"It is certain by
God's Word," says the Rubric, "that children _which are baptized_, dying
before they commit actual sin, are undoubtedly saved." And those which
are not baptized? The Holy Roman Church sends these into a cheerful
place called Limbo, and the baby-souls wander about in chill twilight,
cursed with immortality, shut out for ever from the joys of Paradise.
Many readers will remember Lowell's pathetic poem on this subject, and
the ghastly baptism; they will also know into what devious paths of
argumentative indecency that Church has wandered in deciding upon the
fate of unbaptized infants;--how, when mothers have died in childbirth,
the yet unborn children have been baptized to save them from the
terrible doom pronounced upon them by their Father in heaven, even
before they saw the light;--how it has been said that in cases where
mother and child cannot both be saved the mother should be sacrificed
that the child may not die unbaptized. Into the details of these
arguments we cannot enter; they are only fit for orthodox Christians,
in whose pages they may read them who list. Truly, the Lord is a jealous
God, visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, since unborn
children are condemned for the untimely death of their mother, and
unbaptized infants for the carelessness of their parents or nurses. Of
course, the majority of English clergymen believe nothing of this kind;
but then why do they read a service which implies it? Why do they use
words in a non-natural sense? Why do they put off their honesty when
they put on their surplices?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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