=12.= Such conditions exclude all who have not arrived at the age of discretion and responsibility; and by special commandment the Lord has forbidden the Church to receive any who have not attained to such age.[364] By revelation, the Lord has designated eight years as the age at which children may be properly baptized into the Church, and parents are required to prepare their children for the ordinances of the Church, by teaching them the doctrines of faith, repentance, baptism, and the gift of the Holy Ghost. Failure in this requirement is accounted by the Lord as a sin resting upon the heads of the parents.[365] [364] Doc. and Cov. xx, 71. [365] Doc. and Cov. lxviii, 25-27. =13. Infant Baptism.=--The Latter-day Saints are opposed to the practice of infant baptism, which indeed they believe to be sacrilege in the eyes of God. No one having faith in the word of God can look upon the child as impure; such an innocent being needs no initiation into the fold, for it has never strayed therefrom; it needs no remission of sins, for it is sinless; and should it die before it has become contaminated by the sins of earth, it will be received again, without baptism, into the presence of its God. Yet there are many professedly Christian teachers who declare that as all children are born into a wicked world, they are themselves wicked, and must be cleansed in the waters of baptism to be made acceptable to God. How heinous is such a doctrine!--the child to whom the Savior pointed as an example of emulation of those even who had received the holy apostleship,[366] the Lord's selected type of the kingdom of heaven, the favored spirits whose angels stand forever in the presence of the Father, faithfully reporting all that may be done unto their sacred charges[367]--such souls are to be rejected and cast into torment because their earthly guardians failed to have them baptized! To teach such a doctrine is sin. [366] Matt. xviii, 1-6. [367] Verse 10. =14. The History of Infant Baptism= is instructive, as throwing light upon the origin of this erratic practice. It is certain that the baptism of infants, or pedobaptism (Greek _paidos_, child, and _baptismos_, baptism) as it is styled in theological lore, was not taught by the Savior, nor by His apostles. Some point to the incident of Christ blessing little children, and rebuking those who would forbid the little ones coming unto Him,[368] as an evidence in favor of infant baptism; but, as has been wisely and tersely remarked:--"From the action of Christ's blessing infants, to infer they are to be baptized, proves nothing so much as that there is a want of better argument; for the conclusion would with more probability be derived thus: Christ blessed infants, and so dismissed them, but baptized them not; therefore infants are not to be baptized." [368] Matt. xix, 13; Mark x, 13; Luke xviii, 15.