holy act, is a source of much confusion in his own, and in other writings.1

4. Human Sinfulness.

The solicitude of Baxter to avoid all appearance of favoring the dogma, that God is the cause of our sinful actions, did not lead him, in his latest discussions, to any abatement of the Calvinistic theory of original sin. In some particulars, the volume now under review, gives a peculiar intensity to that theory. It reaffirms some of the remarkable things adduced in Bib. Sacra, Vol. IX. pp. 144-146. It not only asserts that the sin of Adam is imputed to us, but also that it ought in justice to be imputed. "God doth not repute us to have been what we were not; for he judgeth truly and is not mistaken." Baxter discards the idea, that the sins of our progenitor are imputed to us by a sovereign appointment of Heaven. "God doth not impute Adam's sin to us because he will do it, without any real participation of ours; no, nor beyond our true natural participation, but according to it. Otherwise God should have made us sinners, merely because he would do so, and not Adam."8 This scholastic writer also rejects the comparatively modern dogma, that "God so covenanted with Adam, that he should stand or fall for himself and his posterity," and that our dependence upon Adam for our moral character is merely through this covenant. He affirms distinctly:

"That there was any such covenant that if he [Adam] stood, his posterity should all stand, or be confirmed and saved, is more than ever I found in Scripture, or can prove, or do believe. But that it would have been to the benefit of his posterity I doubt not. And that his fall was to the guilt and corruption of his posterity, I doubt not; but (as I said) not without and beyond their natural interest in him, and derivation from him as the reason of it. And we are as much naturally in our next parents." "We receive our original guilt and pravity immediately from our next parents, and but remotely from Adam. It could never have come to us, but through them from whom we receive our nature; from them we receive the guilt and pravity of our nature. Therefore, thus far, at least, our next parents communicate guilt and pravity to us, and not Adam only; in which we see that God's imputation goeth along with real natural participation. It seemeth to me a strange oversight in too many divines, who deny (or observe not) our

1 See Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. X. pp. 705-738.

8 Ib. § 8.

2 Chap. X. § 3.

4 Ib. § 13.

guilt of all the rest of our parents' sins, while we were in their loins as well as of Adam's." "If I have a guilty and depraved soul from my parents, it is because I was one in them virtually or seminally as truly and naturally as I was in Adam; and had not the guilt been theirs, it had never been mine; and if it be mine because it was theirs, why not one part of theirs as well as another?"

The preceding quotation proves that, although Baxter retained to the last his faith that "all mankind descending from [Adam] by ordinary generation, sinned in him and fell with him in that first transgression," yet to the last Baxter discarded the idea that we thus fell on account of any peculiar "covenant made with Adam as a public person not for himself only but for his posterity.” There was, according to Baxter, as real a covenant made with all our ancestors as with the first one. But, connected as we are with Adam and our other progenitors, we sin in them all, not by virtue of any covenant apart from our participation in our ancestors' guilt, but by virtue of that participation itself. "When Adam sinned," says Baxter, "his whole person was guilty and no part innocent;" so when Noah sinned, when every one of our progenitors sinned. "Therefore," continues this unflinching author, "his [Adam's] very semen prolificum had its part in the guilt according to its capacity; and, though it was not a guilty person, it was a part of a guilty person; and a part that was the semen personae; so that, when that semen became a person (Cain), it became a guilty person; the guilt following the subject according to its capacity; and so downward by propagation to this day." No other theory of our guilt for Adam's sin is selfconsistent.

Our resolute divine proceeds to fortify his positions by argument, and to defend them against objections. Both his arguments and his replies illustrate the real meaning of his theory. He writes:

"And the Scripture is more copious, and as plain in making punishment due to children for their next parents' sins, as for Adam's, though Adam's only was the original of all sin and misery. I have elsewhere proved it at large. The case of Cain's posterity, and Ham's and Ishmael's and Esau's and Achan's family, and Ahab's, and many more do fully prove it. And more fully the second commandment and God's declaration of his name to Moses, Exodus 34th, and many a threatening to the seed of the wicked,

1 Chap. X. §§ 9—12.

2 Ib. § 7.

and Christ's express words in Matthew 23: 26. So that Scripture puts us out of doubt.

"The common objection is, that their guilt would be greater on us towards the end of the world, than on them at the beginning, because all our ancestor's guilt would be ours. But I answer, first, if it were so, it would be but many obligations to the same punishment, when it amounteth to that which God seeth our nature capable of. For a finite worm is not capable of more suffering than is proportioned to his nature. And, secondly, this objection vainly supposeth, that none of our ancestors' sins were pardoned. Whereas all are pardoned to the faithful and their seed, and much temporal punishment is pardoned to many of the unsanctified. And God himself, by limiting it to the third and fourth generation, seemeth to set bounds to his own justice. And, thirdly, the guilt of our parents' sins, being of a more diminute nature than that of our own actual sin (caeteris paribus), it falleth not so fully on us, as it did on the committers themselves, nor as our own do. And, fourthly, God offereth us the full pardon of our own and all together. And as long as the law which tells us of our desert of punishment, doth also give us a free pardon, we have no cause to complain.”1

Many writers are wont to modify their phraseology, when they speak of the sin which we committed in our ancestors; but this schoolman of the seventeenth century, who endeavors to reconcile the "generative traduction of souls" with "God's present, yea immediate causation of their essence, which may be called creation," attempts in his "End of Controversy" no qualification of his words, but says, with a noticeable self-consistency:

"And they that consider, that parents cause not children as an artificer maketh an engine, but by generation, which is a communication of their own essence; and what natural interest parents and children have in each other, and that it is real sin that is in both, and that the moral privation in its nature containeth much of man's misery, will easily grant that it is both a sin and a punishment, properly enough so called."

