Spurgeon on Infant Baptism

If I thought it wrong to be a Baptist, I would give it up, and become what I believed to be right. If we could find infant baptism in the Word of God, we would adopt it. It would help us out of a great difficulty, for it would take away from us that reproach which is attached to us—that we are odd, and do not as other people do. But we have looked well through the Bible, and cannot find it, and do not believe that it is there. Nor do we believe that others can find infant baptism in the Scriptures, unless they themselves first put it there.

I am persuaded that so long as infant baptism is practiced in any Christian Church, Popery will have a door set wide open for its return. It is one of those nests which must come down, or the foul birds will build in it again. We must come to the Law and to the Testimony, and any ordinance which is not plainly taught in Scripture must be put away!

As long as you give Baptism to an unregenerate child, people will imagine that it must do the child good, for they will ask, "If it does not do it any good—then why is it baptized?" The statement that it puts children into the Covenant, or renders them members of the visible Church—is only a veiled form of the fundamental error of Baptismal Regeneration. If you keep up the ordinance, you will always have men superstitiously believing that some good comes to the baby thereby, and what is this but sheer Popery?

Since the child cannot understand what is done, any good which it receives must come to it after the occult manner so much in vogue with the superstitious—is it any wonder that Popish beliefs grow out of it? And not only as to infant Baptism, but as to every other doctrine, ordinance, or precept—we must each seek to get back to this Book and follow closely the Word of God.