Infant Baptism (RR)

805. Then an unbaptized infant cannot attain Heaven?

 

An unbaptized infant cannot attain Heaven. Christ has said very definitely, "Unless one be born again ... he cannot enter the Kingdom of God." Jn. III., 3. 

I am not more severe than Christ in my denial. He declares that the ordinary principle of life received by human generation is insufficient. We must receive an additional life of grace by baptismal rebirth. An unbaptized infant has received natural life only and had one birth only. 

If it dies without Baptism it has no claim to the supernatural happiness of Heaven.

812. Do we not read only of adult baptisms in the New Testament?

No.
We read of some adult baptisms, but they were not administered precisely because the subjects were adults, but because they happened to be converted as adults.

Acts XV. commemorates the reception of two complete households into the Church by St. Paul, and we are not told that the adults only in those households were received.

Christ told the Apostles to teach and baptize all nations, and the term all nations certainly includes men, women, and children.

Again St. Paul tells us that Baptism is the Circumcision of Christians, and we know that Circumcision was administered to children. Col. 2, II.
Or is the New Law to be less perfect than the Old, containing no purifying rite for infants? Your ideas are opposed to the whole tenor of Christianity. Christ is the second Adam. If the children of Adam are born subject to original sin and its penalties, so they can be born again of Christ into the life of grace.
Or is Adam to be able to ruin all, yet Christ be unable to save any except adults?
"What is of the flesh is flesh; what is of the spirit is spirit."
Children by virtue of their natural birth are of the flesh, and Our Lord insists that unless one be born again he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.

Do not be misled by the English translation, "Unless a man be born again." The original Greek does not use the word man in this text. It says, "Unless anyone be born again," and a child is someone.

Topic: "Baptism" in Vol 1.
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