Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

“Austin’s third and fourth books against the Donatists demonstrated that they
denied infant baptism, wherein he maintains the argument of infant baptism
against them with great zeal, enforcing it by several arguments.” f175
Bohringer, a late biographer of Augustine, says:
“Infant baptism is the only point of difference between Augustine and the
Donatists, and this grew out of the Donatist notion of the church.” f176
Alluding to and endorsing Bohringer’s statement, W.W. Everts, Jr., than
whom, perhaps, no one in America has a better knowledge of church history,
says:
“This is only a more confident statement of what Gotfried Arnold and Ivirney
had said before in identifying the Donatists and modern Baptists.” f177
Augustine presided over a council of 92 ministers, which aimed at the
Donatists, Montanists and Novatians, declared:
“We will that whoever denies that little children by baptism are freed from
perdition and eternally saved, that they be accursed.”
Armitage says:
“It is commonly conceded that Augustine wrote a separate work against thorn
on infant baptism which has not come down to us. If he did, the fair inference
would be that they rejected that doctrine.” f178
Yes, and if Armitage had thoroughly investigated, he would have learned that
Dr. Benedict has, in his History of the Donatists, produced sufficient amount
of Augustine’s writings to so clearly prove that the Donatists rejected infant
baptism as to leave the fact beyond any reasonable doubt. Cramp regards it
possible that some Donatists practiced infant baptism.
In his history of the Donatists, Benedict mentions four divisions called
Donatists, f179 the last two did not go out from the original company. If any of
the people who were called Donatists ever held to infant baptism, some of the
last two divisions must have been the ones.
Merivale says of the Donatists:
“They represented the broad principle of the Montanists and Novatians, that
the true Church of Christ is an assembly of real pious persons only. … Jerome
and Augustine and others class the Donatists with the Novatians as to general
aim and purpose, and Augustine sneers at them as ‘spotless saints.’” f180
The church government of the Donatists was substantially the same as that of
the Baptists of our own time. W.W. Everts, Jr., says: