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REVIEW. 44 Still pleased to praise, yet not afraid to blame."—Pope.
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Review. 44 Still Pleased To Praise, Yet Not Afraid To Blame."—Pope.
REVIEW . 44 Still pleased to praise , yet not afraid to blame . "—Pope .
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Art . I . —A Plea for Infant Baptism . To which is annexed . An Appendix * containing Two F ' orms of Administering the Rite , By T Bel sham , Minister of Essex-Street ChapeL
Hvo . pp . 130 . 1817 . AS this work is under discussion in the Monthly Repository , we judge it equitable to confine our Review to ^ n analysis of its contents .
Mr . Belstiam proposes " to prove that" the baptism of the infants of baptized Christians was the uniform , universal , undisputed practice of the primitive church , and consequently that it was an apostolic institution . —
That the mode of baptism , whether hy immersion or affusion , was , in fact , and with great wisdom , left to the discretion of the parties concerned And , finally , that infant baptism is a religious service of great and obvious practical utility . "—P . 101 .
He allows that direct evidence concerning baptism , and particularly the baptism of infants is wanting ; but maintains that its place is abundantly supplied by that which is indirect . " And though we cannot produce the testimony of Scripture , we
produce evidence fully equivalent to that of Scripture : nay , if possible , even superior to scripture evidence itself ; for it is , that upon which we actually receive the Scriptures : namely , the uniform , universal , undisputed testimony of Christian antiquity . "—P . 9 .
The following is Mr . BelshanTs own nummary of this testimony : — u baptism of the infant descendants of baptized persons , though clearly alluded to by Irenceus , who was the pupil of Polycarp , bishop of Smyrna and the disciple of the apostle John , and even by Justin
Martyr , who flourished within half a century of the apostolic age , is first explicitly mentioned by TertuUian , a preshyter of Carthage , about A . D . 200 . It is mentioned by this pious but eccentric writer incidentally as a prevailing- practice , which
indeed be disapproved ; and for this disapprobation he assigns his reasons , but he appeals to no authority whatever in support of his opinion . Far from declaring * that it wiis the apostolic rule and the primitive practice to defer baptism to years of discretion , which surely he must have known
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and would have appealed to bad the face been so , he refers to no church , to no sect or party of Christians , to no ecclesiastical writer , not even to a sing-le example in his own age , in support of his own advice for deferring- baptism . The conclusion is
that he knew of none such , and consequently that infant baptism was the universal , or at least the prevailing- and undisputed practice of the church in the time o f TertuUian . From whence it follows by irresistible inference , that infant baptism was an apostolic , and therefore a divine
institution . " Origen , likewise the learned contemporary of TertuUian , in his Commentary upon the Gospels , if they are faithfully translated by Jerome and Rufinus , of which in this case there appears no reason to
doubt , incidentally mentions infant baptism in away which plainly indicates tbat in his time it was the prevailing * practice . He was the most learned man of his ag * e . a presbyter of Alexandria , and spent much of his time among the Christians in different parts of Asia .
" After this , little or no mention is made of infant baptism for nearly fifty years , till A . D . 253 , when a question was moved in a council of sixty-six bishops assembled at Carthage , not whether infant baptism was lawful or expedient , or whether it were a rite of apostolical origin , ( these were facts
whicb never came into discussion , ) but whether it was expedient that an infant should be baptized before the eighth day ? The reply is still extant : in which the council , with St . Cyprian at their head , unanimously determine that it is not necessary nor advisable tbat the baptism should be postponed till the eig-hth day .
u After this , the question aiept for nearly one hundred years : only that Greg-ory , the celebrated bishop of Nazianzum , in Asia , A . D . 360 , in a Treatise written expressly for the purpose of urging pfosel 3 * tes to submit to baptism , advances it as a private opinion of his own , that except
where life is in dang * er it would be expedient to defer baptism till a child is two or three years ef age , when he would be able to speak and to repeat the formula , though he should not be able to understand it : —rplainly allowing- that infant bap tism was then the prevailing * practice .
" But this fact was most fully and indisputably established fifty years afterwards , ahout A . D . 410 , when the Pelagian controversy arose concerning * original siD « Pelag-ius , born in Britain , a man of gre * talents , learning and ^ coinj rikhuieiits ,
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1817, page 682, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2470/page/42/
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