On the question of Infant Baptism the real issue is whether infants are capable of receiving spiritual blessing, and the decisive consideration is the words and example of Jesus.^[1]  In welcoming the children^[2] and laying His hands upon them, Jesus’ action was either an effective communication of His goodwill to them or an empty gesture.  The Church’s interpretation of the incident is the natural one; infants are proper recipients of grace; He blessed them, and they received a blessing.

By admitting them to membership, the Church imparted to them the greatest blessing it had to bestow.  Circumcision, the rite of initiation under the Old Covenant was administered when children were eight days old, and the custom could hardly have failed to influence the first Jewish Christians in their treatment of children under the New Covenant.  Had infant Baptism not been practised from the beginning because it was contrary to Christian teaching, then surely its introduction at a later date must have occasioned controversy; the silence of Church history on any such debate can only mean that children had always been baptized.

The Article declares that ‘The Baptism of young children is in any wise to be retained in the Church, as most agreeable with the institution of Christ.’  Despite strong Scriptural evidence in support of Infant Baptism,^[3] however, the practice has been opposed by those who confuse ‘regeneration’ with ‘conversion’.  Regeneration means being ‘born again’ and is an act of God is Baptisim.^[4]  Conversion is an act of man’s own will; every time we repent of a sin a fresh ‘turning’ or act of the will should follow, by which we determine, by God’s grace, to amend our ways.  Bishop Jeremy Taylor well expressed the necessity of baptizing Infants: ‘Besides the natural birth of infants, there must be something added by which they must be reckoned in a new account; they must be born again, they must be reckoned in Christ, they must be adopted to the inheritance, and admitted to the promise, and entitled to the Spirit.  Now that this is done ordinarily in baptism is not to be denied: for therefore it is called ‘the font or laver of regeneration’; it is the gate of the Church, it is the solemnity of our admission to the covenant evangelical; and if infants cannot go to heaven by the first or natural birth, then they must go by a second and supernatural: and since there is no other solemnity or sacrament, no way of being born again, that we know of, but by the way of God’s appointing, and He hath appointed baptism, and all that are born again are born this way, even men of reason who have or can receive the Spirit, being to enter at the door of baptism – it follows that infants must also enter here, or we cannot say that they are entered at all’.^[5]