08.03.13. Note C—Page 5

Note C—Page 5 Gracious, as Distinguished from Judicial, Forbearance—The death of Infants.

It will be observed, here, that we speak of the dispensation of forbearance, as connected with the plan of saving mercy, and means and influences fitted to lead men to God; without which, indeed, it could not properly be considered as forbearance at all. We altogether omit the question, how far God might not have had reasons for sparing man on the earth, irrespectively of the atonement, and although no such provision of grace had ever been contemplated. Thus, for the sake of illustration, we may venture to conceive of the alternative before the divine mind having been decided otherwise than he was freely pleased to decide it, in his eternal counsels of love; we may imagine that instead of a gracious purpose to save any, there had been a righteous and holy determination to leave all to perish; and still, even on such a supposition, the earth, cursed for man’s sake, might have been spared, the final conflagration delayed, and the race of sinners suffered, or ordained, to increase and multiply, till the full number of the generations of Adam’s children should be completed, and all in succession should individually and collectively give evidence of their participation in his guilt and corruption, and by bringing forth, from the seed of original sin, the bitter fruit of actual transgressions, consummate their iniquity and ruin. This, indeed, may be regarded as but too probable a result, or rather as the inevitable issue of the arrangement we have dared to indicate. For it was not with fallen man as with the fallen angels. These last, headed perhaps by an individual leader, whom either they may have chosen, or God may have appointed, to represent them, completed their apostasy at once. For they, too, may have been treated by God on that footing of representation which seems to characterize so generally his dealings with his creatures; in their case, also, it may have been a single offence, committed in their names by a single and selected surety, which tested their loyalty, and sealed their character and fate; and all the parties on whose behalf the trial was made being already in existence, and capable of giving voluntary consent, the execution of the sweeping sentence may have been swift and summary. But in the case of man, had there been no remedy provided, we must believe that the whole progeny of Adam, whom, in his probation, he represented, must still have been brought into being; and there might seem reason also to conclude, on that supposition, that all would have been suffered, one after another, each individual for himself, to show what was in them; so that none would have been taken away in infancy, or before opportunity had been given them to manifest, by their own wicked works, their practical concurrence in the rebellion of their first father; and so to prove the reality and universality of the imputed guilt and transmitted taint of his original apostasy. If so, then the fact that any little children die, and still more, that so many die, taken along with what is revealed respecting their interest in the life-giving remedy of the gospel, as well as in the deadly disease of sin (Romans 5:14-15), must be viewed as one of the blessed fruits of Christ’s interposition.

It is true that early death is usually deprecated in Scripture as a heavy calamity (Psalms 102:24); and in particular, the death of a little child is represented as a sore stroke and heavy judgment to its parents—as in the instance of David. (2 Samuel 12:14-23.) It is true, also, that in the glorious state of things described by Isaiah (Isaiah 65:17-25), the death of infants seems to be referred to as a special source of sorrow, as well as a peculiar token of sin, from which that period is to be exempt. Nor, indeed, is it possible to conceive of any more affecting proof of the malignity and power of sin, than the sight of one who has never ginned after the similitude of Adam’s sin, or ours—the newborn babe, guiltless of actual transgression—yet on account of sin, suffering, languishing, and expiring. The heart round which the tie of a new affection has begun to twine itself, cannot but be smitten to the dust when the bond is thus rudely and prematurely cut in twain; and recognising the melancholy ravages of the destroyer, where shall it find rest, but in a scene from which this sore disaster is excluded? But all this is quite consistent with the opinion that to die in infancy is a privilege procured by the death of Christ for those who are thus early carried away—that but for his interposition, all the children of Adam would have lived to heap the guilt of their own wilful iniquities, besides their inherited sin, upon their own heads—that it is a part of his purchase to have so many given to him to be regenerated and sanctified from the womb, and to be taken away from the evil to come. This idea we here venture to throw out is one full of interest and consolation, and it seems to be warranted by the analogy of Scripture; but the present is not the occasion for enlarging upon it. Our object in this note is to explain that we do not connect the sparing of the earth, and of men upon the earth, in itself, necessarily with the death of Christ; since, even had there been no design of mediation at all, it might still have been necessary, for the ends of righteous judgment, that there should be time given for the whole race to increase and multiply, and sin, and perish. But that would not have been an exercise of long-suffering, or a dispensation of forbearance and patience, properly so called, any more than the partial respite or license given to Satan and his angels, before their being first bound, and then cast into the lake of fire, can be viewed in that light. Evidently the apostle speaks of a dispensation of suspended judgment, with the accompanying benefit of a system of means fitted to work reconciliation, when he refers to the passing over of men’s sins, through the forbearance of God, as connected with the setting forth of Christ to be a propitiation, through faith in his blood.