This reply startled and mortified Mr. Campbell, and shortly afterward he mentioned the suggested difficulty to his father, who replied, "We make our appeal to the law and the testimony. Whatever is not found therein must of course be abandoned." Not willing to remain in uncertainty on the subject, he procured all the books and tracts he could favorable to the practice. On reading them he was disgusted with the assumptions and fallacious reasonings to sustain the practice, and threw them aside with the faint hope of finding something more convincing in the Greek New Testament. "This, however, only made the matter worse, and upon again entering into a conversation with his father on the subject he found him entirely willing to admit that there were neither 'express terms' nor 'precedent' to authorize the practice. 'But,' said he, 'as for those who are already members of the church and participants of the Lord's Supper, I can see no propriety, even if the scriptural evidence for infant baptism be found deficient, in their unchurching or paganizing themselves, or in putting off Christ, merely for the sake of making a new profession; thus going out of the church merely for the sake of coming in again.'"
From this it seems that he was disposed only to concede that they ought not to teach nor practice infant baptism without divine authority, and that they should preach and practice scriptural baptism in regard to all who were to make, for the first time, a profession of faith. In deference to his views, the son dismissed the subject for the time, "seemingly satisfied with the fallacious reasoning imposed by circumstances, which prevented his father from seeing then the real position which baptism occupied in the Christian economy, and consequently from making, in regard to it, a practical application of his own principles." With this Alexander Campbell seems to have suspended his investigation of the subject, and to have foreborne giving to it that impartial and continued attention necessary to the discovery of truth. In a discourse delivered June 5, 1811, on Christ's commission to his apostles (Mark 16:15,16), he said, in reference to baptism: "As I am sure it is unscriptural to make this matter [baptism] a term of communion, I let it slip. I wish to think and let think on these matters."