======================================================================== WRITINGS OF ALEXANDER CAMPBELL by Alexander Campbell ======================================================================== A collection of theological writings, sermons, and essays by Alexander Campbell, compiled for study and devotional reading. Chapters: 139 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TABLE OF CONTENTS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. 00.00. Campbell, Alexander - Library 2. 01.00. CHRISTIAN BAPTISM 3. 01.000 C O N T E N T S. 4. 01.0000. Copyright Data 5. 01.00000. Dedication 6. 01.000000. PREFACE. 7. 01.0000000. I N T R O D U C T I O N. 8. 01.01.01. The Bible 9. 01.01.02. The Bible (part two) 10. 01.01.03. The Bible - Principles of Interpretation 11. 01.01.04. Faith 12. 01.01.05. Repentance Unto Life 13. 01.01.06. Covenants of Promise - Circumcision 14. 01.01.07. Flesh and Spirit - Liberty and Necessity - New Institution 15. 01.02.01. Book Second 16. 01.02.02 BAPTIZO. 17. 01.02.03. Ancient Versions 18. 01.02.04. English Translators 19. 01.02.05. Reformers, Annotators, Paraphrasts, and Critics 20. 01.02.06. English Lexicongraphers, Encyclopedias, and Reviewers of the Pedobaptist School 21. 01.02.07. Words used in Construction with Baptizo, Raino, Rantizo, Cheo, and Louo,... 22. 01.02.08. The Places where Baptism was Anciently Administered 23. 01.02.09. Apostolic Allusions to Baptism 24. 01.02.10. Passages Urged Against Immersion from the use of Baptizo and Baptismos ... 25. 01.02.11. Legal Sprinklings 26. 01.02.13. History of Immersion and Sprinkling 27. 01.03.01. Subjects of John's Baptism 28. 01.03.02. Subjects of Christian Baptism - Induction of New Testament Cases 29. 01.03.03. Subjects of Baptism and Subjects of Circumcision Contrasted 30. 01.04.01. Design of Baptism 31. 01.04.02. Design of Baptism (part two) 32. 01.05.01. Adoption 33. 01.05.02. Justification 34. 01.05.03. Sanctification 35. 01.06.01. Review of Bishop Kendrick's Treatise 36. 01.06.02. Review of Dr. Miller of Princeton 37. 01.06.03. Review of Professor Miller of Princeton; and Dr. Wall, Vicar of Shorem, in Kent 38. 01.06.04. Review of Professor Miller of Princeton; Dr. Wall, Vicar of Shorem, in Kent,... 39. 01.06.05. Review of Professor Miller of Princeton; Dr. Wall, Vicar of Shorem in Kent, and ... 40. 01.06.07. Review of Professor Stuart of Andover 41. 01.06.08. The Evil of Infant Baptism 42. 01.06.09. Dr. C. Taylor, Editor of Calmet's Dictionary of the Bible 43. 01.06.10. One Hundred and Thirty Four Questions on Infant Baptism 44. 01.08.01. APPENDIX. 45. 01.60.06. Review of Dr. Kurtz and Rev. Mr. Hall 46. 02.01. DELUSIONS 47. 02.02. Prefatory Remarks 48. 02.02.12. Convertible Terms 49. 02.03. DELUSIONS 50. 03.00. THE CHRISTIAN SYSTEM 51. 03.000. TABLE OF CONTENTS. 52. 03.0000. Preface 53. 03.01. The Universe 54. 03.02. The Bible 55. 03.03. God 56. 03.04. The Son of God 57. 03.05. The Spirit of God 58. 03.06. Man as He Was 59. 03.07. Man as He Is 60. 03.08. The Purposes of God Concerning Man 61. 03.09. Religion for Man, and Not Man for Religion 62. 03.10. Sacrifice for Sin 63. 03.11. The Attributes of a Real Sin-Offering 64. 03.12. Christ, the Light of the World 65. 03.13. The Lordship of the Messiah 66. 03.14. Faith in Christ 67. 03.15. Repentance 68. 03.16. Baptism 69. 03.17. The Christian Confession of Faith 70. 03.18. Conversion and Regeneration 71. 03.19. Christians are Persons Pardoned, Justified, Sanctified, Adopted, Saved. 72. 03.20. The Gift of the Holy Spirit 73. 03.21. The Christian Hope 74. 03.22. The Doom of the Wicked 75. 03.23. Summary of the Christian System of Facts 76. 03.24. The Body of Christ 77. 03.25. The Christian Ministry 78. 03.26. The Christian Discipline 79. 03.27. Expediency 80. 03.28. Heresy 81. 03.29. Foundation of Christian Union - Introduction 82. 03.30. Foundation of Christian Union - Fact 83. 03.31. Foundation of Christian Union - Testimony 84. 03.32. Foundation of Christian Union - Faith 85. 03.33. Foundation of Christian Union - Confirmation of the Testimony 86. 03.34. Foundation of Christian Union - Fundamental Fact 87. 03.35. Foundation of Christian Union - Purity of Speech 88. 03.36. Kingdom of Heaven - Table of Contents 89. 03.37. Kingdom of Heaven - Patriarchal Age of the World 90. 03.38. Kingdom of Heaven - The Jewish Institution 91. 03.39. Kingdom of Heaven - The Kingdom of Heaven 92. 03.40. Kingdom of Heaven - The Elements of a Kingdom 93. 03.41. Kingdom of Heaven - The Coming of the Kingdom 94. 03.42. Kingdom of Heaven - Present Administration of the Kingdom of Heaven 95. 03.43. Remission of Sins - Table of Contents 96. 03.44. Remission of Sins - Proposition 01 97. 03.45. Remission of Sins - Proposition 02 98. 03.46. Remission of Sins - Proposition 03 99. 03.47. Remission of Sins - Proposition 04 100. 03.48. Remission of Sins - Proposition 05 101. 03.49. Remission of Sins - Proposition 06 102. 03.50. Remission of Sins - Proposition 07 103. 03.51. Remission of Sins - Proposition 08 104. 03.52. Remission of Sins - Proposition 09 105. 03.53. Remission of Sins - Proposition 10 106. 03.54. Remission of Sins - Proposition 11 107. 03.55. Remission of Sins - Proposition 12 108. 03.56. Remission of Sins - Objections 109. 03.57. Remission of Sins - Recapitulation 110. 03.58. Remission of Sins - Conclusions 111. 03.59. Remission of Sins - Effects of Modern Christianity 112. 03.60. Regeneration - Introduction 113. 03.61. Regeneration - Repentance 114. 03.62. Regeneration - Reformation 115. 03.63. Regeneration - Regeneration 116. 03.64. Regeneration - The Bath of Regeneration 117. 03.65. Regeneration - New Birth 118. 03.66. Regeneration - Renewing of the Holy Spirit 119. 03.67. Regeneration - The New Life 120. 03.68. Regeneration - Physical Regeneration 121. 03.69. Regeneration - The Use of the Theory of Regeneration 122. 03.70. Regeneration - The Regeneration of the Church 123. 03.71. Regeneration - The Regeneration of the World 124. 03.72. Regeneration - Regeneration of the Heavens and the Earth 125. 03.73. Breaking the Loaf - Introduction 126. 03.74. Breaking the Loaf - Proposition 01 127. 03.75. Breaking the Loaf - Proposition 02 128. 03.76. Breaking the Loaf -Proposition 03 129. 03.77. Breaking the Loaf - Proposition 04 130. 03.78. Breaking the Loaf - Proposition 05 131. 03.79. Breaking the Loaf - Proposition 06 132. 03.80. Breaking the Loaf - Proposition 07 133. 03.81. Breaking the Loaf - Objections 134. 03.82. Concluding Address - Address to the Citizens of the Kingdom 135. 03.83. Concluding Address - A word to Friendly Aliens 136. 03.94. Concluding Address - Address to Belligerent Aliens 137. S. Demonology 138. S. IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT SANCTIONED BY DIVINE AUTHORITY? 139. S. The Missionary Cause ======================================================================== CHAPTER 1: 00.00. CAMPBELL, ALEXANDER - LIBRARY ======================================================================== Campbell, Alexander - Library Campbell, Alexander - Christian Baptism Campbell, Alexander - Delusions - an Analysis of the Book of Mormon Campbell, Alexander - The Christian System S. Capital Punishment S. Demonology ======================================================================== CHAPTER 2: 01.00. CHRISTIAN BAPTISM ======================================================================== CHRISTIAN BAPTISM: WITH ITS ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENTS. BY ALEXANDER CAMPBELL. "ONE LORD, ONE FAITH, ONE BAPTISM." BETHANY, VA.: PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY ALEXANDER CAMPBELL. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 3: 01.000 C O N T E N T S. ======================================================================== INTRODUCTION. BOOK I. ANTECEDENT OF BAPTISM. CHAP. I.- The Bible II.- The Bible III.- The Bible--Principles of Interpretation IV.- Faith V.- Repentance unto Life VI.- Covenants of Promise--Circumcision VII.- Flesh and Spirit--Liberty and Necessity--New Institution BOOK II. ACTION OF BAPTISM. CHAP. I.- Bapto--The root of Baptism II.- Baptizo--Greek Lexicographers III.- Ancient Versions IV.- English Translations V.- Reformers, Annotators, Paraphrasts, and Critics VI.- English Lexicographers, Encyclopedias, and Reviewers of the Pedobaptist School VII.- Words used in construction with Baptizo, Raino, Rantizo, Cheo, and Louo, such as epi, en, eis, ek, apo, VIII.- The Places where Baptism was anciently administered IX.- Apostolic Allusions to Baptism X.- Passages urged against Immersion from the use of Baptizo and Baptismos in certain places XI.- Legal Sprinklings XII.- Convertible Terms XIII.- History of Immersion and Sprinkling BOOK III. SUBJECTS OF BAPTISM. CHAP. I.- Subjects of John’s Baptism II.- Subjects of Christian Baptism--Induction of New Testament Cases III.- Subjects of Baptism and Subjects of Circumcision Contrasted BOOK IV. DESIGN OF BAPTISM. CHAP. I.- Design of Baptism II.- Design of Baptism BOOK V. CONSEQUENTS OF BAPTISM. CHAP. I.- Adoption II.- Justification III.- Sanctification BOOK VI. REVIEWS OF THE ADVOCATES OF INFANT BAPTISM. CHAP. I.- Review of Bishop Kenrick’s Treatise II.- Review of Dr. Miller, of Princeton III.- Review of Prof. Miller, of Princeton; and Dr. Wall, Vicar of Shorem, in Kent IV.- Review of Prof. Miller, of Princeton; and Dr. Wall, Vicar of Shorem, and others V.- Review of Prof. Miller, Dr. Wall, &c., continued VI.- Review of Dr. Kurtz, and Rev. Mr. Hall VII.- Review of Prof. Stuart, of Andover VIII.- The Evil of Infant Baptism IX.- Review of Dr. C. Taylor, Editor of Calmet’s Dictionary of the Bible X.- One hundred and thirty-four Questions on Infant Baptism APPENDIX. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 4: 01.0000. COPYRIGHT DATA ======================================================================== WESTERN DISTRICT OF VIRGINIA, TO WIT: Be it remembered, That on the 18th day of February, Anno Domini 1851. ALEXANDER CAMPBELL, of the said District, hath deposited in this Office the title of a book; the title of which is in the words following, to wit:--"Christian Baptism, with its Antecedents and Consequents;" the right whereof he claims as author and proprietor, in conformity with the Act of Congress, entitled, An Act to amend the several and respecting copyrights. ERASMUS STRIBLING, Clerk of the Western District of Virginia. STEREOTYPED BY J. JOHNSON AND CO. PHILADELPHIA. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 5: 01.00000. DEDICATION ======================================================================== To Baptists of every name and party, in the United States of America and in the British Provinces, who speak our vernacular, as an humble Tribute of his respect and esteem, on account of their uniform and persevering advocacy of freedom of thought, of speech, and of action, in all that pertains to the rights of conscience and to civil liberty, as well as for their constant and untiring efforts to sustain the Apostolic institution of Christian Baptism: And especially to those who plead for the Union and Co-operation of all who love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, on the basis of "ONE LORD, ONE FAITH, ONE BAPTISM, ONE GOD AND FATHER OF ALL, ONE BODY, ONE SPIRIT, AND ONE HOPE," this Volume is respectfully and affectionately inscribed by THE AUTHOR. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 6: 01.000000. PREFACE. ======================================================================== THE important question of Christian Baptism is yet, with many, an undecided question. With many, too, it has been decided wrong, because decided on human authority, or on partial evidence, without personal and proper examination. Neither Christian faith nor Christian character can be inherited, as the goods and chattels of this world. There is no royal or ancestral path to faith, piety, or humanity. Whatever truly elevates, adorns, or dignifies a human being, must be, more or less, the fruit of his own efforts. Five points are necessarily involved in this discussion, essential to a rational and scriptural decision of the question. These are: 1. The action, called baptism. 2. The subject of that action. 3. The design of that action. 4. The antecedents; and, 5. The consequents of that action. These are distinct topics, each of which must be scripturally apprehended in its evangelical import and bearings, before this solemn and sublime symbol can be truly enjoyed in its spiritual influences and importance. And such is the prominent and imposing attitude in which its Author placed it, when, in giving a commission to his apostles to convert the nations of the earth to him, he makes this the consummating act of their preaching Christ--of converting and evangelising the world. "Go," said he, "into all the world, convert the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." Misconceptions of this institution are, it has been often remarked, more or less connected with misconceptions of the whole Christian institution, and lie as the sub-basis of the present apostasy from original Christianity. By the grand "Mother of Harlots" and delusions, it has been degraded to the rank of a mere rite or ceremony, and made a door of admission, wide as the whole world, into the bosom of what is impiously called "The Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of Christ." In view of this, the following treatise discusses the whole subject, in what its author esteems its natural and logical order, placing before the mind of the reader each and every point, in its proper position and relative importance to the whole institution. This gives a somewhat miscellaneous appearance to the volume; but, in view of the whole premises, it will, he hopes, make it more really useful and satisfactory to every reader, so much interested in the subject as to give it a candid and careful perusal. The author regards the antecedents and consequents of Christian Baptism, as furnishing not only much material for profitable reflection, on the part of every earnest inquirer after the truth and design of Christianity, but as also furnishing arguments in support of the divine origin, authority, and value of Christian Baptism, necessary to an intelligent and satisfactory decision of the much litigated questions, What is Christian Baptism? and What are the benefits thereof? He has condensed a very large amount and variety of materials on the special questions, What is Christian Baptism? Who are its legitimate subjects? and What its specific design? into as small a space as possible, not desiring to say even a moiety of what he might say on the premises. Much of what is said is designed to be suggestive to the mind of the reader, rather than to leave him nothing to do but to read what is written; to open to his mind the unwasting fountains of light and knowledge contained in the Divine Records of eternal wisdom and providence, that he may see, in the clear, full, and certain light of God’s own book, the glorious scheme of redemption, as indicated in the precious and sublime symbol of Christian Baptism. The continual agitation of this subject is important and benevolent, so long as unscriptural views of it are not only entertained, but made the bitter root of discord amongst good men, and of schism in the Christian profession. Truth ever gains, and error uniformly loses, by discussion. The results of the discussions of this subject during the last thirty years, are at least the addition of a hundred thousand persons to the profession of "one Lord, one faith, and one baptism;" and, so far, have contributed to the triumph of truth, the union of Christians, and the conversion of the world. We, therefore, commend to the blessing of the Lord, this new offering on our part to the advancement of truth in the world, and as an humble means of promoting the cause of Christian union and co-operation amongst all who love Zion and seek the peace and happiness of Jerusalem. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 7: 01.0000000. I N T R O D U C T I O N. ======================================================================== CHRISTIANITY has its theory and its practice. Its theory is the Sacred Writings of the Apostles and Evangelists of Jesus Christ; its practice, the life of the Christian. The Christian profession is not now what it once was. It has become secular and sectarian. The members of the church of Christ were formerly called "saints," "elect of God," "a chosen generation," "a royal priesthood," "a peculiar people." Now they are called "Churchmen," "Dissenters," "Romanists," "Protestants," "Episcopalians," "Presbyterians," "Independents," "Baptists," "Methodists," &c. &c. &c. The church was once "a spiritual house," whose members were addressed as "justified," "sanctified," "adopted," and "saved." It was "a holy nation" whose citizens had their citizenship in heaven. Such were its designations, and such was its general character. The exceptions were comparatively few. These mostly renounced the profession and went back into the world. "They went out from us because they were not of us," said the beloved John; "for had they been of us they would no doubt have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us." But that such would not always be the character of the Christian profession, was clearly foreseen and distinctly foretold by the holy Apostles. "There shall come a falling away"--"an apostasy," said Paul. He adds, "A MAN OF SIN," "THE SON OF PERDITION," will come, and must be developed. His character is delineated, as proud, haughty, and secular. He was, indeed, to be a churchman--to "sit in the temple of God." He would exalt himself amongst and above the gods of earth--the kings and monarchs of nations. This mystic character would gain the ascendency by assumed powers;--"signs," "miracles of falsehood," and "with all the deceitfulness of unrighteousness," amongst them "who did not love the truth," but had pleasure in iniquity. Indeed, "the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter days" a portion of the Christian profession "would depart from the faith," giving heed to seducing preachers, and "to doctrines concerning the spirits of dead men;" "speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their conscience seared as with a hot iron." They would preach a monastic life, advocate celibacy, "forbidding to marry," observing lent, "commanding to abstain from meats which God has created to be received with thanksgiving, being sanctified by the word of God and prayer." Indeed, the Apostle informs us that "as there were false prophets among the people" in former times, "so there should be false teachers as well as false professors among the people of God, who should bring in "condemnable heresies;"--reprobate schisms, and "destructive sects." While acknowledging Jesus as a teacher or prophet, and from God, they would undermine his divinity, "denying the Lord that bought them," "who gave his life a ransom for many," and "who redeemed us to God by his blood." He adds, "Many shall follow their pernicious ways, by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of." Now all this will be done "for filthy lucre’s sake." "Through covetousness shall they with feigned words" (of piety) "make merchandise of you." Their example will lead to skepticism and general infidelity; "for," says the same Apostle, know this especially, "that in the last days scoffers shall come, walking after their own lusts," saying, "Where is the promise of his coming; for all things go on as they did from the beginning of the world?" The mother of all this apostasy and infidelity is compared to a charlatan, or rather to a courtezan very gayly and fashionably attired. "She is arrayed in purple and scarlet, decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden chalice in her hands full of abominations," the rewards of "the filthiness of her fornications." She wears a splendid tiara magnificently adorned; but when deciphered and fairly interpreted, it means, "BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS," and Parent of all Abominations. Such is a portion of the fortunes of the Christian profession as foretold by the Apostles. We have seen it; nay, we live in the midst of it. This "Man of Sin" still lives in Rome, and pretends to be "the Vicar of Christ" and "the Prince of the Apostles." A reformation of Popery was attempted in Europe full three centuries ago. It ended in a Protestant hierarchy, and swarms of dissenters. Protestantism has been reformed into Presbyterianism,--that into Congregationalism,--and that into Baptistism, &c. &c. Methodism has attempted to reform all, but has reformed itself into many forms of Wesleyism. None of these has begun at the right place. All of them retain in their bosom, in their ecclesiastic organizations, worship, doctrines, and observances, various relics of Popery. They are, at best, but a reformation of Popery, and only reformations in part. The doctrines and traditions of men yet impair the power and progress of the gospel in their hands; and, therefore, as communities, they are not distinguished by the ancient piety, zeal, and humanity, nor for their efforts and success in evangelizing the world at home or abroad. It is probable that as many of their own offspring are converted to the world, or to infidelity, as they have reclaimed from the world and the various forms of infidelity, during any given period of years. Most of the Socialists, Agrarians, Fourierists, Owenists, Rationalists, Puseyists, &c., now in Protestant countries, are of Protestant ancestry. Our missionary gains from heathen lands do not more, at most, than fill up the apostasies from Protestant households to the numerous and various forms of infidelity. Living then, as we do, in the midst of such abortive efforts at reformation; seeing the progress of error, and regretting the feeble and slow advances of the gospel upon even the outposts of error, infidelity, and abounding iniquity, we are constrained to inquire, if any thing can be done; and, if any thing, what should it be, and how attempted? To fight the old battles over again, to rally under the old banners of Calvinism, or Arminianism; to propose some Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Congregational, or Methodist platform of improvement, either of theory or practice, or to adopt Scotch, English, or American Baptistism, could promise nothing better than that which already is, or has heretofore been. These have all been tried. Their whole moral and spiritual power has been made to bear upon the present condition and past conditions of sectarianized Christianity. And what have they done? What can they do better than they have already done? Do the new parties called "Reformed" enjoy more spirituality, more union, more harmony and peace among themselves, than the old ones? Are they more benevolent, more liberal, more active, or more successful in converting the world, than the old ones? Or do they seek to unite the faithful, or to bring all Protestant parties into one communion? Are they more successful in active benevolence than those who preceded them? These are questions which, as far as I am informed, must all be answered in the negative. From them united on any one of these creeds, or from them as they now are, can we expect a better Mate of things, internal or external? If so, we ask them for the proof. Till that is given, we shall, because we must, despair of it. All creeds are mere theories of Christian doctrine, discipline, and government, exhibited as a basis of church union. Being speculative, they have always proved themselves to be "apples of discord" or "roots of bitterness" amongst the Christian profession. They have, in days of yore, erected pillories, founded prisons, provoked wars, kindled fires, consecrated autos da fe, instituted star-chambers, courts of high commission, and horrible tribunals of Papal inquisition. Exile, banishment, confiscation of goods, lands, and tenements, and martyrdom, have been their convincing logic, their persuasive rhetoric, and their tender mercies. Having long reflected upon these premises--these creeds, schisms, and parties--as well as on the Sacred Writings of Apostles and Prophets, and the primitive communities founded on them, we are fully convinced that neither Popery, nor any of its Protestant reformations, is the Christian Institution delivered to us in the Holy Scriptures. What is Popery, but the extreme of defection and apostasy? What is Prelacy, but a reformed modification of Popery? What is Presbyterianism, but a reform of Prelacy? What is Congregationalism, or Independency, but a reform of Presbyterianism? And what is Wesleyan Methodism, but a popular emendation of English Episcopacy, combined with the enthusiasm of ancient Quakerism? Amongst them all, we thank the grace of God that there are many who believe in, and love the Saviour, and that, though we may not have Christian churches, we have many Christians. Is not this as obvious and intelligible as that while there are many republicans in England, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Germany, there is not in them all one republic! Protestant parties are all founded upon Protestant peculiarities. Indeed, there is but one radical and distinctive idea in any one of them. That is, their centre of attraction and of radiation. They baptize themselves at the layer of that idea, and assume the name of it, whatever it may be, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Methodist, &c. &c. They build on what is peculiar, and thus, in effect, undervalue that which is common to them all. And yet, themselves being judges, that which is common is much more valuable than that which is peculiar. The sub-basis of all parties is the tenet which is their cognomen. The difference between a Churchman and a Presbyterian is neither Calvinism nor Arminianism, faith nor repentance, righteousness nor holiness, baptism nor the eucharist, but the politics of ecclesiastical organization--the policy called Episcopacy or Presbytery--the single idea of one Bishop, or two Bishops in one church, a Prelate or a Presbytery. Every other peculiarity is but the colouring, modification, or development of this idea. This consecrates the sacramental table. Now, it appears to us, the things which are most commonly believed are most valuable, certainly much more valuable than any one of the partisan peculiarities. The things most commonly believed are, of course, moat evident; and generally in the ratio of the evidence in proof of any fact or proposition is its value. Romanists and Protestants of almost every name believe that "Christ died for our sins," and that "he was buried," and that "he rose again the third day" according to prophecy. These, the Apostle Paul says, will save any man that believes them; if, indeed, he do practically believe them. But who can say this of any one of the partisan foundations? Of the Papal seven sacraments but two are held in common among all Protestants. These are Christian baptism and the Lord’s supper. And who will not say that these two are infinitely more valuable than either marriage or extreme unction, or any or all the five reputed as such? We conclude, then, that a party founded on all that is commonly received by Romanists, Greeks, and Protestants, and nothing more, would not only be a now party, one entirely new, but incomparably more rational, and certainly more scriptural than any of them. From a full survey of the premises of ecclesiastical history, of human creeds and sects,--and especially from a profound regard for the wisdom and knowledge that guided, and the Spirit that inspired the Apostles of Jesus Christ, and that qualified them to reveal his will,--we have proposed an Evangelical Reformation--or, rather, a return to the faith and manners anciently delivered to the saints--A RESTORATION of original Christianity both in theory and practice. The three capital points of which are:-- I. The Christian Scriptures, the only rule and measure of Christian faith and learning. II. The Christian confession, the foundation of Christian union and communion. III. The Christian ordinances--baptism, the Lord’s day, and the Lord’s supper,--as taught and observed by the Apostles. Of these three fundamental propositions we need not, indeed we cannot, now speak particularly. Concerning the first, it would seem enough to say, that as the Christian writings are the production of the Holy Spirit speaking to us through the ministers of Christ, they are just what they ought to be. The Spirit of God being "the Spirit of wisdom and knowledge," the Spirit of eloquence and revelation, author of the gift of tongues, and "the Advocate" of Christ, he certainly could and did select the best forms of human language in which to communicate the mind and will of God to man. He possesses infinitely more wisdom, learning, and eloquence, than all the Councils and General Assemblies that ever met. Hence the Christian Scriptures, when fairly translated, are more intelligible, comprehensive, and consequently better adapted to the whole family of man, than any formula of Christian doctrine ever delivered to man. If, then, we cannot unite, and harmonize all discords, upon God’s own book, in vain shall we attempt it on the books of men. They are, indeed, the only perfect and complete rule and standard of Christian faith and manners, adapted to man as he is, contemplated in both his individual and social character--in the family, church, and national relations of life. The Christian confession, into which we are baptized, and on which we are admitted into the church of God, has been rendered superlatively conspicuous by the emphasis laid on it by the Lord Jesus Christ in person, when he first elicited it at Cesarea Philippi, from that Apostle whose name was Simon Rock, or, in Greek, Simon Peter. The question propounded to the Apostles was, "Who do you say that I, the Son of Man, am? Cephas responded, "THOU ART THE CHRIST, THE SON OF THE LIVING GOD." On this, the Saviour responded, "Thou art called rock, and ON THIS ROCK I WILL BUILD MY CHURCH, and the gates of hades shall not prevail against it." This confession must be made by every applicant for Christian baptism in order to his being constitutionally budded upon the divine foundation; or, as we usually say, admitted into the Christian kingdom or church. No minister, or church of Jesus Christ, has any divine right or authority to ask for more or accept of less than this, in order to Christian baptism. We ought, indeed, to know that the person so professing understands what he says, and gives evidence of the sincerity of his confession: but farther than this neither right reason nor revelation interrogates any man, Jew or Gentile. We need not add that no one can believe, repent, make confession, or be baptized by proxy, or upon another person’s confession. Christianity being personal, both in its subject and object, it is neither family nor national. Every individual "must be born of water and, of the Spirit" in order to admission into the present dispensation of the kingdom of God. Concerning the other Christian ordinances, we observe that, Being monumental of the Christian facts--Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection--and containing in them the grace of God; being also social in their nature, they are weekly institutions, and to be diligently observed by all the faithful in Christ Jesus in their public weekly assemblies. They are, therefore, essential parts of "the communion of saints." As for prayer and praise, they are, indeed, Christian institutions; but not exclusively so. The altar; the priest, and the victim, prayer and praise, belong to no age, dispensation, or form of religion. They are religion itself. Without these five, there is no religion. There was no patriarchal nor Jewish, there is no Christian institution of religion, without these media of reconciliation and worship. We Christians, indeed, have an altar, a high-priest, and a sacrifice, infinitely more sublime and glorious than any one around which Patriarchs or Jews ever assembled. But though we have no private, no family altar, priest, or sacrifice, we have our personal and our Christian family prayer and praise, without which Christian parents cannot possibly bring up their families "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." There is also the Christian fellowship, or contributions for the expenditure of the church of Christ, in its various works of righteousness and benevolence. The expenses of a community, and the benevolence of a community, must also be public as well as private and personal. This was anciently called "THE FELLOWSHIP." In attending upon it, in our weekly assemblies, we become followers of the primitive churches, and enjoy the luxury of socially practising righteousness and mercy on the Lord’s day. That Evangelical Reformation, now in progress, extending over the United States and the English provinces in America, and being now plead in the kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland, and in other places, embracing from two to three hundred thousand professors, in addition to these fundamental matters of scriptural and divine authority, exhibits two other propositions besides those three named, as vital and all-important to the restoration of original Christianity in faith and practice, in letter and in spirit. These are-- 1. That instead of the modern ecclesiastic and sectarian terminology, or technical style, we adopt BIBLE NAMES FOR BIBLE THINGS. For example:--Instead of "sacraments," we prefer ordinances; for "the Eucharist," the Lord’s Supper; for "covenant of works," the law; for "covenant of grace," the gospel; for "Testament," Institution or Covenant; for "Trinity," Godhead; for "first, second, and third person," the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; for "Eternal Son," the Son of God; for "original sin," the fall or the offence; for "Christian Sabbath," Lord’s day or First day; for "effectual calling," calling or obedience; for "merits of Christ," righteousness or sacrifice of Christ; for "general atonement," ransom for all; for "free grace," grace; for "free will," will, &c. &c. As the Lord promised by Zephaniah, that in order to union amongst his people, he would give them "a pure language, that they might all call upon the name of the Lord to serve him with one consent," so every effort at evangelical reformation must, to heal divisions and to prevent debate among Christians--aim at a "pure language," the language of Canaan, and avoid that of Ashdod,--calling Bible things by Bible words. 2. The second grand proposition essential to an evangelical reformation--to Christian union and co-operation in the kingdom of Christ, is,--that UNITY OF FAITH, and not unity of opinion, must be publicly and privately taught and advocated as prerequisite to the communion of the children of God. The Bible, without regard to its books or dispensations, is properly divided into three grand elements. These are properly called facts, precepts, and promises. All these, it is true, might be called facts, as all books might be called words. But in the usual appropriated sense, we call any thing said or done, a fact; any thing commanded to be done, a precept; and any thing promised to be done, a promise. This distinction greatly reduces the subjects of debate--the "doctrines," "strifes of words," and "endless genealogies," which "minister questions and doubts, rather than godly edifying," and makes it quite possible, amidst many diversities of opinion, to maintain "unity of spirit in the bonds of peace." Each of the three dispensations had its own facts, precepts, and promises. The things said and done by God and men from Adam to Moses, constitute its Patriarchal facts; those from Moses to Christ, its Jewish facts; and those from Christ to the end of the apostolic writings, its Christian facts. Each of these three had also its own peculiar precepts and promises. Now as facts are only to be believed, precepts to be obeyed, and promises to be enjoyed and hoped for, as well as believed, we can very easily and perspicuously distinguish what constitutes Christian faith, Christian obedience, and Christian hope, not only from the Jewish and the Patriarchal, but also from all matters of speculation usually called opinions. We must be, because we can be, of one faith, of one obedience, and of one hope; but we need not be, because we cannot be, of one opinion, not being of one mental or physical constitution. Hence the propriety and the beauty of that apostolic exhortation, "Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace; for there is one body, and one Spirit, even as you are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all." These seven reasons, without regard to differences of opinion, are the divine basis of Christian union, and should be of all Christian co-operation. We ask no more--we propose no less. "Matters of doubtful disputations," or, properly, matters of mere speculative belief, have no authority but the reason of man. Paul, therefore, commands, "Receive him that is weak in the faith without regard to differences of opinion;" and "Let the strong bear the infirmities of the weak, and not please themselves," or have their own way. We then lay a divine basis of Christian union. We ask for faith, and not for the deductions of reason; for the testimony of God, and not the opinions of men; and say with the Apostle, "As many as walk by this rule, peace be on them and mercy, even upon the Israel of God." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 8: 01.01.01. THE BIBLE ======================================================================== CHAPTER I THE Bible is the oldest and best book in the world. It is translated into more languages and read by more people than any other volume ever written. Its history and its prophecy comprehend the entire destiny of the world. It presents to us man in his natural, preternatural, and supernatural conditions and characteristics. It records the three great religious ages of the world by developing three dispensations of religion--the Patriarchal, the Jewish, and the Christian. Man as he was, man as he is, and man as he shall hereafter be, are its three grand themes. It reveals God, by unfolding the mysterious relations of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, in the three great works of Creation, Providence, and Redemption. The Bible is divided into two great departments, usually, but improperly, called the Old and New Testaments. The former of these contains the inspired writings of Moses, the first of historians and the greatest of lawgivers, together with those of the ancient Prophets; while the latter contains those of the Apostles and Evangelists of Jesus Christ. Regarded as the Jewish and the Christian Scriptures, it comprehends sixty-six distinct and independent treatises. Thirty-nine of these constitute the Jewish, and twenty-seven the Christian records. The Christian Scriptures are the work of only eight persons, six of whom were Apostles, and two of them Evangelists of Jesus Christ and companions of the Apostles. The Jewish Scriptures were written by more than thirty persons, all of whom, save one,1 were Jews. We put down the immediate authors or writers of the Bible at not less than forty, as the lowest number, though we cannot with absolute certainty name them all. From the birth of Moses till the death of John the Apostle is a period of full sixteen hundred and sixty years. These books were, therefore, in progress of completion not less than fifteen hundred years, and grasp in their historic outlines a period of forty-one centuries. A volume of such immense compass, exhibiting details of persona, places and events so numerous and various, and of such transcendent interest to mankind, seems to possess claims upon the attention and consideration of every human being capable of appreciating its history, its biography, its prophecy, its doctrine, or even its general literature, above those of any other volume in the world. The Jewish Scriptures comprehend history, law, and prophecy. The Jews were wont to distribute them into "the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms:’ The Christian Scriptures preeminently consist of historical and epistolary compositions. Of all the Jewish writers, Moses, and of all the Christian writers, Paul, is the largest and most conspicuous. Both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures begin with history and end with prophecy. Facts or events, past and future, are, therefore, the main subjects on which inspired writers dwell. The historical books of the Old Testament are, in all, seventeen. The prophetic books are also seventeen; while the properly didactic and devotional are but five. The first five books of the New Testament are also historical, the last prophetical, and the rent epistolary. These last are miscellaneous in their character, containing sometimes history, doctrine, precepts, and exhortations. The whole volume, indeed, in its spirit and tendency, is devotional. Whatever God has said in the form of declaration, precept, promise, or threatening, is designed to make the man of God pure and perfect, and thoroughly accomplished for every good word and work. The plan of the Bible, as an instrument or means of salvation, is admirably adapted to the human constitution and to the circumstances which surround man. The end to be obtained is happiness; but that end cannot be accomplished without sanctification or personal devotion to God. It is, indeed, as impossible for God to make any man happy, without making him holy, as it is for him to lie. Now the Bible is all arranged with a supreme reference to this fact. And as piety or holiness consists in a habit of life correspondent with the divine will and character, and is not natural to man as he now is, it must be preceded by a change of heart. But this change of the affections being the result of faith or a belief of the testimony of God, that testimony for such a change must necessarily furnish motives. But these motives presuppose gracious acts of kindness on the part of God. Sacred history, then, records these acts--whether in the form of things said or done, commanded or promised by God. Faith apprehends and receives this testimony concerning these facts. These facts, when believed, produce corresponding feelings or states of mind, sometimes called repentance or a new heart; and this new heart leads to those good actions denominated piety and humanity, or holiness and righteousness. The links in this divine chain of moral and spiritual instrumentality are, therefore, five--facts, testimony, faith, feeling, action;--the end of which is salvation. The whole revelation of God is arranged upon this theory or view of man’s constitution. Thus God acts, the Holy Spirit testifies, man believes, feels, and then acts according to the divine will. Thus becomes he a new creature. This view of man’s constitution explains why the Bible is a volume of facts historical and prophetical--why it begins with history and ends with prophecy--why, in one sentence, God works, then commands, then promises. To illustrate this by the gospel, it is only necessary to state the order of things narrated in the apostolic writings:--1. Jesus died for our sine. 2. The Apostles announced this, and it is proved by the Holy Spirit in his resurrection from the dead, and subsequent operations. 3. Jews and Gentiles believe these annunciations as reported to them by the Apostles and Evangelists. 4. They immediately repent of their sins, and inquire what to do. Their hearts are changed. 5. They then become obedient to the faith. They are saved. The plan of the Bible can only be clearly understood when man’s condition and constitution are clearly and fully apprehended. For, in truth, the Bible is a glorious system of grace--an absolutely complete and perfect adaptation of spiritual means to a great and glorious end. This, however, is not the only grand comprehensive view of the volume of God’s inspiration which we desire to lay before the reader. We wish to look into the mechanism of this sublime instrument of renovation and salvation. Jesus Christ is the centre of the whole evangelical system. He is "the Root and the offspring of David"--"the Sun of Righteousness"--"the bright and the Morning Star"--"the Alpha and the Omega" of the volume. "The testimony of Jesus is the spirit" of all sacred history and of all divine prophecy. Now the history of the Bible is very rationally or philosophically arranged, both in its prospective and retrospective character, with a single and sublime reference to Jesus Christ. Let us analyze it. The first promise to fallen man respects a Messiah--in these words: "I will put enmity between thee," O Serpent, "and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. HE SHALL BRUISE THY HEAD, AND THOU SHALT BRUISE HIS HEEL." The whole Bible but demonstrates, illustrates, and applies this grand promise. Eve’s son of blessings is now to be elicited out of the human race; and just so much of the history of the human race as is necessary to his identification, development, and glorification is given, and no more. Let the reader take this lamp in his hand, read all the historical books of both Testaments, note every fact, incident, and document therein found, and see if they do not arrange themselves in a proper position, either to identify, develope, or glorify this benefactor of our race. We shall glance at Genesis for an illustration. The single book of Genesis contains the only information we have of the human race for the long period of two thousand three hundred sixty and eight years. It begins with creation and ends with the death of the patriarch Joseph. The other books of Moses bring us down to the year of the world 2553. All this history antedates any authentic records of the human race now extant in any nation or language. But the portions of Genesis assigned to the different epochs of human history are most singularly and significantly disproportionate. Why is it that eight-fiftieths, or eight chapters of fifty, are devoted to the history of creation and of the flood, and to the religious and political conditions of the human family, for the long period of one thousand six hundred and fifty-six years; while the single history of one Abraham occupies thirteen-fiftieths, and that of his descendants, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, twenty-four fiftieths!--? Indeed, the fortunes of this Joseph occupy a larger space than that assigned to the first two thousand years of the world. This great disproportion in the details of things can be satisfactorily explained only in one way. That apprehended, and the plan and structure of the inspired writings can be properly understood and appreciated. "The testimony of Jesus," says a divine oracle, "is the spirit of prophecy." It is, I presume, as truly the spirit of sacred history,--Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega of the Bible, because the Bible is the history of redemption. Every thing takes precedence, occupies space, and engages attention in the direct ratio of its bearings upon the development and consummation of human redemption. Take, for example, the antediluvian age: from the moment the gracious intimation that the woman’s offspring would one day "bruise the serpent’s head" is given, its development becomes the all-engrossing theme both of history and of prophesy. Persons, places, and events occupy a prominence and conspicuity as they happen to be connected with that grand central idea of the whole Bible. The altar, the victim, and the priest appear in the history of Cain and Abel; while blood and faith triumph in Abel’s martyrdom. Cain’s history, so far as it is given, is but the shade in the picture, and a few samples of his descendants illustrate the whole history of men in the flesh. He founded a city, and called it after the name of his son Enoch. From Enoch descended the sons and daughters of men. Polygamy was the consummation of his principles in the fifth generation. His offspring were brass and iron manufacturers, and the first that invented portable houses, instruments of music; and that handled the harp and the organ. Tu-bal-cain, or Vulcan, and his sister Naamah, inventor of the distaff and the spindle, are amongst his renowned issue. Not one saint is named in the whole posterity of Cain, the first-born of woman and the prototype of religious persecutors. The history of Cain and Abel being given, because of its connection with the altar and the sacrifice, the historian, prompted by the Spirit of revelation, opens the illustrious lineage of the promised, seed of woman; and that becomes from this moment the backbone of the whole Bible--the grand meridian line of all divine history and prophecy.--Seth is born to fill the place of Abel, and his progeny is counted, one by one, down to Jesus of Bethlehem and of Nazareth. Thus the patriarchal chain of Messiah’s ancestors down to the Flood are Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mehalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah. From the Fall of Man to the Flood, all that is transmitted to us of human affairs or of divine providence connects itself with these ten patriarchs. After the Flood, Noah’s three sons engross our attention. Their connection with all the ancient nations of the earth is briefly but most interestingly sketched. But so soon as reasons are given in the history of Shem, of Ham, and Japheth, for a special providence in dispersing them over the whole earth, and in selecting the younger of these three to stand at the head of the postdiluvian line of the child of promise, the historian confines himself to the royal and sacerdotal line of the Messiah. He next counts off ten other progenitors of our Lord. These are Shem, Arphaxad, Salah, Eber, Peleg, Reu, Serug, Nahor, Torah, Abraham. The promise given to Eve and repeated to Shem, is still further developed and committed to Abraham. To the end of Genesis we have five other noble links in this patriarchal chain. These are Isaac, Jacob, Judah, Phares, and Ezrom. Genesis then gives us in all five-and-twenty of our Lord’s ancestors, and just so much of human affairs as is necessary to their favourable introduction to our notice. Joseph’s history, so pre-eminently connected with the whole drama of man’s redemption, and terminating in the migration and settlement of the symbolic nation in Egypt, is more minutely and particularly detailed than any one individual history in the five books of Moses. His other books, occupying but forty years’ incidents, add no new names to the illustrious line. After the books of Joshua and of Judges, the book of Ruth is inserted to connect Judah and the promise made to him with David through Boaz, Obed, and Jesse--making the line from Ezrom to succeed thus:--Aram, Aminadab, Naashon, Salmon, Boaz, Obed, Jesse, David. The beautiful story of Ruth, the Moabitish saint, inserted for the express purpose of connecting David with Judah, Abraham, and Seth, and of completing through him the illustrious line down to the Virgin’s Son, is itself a demonstration of the truth of our assumption, viz., that the plan of the Bible is to reveal God to man and man to himself, by placing one family under a special providence, and in making all its fortunes first the subject of prophecy, and then of history, from the beginning to the end of the world.2 God meant more than any man has yet comprehended when he said, "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. This is my name for ever and my memorial to all generations." The history of that family is, then, a documentary revelation of the attributes of God, and especially of his truthfulness and covenant-keeping character; while all other histories of all other families serve as night to day in the contrast, to present his people in all the most favourable attitudes before us, and to induce all men to place themselves under the wings of his almighty protection. Soon as David ascends the throne and his family obtains the sceptre of the twelve tribes, the royal lineage is in safe-keeping. The books of Samuel, the Kings, and the Chronicles, down to the end of Old Testament history, not only faithfully preserve the records of the nation, but afford a thousand developments of human nature and of divine providence, full of instruction to all mankind in all ages of the world. Matthew and Luke open the New Testament history by giving from the archives of the nation and the rolls of lineage the ancestry of Jesus up to Adam;--the former, by his legal father, Joseph; the latter, by his natural mother, Mary. By the legal paternal line he is the sixtieth in descent from Adam; while by the maternal line he is the seventy-sixth. The apostolic writings give the history of the Jews down to the crucifixion of their promised Deliverer, the repudiation of them as the nation and people of God, and the adoption of believing Jews and Gentiles, as one in the Lord Jesus, in their stead; while the prophecies of the New Testament indicate the destiny of Israel according to the flesh; as well as Israel according to the spirit, till the final consummation. Such is the plan of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. From the plan of the Bible, as well as from its philosophy, its claims upon the faith and admiration of mankind may be strongly argued. Its philosophy is, That without piety no man can be happy; and that with it, any man in any outward circumstances map be happy to the full extent o€ his capacity for human enjoyment. But human enjoyment is neither animal nor angelic enjoyment. Animal or sensitive enjoyments are supreme and exclusive in the brutal creation, but subordinate in man. Intellectual pleasures are necessarily dependent upon the ministry which the intellect performs. If the intellect is made subordinate to the animal instincts, passions, or propensities, or if the intellect is subordinate to moral and spiritual enjoyments its pleasures are essentially different. In the former case they are but refined animalism; in the latter case they are spiritual and divine. In this view all human enjoyments are reduced to two classes: the one is spiritual, and the other carnal; the one is moral, social, and refined; the other is selfish, exclusive, and gross; the one rises, the other sinks to all eternity. The philosophy of the Bible is, therefore, the philosophy of human happiness, and the only philosophy which commends itself to the cultivated understanding of man. No mere rationalist, philosopher, or sage, ever proposed such a view of happiness to man. It is peculiar to the Bible. It is an original and divine conception, and proves the divine authorship of the book. From the object and character of the book of revelation, its divine authority can be most triumphantly argued. It is a book equally worthy of God to bestow, and of man to receive. Dictated by infinite benevolence, characterized by supreme intelligence, and perfectly adapted, to the genius of human nature, it is worthy of universal reception and of the most profound and grateful homage. Its plan is superhuman and divine. No one class of men of any one age could have formed such a plan as that of writing the history of one family for seven thousand years, and of incorporating with that history a scheme of eternal redemption from sin. And yet it is as clear as the sun in a cloudless sky, that Moses, Joshua, Samuel, Ezra, Nehemiah--with all the Jewish historians, prophets, and poets, during a period of fifteen hundred years, were, without concert, conference, or voluntary cooperation, prosecuting just such an object without seeming to comprehend it. And not they only, but all the patriarchs before Moses, all the renowned fathers of mankind from Adam to Moses, were orally transmitting such information to their descendants; and all the scribes of the Jews, from Malachi to Matthew, were in their chronicles of Jewish times recording such incidents and events as make out the entire history of the family of Jesus Christ from Adam to Joseph, his legal father, and to Mary, his natural mother. This was done but once in all time, and for a purpose just as peculiar and singular as the Bible itself. A skeptic or an infidel might as well argue that king Hiram’s thirty thousand woodsmen and builders, and king Solomon’s one hundred and fifty thousand hewers, stone-cutters, and carriers of burdens, with his three thousand three hundred supervisors and directors were severally and individually working each one after a plan of his own; and that without concert or pre-arrangement, all their materials were fitted up into a temple the most splendid and magnificent that ever stood upon this earth--the wonder of the world and the glory of architecture, as that shepherds, husbandmen, fishermen, artisans, historians, lawgivers, kings, living in different countries, in ages very remote, speaking diverse languages, and of every peculiarity of character, could have, either by accident or design, got up such a volume as the Bible, marked in every page by a peculiar originality of character, a most striking unity of design, pervading an almost infinite variety of circumstantial details, and in a style the most simple, artless, and sublime. The fortuitous concourse of atoms into a universe, indicative of designs and adaptations as innumerable as the stars, as countless as the sands of the sea, would be a rational hypothesis, a plausible and credible theory, compared with such an assumption. The divine inspiration of the Holy Scriptures is, indeed, fully proved by the divine wisdom and knowledge contained in the record itself.--The author is known in his works. God’s book is full of divinity. It reveals what human wisdom cannot fathom, but what human wisdom must believe and approve. God has not only affixed his sign manual to the mission of Apostles and Prophets in the miracles which they wrought, and in the prophecies which they uttered; but he has stamped upon the treasures of wisdom and knowledge which it contains, and incorporated with all its gracious and sublime developments, its holy doctrine; its heavenly spirit, and its divine precepts,, the indubitable indications of its superhuman, supernatural, and divine origin. But we shall, for the present, only attempt to prove its divine origin by the indirect method of reducing to an absurdity a contrary hypothesis.--Paul is my example and my authority for an occasional assault upon the fortress of error by showing what will result from its admission to be truth, or, which is the same thing in other words, by assuming the truth to be a lie. He says, "If there be no resurrection of the dead, then is not Christ raised. If Christ be not raised, then all men are in their sins--preaching is useless, faith is vain; we Apostles are all liars, and all that have died in attestation of it have voluntarily destroyed themselves." So let us reason in this case, in as few words as those found in that admirable argument in proof of the resurrection. We assume that the gospel is true or not true. If it is true, it ought to be obeyed; if it is not true, it ought to be disproved and repudiated. All the world so far agrees with our postulate. Well, now, say it is not true; in other words, it is a falsehood--a lie. What then? 1st. There is not a credible history in the world; because no history possesses so great a number or variety of the attributes of truth or reasons of faith as the gospel history. The original witnesses were plain, common-sense, ordinary, matter-of-fact men. They were eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses of the facts which they attest. Their occupations of life were favourable to having good eyes and good ears. They were chiefly fishermen. The facts which they relate, and which constitute the gospel, were sensible facts--subjected not to one sense, but to several senses. So speaks one of them:--"That which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the word of life, declare we unto you."3 They had nothing to gain, but every thing temporal and fleshly to lose by the proclamation of these facts. They made themselves, "of all men the most miserable." Their life, if their doctrine be not true, is more marvellous than their doctrine: no men ever gave stronger evidence of truthfulness than they. If they cannot be believed, no historian can. There is, then, no credible history in the world. 2d. In the second place, There is no sincerity in martyrdom. It is an indisputable fact that the Messiah and most of the Apostles were martyrs. They died for what they said, and not for what they did.--Mankind in all ages concur in the opinion that the strongest proof of any man’s honesty or sincerity is his dying voluntarily in attestation of the truth of what he affirms. We allege that martyrdom does not prove the truth of a man’s opinions, but only that he sincerely believes them. Sincerity is no test of truth in any matter of theory or speculation. But in all matters of sensible facts tested by the senses, seen or heard by many persons and on many occasions, sincerity in the avowal of them is proof of the certainty of them. Now as martyrdom proves sincerity, and sincerity on the part of witnesses of sensible facts proves the facts--the gospel, being founded on sensible facts, seen often, and seen by many, is true, or there is no sincerity in martyrdom. 3d. If the gospel facts are false, then learning and talent are of no value. The value of talent and learning consists in the power they impart to their possessor to acquire and communicate truth. Now it needs not to be proved, that innumerable multitudes of the most talented and learned men in all the ages of Christianity from its first promulgation till now, have been enrolled amongst the friends and advocates of the Bible. Nay, indeed, in all ages the literature and science of Christendom have been on the side of the Bible, and mainly employed in its service. If, then, the Bible be not true, learning and talent neither protect us from error, nor assist us in the acquisition of truth 4th. But again, On the admission that the gospel is not true, there is no connection between goodness and truth--no excellency in truth. The best men in the world have always been those that believed in the Bible. The most humane, benevolent, public-spirited, philanthropic, and virtuous men that ever lived, whose virtuous examples have been an honour to human nature, have been believers in the truth of the Bible. Now if the Bible be a cunningly devised fable, then there is no necessary connection between truth and moral excellence, any more than between error and virtue. There is, then, no excellency in truth. 5th. Still farther, If the Bible be not true, falsehood, imposture, and error are better than truth. The reason is obvious--the Bible is either true or false. If false, those who believe it believe a lie. But that lie has done more to civilize, refine, purify, and adorn human nature than all the atheism, infidelity, and philosophy of Egypt, Chaldea, Greece and Rome. Surely, then, the Christian lie is better than all the philosophic truth of all ages and all nations. Hence we infer that if the Bible be false, error and fraud work better for mankind than honesty and truth. 6th. But again--If the Bible be false, as all who reject it affirm, then there is no reason in the universe; or, what is the same thing, creation is a maze without a plan, and nature works in vain. We must judge of the unknown by the known. Now the fortunes of our planet are our data for the fortunes of all other planets. The fortunes of its inhabitants are, so far as nature or reason is our guide, the fortunes of the inhabitants of all other planets. Amongst earth’s inhabitants there is one class of beings for whose creation and comfort all others do exist. Man is the name of that class of beings. He is the end of this terrestrial creation. If he be lost--for ever lost, all is lost. Crops of vegetables annually spring out of the earth, and return to it again.--Races of animals feed upon them, and die. They, like their food, but enrich the earth. Day and night succeed each other. Years revolve. The earth turns upon its axis, wheels around its orbit, feeds and buries all its tenantry. Man himself and his food alike perish for ever. Now what is gained by the whole operation? If man lives not again--if the Bible be not true, nature labours in vain: and if there be a Creator, he works without a plan, and toils for no purpose. Nature is an abortion, and the whole machinery of the universe a splendid failure. There is no reason for creation--for nature; and there is no reason in either. If, then, the Bible be not true--if the history it gives of man, his creation, his fall, his recovery, be not true--in one word, if the gospel be a lie and the Bible false, no living man can give one good reason for the existence of our planet, or that of any sun or system in that collation of worlds and systems which compose this mysterious and sublime universe. But if the Bible be not true, it is not enough to say--1st. That there is not a credible history in the world. 2d. That there is no sincerity in martyrdom. 3d. That human learning and talent are of no value. 4th. That there is no excellency in truth. 5th. That falsehood, imposition, and error, are better than truth. And 6th. That there is no reason in the universe; but we must also add, that THERE IS NO GOD! Nature ends in ruin--the world is full of sin and misery--there is no reason for any thing--man lives for no purpose--no kind intimation has been given him of any great and good FIRST CAUSE; which is but equivalent to saying there is no good being above man--no one of almighty power, who could speak to him, enlighten him, or comfort him, touching his origin, his nature, his relations, his obligations, or his destiny; and that is equivalent to saying that there is no supremely Good One, no Creator, or Proprietor of man. For who can imagine a supreme intelligence, of almighty power and of infinite benevolence--who made man and inspired him with such desires after the knowledge of himself--with such longings after happiness perfect and complete--and who has himself the faculty of speech, the power of communicating the knowledge of himself to man; and yet has never spoken to him, never enlightened him on the only point vital to all his interests, his eternal destiny; and compared with which all other enjoyments possible to man as he now is, are not in the proportion of an atom to a universe, or a moment to a boundless eternity! Such an hypothesis is at war with every oracle of reason, with every decision of common sense, and with all the analogies of the universe. It cannot be: it is impossible. There is a God--there is a Book of God--there is truth in history--there is sincerity in martyrdom--there is value in talent and learning--there is an excellency in truth--truth is better than error, falsehood, and imposture--and there is reason in the universe, and a glorious destiny for man. The Bible has been proved to be a divine revelation as many millions of times as there are individuals who have believed it to the salvation of their souls. But it never has been proved to be false to a single individual of the human race. Nor can it ever be so proved. No man who understands what he says, can in truth affirm that he believes it to be false. Who can believe any thing to be false without oral or written testimony? But no living man has either oral or written testimony contradicting the testimony of the Apostles and Prophets: therefore, in the absence of such testimony, he can no more believe it to be false than a blind man can see the sun. A man may doubt whether it be true; but to believe it to be false, or to be assured that it is not true, is altogether impossible. Some persons object to the Bible--because, as they say, its divine inspiration is yet a subject of debate. Such thinkers and reasoners are grossly defective in reason and education. Did ever any one hear of any thing that has been proved to all the world? Is there a single historic fact that is believed by every human being? If there be not one, then every historic fact is yet in debate. But shall we say that no proposition improved, because it is not proved to the whole world! The gospel will never be out of debate while there is one infidel or skeptic in the world. This is, however, no more a disparagement of its truth, or its claims upon all mankind, than it is an argument against any proposition, fact, or testimony, that all the world has not yet acquiesced in its truth. We cannot believe by proxy, as nations, as empires, or as worlds. We must each one believe for himself. Hence the evidence must be considered, understood, and appreciated by every individual for himself: But the fact that millions of all orders of mind, the greatest and most gifted of our race, have believed it to be true--multitudes of them even to martyrdom for its sake; and that not one individual can believe it to be false, is a consideration that ought to silence every modest inquirer, and, were it possible, cover with shame those reckless and senseless dogmatists who declaim against a book of whose contents and whose history they truly comprehend nothing, because it is yet in debate. On their showing, there is nothing credible or worthy of universal acceptance, because there is nothing that is not a matter of doubt or disbelief with some person. But we argue not the question of the Bible’s truth with such opponents. We have not given a tithe of the topics from which its truth is irrefragably argued. Enough, it is presumed, to convince the candid whose minds can discern the force of argument, is contained in the preceding hints and reflections. Christianity has stood erect in the midst of all sorts of adversaries--Jews, Pagans, Turks, Infidels, &c.; and, like the pillars of Hercules, the rock of Gibraltar, or the everlasting mountains, bids defiance to all the billows of the ocean, and to all the tempests of Satan, to shake it from its immovable basis. 1 Job, it is presumed was an Idumean or Arabian sage. 2 See Ruth 4:18-22 3 Ephesians 1:1. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 9: 01.01.02. THE BIBLE (PART TWO) ======================================================================== CHAPTER TWO THAT the Bible contains a revelation from God, is susceptible of every variety and degree of evidence which guides men in the affairs of this life. We have no species of moral evidence that affords to mankind a higher degree of assurance than that on which Prophets and Apostles demand our unwavering confidence. If we admit that there is truth in history, sincerity in martyrdom, value in learning, advantage in talent, excellency in truth, reason in the universe, or a Creator in the heavens; then must we admit that the Bible is inspired by infinite wisdom, and presented to man by his Almighty Father and Benefactor. But as we have given a specimen of the indirect evidence in proof of its divine authorship in our first chapter, we shall now exhibit a sample or two of the direct proof which it offers in support of its claims upon the assent of our understanding and the consent of our hearts. The grand climax of moral evidence consists in the possibility, the probability, and absolute certainty of any fact, event, or proposition. When we can show that the fact presented in any proposition is possible, that it is probable, that it is absolutely certain, we have gone through all the forms of argument upon which the truth of any proposition is admitted. Beyond these, reason asks no more, because she can give no more. Truer the last implies the former two; yet there is an advantage to most minds in ascending, step by step, to any commanding eminence. Now the grand proposition is, that God has spoken to man in the Bible. That it is possible is evident from the fact, that God thunders in the clouds, murmurs in the tempests, whispers in the breeze. Still more evident from the fact, that he has taught the lion to roar for his prey, the beasts of the forest to commune with their companions, and the birds of the air to soothe the human ear with their melodies. But most evident from the fact, that he has given to man a tongue to speak, and an ear to listen to the voice of his brother. The inference, then, is, that God possesses the power which he has imparted to man; that he who taught man to reveal his mind and will to his companions, and even to some domestic animals that wait upon his word, has the power to reveal his own mind and will to his creature man. But we advance a step farther, and assume that it is probable that God has spoken to man. This we argue from the fact that God can speak, that man desires to hear him speak, and that he has created no rational desire in man for which he has not made a proper provision, either in himself or in his works. I need not ask the question, as if any one doubted it, whether there is any desire in man comparable to any desire of life? Nor need I attempt to prove to any one, that of all knowledge imaginable there is none so desirable to man as the knowledge of his own origin and of his ultimate destiny. Now, as God has created these desires, and he is supremely kind and bountiful in all his original creations, and in his constant providence all the reasonable and lawful wants of man, is it not probable that at some time or other he has made a verbal or oral revelation of himself in some way intelligible to man? But in the second place, I argue the probability that God has spoken to man from the indisputable fact, that man himself speaks. Some, I know, assume that language is natural to man, because he has organs of pronunciation; but in good sense, and in good logic, one might as reasonably argue that Greek or Hebrew is natural to man, because he has the power of understanding or of pronouncing those languages. But who ever spoke a language that he did not first learn from another? We all have our vernacular--our mother tongue. We could as easily conceive of one born without a mother, as of one speaking Greek that did not first hear it. But as there certainly was one man who never had a mother, or a father, that man could have no mother tongue--no vernacular. God, then, must have taught man to speak vivâ voce; inasmuch as language is only an imitation of distinct intelligible sounds; and as all language comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of another, (for the deaf have no words, though they have organs of pronunciation,) we must, in all reason, conclude that the first human speaker had heard God himself speak. So Moses, in accordance with our reasoning, teaches that God talked with Adam, and first gave names to things. Moses also informs us that he left one class of objects for Adam to name, and that "whatever Adam called every living creature, that became the name of it." No class of linguists, rhetoricians, or philosophers, has ever been able to explain the origin of language on the principles of human nature. They agree in one point, viz. that it was not originally a conventional thing; that no company of men could assemble to discuss or decide upon it; which is, if properly comprehended, an unanswerable proof of a superhuman origin. So, with the immortal Newton, we conclude, that "God gave to man reason and religion by giving him the use of words." That all mankind had at first one language and one and the same religious faith, is very clearly and logically inferable from the most ancient traditions, and from the structure of the three great dialects of speech from which the modern gibberish of nations has descended. This, however, is a task not to be imposed upon us, nor undertaken by us, in order to the consummation of our present argument. The strong probability that God has spoken to man is, we presume, already established from the simple fact that man himself speaks; and that no man can give himself intelligible languáge, but must receive it from another. But we shall ascend from the possible and the probable to the absolutely certain evidence which the Bible itself furnishes, that God has, in that volume, spoken to man. The evidences which that mysterious and sublime book tenders to those who approach its sacred pages with a candid temper and a becoming reverence, are its doctrines, its precepts, its promises, its miracles, and its prophecies. To these are added the testimonies of unbelieving Jews and Pagans, living contemporaneously with the periods of its development and establishment in the world. Now, as the miracles and the prophecies are matters of record in the book itself, as much as its doctrine, its precepts, or its promises, they are equally, matters of faith, because alike matters of sacred history. Still, pardons of the prophecies, not fulfilled when the last of the Prophets and Apostles died, being yet in progress of fulfilment, afford good authority for classifying the evidence of the divine origin of the Bible under three distinct heads--the intrinsic, the extrinsic, and the mixed. The intrinsic evidences consist in the doctrine, the precepts the promises, the miracles, and the prophecies, published and fulfilled in the records of the book itself. The extrinsic are the testimonies of unbelieving Jews and Gentiles, given to the facts reported in the Old and New Testament records. The mixed are its prophecies fulfilled since the book was completed, those now fulfilling, and those hereafter to be fulfilled, together with those monumental institutions appointed in the Holy Book and observed ever since its publication, down to the present day. Now of all these classes of argument and evidence, we shall select but one, or a part of one of them, in demonstration of what we mean by the absolute certainty which the enlightened Christian enjoys, that God has, in very deed, spoken to man. That shall be a portion of the class of mixed evidences. Nothing, it is alleged by some, produces absolute certainty but the evidence of sense. But even our senses sometimes deceive us. There is, perhaps, something better than the mere evidence of sense. The doctrine and the miracle combined, or the thing seen by the outward eyes corresponding with the promise of it, is better than either apart. They are, indeed, two witnesses instead of one. The doctrine speaks for God, and so does the miracle. A prophecy written in a book a thousand years ago, fulfilled before our eyes, is the highest demonstration that can be given to man of the authenticity and inspiration of the book in which it is written. The proposition and the miracle must agree. They must be equally worthy of having God for their author. But under the same miracle we include more than is sometimes designated by that very indefinite term. The raising of a dead man to life by a word, and the foretelling of a complex event, not depending on the laws of nature, a hundred or a thousand years before it happens, are equally demonstrations of the divine presence and power in the person professing to be sent by the Creator of the universe. With us, a miracle is a display of supernatural power in attestation of some proposition presented by God to man for his acceptance. Miracles are, therefore, signs manual attached to commissions to authentic messengers from God. They are always vouchsafed to special messengers to gain special credit to their messages. By a supernatural power we understand a power that holds in obedience the laws of nature, according to the will of him that possesses it. It is a power that suspends, governs, or directs the laws of nature according to the pleasure of its possessor, but with reference to public advantage. Such was the power vouchsafed to Moses, to Jesus, to many of the Prophets, to all the Apostles, and to some of the Evangelists of Jesus Christ. Of this supernatural power there are two sorts--one that extends beyond the physical laws of nature; and one that extends beyond the intellectual power of man. The foretelling of some complex future event, not depending upon any human knowledge of the operations of matter or of mind, is as clear a proof of supernatural intellectual power, as the removal of a mountain by a word would be of a supernatural physical power. A man that could now predict the fortunes of a city, a family, or a nation, for one or five hundred years to come, would give as clear indications that he possessed the Spirit of God and was divinely commissioned, as if he raised the dead. But they are not always proofs to the same persons. Sensible and outward displays of physical power--such as the miracles of our Lord and his Apostles, were addressed to the senses of living men, in support of their pretensions to a divine call and mission. But the foretelling of an event long distant is not a proof to any contemporary auditor of the divine mission of the prophet. The miracle is developed in the accomplishment, and not in the uttering, of the prediction. When Jesus foretold that within that generation the temple would be so razed to its foundation that "not one stone should be left upon another," not the prediction, but the accomplishment of it, was a miracle to those who witnessed that awful catastrophe. But who will not admit that those who had heard him utter the prediction, or those who had often heard, or read it, before the siege of Jerusalem, and who afterwards saw the city and the temple in ruins, according to the prediction, had just as ample proof and as full assurance that he spoke the truth, and was sent by God, as they had who heard him call Lazarus of Bethany out of his grave, and who witnessed his resurrection in obedience to the call? The fulfilment of prophecies long since uttered, written, and published, is, therefore, we argue, a perfect assurance of the divine mission and inspiration of the Prophet to all who live contemporary with the accomplishment, or even after the accomplishment, provided only that the document containing the prophecy was certainly extant before the consummation. The way is now open to a full development of the assumption, viz. that we who now live have just as perfect an assurance of the truth of the sayings and doings of Prophets and Apostles as they had who lived in their times; or, in other words, that it is not only possible and probable, but absolutely certain that God has spoken to man. An induction of fulfilled prophecies, equal to a volume, might be exhibited from the Jewish and the Christian Scriptures. The Bible is the only book in the world, now or at any former period whose prophecies are almost as numerous as its pages. No other volume presumes to give the whole history of time and of man but the Bible. The book, as before shown, contains the history of one family for seventy generations, and foretells its future fortunes to the end of time. The Ishmaelites, the Idumeans, the Israelites, (descended from Ishmael, Esau, and Jacob,) and their countries, together with Egypt, Syria, Moab, Ammon, Amalek, Babylon, Tyre, Sidon, Nineveh, as well as the Chaldean, Medo-Persian, Grecian, and Roman Empires, with all the fortunes of the Christian church, are written out on the living pages of the sacred book of Prophets and Apostles. Persons, places, and events, ages before their appearance, are foretold with the accuracy of history, by Him who speaketh of "the things that are not" yet in existence, "as though they were." I shall, however, only illustrate and exemplify in two or three particulars. Had we room for a display of singular items occurring in the fulfilment of ancient prophecy, as a specimen of the unerring agreement between the prediction and its accomplishment, we would quote and comment upon Deuteronomy 28:48-58 inclusive. In this passage, Moses predicts the final catastrophe, and ruin of his own nation by the Romans, fifteen hundred and twenty years before it happened. He specifies various particular characteristics of that calamity. We shall notice but ten of them:--1. The people or nation by whom they should be destroyed, were to come from a remote country. 2. Their armies were to come as an eagle to its prey. 3. They were to speak a language unknown to the Jews. 4. They are described to be a fierce and savage people, not respecting age, sex, or condition. 5. They were first to station themselves among them, and then to devour their provisions. 6. They should besiege them in all their high-walled towns and fortresses throughout their whole country. 7. They were to be reduced to such distress and famine as to eat their own offspring. 8. The most affectionate brothers would become evil-disposed and cruel to one another; as also husbands and wives, parents and children. 9. The most delicate and tender-hearted ladies would devour their own offspring. 10. They should perpetrate these awful deeds secretly, through fear of being robbed of their repast. Let any one now read the account which Josephus gives of the fall of Jerusalem and the final calamities of that devoted nation, and see whether these ten items were not accomplished to the letter! Let him read to the case of his narrative of the delicate and elegant lady, who, in every circumstance, verified the prediction, in killing, roasting, and devouring secretly her own innocent and beloved infant, and say whether Moses did not speak by the inspiration of God.1 To those who witnessed these events, and who had in their panda the book of Deuteronomy, then extant in Hebrew and Greek, may we not say that a miracle was exhibited, as indisputable as any miracle performed by Moses or Jesus in the presence of living thousands of spectators? But, to us, both the prophecy and the accomplishment are matters of record, and therefore matters of faith and not of sight. We shall, therefore, advance one step farther, and show a miracle--a display of supernatural intellectual power--by presenting a Jew at the proper angle of vision. Had any man now living the power of raising the dead, unless we accompanied him to the grave and looked on at the proper distance, we could not witness a miracle. So, unless we open the eyes of our understanding, and look with attention and discrimination in this ease, we cannot see a miracle. Behold this Jew! Whose son is he? His father Abraham was born three thousand eight hundred and forty-one years ago! His father circumcised himself and his long-promised son Isaac, some three thousand seven hundred and forty years ago. From Isaac sprang Jacob, Judah;--the Jews. That nation, counting from the birth of its founder, was contemporary with the Assyrian empire almost fourteen centuries. It was also contemporary with the Medes and the Persians, with the Greeks and the Romans, during their entire continuance, and now survives the last of them some thirteen centuries! But is all this so strange, so unprecedented an occurrence; where is the miracle? The Romans, under their general Titus, saw no miracle in the destruction of the nation, the city, and the temple, because they had not the prediction in their eye. Nor can any one see a miracle in this Jew, unless he have the prediction in his eye. We shall now read the prediction, while this circumcised Jew stands before us. Jeremiah was carried captive by Nebuchadnezzar,, and flourished from the 629th to the 588th year before Christ. About the 600th year before Christ, or 2445 years ago, he writes the following prediction, Jeremiah 30:1-16. "I am with thee, O Israel! saith the Lord, to save thee; though I make a full end of, all nations whither I have scattered thee, YET WILL I NOT MAKE A FULL END OF THEE; but I will correct thee in measure, and will not leave thee altogether unpunished." "ALL THEY THAT DEVOUR THEE SHALL BE DEVOURED, AND ALL THINE ADVERSARIES, EVERY ONE OF THEM, shall go into captivity. They that spoil thee shall be a spoil, and ALL THEY THAT PREY UPON THEE will I give for a prey." Where now are the nations that preyed upon the sons of Abraham! Where are their adversaries--the Assyrian, the Medo-Persian, the Greek, and the Roman people! There lives not the man, in the four quarters of the globe, who can say that in his veins flows one drop of the blood of an Assyrian, a Medo-Persian, a Greek, or a Roman; while millions of the house of Israel, of the seed of Abraham, of the Jewish people, can severally say that in their veins flows the blood of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob! Is not, then, every circumcised Jew a miracle, a proof supernatural, that God spake by Jeremiah and the Prophets? Two predictions are here fulfilled and verified to the letter. All these great masses are lost, being mingled with, and "DEVOURED" by, their conquerors. But they that have conquered, disinherited, and dispersed the Jews, could not devour them; for the Lord said, "I will never make a full end of thee." The destruction of the one and the preservation of the other constitute two witnesses for the Bible, and literally fulfil a promise made to Abraham when leaving Ur of Chaldea, three thousand seven hundred and sixty-six years ago. "Abraham," said God, "I will curse him that curseth thee, and I will be a God to thee and to thy seed after thee." But not once, but often the same promises and prophecies are written by the same Prophets, in a language somewhat different, and on that account the more certain of a fair construction. We shall take another example from Jeremiah, Jeremiah 31:35-37. "Thus saith the Lord, who giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; the Lord of hosts is his name: If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever. Thus saith the Lord, If heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the Lord." Here, then, we have a solemn promise from God, that while time endures, while the world lasts, the Jews shall continue as a distinct and peculiar people--a standing miracle, indeed of the truth of the Bible. Many other peculiarities of the destiny of this awful and venerable nation, are clearly pronounced by Moses and their other Prophets; such as the whole details of Deuteronomy 28:1-68, of which I have room but for a single example, Deuteronomy 28:37 : "And thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb and a by-word amongst all the nations whither the Lord shall lead thee." Is this true of any other nation? Do we not hear it almost as often as we hear of the Jews? Yet Moses foretold it three thousand three hundred years ago! With these predictions in our hands, and a Jew before our eyes, do we not see a miracle--a demonstration of a power supernatural and divine? As to the authenticity and the antiquity of the writings of Moses, we happen to have three copies of them, kept by different nations, centuries before Jesus Christ--the Samaritan, the Hebrew, and the Septuagint. He that overthrows these--discredits, or repudiates them--may, by the same ingenuity and learning, discredit and repudiate all antiquity, all history,--sacred, civil, and ecclesiastical. This prophecy and the law of Moses were in the keeping of the most ancient people and languages known to any living man. The case we shall, therefore, consider as fairly and fully made out, viz. that it is possible and probable, nay, absolutely certain, that God has spoken to man in the Law and in the Prophets. But some one may ask for some miracle now extant, in proof of the inspiration of the Christian Apostles. We might hand such a one the Apocalypse; but, being a book of symbols, and not, like the prophecies we have quoted, written in a plain, unfigurative historic style, we shall give one example from the plain, unadorned epistles of Paul. We quote from 2d Thess. chap. 2:--"Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and by our gathering together unto him, that ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter, as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there be a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition: who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he, as God, sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.--Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? And now ye know what withholdeth, that he might be revealed in his time. For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth, will let, until he be taken out of the way. And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming. Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved." The case, or the occasion of this prophecy, is this:--In his first epistle to the Thessalonians, Paul had written of "the day of the Lord coming as a thief in the night;" and also of the change to be effected upon those who should be alive at his coming: "For we," said he, "which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord, shall not anticipate them that are asleep." From which sayings some then taught, that the day of the Lord’s triumph over his enemies’ destruction was soon to arrive, just as some now teach that souls sleep, because Paul thus spake of the dead. To correct these errors, Paul, in his second epistle, by the spirit of revelation, informs them that the day of the Lord’s triumph and the fall of his enemies was then at a great distance. This leads him to expatiate on some great intervening events. That day shall not come till a great apostasy from Christ to another personage shall have occurred; till that MAN OF SIN, or "the man of sin,"--the lawless one, described by Daniel 7:25,--shall have been revealed. The Apostle introduces this mysterious personage as one frequently spoken of among the Thessalonians. He calls him "that lawless one," or "the man of sin." He was described by Daniel in these words:--"He shall speak [impious] words against the MOST HIGH, and shall wear out [or consume] the saints of the Most High, and shall think [or determine] to change times and laws; and they [the saints] shall be given into his hand until a time, times, and the dividing of time; but the judgment [upon him] shall sit, and they shall take away his dominion to consume and destroy it unto the end." This mystic man of sin, the POPE OF ROME, undoubtedly, is described in the following particular points:-- 1. He was to be the son or creature of an apostasy from the primitive faith and manners taught by the Apostles. As Napoleon the Great grew out of the French Revolution, so did the Pope grow out of the metropolitan hierarchies and councils that sprang from the defection of the ancient church. 2. This man without law opposed, in his pretensions, all that were called magistrates, or that were held in reverence by the people. 3. He placed himself upon a throne. 4. This throne was not erected in a Pagan temple, but in the church or temple of God. He is neither a Jewish nor a Pagan, but a Christian High-Priest, Father, or Pope. 5. He shows himself to be, or sets himself up, as a Vicegerent of the Almighty, and calls himself "HIS HOLINESS LORD GOD THE POPE." 6. He was not to appear for some time after the Apostle wrote this letter--not, indeed, while the Roman Cæsars called themselves severally Pontifex Maximus, or the Great High-Priest of the Gods. 7. But the letting, or opposing Pagan chiefs, are to he taken out of the way. 8. And when that is done, this mysterious son of perdition and of iniquity, called by Paul "the lawless one," should be fully developed. 9. He was to appear, after the modus operandi of the Devil, by good words, fair speeches, pretended sanctity--"by all the deceivableness of unrighteousness,"--transforming himself into an angel of light, while at heart as black as Erebus. 10. God, it is affirmed, shall permit all those who loved not the truth in their hearts, to be deluded by this "WICKED ONE," that they all might be condemned as reprobate silver, as spurious coin, and removed from the faithful. Such is the apostolic profile of the first of the Gregories--of him that plucked the golden mitre from the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, and Jerusalem--who assumed to himself the government of the realms of Purgatory, the disposal of all the crowns of the heirs of Pagan Rome, and who, by miracles of deceit, gained the confidence of an apostate church, and consolidated it into a politico-ecclesiastic empire--"BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS"--a monster since the wonder of the world and the terror of all the excellent of the earth. Could any one, we may now inquire, not gifted by a plenary inspiration from the sempiternal sources of light, to whose eye the past, the present, and the future are all alike, have thus so clearly, so comprehensively, and yet so minutely sketched the portrait of the most unnatural and mysterious monster of iniquity the world ever saw? And what event more unlikely to happen, than that one pretending to be the VICAR of Christ, who, twenty years before this portrait was sketched, had been crucified between two malefactors without the gates of Jerusalem--than that one assuming to be the SUCCESSOR of that Galilean Peter, the fisherman, who had neither silver nor gold, and who had forsaken all that he had to partake in the toils, the trials, and the honours of his Master, would have ever thought of aspiring to such a giddy and ambitious eminence, much less of attaining it and transmitting it to a long series of successors through more than twelve full centuries of years? No one can make himself thoroughly acquainted with the origin, progress, and consummation of the Popedom--as developed in the lives of the Popes--or spend one year in Rome, holding in his hand Daniel’s portrait of the man of sin in his 7th chapter, and that of Paul in this letter to the Thessalonians, and not see a stupendous miracle in the literal and enact accomplishment of predictions so copious and yet so minute, held by the church of all ages and of all nations, and now read in all the languages of the civilized world, all literally verified in one individual person succeeding another of the same grand characteristics, for so many centuries. He that does not, in these ample and precise specifications, recognise the finger of God in a clearly developed miracle of the most stupendous dimensions, has certainly sipped no little of the inebriating cup of delusions by which this great sorcerer has enchanted and deceived the nations of paganized Christendom. Our faith in the gospel, we now conclude from these mere specimens of evidence, rests upon the clearest and most solid basis. It rests upon miracles well attested by others, and on miracles seen by ourselves. It rents upon the purity of its doctrine, the majesty and the excellency of its precepts, the riches, the fulness, and the glory of its promises. It rests upon the perfect originality, the unity, the grandeur, and the divine sublimity of its adorable Author. It was promulged by the purest, the noblest, and the most disinterested heralds that ever announced a new doctrine to men. It was sustained by their godly sincerity, their toils, their privations, their endurance of evil, and their glorious martyrdom for its sake. It enrols amongst its believers and defenders the greatest, the wisest, the best and the most gifted of mankind. All that we love, admire, and venerate in human character, appears in the boldest relief in the piety, humanity, and universal excellence of its friends and admirers. It confers upon all its fully initiated disciples, the whole circle of graces that adorn human nature, and fills their lives with the largest and richest clusters of the delicious fruits of benevolence and mercy. It is just such a message from the Throne of heaven as, had we been duly enlightened, we might have expected; such a glorious display of divinity and humanity as fully and eternally glorifies God, and bestows infinite honour and happiness on man. 1 Josephus, Wars of the Jews book 6: chap. 3, page 553. