WATER INSTEAD OF BLOOD.
By William N. Glenn
THE Boston Investigator is authority for the statement that a Catholic contemporary makes the following strange confession:— “To the heart of the pious Catholic mother nothing brings more pain than the loss of a child who, through some cause or another, dies without being baptized.” And such “strong delusion” is a fair specimen of the false theology so prevalent in these last days. What makes that mother sorrow over the fact that her infant was not baptized?—Because she thinks that it is lost, or at least that it will cost a great deal for prayers and masses to redeem it from purgatory. She believes that baptism (sprinkling) would have saved it. To her mind, as a result of her false religious teaching, a little water sprinkled on the child’s head by a priest would have saved it. Here we have the largest denomination of professed Christians in the world virtually holding up a little sprinkling ceremony as the medium of salvation. The matter of the child’s repentance, and confession of sin and faith in Christ, as a scriptural prerequisite to baptism, is not represented as being in any way connected with the mother’s grief. But the child died without baptism; no matter what circumstance might have prevented, the consequences, in the sorrowing mother’s mind, are the same. The sprinkling is, logically at least, presented in lieu of the blood of Christ. From a Protestant standpoint this is antichrist. But we find one of the strongest Protestant denominations warmly discussing the motion to erase from its creed the scriptural clause that the Catholic Church is antichrist. If that motion is correct, if Romanism is not antichrist, then why do not those who favor revision of their creed to conform to that opinion, go at once to the Roman Church? Protestantism sprung from the conviction that Rome was antichristian; then, if any Protestant has become convinced that this was a mistake, consistency would remand him to the Roman remarks. If Protestantism started out on an erroneous basis, then Protestantism is an error, and it is wrong to maintain any organized opposition to the mother church. W. N. GLENN.