Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

CHAPTER 28. F1042 — BAPTIST CHURCH PERPETUITY
TESTED BY THE FRUITS OF BAPTIST CHURCHES.
Christ says: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” Matthew 7:20.
In fruit-bearing Baptist churches of to-day need dread no comparison with
Baptist churches of the apostolic age
(1.) The life and the influence of Baptist churches for a spiritual church.
Rejecting all inherited church membership, rejecting bringing people into the
church in infancy, rejecting bringing them in on motives of policy and
rejecting bringing them in anyway or for any reason before they are born of
God, and contending for exclusion of all known unregenerate persons from
church fellowship; among the great denominations Baptists to-day, as in all the
past, stand alone. Thus, they stand alone for a church of only spiritual persons.
On other churches Baptists have exerted an inestimable influence for good. In
1863 the adherents of the Heidleberg Catechism celebrated its three hundredth
year and published of it a handsome tercentenary edition, edited by prominent
divines and with an elaborate historical introduction. These learned writers
say: This Catechism assumes that
“the baptized children of the church are sealed and set over to the service of
God by the sanctifying and separating act of baptism itself, and that they
belong to the congregation and the people of Christ. … In this respect,
however, it was only in keeping …with the general thinking and practice of
the church in the age of the Reformation; and it is not difficult to see that the
entire catechetical system in particular of the sixteenth century, owed its
whole interest and vigor and success to the same theory of christianity and no
other. It is not intelligible on any other ground; and with the giving away
accordingly of the old belief in BAPTISMAL GRACE and educational religion
we find that it has in a large measure lost its hold upon the practice of our
modern churches, in large measure altogether.” f1043
Listen to these writers tell what has, in such a great measure rooted out the
Romish doctrine of infant church membership and baptismal grace, on which
the writers say the sixteenth century Reformers built modern churches:
“The BAPTIST PRINCIPLE, as it may be called, has entered widely into their
theology and church life, bringing them to make large concessions
practically; so that they find it hard to bear up against its assumptions and
pretensions, and are more and more in danger of being swept away by it from
their ancient moorings, and driven forth into the open sea of spiritual
fanaticism and unbelief. This unquestionably is the great reason why in
certain quarters within these communions such small stress has come to be