Page:On the Revision of the Confession of Faith.djvu/58

50 as to render Section 7 superfluous, while affording us but a sorry substitute for that richer section. In the effort to prevent careless readers from misapprehending a plain and admirably ordered document, it would compel all careful readers to be offended by a bad arrangement and an insufficient theological discrimination. Speaking for myself, then, I do not hesitate to say that the present form of the third chapter suits me precisely, and that the proposed change would be unacceptable and confusing, and appears to me to rest only on an unwillingness to take the trouble to follow the Confession in the logical ordering of its matter.

If the current misapprehensions of Chapter III. are remarkable, I think we may characterize the interpretation of Chapter X., Section 3, which finds a body of non-elect infants, dying in infancy, implied in its statement, as one of the most astonishing pieces of misinterpretation in literary history. It is so perfectly gratuitous as almost to reach the level of the sublime. And when Dr. Van Dyke adduces "the ambiguous phrase 'elect infants dying in infancy,'" as sanctioning "the popular impression that we hold the abhorrent doctrine of the damnation of infants," and as, therefore, one of the three cases in which the necessity for revision is obvious, he renders it easy for us to reply that the phrase is not, properly speaking, "ambiguous," and that the Confession is certainly in no need of revision to guard it from a wholly unreasonable interpretation.

The assertion that the clause in question necessarily implies, as its opposite, a body of non-elect infants dying in infancy, has been so often and so dogmatically reiterated