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Children Viewed in the Light of Scripture
Children Viewed in the Light of Scripture Author:William Reid Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: I. WE ARE BORN DEPRAVED. " If the words which the Apostle uses here (Rom. iii. 10-19) do not most fully and determinately signify a universality, no words ... more »ever used in the Bible, or elsewhere, are sufficient to do it. I might challenge any man to produce any one paragraph in the Scripture, from the beginning to the end, where there is such a repetition and accumulation of terms, so strongly, and emphatically, and carefully to express the most perfect and absolute universality, or any place to be compared to it."—Jonathan Edwards. yO believer in the Bible will deny the guilt and depravity of men and women. There are those, however, who accePt tne Bible as a revelation of God, and who yet deny infant guilt and depravity, or admit it in such a qualified sense as to divest it of all practical significance. We hear children spoken of as " little innocents," and of " the innocence and purity of early childhood." Doubtless children are characterised by much simplicity, docility, and attractiveness; and this allied with the absence of depravity in its more revolting forms, is apt to mislead us as to their true character and condition. Amiable qualities, it ought to be remembered, are not holiness. The young ruler who came to Christ, inquiring " What good thing shallI do, that I may have eternal life?" had much which commended him to Christ; yet his virtue failed when tested by his duty to the poor. We may place the monumental dove of pure white marble over the graves of the young, as emblematic of their innocence, or scatter flowers there, as emblems of their sweetness; but the disfigured form beneath, proclaims more eloquently than either, the doctrine of innate depravity. The universal depravity of our race, and, consequently, the depravity of infants, has been held by almos...« less