Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

laid on infant baptism. … We are surrounded now, as we have just seen, with
a wholly different practice which is the fruit and evidence of a wholly
different faith. What that faith is, or rather what it is not, has been mentioned
already in general terms. It is the absence of a belief in that side of christianity
which is represented to us in the idea of the church being in any way the
organ and medium of grace for the children of men. In this respect our
modern sects are generally of one mind. … They are all of them thus
constitutionally Baptistic; having no power to see in the church membership
of infants and young children anything more than an empty form, and never
daring to make any practical earnest with the thought of their sanctifcation to
God. Such has come to be the reigning habit of thought, it is but too plain
with our American christianity in general at the present time.” f1046
Thus, these great Pedobaptist scholars lamentably concede that Baptist
principles have almost wholly converted the Pedobaptist world from infant
baptism, from baptismal grace and from a consequent unspiritual church —
they concede that Baptist influence has led them to abandon the infant baptism
part of the old catechism, which was “at once cordially welcomed by all but
Romanists and extreme Lutherans,” and which
“was speedily translated into many different languages,” and which “is,
virtually, the platform occupied at the present day by the largest portion of the
Protestant church, especially in regard to its moderate Calvanistic and
f1047 f1044
sacramental doctrines.”
Before the British Congregational Union, Dr. Bonner, the Moderator, in 1858,
said:
“The preeminence given by the Baptists to the personality f1045 of the christian
character and profession becomes a valuable force arrayed on the side of
scriptural evangelism against human traditions, sacredotal and ecclesiastical
pretensions. It is the direct antidote and antagonist to the official virtue and
authority upon which the church of Rome has based the grand apostasy. …
On this principle, perhaps, we may account for a new reformation in
Germany, being apparently identified with the diffusion of Baptist sentiments
in so many States, and for the virulence with which those who teach them and
those who adopt them are so persecuted and oppressed by governments
inspired by ecclesiastical jealousies and alarm.”
Froude, an eminent English historian, not a Baptist, in his Life of Bunyan,
says:
“The Baptists, the most thoroughgoing and consistent of all Protestant sects.
If the sacrament of baptism is not a magical form but is a personal act, in
which the baptized person devotes himself to Christ’s service, then to baptize
children at an age when they cannot understand what they have done may
well seem irrational if not impious.”