Ebook Review of the Baptismal Controversy

The Baptismal Controversy was the controversy of the first half of this century. It produced treatises from a succession of writers, - Archbishop Laurence, Bishop Mant, Mr. Biddulph, Mr. Faber, Bishop Bethell, Dr. Pusey, Dr. Goode, Archdeacon Wilberforce, and others. It came to a head in the Gorham trial, and has since dropped. A review of a field of past controversy, and an attempt to arrive at a judgment upon it, may not be without use to the theological reader.

A controversy, if we collect the strong points and reasonable admissions of the different writers in it, has sometimes a force and value as a whole beyond the separate works of which it is composed; the different works taken together tending to establish a conclusion which is not proved in any one of them singly. In the present controversy Archbishop Laurence and Bishop Bethell, on the one hand, admit that all infants are not regenerate in baptism in the sense, claimed for that term, of actual goodness. On the other hand, Dr. Pusey and Mr. Faber, both disciples of antiquity, claim that sense for this term.