Nominal Church Membership.
By Editor
UNDER the above heading the Independent tells some palpable truths in a very clear manner. They are the more forcible as that paper most strenuously advocates sprinkling for baptism, and has been known to favor infant baptism. But the Independent aims to tell the truth even if it thereby stands self-condemned. Read the following carefully:— Ask a plain deacon or elder if his son is a member of the church, and he will say: "No; we have prayed much for him, he is a child of the covenant, and we believe he will yet be converted; but he is not yet a church member." Go then to his well-indoctrinated pastor and ask him who constitute the church, and he will reply to you, in a worn phrase: "Believers and their children." But he knows perfectly well that he is using the word church in a different sense from what he does when he urges his deacon's son to "join the church." It is only in a very loose and almost meaningless sense that he would say the deacon's boy is already a member of the church. That boy has never suspected that he is in any sense a member of the church. And the only sense in which he is a member is that he has been baptized in his infancy, and is one of those to whom the church owes a special watch and care. He cannot partake of the church's communion at the Lord's table, he cannot vote at a meeting of the church, he has no voice or vote or seat with the church. His only personal act in relation to the church is to withdraw when the members of the church come together. For anything more he must wait till he has been converted and joined the church. And yet the tradition lingers that, by some strange virtue, either of baptism or descent, that child is already in some valid sense a member of the church. The church is composed, we hear it again and again said, of "believers and their children"; and ingenious explanations are made to show how this must be true, though false to outward seeming. Of course, every Protestant denies baptismal regeneration; but then many declare that infant baptism has some sort of mystical influence in bringing the infant soul into relation to God's saving grace, which is only another way of asserting what has been denied. In baptism the child does nothing; is passive. Only the parent and God can do anything. The parent can do nothing but make the rite an act of consecration; and, if God does anything more than to look graciously down and recognize with infinite benevolence the parent's act, we have no evidence for it in reason or Scripture. That there should be any evidence in Scripture is impossible, inasmuch as Scripture has nothing to say about infant baptism whatever. But there are more than might be believed who think they hold that a child of believing parents is, in such a sense, necessarily a child of grace; that he is already regenerated, and is so already a member of Christ's invisible church, and should be of his visible church. They can never carry out practically their theory, for the whole working economy of the church is against it; but there are more than it would seem to intelligent people possible, who hold that the child of believing parents is regenerated from birth, a sure heir of grace and Heaven, and that his conversion is sure to follow in time. We have known not a few to declare that a child thus regenerated in infancy may grow up in sin and not be converted till late in life; that God's grace can thus remain dormant. Such a separation of regeneration and conversion is as unscriptural as it is unreasonable; but it serves to bolster up the idea of infant church membership. It is strange that the Scripture is tortured to support such notions. The declaration of Peter, "The promise is to you and your children," is twisted to mean that there is sure salvation for the children of believers, even though the promise referred to is a special one from Joel, on another subject, quoted by the apostle as foretold at Pentecost. It is about prophesying and dreaming dreams. So we are pointed to John the Baptist, who was "filled with the Spirit from the womb," as a proof of infant regeneration; as if such literal interpretation could not equally prove that infants can talk and tell lies before they are a day old; and, if at best, the case of John were not represented as an exceptional one, instead of the rule in the church. Perhaps these literalists will take the alarm when it is pointed out to them that, if the promise is so definite and the infant children of believers are already regenerated, then those of them who die without evidence of conversion, but who are yet children of the promise and who must be saved, are sure to see the light after breath or after death. For such there must be a second probation, so short is the step between absurdity and "heresy."