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 10: 01.01.03. THE BIBLE - PRINCIPLES OF INTERPRETATION ======================================================================== CHAPTER III THE whole Christian religion, in its facts, its precepts, its promises, its doctrine, its institutions, is presented to the world in a written record. The writings of Prophets and Apostles contain all the divine and supernatural knowledge in the world. Now, unless, these sacred writings can be certainly interpreted, the Christian religion never can be certainly understood. Every argument that demonstrates the necessity of such a written document as the Bible, equally demonstrates the necessity of fixed and certain principles or rules of interpretation: for without the latter, the former is of no value whatever to the world. All the difference, in religious faith, opinion, and sentiment, amongst those who acknowledge the Bible, are occasioned by false principles of interpretation, or by a misapplication of the true principles. There is no law, nor standard,--literary, moral, or religious,--that can coerce human thought or action, by only promulging or acknowledging it. If a law can effect any thing, our actions must be conformed to it. Were all students of the Bible taught to apply the same rules of interpretation to its pages, there would be a greater uniformity in opinion and sentiment than ever resulted from the simple adoption of any written creed. Great unanimity has obtained in most of the sciences in consequence of the adoption of certain rules of analysis and synthesis; for all who work by the same rules come to the same conclusions. And may it not be possible that, in this divine science of religion, there may yet be a very great degree of unanimity of sentiment and uniformity of practice amongst all who acknowledge its divine authority? Is the school of Christ the only school in which there can be no unanimity--no proficiency in knowledge? Is the Book of God the only volume which can never be understood alike by those who read and study it? It cannot be supposed, but by dishonouring God: for, as all the children of God are taught by God, if they are necessarily unintelligent in his oracles and discordant in their views, the deficiencies must rather be imputed to the teacher than to the taught; for the pupils in this school can be taught other sciences in other schools, with such uniformity and harmony of views as to make it manifest to all that they are the disciples of one teacher. God’s Book, is, however, put into the hands of men as it was first spoken to men: but they have, in some cases, been taught not to receive it from God, but from men. They do not consider that the written book, as well as the spoken word, is tendered to us under the stipulations of human knowledge--according to the contract between man and man, touching the value or meaning of the currency of thought:--that every word and sentence is to be weighed and tested by the constitutional laws and standards of the currency of ideas. When one person addresses another, he supposes the person addressed competent to interpret his words; and, therefore, all wise and benevolent men select such words and phrases as, in their judgment, can be interpreted by those addressed. Every speaker proceeds, in all his communications, upon the principle that his hearer is an interpreter--that he has not first to be taught the science of interpretation; and that he is bound so to express himself, that his hearer may interpret and understand his words by an art which is supposed to be native--which is indeed universal--common to all nations, barbarous as well as civilized. Now, as God is infinitely wise and benevolent, in his oral communications to men, he proceeded upon the principle that they were, by this native art, competent interpreters of his expressions; for otherwise, his addresses could be of no value. He could not even begin to teach them a new art of interpretation, as respected his communications, but by using their own words in the stipulated sense, unless we imagine a miracle in every case, and suppose that all his words were to be understood by a miraculous interposition. And this idea, if carried out, would make a verbal revelation of no value whatever to the children of men. If human language had never been confounded--if a multitude of different dialects had not been introduced--no occasion for translating language, as a matter of course, would ever have existed. Again, if words and phrases, and the manners and customs of mankind were unchangeably fixed, or universally the same at all times and in all countries, the art of interpreting would have been still more simple than it is; for so far as it is artificial, it is owing to different dialects, idioms, manners, customs, and all the varieties which the ever-changing conditions of society have originated and are still originating. At present, however, we would only impress upon the mind of the reader, that the very fact that we have a written revelation--that this revelation was first spoken, then written--supposes that there is somewhere a native or an acquired art of interpretation; that the persons addressed were already in possession of that art: for without such an understanding, there would have been neither wisdom nor benevolence in giving to mankind any verbal communication from God: In the present essay, we shall offer a very few remarks upon, first, the inspiration of the Bible; second, the language of the Bible; third, the distribution of the Bible into chapters and verses; fourth, the different dispensations of redemption; and fifth, offer seven cardinal rules of interpretation: 1st. Revelation and inspiration, properly so called, have to do only with such subjects as are supernatural, or beyond the reach of human intellect, in its most cultivated and elevated state. In this sense, "holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit." But besides this inspiration of original and supernatural ideas, there was another species of supernatural aid afforded the saints who wrote the historical parts of the sacred scriptures. There was a revival in their minds of what they themselves had seen and heard; and in reference to traditions handed down, such a superintendency of the Spirit of wisdom and knowledge as excluded the possibility of mistake in the matters of fact which they recorded. The promise "of leading into all truth," and the promise of "bringing all things before known to remembrance," by the Holy Spirit, include all that we understand by inspiration in its primary and secondary import. But while this inspiration precluded the selection of incorrect or unsuitable words and sentences, the inspired men delivered supernatural communications in their own peculiar modes of expressing themselves. To illustrate my meaning by another reference to the gift of tongues;--the subjects of that splendid gift in a moment understood those foreign languages as well at least as they knew their own; and in expressing themselves, selected such terms as, in their judgment, most fitly and intelligibly communicated their ideas. In other words, their own judgment or taste in the selection of terms was not suspended by the new language. They used the terms of the new dialect as they used the terms of their native tongue;--chose such as, in their judgment, would most clearly and forcibly reveal the mind of the Spirit to their hearers. We regard the Apostles of Jesus Christ as gifted with a full and perfect knowledge of the Christian institution; which entitled them, without the possibility of error, to open to mankind the whole will of their Master, whether in the form of fact, precept, promise, or threatening; and as furnished with such a knowledge of the signs of those ideas in human language as to express this knowledge clearly, accurately, and infallibly to mankind. But from what they have spoken and written, we are authorized to think that they were as free in the selection of words and phrases as I am in endeavoring to communicate my views of their inspiration. My reasons for this opinion are, that neither the Prophets nor the Apostles exhibit any sort of solicitude in always expressing themselves in the same words upon the same subject. Nor does any one of them seem at all concerned to be consistent with himself on all occasions, in using the same words; either in delivering precepts, uttering promises, or in giving a narrative of any of the incidents of his own life or those of his companions. We have no less than three accounts of Paul’s conversion and mission to the Gentiles--one from Luke, and two from himself; one delivered to the Jews in Jerusalem, and one before Agrippa; yet no two of them agree in word, though in sense they are uniformly the same.1 We have two accounts of the conversion of the Gentiles--one by Luke, and one by Peter;2 and these are as diverse in words, though as accordant in sense, as the narrative of Paul’s conversion. We have four memoirs of Jesus Christ, brief records of his sayings and doings; and yet no two of them agree in words, in narrating a single speech, or in describing a single incident in his life; though there is, as far as they severally relate, a most perfect harmony in sense. Peter’s allusion to the epistles of Paul fully expresses all that we desire to teach on the subject. "Paul wrote," says he, "according to the wisdom given him." Paul’s epistles are, then, the development and application of that wisdom given to him, expressed in his own style. It may, indeed, be said that, guided by wisdom, it was impossible for him to select, on any occasion, words or phrases inaccurate, or not clearly and fully expressive of the ideas suggested; so that, as Paul himself says, he explained spiritual things in spiritual words, or in words taught by the Spirit. We must, therefore, regard these words as the words of the Spirit. It was God’s Spirit speaking in them, through such words as were natural to them from education and habit. According to these views, the English, or German, or French New Testament, is as much the word of the Spirit as the Greek original, if that original is faithfully translated; but in any other view of inspiration, we have not the word of God, nor the teachings of the Spirit, only in the Hebrew and Greek originals of the two covenants. Before we dismiss this subject„ it may be observed that we find many things in these writings which are quite natural and common, for which inspiration is neither claimed nor pretended; many specimens of which will occur to the reader, when one is fairly examined. "Make haste to come to me soon; for Demas having loved the present world has forsaken me, and is gone into Thessalonica, Crescens into Galatia, and Titus into Dalmatia. Only Luke is with me. Take Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me in the ministry. But Tychycus I have sent to Ephesus. The cloak which I left at Troas with Carpus bring with you, and the books, but especially the parchments."3 The Apostles, acting under the high authority and commission of Jesus Christ, and inspired with all divine and supernatural knowledge, exhibited in doctrine, in precepts, ordinances, promises, threatenings, and development of things spiritual, celestial, eternal, are, in consequence of these endowments and authority, worthy of all respect and regard, even when writing upon the most common matters; and these apparently uninteresting things are, to the student of the Living Oracles, of great value and of indispensable importance in giving a full development of the religion of Christianity, in all its condescensions and adaptations to the most minute and common concerns and business of this life. 2d. God has spoken by men, for men. The language of the Bible is, then, human language. It is, therefore, to be examined by the same rules which are applicable to the language of any other book, and to be understood according to the true and proper meaning of the words, in their current acceptation, at the times and in the places in which they were originally written and translated. If we have a revelation from God in human language, the words of that volume must be intelligible by the common usage of language; they must be precise and determinate in signification, and that signification must be philologically ascertained--that is, as the words and sentences of other books are ascertained by the use of the dictionary and grammar. Were it otherwise, and did men require a new dictionary and grammar to understand the Book of God,--then, without that divine dictionary and grammar, we could have no revelation from God; for a revelation that needs to be revealed is no revelation at all. Again, if any special rules are to be sought for the interpretation of the sacred writings, unless these rules have been given in the volume, as a part of the revelation, and are of divine authority;--without such rules, the Book is sealed; and I know of no greater abuse of language than to call a sealed book a revelation. But the fact that God has clothed his communications in human language, and that he has spoken by men, to men, in their own language, is decisive evidence that he is to be understood as one man conversing with another. Righteousness, or what we sometimes call honesty, requires this; for unless he first made a special stipulation when he began to speak, his words were, in all candour, to be taken at the current value; for he that would contract with a man for any thing, stipulating his contract in the currency of the country, without any explanation, and should afterwards intimate that a dollar with him meant only three francs, would be regarded as a dishonest and unjust man. And shall we impute to the God of truth and justice what would blast the reputation of a fellow-citizen at the tribunal of political justice and public opinion! As, then, there is no divine dictionary, grammar, or special rules of interpretation of the Bible, then that Book, to be understood, must be submitted to the common dictionary,, grammar, and rules of the language in which it was written; and as a living language is constantly fluctuating, the true and proper meaning of the words and sentences of the Bible must be learned from the acceptation of those words and phrases in the times and countries in which it was written. In all this there is nothing special; for Diodorus, Herodotus, Josephus, Philo, Tacitus, Sallust, &c., and all the writers of all languages, ages, and nations, are translated and understood in the same manner. Enthusiasts and fanatics of all ages determine the meaning of words, from that knowledge of things which they imagine themselves to possess, rather than from the words of the authors "they decide by what they suppose he ought to mean, rather than by what he says." To adopt any other course, or to apply any other rules, would necessarily divest the sacred writings of every attribute that belongs to the idea of revelation. It must never be forgotten in perusing the Bible, that in the structure of sentences, in the figures of speech, in the arrangement and use of words; it differs not at all from other writings; and must, therefore, be understood and interpreted as they are. How, then, is the meaning, of its words to be acquired? Every word in the Scriptures has some ideas attached to it, which we call its sense or meaning. But this meaning is not natural, but conventional. It is agreement, usage, or custom, that has constituted a connexion between words and the ideas represented by them; and this connexion between words and ideas, has become necessary by usage. How this originated is not the question before us; the fact is all that now interests us. We are not at liberty to affix what meaning we please to words, nor to use them arbitrarily; inasmuch as custom has affixed, by common consent, a meaning to them. The meaning of words is, therefore, now to be ascertained by testimony; and that testimony we have collected in those books called dictionaries, which, by the consent of those who spoke that language faithfully, represent the meaning attached to those terms, or the ideas of which those words were the signs. "The fact," says Professor Stuart, "that usage has attached any particular meaning to a word, like any other historical fact, is to be proved by adequate testimony. That testimony may be drawn from books in which the word is employed, or from daily use in conversation. But the fact of a particular meaning being attached to a word when once established, can no more he changed or denied than any historical event whatever. Of course, an arbitrary sense can never with propriety be substituted for a real one. All men, in their daily conversation and writings, attach but one sense to a word at the same time and in the same passage, unless they design to speak in enigmas. Of course, it would be in opposition to the universal custom of language, if more than one meaning should be attached to any word in Scripture, in such a case"--that is, in the same passage, and at the same time. But, although a word has but one meaning at the same time and in the same passage, it may, at another time and in another passage, have a different meaning; for many words have, by common consent, more meanings than one. This is what has caused so much ambiguity in language, and so much difficulty in ascertaining the meaning of some sentences and passages in all authors, and in the sacred writings. Every word, indeed, had but one meaning at first; but to prevent the multiplication of words to an indefinite extent, and to obviate the difficulties that would thence arise in the acquisition of the knowledge of a language, words, in process of time, were used to represent different meanings. A question then arises, How shall we always ascertain the meaning of any particular word? If it have but one meaning, testimony or the dictionary decides it at once; but if it have more meanings, then the proximate words used in construction with it, usually called the context, together with the design of the speaker or writer, must decide its meaning. Usage and the context will generally decide. If these fail, the design of the speaker and parallel passages must be summoned. These are the aids which the canons of interpretation authorize in such cases. That there is, generally, perfect certainty in the proper interpretation of a word--that is, in ascertaining or communicating its meaning, (for this is what is properly called the act of interpretation,) is felt and acknowledged on all hands. But the foundation, or reason of this certainty, is a matter which should be evident to all. Now, unless we are compelled by necessity, arising from the laws of language, to any particular meaning, there can be no certainty. Therefore, this compulsion is the very cause of certainty. Philological necessity, or that necessity which the common usage of a word, the context, the design of the writer create, in giving a particular meaning to a word in a sentence, is the ground of that complete certainty, which, whether he can or cannot, explain, every one feels in the meaning of the language. And, as a very eminent critic has said, "If any one should deny that the above precepts lead to certainty, when strictly observed, he would deny the possibility of finding the meaning of language with certainty." These remarks would be sufficient to guide us in acquiring the meaning of words, if they had any one class of meanings only. But there is the literal and the tropical or figurative meaning of words, which must be distinguished before we can feel ourselves competent to decide, with perfect certainty, the true and proper meaning of any composition. And, first, of the literal meaning of words. As has been observed, every word originally had but one meaning; and this, of course, which was first, was the natural, or the literal meaning. Some of our most approved philologists and grammarians define the literal sense of the words to be, "The sense which is so connected with them, that it is the first in order, and is spontaneously presented to the mind, as soon as the sound of the word is heard." "The literal sense does not differ," says the celebrated Ernesti, "among the older and valuable writers, from the sense of the letter." But better defined by Professor Stuart, of Andover:--"The literal sense is the same as the primitive or original sense; or, at least, it is equivalent to that sense which has usurped the place of the original one; for example, the original sense of the word tragedy has long ceased to be current; and the literal sense of this word, now, is that which has taken the place of the original one." Popular writers, in speaking of the sense of words, are wont to substitute grammatical for literal, as equivalent; because literal, in its Latin extraction, and grammatical, in its Greek extraction, exactly represent the same thing. But in a shade differing from these they use the word historical in reference to the interpretation of the Scriptures. "Since," says T. B. Horne, in his Introduction, "it is not sufficient to know grammatically the different expressions employed by writers to interpret ancient works, so it is necessary that we add historical interpretation to our grammatical or literal knowledge. By historical interpretations, we are to understand that we give to the words of the sacred author the sense which they bore in the age when he lived, and which is agreeable to the degree of knowledge which he possessed, as well as conformable to the religion professed by him, and to the sacred and civil rights or customs that obtained when he flourished." When, however, we speak of the literal or grammatical sense of a word, we mean no more than its primitive meaning. And when we speak of the historical meaning of a word, we mean its meaning at any given time. The figurative meaning of words belongs to another chapter. In no book in the world is the literal sense of words the only sense; and still less in the Bible. But no book in the world, either among the ancients or the moderns, has been interpreted, quoted, and applied so licentiously as the Bible. Learned and unlearned have quoted and applied its words, as if its authors were outlaws and rebels in the commonwealth of letters. Some of the ancient Jews said that every letter in a word in the Old Testament had a special meaning, and the very opening of the mouth to pronounce them was significant of something sacred. The rabbinic maxim used to be, and perhaps still is, "On every point of the Scriptures hang suspended mountains of sense." The Talmud says, "God so gave the law to Moses, that a thing can be shown to be clean and unclean forty-nine different ways." Little more than a century ago, Cocceius of Leyden, maintained that "all the possible meanings of a word are to be united." He raised a considerable party upon this principle. But an opposite extreme, and quite as dangerous, into which some have run, is, that "some passages of the Scriptures have no literal meaning at all." If by this it were understood that some passages have only a tropical or figurative meaning, it might be admitted without detriment to our knowledge of the will of Heaven; but as it is understood by many, a license is taken to allegorize, not only the historical part of both Testaments, but also the miracles of Moses, of Christ, and of the Apostles--the paradisiacal state, the flood, and even the precepts and promises of the gospel institution; so that the whole revelation of God is thrown into the laboratory of every man’s imagination, and the key of knowledge for ever taken from the people. That the words of the sacred writings are taken both literally and figuratively, as the words of all other books, is now almost universally conceded; and that the true sense of the words is the true doctrine of the Bible, is daily gaining ground amongst the moat learned and skilful interpreters: in one word, that the Bible is not to be interpreted arbitrarily, is the most valuable discovery or concession of this generation. This, indeed, was confessed by our most distinguished reformers. Melancthon said, "The Scripture cannot be understood theologically until it is understood grammatically." And Luther affirmed that a certain knowledge of Scripture depends only upon knowledge of its words. 3d. The various divisions and subdivisions of the sacred Scriptures into chapters, verses, and members of sentences, are of human authority, and to be regarded as such. Anciently all the books of the sacred Scriptures were written in one continuous manner--without a break, a chapter, or a verse. The division into, chapters that now universally obtains in Europe, derived its origin from Cardinal Cairo, who lived in the twelfth century. The subdivision into verses is of no older date than the middle the sixteenth century, and was the invention of Robert Stevens. Whatever advantages these divisions may have been in the way of facilitating references, they have so dislocated and broken to pieces the connexion, as not only to have given to the Scriptures the appearance of a book of proverbs, but have thrown great difficulties in the way of any easy intelligence of them. The punctuation, too, being necessarily dependent on these divisions, is far from accurate; and, taken altogether, it affords a demonstration that there is no more divinity in the chapters, verses, commas, semicolons, colons, and periods of the inspired writings, than there is in the paper on which they are inscribed; or in the ink by which they are depicted to our view. From all of which facts, the following rule is of essential importance:-- In reading the historical and epistolary parts of the sacred writings, begin at the beginning, and follow the writer in the train of his own thoughts and reasonings to the end of the subject on which he writes, irrespective of chapters and verses. Indeed, even capital letters, punctuation--whether commas, semicolons, colons, periods, paragraphs, interrogative points, notes of admiration, parenthesis, dashes--must be regarded as human comments, and to be deliberately considered and weighed as but the opinions of men. This rule must be observed in all cases when we read for the sake of understanding any of the sacred books or letters. 4th. It must always be remembered by him who would be a scribe, well instructed in the kingdom of heaven, that the whole Bible comprehends three distinct dispensations of religion, or three different administrations of mercy to the human race. These are the Patriarchal, Jewish, and Christian ages of the world. There are three high-priesthoods, viz. that of Melchizedek, that of Aaron, and that of Jesus the Messiah; and under each of these there will be found a different economy of things. A knowledge of the leading peculiarities of each is essential to an accurate knowledge of any one of them and the right interpretation of the Bible. It is a standing maxim in religion, that the priesthood being changed, there is of necessity a change of the law pertaining to acceptable worship. After the close of one dispensation and the commencement of a new one, no man could be accepted in his approaches to God by the preceding economy. Moses, nor Aaron, nor the people of the Jews, after they departed from Sinai, dare approach God by sacrifice--as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were wont to do. The sovereignty and wisdom of God are most conspicuous in these arrangements. But it is our present duty only to say, that before we can feel any confidence in our interpretations of any law, commandment, or institution of religion, a previous question must always be decided--viz. To what dispensation did it belong? 5th. We shall now conclude this summary view of the principles of interpretation, by stating in order seven general rules of interpretation of primary importance, deduced from the preceding reflections:-- Rule I. On opening any book in the Sacred Scriptures, consider first the historical circumstances of the book. These are the order, the title, the author, the date, the place, and the occasion of it. II. In examining the contents of any book, as respects precepts, promises, exhortations, &c., observe who it is that speaks, and under what dispensation he officiates. Is he a Patriarch, a Jew, or a Christian? Consider also the persons addressed--their prejudices, characters, and religious relations. Are they Jews or Christians--believers or unbelievers--approved or disapproved? This rule is essential to the proper application of every, command, promise, threatening, admonition, or exhortation, in the Old Testament or New. III. To understand the meaning of what is commanded, promised, taught, &c., the same philological principles, deduced from the nature of language, or the same laws of interpretation which are applied to the language of other books, are to be applied to the language of the Bible. IV. Common usage, which can only be ascertained by testimony, must always decide the meaning of any word which has but one signification; but when words have, according to testimony--(i. e. the Dictionary)--more meanings than one, whether literal or figurative, the scope, the context, or parallel passages must decide the meaning; for if common usage the design of the writer, the context, and parallel passages fail, there can be no certainty in the interpretation of language. V. In all tropical language, ascertain the point of resemblance, and judge of the nature of the trope, and its kind, from the point of resemblance. VI. In the interpretation of symbols, types, allegories, and parables, this rule is supreme. Ascertain the point to be illustrated; for comparison is never to be extended beyond that point--to all the attributes, qualities, or circumstances of the symbol, type, allegory, or parable. VII. For the salutary and sanctifying intelligence of the oracles of God, the following rule is indispensable:--We must come within the understanding distance. There is a distance which is properly called the speaking distance, or the hearing distance, beyond which the voice reaches not, and the ear hears not. To hear another, we must come within that circle which the voice audibly fills. Now we may with propriety say, that as it respects God, there is an understanding distance. All beyond that distance cannot understand God; all within it can easily understand him in all matters of piety and morality. God himself is the centre of that circle, and humility is its circumference. The wisdom of God is as evident in adapting the light of the Sun of Righteousness to our spiritual vision, as in adjusting the light of day to our eyes. The light reaches us without an effort of our own; but we must open our eyes; and if our eyes be sound, we enjoy the natural light of heaven. There is a sound eye in reference to spiritual, as well as in reference to material light. Now, while the philological principles and rules of interpretation enable many men to be skilful in biblical criticism, and in the interpretation of words and sentences, who neither perceive nor admire the things represented by those words, the sound eye contemplates the things themselves, and is ravished with the spiritual and divine scenes which the Bible unfolds. The moral soundness of vision consists in having the eyes of the understanding fixed solely on God himself, his approbation, and complacent affection for us. It is sometimes called a single eye, because it looks for one thing supremely. Every one, then, who opens the Book of God with one aim, with one ardent desire, intent only to know the will of God--to such a person, the knowledge of God is easy; for the Bible is framed to illuminate such, and only such, with the salutary knowledge of things spiritual and divine. Humility of mind, or what is in effect the same, contempt for all earth-born pre-eminence, prepares the mind for the reception of this light, or, what is virtually the same, opens the ears to hear the voice of God. Amidst the din of all the arguments of the flesh, the world, and Satan, a person is so deaf that he cannot hear the still small voice of God’s philanthropy. But receding from pride, covetousness, and false ambition--from the love of the world--and coming within that circle, the circumference of which is unfeigned humility, and the centre of which is God himself,--the voice of God is distinctly heard and clearly understood. All within this circle are taught by God--all without it are under the influence of the wicked one. "God resisteth the proud, but he giveth grace to the humble." He, then, that would interpret the oracles of God to the salvation of his soul, must approach this volume with the humility and docility of a child, and meditate upon it day and night. Like Mary, he must sit at the Master’s feet, and listen to the words which fall from his lips. To such an one there is an assurance of understanding, a certainty of knowledge, to which the man of letters alone never attained, and which the mere critic never felt. 1 Acts 9:22; Acts 9:24 : 2 Acts 10:11 : 3 2 Timothy 4:8-12. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 11: 01.01.04. FAITH ======================================================================== CHAPTER IV THE Book of God is addressed to the human understanding. It assumes that man, though fallen and depraved, is yet an intelligent being--that he has certain faculties or powers of ascertaining truth, of perceiving and receiving evidence. It does not, indeed, inform him that he has the faculty of seeing, hearing, speaking, or believing. It does not explain to him that the possession of a faculty or power to do any thing, makes it his duty to employ that faculty or power in any way that his Creator may require. But it addresses him as though these were matters perfectly understood and agreed upon between his Creator and himself. Some, in their speculative philosophy, have called these things in question, and have created doubts where none ever before existed. Hence we sometimes find men doubting whether there be such a faculty as faith amongst the mental faculties or powers of man. Philologists, indeed, say, that the term faculty indicates power or ability to do any thing; and Christian philosophers say, that man has just as much power to believe testimony as he has to reason, to hear, or to speak. If, then, any confidence can be due to such authorities, we may say that man, as a human being, has the faculty of speaking, hearing, reasoning, and believing--as naturally as he has the faculty of seeing, tasting, or feeling. We may advance one step farther, and say, that speaking and hearing are both useless endowments--that they are faculties of no value, if we have not the faculty of believing what is spoken, or of ascertaining the truth of what is heard. Indeed, all sound, discriminating thinkers must regard the faculties of speaking, hearing, and believing, as necessarily and essentially related to one another; so that any one of them implies the other two. Why should man have the faculty of speech, if his neighbour had not the faculty of hearing? And why should he have the faculty of hearing, and reasoning upon what is heard, if he have not the faculty of believing what is true? Light, then, does not more obviously exist for the eye, and music for the ear, than speech for hearing, and hearing for faith. Well did Paul, therefore, reason when he said, "Faith comes by hearing, and hearing from the (speech or) word of God." We, therefore, conclude that God never would have spoken to man, if man could not hear him; and that man never would have heard his word if he could not believe what God said to him. The fact, then, that God has given to the world a revelation, is, with me, a demonstration that man has the power to believe it--provided only, his heart and attention are devoted to it. It is an intelligible, veritable, and credible document, worthy of God as its author, and of man as its object. Both oral and written testimony are addressed to our reason; for, although the written testimony is designed for the eye, and the oral testimony for the ear, both are addressed to our reason--to our power of discriminating the characters of truth from those of falsehood. There is in this also a sort of tacit agreement or understanding between the parties--as much as there is between two persons speaking the same vernacular, in the use and meaning of the words and phrases, of the tones and gestures employed in their intercommunications with one another. Revelation, though originally the form of oral testimony, is now altogether in the form of a written record. It is in this form, indeed, still more circumstantially addressed to our reason and our faith. The meaning of its language and the truth of its developments are alike to be ascertained by the faculties to which they are conjointly addressed. It always proceeds upon the assumption that, unless it is understood, it cannot be believed; and that, unless it is believed, it can exert no salutary influence upon our hearts or our lives. To admit the testimony to be true is, in the sacred style, equivalent to believing it; for he that believeth the testimony of God has simply "set to his seal that God is true." Faith, indeed, is always but the conviction of the truth of testimony, whether that testimony be human or divine. To be convinced that any testimony or report is true, is to believe it; to be convinced that it is not true, is to disbelieve it; not to be able to decide, is to doubt. Hence, there are but three distinct states of mind, as respects testimony. We believe, disbelieve, or doubt it. Of all the endowments vouchsafed to man, that of faith is superlatively excellent. To this faculty he owes all that knowledge that ennobles and exalts him in the scale of being. The range and acquisitions of his five senses are as nothing, compared with flee domains of faith. The area of faith is wider than the earth, broader than the sea, extending through all time, and launching into an indefinite eternity, past and future. By faith, we commune with all the living, and with all the dead whose deeds of renown have been inscribed upon the rolls of time. Ages past and gone are ever present with us--empires, that have long since fallen, still stand before us--cities, palaces, and temples, that, ages since, have mouldered down to dust, arise from their ruins and display to us the science and skill, the genius and taste, the pride and superstition of their founders and architects. By faith in human testimony, the experience of ages is brought home to us and made subordinate to our wants and our wishes. By it we may be said to have lived before we were born--to have communed with the men of all ages and nations--to have been contemporaries with all the generations of men. By faith in divine testimony, we know how the universe was made--how worlds began to be--how space sprang from nothing, and how it has been possessed with its unnumbered tenantry of worlds. By it we see the first man springing out of the duet at the bidding of his Almighty Maker, blushing into life in his immediate presence, and receiving a holy spirit from the life-inspiring voice of his Father and his God. By it the see him wrapped in a mystic sleep, and the hand of God dislocating a rib near his heart, which he moulds, after the image of love, incarnate beauty, and presents to Adam as a companion meet for such a man as he. Faith, also, illuminated by the same bright Sun of Eternity, gifts man with the prospective visions of times and ages yet unborn. It presents, to the enraptured vision of the saint, Adam and Eve, with all their redeemed progeny, ransomed from grave: emerging, phoenix-like, from the ashes of an old world; or, Eve-like, rising in immortal beauty and loveliness from the opened aide of the second Adam, making their sublime entry, amidst the acclamations of the celestial choristers, into new heavens and a new earth, especially prepared for them. Truly, then, may we not say with Paul, that "faith is the confident expectation of things hoped for, and the conviction (or evidence) of things not seen?" But the sublime nature, ineffable utility, and importance of faith are not to be learned from a survey of its widespread and long-enduring dominion over time, space, and eternity; but from a strict attention to the place it now occupies in the world and is the church of God, in the present employments, character, and destiny of man. Be it observed, then, that all the faculties of man have a present specific use and importance in the full development of himself, in the formation of such a character as he should rationally desire to possess to all eternity, and in qualifying him to fill his own apace in the world, in the performance of those functions and the discharge of those duties which will avail to the interests and happiness of the world. Every faculty of man has its proper object and its proper use. Has he the faculty of vision? There are objects to be seen, and advantages to be gained from seeing them. Has he the faculty of hearing? There are the harmonies and the melodies of nature and of the human voice to be heard and to be enjoyed. Has he the faculty of reasoning? There are objects to be compared, and conclusions of practical utility to be deduced from them. Has he the faculty of believing? There is the testimony of men, and there is the testimony of God, to be believed and appropriated. Now, as this is the noblest faculty which man possesses, conversant with things past, present, and future, proximate and remote, God has ordained that he shall walk by faith, physically, intellectually, and morally. Hence man is obliged to walk through his whole life more by faith than by his five senses, his own observations, or his own experience--probably more than by these all combined. This being a very fundamental fact, we shall be at some pains to develope it. The infant man enters life more helpless than any animal with whose history we are acquainted. He has not instinct sufficient for the first effort essential to life, health, or comfort. He is as destitute of reason, observation, and experience, as of instinct, to guide him in the pursuit of what is essential to his animal existence. God has made him dependent upon the care, direction, and counsel of his mother or his nurse, in the very first steps of life’s pilgrimage. He must walk by faith in the articles of food and medicine, and all physical safety. He cannot walk by reason, for as yet he has it not. He cannot walk by his own experience, for he has acquired none. He cannot walk by, instinct, for that was not imparted to him. He is, therefore, under an insuperable necessity to walk by faith as respects food, medicine, poison, and all surrounding dangers from fire, flood,, or tempest. If he believe not on the testimony of others that medicine will cure, that poison will kill, that fire will burn, and that water will drown, he must pay the penalty and suffer for his unbelief. More destitute of instinct and of defence than the oyster or the lobster, he must not be left to his own guidance or guardianship. He must not be permitted to experiment with the serpent, the young lion, or with the poisons, animal and vegetable, with which the earth abounds. The law of nature is as imperious and universal as the law of the gospel. If the gospel says, "He that believeth not shall be damned,"--the law of man’s natural existence says, ’If he believe not his mother or his nurse, he must die.’ But it is not in the nursery only that the infant man is trained to walk by faith. He enters the primary school under the same imperious law. The primer is put into his hand. He opens it, and looks at the letters of the alphabet; but neither knows their name nor their sound. He might look at them for a thousand years, and neither know the name nor the sound of the first letter. But, by faith in his teacher, he learns the names and the sounds of them all. By the same principle, he learns the art and mystery of reading his own mother’s language. Does he desire the science of numbers, or that of magnitudes? He is, equally obliged to walk by faith either in the written testimony or in the verbal explanation of a teacher. Does he desire to learn ancient or foreign language--to distil sweetness and pleasure from Greek and Roman springs? Then must he repose implicit faith in his lexicographer, and believe him in every definition of verb and noun. Having passed through the nursery training and discipline by faith, having also advanced through the primary and high-school education under the guidance and supremacy of the same universal law, does he desire to take his place as a free agent on the active theatre of life? Does he become a merchant, a mechanic, an agriculturist? He is still to walk by the same rule, and to be governed by the same stern necessity. Believe he must in those who have gone before him in every calling and department of life. He has to buy and sell, to barter and exchange the products of his own labour, or the products of other men’s labour, by faith in human testimony. In receiving a shilling, a guinea, an eagle, a bank-bill, a bill of exchange, a draft, he must act by faith as to their genuineness, their value at a given time and at a given place. All of which. depends upon the testimony of others. In paying or in receiving payments, he acts by the same principle and obeys the same law. Even the weights and measures by which he buys and sells are to him almost universally matters of testimony and faith. What need have we of farther witness? In natural and social life, in the nursery and at school, in the active business and pursuits of life, men are compelled in all cases first, and in most cases always, to walk by faith. Their own senses, observation, and experience, in process of time, guide them in co-operation with testimony and faith; but these first lead the way and continue our chief guides through all the great concerns of life! Why, then, should it be otherwise as respects things unseen, spiritual and eternal? Here, indeed, we must "walk by faith, and not by sight." But the skeptic and the infidel have no reason to reject the gospel, or deny the Bible, because it imparts its blessings only through faith. Nature, society, and the gospel bear equally impressed upon them the characteristic marks of the same great original. If man, in things temporal and with respect to his present life, walks by faith, why should it be thought incredible that God would have him to walk by faith in things spiritual and with respect to an eternal life? The conditions of spiritual and eternal life are, in this all-important feature, the same. He that believeth not must perish, is equally true as respects both. The gospel assumes that which Christian and infidel must equally admit;--that mankind are accustomed to walk by faith in all the important concerns of this life. It, therefore, very rationally addresses itself to this faculty in addressing man. It proposes to him no new principle. It speaks in harmony with the presiding genius of his own nature. It submits to him clear and ample testimony in proof of all that it demands and of all that it promises. Its language is,--"If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater." If men’s words may be relied on, how much more the word of God! Great virtue and power are attached to the faith of the gospel. Some, however, ascribe this efficacy rather to the manner of believing it, than to the truth which is believed. There are some very popular mistakes upon this subject. Some imagine that there are several ways of believing testimony, or of assenting to evidence. This is, however, a very great error, and of injurious tendency. There is but one way of believing any testimony, human or divine; and that is, to admit it to be true. He that admits any testimony to be true, believes it; and no believer can do more than admit the truth of a witness. There are, indeed, or may be, different degrees of clearness and certainty in the evidence adduced in any case; and hence there are, or may be, as many different degrees of conviction or assurance of the truth of it. Hence faith is strong or weak, in the ratio of the clearness and force of the testimony adduced. But the clearness and force of testimony is not necessarily innate in the words or manner of the witness; but much depends upon the discrimination and clearness of perception, as well as upon the candour of the believer, in appreciating the clearness and force of the testimony adduced. It is, therefore, essential to strong and vigorous belief in any thing, that the testimony be clear and forcible in itself, and that it be clearly perceived and fully comprehended by the believer. It follows, then, that there are not several ways of believing; but that there may be different degrees of evidence, and that one person may more clearly and satisfactorily believe than another. The head, the heart, the will, the conscience are all simultaneously exercised in the act of believing in order to justification. The head alone believes thing. Nor does the heart, the will, the conscience alone believe any thing. The understanding simply discerns truth, the conscience recognises authority, the heart feels love, the will yields to requisition. The gospel engages, interests, allures, captivates the enlightened sinner. So that, "with his heart," his whole soul, "he believes to righteousness, and with his mouth he confesses to salvation." Some superficial thinkers have spoken and written much upon different kinds of faith. They have "historical" and "saving faith," the "faith of miracles," and the "faith of devils," the "faith direct and reflex," "temporary and enduring faith," &c. &c. These are conceits of the old metaphysical theologians, and have done a world of mischief. By placing historical and saving or divine faith in contrast, and in giving all value to saving and none to historical belief, they have bewildered themselves and their followers:-- "Faith was bewildered much by men who meant To make it clear, so simple in itself, A thought so rudimental and so plain, That none by comment could it plainer make. All faith was one. In object, not in kind, The difference lay. The faith that saved a soul, And that which in the common truth believed, In essence, were the same. Hear, then, what faith, True, Christian faith, which brought salvation, was: Belief in all that God revealed to men; Observe, in all that God revealed to men, In all he promised, threatened, commanded, said, Without exception, and without a doubt." There is no faith worth any thing that is not historical; for all our religion is founded upon history. What would any Jew or Christian have believed concerning Moses or Jesus, but for the history of those persons? Is there any man under the broad heavens who believes in Moses or in Jesus, who has not first heard of the Lawgiver and the Saviour from history, oral or written? Not one. But there are those who believe in Moses and in Jesus on mere human tradition, without any correct knowledge of the history; and there are those who believe on Moses and on Jesus on the proper evidence; but they have such views of Moses and of Jesus as render their faith of no value. They hold opinions and views of these persons that make them mere shadows or ideal personages. Our Saviour told certain Jews that believed in Moses, as they alleged, that had they "believed Moses, they would have believed him;" but not having believed the writings of Moses, they could not believe his words. Multitudes believe something concerning Jesus the Messiah on mere national or human authority and prescription, who have not one distinct real conception or apprehension of him; and, consequently, "he will not commit himself to them." Many in Jerusalem, while he was there, like Nicodemus when first he visited him, believed in him; to whom, we are told, he would not commit himself, because he knew what mistakes and misconceptions they entertained concerning him. The whole history must be clearly understood and cordially received in its true sense and on its divine evidence, as demonstrated by the Holy Spirit, before any one can, in strict propriety, be said to believe it. All who thus believe it, will find that it is both the wisdom and power of God to salvation. But the power and efficacy of faith depend not so much upon the act or manner of believing, nor upon the certainty of the evidence, nor even upon our assurance of its truth, as upon the nature and value of the thing that is believed. THE POWER FAITH IS IN THE TRUTH BELIEVED. The power of faith is in the power of truth. It is not eating that sustains or destroys human life. It is what is eaten. Some eat and live--others eat and die. Some believe and are saved--others believe and are damned. Both characters truly and sincerely believe. But the former believe the truth and are saved--the latter believe a lie and, are damned. So true it is, that it is not the manner of believing that saves or destroys, nor the sincerity of believing; but the meaning or nature of that which is believed. "God," says Paul, sends to some "a strong delusion;" or allows them to, receive a strong delusion, so "that they may believe a lie" and be condemned; while to others he sends the truth with power, that they may believe and be saved. Some believe fatally, yet sincerely--indeed all, who believe an error or a falsehood. Some, indeed, prefer to believe a pleasing and agreeable falsehood rather than an unsavoury or disagreeable truth. Hence some really love darkness, while others love the light and the truth. It is highly important that this great proposition be somewhat elaborated and demonstrated;--that salvation is not in the act of believing, but in the object or proposition that is believed. It is the object of faith, and not faith itself, that has the power to save. If we examine our physical, intellectual, and moral constitution, in all their organs, faculties, and capacities, one by one, we shall find that it is neither the possession of them nor the employment of them that affords us health, safety or happiness; but the objects on which they are employed. It is not eye, nor the act of seeing, that affords us pleasure or pain. It is the thing seen. It is not the ear, nor the act of hearing, but the thing heard, that soothes or irritates. So of the organs of tasting, smelling, feeling. The pleasures of sense, derived from tastes, colours, and contacts, are not in the senses or organs themselves, nor in the operations of the organs, but in the objects on which these senses act. The same universal law obtains in the intellectual and moral departments of our nature. It is not the faculty of perception, reflection, comparison, or memory--or the employment of these faculties; but the things perceived, reflected upon, compared imagined, or remembered, that afford us either pleasure or pain. So of all the affections and passions. We love and we hate; we admire and adore with pleasure or pain, according to the objects. And were we to adopt the new philosophy of fifty organs in the human head, and of as many faculties, called acquisitiveness, cautiousness, &c. &c., we should find the same law without a single exception. If, then, the faculty of faith, or the operation of faith, has any power to bless, to animate with hope, to justify, to sanctify, to regenerate, or to save, that power is neither in the faculty, in the act, nor operation, but in the object on which it terminates. Still, the objects subjected to the faculties of man,--whether sensitive, intellectual, or moral,--can afford him neither pleasure nor pain, unless apprehended and appropriated by the faculties to which they severally belong. The richest, most variegated, and beautiful landscape in nature--the most majestic and sublime operations of the divine hand in heaven or earth, afford no pleasure to the eye unless viewed and contemplated by that organ. The most rapturous harmonies and melodies of nature or of art afford no pleasure unless listened to and heard. In vain the aromatic shrubs and fragrant flowers of the garden pour their delicious odours into the bosom of gentle zephyrs, to be wafted to our nostrils, if we inhale them not. So the rich provisions of Almighty love, displayed to man in a thousand ways, but consummated beyond our powers of thought and utterance in the gift of eternal youth, beauty, and loveliness to fallen man, through the incarnation of the everlasting WORD--the sufferings unto death of his only begotten and infinitely beloved Son--and through the sanctification of his HOLY SPIRIT,--unless apprehended and appropriated by faith, can neither fill the soul with heavenly peace, and joy, and love, nor give to man the victory over death, the grave, and Satan. Hence, by a figure of speech which puts the instrument for the agent, salvation is ascribed to faith, while it virtually belongs to the sacrifice and intercession of the Messiah. The gospel, then, as ministered now by the Holy Spirit, is "the power of God for salvation to every one that believes it." Faith, indeed, is but the hand that apprehends and appropriates Christ as revealed to us by the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven. Salvation, then, is of faith, that it might be by grace. For as the hand that plucks the fruit is not the fruit, is not that which either creates or sustains life, but only that which ministers to its development and preservation--so faith’s sublime efficacy is not in itself, but in that which it receives and appropriates to the soul of man, in which alone is the spring and fountain of eternal life. Having now, as we hope, clearly ascertained the necessity, utility, and value of faith in the Christian institution, it is expedient that we also ascertain, if possible, that great central proposition in the Christian system which gives to faith all its sovereignty over the heart, and soul, and life of man. It were of little value to the sick and dying could we convince them that all medicinal efficacy was in a certain specific remedy, and not in the act of receiving it into the system; and yet withhold from them a revelation of that sovereign specific. There is, then, but one remedial system, for sin and sinners, in this universe. There never can be but one such system under a government of perfect wisdom, of immaculate holiness, of inflexible justice, of inviolate truth, and of infinite mercy. That one only omnipotent remedy--though composed of many mysterious and sublime elements, displayed in the wonderful facts of Messiah’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven--is nevertheless all concentrated in the form of one proposition, on the faith and intelligence of which is suspended instrumentally the salvation of any human being. All the truths of the Bible are but the envelope of this remedy--inscribed, indeed, with directions for its use, and innumerable certificates in attestation of its life-restoring power. That proposition in word is, "GOD IS LOVE"--that proposition in fact is "GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD THAT HE GAVE HIS ONLY BEGOTTEN SON--(a sin-offering)--"THAT WHOSOEVER BELIEVETH IN HIM MIGHT NOT PERISH, BUT HAVE EVERLASTING LIFE." "The testimony of God," summed up by the last of the Apostles, is, "God has granted to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son." "He, then, that has the Son, has this life; he that has not the son of God, has not this life." But all this is again concentrated in a single proposition concerning the person, office, and mission of his Son--viz. "Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God." This is the most fundamental proposition in the moral universe. It is the foundation of the system of redemption--the foundation of a Christian’s hope in God--and the foundation of the Christian church. Jesus himself so commended it, Matthew 16:16-17. Paul also so commends it to our consideration, 1 Corinthians 3:11, saying, "Other foundation can no man lay than that which is already laid"--viz. that Jesus is the Christ.1 So God himself commended it by Isaiah 28:16 : "Thus saith the Lord God, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation-stone, a tried stone, a precious corner-stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste"--"shall not be confounded world without end." So also the Holy Spirit attested it, Acts 2:36. "Let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God has made that Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ." Thus the Father, the Son; and the Holy Spirit agree in one testimony concerning Jesus. This is the testimony of the Law in all its types--the testimony of all the Prophets in their predictions of the gospel kingdom--and it is the testimony of the Twelve Apostles. In this proposition, therefore, is the mysterious and sublime power of the gospel. It is the, distinctive and peculiar object of the Christian’s faith. There is no salvation in the belief of the call of Abraham, the mission of Moses, or the preaching of John the Harbinger, any more than in the translation of Enoch, the salvation of Noah from the flood, or of Lot from the overthrow of Sodom. There is no development of the Messiah in any of these facts or declarations. Many such facts, events, and declarations are but the envelope of the great truth of all divine revelation. The bread which sustains life is not in the ear nor in the chaff, but in the corn. Still it is true, that were there no ear and no chaff, there would be no wheat. We give them their proper importance; but not an importance beyond their meaning and design. The power of the sword is not in the scabbard, nor in the handle, but in the blade. The power of saving faith is in the saving truth believed. Of course, no truth can have power over either the heart or the hope of man that is not understood. The efficacy is in the sense, and not in the sound. The sense of the great proposition is, therefore, that which is believed, and not the mere words which contain that sense. Indeed, the faith that saves the soul communes with the sense of words, and not with the words themselves. Millions professing Christianity seem to think that there is a peculiar virtue in the mere enunciation of "the persons of the Trinity"--a sort of magic charm or cabalistic power in so many words or letters peculiarly arranged. But the Great Teacher said, "It is eternal life to know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent."2 And Isaiah said, "By the knowledge of him shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities."3 And Jesus said, "He that received the seed in good ground is he that heareth the word and understandeth it."4 Again he says, "If you continue in my word, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."5 Reprobates are sometimes described as those who "hear," but who do not understand the gospel. And they do not understand it because they will not; for ears and understanding they have, but they will not, they do not, apply them. Still the truth believed, understandingly believed, is that which instrumentally saves the soul. Hence preached the evangelical Isaiah, "Incline your ear"--"Hear," said the Lord, "and your soul shall live, and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David." These things being so, according to the constitution of the human mind and of the universe, the great proposition must be understood before it can be believed in its sanctifying and saving efficacy. But that when so believed it possesses the power, is clearly and strongly affirmed by high authority. Thus speaks the Apostle John:--"Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God." Again, says the same Apostle:--"This is the victory that overcometh the world--viz: our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?" "Many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that, believing, you may have life through his name."6 The importance and salutary power of this faith need not, methinks, to be further, argued. The justified, and sanctified, and saved build their hopes upon it--Jesus builds his church upon it--God himself founds the remedial system upon it. He that believes it is begotten and born of God--he overcomes the world--and will, most certainly, be saved and obtain through it eternal life; for no man can believe in its true meaning, and not confide in it. Demons, indeed, believe and tremble. They cannot believe that Jesus died for them. Therefore, they can have no confidence in him. They cannot appropriate one of his promises. But sinful men can believe that to them is the word of this salvation sent, and they can confide in the Lord Jesus. Through their faith in the testimony of God, and their personal confidence in the promises of Christ, they can individually say, "Christ loved me, and gave himself for me." This is to believe God, and to believe in him whom he has sent. This, indeed, is the effect of all true faith; for no one can be said to believe in Jesus that does not confide in him for his own personal salvation. It remains, then, that we develope the full meaning o€ this vital proposition as "the foundation of repentance from dead works," and as the basis of all Christian piety and humanity. In doing thin we shall, in our next chapter, attempt to develope that "REPENTANCE UNTO LIFE" which God has granted to the nations as the fruit of their faith in the divinely authenticated proposition that "Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God." 1 So it reads in the Greek of the received text. 2 John 3:1. 3 Isaiah 53:11. 4 Matthew 13:23. 5 John 8:31. 6 John 20:30-31. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 12: 01.01.05. REPENTANCE UNTO LIFE ======================================================================== CHAPTER V "He is exalted a PRINCE and a SAVIOUR, to grant repentance to Israel and remission of sins."-- Acts 5:31. "Then hath God also granted to the Gentiles repentance unto life."-- Acts 11:18. IN the Christian Institution faith and repentance are essentially and inseparably connected. As to the nature of that connection there has, indeed, been some debate amongst the learned theorists; but as to the fact itself, there is no controversy amongst intelligent Christians of any denomination. What that connection is, as well as the nature and importance of evangelical repentance, will best appear from an induction and examination of the more prominent portions of the Christian Scriptures which treat upon that subject. The book of God, in all matters of vital importance, is its own best interpreter. As, then, the import of the term repentance has sometimes been a matter of doubt with some sincere inquirers, we shall hastily glance at its history, as found in the apostolic writings. The English verb repent, and the noun repentance, are, together, found no less than sixty-four times in the common New Testament. Of the forty times we find the verb repent in the version commonly read by authority, we have two very different words representing it in the Greek original. It is generally more or less unfortunate to have two words of very different etymology uniformly translated by one and the same term. It sometimes creates considerable ambiguity as to the sense of the term or the passage in which it is found. There is, indeed, in this case a very fortunate circumstance, which throws much light upon the whole subject of repentance. It is this:--One of these terms, 1 which, etymologically and in common usage, intimates mere regret or concern for something done, without respect to a change of the affections or of the conduct of an individual, is never found in connection with faith, or any of the gospel facts reported in the Christian records. In the case of Judas it is found, but in such a connection of things as clearly intimates its proper sense. In that case, all agree that it indicated neither change of heart nor change of life. Nor is it in all the Christian Scriptures ever found in the imperative mood. God never commanded any person to repent in the style of Judas, of whom it is said, he repented and afterwards hung himself. Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, so uses this term as to indicate that he himself repented of a good action--and that there was a repentance to be repented of, and "a repentance not to be repented of." All this ambiguity is the fault of translators. The words used by the Apostle are different, and in all reason ought to have been translated by different words. Then all would have understood him on the subject of evangelical repentance much better. Every one knows that a person may sometimes regret, or be sorry for, a good action; especially when, on conferring a benefit on any one, that benefit is abused to the injury of him that receives it. Paul, indeed, regretted that he had written a very good letter to the Corinthians, because it had produced excessive grief and sorrow among them. But seeing that it had resulted in a "repentance to salvation," he ceased to regret that he had written it.1 God himself is said "to repent" and "not to repent;" but as there is no change of his affections, no reformation in his repentance, the term used is not that connected with the gospel. "I have sworn," said he, "and will not repent."2 "Thou art an eternal priest." Does he not here mean that he will never regret nor recall this appointment? While, then, we are sometimes bewildered by having these two words, so radically different in sense, translated by one and the same representative on every occasion, when the special import of one of them is understood, we may, perhaps, gain a more distinct view of the proper import of the other, or of that repentance which is to life and to salvation. It being already shown that one of these words does not indicate any change in the affections, any transformation of character, any real reformation of life, and is, therefore, never found in the imperative mood in the sacred Scriptures, and that the other term is exclusively used in commanding and setting forth that change of heart and life connected with salvation, we have in the force and meaning of the word selected a very strong intimation of that which constitutes that repentance to life which is now the subject of our present inquiry. It is not, then, without good reason that we conclude from the history of this term, so far as already traced, that neither remorse nor regret for the past, neither sorrow for evils done, nor purposes of amendment of life, fill up the meaning or exhaust the force of the word selected by the Apostles. But tracing inductively the history of a word chosen by the Holy Spirit to reveal his will to us, which occurs not less than fifty-eight times in the New Institution, we may, certainly, arrive at a very clear comprehension of its meaning. A few specifications shall suffice for our present purpose. It is specially worthy of notice in this investigation that in the first and last communications of the Messiah we find an imperative repent. His harbinger, also, introduced his personal advent with the command, "Repent, for the reign of heaven approaches." In the commencement of his own personal ministry, his first discourse was, "Repent, for the reign of heaven approaches." His twelve Apostles, under their first commission, we are informed by Mark, went abroad proclaiming repentance to people. The same proclamation was made by the seventy evangelists sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Indeed, the ministry of John is characterized as the proclamation of "the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins."4 So that during the personal ministry of the Lord Jesus, and that of his harbinger, repentance was the burthen of every discourse to the people. The questions propounded to the preachers by the more conscientious portions of their hearers, clearly intimate what was their understanding of the precept "repent" The question, "What shall we do?" generally propounded by those who first heard them, intimates that personal reformation, and not mere change of views or feelings, was implied in the precept itself. The profession of repentance without reformation or fruits worthy of it, they were clearly informed, would avail nothing. So evident it is that their contemporaries understood by the precept "repent" what we associate with the word "reform." Nor was it different under the last commission given to the twelve Apostles. It is true, the word repent is not found in the version of it by Matthew or Mark, but when expounded by the Apostles themselves, and when reported by Luke, it is evident that they understood the preaching of the gospel to be the preaching of repentance, with new arguments and motives. According to Luke, the Messiah, immediately before his ascension, said that "repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name amongst all nations, beginning at Jerusalem." So that with great propriety, the first precept given by Peter in his opening speech on the memorable Pentecost, to his inquiring audience, was "repent and be baptized every one of you." Not to multiply quotations, it may suffice to add, that Paul not only represented his whole ministry of the word as "the preaching of repentance towards God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ," but also assured the Athenians that, under the new constitution of grace as ministered by Jesus, "God commands all men, everywhere, to repent." Even Christians, when they grow cold or worldly in their profession, are, in the last epistles addressed by the Saviour, through his servant John, to the churches of Asia, commanded to repent and do their first works. Truly, then, we may say with Peter, that "Jesus is exalted a Prince and a Saviour, to grant repentance to Israel and the remission of sins." It must, we think, appear obvious to all upon a little reflection, that the proclamation of repentance is a proclamation of mercy--hence the connection between repentance and remission of sins. If God had not intended to forgive all men on repentance, to what purpose could he have commanded all men to repent? Repentance was never preached to fallen angels or apostate spirits, because there could be offered to them no motive to repent. Mercy, then, is always preached when repentance is preached. Hence the necessity of faith as "the foundation of repentance from dead works." This single consideration--that the proclamation of repentance is a proclamation of mercy, and that mercy propounds motives in the gospel to induce to repentance methinks ought to satisfy every reflecting mind that the connection between faith and repentance is that of cause and effect, or of means and end. Unless the motives are accredited, the arguments of mercy are impotent and unavailing. Nay, indeed, they are as though they were not. So true is it that "he that cometh to God" must not only "believe that he exists," but also "that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him." But how could any one believe that God is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him, unless God has so promised in the gospel. Repentance, indeed, antecedent to faith, to me appears impossible; for how could any one repent of sin against God if he did not believe that he had sinned against God! And how could the mercy of God afford any encouragement to repentance unless that mercy is reported to us and believed! So, then, repentance comes by faith, as faith by hearing, as hearing by the word of God. As no one could hear God unless God had first spoken, and as no one could believe a message that he has never heard, so no one could repent of sin, as respects God, who has not first believed in his mercy. Notwithstanding these very obvious reflections, and almost primary and self-evident truths, there are a few learned men who, by reason of the fallacies of their own metaphysics, argue that repentance, or a change of heart, must precede faith; and thus faith, instead of purifying the heart, is itself the offspring of a pure heart. They quote a saying of the Messiah reported by Mark--"Repent and believe the gospel"--in proof of their theory. The argument, thence deduced, is, that in the collocation of these words, repentance precedes faith. But is this a sound argument? Is the order of words in a sentence the necessary order of things or of effects? Did not Peter command those who believed his first discourse, on asking what they should do, to repent and to be baptized? Their propounding this question was upon the admission of his testimony; and, therefore, his commanding them not to believe, but to repent, is a clear intimation of the relation between faith and repentance. One fact is enough in this case:--the persons addressed already believed in God, and are now commanded to repent of their sins against God, and to believe the gospel. "You believe in God," said the Messiah, "believe also in me." Paul did preach repentance the Jew and to the Greek, who admitted there was a God, and then preached also faith in Jesus Christ, and a corresponding repentance. The same theorists who place repentance before faith, annihilate the grace of God which appears in the gracious proclamation of mercy announced by Peter to the council of the Jewish nation, assembled to intimidate the Apostles in the work of their ministry. Peter affirmed that Jesus was exalted to the right hand of God to be a Prince and a Saviour, to grant repentance to Israel. This they interpret as indicating that God works repentance in the hearts of the elect. "Israel represents the chosen race;" and "granting repentance" is with them "giving it into their hearts." We have no business with their theory--to prove it true or to prove it false. Our business is to show that such would be a misconstruction of a very sublime and gracious declaration, and would certainly neutralize, if not stultify, the word ALSO in the declaration of the brotherhood in Jerusalem, made to Peter, some seven years after this time:--"Then hath God ALSO granted to the Gentiles repentance unto life." What candid mind does not perceive that, if Israel represents the elect in the one passage, the term Gentiles must represent the non-elect in this passage; and if the words "granting repentance" mean specially working it in the hearts of the elect, in the one passage, in the other it must mean that he works it in the heart of the non-elect? This is still farther corroborated by the word ALSO; for in the similarity of the words "granting repentance to Israel," and "granting repentance to the Gentiles," ALSO, superadded to the latter, must refer to the former, and affirm that in whatever sense he granted repentance to Israel he has granted it to the Gentiles. Having, as we conceive, now rescued this passage from the theoretic doctors, we shall next endeavour to appreciate it in its apostolic value and evangelical importance. It is, as we must think, a very sublime and exhilarating annunciation of a very grand scheme of mercy and deliverance to the whole world, Jew and Gentile, consequent upon the coronation of the new King of the Universe. This is the rudimental conception which, in the Apostle’s speech, preceded the gracious development. As if he had said--"You the sanhedrim, in council assembled, condemned to death and slew the Lord Jesus, hanging him upon a tree. But God condemned your sentence by raising him from the dead, and exalting him to his own right hand to be a PRINCE and a SAVIOUR; not, indeed, exalting him to pronounce upon you an irreversible doom of perdition and ruin for this your unparalleled crime, but for the purpose of tendering repentance as a foundation of remission of sins to his own nation and people--the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--his ancient friends." To "grant repentance" is, then, to make room for the advantage of a change of views concerning him--a change of feeling or of heart to him--and a change of conduct towards him. It is to make possible a plenary remission of sins to all who are truly sorry for their sins, and, forsaking them, turn to the Lord. "To grant repentance" is, then, a most sublime indication of the mercy of God and of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is a very sententious and summary annunciation, that a system of grace and mercy is now adopted to lead man to repentance, that he "may obtain remission of sins, and an inheritance amongst them that are sanctified." This magnificent display of the glory of Divine grace was first tendered to the Jews--to those persons whose hearts were full of murder, and whose hands were full of blood. This was superlatively kind and divinely great; for certainly, if there was yet room in the bosom of God to allow repentance to Israel, no other nation or people should ever after despair. To confine the first publication of the gospel to the Jews, and to press it upon the acceptance of that hardened, disobedient, and wicked race was laying a broad, and deep, and solid basis of hope in the mercy of God to all other people to whom it might afterwards be tendered. To them it was first sent, as was the Messiah himself, in person. But now, the Lord be praised and glorified for ever! it is most cordially and most importunately granted--tendered to all nations of the earth, with the assurance that Jesus has not only become the propitiation for the sins of the Jews, but also for the sins of the whole world; so that faith, repentance, and baptism are, by the commandment of the everlasting God, now announced to all the world for the remission sins. Repentance, then, is a divinely chartered right, vouchsafed to every nation under heaven, through the mediation of the Lord Messiah. Hence Paul, the ambassador of the Messiah to the Gentiles assured the idolatrous Athenians, that "God commandeth all men everywhere, to repent." The universality of this promulgation of repentance still farther merits our special attention. Its universality proves the universality of man’s sin, the universality of God’s grace, and the universality of human misery and ruin without it. If God commanded all men, everywhere, to repent, it certainly intimates that all men, everywhere, need repentance--that all men are guilty before God. This is not merely the weakness and frailty of human nature, so often complained of and lamented; it is not the mere imputation to us of the sin of our common ancestor and representative; but it is our voluntary ignorance of God--our voluntary ignorance of his will--or our mere indifference to the whole subject of the being, character, and will of God. It is, in other cases, our rebellion against his precepts, our disregard of a sense of duty, of the dictates of conscience, the known and often repeated violations of his law. A mere want of that perfection which he necessarily and kindly would require of us, alone renders all the world guilty before God. But more especially the present and most fearful condemnation that now presses upon that world to which we now belong, is--"that light has come into the world"--not natural light, nor legal light, but evangelical light--the light of life eternal, and men choose darkness--prefer ignorance, lust, and passion, to the light of the knowledge of the glory of God radiating from the face of the Lord Jesus Christ. Hence the oft-repeated and awful oracle--"Unless you repent, you shall all perish." God, then, justly commands all men, everywhere, to repent. But the universality of the precept not only proves that all the world is guilty before God, but that "the mercy of God is unto all and upon all" that do repent. It is a promulgation of the universality of God’s grace and mercy. He has granted repentance to Jew and Gentile, because he has grace and mercy for every penitent Jew and Gentile on the face of the earth. How real, then, the provisions of almighty love! How vast the benevolence of God! Truly God has inexpressibly loved mankind, when "he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him might not perish, but have everlasting life." "He sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved." It is, as the sequel may show, a conviction of this that leads man to reformation of life, that reconciles him to God, and subdues his heart to the obedience of faith. But again: the universality of the proclamation of repentance renders it universally indispensable to forgiveness. Faith, without it, is dead and unavailing. Works of any sort, without it, are unacceptable to God, and of no salutary influence upon him that performs them. Without repentance there is, therefore, no salvation to any human being; for certainly, if the universality o€ a precept demonstrates the universality of its objections; if the universality of grace proves that all men may participate of it, so the universality of the precept repent, argues the necessity of repentance on the part of every individual, in order to his personal salvation; and hence the conclusion is as logically as awfully true--no repentance, no salvation. Still, it is needful to press still farther upon the attention of the reader that faith is as truly "the foundation of repentance from dead works," as testimony is the foundation of faith. But faith receives its character and power from the character of the truth believed. Here arises the difference between what has improperly been contrasted legal and evangelical repentance--terms which define nothing--which are as useless as they are unscriptural. True, indeed, there is a repentance which arises from the consideration of the consequences of our actions, sometimes called legal, set forth in the words before defined--a concern and terror on account of the fruit of our doings; and there is also a change of mind arising from the consideration of the principles from which our actions proceed. Neither of these ideas, however, nor the designation of worldly and godly sorrow for our actions, expresses the view which we desire to communicate. There is a repentance that arises from a discovery of the character and grace of God developed in the gospel, in making provision for the pardon of sin, which characterizes that change of mind designated repentance unto life as a "repentance towards God;" and there is a repentance which arises merely from the dread of punishment, without any hatred of sin or love of holiness. An enlightened and genuine convert to the gospel repents of every antecedent repentance; for, in truth, a repentance that merely springs from the shame or penalty of transgression, is such a proof of moral degradation as to call for repentance from every one that knows the grace of God in truth. Hence the discriminating Paul taught the Corinthians that there was a repentance not to be repented of, which clearly implies that there might be as, in fact, there is, a repentance that needs to "be repented of." Thus are we led, step by step, up to the apprehension of "repentance unto life." Such a repentance implies, because it requires, an antecedent faith in some proposition having life in it; for the life is not in the repentance, but in that to which it leads. The life is proposed as the end, while repentance is but the means to attain it. Yet are they inseparably connected; for this life is not without repentance, nor this repentance without life. Views there are, in the faith, and motives inspired by it, which, when perceived and possessed, work this mysterious and sublime change. It is light that makes manifest every thing. Yet light is very different from the things manifested by it. It is the truth developed in the great proposition that God is; by Christ, reconciling a world to himself, not imputing to men their trespasses, but beseeching them to be reconciled to him, because he has made his Son a sin-offering for us, that we might be made perfectly righteous through him. Now, all this is comprehended in that cardinal proposition, on the belief of which the Lord promised to build his church, viz:--that "Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God." It is this sublime proposition, apprehended and realized by faith, that works repentance unto life; that subdues, softens, pacifies, and reconciles the heart to God, and prepares it to be a temple of the Holy Spirit. This is that cardinal element in the gospel which contains in it the principle of eternal life. Christ, indeed, is our life. "Our life is hid with Christ in God." But to us Christ is first presented in the testimony concerning him; then he is in the faith of him that believes that testimony; then in his heart he becomes "the hope of glory; " and, finally, in his life of righteousness and holiness, he is manifested to the world. This, indeed, constitutes "a reformation not to be repented of." Now, the preaching of the gospel is the only divinely-appointed means for producing this sublimely moral and spiritual renovation of heart. Christ must be revealed to us by the holy Spirit in all the fulness of his grace, and all the attractions of his love. He must be made to stand out before us as "the brightness of his Father’s glory"--as the "express image" of his glorious and lovely character. His obedience unto death, his voluntary sacrifice of himself for our sins, the unspeakable value of his blood, as the only means of expiation and personal purification, must be fully set before the mind, as well as the necessity of his death, to honour and justify God in justifying a sinful man. If, indeed, repentance unto life be a change of our views, of our affections, and of our conduct, as it most certainly is, then that person, in relation to whom our views, affections, and conduct are to be changed, must be developed to our apprehension in such an attitude and character as to be the proper means of accomplishing such a change. The revelation of the Father, and of the Son, is not made to us through the works of nature or the schemes of providence and moral government. This revelation is exclusively confined to the work of redemption. Hence the necessity of correct views and a just appreciation of the nature of the death of Christ as an atoning sacrifice. That is the radiating centre of the whole remedial system. It is in that we discover all the divine excellencies. It is there, and only there, that inflexible justice, immaculate purity, inviolate truth, and infinite mercy, appear in perfect harmony with each other, combining all their effulgence and glory in opening for us a way into the holiest of all. Beholding there, as in a reflecting mirror, the purity of God and our own deformity; the majesty of his government and the dignity of his law; the malignity and hatefulness of sin, in contrast with the beauty and loveliness of holiness, righteousness, and truth, we are changed into the same image from glory to glory, by the Spirit of the Lord. Thus contemplating him whom our sins have pierced, we begin to mourn over them, and to abhor them; we prostrate ourselves before his throne of mercy, and, with the humble and penitent publican, we say; "God be merciful to me a sinner." Such is that repentance unto life which God, through Jesus Christ, has granted to the Jew and to the Greek. In the Geneva version of the New Testament, as well as in some other ancient English versions, "amend your life" and "amendment of life" are used for repent and repentance. Reform and reformation, in the judgment of some of our best critics, are to be preferred to repent or amend your lives. But all sound interpreters agree in this; that, while a change of mind, including a change of views and a change of feelings, is, by the etymology and use of the original term, clearly indicated, and essential to the requisitions of the gospel; still the consummation and evidence of "repentance unto life," or of "repentance towards God," is a new and holy life. To which, indeed, a change of views and a change of the heart are indispensable. Therefore it is that the phrases "repentance unto life," "reconciliation to God," "reformation," are representatives of the same great radical change contemplated under different forms and figures of speech. True repentance never fails to manifest itself in all cases of injury to the person, character, or property of our neighbour, by an immediate redress, as far as possible, of any injury we may have done him. The Jewish law of offerings for trespass on the rights of others, made a restitution and satisfaction to the injured in all cases in which it was possible, essential to forgiveness. No acknowledgment to the Lord--no offering to the priest, could obtain remission, unless the injury done was redressed to the full amount possible. Zaccheus repented of all his wrongs done to his neighbours in this way, and was honoured by the Messiah in a very public and impressive manner. It has reason and law, and the approbation of the Messiah, to enforce it. Christians, when delinquent in any duty, when backsliding or simply growing cold, are also commanded to repent--to do their first works. Every allusion to repentance unto life indicates that it is no mere change of a creed, a theory, or a profession. It is a real, positive change of heart and of life. "Old things are passed away, all things are become new." "Fruits meet for repentance" are always expected to be consequent upon the profession of it. Without these, the pretension is idle and deceptious. These fruits are truth, piety, justice, humanity; the crucifixion of the flesh, with all its affections and lusts. "The grace of God which brings salvation teaches us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present evil world." Such is evangelical repentance, in deed and in truth. Its connection with faith as its fruit, as its constant concomitant, is, we hope, from the evidences adduced, and the accompanying reflections, sufficiently apparent. Its whole importance in the Christian system cannot be contemplated apart from other precepts and duties very intimately associated with it. We have but in part traced its connection with faith, with the word of truth, with the Spirit of God, with the sacrifice of the Messiah. It is intimately associated with Christian baptism. So intimate is this connection, that both by John the Baptist and Peter, and the other Apostles, it is made to precede it as essential to its practical benefit to the subject of that holy ordinance. It will again fall in our path to hear and contemplate the connection between faith, repentance, baptism, and the remission of sins. Meantime, it must suffice to say, that all the links of that golden chain of grace which connects and binds our souls to the throne of God, are most intimately connected with one another; and the institutions and ordinances that call for them as prerequisites, are most happily devised, not only to display that connection, but also to make each one of them contribute, in the proper time and place, that amount of blessing to us which our condition and circumstances in life so necessarily require. The duty of repentance is, indeed, always obligatory on every one that commits any act of impiety or immorality. Without repentance, pardon of sin is impossible. God cannot forgive the impenitent. It would be doing the offender a great wrong, and God a great dishonour. There is a state of mind suitable to the reception of the grace of forgiveness. In the absence of that state, it could not be enjoyed. Hence, motives to lead man to this state are indispensable; and according to the motives, so is that state of mind to which the Lord has always been pleased to vouchsafe this gift. He is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance--thereby indicating that then, and not till then, can any one be saved. 1 Metamelomai. 2 2 Corinthians 6:10. Metanoian eis soteerian. Metanoia, and not metamelomai, is the word connected with salvation. How much better, then, to have given the contrast to the English reader which the Apostle gave to the Greek reader. In the new version the whole passage reads as follows:--"I now rejoice, not that you were made sorry, but that your sorrow produced reformation: for you were made to sorrow in a godly manner, that you might be injured by us in nothing. For godly sorrow produces a reformation to salvation, never to be repented of; but the sorrow of the world produces death." As descriptive of godly sorrow he adds:--"Behold, now, this very thing--your being made sorry with a godly sorrow--what carefulness it wrought in you; yes, what clearing of yourselves; yes, what indignation; yes, what fear; yes, what earnest desire; yes, what zeal; yes, what revenge." 3 Metamelomai, not metanoeoo. 4 Mark 1:4. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 13: 01.01.06. COVENANTS OF PROMISE - CIRCUMCISION ======================================================================== CHAPTER SIX "And he gave him the covenant of circumcision; and Abraham begat Isaac, and circumcised him the eighth day."--STEPHEN. Acts 7:8. THE Creator of the universe, the Father of angels and of men, has always operated according to a previous purpose, and governed according to an antecedent law. Creation, providence, and redemption are, indeed, but the execution and development of eternal counsels. The universe is one grand system, the result of a well-matured plan, the consummation of a previously-existing scheme. It is not an accident, a contingency, a fortuitous concourse of atoms; but a sublime system of adaptations tending to a complete and perfect development of its author, according to the intellectual and moral capacities of his rational offspring. With our greatest apostle we say--"Of him, and through him, and to him are all things: to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen!" So much of the universe, its author, and plan, as man can understand and enjoy, as he is now constituted, God has kindly opened to his contemplation and apprehension. All beyond this is designed for future development, or for other ranks of intelligence above us. Meantime, a volume has been kindly presented to man, containing as account of himself, his origin, present condition, and future destiny. It is such a revelation of God and of man, such a record of the past, and such an anticipation of the future, as meets all the intellectual wants and moral exigencies of the human race. This divinely-inspired volume proceeds upon the plan of a gradual and progressive development, adapting itself to all the conditions of human existence. The human family having an infancy, a childhood, a manhood, and an old age, the Book of God not only recognises these conditions of our existence, but admirably adapts itself to them all. We have the bud and the blossom, the green and the ripe fruit of humanity, as we have them in other departments of nature. So have we a characteristic unity of plan, a characteristic progression and development in all the works and ways of God to man. It is the same great mind, the same supreme intelligence, the same active benevolence, working everywhere and at all times in the communication of himself to his intelligent and moral offspring. God appears first as a Creator; next as a Preserver; then as Governor of his own universe. In all these attitudes, as in the special case of man’s redemption, he not only uniformly acts according to a previous plan, but in all his plans and operations there is a peculiar unity or similarity of action. In creation he operated through authoritative precepts. "He spoke, and it was done;" he commanded, and, from nothing previously existing, the hosts of the universe arose at his bidding; his simple volition, assuming the form of an oral precept, gave birth to the universe and all that inhabit it. The six days’ operations make but one imperative sentence, solemnly pronounced. The word of God is, therefore, the Constitution of the Universe. As the human body to the soul, so is the word of God to his volition. His word is but the vehicle through which his creative power manifests itself. It is the mere form or embodiment of his volition--the annunciation of his purpose. God always works by means, never without them. The means, indeed, are but the envelope of his will. The connection between the means and the end is not always apparent, and probably never fully understood. Can any one show the necessary connection between commanding light to spring out of darkness, and the shining forth of light? Yet, at the bidding of God, darkness brought forth light! We still enlighten the world by making the darkest and blackest of all things the parent of light, and the medium of general information. What is more opaque than a metallic type? What is blacker than ink? Yet these are the suns and the stars of the intellectual and moral world. It is not the carte blanche, the pure white paper, but the dark letters upon it, that enlighten the world. Probably the means and the end were never more alike, nor more philosophically connected, than in the case of bringing light out of darkness by a metallic type covered with ink. The universe, resting upon the word of God, the embodiment of his will, has, therefore, a fixed and immutable constitution. Nature (a term not generally well understood) is but the constitutional operation of a conservative law. Man, in his physical constitution, is wholly at the disposal and under the control of the common law that presides over the destinies of all other terrestrial bodies. But he has a mind as well as a body. He has a moral as well as a physical constitution. His happiness is not earthly and sensual, but designed to be both spiritual and heavenly. Hence the necessity of a moral constitution for moral agents capable of enjoying a spiritual system. Man must, indeed, be governed by some supreme divinity. He must have a constituted and absolute sovereign Lord and Master. And there must be some supreme constitution, or law, or covenant, by which his Sovereign and himself can understand each other and maintain perpetual amity. He may honour the God that made him, or make a god for himself. A god he must have. And he may accept of a constitution or covenant from God, or make one with Satan and ruin. A covenant he must have. Thus advance we through the portico of experience to the threshold of the temple of revelation. Standing here on consecrated ground, we feel the need of just such a system--such constitutional provisions as are indicated in the "covenants of promise," with which the volumes of divine revelation abound, and by which these volumes are divided into several parts. The Bible covenants are connected with the names of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Aaron, David, Jesus the Messiah. These are all, more or less, public transactions. We shall, therefore, severally examine them, and deduce from the analysis some practical and useful conclusions. But first it may be asked, What do we understand by a covenant? An analysis of the covenants themselves will best indicate this. But in anticipation of the result of such an examination, we shall now define the term. Amongst men we have covenants. In these there are parties. One may sometimes be the covenanter--the other the covenantee. The former propounds--the latter accepts the stipulation. These terms are, however, seldom used. Both parties are most generally both covenanters and covenantees. They both stipulate and re-stipulate. Such covenants are agreements or bonds entered into between two or more parties on certain terms. Such the Greeks called a suntheekee--the Latins a fœdus--we a covenant, because that word literally indicates a coming together--an agreement. With us, indeed, a constitution, or a form of government, because an agreement on certain principles between the government and the citizens, is; to all intents and purposes, a covenant. The Hebrew term berith, derived from barar, to purify, indicating a purification, usually by sacrifice, is that used to represent these transactions in the book of Genesis and throughout the Jewish Scriptures. This word is represented in the Septuagint, or Greek version, by the term diatheekee, and never by suntheekee. In a suntheekee, or covenant between man and man, the parties are or may be equal. They are always human beings. But in a diatheekee one of the parties may be so far above the other in rank and nature, as to propound all the items of the institution or covenant to the other party; to which that party must accede in order to the participation of the blessings or benefits proposed in the institution. Hence, precepts as well as promises are called covenants when they emanate from God, and have any benefits annexed to them. When any service is exacted, or any duty commanded, by an offended party, and made the condition of friendship or agreement with the offending party, it may be called a diatheekee in the Jewish acceptation. Divine covenants having always been founded upon sacrifice is, indeed, the best reason for their having been called berith. It is very obvious that without sacrifice to purify the party taken into covenant with God, no transaction of this sort was ever valid, or regarded as ratified. This may, indeed, be the reason why the first covenant or charter given to man is not called anywhere in the Scripture a covenant, though possessing all the constituents of a covenant, sacrifice only excepted. But as theologians of all schools have called this transaction a covenant, wanting sacrifice, we shall in our list of covenants give to it its usual title, and proceed to adduce these public transactions as they occur in the Jewish writings. When God instituted human society by the creation of the original pair, he immediately granted to them a charter or institution indicative of their relations to him, and declarative of the conditions of their future happiness. This has sometimes been theologically called a covenant of works, in contrast with a covenant of grace. But there were no works prescribed in this institution. It was a charter, a stipulation, and a guarantee of liberty and life to man. It removed all suspense and uncertainty as to the extent of his liberty or the continuance of his felicity. It was liberty and life secured by an immutable charter on no other condition than to observe a prescribed limit. Its seal was the tree of life, by the fruit of which our progenitors might have lived for ever, did they but keep within the precincts of that liberty and bliss kindly secured to them by this Divine institution. Such was the original charter vouchsafed to man. The second covenant or institution of favour bestowed upon our race was that conferred on the father and founder of the postdiluvian world. After the deluge God kindly gave to Noah an assurance that he would never repeat that calamity again. It was a charter concerning "day and night, seed-time and harvest, summer and winter," in all coming time. Jeremiah 33:20-25. Genesis 9:1-9. Its seal or pledge is the rainbow. The third institution was that tendered to Abraham in the seventy-fifth year of his life, and of the world 2083, guarantying to him a son, a great public benefactor, in whom all the families of the earth should be blessed. These three institutions were of a very public character, being tendered to the human race. The whole world is interested in each of them. Life and liberty were covenanted in the first; day and night, seed-time and harvest in the second; a redeemer and benefactor is promised in the third. But to secure and develop all the blessings of the third, other institutions were annexed. One concerning an inheritance for the family from which the world’s benefactor was to arise; the other concerning a special providence which in all temporal favours would distinguish the family of this most illustrious philanthropist. That concerning the inheritance is recorded in the fifteenth chapter of Genesis, and that concerning the special providence in the seventeenth. The former occurred immediately before the birth of Ishmael, in the eighty-sixth of Abraham, and the latter about the same time before the birth of Isaac, in the ninety-ninth of Abraham. The covenant guarantying the inheritance was confirmed over sacrifice; that concerning the family, by circumcision. The land was to be bought at the price of the blood of its inhabitants,--the family blessings by insulating the people of Abraham from all other families by the circumcision of the males of his household while yet infants, without their knowledge or consent. This is the transaction which Stephen denominated the "covenant of circumcision." The covenant first stipulated with Abraham on his departure from Ur of Chaldea is by Paul called "the covenant concerning Christ." That concerning Christ was in the seventy-fifth, while that concerning the flesh or circumcision was in the ninety-ninth of Abraham. These transactions, though not so extensive and public as the three former institutions, are nevertheless both public and national. The whole world is interested in the first three; the whole family of Abraham through Isaac and Jacob in the last two. True, the Gentiles as well as the Jews derive advantages, though not the same advantages, from these institutions. By locating the family of Abraham in a well-defined country, whose boundaries are given, and by putting upon every male child an indelible mark in the flesh declarative of the covenant with Abraham, the Gentiles are assisted in deciding the pretensions of Jesus of Nazareth to be the covenanted Saviour of the world. But as there were two great promises in these institutions vouchsafed to Abraham, one concerning his natural, the other concerning his supernatural offspring--and as the whole human race was interested in the one or the other, or in both, each one of these promises was at a proper period developed in a great national institution--one represented by Sarah and the other by Hagar, the typical mothers of Abraham’s offspring. Two kingdoms, one of this world, and one "not of this world," were built upon these two institutions. That of this world Paul allegorically sets forth in the character and relation of Hagar and her son Ishmael; the other, "not of this world," he sets forth in the same style in the relation and character of Sarah and her son Isaac. One of these was dispensed to all Israel by the mediator Moses--the other to all the believing sons of Abraham in all nations by the mediator Jesus. One of these institutions, from Mount Sinai, is now called the Old Covenant, generating to bondage; the other is called the New Covenant, from Jerusalem above, of the character of the free woman, the mother of all the free-born sons of God. Besides these public institutions, we shall allude to two others--one concerning the priesthood of Aaron, the other concerning the throne of David; one concerning the mitre, the other concerning the sceptre of Israel. The priesthood was covenanted to Aaron, the sceptre to David. Each of these is designated as a covenant. "Thou shalt anoint the sons of Aaron as thou didst anoint their father, that they may minister to me in the priest’s office: for their anointing shall surely be an everlasting priesthood throughout their generations." Exodus 40:13-15. Again, "Behold I give unto the son of Eleazer, the son of Aaron, my covenant of peace: and he shall have it, and his seed after him, even the covenant of an everlasting priesthood." Numbers 25:12-13. Concerning the kingdom he saith--"The Lord hath rent the kingdom of Israel from thee this day, and hath given it to a neighbour of thine, better than thou. The STRENGTH OF ISRAEL will not lie, nor repent: for he is not a man that he should repent." 1 Samuel 15:28. "The Lord hath sworn to David to translate the kingdom from the house of Saul, and to set up the throne of David over Israel and over Judah, from Dan even to Beersheba." 2 Samuel 3:9-10. "I have made a covenant with my chosen; I have sworn unto David my servant, Thy seed will I establish for ever, and build up thy throne to all generations." Psalms 89:3. "Once have I sworn by my holiness, that I will not lie unto David: his seed shall endure for ever, and his throne as the sun before me." Psalms 89:35-36. From all these transactions of divine authority, these gifts and promises of God, considered in the aggregate, and each one minutely analyzed, we come to the following conclusions:-- 1. Of these nine covenants, God was always one party. They mere all divine institutions. 2. Seven of them were made with individual men. These men were Adam, Noah, Abraham, renewed to Isaac, and again to Jacob, Aaron, and David; but they were all public men, heads and representatives of families and nations. 3. Each of them had a blessing peculiar to itself. They were all gracious. The first guarantied life and liberty; the second, day and night, seed-time and harvest, without a second and universal deluge; the third, the blessing of all nations, spiritually and eternally, in a son of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the fourth secured an inheritance; the fifth promised a special providence; the sixth conferred the office of the priesthood--atonement, intercession, and benediction, in the name of Jehovah, to Aaron and his first-born sons; the seventh gave the sceptre and throne of Israel to David and his sons for ever. 4. Two of them became the constitutions of kingdoms. The Jewish state was founded upon that mediated by Moses at Mount Sinai. The Christian church is founded upon that promised in Jeremiah 31:31-34, developed in the Apostolic Records--especially Hebrews 8:1-13. 5. Each of them had an appropriate seal, pledge, or token connected with it. They were solemnly closed and confirmed bonds, or charters. There is a singular appositeness and congeniality between the; seals and pledges of these institutions and their provisions. For example, the Covenant of Life and Liberty, or the Adamic Institution, had the Tree of Life for its pledge and security. The Covenant against a Deluge, guarantying day and night, seed-time and harvest, has the Rainbow in the bosom of a dark and portentous cloud; that concerning the Messiah had a simple oath; that concerning an inheritance bought with blood was sealed by the usual signs of ancient treaties--the parties passing between the divided bodies of victims; that concerning temporal blessings connected with the fleshly offspring of Abraham, was confirmed by circumcision; that at Mount Sinai, ministered by Moses, was sealed with animal blood and sacrifices; the New Covenant, with the most precious blood of the Son of God; the Covenant of Peace with Aaron and his sons, by an oath; and that with David concerning the sceptre and throne of Israel, with an oath; the kingdom of the Messiah, as now administered by a Royal Priest, Melchizedeck’s antitype, is also confirmed by an oath. The seals of all these public charters, institutions, or covenants, (for these words in their respective prominent attributes fully represent them,) were, then--the Tree of Life, the Rainbow, Sacrifice, Circumcision, Animal Blood, smeared or sprinkled, (whence came the red wafer and the red wax,) the Oath of God. Of these institutions those sealed with the oath of God are the most sublime. "The covenant confirmed of God" in relation to the Messiah, had no seal but the oath of God. Hence the two covenants emblematic of its virtues--the mitre and the throne--were solemnized by oaths. The covenant of peace through blood, and covenant of royalty and power, complete the official glory of the Messiah. The Lord has given him for a covenant, a sacrifice, a purifier to his people. "He is made of God to us wisdom, righteousness, holiness, and redemption." Concerning seals or signs, wherever God has annexed them, we have to remark, that they are either monumental of the facts on which the covenant is founded, or they are pledges and seals securing to the covenantees the blessings of the institution. Circumcision was both a sign and a seal. So Paul affirms. Of Abraham he says, "He received the sign of circumcision," a "seal of the righteousness of that faith" which yet uncircumcised he possessed. He uses terms indicative of very different ideas. A sign, (seemeion,) a token or monument of a transaction; and a seal, (sphragis,) a guarantee, a pledge of approbation, a pledge confirmatory. Circumcision was then a sign to all the circumcised, a token, a monument significant of the separation of Israel to God under a special providence. Signs intimate the same things to all the proper subjects of them; consequently, as a sign, circumcision intimated the same thing to every individual--Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac--or any infant son or servant taken into that institution. But it sealed to Abraham what it did not seal to Ishmael, Isaac, or any other person. It was to him A SEAL of righteousness before possessed--a "righteousness of faith." This it could not be to them, nor to any infant or unbelieving Pagan. Nor, indeed, was it ever a seal to any other human being of any moral excellence, faith, or righteousness possessed before it. Its being a divine token, or mark confirmatory or approbatory of the single faith of Abraham, was altogether peculiar; because by his faith he became the father of all believers in all ages; and, therefore, the covenant of circumcision was given to him alone in approbation of his faith. His faith is thus made a model faith. If a million of believing men had been circumcised after the manner of Abraham, not one of them could say his faith was a model faith, or that his circumcision was a divine seal approbatory of his faith, nor could any one say it of them. On this subject there are volumes of false and absurd reasonings from men who, on other subjects, are learned and rational. The style of the Apostle is, indeed, itself indicative of all this difference. He says "he received the sign of circumcision--"the token of the covenant--"a seal of the righteousness of the faith." It was the token and a seal. To all it was the token--to Abraham alone it was a seal of the righteousness of a faith before possessed. As the token, it was common to all--as a seal, it was peculiar to one, and only one man of all the race. To every other human being circumcised according to the covenant, it signified the same thing. It did not mean one thing to A and another to B. It signified no spiritual blessings, it sealed no eternal blessings to Isaac more than to Ishmael--to Jacob, more than Esau--to John, more than to Judas. This is true, whether contemplated as a sign or a seal. The seal to a bond confirms and secures just the specifications of the bond; and neither more nor less than the specifications to every one named in it. Now, Annas and Caiaphas, Judas and Paul, were just as proper subjects for circumcision as David or Daniel, as Moses or Aaron. It secured only the provisions of that covenant. But neither the promise of the Holy Spirit, nor remission of sins, nor eternal life, were among the provisions of the covenant of circumcision. It, therefore, was neither the sign nor the seal of them. It was a covenant in the flesh, pertaining to the flesh, and confined to the flesh, specified in the covenant. It was not for all flesh, but for some flesh--for that flesh only which was in Abraham, or which would amalgamate with the flesh of Abraham. Abraham’s son, Abraham’s servant, or any one with or without faith, that would join with them in their fortunes, might receive it; but no one else. Indeed, of all covenants, human or divine, it may be affirmed that their benefits belong alike to every covenantee--that whatever is legally covenanted in them to one, belongs alike to every other legal subject of them. This single truth, as plain as any other Bible truth, for ever settles all debates among reasonable men as to the provisions of this or any other covenant. The covenant with Noah, the covenant concerning Christ, the covenant concerning the worldly inheritance, the covenant of the priesthood, the covenant of the sceptre, the covenant at Mount Sinai, and the covenant of circumcision are all alike in this particular. Every covenantee inherits equally and identically the same constitutional or chartered rights and immunities, just as every naturalized citizen of the United States has all the same constitutional rights and privileges of every other naturalized citizen. Every one in Noah’s covenant, every first-born son of Aaron, every one in the national covenant mediated by Moses, and every one in the covenant of circumcision derived the same advantages from the covenant of which he was a proper subject. Paul, indeed, asks and answers the question "what profit was there in circumcision," and "what advantage hath the Jew?" Many advantages, indeed, were connected with it. But what was the chief advantage? Regeneration? Remission of sins? The Holy Spirit? Life everlasting? No, no: not any one of these--but "chiefly to them were committed the oracles of God." The Gentiles now have these oracles without faith, without circumcision, without baptism. This, indeed, makes faith, regeneration, spiritual and eternal salvation possible; and this, indeed, is a great blessing. So, then, the matter of circumcision, as to its advantage, is settled by high authority. It gave the oracles of God in keeping to the Jewish nation. This was its nighest approach to spiritual blessings! But circumcision became a type. Of what? The circumcision of the heart. The manna became a type, the Sabbath became a type, the stricken rock became a type, Jordan became a type, and why should not circumcision become a type? We, believing Gentiles, are now "the circumcision," because (not in the flesh, but) "in the spirit we worship God, rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh," neither in cutting, nor washing, nor cleansing the flesh. This once was the outward circumcision in the flesh; but neither baptism nor any other ordinance came in room of it. Such talk is a scandal to the age. The circumcision of the heart by the Holy Spirit came in room of the circumcision of the flesh by the knife of a Jewish father or a mother, a master or a mistress. Circumcision is now "that of the heart," and, not of the law in the flesh, "but in the spirit," "whose praise" (because the operation is invisible) "is not of man, but of God." The ancient prophets that preached concerning Christ and his kingdom were wont to say, "Circumcise the foreskin of your hearts." "Make you a new heart," &c. It was the stress of the tempest of debate that first compelled a portion of Protestant Christendom to make baptism instead of the Holy Spirit stand in the room of circumcision. And yet of all theological logicians, they are the least entitled to our confidence who can make the sign of a covenant concerning the flesh, the sign of a covenant concerning the spirit;--who can tear away the seal from one bond, and patch in its stead the seal of another bond. Or, what is the same thing, write a new bond over an old seal! From such logicians and theologians we all pray for a deliverance. The myriads of Jews converted to the faith of Jesus as the Messiah that were baptized, notwithstanding their former circumcision, and the myriads of baptized Christian Jews that, during much of the apostolic age, continued to circumcise their children, one would think might have thrown some obstacle in the way of such reasoners as find for infant baptism a pretext in infant circumcision. They have, indeed, a faith that removes mountains;--a faith in human authority that removes the mountains interposed by Apostles and Prophets between their premises and their conclusions. That Jesus and the Holy Twelve had all been circumcised and afterwards baptized; that all the first converts to Christianity were circumcised persons, had upon them the sign of circumcision, yet commanded every one to be baptized, is, in their vision, no obstacle to the theory of baptism in room of circumcision. Hundreds of years passed away before anyone thought of making baptism a substitute for infant circumcision. Our main object, indeed, in thus inquiring into covenants, their signs and seals, is rather to enforce the necessity of covenanting with the Lord, than to descant upon the false reasonings and erroneous conclusions of such fathers as are looked up to for authority in introducing a new covenant for infants to sign before they can read it, or hear it read. Faith and repentance, of which we have taken some notice in former essays, are peculiar to no dispensation of religion, nor to any age of the world. Since man fell till the present moment, faith and repentance have always been indispensable to deliverance from sin. "He that cometh to God must first believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him." But the institutions and charters of privilege have differed in some respects, as time has advanced. Covenants of promise and of privilege have, indeed, always been in existence; and God’s people have always been in covenant with God. The gospel is, indeed, presented in the form of a covenant. The Messiah seals it as his covenant--"the new," "the better," "the everlasting covenant." He is himself both the covenant, and the Mediator of it, as he is himself the victim, the altar, and the priest. We are said to be "in Christ;" but before we are in him, we must come into him by covenant. He is the oath of God accomplished, and we take the vow; God is the covenanter, Christ the covenant, and we the covenantees; we are reconciled to God through him. He sealed the covenant with his own blood. The Lord’s supper is the pledge of it. But he will have us to die, to be buried, and to rise again for him, as he died, was buried, and rose again for us. Hence the institution of Christian baptism. We must pass through the solemn sign, and must lie with him in the grave and rise with him to a new and better life. These are outward signs of an inward and true and real covenant with the Lord, by and through which we individually, each one for himself, are made partakers of the fulness of the blessings of the gospel of Christ. Every covenant propounded by God to man since his fall is based upon sacrifice. No intercourse between God and rebel man can be instituted upon any other principle. Every Divine stipulation is a stipulation of mercy dictated by a pure benevolence, a Divine philanthropy, and based upon such a sacrifice as inflexible justice and immaculate purity can approbate and acquiesce in. There is no covenant of redemption based upon human effort or human merit. All God’s overtures are the offspring of pure, unmerited favour. The conditions propounded are not merely to justify God before the universe, though that must be always secured; but benevolence requires that man should believe what God says, feel in harmony with all his requisitions, and obey from his heart every precept. The conditions of believing what God says and of doing what God commands, are all conditions of grace, of justice, and of pure benevolence. God, with all reverence be it spoken, can make no sinful man happy in any other way than the gospel propounds. Our duty, our honour, our interest, and our happiness are equally consulted and secured in accepting the covenant of life through the obedience unto death of God’s beloved Son. This we do by obeying from the heart the precepts of righteousness and mercy delivered to as by the holy Apostles. Thus we enter into covenant with God, we become his, and he becomes ours the instant we obey from the heart the Apostles’ doctrine. Before closing, for the present, the whole subject of covenanting, we may add that there are times, occasions, and circumstances requiring us, or, at least, making it expedient for us, to stipulate private and personal covenants with God--indeed, times when communities may and ought to enter into covenant with one another and with the Lord. We can adduce good examples for such transactions from the history of the age of revelation. Individual men and communities of good men may, and indeed in some cases ought, to enter into a covenant with God. Jacob, on his way to Padan-Aram, is one case of this sort; and Nehemiah and the reformers of his time are another case in point. But of these we cannot now speak particularly. