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    infants ? Had other heretics escaped his notice ? "Had he forgot himself , when he had taxed the Pelagians with denying Infant Baptism ; and when he complained , in another book , of people who opposed it ? If it were an established , universal custom , for

    whose use was the law made to cora ^ pel it ? A thousand more such questions might be put , all tending to contradict the falsehood . Jerome knew better , and expressly mentions it in a

    curious letter to a Christian Lady , for the purpose of decoying her daughter Paula into a convent , it should seem to be instructed by her mother , and baptized / ' P . 218 .

    In his Ecclesiastical Researches * ( p . 55 9 ) under the Greek Church , he observes , " During the three flr 3 t centuries Christian congregations , all over the East , subsisted in separate , independent bodies , unsupported by government , and consequently without

    any secular power over one another : all this time they were baptized churches , and though all the fathers of the four first ages down to Jerome were of Greece , Syria and Africa , and though they give great numbers of histories of the baptism of adults , yet

    ther £ is not one record of the baptism of a child , till the year 370 , when Galates , the dying son of the Emperor Valens , was baptized , by order of a monarch , who swore he would not be contradicted . " Theod . Lib ,, iv . Cap . 17 . " The age of the prince , " continues Mr . Robinson , •** is uncertain ,

    and the assigning of his illness as the cause of his baptism , indicates clearly enough that Infant Baptism was not in practice *" The introduction of Infant Baptism , then , into the Greek Church , appears to have been gradual , till it was

    established by the law . But when their religious rites were afterwards regulated by rituals , approved by human authority , he observes , on the authority of writings and antiquaries , of the most unexceptionable character , that even then the Illuminations

    illustrate his doctrine ; one exhibits what in the rituals is called Association or Fellowship ; and he adds , " that a Baptist would suppose it was a representation of John , in the act of forming a Christian Church / ' P- 500 . He remarks , that the most ancient rituals of the Greek Church wer 6 ori *

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    glnally prepared for adults , and that services were afterwards accommodated to the use of children . His observations on this point are inge * - nious , and , at the same time , probable , resting indeed on very ample

    testi-. Of the innumerable Christians of the East , who are not in communion with either the Greek or Roman Churches , ( 484 , ) some of which formed similar hierarchies , independent of them , and others were of no

    hierarchies , but always- retained their original freedom : among these people , more than among the former , we may expect , for obvious reasons , to find examples of the primitive practice ; but of them all , whether of the

    Establishment or Dissidents , hfe says , ** yet they all administer baptism by immersion , and there is no instance of this contrary . ' * The patriarch of the Nestorians ( Dissenters from the Greek Church )

    hath under his jurisdiction more than four hundred and thirty Metropolitan and Episcopal Churches . Thefr iituals are adapted to the catechumen state ; in the case of children , the church supposes the parents have edu ~ cated them . Their rituals were

    composed for adult baptism , and he thinks the baptism of little children was first introduced there by the patriarch Jesu Jabus , in the seventh century j and though the point may admit of some doubt , ( as to the exact time , ) yet his opinion , by admitted facts , is rendered highly probable .

    To relieve , then , your Correspondent ' s anxieties on this topic , he should be told , that in the History of Baptism , the very early and universallyprevailing- practice of Infant Baptism is denied , and to my humble apprehension disproved ; that when it first

    appeared it was opposed , and continued to be opposed , as long as meu could oppose it , and that it was opposed , in the practice of men of the opposite party in almost every part of the world . That even after despots and civil magistrates and popes had

    enforced Infant Baptism as a national practice , the most learned antiquartes of the Catholic Church , following the evidence , which irresistibly struck them on ancient monuments , so far a $ the mode goes , * would laugh at such as affect to render the word baptism

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    On Mr . Belshanis Censure of Robinson . 439

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1818, page 439, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2478/page/31/