makes
faith first, baptism second, entering the church third; whereas baptism
comes before the conscious faith of the subject. If so, then why object to
infant baptism?
Baptism is that sacrament by means of which the order of divine grace is
continued. It generates faith, and its development is from authoritative,
to free, personal faith. "What the personal election of Christ was to the
first circle of disciples, that baptism is for the successive church, the
divine fact through which Christ gives to His church its true and eternal
beginning in the individual." If so, then is it not plain that baptism goes
before the self-conscious faith of the subject? And if this church-founding
sacrament brings your child into a living and saving relation to the
church, then why deny it that baptism? Dare you reverse the divine
procedure which God has ordained for the salvation of His people? And if
Christ is related to the individual only through the general; if He is
related to the members only through the body, and having fellowship with
them only as the Head of that body, then is it not plain that your
children, in order to come to Him as such, to be incorporated with Him and
related to Him in a saving way, must come to Him through the church,--must
become a member of it, and that too in the manner and through the medium
He has prescribed, viz., baptism?
He who, for the reason, therefore, that children can have no self-conscious
faith, refuses to have them baptized, but exposes his ignorance of the
divine procedure of grace as developed in the church, of the true moral
relation between parent and child, and of the scripture idea of the
Christian home.
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