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 14: 01.01.07. FLESH AND SPIRIT - LIBERTY AND NECESSITY - NEW INSTITUTION ======================================================================== CHAPTER VII FLESH AND SPIRIT--LIBERTY AND NECESSITY--NEW INSTITUTION. IT was observed in our chapter on "Covenants of Promise," that those vouchsafed to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were finally engrossed and developed in two grand social institutions, called "the Old and New Covenants." Each of these had its own peculiar provisions, precepts, promises, and mediator. Moses mediated and administered the one; Jesus the Messiah mediates and administers the other. These great institutions are very improperly called, on the title-page of our Bibles, "the Old and New Testaments." "Testaments are of no force;" said Paul, "while the testator lives." Whether a true or false version of the original, this, certainly, is a true saying. The last will and testament is made valid and obligatory by the death of the testator. But neither God nor Jesus Christ made two last wills or testaments. Hence the title-page of the apostolic writings usually printed "THE NEW TESTAMENT OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST," is every way inadmissible. First, a new testament of Jesus Christ implies that there was an old one! Is this a fact? Again, if there be two testaments of Jesus Christ, the last one only is valid, according to the proper meaning of the word, and the reasoning of the Apostle. But does any one believe, that Jesus Christ made first one will, and then changed it, making it void, by a second--or last will and testament! Yet all our Bibles published "by authority," perpetrate this great mistake, this palpable aberration from propriety. Translate it "the covenant of Jesus Christ," or "a new covenant administered by Jesus Christ," and we speak rationally, scripturally, and intelligibly. God has given to mankind in the Bible two great covenants, the first administered by his servant, Moses, the second by his Son, Jesus Christ, our blessed Lord. The former is the old, the latter the new covenant. By a figure of speech very common, the Jewish writings are called the old covenant, because they contain it, and grow out of it; and by the same figure, the Christian Scriptures are called the new covenant, because they contain it and originate from it. These two grand social institutions, it was also remarked, are but the development of two great promises made to Abraham; one concerning his natural, the other concerning his spiritual offspring. One of these promises is--"I will make of thee a great nation, and will bless him that blesses thee, and curse him that curses thee." The other promise is--"In thee," that is, "in thy seed, shall all the families of the earth be blessed." One family exhausts the first covenant, while the second unites in one community all the faithful of all the families of the earth. The first promises to all its subjects, all worldly and temporal blessings; the second guarantees to all its subjects, spiritual and eternal blessings. But the centre of attraction, or the principle of association in these two communities, differs as radically as do the blessings stipulated in each of them; so that connection with the one community secures no interest in the other. The flesh of Abraham is the centre of attraction in the one, while the faith of Abraham is the centre of attraction in the other. All the privileges, rights, interests, and immunities in the one are fleshly and temporal; all the rights, interests, and immunities in the other are spiritual and eternal. A person being the son, of Abraham by the flesh gives him no interest whatever: in any of the blessings of a son of Abraham by faith. Neither does a Gentile’s being a son of Abraham by faith, give him, any interest whatever in any of the covenanted blessings of a son of Abraham by blood. Every thing in these two institutions is consistent with their respective centres of attraction or principles of union. Blessings and curses, temporal and fleshly, are the rewards and sanctions of the one; while blessings and curses, spiritual and eternal, are the rewards and the sanctions of the other. The ordinances attached to the first covenant are called "carnal," while those appended to the new are "spiritual." The inheritance of the first covenant was worldly. Its blessings were in the basket and in the store, in the flocks and herds, in fruitful seasons and abundant harvests, in oil and, wine, in milk and honey, in victories and triumphs over their national and personal enemies. Their tabernacle and their temple, with all that appertained to them--their altars and lavers, their tables and candlesticks, their censers and incense, their gold and their gems, their priests and victims, their blood and water, their oil and wine--their music and their dance, their trumpets and their cymbals, their feasts and their fasts, were, all of the same sensible, fleshly, and worldly character, suited to a carnal, worldly, and unregenerated nation; every citizen of which, good or bad, was a member of the church: for the church and the nation of Israel, were not only commensurate, but identically the same. Their suspensions were mere temporary separation from the public assemblies, and their great excommunication was death according to the law. Still, under that national and worldly, or politico-religious institution, there were persons who had faith in the promised Messiah, and spiritual illumination; who saw the promised blessings afar off, and embraced them, and walked with God. But they were sanctified and saved by the grace and spiritual provisions of another institution--the kernel that was in the shell of those outward symbols. For "the law was a shadow," or faint adumbration of "good things to come;" not, indeed, "the exact image of them," but a general outline, through which those "led by the Spirit" were inducted into the holy of holies of that sublimely allegoric representation. Still, the good and the bad worshipped in the same sanctuary, came up to the same festivals, observed all the same rites, and shared in all the national blessings and calamities. They had, indeed, legal sacrifices, a legal repentance, and a legal remission of sins. The sinner came to a priest, as great a sinner as himself. He carried his lamb, his kid, or his calf, to the altar. He laid his right hand upon its head, confessed his sin, and killed it. The priest piled its flesh upon the altar, poured out or sprinkled its blood, while the fire of heaven consumed it. This done, the legal penalty only was remitted. It did not strengthen the heart, nor "make him perfect who did this service, as pertained to his conscience." Hence, their sins were again "remembered every year," in the annual atonements. And even the most faithful and believing amongst them only received a final and plenary remission of sins, by reason of the ransom then prospective "for the redemption of the transgressions" under that covenant, that they who were then called might with us partake in the blessing of the eternal inheritance. The Jewish institution, and the people under it, were alike carnal. "Carnal ordinances," says Paul, "were imposed on them until the time of reformation." They had letter and symbol, but they had not the spirit nor the reality. They had, indeed, the word addressed to the ear, and the picture to the eye; but that which was spoken they neither understood nor obeyed; and that which was a type they could not read, "for they could not see to the end or meaning of that which is now abolished." Paul, that greatest of commentators, most aptly calls it letter, and type, and shadow, while with him the new covenant is "spirit, and righteousness, and life." The letter killeth, while the spirit giveth life. It is also called "the ministration of condemnation," while the gospel is called "the ministration of righteousness." The former, indeed, was gloriously introduced, but much more gloriously the latter. Still, we must enter the sanctuary of the Lord through its own portico. The new covenant always presupposes the knowledge of the old. The reader of the apostolic writings is supposed to have read or learned from Moses and the Prophets. The gospel presupposes the law. It was a school-master to introduce the Messiah to our acquaintance. It is all letter and type; but we receive the spirit through the letter, and the reality through the type. "The law was given by Moses, but the grace and the reality, or the truth, came by Jesus Christ." As the body to the spirit, so stood the Jewish to the Christian institution in many prominent points of view. As the spirit dwells in the body, so the gospel dwelt in the Levitical institution. When that died, the spirit, or that indicated by all its ordinances, alone survived. So that while that religion sanctified to the purifying of the flesh only, the Christian sanctifies the spirit, and through it the soul and body. "We, therefore, serve in the newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter." "Christ is the end of the law for justification to every one that believeth." The ritual of Moses, says Paul, "stood only in meats, and drinks, and divers ordinances concerning the flesh, imposed on the Jews until the time of reformation." We, then, serve in a "better tabernacle" than did the Jewish people. For their animal sacrifices, we have the slain Lamb of God. For their deliverance from penal temporal sufferings, through the blood of bulls and goats, we have "justification from all things"--through faith in the blood of the Messiah. For their legal purification by "the water of separation," we have the sanctification of the spirit, through faith in the blood of Christ, and baptism into his death. For their oil of consecration, we have the anointing of the Holy Spirit, by which we are led into all truth and holiness. For their national adoption, we have a personal and filial adoption into the family of God, by which we feel that we are sons, and can say, "Our Father, who art in heaven." The doctrine of a future life, and of the immortality of man, constituted no part of the Jew’s religion. There is not one promise of eternal life, not one word of the heavenly inheritance in any part of the Jewish institution. Neither is there one threat of any punishment after death. Indeed, neither salvation nor damnation, in the Christian sense of these terms, ever occurs in any portion of the writings of Moses, so far as they respect the Jewish nation, religion, or peculiarities. The law was added to an antecedent promise, as Paul affirms. So that the Jewish institution is to be contemplated as an episode--an intercalary or parenthetic dispensation.1 It was added to the antediluvian revelations. Enoch, the seventh from Adam, is one of those ancient prophets who taught a future life, a future condemnation of wicked men; and in his own personal translation to heaven, God gave a practical demonstration of the certainty of a state of immortality for those who walked with God according to the rules prescribed for them. That such rules were given, is evident from the fact that where no law is, there can be neither obedience nor disobedience. Evident, then, it must be to all who reflect on Scripture premises that the object of the Jewish institution was not to reveal life and immortality, nor to prescribe rules for the attainment of them. Moses and his law are better defined by Paul to the Hebrews. When comparing him with the character and official grandeur of "the Apostle and High Priest of our religion," Paul represents Moses as having lived and acted for "a testimony of the things that were to be spoken in after tines." God gave the mould or pattern to Moses, and Moses cast the type. He gave the letter which leads us to Christ and which reveals Christ to us. To this the Prophets added much in after times. Still, Moses and his tabernacle and worship are but the patterns of things in the heavens--a shadow of good things, then future, but now come. The covenant of circumcision and of the Law, as administered by Moses, had, therefore, no special, direct, or specific relation to a spiritual people or a spiritual institution. Circumcision, though before the law, is by the Messiah himself incorporated with it; because, as we have shown, that covenant was one of the "covenants of promise" engrossed in the national institution given to the twelve tribes. The words of the Messiah are remarkable: "If a person receives circumcision on the Sabbath day," (being sometimes the eighth day,) says he, "that the law of Moses be not broken, why thus speak of him whom the Father has sent into the world?" &c. Thus we are directed to the gospel, as a new and sublime development of God’s philanthropy, prepared for an educated world. The Jews were all minors, under tutors and governors, until the fulness of time, when God sent forth his Son, born of woman, and made under the law himself, that he might redeem his own people from the curse of the law, and introduce a new system, bringing in an everlasting redemption for us. The Christian institution is addressed to the understanding, the heart, the conscience. It first presents itself to the understanding. It works its way into the heart. It seizes the affections and induces men to come, not to be carried or borne by physical necessity to Christ. "A willing people in the day of thy power shall come to thee." Christianity presupposes that its subjects shall first be taught by Moses, and then come to Christ. No man can come to Christ unless God induces him to come, by the former intimations given by Moses and the Prophets. "If they will not hear them," they never can, they never will come to Christ; "they would not be persuaded though one rose from the dead." Not so the antecedent institution. Men were by necessity born members of it. There was no appeal to the understanding, no addresses to the conscience, no motives addressed to the heart to win over a people to the Jewish institution. They were Jews, not by choice, but by necessity. They were compelled to be members of that church, just as they were compelled to be born. They were, indeed, born of the flesh, and not of the spirit, as preparatory to admission into that church. No one preached to the Jews that they must be born again to enter into their kingdom of God. We have no regeneration in the law of Moses. The Jewish elect are all chosen in Abraham’s flesh. Hence, there never was a missionary sent out of the Jewish Church to bring into it any one not born of the flesh of Abraham. There was no gospel in the law but for the Jews. Their inheritance was on earth, and their title to it was blood, and not faith,--natural, and not supernatural birth. Hence the perplexity of Nicodemus, when he heard the doctrine of the necessity of intelligence, and a new birth, in order to entrance into the new kingdom of God. A few proselytes from a few nations were, on their own application, in certain cases, admitted into that community. To these, certain privileges were extended; but the genius, character, and aim of that institution was not catholic. It had the flesh of the Messiah in solemn keeping for fifteen hundred years--and, therefore, did only admit of a few proselytes. Its "proselytes of justice," or its real proselytes, (for as for those of "the gate," we have no authentic evidence; they seem to be a modern invention,) were, on full conviction and a solemn declaration of their willingness to be governed by the whole law of Moses, admitted to circumcision; and so soon as healed from the wound inflicted in the performance of that bloody rite, they were plunged into a cistern of water by one single immersion; and thus incorporated into the Jewish nation. So teach some of the Jewish Rabbis. Still, this provision for the benefit of a few worshippers of the true and only living God, in no way changes the general and appropriate character of that institution. Its proper subjects were not circumcised to make them members of the Abrahamic or Mosaic church, but to mark them as such; the church and nation being always coextensive. There was, therefore, no necessity whatever for any one to be born either of the spirit or of water, to become a member of the Jewish community, or to participate in its honours and privileges. On the contrary, Christianity is catholic in its spirit, and proselyting in its character. It contemplates a great community, gathered out of every nation, kindred, tongue, and people. It makes provision for them all. Jesus was born a Jew, and came first to his own family and church, and, to confirm the covenant made unto the fathers, he tendered to them of the circumcision the blessings of membership in his new institution. He confined his personal labors to his own people. He informs every man in Judea by some one of the seventy heralds, that the new kingdom of God was soon to appear. After his death, born again from the dead, literally and truly regenerated, he feels no more the ties of Jewish blood, and sends his twelve illustrious heralds into all the nations of the earth, to gather out of them a people for his name. He begins with the Jews, proceeds to the Samaritans, and thence to all the nations of the earth. He founds a new kingdom under a large commission. He sends them into the whole world, and commands them to convert all nations. He establishes the doctrine of personal liberty, of freedom of voice, and of personal responsibility, by commanding every man to judge, reason, and act for himself. "Preach the gospel" to the whole human race--"to every creature," is his benevolent precept. This is truly a catholic spirit, and worthy of all admiration. There are now no more fleshly or family distinctions. There are now no hereditary rights and honours as respects access to the person of the Messiah. There is no natural relation to him that gives any sort of claim, right, or privilege spiritual. Parents and children are now alike to act for themselves. It is he, and only be, "who believes and is baptized, that shall be saved." In the Lord’s kingdom there is neither Jew nor Gentile, Barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free. Indeed, there is neither male nor female, parent nor child, under his administration. Intelligence and candour, faith and obedience, are supposed to be possessed by every member of Christ’s kingdom. There are not two classes of church members in Christ’s church, any more than there are not two sorts of citizens in the United States. There are no patricians nor plebeians, no feudal barons nor feudal serfs, amongst all the faithful in Christ Jesus. All are one in rank and privilege in Christ’s kingdom. It is not flesh, but spirit, that characterizes Christian membership. The Harbinger anciently preached, when preparing a people for the Lord, "Think not to say that you have Abraham for your father." No hereditary privileges now. "Repent, every one of you, and bring forth fruits worthy of repentance." The Christian church is the only perfect cradle of human liberty, as it is the only proper school of equal rights and immunities on earth. It commands every man to think, speak, and act for himself. It asks not even a parent to stand or fall for his child. It knows no sponsorship, no godfather, nor godmother. It asks no father to make a profession for his child. It commands him to "bring up his children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." It guaranties freedom of thought, of speech, and of action, to every citizen under the Messiah’s reign--provided only, he speaks and acts as the oracles of God require. The great doctrine of a personal accountability is made the foundation of personal liberty. It teaches that every man shall give an account of himself to God. And as there shall be no proxies in the future and eternal judgment, so there must be none in Christ’s kingdom on earth. From these sublime facts spring all rational liberty of thought and action on the greatest choice which man can make: whom he shall acknowledge, love, and serve as his God, and in what way and manner he shall best serve him. Both Joshuas--he that led the twelve tribes of Israel into Canaan, and our Joshua, "the great Captain of Salvation," "who leads many sons to glory," say, "Choose you this day whom you shall serve." "If the Lord be God, serve him; but if Baal be god, serve him." Previous examination of the pretensions of the candidates for our suffrage is presupposed. No one can choose without consideration and comparison. Hence infants cannot choose whom they should serve, and whose name shall be stamped upon them, because they cannot consider and compare rival candidates. But were not the babes of Israel circumcised; and did not that bind them to the religion of their fathers? Circumcision bound no man morally or religiously. It was merely the sign of a covenant between God and Abraham. The persons whom Joshua commanded to make a choice had all been circumcised. The female infants uncircumcised were neither more bound nor more free in moral and religious obligation than the circumcised male infants. If one infant is bound by circumcision or baptism to the religion of its father, then all are; for these rites are of the same significance and of the same obligation to all. Indeed no Jew ever supposed that his circumcision morally obliged him: for without one single demur of this kind, not only Joshua commanded the circumcised to choose, but so did the Messiah and the twelve Apostles command all whom they addressed to choose whom they should serve, and in what manner they should serve him. Hence myriads of circumcised Jews in the age of the Apostles renounced Judaism and embraced Christianity, circumcision to the contrary notwithstanding. We have said that "circumcision" means the same thing to every circumcised person of the name class. To Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and Esau, it means just the same thing. So does every ordinance to all the subjects of it. If Jesus commands infants to be baptized, it morally or politically obliges them all to the same course of action. If it binds one to the religion of his parents, it binds all; and then it is in every case a barrier interposed between God and human liberty of choice;--every baptized infant is bound to follow the religious belief and profession of his parent or godfather without consideration, comparison, or choice. According to this view of the subject, Martin Luther and John Calvin morally offended God in becoming Protestants. The Jew as well as the Mussulman sins in becoming a Christian. The Churchman and the Presbyterian sins against in becoming a Baptist, a Methodist, or a Moravian. If God has given this power to parents, and if children are thus obliged by parental vows for them, then is it not preposterous ever after to teach them to think, to reason, and to act for themselves in any moral concern, if in the greatest of all concerns they are compelled by divine authority to be thus servile and obsequious to the will of another? No religion preached on earth is so favourable to human liberty as the Christian. Indeed, it prescribes the only rational foundation of liberty even submitted to the human understanding. This it does by making every man’s destiny for ever depend upon his own choice. If he must be judged for himself, he must think and choose for himself--is as sound logic, as sound theology, as were ever preached. His father cannot act for him unless he be judged for him. No Pedobaptist has, therefore, fully abjured popery. He carries a pope in his bosom, so long as he will vow for his child, and then by the force of that vow teach his son that he is obliged to join his father’s church, because in that church he was sealed, signed, and delivered by the divine warrant of infant baptism. There is, then, a doctrine of liberty and necessity in the American church as respects church membership and religious charters, as well as in the schools of moral philosophy. This new species of ecclesiastical fatalism is not confined to Calvinists, but extends into the bosom of the Arminian churches. They all, more or less, and sometimes while disavowing it, impose their solemn rites upon their infant offspring, by dedicating them to God; and that in connection with certain ecclesiastic formulas of faith and manners. They say, "Only dedicate them to God." Only dedicate them!! This is still worse. Dedicate them as a thing, a chattel, or a person! Such dedication is not named in the Bible nor in the oracles of Christian reason and faith.2 I have sometimes listened, not with admiration of the wisdom, but with astonishment at the weakness, of some of our hoary doctors, descanting upon the great advantages of infant dedication. Strange, thought I, that neither Moses nor the Prophets, neither Christ nor his Apostles, ever spoke one word in commendation of dedicating a person to the Lord, infant or adult. To dedicate a thing is, indeed, intelligible; because it has no soul in it to dedicate itself--but to speak of dedicating any thing with a soul in it to the spiritual service of the Lord, as it appears to me, shocks all common sense. On this subject, as well as some others, our theological dictionaries and "Encyclopedias of Religious Knowledge" are at fault. They can quote no passage in which a person is dedicated to any service--not even consecrated, or set apart, unless possessing a spiritual mind.3 To dedicate infants to the Lord is, therefore, wholly a papistical notion, a delusion of the imagination, an article of spiritual traffic by those who deal in the wares and merchandise of the great ecclesiastic emporium, "spiritually called Babylon and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified." It is an ingenious contrivance to rob them of a property, a right of the value of which they can form no correct estimate, and for which the whole world would be no equivalent. I sincerely pity the youth who has thus been piously wronged of one of the dearest rights and noblest privileges ever guaranteed to man. Enslaved he is to a set of opinions thus imposed upon him, under pretence of a divine authority, being told that vows undertaken and made for him must be assumed by himself, for that he is under covenant to keep them. The Jew was, by what some call fate, obliged to be a Jew. He had no choice as to the covenant under which he should live, and whose sign he should wear deeply inscribed upon his flesh. But under the Christian institution every one is called upon to choose his own master and his own associates. Perfect liberty is extended to all; requiring. from all deliberation, examination, and decision. "Whosoever willeth, let him come and drink of the water of life freely." The New or Christian Institution is the full development of the divine philanthropy. It is not a Hebrew, Greek, or Roman Catholic institution, but simply a catholic institution. It is not the starlight, the moonlight, the twilight, but the sunlight development of the divine philanthropy. Its promises are free and ample, and rich in the choicest blessings which Gad can bestow upon man as he now is. It addresses man as he is--an animal, intellectual, and moral being in ruins; and for no other purpose but to make him what he ought to be. In contrast with every system in the universe, it is purely a spiritual system. It begins with the heart of man. It transcribes the will of God, expressed in the law of righteousness and holiness, upon the table of the human heart. God, in this New Institution, gives this law not into the hand of a mediator, and then into the hands of the people; but he gives them into the hearts of all the covenantees. He makes them all spiritually intelligent. Not a citizen in his kingdom can be found ignorant of the Lord. They "know him from the least to the greatest." They are an enlightened and spiritual people. Of such a people "he is not ashamed to be called their God." He makes them his people--he becomes their God, and declares that he will remember "their sins and their iniquities no more." Beyond these blessings, man can ask for nothing more in order to spiritual happiness. As an animal being, he may for a time need food and raiment. But these are guaranteed to him on certain conditions. If he ask for them and work for them, God has promised them. And as for the future, the infinite and eternal future, the universe is his. He will obtain the freedom of the eternal city. The "things to come" are all his. Such is the inheritance attached to the new institution. It is, indeed, beyond the river Jordan. But, while in the wilderness of sin, he may eat the mystic manna, drink of the spiritual rock, and walk by the guidance of the cloud, illumined by the Spirit of God, till he behold the "clearer light of an eternal day." The provisions of this institution, so ample, so rich, and so enduring, have cost a very great price, and call for a very thorough renunciation of oneself on the part of all who would partake of its blessings. Hence its conditions are in harmony with the liberality of its provisions and the dignity of its Author. It cannot be merited, but must be received as a perfect gratuity. The conditions, then, are not the conditions of a purchase, but of a free donation. God bestows its blessings in a way the most blissful to the recipient. He simply requires a surrender of his own will, and a consecration of his person to the glory of his God and his Redeemer. He is bought with a price of such inconceivable value as to make it his duty and honour to give himself away for ever to Him that ransomed him. But that very surrender is made the unwasting spring of eternal consolation and bliss to him. He drinks more liberal draughts of consolation from the conditions of pardon and salvation than if he could have bought it himself. For when God asks him to give himself away to him, God gives himself to him in every way that he can enjoy him now and for ever. Truly this is a gracious institution. If the law was given by Moses, truly the grace and the reality have come to us by Jesus Christ. Man blesses not himself, but is blessed in obeying the gospel. Faith, repentance, and baptism are, therefore, selected as the media of communication of all spiritual blessedness, to man in entering into covenant with God. The world called Christian has long since decided that three things are essential to the Christian profession; that a person must believe, and repent, and be baptized, before he can enter into the kingdom of Jesus Christ, called "the church of the living God, the pillar and the support of the truth." The constitution of the Christian church, it seems, requires all this. Hence the Acts of the Apostles, as reported by Luke, develop this as the universal law for Jew, Samaritan, or Greek. Not one exception in Jerusalem, Samaria, or to the uttermost parts of the earth. The order was, Hear, believe, repent, and be baptized, every one of you. Five things were essential to conversion: preaching, hearing, believing, repenting, and being baptized. The Apostles preached, the people heard, then believed, then repented, then were baptized, and then went on their way rejoicing in the remission of their sins, the reception of the Holy Spirit, and the hope of eternal life. The nice connection and intimate dependence of these items will now call for clear and ample development. Faith, repentance unto life, the covenants of promise, and the new institution, being now introduced to the consideration of the attentive reader, we shall next furnish a few chapters on Christian baptism. 1 Bishop Warburton, in his Divine Legation of Moses, argues, from the silence of Moses on the subject of future rewards and punishments, that he was divinely inspired, inasmuch as all the founders of antecedent states and empires founded their empires upon that basis; or sanctioned their laws by the penalties of eternal rewards. But his lordship seemed not to have observed that Moses needed not such enactments or sanctions, inasmuch as the nation which he formed was in possession of that knowledge before he was born. His learned and ingenious arguments on this main branch of his subject are regarded as a splendid sophism. 2 Persons having hearts consecrated to the Lord, may, by the people, be set apart or consecrated to certain services, in strict propriety of speech. And in another sense, typical and fleshly persons and things were dedicated under the law, to serve according to the letter, where spirituality was not required. But to dedicate to a spiritual service those not having a spiritual mind, is without law and without example. 3 Hannah, it is alleged, dedicated her son to the Lord. Neither by circumcision nor by baptism! She asked, in prayer, for a son, and vowed to give him to the Lord, if he would hear her prayer. The Lord gave her a son, and she kept her vow. When weaned, she returned him to the Lord--took him to the house of the Lord at Shiloh, and left him there to be educated. Is this the dedication of those who plead for infant baptism! If not, why pervert it to such a use? ======================================================================== CHAPTER 15: 01.02.01. BOOK SECOND ======================================================================== BOOK SECOND THE PROPOSITION.--Immersion in water into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, is the one only Christian Baptism. CHAPTER I. BAPTO. ARGUMENT 1.--Bapto, the root of Baptizo, whence the adopted words baptize and baptism, like all other radical words denoting specific action, never loses its specific sense in its derivatives. IN the commission which the Messiah gave to his Apostles for converting the nations, he commanded three things to be done, indicated by three very distinct and intelligible terms, viz. matheteusate, baptizontes, didaskontes. Unfortunately one of these three Greek words has become a subject of much controversy. While all agree that the first term may be literally and properly rendered make disciples, and the last teaching them, the second, not being translated but transferred into our language, is by some understood to mean sprinkling; by others, pouring; by a third class, immersing; and by a fourth class, purifying them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Fortunately, the meaning of any word, Hebrew, Greek. Latin, or English, is a question, not of opinion, but a question of fact; and, being a plain question of fact, it is to be ascertained by competent witnesses, or by a sufficient induction of particular occurrences of the word at different times, on various subjects, and by different persons. All good dictionaries, in all languages, are made upon a full examination of particular occurrences--upon a sufficient induction of distinct instances--and convey the true meaning of a word at any given period of its history. The action, then, which Jesus Christ commanded to be done in the word baptizo, is to be ascertained just in the same manner as the action enjoined in matheteuo, or that commanded in didasko, its associates in the commission. We ask no other law or tribunal for ascertaining the meaning of baptizo than for ascertaining the sense of matheteuo or didasko. They are all to be determined philologically, as all other foreign and ancient terms, by the well-established canons of interpretation. From a, candid, judicious, and impartial application of these laws, there is not the least difficulty in the case. There is indeed, less difficulty in ascertaining the meaning of the word baptizo than that of either of the other words standing with it in the commission; because, a word more restricted, more circumscribed, and appropriated in its acceptation than either of its companions; because, moreover, it is a word of specification, and not so general and undefined as matheteuo or didasko--"making disciples" and "teaching them." It indicates an outward and formal action into the awful name of the whole Divinity; and consequently, à priori, we would be led to regard it as a most specific and well-defined term. The action was to be performed by one person upon another person, and in the most solemn manner. Besides, it is a peculiar and positive ordinance. All admit that baptism is a positive ordinance; and that positive precepts, as contradistinguished from moral precepts, indicate the special will of a sovereign in some exact and well-defined action, the nature, form, and necessity of which arise not from our own à priori reasonings about utility or expediency, but from the clearly-expressed will of the lawgiver. It is farther universally agreed that circumcision was a positive and not a moral institution, made right and obligatory by the mere force of a positive law. It enjoined a specific act upon a specific subject, called for exact obedience, and was therefore definitely set forth by a specific and not by a generic term. This fact will not, I presume, be disputed. Baptism, then, like circumcision, must have the specific action to be performed, implied, and expressed in it. That baptism is such a term, if it be disputed, the sequel will, we presume, abundantly prove. Meantime, before hearing the witnesses or submitting the induction, it may not be uninteresting to pursue this analogy a little farther, and to show, à priori, that such a specific precept or term is to be expected. Will it not be conceded by all, that whatever good reason can be given why, not a general, but a specific word was chosen by God, in commanding circumcision to Abraham and his posterity, demands a term as specific and intelligible from the Christian Lawgiver in reference to the institution of baptism? Now, as Jesus Christ must have intended some particular action to be performed by his ministers, and submitted to by the people, in the command to baptize them, it follows that he did select such a word, or that he could not or would not do it. This is a trilemma from which escape is not easy. If any one say he could not, then either the language which he spoke, or his knowledge of it was defective. If the former, then the language was unfit to be the vehicle of a divine revelation to man; if the latter, his divine character and mission are directly assailed and dishonoured: or if any one say he could have done it, but would not, he impeaches either his sincerity or benevolence, or both; his sincerity, in demanding obedience in a particular case, for which he cared nothing; his benevolence, in exacting a particular service in an ambiguous and unintelligible term, which should perplex and confound his conscientious friends and followers in all the ages of the world! Follows it not, then, that he could, that he would, find such a word, and that he has done it--and that baptizo is that specific word? Before summoning our most authoritative witnesses to the meaning of this important word baptizo, I shall assert a few facts, which, I presume, will not be denied by any one properly acquainted with the original language of the New Testament:-- 1. Baptizo is not a radical, but a derivative word. 2. Its root, bapto, is never applied to this ordinance. 3. In the common version, bapto is translated, both in its simple and compound form, always by the word dip. 4. Bapto is never translated by dye, stain, or colour. 5. Baptizo, with its derivatives, is the only word used in the New Testament to indicate this ordinance. And, 6. The word baptize has no necessary connection with water, or any liquid whatever. Now from these indisputable facts, as hereafter to be developed, some important corollaries are deduced; such as-- 1st. Baptizo indicates a specific action, and, consequently, as such, can have but one meaning. For if a person or thing can be immersed in water, oil, milk, honey, sand, earth, debt, grief, affliction, spirit, light, or darkness, &c., it is a word indicating specific action, and specific action only. Baptizo, confessedly a derivative from bapto, derives its specific meaning, as well as its radical and immutable form, from that word. According to the usage of all languages, ancient and modern, derivative words legally inherit the specific, though not necessarily the figurative, meaning of their natural progenitors; and never can so far alienate from themselves that peculiar significance as to indicate any action specifically different from that intimated in the parent stock. Indeed, all the flexions of words, with their sometimes numerous and various families of descendants, are but modifications of one and the same generic or specific idea. We sometimes say that words generally have both a proper and a figurative sense. I presume we may go farther, and affirm that every word in current use has a strictly proper and a figurative acceptation. Now, in the derivation direct, (for there is a direct and there is an indirect derivation,) the proper and natural or original meaning of the term is uniformly transmitted. Let us, for example, take the Saxon word dip, through all its flexions and derivatives. Its flexions are dip, dips, dippeth, dipped, dipping: from these are derived but a few words, such as the nouns dipping, dipper, dip-chick, dipping-needle. Now, in all the flexions and derivatives of this word, is not the root dip always found in sense as well as in form? Wherever the radical syllable is found the radical idea is in it. So of the word sprinkle: its flexions are sprinkle, sprinkleth, sprinkling, sprinkled; and its derivatives are the nouns sprinkling and sprinkler. Does not the idea represented in the radical word sprinkle descend through the whole family? We shall visit a larger family. From the verb read, whose flexions are reads, readeth, reading, come the descendants reading, (the noun,) readable, readableness, readably, reader, readership. The radical syllable is not more obvious than the uniformity of its sense throughout the whole lineage. Let us now advance to the two Greek representatives of the verbs dip and sprinkle. These are ancient families and much larger than any of the modern. Bapto, the root, has some seven hundred flexions, besides numerous derivatives. We shall only take the indicative mood through one tense and through one person--bapto, ebapton, bapso, ebapsa, ebaphon, bapho, bebapha, ebebaphein. Its derivatives are baptizo, and its regular flexions more than seven hundred, including all its forms of mood, tense, participle, person, number, gender, case; from which spring baptismos, baptisms, baptisis, baptistees, baptomai, baptisomai, baptos, baptisteerion, bapha, baphikos, bapheis. These, through their some two thousand flexions and modifications, retain the bap and as uniformly the dip represented by it. The same holds good of its distant neighbour raino, I sprinkle. It has many flexions and nearly as many derivatives as bapto. It has raino, rainomai, rantizo, rantismos, rantisma, ranteer, rantis, rantos, with their some two thousand flexions. These all exhibit the radical syllable rain or ran, and with it the radical sprinkle. Now, as it is philologically impossible to find bap in rain, or rain in bap, so impossible is it to find dip in sprinkle, or sprinkle in dip. Hence the utter impossibility of either of these words representing both actions. It is difficult to conceive how any man of letters and proper reflection can for a moment suppose that bapto can ever mean sprinkle, or raino dip. This my first argument is, I own, a work of supererogation, inasmuch as all admit that baptizo, and not bapto, is the word that the Messiah chose, to represent the action he intended, called baptism; and all the learned admit that its primary, proper, and unfigurative meaning is to dip. Hence, if all that I have said on flexion and derivation were grammatically false and philologically heterodox, as well as illogical, my cause loses nothing. I feel so rich in resources that I can give this and many such arguments for nothing, and still have much more than a competency for life. But be it all strictly and philologically true and solid, as I unhesitatingly affirm it, this single argument establishes my first proposition without farther effort. For, as all allow that dip is the primary and proper meaning of bapto, and colour, stain, dye, and wet, its figurative or secondary meanings; and as all admit that baptizo is the word that the Christian Lawgiver consecrated to indicate this ordinance; and as it is incontrovertibly derived from bapto, and therefore inherits the proper meaning of the bap, which is dip, then is it not irresistibly evident that baptizo can never authorize or sanction any other action than dipping or immersion, as found in Christ’s commission! Such is my first argument, which, if false, I lose nothing; which, if true, my proposition is already established. But we must have arguments and illustrations for the unlearned as well as for the learned. Before we advance to our second argument, founded on baptizo itself, I shall, in three English words, selected at random, show that neither number nor variety of derivatives from a common stock can ever nullify the original idea or action suggested. I take a verb, a noun, and a preposition, with their whole families. I open at the verb adduce--duce from duco, I lead, is the root. The family lineage is abduce, adduce, conduce, deduce, educe, induce, introduce, obduce, produce, reduce, seduce, traduce, circumduction, deduction, induction. Next comes the noun guard, from which the verb guard, guarding, guarded, guarder, guardedly, guardedness, guardship, guardable, guardful, guardage, guardance, guardiant, guardian, guardianess, guardianship, guardianage, guardless. And finally we open at the preposition up, whence spring upon, upper, uppermost, upperest, upward. Now, can any one for a moment doubt that in these three examples, the radical syllables duce, guard, and up, retain the same sense, whatever it may be, generic or specific, through every branch of their respective families. Ancient Greek grammarians sometimes arranged their verbs in the form of trees, making the origin of the family the root; the next of importance, the trunk; the next, the larger branches; and so on to the topmost twig. In this way both flexion and derivation were occasionally exhibited. This fact I state because it suggests to me a new form of presenting this, my first argument, to the apprehension of all my readers. A great majority of our citizens are better read in forests, fields, and gardens, than in the schools of philology or ancient languages. Agriculturists, horticulturists, botanists will fully comprehend me when I say, in all the dominions of vegetable nature untouched by human art, as is the root so is the stem, and so are all the branches. If the root be oak, the stem cannot be ash, nor the branches cedar. What would you think, courteous reader, of the sanity or veracity of the backwoodsman, who would affirm that he found in a state of nature a tree whose root was oak, whose stem was cherry, whose boughs were pear, and whose leaves were chestnut. If these grammarians or philologists have been happy in their analogies drawn from the root and branches of trees to illustrate the derivation of words, how singularly fantastic the genius that creates a philological tree whose root is bapto, whose stem is cheo, whose branches are rantizo, whose fruit is katharizo; or, if not too ludicrous, and preposterous for English ears, whose root is dip, whose trunk is pour, whose branches are sprinkle, and whose fruit is purification! My first argument, then, is founded on the root bapto, whose proper signification all learned men say is dip, and whose main derivative is baptizo--which, by all the laws of philology and all the analogies of nature, never can, never did, and never will signify either to pour or sprinkle. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 16: 01.02.02 BAPTIZO. ======================================================================== CHAPTER II BAPTIZO. ARGUMENT 2.--Greek lexicographers, with one consent, in their definitions, as well as Greek philosophers, historians, orators, and poets, in their use of this term BAPTIZO, render it dip, plunge, immerse: never as indicating sprinkling, pouring, or scattering any thing. I NOW proceed to baptizo itself, the word foreordained by the Messiah to indicate his will in this sacred ordinance. Meanwhile, we have not forgotten that the meaning of baptizo, as well as bapto, is a question of fact, to be decided by impartial and disinterested witnesses, whose testimony is to be fairly stated, candidly heard, and impartially weighed, before the case is finally adjudicated. My witnesses are so numerous that I must call them forth in classes, and then hear them in detail. I shall first summon the Greek lexicographers, the most learned and most competent witnesses in this case, in the world. These gentlemen are, and of right ought to be, inductive philosophers. Philology is the most inductive of all sciences. The meaning of a word is ascertained by the usage of those writers and speakers whose knowledge and acquirements have made them masters of their own language. From this class of vouchers we have derived most of our knowledge of holy writ, and of all that remains of Grecian literature and science. We, indeed, try the dictionaries themselves by the classics, the extant authors of the language. We prove or disprove them by the same inductive operation by which we ascertain the facts of any science, mental or physical. I will rely exclusively upon the most ancient, the most impartial, and the most famous lexicographers. I therefore prefer those on my respondent’s side of the question to those on my own, and I prefer them who lived and published before the controversy became so rife as it has been during the present century. 1. We shall first hear the venerable Scapula, a foreign lexicographer, of 1579. On bapto, the root, what does this most learned lexicographer depose? Hear him: "Bapto--mergo; immergo, item tingo (quod sit immergendo)." To translate his Latin--To dip, to immerse; also, to dye, because that may be done by immersing. Of the passive baptomai he says, "Mergor, item lavor--to be immersed, to be washed." Of Baptizo--"Mergo seu immergo, item submergo, item abluo, lavo--To dip, to immerse; also, to submerge or overwhelm, to wash, to cleanse." 2. Next comes the more ancient Henricus Stephanus, of 1572. Bapto and baptizo--"Mergo seu immergo ut quae tingendi aut abluendi gratia aqua immergimus--To dip or immerge, as we dip things for the purpose of dyeing them, or immerge them in water." He gives the proper and figurative meanings as Scapula gives them. 3. We shall next hear the Thesaurus of Robertson. My edition was printed at Cambridge, 1676. It is the most comprehensive dictionary I have ever seen. It contains 80,000 words more than the old Schrevelius. It is, indeed, sometimes titled Cornelii Sehrevelii Lexicon Manuale Graeco-Latinum Copiosissime Adauctum. His definitions are generally regarded as the most precise and accurate. He defines baptizo by only two words--mergo and lavo--one proper and one figurative meaning--to immerse, to wash. 4. Schleusner, a name revered by orthodox theologians, and of enviable fame, says, (Glasgow ed. 1822,)--"1st. Proprie, immergo ac intingo, in aquam immergo. Properly it signifies, I immerse, I dip, I immerse in water. 2d. It signifies, I wash or cleanse by water--(quia haud raro aliquid immergi ac intingi in aquam solet ut lavetur)--because, far the most part, a thing must be dipped or plunged into water that it may be washed." Thus he gives the reason why baptizo figuratively means to wash, because that it is frequently the effect of immersion. 5. After Schleusner, we shall hear the distinguished Pasor. My copy is the London edition of 1650. "Bapto et baptizo-- Merge, immerge, tingo--quod sit immergendo, differt a dunai quod est profundum peters et penitus submergi." Again he adds--"Comparantur afflictiones gurgitibus aquarum quibus veluti merguntur qui miseriis et calamitatibus hujus vitae conflictantur, ita tamen merguntur ut rursus emergant." All of which we translate as follows:--"To dip, to immerse, to dye, because it is done by immersing. It differs from dunai, which means to sink to the bottom and to be thoroughly submerged." Metaphorically, in Matthew, afflictions are compared to a flood of waters in which they seem to be immersed who are overwhelmed with the miseries and misfortunes of life; yet only so overwhelmed as to emerge again. 6. After these venerable continental authorities we shall now introduce a few English lexicographers, both general and special. Parkhurst’s Lexicon for the New Testament deposes that baptizo, first and primarily, means to dip, immerse, or plunge in water; but in the New Testament it occurs not strictly in this sense, unless so far as this is included in "to wash one’s self, be washed, wash the hands by immersion or dipping in water." Mark 7:4, Luke 11:38. To immerse in water or with water, in token of purification from sin and from spiritual pollution; figuratively, "to be immersed or plunged into a flood or sea, as it were, of grievous afflictions and sufferings." So the Septuagint and Josephus use it--he anomai me baptizei--Iniquity plunges me into terror. 7. Next comes Mr. Donnegan, distinguished and popular in England and America. "Baptizo--to immerse repeatedly into a liquid, to submerge, to sink thoroughly, to saturate--metonymically, to drench with wine, to dip in a vessel and draw. Baptismos--Immersion, submersion, the act of washing or bathing. Baptistees, (a baptist,) one who immerses, submerges. Baptisma, an object immersed, submerged, washed, or soaked." 8. Rev. Dr. John Jones, of England, deserves the next place, at least in rank. Bapto he defines, "I dip, I stain;" and baptizo, "I plunge, I plunge in water, dip, baptize, bury, overwhelm." 9. Greenfield, editor of the Comprehensive Bible, the Polumierian New Testament, &c., &c., whose reputation as a New Testament lexicographer is well known, says--"Baptizo means to immerse, immerge, submerge, sink." I. N. T. "To wash, perform ablution, cleanse, to immerse, baptize, and perform the rite of baptism." 10. Two Germans of distinction may be next heard. Professor Rost, whose reputation is equal to that of any other German linguist, in his standard German Greek Lexicon, simply defines bapto by words indicating to plunge, to immerse, to submerge. 11. Bretshchneider, said to be the most critical lexicographer of the New Testament, affirms that "an entire immersion belongs to the nature of baptism. This is the meaning of the word: for in baptizo is contained the idea of a complete immersion under water, at least so is baptisma in the New Testament." 12. Bass, an English lexicographer, for the New Testament, gives baptizo "to dip, immerse, plunge in water; to bathe one’s self; to be immersed in sufferings or afflictions." If Pickering could be regarded as a new or distinct lexicographer, we should add his testimony, as it is corroborative of the above. He gives baptisma "immersion, dipping, plunging; metaphorically, misery or calamity with which one is overwhelmed." 13. I shall conclude this distinguished class of witnesses from the high school of lexicography with the testimony of Stokius, who has furnished us with a Greek and Hebrew clavis--one for the Hebrew and one for the Greek Scriptures. My edition is the Leipsic, of 1752. This great master of sacred literature says, "Generatim ac vi vocis intinctionis ac immersionis baptizo notianem obtinet. Speciatim proprie est immergere ac intingere in aquam;" which we translate, "Baptizo generally, and by the force of the word, indicates the idea of simply dipping and dyeing; but properly it means to dip or immerse in water." He defines baptisma in a like manner--"It generally denotes immersion and dyeing; but by the innate force of the term, it properly imports immersion or dipping of a thing in water, that it may be washed or cleansed." And mark especially the following frank declaration of this distinguished theologian and critic:--"The word is transferred to denote the first sacrament of the New Testament, which they call the Sacrament of Initiation--viz, baptism. In which sacrament those to be baptized were anciently immersed in water, as now-a-days they are only sprinkled with water, that they may be washed from the pollution of sin, obtain the remission of it, and be received into the covenant of grace as heirs of eternal life." So depose these thirteen great masters on the native, original, and proper meaning of the word in debate: to whose testimony I might add several others, were it not that they are but a monotonous repetition of those already presented. But to sum up this class of evidence, and to show from the highest source of American theological authority that I have neither misquoted nor misinterpreted the verdict of this illustrious jury of thirteen unchallenged judges, I will quote the words of Professor Stuart, of the Andover Theological School:--"Bapto, Baptizo mean to dip, plunge, or immerge into any liquid. ALL LEXICOGRAPHERS AND CRITICS OF ANY NOTE ARE AGREED IN THIS."1 He is my American apostle, standing to this argument as Paul stood in comparison with the original twelve--himself the one only Apostle to the Gentiles, though the thirteenth as respected the original twelve selected of and for the Jews. Before dismissing this class of witnesses, it is pertinent to my proposition that I state distinctly three facts:-- 1. These lexicographers were not Baptists, but Pedobaptists. 2. Not one of them ever translated any of these terms by the word sprinkle. 3. Not any one of them ever translated any of these terms by the word pour. Consequently, with all their prejudices, they could find no authority for so doing, else doubtless they would have done it. My readers will, I hope, pardon the introduction of so many Greek and Latin words. The occasion demands it. From the course pursued by our neighbouring denominations, we are compelled to lay the corner-stone of our superstructure not only deep in the earth, but upon a solid Greek basis. The foundation being laid on a Grecian rock, and the wall above-ground, our labours will, we hope, be more intelligible, and consequently more agreeable and more interesting to us all. We have, then, the unanimous testimony of all the distinguished lexicographers known in Europe and America, that the proper and everywhere current signification of baptizo, the word chosen by Jesus Christ in his commission to the Apostles, is to dip, plunge, or immerse; and that any other meaning is tropical, rhetorical, or fanciful. This being so, then our first proposition must be undoubtedly true. But besides these, I have various other classes of witnesses to adduce in solemn confirmation of the testimony of this most learned, veritable, and venerable class of men. But it will be asked, "On what authority are dictionaries to be received?" It will be answered, On the suffrage of the learned. Again, "On what principle are the suffrages of the learned obtained?" It is responded, On their own knowledge of the agreement of the definitions with the usage of the standard writers of the language. Then we are thrown at once upon the common use of those writers who are regarded as competent judges of their own language at the times in which they lived. By an examination of these, we come inductively to a proper understanding of any particular word. Happily for us, this work has been, in a good measure, done already, at least much of it has been done by Dr. Gale, of England; Dr. Alexander Carson, of Ireland; Professor Stuart, of Andover, and others who preceded them; and even some of us have done a little at it, and can do some more. No word, indeed, in the Greek language has already been more rigidly canvassed and more accurately traced than baptizo, and none more satisfactorily established. I can only give a specimen of the classic, literal, and figurative usus loquendi in the case of baptizo and its root bapto:-- 1st. Of the proper meaning of baptizo:-- "Lucian, in Timon, the man-hater, makes him say--’If I should see any one floating toward me upon the rapid torrent, and he should, with outstretched hands, beseech me to assist him, I would thrust him from me, baptizing (baptizonta) him, until he would rise no more.’" "Plutarch, vol, 10: p. 18. ’Then plunging (baptizon) himself into the lake Copais.’" "Strabo, lib. 6, speaking of a lake near Agrigentum, says ’Things that elsewhere cannot float, do not sink (baptizesthai).’ In lib. 12, of a certain river he says--’If one shoots an arrow into it, the force of the water resists it so much, that it will scarcely sink (baptizesthai).’" "Polybius, vol. 3: p. 311. ult., applies the word to soldiers passing through water, immersed (baptizomenoi) up to the breast." "The sinner is represented by Porphyry, p. 282, as baptized (baptizetai) up to his head in Styx, a celebrated river in hell. Is there any question about the mode of this baptism?" "Themistius, Orat. 4: p. 133, as quoted by Dr. Gale, says--’The pilot cannot tell but he may save one in the voyage that had better be drowned (baptisai), sunk into the sea.’" "The Sibylline verse concerning the city of Athens, quoted by Plutarch in his life of Theseus, most exactly determines the meaning of baptizo. Askos baptizee dunai de toi on themis esti." "Thou mayest be dipped, O bladder! but thou art not fated to sink." "For our ship," says Josephus, "having been baptized or immersed in the midst of the Adriatic sea." "Speaking of the murder of Aristobulus, by command of Herod, he says, ’The boy was sent to Jericho by night, and there by command having been immersed (baptizomenos) in a pond by the Galatians he perished.’ The same transaction is related in the Antiquities in these words: ’Pressing him down always, as he was swimming, and baptizing him as in sport, they did not give over until they entirely drowned him.’" "Homer, Od. 1: 392: As when a smith dips or plunges (baptei) a hatchet or huge poleaxe into cold water, viz. to harden them." "Pindar, Pyth. 2: 139, describes the impotent malice of his enemies, by representing himself to be like the cork upon a net in the sea, which does not sink: As when a net is cast into the sea, the cork swims above, so am I unplunged (abaptistos); on which the Greek scholiast, in commenting, says: ’As the cork ou dunei, does not sink, so I am abaptistos, unplunged, not immersed. The cork remains abaptistos, and swims on the surface of the sea, being of a nature which is abaptistos; in like manner I am abaptistos.’ In the beginning, of this explanation, the scholiast says: ’Like a cork of the net in the sea, ou baptisomai, I am not plunged or sunk.’ The frequent repetition of the same words and sentiment, in this scholium, shows, in all probability, that it is compiled from different annotators upon the text. But the sense of baptizo in all is too clear to admit of any doubt." "Aristotle, de Color. 100: 4, says: By reason of heat and moisture, the colours enter into the pores of things dipped into them, (tou baptomenou.) De Anima, 3: 100: 12: If a man dips (bapsei) any thing into wax, it is moved so far as it is dipped. Hist. Animal. 8: 100: 2, speaking of certain fish he says: They cannot endure great changes, such as that, in the summer time, they should plunge (baptosi) into cold water. Ibid. 100: 29, he speaks of giving diseased elephants water to drink, and dipping (baptontes) hay into honey for them." "Aristophanes, in his comedy of The Clouds, Acts 1:1-26 : scene 2, represents Socrates as gravely computing how many times the distance between two of its legs a flea could spring at one leap; and in order to ascertain this, the philosopher first melted a piece of wag, and then taking the flea, he dipped or plunged (enebaphes) two of its feet into it," &c. "Heraclides Ponticus a disciple of Aristotle, Allegor. p. 495, says: When a piece of iron is taken red hot from the fire, and plunged in the water (udati baptizetai), the heat, being quenched by the peculiar nature of the water, ceases." "Herodotus, in Euterpe, speaking of an Egyptian who happens to touch a swine, says: Going to the river [Nile] he dips himself (ebaphe eauton) with his clothes." "Aratus, in his Phaenom. 5: 650 speaks of the constellation Cepheus, as dipping (baptoon) his head or upper part into the sea. In 5: 858, he says: If the sun dip (baptoi) himself cloudless into the western flood. Again, in 5: 951. If the crow has dipped (ebapsato) his head into the river," &c. "Xenophon, Anab. 2: 2, 4, describes the Greeks and their enemies as sacrificing a goat, a bull, a wolf, and a ram, and dipping (baptontes) into a shield filled with their blood, the Greeks the sword, the Barbarians a spear, in order to make a treaty that could not be broken." "Plutarch, Parall. Grace. Rom. p. 545: speaking of the stratagem of a Roman general, in order to insure victory, he says: He set up a trophy, on which, dipping his hand into blood (eis to aima--baptizas), he wrote this inscription &c. In vol. 6: p. 680 (edit. Reiske), he speaks of iron plunged (baptomenon), viz. into water, in order to harden it. Ibid. p. 633, plunge (baptison) yourself into the sea." "Diodorus Siculus, edit. Heyne, 4: p. 118: Whose ship being sunk or merged (baptistheises). Some other editions read baptistheises plunged into the deep, which is a good gloss." "Plato, De Repub. 4: p. 637, represents dyers, who wish to make a permanent colour, as first choosing out wool, sorting and working it over, and then (baptousi) they plunge it, viz. into the dyestuff." "Epictetus, 3: p. 69. ed. Schwiegh., in a fragment of his work says: As you would not wish, sailing in a large ship adorned and abounding with gold to be sunk or immerged (baptizesthai), so," &c. "Hippocrates, p. 532, edit. Basil: Shall I not laugh at the man who sinks (baptisonta) his ship by overloading it, and then complains of the sea for engulfing it with its cargo? On page 50, to dip (baptein) the probes in some emollient. Page 51, dipping (bapsasa) the rag in ointment, &c. Page 104, cakes dipped (embaptomenoi) into sour wine. Page 145, dipping (baptoon) sponges in warm water. And in the same way in all parts of his book, in instances almost without number." "Heraclides, Allegor., says, When a piece of iron is taken red-hot from the fire and plunged (baptizetai) into water." "Heliodorus, 6: 4. When midnight had plunged (ebaptizon) the city in sleep." FIGURATIVE USE. "Plutarch. Overwhelmed with debts (bebaptismenon)." "Chrysostom. Overwhelmed (baptizomenos) with innumerable cares." "Lucian, 3: page 81. He is like one dizzy and baptized or sunk (bebaptismeno)--viz. into insensibility by drinking." "Justin Martyr. Overwhelmed with sins (bebaptismenos)." "Aristotle, de Mirabil. Ausc., speaks of a saying among the Phenicians, that there were certain places beyond the pillars of Hercules, which when it is ebb-tide, are not overflowed (me baptizesthai), but at full-tide are overflowed (katakluzesthai); which word is here used as an equivalent for baptizesthai." "Plato, Conviv. p. 176. I myself am one of those who were drenched or overwhelmed (bebaptismenon) yesterday, viz. with wine. In another place: Having overwhelmed (baptisasa) Alexander with much wine. Euthydem. p. 267, ed. Heindorf. A youth overwhelmed (baptizomenon), viz. with questions." "Philo Judaeus, vol. 2: p. 478. I know some, who, when they easily become intoxicated, before they are entirely overwhelmed (printeleos baptisthemai), viz. with wine." "Diodorus Siculus, tom. 1: p. 107. Most of the land animals that are intercepted by the river [Nile] perish, being overwhelmed (baptizomena); here used in the literal sense. Tom. 1: p. 191: The river, borne along by a more violent current, overwhelmed (ebaptise) many; the literal signification. Tom. 1: p. 129. And because they [the nobles] have a supply by these means [presents], they do not overwhelm their subjects with taxes." Many instances are given by Stuart, Carson, and others, in which bapto signifies to dye. It is, indeed, useless to array these, inasmuch as there is now no longer dispute on that subject. Since Messrs. Carson and Stuart’s essays on this subject, it is agreed among the learned of all parties that bapto and baptizo do differ only in one point, not formerly observed by the lexicographers themselves; and that point is, that BAPTO IS NEVER USED TO DENOTE THE ORDINANCE OF BAPTISM, AND BAPTIZO NEVER SIGNIFIES TO DYE. In the radical and proper import, it is abundantly evident that they are isodunai, exactly the same as to signification. But it has been urged that bapto and baptizo have a classic and a sacred use--that they mean one thing in common classic Greek, and another in the Septuagint Old Testament, in the apochryphal books, and in the apostolic writings--that the synagogue and classic use is different. As truly might they affirm that matheteuo and didasko, the other terms in the commission, have two meanings--one for the Bible, and another for all other books; and thus take from us at once the key of interpretation. I cheerfully admit the provincial and idiomatic acceptation of terms, and that sometimes words have some shades of meaning in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures which are not common in other books: still, this admission has much more to do with phrases and particular modes of expression than with the exact meaning of words. When any man in debate assumes that a word means sprinkle in the Bible and dip in all other books, or that any term is specifically different in its acceptance there from its current use elsewhere, I demand the proof: clear, ample, and satisfactory proof. But, while that is withheld, I must withhold confidence in his judgment and respect for him as a scholar. But no one has yet shown that baptizo, or its root bapto, has any other specific meaning in the Bible than in other writings. I demand an induction of all the occurrences of these words in Holy Writ from the person who assumes that ground; and also an effort from him to affix to them in any of these occurrences a meaning necessarily different from their current use. This, I presume, can never be done; and, therefore, by a real scholar, will never be attempted. Baptizo is found but twice in the Old Testament. The first of these, says Mr. Stuart, means to immerse, dip, or plunge. 1 Kings 5:14 : "Naaman plunged himself seven times into the Jordan." This was the way that he obeyed the precept, "Go wash (lousai) thyself seven times in the Jordan." The second means figuratively to overwhelm. "My iniquity overwhelms me," (me baptizei.) Isaiah 21:4. No exception as yet. It is found but twice in the apochryphal books of the Old Testament. Of Judith, chap. 12: 5, it is said, "she went out by night and washed (ebaptizeto) herself in the camp at the fountain of water." In Sirach, 31: 25, there occurs the expression baptizo menos apo nekroon. He who is cleansed from a dead carcase and toucheth it again, what doth he profit by his washing? too loutree autou. According to the law, Numbers 19:19, the unclean was never cleansed until he bathed himself in water. These instances, therefore, constitute no exception from the established meaning of the word in classic and common use. Professor Stuart gives all the places where bapto is found in the Septuagint. Bapto is found in Leviticus 4:6; Leviticus 14:6; Leviticus 14:51; Leviticus 11:32, translated dip and plunge. In Numbers 19:18; Deuteronomy 33:24; Joshua 3:15; Ruth 2:14; 1 Samuel 4: 27; 2 Kings 8:15; Job 9:31; Psalms 68:23. In these passages it is, with the exception of once plunge, always dip; and amongst the plunged and dipped are vessels, mattresses, and persons. Bapto is used to indicate "to smear or moisten by dipping," says Professor Stuart, three times: Leviticus 4: 47; Leviticus 14:16; Exodus 12:22. It once signifies to tinge or colour, Ezekiel 23:15 --tiarai baptai--coloured turbans. The text is, however, doubtful. It is found translated wet or moisten, twice; Daniel 4:36; Daniel 5:21. "His body was moistened, or wet, with the dew of heaven." Of nineteen occurrences of bapto in the Old Testament, it is once translated colour, twice wet, twice plunge, and fourteen times dip. The only question remaining, is, How is baptizo translated in the New Testament, in which it is found eighty times? Bapto, with its compound embapto, is found six times in the New Testament; baptizo is found eighty times; baptismos, four times; baptisma, twenty-two times; and baptistees, fourteen times; in all one hundred and twenty-six times. In the common version, bapto and embapto are always translated dip; baptizo is twice translated wash; baptismos is three times translated washing; baptisma and baptistees are never translated, but transferred--the former into baptism, and the latter into baptist. They are never translated by any of the words sprinkle, pour, or purify. Why this family of five distinguished members, occurring one hundred and twenty-six times in one small volume, should, in two of its members, occurring jointly thirty-six times, never be translated at all; and why the main branch, baptizo itself, consecrated by the commission to a most important purpose, should, in eighty times, have been translated only twice, and then by a term so vague as wash; and baptismos three times by washing,--is a very curious problem left for future discussion and development. Meantime, from the induction, both sacred and classical, now given,--and of the classical but a specimen of what is available has been given,--may we not, without farther argument, satisfactorily conclude that the lexicographers whose testimony we have heard had, from the usus loquendi--the well-established law of public usage--ample authority for the uniform translation of these words in their proper, original, and primitive sense, by the terms plunge, dip, or immerse, which they have so unanimously and so decidedly given them in all their statements? It is with the proper and unfigurative, and not with the fanciful and rhetorical meaning of words, we have to do in all positive institutions. Sir William Blackstone has truly said, (and who is higher authority than he?)--"The words of a law are generally to be understood in their USUAL AND MOST KNOWN SIGNIFICATION; not so much regarding the propriety of grammar; as their general and popular use: but when words bear either none or a very absurd signification, if literally understood, we must a little deviate from the received sense of them."2 Bishop Taylor has also well said, "In all things where the precept is given in the proper style of laws, he that takes the first sense is the likeliest to be well guided. In the interpretation of the laws of Christ, the strict sense is to be followed." Dr. Jonathan Edwards, the greatest of American Presbyterian theologians, has truly said, "In words capable of two senses, the natural and proper is the primary; and, therefore, ought, in the first place and chiefly, to be regarded." A greater still, Vitringa, has said, "This is accounted by all a constant and undoubted rule of approved interpretation, that the ordinary and most usual signification of words must not be deserted, except for sufficient reasons." To similar effect declare Sherlock, Waterland, Owen, and Dr. Cumming, as quoted in Booth’s Defence of his Pedobaptism Examined, vol. 3, London, 1792, p. 253-256. Before dismissing this subject, we must yet hear Turretine, the systematic standard theologian of the orthodox schools of Presbyterianism. His words, fairly translated are, "It is acknowledged by all that we should never depart from the proper and native signification of words, except for the weightiest and most urgent reasons."3 We shall conclude with Dr. Benson, another favourite:--"What can be more absurd than to imagine that the doctrines or rules of practice which relate to men’s everlasting salvation should be delivered in such ambiguous terms as to be capable of many meanings?"4 Well does the English Pirie say, "Law," and as fully developed in chapter III, of this work, "requires words and phrases of the most ascertained and unequivocal sense." If seven such names as are here given are not valid authority on the proper interpretation of laws and positive institutions, to whom shall we hearken? Their testimony being admitted, and the plain and unanimous testimony of the lexicographical jury above given, on the proper, current, and popular use and meaning of baptizo, can any one show reason why we should not, a second time, regard my first proposition as fully proved? All the dictionaries give dip or immerse as the proper, common, and current use of baptizo; and all our quotations from some thirty of the most classic authors, as well as from the canonical Greek Scriptures of the Old Testament, sustain them in so doing. And that the proper, common, and current use of words is to be always preferred and adopted in the interpretation of laws and ordinances, is attested by a host of witnesses of the highest authority, and sustained by Horn and Ernesti in their canons of interpretation. I repeat: must we not, then, conclude that immersion, and immersion only, is Christian baptism, according to the mind and will of our Lawgiver and Judge? 1 Biblical Repository for 1833, page 298. 2 Com. Vol. I sec. 2. 3 De Satisfactione Christi, part 1, sec. 23. 4 Hist. Bapt., Robertson, p. 36. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 17: 01.02.03. ANCIENT VERSIONS ======================================================================== CHAPTER III. ANCIENT VERSIONS. ARGUMENT 3.--Not one of the ancient versions uses a word indicative of sprinkling or pouring water on a person, in order to his Christian baptism; but all concur in the choice of a term intimating immersion, dipping, or plunging a person, if any allusion be made to the form of the action. EVERY class of witnesses summoned with reference to the proposition before us is regarded as a new argument. Indeed, in strict propriety, every single witness is a distinct argument; but we do not so count them in this discussion. We summon witnesses in classes to prove certain subordinate propositions, which, when proved, make full and perfect arguments in support of the grand proposition touching the action of baptism. But, when offering a new argument, or summoning a new class of witnesses, I desire it to be clearly understood that it is not to fortify a previous argument, or to corroborate witnesses already adduced. We regard every single argument offered as full and sufficient of itself, if we had not another. One good argument will sustain any true proposition; for a false proposition can never bring to its aid one sound argument. The next class of witnesses to whose testimony we invite attention is that of the ancient Versions. Of these the oldest is the Peshito Syriac Version, supposed to have been completed early in the second century: some say, at the close of the first. Dr. Henderson, a learned Pedobaptist, gives it as his opinion that "when the Lord gave the commission to the Apostles to baptize all nations, there is every reason to believe that he employed the identical word found in the Peshito Syriac Version." That word for baptizo is amad, which, this aforesaid Dr. Henderson maintains, etymologically signifies "standup," "stand erect." If this be the original word used by the Saviour in his native Syro-Chaldaic language, then baptizo found in our Greek copies must be a translation of amad, and, in the judgment of the Greek translators of Matthew, equivalent to it. But who of the Pedobaptist school will presume to say that baptizo means to stand up or stand straight? The fact, then, is, Dr. Henderson is wrong either in his construction of amad, or our Lord could not have used amad, inasmuch as all copies have baptizo in the commission, according to Matthew: and no man, now-a-days, will argue that baptizo means to stand up, or that the Syriac amad means to sprinkle, pour, or purify. One might argue that as baptism has a resurrection in it as well as a burial, it might be no more figurative or improper to call it a rising up to a new life, than a lying down or putting off of an old one--an emersion as well as an immersion. If indeed, as some Pedobaptists suppose, it etymologically means to "stand up," or "rise up," rather than to be buried, it makes nothing at all against our views, while it certainly does against infant sprinkling: for who could make an infant stand up, or stand erect, to receive a drop of water or the sign of a cross? But what say the lexicons? "Castel and his editor Michaelis, Buxtorf, and Schaaf are all unanimous. The first gives the following meanings: ’Ablutus est, baptizatus est. Aphel, immersit, baptizavit.’ Buxtorf gives, ’Baptizari, intingi, ablui, abluere se, Ethp. Idem. Aphel, baptizare.’ Schaaf: ’Ablui se, ablutus, intinctus, immersus in aquam, baptizatus est. Ethpeel, Idem quod Peal. Aphel, immersit, baptizavit.’ Gutbier, in the small lexicon affixed to his edition of the Syriac Testament, gives the meaning, ’Baptizavit, baptizatus est. It. sustentavit;’ but without any reference to support the last meaning; and it is apparently introduced simply for the purpose of deducing from the verb the noun columna. With this exception, the authority of the lexicons referred to is altogether against any such meaning as ’to stand.’" These three great authorities give to amad the very same meanings which our twelve Greek Lexicons give to baptizo and its family--to immerse, dip, or plunge, and, figuratively, to wash or cleanse. With regard to the Arabic versions, the Persic, Ethiopic, the Egyptian with its three dialects, the Coptic or Memphitic, the Sahidic or Thebaic, and the Basmuric of the Delta--to all of which the name Coptic is often applied; and with regard to the Armenian, Slavonic and Gothic, with its German, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish families, down to the Anglo-Saxon, to the history of all of which I have paid some attention so far as to trace the developments of the gospel commission; I shall give the result of my investigations, both general and special, in the words of Mr. Gotch, of Trinity College, Dublin, in his critical examination of the rendering of the word baptizo in the ancient and many of the modern versions of the New Testament:-- "The conclusions to which the investigation leads us, are-- "With regard to the ancient versions, in all of them with three exceptions, (viz. the Latin from the third century, and the Sahidic and Basmuric,) the word baptizo is translated by words purely native; and the three excepted versions adopted the Greek word, not by way of transference, but in consequence of the term having become current language. "Of native words employed, the Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, Coptic, Armenian, Gothic, and earliest Latin, all signify to immerse; the Anglo-Saxon, both to immerse and to cleanse; the Persic, to wash; and the Slavonic, to cross. The meaning of the word adopted from the Greek, in Sahidic, Basmuric, and Latin, being also to immerse. 2. "With regard to the modern versions examined, the Eastern generally adhere to the ancient Eastern versions and translate by words signifying to immerse. Most of the Gothic dialects, viz. the German Swedish, Dutch, Danish, &c., employ altered forms of the Gothic word signifying to dip. The Icelandic uses a word meaning cleanse. The Slavic dialects follow the ancient Slavonic; and the languages formed from the Latin, including the English, adopt the word baptizo; though, with respect to the English, the words wash and christen were formerly used, as well as baptize. It may perhaps be acceptable to place these results together in a tabular form, as follows:-- VERSION. DATE. WORD EMPLOYED. MEANING. SYRIAC: Peshito, 2d cent. amad, immerse. Philoxenian, 6th cent. amad, immerse. ARABIC: Polyglot, 7th cent. amada 47 times, immerse. Propaganda, 1671 amada, immerse. Sabat, 1816 amada, immerse. PERSIC, 8th cent. shustan & shuyidan, wash. ETHIOPIC: 4th cent. shustan, immerse. Amharic, 1822 shustan, immerse. EGYPTIAN: Coptic, 3d cent. tanaka, immerse, plunge. Sahidic, 2d cent. baptizo, immerse. Basmuric, 3d cent. ARMENIAN, 5th cent. mogridil, immerse. SLAVONIC: 9th cent. krestiti, cross. Russian, 1519 same root, cross. Polish, 1585 Bohemian, 1593 Lithuanian, 1660 Livonian, or Lettish, 1685 Dorpat Esthonian, 1727 &c. &c. GOTHIC: 4th cent. daupjan, dip. German, 1522 taufen, dip. Danish, 1524 dobe, dip. Swedish, 1534 dopa, dip. Dutch, 1460 doopen, dip. &c. &c. Icelandic, 1584 skira, cleanse. ANGLO-SAXON, 8th cent. dyppan, fullian, dip, cleanse. LATIN: Of the early fathers 8th cent. tingo immerse. Ante-Hieronymian, 3d cent. baptizo, immerse. Vulgate, 4th cent. baptizo, immerse. French, 1535 baptiser, immerse. Spanish, 1556 baptizar, immerse Italian, 1562 bapttezzare, immerse &c. &c. English: Wicklif, 1380 wash, christen, baptize, immerse. Tindal, 1526 baptize, Welsh, 1567 bedyddio, bathe. Irish, 1602 baisdim, bathe. Gaelic, 1650 baisdeam. bathe." Here, then, we have sixteen ancient versions, six of them in the 2d and 3d centuries, and ten of them completed before the close of the 9th, indicative of immersion--one, from the sign made in baptism by the Romanists, is rendered cross. From the 9th century, we have twenty more, all indicative of the same fact. In all these, we have thirty-six foreign, and many of them ancient versions, in proof of our first proposition. In all these, it is not once rendered by the word sprinkle or pour. The investigation of Mr. Gotch goes to show, moreover, that the notion of either transferring the original word into translations, or of manufacturing new words, has no countenance from these thirty-six ancient and modern versions. He very justly observes-- "Our investigation, then, shows that it has not been the practice of translators, until quite recent times, to adopt the plan of ’transference’ in respect to the word baptizo. The word has been translated, in most instances, by a term strictly native; or, where the term has been derived from the Greek, it appears to have become naturalized in the respective languages before the translation was made. There is no instance, until of late years, in which it can be shown that the translators made the word; and it well deserves the consideration of all who are engaged in translating, or disseminating translations of the word of God, how far such a plan is justifiable. It may, indeed, be said, that though the word baptizo has not been thus transferred, other words have; and that thereby the principle of transference is countenanced by former translators. It is certain that such words as proper names, and designations of things which are not known, and therefore have no word by which they can be expressed, must be so rendered: but what proof is there of translators, in general, carrying transference farther than this? Let it be remembered, that the Greek language was closely united to the Latin, to which the appeal has been frequently made; and that on this account, Greek words were continually naturalized in it. Such words we may expect to meet with; but to prove that translators transferred words in the modern sense of the term, it must be shown that words, the meaning of which might have been expressed in the language, were given, not only by terms derived from the Greek, but without meaning;--being made for the occasion, and purposely left without definition. It will not surely be said that the word baptizo has no meaning,--that a command, involving, as most Christians believe, a thing to be done by or for every disciple, yet conveys no definite idea of what is to be done. We are not now inquiring what that meaning is: every one who attempts to translate the word of God is bound to judge for himself on that point. Let him so judge, and give the result of his judgment." To all which we cheerfully assent. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 18: 01.02.04. ENGLISH TRANSLATORS ======================================================================== CHAPTER IV. ENGLISH TRANSLATORS. ARGUMENT 4.--No English translator, known to me, has at any time translated any word of the Bapto family by the words, sprinkle, pour, or purify. BY English translators, we understand those who have made into our vernacular a translation of any of the books of the Apostolic writings, or of the whole volume. In the late London Hexapla, which lies before me, first published by Baxter; London, 1841, there are the six most prominent English versions; viz. that of Wicklif, A. D. 1380; Tyndale, 1584; Cranmer, 1539; Geneva, 1557; Anglo Rhemish, 1582; Authorized, 1611. Besides these six versions, of most distinguished fame, I have more than as many others of much respectability; and some of them, upon the whole, of equal literary merit,--such as Doddridge’s, Thompson’s, Wesley’s, Penn’s, the Anonymous, Campbell’s Four Gospels, McKnight’s Epistles, Stuart’s version of the Romans and Hebrews--works of much merit, besides some others of minor fame, not including a Baptist version, which, although I am in many points better pleased with it than with the common, I deem it improper to admit into this class of witnesses. Now, of some fifteen complete versions on my shelf, besides several partial ones, not one has ever translated any word of the Bapto family by the words, sprinkle, pout, or purify. But I make my appeal, not only to the translations themselves, but to the authors of them,--to as many of them, at least, as have written or spoken freely on the subject, to whose writings and opinions we have had access, directly or indirectly. William Tyndale: "The plunging into water signifieth that we die and are buried with Christ, as concerning the old life of sin, which is Adam; and the pulling out again signifieth that we rise again, with Christ in a new life." Beza: "Baptizein does not signify to wash but by consequence; for, properly, it signifies to immerse for the sake of dyeing or tinging."--Vol. 2: p. 27, 28. The translators of the common version were all, or nearly all, genuine Episcopalians, and, at the very time they made the version, were accustomed to use a liturgy which made it the minister’s duty, in the sacrament of baptism, "to take the child and dip it in the water" contained in the font. I have seen copies of James’ version, printed in 1611, which contain the psalms and the service of the church, in which frequent allusions are made to immersion, all indicative of the fact that it was then regarded as the primitive and proper baptism; consequently, these translators accepted the king’s appointment and restrictions, to retain baptize and baptism, rather than translate them, and on no occasion favoured the innovation of sprinkling by any rendering, or note marginal, in that translation. Doddridge, on Acts 8:38, says, "Baptism was generally administered by immersion, though I see no proof that it was essential to the institution. It would be very unnatural to suppose that they went down to the water merely that Philip might take up a little water in his hand to pour on the eunuch. A person of his dignity had, no doubt, many vessels with him in his baggage on such a journey through so desert a country--a precaution absolutely necessary for travellers in these parts, and never omitted by them."1 On Romans 6:4, Doddridge repeats the same views, saying--"It seems the part of candour to confess, that here is an allusion to the manner of baptizing by immersion, as most usual in these early times." Of course, then, this erudite and pious Congregationalist could never render any member of this family by any word intimating any action different from immersion. McKnight, also, not only in his Epistles, but also in his Harmony, bears witness to the true and proper meaning of the word. He substitutes dip for wash in Mark 7:4 : For when they come from market, except they dip themselves, they eat not.2 The divers washings of the ninth of the Hebrews, common version, he translates into divers immersions, and thus restores two of the mistranslations of baptizo back to their proper meaning. In his comments on Romans 6:1-23 : and Colossians 2:1-23 :, and in many other passages, he boldly asserts immersion as the proper baptism, practised and taught in the primitive age: "In baptism, the rite of initiation into the Christian Church, the baptized person is buried under the water, as one put to death with Christ on account of sin, in order that he may be strongly impressed with a sense of the malignity of sin, and excited to hate it as the greatest of evils, Romans 6:3. Moreover, in the same rite, the baptized person being raised up out of the water, after being washed, he is thereby taught that he shall be raised from the dead with Christ, by the power of the Father, to live with him for ever in heaven, provided he is prepared for that life by true holiness, Romans 6:4-5. Farther, by their baptism, believers are laid under the strongest obligations to holiness, because it represents their old man, their old corrupt nature, as crucified with Christ, to teach them that their body, which sin claimed as its property, being put to death, was no longer to serve sin as its slave." "Christ’s baptism was not the baptism of repentance; for he never committed any sin: but, as was observed, Prelim. Ess. 1, at the beginning, he submitted to be baptized, that is, to be buried under the water by John and to be raised out of it again, as an emblem of his future death and resurrection. In like manner, the baptism of believers is emblematical of their own death, burial, and resurrection. See Colossians 2:12, note 1. Perhaps also it is a commemoration of Christ’s baptism. "He tells the Romans, that since they were planted together in the likeness of his death, namely, when they were baptized, they shall be also planted together in the likeness of his resurrection, by being raised to a new life in the body at the last day. "The burying of Christ and of believers, first in the water of baptism and afterwards in the earth, is fitly enough compared to the planting of seeds in the earth, because the effect in both cases is a reviviscence to a state of greater perfection." "Being buried with him in baptism. Christ began his ministry with receiving baptism from John, to show in an emblematic manner, that he was to die and to rise again from the dead. And after his resurrection, he commanded his disciples to initiate mankind into his religion, by baptizing them, as he himself had been baptized, to show, that although they shall die, like him, through the malignity of sin, yet, as certainly as he rose from the dead, believers shall be raised at the last day, with bodies fashioned like to his glorious body. Wherefore, his disciples having been baptized, as he was, and for the very same purpose, they are fitly said to be buried with Christ in baptism; and in baptism to be raised with him." "The circumcision which Christ performs, being accomplished by the influence of the doctrines of the gospel on the minds of believers; and their belief of these doctrines being founded on their belief of the resurrection of Christ, their belief of that great miracle is justly represented as the means, whereby they are raised out of the water of baptism new creatures, who, as the apostle observes in the next verse, are, like Christ, to be raised at the last day, to an eternal life in the body."3 Dr. George Campbell need scarcely be named in this place, inasmuch as his views of baptize and baptismos are so clearly, fully, and repeatedly declared. A single passage from him is all that we shall quote at present: "’Undergo an immersion like that which I must undergo,’ to baptisma ho ego baptizomai baptisthenai. English translation: To be baptized with the baptism that I am to be baptized with. The primitive signification of baptisms is immersion; of baptizein, to immerse, plunge, or overwhelm. The noun ought never to be rendered baptism, nor the verb to baptize, but when employed in relation to a religious ceremony. The verb baptizein sometimes, and baptein, which is synonymous, often occurs in the Septuagint and Apocryphal writings, and is always rendered in the common version by one or other of these words, to dip, to wash, to plunge. When the original expression, therefore, is rendered in familiar language, there appears nothing harsh or extraordinary in the metaphor. Phrases like these, to be overwhelmed with grief, to be immersed in affliction, will be found common in most languages." "The word baptizein, both in sacred authors and classical, signifies, to dip, to plunge, to immerse, and was rendered by Tertullian, the oldest of the Latin fathers, tingere, the term used for dyeing cloth, which was by immersion. It is always construed suitably to his meaning. Thus it is, en udati, en to Iordane. But I should not lay much stress on the preposition en, which, answering to the Hebrew beth, may denote with as well as in, did not the whole phraseology, in regard to this ceremony, concur in evincing the same thing. Accordingly, the baptized are said anabainein, to arise, emerge, or ascend, Matthew 3:17, apo tou udatos, and Acts 8:39, ek tou udatos, from or out of the water. Let it be observed further, that the verbs raino and rantizo, used in Scripture for sprinkling, are never construed in this manner. I will sprinkle you with clean water, is in the Septuagint, Raino eph’ umas katharon hudor, and not as baptizo is always construed. Raino umas en katharo udati See also Exodus 39:21. Leviticus 6:27; Leviticus 16:14. Had baptizo been here employed in the sense of raino, I sprinkle, (which as far as I know, it never is, in any use sacred or classical,) the expression would doubtless have been Ego baptizo eph umas udor, or apo tou udatou, agreeably to the examples referred to. When, therefore, the Greek word baptizo is adopted, I may say, rather than translated into modern languages, the mode of construction ought to be preserved so far as may conduce to suggest its original import. It is to be regretted that we have so much evidence that even good and learned men allow their judgments to be warped by the sentiments and customs of the sect which they prefer. The true partisan, of whatever denomination, always inclines to correct the diction of the Spirit by that of the party.4 Beza observes, on Mark 7:4 : "Christ commanded us to be baptized; by which word, it is certain, immersion is signified; baptizesthai, in this place, is more than niptein; because that seems to respect the whole body, this only the hands. Nor does baptizein signify to wash, except by consequence; for it properly signifies to immerse for the sake of dyeing. To be baptized in water, signifies no other than to be immersed in water, which is the external ceremony of baptism. Baptizo differs from the verb dunai, which signifies to plunge in the deep and to drown." After such testimonies as the above, it would seem superfluous to add from Wesley such concessions as his remarks on Romans 6:4 : "We are buried with him," &c. "Alluding here to the ancient manner of baptizing by immersion;" or to the concessions of Stuart, who has said: "That the Greek fathers, and the Latin ones who were familiar with the Greek, understood the usual import of the word baptizo, would hardly seem to be capable of a denial. That they might be confirmed in their view of the import of this word, by common usage among the Greek classic authors, we have seen in the first part of this dissertation. "For myself, then, I cheerfully admit that baptizo in the New Testament, when applied to the rite of baptism, does in all probability involve the idea, that this rite was usually performed by immersion, but not always." Evident, then, it is, not only that the English translators did not even translate baptizo, or its lineage, by the words pour, sprinkle, or purify, but that they could not so translate them from their knowledge of the ancient customs and the classic and sacred use of these terms. Thus, then, we have, by a new, distinct, and independent class of witnesses, of the highest celebrity for eminent literary attainments and for highly cultivated and refined conscientiousness, furnished another argument in proof of our first proposition, which, without regard to any other, would seem sufficient to establish it beyond the possibility of refutation. For, will not that distinguished doctor, Common Sense, whom all believe, naturally conclude that so many learned, conscientious, and religious men, having so much at stake themselves, continually sprinkling in the name of the Lord, would, if they could, have given some countenance to their own favourite practice, by translating some one or more of these one hundred and twenty-six occurrences of these terms in a way favourable to their own beloved practice. Certain it is, then, that their practice had some other foundation than the meaning of the word in the apostolic commission, concerning which foundation we may hereafter speak. 1 See Dr. Shaw’s Travels, Preface, p. 4. 2 Sec. 64, p. 352. 3 Boston Ed. 1810, six vols. Vol. 1: p. 283. Also, on Romans 6:4-5, p. 288. Again, vol. 3: p. 520 and 521. 4 Campbell’s Dissertations, vol. 4: p. 128, and p. 27. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 19: 01.02.05. REFORMERS, ANNOTATORS, PARAPHRASTS, AND CRITICS ======================================================================== CHAPTER V. ARGUMENT 5.