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 that God will say to any that are in their blood and filthiness, Live. Who can quarrel with his Justice, that he should damn any, though he see nothing but Original Pollution in them? Among men we crush the Serpents' Eggs before the Serpent be grown; and might not God destroy us for our Birth-Sin?

Few works, perhaps, have been held in higher repute by the orthodox schools of divinity, or are to be found more frequently referred to in the outlines of the Course of Theology taught in these schools, than Ridgley's Body of Divinity, and Stapfer's Polemical Theology. It is therefore important to our purpose to ascertain the opinion of these writers upon the doctrine in question.

Now, as to Ridgley, there can be no doubt that he believed in infant damnation; though, much to the annoyance of some of his brethren—President Edwards in particular—he thought with some others, that it would be of a mitigated kind. He was evidently anxious to rid himself of the doctrine, as thousands of others have been; but he had such a deep sense of its adhesiveness to certain other doctrines which he had never thought of questioning—he saw that it was so closely interwoven with his entire system of theology—that he could not give it up altogether. As an authority, therefore, he is the more important for being a reluctant one. His "Body of Divinity" is the substance of several lectures on the Assembly's Larger Catechism. The following quotations from it,