Old Lutheran Quote(s) of the Day

Krauth on the death of the unbaptized child:

"It is not the doctrine of our confession that any human creature has ever been, or ever will be, lost purely on account of original sin. For while it presupposes that original sin, if UNARRESTED, would bring death, it supposes it to be arrested, certainly and ordinarily, through the Holy Spirit by the divine means rightly received, and throws no obstacle in the way of our hearty faith that, in the case of infants dying without the means, the Holy Ghost in His own blessed way, directly and extraordinarily, may make the change that delivers the child from the power of indwelling sin." (p. 429 Conservative Reformation)

Also this:

"In the fact that there is an ordinary means appointed, our Church sees the guaranty that God wishes to renew and save children, and what so powerfully as this prompts the blessed assurance that if God fails to reach the child in His ordinary way, He will reach it in some other!... When then in the mysterious providence of this Lover of these precious little ones, they are cut off from the reception of His grace by its ordinary channel, our Church cherishes the most blessed assurance, wrought by the very existence of infant baptism, that in some other way God's tenderness will reach and redeem them. Our confidence in the uncovenanted mercy of God is strong in proportion to the tenacity to which we cling to Baptism as the ordinary mean, most necessary on our part, if we can possibly have it or have it given." (p. 438 Conservative Reformation)