--Reformers, Annotators, Paraphrasts, and Critics. OUR fifth argument in support of this proposition shall consist of the testimony of reformers, annotators, paraphrasts, and critics, touching the meaning of the terms in dispute, and the ancient usage,--selected from those only who favoured sprinkling or pouring as a more convenient, comfortable, and polite usage. At the head of the list, we must place Luther. In the 5th of the Smalcald articles drawn up by Luther, he says, "Baptism is nothing else than the word of God with immersion in water." "Baptism is a Greek word, and may be translated immersion, as when we immerse something in water, that it may be wholly covered. And although it is almost wholly abolished, (for they do, not dip the whole children, but only pour a little water on them,) they ought nevertheless to be wholly immersed, and then immediately drawn out; for that the etymology of the word seems to demand." "Washing of sins is attributed to baptism; it is truly, indeed, attributed, but the signification is softer and slower than it can express baptism, which is rather a sign both of death and resurrection. Being moved by this reason, I would have those that are to be baptized, to be altogether dipt into the water, as the word doth sound, and the mystery doth signify."1 Calvin: "The word baptizo signifies to immerse, and it is certain that immersion was the practice of the ancient church."2 Grotius: The great Grotius says, "That this rite was wont to be performed by immersion, and not by perfusion, appears both by the propriety of the word and the places chosen for its administration, John 3:23, Acts 8:38, and by the many allusions of the Apostles, which cannot be referred to sprinkling, Romans 6:3-4, Colossians 2:12. The custom of perfusion or aspersion seems to have obtained some time after, in favor of such who lying dangerously ill were desirous to dedicate themselves to Christ. These were called Clinics by other Christians. See Cyprian’s Epistle to Magnus to this purpose. Nor should we wonder that the old Latin fathers use tingere for baptizare, seeing the Latin word tingo does properly and generally signify the same as mersare, to immerse or plunge."3 Dionysius Petavius: "And indeed," says he, "immersion is properly styled baptismos, though at present we content ourselves with pouring water on the head, which in Greek is called perixusis, that is, perichysm, if I may so Anglicize, but not baptism." Casaubon: "For the manner of baptizing," says he, "was to plunge or dip them into the water, as even the word baptizein itself plainly enough shows, which, as it does not signify dunein to sink down and perish, neither certainly does it signify epipolazein, to swim or float a-top; these three words, epipolazein, baptizein, dunein, being very different." Vitringa: "The act of baptizing is the immersion of believers in water. This expresses the force of the word."4 Salmasius: "Baptism is immersion, and was administered in former times according to the force and meaning of the word."5 Hospinianus: "Christ commanded us to be baptized; by which it is certain immersion is signified."6 Zanchius: "The proper signification of baptize is to immerse, lunge under, to overwhelm in water." Alstedius: "To baptize signifies only to immerse; not to wash, except by consequence." Witsius: "It cannot be denied that the native signification of the words baptein and bapteizein is to plunge, to dip."7 Gurtlerus: "To baptize, among the Greeks, is undoubtedly to immerse, to dip; and baptism is immersion, dipping. Baptismos en Pneumati hagio, baptism in the Holy Spirit, is immersion into the pure waters of the Holy Spirit; for he on whom the Holy Spirit is poured out, is, as it were, immersed into him. Baptismos en puri, ’baptism in fire,’ is a figurative expression, and signifies casting into a flame, which, like water, flows far and wide; such as the flame that consumed Jerusalem. The thing commanded by the Lord, is baptism; immersion into water."8 Baddaeus: "The words baptizein and baptismos are not to be interpreted of aspersions, but always of immersion."9 Ewing, of Glasgow: "Baptizo in its primary and radical sense, I cover with water. It is used to denote, 1st. I plunge, or sink completely under water." Leigh: "The native and proper signification of it [baptizo] is, to dip into water, or to plunge under water." Bossuet: "’To baptize signifies to plunge, as is granted by all the world." Vossius, as quoted by Gale: "The great Vossius speaks exactly to the same purpose, and, indeed, almost in the same words; for without ever taking the least notice of lavo, or the like, he expressly says, that bapto and baptizo are rendered by mergo or mergito, and tingo, yet they properly signify mergo; and tingo only by a metalepsis, 1: e. as tingo implies mergo: and, therefore, he adds, tinging follows immersion, and is done by it." Venema: "The word baptizein, to baptize, is nowhere used in the Scripture for sprinkling."10 Bloomfield: "There is here [Romans 6:4] plainly a reference to the ancient mode of baptism by immersion; and I agree with Koppe and Rosenmuller, that there is reason to regret it should have been abandoned in most Christian churches, especially as it has so evident a reference to the mystic sense of baptism." Scholz, on Matthew 3:6 : "Baptism consists in the immersion of the whole body in water." Augusti: "The word baptism, according to the etymology and usage, signifies to immerse, submerge, &c., and the choice of the word betrays an age in which the later custom of sprinkling had not been introduced." Buttman, in his Larger Grammar, simply puts dawn, "bapto, to immerse." Edinburgh Reviewers of Carson’s work: "They tell me (says Mr. Carson) that it was unnecessary to bring forward any one of the examples to prove that the word signifies to dip,--that I might have commenced with this as a FIXED POINT UNIVERSALLY ADMITTED." Before dismissing this host of witnesses, sine die, while we have the Greek lexicographers, Greek classics, Bible translators, reformers, annotators, paraphrasts, and critics before us, all concurring with perfect unanimity in giving to baptizo, the word in the apostolic commission, the primary and proper meaning of dip, immerse, plunge, and no other figurative or rhetorical meaning incompatible therewith, I shall, to relieve the reader from so much attention to the mere documentary details of evidence, institute an argument on one philological fact, or law of language, which not only gives a satisfactory reason for this truly marvellous concurrence, but also itself constitutes a new argument, so far, at least, as to show that this word never can have but one meaning. The force of this argument requires only a concession which no man can refuse, namely, that baptizo once signifies to dip or immerse. This point conceded, and, according to the law in such cases, it must always signify to dip. Mr. Carson, one of the most acute and able critics on this subject, affirms that words of mode have but one meaning, and that baptizo is a verb of mode. To that canon I unhesitatingly assent. It is incontrovertibly true. Still, whether baptizo be a word of mode may be questioned. It is, indeed, denied by some, and although without proper evidence, still, in this case, it is to my mind objectionable, for two reasons:--1st. In the profound policies of the mere ingenious Pedobaptists, the whole controversy concerning the baptismal action was converted into a mere question of mode. The less educated and unsuspecting Baptists were ensnared by it; and, as their more prudent opponents designed, for some two centuries there have been on the theatre no less than three modes of baptism. One baptism with three modes! A grand ecclesiastical hoax! All have been entrammelled by it. And yet, like the lunar hoax, it only required a single reflection to annihilate it. Translate the one baptism and the three modes by their proper significants, and the sophistry is exposed. One immersion by any one of the modes, sprinkling, pouring, or immersing! Or substitute one pouring, by the mode of immersion, sprinkling, or pouring! I do not recollect to have ever seen this sophism exposed before my debate with Mr. Walker, in June, 1820. But, in the second place, it may be asked, of what action is immersion the mode? It is not necessarily, but accidentally a mode of washing, because there is neither soap nor water in baptizo. It is not necessarily a mode of staining, dyeing, colouring, purifying, any more than of polluting, burning, or destroying. Of what general action is it, then, the mode? ? It may, indeed, be perchance a mode of cleansing, purifying, washing, colouring, &c., but only by accident, and not from necessity. For these two reasons, I am unwilling, under all the ordinary circumstances of this case, to adopt the definition that "baptizo is a word of mode." I would rather say, it is a word of specific action. All verbs of action are either generic or specific. They indicate indefinite or definite action. There is nothing, for example, specific in the words cleanse, wash, purify, sanctify, go, come, &c. There is nothing specific in the word travel; but there is in the words ride, walk, swim, sail. There is nothing specific in the word move; but there is in creep, run, hop, leap, fly, &c. Now, as Dr. G. Campbell has well observed, "There is a great difference between the mention of any thing as a duty, especially of that consequence that the promises or threats of religion depend on the performance or neglect of it, and the bare recording of an event as fact; as in the former the words ought to be as special as possible, that there may be no mistake in the application of the promise, no pretence for saying that more was exacted than was expressed in the conditions; but in relating facts, it is often a matter of indifference whether the terms be general or special."11 In the judgment, then, of this greatest and soundest of biblical critics, baptizo ought to be a specific term, and not one of vague, indefinite, or generic sense. And that it is so, a little reflection, methinks, will render most apparent to all. Something was to be done into the name of the Father, &c. This is of itself evidence that the action was specific; for, if the name into which it was to be performed was specific, certainly it is as important that the action itself should have been specifically commanded. Nay, had it not been specifically commanded, how could the ordinance be obeyed ? He could not possibly mean "purify them," for the Messiah, having presented no form of purification, could not have expected obedience, unless he had specified the action to be done. But there is no need of any other proof that baptizo indicates a specific act, than the two facts:--1st, That it is to be applied to all manner of subjects or substances,--to wine, oil, blood, water, sand, debt, grief, sorrow, spirit; and that it signifies to dip, at least, sometimes, says the whole learned world. Now, a word that once signifies to immerse, never can signify to pour or sprinkle; because no three acts are more specifically different than these; and because it is essential that a specific term have but one meaning: for example, if to walk and to ride were both indicated by the same word, who, on hearing that word, could know which action was performed? If, then, baptizo once mean dip, it never can mean sprinkle, pour, or purify, unless these actions are identically the same. So obvious is this, that a person might risk even his life upon the fact that, if immersing a person was a capital offence, and if A B, when charged with it by the judges, proves that he only sprinkled water upon him there is not a jury of twelve men compos mentis in America that will not exonerate him from the crime. This view of the subject is susceptible of much amplification. But we have space only to state it in unambiguous terms. Baptizo means to dip, by consent of the whole world, and being a specific word, it never can have but one meaning, just as the word sprinkle never can mean to dip. 1 Op. vol. 1: 336. 2 Instit. b. 4, s. 15. 3 Matthew 3:6. Gale. 4 Aphor. Band Theol. Aphoris. 884. 5 De Caesarie Virorum, p. 669. 6 Hist. Sacram. 1. 2: 100: 1: 30. 7 In. His. Ecc. p. 138. 8 Institut. Theo. cap. 33: §§ 108, 109, 110, 125. 9 Theolog. Dogmat. 1. 5: 100: 1: § 5. 10 Vol. p. 5. 11 Four Gospels, vol. 1: dis. 6, par. 2, § 20. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 20: 01.02.06. ENGLISH LEXICONGRAPHERS, ENCYCLOPEDIAS, AND REVIEWERS OF THE PEDOBAPTIST SCHOOL ======================================================================== CHAPTER VI. ARGUMENT 6.--English Lexicographers, Encyclopedias, and Reviewers of the Pedobaptist School. OUR sixth argument shall consist of a few testimonies from some of our most eminent English lexicographers, encyclopedias, and reviews, of the Pedobaptist school. Richardson, the most learned of English lexicographers, interprets the word baptizo and its family thus: "To dip, or merge frequently, to sink, to plunge, to immerge." He concludes his long list of quotations with a few lines from Cowper-- Philosophy, baptized In the pure fountain of eternal lore, Has eyes, indeed, and viewing all she sees As meant to indicate a God to man, Gives him his praise, and forfeits not her own. Cowper’s Task, Book 3. Dr. Johnson, in his Dictionary, says, "To baptize is to christen, to administer the sacrament of baptism to one. Baptism, an external ablution of the body, with a certain form of words." This surely is popular and ecclesiastic enough. But, as quoted by Boswell, he says-- "Dr. Johnson argued in defence of some of the peculiar tenets of the church of Rome. As to giving the bread only to the laity, he said, "They may think that, in what is merely ritual, deviations from the primitive mode may be admitted on the ground of convenience; and I think they are as well warranted to make this alteration, as we are to substitute sprinkling in the room of the ancient baptism."1 The Monthly Reviewers of England say-- "We acknowledge there are many authorities to support it [immersion] among the ancients. The word baptize doth certainly signify immersion, absolute and total immersion, in Josephus and other Greek writers. * * * The examples produced, however, do not exactly serve the cause of those who think that a few drops of water sprinkled on the forehead of a child, constitutes the essence of baptism. In the Septuagint, it is said that Nebuchadnezzar was baptized with the dew of heaven; and in a poem attributed to Homer, called The Battle of the Frogs and Mice, it is said that a certain lake was baptized with the blood of a wounded combatant--(Ebapteto a? aimati limne porpureo.) A question has arisen, in what sense the word baptise can be used in this passage. Doth it signify immersion, properly so called? Certainly not: neither can it signify a partial sprinkling. A body wholly surrounded with a mist; wholly made humid with dew; or a piece of water so tinged with and discolored by blood, that if it had been a solid body and dipped into it, it could not have received a more sanguine appearance, is a very different thing from that partial application which in modern times is supposed sufficient to constitute full and explicit baptism. The accommodation of the word baptism to the instances we have referred to is not unnatural; though highly metaphorical; and may be resolved into a trope or figure of speech, in which, though the primary idea is maintained, yet the mode of expression is altered; and the word itself is to be understood rather allusively than really; rather relatively than absolutely. If a body had been baptized or immersed, it could not have been more wet than Nebuchadnezzar’s; if a lake had been dipped in blood, it could not have put on a more bloody appearance. "Hitherto the Antipedobaptists [or Baptists] seem to have had the best of the argument on the mode of administering the ordinance. The most explicit authorities are on their side. Their opponents have chiefly availed themselves of inference, analogy, and doubtful construction."2 It is due to our opponents, that when we quote their special pleaders, we ought to give their testimony on both sides. Chambers’ Cyclopedia, or Dictionary of Arts and Sciences: London, 1786. "Baptism, in Theology; formed from the Greek baptizo, of bapto--I dip or plunge, a rite or ceremony by which persona are initiated into the profession of the Christian religion. "The practice of the Western Church is to sprinkle the water on the head or face of the person to be baptized, except in the Church of Milan, in whose ritual it is ordered that the head of the infant be plunged three times into the water; the minister at the same time pronouncing the words ’I baptize thee in the name of the Father, the Son, and the holy Ghost’--importing that by this ceremony the person baptized is received among the professors of that religion, which God, the Father of all, revealed to mankind by the ministry of his Son, and confirmed by the miracles of his Spirit. A triple immersion was first used, and continued for a long time: this was to signify either the three days that our Saviour lay in the grave, or the three persons in the Trinity. But it was afterwards laid aside, because the Arians used it: it was thought proper to plunge but once. Some are of the opinion, that sprinkling in baptism was begun in cold countries. It was introduced into England about the beginning of the ninth century. At the Council of Celchyth, in 816, it was ordered that the priest should not only sprinkle the holy water upon the head of the infant, but likewise plunge it in the bason. There are abundance of ceremonies delivered by ecclesiastical writers, as used in baptism which are now disused; as the giving milk and honey to the baptized, in the East; wine and milk in the West, &c. "The opinion of the necessity of baptism in order to salvation, is grounded on these two sayings of our Saviour: ’He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved;’ and, ’Except a, man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.’" Brande’s Cyclopedia: New York, 1843. "Baptism, (Gr. bapto, I dip.) The rite of initiation into the community of Christians, ordained by Christ himself, when he commissioned his Apostles to go and baptize all nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. "Baptism was originally administered by immersion, which act is thought by some to be necessary to the sacrament. It is not clear, however, even in the Scripture History, that this ceremony was always adhered to. At present, sprinkling is generally substituted for dipping, at least in northern climates." Taylor’s Calmet. "Baptism is taken in Scripture for sufferings: ’Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of, and be baptized with the baptism which I am baptized with?’ Mark 10:38. And Luke 12:50, ’I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished?’ We find traces of similar phraseology in the Old Testament, (Psalms 69:2-3,) where waters often denote tribulations; and where, to be swallowed up by the waters, to pass through great waters, &c., signifies to be overwhelmed by misfortunes. "There is a very sudden turn of metaphor used by the Apostle Paul, in Romans 6:3-5. ’Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? therefore we are buried with him by baptism into his death--that we should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together [with him] in the likeness of his death, we shall be also planted in the likeness of his resurrection.’ Now what has baptism to do with planting? Wherein consists their similarity, so as to justify the resemblance here implied? In 1 Peter 3:21, we find the Apostle speaking of baptism, figuratively, as ’saving us;’ and alluding to Noah, who long lay buried in the ark, as corn long lies buried in the earth. Now, as after having died to his former course of life in being baptized, a convert was considered as rising to a renewed life, so, after having been separated from his former connections, his seed-bed, as it were, after having died in being planted, he was considered as rising to renewed life also." Edinburgh Encyc. "In the time of the Apostles the form of baptism was very simple. The person to be baptized was dipped in a river or vessel, with the words which Christ had ordered, and, to express more fully his change of character, generally assumed a new name. The immersion of the whole body was omitted only in the case of the sick, who could not leave their beds. In this case, sprinkling was substituted, which was called clinic baptism. The Greek church, as well as the schismatics in the East, retained the custom of immersing the whole body; but the Western church adopted, in the thirteenth century, the mode of baptism by sprinkling, which has been continued by the Protestants, Baptists only excepted." These we deem a fair specimen of this species of testimony. To these many more might be adduced, but without increasing authority. Amongst these Encyclopedias and Dictionaries are the chief standards and originals of the modern. Most of the Dictionaries commonly in use, like Webster and Walker, give no meaning of the terms but that in common use. With them they mean what modern practice says, to christen, to sprinkle, or to immerse. The elder ones, before the controversy became so warm, gave the original and proper meaning of this much and long litigated word. 1 Life of Johnson, vol. 2, p. 499, 509. 2 Monthly Review, vol. 70: p. 496. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 21: 01.02.07. WORDS USED IN CONSTRUCTION WITH BAPTIZO, RAINO, RANTIZO, CHEO, AND LOUO,... ======================================================================== CHAPTER VII. ARGUMENT 7.--Words used in construction with Baptizo, Raino, Rantizo. Cheo, and Louo, such as epi, en, eis, ek, apo. OUR seventh argument, in development and confirmation of the true meaning of baptizo, is derived from the words used in construction with it, as contradistinguished from all its rivals, raino, cheo, louo, and the prepositions, epi, en, eis, ek, apo, used in construction with them. We shall commence with epi, the word essential to the use of raino, rantizo, and that family. For the reasons already given, we are obliged, in positive laws and precepts, to take all the words in their primitive, proper, or common, and not in their figurative and peculiar significations. Epi frequently signifies on or upon; en, generally, in; eis, into; ek, of, out of, or from; and apo, from. But we have a shorter and more satisfactory way of ascertaining the use and import of these prepositions than the more common method of comparing all their occurrences: We take them and their principals together. For in this way there is less room for false and inconclusive reasoning, and the most illiterate may thus comprehend them. We shall illustrate this by taking raino, and its compound perirraino, and epi, together, and bapto and baptizo, with en and eis, as they are found in common usage. I assert, then, that for some reason raino and epi agree together; baptizo and en also agree together; but raino and en, or baptizo and epi, so perfectly disagree, as never to be found construed in amity in any Greek author, sacred or profane. 1. Perirranei epi ton katharisthenta, sprinkle the blood upon him to be cleansed, Leviticus 14:7. 2. Perirranei epi teen oikian, sprinkle upon the house, Leviticus 14:51. 3. Ranei epi hilasterion, he shall sprinkle it upon the mercy-seat, Leviticus 16:14. This phrase occurs the second time in the same verse. Perirranei epi ton oikon, he shall sprinkle it upon the house; epi ta skeua, upon the furniture; epi tas psuchas, upon the persons. The same idiom is here found three times in one verse, Numbers 19:18. Again, in Numbers 19:19, Perirranei epi ton akatharton, he shall sprinkle it upon the unclean. Again, Ezekiel 36:25. Rano epi humas katharon hudoor, I will sprinkle upon you clean water. In construction, then, with the person upon whom water is sprinkled, the verb raino is followed by epi; never by en or eis. A sprinkles water, blood, oil, dust, or ashes upon B; but never sprinkles B in blood, oil, dust, &c.: whereas, baptizo in such cases is followed by en and eis; never by epi. A immerses B, not upon, or with, but in water. This is a most convincing fact that baptizo, occurring eighty times in the New Testament, is never construed with epi, nor raino with en or eis. Baptizo is frequently construed with en and eis, and raino with epi; but they never interchange these particles. A shadow does not more naturally accompany an object standing in the sunshine, in this latitude, than does epi accompany raino, and en, baptizo, in the cases described. All this is equally true in the case of cheo, to pour. The object on which water or any thing is poured, is designated by epi; never by en. The thing poured or sprinkled always follows the verb to pour or sprinkle; the person is always preceded by upon. Neither of these facts ever occurs in the case of baptizo. In that case, the person follows the verb; and the material in which the action is performed is always preceded by en, expressed or understood. Hence, the uniform construction in the one case is, "I immerse B in water;" in the other case, the construction is, "I pour, or sprinkle water upon B." Not more clearly different are these two constructions in English than they are in Greek. Indeed, the object immersed is never governed by a preposition; the object sprinkled or poured is always governed by a preposition, The actions, then, in the original are just as distinct as are the words baptizo, cheo, raino, and their respective constructions. Louo, to wash, is by some supposed to be identical with baptizo. They imagine that because baptizo is metaphorically rendered by louo, to wash, in a few instances, they must be identical in meaning. But such is not the fact. Baptizo is sometimes figuratively rendered by louo; but louo is never rendered by baptizo! Hence louo and baptizo, and their representatives, to wash and to baptize, are not convertible terms. But, in the definition of words, the word defined and the definition must in all cases be convertible, if the definition be a correct one. Hence, baptizo does not mean to wash, except by accident, metonymically. To one accustomed to read the New Testament with a critical eye, these are facts which clearly forbid such an assumption. For instance, louo and baptizo occur in the same sentence, and sometimes in the same clause of a sentence, in direct contradistinction. Thus, in the case of the jailer, Acts 16:1-40 :: "He washed their stripes and was baptized." And Ananias said to Paul, "Arise, be baptized, and wash away thy sins." It is not said, be washed, and then wash away thy sins. It does not say, "he washed their stripes, and was washed himself and all his family." These examples most satisfactorily demonstrate that the Apostles never used baptizo and louo, or immerse and wash, as convertible or equivalent terms. Baptism, is, therefore, not washing; nor washing, baptism; in virtue of the meaning of the original terms. Rantizo and louo are as inimical as baptizo and louo, for we find them standing in the same clause together. Thus, Paul--"Having your hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and your bodies washed with clean water." Sprinkling and washing are, therefore, as inconvertible as immersion and washing. The precision of the Greek language, and its uniformity in the use of words in general, and of some words in particular, is truly remarkable. The Greeks that spoke and wrote during the last three hundred years of the Jewish dispensation, had three words usually translated wash. These are, nipto, louo, pluno. They never, in sacred use, confound them. These three represent three kinds of washing, and, consequently, one of them is never substituted for the other. Nipto, I have found thirty-four times in the Greek scriptures of both institutions; pluno, seventeen times; and louo, twenty-five times. The first has respect to the hands and feet; the second, to garments and to polluted persons and things; and the third, to persons and things, whether polluted or not. 1 Bathing, the medicinal use of water, and cleansing from legal impurities, are set forth by louo. Hence Naaman, the leper, when commanded to bathe (louo), dipped himself in the Jordan seven times. I have never found epi in construction with nipto, louo, or pluno, any more than with baptizo. We find en, however, in construction with them all; because the hands, feet face, person, and garments might all be washed in some liquid, but not upon it. The congruity of things, therefore, calls for certain prepositions in construction with verbs of action; and these go very far to settle any thing doubtful in the acceptation of the principal word in any given passage. Now, as baptizo has frequently both en and eis construed with the liquid or material used in the ordinance, and raino and cheo never, follows it not that these prepositions demonstrate a meaning in these words wholly incompatible with each other, so far as action is concerned? It is as impossible either to pour or sprinkle a man into or in a river, as it is to immerse him upon it, or to immerse water upon him. It is, therefore, offering the grossest violence to all the laws of congruous construction to attempt to translate baptizo by sprinkle, pour, or purify; or raino and cheo by immerse, plunge, or overwhelm. The best lexicography, both of the principals and their usual retinue of particles and circumstances, peremptorily forbids such liberties. Concerning ek and apo, we shall say something in our next argument. 1 See the following references:-- Nipto is found, Genesis 18:4; Genesis 19:2; Genesis 24:32; Exodus 30:19-21; Genesis 40: 24, 31; Deuteronomy 21:6; Judges 19:21; 1 Samuel 25:41; 2 Samuel 11:8; 2 Chronicles 4:8; Psalms 26:6; Psalms 58:10; Psalms 73:13; Song of Solomon 5:3. In the New Testament, Matthew 6:17; Matthew 15:2; Mark 7:3; John 9:7; John 7:11; John 11:15; John 13:5-6; John 13:8; John 8:8; John 8:10; John 8:12; John 14:14; 1 Timothy 5:10. In all these places, wash hands, feet, or face, and nothing else. Pluno is found, Leviticus 6:27; Leviticus 13:54-55, Leviticus 13:58; Leviticus 14:8-9; Leviticus 17:1-16; Leviticus 18:1-30; 2 Chronicles 4:6; Psalms 51:2, Psalms 51:7; Jeremiah 2:22; Jeremiah 4:14; Genesis 49:11; Isaiah 4:4; Ezekiel 16:9; Revelation 7:14. Louo, Leviticus 14:8; Deuteronomy 23:11; Leviticus 14:8; Leviticus 17:16; Leviticus 15:16; Leviticus 16:4; Leviticus 16:24; Leviticus 22:6; Exodus 29:4; Exodus 40:12; Exodus 2:5; Ruth 3:5; 2 Kings 5:10; 2 Kings 5:12-13; 2 Kings 9:30; Isaiah 1:16; 2 Samuel 12:20; Ezekiel 16:4; Ezekiel 16:9; Acts 9:37; Acts 16:33; 1 Corinthians 6:11; Hebrews 10:22; 2 Peter 3: 22. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 22: 01.02.08. THE PLACES WHERE BAPTISM WAS ANCIENTLY ADMINISTERED ======================================================================== CHAPTER VIII. ARGUMENT 8.--The places where Baptism was anciently administered. OUR eighth argument is derived from the places where the ordinance of baptism was anciently administered; which will still farther develop the force of the prepositions in construction with baptizo. Baptism was first administered in rivers. The first Baptist, during his public ministry, spent much of his time on the banks of the Jordan. Thither resorted to him "all Judea and Jerusalem, and were baptized of him in the Jordan, confessing their sins." They were not baptized upon Jordan, nor were they baptized with Jordan, nor was Jordan baptized upon them; but they were baptized in Jordan. Our English in is but the adoption of the Greek en. The Romans borrowed their in from the Greeks, and we borrowed our in from the Romans; and all these ins are of one and the same signification and construction. In is neither at, with, nor by; except by figure. It is literally in. In the house, is not at the house, with the house, nor by the house; but in the house. Now, as epi does not bring the Jordan upon them, and as eis and en place them in the river, the meaning of ek and apo is by necessity established as assisting the baptized to emerge out of the river. If the liberty which Pedobaptists have taken with these prepositions, in the heat of controversy, has called forth the admiration and reproofs of their own most learned and sober-minded men, why should it be thought strange that we should be astounded at the recklessness of such men as Dr. Miller of Princeton, and others, who, in defiance of their own reputation for learning and good sense, have contradicted, in express terms, all our lexicographers, translators, reformers, historians and distinguished critics, for the sake of the papal dogma of infant rantism, consecrated by John Calvin, John Knox, Theodore Beza, and their adherents. On counting the actual occurrences of en in the New Testament, I find it is found 2660 times. Of this immense number of times, though these learned doctors tell you of its two-and-twenty meanings, it is translated in your common testament 2045 times by in. Yet such critics as Dr. Miller, when he puts on his Pedobaptist spectacles, will have it with always when baptism is alluded to. John baptizes with water; but, when the phrase comes, en to Jordanee, he passes it by. He does not say, he baptized them with Jordan; but, passing it by, he says that eis means at or to, in such cases. Well, not having time to count over the whole book, I found in the four gospels that eis occurs 95 times. Of these, it is translated by into 372 times, and by to, for into, more than one hundred times; for to the house, to the temple, to the city, to Jerusalem, Bethany, Nazareth, &c., means into; and of 273 times unto, it might have been very often into; thus making, in all, 500 out of 795 occurrences. As for ek and apo, frequently rendered out of and from, it is, on two accounts, unnecessary to speak particularly; because, first, whether they are more commonly rendered by from or out of, avails nothing, seeing that from, nine times in ten, is out of, in sense. For example, from heaven, from the temple, from the city, from the grave, means out of these places, and not from the boundaries of them. In the second place, it being evident that baptizo, with en and eis, most certainly places the subject in the pool, in the river, or in the bath, ek and apo must bring them out of it. Fancy or taste may increase indefinitely the figurative meaning of words; but the number of figurative meanings is of no philological account in fixing the common or proper meaning of any word; still less the mere connectives of speech. The partial and one-sided mode of interpretation is nowhere more apparent than in the cavils about these prepositions. We shall produce but a single example: Epi and en will illustrate the matter. After raino or cheo, epi is always translated upon, without one demurrer in all the Pedobaptist ranks; yet epi, out of 920 times in the New Testament, is translated by upon only 158 times, that is, about once in six times: whereas, en is translated four times in every five by in. Yet to sprinkle upon is never cavilled at by a Pedobaptist; while to baptize, or immerse in, is always repudiated as an unwarrantable licence on the part of a Baptist!! But the reason given why John baptized at Enon, one would think, ought to silence every doubt or cavil on that question. But, alas for frail human nature! it will not always be persuaded, though one rose from the dead. Hence, although we are expressly told that John baptized at Enon, because there was much water there, the spirit of the sectary sets about to prove that there was not much water there, but only a few rivulets. And, if at last he is constrained to admit, that even many pools might be collected from many rivulets, he sets about finding some other use for the many rivulets and pools than for the performance of baptism. In his heated imagination, he sees all the dromedaries and camels of Arabia carrying the people to John’s tent, and, that these thirsty animals, coming off their long journey, might have something to drink, the humane John, who always kept a bason and a squirt upon his table for the purpose of baptizing, pitched his tent near to Enon for the sake, not of baptizing, but of watering the caravans that flocked to his baptism. Credat Judæus Apella, non ego. To argue against imagination, is like arguing against love or our instinctive appetites. Still we must remark, that polla hudata signifies much water, and that John the Apostle uses the phrase in his writings no less than five times; the other instances, too, all requiring much water. The mystic mother of papal Rome sits on "many waters." Are these little rivulets, indeed! The voice of God, too, is compared to the sound of many waters! Can these be rivulets? John, in the Hebrew and Greek style, uses polla hudata, in the plural form, for much water. I believe we never have hudor in the singular number in all the Septuagint; hence, we are confirmed in the belief that, in Jewish style, the plural form indicates much water, just as the word always indicates to us. But does not the sentence itself refute the presumptuous construction sometimes imposed on it. Reads it not, that John baptized at Enon for a given reason? He did not encamp or lodge there for that reason; but he baptized there for that reason. Hence, the baptizing and the reason, much water, most fairly and honourably go together. John baptized at Enon for no other reason than that there was much water there. Suppose, for example, we were told that a celebrated millwright had located on a certain creek because it contained much water, who would more honour his own understanding, he that affirms he located there for the sake of watering his stock, or for the sake of erecting mills? As to the location of Enon, whether it were north of John’s first location, some fifty miles up the river Jordan, or whether it was a stream issuing from a fountain called "Ainyon, Doveseye Spring," or whether it was a sun-fountain, near Salim, venerated by the old Canaanites, are questions I have neither leisure nor inclination to discuss. Robinson, in his History of Baptism, discusses such questions at great length. I refer the curious to him, and will only give a short extract from his work on the use of the words polla hudata: "It is observable, that the rivers Euphrates at Babylon, Tiber at Rome and Jordan in Palestine are all described by polla hudata. Jeremiah speaks of the first, and, addressing Babylon, says, ’O thou that dwellest upon many waters, thine end is come’ for Babylon was situated on what the Jews called the river, the great river Euphrates. The Evangelist John describes Rome, which was built on the Tiber, by saying, ’The great harlot the great city which reigneth over the kings of the earth, sitteth upon many waters.’ Ezekiel describes Judea and Jordan, by saying to the princes of Israel, ’Your mother is a lioness, her whelps devour men, she was fruitful by reason of many waters;’ an evident allusion to the lions that lay in the thickets of Jordan. The thunder which agitates clouds, charged with floods, is called the voice of the Lord upon many waters: and the attachment that no mortification can annihilate, is a love which many waters cannot quench, neither can the floods drown. How it comes to pass that a mode of speaking, which on every other occasion signifies much, should in the case of baptism signify little, is a question not easy to answer." To an unsophisticated mind, this passage, together with the various locations of John along the Jordan, sometimes on this side, and sometimes on that side, methinks, independent of every other argument, would refute the notion of sprinkling. But how much more, when the meaning of the word and the laws of construction, already established, assert that John’s disciples were immersed in the Jordan, confessing their sins! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 23: 01.02.09. APOSTOLIC ALLUSIONS TO BAPTISM ======================================================================== CHAPTER IX. ARGUMENT 9.--Apostolic allusions to Baptism. OUR ninth argument in proof of Proposition I. is drawn from the apostolic allusions to baptism. In Romans 6:4, baptism is referred to as a burial and a resurrection. See also in Colossians 2:1-23 : These passages read as follows: "Know you not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death; that like as Christ was raised from the dead, we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection." Romans 6:3-5. Again says Paul, "Buried with him in baptism, wherein also you are risen with him, through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead." Colossians 2:15. Notwithstanding Prof. M. Stuart has spiritualized away any allusion to immersion in these passages, and has been followed by all that class of our American clergy who regard him as one of the ablest and most orthodox of commentators; and, notwithstanding some one or two others, who are the centres of inferior systems, concur with him;--still I would be willing to have these passages interpreted by Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and other doctors of Pedobaptism. Beginning with Calvin and ending with the greatest oracle in all the Presbyterian ranks, in Britain or America, for once, I believe I shall deliver up this passage into their hands, without note or comment. Calvin: "Are you ignorant. The apostle proves that Christ destroys sin in his people from the effect of baptism, by which we are initiated into the faith of the Messiah. For we, without controversy, put on Christ in baptism, and are baptized on this condition, that we may be one with him. Paul thus assumes another principle, that we may then truly grow into the body of Christ when his death produces its own fruit in us who believe. Nay, he teaches us that this fellowship of his death is chiefly to be regarded in baptism, for washing alone is not proposed in this initiatory ordinance, but mortification, and the death of the old man; whence the efficacy of Christ’s death shows itself from the moment we are received into his grace." Barnes: "Therefore we are buried, &c. It is altogether probable that the apostle in this place had allusion to the custom of baptizing by immersion. This cannot, indeed be proved, so as to be liable to no objection; but I presume that this is the idea that would strike the great mass of unprejudiced readers." Locke: "We did own some kind of death by being buried under the water, which, being buried with him I e. in conformity to his burial, as a confession of our being dead, was to signify that, as Christ was raised up from the dead into a glorious life with his Father, even so we being raised from our typical death and burial in baptism, should lead a new sort of life, wholly different from our former, in some approaches towards that heavenly life that Christ is risen to." Wall: "As to the manner of baptism then generally used, the tests produced by every one that speaks of these matters, John 3:23, Mark 1:5, Acts 8:38 are undeniable proofs that the baptized person went ordinarily into the water, and sometimes the baptist too. We should not know from these accounts whether the whole body of the baptized was put under water, head and all, were it not for the two later proofs, which seem to me to PUT IT OUT OF QUESTION: One, that St. Paul does twice, in an allusive way of speaking, call baptism a burial; the other, the customs of the Christians, in the near succeeding times, which, being more largely and particularly delivered in books; is known to have been generally, or ordinarily, a total immersion." Archbishop Tillotson: "Anciently, those who were baptized were immersed and buried in the water, to represent their death to sin; and then did rise up out of the water, to signify their entrance upon a new life. And to these customs the apostle alludes, Romans 6:2-5." Archbishop Secker: "Burying, as it were, the person baptized in the water, and raising him out again, without question, was anciently the more usual method; on account of which St. Paul speaks of baptism as representing both the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, and what is grounded on them,--our being dead and buried to sin, and our rising again to walk in newness of life." Sam. Clarke: "We are buried with Christ in, baptism, &c. In the primitive times the manner of baptizing was by immersion, or dipping the whole body into the water. And this manner of doing it was a very significant emblem of the dying and rising again, referred to, by St. Paul, in the above mentioned similitude." Wells: "St. Paul here alludes to immersion, or dipping the whole body under water in baptism; which, he intimates, did typify the death and burial (of the person baptized) to sin, and his rising up out of the water did typify his resurrection. To newness of life." Bishop Nicholson. "In the grave with Christ we went not; for our bodies were not, could not be buried with his; but in baptism, by a kind of analogy or resemblance, while our bodies are under the water, we may be said to be buried with him." Doddridge: "Buried with him in, baptism. It seems the part of candour to confess, that here is an allusion to the matter of baptizing by immersion." George Whitefield: "It is certain that in the words of our text, Romans 6:3-4, there is an allusion to the manner of baptism, which was by immersion, which is what our own church allows," &c. John Wesley: "Buried with him--alluding to the ancient manner of baptizing by immersion." Whitby: "It being so expressly declared here, Romans 6:4, and Colossians 2:12, that we are buried with Christ in baptism, by being buried under water; and the argument to oblige us to a conformity to his death, by dying to sin, being taken hence; and this immersion being religiously observed by all Christians for thirteen centuries, and approved by our Church, and the change of it into sprinkling, even without any allowance from the author of this institution or any licence from any council of the church, being that which the Romanist still urges to justify his refusal of the cup to the laity; it were to be wished that this custom might be again of general use, and aspersion only permitted, as of old, in case of the clinici, or in present danger of death." Macknight: "Planted together in the likeness of his death. The burying of Christ, and of believers, first in the water of baptism and afterwards in the earth, is fitly enough compared to the planting of seeds in the earth, because the effect, in both cases, is a reviviscence to a state of greater perfection." Assembly of Divines: "’If we have been planted together,’ &c. By this elegant similitude, the apostle represents to us, that, as a plant that is set in the earth lieth as dead and immovable for a time, but after springs up and flourishes, so Christ’s body lay dead for a while in the grave, but sprang up and flourished in his resurrection; and we also, when we are baptized, are buried, as it were, in the water for a time, but after are raised up to newness of life." I cannot find room for the witnesses which I could accumulate on this point. Concurrent with these are Grotius, Beza, Bloomfield, Koppe, Rosenmuller, &c. I will conclude this venerable, learned, and highly authoritative list, with the most distinguished Presbyterian preacher of our day. In the recent "Lectures on the Epistle to the Romans," the justly honoured Thomas Chalmers, D. D. and LL. D., boldly and independently thus expresses himself, on Romans 6:4 :-- "The original meaning of the word baptism is immersion; and, though we regard it as a point of indifferency, whether the ordinance so named be performed in this way or by sprinkling--yet we doubt not that the prevalent style of the administration in the apostles days was by an actual submerging of the whole body under water. We advert to this for the purpose of throwing light on the analogy that is instituted in these verses. Jesus Christ by death, underwent this sort of baptism by an immersion under the surface of the ground, whence he soon emerged again by his resurrection. We, by being baptized into his death, are conceived to have made a similar translation. In the act of descending under the water of baptism to have resigned an old life, and in the act of ascending to emerge into a second or a new life--along the course of which it is our part to maintain a strenuous avoidance of that sin which as good as expunged the being that we had formerly; and a strenuous prosecution of that holiness which should begin with the first moment that we were ushered into our present being, and be perpetuated and made progress toward the perfection of full and ripened immortality." This is one of the best arguments for universal consumption. All do not,--all cannot understand Greek criticism. But when Paul explains baptism thus allusively, by comparing it with a burial and a planting, (as seeds in the same bed--for so sunphutoi intimates,) all plain, common-sense men can fully appreciate how the Apostle understood the matter. I have given no comment of my own on Romans 6:4; Colossians 2:12. I have given one wholly from the other side. I will only say, that when any of the Liliputians of the present day preach against this view of Romans 6:1-23 :, it might be a good argument to their modesty to remind them of what Calvin and this host, down to Chalmers, have said. After hearing these (certainly to us) impartial witnesses, it might be gratifying to some Pedobaptists to hear one of the most reckless, daring, and consequential of American doctors "assure" his people, that their sprinkling is just the very thing that ought to satisfy them. Dr. Miller of Princeton says:-- "I am aware, indeed, that our Baptist brethren, as before intimated believe, and confidently assert, that the only legitimate and authorized meaning of this word is to immerse; and that it is never employed, in a single case, in any part of the Bible, to express the application of water in any other manner. I can venture, my friends, to assure you, with the utmost confidence, that this representation is wholly incorrect. I can assure you, that the word which we render baptize does legitimately signify the application of water in any way, as well as by immersion. Nay, I can assure you, if the most mature and competent Greek scholars that ever lived may be allowed to decide in this case, that many examples of the use of this word occur in Scripture, in which it not only may, but manifestly must signify sprinkling, perfusion, or washing in any way. "Now, we contend that this word does not necessarily, nor even commonly, signify to immerse; but also implies to wash, to sprinkle, to pour on water, and to tinge or dye with any liquid; and, therefore, accords very well with the mode of baptism by sprinkling or affusion." I am, in duty, bound to say, after confronting Prof. Miller of Princeton with this mighty host, that in all my readings on baptism, and they are not meagre, I have not met with any writer of any pretensions, so regardless of his own character for learning, for skill in criticism, for knowledge of language, for a strict regard to truth, for historical accuracy, whether on the subject or action of baptism, as this said Dr. Miller of Princeton. His little book on baptism is really one of the weakest, most puerile, most ill-natured, uncandid performances I have ever read;--the most unworthy performance for any professor in a theological school, in a denomination aspiring after literary eminence, that can well be found in the nineteenth century. I make no comments on the passages above quoted. I simply place them in contrast with his own Calvin, and all between him and his Scotch brother, Chalmers. The contrast alone is enough for one lesson. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 24: 01.02.10. PASSAGES URGED AGAINST IMMERSION FROM THE USE OF BAPTIZO AND BAPTISMOS ... ======================================================================== CHAPTER X. ARGUMENT 10.--Passages urged against immersion from the use of baptizo and baptismos in certain places. MY tenth argument shall be deduced from those passages which Pedobaptists usually urge against baptizo and baptisma, as not indicating immersion. The very passages which they quote against our views, together with their efforts at explaining them away, greatly confirm and establish our conclusions. We shall commence with Mark 7:3-4, and Luke 11:38 : Except they wash their hands oft, eat not. And when they come from market, except they wash (baptisoontai) they eat not. And many such things they hold, as the washings (baptismous) of cups, pots, brazen vessels, and beds (or couches). Luke 11:38 : The Pharisees wondered that Jesus had not washed (ebaptisthe) before dinner. These washings before dinner, reported by Mark and Luke, contain the only two instances in which any part of baptizo is ever translated by wash, in the New Testament. And, fortunately, the antithesis between the washings here mentioned, indicated by the words employed in the original, and the facts stated, not only does not sustain the common version in translating both words by the same word, wash; but clearly intimates that the latter term, baptizo, ought here to have been rendered immerse. In Mark 7:3, it is nipto with pugmee, a word already shown to mean washing the hands, face, or feet, always when applied to the human person. This is true in every case in the Bible. Moreover, it has pugmee, the fist, in construction with it; that is, as Lightfoot and others interpret it, to the wrist, or so far as the fist extends. When the hand is shut, says Pollux, as quoted by Carson, the outside is called pugmee.1 Now, as this limits the first washing, the second, being expressed by baptizo, and having no part of the body mentioned as its peculiar regimen, according to the usage of the Greeks, (and the Romans, in the case of lavo,) the whole body is meant. Hence, they dip or bathe themselves after being to market; whereas, ordinarily, they wash their hands only up to the wrist. Both Campbell and Macknight2 translated the word in this passage, immerse. Some of our lexicons, such as Schleusner’s, Scapula’s, Stokius’s, &c., quote this passage in proof that washing is sometimes the effect of immersion. The meaning of baptisoontai, here, as in Luke 11:38, being thus clearly indicated, (for Luke speaks of the same custom as Mark,) we have, then, found baptizo, in its eighty occurrences in the New Testament, uniformly signifying immersion; and never sprinkling nor pouring. Baptismos is also translated washing, in Hebrews 9:2, as well as in Mark 7:4. The diverse washings of cups, pots, brazen vessels, tables, couches, persons, and things mentioned among the traditions of the elders and the institutions of the law, were for ceremonial cleansing. Hence, all by immersion; inasmuch as nothing was ever cleansed, since the world began, by sprinkling water upon it. Meantime, I assume this fact, but I will hereafter demonstrate it:--Macknight and Campbell were much more learned in the true meaning of this word than the whole college of the king’s translators. Macknight translates the "diverse washings" of the common version by "diverse immersions," Hebrews 9:2. Baptismos is never applied to the Christian ordinance,--baptisma generally; and, therefore, our translators never translated the latter but by baptism, and baptismos three times by washing. We have, then, in one hundred and twenty occurrences of baptizo, baptismos, baptisma, and baptistees, not found a single exception. But we find bapto, in Daniel, in some of its flexions, twice translated wet; and that, too, by the dew of heaven! It was, then, a general wetting--profuse as immersion; and this metonymy, of the effect for the cause, clearly indicates that in the days of the Septuagint, the idea of sprinkling was never associated with bapto. Dews are more wetting in this country,--much more so in Asia, in the environs of the Euphrates,--than any Pedobaptist sprinkling since the council of Ravenna. Soaking, wetting, dyeing, colouring, and even washing, it has always been conceded, are frequent meanings of bapto; because, as all the dictionaries explain, these processes are accomplished by immersing. Indeed, these metaphors all go to show that immersion was the proper and fixed meaning of the term; for, unless things were covered in some way, they could neither be dyed, coloured, washed, soaked, or even thoroughly wet. But it is frequently urged, with great vehemence, that the baptism of the Holy Spirit promised in the New Testament, was said to be accomplished by pouring out of the Spirit; and, hence, pouring is the true baptism! This passes for conclusive logic with thousands; and yet nothing is much more preposterous. There can, possibly, be no analogy between the pouring of water and the pouring out of the Spirit. There is no resemblance between the Spirit and water; and, consequently, there can be none in the pouring of them out. But the Spirit of God is compared to a well of water springing up within us. Is that baptism, by the force of comparison? If so, the Spirit is compared to the wind blowing; and it is compared to a person breathing upon another, &c. Shall we, then, say that any, or all of these, are supposed to resemble baptism? Many other such phrases there are; and, certainly there is as much propriety in supposing that breathing, blowing, or springing up are quite as analogous to baptism as pouring out; and that, if pouring be baptism, then are breathing, blowing, and springing up, baptism! But pouring out of the Spirit is never called baptism. It is, strictly, the preparation for it; just as the tanner or the fuller pours out water into his vat, in order to prepare for immersing into it the subjects of these processes. So God poured out the gifts of the Spirit most copiously on Pentecost, that the disciples might be subjected to, or immersed in, all these influences! Such is my understanding of a very bold metaphor. But, as I am so fond of Pedobaptist authority, I shall show that some of the most learned of them are with us here also. I find a rich cluster of these Pedobaptist grapes, just ready to my hand, in Booth’s Reply to Dr. Williams; and I will just transfer it, leaves and all, to my page. Gurtlerus: "Baptism in the Holy Spirit, is immersion into the pure waters of the holy Spirit; or a rich and abundant communication of his gifts. For he on whom the Holy Spirit is poured out, is, as it were, immersed into him." Bp. Reynolds: "The Spirit, under the gospel, is compared--to water: and that not a little measure, to sprinkle, or bedew, but to BAPTIZE the faithful in, (Matthew 3:11; Acts 1:5;) and that not in a font, or vessel, which grows less and less, but in a spring, or living river." Ikenius: "The Greek word, baptismos, denotes the immersion of a thing, or a person, into something. Here, also, [Matthew 3:11, compared with Luke 3:16,] the baptism of fire, or that which is performed in fire, must signify, according to the same simplicity of the letter, an immission, or immersion, into fire--and this the rather, because here, to baptize in the Spirit and in fire are not only not connected, but also opposed to being baptized in water." Le Clerc: "He shall baptize you in the Holy Spirit. As I plunge you in water, he shall plunge you, so to speak, in the Holy Spirit." Casaubon: "To baptize is to immerse--and in this sense they apostles are truly said to be baptized; for the house in which this was done was filled with the Holy Ghost, so that the apostles seemed to be plunged into it, as into a fish-pool." Grotius: To be baptized, here, is not to be slightly sprinkled; but to have the Holy Spirit abundantly poured upon them." Mr. Leigh: "Baptized; that is, drown you all over, dip you into the ocean of his grace; opposite to the sprinkling which was in the law." Abp. Tillotson: "It [the sound from heaven, Acts 2:2] filled all the house. This is that which our Saviour calls baptizing with the Holy Ghost. So that they who sat in the house were, as it were, immersed in the Holy Ghost, as they who were buried with water, were overwhelmed and covered all over with water, which is the proper notion of baptism." Bp. Hopkins: "Those that are baptized with the Spirit are, as it were, plunged into that heavenly flame, whose searching energy devours all their dross, tin and base alloy." Mr. H. Dodwell: "The words of our Saviour were made good, Ye shall be baptized (plunged or covered) with the Holy Spirit, as John baptized with water, without it." "Thus modern Pedobaptists who practised pouring or sprinkling. Let us now hear one of the ancients, who wrote in the Greek language and practised immersion. Cyril, of Jerusalem, who lived in the fourth century, speaks in the following manner:--’As he who is plunged in water and baptized, is encompassed by the water on every side, so are they that are wholly baptized by the Spirit. There [under the Mosaic economy] the servants of God were partakers of the Holy Spirit; but here they were perfectly baptized, or immersed of him.’ These testimonies are quite sufficient, one would imagine, to vindicate our sense of the term baptize, when used allusively with reference to the gifts and influences of the Holy Spirit." If, then, so many learned Pedobaptists can themselves reconcile this style to immersion, why should any of them complain of our so attempting? One question more. If baptism be pouring, why do they sprinkle? Are pouring and sprinkling the same action? But I have yet another objection from which an argument may be drawn:--’Arise, and be baptized, Saul, said Ananias; and Saul arose and was baptized." A clear proof that Paul was baptized standing; consequently, not immersed!! In Luke’s writings alone, we have this idiom eight times--’Anastas, with an imperative immediately following, and without a conjunction or a comma, is found in Luke 17:19; Luke 22:46; Acts 9:11; Acts 10:13; Acts 10:20; Acts 11:7; Acts 22:10; Acts 22:16. In every instance, it indicates a divine command from the Lord in person, or from a supernatural agent acting for him. Nothing expressed by the term rise, different from the action to be performed. In no instance does the precept arise terminate the action. It never means two actions in any one case. It is not arise and be baptized. It is an idiom of expressing one immediate action. The idiom always changes when an action different from rising up is intended. Another imperative form, with a copulative of some kind, intimates two actions: Acts 8:26; Acts 9:6; Acts 9:34; Acts 26:16. In all these it is anasteethi, followed by a copulative, rise and stand upon thy feet, rise and go into the city, &c. In these last cases, there is something more than mere earnestness and authority expressed. There are two distinct imperatives: do this and do that. But anastas poreuouo is quite a different idiom. In this case, rising is no more than an adjunct. It is not a distinct precept; therefore, it is never rendered stand up. Almost every orator, indeed, in a persuasive and exhortatory address, in our language, uses the term rise when an erect position or a mere change of position is never thought of. In this way, it is used ten times for one in any other sense, especially in warm and ardent appeals:--Rise, citizens!--rise, sinners!--rise, men and let us do our duty. In this common sense import of the term did Ananias address Paul. From the whole premises, I argue that if Ananias intended to sprinkle Paul, he would not have commanded him to rise and be baptized. For immersion, he must go to the water; for sprinkling, the water could have been brought to him. The efforts made by some Pedobaptists to make it appear from this passage that Paul was baptized standing up are alike indicative of their humble attainments in Greek literature, as well as of the inveteracy of their prejudices. No man, so far as known to me, of any eminence for Greek literature, has ever made such an attempt. When all the objections against immersion are considered, one by one, we may conclude, with Professor Stuart-- "For myself, then, I cheerfully admit, that baptizo, in the New Testament when applied to the rite of baptism, does in all probability involve the idea that this rite was usually performed by immersion, but not always." The three last words, "but not always," founded on such passages as I have examined, are built upon too slender a basis for so strong a man. 1 Page 102. 2 Macknight’s Harmony of the Four Gospels, Mark 7:1-37 : ======================================================================== CHAPTER 25: 01.02.11. LEGAL SPRINKLINGS ======================================================================== CHAPTER XI. ARGUMENT 11.--Legal Sprinklings. MY eleventh argument in proof of the proposition before us is drawn from the fact--THAT SPRINKLING AND POURING MERE WATER ON ANY PERSON OR THING FOR ANY MORAL, CEREMONIAL, OR RELIGIOUS USE, WAS NEVER DONE BY THE AUTHORITY OF GOD SINCE THE WORLD BEGAN. Let no one be startled at the novelty of the announcement of this fact. I am aware that it has been over-looked in all the books written upon the subject,, and in all the discussions of the question that have ever fallen under my observation. It is, however, on that account no less true--no less important. In truth, if this point be established, it is an end of the controversy among Protestants. If, then, I sustain this fact, I shall, in my humble opinion, have achieved a service to the cause of truth of paramount importance. It will put an end to this everlasting strife about foreign authorities, Greek verbs, nouns, and prepositions. It will decide the wavering--it will strengthen the weak--it will confound opposition--it will silence every demur. Some may, in the first instance, laugh at it; some may affect to disparage it; but I know too much of human nature--of the conscientious--to think that any one at all interested in knowing and doing the Master’s will, can ever rest satisfied with himself, so long as he makes light of such a fact as that now before us. The law of Moses, the typical dispensations, the ceremonial cleansings, the "diverse washings," as they call them, once divinely instituted, have never yet occupied that place in theological schools, in the systems of public instruction, either in the congregation or in the halls of divinity, that they merit. An intimate knowledge of the five books of Moses will elucidate the Christian religion more fully and more satisfactorily than all the geological libraries in Christendom, in the absence of that knowledge. It is, indeed, assumed that Christianity is a sort of continuation of Judaism enlarged and improved, without its bloody rites, but retaining its sprinklings or washings with water as a sort of refined ceremonial--an evangelico-legal purification. I am sorry to see that "holy water" is still popular with more than Roman Catholics, and that the sprinklings of the law have been mistaken for a kind of holy water aspersions and ablutions. Mere water, I again assert, was never sprinkled on man, woman, or child by any divine warrant or formulary, under any dispensation of religion, Patriarchal, Jewish, or Christian. Here, then, is the Law and the Testimony. Let an example be produced. Blood was sprinkled, and water mingled with blood, or with the ashes of a blood-red heifer, called sometimes clean or pure water, a contraction for "the water of purification," "the water of separation," "the water of cleansing." And strange though it may appear, some commentators have wholly misconceived the phrase clean water, not discriminating between the Gentile and Jewish sense of those terms: yet to confound the true Lord with the "lords many" of Gentilism, is not more warrantable than to confound "clean water" with water free from any foreign admixture. Reference can be had to every passage in the Bible on this subject. I have examined them one by one; and here is the sum of them. Water was never poured, in any instance, upon a human being in virtue of any statute, law, or regulation of divine authority, for the purpose of sanctifying purifying, or cleansing him from any kind of legal, ceremonial, or moral pollution--for the sake of healing him or cleansing him from any malady, physical or mental. Water mingled with ashes is commanded to be sprinkled, as a water of separation, or of cleansing persons polluted by any contact with things forbidden or declared unclean. The only passages in the Bible, Old Testament or New, in which this subject is mentioned, are-- Numbers 7:1-89 : "Sprinkle water of purifying [sin-water in the margin] upon them, [the Levites,] and let them shave all their flesh, and let them wash their clothes and make themselves clean." Again, Numbers 7:18-19, and Numbers 7:21. The manufacture of this "sin-water," or water of purification--the law of the red heifer without spot, and the preparation of her ashes, and the manner of them, are detailed in this chapter. These four passages are the only passages in the law of Moses that speak of sprinkling water. Allusion to this "clean" or "cleansing water" is found once, and only once in the Prophets--"Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you." Ezekiel 36:25.1 In the New Testament, we find the term "sprinkle" only seven times. Hebrews 9:19; Hebrews 9:21, "Moses sprinkled both the book and all the people with blood." Hebrews 10:22, "Having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water." In Hebrews 9:12, we have an allusion to the red heifer: "The ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean." Hebrews 11:28 also affords another instance: "Moses kept the sprinkling of blood." And Hebrews 12:24 alludes to the "blood sprinkling." While Peter, in 1 Peter 1:2, alludes to the sprinkling of Christ’s blood. So that sprinkling of water receives no countenance whatever from the New Testament. We have, indeed, diverse bathings in water alone, though no sprinkling of water alone, in the Law. In Leviticus, Leviticus 15:5, Leviticus 15:8, Leviticus 15:10-11, Leviticus 15:13, Leviticus 15:16, Leviticus 15:18, Leviticus 15:21-22, Leviticus 15:27. Here are ten diverse bathings in one chapter. The whole flesh is said to be bathed, or the whole person bathed, in order to cleansing. Also, Leviticus 16:26; Leviticus 16:28, there are two other bathings in order to cleansing--he that carried off the scape-goat, and he that burned the remains of the offerings of the great day of atonement. In Leviticus 17:15-16, another bathing of the person and a washing of the clothes for purification. In Num. also, Numbers 19:7-8, Numbers 19:19, we have three other bathings in order to cleansing. In all, we have sixteen distinct bathings mentioned in order to purification. These washings or bathings are uniformly expressed by louo, and contrasted with pourings and sprinklings. How the bathing was accomplished we are not told, only that it was not done by sprinkling nor pouring. These are therefore called by Paul "diverse baptisms," or baptisms on diverse occasions. How any man of the learning of Professor Stuart, and his critical discrimination, could have overlooked the fact that sprinklings are never alluded to in these diverse bathings reported by Moses, but in fact are sometimes placed in antithesis with them, is a singular oversight, attributable, I presume, to his taking for granted that the diverse washings of Paul might cover the whole ground of Jewish ablutions. But this most clearly is not the fact.2 There yet, indeed, remains another fact of much significance and authority in this discussion, and which still farther explodes the notion of any ablutions being performed by sprinkling even the water of purification alone. It is this, that no one legally polluted, ceremonially unclean, was ever cleansed, even by the water of purifying itself. They had all to be bathed or immersed before they could enter into the congregation or the sanctuary of the Lord. On the verity and correctness of these statements much, very much, depends. If they are as reported, and that they assuredly are, where has sprinkling water any authority from the Bible? Has it any countenance from the Law? Has it any from the Prophets? Has it any from the Apostles and Evangelists of Jesus Christ? If it have, who will name the passage? There is not one, from Genesis to the end of the Apocalypse. Is this the first time that sprinkling water in the name of the Lord has been driven out of the Bible, without one shadow of countenance from any rite, ceremony, or ordinance, Patriarchal, Jewish, or Christian? That these legal bathings were neither sprinklings nor pourings, is already proved. That they were immersions is very obvious, from one fact: The leprous had always to bathe himself after being sprinkled with the water of separation. Louo is, therefore, always used. Now, when Naaman, the Assyrian leper, came to Elisha to be cleansed, he commanded him to bathe (louo) in Jordan seven times. He uses the same word found in the case of the leper. How this word was understood may be learned from the fact, that he dipped himself seven times in the Jordan. According to all the evidence now before us, and, indeed, from all that is written in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, the following conclusions are ascertained facts:--That upon persons and things blood was sprinkled; on the human person or head oil was poured; but water was never religiously sprinkled or poured; but the washing or immersing in it was the universal--the immutable practice since the world began. Blood had primary respect to guilt; therefore, it was sprinkled. Oil had primary respect to the Spirit; therefore, it was poured out. Water had primary respect to cleansing the person from pollution; therefore, immersion or bathing in it was always obligatory on those who sought personal cleansing from legal or any other sort of uncleanness. Touching the meaning of the blood-red heifer and her ashes, it is important to know that blood could not be sprinkled only when warm; therefore, neither by itself nor in water was it adapted to aspersion. But, to show that its virtue was not momentary as its heat, and that the atoning efficacy of sacrifice continued long after the death of the victim, the burning of the heifer and the preservation of her ashes for an age was an admirable provision. And, because many are to partake in the efficacy of one sacrifice, the joint distribution of it was beautifully adumbrated by the action of sprinkling. Good reasons can be given for the three actions, sprinkling, pouring, dipping; and for their never being confounded in Holy Writ. The heart is sprinkled, the head anointed, and the body bathed. Infant or adult sprinkling with water is a papal legend, an idle ceremony, without a shadow of evidence in Old Testament or New.3 1 I have left out one occurrence of the word sprinkle, because of its doubtful interpretation. It is found Isaiah 52:15 : "So shall he sprinkle many nations." Junius and Tremellius, for whose learning and general critical acumen in their Latin version, lying before me, London edition, 1581, I have a high respect, thus render it:--Ita persperget stupore gentes multas--"So shall he astonish (sprinkle with astonishment) many nations." The Septuagint uses thaumasontai--"So shall he astonish many nations." And in the five other versions of Bagster’s Hexapla, equivalent terms are employed. Adam Clark observes on this passage: "I retain the common rendering, though I am by no means satisfied with it. Yazzeh, frequent in the law, means only to sprinkle; but the water sprinkled is the accusative case, the thing on which has al or el. Thaumasontai makes the best apodosis." So think I. The connection would be more consistent. "So shall he astonish many nations." "The kings shall shut their mouth at him." But Lowth has it, "So shall he sprinkle with his blood many nations." So far as my position is concerned, any translation is equal. 2 In alluding to the learning and candour of Professor Stuart, of Andover, for both of which I cherish a very high respect, I would not be understood as at all regarding either as perfect. His elaborate essay on BAPTISM is frequently defective in candour, and is not wholly exempt from errors and imperfections in a literary point of view. Some of these have already been pointed out by Messrs. Judd and Ripley and others. He does not always honour his own rules of interpretation by a rigid compliance with them. A few specifications are all that we have room for. The Professor, page 313 of the Biblical Repository, proposes to show that baptize sometimes intimates copious effusion as well as immersion; but never gives, in all his elaborate inductions, a single example--because, as I honestly presume, he could not. He avers that classic authors usually employ eis after baptize, to indicate plunging, and yet he translates it himself plunge without eis, and fails to prove the generality of the usage. While contending that eis ton Jordanee (into the Jordan) would be the proper construction after baptizo, if immersion were intended,--on finding a case of that sort, (Mark 1:9,) he will not admit it to be a full evidence of immersion. In fact, nothing could prove to him that it certainly was the primitive practice; although to him it is extremely probable--almost certain--wanting, no one can see, how little of full assurance. He seems to make eis with an accusative denote instrumentality, a case unprecedented in philology, in rendering eis ton Jordaneen. WITH THE JORDAN; and in alleging that "the phrase may designate the element with which John performed the rite." At another time, be will not have our Lord to emerge from the water of Jordan, neither by the force of baptizo nor anabaino. Immersion dose not imply emersion, and anabaino does not anywhere mean to emerge or escape out of the water, especially in the New Testament usages. "As to emerging out of water," says Mr. Stuart, "I can find no such meaning attached to anabaino;" yet, as Mr. Judd has shown, it is so found repeatedly. In the epistle of Barnabas, sec. 11, "There was a river, and anabainen ex autou--and out of it rose beautiful trees." And Matthew 16:27, "Take up the first fish that cometh up out of the sea"--anabanta. Also, Revelation 13:1, "I saw a beast rising up out of the sea--ek tees thalassees anabainon--the same idiom with the Septuagint, when the witch of Endor describes Saul anabainonta ek tees gees--ascending out of the earth; theous anabainontas ek tees gees--gods ascending out of the earth." Judd’s Review, page 49. With Professor Stuart, apo will not bring a person out of a liquid. He has found "no place where it is applied to denote a movement out of liquid into the air." But others have found such examples: Homer makes Aurora to rise up, ap okeanou, Il. 19: 1. A fish, in Tobit 6: 2 leaped apo tou potamou, from the river. It is therefore a clear case, as Dr. Campbell long since proved, that anabaino will represent an emerging from water. Judd, page 50. Many similar defects can be collected out of this essay, of a philological character. But I will only notice a more serious imputation,--the want of candour. Take the following for example:-- "He supposes that katebesan amphoteroi eis to udor does neither necessarily nor probably mean, they descended into the water. After citing several examples in proof that eis means to or towards, in every one of which it most clearly signifies into, he remarks on the verb, "that when one analyzes the idea of katabainon, going down, descending, he finds it indicates the action performed before reaching a place, the approximation to it by descent, and not the entering into it; so that whether the person thus going down, eis to udor, enters into it or not, must be designated in some other way than by this expression." This is just as conclusive as though one were to take the English expression, they descended into the water, and contend that it does not mean, they went down into the water; because when one analyzes the idea of descending, be finds that it indicates the action performed before reaching a place, approximation to it, and not the entering into it. It is not pretended that the verb of itself expresses entering into; but if katabaino, to descend, in connexion with eis, into, does not express entering into, I ask, what phraseology can be found in the language that will express it? The same liberty that is taken with Scripture, in frittering away its meaning in regard to baptism, if carried through, would unsettle at once the most important doctrines of the Bible, annihilating alike the hopes of the righteous and the fears of the wicked. For what evidence would remain to us that the latter will at last go away into everlasting punishment, or the former into life eternal? It might be said, with just as much propriety in the one case as the other, that eis means to or towards, and that whether the righteous are actually received into heaven, or the wicked turned into hell, must be designated by some other expression than this. But such an unwarrantable license with the Scripture cannot fail to receive the disapprobation of every conscientious reader. "But," says Professor Stuart, "I have another remark to make on katebesan amphoteroi eis to udor, they BOTH went down, to the water. This is, that if katebesan eis to udor is meant to designate the action of plunging or being immersed into the water, as a part of the rite of baptism, then was Philip baptized as well as the eunuch; for the sacred writer says that BOTH went into the water. Here then must have been a rebaptism of Philip; and, what is at least singular, he must have baptized himself, as well as the eunuch. All these considerations together show, that the going down to the water, and the going up from the water, constituted no part of the rite of baptism itself; for Philip did the one and the other just as truly as the eunuch." I had little expected any thing so disingenuous from Professor Stuart. There is neither reason nor candour in the remark. It is egregious trifling; and that, too, on a subject where we had reason to expect at least common sincerity and fair argument. Who supposes that the walking down into the water is meant to indicate the action of plunging, as a part of the rite of baptism? No Baptist ever suggested such an idea. The writer says they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him. Here were two distinct actions: the first, that of going down into the water, in which both Philip and the eunuch were agents; and the second, that of baptism, in which Philip was the agent, and the eunuch the subject. What we claim is, that the baptism was performed in the water, subsequently to their going down into it, and previously to coming up out of it; and this circumstance furnishes strong proof of immersion, inasmuch as it is incredible that Philip and the eunuch would both have gone down into the water merely for the purpose of sprinkling." Judd’s Review, pp. 61, 62. It gives me pain rather than pleasure to expose these frailties of one so deservedly eminent in biblical criticism. They are indeed another evidence that no man can either make error consistent with itself, nor himself consistent with himself, while at one time reasoning with, and at another time without, bias. 3 It is worthy of note, that these actions under the law were always on persons already members; and not to make them such. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 26: 01.02.13. HISTORY OF IMMERSION AND SPRINKLING ======================================================================== CHAPTER XIII. ARGUMENT13.--History of Immersion and Sprinkling. ARGUMENT thirteenth is a mere sketch of the history of immersion and sprinkling. On the subject of immersion, we shall commence with the primitive Greek fathers. We have examined all their extant writings, and give the following as the sum of all that can be gathered from them on immersion. Barnabas: "Consider how he hath joined both the cross and the water together; for this he saith, ’Blessed are they who, putting their trust in the cross, descend into the water.’" * * Again, "We go down into the water, full of sin and pollutions; but come up again bringing forth fruit; having in our hearts the fear and hope which is in Jesus." Hermes, writing about A. D. 95, speaking of baptism and backsliders, says, "They are such as have heard the word, and were willing to be baptized in the name of the Lord; but, when they call to mind what holiness it required in those who professed the truth, withdrew themselves." Again, "Before man receives the name of the Son of God, he is ordained to death; but, when he receives that seal, he is freed from death, and delivered unto life: now, that seal is water, into which men descend under an obligation to death, but ascend out of it, being appointed unto life." Justin Martyr. About A. D. 140, Justin Martyr wrote "An apology for Christians; addressed to the Emperor, the Senate, and People of Rome." In this work, he describes the doctrines and ordinances of the Church of Christ; and, on baptism, has the following passage:--"I will now declare to you, also, after what manner we, being made new by Christ, have dedicated ourselves to God; lest, if I should leave that out, I might seem to deal unfairly in some part of my apology. They who are persuaded and do believe that those things which are taught by us are true, and do promise to live according to them, are directed first to pray and ask of God, with fasting the forgiveness of their former sins; and we also pray and fast with them. Then we bring them to same place where there is water, and they are baptized by the same way of baptism by which we were baptized: for they are washed (en to udati) in the water in the name of God the Father, Lord of all things; and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit." Tertullian, A. D. 204: ’Because the person, [to be baptized,] in great simplicity . . . is let down in the water, and, with a few words said, is dipped." Homo in aqua demissus, et inter pauca verba tinctus. Again, when speaking of the vain anxiety to be baptized in the Jordan,--"There is no difference, whether one is washed in a sea or in a pool, in a river or in a fountain, in a lake or in a channel; nor is there any difference between them whom John dipped in the Jordan and those whom Peter dipped in the Tiber:" quos Joannes in Jordane, et quos Petrus in Tiberi tinxit. He also uses the words, "In aqua mergimur," 1: e. we are immersed in the water. Gregory Nazianzen, A. D. 360: "We are buried with Christ by baptism, that we may also rise again with him; we descend with him, that we may also be lifted up with him; we ascend with him, that we also may be glorified with him." Basil, A. D. 360: "En trisi tais katadusesi, &c. By three immersions, the great mystery of baptism is accomplished." Ambrose, A. D. 374: "Then wast asked, ’Dost thou believe in God the Father Almighty?’ Thou saidst, ’I do believe,’ and wast immersed; that is, thou wast buried, (mersisti, hoc eat, sepultus es.) Thou wast again asked, ’Dost then believe on our Lord Jesus Christ and his crucifixion?’ Thou saidst, ’I believe,’ and wast immersed again, and so wast buried with Christ." Cyril, of Jerusalem, A. D. 374: "As he ho endunon en tois udasi, who is plunged in the water, and baptized, is encompassed by the water on every side; so they that are baptized by the Spirit are also wholly covered all over." Chrysostom, A. D. 398: "To be baptized (kai katoduesthai) and plunged, and then to emerge or rise again, is a symbol of our descent into the grave, and our ascent out of it; and therefore, Paul calls baptism a burial." Witsius: "It is certain, that both John the Baptist and the disciples of Christ, ordinarily practised immersion; whose example was followed by the ancient church, as Vossius has shown by producing many testimonies from the Greek and Latin writers." Mr. Bower: "Baptism by immersion was, undoubtedly, the apostolical practice, and was never dispensed with by the church, except in case of sickness." G. J. Vossius: "That the apostles immersed whom they baptized there is no doubt . . . And that the ancient church followed their example is very clearly evinced by innumerable testimonies of the fathers." Mr. Reeves: "The ancients carefully observed trine-immersion, insomuch that, by the ’Canons Apostolical,’ either bishop or presbyter who baptized without it was deposed from the ministry." Encyclopædia Ecclesiastica: "Whatever weight, however, may be in these reasons as a defence for the present practice of sprinkling, it is evident that, during the first ages of the church, and for many centuries afterwards, the practice of immersion prevailed; and which seems, indeed, never to be departed from, except were it was administered to a parson at the point of death, or upon the bed of sickness,--which was considered, indeed, not as giving the party the full privileges of baptism,--or when there was not a sufficient supply of water. Except in the above cases, the custom was to dip or immerse the whole body. Hence St. Barnabas says, ’We go down into the water,’" &c. Mr. Wall, (who explored all the voluminous writers of antiquity in search of evidence of infant baptism,) says, "This [immersion] is so plain and clear, by an infinite number of passages, that as one cannot but PITY the weak endeavours of such Pedobaptists as would maintain the negative of it, so we ought to disown and show a dislike of the profane scoff’s which some people give to the English Antipedobaptists [Baptists] merely for the use of dipping; when it was in all probability, the way by which our blessed Saviour, and for certain, was the most usual and ordinary way by which the ancient Christians did receive their baptism. ’Tis a great want of prudence as well as of honesty, to refuse to grant to an adversary what is certainly true, and may be proved so. It creates a jealousy of all the rest that one says." "The custom of the Christians in the near succeeding times [to the apostles] being more largely and particularly delivered in books, is known to have been generally or ordinarily a total immersion." Professor Campbell: "I have heard a disputant in defiance of etymology and use, maintain that the word rendered in the New Testament baptize, means more properly to sprinkle than to plunge; and in defiance of all antiquity, that the former was the earliest, and--the most general practice in baptizing. One who argues in this manner never fails, with persons of knowledge, to betray the cause he would defend; and though, with respect to the vulgar, bold assertions generally succeed as well as argument, and sometimes better; yet a candid mind will always disdain to take the help of falsehood, even in the support of truth." Edinburgh Reviewers: "We have rarely met, for example, with a more weak and fanciful piece of reasoning than that by which Mr. Swing would persuade us that there is no allusion to the mode by immersion, in the expression ’buried with him in baptism.’ This point ought to be frankly admitted, and, indeed, cannot be denied with any show of reason." Bishop Bossuet: "We are able to make it appear, by the acts of councils, and by the ancient rituals, that for THIRTEEN HUNDRED YEARS, baptism was thus [by immersion] administered throughout the whole church, as far as possible." Stackhouse: "Several authors have shown, and proved, that this immersion continued, as much as possible, to be used for thirteen hundred years after Christ." Stuart: "The mode of baptism by immersion, the Oriental church has always continued to preserve, even down to the present time: see Alatii de Eccles. Orient. et Occident. lib. 3: ch. 12. sec. 4; Acta et Script. Theol. Wirtemb. et Patriarch. Constant. Jer. p. 63, p. 238 sq.; Christ. Engeli Enchirid. de Statu hodierno Graecor. ch. 24; Augusti, Denkwurd. 7: p. 226, sq. The members of this church are accustomed to call the members of the western churches sprinkled Christians, by way of ridicule and contempt: Walch’s Einleit. in die relig. Streitigkeiten, Th. V. pp. 476-481. They maintain that baptizo can mean nothing but immerge: and that baptism by sprinkling is as great a solecism as immersion by aspersion; and they claim to themselves the honour of having preserved the ancient sacred rite of the church free from change and from corruption, which would destroy its significancy: see Alex. de Stourdza, Considerations sur la Doctrine et l’Esprit de l’Eglise Orthodoxe, Stutt. 1816, pp. 83-89. "F. Brenner, a Roman Catholic writer, has recently published a learned work, which contains a copious history of usages in respect to the baptismal rite: viz. Geschichtliche Darstellung der Verrichtung der Taufe, etc., 1818. I have not seen the work; but it is spoken of highly, on account of the diligence and learning which the author has exhibited in his historical details. The result of them, respecting the point before us, I present, as given by Augusti, Denkwurd. 7: p. 68. "’Thirteen hundred years was baptism generally and ordinarily performed by the immersion of a man under water; and only in extraordinary cases was sprinkling or affusion permitted. These latter methods of baptism were called in question and even prohibited.’ Brenner adds, ’For fifteen hundred years was the person to be baptized, either by immersion or affusion, entirely divested of his garments.’ "These results will serve to show what a Roman Catholic writer feels himself forced by historical facts to allow, in direct contradiction to the present practice of his own church; which nowhere practises immersion, except in the churches of Milan: it being everywhere else even forbidden. "In the work of John Floyer, on Cold Bathing, page 50, it is mentioned that the English Church practised immersion down to the beginning of the seventeenth century; when a change to the method of sprinkling gradually took place. As a confirmation of this, it may be mentioned that the first Liturgy, in 1547, enjoins a trine-immersion, in case the child is not sickly: Augusti, ut sup. p. 229. "We have collected facts enough to authorize us now to come, to the following general conclusion respecting the practice of the Christian Church in general, with regard to the mode of baptism, viz. from the earliest ages of which we have any account, subsequent to the apostolic age, and downwards for several centuries, the churches did generally practise baptism by immersion, perhaps by immersion of the whole person; and that the only exceptions to this mode which were usually allowed, were in cases of urgent sickness, or other cases of immediate and imminent danger where immersion could not be practised. "It may also be mentioned here, that aspersion and affusion, which had in particular cases been now and then practised in primitive times, were gradually introduced. These became, at length, as we shall see hereafter, quite common, in the western church almost universal, sometime before the Reformation. "In what manner, then did the Churches of Christ, from a very early period, to say the least, understand the word baptizo in the New Testament? Plainly, they, construed it as meaning immersion. They, sometimes, even went so far as to forbid any other method of administering the ordinance, cases of necessity and mercy only excepted. "If, then, we are left in doubt, after a philological investigation of baptizo, how much it necessarily implies; if the circumstances which are related as accompanying this rite, so far as the New Testament has given them, leave us still in doubt; if we cannot trace, with any certainty, the Jewish proselyte-baptism to a period as early as the baptism of John and Jesus, so as to draw any inferences with probability from this; still, we are left in no doubt as to the more generally received usage of the Christian Church, down to a period several centuries after the apostolic age. "That the Greek fathers, and the Latin ones who were familiar with the Greek, understood the usual import of the word baptizo, would hardly seem to be capable of a denial. That they might be confirmed in their view of the import of this word, by common usage among the Greek classic authors, we have seen in the first part of this dissertation." Stuart’s Bib. Repos. p. 662. To an authority so plenary and venerable with all the Pedobaptists of New England and of the Union, little can be added from other sources. One short step more, however, would have destroyed all this authority, so far as serviceable to us; for then Professor Stuart would have been a Baptist. He has, then, said all that a Pedobaptist could say, both in the philological and also in the historical department. That he can repose in satisfaction upon a probability so perfectly slender, is a problem in casuistry to which I shall not now allow myself to advert; that he has not one chance in ten thousand to be safe on this point, his own reasonings show. Neander’s History of the Christian Religion: "Baptism was originally administered by immersion; and many of the comparisons of St. Paul allude to this form of its administration: the immersion is a symbol of death, of being buried with Christ; the coming forth from the water is a symbol of a resurrection with Christ; and both taken together, represent the second birth, the death of the old man, and a resurrection to a new life. An exception was made only in the case of sick persons, which was necessary, and they received baptism by sprinkling." Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History--1st century: "The sacrament of baptism was administered in this century, without the public assemblies, in places appointed and prepared for the purpose, and was performed by immersion of the whole body in the baptismal font. "The sacrament of baptism was administered publicly twice very year, at the festivals of Easter and Pentecost or Whitsuntide, either by the bishop or the presbyters in consequence of his authorization and appointment. The persons that were to be baptized, after they had repeated the creed, confessed and renounced their sins, and particularly the devil and his pompous allurements, were immersed under water, and received into Christ’s kingdom by a solemn invocation of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, according to the express command of our blessed Lord. After baptism, they received the sign of the cross, were anointed, and, by prayers and imposition of hands, were solemnly commended to the mercy of God, and dedicated to his service; in consequence of which, they received the milk and honey, which concluded the ceremony. The reasons of this particular ritual coincide with what we have said in general concerning the origin and causes of the multiplied ceremonies that crept, from time to time, into the church. [2d century.] "Adult persons were prepared for baptism by abstinence, prayer, and other pious exercises. It was to answer for them that sponsors or godfathers were first instituted, though they were afterward admitted also in the baptism of infants. "There were, twice a year, stated times when baptism was administered to such as, after a long course of trial and preparation, offered themselves as candidates for the profession of Christianity. This ceremony was performed only in the presence of such as were already initiated into the Christian mysteries. "We have only to add, that none were admitted to this solemn ordinance, until, by the menacing and formidable shouts and declamation of the exorcist, they had been delivered from the dominion of the prince of darkness, and consecrated to the service of God. The origin of this superstitious ceremony may be easily traced, when we consider the prevailing opinion of the times. The driving out of this demon was now considered as an essential preparation for baptism; after the administration of which, the candidates returned home, adorned with crowns and arrayed in white garments, as sacred emblems; the former, of their victory over sin and the world; the latter, of their inward purity and innocence." [3d century.] History of the Church, by George Waddington, M. A.: "The ceremony of immersion (the oldest, form of baptism) was performed in the name of the three persons of the Trinity; it was believed to be attended by the remission of original sin, and the entire regeneration of the infant or convert, by the passage from the land of bondage into the kingdom of salvation." Text-Book of Ecclesiastical History, by J. C. I. Geiseler: "The custom of considering certain doctrines and rites as mysteries [in the 3d and 4th centuries] would naturally have some effect on the mode of admission to the church. Baptism was preceded by a long preparatory course, during which the catechumens (katechumenoi) were gradually led, from general religious and moral truths, to the peculiar doctrines of Christianity, by teachers appointed for the purpose, (catechistes,) and must pass through various grades (audientes, genuflectentes, competentes,) before they were deemed fit to be actually admitted. This course usually occupied several years, and often the catechumens voluntarily deferred their baptism as long as possible, on account of the remission of sins by which it was accompanied. Hence, it was often necessary to baptize the sick, and in that case sprinkling (baptismus clinicorum, tou klinikou,) was substituted for the usual rite. The baptism of infants became now more common. The use of exorcism is distinctly mentioned, and all who had been baptized, even the children, partook of the Eucharist." Cave’s Primitive Christianity: "The action having proceeded thus far, the party to be baptized was wholly immerged or put under water; which was the almost constant and universal custom of those times, whereby they did more notably and significantly express the three great ends and effects of baptism. For, as in immersion there are in a manner three several acts the putting the person into water, his abiding there for a little time, and his rising up again; so by these were represented Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection; and, in conformity thereunto, our dying unto sin, the destruction of its power, and our resurrection to a new course of life. By the person’s being put into water was lively represented the putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, and being washed from the filth and pollution of them; by his abode under it, which was a kind of burial unto water, his entering into a state of death or mortification, like as Christ remained for some time under the state or power of death. Therefore, as many as are baptized into Christ, arc said to be ’baptized into his death, and to be buried with him by baptism into death, that, the old man being crucified with him, the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth he might not serve sin, for that he that is dead is freed from sin,’ as the apostle clearly explains the meaning of this rite. Then, by his emersion, or rising up out of the water, was signified his entering upon a new course of life, differing from that which he lived before, that, ’like as Christ was raised up from the dead to the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.’" Grotius: "Buried with him by baptism. Not only the word, baptism, but the very form of it, intimates this [immersion]. For an immersion of the whole body in water, so that it is no longer beheld, bears an image of that burial which is given to the dead. There was in baptism, as administered in former times, an image both of a burial and of a resurrection." Bishop Taylor: "The custom of the ancient churches was not sprinkling, but immersion; in pursuance of the sense of the word (baptize) in the commandment and example of our blessed Saviour. Now this was of so sacred account in their esteem, that they did not think it lawful to receive him into the clergy who had been only sprinkled in his baptism, as we learn from the Epistle of Cornelius to Fabius of Antioch." Archbishop Usher: "Some there are, that stand strictly for the particular action of diving or dipping the baptized under the water, as the only action which the institution of the sacrament will bear; and our church allows no other, except in case of the child’s weakness; and therein is expressed our Saviour’s baptism, both the descending into the water, and the rising up." Church of England: "As we be buried with Christ by our baptism into death, so let us daily die to sin, mortifying and killing the evil motions thereof. And as Christ was raised up from death by the glory of the Father, so let us rise to a new life, and walk continually therein." In the directions for the "Public Baptism of Infants," the Book of Common Prayer says: "Then the priest shall take the child into his hands, and shall say to the godfathers and godmothers, ’Name this child.’ And then, naming it after them, (if they shall certify him that the child will endure it,) he shall DIP it in the water, discreetly and warily, saying," &c. Encyclopædia Britannica: "The Muscovite priests plunge the child three times over head and ears in water."--Art. Russia. Richard Baxter: "It is commonly confessed by us to the Anabaptists, as our commentators declare, that in the apostles’ time, the baptized were dipped over head in the water, and that this signified their profession, both of believing the burial and resurrection of Christ; and of their own present renouncing the world and flesh, or dying to sin and living to Christ, or rising again to newness of life, or being buried and risen again with Christ, as the apostle expoundeth (Colossians 3:1-25 : and Romans 6:1-23 :;) and though we have thought it lawful to disuse the manner of dipping, and to use less water, yet we presume not to change the use and signification of it." To these testimonies from ecclesiastical histories, and others alluding to ancient records, many more might be added; such as testimonies from Du Pin, Milner, and the Roman Fathers, without at all increasing the evidence. For, on reading Mosheim’s notices of the three first centuries, we may see the ancient institution and the continual change going on in the concomitant rites and usages, as clearly, though not as fully, as from a thousand volumes. In the first century we have a simple immersion--a few additions in the second--many more in the third--and so on. We shall, therefore, glance for a moment at the origin and history of sprinkling, and thus add to the chapter of evidence now before us. And with whom should we more naturally commence than with the father of ecclesiastical historians--Eusebius himself?-- "Novatus, being relieved thereof by the exorcists, fell into a grievous distemper; and it being supposed that he would die immediately, he received baptism, being besprinkled1 with water, on the bed wheron he lay, (if that can be termed baptism,) neither when he had escaped that sickness, did he afterwards receive the other things which the canon of the church enjoineth should be received: nor was he sealed by the Bishop’s imposition of hands: which, if he never received, how did he receive the Holy Ghost?" The canon to which he alludes is the following:-- "That they who were baptized in their beds if they recover again, should afterwards go to the Bishop that he might supply what was wanting in that baptism." This clinic baptism slowly advanced, but never got into much favor for thirteen centuries. As to the introduction and progress of sprinkling, the Edinburgh Cyclopædia gives the following account: "The first law for sprinkling was obtained in the following manner: Pope Stephen II. being driven from Rome by Adolphus, king of the Lombards, in 753, fled to Pepin, who, a short time before, had usurped the crown of France. Whilst he remained there, the monks of Cressy, in Britany, consulted him whether, in case of necessity, baptism poured on the head of the infant would be lawful. Stephen replied that it would. But though the truth of this fact be allowed--which, however, some Catholics deny--yet pouring, or sprinkling, was admitted only in cases of necessity. It was not tell the year 1311 that the legislature, in a council held at Ravenna, declared immersion or sprinkling to be indifferent. In Scotland, however, sprinkling was never practised in ordinary cases, till after the Reformation, (about the middle of the sixteenth century.) From Scotland, it made its way into England, in the reign of Elizabeth, but was not authorized in the Established Church." Art. Baptism. Wall, the most learned and able of Pedobaptist writers, gathers up into one paragraph a volume of evidence in attestation of the fact just now asserted. I shall give his words in lieu of a hundred extracts which can be readily gleaned from ecclesiastic writers:-- "France seems to have been the first country in the world where baptism by affusion was used ordinarily to persons in health, and in the public way of administering it. They [the Assembly of Divines at Westminster] reformed the font into a basin. This learned Assembly could not remember that fonts to baptize in had been always used by the primitive Christians long before the beginning of Popery, and ever since churches were built; but that sprinkling, for the common use of baptizing, was really introduced (in France first, and then in other Popish countries) in times of Popery. And that accordingly all those countries in which the usurped power of the Pope is, or has formerly been owned, have left off dipping of children in the font: but that all other countries in the world, which had never regarded his authority, do still use it: and that basins, except in case of necessity, were never used by Papists, or any other Christians whatsoever, till by themselves. What has been said of this custom of pouring or sprinkling water in the ordinary use of baptism, is to be understood only in reference to these Western parts of Europe; for it is used ordinarily no where else. The Greek Church in all the branches of it does still use immersion; and they hardly count a child, except in case of sickness, well baptized without it. And so do all other Christians in the world, except the Latins. That which I hinted before, is a rule that does not fail in any particular that I know of, viz. All the nations of Christians that do now, or formerly did submit to the authority of the Bishop of Rome, do ordinarily baptize their infants by pouring or sprinkling. And though the English received not this custom till after the decay of Popery, yet they have since received it from such neighbouring nations as had begun in the time of the Pope’s power. But all other Christians in the world, who never owned the Pope’s usurped power, do, and ever did, dip their infants in the ordinary use." History of Infant Baptism, Part 2:, chap. 9: Bishop Burnet’s reason for the change is thus expressed:-- "The danger of dipping in cold climates may be a very good reason for changing the form of baptism to sprinkling." Vol. 4:, page 162. HISTORY OF SPRINKLING. Novatian, as before shown in the histories quoted, had water poured all over him in a bed. This happened not earlier than A. D. 251, probably 253. (Eusebius, p. 114.) About eighty years after this time, when other sick and feeble persons were preferring, this method introduced by Novatian, so far as all authentic records inform us, a decree was issued, called "the 12th canon of the Council of Neocæsarea," against such pourings, inhibiting persons so poured upon from any participation in the honours of the ministry or priesthood. Dr. Wall, who cannot be suspected of any partiality to Baptists, or any of us, gives such a history of the introduction of sprinkling and pouring as must satisfy every candid and disinterested man that it came into use by slow degrees, and only in some of the more western parts of the western Latin church, and that for full thirteen centuries the whole world practised immersion, with the exception of invalids and pretenders of inability to endure cold bathing. Bonaventure, in A. D. 1160, alludes to sprinkling in France as becoming an ordinary practice. So do the Synod of Angiers, 1275, speak of dipping and pouring as indifferent. The Synod of Aix, 1585, allowed pouring, or dipping or pouring, according to the usage of the church, but commanded the water to be poured out of ladles. It made very little progress in Italy, Germany, or Spain, till the 14th and 15th centuries. Erasmus, who spent some time in England, during the reign of Henry VIII., observes, "With us the Dutch have the water poured on them. In England they are dipped." In his colloquy, called Ichthusphagia, supposed to have been written in England, he represents infants as "dipped all over in cold water, soon after birth, and that, too, in a stone font." Wickliffe thought it immaterial whether they be dipped once, or thrice, or water poured upon their heads, according to the custom of the church to which they belong. The Manuale ad Usum Savum, printed 1530, the 21st of Henry VIII., orders, "Let the Priest baptize [the candidate] him by dipping him in the water thrice:" So decrees the Common Prayer Book of Edward VI., 1549: "the Priest shall dip it in the water thrice." Edward VI. was himself dipped: so was Queen Elizabeth. Dipping continued during Queen Mary’s reign. Watson, a Papist Bishop, in 1558, the last of the Queen’s reign, published a volume on the sacraments, in which he says, "Though the old ancient tradition of the church hath been from the beginning to dip the child three times, it is sufficient." Wall: "It being allowed to weak children (though strong enough to be brought to church) to be baptized by effusion, many fond ladies and gentlewomen first, and then by degrees the common people, would obtain the favour of the Priest to have their children pass for weak children, too tender to endure dipping in the water. ’Especially,’ as Mr. Walker observes, ’if some instances really were, or were but fancied and framed, of some child’s taking cold or being otherwise prejudiced by its being dipped.’" "And another thing that had a greater influence than this, was, that many of our English divines and other people had, during Queen Mary’s bloody reign, fled into Germany. Switzerland, &c.; and, coming back, in Queen Elizabeth’s time, they brought with them a great love to the customs of those Protestant churches wherein they had sojourned: and especially the authority of Calvin, and the rules which he had established at Geneva, had a mighty influence on a great number of our people about that time. Now, Calvin had not only given his dictate in his Institutions, that ’the difference is of no moment, whether he that is baptized be dipped all over; and if so, whether thrice or once; or whether he be only wetted with the water poured on him:’ but he had also drawn up for the use of his church at Geneva, (and afterwards published to the world,) a form of administering the sacraments, where, when he comes to order the act of baptizing, he words it thus: ’Then the minister of baptism pours water on the infant, saying, I baptize thee,’ &c. There had been, as I said, some synods in some dioceses of France that had spoken of affusion without mentioning immersion at all; that being the common practice: but for an office or liturgy of any church, this is, I believe, the first in the world that prescribes affusion absolutely. Then Musculus had determined,--’As for dipping of the infant, we judge that not so necessary; but that it is free for the church to baptize either by dipping or sprinkling.’ So that (as Mr. Walker observes) no wonder if that custom prevailed at home, which our reformed divines in the time of the Marian persecution had found to be the judgment of other divines, and seen to be the practice of other churches abroad; and especially of Mr. Calvin and his church at Geneva." "And when there was added to all this the resolution of such a man as Dr. Whitaker, Regius Professor at Cambridge, ’Though in case of grown persons that are in health, I think dipping to be better; yet, in the case of infants and of sickly people, I think sprinkling sufficient.’ The inclination of the people, backed with these authorities, carried the practice against the rubric, which still required dipping, except in case of weakness. So that in the latter times of Queen Elizabeth, and during the reigns of King James and King Charles I., very few children were dipped in the font." Concerning the use of basins, Dr. Wall remarks:-- "The use was, the minister continuing in his reading-desk, child was brought and held below him; and there was placed for that use a little basin of water, about the bigness of a syllabub-pot, into which the minister dipping his fingers, and then holding his hand over the face of the child, some drops would fall from his fingers on the child’s face. For the Directory says, it is ’not only lawful but most expedient’ to use pouring or sprinkling." How the Church of England has changed its practice, the same learned doctor observes:-- "Upon the review of the Common Prayer Book, at the restoration, the Church of England did not think fit (however prevalent the custom of sprinkling was) to forego their maxim--that it is most fitting to dip children that are well able to bear it. But they leave it wholly to the judgment of the godfathers and those who bring the child, whether the child may well endure dipping or not; as they are, indeed the most proper judges of that. So the priest is now ordered, ’If the godfathers do certify him that the child may well endure it to dip it in the water discreetly and warily. But, if they certify that the child is weak, it shall suffice to pour water upon it.’ The difference is only this: by the rubric, as it stood before, the priest was to dip, unless there were an allegation of weakness. Now he is not to dip, unless there be an averment or certifying of strength sufficient to endure it." Amongst the most distinguished men of the Church of England that, in Dr. Wall’s time, or before it, argued for immersion, are Sotus, Mede, Bishop Taylor, Dan. Rogers, Sir Norton Knatchbull, Walker, Towerson, Whitby, Dr. Cave, &c. &c. He gives the words of some of them:-- Sotus: "Baptism ought to be given by dipping; so as that it is not lawful to give it otherwise, unless for some necessary, or creditable, and reasonable cause." Vasquez says of sprinkling, "That it is not at all in use, and so cannot be practised without sin, unless for some particular cause." Mede: "There was no such thing as sprinkling, or rantismos, used in baptism in the Apostles’ times, nor many ages after them." Sir N. Knatchbull: "With leave be it spoken I am still of opinion that it would be more for the honour of the church, and for the [peace and] security of religion, if the old custom could conveniently be restored." Dr. Whitby: "It were to be wished that this custom [of immersion] might be again of general use." Dr. Cave: "The almost constant and universal custom of the primitive times." Dr. Towerson, after reciting the arguments in favour of immersion, in his explication, makes, for a Churchman, the following remarkable concession:-- "How to take off the force of these arguments altogether, is a thing I mean not to consider; partly because our church seems to persuade such an immersion, and partly because I cannot but think the forementioned arguments to be so far of force as to evince the necessity thereof, where there is not some greater necessity to occasion an alteration of it." With the above specimen, selected from Dr. Wall, I shall conclude this species of evidence. With regard, however, to the introduction of sprinkling and affusion into Scotland, England, and consequently into America, we must give a few extracts from his 4th volume. Dr. Wall argues the cause of dipping, and the necessity of the return to it, on various occasions. I shall give but one extract, because it contains much of the history of sprinkling in a few words:-- "That our climate is no colder than it was for those thirteen or fourteen hundred years from the beginning of Christianity here, to Queen Elizabeth’s time; and not near so cold as Muscovy, and some other countries where they do still dip their children in baptism, and find no inconvenience in it. "That the apparent reason that altered the custom was not the coldness of the climate, but the imitation of Calvin and the church of Geneva, and some others thereabouts. "That our reformers and compilers of the liturgy (even of the last edition of it) were of another mind. As appears both by the express order of the rubric itself, and by the prayer used just before baptism, ’Sanctify this water,’ &c., ’and grant that this child to be baptized therein,’ &c.; (if they had meant that pouring should have always, or most ordinarily have been used, they would have said therewith;) and by the definition given in the Catechism of the outward visible sign in baptism: ’Water, wherein the person is baptized.’ I know that in one edition it was said ’is dipped or sprinkled with it.’ I know not the history of that edition; but as it is a late one, so it was not thought fit to be continued. The old edition had the prayer beforesaid in these words, ’baptized in this water.’ "That if it be the coldness of the air that is feared; a child brought in loose blankets, that may be presently put off and on, need be no longer naked, or very little longer than at its ordinary dressing and undressing; not a quarter or sixth part of a minute. "If the coldness of the water, there is no reason, from the nature of the thing; no order or command of God or man that it should be used cold; but as the waters, in which our Saviour and the primitive Christians, in those hot countries which the Scripture mentions, were baptized, were naturally warm by reason of the climate: so if ours be made warm, they will be the liker to them. As the inward and main part of baptism is God’s washing and sanctifying the soul, so the outward symbol is the washing of the body, which is as naturally done by warm water as cold. It may, I suppose, be used in such a degree of warmth as the parents desire. "As to those of the clergy who are satisfied themselves, and do in their own minds and opinions approve of the directions of the liturgy, and would willingly bring their people to the use of it; it is too apparent what difficulties lie in the way. So that this quarreller has no ground in his assuming way to demand, ’Why they do continue,’ &c. "The difficulty of breaking any custom which has got possession among the body of the people, (though that custom be but of two or three generations,) is known and obvious. And there being a necessity of leaving it to the parent’s judgment whether their child may well endure dipping or not, they are very apt to think or say not: and there is no help for it. For none, I think, will pretend that the minister should determine that, and dip the child whether they will or not. He can but give his opinion the judgment must be theirs; and they are for doing as has been of late usual. "But there are, besides this general, two particular obstacles, which it may he fit to mention. "1. One is, from that part of the people in any parish, who are presbyterianly inclined. As the Puritan party brought in this alteration; so they are very tenacious of it; and as in other church matters, so in this particularly, they seem to have a settled antipathy against the retrieving of the ancient customs. Calvin was, I think, (as I said in my book,) the first in the world that drew up a form of liturgy that prescribed pouring water on the infant, absolutely, without saying any thing of dipping. It was (as Mr. Walker has shown) his admirers in England, who in Queen Elizabeth’s time brought pouring in ordinary use, which before was used only to weak children. But the succeeding Presbyterians in England, about the year 1644, (when their reign began,) went farther yet from the ancient way, and instead of pouring, brought into use in many places sprinkling: declaring at the same time against all use of fonts, baptisteries godfathers, or anything that looked like the ancient way of baptizing. And as they brought the use of the other sacrament to a great and shameful infrequency, (which it is found difficult to this day to reform,) so they brought this of baptism into a great disregard. Now I say, a minister in a parish, where there are any considerable number inclined, this way, will find in them a great aversion to this order of the rubric. They are hardly prevailed on to leave off that scandalous custom of having their children, though never so well, baptized out of a basin or porringer is a bed-chamber, hardly persuaded to bring them to church; much farther from having them dipped, though never so able to endure it. "2. Another struggle will be with the midwives and nurses, &c. These will use all the interest they have with the mothers, (which is very great,) to dissuade them from agreeing to the dipping of the child. I know no particular reason, unless it be this. thing which they value themselves and their skill much upon is, the neat dressing of the child on the christening day; the setting all the trimming, the pins, and the laces in their right order. And if the child be brought in loose clothes, which may presently be taken off for the baptism, and put on again, this pride is lost. And this makes a reason. So little is the solemnity of the sacrament regarded by many, who mind nothing but the dress, and the eating and drinking. But the minister must endeavour to prevail with some of his people who have the most regard for religion, and possibly their example may bring in the rest." The history of sprinkling water on men, women, or babes, is without any authority from Old testament or New. Neither the Jews’ religion nor Christianity ever required or approved it. It has no more authority from the Bible than transubstantiation, auricular confession, purgatory, celibacy, or the worship of angels and demi-god mediators. In the history of Christianity, the whole world, Eastern and Western Christendom, with the exception of a few sick and dying persons, practised immersion during the long space of thirteen hundred years. Since that time, license was granted first by the Pope, in 1311, to practise affusion with the authority of the church. Calvin next gave a law to his branch of the church, authorizing affusion. This was carried first into Scotland, and then into England, after the reign of Mary of bloody memory; and finally imposed upon the people, much against their own conviction and inclination at first. Time, however, reconciled them to it; and it was not often necessary to fine and punish them for neglect of duty, as it once was in our good Episcopalian Commonwealth of Virginia, as the following penal statute, lamentably for the honour of our forefathers, too amply witnesseth:-- Copy of a law, found in Henning’s Statutes at large, vol. 2, page 165, Dec. 1662, 14th Charles II. "ARTICLE III.--Against persons that refuse to have their children baptized. "Whereas many schismatical persons, out of their averseness to the orthodox established religion, or out of the newfangled conceits of their own heretical inventions, refuse to have their children baptized-- "Be it therefore enacted, by the authority aforesaid, That all persons that, in contempt of the divine sacrament of baptism, shall refuse, when they may carry their child to a lawful minister in that county, to have them baptised, shall be amerced in two thousand pounds of tobacco--halfe to the informer, and halfe to the publique." A few such statutes would soon make infant sprinkling both orthodox and popular. The largest half of Christendom, as respects territory, including all Asia, all Africa, much of the north of Europe, still practise immersion--indeed, all Christendom, as Wall says, that never bowed to the throne of the Pope of Rome. With this Virginian statute, I shall conclude this mere sketch of the introduction, progress, and prevalence of sprinkling in the western section of the Christian profession. Were it not for a gross imposition, some way practised upon western and Protestant Christendom--that immersion is a thing of yesterday, and limited to a few hundred thousand Baptists; and that sprinkling and pouring have been always and almost universally in popular faith and practice,--I should not have supposed it of much importance to pause in the way of comment upon the facts now clearly lying before us. But, in view of this most unfounded and fallacious assumption, I deem it incumbent on me to fix the attention of the community upon this voluminous and instructive, and incontrovertible fact. I have not used, in this branch of the argument, more than in the preceding part of it, any ex parte witnesses; unless, indeed, the universal repudiation of Baptist testimony and the constant listening to Pedobaptist should be regarded as preferring one-sided evidence. But, I presume the Pedobaptists, if not the Baptists, will forgive me this wrong. That I have repudiated a respectable multitude of faithful and competent vouchers from giving testimony, merely because they are on my side, is, indeed, not treating our friends so kindly and respectfully as our opposers; still, I opine, it is the shorter and the safer, and, therefore, the better way of conducting the controversy. If, then, the Apostles authorized and allowed sprinkling privately, as some few of our opponents assume, in that case it would be preferable to the custom of immersion; because, 1st, it is a matter of no self-denial or trouble to have a wet finger pressed upon one’s brow, or a few drops sprinkled upon the check; and, 2d, because it would have been just as pleasing to the Lord as immersion, inasmuch as he is always pleased with his own appointments, and most cheerfully accepts the obedience which he requires. It is, indeed, a most unprecedented case of divine legislation, that the Lord should command and authorize two actions, so very diverse in form and significance; to be performed by his own direct authority, and then call them by one and the same name. Be it so, however, that he was pleased to sanction privately one such anomaly; I ask, on the principles that govern human nature, and from the customs and history of the world, how it could so soon have degenerated from affusion to immersion, and in so short a time become so universal, that not one instance of sprinkling is found on record, either in the New Testament or in ecclesiastical history, for the first two hundred and fifty years? Men generally degenerate from hard and grievous exactions to those which are lighter and more agreeable; but, on the assumption before us, as Bishop Smith of Kentucky argues, the whole church immediately abandoned the easy and light service of sprinkling for immersion! When God formerly asked the fat and costly sacrifices of the flocks of Jacob for his altar and his priesthood, the ungrateful Israelites in a few centuries so far degenerated as to offer only the poor and worthless. But in this case, when he asks for a dove or a sparrow, they degenerate to a full-grown ox or a heifer! I should be pleased to hear some ingenious essayist attempt an explanation of this singular anomaly. Till satisfactorily explained, we must, however, continue to regard it as a most unfeasible assumption, destitute of any, the least probability. We have, then, but one case of pouring on record during two hundred and fifty years. The Messiah was gone to heaven more than two centuries before the sick and distracted Novatian, of Rome had water poured all over him on a bed;--if, indeed, as Eusebius says, that could be called baptism. Perhaps there may have been, about that time, a few others; but so few and so obscure, (if there were any,) that neither Eusebius nor any other historian names them. The Council of Neocæsarea, sixty-four years after this time, condemned such pourings, which, being the first public notice of the affair, proves that it had not yet spread far, and, in the second place, that it was not then regarded by the bishops with much favour. The delicacy of infants, the fond and foolish tenderness of superstitious mothers, the notion of the deadly influence of original sin, the importance of baptism as an ablution, and the sick and dying invalids that could not endure immersion, one would think, would have earlier made larger inroads upon the Apostolic law and ordinances, and prevailed more extensively than it seems they did. The facts then are, the whole world immersed, with these few exceptions, for thirteen centuries. The east half of Christendom still continues the practice. The Greek portion of the church never to this day has given up the primitive practice. This, too, is an argument of more weight that even the numerical magnitude of this immense section of the church. It is not merely the voice of many millions, but the voice of many millions of Greeks;--of men who knew what Apostles and Greek fathers had written; who needed no translators, nor scholiasts, nor annotators, nor historians, to read them lessons on the primitive practice or on the meaning of Christ’s commission. Some seventy-five or a hundred millions of such vouchers on a mere question of fact, qualified as they were, on the mere principle of human authority, would outweigh the world. But, even when the Council of Ravenna granted to France and the Papal territory the privilege of affusion, it is not to he concluded that the millions of Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and England immediately accepted of the indulgence. They did not. France herself did not. England held on for three centuries more to immersion;--so did some other portions of eastern Europe; and one portion of the Roman church holds on to this day to the old apostolic custom. We have, then, a tremendous majority, if that is of any value:--the whole church for thirteen hundred years; the half of it for eighteen hundred years; and of the balance, some portions of it for fourteen hundred, and one large portion for sixteen hundred years. Concerning the magnitude of the Greek church, compared with the Roman, we learn much from the fact, that during the first seven general councils, the aggregate of Greek bishops was some twenty-two thousand, while that of the Roman bishops was less than thirty! But there is a very plain and tolerably accurate way of ascertaining the comparative number of those immersed and sprinkled in all time. We have, first, all Christendom for thirteen centuries, and half of it for five. Now, allow an average of one hundred millions every third of a century to have been baptized, which is certainly within the limits of the actual number, (but it will show the ratios just as well as the true number,) then we have for eighteen centuries, in all, five thousand five hundred millions; of this number, four thousand millions were immersed during the first thirteen centuries. Then we have the one-half of five centuries, which is seven hundred and fifty millions, added to four thousand millions,--giving an aggregate of four thousand seven hundred and fifty millions immersed, for seven hundred and fifty millions sprinkled, during all the ages of Christianity; that is, in the ratio of seven immersed to one sprinkled. In making this estimate, we have given all that have been immersed in the western half of Christendom for the last five hundred years, to compensate for all the clinics that were sprinkled during the first thirteen centuries. After making the most reasonable deductions which can be demanded, we have an immense majority of immersed professors, compared with the sprinkled. This argument is not urged in proof of the truth of our positions, but as a refutation of those who would represent immersion as a small affair, in the esteem of all ages, compared with sprinkling. In displaying the documentary evidence of the universality of immersion in the early ages of Christianity, and of the opinions of learned men on the question of the baptismal practice of the church in all ages, we have dealt rather with a sparing hand. We could fill a respectable volume with concessions, confessions, and candid acknowledgments from the greatest Pedobaptist names of Christendom; but, really, it seems to us a work of supererogation. After such men as Mosheim, Waddington, Geiseler, Neander, Brenner, Cave, Taylor, Baxter, Usher, and Grotius, of the modern witnesses;--after such admissions on the part of Stuart and Wall, from their extensive readings;--all declaring the ancient practice, for so many centuries, to be the almost universal practice of the church, why should we summon a hundred others to tell the same story, and to reiterate the same facts? Like Wall, we might fill several volumes with such details. But, may we not say, that if any one hear not these evidences, they would not be persuaded though they were multiplied a thousand-fold! I do not quote the Koran to prove that the Mohammedans so render and understand baptism, though I could have done it; nor do I refer to the frequent immersions enjoined in the Mohammedan code; nor did I tell how many conveniences there were for practising immersion either in the brook Kedron, at the pool of Bethesda, being, according to Maundrel, several hundred feet long and broad, and eight feet deep, or at the private and public baths all over Judea; nor have I gone to Philippi, nor to the baptisteries of ancient renown,--not even that of St. Sophia, erected by Constantine, with its immense convocation-room, large enough for an œcumenical council; nor have I told of the famous Lateran baptistery, once bestowed by Constantine to Sylvester, bishop of Rome; nor of the baptistery of Ravenna, with its octangular edifice of two hundred and thirty English feet square; nor have I named the baptistery at Florence, remarkable for its numerous baths; nor have I told of the thousand baths of Robinson; nor gone into the proof of the proposition that baths were as common in the East as bake-ovens in Pennsylvania; neither have I given long accounts of the immersion of many kings, and queens, and princesses, from Elizabeth back to Constantine the Great; nor have I alluded to a score of little things usually introduced to substantiate the testimony given;--all of which, after what I have said and cited, appears about as superfluous, unnecessary, and, I might add, as ridiculous, too, as if, after proving, by twelve of the most veracious witnesses ever sworn, that A B was actually drowned within one mile of Jerusalem, I should then summon a few travellers that had sometimes visited Jerusalem, to say that there was actually water deep enough to drown A B, within one mile of the city! Nor have I quoted Milton and all the old poets, to prove from their sayings and allusions that they all admitted immersion to have been found either in baptizo or in history; nor even half of the great men now living: I have not introduced the great German Tholuck, on Romans 6:4, saying, "In order to understand the figurative use of baptism, we must bear in mind THE WELL-KNOWN FACT, that the candidate, in the primitive church, was immersed in water and raised out again;" nor have I introduced Urner, saying, "that, in the apostolic age, baptism was by immersion, as its symbolic action shows;" nor Belchneider, in his Theology, saying, "Immersion was the original apostolic practice;" nor Starck, nor Guericke, nor Hahn, nor Von Coeller, nor Frilsch,--all affirming the same, in words either tantamount or paramount. Nor have I been peculiarly attentive to the removal of the little objections made by great men, on numerous accounts, to the difficulties of immersing three thousand in one day--as if immersion required twice as long time as sprinkling, which no one of experimental knowledge would believe, for sixty persons have often been immersed by one person in one hour; nor have I, from this fact, repudiated the custom of long narrations of Christian experience prior to immersion, though the argument is irresistible:--three thousand persons in one day enlightened, convinced, converted, declare their faith and penitence, relate their experience, and are immersed in some six or eight hours; nor have I at all adverted to the great difficulty of finding water at all seasons and in all places, as if a man could live long in any country where he could not find water enough to cover him,--or, as if the Lord would condemn any man for not doing what, at a particular day or in a particular place, was physically impossible; as if men would not have as much sense nowadays as in old times, when they went out of one place to another to be baptized, on various accounts besides scarcity of water; nor yet have I shown that Philippi was situated upon a river, and Corinth between two seas; and that there was not a church constituted in the apostolic age, known to history, that had not within its precincts, or in its vicinity, baths, public and private, rivers or pools of water, adequate to all the requisites of Christian immersion. The reason why I have not attempted all this, is, because such an effort on my part would be wholly gratuitous. For, if John the Harbinger baptized our Lord in the Jordan; if all Jerusalem, Judea, and the circumjacent country went out to him, confessed their sins, and were baptized by him in the Jordan; if John baptized at Enon, near to Salem, because there was much water there; if an Ethiopian officer went down into the water, in the desert, and came up out of the water, when baptized by Philip; and if the first Christians were all buried with the Lord in baptism; follows it not, that neither sprinkling nor pouring is Christian immersion, or Christian baptism? Nay, if in a single case it were clearly shown that any one, in the act of Christian baptism, had been immersed, follows it not that in every case Christian baptism was Christian immersion? unless, indeed, there are two Christian baptisms! But this is inadmissible; inasmuch as the Holy Spirit, by Paul, has said, that "there is one Lord, one faith, and one baptism." As rationally, therefore, might any one plead for two Lords and two faiths as for two baptisms. To conclude, then, on all the premises submitted in this book, I must say, that it appears to me as congruous with good sense, good learning, and good taste to affirm that a person can be immersed by sprinkling or by pouring--or poured or sprinkled by immersion, as that he can be baptized by either the one or the other. 1 "This word perichutheis, Rufinus very well renders perfusus, besprinkled; for people who were sick, and were baptized in their beds, could not be dipped in water by the priest, but were sprinkled with water by him. This baptism was thought imperfect, and not solemn, for several reasons. Also, they who were thus baptized were called ever afterwards, clinici; and, by the 12th canon of the Council of Neocæsarea, these clinici were prohibited the priesthood."--Eusebius. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 27: 01.03.01. SUBJECTS OF JOHN'S BAPTISM ======================================================================== B O O K T H I R D. CHAPTER I. SUBJECTS OF JOHN’S BAPTISM. THE action called baptism, so far as judged convenient and necessary, has been ascertained. A miniature view, while it is more portable and convenient, may be as true and faithful to the original as one large as life. There is sometimes as much argument in a page as in a volume--in a sheet as in an octavo. The age of folios and quartos has passed away. Men of reflection know that many words and long sentences are not always arguments. In an age of books, like the present, a tract may be read while a treatise may be neglected; and, therefore, may be made more useful than a volume. We now propose a miniature view of the subject of baptism, or the person that ought to be baptized. A million of pages could not convince a certain class of men on any subject to which they are already committed. They love to have, it so they will have it so; and, therefore, it is so. Our hopes generally terminate upon the uncommitted--the candid and the inquisitive for truth. For their sake, and with an almost single eye to their illumination and rescue from error, we select arguments and authorities, both as respects variety and number. To this class we now propound the question, Who of mankind have a right to receive the blessing of Christian baptism? Before tendering an answer to the important question, Who ought to be baptized, it will be expedient to inquire to what dispensation or institution of religion this solemn and significant ordinance belongs. Our most reformed standards of Protestantism affirm, with the Westminster Confession, that "baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament;" and, consequently, belonged not to the Patriarchal or Jewish institution of religion. This is a very important decision of a very leading question bearing directly and forcibly on the great subject of investigation. But we may be asked, What importance is attached to the fact that it is a New Testament ordinance? The fact that there is an Old and New Testament, an obsolete and an existing divine institution, is pregnant with very important results and bearings as respects both duty and privilege. A new Testament or a new Will makes a prior one of no binding influence or importance. Paul thus reasons in his letter to the Hebrews. His words are, "In that God saith, I will make a new institution, or testament, he hath made the first old;" that is, obsolete. Still, the Old Testament, being the mould or type of the New, may be of much value to us, even although it ceases to be binding. If the shell of an antediluvian fish increases our knowledge of physical nature, why may not the moulds and types of the Jews’ religion, in which our Christian institution was once enveloped, increase our knowledge of that institution? God has generally presented a picture to the eye as well as a word to the ear, in revealing his purposes and designs to the human race. To look into the Patriarchal and the Jewish institutions through the developments of the Christian religion, is, therefore, of much importance, both as respects the enlargement of our knowledge and the confirmation of our faith. To myself, as to many other students of the Bible, it is demonstrably evident that God has from the beginning of time been arranging the prominent characters and incidents in human history and the leading events of his own moral government and providence in such a way as to create faith in his testimony, and to illustrate and render more intelligible the mysteries of Christ and his gospel. To glance at a few of these, with a reference to the subject on hand, may not be without some interest and advantage to the inquirer after the proper subject of baptism. Placing, then, before us the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, or the Oracles of God committed to the Jews and those committed to the Christians, we discover in them the following singular coincidences:--Each has its Adam, its constitution, its special community, its Mediator, its precepts, its promises, its privileges, its rewards, its punishments. Hence the frequency with which these are placed in contrast by the authors of the volume containing the Christian Scriptures. In the apostolic writings we have two Adams contrasted--the first and the second, the earthly and the heavenly. We fell in the first, we rise in the second. There are two chief covenants--the first and the second, the old and the new; two Mediators--Moses of the first, and the Lord Messiah of the second; two communities--the Jewish and the Christian; two births--that of the flesh and that of the Spirit; two positive precepts--circumcision and baptism; two classes of promises--the one temporal, the other spiritual: two inheritances--one in Canaan and one in heaven. But as the first existed for the sake of the second, and as the points of shadow and substance, of type and antitype, are numerous and various, the prominent characteristics, designs, and tendencies of these two divine institutions are set in order before us and pictured out in several conspicuous and remarkable persons, events, and circumstances. To these also we shall briefly allude as preparatory to a proper development of the question before us. There are several public persons, such as Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, with their families, made to stand in a double position to mankind--as natural progenitors of the race, and as typical or spiritual persons. Adam was the father and representative of the whole human race. From him we have all inherited both life and death. We all live because he lived; we die, because, as our representative, he sinned. His two sons, Cain and Abel, represent two seeds or races of men. Cain was a man and a murderer, and Abel was a saint and a martyr. Seth takes Abel’s place, and his descendants remain for seventy generations, till the Messiah appears. Cain’s offspring perished in the flood. Abraham of all the sons of Seth, was the most illustrious personage down to the times of the Messiah. He was constituted "the Father of the Faithful," and his faith the model faith of the family of God. He had two sons--one by nature and one by faith. The mother of the first was a slave--of the last, a free woman. The two women represent the two covenants, and their two sons the two communities under them.1 One of these sons was "born after the flesh," the other "after the spirit," or by faith. Two families spring from these--the Ishmaelites and the Israelites. But Isaac was the person from whom the promised Benefactor and Redeemer of the world was to come. "In Isaac shall thy seed be called." Isaac became a father: he has two sons, and only two--Esau and Jacob. Jacob is converted into Israel, while from Esau the Edomites descend. To Ishmael Abraham gave a loaf of bread and a bottle of water; to Isaac, all his estate. To Esau God gave Mount Seir; to Israel, Canaan, for an inheritance. It is worthy of remark that of these three most remarkable persons,--Adam, Abraham, and Isaac,--the first-born sons were only born after the flesh, and lived after the flesh; while their second born sons were born after the Spirit, and lived according to the Spirit. "Howbeit," said Paul, "that was not first which was spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterwards that which is spiritual:’ Of the first class were Cain, Ishmael, and Esau; of the second, Abel, Isaac, and Israel. Such were the original elements, the mystic alphabet of spiritual things, as time in its evolutions afterwards developed. The typical nation is created out of the flesh of Isaac, according to what God had said to Abraham--"In Isaac shall thy seed be called." Hence the fortunes of Jacob and his sons are spread out before us from that day until the Messiah is born, to the comparative obscuration and disparagement of every other nation and people. They became "a nation, great, and mighty, and populous," and are placed under the special wing of Jehovah as their King. Their males are marked in the flesh by a special covenant entered into in the 99th of Abraham, one year before Isaac was born. Hence Isaac was born in circumcision. While on their way from Egypt to Canaan, they are constituted into a holy nation, a kingdom of priests; not spiritually holy, indeed, but holy as respected the flesh. Hence the free use of the term holy in its application to that people. Their camp, their tabernacle, with all its furniture,--their priesthood, with all its appurtenances, as well as their persons, were separated, sanctified, or made holy to the Lord. It is at Sinai that Moses appears as a mediator. It is there that the natural seed, the inheritance, and a special relation to God, are engrossed in one great politico-ecclesiastic institution. These three are now imbodied in one covenant and solemnly ratified. The seed of Abraham had now multiplied into millions, but the promised seed was not yet come. While the flesh of the Messiah is in the nation, it must continue under a theocracy. It must be under the special care and direction of God. Its institutions must all be mystic, while the Messiah is hid in the family of Abraham. The new birth was represented by a "baptism into Moses, in the cloud, and in the sea." The mystic manna, or "THE BREAD OF LIFE," was concealed under the covert of the manna that daily fell around their dwellings. The stricken Rock, whence issued a living stream, was to them Christ. The cloud which over-shadowed them by day and illuminated them by night, which guided and protected them through the wilderness, was to them what the Holy Spirit is to Christians in all his influences through his word and ordinances. Their whole pilgrimage through the desert is a picturesque representation of human life under a remedial system. Death was shadowed forth in their Jordan, and heaven itself in their Canaan. "The things that happened unto them happened unto them for types, and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world" (the consummation of that dispensation) "have come." The long-promised and joyfully anticipated hour arrives--the "fulness of time" has come--the proper offspring of the woman appears. His harbinger anticipates him by a few months. In proper time he announces his appearance. He proclaims the acceptable year of the Lord, and prepares a people for his reign. He commences in the bosom of the Jewish church. He strikes at their cardinal errors in theory and practice. He says, "Think not to say you have Abraham for your father." He repudiates all reliance upon the flesh. "God," said he, "can raise, of these inanimate stones, sons to Abraham." "Reform," continues he, "for the REIGN OF HEAVEN approaches." He assures his countrymen that the day of excision and destruction was nigh to all them that trusted in the flesh. To use his own words, "the axe" then lay at the root of every barren tree. The fatal blow was about to be inflicted upon them, that would convert them into fuel. He announces, in very intelligible words, that his immediate successor, whose way he was preparing, would immerse the people in fire and in the Holy Spirit. They should all be immersed into their respective tenets. Those who received the Messiah should be immersed into the Holy Spirit; and those who did not would be cast into fire: for so the context defines the subjects of the two baptisms--that of the Spirit and that of the fire. Hence the ministry of John; both his preaching and baptism are indicative of a new organization upon another principle than that of the Jewish organization. Fleshly connection with Abraham, or with any antecedent covenant would not be to any one a passport into the new association. A new faith and a new repentance are now proposed as the basis of a new ecclesiastical institution. The Jews, as a nation, expected a Messiah; but, as a nation, they rejected Jesus as that Messiah. Hence, as a national community, they ceased to be God’s holy nation and his peculiar people. But they are not rejected as Jews, neither are they received to baptism as Jews. They are rejected because they reject Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, and they are received because they have received Jesus as the Messiah. It is essential to our induction into the spirit and genius of primitive and pure Christianity that we keep this cardinal and all-important fact before us--viz. that the Jews were neither received nor rejected by John as Jews; nor were they received or rejected upon the indefinite belief or disbelief of a Messiah, a Saviour to come; but they were received or rejected upon the distinct and definite belief or disbelief--that Jesus of Nazareth was that definite and special Messiah, of whom Moses, in the law, and all the Prophets did speak. In preparing a people for the Lord, John did not propose to build a church within a church--to erect an imperium in imperio; but simply by faith, repentance, and baptism, to have a people ready for the manifestation of the Messiah, to become the nucleus of a new institution. FAITH, then, and not flesh--personal repentance, and not family lineage, are essential prerequisites to admission into John’s confidence and baptism, as the herald of the true Messiah. Thus, he levelled the mountains and exalted the valleys; thus, he made the crooked ways straight and the rough places smooth, that all flesh might now meet on one new, solid, sublime, and enduring foundation. Neither John nor his preaching, neither his repentance nor his baptism, was intended to reform or new-modify, to improve or perfect the Jewish constitution and community. Since the Messiah was born, and had come out of the nation, its solemn rites were but an empty shell. The kernel was now extracted. Hence spirit and not flesh, faith and not blood, baptism and not circumcision, became the burden of the Harbinger, the Messiah himself, and his seventy Evangelists. Very early in the evangelical history, we are told that he came to his own country--ancient Canaan, the covenanted inheritance of Abraham and his seed; but his own people--his kinsmen in Abraham, received him not in the character and mission which he had assumed. But he was well and cordially received by a few. Hence it is declared, that "to as many as received him, to them he gave the privilege or power to become the sons of God--even to them that believe in his name; who were born, "not as the Jewish nation," of blood, of flesh, and of the will of man; but of God." Here is the clear and distinct avowal of the spirituality of the new kingdom. God’s ancient kingdom was of this world, so long as the flesh of his Son was in it. But now he has come out of it, and faith unites us to him as the Founder of a new kingdom. This explains his speech to Nicodemus, a learned ruler of the Jews’ church, on the necessity of being spiritually born before he could possibly be admitted into the new kingdom of God. There is great potency in an appropriate name. Hence the Spirit of wisdom and of eloquence selected for the first annunciation of this new institution the beautiful and attractive name, "THE REIGN OF HEAVEN." This reign of Heaven in the heart, in a society, or organized community, is called THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, and the Kingdom of God. But, as the Jews were, in their fleshly and worldly character, as a nation and people, placed under the special government of God, they were, in that sense, called "the Kingdom of God." It was, therefore, kindly intimated by the first of the Evangelists, and by the Harbinger on his first annunciation of a new institution, that, in contrast with the kingdom of God amongst the Jews, which was of this world, this should be first known as "the Kingdom of heaven," because of its inducting its citizens into a state of spiritual blessedness, as far above all antecedent dispensations as the heavens are higher than the earth. It is cheerfully and thankfully admitted that amongst myriads of men in the flesh, there always was a remnant of persons in the Jews’ institution of distinguished piety and of great moral and spiritual excellence and eminence. But they were not so by the spirit and force of that institution, but by the spiritual provisions of the first covenant that God made with Abraham; which, in its prospective character, intimated the Christian institution with all its provisions of righteousness and mercy, as now fully developed. But now, all true citizens of the Christian kingdom, by virtue of its own provisions, and without any foreign aid from an antecedent or a subsequent institution, are made partakers of all spiritual light, liberty, and privilege essential to the full development of a perfect character, and to the full enjoyment of all the blessings of wisdom, righteousness, holiness, and redemption. The institution announced by John is properly called a New Institution. Hence its foundation is new, as well as its privileges, rights, immunities. John, in preparing the way for its annunciation, therefore, very appropriately calls for personal reformation before baptism. He refuses all who cannot, or who will not, confess their sins and profess repentance prior to baptism. All his converts were baptized by him confessing or acknowledging their sins. Hence, they were persons who had sinned, and who did believe, and could make confession of sin and declaration of repentance. No one can say that John preached two baptisms, one having no confession of sin, no repentance connected with it; and one that refused both Pharisee and Sadducee, soliciting baptism because of their relations to Abraham, without faith in the Messiah and reformation of life. Indeed, John positively declares that he preached "the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins." It is called "the baptism of repentance." Now, it is impossible that infants or impenitent persons could have been the subjects of John’s baptism. Two things were essential to entitle a person to John’s baptism: the first is, that he had been a sinner, and was now a penitent sinner. Will either of these apply to tender infants? Who presumes to say that infants are sinners, or that they are penitent sinners, and that they can speak out and confess that they once were impenitent, but are now penitent sinners? In the absence of actual transgression, in the absence of repentance for actual transgression, and in the absence of a power to speak out and confess their sins, no one was a proper subject of John’s baptism. May we not, then, fearlessly affirm that, for these irrefragable reasons, John baptized no infants--none, indeed, but penitent and reforming persons of mature age and reason. One important fact, of much value in this investigation, is now established, viz. that the introductory baptism, ordained by God, called for knowledge, conviction of sin, repentance, and confession on the part of the subjects of it. That this conclusion may appear well-founded, we shall submit all the passages that speak of the subjects of John’s baptism, and the peculiarities of his mission. They are the following:-- Mark 1:1 : "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." John 1:6-7 : "There was a man sent from God, whose name was John: the same came to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe." Matthew 3:3 : "For this is he that was spoken of by the Prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight." Luke 1:16-17 : "And many of the children of Israel shall ho turn to the Lord their God: and he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord." Luke 3:1-2 : "Now, the word of God came unto John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness." Mark 3:1 : "In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judea." Luke 3:2 : "And he came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins." Matthew 3:2 : "And saying, Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Acts 13:24 : "John preached the baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel." Acts 19:4 : "Saying unto the people, that they should believe on HIM which should come after him--that is, on Christ Jesus." John 1:19-31 : "And this is the record of John, when the Jews sent Priests and Levites to ask him, Who art thou? He confessed, I am not the Christ. I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness Make straight the way of the Lord. And they asked him, Why baptizest thou, if thou be not that Christ? John answered, I baptize in water; but there standeth one among you, who, coming after me, is preferred before me. That HE should be manifest to Israel, therefore am I come baptizing in water. 33. [For God] sent me to baptize in water." Matthew 3:5-6 : "Then went out to him Jerusalem and all Judea, and all the region round about Jordan; And were baptized of him in the Jordan, confessing their sins." Mark 1:4-5 : "John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. And there went out unto him all the land of Judea and they of Jerusalem, and were all baptized of him in the river of Jordan, confessing their sins." Luke 3:12-13 : "Then came also publicans to be baptized, and said unto him, Master, what shall we do? And he said unto them, Exact no more than that which is appointed you." Matthew 3:7-12 : "But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth, therefore, fruits meet for repentance. And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham for our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. I, indeed, baptize you with water unto repentance; but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear; he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire. Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire." Matthew 3:13-15 : "Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John to be baptized of him. But John forbade him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest then to me? And Jesus answering, said unto him, Suffer it to be so now; for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered him." Mark 1:9 : [Thus] "Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and he was baptized of John in the Jordan." Matthew 3:16 : "And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water." Mark 1:10 : "And--coming up out of the water," Luke 3:21-23 "and praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased. And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age." John 1:32 : "And John bare record, saying, I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him. John 1:29, John 1:36. And looking upon Jesus as he walked, he saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world! John 1:34. And I saw, and bare record that this is the Son of God. John 1:28. These things were done in Bethabara, where John was baptizing." John 3:22 : "After these things came Jesus and his disciples into the land of Judea; and there he tarried with them and baptized. John 3:26-27. And they came unto John, and said unto him, Behold, he that was with thee beyond Jordan, to whom thou barest witness, behold, the same baptizeth, and all men come to him. John answered and said, A man can receive nothing except it be given him from heaven. John 3:30. He must increase, but I must decrease." John 4:1 : "When, therefore, the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John 2:1-25. (Though Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples,) John 4:3. He left Judea, and departed again into Galilee. John 10:40. And [he] went away again beyond the Jordan, into the place where John at first baptized; John 10:42. And many believed on him there." Luke 7:24 : "And when the messengers of John were departed he began to speak unto the people concerning John. What went ye out into the wilderness for to see? Luke 7:26. A Prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a Prophet." Matthew 11:10-11 : "For this is he of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women, there hath not arisen a greater than John the Baptist." John 5:35 : "He was a burning and a shining light." Mark 11:29-33. "And Jesus answered and said unto them, I will also ask you one question. The baptism of John, was it from heaven, or of men? Answer me. And they reasoned with themselves, saying, If we shall say, From heaven; he will say, Why then did ye not believe him? But if we shall say, Of men; (all the people will stone us: Luke 20:6,) they feared the people; for all men counted John that he was a Prophet indeed. And they answered and said unto Jesus, We cannot tell." Luke 7:29 : "And all the people that heard him, and the publicans, justified God, being baptized with the baptism of John 30. But the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the counsel of God against themselves, being not baptized by him." From a careful examination of the whole testimony of the four Evangelists concerning John’s baptism, there appears as much reason to conclude that the Messiah was an infant when John immersed him in the Jordan, as that he ever baptized an infant or any one incapable of confessing his sins and professing reformation. His baptism is called baptism of repentance. It is so called by Matthew, Mark, and Paul; of course, then, none but penitents could be the subjects of a "baptism of repentance for remission of sins." Infants have not sins to repent of; and, therefore, can neither morally, nor physically, nor by proxy confess them. Hundreds of candid Pedobaptists avow the conviction that John’s baptism, at least, was addressed only to persons of mature age and reason. With the Episcopal commentators, T. Scott and Burkitt, "almost all learned men say John’s baptism was the baptism of repentance, of which infants were incapable." Burkitt’s Notes on Matthew 19:13-15. "It does not appear that any but adults were baptized by John. Adults professing repentance and a disposition to become the Messiah’s subjects, were the only persons whom John admitted to baptism." T. Scott’s Com., Matthew 3: 56. It is as inexpedient as unnecessary to multiply such concessions and acknowledgments as these. Scarcely any one is so presumptuous as to contend that John baptized any one, except the Messiah, who did not confess his sins; and but very few have had courage to affirm that he ever sprinkled or poured water upon any one, infant or adult. But there are those that assume that there was a Jewish proselyte baptism in use long before the days of the Baptist, and that John derived his baptism from it. This, it must be confessed, is a very weak bulwark in defence of infant baptism. Infant proselytes!! What an easy triumph!! John could not have said to such, "Generation of vipers, who has warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth fruits worthy of repentance, and think not to say, We have Abraham for our father." A few great names have, indeed, been arrayed before us, affirming that such a rite was in use from very ancient times amongst the Jews. But as many great, if not greater names, can be arrayed on the negative side. Do they mention a Lightfoot, a Beza, a Maimonides ? We will offset these with a Wernsdorfius, a Deylingius, an Eliezer, and a Knatchbull. Do they appeal to the Talmud, "that labyrinth of errors and foundation of Jewish fables?" We call for Josephus, who is as silent as the grave on this assumption. Do they appeal to Rabbis? We summon Philo and the Apocrapha. Neither of these so much as allude to it. Do they tell us of Dr. Owen? We tell them of Dr. Benson. Do they prove that ever the Jews baptized a proselyte? Let them name him. Then we will show that he lived after the days of John the Baptist, from whom doubtless certain Jews borrowed proselyte baptism. But we appeal to a stronger and a clearer light. We inquire at the Oracle of God. And what saith it? That John’s baptism was a new institution. The words of those who ought to know it import this. The PRIESTS and the LEVITES ask John, "If thou art neither the Christ, nor Elias, nor the Prophet, why baptizest thou?" For this reason, says John, "I am come baptizing in water, because" I knew that "HE should be made manifest to Israel." Does not this indicate a new commission and a new institution? To the same effect, says Paul, in his speech at Antioch, in Pisidia--"When John had first preached before his coming the baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel." But there are two passages of Scripture still more expressly contradictory of this assumption. The one is taken from the Messiah himself. I ask you, says he, "Whence came the baptism of John--from heaven or from men?" They dare not say from men, for the people know better and would have stoned them. The other passage is Hebrews 9:10. In this all the divinely appointed rites, washing and bathing practised by the Jews, are said to have been ordained only till the time of reformation, or to the Christian era. These clearly indicate that John’s baptism was from God, and not from tradition or from the Jews. Indeed, all this is logically and grammatically implied in calling him the Baptist. A baptist he might have been, but the Baptist he could not be but by contrast or by eminence. There is, however, one fact in the history of Jews’ proselyte baptism as ancient as the existence of the usage, whether that be before or since the Baptist’s time, fatal to the use that the advocates of infant baptism make of it. It is this: "IT WAS NEVER REPEATED ON THE POSTERITY OF THOSE WHO HAD BEEN THUS BAPTIZED."2 Dr. John Walker, of Dublin, and the Socinians, regarding Christian baptism as a proselyting institution, refuse baptism to those whose parents have been baptized. Indeed, all those who regard baptism as a proselyting usage, after the Jewish style, ought never to baptize their descendants, whether infants or adults. We conclude, then, from all the premises extant, whether in the New Testament or out of it, that the baptizing of infants is without the slightest countenance, so far down as the personal Ministry of John the Baptist, or of the Messiah in person, is concerned. If, then, it be a divine institution, it must be a Christian institution; and if a Christian institution, it must have been instituted by Jesus Christ. Of course, then, the proof necessarily lies upon him that affirms that Jesus Christ ordained it. We ask for such evidence. Those who have it must, then, produce it. It is not incumbent on us to prove that the Messiah did not institute or ordain infant baptism. It is incumbent on them that inculcate and practise it to show the Christian authority under which they act. A positive institution requires positive precept--a positive and express authority. No positive institution has ever been established upon mere inference. To attempt to found a positive Christian ordinance upon an inference, or upon a series of inferences, is, in spirit and in effect, to stultify and make void its pretensions. When was there in the history of the Bible a positive institution or a divine ordinance erected, enforced, and practised, upon a mere inference? We ask for a parallel case. It never has been given. It never can be given. We have called upon its advocates times without number for such a precept--for such a positive injunction; but hitherto we have asked in vain. We can, occasionally, circumstantially prove a negative. We sometimes prove an alibi. We show that the accused was elsewhere at the time and place in which the imputed deed was committed. The argument then is, The accused did not do it, because he could not do it; for he was not there. The assumption on hand may, indeed, in this way be negatived, and the negative maintained. We show that there is no baptism of divine authority, or of divine record, that did not require a moral qualification on the part of the subject of it. John, for example, demanded faith, repentance, and confession on the part of those who demanded his baptism. Indeed he went still farther. He repudiated the plea of ancestorial worth, of ancestorial faith, in the strongest imaginable terms. He supposes a case in which a son of Abraham, "the Father of the Faithful," presents himself demanding baptism on account of fleshly relationship. And what does he say to him? "Think not to say in your heart that you are a son of Abraham"--that this renowned Patriarch is your father. Nay, verily. "Bring forth fruits worthy" of the profession of repentance. Confess your sins and forsake them. Here, then, may be found a full demonstration of the ground we have assumed. The required qualification of the subject maybe such as to negative the approach of any one, of every one who is physically or otherwise disqualified. Now what alibi in law is more evident than if faith, repentance, and confession be required in any case as a prerequisite to the reception of any institution, the want of those qualifications wholly disqualifies such a candidate for that institution, and negatives his advances to it. So long, then, as it is written, "If thou believest with all thy heart thou mayest," it is also implied that if thou dost not believe with all thy heart thou mayest not be baptized. 1 Galatians 4:1-31 : 2 See the great Selden, De Jure, et Gen. Lib. 2: Cap. ii pp. 139, 142. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 28: 01.03.02. SUBJECTS OF CHRISTIAN BAPTISM - INDUCTION OF NEW TESTAMENT CASES ======================================================================== CHAPTER II. SUBJECTS OF CHRISTIAN BAPTISM.--INDUCTION OF NEW TESTAMENT CASES. JOHN’S baptism was not Christ’s baptism. It was a preparatory institution. John was not sent by the Lord Jesus Christ, but by his Father. "Behold," said God the Father, "I send my messenger to prepare the way before thee."1 John fulfilled his mission. He prepared a people for the Lord. Those whom he prepared had been, as we have seen, instructed before they were baptized. It is, then, just as evident that John’s disciple’s were not infants, as that they were not sprinkled. But Christian baptism is our theme. It was instituted by Jesus Christ; and neither by Moses, the lawgiver, nor by John, the reformer. When, then, did he institute it? Not at the beginning, nor at the end of his life. During his public ministry, and until he was crucified and buried, John’s baptism had neither rival nor substitute. Jesus, indeed, says John, "baptized not, but his disciples baptized." The preparatory school continued during the whole personal ministry of the harbinger and the Messiah. But, when John was beheaded, and Jesus crucified, there was a people prepared for the Lord!! These were they that rallied around the Messiah during the last scenes of his life and after his resurrection. These were they to whom he showed himself alive after his passion, and to whom he communicated freely, during the period of forty days, the things concerning the kingdom of God. How many hundreds composed the preparatory school of the risen Lord, we are not informed. We learn from Paul, that, in one of their meetings, more than five hundred disciples were present. But, as God did not deliver his law to the people at the foot of the mount, but to Moses in the mount, so the Messiah did not deliver his new institution and law to these hundreds, but to the select band of the Apostles, to whom he had already imparted his gracious purposes. To them he gave the commission, and the law of baptism, upon a mountain in Galilee. It was given immediately before his visible and personal ascension into heaven. It was his last act, the consummation of his work as a Lawgiver and King. It is most fully reported by Matthew, and is in the following words:--"All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you." This is the law of Christian baptism, the institution and origin of it; and, certainly, it is a clear and express precept. Though quite intelligible in the common version of it, as now quoted; it is, nevertheless, imperfectly and, indeed, in a comparative point of view, rather obscurely translated. It should, in strict accordance with the original Greek, be translated--"All authority in heaven and in earth is given to me: go you, therefore, and make disciples of call nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all the things that I have commanded you; and, behold! I am always with you to the conclusion of this state." According to the common version of this law of baptism, Jesus taught the Apostles first to teach all nations, then to baptize them; and again to teach them all his observances. The common reader would regard this as simply requiring that the nations be taught before and after baptism! But, in the original language, we have not this difficulty to contend with. We have two words of very different meaning, occurring in the same verse, translated by one and the same word, teach. These are matheteuoo and didascoo. They are visibly and audibly different words. They are not composed of the same characters, nor of the same sounds. They are just as different in sense. They both, indeed, mean to impart instruction; but it is a different kind of instruction. The first indicates that instruction necessary to make a disciple: the second imparts that species of instruction afterwards given to one who has become a disciple with regard to his duties. The first represents the person, character, and claims of the teacher, and the necessity of becoming his pupil; the second represents the duties and obligations of the pupil to his teacher. The first intimates the simple preaching of the gospel as Mark the evangelist interprets it, Mark 14:16. His version of the whole commission is--"Go ye into all the world, preach the gospel to every creature; he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; he that believeth not shall be damned." Now, that three things, very different from each other in some essential attribute, are prescribed by the Lord Messiah in this commission, or law of apostolic and ministerial duty in his service, cannot admit of a rational doubt. What these three distinct things were, need scarcely be enumerated. Every reader must observe that they were first to preach the gospel, or make disciples--produce faith. Then they were to baptize them, so instructed into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. In the third place, they were didactically to propound to them, or teach them to observe and practise the Christian ordinances and duties. But, as every one will not admit, with entire freedom from prejudice, our interpretation of the law of baptism, I have concluded to collate the views and interpretations of this passage; entertained and taught by distinguished scholars and critics on the Pedobaptist side of this question. They will be heard by many of my readers with more authority and candour than I could claim for myself. Here, then, are a few samples of Pedobaptist interpretations of the law of Christian baptism. They are, for the most part, copied from "Booth’s Pedobaptism Examined," a work of very great labour and of distinguished merit:-- Grotius: "Seeing there are two kinds of teaching, one by way of introduction to the first principles, the other by way of more perfect instruction: the former seems to be intended by the word matheteuin, for that is, as it were, to initiate into discipline, and is to go before baptism; the latter is intended by the word didaskein, which is here placed after baptism." In loc. Calvin: "Because Christ requires teaching before baptizing, and will have believers only admitted to baptism, baptism does not seem to be rightly administered, except faith precede. Under this pretence, the Anabaptists have loudly clamoured against Pedobaptism." In Harm. Evang. Comment. ad loc. Dr. Barrow: "What the action itself enjoined is, what the manner and form thereof, is apparent by the words of our Lord’s institution: Going forth, saith he, teach, or disciple, all nations, baptizing them. The action is baptizing or immersing in water; the object thereof, those persons, of any nation, whom his ministers can, by their instruction and persuasion, render disciples; that is, such as do sincerely believe the truth of his doctrine, and seriously resolve to obey his commandments." Works, vol. 1: p. 518, edit. 1722. Saurin: "In the primitive church, instruction preceded baptism, agreeably to the order of Jesus Christ; ’Go, teach all nations, baptizing them.’ . . . Thus, likewise, we understand St. Peter, when he says, that the baptism which saves us, is ’not the putting away the filth of the flesh; but the answer of a good conscience.’ The answer of a good conscience, is that account which the catechumen gives of his faith and knowledge. Whence it came to pass, that the ancients usually called a baptized person, one that was illuminated." Serm. tom. 1: pp. 301, 302. Le Haye edit. 3d. Vossius: ’Respecting adults, it is required that they be taught the Christian religion and profess it, before they be baptized; for this the very institution of baptism teaches, (Matthew 28:19; Mark 16:15-16.) We are taught the same thing by the practice of John the Baptist, and of the Apostles, (Matthew 3:1-2; Luke 3:3; Acts 2:38; Acts 2:41.)" Disput. de Bap. disput. 12: § 3. Dr. Doddridge: "I render the word matheeteusate, proselyte, that it may be duly distinguished from didaskontes, teaching, (in the next verse,) with which our version confounds it. The former seems to import instruction in the essentials of religion, which it was necessary adult persons should know and submit to, before they could regularly be admitted to baptism; the latter may relate to those more particular admonitions in regard to Christian faith and practice, which were to be built on that foundation." Note on the place. Limborch: "They could not make disciples, unless by teaching. By that instruction, disciples were brought to the faith before they were baptized, (Mark 14:15-16.)" Instit. 1. 5: 100: 67: § 7. Dr. Whitby: "Matheteuin here, is ’to preach the gospel to all nations,’ and to engage them to believe it, in order to their profession of that faith by baptism: as seems apparent, (1) From the parallel commission, Mark 16:15, ’Go, preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth, and is baptized, shall be saved.’ (2) From the Scripture notion of a disciple, that being still the same as a believer. . . . If here it should be said that I yield too much to the Anti-pedobaptists, by saying, that to be made disciples here is to be taught to believe in Christ; I desire any one to tell me how the Apostles could matheteuin, make a disciple of a heathen or an unbelieving Jew, without being mathetai or teachers of them; whether they were not sent to preach to those that could hear, and to teach them to whom they preached, that ’Jesus was the Christ,’ and only to baptize them when they did believe this." Annotat. on the place. Venema: "’Go’ says our Lord to the Apostles, ’teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.’ This is an excellent passage, and explains the whole nature of baptism. Before persons were baptized, it was necessary for them to believe the preaching of the Apostles, which faith they were to profess in baptism. For the word matheteuin, in the style of the New Testament, does not signify barely to admit into a school and instruction; but to admit after the doctrine is believed, and after a previous subjection to the school." Dissertat. Sac. 1. 2: 100: 14: § 6. Mr. Baxter: "Go, disciple me all nations, baptizing them. As for those that say they are discipled by baptizing, and not before baptizing, they speak not the sense of that text; nor that which is true or rational, if they mean it absolutely as so spoken: else, Why should one be baptized more than another? . . . . This is not like some occasional historical mention of baptism; but it is the very commission of Christ to his Apostles for preaching and baptizing, and purposely expresseth their several works, in their several places and order. Their first task is by teaching, to make disciples, who are, by Mark, called believers. The second work is to baptize them, whereto is annexed the promise of their salvation. The third work is to teach them all other things, which are afterwards to be learned in the school of Christ. To contemn this order, is to renounce all rules of order; for, where can we expect to find it, if not here? I profess my conscience is fully satisfied from this text, that it is one sort of faith, even saving, that must go before baptism, and the profession whereof the minister must expect." Disputat. of Right to Sac. pp. 91, 149, 150. It would be superfluous to add any thing farther, either in development or in proof of the fact that the Lawgiver and King of Zion did command his Apostles to first preach the gospel to every nation, in order to the conversion of the people; then to baptize those who believed; and, in the last place, to teach them to observe and do all things whatsoever he commanded them. In the judgment of those learned and candid Pedobaptists just now quoted, with whose judgment we fully concur, the Evangelist Mark gives the full substance and meaning of Matthew’s version of the law of baptism, in quoting the sense rather than the words spoken. "Go ye into all the world; preach the gospel to every creature: he that believeth it, and is baptized, shall be saved; and he that believeth it not shall be damned." The word, indeed, must be spoken before it can be heard; it must be heard and understood before it can be believed; it must be believed before it can be obeyed; and it must be obeyed before it can be enjoyed. It is not in the power of angels or of men to change this order of things. Hence, no one can enjoy the benefits of Christian baptism that receives it in any other way than that suggested in his divine law. On the authority of the Apostle Matthew and the Evangelist Mark, we conclude, that the express will and command of the Lord Jesus Christ is, that none but an intelligent professing believer of the apostolic gospel is a fit and lawful subject of Christian baptism. Our second argument is drawn from the divinely-recorded practice of the Apostles, to whom this commission was given while they were employed in executing it. There is one historical book in the sacred writings of the Christian Institution that records the acts and deeds of the Apostles under this commission. Luke the Evangelist is the author of that book of the ACTS OF THE APOSTLES. To it, then, we shall look for a matter of fact exposition of the sense in which the Apostles understood the commission. In the first chapter of this book of Apostolic acts, we are informed, that the Messiah himself, in person, immediately before his ascension, gave them specific directions where to commence and whither to proceed, into all the world, in preaching the gospel to the whole human family. He commands them to begin at Jerusalem; thence to proceed through Judea; thence to Samaria, and thence to the uttermost parts of the earth. Now, a few examples of this mode of procedure in discharging these duties will fully demonstrate how they understood the divine precept under which they acted. We shall, then, examine a few cases. On Pentecost, Peter first preached the Christian gospel as developed and consummated by the resurrection, ascension, and glorification of the Lord Messiah. Thousands heard him, were convicted of guilt, and sued for mercy. They asked him what they should do. His response is most apropos to the question propounded--"Repent and be baptized, every one of you," said he. He does not say, "Be baptized and repent;" but, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you:" Here, there appears to be a strict conformity to the Baptist John in his "baptism of repentance for the remission of sins." But still more definite and precise the historian in narrating who were that day baptized. "Then," says Luke, "they that gladly received his word were baptized." None else--not one; for so the words imply. He could not have said that they who gladly received his word were baptized if infants and persons not professing to have received it had been baptized. He ought in that case to have said, that they who gladly received his word, with all their families, were baptized. Then we should have had no objections to baptizing those who neither gladly receive the word nor profess to have received it. Passing from Jerusalem to Samaria, at which place we have the second report of Christian baptism, we find Philip, acting the evangelist, preaching the gospel to the people of Samaria. They hear him with candour, and multitudes believe. "When," says Luke, "they believed Philip preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized both men and women."2 "Then Simon himself believed also, and when he was baptized he continued with Philip," &c. This is the whole report of preaching the gospel and of baptizing in Samaria. It is, then, indisputably evident, from the narrative, that Philip interpreted the commission as we have done; or, what is the same thing, he followed the example of Peter in Jerusalem, on Pentecost, who, doubtless, infallibly so understood it. None but "believing men and women" were baptized by Philip. Had there been children or babes baptized, he would, certainly, have specified them when going into the details of "men and women." But they are excluded not only by the omission of adding to the men and women the word children; but by giving to them the reputation of believing men and women. Had the historian only said, "When they heard Philip preaching the gospel, they were baptized, men, women, and children," there would have been, at least, some plausibility in pleading for the baptism of babes. Even then, however, it would have been incumbent on any one pleading for infant baptism from such language, to prove that these children, who are classed among them that heard the gospel, were speechless babes. But, as it is, there is not the slightest ground to plead for infant subjects of baptism, from any precept, precedent, hint, or allusion, that could warrant such a practice, from any thing which as yet occurred in Jerusalem, Judea, or Samaria. We shall, then, next proceed with the Evangelist Philip to another field of labour. We next find him preaching in the desert to a political grandee, the treasurer of an Ethiopian queen--a gentleman, no doubt, of distinguished moral character. We have the narrative of this baptism in the same chapter with that of the Samaritan people. He solicited baptism, after hearing Philip preach the gospel from the Prophet Isaiah. Being a Jew, by nation, he was well read in the Prophets; and, so soon as his doubts and difficulties were removed, he desired to submit to the Lord. We hold the report of his baptism peculiarly important in this discussion; not because he was a well-educated adult believer of the gospel, but because of the answer given to him from the Evangelist Philip, on his demanding baptism--What hinders, or what should hinder my being baptized, Philip? Nothing, virtually responds the preacher, but the want of faith. "I believe, sir," said he, "that Jesus is the Son of God." Then he baptized him. This is a very striking proof that a profession of faith is, in all cases, essential to the reception of Christian baptism. Had not the question been thus formally propounded and responded to, there might have been some suspicion concerning the proper qualification of the subject of baptism. Now, as there is one baptism that makes faith an essential prerequisite, it lies upon those who assume a baptism without faith, to prove that there are two baptisms--one requiring faith, and one requiring flesh only in the subject. The next case of baptism reported in the history of the labours of the Apostles, is that of Saul of Tarsus. We need not prove that he was a believing subject. This case is circumstantially narrated in the ninth chapter of this book. "Arise, brother Paul, and be baptized and wash away thy sins, calling upon the name of the Lord."3 "And he arose and was baptized." This is a baptism that indicates faith, repentance, and a desire to honour the Lord, on the part of him who solicits it. A case, that comes nearer to us than any other, is reported in the tenth chapter of this book. It is the conversion of the Gentiles. Cornelius and his family, his kindred and friends, were assembled at Cesarea, and the Apostle Peter is especially sent to open to them the kingdom of God. A more attentive and more deeply-interested audience never, we presume, assembled, than the first Gentile auditory. Peter opened to them the door of faith. While he spoke the word to them all, the Holy Spirit fell upon them all. They all spoke in foreign tongues. They all, of course, believed; and were all baptized by the authority of Peter. Some seven years are now passed away, since the commission was given to the Apostles. In the mean time, great multitudes have been converted. Myriads have been immersed in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria. The Gentiles, too, are visited, and many of them believed and are baptized: but, as yet, not one word, allusion, or reference, that could lead any one to imagine that an infant had been ever thought of as a subject of Christian baptism. The next cases of baptism reported are that of a lady of Thyatira; called Lydia, and her family; and that of the Philippian jailor, and his family. In these families, our Pedobaptist friends are peculiarly interested. Having borrowed several Papal traditions from the Roman Church, amongst which is that of infant christening, sometimes called infant baptism, and being, from family associations, desirous to retain them, they seize these two cases with great earnestness, and from them endeavour to extract some authority for this consecrated custom. On any subject of importance pertaining to this life, we would not impose upon ourselves so inconsiderately by gratuitous assumptions and fallacious reasonings as in this most important of all subjects--the salvation of our souls--the will of the Lord concerning our duty and happiness. From the beginning of Matthew, down to the sixteenth of the Acts of the Apostles, we have neither precept nor precedent, neither hint nor allusion on the subject of infant baptism. Notwithstanding this, there are some of our Pedobaptist brethren who seek to find a warrant for this tradition at so late a period, and in cases and details that have not a single allusion to it. We must, then, candidly examine these two cases. Lydia, it is assumed, was a married lady. It is assumed she had children. It is also assumed that some of her children were infant children. It is also assumed that she had these infant children with her, although three hundred miles from home; for she was now at Philippi on business, her home being at Thyatira. On these four assumptions is the first argument for infant baptism drawn from the four gospels and Acts of Apostles. Now it being much more probable that Lydia was an unmarried rather than a married lady, being a dealer in purple and in ladies’ apparel, having with her other females and servants on a journey from home, the chances are all against these four assumptions. What a hypothetical basis for a divine institution! Was there ever a positive ordinance founded upon such assumptions! But the internal evidences are still more fatal to the hypothesis. For she represents herself as a householder and the head of a family. "If," said she to the Apostle and his suite, "you have judged me faithful to the Lord, come into my house and continue there." It was a delicate thing for a Christian lady, most probably a maid, to invite the Apostle and his fellow-travellers to sojourn with her. Hence she places this matter upon Christian grounds. If you have confidence in my devotion to the Lord, make my house your home. They did so, and the sequel shows that her household was composed rather of adults than of infants: for, says Luke, before the Apostle left Philippi, on coming out of jail he visited Lydia’s house, and seeing the brethren there he comforted them and departed. There is not, then, by any incident or allusion in this whole affair, the slightest ground for the hypothesis that there was an infant in the household of Lydia. The jailor’s family is as barren of encouragement and of favour to the patrons of infant baptism, as that of Lydia. His family were all baptized, it is true. But who are they? Infants? That would be worse than a gratuitous assumption: for we are told that before they were baptized he "spake the word of the Lord to him and to all that were in his house;" and we are again informed that after his baptism and that of his family, the jailor "rejoiced, believing in God with all his family." These declarations negative, in very intelligible terms, the assumption that infants were baptized in the household of the jailor by the authority of the Apostle to the Gentiles. Paul did not preach the gospel to babes, nor did they rejoice, believing in God, because of blessings which they then neither could understand nor receive. There yet remain two other cases of baptism reported in the book of the Acts. These are the cases of the baptism of the Corinthians and certain Ephesians. The cases are very obvious. That of the Corinthians is very beautifully told in the following words, when Paul preached in Corinth:--"Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord, with all his family; and many of the Corinthians, hearing, believed, and were baptized." What a beautiful comment on the saying, "Faith comes by hearing--by hearing the word of the Lord." The Corinthians first heard, then believed, and then were baptized. Without hearing there is no faith, and without faith there is no fitness for baptism, and without the profession of that faith no one can be a fit subject of Christian baptism. It is, indeed, unquestionably true, that faith in the heart is essential to the enjoyment of every Christian precept, promise, and covenanted blessing; but faith in the heart unprofessed, or Christ in the heart unconfessed, would not, according to the practical decisions of the Christian Apostles, authorize any pastor, evangelist, or professor to baptize any man or woman. "With the heart man believeth for righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made for salvation." Hence the call upon the candidate--"Dost thou believe?" or "If thou believest with all thy heart thou mayest." The confession elicited by such a formal way of putting the question is--"I believe that Jesus is the Messiah the Son of God." Many of the Corinthians, we are informed heard, believed, and confessed. Now had they not confessed their faith, could either Paul, or Luke, or any one else say that they believed? The case of the twelve Ephesians, reported in the 19th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, is very remarkable and worthy of special consideration. These twelve men, when asked "whether they had received the Holy Spirit since they believed," declared that, so far from having received the Holy Spirit, they had not so much as heard that "there was any Holy Spirit." Paul responds--"Into what, then, were you baptized?" "Into John’s baptism," they immediately replied. The mystery was then resolved. In the formula of John’s baptism there was no Holy Spirit named. But in the Christian baptism there was, for so the commission prescribed. This is a full answer to all that class of speculators who affirm that because Luke does not state that the formula commanded was always pronounced by the Apostles--the Apostles did not baptize into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. They cannot appreciate the difference between baptizing in the name or by the authority of the Lord, and into the name of the Lord or into the name of the holy Spirit. The fact here stated, that these Ephesians had not heard of the name of the Holy Spirit, intimates that they had lived remote from the fields cultivated by the Apostles. They had not heard of the affairs of Pentecost, and consequently of Christian baptism. But that does not teach us that they had been baptized during John’s ministry, but rather since it had ceased. Hence the necessity of confessing the Lord Jesus, and of being baptized into the new revelation of God, or "into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."4 That these twelve Ephesians were now immersed into the name of the Lord Jesus, is unequivocally affirmed. After this, on the imposition of the hands of the Apostles, they received the peculiar gift of that age--they immediately "spake with tongues and prophesied." As rationally and as credibly might any one affirm that these twelve Ephesians were twelve infants, as affirm that there is "in the four gospels or in the Acts of the Apostles" one word or syllable in favour of this Papal assumption. Tradition, and tradition only, and that from no reputable fountain, is the only protection and authority for infant baptism. But this is not strong enough. Positive laws imply their negative. If the negative commandment, "Thou shalt not steal," imply thou shalt be honest; or if the positive precept, "Honour thy father and thy mother," is equivalent to thou shalt not dishonour thy father or thy mother, then, to say the least, the law, "If thou believest thou mayest," is equivalent to another law, "If thou believest not thou mayest not be baptized." Hence the Lord promised salvation not to him who is only baptized, but to him who believeth and is baptized. The divinely inspired history of the Christian church, down to the 64th year of the Christian era, has now been fully examined, and every case of baptism on record considered. The commission enacted preaching, baptizing, and teaching. The Apostles did accordingly first preach the gospel to every individual whom they baptized. Then they immersed just so many as said they believed the gospel. And, in the last place, taught them what they must do to please the Lord, to comfort their brethren, to convert the world, and to make their own calling and election sure. When the baptized are spoken of, they are represented as hearing the gospel first, then as believing it, and then as being baptized. This is the uniform and immutable practice during the apostolic age. In the two households reported in the Acts of Apostles, to which not a few look for countenance and encouragement in their infant baptism, we find not a hint or circumstance looking in that direction. Indeed, so unequivocal is the testimony of these households in favour of believing subjects, and believing subjects only, that all sensible and candid Pedobaptists give them up. A few citations from some eminent critics and commentators on the case of Lydia and that of the jailor may serve as an exponent of the views of the most learned and candid Pedobaptist commentators. Dr. Whitby, Acts 16:15, Paraphrase: "And when she and those of her household, were instructed in the Christian faith, in the nature of baptism required by it, she was baptized and her household." Limborch: "An undoubted argument, therefore, cannot be drawn from this instance, by which it may be demonstrated that infants were baptized by the Apostles. It might be that all in her house were of a mature age who, as in the exercise of a right understanding they believed, so they were able to make a public profession of that faith when they received baptism." T. Lawson, referring to this argument, says, "Families may be without children; they may be grown up, &c. So it is a wild inference to ground infant baptism upon." Assembly of Divines: "Of the city of Thyatira--a city of Asia--here dwelt Lydia, that devout servant of God." "And entered into the house of Lydia: doubtless to confirm them in the faith which they had preached to them--Lydia and hers, hearing of their miraculous deliverance, could not but be comforted and confirmed in the truth." Annot. on Acts 16:14; Acts 16:40. From the same source we quote Doddridge, Matthew Henry, and Calvin, who stand side by side in my library:-- Doddridge: "Thou shalt be saved and thine house. The meaning cannot be that the eternal salvation of his family could be secured by his faith: but that if they also themselves believed, they should be entitled to the same spiritual and everlasting blessings with himself; which Paul might the rather add, as it is probable that many of them, under this terrible alarm, might have attended the master of the family into the dungeon." Matthew Henry: "The voice of rejoicing, with that of salvation, was heard in the jailer’s house. He rejoiced, believing in God, with all his house: there was none in his house that refused to be baptized, and so made a jar in the ceremony; but they were unanimous in embracing the gospel, which added much to the joy." Calvin. "Luke commends the pious zeal of the jailer, because he dedicated his whole house to the Lord; in which also the grace of God illustriously appeared, because it brought the whole family to a pious consent." But I know not whether the candour and justice of these Pedobaptists that make such admissions as those of Doddridge, Henry, Calvin, &c., or the disingenuousness and violence of those commentators, such as Burkett, D’Oyly, and Mant, and who say with Burkett, "Having been so many ages in possession of this privilege, (infant baptism,) we may more reasonably require of the Anabaptists to prove by express Scripture that children [infants he means] were not baptized by the Apostles when they baptized whole families, whole nations according to their commission, than they can require of us to prove that they were." Notes on Acts 16:15. This from an Episcopalian commentator--"the Vicar and Lecturer of Dedham"--is no weak proof of the childish imbecility which the advocates of infant baptism are obliged to assume in defence of their tradition. What logician, or lawyer, or common-sense reasoner ever requires his opponent to prove a negative! Instead of proving that there were infants in those houses, he asks those whom he nicknames Anabaptists to prove that there were not infants in them!! Although we have shown from the descriptions given of those families or households, from their hearing the word of the Lord, from their rejoicing in God; and in the case of the household of Stephanie, "the first fruits" or first converts mentioned in the church of Corinth, from their having addicted themselves to "the ministry of the saints," that there could not have been infants in those families, or any one baptized but believers; still it is not in logic, or law, or reason, to ask or compel any one to prove a negative. It is passed into a universal law that the burthen of proof always lies upon him who affirms that there were infants in those families. Should any one place himself upon the estate of a Burkett or a Clark, and occupy his premises for as many years as the centuries of infant baptism or infant communion, and when asked to prove his right or show his title to occupy the estate claimed by his reverence, should say, "Prove, sir, that I have no such right, and then, sir, but not till then, will I give up my possession." I would be pleased to hear with what attitude and tone his Grace would reply, Show me your right, sir; but ask me not to show what you have not got. The plea of ancient tradition is the strength of Popery and the weakness of Protestantism. She advocate not ancient, but original Christianity. The plea of high antiquity or tradition has long been the bulwark of error. It cleaves to its beloved mother, TRADITION, hoary Tradition, with an affection that increases as she becomes old and feeble. Errorists of all school:; are exceedingly devout and dutiful so far as the precept "Honour thy father and thy mother" is concerned. 1 Matthew 9:10. 2 Acts 8:12. 3 Acts 9:16; Acts 9:18; Acts 9:22. 4 The childish efforts of Dr. John Hill, and almost all the old Baptist expositors, to make it appear that these twelve men were not baptized into the Christian faith on this occasion, are so perfectly futile that it would be a waste of time to expose the fallacy of their expositions. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 29: 01.03.03. SUBJECTS OF BAPTISM AND SUBJECTS OF CIRCUMCISION CONTRASTED ======================================================================== CHAPTER III. SUBJECTS OF BAPTISM AND SUBJECTS OF CIRCUMCISION CONTRASTED. THE doctrine of the Bible, on any particular subject of inquiry, can be clearly and satisfactorily ascertained only by a full induction of all that is found in it upon that subject. When the induction is perfect and complete, and fully comprehended on any one point, we never can have any more divine light upon that subject. This is our method of learning and of teaching what the Holy Spirit has taught on any given question. Who may, with divine approbation, be baptized? or, as usually expressed, who are the proper subjects of Christian baptism? is the question now under consideration. It having been universally admitted that baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament, or an ordinance of Jesus Christ, our inquiry upon the action, subject, or design of Christian baptism must be confined to an induction of whatever is said on any of these topics by the writers of that volume. So far, we have pursued this method. Nothing that was written before or after the apostolic age can be rationally admitted as evidence in this case. In the preceding chapter, we not only examined the commission given to the Apostles, which instituted and ordained Christian baptism; but also adduced and examined every case of baptism reported in the Acts of the Apostles, from the giving of the commission to the end of that treatise--a period of some thirty years. The book, indeed, furnishes only some nine cases in all; but they are of a peculiarly striking impressive, and circumstantial character, and include under them several thousand persons. The first of these occurs in Jerusalem, and embraces three thousand Pentecostian converts. The subjects of that baptism are represented as believers--as persons who had previously "gladly received the word," and were then baptized. Not one was baptized who had not gladly received the gospel that Peter preached. The city of Samaria is next on record. When the citizens of Samaria heard and believed Philip, "preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women." The word children is not added; because there were none such baptized. The particularity of detail which mentioned "men and women" would, doubtless, have mentioned infants, if there had been any such baptized. The Ethiopian nobleman is the third case. That he professed faith is just as clearly stated as that he was baptized; or as that, after baptism, "he went on his way rejoicing." Saul of Tarsus, afterwards Paul the Apostle, is the fourth case. Then come the Gentiles at Cesarea Philippi, and Peter’s success among them as the fifth case. The whole audience believed, received the Holy Spirit, and were baptized. Down to this time, we have the prominent details of almost seven years from the ascension, and the addition of not less than ten thousand persons to the original one hundred and twenty, and not one infant or child as yet named or alluded to as having been baptized. Then we have the household of Lydia and of the Philippian jailer; in neither of which is there any evidence that there was any departure from the preceding usage. Such are the sixth and seventh cases on record. Then have we the case of the Corinthians and that of the Ephesians; in both of which we are expressly informed that they "heard, believed, and were baptized." So that, in the Four Gospels, and in the Acts of the Apostles, reaching down to the year of our Lord 63, in which we have the accounts of many myriads of converts, comprising Jews, Samaritans, and Gentiles, we have no example of the baptism of any other than believing and professing persons. May we not, then, say with the utmost assurance, that, so far as all sacred history deposes, there is not any evidence whatever that a single infant or non-professing person had been admitted to baptism during the lives of the Apostles? What now remains of biblical authoritative evidence, except the Apostles’ Epistles? To these, then, we must next turn our attention. We shall take them up in the order in which they usually stand in the received version. In examining them, we may expect to find sundry allusions to Christian baptism, and from these, doubtless, we may infer some things corroborative of the historical evidence now before us. In Romans 6:1-23, we find a very lucid reference to baptism, indicative of the character of its subjects. The Apostle affirms, that "so many of us as have been baptized into Jesus Christ, have been baptized into his death; therefore, we are buried with him by baptism into death--that like as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of his Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life!" Can this apply to infants? Have they been baptized into Christ’s death, and risen with him to walk in a new life? This putting off of the old man and putting on the new is not the work of infantile minds, but of those whose senses are exercised to discern both good and evil. Had the Romans been accustomed to have their infants baptized, could Paul have thus written to them? There are more frequent allusions to baptism in the first letter to the Corinthians than in any other epistle. In Acts 18:1-28 :, we have learned who were first baptized in Corinth--men and women only. We shall now inquire whether, in his letters to them, Paul indicates that any other than men and women, or, persons of age and reflection, had, at the date of this epistle, been baptized. 1 Corinthians 1:13, he asks the question, "Were you baptized into the name of Paul?" Could any persons baptized in infancy answer such a question? Could they say either in or into what name, by whom or for what they had been baptized? This alone intimates that the primitive subjects of baptism could remember and reflect upon the design of their baptism, as well as the time of it. In the same connection, he adds, "I thank God that I baptized none of you but Crispus and Gaius. I baptized also the household of Stephanas; and I know not whether I baptized any other: for Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel." Unless, then, there should be found some infants in the household of Stephanas, there is none in this passage. But the Apostle relieves us from all dubiety on that subject, by informing us of the character of this household: chap. 1 Corinthians 16:15, "You know," says he, "the family of Stephanas that it is the first-fruits of Achaia, and that they have addicted themselves to the ministry of the saints." They were not infants; but they were the first converts in Achaia, and they were remarkable for their devotion to the service of the saints. The other allusions to baptism, in this epistle, are rather figurative than literal references to the subject. 1 Corinthians 10:1, "All our fathers were baptized into Moses, in the cloud and sea; and they all eat the mystic manna and drank the mystic rock." And, again, 1 Corinthians 12:13, "For by one Spirit we are baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, and we all have drunk of the one Spirit." "Else, what shall they do who are baptized for the dead, or in the hope of the resurrection of the dead?" These all are indicative of thought, faith, feeling, emotion, and hope, on the part of the baptized. As yet, there is not found a single intimation, allusion or hint to infant baptism. In the letter to the Galatians, we have another reference to baptism. It is found, Galatians 3:27 : "As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ." This passage is very similar to that quoted from Romans. It is, indeed, more definitive of the character of those baptized. They had, without a single exception, been professors of the faith. Of all the baptized of all the churches, in the province of Galatia, Paul affirms there was not one that had not by a profession of faith put on Christ. Could any one say this of all the baptized in any Pedobaptist church in the world? We, however, with Paul, can say that all the baptized in our church, in the United States, have put on Christ--have confessed and assumed him as their Saviour and their Guide. We have not yet done with Paul’s epistles. To the Ephesians, he says, Ephesians 4:1-32, "There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism." There are not, then, infant baptism and adult baptism for these are, certainly, two baptisms, and not one. Sprinkling and pouring are not one immersion, neither are immersion and sprinkling one pouring: no more are infant and adult baptism one baptism. A baptism for sins pardoned, and a baptism for sins to be pardoned, or for no pardon of sins at all, past, present, or future, cannot be regarded as one and the same baptism. In one baptism, there must be a unity, as respects subject, action, and design. To the Colossians, Colossians 2:12, Paul speaks of baptism as to the Romans. Of them, he says, they were "buried with Christ in baptism, in which they were also risen with him through the faith of the operation" (or work) "of God, who hath raised him from the dead." So far, and no farther, deposeth Paul in his epistles. We know not another passage, in all his writings, that has any allusion whatever to the subjects of baptism, not now laid before our readers. So far, then, there is but one voice in all the writings of Paul and Luke, as well as the other Evangelists, upon the proper subjects of baptism. As to John’s baptism, its very name precludes the supposition that any but persons of knowledge and faith could be subjects of it. It is called "the baptism of repentance:" of course, infants are positively excluded. They need not to repent; nor are they capable of repentance. They are not more incapable of repentance than they are of sins to be repented of. We have yet another allusion to baptism in the Epistles. Peter says, "The antetype" of the salvation of Noah in the ark by water, is Christian baptism. "Baptism," says he, "doth also now save us (not in the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but through the answer of a good conscience towards God,) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ." Infants are wholly incapable of the response of a good conscience towards God through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This requires both knowledge, reflection, and faith--of which they are not susceptible. Now, as James, John, and Jude do not, in their epistles, allude at all to baptism, we have laid before the reader every passage that relates to the subject of baptism found in the apostolic epistles. We have, then, the whole history of the Christian church from its origin to the close of the volume of inspiration, whether in the form of history or epistolary details, without meeting with a single case of infant baptism, expressed or implied. In all the instances before us, there is not one of doubtful disputation. This, of course, will be satisfactory to all persons who believe that Christianity is all found in the New Testament. But there are some who, through an erroneous and defective education, are led to look for it in the law of Moses, or in the philosophy of the schools. But, would it not be a reflection upon the character of the Founder of Christianity, if, in this most essential institution, he had failed to develop his whole law to his people? Had Moses sent the Jews to Noah to learn what, as Israelites, they should believe and do, it would have been, on his part, an indication of incompetency--a disparagement of his own commission. Still more preposterous and inadmissible the imputation against the mediatorial dignity of the Lord Messiah, if, as is assumed, he failed to reveal his own ordinances, and sent us to Moses or left us to the schools of philosophy to ascertain what are the positive ordinances of his religion, and what are the first duties of those who desire constitutionally to place themselves under his protection and guidance. We cannot, as intelligent believers of the plenary inspiration, divine mission, and authority of our Lawgiver and King, for one moment admit that he has left us to infer from Patriarchal or Jewish customs, or from the traditions of the elders, what is expedient and fitting as respects the positive ordinances of the New Institution. We scarcely know whether it is compatible with the dignity of our Master, that, in pleading his cause with the corrupters of his institution, we should gravely discuss the traditions and conjectures by which they have made of no effect his laws. And, certainly, infant baptism, so far as it prevails, makes void and annuls believer’s baptism. If, then, believer’s baptism be a divine institution, it must follow that they who prevent it by anticipating it, and substituting for it a human institution, do, as far as in them lies, annul and make void the commandments and ordinances of God. All that are born in every Pedobaptist community are deprived of the blessings of the Messiah’s institution--of the pleasure which the Lord himself had in honouring the divine institution preached by John, and which all the Apostles and first Christians enjoyed during the times of the original proclamation of the kingdom of God. We, therefore, judge it expedient to advert to some of the reasonings by which many are deluded, unintentionally it may be, in some instances, on the part of those who so far sophisticate their minds, by fallacious reasonings, into the opinion that infant baptism is pleasing to God, because required by him. They produce no precept for it. They produce no precedent for it in all the oracles of God; nay, they admit it has neither divine precept nor example; but they infer that it is pleasing to God and useful to children, if not to men, to be early initiated into the church, and made members thereof; assuming, as they advance, that God’s Church always had infant members in it, and that they inherited blessings consequent upon such membership. They, moreover, assume that the Jewish nation was the Church of God in the same sense that any community now may be called the Church of God; and that the covenant of circumcision is the everlasting covenant or constitution of the Christian church, &c. &c. They even argue the identity, the perfect and complete identity of the Jewish nation and the Christian church. They call it "the Jewish church," not desiring to call it a nation, as God and the people called it; because, to say that the Jewish nation and the Christian church are identical, is rather too gross a form of speech for Christian ears. In assuming these premises, which they cannot sustain, it lays upon us, not the necessity of assailing their position by formally disproving the assertion, but merely of noting the grounds on which they sometimes seek inferentially to sustain it. But as we write not for mere logicians, but for the great multitude, we shall not stand upon logical niceties, but proceed to suggest some reasons, and facts, too, why we cannot, for a moment, admit the identity of the Jewish nation and the Christian church--the identity of their constitutions, or the essential or formal identity of their initiatory rites and ordinances. We shall rely on a few palpable facts and evidences. I. The words nation and church are neither literally nor spiritually identical. A nation is the whole population of any given country, with the mere exception of sojourners and pilgrims. A church is a select society called out of a nation. A nation, then, is the aggregate population: a church, a select community. The former comes from the Roman natio--from nasci, natus, to be born--the people born in any given country; the latter, literally, the kuriakee, or house of the Lord, from ecclesia, the called out, the chosen people. Hence, the Christian community is a people called out of the world--a people formerly called out of the Jewish nation, and out of the Greek and Roman nations. They constitute a holy and spiritual nation--sons and daughters born to God. All, then, that are born of the flesh in any country, are its nation; and those that are born of the Spirit in any nation are its church in that nation. "A national church" is, therefore, a great national absurdity--an absurdity both in language and in fact. If a whole nation constitute but one society, how can that one society be called out of it? What remains, when all are taken? In Roman Catholic nations, it is all church and no world; or rather, all world and no church. II. The Jewish nation, as a nation, was a part of the descendants of Abraham, had a national covenant based upon the flesh, guarantying only fleshly, temporal, and worldly privileges. They were, indeed, as respected the world, an election according to the flesh. God loved the fathers and chose their children not for their own sake, but for that of their fathers: Romans 11:1-36 : They had a law written on tables of stone, a fallible lawgiver, ordinances concerning the flesh, a carnal priesthood, a brazen altar, animal sacrifices, a worldly sanctuary, a temporal and earthly inheritance, governed by degenerate kings. Can any one, then, consistently affirm that the Jewish and Christian churches, or, more properly, the Jewish nation and the Christian church, are, therefore, one and the same religious, spiritual, and moral community--identically one and the same church?! If so, he is more infatuated by system than guided by reason or truth; and, therefore, more to be pitied; or, as the case may sometimes be, more to be contemned than reasoned with on the subject. III. The Christian church is described as called out of the world, born again, regenerated, illuminated, justified, sanctified, adopted, saved, a holy nation, a peculiar people, a royal priesthood, a spiritual family, a royal race--having "an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away." Not so the Jewish, in one single point. Not so any nation or people on the earth, in the aggregate. IV. Hence the Apostles, in calling out of the world a people for the Lord, or, what is the same thing, in building a church, demanded just as much from the Jew as from the Samaritan or from the Greek--as much from the excellent Cornelius and the amiable Lydia as from the betrayers and murderers of the Son of God. To the Jew and to the Greek they preached "repentance towards God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ;" and thus God "visited the nations to take out of them a people for his name:" Acts 15:14. V. Hence, the Church of Jesus Christ is called a new body--a "new man." It has a "new covenant," or constitution, a new Lawgiver, a new Prophet, a new King. It has a new altar, a new sacrifice, a new High-Priest. It has new ordinances, a new baptism, a new supper, and a new Lord’s day. It was introduced and consummated by a better Mediator than Moses, and is established upon "better promises." The door of admission into the Jewish community was as wide as the door into the world. No intellectual, moral, or spiritual qualification was required of any man, in order to admission into it. If he were legitimately or illegitimately born of Jewish blood, or even bought by Jewish money, he was entitled to its initiatory and solemn rites and ordinances. It had, indeed, no initiatory rites whatever, except for adult proselytes from pagan nations. The children of Jews were not circumcised to make them Jews, but they were circumcised because they were born Jews. Circumcision only marked their flesh and identified it with that of Abraham. It was to them a sign, a proof of lineage and of blood; but indicated neither moral qualification nor moral change. What profit, then, had the Jew in his circumcision? Its national advantages were very considerable; but its chief benefit was, that "unto them were committed the oracles of God." They had the means of illumination and of salvation. But so have the nations of Europe and of Christendom. But does the mere possession of these oracles secure the salvation of any man? No, no; not one. Still, the possession of them is sometimes, and may often become, the greatest blessing to those that hold them, and not only hold them, but who are held, and led, and guided by them. But the advocates for infant baptism argue the identity of the Jewish nation and the Christian church for the sake of its alleged covenant of circumcision, and for the purpose of pleading their national, natural, fleshly infant membership. Though it must be admitted, that "the covenant of circumcision" is neither the covenant of grace nor the constitution of the Jewish nation; for circumcision is not of Moses, but of Abraham and the Patriarchs; yet they seek to make it the root of their ecclesiastic constitution or church covenant, and strangely infer the rite of infant baptism from the bloody rite of infant circumcision. Strange, that the putting of water upon an infant could doctrinally be the same with taking blood from it; or the immersing it in water, identical, in covenant import, with cutting off a portion of its flesh! That one and the same covenant could have had two seals, at two different periods, so discordant and uncongenial, would, methinks, require very explicit and very satisfactory proof. But, still more revolting to my mind, that any covenant ratified by human blood could be the same with that ratified by the blood of the Son of God! And is not the Christian church founded upon the new constitution sealed and ratified by the blood of Jesus Christ? Was, then, the Jewish church, assumed to be founded upon the bloody rite of circumcision identically the same with the Christian church founded upon the blood of the slain Lamb of God!! In what absurd predicaments do the advocates for infant baptism on the ground of the covenant of circumcision, place themselves before the world, in their attempts to sustain the antiquated tradition commended to them by the great godmother of antichristian innovations? But as all may not intuitively see the justness or relevancy of these remarks, we shall present the subject in a somewhat more tangible and intelligible form. We need only premise that when any one thing comes in the room or place of another, it must occupy the room or place of that thing. Now, as most Pedobaptists of the Presbyterian and Congregational schools affirm baptism is a sort of spiritual circumcision, standing in the same relation to our church covenant as did circumcision to the Jewish covenant, we shall proceed to examine this hypothesis, by inquiring in what particular does infant baptism fill the place or occupy the room of circumcision. On former occasions, we have found some sixteen points in which these two institutions do not fill the place or room of one another. Indeed, they do not at all resemble one another in any one of these particulars: 1. Males only were subjects of circumcision; but males and females are subjects of Christian baptism. "Every male child among you shall be circumcised." The Apostles "baptized both men and women." 