# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1863_S262
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

262 Some Remarks on a New Apology of the Reformed Church.

But does he not deny this — how so? Should God, indeed, have been able to create a holy man out of nothing, but be unable to make a regenerate child of God out of a created and redeemed human child? Yet our polemicist himself says: "That the free grace of God can work the new life even in small children, and does in fact work it in individual cases, is not thereby meant to be denied." The writer makes this concession chiefly, no doubt, because he fears that the example of John the Baptist will be held up against him, who was already filled with the Holy Spirit in his mother's womb and leaped for joy at the greeting of the mother of the Lord. But with this concession our anti-Lutheran refutes himself so thoroughly that no corrective remark from our side is really needed on this point at all. For even a child can see that if, by his own admission, the "free grace of God" can work regeneration without baptism, then it is downright absurd to maintain that it is nevertheless not possible for the grace of God to work it with, in, and through baptism! Or does the grace of God perhaps cease to be free when a means of grace is added to it? — Now it would make some sense to say: the grace of God regenerates children through baptism, but God can, according to his free grace, also work this without baptism; but it is utterly senseless to say: it is, to be sure, "an inconceivable thought that in an infant not yet arrived at consciousness a regeneration could have taken place" through baptism, but it is, however, a conceivable thought that it took place through the "free grace of God in baptism." It is clear that our Herr Licentiate resists the acceptance of a regeneration of little children not because he sees in it something contradictory, but because he would like to prove that the Lutheran Church has not yet, like his Reformed Church, broken wholly and completely with Rome; but in the heat of his assault upon the Lutheran Church, which he holds in such contempt, he has, by mistake, not only seized upon the rotten weapon of a rational objection, but has in the end broken and thrown it away himself.

Another ground which Hr. Lic. Krummacher adduces for holding the Lutheran doctrine of baptism to be objectionable lies in the addition: "of which" (= of which regeneration) "no trace shows itself in the being of the child in the course of its development." — On this it need simply be observed: if Hr. K. has noticed no trace, in baptized children, of the regeneration that took place in them in their baptism, this only proves: in part, that such works of grace cannot be perceived like sensible things — the physical birth that has occurred, for instance; and in part, that only he, Hr. K., has not had the good fortune to perceive in baptized children the marks of the baptismal grace, powerful also in later life, which thousands of truly Christian parents have already perceived and still perceive daily. It is, indeed, sadly true that on the whole these perceptions are just as rare, or even rarer, than the perceptions of adults who have come to faith