Unborn Babes To Burn Forever: The damnable doctrine of Infant Damnation was one of the most terrifying and effective impostures of the Church to drive helpless victims into the fold of Christ. Infamous enough was the earlier doctrine of exclusive salvation, that the unbaptized adult, the individual outside the church was the heir to eternal damnation. But soon the terror was extended to the just-born infant, to even the fetus in its womb. St. Augustine affirmed this atrocity with all his vehemence; all the Fathers without exception dinned it eternally, as yet today. A treatise of the greatest authority, De Fide, long attributed to Augustine, but now known to be the work of Bishop St. Fulgentius[CE.vi,317.] thus states the horrid doctrine:" Be assured, and doubt not, that not only men who have attained the use of their reason, but also little children who have begun to live in their mother's womb and have there died, or who, having been just born ,have passed away from the world without the sacrement of holy baptism, administered in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, must be punished by the eternal torture of undying fire; for although they have committed no sin by their own will, they have nevertheless drawn with them the condemnation of original sin, by their carnal conception and nativity."[sec.70.] Lecky who quotes the passage, thus comment the effects as witnessed in practise throughout the Middle Ages: Nothing indeed can be more curious, nothing more deeply pathetic, than the record of the many ways by which the terror-strickened mothers attempted to evade the awful sentence of their church. Sometimes the baptismal water was sprinked upon the womb; the still-born child was baptized, in hope that the Almighty would antedate the ceremony; sometimes the mother invoked the Holy Spirit to purify by His immediate power the infant that was to be born; sometimes she recieved the Host or obtained absolution, and applied them to the benefit of her child. For the doctrine of the church had wrung the mother's heart with an agony that was too poignant for even that submissive age to bear.'[ Rationalism in Europe,i,362-364] And all this on account of an apple eaten four thousand years before they were born; willed by the Deity who had foreordained their birth and premature death,before His Holy Church could come for the Baptismal fees!..J.Wheless...