2. Circumcision was ordained to be performed on the eighth day--the first day of the second week of every male child. Does any party of Pedobaptists occupy the same day in dispensing the rite of infant baptism? Not one. 3. Adult males circumcised themselves. Do adult believers baptize themselves? 4. Infant males were circumcised by their own parents. Do Christian parents baptize their own infant children? 5. Infant and adult servants were circumcised neither on flesh nor faith, but as property. Does infant baptism ever occupy this place? 6. Circumcision was not the door into the Jewish church. It was four hundred years older than the Jewish church, and introduced neither Isaac, Ishmael, Esau, nor Jacob into any Jewish or patriarchal church. It never was to any Jew, its peculiar and proper subject, an initiatory rite? Why, then, call infant baptism an initiatory rite? 7. The qualifications for circumcision were flesh and property. Faith was never propounded, in any case, to a Jew, or his servants, as a qualification for circumcision. But do not Pedobaptists sometimes say--If thou believest with all thy heart, thou mayest? 8. Infant baptism is frequently called a dedicatory rite. Believers may dedicate themselves, but cannot dedicate others to the Lord in a Christian sense. In the Jewish sense, however, the same persons were dedicated to the Lord. But dedication was never performed by circumcision. The circumcised were afterwards dedicated to the Lord: Numbers 8:13-21. Why, then, make baptism a dedicatory rite in room of circumcision? 9. Circumcision, requiring neither intelligence, faith, nor any moral qualification, neither did nor could communicate any spiritual blessing. No person ever put an Christ, or professed faith in circumcision. 10. Idiots were circumcised: for neither intellect nor any exercise of it was necessary to a covenant in the flesh. Is this true of baptism? 11. Circumcision was a visible, appreciable mark, as all signs are, and such was its chief design. Does baptism fill its room in this respect? 12. The duty of circumcision was not personal, but parental. Parents were bound to circumcise their children. The precept ran thus--"Circumcise your children." But in baptism it is personal--"Be baptized, every one of you." 13. The right of a child to circumcision, in no case, depended upon the intelligence, faith, piety, or morality of the parents. Why, then, in substituting for it infant baptism, are its benefits to infants withholden from it, because of the ignorance, impiety, or immorality of its parents? Does infant baptism exactly fill the place of circumcision in this particular? 14. Circumcision was a guarantee of certain temporal benefits to a Jew. Does baptism guaranty any temporal blessing to the subject of it? 15. It was not to be performed in the name of God, nor into the name of any being in heaven or earth. Why, then, on the plea of coming in the room of circumcision, is any infant baptized in or into the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? 16. The subject of circumcision was a debtor to the whole law. Is this true of every subject of baptism? If these discrepancies do not fully annul the pretensions of baptism as coming in the room and place of circumcision, we know not what discrepancies, either in number or kind, would be sufficient for such a purpose! These sixteen indisputable facts are truly distinct and demonstrable attributes and properties of circumcision, each of which differs, and of course the aggregate differs from baptism as now administered by Romanists and Protestants. Had we deemed it at all important, we could as easily, in all the other alleged points of identity between the Jewish and Christian institutions, have made out lists of specifications, either more or less numerous than the preceding. But that being only to multiply words to no profit, I am content to annihilate infant church membership as founded upon the identity of signs and seals. A thousand vague generalities are worth nothing--absolutely worth nothing in a question of identity.1 How entirely unfounded and gratuitous the assumption that baptism and circumcision are seals of the same covenant, or that the former came in room of the latter, must appear evident and demonstrative to those who read, with a discriminating eye, the history of baptism as reported in the New Testament. All the subjects of John’s baptism had been circumcised. The Messiah was circumcised the eighth day.2 As the first-born of his mother, he was on the fortieth day dedicated to the Lord according to law. He was baptized in his thirtieth year. Was baptism, in his case, a substitute for circumcision?! All the males baptized by the Harbinger, (and we read of no females baptized by him,) had been circumcised. In these cases, then, there is no favour shown to the fond speculations of Pedobaptists. And who were the persons baptized in Pentecost, Jerusalem, and Samaria? The three thousand? The five thousand? The myriads of Jews that had been baptized and were all zealous of the law? Had they not all, to a man, been circumcised? Yes, circumcised and baptized also. Where now the phantom of baptism--of infant baptism, a substitute for infant circumcision? Can any one sensibly and truthfully say that the latter is a substitute for the former? But one assumption usually requires the aid of another. It is assumed that circumcision is done away, and that baptism is come in room of it. "Done away," by what authority? It was not done away, so far down the Christian age as New Testament history reaches. A report had gone abroad that Paul forbade the Jews to circumcise their children. This, so late as the year sixty, brought Paul into some trouble. He was, indeed, at considerable expense and labor in denying the charge, and in contradicting those who slandered him in this particular.3 The believing Jews continued circumcision till entirely amalgamated with the believing Gentiles in the Christian church. They never gave it up because of baptism. It was their national badge and peculiarity, and stood not in the way of their baptism and communion with the believing Gentiles. Those Judaizers who sought to bring the Gentiles into the practice of it were severely reproved; and those Gentiles or Jews that presumed to say that it must be added to Christianity, were informed that if they added circumcision to the gospel, "they became debtors to do the law," and "that Christ should profit them nothing." There is, then, not any foundation whatever, in the New Testament, for the assumed identity of "the Jewish and Christian churches," or of the covenants on which they are respectively founded. The Christian church is founded upon the New Covenant; Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone, and not on the covenant of circumcision. Baptism has not come in the room of any thing. It is a New Testament ordinance of great significance and value to the Christian church. It is a personal duty which every believer owes to himself and to the Lord. The gospel of Jesus Christ, and all its institutions, are addressed to persons who can learn, who can hear, understand, and obey. "It proclaims liberty to the captive." It emancipates man from the slavery of sin. It treats him as one who must think, and reason, and learn and obey for himself. It inspires man with a spirit of liberty and mental independence. "If the Son shall make you free; you shall be free indeed," is one of the Messiah’s own promises. We have now, I hope, satisfactorily seen, from a full induction of every case of baptism reported or alluded to in the historical and epistolary writings of the New Testament, that there is not one instance of infant baptism, expressed or implied, from the, first to the last page of that apostolic and Divine Volume. There is neither precept, precedent, nor allusion, directly or remotely squinting at it, in all the pages of inspiration. As soon may we find the legends of purgatory, auricular confession, transubstantiation, the invocation of the Virgin, or prayers for the dead, as find in that volume any authority whatever for infant baptism or infant communion. No one need ask, Why, then, so early introduced and so long in practice, and why believed by so many great, and learned, and excellent men? Ah me! what profane tenets, what fatal aberrations from the Sacred Scriptures may not be maintained and defended in this way! How ancient the alleged saving virtue of celibacy--the fasts, the feasts, the penances, and works of supererogation of Papal superstition! Nay, how many excellent Roman worshippers of the Virgin Mary! What Fenelons, and Rollins, and Pascals, and St. Pierres adorn the annals and fill the niches of Papal fame! If great, and learned, and reverend names can authenticate tradition, silence demurs, and satisfy weak consciences, there is not an error in Popery nor an imagination in the ramblings of monkish fanaticism and religious buffoonery that may not be favourably regarded, and cherished with a profound and worshipful respect. But we have not so learned Christ. 1 See Chapters VI. and VII. on Circumcision--on Flesh and Spirit. Book I. 2 Luke 2:21. 3 Acts 21:24; Acts 25:21. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 30: 01.04.01. DESIGN OF BAPTISM ======================================================================== B O O K F O U R T H. CHAPTER I. AS there cannot be a general providence without a special one, so there cannot be a general design in the Christian Institution without a specific design in every part of it. If, indeed, religion be a reasonable service, there must be a reason for every part of it; and that reason, whatever it may be, is the proper design of it; for reason without design is inconceivable. Reason and design are, indeed, inseparable; or, rather, they are two names for the same thing. Now, as the whole universe is but one grand system of designs terminating in one grand result, so the Christian Institution is one great system of means and ends terminating in one grand consummation--the supreme glory of its Author, in the purity and happiness of his intelligent and moral offspring. The gospel system is a system of redemption--a deliverance of its subjects from ignorance, guilt, and bondage. It contemplates a new creation--a transformation of man in body, soul, and spirit. It is, therefore, a great system of physical, moral, and spiritual means and ends. Hence, its doctrine, its precepts, and its promises are but developments of a remedial system, originating in the benevolence of God, guided by his wisdom, and perfected by his power. This scheme of mercy has its parts; and each of these parts has its own peculiar object. Faith is not a substitute for repentance, holiness, or righteousness; but a means to these ends. As a means, it is, indeed, indispensable to every one of them. Prayer, reading or hearing, and meditation are means of sanctification. But any one of these, without the other, would be incomplete and incompetent to the end proposed. So of the positive institutions of the Christian system. Baptism, the Lord’s day, and the Holy Supper are indispensable provisions of remedial mercy. Not one of them can be dispensed with by any one who desires the perfection of the Christian state and of the Christian character. Eating, drinking, sleeping, exercising, though not of the same nor of equal importance, are, nevertheless, all essential to the preservation and comfortable enjoyment of the human system. These things premised, we are induced, according to our plan, to institute an inquiry into the use of Christian baptism, or, rather, into the design of it. It is a conspicuous and prominent part of the Christian religion, and is spoken of and alluded to more than one hundred times in the New Testament. It is worthy of a full examination, and of the most respectful consideration and regard. It could not occupy so much space in so small a volume, and yet be considered as a matter of indifference, or of but little importance. We must, therefore, regard it with the respect and reverence due to a very prominent divine institution. But the design of this institution has long been thrown into the shade because of the wordy and impassioned controversy about what the action is, and who may be the proper subject of it. Now, it must be confessed that, whatever importance there may be in settling these questions, that importance is wholly to be appreciated by the design of the institution. This is the only value of it. The question concerning the value of any action is incomparably superior to the question, What is the act itself? or to the questions, Who may perform it? or, Upon whom may it be performed? We are, therefore, induced to believe that the question now before us is the all-interesting important question--indeed, the transcendent question in this discussion. The appeal, therefore, must be made to the proper tribunal. It must be carried up to the Apostles and Evangelists of Jesus Christ. What, then, do they propose as the deign of New Testament baptism? We say New Testament baptism, because we have in that book "THE BAPTISM OF JOHN," and the baptism ordained by Jesus Christ. Although not one, nor identical, they may materially unfold and illustrate each other. They both came from heaven. They both immersed believing and penitent persons, and were alike indicative of divine wisdom and benevolence. The Harbinger was sent "to prepare a people for the Lord." He designed to enlighten and purify them. Hence he was both a preacher of faith and reformation, and proclaimed "the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins." It would, then, appear from the very annunciation of John’s baptism, that its design was of a transcendently important and interesting character. The form of expression is exceedingly familiar and intelligible; and, were it not for an imaginary incongruity between the means and the end, or the thing done and the alleged purpose or result, no one could, for a moment, doubt that the design of baptism was "for the remission of sins."1 The form of expression is the most common in language, and especially in the simple and sacred style of the Apostles and Evangelists. From the few examples at the foot of the page, any one may see with what little reason and evidence any one can intimate that the form of the expression does not indicate the design of an action. Indeed, if this preposition does not intimate design, we might well ask, What other word in that language could suggest such an idea? Nor is it only casually intimated that New Testament baptism was ordained for this purpose. It is the only purpose for which it was ordained; whether in the hands of John or of the twelve Apostles. What could be more plain or intelligible than such forms of expression as the following:--"John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins." (Mark 1:4.) It was not a baptism, but the baptism of repentance. It was not for remission of sins, but for the remission of sins. The fixtures of language could not more safely secure the intention of an institution. It was not because your sins have been remitted; but it is for, or in order to the remission of sins. Nor is this a form of expression peculiar to one Evangelist. Luke, as well as Mark, uses the same formula:--"And John came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins." Luke 3:3. John’s baptism was as certainly "for the remission of sins" as it was "the baptism of repentance." The death of the Messiah, or the blood of the new covenant; was not more certainly for the remission of sins, so far as the expression goes, than was the baptism of John for the remission of sins. Indeed, they are not merely similar, but are identical expressions in both cases. It does not, however, follow that they are in the same sense "for the remission of sins." But that they are, in some sense, for the remission of sins, can be denied by no man who either understands the language of the Bible or the language of men. From the apostolic style, one might as reasonably conclude that Jesus died because man’s sins had been remitted, or because the sin of the world had been taken away, ash that men are to be baptized, or that John baptized men "because their sins had been remitted." To take such freedom with language, with the language of the Bible, would be to make the word of God of no effect; or, what is the same thing, of no certain interpretation: in other words, of no meaning. If goods are laid up for past years--if men buy food for those who never can use it--if men provide money for the expenses of journeys already paid for,--then may it be said that John baptized for sins already remitted; or that his baptism was for those who were already cleansed from their pollutions. When the Lord said, "To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world," does he not intimate that he had a design in coming into the world? When Stephen said that Pharaoh cast put the children of the Israelites to the end2 that they might not live, does he not mean that their destruction was designed by their exposure? When Stephen again says (Acts 7:5) that God promised Canaan to Abraham "for a possession," was it not his design to invest him with that inheritance? And when it is said by the people of Damascus, (Acts 9:21,) that Saul of Tarsus came to that city "for the intent that he might" persecute the disciples; and if, eis, the word always used when baptism and remission of sins are connected, be the word in all these cases containing the sense of "FOR," "in order to," "to the intent that," or "for the intent," shall we hesitate to allow, that, in connection with remission of sins, it has the same meaning; or, that our translators so understood it? Should any one be so regardless of his reputation, he would be as unsafe as unworthy to be reasoned with on any question of religion or morality, whenever he stands committed to its affirmative or negative. So far, then, as the force of the preposition is of any consequence or value to show a connection between baptism and remission of sins, it is incontrovertibly indicative of that connection. But were it translated in every case by into or unto, (versions of the word very common in all writings, sacred and profane,) it is as certainly, though not so obviously to all minds, indicative of such a connection. To baptize into remission, or unto remission, intimates that the subject of that act is about passing into a new state; as entering into partnership, or entering into marriage, indicates that it is for such purposes the action, whatever it may be, is performed. "Unto what, then, were you baptized?" (Acts 19:3,) is equivalent to the question, For what were you, then, baptized; or, into what were you, then, baptized? In either case, the relation of the person baptized is changed. It only remains in this part of our essay that we present, in the order of the inspired books, all the passages that plainly import any connection between baptism and remission of sins. They are the following:-- 1. "John did baptize--and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins." Mark 1:4. 2. "The people of Judea and Jerusalem were baptized by him in Jordan, confessing their sins." Mark 1:5. 3. "And he came into all the country about the Jordan preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins." Luke 3:3. 4. "Repent, and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of the Lord Jesus, for the remission of sins." Acts 2:38. 5. "Arise and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, invoking the name of the Lord." Acts 22:16. These are oracles as express and explicit as any we can imagine. Any one of them would establish the connection for which we plead. For, if once such a connection is clearly established, it depends not upon the repetition of it, but upon the clearness and definiteness of the expression of it. This is intimated clearly in another passage:-- 6. "There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism." Ephesians 4:5. Now, if there be but one baptism, and if it appear that both the New Testament dispensations of baptism, by John and by the Apostles, clearly affirm a connection between baptism and remission of sins--must it not follow that the only diviner-instituted baptism is for the remission of sins. It may, however, tend to the confirmation of those halting between two opinions, to inquire, whether there be any other connection between baptism and any thing else noted in the Christian Scriptures; and, if so, of what nature and kind it is? In the first place, then, no one is commanded to be baptized for any thing else; and no one is ever said to have been baptized for any thing else, than for the remission of sins. This is a very important fact, and worthy of much reflection. I know, indeed, it may be said that there are two or three forms of expression that might be translated in such a way as to intimate some other connection. For example:-- "As many of you as were baptized for Jesus Christ were baptized for his death." Romans 6:3. "Know you not that all our fathers were baptized for Moses--in the cloud and in the sea?" 1 Corinthians 10:2. "For by one Spirit we are all baptized for one body." 1 Corinthians 12:13. "For as many of you as have been baptized for Jesus Christ, have been baptized for his death." These four passages complete the canon--the whole volume on the subject of the relation of baptism to spiritual rights, privileges, and honours. We have, for the sake of uniformity, and of giving weight to all conceivable objections, preferred the common version of these passages. The reader will remember, that in all these it is, in the common version, "into Christ," "into his death," "into one body," &c. Whether, then, we read for or into one body, and for or into his death, the sense is the same. If any one be baptized for the Lord, for his death, or for his body, as a design, as an end, it is for the sake of the rights, privileges, and honours of his body, or for the sake of the rights, privileges, and honours accruing from his death, his church, or himself. Of all these, remission of sins is the leading and the introductory blessing--from which follow, as consequences, all spiritual privileges, honours, and immunities. "For, if you be Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise." Evident, then, it is, that there is no specific design on account of which any one can constitutionally be baptized, except it be for the remission of sins previously committed. We are not commanded to be baptized for faith, for repentance, for justification for regeneration, for sanctification, for adoption, for the Holy Spirit, for eternal life. We are commanded to be baptized "for the remission of sins" not for the remission of "original sin"--not for the remission of sins yet to be committed or in advance; but for the remission of sins that are past, that have been committed, "through the forbearance of God." True, when immersed into Christ, we have "put on Christ;" and, of course, are in him and under him, interested in all the provisions of that covenant of life and salvation of which he is the Alpha and the Omega, the Author and the Mediator. Still, through faith and repentance, we are commanded to be baptized for one specific purpose, just as much as we celebrate the Lord’s day and the Lord’s supper for a specific purpose. Every Christian institution has, indeed, its own peculiar and specific object, which can be neither secured nor enjoyed so well any other way. Having, then, philologically ascertained that, in the sacred writings of the Apostles and Evangelists of our King, the baptisms of the New Testament were all for the remission of sins, and for no other specific purpose; our second leading inquiry must be, In what sense is baptism for the remission of sins. The connection between baptism and remission being now fully ascertained and established, the nature of that connection comes deservedly under our immediate examination. The relations of time in which one thing may stand to another, are antecedent, simultaneous, and consequent. But the question is not about their relations as respects mere time, place, or circumstance; but as respects natural or necessary dependence--such as that of cause and effect. We contemplate the relations of persons and things with regard to the causes of their existence or the various influences which they may exert on one another. When a man’s salvation, for example, is sometimes ascribed to faith, to repentance, to baptism, to the grace of God, to the blood of Christ, to his own efforts, we are desirous to know why a man’s salvation should be assigned to so many causes. To prevent confusion, or to relieve the mind from a perplexed, indistinct, and imperfect conception of the influences of numerous and various causes, affecting the existence of any thing, either as respects itself or our conceptions of it, we have given to the word cause a very comprehensive meaning, and have been obliged to select names to express the various applications of the word. Thus, we have a moving or original cause, an efficient or meritorious cause, an instrumental cause, a concurrent cause, a final cause.3 Every theory of redemption and salvation, with more or less clearness of perception and precision of expression, admits the necessity of such distinctions as these. Since the days of St. Augustine, Calvin, and Luther, since the Jansenists and their rival orders of monkery, all writers and reasoners on this subject, have been constrained to admit of a system of causes cooperating in man’s salvation. The kingdoms of nature,--mineral, vegetable, and animal,--are replete with such combinations of concurring causes in the various results of the divine wisdom, power and goodness. There is not any thing in the universe of created things, that is the result of a single cause, as to its being, its continued being, or to its well-being. Indeed, the different attributes of God himself are so many concurrent causes in our conceptions of things, both material and mental. Portions of nature, celestial and terrestrial, are to be ascribed to his wisdom, his knowledge, his power, his goodness; and every single result has in it the concurrence of all these. But, to keep distinctly before our minds the design and place of Christian baptism--(for we must observe, that for most minds, it is enough to read the precept, "Repent and be baptized, everyone of you, for the remission of sins," without presuming to comprehend or develop the necessity of it)--two facts are most obvious:--First, that all men alike need the Christian institution; second, that, whatever any one institution is to any one proper subject of it, it is in some degree the same to every other proper subject of it. Therefore, we all need every divine institution. Philosophers are generally more curious and inquisitive than wise. They delight to comprehend every thing, or to assume to understand all mysteries. But who can specify, enumerate, and sort up the causes that convert one grain of corn into the flesh, blood, bones, and covering of a man, a horse, or any other animal that lives upon it? Or can set forth the number, the variety, and the order of the causes that are necessary to animal life, health and comfort? If not, then why so dogmatical and pragmatical--so inquisitive and positive--so dictatorial and absolute in matters solely depending upon the positive will and law of God? To conclude our remarks on this part of the subject, we must assign to every institution of Heaven its own proper place, whether in nature, in providence, or in redemption. We must give to grace, to faith, to repentance, to baptism, to the purpose of the Father, to the blood of the Son, to the sanctification of the Holy Spirit--to each of these severally its proper place and importance in redemption and salvation; and to all of them a concurrent efficacy in the rescue and delivery of man from sin, misery, and ruin. While, then, we must say with Peter, "Baptism doth also now save us," we will also say with Paul, that "we are saved by grace," "justified by faith," "redeemed by the blood of the Lord Jesus," "sanctified by the Spirit of our God," and with James, that "a man is justified by works, and not by faith only." We do not, however, place baptism among good works. Good works have our brethren, and neither God nor ourselves, for their object. They directly and immediately terminate upon man; while, in their reflex influence, they glorify God, and beatify ourselves. In baptism, we are in spirit, as well as in person, buried with the Lord, "wherein also we are raised with him." Dead men neither bury themselves nor raise themselves to life again. In baptism, we are passive in every thing but in giving our consent. We are buried and we are raised by another. Hence, in no view of baptism can it be called a good work. The influence which baptism may have upon our spiritual relations is, therefore, not because of any merit in the act as our own; not as a procuring cause, but merely as an instrumental and concurring cause, by which we "put on Christ," and are united to him formally as well as in heart, entering into covenant with him, and uniting ourselves to him in his death, burial, and resurrection. Hence, said the Apostle, "As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have been baptized into his death"--"have put on Christ." While, then, baptism is ordained for remission of sins, and for no other specific purpose, it is not as a procuring cause, as, a meritorious or efficient cause, but as an instrumental cause, in which faith and repentance are developed and made fruitful and effectual in the changing of our state and spiritual relations to the Divine Persons whose names are put upon us in the very act. It is also a solemn pledge and a formal assurance on the part of our Father, that he has forgiven all our offences--a positive, sensible, solemn seal and pledge that, through faith in the blood of the slain Lamb of God, and through, repentance, or a heartfelt sorrow for the past, and a firm purpose of reformation of life, by the virtues of the great Mediator, we are thus publicly declared forgiven, and formally obtain the assurance of our acceptance and pardon, with the promised aid of the Holy Spirit to strengthen and furnish us for every good thought, and word, and work. Some have such a puerile and inadequate conception of Christian baptism, as to regard it as a mere ceremonial introduction into the church--a way of making a profession of the Christian religion--no way affecting the spiritual relations of the subject. This view of it ought to have been expressed by such a precept as the following:--"Repent and be baptized, every one of you, for admission into the church." But no such precept, in form, in substance, or in sense, is found in God’s own book. As we have, then, but one Lord, one faith, and one baptism, and that baptism is "for the remission of sins"--to give us, through faith and repentance, a solemn pledge and assurance of pardon, any other baptism is a human invention and of no value; wanting, as it does, the sanction of the Lord Jesus, who ordained it, and submitted to the baptism of John as an example to others to honour and obey every divine institution. But there are other passages of Sacred Scripture that both illustrate and confirm the views now presented. It is a very important and interesting fact, that no great doctrine or institution of Christianity wholly depends upon a single passage, or even upon a mere plurality of passages. Such is not the Lord’s way of teaching his will to weak and erring mortals. He gives us line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little; wisdom for the wise, knowledge for the prudent, and information for all. No great doctrine; no important principle, no solemn, moral, or religious duty ever was confined to a single enunciation. The more important the duty or the more valuable the privilege, the more ample, explicit, and frequent the allusion to it, except in cases so plain and of such easy intelligence and comprehension that he may run that reads it. Baptism, a new institution, is an ordination of great significance, and of the most solemn and sublime importance. It is a sort of embodiment of the gospel; and a solemn expression of it all in a single act. Hence the space and the place assigned it in the commission. It is a monumental and commemorative institution, bodying forth to all ages the great facts of man’s redemption as developed and consummated in the death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Hence, immediately upon the first constitutional promulgation of it on the part of the Christian Lawgiver and Saviour, he adds, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved." This has in all past time, and will in all future time impart to this institution a solemnity, a significance, and an importance which no art or ingenuity of corrupted Christianity can long obscure or successfully deface. It will give to it an authority and a claim upon the understanding, the conscience, and the affections of the humble and the devout, which no sophistry or hardihood can weaken or destroy. To associate faith and baptism as antecedents, whose consequent is salvation, no matter what the connection may be, will always impart to the institution a pre-eminence above all other religious institutions in the world. The Lord does not say, he that believeth and obeys this or that moral precept shall be saved; but "He that believeth the gospel and is baptized shall be saved." This very intelligible and prominent annunciation, just before his ascension, greatly explains and justifies the new precept promulged by Peter, a few days afterwards, when the ascended Lord had sent down his Holy Spirit to advocate his cause. Peter, after the new light imparted in the commission, feared not to say to the inquiring Jews, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of the Lord Jesus, for the remission of sins." Nor did any one, so far as the history of the apostolic labors is reported, ever express a doubt or an inquiry upon the connection thus solemnly established between faith, repentance, baptism, and remission or salvation. So far from this, that the Apostles frequently allude to the subject in their epistles as though, by universal consent, it was understood to be a symbol of moral purification--a washing away of sin in a figure, declarative of a true and real remission of sin--a format and definite release of the conscience from the feeling of guilt and all its condemnatory power. There remains, in the historical books of the New Institution, another very striking evidence of the proper design of Christian baptism. It being a change of the verbiage of Peter, and from another speaker, and addressed to a great sinner, it is peculiarly striking and impressive. It is the address of Ananias to Saul of Tarsus, than whom had not then lived a more fierce and hostile spirit opposed to the claims of Jesus of Nazareth. When commanded to wait for a message from the Lord, Ananias waited upon him; and, after a very short introduction, be said to Saul of Tarsus, "Arise, brother Saul, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, invoking the name of the Lord." A most unguarded and unjustifiable form of address, under the sanction of a divine mission, if baptism had not for its design the formal and definite remission of sins, according to the Pentecostian address. From the express authority and evidence of Apostles and Evangelists, without any inferential reasoning, we feel constrained to conclude that the baptisms of this New Testament, both of John and Jesus, were for the true, real, and formal remission of sins, through faith in the Messiah, and a genuine repentance towards God. We shall, however, for the sake of some of our readers who are slow to believe all that the Apostles have spoken, devote to the subject another essay, in the further examination of the sacred writings, and in some notices of the traditions of the fathers. 1 The preposition translated for in this connection of means and designs is often so translated; and might have been hundreds of times much better so translated in the common version of the New Testament, than by into or unto, or to. We shall give a few examples, selected out of many such in the common version:-- Matthew 5:13 : "It is good for nothing." "Take no thought for to-morrow:" Matthew 6:34. "Do it for a testimony to them:" Matthew 8:4. "For a testimony against them:" Matthew 10:18. "Shed for many for the remission of sins:" Matthew 26:28. "Told for a memorial of her." Matthew 26:13. "Gave them for the potter’s field"--"for the burial of strangers:’ Matthew 27:7-8. Do not these indicate the design or the end for which a thing is given or done? Did not the Messiah shed his blood for the remission of sins? Was not the money given for the potter’s field? Was it not for the burial of strangers? As Luke writes "the Gospel" and "Acts of the Apostles," we shall give a few examples from him also:--"For the fall and arising of many in Israel." "For a sign which shall be spoken against:’ Luke 2:34. "For, therefore, [for this purpose,] I am sent:" Luke 4:43. "Take nothing for your journey" Luke 9:3. "Buy meat for all this people:" Luke 9:13. "He is not fit for the kingdom of God." Luke 9:62. "Goods laid up for many years:" Luke 12:19. "It is not fit for the land, or for the dunghill:" Luke 14:24. "Be baptized for the remission of sins:" Acts 2:38. "Gave it to him for a possession:" Acts 6:5. "Nourished him for her own son:" 6: 21. "Came here for that intent:" Acts 9:21. "Are come up for a memorial:" Acts 10:4. "For the work I have appointed them:" Acts 13:2. "That thou shouldest be for salvation:" Acts 13:47. "For the work which they fulfilled:’ Acts 14:26. These are but a few examples from Luke. 2 Here it is eiV, for, to the end that, the word always used in reference to "baptism for the remission of sins." 3 See, in Book 5:, the article on Justification. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 31: 01.04.02. DESIGN OF BAPTISM (PART TWO) ======================================================================== CHAPTER II. DESIGN OF BAPTISM. EVERY divine institution has its own specific design. They all, indeed, have one grand, general design;--the glory of God, and the happiness of man. But, as neither the glory of God nor the happiness of man consists in one item, or in one manifestation, his precepts and our acts of obedience are necessarily both numerous and various. Nature and religion being the offspring of the same supremely wise and benevolent mind, may be supposed to carry in them conclusive evidence of the same divine original. Hence, the numerous and various parables and allusions to nature on the part of the great Teacher, while developing that gracious institution, of which he is the beginning, middle, and end. Now as in nature, no one ordinance or institution can become a substitute of another, so, in Christianity, no one, ordinance can either be dispensed with or substituted for another, but at the detriment and loss of the subject. There is a specific virtue in every ordinance of religion, as in every ordinance of nature. There is no substitute for air, light, heat, or moisture, in either the vegetable or animal kingdom; and there is no substitute for faith, repentance, and baptism, in the present dispensation of grace. It is not for us to ask, nor is it due to us from God to give, the reason why. He ordains and commands blessings to be bestowed in his own way; and it is alike our duty and our happiness implicitly to obey and enjoy them. We have only to ascertain the fact that God has so commanded, and our duty then is to obey. All the ordinances of Christianity are means of grace. Faith, repentance, baptism, the Lord’s day; the Lord’s supper, the church and its ministry, are all means of grace. There are, indeed, many graces requisite to the completion and perfection of Christian character. There is the grace of faith--the grace of repentance--the grace of forgiveness--the grace of justification--the grace of sanctification--the grace of adoption--the grace of assurance--the grace of perfection--the grace of happiness. There are means of each and of all of these graces. Is there the grace of faith? There are the means of faith; the well-attested testimony of God. Is there the grace of repentance? There are the arguments drawn from our guilt and God’s infinite mercy. Is there the grace of forgiveness? There are the blood of Christ, the love of God, and the promises addressed to our faith. Is there the assurance of pardon? There is baptism for the remission of sins; and, as a consequence, the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the holy Spirit. Is there the grace of justification? There are the death of Christ; faith in it, repentance, and a baptism into his death. Is there the grace of adoption? There is the Spirit of God bearing witness with our spirit that we are the sons of God. Is there the grace of perfection? There are the precepts, the example of Christ, the Lord’s day, the Lord’s supper, the fellowship and prayers of kindred spirits, and the obedience of faith. Is there the grace of happiness? Then there are the love of God shed abroad in the heart, the favour of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the communion of the Holy Ghost--a pledge and an earnest of the eternal rest. But we have now before us the special design of baptism, as the assurance of remission; a pledge of pardon, of our burial with Christ, and our resurrection to a new life. This is "baptism for the remission of sins." That baptism was designed for the remission of sins, for a pledge and an assurance of pardon, through the Messiah, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; we shall now first proceed to prove. 1. Testimony of the Harbinger himself: "In those days came John the Baptist; the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord! Make his paths straight. John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins." Mark, the Evangelist; Mark 1:2-4. 2. Luke also affirms, Luke 3:3 : "And he came into all the country about the Jordan preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins." 3. Peter, to whom the keys of the approaching Reign of Heaven were committed by the Lord in person, in opening the gospel kingdom, when first asked by penitent believers what they should do in order to remission, answers--"Repent," or reform, "and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of the Lord Jesus, for the remission of sins." Acts 2:37. 4. This connection between faith and baptism for the remission of sins, nay, for salvation itself, was, indeed, first announced by the Lord in person, in giving the commission after his resurrection--"Preach the gospel to every creature." "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved." Mark 16:16. 5. Ananias, sent specially to Saul of Tarsus by the Lord, preaches after the same manner, when he says, Acts 22:16, "Arise, brother Saul, and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling upon the name of the Lord." 6. Cornelius, the centurion, on hearing Peter, was hearing words by which an angel told him, "he and his family should be saved." And when these words were announced, Peter commanded him and all present forthwith to be baptized. Acts 10:1-48 : 7. We shall hear Luther, the great Reformer:-- "This is not done by changing of a garment, or by any laws or works, but by a new birth, and by the renewing of the inward man, which is done in baptism, as Paul saith, ’All ye that are baptized have put on Christ,’ Also, ’According to his mercy he saved us by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost.’ Titus 3:5. For besides that they who are baptized are regenerated and renewed by the Holy Ghost to a heavenly righteousness and to eternal life, there riseth in them also a new light and a new flame; there riseth in them new and holy affections, as the fear of God, true faith, and assured hopes, &c. There beginneth in them also a new will, and this is to put on Christ truly and according to the gospel. "Therefore, the righteousness of the law, or of our own works, is not given unto us in baptism; but Christ himself is our garment. Now Christ is no law, no lawgiver, no works, but a divine and an inestimable gift, whom God hath given unto us, that he might be our justifier, our Saviour, and our Redeemer. Wherefore to be appareled with Christ according to the gospel, is not to be appareled with the law or with works, but, with an incomparable gift; that is, with remission of sins, righteousness, peace, consolation joy of spirit, salvation, life, and Christ himself." Luther on Galatians: Phila. 1801, 8vo. p. 302. 8. We shall next hear Calvin:-- "From baptism out faith derives three advantages, which require to be distinctly considered. The first is, that it is proposed to us by the Lord as a symbol, and token of our purification; or, to express my meaning more fully, it resembles a legal instrument properly attested, by which he assures us that all our sins are cancelled, effaced, and obliterated, so that they will never appear in his sight, or come into his remembrance, or be imputed to us. For he commands all who believe, to be baptized for the remission of their sins. Therefore, those who have imagined that baptism is nothing more than a mark or sign by which we profess our religion before men, as soldiers wear the insignia of their sovereign as a mark of their profession, have not considered that which was the principal thing in baptism; which is, that we ought to receive it with this promise, ’He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved.’ Mark 16:16. "2. In this sense we are to understand what is said by Paul, that Christ sanctifieth and cleanseth the church ’with the washing of the water by the word,’ Ephesians 5:26; and, in another place, that ’according to his mercy he saved us by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost,’ Titus 3:5; and by Peter, that ’baptism doth save us,’ 1 Peter 3:21. For it was not the intention of Paul to signify that our ablution and salvation are completed by the water, or that water contains in itself the virtue to purify, regenerate, end renew; nor did Peter mean that it was the cause of salvation, but only that the knowledge and assurance of it is received in this sacrament: which is sufficiently evident from the words they have used. For Paul connects together the ’word of life’ and ’the baptism of water;’ as if he had said, that our ablution and sanctification are announced to us by the gospel, and by baptism this message is confirmed. And Peter, after having said that ’baptism doth save us,’ immediately adds, that it is ’not the putting away the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience towards God,’ which proceeds from faith. But on the contrary, baptism promises us no other purification than by the sprinkling of the blood of Christ; which is emblematically represented by water, on account of its resemblance to washing and cleansing. Who, then, can pretend that we are cleansed by that water, which clearly testifies the blood of Christ to be our true and only ablution? So that, to refute the error of those who refer all to the virtue of the water, no better argument could be found, than in the signification of baptism itself, which abstracts us as well from that visible element, which is placed before our eyes, as from all other means of salvation, that it may fix our minds on Christ alone. "3. Nor must it be supposed that baptism is administered only for the time past, so that for sins into which we fall after baptism, it would be necessary to seek other new remedies of expiation, in I know not what other sacraments, as if the virtue of baptism were become obsolete. In consequence of this error, it happened in former ages, that some persons would not be baptized except at the close of their life, and almost in the moment of their death, so that they might obtain pardon for their whole life; a preposterous caution, which is frequently censured in the writings of the ancient bishops. But we ought to conclude, that at whatever time we are baptized, we are washed and purified for the whole of life. Whenever we have fallen, therefore, we must recur to the remembrance of baptism, and arm our minds with the consideration of it, that we may be always certified and assured of the remission of our sins. For though, when it has been once administered, it appears to be past, yet it is not abolished by subsequent sins. For the purity of Christ is offered to us in it; and that always retains its virtue, is never overcome by any blemishes, but purifies and obliterates all our defilements." 9. Timothy Dwight, President of Yale, says:-- "To be born of water here means baptism and in my view it is as necessary to our admission into the visible church, as to be born of the Spirit is to our admission into the invisible kingdom." "It is to be observed, that he who understands the authority of this institution and refuses to obey it, will never enter into either the visible or the invisible kingdom." 10. Dr. Thomas Scott, author of the Commentary, says:-- "Men and brethren, what shall we do?--To this the Apostle replied, by exhorting them to repent of all their sins, and openly to avow their firm belief that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, by being baptized in his name. In thus professing their faith in him, all who truly believed would receive a full remission of their sins for his sake, as well as a participation of the sanctifying and comforting graces of the Holy Spirit." Scott’s Commentary on Acts 2:38. 11. Witsius (on the Economy of the Covenants, London, 1837, 2 vols. p. 429) says:-- "Thus far concerning the rites of immersion and emersion. Let us now consider the ablution or washing, which is the effect of the water applied to the body. In external baptism there is ’the putting away the filth of the flesh,’ 1 Peter 3:21, which represents the ablution or washing away the filth of the soul contracted by sin, Acts 22:16, ’Arise and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord.’ But the filth of sin may be considered either with respect to the guilt, which is annexed to the filth or stain, and so it is removed by remission, which is a part of justification; or with respect to the stain itself, or spiritual deformity and dissimilitude to the image of God, and so it is taken away by the grace of the sanctifying Spirit; and both are sealed by baptism. Of the former, Peter speaks, Acts 2:38, ’Be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of sins.’ Concerning the latter, Paul writes, Ephesians 5:25-26, ’Christ loved the church, and gave himself for it, that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word.’ And they are laid before us both together, 1 Corinthians 6:11, ’But ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.’" So speaks one of the moat learned and influential of the great continental doctors, in his work on the Economy of the Covenants. 12. Rev. James McCord, one of the most popular and learned Presbyterian ministers of Kentucky, of the present century, said some years ago:-- "You will not, therefore, deem it an unreasonable statement, that there is no ordinary possibility of salvation without the precincts of the Christian church, if once we can clearly make it out to you that the church is the great mean of effecting man’s salvation. "This is not one of those questions that are only to be settled by long and difficult argument. It is a question of fact; and you mil find the decision written, as with a sunbeam, in every page of Scripture. When the Saviour gave commandment to his Apostles to proclaim his great salvation to all people under heaven, what was the declaration that accompanied this commandment? ’He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved.’ When those Apostles made the first proof of their ministry, in the city of Jerusalem, on the memorable day of Pentecost, what was their answer to the agonized multitudes who felt convicted of the sin of crucifying God’s own Messiah, and cried out in horror, ’Men and brethren, what shall we do?’ ’Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.’ This was their answer to the eager inquiry. When the Apostles went abroad among the Gentile nations, what other prescription did they ever give for attaining to God’s salvation? Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ:’ ’believe and be baptized:’ ’the word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart--that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thy heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For, with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation."’ Last Appeal, p. 165, 166. 13. And that this is all consistent with certain declarations of the Westminster Catechism and Confession of Faith, the following extracts show:-- "Q. 165. What is baptism? "A. Baptism is a sacrament of the New Testament, wherein Christ hath ordained the washing with water in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, to be a sign and seal of ingrafting into himself; of remission of sins by his blood, and regeneration by his Spirit; of adoption, and resurrection unto everlasting life; and whereby the parties baptized are solemnly admitted into the visible church, and enter into an open and professed engagement to be wholly and only the Lord’s." The doctrine of the Confession is more fully declared in chap. 28, sec. 1;--to which we invite attention. It is in the words following:-- "Baptism is a sacrament of the New Testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, not only for the solemn admission of the party, baptized, into the visible church; but also to be unto him a sign and seal of the covenant of grace, of his ingrafting into Christ, of regeneration of remission of sins, and of his giving up unto God, through Jesus Christ, to walk in newness of life: which sacrament is, by Christ’s own appointment, to be continued in his church until the end of the world." 14. To the same effect speak other Confessions of Faith, such as-- 15. Episcopalian: The clergy are ordered, before proceeding to baptize, to make the following prayer:1 "Almighty and everlasting God, who, of thy great mercy, didst save Noah and his family in the Ark from perishing by water; and also didst safely lead the children of Israel, thy people, through the Red Sea; figuring thereby thy holy baptism; and by the baptism of thy well-beloved Son Jesus Christ in the river Jordan, didst sanctify the element water, to the mystical washing away of sin; we beseech thee, for thine infinite mercies, that thou wilt mercifully look upon these thy servants; wash them and sanctify them with the Holy Ghost; that they, being delivered from thy wrath, may be received into the Ark of Christ’s church; and being steadfast in faith, joyful through hope, and rooted in charity, may so pass the waves of this troublesome world that finally, they may come to the land of everlasting life; there to reign with thee, world without end, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen." After reading a part of the discourse with Nicodemus, they are ordered to make the following exhortation:2 "Beloved, ye hear in this gospel the express words of our Saviour Christ, that except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. Whereby ye may perceive the great necessity of this sacrament, where it may be had. Likewise, immediately before his ascension into heaven, (as we read in Mark 16:1-20) he gave command to his disciples, saying, Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not, shall be damned. Which also showeth unto us the great benefit we reap thereby. For which cause, St. Peter the Apostle, when, upon his first preaching of the gospel, many were pricked at the heart, and said to him and the rest of the Apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do? replied and said unto them, Repent and be baptized, every one of you, for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost: for the promise is to you and your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call. And with many other words exhorted he them, saying, Save yourselves from this untoward generation. For, as the same Apostle testifieth in another place, even baptism doth also now save us, (not the putting away the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience towards God,) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Doubt ye not, therefore, but earnestly believe that he will favourably receive these present persons, truly repenting; and coming unto him by faith; that he will grant them remission of their sins, and bestow upon them the Holy Ghost; that he will give them, the blessing of eternal life, and make them partakers of his everlasting kingdom:’ 16. The Methodist Creed says:-- "Dearly beloved, forasmuch as all men are conceived and born in sin, (and that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and they that are in the flesh cannot please God, but live in sin, committing many actual transgressions:) and that our Saviour Christ saith, None shall enter into the kingdom of God, except he be regenerate and born anew of water and of the Holy Ghost; I beseech you to call upon God the Father through our Lord Jesus Christ, that of his bounteous goodness he will grant to these persons that which by nature they cannot have that they may be baptized with water and the Holy Ghost, and received into Christ’s holy church, and be made lively members of the same." Then, it is ordained that the minister say, or repeat, the following prayer:-- "Almighty and immortal God, the aid of all that need, the helper of all that flee to thee for succour, the life of them that believe and the resurrection of the dead: We call upon thee for these persons, that they, coming to thy holy baptism, may receive remission of their sins, by spiritual regeneration. Receive them, O Lord, as thou hast promised by thy well-beloved Son, saying, Ask, and ye shall receive, seek, and ye shall find, knock, and it shall be opened unto you; so give unto us that ask; let us that seek find; open the gate to us that knock; that these persons may enjoy the everlasting benediction of the heavenly washing, and may come to the eternal kingdom which thou hast promised by Christ our Lord. Amen." Dis. p. 105. 17. Baptist: Chapter 30: sec. 1--"Baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, to be unto the party baptized a sign of his fellowship with him in his death and resurrection; of his being ingrafted into him; of remission of sins and of his giving up unto God, through Jesus Christ, to live and walk in newness of life." The Baptist follows the Presbyterian church as servilely as the Methodist church follows the English hierarchy. But she avows her faith that immersion is a sign of remission. A sign of the past, the present, or the future! A sign accompanying! 18. Confession of Bohemia: "We believe that whatsoever, by baptism is in the outward ceremony signified and witnessed, all that doth the Lord God perform inwardly. That is, he washeth sway sin, begetteth a man again, and bestoweth salvation upon him: for the bestowing of these excellent fruits was holy baptism given and granted to the church." 19. Confession of Augsburg: "Concerning baptism, they teach that it is necessary to salvation, as a ceremony ordained of Christ: also, by baptism the grace of God is offered." 20. Confession of Saxony: I baptize thee--that is, I do witness that, by this dipping, thy sins be washed away, and that thou art now received of the true God." 21. Confession of Wittenburg: "We believe and confess that baptism is that sea, into the bottom whereof, as the Prophet earth, God doth cast all our sins." 22. Confession of Helvetia: "To be baptized in the name of Christ, is to be enrolled, entered, and received into the covenant. and family, and so into the inheritance of the sons of God; that is to say, to be called the sons of God to be purged also from the filthiness of sins, and to be endued with the manifold grace of God for to lead a new and innocent life." 23. Confession of Sueveland: "As touching baptism, we confess that it is the font of regeneration, washeth away sins and saveth us. But all these things we do understand as Peter doth interpret them. 1 Peter 3:21." Could any thing be added confirmatory of the creeds, we should look to the great ecclesiastic fathers, such as-- 1. Barnabas, in his Catholic Epistle, chap. 11:, says--"Let us now inquire whether the Lord took care to manifest any thing beforehand, concerning water and the cross. Now, for the former of these, it is written to the people of Israel, how they shall not receive that baptism which brings to forgiveness of sins; but shall institute another to themselves that cannot. For thus with the Prophet, ’Be astonished, O heavens! and let the earth tremble at it; because this people have done two great and wicked things: They have left me, the fountain of living waters, and have digged for themselves broken cisterns that can hold no water. Is my holy mountain, Zion, a desolate wilderness? For he shall be as a young bird when its nest is taken away.’ ’Consider how he hath joined both the cross and the water together.’ For this he saith: ’Blessed are they, who, putting their trust in the cross, descend into the water; for they shall have their reward in due time: then, saith he, will I give it them.’ But, as concerning the present time, he saith, ’Their leaves shall not fail.’ Meaning thereby, that every word that shall go out of your mouth, shall, through faith and charity, be to the conversion and hope of many. In like manner does another Prophet speak: ’And the land of Jacob was the praise of all the earth; magnifying thereby the vessels of his Spirit. And what follows? ’And there was a river running on the right hand, and beautiful trees grew up by it, and he that shall eat of them shall live for ever: The signification of which is this: that we go down into the water, full of sins and pollutions; but come up again bringing forth fruit; having in our hearts the fear and hope which are in Jesus by the Spirit: ’And whosoever shall eat of them shall live for ever: That is, whosoever shall hearken to those that call them, and shall believe, shall live for ever." 2. Hermas deposes as follows, in a work of his, called "The Commands of Hermas:"-- "And I said to him, ’I have even now heard from certain teachers, that there is no other repentance besides that of baptism; when we go down into the water, and receive the forgiveness of sins; and after that we should sin no more, but live in purity.’ And he said to me--’Thou hast been rightly informed.’" 3. Justin Martyr wrote about forty years after John the Apostle died; and stands most conspicuous among the primitive fathers. He addressed an Apology to the Emperor Antoninus Pius. In this apology, he narrates the practices of the Christians, and the reasons of them. Concerning those who are persuaded and believe the things which are taught, and who promise to live according to them, he writes:-- "Then we bring them to some place where there is water, and they are regenerated by the name way of regeneration by which we were regenerated: for they are washed in water, (en to udati,) in the name of God the Father and Lord of all things, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit: for Christ says, ’Unless you be regenerated, you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven;’ and every body knows it is impossible for those who are once generated (or born) to enter again into their mother’s womb." 4. Tertullian, the first who mentions infant baptism, flourished about A. D. 216. He writes against the practice: and among his most conclusive arguments against infant immersion, (for then there was no sprinkling,) he assumes, as a fundamental principle not to be questioned, that immersion was for the remission of sins; and this being universally conceded, he argues as follows:-- "Our Lord says, indeed, ’Do not forbid them to come to me;’ therefore, let them come when they are grown up--let them come when they understand--when they are instructed whither it is that they come. Let them be made Christians when they can know Christ. What need their guiltless age make such haste to the forgiveness of sins? Men will proceed more warily in worldly goods; and he that should not have earthly goods committed to him, yet shall have heavenly! Let them know how to desire this salvation, that you may appear to have given to one that asketh." P. 74. 5. Origen, though so great a visionary, is, nevertheless, a competent witness in any question of fact. And here I would again remind the reader, that it is as witnesses in a question of fact and not of opinion, we summon these ancients. It is not to tell their own opinions, or the reasons of them; but to depose what were the views of Christians on this institution in their times. There was no controversy on this subject for more than four hundred years; and, therefore, we only expect to find incidental allusions to it; but these are numerous, and of the most unquestionable character. Origen, in his homily upon Luke, says:-- "Infants are baptized for the forgiveness of their sine. Of what sins? Or, when have they sinned? Or, how can any reason of the law, in their case, hold good, but according to that sense that we mentioned even now? (that is) none is free from pollution, though his life be but the length of one day upon the earth." And in another place he says, that-- "The baptism of the church is given for the remission of sins." And again-- "If there were nothing in infants that wanted forgiveness and mercy, the grace of baptism would be needless to them." In another place, he says-- "But in the regeneration, (or new birth,) by the laver, (or baptism,) every one that is born again of water and the Spirit, is clear from pollution: clear (as I may venture to say) as by a glass darkly." 6. And as for Chrysostom, he expressly says:-- "In baptism, or the spiritual circumcision, there is no trouble to be undergone, but to throw off the load of sins, and receive pardon for all foregoing offences." And again-- "There is no receiving or having the bequeathed inheritance before one is baptized; and none can be called a son until he is baptized." 7. Cyprian: "While," says he, "I lay in darkness and uncertainty, I thought on what I had heard of a second birth, proposed by the divine goodness, but could not comprehend how a man could receive a new life from his being immersed in water, cease to be what he was before, and still remain the same body. How, said I, can such a change be possible? How can he, who is grown old in a worldly way of living, strip himself of his former inclinations and inveterate habits? Can he, who has spent his whole time in plenty, and indulged his appetite without restraint, ever be transformed into an example of frugality and sobriety? Or he who has always appeared in splendid apparel, stoop to the plain, simple, and unadorned dress of the common people? It is impossible for a man, who has borne the most honourable posts, ever to submit to lead a private and obscure life: or, that he who was never seen in public without a crowd of attendants and persons who endeavoured to make their fortunes by attending him, should ever bear to be alone. This," continues he, "was my way of arguing: I thought it was impossible for me to leave my former course of life, and the habits I was then engaged in and accustomed to; but no sooner did the life-giving water wash the spots off my soul, than my heart received the heavenly light of the Holy Spirit, which transformed me into a new creature; all my difficulties were cleared, my doubts dissolved, and my darkness dispelled. I was then able to do what before seemed impossible: could discern that my former life was earthly and sinful, according to the impurity of my birth; but that my spiritual birth gave me new ideas and inclinations, and directed all my views to God." Cyprian flourished A. D. 250. On what occasion or on what question could we, with more propriety or with more confidence than on the present, ask--"What need have we of farther testimony? We have heard the Harbinger of the Messiah and the Messiah himself; we have heard his holy Apostles and Evangelists; we have heard the primitive Apostolic church, the most venerable and reputable ecclesiastic fathers; we have heard the Hebrew church, the Greek church, the Roman church, and all Dissenting churches confess "ONE BAPTISM FOR THE REMISSION OF SINS." We have not only heard the renowned founders, reformers, and acknowledged oracles of all Protestant parties, but also have read in their own words, in the symbols, creeds, and formulas of their communion and intercommunion, their expositions and defences of Christian baptism as a sign and a seal of remission of all past sins--and again of confession and petition as the means of pardon for all sins committed after baptism. There is not only a general, but, I might say, a universal admission of the theory, with comparatively few dissentients, as respects the practice and explicit dispensation of the ordinance for this purpose. Some, nay many, have taught and exhibited baptism alone as an effectual mean of salvation and pardon, Hence originated infant baptism; and hence, too originated a denial of baptism or remission of sins. This is the history of the whole controversy in one sentence. The Greek and Roman churches, during their apostasy, taught baptism alone, or without faith, for remission of sins. Some of the reformed churches, while they practised the papal rite of sprinkling babes, repudiated its connection with the remission of sins; but were never able to give a good reason for this practice that did not imply such a belief. Baptists, too borrowing every thing from their Pedobaptist brethren but the subject and action of baptism, have reduced it to a mere form of making the Christian profession--a door into their church. But when in, they harmonize in every thing with those without the pale of their communion, orthodox in their opinions of the true theory of Christian doctrine. So that, among all these parties, there is no true and scriptural dispensation of Christian baptism. Baptism, according to the Apostolic church, is both "a sign" and "a seal" of remission of all former sins. In this sense only does "baptism now save us." Not in putting away the filth of the flesh, but in obtaining a good conscience through faith in the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. This faith in our hearts is expressed in the sign of baptism, our burial and resurrection with him, indicated by an immersion in water and an emersion out of it. Circumcision is said to have been, in one case at least, a sign and a seal. Baptism, in the same sense, and in a similar case, is also both a sign and a seal--the sign, however, at most, is only indicative of what has been sealed. Such, indeed, are all sensible signs. The sense, we may say, is in the sign, and the confirmations in the seal. This circumcision, or cutting round, and cutting off, was a sign of the insulation or separation of Abraham and his seed from every other nation and people. But to Abraham himself, previously possessed of faith in the promised Messiah, it was also a seal, or confirmation of that faith and its rightfulness which he had experienced and expressed before he was circumcised. But such it was not to either Ishmael or Isaac. To them was a sign of their separation from other tribes, and a people, and a confirmation that they were of the seed of Abraham and heirs of Canaan, accord to a divine charter. Baptism, though not an antetype of a type, a sign of a sign, or a seal of a seal, as some system-makers would make it when representing it as coming in the room and standing in the stead of circumcision, is, indeed, analogous to circumcision, as the Sabbath to the Lord’s day, or as the Passover to the Lord’s supper, especially in this:--that in one point it is a sign of the burial and resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and of our burial and resurrection in and with him; and, in another point of view, a seal of the righteousness of faith, or the remission of all our past sins, through faith in his blood, then, and in that act, publicly expressed and confirmed. This, most unquestionably, is its place, its meaning, and importance in the Christian institution. This, and no other view of it, now entertained by professing Christians, fully expounds and exhausts all that is said of it in the Apostolic Scriptures, in the abstracts of Christian doctrine and formulas of the primitive and ancient church, as well as in the sayings and expositions of our most gifted, learned, and Christian expositors of the Christian doctrine, a few samples of which, and but a few of those in our possession, have now been presented to the reader. Yet these are, we presume to say, enough to reconcile us to such sayings as these:--"He that believes and is baptized shall be saved." "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of the Lord Jesus, for the remission of sins." "Arise and be baptized, and wash away your sins." "The like figure corresponding thereunto, baptism doth save us," &c. &c. Not, indeed, that there is anything in the mere element of water, or in the form of placing the subject in it, or in the person that administers it, or in the formula used upon the occasion, though both good taste and piety have something to do in these particulars, but all its virtue and efficacy is in the faith and intelligence of him that receives it. To him that believeth and repenteth of his sins, and to none else, then, we may safely say, "be baptized for the remission of your sins," and it will surely be granted by the Lord, and enjoyed by the subject with an assurance and an evidence which the word and ordinances of the Lord alone can bestow. 1 Common Prayer, p. 165. 2 Page 165. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 32: 01.05.01. ADOPTION ======================================================================== B O O K F I F T H. CHAPTER I. ADOPTION. ANTECEDENT and consequent are relative terms. A consequent is that which follows from, or is dependent upon an antecedent;--the result of an instituted connection between it and that which precedes it, in nature or by appointment. There is a conventional and artificial, as well as a natural and necessary, connection between antecedents and consequents. Consequents in grammar, logic, mathematics, religion, though always dependent in some way upon their respective antecedents, are not in the same sense, nor always, when in the same sense, in the same degree dependent upon their antecedents. In nature, the succession of day and night, of summer and winter, of seed-time and harvest are essentially natural consequents, because the effects of the motions of the earth. While the earth remains, they must continue. But the motions of a wheel, by the weight and motion of water upon it, are consequents both of nature and of art combined. In things mental and spiritual, the connection between moral and spiritual antecedents and consequents is not to be measured by time, or the motions of bodies. A perception, a thought, a volition, and an action may be so simultaneous as to baffle all the measures of time. Still they are, in nature or by divine appointment, antecedent and consequent, though they may not stand to each other as cause and effect. But who can satisfactorily trace the connection between antecedents and consequents in the operations of nature in many of her most beautiful and beneficent developments? Take, for example, some of her sublime processes in crystallization. Who can explain her operations in converting certain fluids into various solid bodies of the most beautiful and grotesque forms and of the most variegated colours. Who can explain the phenomena of their polarity, which causes one particle of matter to attract an atom of another particle and to repel the other parts of it, so as to form numerous sides bounded by plane surfaces? Who can enumerate and arrange the antecedents and consequents acting and reacting in converting the contents of an egg into a well-formed and well-fledged peacock? The mysteries of a spiritual process on the inner man are not more incomprehensible than the mysteries of that incubation which forms bones, muscles, arteries, veins, skin, feathers, and hairs out of the yolk of an egg. Still, it is in the way of antecedents and consequents, in action and in reaction. In making a son of God out of a son of man, as he now is, the process may be more sublime and spiritual, but not more mysterious and incomprehensible. There is the spirit of man, paralyzed and dead in trespasses and sins, energized, quickened, and transformed by the power of Divine truth, perceived, received, and obeyed. Here are antecedents and consequents not governed by the laws of matter. Hence faith, repentance, and baptism are severally essential to the exhibition, development, and perfection of the Christian man. Faith and truth, repentance and death unto sin, baptism or a burial and resurrection with Christ, are as much antecedents and consequents respecting one another as are oxygen, caloric, and light to animal life and comfort. But we do not separate these, in nature nor in operation, from one another: no more can we separate faith, repentance, and baptism, in regeneration or conversion, according to the spiritual agencies concurrent in forming a new man out of an old man. We are, indeed, enlightened, converted; or, rather, we are enlightened, quickened, regenerated, justified, adopted, sanctified, and saved by the truth believed and obeyed. Faith and obedience are in embryo, twin sisters in the heart of a convert; and are developed, manifested, and perfected by the overt acts of confession and profession, or by faith and baptism. When, then, we say that justification, sanctification, and adoption are consequent upon faith, repentance, and baptism, we mean not to place repentance and baptism on a level with faith, or as worth any thing without it. Nay, indeed, we rather regard baptism as deriving all its value from faith, and as being an embodied and formal profession of it. "For, as faith, without works, is dead, being alone," so baptism, without faith, is a mere useless ceremony, and in no respect benefits, rather, indeed, injures its subject. Even faith itself is of no value separated from the blood of Christ. Our life spiritual is found in the moral of his blood. For, as nothing which we eat can enter, but by its death and dissolution, into our blood and life, so nothing that Christ did, apart from what he suffered, can ever enter into our spiritual life, health, and moral constitution. Baptism being the last of the series of truth, faith, repentance, love, and profession, it is properly styled, in figure, "being born again," or being "born of water and of the Spirit." And faith being an active, operative principle, containing in it all that is in the gospel of Christ’s blood, it is the vitalizing principle of Christian activity and of all Christian excellence and enjoyment. Adoption is usually placed after justification, in our systems of scholastic theology. We are not in possession of any good reason for this peculiar arrangement. "Because you are sons," says Paul, "God has sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, breathing Abba, Father." Adoption, indeed, is a mere act of Divine favour, much more glorious on the part of God, than the adoption of a squalid wretch on the part of a king, to be an heir in common with his own son. In our baptism, we are born into the Divine family, enrolled in heaven. We receive justification or pardon, we are separated or sanctified to God, and glorified by the inspiration of his own Spirit. While justification and sanctification, especially the latter, occupy a very large space in Apostolic Christianity, adoption is but occasionally named or alluded to. It is wholly and exclusively a work of Divine grace. But justification and sanctification--although the former is really no more than pardon, and the latter no more than separation to God, to his service, to his and our glory--cover a large space in the remedial economy. We shall, therefore, develop more at length justification and sanctification; the former of which changes our state, and the latter not only our state, but our character. We shall, however, in doing this, present them as the consequents of Christian baptism, as Paul does, when he says, "But you are washed," in baptism "but you are justified, but you are sanctified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 33: 01.05.02. JUSTIFICATION ======================================================================== CHAPTER II. JUSTIFICATION. "IF any man be in Christ," says Paul, "he is a new creation; old things have passed away; all things have become new." By the special favour of God, Jesus Christ "is made unto us wisdom, justification, sanctification, and redemption." Hence, as saith the Prophet, "In him shall all the seed of Israel be justified, and in him shall they glory." "He that boasteth," therefore, "let him boast in the Lord." What, then, is justification, the first fruit of this heavenly cluster of Divine graces? It is, indeed, a trite but a true saying, that the term justification is a forensic word; and, therefore, indicates that its subject has been accused of crime, or of the transgression of law. It also implies that the subject of it has not only been accused and tried, but also acquitted. Such, then, is legal or forensic justification. It is, indeed, a sentence of acquittal announced by a tribunal, importing that the accused is found not guilty. If convicted, he cannot be justified; if justified, he has not been convicted. But, such is not justification by grace. Evangelical justification is the justification of one that has been convicted as guilty before God, the Supreme and Ultimate Judge of the Universe. But the whole world has been tried and found guilty before God. So that, in fact, "there is none righteous; no, not one." Therefore, by deeds of law, no man can be justified before God. "For should a man keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all." He has despised the whole authority of the law and the Lawgiver. It is, then, utterly impossible that any sinner can be forensically or legally justified before God, by a law which he has in any one instance violated. If, then, a sinner be justified, it must be on some other principle than law. He must be justified by favour and not by right. Still it must be rightfully done by him that justifies a transgression, else he will be liable to the charge of injustice to the law and the government. This is the emergency which must be met by evangelical justification. The mission and mediation of the Messiah were primarily to meet this emergency; though, indeed, he has done much more than to meet it. Evangelical justification is, therefore, a justification by favour as respects man; and it has been made just also on the part of God, by the sacrifice or obedience unto death of his Son. Still it must be regarded as not a real or legal justification. It is, as respects man, only pardon, or forgiveness of the past; but the pardoned sinner being ever after treated and regarded as though he were righteous, he is constituted and treated as righteous before God. He is as cordially received into the favour and friendship of God, as though he had never at any time offended against his law. This, then, is what is peculiarly and appropriately called "evangelical justification." Still, legally contemplated, God, in fact, "justifies the ungodly." And so teaches the Apostle Paul. But every one of reflection will inquire, How can the justification of the ungodly be regarded as compatible with the justice, the purity, the truthfulness of God? How can he stand justified before the pure, and holy, and righteous peers of his celestial realm--the hierarchs and princes of heaven? This is, indeed, to very many, a profound mystery. And "great," truly, "is the mystery of godliness." Standing at this point, and viewing it in all its bearings, heaven is always in rapture while contemplating this new, and grand, and glorious revelation of the manifold wisdom of God. It is, however, a revealed mystery. One there is, and was, and evermore will be, who, by his obedience to that violated law, even unto death, has so magnified and made honourable, that law and government, as to open a channel through which truth, righteousness, and mercy can harmoniously flow together and justify God while justifying the sinner, by pardoning him, and then treating him as though he never had sinned against his throne and government. His death was, therefore, contemplated as the one only true, real, and adequate sin-offering ever presented in this universe, in the presence of God, angels, men, and demons, that does for ever justify God in justifying man. It will for ever silence all demur, and fill the universe, heaven and eternity, with the praise of the Lord. Hence, in perfect harmony with all the types of the law, the oracles of the Prophets, and the promises and covenants of God, he is truly, rightfully, and with the emphatic seal of God, surnamed "JEHOVAH OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS." Therefore, as saith Isaiah, "By the knowledge of him shall my righteous servant justify many whose iniquities he shall have borne." How, then, is it dispensed? or, rather, how is it received and enjoyed? "It is through faith," says Paul, "that it might be by grace," to the end that the promise of eternal life "might be sure to all the seed;" whether, by nature, Jews or Gentiles. It is through faith, and not on account of faith, as though there was in faith some intrinsic merit. It is worthy of remark, that if faith were a work of the head or of the heart, or of both, possessing inherent and essential merit, it would be as much a work to be rewarded as any other exercise of the understanding or of the heart. Love is said "to be the fulfilling of the whole law," and covetousness is called idolatry. Were, then, justification to be founded on faith, hope, or love, as works of the understanding or affections, it could be no more of grace than any other blessing received on account of any thing done by us or wrought in us. Hence, in the evangelical dispensation of justification, it is in some sense connected with seven causes. Paul affirms, that a man is justified by faith: Romans 5:1; Galatians 2:16; Galatians 3:24. In the second place, he states, that, "we are justified freely by his grace:" Romans 3:24; Titus 3:7. In the third place, on another occasion, he teaches that "we are justified by, Christ’s blood:" Romans 5:9. Again, in the fourth place, he says, that "we are justified by, the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God:" 1 Corinthians 6:11. To the Galatians, in the fifth place, he declares, that "we are justified by Christ:" Galatians 2:16. In the sixth place, Isaiah says, "we are justified by knowledge:" Isaiah 53:11. And James, in the seventh place, says, "we are justified by works:" James 2:21. Thus, by Divine authority, faith is connected as an effect, in some sense, of seven causes, viz. Faith, Grace, the blood of Christ, the Name of the Lord, Knowledge; Christ, and Works. May it not, then, be asked, Why do so many select one of these only, as essential to justification? This is one of the evidences of the violence of sectarianism. Call these causes or means of justification, and they may severally indicate an influence or an instrumentality in the consummation of this great act of Divine favour. He that assumes any one or two of them, as the exclusive or one only essential cause of a sinner’s justification, acts arbitrarily and hazardously, rather than discreetly or according to the oracles of God. We choose rather to give to them severally a Divine significance, and, consequently, a proper place in the consummation of evangelical justification. We feel obliged to use the same reason and discretion in ascertaining the developments of this work of Divine grace, that we may employ in searching into the works of God in nature and in moral government. How many agents and laws of nature co-operate in providing our daily bread? Suns rise and set, moons wax and wane, tides ebb and flow, the planets observe their cycles, morning, noon, and night perform their functions, the clouds pour their treasures into the bosom of the thirsty earth, the dews distil their freshness on the tender blade, and the electric fluid, unobserved, in perpetual motion, as the anima mundi ministers to life in every form of vegetable, animal, and human existence. Why, then, to reason’s ear should it sound discordant, or, to reason’s eye appear uncouth, that, in the scheme of redemption and regeneration, God’s instrumentalities should be as numerous and as various, yet as co-operative as those in outward and sensible nature. Again, let us survey the works of man to man, his modes and forms of action in the consummation of some grand scheme of human benefaction. Take, for example, that philanthropist who, standing on the sea-shore, descries a shipwrecked crew clinging to a portion of the wreck, tossed to and fro among the foaming billows of an angry sea. He calls to his son, and commands him to seize a boat and hasten to their rescue. He obeys. Cheerfully he plies the oars, and fearlessly struggles through many a conflicting wave, till he reaches the almost famished and fainting crew. He commands them to seize his arm and let go the wreck, and he will help them into his boat. They obey, and, all aboard, he commands them to grasp each his oar and co-operate with him in seeking the port of safety. They cheerfully co-operate, and are saved. The spectators and the narrators of this scene form and express very different views of it. One says, the perishing crew were saved by a man on the shore; another, by his son; another, by a boat; another, by getting into a boat; another, by rowing themselves to shore; another, by a favourable breeze. They all told the truth. There is no contradiction in their representations. But a philosopher says, they were saved by all these means together. Such is the case before us. These means may be regarded as causes co-operating in the result, all necessary, not one of them superfluous. But some one of them, to one person; another, to a second person; another, to a third person; and another, to a fourth, appears more prominent than the others: consequently, in narrating the deliverance, he ascribes it mainly to that cause which, at the time, made the most enduring impression on his own mind. But the calm, contemplative thinker thus arranges these concurrent causes. The original or moving cause was the humanity and kindness of the father that stood on the shore and saw them about to perish. His son, who took the boat and imperiled his life, was the efficient or meritorious cause. The boat itself was the instrumental cause. The knowledge of their own condition and the kind invitation tendered to the sufferers was the disposing cause. Their consenting to the condition was the formal cause. Their seizing the boat with their hands and springing into it was the immediate cause. And their co-operative rowing to the shore was the concurrent and effectual cause of their salvation. Had any one of the Apostles been accosted by captious, inquisitive, and speculative partisans for a reconciliation of all he had said, or that his fellow-labourers had said in their narratives, or allusions to particular persons, scenes, or events happening in his presence, or under his administration of affairs; had he been requested to explain and reconcile them with what he, or others of equal authority, had on other occasions said or written concerning them, doubtless, in some such way he could and would have explained them. Indeed, in the common experience of all courts of inquiry, and tribunals of justice, where numerous statements are made on questions of facts, by a single witness, and, still more, when a plurality are examined, such diversified representations are made rather to the confirmation than to the detriment or disparagement of the import or the credibility of these statements. How often, and by how many cavillers have the Four Gospels been subjected to such ordeals, on such pretences? But who has yet found good reasons to disparage or discredit these narratives on account of such assaults or misunderstandings? No question agitated since the era of Protestantism has occupied so much attention, or concentrated a greater amount of learning and research than the question of justification by faith; not, indeed, because of the inherent difficulties of the subject, but because of the defection and apostasy of the papal hierarchy, and the thick pall of darkness and error with which it had enveloped the whole Bible. One extreme generates another. Hence the terminology of the most orthodox schools on this subject is neither so scriptural nor so intelligible as the great importance of the subject demands. To harmonize the seven statements found in the Bible on this subject, we know no method more rational or more scriptural than that indicated in the illustration given. We are pardoned and treated as righteous, or, in other words, we are justified by the grace of God the Father, as the original and moving cause; by Christ his Son, and by his blood or sacrifice, as the meritorious cause; by faith and knowledge, as instrumental causes; by our convictions of sin and penitence, as the disposing cause; and by works, as the concurrent or concomitant cause. This, however, is justifying God in justifying us. "You see," said the Apostle James, "how faith wrought by works," in the case of Abraham, when he offered up his son upon the altar; "and by works his faith was made perfect." Indeed, true faith necessarily works; therefore, a working faith is the only true, real, and proper faith in Divine or human esteem. Faith without works is no more faith than a corpse is a man. It is, therefore, aptly, by high authority, regarded as "dead." Faith alone, or faith without works, profits nothing. But, as Romanists taught works without faith, Protestants have sometimes taught faith without works. The latter quote Paul, and the former quote James, as plenary authority. But the two Apostles have fallen into bad hands. Paul never preached faith without works, nor James works without faith. Between these parties, the Apostles have been much abused. Controversies generate new terms or affix new ideas to words. The question between Calvin and Arminius--or between their followers, is not the identical question between Paul and the Jews, or James and nominal Christians. The works of the law, and the works of faith are as different as law and gospel. Works, indeed, are to be considered as the imbodiments of views, thoughts, emotions, volitions, and feelings. They are appreciable indications of the states of the mind; sensible exponents of the condition of the inner man. For example, he that seeks justification by the works of the law is not in a state of mind to be justified by the blood of Christ, or by the grace of God; he is ignorant of himself, ignorant of God; consequently, too proud of his powers to condescend to be pardoned or justified by the mere mercy and merits of another. Rich, and independent in his views of himself, he cannot think of being a debtor to the worth and compassion of one who contemplates him as ruined and undone for ever. He is too proud to be vain, or too vain to be proud of himself. In either view, he cannot submit to the righteousness of faith. For this purpose, Paul says of the Pharisaic Jews, "They, being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves to the righteousness of God," or to that righteousness which God has provided for the ungodly. On the other hand, the works of him that is justified by faith are exponents of an essentially different state of mind. He is humble, dependent, grateful. Feeling himself undone, ruined, a debtor without hope to pay, he sues for mercy, and mercy is obtained, he is grateful, thankful, and humble before God. In this view of the matter, to justify a man for any work of which he is capable, would be to confirm him in carnality, selfishness, and pride. But, convinced, humbled, emptied of himself, and learning, through faith in the gospel, that God has provided a ransom for the ruined, the wretched, and the undone, he gladly accepts pardon through sovereign mercy, and humbles himself to a state of absolute dependence on the merits and mercy of another. Justification by faith in Christ is, then, the imbodiment of views in perfect harmony with truth, with our condition, with the whole revealed character of God, and, necessarily, tends to humility, gratitude, piety, and humanity; while justification sought by works as naturally tends to pride, ingratitude, impiety, and inhumanity. Such being the true philosophy of justification by faith, and of justification sought and supposed to be obtained by works of law, we need not marvel that the God of all grace, after having sent his Son into our world to become a sacrifice for us--to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification--should have instituted faith in him, in his death, burial, and resurrection, as the means of a perfect reconciliation to himself, commanding us not only to cherish this faith in our hearts, but exhibit it by a visible death to sin; a burial with Christ to sin, and a rising again to walk in a new life, expressed and symbolized by an immersion in water into the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, not as a work of righteousness, but as a mere confession of our faith in what he did for us, and of our fixed purpose to walk in him. Hence, it is the only suitable institution to such an indication, as being, not a moral work of righteousness, but a mere passive surrendering of ourselves to die, to be buried, and to be raised again by the merit and aid of another. Baptism is, therefore, no work of law, no moral duty, no moral righteousness, but a simple putting on of Christ and placing ourselves wholly in his hand, and under his guidance. It is an open, sensible, voluntary expression of our faith in Christ, a visible imbodiment of faith, to which, as being thus perfected, the promise of remission of sins is divinely annexed. In one word, it is faith perfected. Hence, when Paul exegetically develops its blessings, he says, "But you are washed, but you are sanctified, but you are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our Lord."1 Thus, justification, sanctification, and adoption--the three most precious gifts of the gospel are evangelically connected with faith in the Lord Jesus and baptism into his death. The immediate baptism of the first converts, after faith, is satisfactorily explained in this view of it: three thousand in one day believed and were baptized. The jailer and his family were. enlightened, believed, and were baptized the same hour of the night. Paul himself, so soon as he bad recovered from the influence of the supernatural brightness which deprived him of sight, and before he had eaten or drunk any thing, was commanded, without delay, to be forthwith baptized. "And he arose and was baptized." Baptism, with them, was the perfecting, or confession, of their faith. The Ethiopian eunuch, on his journey in the desert, is as striking an example of this as are the cases named. It was "putting on Christ" as their righteousness. Baptism, without faith, is of no value whatever; for, in truth, baptism is but the actual and symbolic profession of faith. It is its legitimate imbodiment and consummation. And whatever virtue there is in it, or connected with it, is but the virtue of faith in the blood of Christ applied to the conscience and to the heart. The burial in water is a burial with Christ and in Christ. "For in him shall all the seed of Israel," the believing children of Abraham, "be justified," and in him, "and not in themselves, shall they glory." It is, then, the sensible and experimental deliverance from both the guilt and the pollution of sin; and for this reason, or in this view of it, believing penitents, when inquiring what they should do, were uniformly commanded by the ambassadors of Christ to be "baptized for the remission of sins," as God’s own way, under the New Institution, of receiving sinners into favour, through the death, burial, and resurrection of his Son, into whose name especially, as well as by whose mediatorial authority, they were commanded to be, on confession, buried in baptism. Salvation, in the aggregate, is all of grace; and all the parts of it are, consequently, gracious. Nor do we, in truth, in obeying the gospel, or in being buried in baptism, make void either law or gospel, but establish and confirm both. 1 1 Corinthians 6:11. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 34: 01.05.03. SANCTIFICATION ======================================================================== CHAPTER III. SANCTIFICATION. PREFACE.