Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 28:110 (Apr 1871)
Article: The Church-Membership Of Baptized Children
Author: Lewis Grout

BSac 28:110 (April 1871) p. 262

The Church-Membership Of Baptized Children

Rev. Lewis Grout

It is a common remark that our duties are modified and determined by our relations. Taking this to be true, how important it is that the church of Christ should carefully consider that relation which is instituted between herself and those children whom she brings to the baptismal font. Nor would this seem to be either common or easy; else we might suppose the opinions of many of our clergy and laity would be less vague and diversified. Inquiring of one and another as to their thoughts on this subject — what they believe to be the proper ecclesiastical standing of baptized children; whether they belong to the church, are in it and of it, or out of it, or where they are—the writer has been somewhat surprised at the variety of views that prevail, even among those who are supposed to be of the same general faith in respect to the duty and import of infant baptism.

All agree that such children must be related to the church somehow, and that this relation must be of such a nature that something good ought to be expected to come of it. Yet some seem to look upon it as wholly an external one, and so deny that they are either in the church or members of it at all, in any sense. Some will admit that they belong to the church, yet seem to doubt or deny that the church belongs at all to them; that is, the church has a claim upon the children, and an interest in them, but the children have as .yet no interest or place in the church. Some hold that they are in the church, yet not of it; as though to be in it, in any sense deserving the name, is not to be of it. Not a few seem to regard them as neither in it nor out of it, but as occupying some sort of middle ground; as though this were either

BSac 28:110 (April 1871) p. 263

scriptural or tenable. Our own conviction is that these views fall, all sadly, though not all equally, short of the truth: that on this point our Congregational churches, many of them, at least many members in most of them, have departed from the teaching of the divine word, from the faith and practice of the primitive church, from the faith and practice of the Puritan Fathers, and from the faith, at least, of other branches of the catholic church of the present age, the Baptists alone excepted.

Nor can we rid ourselves of the conviction that much of the neglect into which infant baptism is alleged to have fallen within the memory of the living, and much of the neglect of that nurture, too, which the church owes her baptized children, are among the sad consequences of the doubts, errors, and haziness of sentiment that prevail among us on this subject. Nor, again, do we think it among the least hopeful signs of the times, pertaining to this point, ...