5. State of Infants.

As it has been queried, whether or not the doctrine of infant damnation has found advocates in the church, it may be interesting to notice Baxter's remarks upon that theme. He says, that some suppose all infants (dying such) to be saved; some

1 Chap. X. §§ 14, 15.

2 Chap. X. § 20. Everywhere Baxter insists that nothing can be sin which does not deserve punishment; therefore "in Adam we deserved death." Chap. XXI. §§ 34, 41.

suppose that none of them are actually glorified, but all of them are incapable of positive glory; others affirm that one class of infants are actually glorified, and that another class are punished poena damni, but not poena sensus. (This distinction is rejected by Baxter, who believes that if an infant be deprived of true joy, that infant will suffer real pain.) Some believe, he further asserts, that all baptized infants are saved, and unbaptized infants are punished with the mere poena damni; others believe that all infants baptized with the parents' consent are saved; others still, that all infants baptized by the consent of any real or even nominal Christian are delivered from punishment. According to some, the faith of the church who dedicate the infant in baptism is, the condition of the infant's rescue from punishment; according to others, "any one baptized by a godfather's offer, who undertaketh for his Christian education, shall be saved, and no other." "Some lay the hope upon ancestors' faith and say, that if the great-grandfathers, or others before them, were faithful, the infants shall be saved." "The commonest opinion among the English Calvinists is, that God hath made no certain promise of the salvation of any particular infant, but by his general promise of mercy to the seed of the faithful, hath given cause to hope that more of them than of others shall be saved; and, therefore, that they are by baptism to be entered into the visible church, as we baptize the adult, while we are not certain but they may be hypocrites." According to Baxter, then, the Calvinists of his time did not believe that all of even the baptized infants of pious parents will be saved. The Anabaptists of that day went further still, and taught "that there is no promise nor assurance of the saving of any particular infants in the world, either Christians or heathens; but only that God electeth some whom he will sanctify and save, and reprobateth others whom he will damn." "So that we cannot say that he will save ten, or that he will damn ten of all the world; nor have the faithful any more promise than heathens of the salvation of their infants." In the following words Baxter expresses his own opinion, which is in exemplary harmony with his doctrine on Original Sin.

"God who visited Adam's sin on all his posterity, hath in the covenant of grace, also, so joined infants to the parents, that till they have a will to choose for themselves, their parents may choose for them, and dispose of them for

1 Chap. XIX. § S, 13.

their good, and God taketh them as members of the parents so far. And so he hath made many express promises of mercy to the faithful and their seed, (and threatenings to the wicked and their seed). And this mercy cannot be consistent with their damnation; for it is to be their God, and to love and bless them, which cannot stand with damning them. And God having but one covenant, seeing they are in the same covenant with their parents, and not another, if it give pardon to the parents, it doth also to the child, of whom no condition is required, but that he be offered by a believing parent to God; whose acceptance is salvation." "If an infant be the child of a true believer, he hath all that God and the church require, and, therefore, if he be to be baptized, he is certainly put into a state of life, because no condition is wanting on his part."1

As Baxter believed that infants were real, and, therefore, illdeserving participators in their ancestors' sin, and as he refused to sanction the theory that infants, dying such, pass into a "middle state" in which they are deprived of happiness but freed from pain, we infer that, in his last years, he did not absolutely disbelieve the theory of a strictly merited, a positive, though justly proportioned misery, inflicted on infants who die without having been baptized on the true faith of their parents."

$6. State of the Heathen.

Decisive as Baxter's expressions are with regard to Original Sin, he yet lets fall some indefinite remarks with regard to Total Depravity. "Nature itself," he says, "is not in lapsed man divested of all moral or divine principles." "In the will there are some inclinations still to good as good, and therefore to God as far as he is truly conceived of as God, and so far as that conception is not conquered by a cross conception of some enmity; and so of other good." Pope Adrian taught that "an unsanctified man (not in a state of salvation) may so far love God, even above himself, as to consent rather to die and be annihilated, than (were it possible) God should be annihilated, or not be God." And says Baxter: "I am not able to confute or deny" this. 66 'He that tells men, that they shall be saved, if they would rather be annihilated than that there should be no God, doth make them a promise which God hath not made." These expressions of Baxter are afterwards explained by the remark,

1 Chap. XIX. §§ 16, 14.

2 Ib. §§ 2, 5.

Chap. XIV. §§ 6, 10.