Baptismal Regeneration A BLASPHEMOUS FABLE. LETTERS ΤΟ Canon Crosthwaite and His Grace the Lord Primate: DEBATES ON THE BAPTISMAL SERVICE IN THE BY THE REV. JOHN THOMAS WALLER, RECTOR OF KILCORNAN, CO. LIMERICK. "Baptism representeth unto us our profession" (Baptismal Service). "Then as to what he says, 'That no one can be a minister of the Reformed Church of England who is certainly not persuaded of the regeneration of every infant baptized,' NEITHER IS THAT TRUE" (Dean Durel, 1677). DUBLIN: GEORGE HERBERT, 117, GRAFTON-STREET. THIS correspondence, which appeared in the Ecclesiastical Gazette and Church Advocate, arose out of the following letter of CANON CROSTHWAITE'S : Sir, BAPTISMAL GRACE. I really think it is time that this endless controversy should cease-tiresome alike to you and your readers. The question is threshed to powder: WE MAY SWEEP UP THE FLOOR, AND TAKE UP OUR DEPARTURE, &c. Your obedient Servant, CHARLES J. C. CROSTHWAITE, Canon and V.G. of Kildare. BAPTISMAL REGENERATION. BAPTISMAL REGENERATION AND CANON DEAR SIR,-I see that Canon Crosthwaite is still writing on Baptismal Regeneration,* and striving to prove that our Reformers held that blasphemous fable and dangerous deceit : I would, therefore, refer him to the British Critic of 1842, a High Church journal, where he will find the following: "It is now about ten years since members of the University of Oxford began to put forward, by means of tracts and other publications, various High Church doctrines, which they asserted, and which all agree, had been a long time laid aside, or but indifferently maintained in our Church. These doctrines, which are mainly those of BAPTISMAL REGENERATION, the REAL PRESENCE, the EUCHARISTIC SACRIFICE, TRADITION, CHURCH AUTHORITY, APOSTOLICAL SUCCES"The Laudean School was as clearly A NEW SION," &c. "The great point in dispute is briefly this:-Whether the full baptismal blessing is, in the case of infants, under all circumstances, invariably and universally bestowed; whether, in fact, God has pledged himself, whenever an infant is baptised, apart from all consideration of every other circumstance, except a mere act of baptism, to give that child, in the act, the full blessing of spiritual regeneration" (Goode's Infant Baptism, Preface v.). "Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. As early as 1601 he revealed his divergence from the theological and ecclesiastical principles which had prevailed in the Church of England since the Reformation, by declaring, in one of his lectures, that the Church of Rome had, previous to that event, been the true visible Church of Christ earth; and in the theses which he defended, in 1604, for the degree of Bachelor in Divinity, he maintained, against the Puritans, the necessity of baptism as the vehicle of regeneration, and the necessity of the episcopate to the existence of a true Church. These views excited great opposition in Oxford, and even drew upon him a formal censure |