Page:On the Revision of the Confession of Faith.djvu/61

Rh here is to raise a false antithesis, which was not in the minds of the writers; and to make any inferences from this false antithesis is to read something of our own into the text. If we choose to raise such questions of our own, let us answer them; the Confession has not raised them, and does not answer them by statement or implication.

This interpretation of the bare text is powerfully supported by the history of the framing of this phrase in the Assembly. The chapter on effectual calling in the first form lacked Section 3, and therefore it was ordered ("Minutes," p. 134) "that something be expressed in fit place concerning infants' regeneration in their infancy." Observe, this is the point in the minds of the Assembly—the regeneration of infants in their infancy. What they wished to do was to show that Sections 1 and 2 did not exclude those who die in infancy from salvation, by the assertion that the effectual call came through the word. It was the possibility and actuality of regeneration in infancy that they wished to assert, and this, and this only, they do assert,—without implying anything at all as to how many of infants dying in infancy are so regenerated, which they would have adjudged a wholly inappropriate subject to broach at this place. We read in the "Minutes" of debates about this section, but absolutely nothing of the debate turning on anything else than the memorandum quoted above suggests. The phrase that occurs once, "Proceed in debate about elect of infants" (p. 162), furnishes no ground whatever for an opposite inference. In the complete uncertainty as to what is meant by the phrase, "elect of infants," or indeed whether it represents anything more than one of the numerous verbal blunders of the not over-careful scribe, it only tells us that Section 3 was carefully considered before it was finally accepted. All we know is that it cannot mean anything inconsistent