eternal death without remedy, but because it so seemed good in the sight of God?"—"It is a dreadful decree, I confess."[1]
No one, we think, after reading these citations, will doubt that John Calvin believed and taught the monstrous doctrine of infant damnation. Yet he was one of the most distinguished of the "Reformers," and a man to whom multitudes in the Christian Church have long been accustomed to look with reverence, as to a teacher of more than ordinary wisdom.
But this doctrine was not peculiar to Calvin; nor did it originate with him or the Reformation. Turretin, an eminent Calvinistic writer, assures us that "the
Orthodox Church has always held the doctrine of the danmation of infants."[2] For centuries prior to the Reformation it had been deemed a heresy to deny this doctrine. A writer in the Christian Examiner for 1828, treating of this subject, says:
"It had been adopted by the Roman Catholic Church for ages, and the Reformers are not exclusively entitled to the praise of giving this last finish to their doctrines of predestination and original sin. They had become familiar with its horrors in the common belief of that church, that such as die without baptism, including of course all heathen infants, have nothing to save them from hell, or at least from future punishment somewhere. Though most Protestants at last dissented from the church they abandoned, in denying the necessity of this rite to salvation, the damnation of infants was, nevertheless, held to be a necessary consequence of their guiltiness