--In a specific, evangelical sense, sanctification is the act of separating a person or thing from a common to a special and spiritual use. In the following chapter on Sanctification, we have dilated, in a discursive way, on the whole subject of spiritual influence, in illumination and conversion, as terminating in sanctification. These, indeed, are concurrent means of self-consecration and of Divine sanctification or separation to God. But, in strict reference to our specific object, here, we have only to state, that the Christian is contemplated, not merely as adopted into the family of God, not merely as pardoned or justified, but, as also sanctified or consecrated to God, both in state and character. Of this separation or sanctification to God, the Holy Spirit,--which, in the Christian, is the Holy Guest, commonly called the Holy Ghost, is the personal agent and author, his word the instrument, and the blood of Christ, apprehended and received by faith, the real, cleansing, purifying means. Holiness is literally separation from the earth to God and heaven. Faith, therefore, in the unseen, the spiritual, and the heavenly, is as necessary to sanctification as to justification, pardon, or adoption. We are justified by faith, sanctified by faith, whatever the instrument or means may be; whether the word of God, the blood of Christ, or the ordinance of baptism. The reason of this is, that without faith every man is spiritually blind, and dead to the things of God, of Christ, and heaven. Well has Paul defined it to be the evidence or conviction of things not seen, and, consequently, the confidence of things hoped for. But faith, as James teaches, is perfected only by obedience. In reference to this and to our baptism, we are said to be washed or purified by the bath of regeneration, sometimes called "the washing of the new birth," and by the "renewal of the Holy Spirit." In the following essay, we have argued the whole subject of spiritual influence, as understood and taught by us, and as terminating in our sanctification and holiness, which, indeed, is the glorious consummation of the whole Christian dispensation. "For, without holiness, no man shall see," or enjoy, "God." "Happy the pure in heart," said the great Teacher, "for they shall see God," "in whose presence there is fulness of joy, and at whose right hand there are pleasures for evermore." ON the subject of spiritual influence, there are two extremes of doctrine. There is the Word alone system, and there is the Spirit alone system. I believe in neither. The former is the parent of a cold, lifeless rationalism and formality. The latter is, in some temperaments, the cause of a wild, irrepressible enthusiasm; and, in other cases, of a dark, melancholy despondency. With some, there is a sort of compound system, claiming both the Spirit and the Word--representing the naked Spirit of God operating upon the naked soul of a man, without any argument or motive interposed, in some mysterious and inexplicable way--incubating the soul, quickening, or making it spiritually alive, by a direct and immediate contact, without the intervention of one moral idea or impression. But, after this creating act, there is the bringing to bear upon it the gospel revelation, called conversion. Hence, in this school, regeneration is the cause; and conversion, at some future time, the result of that abstract operation. There yet remains another school, which never speculatively separates the Word and the Spirit; which, in every case of conversion, contemplates them as co-operating; or, which is the same thing, conceives of the Spirit of God as clothed with the gospel motives and arguments--enlightening, convincing, persuading sinners, and thus enabling them to flee from the wrath to come. In this school, conversion and regeneration are terms indicative of a moral or spiritual change--of a change accomplished through the arguments;--the light, the love, the grace of God expressed and revealed, as well as approved by the supernatural attestations of the Holy Spirit. They believe, and teach, that it is the Spirit that quickens, and that the Word of God--the Living Word--is that incorruptible seed which, when planted in the heart, vegetates, and germinates, and grows, and fructifies into eternal life. They hold it to be unscriptural, irrational, unphilosophic to discriminate between spiritual agency and instrumentality--between what the Word, per se, and the Spirit, per se, severally does, as though they were two independent and wholly distinct powers or influences. They object not to the co-operation of secondary causes; of various subordinate instrumentalities; the ministry of men; the ministry of angels; the doctrine of special providences; but, however, whenever the Word gets into the heart--the spiritual seed into the moral nature of man, it as naturally, as spontaneously grows there as the sound, good corn when deposited in the genial earth. It has life in it; and is, therefore, sublimely and divinely called "The Living and Effectual Word." I prefer the comparisons of the Great Teacher. They are the most appropriate. We frequently err when handling these, because, in our quest of forbidden knowledge, we are disposed to carry them farther than he himself did. In the opening parable of the Gospel Age--a parable placed first in the synopsis of parables by Matthew, Mark, and Luke--he thus compares the Word of God to seed; and, with reference to this figure, he compares the human heart to soil, distributed into six varieties; the trodden pathway, the rocky field, the thorny cliff, the rich alluvion, the better, and the best of that. But we are not content with that beautiful and instructive representation of the philosophy of conversion. We must transcend these limits. We must explain the theory of soils. We must even become spiritual geologists, and explore all the strata of mother earth; and, even then, there yet remains an infinite series of whys and wherefores, concerning all the reasons of things connected with these varieties. These speculations, and the conflicting theories to which they have given birth, we will and bequeath to the more curious and speculative, and will farther premise some things necessary to a proper opening of the argument. Man, by his fall, or apostasy from God, lost three things--union with God, original righteousness, and original holiness. In consequence of these tremendous losses, he forfeited life, lost the right of inheriting the earth, and became subject to all the physical evils of this world. He is, therefore, with the earth on which he lives, doomed to destruction; meanwhile, a remedial system is introduced, originating in the free, sovereign, and unmerited favour of God; not, indeed, to restore man to an Eden lost--to, an inheritance forfeited--to a life enjoyed before his alienation from his Divine Father and benefactor. This supremely glorious and transcendent scheme of almighty love, contemplates a nearer, more intimate, and more sublime union with God, than that enjoyed in ancient Paradise--a union, too, enduring as eternity--as indestructible as the Divine essence. It bestows on man an everlasting righteousness, a perfect holiness, and an enduring blessedness in the presence of God for ever and ever. To accomplish this a new manifestation of the divinity became necessary. Hence the development of a plurality of existence in the Divine Nature. The God of the first chapter of Genesis is the Lord God of the second. Light advances as the pages of human history multiply, until we have God, the Word of God, and the Spirit of God, revealed in the law, the prophets, and the Psalms. But, it was not until the Sun of Righteousness arose--till the Word became incarnate and dwelt among us--till we beheld his glory as that of an only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth; it was not till Jesus of Nazareth had finished the work of atonement on the hill of Calvary--till he had brought life and immortality to light, by his revival and resurrection from the sealed sepulchre of the Arimathean senator; it was not till he gave a commission to convert the whole world, that the development of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit was fully perfected and completed. Since the descent of the Holy Spirit, on the birth-day of Christ’s church--since the glorious immersion of the three thousand triumphs of the memorable Pentecost, the church has enjoyed the mysterious and sublime light of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, as one Divinity, manifesting itself in these incomprehensible relations, in order to effect the complete recovery and perfect redemption of man from the guilt, the pollution, the power, and the punishment of sin. No one believes more firmly than I, and no one, I presume, endeavours to teach more distinctly and comprehensively than I, this mysterious, sublime, and incomprehensible plurality and unity in the Godhead. It is a relation that may be apprehended by all, though comprehended by none. It has its insuperable necessity in the present condition o€ the universe. Without it, no one can believe in, or be reconciled to, the remedial policy, as developed in the apostolic writings. And, indeed, I have no more faith in any man’s profession of religion, than I have in the sincerity of Mahomet, who does not believe in the Father, and in the Son, and in the Holy Spirit as co-operating in the illumination, pardon, and sanctification of fallen, sinful, and degraded man. While, then, I repudiate, with all my heart, the scholastic jargon of the Arian, Unitarian, and Trinitarian hypotheses, I stand up before heaven and earth in defence of the sacred style--in the fair, full, and perfect comprehension of all its words and sentences, according to the canons of a sound, exegetical interpretation. I COULD not, indeed, esteem as of any value the religion of any man, as respects the grand affair of eternal life, whose religion is not begun, carried on, and completed by the personal agency of the Holy Spirit. Nay, I esteem it the peculiar excellence and glory of our religion, that it is spiritual; that the soul of man is quickened, enlightened, sanctified and consoled by the indwelling presence of the Spirit of the eternal God. But, while avowing these my convictions, I have no more fellowship with those false and pernicious theories that confound the peculiar work of the Father with that of the Son, or with that of the Holy Spirit, or the work of any of these awful names with that of another; or which represent our illumination, conversion, and sanctification as the work of the Spirit, without the knowledge, belief and obedience of the gospel, as written by the holy apostles and evangelists, than I have with the author and finisher of the book of Mormon. The revelation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is not more clear and distinct than are the different offices assumed and performed by these glorious and ineffable Three in the present affairs of the universe. It is true, so far as unity of design and concurrence of action are contemplated, they co-operate in every work of creation, providence, and redemption. Such is the concurrence expressed by the Messiah in these words--"My Father worketh hitherto, and I work"--"I and my Father are one" "Whatsoever the Father doeth, the Son doeth likewise:" but not such a concurrence as annuls personality, impairs or interferes with the distinct offices of each in the salvation of man. For example: the Father sends his Son, and not the Son his Father. The Father provides a body and soul for his Son, and not the Son for his Father. The Son offers up that body and soul for sin, and thus expiates it, which the Father does not, but accepts it. The Father and the Son send forth the Spirit, and not the Spirit either. The Spirit now advocates Christ’s cause, and not Christ his own cause. The Holy Spirit now animates the church with his presence, and not Christ himself. He is the Head of the church, while the Spirit is the heart of it. The Father originates all, the Son executes all, the Spirit consummates all. Eternal volition, design, and mission belong to the Father; reconciliation to the Son; sanctification to the Spirit. In each of these terms there are numerous terms and ideas of subordinate extent, to which we cannot now advert. At present, we consider the subject in its general character, and not in its particular details. In the distribution of official agency, as it presents itself to our apprehension, with reference to the subject before us, we regard the benevolent design and plan of man’s redemption, as originating in the bosom of our Divine Father; the atonement, or sacrificial ransom, as the peculiar work of the Messiah; and the advocacy of his cause, in accomplishing the conversion and sanctification of the world, the peculiar mission and office of the Holy Spirit. Thus, the Spirit is the author of the written Word, as much as Jesus Christ is the author of the blood of atonement. The atoning blood of the everlasting covenant is not more peculiarly the blood of Jesus Christ, than is the Bible the immediate work of the Holy Spirit, inspired and dictated by him; "for holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit" Now, as Jesus, the Messiah, in the work of mediation, operates through his blood; so the Holy Spirit, in his official agency, operates through his word and its ordinances. And thus we have arrived at the proper consideration of our proposition, to wit: In conversion and sanctification, the Holy Spirit operates only through the Word of Truth. In how many other ways the Spirit of God may operate in nature, or in society, in the way of dreams, visions, and miracles, comes not within the premises contained in our proposition. To what extent He may operate in suggestions, special providences, or in any other way, is neither affirmed nor denied in the proposition before us. It has respect to conversion and sanctification only. Whatever ground is fairly covered by these terms, belongs to this discussion. What lies not within these precincts, comes not now legitimately before us. I. Our first argument in proof of our proposition shall be drawn from the constitution of the human mind. That the human mind has a specific and well-defined constitution, is as evident as that the body has a peculiar organization; or that the universe itself has one grand code of laws which governs it. Our intellectual and moral constitution, as well as our physical, has its peculiar powers and capacities--not one of which is violated on the part of its Creator, in our remedial administration, any more than are our sensitive and animal faculties destroyed or violated by the physician who rationally and benevolently aims at our restoration to health from some physical malady. No new faculties are imparted--no old faculty destroyed! They are neither more nor less in number; they are neither better nor worse in kind. Paul the apostle and Saul of Tarsus are the same person, so far as all the animal, intellectual, and moral powers are concerned. His mental and physical temperaments were just the same after, as before be became a Christian. The Spirit of God, in effecting this great change, does not violate, metamorphose, or annihilate any power or faculty of the man, in making the saint. He merely receives new ideas, and new impressions, and undergoes a great moral or spiritual change--so that he becomes alive wherein he was dead, and dead wherein he was formerly alive. As the body or outward man has its peculiar organization, so has the mind. Both are organized in perfect adaptation to a world without us: the one to a world of sensible and material objects, the other to that world, and to a spiritual system also, with which it is to have spiritual intimacy and communion. But the mind is to commune with its Creator, and its Creator with it, through material as well as through spiritual nature: and for this purpose he has endowed it with faculties, and the body with senses, favourable to these benevolent designs. Now, as the body has to subsist upon material nature, and the mind upon the spiritual system, both are so organized and furnished as to secure and assimilate so much of both as are necessary for this end. Thus, for example, the body lives, moves, and has its being in the midst of matter from which it is to draw perpetual sustenance and comfort. For doing this, it is admirably fitted with an animal machinery, created for this purpose, without which animal life would immediately become extinct. The lungs are fitted for respiration, and the stomach is furnished with all the powers necessary to the reception, digestion, and assimilation of so much material nature as is necessary to the healthful, vigorous, and comfortable subsistence of the body. But nothing from without can afford it subsistence or comfort, but in harmony with this organization. Man, then, has to live by breathing, eating, and drinking; and, without these operations, nothing around him can afford him life and comfort. Nothing of the bounties of nature can administer to his animal enjoyments in any other way. God, then, feeds and sustains man in perfect harmony with this organization. He neither dispenses with any of these powers nor violates them, in supporting physical life and comfort. Precisely so is it in the spiritual system. The mind has its powers of receiving, assimilating, and enjoying whatever is suitable to itself, as the body with which it is furnished. While imbodied, it has only its own proper faculties; but it has, also, organs and senses in the body, by and through which it communes with matter and with spirit, with God, and nature, and man; and through which they commune with it. It receives all the ideas of material nature by outward, bodily senses, without which it could not have one idea or impression of the external universe. A blind man has no idea of colours, nor a deaf man of sounds. Since the world began, every man sees by his eyes and hears by his ears. Whatever knowledge, therefore, is peculiar to any sense can never be acquired by another. If God give sight to the blind, or hearing to the deaf, he does it by restoring these senses; for, since the world began, no man has ever seen by his ears nor heard by his eyes. So true it is, that all our ideas of the sensible universe are the result of sensation and reflection. All the knowledge we have of material nature has been acquired by the exercise of our senses and of our reason upon those discoveries. With regard to the supernatural knowledge, or the knowledge of God, that comes wholly "by faith," and "faith" itself "comes by hearing." This aphorism is divine. Faith is, therefore, a consequence of hearing, and hearing is an effect of speaking; for, hearing comes by the Word of God spoken, as much as faith itself comes by hearing. The intellectual and moral arrangement is, therefore--1. The word spoken; 2. Hearing; 3. Believing; 4. Feeling; 5. Doing. Such is the constitution of the human mind--a constitution divine and excellent, adapted to man’s position in the universe. It is never violated in the moral government of God. Religious action is uniformly the effect of religious feeling; that is the effect of faith; that of hearing; and that of something spoken by God. Now, as faith in God is the first principle--the soul-renewing principle of religion; as it is the regenerating; justifying, sanctifying principle,--without it, it is impossible to be acceptable to God. With it, a man is a son of Abraham, a son of God; an heir apparent to eternal life--an everlasting kingdom. And what is Christian faith? It is a belief of testimony. It is a persuasion that God is true; that the gospel is divine; that God is love; that Christ’s death is the sinner’s life. It is trust in God. It is a reliance upon his truth, his faithfulness, his power. It is not merely a cold assent to truth, to testimony; but a cordial, joyful consent to it, and reception of it. Still, it is dependent on testimony. No testimony, no faith. The Spirit of God gave the testimony first. It bore witness to Jesus. It expected no faith without something to believe. Something to believe is always presented to faith; and that something must be heard before it can be believed; for, until it is heard, it is as though it were not--a nonentity. But it is not enough that it be heard by the outward ear. God has given to every man an inward as well as an outward ear. The outward recognises sounds only; the inward recognises sense. Faith is, therefore, impossible without language; and, consequently, without the knowledge of language, and that language understood. It is neither necessary nor possible, without language--intelligible language. An infant cannot have faith; but it needs neither faith, nor regeneration, nor baptism. It was a figment of St. Augustine, adopted by Calvin, propagated in his Institutes, and adopted by his children. These infant regenerators are lame in both limbs: in the right limb of faith, and in the left limb of philosophy. They move on crutches, and broken crutches, too. They have no philosophy of mind, or else they abandon it in all their theological embarrassments. They will have infants regenerated, and souls morally dead quickened by a direct impulse. The Spirit of God is supposed to incubate their souls--to descend upon them and work a grace in them--a faith without reason, without argument, without evidence, without intelligence, without perception, without fear, hope, love, confidence, or approbation. The whole system of Calvinism, of Arminianism, is crazy just at thus point. They build a world upon the back of a tortoise; they build palaces upon ice, and repose upon couches of ether. They have not one clear idea on the subject of regeneration. It is to them a mystery--a cabalistic word--a mere shibboleth. The philosophy of mind is converted into a heap of ruins. They have the Spirit of God operating without testimony--without apprehension or comprehension--without sense, susceptibility, or feeling: and all this for the sake of an incomprehensible, unintelligible, and worse than useless theory. I, therefore, ex animo, repudiate their whole theory of mystic influence, and metaphysical regeneration, as a vision of visions, a dream of dreams, at war with philosophy, with the philosophy of mind,, with the Bible, with reason, with common sense, and with all Christian experience. ARG. II.--A second argument is deduced from the fact, that no living man has ever been heard of, and none can now be found, possessed of a single conception of Christianity, of one spiritual thought, feeling, or emotion, where the Bible, or some tradition from it, has not been before him. Where the Bible has not been sent, or its traditions developed, there is not one single spiritual idea, word, or action. It is all midnight--a gloom profound--utter darkness. What stronger evidence can be adduced, than this most evident and indisputable fact? It weighs more than a thousand volumes of metaphysical speculations. One would most rationally conclude, that, if the Spirit of God did anywhere illuminate the human mind, or work into the heart the principle of faith previous to, and independent of, any knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, he would most probably do it in those portions of the earth, and amid those vast masses of human kind, entirely destitute of the Word of Life; wholly ignorant of the "only name given under the whole heaven," by which any sinful man can be saved. If, then, he has never operated in this way, where the Bible has never gone, who can prove that he so operates here, where the Bible is enjoyed? When, then, we reflect upon the melancholy fact so often pressed upon the attention of Christendom, by her missionaries to heathen lands, that not one-third of human kind enjoy the name of Jesus; that six-tenths or seven-tenths of mankind are wholly given up to the most stupid idolatries and delusions; that pagan darkness and Mohammedan impostures cover the fairest and largest portions of our earth, and engulf the great majority of our race in the most debasing superstitions--in the grossest ignorance, sensuality, and vice; and that from these is withholden all spiritual and Divine influence of a regenerating and salutary character, so far as all documentary evidence avoucheth. If, then, indeed, the Spirit of the Bible, the Holy Spirit of our God, did, at all, travel out of the record, and work faith, or communicate intelligence, without verbal testimony, methinks this is the proper field. And there being no evidence of his having so done, is it not a fact, as clear as a revelation from heaven--clear as demonstration itself--that the illuminating, regenerating, converting, sanctifying influence of the Spirit of Wisdom and Revelation are not antecedent to, nor independent of, the written oracles of that Spirit? ARG. III.--A third argument is deduced from the fact, that no one, professing to have been the subject of the illuminating, converting, and sanctifying operations of the Spirit of God, can ever express a single right conception or idea on the whole subject of spiritual things, not already found in the written word. We have been favoured with numerous revelations of the experiences of the most spiritually-minded and excellent Christians of this our age. And, on listening to them with the strictest attention, marking, with all our powers of discrimination, every idea, sentiment, and expression as uttered, I have never heard one suggestion, containing the feeblest ray of light, which was not eighteen hundred years old, and already found in the Holy Scriptures--read of all men who choose to learn what the Spirit of God has said to saints and sinners. Evident, then, it is, from this fact, which, I presume, I may also call an incontrovertible fact, that no light is communicated by the Holy Spirit, in regenerating and converting men; which is equivalent to saying, that, "in conversion and sanctification, the Spirit of God operates only through the Word of Truth." ARG. IV.--A fourth argument is derived from another fact, which calls for special consideration just at this point, to wit: whatever is essential to regeneration in any case, is essential to it in all cases. The change, called regeneration, is a specific change. It consists of certain elements, and is effected by a special agency. If it be a new heart given, a new life communicated, it is accomplished in all cases, as generation is, by the same agency and instrumentality. If then, the Spirit of God, without faith, without the knowledge of the gospel, in any case, regenerates an individual, it does so in all cases. But if faith in God, or a knowledge of Christ, is essential in one case, it is essential in every other case. Now, this being admitted, as I presume it will be, without farther argument or illustration, follows it not, then, that neither the Word of God nor the Gospel of Christ, neither preaching nor teaching, neither hearing nor believing is necessary to regeneration, according to the doctrine of the Protestant church? Inasmuch as that church of churches believes and teaches that infants and pagans are regenerated, in some cases, without any instrumentality at all, by the direct, naked, and abstract influence of the Spirit of God operating immediately upon their souls. As this is a most essential affair in this discussion, it is all-important that we deliver ourselves in the very words of the most orthodox of these churches:-- "This effectual call is of God’s free and especial grace alone; not from any thing at all foreseen in man: nor from any power or agency in the creature co-working with his special grace, the creature being wholly passive therein; being dead in sins and trespasses, until, being quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit, he is thereby enabled to answer this call, and to embrace the grace offered and contained in it; and that by no less power than that which raised up Christ from the dead. Elect infants, dying in infancy, are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit, who worketh when, and where, and how he pleases; so also are other elect persons, who are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the word."1 Now, I ask of what use is the ministry of the Word in any case, so far as regeneration is concerned? This is a point on which I am peculiarly solicitous of illumination. Surely faith, and preaching, and the gospel ministry are all vain and useless in making a man a new creature, if dying infants and untaught pagans may be regenerated by the Spirit alone, without faith, knowledge, or any illumination whatever. Nay, indeed, if my position be true, and true it most assuredly is, that whatever is essential to regeneration in any case is essential in all cases, then, although we have three classes of subjects, to wit, elect infants, elect pagans, and elect gospel hearers, we have for them all one and the same species of regeneration. Miracles truly never cease on this hypothesis: inasmuch as the regeneration of every infant is a demonstration of a power as supernatural as the resurrection of the Messiah. Unfortunately, however, this power is not only never displayed to our conviction at the time, nor ever so displayed after the event as to become an object of perception, much less of sensible demonstration. If, indeed, as it sometimes happens in some branches of this school, regeneration is not regarded as another name for conversion and sanctification, but a previous work, then it will be important that we be enlightened on the question, How long the interval between regeneration and conversion, between regeneration and faith, and between regeneration and the dying infant’s or pagan’s exit? For if the interval be such as to preclude the possibility of conversion and sanctification, we should have the startling fact promulged, that infants, and pagans too, dying regenerate, enter heaven without being converted! Another curious question will certainly arise. Of what use is infant baptism, according to such a theory of regeneration? For, if elect infants are regenerated without knowledge, faith, repentance, or baptism, and if non-elect infants, though baptized, are not regenerated, why have such a war of words about a matter virtually worth nothing to the living or to the dead? ARG. V.--A fifth argument shall be deduced from the Holy Spirit’s own method of addressing unconverted men; by signs addressed to the sense, and words to the understanding and affections. The Messiah himself, the Seventy Evangelists, and the Twelve Apostles were accomplished and fitted for their ministry to the world by such inspirations and accompanying powers as human nature and society, Jewish and pagan, then required, and I presume always will require. They were first sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel; and afterwards the Apostles were sent to the Gentiles. Now, in seeking to regenerate and save the human family, they, divinely guided, uttered human words, and accompanied them with certain miracles. These were the means supernaturally chosen and used. They were certainly apposite means; appropriate and fitted to the end proposed by the donor of this intelligence and power. He seems to have sought admission into the hearts of the people by these glorious displays of Divine power presented to the eye, and these words of grace addressed to the ear. They saw the sick healed, the leper cleansed, demons dispossessed, and the dead raised; and, while seeing these solemn and significant arguments, they heard words of tenderness--words of pardon and of life, spoken with a divine earnestness, with a heavenly sympathy and affection. Thus the Spirit sought to convert them. He used means, rational means; therefore, we argue, such means were necessary, and are still, in certain modifications of that same supernatural grandeur, necessary to conversion and sanctification. Signs, as Paul explains them, were necessary, not for believers, but for unbelievers. They were necessary to faith. The miracle opened the heart, the testimony of the Lord entered, and the Spirit of God with it; and the work of conversion was finished. Now, may we not conclude that miracles and words are not a mere redundancy--a mere superfluity? May we not regard them as essential means, employed by the Holy Spirit, in accomplishing his work? It is, perhaps, important also to say, that the proof of a proposition is always subordinate in rank to the proposition which it proves. The life is not in the miracle, but in that which the miracle proves. The grand proposition is, that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. He that believes this proposition is "begotten of God." It is the "incorruptible seed." It is the "living Word." It abideth for ever. The church of the Messiah is built upon it. The promises, then, certainly justify the conclusion, that, in converting and sanctifying the world, the inspired Apostles and Evangelists used means of divine authority; and neither did depend upon, nor teach others to depend upon any agency from above, dispensing with such an instrumentality. ARG. VI.--A sixth argument is derived from the name chosen by the Messiah as the official designation of the Holy Spirit. He calls him the Paracletos, and that, too, with a special reference to his new mission. This term, occurring some five times in the apostolic writings, is, in the common version, translated both comforter and advocate; and, by Dr. Campbell, monitor. As an official name, I prefer advocate to either of the others. It is generic, and comprehends them both. An advocate may be a monitor, or a comforter; but a monitor, or a comforter, is not necessarily an advocate. Now, as the Spirit is to advocate Christ’s cause, he must use means. Hence, when Jesus gives him the work of conviction, he furnishes him with suitable and competent arguments to effect the end of his mission. He was to convince the world of sin, righteousness and judgment. In accomplishing this, he was to argue from three topics--1. The unbelief of the world; 2. Christ’s reception in heaven; 3. The dethronement of his great adversary, the Prince of this world. Then the person, mission, and character of the Messiah alone came into his pleadings. Jesus promised him the documents. And, indeed, the Four Evangelists are arranged upon the instruction given by the Messiah to his advocate. In converting men, the Spirit, the Holy Advocate, was to speak of Jesus. Hence, speaking of Jesus by the Spirit, is all that was necessary to the conversion of men. The official service and work thus assigned the Holy Spirit is a standing evidence that, in conversion, and sanctification, he operates only through the Word. And, as it has already been shown conversion is, in all cases, the same work, he operates in this department only by and through the Word, spoken or written; and neither physically nor metaphysically. ARG. VII.--A seventh argument shall be deduced from the opening of the commission; from the gift of tongues, by which the Advocate commenced his operations. That the Messiah had a commission for convincing and converting the world has been already shown. That he was to use arguments has been fully proved; that he was to speak and work also; that, by signs and miracles he accompanied the Word, and made it effectual. Now, that language is essential to the completion of the commission, is farther proved from the great fact, that the first gift of the Holy Spirit, under the Messiah’s commission, was the gift of tongues. Language, not merely the various dialects of human speech, but language itself--not Hebrew, Greek, and Roman--but that of which Hebrew, Greek, and Roman are mere dialects, forms, or modes, is essential. He gave the first, and he gave the second. He made glorious display of the use of language, of the need of tongues, in commencing his new work. He gave utterance; for utterance is his gift: So Paul to the Corinthians said, "You are enriched by him in all knowledge, and in all utterance." The day of Pentecost is the best comment on this whole subject of spiritual influence, ever written. We have much use for it in this discussion. It is just as useful on the work of the Spirit, as on the genius and design of baptism. It seldom occurs to us, that all Christendom--the living world, is now indebted for the very book that records the name, and embalms the memory of the Messiah, and for all that is known of the Holy Spirit--for the very language of the new covenant--for the Gospel of the kingdom--and for every spiritual idea and conception of God, of heaven, of immortality, of our origin, nature, relations; obligations, and destiny, to the immediate agency of this Spirit of all Wisdom and Revelation--to the gift of tongues, or of language. Yet, true to the letter it is, that "no one could say that Jesus is Lord, but by the Holy Spirit." Some among us, through the ignorance that is in them on this grand theme, ascribe to the human mind the powers of the Holy Spirit. They describe the human mind as possessing some sort of innate power of originating spiritual ideas; to arrive at the knowledge of God by the mere contemplation of nature. They annihilate the doctrine of the fall; of human imbecility and depravity, and adorn human reason with a very splendid plagiarism, called natural religion. While at variance on almost every thing else, the mental philosopher and the Deist, the Romanist and the Protestant, the Calvinist and the Arminian admirably coalesce and harmonize in this self-congratulatory assumption. They say, that man can, by the feeble, glimmering rush-light of his own studies of nature, either descend from his a priori, or ascend from his a posteriori reasonings to God--to the apprehension of his very being and perfections; human responsibility, the soul’s immortality, and a future state of rewards and punishments, without the Bible, and without the teaching of the Holy Spirit. We have neither so studied nature nor learned the Bible. We subscribe to Paul’s dogma, "The world by wisdom knew not God," and agree with him, that "it is by faith," and not by reason, "we know that the worlds were formed by the Word of God--so that things now seen existing did not formerly exist." We, indeed, ascribe all our ideas of spirit and of a spiritual system--our conceptions of God as creator--of creation itself, of providence, and of redemption, to one and the same Spirit, and to that Logos who, in one form or other, has been the prophet or the advocate of the Messiah and his cause, for some six thousand years. We go farther. We assign to the Spirit of all Wisdom and Revelation the origination of the spiritual language; perhaps, indeed, of all language. The most enlightened men, whether pagans, Jews, or Christians, regard language as a divine revelation--even that large portion of it derived from--sensible objects. The philosophers, from Plato down to Dr. Whitby, have claimed for the Supreme God this honour. They have refused it to either civilized or uncivilized man--to all conventional agreement. They have handled, with great effect, the plainest of propositions, that councils could not be convened; that if they had spontaneously arisen, no motions could have been made, no debates commenced nor conducted without the use of speech. Philosophers assume that men think in words, as well as communicate by them; or, at least, have some image of the thing, natural or artificial, or they cannot even think about it. The natural process, which can easily be made intelligible to all, is, that the thing is pre-existent, the idea of it next, and the word last. The line ascending is the word, the idea, the thing. The line descending is the thing, the idea, the word. Now, as the line descending is necessarily the first, we must, especially in things spiritual, admit that the spiritual things could be communicated to man only by one that comprehends them, who had seen them, and who selected from the elements of that language first given to man, when he conversed face to face with God in Eden, the proper materials for words to communicate things spiritual. In strict accordance with this assumption, Moses teaches us that God conferred with Adam, and continued his lessons until Adam was able to give every creature around him a suitable name. That language commenced in this way all admit, from one fact, to wit: EVERY ONE SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE WHICH HE FIRST HEARS. This is his vernacular. A miracle is before us. The first man spoke without being spoken to; else God spoke to him. Either is a miracle: and of the two, the latter is of the easiest credence; and, indeed, it is to the faithful evidently true from the words of Moses. With Plato, then, I say, that God taught the primitive words, and from that, man manufactured the derivatives. With Newton, I say, God gave man reason and religion by giving him speech. With tradition, I say, that the god THATH of the Egyptians is the THEOS of the Bible, and the LOGOS of the New Testament. The LOGOS incarnate is the Messiah of Christianity. Therefore, the Spirit of God, now the SPIRIT of the WORD, is the origin of all spiritual words and conceptions. With Paul, therefore, I say, "We speak spiritual things in spiritual words, or words which the spirit teacheth, expressing spiritual things in spiritual words." ARG. VIII.--An eighth argument may be drawn from 1 Peter 1:23, "Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible seed, by the Word of God which liveth and abideth for ever." Now, as we all remember, our Lord himself compares his Word, or the Word of God, to seed planted or Sown; and, under the parable of the sower, represents its various fortunes, and beautifully teaches the true philosophy of conversion in the fact, that the good ground is the man who "receives the Word of God in an honest heart." Under both metaphors, drawn the one from the vegetable, the other from the animal kingdom, the word of God is the seed, of which we are born again or renewed in heart and life. This Word of God liveth and abideth: for God lives and abides for ever. With regard to the essentiality of the seed. We all know that in the vegetable kingdom, without seed there is no harvest, no fruit. And, as certain it is, that when the Word of God is not first sown in the heart, there can be no regeneration, or renewal of the spirit, and, consequently, no fruit brought forth unto eternal life. So the metaphors taken from the animal and vegetable kingdoms, teach the same lesson. But does not the mere fact that Peter says, "we are born again of incorruptible seed," declare that where this incorruptible seed is not, there can be no birth! Is it necessary now to traverse the whole face of nature, to explore the whole kingdom of botany, to find a plant without a seed, in order to prove the proposition, that every ear of corn comes from one grain of seed deposited in the earth? No more is it essential to my argument, that I should first hear all the conversions in the world, before I conclude that there is one that originated without the word of God having been first sown in the human heart. Will not all the world believe me, that if I prove in one case that without the specific seed,--corn, wheat, &c., we cannot have a crop, that it is true in all other cases, without a particular examination of every alleged case. And from every principle of analogy, if I prove the Word in one case of a new heart to be necessary, it needs not that I prove it to be so in every other heart, and in every other case. The mere fact of calling the Gospel the incorruptible seed, is enough. Where that seed is not, the fruit of it cannot be. The phrase, "the incorruptible seed" of any thing, indicates, in the ears of common sense, that is essential to that thing; and if so, then who can be a Christian without being born?--and who can be born but according to one uniform and immutable law? Now, in the theory we oppose, there is no uniformity; there is a plurality of ways of being born, which, to my mind, is most palpably at fault in every particular. But I will adduce some other testimonies under this head of argument. We shall hear James the apostle, James 1:18 : "Of his own will begat he us by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creation." Hence the truth again appears as an instrument of regeneration. God’s will is the origin of it; his Spirit the efficient cause of it; but the Word is the necessary instrument of it. By the Word of Truth, then, we are begotten, and not without it, according to James. We may add testimonies without increasing either authority or evidence; but, for the sake of illustration, if not for we shall offer a few other testimonies to complete this We shall hear Paul, as a father, speak to the faith in Corinth-- 1 Corinthians 4:15 : "As my beloved sons I warn yon; for though you have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet you have not many fathers; for in Christ Jesus have I begotten you through the gospel." Paul regards the gospel just in the same attitude in which James represents it. The gospel is here the seed, the instrument of the conversion of the Corinthians. But the whole oracle of God is unique on this subject. God "purifies the heart by faith," that is, the truth believed--not by believing as an act of the mind, but by the truth believed, which constitutes "the faith." Paul also told the Thessalonians that God had, "from the beginning, chosen them to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth." Here again the belief of the truth is the instrument of sanctification and salvation. I shall conclude this little summary of a portion of the direct and positive testimony of God, in proof of my grand position on the Holy Spirit’s work of conversion and sanctification, by the testimony of the Messiah, in person: "Sanctify them through thy truth, O Father, for thy Word is the truth." Whether, then, we call the truth the Word, the Word of God the gospel, it is called the seed, the incorruptible seed of the new birth; by which a sinner is quickened, begotten, born, sanctified, purified, and saved. I regard this my eighth argument as a host in itself--nay, as a solemn, direct, and unequivocal declaration of God, in attestation of the entire truth and safety of the proposition concerning both conversion and sanctification. Still I will yet add other arguments. ARG. IX.--One shall be based on the special commission given to Paul, as expounded by that given to the Messiah himself. And therefore, we shall read that to the Messiah, as introductory to that presented to the apostle Paul. "I give thee," says Jehovah, "for a covenant of the people; for a light of the Gentiles; to open the blind eyes; to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house." "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me; because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings to the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn." Isaiah 42:6-7; Isaiah 61:1-2. We shall now hear Paul relate his own, as he had it from the mouth of the Lord: "I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou halt seen, and of those things in the which I will appear unto thee; delivering thee from the people and from the Gentiles, unto whom now I send thee--to open their eyes, to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive the forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith, that is in me." Here, then, we have a full development, in these grand commissions, of the manner and means employed in the wisdom and grace of God in converting and sanctifying the nations of the earth, through the mediation of the Messiah. The most conspicuous point, or the chief means stated, is--that God would use light, knowledge, the gospel, and that he would OPEN THE EYES of men--turning them from darkness to light, and from the kingdom and power of Satan to God. God, then, who commanded light to arise out of darkness, has used moral, spiritual light--that is, revelation, the gospel--as the means of conversion and sanctification. Illumination is, therefore, an essential prerequisite to conversion and holiness. Without light there is no beauty; for in the dark, beauty and nothing are undistinguishable. Without light there is nothing amiable, because amiability requires the aid of light for its exposition, as much as beauty. The power of Satan is in darkness; the power of God is in light. God, therefore, works by light; and Satan by darkness. Hence, in Paul’s commission, it reads, "Turn them from darkness to light;" and the consequences will be, "from the power of Satan to God;" and the ultimate effect will be remission of sins, and an inheritance among the sanctified. After the study of these, and many such similar documents, found in the Bible, I confess I am wholly unable to conceive of a religion without knowledge, without faith, without an apprehension, an intelligent, as well as a cordial reception of the gospel of Christ. I repudiate, therefore, with my whole heart, a notion of infant, idiot, and pagan regeneration--this speculative conversion, without light, knowledge, faith, hope, or love. It makes void the whole moral machinery of the Bible, the Christian ministry, and the commission of the Holy Spirit. It is no advocate of Christ; it is no comforter of the soul, on the hypothesis of infant, and pagan, and idiot regeneration. ARG. X.--Whatever influence is ascribed to the Word of God in the Sacred Scriptures, is also ascribed to the Spirit of God. Or in other words, what the Spirit of God is at one time, and in one place, said to do, is, at some other time, or in some other place, ascribed to the Word of God. Hence I argue that they do not operate separately, but in all cases conjointly. We shall give an induction of a number of cases in exemplification of the fact. Are we said to be enlightened by the Spirit of God? We are told in another place, "The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes." Again--"The entrance of thy word giveth light, and makes the simple wise." Are we said to be converted by the Spirit of God? we bear the Prophet David say, "The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul." Are we said to be sanctified through the Spirit of God? we hear our Lord pray to his Father, "Sanctify them through thy truth, thy Word is the truth." Are we said to be quickened by the Spirit of God? the same is ascribed to the Word of God. David says, "Thy Word, O Lord, hath quickened me." "Stay me with thy precepts, thy statutes quicken me." This is one of the strongest expressions. In other forms of speech, the same effects and influence are ascribed to both. Paul, in one text, says, "Be filled with the Spirit;" and, when again speaking of the same subject, in another, he says, "Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly." In both cases, the precepts are to, be fulfilled in the same way, "Teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, making melody in your hearts to the Lord." "The Spirit," says Paul to Timothy, "speaketh expressly that in the latter days, some shall depart from the faith." Again--"Know ye, in the last days, perilous times shall come." Again--Paul says he has sanctified the church, and cleansed it with "a bath of water and the Word." In another instance, he says, he hath saved us "with the washing of regeneration and the renewal of the Holy Spirit." Are we said to be "born of the Spirit?" we are also said to be born again, or "regenerated by the Word of God." I might trace this matter much farther; but, I presume, as we have touched upon the most important items, we have found such an induction as will satisfy the most scrupulous. Until questioned, I shall strongly affirm it as a conclusion fairly drawn, that whatever effects or influences connected with conversion and sanctification are, in one portion of Scripture, assigned to the Word, are ascribed also to the Spirit; and so interchangeably throughout both Testaments. Whence we conclude, that the Spirit and the Word of God are not separate and distinct kinds of power--the one superadded to the other--but both acting conjointly and simultaneously in the work of sanctification and salvation. ARG. XI.--An eleventh argument is deduced from the important fact, that resisting the Word of God, and resisting the Spirit of God, are shown to be the same thing, by very clear and explicit testimonies: such as Stephen, the proto-martyr, when filled with the Holy Spirit, and, indeed, speaking as the Holy Spirit gave him utterance, in the presence of the Sanhedrim, said, "You circumcised in heart and ears, as your fathers did, so do you. You do always resist the Holy Spirit." What proof does he allege? He adds, "As your fathers did, so do you," (resist.) "Which of the prophets did they not persecute?" This, then, is his proof. In persecuting the Prophets, they resisted the Holy Spirit; because the words spoken by the Prophets were suggested by the Spirit. We are said to resist a person when we resist his word. When, then, any one resists the words of the Prophets or the Apostles, he is said by inspired men to resist the Holy Spirit. This important fact should be more frequently insisted on than it is. Men should be taught, that, in resisting the words spoken by Apostles and Prophets, they are, in truth, resisting the Holy Spirit, by whom they uttered those words. May we not, then, consistently say with Stephen, that, when men resist the Prophets and Apostles in their writings, and will not submit to their teachings, they are resisting the Holy Spirit? This being admitted, follows it not again, that the Spirit of God operates through the truth; and that we are not to suppose that, in conversion and sanctification, they do operate separately and distinctly from each other? A still more impressive instance of this kind we find in the book of Nehemiah. In his admirable prayer, preserved in the ninth chapter, he has two very remarkable expressions; one in the 20th and one in the 29th verse. In the former, when speaking of the instructions given the Jews by Moses, he said, "Thou gavest also thy good Spirit to instruct them;" and in the latter, he says, "Many years didst thou forbear them, and testifiedst against them by thy SPIRIT in thy Prophets, yet would they not hear." Here, then, we are taught that God, by his Spirit; in Moses, instructed the Jews by his good Spirit, and that, in testifying to them by the Prophets, God was testifying to them by his Holy Spirit. We are, then, still more fully confirmed in the conclusion that the Spirit of God operates through his Word, and only through his Word, in conversion and sanctification; and that the Word and Spirit of God, in those spiritual and moral changes and influences of which we now speak, are never to be regarded as operating apart; that whatever is done by the Word of God, is done by the Spirit of God; and whatever is done by the Spirit, is done through the Truth--and certainly he can through that instrument operate most powerfully on the spirit of man, as all Christian experience and the saints of all time exhibit. ARG. XII.--A twelfth argument is deduced from the fact, that God created nothing without his Word. "He said, Let there be light, and there was light." "By faith," says Paul, "we know that the worlds were framed by the Word of God." All the details of the six days show that "God made all things by the Word of his power." Of course, then, we have no idea of any new creation or regeneration without the Word of God. It is an overwhelming fact, that God does nothing in creation or redemption without his Word. His creative power has always been imbodied in that sublime instrument. Nay, it is the sword of the Spirit. Still, there was, through that Word, an Almighty power put forth, and still there is both in conversion and sanctification. God works mightily in the human heart by his Word. The heart of the King’s enemies are mightily broken by it. Hence, faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. Indeed, there is much of this wisdom of God apparent in the fact that he has chosen the term Logos to represent the Author and Founder of the Christian faith, in its antecedent state of existence. And, hence, John represents Jesus Christ himself as the Word of God incarnate: "Now the Word was made flesh," or became flesh, "and dwelt amongst us." This is a mysterious name. He had a name given him which no one can comprehend. His name is the WORD OF GOD. Now, as Jesus Christ was "once God manifest in Word," and now God manifest in flesh, we have reason to regard the Word of God as an imbodiment of his wisdom and power. This, however, is spoken with a reference to the gospel Word; for Jesus Christ is both the wisdom and the power of God, and so is his gospel; because containing this development. It is the wisdom and power of God unto salvation, to every one that believes it. It was not, however, in a creating light alone that God employed his Word. Every work of creation is represented as the product of his Word. He said, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters," and it was so. Again, "Let the dry land appear," and it was so. "Let the earth bring forth grass," and it was so. And, last of all, "Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion. So God created man." God, therefore, made man in his own image by his Word, and he now restores him to that same image by his Word of power. Thus, we have all the authority of the Bible with us, in our views of spiritual and Divine influence. A spiritual, or moral, or creative power, without the Word of God, is a phantom, a mere speculation. It receives no countenance from the Bible. ARG. XIII.--The Lord has imbodied his Will in his Word. Now the will of God is another form of his power. Divine volition is Divine power. The Word of God is the fiat of God. "Let there be," is a mere volition expressed. Indeed, we may go farther and say, that the Word of the Lord is the Lord himself. The word of a king is the king himself, so far as authority or power is considered. As the Lord Jesus is the Word of God incarnate, so is his Word an imbodiment of his power. For, as Solomon says, "Where the word of a king is, there is power;" there is the power of the king himself. The Word of God is, then, the actual power of God. God is a consuming fire, and his "Word is as fire, and as a hammer that breaketh the rocks to pieces." It should not, therefore, be thought strange, that the Word of God and the Spirit of God are sometimes represented as equi-potent--as equivalent. Indeed, in all those passages that represent the Word and Spirit of God as being the causes of the same effects, this equivalency is clearly implied. Hence, while Peter says, "By the Word of God, the heavens were of old," Job says, "By his Spirit he has garnished the heavens." Can any one imagine what power could have been superadded to the Word of God, that created light, that made the heavens and the earth, that made man upright or holy. If so, let him explain what that power could have been, which was distinct from, and attached to, or that accompanied that word by which all things were created and made. Explain that accompanying power, and I will explain the accompanying spiritual or supernatural power in the case of regeneration! You cannot break a man down by physical power. You cannot soften and subdue the heart, as you grind a rock to pieces. A superadded power beyond motive, is inconceivable to any mind accustomed to think accurately upon spiritual and mental operations. The heart of man is to be subdued, melted, purified from all its hatred of God and enmity, by love; by developments of grace, and not by any conceivable influence of a different nature. His love is poured out into our hearts, says Paul, by the Holy Spirit that is given to us. Men had better be careful how they speak of, and how they treat, the word of God. It will stand for ever. Till the heavens pass away, not one word shall fail. Mountains, by the wasting hand of time, may crumble down to dust--oceans may recede from their ancient limits--the heavens and the earth may pass away--but God’s word shall never, never pass away. It is God’s mighty moral lever, by which he raises man from earth to heaven. It is his almighty, awful, sublime, and gracious will, imbodied in such a medium as can enter the secret chambers of the human heart and conscience, and there stand up for God, and confound the sinner in his presence. The love of God is all enveloped in it, and that is the great secret of its charm--the mystery of its power to save. It is love, and love alone, that can reconcile the heart of man to God. Now love is a matter of intelligence--a matter that is to be told, heard, believed, and received by faith. "The power of God to salvation" is the persuasive power of infinite and eternal love, and not the compulsive and subduing power of any force superadded to it. The promise of eternal life is itself a power of mighty magnitude. So are all the promises that enter into the Christian hope. These are almighty impulses, when understood and believed upon the veracity and faithfulness of God. ARG. XIV.--There yet remains another argument, if I may so call it. It is, indeed, an induction of every case of conversion reported in the inspired record. It is an account of the various influences of the Holy Spirit in adding members to the Christian church at its very commencement, and to the end of the apostolic history. Of these I will give a few specimens:-- When the Holy Spirit fell from heaven on Pentecost, it fell only on "the one hundred and twenty," and not upon the promiscuous assembly. For the multitude, after the Spirit’s descent, did still upbraid the disciples with drunkenness. Those who first received it that day, preached by it to the audience. The thousands who heard were pierced to the heart, and yet had not received the Spirit. They believed, and were in agony of fear and terror, but yet had not received the Spirit. They asked what they should do, and yet had not received it. Peter commanded them to "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." Of course, then, they had not yet received that gift. They, however, gladly received his word, and were baptized. We have, then, the first three thousand converts regenerated by gladly receiving the Word and baptism. This is a strong fact for the first one in my fourteenth argument. The second fact of conversion is found Acts 4:1-37 :, and the question is, how were they regenerated? We shall read the passage "Howbeit, many of them which HEARD THE WORD believed, and the number of the men was about five thousand." We are now morally certain that these five thousand were converted by the Spirit only through the Word. We have already eight thousand examples of our allegation, and not one instance of one converted without the Word. Our third exemplification is found Acts 5:14 : "And believers were the more added to the Lord, multitudes of both men and women." Women are here mentioned as well as men. We then, got multitudes of both sexes to add, in proof that the Spirit converted these, not without the Word, but by what they saw and heard. We shall find a fourth example, Acts 8:5-6; Acts 8:12. Philip went to Samaria and preached Christ to them. "And when they believed Philip preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God and the name of the Lord Jesus, they were baptized, both men and women." So the Samaritans were regenerated by the Holy Spirit through faith in the Word, which Philip preached. A fifth example is found in the eunuch. "If thou believest with all thy heart, thou mayest" He said: "I believe that Jesus is the Son of God." Then he, too, was born of the water, and converted, not without the Word. Paul furnishes a sixth case. When he had fallen to the ground, he heard "a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me--I am Jesus whom thou persecutest." His case is certainly one of indisputable certainty. He both saw, heard, and believed, and was baptized. To these I might add the case of Eneas, the citizens of Lydda and Saron, the assembly in the house of Dorcas, Cornelius, and his friends, Lydia and the jailer, Dionysius, Crispus, the Corinthians and the Ephesians, &c. &c., as reported in the Acts of the Apostles. In not one of these cases did the Holy Spirit operate without the Word, but always through it. Of the Corinthians, it was said, "And many of the Corinthians hearing, believed, and were baptized." This was true of all that were regenerated through the Spirit, during the ministry of the Apostles. Hence, to convert men by the accompanying influence of the Holy Spirit, we must do what Paul commanded Timothy--"Preach the Word, be instant in season and out of season." Then, no doubt, many will be enlightened, renewed, sanctified, and comforted by the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit. 1 So speaks the Presbyterian Confession, chap. X, §§ 2, 3. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 35: 01.06.01. REVIEW OF BISHOP KENDRICK'S TREATISE ======================================================================== B O O K S I X T H. CHAPTER I. REVIEW OF BISHOP KENRICK’S TREATISE. THE Roman Bishop of Philadelphia, in 1843, published "A Treatise on baptism, with an Exhortation to receive it, translated from the works of St. Basil the Great, to which is added a Treatise on Confirmation," with the following motto: "Let a man so account of us as of the ministers of Christ and the ministers of the mysteries of Good." 1 Corinthians 4:1.--"Philadelphia: M. Fithian, 61; North Second Street: 1843." In reviewing the arguments and apologies for infant baptism which have fallen under our notice, we intended to place the most ancient and authoritative treatise on that subject first before our readers; that, in reviewing its strong points, we should be relieved from the labour of reviewing more modern treatises, as they are generally but a reiteration or new modification of those which have preceded them. We had then purposed to place the celebrated work of Dr. Wall, or that of Peter Edwards, as first on our table. But on glancing over the works in my library on that subject, I found the work now before me, from the pen of a Roman Prelate; and although of recent and contemporaneous origin, containing, as it does, the varied ecclesiastic learning of the mother and mistress of all Pedobaptist churches, so far as rite is derived from them, I concluded that popular judgment and popular taste would give precedence to the Mother and hear her first, with all the respect due to her great hoary antiquity. The Bishops of Rome have a higher reputation for ecclesiastic learning than even the Protestant Prelates of England; whether deserved or not, I am not appointed an arbiter to decide; but think, at least, having been the foster parents of infant baptism, they are worthy of precedence. Now, although the work before us is of recent origin, we must regard it as better and even more learned than works of a higher antiquity; because, superadded to all that Roman Prelates formerly knew on that subject are the experience, reflections, and modern literature of our contemporary, Bishop Kenrick. We shall, therefore, hear him in his own language set forth the foundation on which he places the institution of infant baptism; and, for the sake of future reference, arrange numerically his arguments in proof of his position. First, then, we shall hear from him the doctrine of what he calls the Catholic Church--by which he does not mean the Greek Catholic nor the Protestant Catholic, but the Roman Catholic Church. "The Catholic Church holds that all infants are capable of baptism, independently of the piety or faith of their parents; although the children of unbelievers are not to be baptized against the will of their parents, or in circumstances that expose the sacrament to manifest profanation."1 The Calvinistic or Presbyterian Church, or "Calvin and his followers, ground the practice of baptizing infants on the principle that the covenant of God is with the faithful and their posterity; whence they restrict it to the children of believers; who, being embraced in the covenant, have a right to receive the sign of association with the visible church."2 See a discussion on Christian Baptism, by W. L. McCalla, Philadelphia., 1828. Concerning this Presbyterian foundation of infant baptism, founded on a covenant with the faithful and their posterity, the Bishop only says that it is "gratuitously supposed, and cannot be inferred from the ancient covenant with Abraham and his seed." To which I may add, that this hypothesis is suicidal to the Presbyterian doctrine of election, or, if not, to the church itself. She maintains that the Christian ordinances belong to the visible elect family or church of God, and to none else. Now, as she does not believe nor teach that the children of even believing parents are, as such, the elect children of God, or regenerated in fact, or in form, or in profession, how can she dispense to them the ordinance of Christ, they not belonging in fact or profession to the elect of God? She never has been able, and, I predict, never will be able, to reconcile her doctrine of election and her doctrine of grace and the ordinances of grace with her assumption of the Abrahamic covenants; for all the children of Abraham were an elect nation for the same purpose--according to the flesh; and neither infants nor adults were required to believe in any doctrine of grace in order to circumcision. They were circumcised because of fleshly relation, and not because of any spiritual relation to God or Christ. But we have to do at present with Bishop Kenrick, of the Roman Church in Philadelphia; and now we shall consider his proof of his assumption that all infants, as such, whether the offspring of Turk, Jew, Infidel, or Christian, are alike the proper subjects of Christian baptism. His first is-- Logical Argument, No. I.--"All of us are by nature children of wrath, being stained by sin. Baptism is the laver wherein sin is washed away. It must, then, be applicable to infants." Romantic logic! A syllogism of four or five terms, and yet without a middle term! Pope Pius IX., with all his infallibility and liberality, could not consecrate it into a logical or rational argument. It is as if one should argue--"All of us are by nature children of appetite, being impelled by hunger. The table is the place whereat hunger is driven away by those who can eat. The table, then, must be applicable to infants, whether they can eat or not." This is even a better argument than the bishop’s syllogism: for that assumes that baptism is, without any qualification whatever on the part of the subject, the laver wherein sin is washed away! But no well-informed man does believe that. To make his argument stand out in all its logical grandeur, it would read thus:--"All of us are by nature children of wrath, being stained by sin. Baptism is the laver wherein the sin of living men is washed away. It must, then, be applicable to infants, living or dead." But we take more interest in his biblical than in his logical arguments. Of these the first is-- Bible Argument, No. I.--"Who," says the bishop, "would venture to deny that they can be saved of whom Christ has said, ’Suffer the little children to come to me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God!"’ To this argument I have four objections:-- 1. It changes the subject of discussion. It is baptism, and not salvation, for which the bishop pleads; and now he talks of salvation, and asks, "Who can deny that infants can be saved." 2. These children were brought to the Messiah, neither for baptism nor for salvation, but for his blessing. 3. They were brought to Jesus before Christian baptism was ordained; and, therefore, their case can have no logical nor scriptural connection with baptism. 4. Jesus does not say that the kingdom of God is composed of little children; but of such as are, in some respects, like them. The English Hexapla, in all its versions, even including the Rheims, has "of such," and not of them. The late Polyglot, containing eight languages, which I have just examined, also favours this version. The French version expresses the full sense of them all. It reads in Matthew 19:13; Mark 10:14; Luke 18:15, Qui lour ressemblent. The kingdom of God is of those who resemble them. There is not, then, a single version of the New Testament, in either Bagster’s Hexapla, or in Bagster’s recent splendid Polyglot Bible, containing the Greek, Hebrew, Latin, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish approved versions, that justifies the bishop’s gloss. But, strange to tell, while the bishop makes original sin at one time a reason for infant baptism, he quotes with approbation the Abbot of Cluney, who wrote against Peter de Bruis of the twelfth century, pleading the innocence of children as a reason why they should certainly be baptized. The abbot asks, How will you any longer repel innocence from Christ? Will you snatch children from Christ who embraces children?" Thus the bishop, in his logical argument, will have original sin, and now will have their innocence a passport to Christian baptism! Surely, the legs of the lame are unequal! A Second Logical Argument.--The bishop draws his second logical argument from "all scriptural texts which speak of baptism as a washing, a renovation of the Holy Spirit." He says, "All such texts warrant the baptism of infants"--because, "they must be washed in the blood of the Lamb from the hereditary defilement." They, therefore, come forth from the font purified, justified, sanctified, having no spot or wrinkle, or any such thing. This is another new variety of the syllogism. If this be proof, I know not what could not be proved by putting a therefore after any three assertions. Assertion 1. All scriptural teats that speak of the washing of regeneration, warrant the baptism of infants. Assertion 2. Because they must be washed in the blood of the Lamb from hereditary defilement. Assertion 3. Therefore, they come forth from the font purified, justified, sanctified, having no spot, wrinkle, or any such thing. This is another Romantic syllogism, and would be universally smiled at, were it not that it comes from a Roman bishop in Philadelphia. I have only to say, that it assumes that a few drops of water from the finger of priest or layman, (for Rome admits of lay baptism,) pronounced with, the name of "the Trinity," is equal to the blood of Christ--nay, more than equal to the blood of Christ: for that blood, in its justifying power, requires faith on the part of the subject; but water is so much more efficacious that it requires no faith whatever on the part of the subject of infant justification and purification. Bishop Kenrick is, in some respects, a candid man; and, therefore, he reasons rather awkwardly; for, at one time his candour must be sacrificed to his position; at another time, his position to his candour. I will give two very remarkable proofs of his candour:--1st. Contrary to all my antagonists, he admits that infant baptism is not commanded in the commission, and cannot be legitimately inferred from it--"Go, convert the nations, baptizing them," &c. Of both versions of the commission, by Matthew and Mark, he observes, "Whether infants should be baptized cannot be inferred with certainty from the words of the commission." He then proceeds to answer the question, "Why, then, baptize them, if the commission do not authorize it?" He also repudiates the argument from circumcision, and will not use it, as being unworthy of the Apostles to be left to guess at what they should do while acting under a commission from the Lord. We shall hear him on both these points:-- "But, then, it may be asked, On what authority can they be baptized? If the commission do not regard them, they are necessarily beyond its reach, and the attempt to baptize is an unauthorized measure. I care not to answer with some that the term rendered ’teach’ maybe understood of making disciples, and initiating into Christ. Neither shall I allege, as a matter of mere inference, the divine command that each male infant, on the eighth day after his birth, should be circumcised,, and thus incorporated with the people of God: whence, it is said; the Apostles must have understood that infants should be admissible to the Christian rite which supersedes circumcision, especially inasmuch as the children of proselytes are said to have been washed with water, when their parents were admitted to Jewish privileges. I do not at all allow that the Apostles were left to guess their Master’s will from any circumstance; but I maintain that they were instructed by Him in the sacred functions entrusted to them, and were enlightened by the Holy Spirit that they might not err. The divine ordinance, on this point, must be earned from their teaching and their acts, as recorded in Scripture, or, in the want of decisive evidence of this sort, from the teaching and practice of the church which they founded." This is a very liberal and valuable surrender. Half of our treatises in favour of infant baptism are made up of assumptions connected with the identity of covenants, seals, and churches. Presbyterians, of every school, lay great stress on infant circumcision as a warrant for infant baptism. But Bishop Kenrick, not sworn to Calvinism, is more enlarged in his views of this ancient institution. He, therefore, will not send the twelve Apostles, with Christ’s commission in their hands, a-begging for instruction to Abraham, Moses, or the Jews, on the subject of preaching the gospel and baptizing. He intimates a very evident disagreement between his views and those of all the champions of the infant rite with whom I have wrestled on the subjects of both circumcision and the commission. He even inculpates either the learning or the fidelity of Rosenmuller, on the word matheteusate, found in Matthew 28:1-20 :, which means, says he, to make disciples. Rosenmuller contends that matheteusate may be understood of taking into the number of followers of Christ infants, who are afterwards to be instructed. This the Roman bishop repudiates, saying, "I do not, however, choose to rely on this verbal criticism, as the most obvious meaning of the term is to instruct effectually, so as to bring over to the number of disciples and believers those who were strangers to the truth. It is used of a scribe thoroughly instructed in heavenly truth, matheteutheis, Matthew 8: 52, and of Joseph of Arimathea, who was instructed by our Divine Master, and believed in him; Matthew 28: 57. Protestant writers have been led to forced explanations of words of Scripture to sustain the principle that all things necessary for salvation can be proved from it." Upon this very just and necessary surrender of the commission, our learned prelate takes occasion to descant upon the value of tradition, and very candidly gives up the whole scriptural argument for infant baptism, as imperfect and unsatisfactory. When any one, on the Pedobaptist ground, tells me that the Sacred Scriptures, on this point, are not "thoroughly conclusive," I will concur with him in another point, which the bishop himself seems also to admit, viz. that the baptizing of infants cannot be "satisfactorily vindicated." Here, then, the door is opened for tradition. I am sorry to say that, in this respect, the bishop displays more honesty than some Protestant Pedobaptists: for he at once admits both the need and the importance of tradition, and openly quotes, applies, and confides in it; whereas, the Protestants, many of them at least, verbally denounce and abjure tradition; and yet, after all, really build on it. Of this we shall, perhaps, give some proofs hereafter; as we have, alas! too many of them. We shall only farther quote this passage, and allow it to speak for itself:-- "Without the aid of tradition, the practice of baptizing infants cannot be satisfactorily vindicated, the scriptural proofs on this point not being thoroughly conclusive: yet we do not, on this account, neglect the arguments which it furnishes, and which have considerable force." But though unable to find any rational or scriptural authority in circumcision or in the commission for infant baptism, the bishop is resolved, if possible, to maintain it; and seems with fresh spirit to appeal to the households baptized by the Apostles. We shall, then, hear him on his second SCRIPTURAL ARGUMENT:-- "We are challenged to show that the Apostles baptized infants. Had we a detailed enumeration of their ministerial acts, the challenge would be reasonable; but the book styled their Acts contains only some of the chief facts which marked the origin and proved the divine authority of the Christian church. Yet even there it is said that Lydia ’was baptized and her household, and the jailer ’was baptized and presently all his family;’ and St. Paul testifies that he ’baptized also the household of Stephanas.’ It cannot indeed be proved that infants were in these families; but the presumption is that there were, and the general expressions naturally lead us to consider the baptism of all the children as following the conversion of the parent." Our resolute champion for the infant rite, in his self-respect and candour, is, it appears, in the end of his enumeration of households baptized, constrained to give up his own argument deduced from them, and to acknowledge that an infant cannot be found in any one of them. So these, too, are abandoned, and his dernier resort is to tradition--ecclesiastic tradition. He, of course, desires to find in the first century or second century some case that would favour the idea. Beginning with Justin Martyr, who flourished about the middle of it, and then proceeding to Irenæus, who flourished at the end of it, he cannot find a clear allusion to it, much less a positive proof of it; for infant baptism is not so much as named in any fragment of ancient tradition during the first and second centuries. No living man can find any allusion to it, or account of it, till in the third century, and even then there is little certain and less indicative that it had obtained in the Christian church so called. Positive ordinances demand positive proof as certain as divine ordinances require the proof of divine authority. But neither he nor any other man can, from the oracles of God, or from ecclesiastical history, produce any direct, positive proof, human or divine, for infant baptism during the first two hundred years of the Christian age. We shall hear the Prelate on this subject, and then lay him on our shelf pro tempore:-- "The ancient practice of baptizing infants, of which the origin at any period subsequent to the apostolic age cannot be pointed out, is the strongest presumptive evidence of their practice. "St. Justin the Martyr speaks of ’many persons of both sexes, sixty or seventy years old, who from childhood had been devoted to Christ, and persevered in virginity unto that age.’ Although the terms employed do not express their baptism in infancy, they certainly afford ground for believing it, for their early instruction in the doctrines of Christ, and their enrolment among his disciples, are easily understood on this hypothesis." No positive or decisive evidence, but air-built, conjectural, and far-fetched speculations as yet appear; and doubtless if any man could find any thing better, a Roman bishop might rationally be expected to have it in his possession. Meantime, we are at present engaged with the Bible evidence and arguments deducible from the Christian Scriptures; and having found, in the judgment of the bishop, "no positive or satisfactory proof," nothing "thoroughly conclusive," either in circumcision, the commission, or in household baptism--nothing in the form of precept, example, or precedent, in any portion of the canonical Scriptures, we shall next hear one of his neighbours,-- Dr. MILLER of Princeton, "Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Church Government, in the Theological Seminary at Princeton. Philadelphia, 1835: published by J. Whetham." We prefer Miller to any other American, or even English writer, on this subject, because of his opportunities and position in society, and because his calling and profession make it his duty to be in possession of all that is written or of value upon the subject. It will, therefore, exempt me from the necessity of, reviewing the sources whence he has derived his arguments--such as Wall, Edwards, Walker, Williams, Parsons, Evans, Wardlaw, Moore, Dwight, &c., &c., and also his own reasonings and reflections on all the premises. The doctor, too, is as venerable for his years as for his learning; and after him we shall find little to interest us in other writers, though courtesy and popular opinion may require us to notice some of them. Dr. Miller had the subject long before his mind, and has greatly concentrated the arguments commonly used, besides adding his own profound speculations on the premises. We shall, therefore, hear him with attention, examine him with care, and object to his views with all becoming candour and respect. I have only farther to premise a single regret as to the doctor’s style of treating the subject. It is not that his style is too obscure, diffuse, or inelegant; but because it is too dogmatical, positive, and somewhat ex-cathedral. I am sorry to have to except to the statement of the case in issue; on the very opening of his first discourse on the direct evidence in favour of infant baptism. He may, indeed, without any evil intention, have done this; but it is peculiarly unfortunate, for himself and his reader, who are likely to be deceived by the error and seduced into much false, or, at least, irrelevant reasoning. His statement is in the following words:--"It is well known that there is a large and respectable body of professing Christians among us, who believe and confidently assert that baptism ought to be confined to adults; who insist that when professing Christians bring their infant offspring and dedicate them to God, and receive for them the washing of sacramental water in the name of the Father, &c., &c., they entirely pervert and misapply an important Christian ordinance."3 I have placed certain words in this quotation in italics, that the reader may pause and reflect upon them, and ask himself, Is this the true statement of the controversy? We are free to confess that it is not a true statement of the case. There is no denomination of Baptists in Christendom, known to me, that teaches that baptism ought to be confined to adults, or that minors, or even young children, should be debarred from it. It is not a question about adults and minors, adults or infants. I have baptized many infants in law and young children in years, and so I presume have many others technically called Immersionists or Baptists. Dr. Miller makes it a question of years--with us, it is a question of faith. It is not about nonage or adult age, but about intelligence and belief. He pleads for a baptism without faith in the subject, without the power to make a profession of it. We argue for a baptism preceded by a profession of faith on the part of the subject. This is the real issue--the one assumed by him is a false issue. The doctor’s statement is also characterized by unscriptural terms--such as "washing of sacramental water," "dedicate our infant offspring." How can that be "sacramental water" to one ignorant of a sacrament? How is baptism a sacrament? Whence came these barbarous terms? And how can one be washed with a dewdrop on the face, or with a moistened finger? Does not the doctor wholly misconceive the ordinance of dedication? Neither circumcision among Jews, nor baptism among Christians, was, under any dispensation, regarded or called "dedication." Neither dedicate nor dedication, though often occurring in the Bible, is once found in the sacred Scriptures applied to persons, but always to things. Can parents dedicate their children to the Lord? In what way? By what authority? The dedication of children as soon as born, is of equal authority with the Roman custom of making saints of very great sinners so soon after their death as their faults are forgotten. Can the ceremony of giving a name to a child change its position to God, his church, or the human race? And if so, by what authority? "We are bound," says the doctor, "to bring our infant seed in the arms of faith and love, and present them before the Lord, in that ordinance which is at once a seal of God’s covenant with his people."4 If infant baptism or affusion be a seal of a covenant, where is it so stated, and what is the covenant into which children enter, and what does baptism seal to them? These are questions which Dr. Miller, I am sure, never can answer with any rational or scriptural authority. God affixes no seal to blank covenants, nor to any covenant he does not make good. What do the infant seed of Pedobaptists show or possess of covenanted mercies not enjoyed by others? But the doctor says, "We have no doubt that the visible church" [who ever saw an invisible church?] "is made up not only of those who personally profess the true religion, but also of their children."5 His reasons for his faith are--1st. "Because in all Jehovah’s covenants with his professing people, from the earliest ages and states of society, their infant seed have been included." Page 15. Query--Are they born into it, or circumcised into it, or baptized into it? If they are born into it, then natural birth is the door into both the church and the world. They enter both at once. But if circumcision was the door, or baptism the door, then Adam, Abel, Enoch, Noah, Melchisedec, nor any saint, for two thousand and eighty-three years, ever got into the church. The doctor’s hypothesis is a lusus naturæ, or a lusus mentis, or a rank delusion. Circumcision was the door into the church, or it was not. If the door into the church, then no one entered it for two thousand and eighty-three years. If it was not, then baptism being, according to the doctor, its substitute, is not the door. The doctor’s logic or theology must fail, or, perhaps, both, to extricate him out of this dilemma. The covenants made with Adam, Noah, and one of those made with Abraham, had respect to their whole seed, good and bad. But no such covenant could, by any possibility, be an ecclesiastic one, because an ecclesiastic covenant, as the term imports, respects those selected, or called out; and a covenant that takes all a man’s seed, as did that with Adam, Noah, and the covenant of circumcision made with Abraham twenty-four years after the "covenant concerning Christ," never could be a church covenant. Hence the facts of the Bible, and its technical terms, alike with common sense, excommunicate the doctor’s reasonings beyond the pale of reason and philosophy. But there is another radical aberration in the Doctor’s mind, as it appears to me, on the subject of "covenants made with professing people." If the covenant be made with professing people as such, then they can have no issue, no covenanted issue, I mean, but a professing issue. Hence the covenant with Abraham concerning his spiritual seed--a covenant made with him as a spiritual and not as a natural father, twenty-four years before the covenant in the flesh, recognises no children but those of faith: so Paul taught me to reason when he said--"If you be Christ’s," you Jews or Gentiles, "THEN are you Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the covenant," alias, promise. This settles the matter, as it appears to me, till the day of judgment. Now, unless Dr. Miller can show that whether Christ’s or not, Jews are the seed of Abraham according to the covenant before confirmed (eis Christon,) in reference to Christ, then he must acknowledge that this his fundamental hypothesis is but a brilliant fancy, a splendid sophism, playing round the galleries of the imagination, but entering not into the sanctuary of reason and sacred truth. The second reason assigned in proof that the visible church is made up of professors and their fleshly offspring, is--"The close and endearing connection between parents and children,"--"a strong argument in favour of the church membership of the infant seed of believers." "Can it be, my dear friends," says the doctor, in arguing this case, "that when the stem is in the church, the branch is out of it!" If this be not carnalizing the church of Christ, I ask what would constitute that offence against him who said--"unless a man be born again," "born of water and of Spirit," "born from above," he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. "If any man be in Christ he is a new creature." If the stem be in the church, that is, the flesh of the parents, then the branch from the flesh must also be in it. But if the stem be the spirit or new man, then the branch cannot be the flesh of the child, but its spirit. Can any one imagine a greater confusion of ideas in the mind of a learned sage, than appears in such reasonings. It is the perversity of a fallacious and unscriptural system that compels a literary gentleman, a learned father in the Presbyterial Israel, to speak such incongruous things. Again, if "the close and endearing connection" between parents and children be a strong argument that infants should be baptized and brought in through natural affection for them; would it not be quite as good logic to argue as follows?--"The close and endearing connection" between husband and wife, being one flesh, "is a strong argument in favour of the church membership of the wife of a Christian husband." And, in the same bold style of proof, we would ask--Can it be, my dear friends, that when the head is in the church, the body should be out of it? And is not "the husband the head over his wife as Christ is the head of the church?" If Mr. Miller’s second argument be a sound one, it will behove that, owing to the "close and endearing connection between husbands and wives," when the husband or the wife is in the church, the other party ought to be a church member also. If Mr. Miller repudiates this view, he repudiates his own reasoning. In the present essay, we have not space to respond to the other reasons which Dr. Miller alleges in proof of his favourite dogma. We must reserve the remainder of them for another tract. The elaborate researches and efforts on the part of those learned advocates of this ancient tradition, furnish very strong arguments against their position. They affirm, in all their standards, that "baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament and ordained by Jesus Christ" himself. Why, then, in the face of this very just and correct annunciation of their faith, go to Moses and Abraham to find a foundation for an ordinance of Jesus Christ? Are solemn Christian ordinances to be established by remote abstract and philosophical reasonings, instead of positive precepts? Positive institutions require positive enactments, and cannot be established by mere inferential reasonings. This is an oracle as ancient as those of sacrifice, the altar, and the priest. Could any one have introduced circumcision by inferential reasoning, or change circumcision from blood to water, from cutting the flesh to wetting the face? He that believes this will not find it difficult to believe in transubstantiation or any other metamorphosis of Patriarchal, Jewish, or Christian institutions. 1 Page 125. 2 Page 124. 3 Page 14. 4 Page 15. 5 Ibid. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 36: 01.06.02. REVIEW OF DR. MILLER OF PRINCETON ======================================================================== CHAPTER II. REVIEW OF DR. MILLER OF PRINCETON. TWO of Dr. Miller’s reasons in favour of a mixed church--a church composed of professors and non-professors--of regenerate and unregenerate persons--of voluntary and involuntary members, have been considered and shown to be naked assumptions, without any show of scriptural evidence or authority. We shall now examine his other reasons for infant church membership. His third reason is--"The actual and acknowledged church membership of infants under the Old Testament economy, is a decisive index of the Divine will in regard to this matter." Now, on his own showing, the non actual and unacknowledged church membership of infants under the Old Testament economy, would be a decisive index of the Divine will in regard to this matter. Dividing, then, the Old Testament economy into four thousand years from Adam to Christ, we have two periods of a very different character. There is a period of 2100 years from Adam to the covenant of circumcision, during which time there was not an indication of infant church membership by any kind of right, title, or visible recognition whatever. There was, indeed, a period of about 1490 years, in which there was a national institution--in which was recognised a male infant membership, and other hereditary honours. The mitre, sceptre, and the tribeship honours were alike hereditary in this "Jewish national church state." By what new species of logic and theology he makes an Old Testament church of four thousand years standing a model of a Christian church we know not, especially as more than half that time there was no infant membership whatever; and during the remainder of it, only a male infant right in a national institution. But why argue for one portion of its male hereditary rights, and oppose another part of it? Why contend for male infant membership, and not for male infant rights to the priesthood and the throne? Why make the Old Testament national institution a reason for infant church membership, and not also for church rulers, priests, and kings? Did not this Old Testament church birthright make of certain males, according to tribes and families, priests and kings, as well as citizens? And did it not equally exclude females from them all? If there be reason, or truth, or propriety in his assumptions, Professor Miller ought to have his sons fill his chair theological and his pulpit ministerial, in virtue of his own flesh; and also exclude his infant daughters from membership in the church, because, girls, under Moses, had no national birthrights to sealing ordinances! What an unenviable intellectual discrimination do these veteran defenders of Papal traditions evince in the defence of infant church membership! But our learned professor affords many other such instances of his own peculiar logic. In the very same chapter, in proof that circumcision sealed to infants spiritual blessings, he alleges that "circumcision is expressly declared, by the inspired Apostle, to have been a seal of the righteousness of faith." Romans 4:11. Our logical text-books do not afford a more complete illustration of the "fallacia accidentas," or of the error of affirming a general or a universal truth from an accidental or particular case, than does our zealous Pedobaptist present to the literary world in his quotation of Romans 4:11. Paul, in this place, says of Abraham that "he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had before he was circumcised." From which singular and remarkable case, Dr. Miller infers that circumcision was the seal of the righteousness of faith to infants that have no faith! If he does not argue this, I ask what does he argue?--! Can an infant, male or female, have a righteousness of faith, without having faith?--! Must not a human being have faith before he can have its righteousness? I would ask, Was circumcision to Ishmael, or to the babe Isaac, what it was to Abraham, who had believed God many years before either of them was born? But Paul calls circumcision the sign and a seal--not the seal. It was to all the circumcised infants a sign in their flesh that they were of the blood of Abraham; but not to any one of them a sign of any faith, or righteousness of faith--for they had neither on the eighth day. Were we allowed to suspicion a design to mislead, Dr. Miller affords ample means, of making out a very strong case from the liberty which he here takes with the sacred text. He entirely changes the meaning of the passage as read in the common New Testament and in the original, by leaving out the definite article before faith, and again by lopping off an entire member of the sentence defining the word faith in Paul’s use of it here. This will appear to all by quoting Paul’s own words, and placing them in contrast with the words that Dr. Miller puts into Paul’s mouth. Paul’s words are--"He received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had being yet uncircumcised." But Dr. Miller makes Paul say, "He received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of faith." The doctor makes circumcision in all cases a seal of the righteousness of faith; while Paul makes it only a seal of the righteousness of that faith possessed long before the date of the covenant of circumcision. Now I will not, in charity, call this a wilful handling of the word of God deceitfully; but will rather say it is a proof of the perversity of prejudice; or of the blindness sometimes accompanying long cherished errors. But what makes this sophism still more unpardonable is the fact, that Paul, in commenting on the case, alleges that it was designed for a very special purpose; viz. to indicate that in the gospel age Gentiles without circumcision should equally enjoy with the circumcised all the blessings of the Christian institution; and, therefore, his having the righteousness of faith before circumcision, constitutes him the "father of all them that believe, though they be not circumcised;" and also, "the father of circumcision to them who are not of the circumcision only, but who also walk in the steps of that faith of our father Abraham which he had while uncircumcised." This explanation of a seal of the righteousness of the faith of Abraham, possessed twenty-four years before he was circumcised, leaves not the shadow of an excuse for any man of letters making that use of it probably adopted, rather than fabricated, by Professor Miller. His fourth reason for infant membership is no better than his third. It is, indeed, less excusable, because it adds to its logical infirmities a gratuitous assertion concerning a concession which it cannot prove. It reads thus:--"As the infant seed of the people of God are acknowledged, on all hands, to have been members of the church equally with their parents, under the Old Testament dispensation, so it is equally certain that the Church of God is the same in substance now that it was then." They are not "acknowledged on all hands to, have been members of any church" for two, thousand one hundred years; and not members of a Church of God, unless a nation be a church; and not then, unless male infants mean "the infant seed of the people of God." Now, as these are not certain--nay, not true--from his own words, this argument is a logical fallacy. His words are, "It is equally certain that the church of God is the same in substance now as then." That is--It is equally certain as that which is wholly uncertain--nay, contrary to the most express testimony. The evidence that the Jewish nation and the Christian church are not identically one and the same in substance, spirit, or form, is, to an unprejudiced mind, most copious, clear, and irrefragable. I will give a few proofs of it by stating a few facts:-- 1. The house that Moses built and the house that Christ built are spoken of as two, and not as one and the same. Paul to the Hebrews, chap. 3:, "Moses was faithful as a testimony of things to be spoken" in the gospel age--faithful in God’s house; but "Christ as a son over his own house, whose house we (Christians) are." Now, as Moses was born before he built God’s house, so the Messiah was born before he built his own house: They are, then, two houses, and not one and the same. 2. God promised, by Isaiah, Isaiah 28:16, that he would build a new house, or church, and himself lay the foundation of it. "Behold, I lay in Zion, for a foundation stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation." Of course, Moses had not laid even the foundation of the New Institution, or Christian temple. 3. Daniel 7:1-28, also declares that, in the days of the Roman Cæsars, "the God of heaven would set up a kingdom," which would survive "all the kingdoms of the world, and stand for ever." Surely, that was not the Jewish church. It had been set up long before. 4. Dr. Miller will have the Jewish covenant and the Christian covenant the same; whereas, God promised a new covenant, and also told the Jews by Ezekiel, Ezekiel 16:61, that he would make a new covenant, and add, to a portion of the Jews, the Gentiles, and form a new community; but, says he, "Not by thy covenant;" yet Dr. Miller affirms by one "and the same precious covenant." He makes Jesus Christ the head of the Jewish church; for, with him, the Jewish nation and the Christian church are identical throughout. "The same head, the same precious covenant, the same great spiritual design, the same atoning blood, the same sanctifying Spirit." Such are his dogmata; and his illustration is, "It is not more certain that a man arrived at mature age is the same individual that he was when an infant in his mother’s lap, than it is that the church, in the plenitude of her light and privileges, after the coming of Christ, is the same church which, many centuries before, though with a much smaller amount of light and privilege; yet, as we are expressly told in the New Testament, (Acts 7:28,) enjoyed the presence and guidance of his Divine Head in the wilderness." P. 19. The illustration is much better than the proof. It is certain that the infant and the full-grown man are identically the same person; for, of this, consciousness is the highest proof. But has the Christian church this consciousness? Nay; Dr. Miller gives that up;, and proves his allegata by simply affirming here; that the Christian church is identically the Jewish church, full-grown; because the Jewish church enjoyed, according to Stephen, "the presence and guidance of her Divine Head." Suppose it should be said, for illustration of this splendid logic, that George Washington was both the head of the American army and afterwards the head of the American nation--that, therefore, the American army and the American nation were identically one and the same institution or body corporate; what would our political doctors say? Yet, just such a logician is this venerable theological professor of Princeton. To illustrate or argue the identity, the doctor proceeds into the Galatians, and brings up the fourth chapter to sustain his notion of identity. Because an heir, when a minor, is under a master as much as a servant, therefore the Jewish community and the Christian community are identically one church. Now, the Apostle’s own argument in that chapter most expressly compares the Jewish covenant and people to Hagar and Ishmael, and the Christian covenant and people to Sarah and Isaac--saying, that the two women represent two covenants, or constitutions, and that the two sons represent two distinct communities--the Jews and the Christians. The difference between the Jewish community and the Christian institution was never more circumstantially drawn by the Apostle Paul, or any one else, than in this graphic allegory. Here is the slave Hagar and her bond-son, and here is the free Sarah and her free-born son. Here are the Jews, born after the flesh, and the Christians, after the Spirit. The Jewish institution, in the birth of its members, differed nothing from England or the United States--the door into both was flesh, blood, or natural birth; but, into Christ’s church none can enter, unless, like Isaac, they are supernaturally born, or born after the Spirit. So the Apostle argues: "Cast out the bond-woman Hagar and her son Ishmael--both the old covenant and those born under it; for the son of the bondwoman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman." Dr. Miller says they are identically the same, and do inherit the same relation. But Paul differs from the doctor; averring, "So we, brethren, are not children of the bondwoman"--of the Jewish covenant; for these two women represent the two covenants; but we Christians are "children of the freewoman," or new covenant. It will not help the doctor, to assume that the dispensations are two and the covenants one, since Paul makes two covenants. Indeed, this whole hypothesis of two dispensations of one covenant, is but dust and ashes thrown by the theological doctors into the eyes of their too credulous devotees. Two dispensations of religion change membership and privileges just as much as two covenants. A covenant is a dispensation. There is, therefore, just as much sound sense as sound theology in speaking of two dispensations of one dispensation, as in speaking of two dispensations of one covenant. It is learned nonsense. A modest theologian would, methinks, be satisfied with the fact that the Saviour preached a new birth as essential to admission into the Christian church or reign of Heaven. The Jews were born of flesh, of blood, and of the will of man; but not of God. But the Messiah, who came to set up a new kingdom, preached a new doctrine, and gave, only to those who received him, the power or privilege to become the children of God. And this, we are expressly told, cut off all the sons of the flesh: for, only "to those who received him, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God, gave he privilege to become the children of God," or members of his church. Hence, to Nicodemus, he affirmed, "Except a man, be born again he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." But our learned Dr. Miller is full of proof-texts. That the Jewish church and the Christian are identically one and the same institution he alleges from the dislocated joint of an argument, Hebrews 4:2, "For unto us was the gospel as well as unto them:" that is, in the doctor’s vision, to saying, the same gospel was preached unto the Jews that has been preached to us. Suppose that were the fact; would that make us Jews, or them Christians?! It certainly, on the doctor’s showing, has as much power to make Gentiles Jews as Jews Christians! But few men, in this our day of learned criticism, would have the courage to make such a quotation: for all the learning of the age is on the side of reading the passage, "For glad tidings of a rest to come are preached to us Christians, as were glad tidings of a rest (in Canaan) preached to them;" but the good tidings of a rest in Canaan preached to them did not profit them, (since but two men of the whole nation entered into that rest,) because of not believing the glad tidings concerning it announced to them. So evident is this the contextual import of the passage, that children in our Sunday-schools, equally with the most learned of our critics, so understand it. Surely, Dr. Miller has survived his generation! This can only be excelled by Dr. Miller himself. The Jewish church ate the manna and drank the mystic rock, and are a gospel church because, says the doctor, they are builded on the same foundation--the Apostles and Prophets. Moses alone founded the Jewish church. It is only at this Princeton Observatory, through some new ecclesiastic telescope, that the Prophets and Apostles were seen along with Moses when he founded the church of Christ in the wilderness of Sin!! But, finally, the doctor completes his climax by the parable of the Good Olive Tree, Romans 11:1-36 : The case is this: Jeremiah (Jeremiah 16:1-21) in allusion to the past history of the nation, says, "The Lord called thy name a green olive-tree, fair and of goodly fruit." Paul to the Romans applies this figure, and reminds some Gentile brethren, compared to the branches of a wild olive, that they had been grafted into the good olive-tree and made to partake of its root and fatness. Some of the natural branches of this olive-tree had been broken off, and they were grafted in their place. That we may not pervert or misapply this allegory, it is important to keep the facts on which it is founded clearly before our minds. Of these, the following are chief:-- 1. "To the Jews pertained the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises, whose are the fathers, and of whom, as to the flesh, Christ came." But Christ’s church is not found in the inventory of their peculiar rights, honors, and privileges. They had the adoption and the Shekinah. They were the only people that God acknowledged nationally, and among whom he pitched his tent and held his abode. The covenants guarantying blessings to the human race, and of making them nationally according to the flesh a peculiar people, were in their hands. To them the law of circumcision was given. The typical worship of the only living and true God was theirs. The promises spiritual and eternal were given to them for the benefit of the human race. This, indeed, was a chief blessing; for Paul admits their chief advantage to have been, that "to them were committed the oracles of God." The three great fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in whom God promised to bless all the families of the earth, were their natural progenitors. Hence the Messiah himself was the natural son of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with some fifty-two other progenitors: for, according to Luke, Jesus was the fifty-sixth person in descent from Abraham. But it is nowhere said that to them pertained the church or believing family of the only living and true God. This is assumed by all those who make the Jewish nation and the Christian church identical. There was a people of God before Abraham, and after Abraham they did not derive their blood from him. Abraham, that he might be a great father, was made the father of two races of men--a natural and a spiritual progeny. The history of Sarah and Hagar and their two sons stereotypes this for ever. Now for almost two thousand years these two races were chiefly found in one nation. This was the good Olive Tree. Especially was it good while the whole nation, as such, kept pure the only true worship of one only living and true God. But, be it emphatically said, that this was predicted to continue so only till the Messiah should come. For the patriarch Jacob, when dying, said of Shiloh, the son of Judah, "To him shall the gathering of the people be." Many a type and prophecy indicate this. Hence, according to prophecy, "he came in the fulness of time" to his own nation, but "his own people received him not." "To as many, however, as received him" in his proper character, and to none else, "he gave the privilege of becoming the children of God, even to them that believe on his name; who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." Hence "if we be Christ’s," and in no other way, "we are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise." The worldly sanctuary and service are abolished, and the worldly race of Abraham are broken off from now being the peculiar people of God. A portion, however, of the natural seed of Abraham became his spiritual seed, and formed the nucleus of a new institution. To them, as Christ’s church, the believing Gentiles are added. Thus the natural branches of God’s ancient olive-tree are every one broken off; and none but spiritual branches, or believing men and women, are regarded as his peculiar people. Into this good olive-tree believing Gentiles are as admissible as believing Jews; for now "we are all the children of God by faith in Jesus Christ;" and "if any man be in Christ he is a new creature, old things are passed away, behold all things have become new." How Dr. Miller could mystify or overlook the three following declarations,--"Because of unbelief they were broken off"--"Thou standest by faith"--and, "If they abide not in unbelief, God will graft them in again"--can only be explained on the alleged all-predominating power of prejudice. Are not these declarations fatal to his assumption that all that are born of a certain kind of human flesh are, without faith, to be grafted into Christ’s good olive-tree? To any such engrafted individual, who could say with Paul, "Thou standest by faith?" "Be not high-minded, but fear!" Dr. Miller’s fifth argument is--"If infants were once members, and if the church remains the same, they undoubtedly are still members, unless some positive Divine enactment excluding them can be found." P. 21. But we have shown that infants never were members of any church less than a whole nation, or a church founded on blood. Therefore, his fifth argument is, in one of its branches, altogether baseless as a dream. In the other branch--"if the church remains the same"--it is equally without foundation. There never was a community on the earth founded upon faith till Jesus Christ came. This is the divine and glorious character of Christ’s Church. All other communities, ancient or modern, are founded in blood or selfishness of some kind. But this alone is founded on faith--"If thou believest with all thy heart thou mayest." This is its essential and indispensable prerequisite. