Jeremiah it is written:  (Jer. i. 5) “Before thou earnest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee.” Of John the Baptist it is written:  (Luke i. 15) “He shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother’s womb”.  To Timothy, Paul says:  “From a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation,” and in speaking of Timothy’s faith Paul says, that faith “dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice.”  Psalms lxxi. 5-6:  “Thou art my trust from my youth.  By thee have I been holden up from the womb.”

It is therefore possible for God, not only to give His Grace to a child, but to keep that child in His Grace all its days.  To dispute this is, simply, to dispute the record that God gave.

Lest some one should still say, however, that the examples above noted are isolated and exceptional, we note further, that the tenor of the whole Word is in harmony with this idea.  Nowhere in the whole Bible is it even intimated that it is God’s desire or plan that children must remain outside of the covenant of Grace, and have no part or lot in the benefits of Christ’s redeeming work until they come to years of discretion and can choose for themselves.  This modern idea is utterly foreign and contradictory to all we know of God, of His scheme of redemption, and of His dealings with His people, either in the old or new dispensation.  He ordained that infants at eight days old should be brought into His covenant.  He recognized infant children as partakers of the blessings of His covenant. “Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise;” “Suffer them to come unto Me.”  Everywhere it is taken for granted that the children who have received either the Old or New Testament sacrament of initiation are His.  Nowhere are parents exhorted to use their endeavors to have such children converted, as though they had never been touched by divine Grace.  But everywhere they are exhorted to keep them in that relation to their Lord, into which His own ordinance has brought them.  Gen. xviii. 19, “I know that he will command his household after him, and that they shall keep the way of the Lord.”  Psalm lxxviii. 6, 7, “That the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born, which should arise and declare them to their children, that they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments.”  Prov. xxii. 6, “Train up a child in the way he should go; when he is old he will not depart from it.”  Eph. vi. 4, “Bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”