"Steering a middle course": with Wittenberg and Zurich against Geneva

I turned to the 1834 Bampton Lectures of Richard Laurence (then Archbishop of Cashel) - An Attempt to illustrate those Articles of the Church of England which the Calvinists improperly consider as Calvinistical - to explore his view that the Articles of Religion on original sin, free will, works, and predestination were "in perfect conformity ... with the doctrine of the Lutherans".  This was part of a wider project on laudable Practice on how the broad High Church tradition and its antecedents, from the early 17th to the early 19th centuries, identified with Lutheranism.  

Laurence's Bampton Lectures, however, also pointed to another, perhaps surprising source, for a High Church critique of Calvinistic predestinarianism: the theology of Zurich as articulated by Zwingli and Bullinger.  (This was not entirely without precedent, as previously suggested.) This is particularly evident in Laurence's Sermon III, addressing Article 9 'Of Original or Birth-sin', challenging both what he describes as the insufficiency of the medieval Scholastic account of original sin and the radical over-reach of the Calvinistic account:

our Church represents it to be the fault and corruption of every man's nature, not the loss of a superadded grace, but the vitiation of his innate powers; a vitiation, by which he is very far removed from original righteousness, and by which, she subjoins, again repeating the word before used as distinctly expressive of her meaning, he is inclined to evil of his own nature; so that his passions continually resist the control of his reason. Yet while she esteems it not, as her adversaries held, an innocuous propensity, she does not declare it to be punishable as a crime; but steering a middle course, with a moderation, for which she is always remarkable, asserts it only to be deserving of God's displeasure ...

It has been supposed collaterally to hint the approbation of an opinion, which in all probability never entered the minds of our Reformers; to insinuate the general imputation of Adam's guilt to his posterity as the basis of the Calvinistical Predestination. But in truth, how attentively soever the Article be examined, not even the most distant allusion to an imputation of this kind is in any sense to be discovered ...

One fact at least seems beyond controversy, and one, which many may think decisive of the question. It is certain that Calvin himself never directly taught it; but that at a period long after his death, his followers formally introduced it, in order to supply, what they imagined to be, a striking deficiency in their system. 

Laurence them moves to consider the issue of infants dying without Baptism.  He begins by referring to the Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum, Cranmer's failed attempt to revise the canon law of the English Church.  On the matter of infants dying before receiving the Sacrament of Baptism, Laurence provides a translation of its statement:

In this work the scrupulous superstition of those is expressly condemned as impious, who so completely tie down the grace of God and the Holy Spirit to the sacramental elements, as explicitly to affirm, that no infant can obtain eternal salvation, who dies before baptism: an opinion, it is said, far different from ours.

A view of original sin which leads to the suggestion that infants dying before Baptism are damned, because they are condemned by virtue of Adam's sin, he declares to be rejected, for various reasons, by the Reformers:

The other instance alluded to respects the fate of infants dying without baptism, whom some have conceived that our Church excludes from salvation. But that the very reverse of this is the fact, appears highly probable from a passage in the Article itself; in which it is said, as I before observed, not that the corruption of our nature produces actual condemnation, but that merely it is deserving of it; a distinction apparently intended to be marked with precision ...

Indeed had our Reformers on this occasion deliberately patronized the tenet, which some attribute to them, they would have directly incurred, what it is supposed they wished to avoid, the charge of singularity. No doubt can exist that Luther disapproved it. Calvin likewise was far from admitting it in an unqualified sense, hesitating to avow the distinction which his theory required; while the Zuinglians unreservedly opposed it in the most manly way, maintaining, upon their favourite principle of Universal Redemption, that all infants without exception, whether baptized, or unbaptized, are saved through God's gracious promise, and in virtue of his Covenant, by the expiation which Christ made upon the cross for the whole race of mankind; an expiation only capable of being rendered void in its effects by wilful perversity and conscious crime.

Note the praise for the Zwinglians, who opposed the damnation of unbaptized infants "in the most manly way". This praise continues in a footnote to Sermon III:

The liberality of the sentiments entertained by the Reformers, in general, respecting the salvation of infants dying before baptism, originated not with the Lutherans. Zuingle was the first who asserted it, and it should be added, that his assertion was made without restrictions of any kind.

Another footnote contrasts Zwinglian and Lutheran moderation with the Calvinist decree of damnation:

Upon the whole, Zuingle believed, that all infants, without exception, dying before the commission of actual crime, are admitted into the kingdom of Heaven; Luther, all born of those who are themselves within the Christian Covenant, leaving the fate of Heathen children to the revelation of God's mercies in a future life; but Calvin, only such as the Almighty has been pleased to distinguish by a mysterious decree of personal election.

The "middle course" of the Articles, following Zwingli and Luther, thus offered a gracious Christocentric alternative to both Scholastic understatement and Calvinistic overstatement of Original Sin:

Avoiding one extreme, they meant not to rush into another; and what soever use ignorant or enthusiastical men may have since made of any strong expressions, which they adopted, offensive only when misapplied, they never intended so to degrade our nature, as if it were lost to every sense of moral excellence; they were alone desirous of reducing its proud pretensions to the unadulterated standard of holy Scripture, to demonstrate, that the Christian redemption is not useless, nor grace promised us in vain.