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh." Hence we must be born again in order to enter into Christ’s kingdom. His sixth argument is to show that baptism came in the room of circumcision. He, however, strange to tell, proves that it has not come in the room of it. He says that "circumcision publicly ratified admission or entrance into the visible family of God." P. 23. But circumcision was not the door into Abraham’s family, or the family composed of the children of Abraham. Natural birth was the door, and not circumcision. Moreover, circumcision was confined to male children. It was also restricted to the eighth day after natural birth. In these particulars, as in many others, baptism is proved not designed to fill or occupy the room of circumcision. He seems to have forgotten that Jesus Christ was himself both circumcised and baptized--that the twelve Apostles were circumcised and baptized--that the whole Christian church, for seven years after its birth on Pentecost, in its myriads of converts, all Jews, was entirely composed of persons both circumcised and baptized--myriads of the Jews believed and were baptized! Two seals, blood and water, attached to one subject and to one covenant as doors into the church! Nay, farther, he asserts that circumcision was done away, and that baptism came in the room of it. But where is his proof? Circumcision was not, in any recorded case, dispensed with. The believing Jews, down to the end of the New Testament history, circumcised their children. Paul publicly declared, by an overt act, that he had not commanded them to desist from circumcising their children. It is, then, perfectly gratuitous to affirm that circumcision has been done away by any divine statute; and, consequently, that baptism has come in the room of it. Dr. Miller’s seventh argument for infant baptism is household baptism, already noted. Bishop Kenrick gives that up, as wholly inconclusive, and so must every enlightened man of candour. There is no case of family baptism indicating infant baptism. On the contrary, we have shown that there is internal evidence that there was no case of infant baptism in any one of them. But suppose there was no ambiguity on the subject of infant baptism, that it was a matter clearly established; even then it could not be proved that in the three or four families reported there was an infant in them. In the first place, it is not named. Hence it is inferential. There is no circumstance at all indicating or even implying it. Then it rests upon mere possibility, not upon the least probability; for there are amongst us many families or households and not an infant in them. Therefore, nothing remains but bare possibility; and he that builds a Christian institution upon a mere possibility, is not to be reasoned against; for there is no sound reason in him. His eighth reason is, that "had the sign of infant membership been suddenly withdrawn, there would have been wounds and murmurings, and feelings of deep revolt and complaint against the new economy." Had they, indeed, had as carnal and secular views as Dr. Miller seems to have of Christianity and Christian baptism, there would have been a fearful tumult and uproar among the people. But when we remember that faith and repentance, from the days of the Harbinger, were preached as essentially prerequisite to baptism, and that John refused to baptize some who demanded it on the ground of having Abraham, or some saint, for their father, we only wonder that any one well read in the New Testament could have ever found such an objection. And still more especially, after reading the Acts of Apostles, in which faith is so often connected indissolubly with baptism. When Jesus said, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved," who can rationally expect to find his followers and his Apostles teaching by their practice--he that is baptized without faith shall be saved? His ninth argument is, "The New Testament abounds with passages which cannot reasonably be explained but in harmony with this doctrine." Among his specifications, the following are deserving of notice: The first is a prediction of Isaiah, intimating that a time would come in which the wolf and the lamb would feed together--in which God would create new heavens and a new earth--increase the age and comforts of his people and bless their offspring. He next relies upon the words of the Saviour to those who were inhibiting parents from bringing their children to the Lord for the imposition of his hands and a benediction. The next is Peter’s assurance to the Jews that the promise of the Holy Spirit was tendered to the believing Jews and their descendants or children. And then the argument of Paul to those who would have some believing wives or husbands to separate from their unbelieving partners. To the last of these only need we now advert, as the others have been already examined in our last Review. Indeed, the promise quoted from Isaiah for the sake of the phrase, "and their offspring with them," and that from Acts 2:1-47 :, "The promise is to you and your children," are but a puerile play upon the words children and offspring, as if offspring and children were identical with speechless babes. These terms generally mean our descendants. We are at eighty years the children of our fathers--just as much their offspring at eighty years as eight days. These are so palpably a begging of the question, that it would be only an idle parade of words to expose them. But the sentence, 1 Corinthians 7:14, calls for a special notice, as we have formerly adduced it as a conclusive argument against the slightest probability of infant baptism as either taught or thought of in the apostolic age. It stands before the public unresponded to in my discussion with Mr. Rice. The words are--"The unbelieving husband is sanctified by" (or to) "the wife; and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by" (or to) "the husband; else were your children unclean; but now are they holy." Booth, in his "Pedobaptism Examined," adduces more than twenty of our most distinguished critics, reformers, and commentators; among whom are Melancthon, Whitby, Camerarius, Wolfius, Vitringa, &., in proof that the holiness or sanctification of the unbelieving party and their children here is not that of the new covenant nor of church relation; but as bread is "sanctified by the word of God and prayer," so is this relation sanctified as respects matrimonial intimacies. The marriage relation and those growing out of it are not to be dissolved, but are lawful and proper, though one of the parties should not be converted to God with the other. For, were it otherwise, your offspring would be unclean and not to be endured; but now are they holy or sanctified to you. Two things must appear obvious, as we conceive, from this passage:--First, That the unbelieving parent and the child were in the same sense sanctified or holy to the other party; and, in the second place, that, as the Apostle changes the address from the third person to the second, he includes all the infants born to the church in Corinth. "Your," not their "children," said the Apostle, are not to be judged unclean and to be repudiated: but to be regarded as worthy of your care, protection, and support. Now had infant baptism been ordained in the primitive church, all infants would have been alike consecrated by it, and the Apostle could not have said, "Else were your children unclean;" for that could not have been supposed had they been baptized. Thus it is manifest, from this passage alone, that infant church membership and infant baptism were alike unknown and unthought of in the age of the Apostles. But to make infant holiness a passport to baptism is not only unsupported but unsupportable by any plausible proof deduced from the New Testament. Infant holiness, in a covenant sense, a prerequisite to baptism, is certainly, so far as the oracles of Christ and his Apostles are regarded, a new idea. What a strange argument Dr. Miller puts into the mouth of Peter! Dr. Luke makes him say, "Be baptized every one of you for the remission of sins." Doctor Ananias says to Paul, "Arise and be baptized, and wash away your sins." But Dr. Miller says, "Arise and be baptized, you innocent babes, and wash yourselves, because you are relatively holy, and are actually born members of the church."1 Dr. Miller’s tenth and last argument for infant baptism is, "Finally, the history of the Christian church from the apostolic age furnishes an argument of irresistible force in favour of the Divine authority of infant baptism." Of this argument we cannot say much. We have, already noticed it in our last essay, and shown that there is no historic evidence of infant baptism till the third century. When first named, too, it was opposed as an innovation. And what is no little remarkable, infant communion at the Lord’s table is as well authenticated from the annals of the church of the same century as it is. Nay, more, the monastic life, or perpetual celibacy, constitutes another of its coevals, and virginity becomes as efficacious to gain heaven and glory as faith in Christ or his resurrection from the dead. Infant baptism, infant communion, perpetual virginity, are of the same origin and of the same century, as we may hereafter show, and I hope to the conviction of some who have long been imposed on by the alleged high antiquity of infant church membership and infant baptism. We have not yet bid adieu to Dr. Miller of Princeton, We only bid him good-bye, in hope of listening to him on some other branch of the subject. 1 Dr. Miller quotes with approbation the late Dr. Mason, of New York,, who took the bold and presumptive ground that "the infants of believing persons are born members of his church." P. 32. Query--If they are born members of the church, how can baptism be the door of admission? ======================================================================== CHAPTER 37: 01.06.03. REVIEW OF PROFESSOR MILLER OF PRINCETON; AND DR. WALL, VICAR OF SHOREM, IN KENT ======================================================================== CHAPTER III. REVIEW OF PROFESSOR MILLER OF PRINCETON; AND DR. WALL, VICAR OF SHOREM, IN KENT. FRANCIS PATRICK KENRICK, Bishop of Philadelphia, as before cited, in his "TREATISE OF BAPTISM" admits that infant baptism cannot be satisfactorily sustained from the inspired writings. His words are--"Without the aid of tradition, the practice of baptizing infants cannot be satisfactorily vindicated, the Scripture proofs on this point not being thoroughly conclusive; yet we do not, on this account, neglect the arguments which it furnishes, and which have considerable force."1 Dr. Wall also relies much more on tradition than on apostolic testimony. He occupies a volume with quotations, and comments upon them, from the Fathers and the ancient Councils, both general and local. Tradition is, indeed, his main pillar. He quotes incomparably more from the Fathers and ancient writers than from Moses and the Prophets, or from Jesus and the Apostles. He begins with Clemens Romanus, and Hermas, and arrays before us in great pomp, Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Clemens Alexandrinus, Tertullian, Origen, St: Cyprian, St. Basil, St. Gregory, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Austin, &c. He even adduces Pelagius, the heterodox Coelestius, and Pope Zosimus. The Donatists, Arians, and Pelagians, equally with the orthodox, are made to pass in review, and to declare in favour of infant ablution or infant immersion. With Dr. Wall there was no baptism, in form or in fact, without immersion. But those who now rely upon him in sustaining the traditional subjects of baptism will not hear him on the apostolic form of the institution itself. They admit but one-half of his testimony, and reject the other half. They will have infant affusion, but Dr. Wall will have infant immersion. In the present essay, I shall attempt to show that the argument from tradition, drawn out with so much display, proves too much for any sect of Protestants in Christendom. Admitting that every author adduced relates with all truthfulness and fidelity the facts which he states, as transpiring in his own age or country, on Protestant principles, with Protestants themselves it can afford no authority for infant baptism. It is a rule or law of evidence, of universal acquiescence and authority, that the testimony of any witness is admissible or inadmissible to the full extent of his deposition. So far, then, as it is his testimony, we are obliged to receive all or none of it. If, for example, we receive the testimony of Tertullian, Origen, Cyprian, Chrysostom, &c. &c., as to the existence of infant baptism in their day and country, we must also receive their testimony in favour of infant communion, and in favour of the monastic and ascetic life. With whatever respect for them, or with whatever authority we receive their testimony in the one case, we must receive it in the other cases. If their testimony be authoritative touching any fact or opinion, as to the existence of it, the universality of it, or the meaning of it, it is equally so touching them all. This being an oracle of common sense--an axiom in moral evidence--we assume it, and proceed upon the assumption, as upon an incontrovertible fact. We, therefore, proceed to show that all the authors of note relied on by Dr. Miller, Dr. Wall, or any other doctor of Protestant theology, in proof of the early existence of infant baptism, who have distinctly named or alluded to it, as a custom, or rite, existing in their time, equally establish the existence, universality, and antiquity of religious celibacy, the sanctifying efficacy of virginity, and the superlative merit of the monastic life. Since writing my last essay on this subject, I have read, with more or less attention, some hundreds of pages, many of which, though read in former years, were again read as though entirely new, that I might repose in the full assurance that I give a faithful view of the testimony and opinions of the authors quoted. And, although in possession of the principal records of both Grecian and Roman Fathers and their opinions, I generally prefer to quote their opinions and statements from Taylor’s "Ancient Christianity,", because now a popular work; and because he has with great fidelity and ability examined and reported the views of the Greek and Roman Fathers on the subjects named; and especially because his antagonists, the Oxford Tract theologians, with all their armour on, have not, so far as I have learned, presumed to cavil at his array of patristic authority and opinions. I state the argument in the following terms:--Romanists quote the Greek and early Roman fathers of the four first centuries, in proof of monastic life--the celibacy of the clergy--the merit of perpetual virginity--the pontificate of Peter in Rome--and infant communion. Protestants quote the same authorities for infant baptism, and argue from them in the same manner as the Romanists for their other traditions. But Protestants repudiate the Greek and Roman Fathers as competent and credible witnesses for infant communion, the pontificate of Peter in Rome, the monastic life, and a bachelor priesthood; yet they quote with confidence and hear with gladness the same authors in favour of infant baptism. This we regard as an indefensible aberration from sound logic and fair play. If we receive their testimony in the one case, in evidence of the universality, antiquity, and authority of infant baptism, we ought by all means to receive the whole of their testimony in the case of the universality, antiquity, and authority of the monastic life--the celibacy of the clergy, the merits of perpetual virginity, &c. &c. But Protestants will say that the Romanists in these cases depend upon tradition alone for authority, while, in the case of infant baptism, we mainly depend upon scriptural authority, and only corroborate it by the ancient Greek and Roman Fathers, historians, and commentators. This, however, is not the fact. Romanists plead for scriptural authority for their traditions and found their arguments on what they call "Bible doctrine," if not upon express Bible precepts and positive enactments. Protestants are not able to maintain this ground with sensible and well read Romanists. For example, take the monastic life, the celibacy of the clergy, and the merits of perpetual virginity, and ask a well-bred and well read Romanist, What Bible authority have you, sir, for these traditions? What defence will he make? Probably he will begin with Paul, the great Apostle to the Gentiles, Barnabas his companion, and Timothy his adopted son; and show that they waived matrimony for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He will also tell of those who forsook houses, and lands, and husbands, and wives, for the Lord’s sake. Nay, he will read you two learned homilies--one on a passage from Jesus, and one from Paul. That from Jesus is recorded Matthew 19:12 : "For there are some eunuchs which were so born from their mother’s womb, and there are some eunuchs which were made eunuchs by men, and there be eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake: He that is able to receive it, let him receive it." Monks, say some Romanists, are eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. "They have made themselves so." "Now let him that can receive it, receive it;" that is, say they, "make themselves eunuchs, or monks, for the sake of gaining the kingdom of heaven." The famous Origen, literally made himself a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. The Essenes, contemporary with the Messiah, are by some supposed to be here alluded to by him. They were really monks, for the sake of greater seclusion from the world, and were regarded as the most pure and holy sect among the Jews. Here, then, says the Romanist, is high authority for the plea of the superior spirituality and sanctity of virginity and the ascetic life. Now who can make a more scriptural argument for infant baptism than this?--! But this is not all. Paul teaches the theory as well as the practice of celibacy. Hear him:--"It is good," says he, "for a man not to touch a woman." And certainly better for a woman not to touch a man! "I say, then, to the unmarried and to widows, it is good for them if they abide" (single!) "even as I. For I would that all men were even as I myself. Art thou loosed from a wife, then seek not a wife. He that is unmarried careth for the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but he that is married careth for the things of the world how he may please his wife. The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit; but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband." Doubtless, then, if "he that giveth his daughter in marriage doeth well, he that giveth her not in marriage doeth better." Now who may not hence infer that Paul was in favour of nuns as well as monks? From these premises, can any one reasonably say that the Romanist depends less on the Bible for his holiness of virginity and the excellency of monkery than does the Pedobaptist for his infant initiation and dedication to the Lord? I trow not: So far, to say the least, methinks, the Bible plea for the sanctity and blessedness of celibacy and that of infant holiness, or infant baptism, are inferentially equal. But our present business is with tradition. For this purpose, we have selected that prolific cause and fountain of Roman pollutions, the Monachism. We shall, therefore, give a few specimens of the estimation in which it was held by the Ante-Nicene Fathers. To be understood by the least conversant with ecclesiastic history, in these brief allusions and quotations, I will state that the Fathers, so called by the Greek and Roman churches, are divided into three classes:--The Apostolic Fathers--viz. Barnabas, Clement of Rome, Hermas, Ignatius, and Polycarp. The Ante-Nicene Fathers, or those who were conspicuous at or before the Council of Nice, which sat two or three months at Nice, in Bythinia, A. D. 325. Socrates says that 318 Bishops met in this council. The present Nicene Creed is, indeed, but a development or expansion of the Council of Nice, made by 150 Bishops at the second general council, which, in 381, met at Constantinople. The Ante-Nicene Fathers, so called, are the beau ideal of Protestant orthodoxy; and, hence, the names of Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, Cyprian, Lactantius, Eusebius, Athanasius, Cyril of Jerusalem, Hilary, Basil, the two Gregories, Nazianzen and Nyssen, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustin, Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, and Theodoret, are conspicuous--not all, indeed, but a majority of them, Ante-Nicene: for there are in all forty-two Fathers, a majority of which were Ante-Nicene, while the others are called Post-Nicene. These, together with the five Apostolic Fathers, make out the entire Fathers of the Greek, Roman, and Protestant churches, amounting in all to forty-seven. Now, in glancing at these, we shall summon a few of the most famous, both as fathers and as writers, to represent the whole patristic brotherhood, whose opinions give laws to the Catholic church in all matters of opinion, faith, and practice. Before hearing them depose, we shall quote a few passages from the most conspicuous and authoritative of them, declarative of the Catholic views of the monastic life. But, as farther prefatory to these, we must allude to the Grecian fountain of errors, which, together with the Gnostic and Roman fountains, gradually corrupted the whole Christian church. The Greeks had a temple dedicated to HESTIA, who, as the tradition goes, when wooed by Neptune, laid her hand on the head of Jupiter and vowed perpetual virginity; for which he allotted to her a throne in the midst of every mansion, the choicest portions of the sacrifices, and to be honoured in all the temples of the gods. The Roman VESTA, for whom was erected a splendid temple in Rome, was but a new version of the Grecian Hestia. On the altar of this splendid temple perpetually flamed a holy fire, tended by six priestesses. Hence, at an early period, arose in the Christian churches the idea of having in the cloister connected with them bands of females sworn to chastity and the Lord. These became the archetypes of all the sisterhoods in all the abbeys, convents, priories, nunneries, cloisters, in ancient and modern Christendom. The grand question which pioneered the way for the general admission into the church of these abominations, was, "Satan has his devoted widows and his virgin priestesses, and should not Christ have his?" Concerning this much extolled institution, so canonized and glorified as the only path to the highest honours of Paradise, we have the opinion of almost all the early Greek and Roman Fathers. It is set forth in such terms as the following:--"The celestial or angelic excellence of virginity," cultivated by "the spouses of Christ," who, "in the celestial and apostolic practice of vowing virginity to the Lord," have arisen to the loftiest pinnacle in the temple as "Christ’s jewels." It would be disgusting rather than acceptable to most of our readers, to enter into the secrets of these holy vestal virgins, devoted to the church. Yet we must allude to the contaminations of sacerdotal virtue universally attendant on their existence, as expressed by their warmest advocates and apologists. Even Cyprian himself speaks of clerical paramours--of the spiritual intercourse of these father confessors with these immaculate angelic virgins, as to, make the whole institution a public scandal, a disgrace to even Rome or Corinth in their most wanton days, and to make his nunneries or abbeys any thing but houses of prayer--the residence of virgin purity and piety. These abuses, or rather legitimate fruits of the system, called forth many an excuse, and originated some singular expositions of Scripture; a sample of which we will give from Tertullian--"The command, ’Increase and multiply,’ is abolished; yet, as I think, (contrary to the Gnostic opinion,) this command in the first instance, and now the removal of it, are from one and the same God; who then, and in that early seed-time of the human race, gave the reins to the marrying principle until the world should be replenished, and until he had prepared the elements of a new school of discipline. But now, in this conclusion of the ages, he restrains what once he had let loose, and revokes what he had permitted. In a thousand instances, indulgence is granted at the beginning of things. So it is that a man plants a wood and allows it to grow, intending in due time to use the axe. The wood, then, is the old dispensation, which is done away by the gospel, in which the axe is laid at the root of the tree." So reasons the first man who, in any extant records of the church, first names infant baptism!! We shall next hear St. Cyprian, born A. D. 200. So early as the age of St. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, born one hundred years after John the Apostle died, the notion of the divine virtue and excellency of celibacy had so generally prevailed in the church, that he complains, in no measured terms, of the abuses of it. "Concerning those," says he, "who, after having solemnly devoted themselves to continence, have been found cohabiting with men--(detectae in eodem lecto pariter mansisse cum masculis)--yet professing themselves inviolate, you have desired my advice. It is, then," replies the bishop, "by no means to be allowed that young women live with men. If, indeed, they have cordially dedicated themselves to Christ, let them modestly and chastely, and without subterfuge, hold to their purpose, and thus, constant and firm, look for the reward of virtue--premium virginitatis." So general was the idea of the angelic virtue of celibacy, that, in Cyprian’s time, it had been so perverted by the priesthood as to call for Cyprian’s denunciations against the clergy in such language as, "How shall the clergy be guides in the path of virtue and piety, if from them proceeds a contaminating warranty of vice. Thou hast, therefore, well done in withdrawing from the deacon and others qui cum virginibus dormire consueverunt."2 Clement of Alexandria, who rather preceded St. Cyprian as a writer, speaks in terms as bold as the Bishop of Carthage. But we prefer to quote a few words more from St. Cyprian, because Dr. Miller and Dr. Wall make much of his testimony as to the prevalence of infant baptism in his Carthaginian diocese. How monkery prospered under his dispensations, we may learn from encomiums upon it. In addressing nuns, he says, "These are the flowers of the ecclesiastical plant--the grace and ornament of the heavenly grace--a gladsome produce--a work, whole and incorrupt, of all honour and all praise--the image of God reflecting the sanctity of the Lord and the most illustrious portion of Christ’s flocks. By these, [nuns,] and in these, is the noble fecundity of Mother Church recommended and made copiously to flourish; and just so much as this plentiful virginity swells its numbers, does the Mother herself augment her joys. It is to these, then, that I speak--it is these that I proceed to exhort--yet in affection rather than in the tones of authority." Farther, our good Archbishop Cyprian says, "The continence and pudicity proper to a nun do not consist merely in the inviolate perfection of the body; but, besides, the integrity of the body consists in the fair and modest attire and ornament of the person." After this quotation, Mr. Taylor exclaims, and we exclaim with him, "Here is excellent Quakerism as well as Popery, and both sixteen hundred years old." Modesty forbids us from quoting Cyprian in what he says farther of this "plentiful virginity," when reproving them for their shameful pranks at the public baths. He asks, "What have virgins of the church to do at promiscuous baths--to violate the commonest dictates of feminine modesty?! With your robes, your personal honour and reserve are cast off." According to Mr. Taylor, modern Popery is quite a reform upon "ancient Christianity," or the Christianity contemporary with the origin of infant baptism. If I might quote St. Bernard here, though, not of the fathers of the church, but as one who had more personal authority and popularity than any one man that ever lived since the Council of Nice--to whom popes and their vassals gave equal reverence--of whom Luther said, "If ever there has been a pious monk who feared God, it was St. Bernard, whom I hold," said the reformer, "in much higher esteem than all other monks and priests throughout the globe." Of virginity, which he calls chastity, he says, "What so fair as this chastity, which makes of a man an angel! An angel and a churchman differ, indeed, as to purity, but not as to virtue--for, although the purity of the angel be the happier of the two, that of the man must be admitted to be the more energetic." "Who, then," continues he, "would scruple to call the life of the Cœlebs a celestial and angelic life! or what will all the elect be at the resurrection which ye are not even now, as the angels of God in heaven, who abstain from matrimonial connections." "You grasp, my beloved brethren, the pearl of great price, ye grasp that sanctity which renders you like to the saints in glory, and the home servants of God, as saith the Scriptures, incorruptness places us next to God; not by your own merits are you what you are, but by the grace of God; and, as chastity and sanctity, I may call yon TERRESTRIAL ANGELS." It would be easy for me to fill many pages from Tertullian and Cyprian to the same effect. They are, indeed, followed in their views by almost all the ancient church. Isidore says, "As high as the heavens are above the earth, and as far as the soul excels the body, so does the state of virginity surpass that of matrimony." That these were not novelties or innovations, even in the times of Tertullian and Cyprian, may be inferred from a passage in Justin Martyr’s Second Apology. His words are, "Many men as well as women who, having followed the Christian institution from their earliest years, have remained to an advanced age--sixty or seventy years incorrupt--diaphoroi diamenousai--unmarried or inviolate." Nay, we find in the Epistles of Ignatius to Polycarp, contemporaries, if not converts, of John the Apostle, indications of the germ of this opinion or theory of asceticism. His words axe, "If any one be able to abide in purity, (celibacy,) in honour of the Lord’s flesh, let him do so without boasting. If he boasts, he is lost; or, if he consider himself, on that account, more than the bishop, he perishes." The early attempts to fabricate tales of the perpetual virginity of Mary, the mother of Jesus, owe their origin to the same spirit of error. They will have her still the Virgin Mary, though the wife of Joseph, after she had brought forth her first born son. Could Jesus have been her first born, if she had never had a second child? Or could it be said that he knew her not, until she had brought forth her first born son, if he had never known her? But there is nothing can stand erect, however strong and clear, before the spirit of fraud or fiction. It is alleged that Ignatius is the first that called the nuns "the espoused of Christ," and "Christ’s jewels." But this is a matter of little moment, inasmuch as at a very early period a new nomenclature was introduced. We hear Tertullian asking with indignation, "Shall one who has contracted a second marriage baptize?" "Or, shall such a one make the eucharistic oblation?" But before this style and terminology, we have the Gnostics, the Nicolaitans, the Essenes, the Ebionites, and the Cabalistic Jews foisting into the Christian vocabulary an impure speech, from which it has never been expurgated. In view of this fact, and the history of the first century of Christianity, I concur with Isaac Taylor, author of "Spiritual Despotism," and the "Natural History of Enthusiasm," &c. &c., in the following opinions:--"The opinion that has forced itself upon my own mind is to this effect; that the period, dating its commencement from the death of the last of the Apostles or apostolic men, was altogether as little deserving to be selected and proposed as a pattern as any one of the first five of church history; it had, indeed, its single points of excellence, and of a high order; but by no means shown in those consistent and exemplary qualities which should entitle it to the honour of being considered as a model to after ages." "THE GROSSEST ERRORS OF THEORY AND PRACTICE ARE TO BE TRACED TO THEIR ORIGIN IN THE FIRST CENTURY." Of course, we should not wonder to see such men as Ambrose, Basil, Gregory Nyssen, Chrysostom, Jerome, and Augustine, endorsing for celibacy, monkery, and the whole ascetic system, as set forth in the writings of Tertullian, Cyprian, and their predecessors. We can endorse the great Basil affirming that "Virginity is that which makes man resemble the incorruptible God;" and I can believe J. Taylor in affirming, "that an unreserved translation of Basil, one of the best of the fathers, could it be tolerated, would astound the Christian world." And what shall we say of Chrysostom, addressing a nun, saying that, "like cherubim and seraphim, she and her order constituted not the attendants of the Eternal King, but his very chariot." And, again, "gold hath, indeed, by nature its splendour; but when saturate with fire, how admirable, nay, even fearful it is! And thus, when a soul such as this occupies the body, not only shall the spectacle be wondered at by men, but by angels." Glory, honour, and immortality to the nuns!! To complete the picture of ancient (but not Apostolic) Christianity, to which Dr. Wall and Dr. Miller trace up infant baptism in the argument now under consideration, I feel disposed to introduce St. Athanasius himself, "the chief of the first three" in the esteem of them that worship antiquity. But I have space only to say of him what is equally true, and truly said by Mr. Taylor, of his contemporaries--Gregory of Nyssa, his brother Basil, and Ambrose--in the following interrogatories:-- 1st. "Aside from the mere ecclesiastical question of the pretensions of the Bishop of Rome, can any broad and intelligible distinction be established between Gregory Nyssen and the Popery of the tenth century?" 2d. "Can any important distinction be made good between this Gregory and his contemporaries, Basil, Athanasius, and Ambrose?" 3d. "And this question I would humbly and seriously address to men fearing God, (and completely informed,) whether EACH ARTICLE of Paul’s explicit prediction of the coming apostasy, does not find its pointed and complete fulfilment in the system which this writer’s works imbody?" And of Jerome--Jerome, the author of the Vulgate--the more learned and intelligent Jerome, the same author says, "Jerome must take his place among the foremost promoters of the false principles of the Nicene church system"--of Popery in its worst form. I prefer interposing between myself and a portion of the reading public, the learned, the evangelical, the popular, and eloquent author of "Spiritual Despotism," "Saturday Evening," "Ancient Christianity," and other interesting and instructive treatises; because he cannot be suspected of any squinting to what some might call our own peculiarities on the proper scriptural evangelical subject of Christian baptism. No one, however, in England or in America, in the present century, nor in any century since Luther fulminated against the Lion of Popery, has given a more complete and decisive blow to English and Scottish pedobaptism and pedorantism, so far as any appeal or reference to human tradition, ecclesiastic history, or patristic authority, however nearly approximating the apostolic age, the days of Saint John, Saint Peter, or Saint Paul, than this same Mr. Isaac Taylor, in his treatise, from which I have drawn so freely in this essay. Courteous reader, ask no more how could the custom of baptizing infants, or unbelieving boys, so soon and so generally appear in the ages immediately succeeding the Apostles. This, however, is not the fact, as is too often assumed, and as we may hereafter show; but admitting, for the sake of argument, that it is named by Tertullian at the close of the second or at the commencement of the third century, what of it, since then, or long before that time, also appeared monkery, asceticism, the omnipotence of virginity, and the embryo blossoms of all the abominations of Popery?--! Errors universally reprobated by all Protestants, which Papistical writers advocate, and without which Popery would immediately die, are still more ancient, more venerable, more universal than infant affusion or infant immersion, and advocated by all and by more than all the ancient writers that are quoted in proof of the antiquity, universality, or of the importance of infant ablution. Let no one ask, How could infant baptism be so early introduced and spread so fast or so far, unless originally of apostolic authority, because of his own inability to answer the question. Is he a Protestant? Let him, then, rather ask, How a virgin priesthood, refusing to ordain the husband of one wife, could so early have been imagined, much less enacted in the face of him who said, "Let him be the husband of one wife--ruling his own children well," &c. Is he a Protestant? Then let him ask, How could they so early refuse the cup to the laity, in the face of the oracle of Christ--saying, "Drink you all of it." Is he a Protestant? Let him then explain how could they have converted Mary, the mother of Jesus, into a virgin, and christened her the immaculate holy Mary. And although Jesus repudiated her having any peculiar power with him, because she was his fleshly mother, making all the faithful women severally his mother or his sister, as the case might be, how can they invoke her name ten times for once they invoke that of her Son, and then always to intercede for them with her Son, as possessing still fleshly maternal authority with him! Is he a Protestant? Let him show how auricular confession, transubstantiation, invocation of the saints, prayers for the dead, purgatory, and penance began, before he perplexes himself or any one else upon the question, How originated infant ablution? Dr. Miller’s tenth argument in favour of infant baptism, as reported from his own book in our last essay, is--"Finally, the history of the Christian church from the apostolic age furnishes an argument of irresistible force in favour of the Divine authority of infant baptism." From the documentary evidence we have furnished from the history of the Christian church, may we not now ask, not only the reader of Dr. Miller’s book, but Dr. Miller himself, Whether Leo X. or Plus IX., both old bachelors, might not, with equal show of reason and evidence, have said, "Finally, the history of the church from the apostolic age furnishes an argument of irresistible force in favour of the divine authority of sacerdotal celibacy, of the sanctity of virginity, and the sublime excellency of a monastic life." Dr. Miller’s logic is evidently at fault here, as in some other points. His witnesses prove too much for him; and would, if he dare listen to them to the end of their testimony, compel him to become the advocate of an unmarried ministry, and of the paramount purity of monks, and friars, and vestal nuns. He has as venerable, as learned, and as numerous a host of ecclesiastic fathers, confessors, and historians in favour of clerical celibacy as in favour of infant baptism,--nay, I will strongly affirm, a much more numerous and powerful host in favour of the heaven-subduing grace of pure virginity, sanctified at the altar of the church, than he or any other man on this continent can adduce in favour of infant affusion or infant baptism. If, then, the number or reputation of the authorities, according to Dr. Miller, renders the argument from church history "irresistible" as respects the divine authority of infant baptism; the argument from church history must be equally irresistible in favour of monkery and an unmarried priesthood for we have all the same authorities, and a few more of as high, if not of a still higher reputation than they, in favour of the most baseless, most unreasonable, most desolating tenet of Popery--the heaven-subduing potency of perpetual bachelorship or celibacy, and its indispensability to the efficacious administration of ecclesiastical institutions, and to the virtue of prayers, penances, and intercessions. 1 Page 129, Philadelphia edition, 1843. 2 Who are accustomed to sleep with virgins. Ancient Chris., p. 114. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 38: 01.06.04. REVIEW OF PROFESSOR MILLER OF PRINCETON; DR. WALL, VICAR OF SHOREM, IN KENT,... ======================================================================== CHAPTER IV. REVIEW OF PROFESSOR MILLER OF PRINCETON; DR. WALL, VICAR OF SHOREM, IN KENT, AND OTHERS. HAVING already given a fair, and, I think, ample specimen of the value of the testimony of those "Fathers" mainly relied on by the most learned and influential of the advocates of infant baptism, I intend to occupy not many more pages on the argument drawn from tradition, oral or written. We must logically and morally discriminate between the testimony of the Greek and Roman Fathers concerning facts and events extant or transpiring in their own times, and their own opinions touching those facts and events. It is as much a fact that a certain opinion was entertained or propagated by a Tertullian, an Origen, or a Cyprian, as that such men lived in the third century. It may also be a fact that they entertained such an opinion, or that they did not; but neither the fact of their entertaining or not entertaining any given opinion is any proof to us or to their contemporaries of the truth or the falsehood of such an opinion. The fact that infant communion was as common as infant baptism in the "ancient church," and that it was plead for by such men as Photius, Cyprian, Augustine, &c., should be, methinks, a sufficient reproof to all Protestants, at least, for their implicit admission of the testimony of certain Greek Fathers as to the existence of an opinion in favour of infant baptism, or of the fact that some infants had been baptized in the third century. And certainly there is still more incongruity in administering the elements commemorative of the Saviour’s sacrificial death to an unconscious, unthinking babe, than in either sprinkling water upon its face, or in immersing it in water into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Still, in defiance of all reason, propriety, and the total absence of all scriptural authority, the whole Greek church and the whole Roman church admit infants to the eucharist; or, as some semi-protestants call it, the sacrament of the supper. If, then, Dr. Wall and Dr. Miller--if Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and all Pedobaptists receive as authorities ancient opinions, or the testimony of Greek and Roman Fathers as to the existence of opinions, and practices in their times, in evidence of the Divine and apostolic authority of infant baptism, why repudiate their own witnesses when they equally depose in favour of infant communion? Why administer the one "sacrament" to babes, and withhold from them the other "sacrament," having as good authority for the one as for the other? Nay, better for infant communion than for infant baptism--because infants ate the passover, which they say was the prototype and precedent of the supper. But as they are bold, we must be bold also. We affirm, and I know that our opponents dare not deny it, that not one of the five "Apostolic Fathers"--Barnabas, Clement of Rome, Hermas, Ignatius, or Polycarp--either name or allude to infant baptism, or say any thing that would imply it; but, on the contrary, say that which implies believer baptism, and believer baptism only. Neither do the oldest of the Greek Fathers--Papias, Dionysius of Corinth, Tatian, Melito, Irenæus, Theophilus, or Clement of Alexandria, name it. Nor, indeed, does Justin Martyr indicate the existence of the rite in his time. He is, however, the first of Dr. Wall’s cloud, of historic witnesses of the opinions on the subject. Certain it is, that Justin Martyr does not once name infant baptism. On the contrary, his history of Christianity in the second century forbids the assumption. His words are--(I have the Greek before me, but will give Dr. Wall’s own version of them)--"Those who are persuaded and do believe those things which are taught by us are true, and do promise to live according to them, are directed first to pray and ask of God, with fasting, the forgiveness of their former sins; and we also pray and fast together with them.1 Then we bring them to some place where there is water,2 and they are regenerated by the same way of regeneration by which we were regenerated; for they are washed with water in the name of God, the Father and Lord of all things, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit. For Christ says, unless you be regenerated you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven: and everybody knows it is impossible for those that are once generated, or born, to enter again into their mother’s womb."--"The washing is called the enlightening," &c. Dr. Wall argues from this passage that the ancient church regarded baptism as regeneration, and as commonly called it ’regeneration’ as the Episcopalians call it ’christening.’ But, waiving all criticism on the propriety of this language, we only ask, How does all this prove infant baptism? Does not the whole passage cited clearly intimate that the subjects of Justin Martyr’s baptism were believers, and had agreed to live according to Christ’s will, before they took them to the water?3 But the advocates of infant baptism will concede this, and flee to another passage from the same author as directly favouring their theory. They quote a few words from Justin’s First Apology. The passage already read is from his Second Apology. We shall hear that portion from his First Apology.--"Several persons among us, of sixty and seventy years old, of both sexes, who were discipled (or made disciples) to Christ in or from their childhood, do continue uncorrupted (or virgins)." "From childhood"--not from infancy. In the original Greek of Justin it is ek paidoon, which indicates from ten to fifteen, rather than from eight days to two years. There is not, then, any authority whatever for assuming Justin Martyr as a witness in favour of infant baptism. It cannot be logically or philologically deduced from any thing I have ever seen quoted from him. Unless, then, we assume that to be regenerated means neither more nor less than to be baptized, there is no Greek Father, no Apostolic Father, no ecclesiastic writer, who so much as names baptism in connection with infants before the third century. Nor, indeed, do they ever speak of regenerated infants. The Greeks have four words for children. They have brephos, a babe; paidion, a little child; teknion, a little child figuratively; and pais, a youth, a stripling, any one under age. Now it happens that neither Dr. Wall nor Dr. Miller, nor any of those special pleaders for infant baptism, seem to know, and certainly do not make known to others, the fact which I have now stated: nay, they assume, without the shadow of proof, that pais must mean, in the New Testament, or in the style of the Greek Fathers, an infant; that is, a brephos, or babe; and this, too, in the face of the fact that we have these four words frequently in the New Testament Greek, and wherever we find a literal babe or infant in the New Testament, we find brephos in the original; and wherever literal little children are spoken of, we have in no case pais, but always paidion or teknion. With regard to pais, the word used by Justin Martyr, in his Second Apology, on which Dr. Wall and others so much rely, it is applied to persons of from twelve to thirty years of age in the New Testament. Jesus, at the age of twelve, and after he had risen from the dead, is called pais. Acts 4:27. Eutychus, a young man, mentioned Acts 20:12, is represented by the word pais. So of others from twelve to twenty years old. Of the Greek Fathers of this era we have none other quoted by Dr. Wall or Dr. Miller. Tertullian is the first of the Latin writers who early in the third century mentions infant baptism. He does, indeed, name it; but I have long since said, and no one has as yet presumed to refute it, that he opposes it as an innovation. Dr. Miller says--"Tertullian, about two hundred years after the birth of Christ, is the first man of whom we read in ecclesiastical history, as speaking a word against infant baptism." Well, uncandid as this is, we must request our readers to remember that Dr. Miller says Tertullian spoke against it. But he says he is the first man that spoke against it. And who, we might ask, was the first person that spoke for it? Any one before Tertullian? If any one, his name has not reached us! But what is the professor’s solution of this case? Why did Tertullian speak against it? Hear him:--"Tertullian adopted the superstitious idea that baptism was accompanied with the remission of all past sins."4 And who of his predecessors or contemporaries did not teach the same "superstitious idea?" Who did not also, according to Dr. Wall, adopt a still more superstitious idea, that baptism and regeneration were convertible terms--perfect and complete equivalents?--and that there was not one writer during the first four centuries that understood baptism as any thing else but regeneration!! And did not all of them, as well as Tertullian, teach "that sins committed after baptism were peculiarly dangerous?" These are Pedobaptist assertions--not ours. Tertullian’s views may be gathered from the extracts found in Wall’s history of infant baptism. "They who administer baptism," says Tertullian, "are to know that it must not be given rashly." "’Give to every one that asketh thee,’ has its proper subject, and relates to almsgiving; but that command is rather here to be considered; ’Give not that which is holy to dogs, neither cast your pearls before swine;’ and that, ’Lay hands suddenly on no man, neither be partakers of other men’s sins. Therefore according to every one’s condition and disposition, and also their age, the delaying of baptism is more profitable, especially in the case of little children. For what need is there that the god-fathers should be brought into danger? because they may either fail of their promises by death, or they may be mistaken by a child’s proving of wicked disposition. Our Lord says, indeed, ’Do not forbid them to come to me;’ therefore, let them come when they are grown up--let them come when they understand. When they are instructed whither it is that they come, let them be made Christians, when they can know Christ. What need their guiltless age make such haste to the forgiveness of sins? Men will proceed more warily in worldly goods; and he that should not have earthly goods committed to him, yet shall have heavenly!! Let them know how to desire this salvation, that you may appear to have given it to one that asketh." I wonder not that any one who calmly and dispassionately reads even so much as we have quoted from Tertullian’s writings, and more especially if he have patience to read so much of them as is found in Du Pin, or even Dr. Wall, should conclude with Richard Baxter, saying, "Yet again will I confess that the words of Tertullian and of Nazianzen show that it was a long time before all were agreed of the very time, or of the necessity of baptizing infants before any use of reason, in case they were to live to maturity." Can any one think--I mean any one free from prejudice--that had infant baptism been an apostolic institution preached from the beginning, any men of learning in the age of Tertullian would have so written about it as here reported by his friends and the friends of that institution? We cheerfully admit the probability that infant immersion, god-fathers, infant communion, monkery, &c. &c. commenced about the times of Tertullian and St. Cyprian, in the first half of the third century. This will, however, appear still more evident from the decision of the Council of Carthage, composed of sixty-six bishops, which met Anno Domini 253, to deliberate on certain queries referred to it by Bishop Fidus; one of which was,--"Whether an infant, before it was eight days old, might be baptized, if need required?" We shall give a few extracts from this celebrated response of the Council to the query sent up to Carthage by Bishop Fidus:--"We read your letter, most dear brother, in which you write of one rector or priest, &c. But as to the case of infants whereas you judge that they must not be baptized within two or three days after they are born; and that the rule of circumcision is to be observed, so that none should be baptized and sanctified before the eighth day after he is born; we were all in the assembly of the contrary opinion. We have judged that the grace and mercy of God are to be denied to no person that is born. For whereas our Lord in the gospel says, ’The Son of Man came not to destroy men’s souls, or lives; but to save them:’ as far as lies in us, no soul, if possible, is to be lost. For what is there deficient in him who has been once formed in the womb by the hands of God?"--"All things that are made by God are perfect by the work and power of God their Maker. The Scripture gives us to understand the equality of the divine gift on all, whether infants or grown persons. Elisha, in his prayer to God, stretched himself on the infant son of the Shunamite woman who lay dead, in such a manner that his head, and face, and limbs, and feet were applied to the head, face, limbs, and feet of the child;5 which, if it be understood according to the quality of our body and nature, the infant could not hold measure with the full-grown man, nor its limbs fit and reach to his great ones. But in that place a spiritual equality, and such as is in the esteem of God, is intimated to us; by which persons that are once made by God are alike and equal." The remainder of this letter is as weak and childish as the specimen before us, and concludes with these words:--"It is not for us to binder any person from baptism and the grace of God, who is merciful and kind and affectionate to all. To infants our help and the divine mercy are rather to be granted, because, by their weeping and wailing at their first entrance into the world, they do intimate nothing so much as that they implore compassion." Such was the wisdom, and learning, and good sense of the African council of sixty-six Bishops, who decreed that infants should be baptized as soon as born; and that, too, in A. D. 253. From such a council who could expect a more sage conclusion or a higher authority than that of Elisha stretching himself down to the dimensions of an infant! High authority, indeed, and is only surpassed by the following passage, which, so far as argument is concerned, embraces the remainder of the letter:--"If the greatest offenders, and they that have grievously sinned against God before, have, when they afterward come to believe, forgiveness of their sins; and no person is kept off from baptism and the grave; how much less reason is there to refuse an infant, who, being newly born, has no sin, save that, being descended from Adam according to the flesh, he has from his very birth contracted the contagion of the death anciently threatened; who comes for this reason more easily to receive forgiveness of sins, because they are not his own, but others’ sins that are forgiven him." Such the philosophy, the reason, and the authority of the Council of Carthage, and such the character of the third century and its bishops! An age and a people peculiarly qualified to introduce and ordain infant baptism. We will not weary our readers with any more such extracts from the men who afterwards plead for infant baptism. Nor do we at all deem it essential to trace the history of infant baptism or that of infant communion, of godfathers, and all the other appendages of this human tradition. We concede, without a demur, that, in the Greek and the Roman church, whether in Africa, Asia, or Europe, infant baptism, with its kindred accompaniments of sponsors, the salt, the spittle, and the oil; together with monachism, with all its forms; and virginity, with all its potency on earth and in heaven, not only existed, but in triumph reigned for more than twelve hundred years. Infant baptism, with its other accompaniments, has been gradually losing its power over the human mind; and, in every conflict with those who repudiate it as a papal tradition, it has uniformly fallen in public favour, and is ever making unsuccessful aggressions upon those who seek to find for it either precept or example in all the written records of Prophets and Apostles. Still, in every century from the times of Tertullian till now, there have been many witnesses for the Apostolic baptism. A host of learned and pious men have in all ages stood up as remonstrants against the pretensions of those who sought for infant baptism any other warrant than the doctrines and commandments of men. A few notices of those distinguished men who, in word and deed, testified against it, are all that we have room for in these essays. Of distinguished men in the third century, the celebrated Baxter says, that "Tertullian, Origen, and Cyprian, who lived in the second and third centuries, do affirm that in the primitive times none were baptized but such as engaged themselves to obey him." Saint’s Rest, 1st. ed., chap. 8. Fourth Century.--Jerome says, "The Lord commanded his Apostles that they should first instruct and teach all nations, and afterwards should baptize them that were instructed in the mysteries of the faith; for it cannot be that the body should receive the ordinance of baptism before the soul has received the true faith." Jerome’s Comment on Matthew 27:19-20. Athanasius, in his third sermon against the Arians, says, "Our Saviour hath not simply commanded to baptize; but first said teach, then baptize; because true faith proceeds from teaching, and baptism rightly follows faith." See Merningus, part 2, p. 370. "Epiphanius, Bishop of Cyprus, was baptized upon a profession of his faith, and did afterwards assert for doctrine that none ought to be baptized but such." See Metaphrastes, 1. 1, chap. 30; and Mern. p. 336, as quoted by Junius. During this century, there were sundry councils and synods. The Council of Laodicea, of Neocesarea, and the synods of this time agreed in this, that "whosoever were to be baptized should give in their names, and then, after due examination, should be baptized. And not only great men, and even princes, converted from paganism, were baptized; but even the sons and daughters of believing parents were baptized when arrived at adult years." A clear proof that infant baptism had not yet become general; for the children of believing parents would certainly have been baptized, had any infants in ordinary cases been baptized. Amongst the vast numbers of the children of believers that were baptized in adult years, during this century, we shall mention a few men of renown. Basil the Great, son of a Christian bishop, was baptized in the Jordan, when advanced in years. Gregory, son of Gregory Bishop of Nazianzen, was baptized at the age of twenty. Constantine the Great, a Briton born, and King of England, son of Helena, a zealous Christian, was well advanced in years before he was baptized. During his reign, most of his British troops were Christians, A. D. 320. Ambrose refused to be baptized till he was chosen Bishop of Milan. Chrysostom was born of believing parents, and was educated by Miletus, a bishop; yet he was not baptized till the age of twenty-one. Hugo Grotius, while saying this of Chrysostom, adds, "Many of the Greeks, in every age, to this day, keep the custom of deferring the baptism of their little ones till they make a profession of their faith." Erastus testifies that "Jerome was born in the city of Shydon, of Christian parents; was brought up in the Christian religion, and was baptized in the thirtieth year of his age." "Austin, the son of the gracious Monica, being instructed in the faith, was not baptized till thirty.". See Osiander’s Book, cent. 4, 1. 3, p. 371-380; also Nauclerus, A. D. 391. Historia Tripartita tells us, that "Theodosius, the emperor, was born in Spain, and his parents were both Christians; that he was instructed in the Christian faith; and, falling sick at Thessalonica, he was baptized by Achalis." See Dr. Taylor, lib. Proph. p. 239. I cannot close the testimonies of the fourth century better than by presenting to the reader the words of Dr. Barlow, Doctor of the Chair at Oxford--a man eminent for learning. On reviewing the records of antiquity and the arguments of his Pedobaptist friends, in a letter to a friend, he says, "I do believe and know that there is neither precept nor example for infant baptism, nor any just evidence for it for above 205 years after Christ; that Tertullian condemns it as an unwarrantable practice. I have read what my learned friends, Dr. Hammond and Mr. Baxter, and others, say in the defence of it; and I confess I wonder not a little that men of such great parts should say so much to so little purpose; for I have not as yet seen any thing like an argument for it." Thus far Doctor Barlow, Jun. 69. Fifth Century.--In this age, there were many public advocates of the true baptism. Chrysostom, whose baptism we mentioned in the last century, in the fifth century publicly taught that "the time of grace (or when a man obtained grace) or conversion, was the only fit time for baptism, which," says he, "was the season in which the three thousand in Acts 2:1-47 :, and others afterwards, were baptized." See Magd. cent. 5, p. 368. Faustus Regiensis, a bishop in France, taught in this age, that "the will and desire of the party that comes to be baptized are necessary." Evegrius says, that "they who have been instructed in the word of God were the proper subjects of baptism." See Merningus, p. 421-425. Sixth Century.--Gregory says, "In baptism the elect receive the gift of the Spirit, whereby also their spirits or understandings are enlightened in the Scriptures, and that by faith in the death of Christ, by baptism, their sins are forgiven." In this century, the Council of Agather decreed, that the articles of faith be first preached to the persons to be baptized, before they are baptized" Vicecome’s History, p. 482. Seventh Century.--In this age, the Bracarens Council, in Spain, decreed, that "no adult persons but such as had been well instructed and examined, should be baptized." "The Council of Toletanus express the same import; and we find that Paulinus baptized in the River Trent, in England, a great number of men and women." See Bead. 1. 2, chap. 16, cent. 7, p. 145. "In Egypt, in this century, the Christians departed from the faith of the church of Rome, placing it upon the Apostolic foundation, that the person should first believe before he is baptized." Vice. 1. 9, chap. 3. Eighth Century.--Bede, who lived in this century, page 220, says, "Men are first to be instructed in the knowledge of the truth, then to be baptized as Christ has taught; because that, without faith, it is impossible to please God." The learned Haime, on Matthew 28:19; says, "In these words is set down the rule how to baptize--that is, that teaching should go before baptism; that Christ says, Teach all nations, then baptize: for he that is to be baptized must first be instructed to believe what he in baptism shall receive. In this century, the Council of Paris and that of Laodicea decreed that those who are to be baptized ought first to be instructed in the faith, and make a confession of it." Ninth Century.--Rabanus, chapter 4:, says that "the catechism, which is the doctrine of faith, must go before baptism; to the intent that he who is baptized may first learn the mysteries of faith; and," continues he, "the Lord Jesus anointed the eyes of him that was born blind, with clay made of spittle, before he sent him to the waters of Siloam, to signify that he that is to be baptized must first see, or be instructed in the faith concerning the incarnation of Christ. When he that is instructed doth believe, then he is to be admitted to baptism, that he might know whom he afterwards ought and, in duty, is bound to serve." Albinus says, "Three things are visible in baptism--the body, the water, and the administrator; and three things invisible-- the soul, faith, and the Spirit of God, which are all joined by the word of God." P. 220. Rabanus likewise observes, that "The adults were first to be instructed in the faith, and duly examined before they were baptized; and that as Noah and his family were saved by water and the ark, so the faithful are saved by Christ and baptism." P. 144. Tenth Century.--In this age, Smaragdo, on Matthew 28:19, observes, "Men are to be taught in the faith, then after to be baptized therein; for it is not enough that the body be baptized, but that the soul, by faith, first receive the truth thereof." P. 187. Eleventh Century.--Anselm says that, "Believers are baptized into the death of Christ, that they, believing his death and conforming thereto, may, as dying with him, live also with him." P. 169. Again, says he, "Christian baptism is the washing of water into the word of life. Take away either the water or the word, baptism ceaseth." P. 116. "In this century, the Waldenses and Albigenses loudly asserted and extensively practised believer baptism." Twisk, Chron. 1. 11, A. D. 1100, p. 423. "Peter Bruise, a learned author in Toulouse, France, and his numerous followers, were zealous asserters and practisers of baptism after faith and repentance." Dutch Mar. chap. 11. Twelfth Century.--Alburtus Magnus says, "The laver of baptism is not proper but to the illuminated and called, who can draw virtue from the death of Christ." Page 413. Thomas Aquinas says that "in baptism God words inwardly, as he dispenseth the ordinance outwardly; there is not only a consecration of the soul to God, but the body; because the whole man, by baptism, is dedicated to God; for by baptism we die to the life of sin, and begin to live a new life of grace." P. 424. "In this century there was a great spread of those who practised believer’s baptism." Twisk, Chron. 1:13, pp. 528, 529. Thirteenth Century.--In this century, Jacob Merningus says that "he had in his hand, in the German tongue, a Confession of the Faith of the Baptists, called Waldenses, which asserts that in the beginning of Christianity there was no such thing as baptizing infants, and that their forefathers practised no such thing, as Johannes Bohemius writes in his second book; and Merningus’ History of Baptism, part 2d, page 736." Moreover, it is observed by many, that "this faith and practice made a prodigious spread through Poland, Lombardy, Germany, and Holland." Montanus, p. 86. Merningus, p. 737. Fourteenth Century.--In addition to the evidence cited above, which also bears upon this century, as, indeed, the documents presented with respect to any century always have an important bearing upon that immediately succeeding, we find that "Carlos, Bishop of Meyland, did exhort the ministers under his charge that they should first teach the faith; and that only upon a confession of faith and a good conversation they should administer baptism." Merning. p. 740. The confession of the Thabotites, in the year 1431; confirms that in this century there were many Baptists, especially in Bohemia. They say, "We do from our hearts acknowledge that the ordinance of baptism is washing, which is performed with water, which, according to Christ’s words, doth hold out (i. e. in a figure) the washing of the soul from sin according to Christ’s command." Matthew 28:19. Merning. p. 743. Fifteenth Century.--In this century the Baptists spread amazingly. Mern. p. 772. Twisk says, in his Chronology, page 930, that in the year 1457, "the Waldenses, who were Baptists, were much spread in Hungary." That these Waldenses were Baptists, Montanus, Impress 2d, says that "the Waldenses, in the public declarations of their faith to the French king, A. D. 1521, assert in the strongest terms the baptizing of believers, and deny that of infants." Balthazer Lydia testifies that "at this time there were several churches in Thessalonica, in Greece, supposed to have continued successively from the Apostles’ time, agreeing with the faith of the Waldenses." See B. L. Treatise 3, of the Waldenses. "Two persons were sent from the churches in Thessalonica to find some of the same faith with themselves; and coming into Switzerland, they were taken prisoners and put into the castle of Passaw, who declared to many that they had in their care (at Thessalonica) the original of Paul’s epistles, which he sent to them." Mern. page 739. Sixteenth Century.--It is scarcely necessary to continue the history farther down than this century, as almost every person knows that there were myriads of advocates for believer baptism in this century. I shall, however, mention one distinguished advocate of this cause, who flourished in this century. Jacob de Roor, a prisoner in Bruges, in Flanders, steadfastly owned and maintained as follows, viz. "That the baptism which the Apostles taught and practised must needs be after believing, because it is for the burying of sin, the bath or evidence of regeneration, the covenant of a Christian’s life, the putting on the body of Christ, and planting into the true olive-tree Christ Jesus, and for the right entrance into the spiritual ark, whereof Christ Jesus is the builder." From the preceding documents, a mere sample of what may be gleaned from the pages of ecclesiastical history, the observant reader will readily see how much credit is due to the Princeton professor as a lecturer on ecclesiastical history, when he says, "It is an undoubted fact that the people known in ecclesiastical history under the name of ’Anabaptists,’ who arose in Germany in the year 1552, were the very first body of people in the whole Christian world who rejected the baptism of infants on the principles now adopted by the Anti-Pedobaptist body." (Page 32.) Unless there be some premeditated oracular ambiguity in this expression, which it would be uncharitable to suppose, one could not easily make an assertion more unjustifiable or insupportable, as the documents I have given fully show, and to which many more might be added. I have drawn upon my labours and researches some twenty-seven years ago for the above items, which, with much toil and more leisure than I can now command, I collected from reliable sources, for a tract of some 70 pages, titled "Strictures on These Letters respecting the Debate at Mount Pleasant, published in the Presbyterian Magazine: Philadelphia, 1821:--by Rev. Dr. Samuel Ralston, D.D." These Strictures, although before that Rev. Doctor and others of his party now for more than a quarter of a century, have never been responded to, so far as I have learned; and the facts and documents here furnished stand as yet uncontradicted by the Pedobaptist world. 1 Very like the actions of infants. 2 We are more courteous than Justin Martyr’s Christians. We bring the water to the infants, but they carried the infants to the water! 3 Wall’s History of Intent Baptism, vol. 1:, pp. 67, 70, Oxford edition, 1836. 4 Miller on Baptism, page 32. 5 Strange stretching, this! We would rather say, contracting himself. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 39: 01.06.05. REVIEW OF PROFESSOR MILLER OF PRINCETON; DR. WALL, VICAR OF SHOREM IN KENT, AND ... ======================================================================== CHAPTER V. REVIEW OF PROFESSOR MILLER OF PRINCETON; DR. WALL, VICAR OF SHOREM IN KENT, AND OTHERS. IT is presumed that quite enough has been said on the main pillars of infant baptism--its antiquity and generality. On the same foundation, stand five of the seven sacraments of Roman Catholicism, together with a bachelor priesthood, and the paramount virtues and powers of celibacy and the monastic life. We have also shown, I hope, to the entire satisfaction of every honest mind--of every inquirer after truth--that there has always been, even in the most degenerate days, a valiant band of saints and martyrs bearing testimony against these encroachments of "THE MAN OF SIN" upon the institutions of the Law-giver and King of the Christian people. From all of which documentary argument and proof, we learn how little credit is due to those most reputable "Doctors of modern Divinity" who endeavour to produce the impression that the "German Anabaptists" of the 16th century were the first people in the would that either opposed infant baptism, or assumed the ground on which the present Immersionists, commonly called Baptists, raise their banners and collect a community for the Lord. Still, that no point in this controversy may be wholly over-looked or disparaged through apparent ignorance or neglect, I think it expedient to say a few words upon the ancient, though not primitive, institution of the CATECHUMENS. By the catechumens we mean those children admitted into the schools of the ancient church for the purpose of being prepared to make an intelligent profession of Christianity. That all our readers may have an impartial history of them, I quote the whole article concerning them from Buck’s Theological Dictionary, which I find generally quoted in Dictionaries and Encyclopedias of more modern date:-- "CATECHUMENS, the lowest order of Christians in the primitive church. They had some title to the common name of Christians, being a degree above pagans and heretics, though not consummated by baptism. They were admitted to the state of catechumens by the imposition of hands and the sign of the cross. The children of believing parents were admitted catechumens as soon as ever they were capable of instruction; but at what age those of heathen parents might be admitted is not so clear. As to the time of their continuance in this state, there were no general rules fixed about it; but the practice varied according to the difference of times and places, and the readiness and proficiency of the catechumens themselves. There were four orders or degrees of catechumens. The first were those instructed privately without the church, and kept at a distance, for some time, from the privilege of entering the church, to make them the more eager and desirous of it. The next degree were the candidates, so called for their being admitted to hear sermons and the Scriptures read in the church, but were not allowed to partake of the prayers. The third sort of catechumens were the genuflectentes, so called because they received imposition of hands kneeling. The fourth order was the competentes et electi; denoting the immediate candidates for baptism, or such as were appointed to be baptized the next approaching festival; before which, strict examination was made into their proficiency, under the several stages of catechetical exercises. "After examination, they were exercised for twenty days together, and were obliged to fasting and confession. Some days before baptism they went veiled; and it was customary to touch their ears, saying Ephphatha,--i. e., Be opened; as also to anoint their eyes with clay: both ceremonies being in imitation of our Saviour’s practice, and intended to signify to the catechumens their condition both before and after their admission into the Christian church." If, then, infant baptism had been the custom of the primitive church, I ask these hoary doctors of modern divinity, how could it have happened that schools were so early, even in their "ancient church," established for preparing children for baptism by inducting them into the knowledge of the facts, precepts, and promises of Christianity? Can any one of these defenders of the high antiquity of infant baptism give a good reason for such schools? Yes, says one of the most ingenious of them, they were instituted for heathen children! Whether to ascribe this dogma to his temerity or to his intractability, I know not; but this I know, that he has read ecclesiastical history to little account who assumes this attitude on this question. Surely every mere tyro in ecclesiastic learning remembers the case of the celebrated St. Augustine, born in Tagasta, 354; who, by "his Christian mother Monica, was placed among the catechumens; " so that, says Du Pin, "falling dangerously sick, he earnestly desired to be baptized;" but was not then, till better educated!! For, according to the rule of the church, "catechumens were not to be prayed for who died without baptism." Dr. Mosheim assigns to these catechumens a place in the institutions of the first century. His words are:-- "Whoever acknowledged Christ as the Saviour of mankind, and made a solemn profession of his confidence in him, was immediately baptized and received into the church. But, in process of time, when the church began to flourish, and its members to increase, it was thought prudent and necessary to divide Christians into two orders, distinguished by the names of believers and catechumens. The former were those who had been solemnly admitted into the church by baptism, and in consequence thereof were instructed in all the mysteries of religion, had access to all the parts of divine worship, and were authorized to vote in the ecclesiastical assemblies. The latter were such as had not been dedicated to God and Christ by baptism; and were, therefore, admitted neither to the public prayers, nor to the holy communion, nor to the ecclesiastical assemblies." Again he says-- "In the earliest times of the church, all who professed firmly to believe that Jesus was the only Redeemer of the world, and who, in consequence of this profession, promised to live in a manner conformable to the purity of his holy religion, were immediately received among the disciples of Christ. This was all the preparation for baptism then required; and a more accurate instruction in the doctrines of Christianity was to be administered, to them after their receiving that sacrament." Again--"The methods of instructing the catechumens differed according to their various capacities. Those in whom the natural force of reason was small, were taught no more than the fundamental principles and truths, which are, as it were, the basis of Christianity. Those, on the contrary, whom their instructors judged capable of comprehending, in some measure, the whole system of Divine truth, were furnished with superior degrees of knowledge; and nothing was concealed from them which could have any tendency to render them firm in their profession and to assist them in arriving at Christian perfection. The care of instructing such was committed to persons who were distinguished by their gravity and wisdom, and also by their learning and judgment. And from hence it comes that the ancient doctors generally divide their flock into two classes; the one comprehending such as were solidly and thoroughly instructed; the other, those who were acquainted with little more than the first principles of religion; nor do they deny that the methods of instruction applied to these two sorts of persons were extremely different. "The Christians took all possible care to accustom their children to the study of the Scriptures, and to instruct them is the doctrines of their holy religion: and schools were everywhere erected for this purpose, even from the very commencement of the Christian church." Is it not clear, then, Pedobaptist historians being witness, that pains were taken by Christian parents, even before the first century, to prepare their children for baptism? Were there, in their judgment, two baptisms--one for speechless babes, and one for educated children and adults? Or does any one assume the absurd position that the catechumens were the young or old children of unbelieving Jews and pagans? This they must assume, or admit that the children of Christian parents were taught before they were baptized. Speaking of the third and fourth centuries, as respects the growing custom of baptizing infants, the learned historian J. C. J. Giesler says, "The custom of considering certain doctrines and rites as mysteries would naturally have some effect on the mode of admission to the church. Baptism was preceded by a long preparatory course, during which the catechumens (catechoumenoi) were gradually led from general religious and moral truths to the peculiar doctrines of Christianity, by teachers appointed for the purpose, (catechistes,) and must pass through various grades (audientes, genuflectentes, competentes) before they were deemed fit to be actually admitted. This course usually occupied several years, and often the catechumens voluntarily deferred their baptism as long as possible, on account of the remission of sins by which it was accompanied. Hence, it was often necessary to baptize the sick, and in that case, sprinkling (baptismus clinicorum, ton klinikon) was substituted for the usual rite. The baptism of infants became now more common. The use of exorcism is distinctly mentioned, and all who had been baptized, even the children, partook of the eucharist." We might quote Waddington and other ecclesiastical historians on our shelves, to the same effect; but this would be more for display than for edification. It is, we think, already proved, from this institution alone, that infant baptism was not from the beginning. From all the premises before us, may we not, then, safely affirm that there is no divine precept, no approved example, no authority for infant baptism in the Holy Oracles or in the history of the primitive church? On the contrary, there are--1st. the faith and repentance often required; 2d, in the import of the institution itself; 3d, in the schools and discipline established in and by the ancient church for the instruction and preparation of children for the proper understanding and believing reception of the ordinance--the clearest indications that there is no more divine authority for baptizing an infant than for giving it the consecrated wafer, the holy oil of Romanism, or the sacred memorials of a Saviour’s dying love? With these premises before the candid reader, we ask him whether he can repose with a full acquiescence in the tenth and last argument of Dr. Miller, and that of his still more learned predecessor, Dr. Wall--viz. that "the history of the Christian church from the apostolic age furnishes an argument of irresistible force in favour of the Divine authority of infant baptism!" Great must be the implicit confidence of any man, we think, or great must be his ignorance of church history, who can lend his assent to an assumption as gratuitous and unwarrantable as the plea for auricular confession, transubstantiation, or extreme unction. I am now, and have been long of the opinion that these reverend gentlemen who talk so easily and so positively of church history and its faithful records, are much better read in Roman Catholic church history than in Christian antiquity or the true history of the hosts of remonstrants that never gave their assent to the haughty, imperious, and baseless assumptions of "THE MAN OF SIN," whose church history is but that of his own lofty pretensions to a regular, hereditary, ecclesiastical descent from St. Peter and that church in the imperial city, of which they say he was the first prelate as well as the chief founder; the whole of which story, though gravely told a million of times, and fully believed by a thousand million of human kind, during twelve successive centuries, is as grand a legend or as magniloquent a tale as that of the Arabian Nights, or that of the more plausible Robinson Crusoe. But that my readers may hear Dr. Miller in his own grave conclusions, and that I may give him the last word, and lest any one should think that I have done him any injustice, I shall quote directly his own epitome of the strength of his own evidence. It is in the words following, to wit:-- "Such is an epitome of the direct evidence in favour of infant baptism. To me, I acknowledge, it appears nothing short of demonstration. The invariable character of all Jehovah’s dealings and covenants with the children of men; his express appointment, acted upon for two thousand years by the ancient church; the total silence of the New Testament as to any retractation or repeal of this privilege; the evident and repeated examples of family baptism in the apostolic a the indubitable testimony of the practice of the whole church on the Pedobaptist plan, from the time of the Apostles to the sixteenth century, including the most respectable witnesses for the truth in the dark ages; all conspire to establish on the firmest foundation the membership, and the consequent right to baptism, of the infant seed of believers, If here be no divine warrant, we may despair of finding it for any institution in the church of God." I do not think it necessary to proceed to an examination of all the alleged authorities for infant baptism adduced from the last half of the third century, and from the fourth and fifth centuries. These are all too far off from the apostolic age. Besides, in the same period I find almost all the errors of the ancient church appearing in well defined outlines, explicit enough for the humblest intellect. It may, however, be useful to some minds, easily influenced by even a spurious antiquity, to state a few undeniable facts, and to make a few observations on the testimonies pressed upon our attention by Dr. Wall and his too credulous and sanguine admirers. I shall begin with the celebrated Council of Carthage, A. D. 253, and its presiding genius, St. Cyprian, with his sixty-six bishops. H. Danverse, in his book on Baptism, 1674, alleges, that he "would rather believe that these things" (touching the baptism of infants eight days old) "had been foisted into his writings by that villainous, cursed generation, that so horribly abused the writings of most of the ancients, than to suppose Cyprian and his bishops so ignorant as to decide in favour of baptizing on the eighth day." I see no need for such a solution of the case: for other sayings and decisions of this Council of Carthage were equally childish. For example "We judge," says he, "that no person is to be hindered from obtaining the grace of remission, because they are not his own, but others’ sins, that are forgiven him"--that is, original sin or the sins of his parents are forgiven him. A sage argument, truly, for infant baptism! But the learned Grotius takes other ground, and denies that there is any authority from any council for infant baptism previous to the Council of Carthage, held in the year 418. He argues against the universality of infant baptism even in the third century. Besides, Dr. Wall himself admits that some of the reasons given by these "Fathers," in support of the alleged decrees of the African Council, "are weak and frivolous." Were I challenged to the task, as a matter of consequence, to take the whole collation and authors of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, adduced by Dr. Wall, and to argue from them against the assumption that infant baptism was from the beginning, I would, with much confidence of a successful issue, very cheerfully undertake it. Nothing in the form of circumstantial reasoning could, to my mind, be more conclusive against him than his own authorities, in the hand of a skilful and competent reasoner. I will give only a sample or two of his authorities, and of the logical application of them to this effect. He quotes the letter of the Council of Carthage, A. D. 253, addressed to Fidus, in response to the interrogatory, "Whether an infant, before it was eight days old, might be baptized, if need required!" Fidus was, it seems, against this practice. The Council are in favour of it: for what reasons? 1st. "Because the Son of Man came not to destroy men’s lives, but to save them." 2d. "Because, as far as lies in us, no soul is to be lost." "For it is written, To the clean all things are clean." 4th. "Because the eighth day, that is next to the Sabbath day, was to be the day on which the Lord was to rise from the dead, and quicken us and give us the spiritual circumcision." 5th. "Because Peter. said, The Lord has shown me that no person is to be called common or unclean." 6th. "Because they are not his own, but others’ sins, that are forgiven him." "Therefore, it is not for us to hinder any person from baptism and the grace of God, who is merciful and kind and affectionate to all."1 So reason St. Cyprian and his sixty-six bishops. Not one scripture is quoted by way of authority. No appeal is made to scripture precept, precedent, or even to the history of the church. Now, can any one, free from prejudice, imagine that if infant baptism had been, from the beginning a primitive, apostolic usage, such a superannuated, dotardly affair as this Carthage decision could possibly have occurred, or that such a question should have been debated as late as the last half of the third century? I wonder not that such men as "the great Grotius" should have argued against the universal prevalence of infant baptism even so late as the fourth century, from the very authorities which are urged in proof of its apostolic origin and authority. Concerning the sixth canon of the Council of Neocesarea, passed A. D. 314, which saith, "A woman with child may be baptized when she pleases. For the mother in this matter communicates nothing to the child: because, in the profession, every one’s own [or peculiar] resolution is declared, [or because every one’s resolution is declared to be peculiar to himself.]" I am of the same opinion with Grotius, who says of it, "How much soever the commentators draw it to another sense, it is plain that the doubt concerning the baptizing women great with child, was for that reason because the child might seem to be baptized together with the mother, and a child was not wont to be baptized but upon its own will and profession." Grotius quotes Balsamon and Zonaras, of the twelfth century, as interpreting this canon as he does, for which he has good authority. But on these matters I lay no stress whatever. They only show that learned and very distinguished men, not Baptists either, concur with us in repudiating the decrees of councils as evidence that infant baptism was fully established in their days, or that it was from the beginning. After describing the preparation for receiving baptism, as respects the state of mind of the recipient of it, St. Gregory Nazianzen says, "Some may suppose this to hold in the case of those who can desire baptism. What say you to those that are as yet infants, and are not in a capacity to be sensible either of the grace or the miss of it? Shall we baptize them too? Yes, by all means, if danger make it requisite. For it is better that they be sanctified without their own sense of it, than that they should die unsealed and uninitiated. And a ground of this to us is circumcision, given on the eighth day, which was a typical seal, or baptism, and was practised on those that had no use of reason, as also the anointing of the doorposts, which preserved the first-born by things that had no sense." "As for us," (whom danger of death does not threaten,) "I give my opinion that they should stay three years or thereabouts, when they are capable to hear and answer some of the holy words, and though they do not perfectly understand the words, yet they form them, and that you then sanctify them in soul and body with the great sacrament of initiation."2 This needs no comment. At this period, A. D. 360, it is very evident that infant baptism was still in debate; and no one as yet presumes to appeal to the history of the church from the beginning. This may be made still more evident from the words of the great Basil, his contemporary. He says, "There is a time for sleep, a time for watching, a time of war, a time of peace; but any time of one’s life is proper for baptism; yet the most proper time is Easter." Again, he says, "Do you demur, and put it off, when you have been from a child catechised in the word? Are you not got acquainted with the truth? Having been always learning it, are you not come to the knowledge of it? A seeker all your life long; a considerer till you are old. When will you be made a Christian? When shall we see you become one of us? You do not know what change to-morrow may bring." This is a very striking passage; and, notwithstanding the assertion of Dr. Well, that these were the children, not of Christians, but of unbaptized pagans, I must think that amongst these were the children of Christians; else, I ask, how could he say, "You have been from a child catechised in the word!" Did pagans so bring up their children? Did they teach them that the Bible was the book of God? Did they introduce them to a Saviour in whom they did not believe? This passage from Basil is alone sufficient to show that, in the fourth century, infant baptism was any thing but universal. To Basil, we shall add a quotation from St. Chrysostom: "The catechumens being of this mind," (having an aversion to a godly life,) "to take no care of a godly life; and those that are baptized, some of them, forasmuch as they were children when they received it, and some, for that they received it in a fit of sickness, having put it off to that time, and having no mind to live godly, show no good inclination. And they that received it in their health show but very little; having been for the present zealously affected, afterward, even they let their fire of zeal go out." So spoke Chrysostom, A. D. 380. We are now brought down to the era of the Pelagian controversy, to the commencement of the fifth century, and till this time we have no decree of any council, nor declaration of any distinguished author that, fairly construed, could induce us to think that infant baptism was practised from the beginning, or that it had become universal. No one appears even disposed to trace it up to the apostolic age; but to assign for it some other reason or authority, doctrinal or inferential. It seems, indeed, all the while struggling against objections, and finding in circumcision, or expediency, or in the opinion of some distinguished persons, a support for itself--evidently wanting the seal and the authority of apostolic sanction, either in the form of precept or example. We know no good reason for either listening to, or examining, the conflicts of St. Austin and St. Jerome against Pelagius and Cælestius, on original sin, and their respective allusions to baptism for remission of sins; or the reasons urged for and against its application to infants according to their respective theories and hypotheses. They but reiterate the dogmas and decrees of their own times--the decisions of fathers and councils, with their own assertions and opinions. As a matter of curiosity, however, we will quote a passage or two from Dr. Wall’s History of Infant Baptism, setting forth the views of the most orthodox of all the great fathers, the defenders of the faith and traditions of the true church, as opposed to the equally distinguished heterodox and heretical Pelagius, who is quoted as affirming that "men slander me, as if I denied the sacrament of baptism to infants, or did promise the kingdom of heaven to some persons without the redemption of Christ; which is a thing that I never heard, no, not even any wicked heretic say."3 "Who is there so ignorant--who can be so impious as to hinder infants from being baptized and born again in Christ, and to make them miss of the kingdom of heaven; since our Saviour has said that none can enter into the kingdom of heaven that is not born again of water and the Holy Spirit? Who is there so impious as to refuse to an infant, of what age soever, the common redemption of mankind, and to hinder him that is born to an uncertain life from being born again to an everlasting and certain life?"4 Pelagius, in all this, was verbally most orthodox: for all the church, with the great St. Austin, believed and taught infant baptism for the remission of sin original. Austin said of the Pelagians, "Beset both with the authority of God’s word, and with the usage of the church that was of old delivered to it, and has been since kept by it in the baptizing of children, that they dare not deny that infants are baptized for forgiveness of sins, and that it must not be supposed that the church does this in any trickish or deceitful meaning; but since what is acted is acted seriously, that which is spoken must be supposed to be really done." But adds St. Austin, although Pelagius in this speaks according to the true church, "The Pelagians do not yield that infants are baptized for the remission of sins in such a sense as that any sins are forgiven to them who, they say, have none,"--namely, infants; "but that they, though they be without sin," (i. e. original sin,) "yet are baptized with that baptism by which is granted forgiveness of sins to all that have any."5 Concerning this concession of Pelagius to the orthodox St. Austin, Dr. Wall says, "There will ever be this difference between a man of sense and a thick-skulled man--that the former, if he find himself gravelled, will, at least, have the modesty to give over talking. Pelagius, after he was brought to this contradiction, kept silence, and we hear no more of him."6 So, then, it appears that Pelagius, St. Austin, and Dr. Wall agree, first, in infant baptism; and secondly, in pretence the first, and in sincerity the last two, believed in the baptism of infants for the remission of original sin; and that without either faith or repentance on their part. This, no doubt, was the mystic charm of infant baptism, and its passport into the Catholic faith of all that taught or believed infant damnation for original sin, or because of simple descent from a fallen and condemned progenitor. Indeed, Dr. Wall strongly affirms that St. Austin, and the orthodox with him, "held as certain that children which are baptized, dying before they commit actual sin, are undoubtedly saved;" "for," continues Dr. Wall, "St. Austin says in there last words that ’he that does not believe this’--that baptized children dying in infancy are undoubtedly saved--’is an infidel."’ "Austin plainly supposes," says Dr. Wall, "that without baptism they would be liable to eternal damnation because of original Sin."7 "Austin did not think," says Dr. Wall, "nor pretend that infants that are baptized have, in any proper sense, faith or repentance, or conversion of heart, &c. How much soever he is here pressed with the difficulty of explaining the reasons why godfathers answer in the child’s name--’He does believe’--he does not, for all that, fly to the justifying of so great a paradox as to say that the child does indeed, in a proper sense, understand, believe, or disbelieve any thing. He shows the words are true in a sacramental sense, but does not maintain that they are so in a proper one. Nay, he plainly yields that they are not: he grants that infants cannot as yet either believe with the heart or confess with the mouth. And when, at other times, he argues that infants, after they are baptized, are no longer to be counted either among the infidels or catechumens, but the fideles or credentes, (believers;) yet still he means and explains himself as he does here--’that they are constituted fideles, not by that faith which consists in the will of believers, but by the sacrament of faith.’ He holds, indeed, that the Holy Spirit does do offices for the infant and is in the infant. You see here his words: the regenerating spirit is one in these that bring the child, and in the child that is brought: and in that part of the epistle which I left out because of the length, he says, ’The water affording outwardly the sacrament of the grace, and the Spirit operating inwardly the benefit of the grace, loosing the bond of guilt, &c., do regenerate.’ But he supposes the infants to be merely passive, and not to know, understand, or co-operate any thing themselves." "We affirm, therefore, that the Holy Spirit dwells in baptized infants, though they know it not: for after the same manner they know him not, though he be in them, as they know not their own soul: the reason whereof, which they cannot yet make use of, is in them, as a spark raked up, which will kindle as they grow in years." Dr. Wall, pp. 276, 277, 278. Thus believed, wrote, and taught the revered and admired Saint Austin, the beau ideal and prototype of the justly celebrated John Calvin. I have given Dr. Wall’s translation of the original Latin, lying before me, that I might not be supposed to have given a single tint or shade to the views of the great patron of infant baptism. With such views of baptism as these here delineated, professed by orthodox and heterodox, by catholics and heretics, no one need wonder at the popularity of the rite, its wide diffusion, or the tenacity of its hold on the minds and affections of a too credulous and servile people. We have considered every thing extant, appealed to by its advocates, in Old Testament and New--every thing alleged from church history, in the form of "Apostolic Fathers," Greek Fathers, distinguished writers, "decrees of Synods and Councils," &c. &c., down to the period when "THE MAN OF SIN" arrives at full maturity, and, with his crown and mitre, his shepherd’s crook, his crosier and sword spiritual, proclaims himself PONTIFEX MAXIMUS, "the PRINCE OF THE APOSTLES," "the VICAR OF CHRIST," and "the HEAD OF THE CHURCH." From this period down, we can find, as we have already shown, a host of distinguished men in every age, with their scattered communities--Mountaineers or Piedmontese--bearing witness for the Apostolic Institutions, and against the haughty and insolent assumptions of the Roman Pontiff, exalting himself above all the gods of earth and objects of human fear, sitting in the temple of God, assuming to be his Vicegerent, claiming for himself a reverence and an adoration due to God alone. He, indeed, has even aimed, and successfully, "to change times and laws" and usages inimical to his own claims and pretensions. Leaving the youth of the Christian profession to the necessity of making a personal application and a personal profession of the faith before initiation by baptism, was by no means so favourable to the rapid growth and worldly aggrandizement of his church, as the universal baptism of infants as soon as born. The Roman hierarchy never was in favour of much thinking or examination on the part of its population. The clergy will think for them, if the people will only faithfully believe and serve them. I need not, then, trace through the sixth century the still more rapid progress of this rite. It never was, however, catholic--that is, universal. To pursue it farther in this direction would be but waste of time and prodigality of life. 1 Wall’s History of Infant baptism, vol. 1:, pp. 129-132. 2 St. Gregory Nazianzen, as quoted by Dr. Well, vol. 1: p.177. The Greek for the sacrament of initiation, is, tw megalw musthriw thV teleiwsewV rather the great mystery of perfection or initiation. 3 Wall, vol. 1: p. 236. 4 Ibid. p. 450. 5 Wall, vol. i, p. 454. 6 Ibid. p. 454. 7 Wall, vol. 1: p. 273. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 40: 01.06.07. REVIEW OF PROFESSOR STUART OF ANDOVER ======================================================================== CHAPTER VII. REVIEW OF PROFESSOR STUART OF ANDOVER. WE do not think that we would presume too much upon the candour and good sense of all impartial inquirers after the proper action and subject of Christian baptism, who may have read with impartial consideration our previous essays on these highly interesting topics, if we should say, that, in their judgment, these two important items of the Divine will have been amply and satisfactorily developed by an appeal to the proper sources of evidence and authority, on such questions. Still, as the minds of very many well-disposed persons have been greatly sophisticated by a show of authority and certain special pleadings, based on some comparatively obscure passages of Scripture, or allusions to ancient customs, not well understood, I judge it expedient to select a few specimens of these, by way of appendix to the direct evidence already furnished on those topics. And, first, on the action of baptism, much has been inferred from one occurrence of the word baptizo, rendered by the word wash, Mark 7:3-4. Professor Stuart, of Andover, writes a very elaborate essay to sustain the opinion of Calvin--viz. "It is of no consequence at all whether the person baptized is totally immersed, or whether he is merely sprinkled by an affusion of water. This should be a matter of choice to the churches in different regions, although the word baptize signifies to immerse, and the rite of immersion was practised by the ancient church." P. 364. "To this opinion," says he, "I do most heartily subscribe." Of course, then, the strict and proper meaning of the word baptize is of no consequence whatever, as every one’s choice is all-sufficient to please God! The Lawgiver of the universe enacts a positive law, and gives to every man his choice of three modes of observing it. Whichever of the three best pleases A, B, or C, will perfectly please God!! This is certainly a very complaisant and generous condescension to human predilections and caprices. But with him the word wash justifies this: for, as we may wash by sprinkling, pouring, dipping, it is wholly indifferent which of the three we use. Whichever pleases us, pleases God!! In looking over the use of baptizo in the New Testament, finding that in eighty times occurring, it is twice translated wash; and baptismos, occurring four times, though never applied to the ordinance, is three times translated washing, he assumes that this rendering, because of its permitting three ways of using water, is the very meaning which we should always affix to the word when indicating the institution of Christ!! Yet, strange to tell, by only looking at a good concordance, he might see that the word baptisma, appropriated to the ordinance by the Messiah and his Apostles, though occurring twenty-two times, is never translated by the term wash or washing. What a glorious ambiguity is here created! Out of the whole family of baptizo, though occurring one hundred and twenty times in the New Testament, he finds once wash and washed, and thrice washing. Now, then, the only ground of debate at present is, Does the term wash, in these passages, or rather the verb wash, as found in the English Testament, Mark 7:3-4, indicate any thing short of immersion in that particular case? And that I may save the labour of much writing, I will freely quote from Professor Ripley’s Examination of Professor Stuart’s Essay. On pages 39-47, the professor says:-- "The whole passage, as expressed in the common version, is the following:--’For the Pharisees and all the Jews, except they wash their hands oft, eat not, holding the tradition of the elders and when they come from the market, except they wash, they eat not.’ Here are mentioned two instances of washing, (so called;) the first, a matter of constant occurrence; the second, an observance performed after returning from the market. The inquiry is a very natural one, Did these washings differ from one another in any respect? To this inquiry, an affirmative answer can scarcely be avoided. For, in the first place, one was a washing which commonly occurred before a meal, without regard to the employment that had preceded it; so that even if a person had remained at home, still, before taking his meal, he would wash his hands. The other was a ceremony, performed after having been exposed to the various occasions of defilement which would be connected with his attendance at market. Such was the variety of persons and things with which he might have contact, that a more formal and thorough ablution would naturally be performed. "In examining the whole passage, especially in the original, an attentive reader will perceive an advance in the thought. There is presented, at first, the general custom, and then a specific case, namely, after returning from the market. If, in common, the hands were washed before eating, the reader is prepared to hear that, after returning from a mixed crowd of people, something different from, or additional to, this washing was performed. The English reader might overlook this, on account of the repetition of the word wash in the fourth verse; although I cannot but think he would, if attentive, be sensible of some deficiency in the representation, unless he should conclude, from the repeated use of the same word, wash, that his expectation of a more formal and thorough ceremony after returning from market, was an incorrect one. But, to a careful reader of the Greek, no such sense of deficiency arises, and no such disappointment occurs. For, as further showing that there was a difference between the two instances of washing, I observe:-- "In the second place, two different Greek words are employed to express the washing in the two different cases. In the third verse, we read ean me nipsoontai; while, in the fourth, we read ean me baptisoontai. These two words well correspond to the circumstances of the two cases; and, rendered according to the proper meaning, clearly exhibit the advance in the thought. To make this matter plain to a mere English reader, I observe, there is a difference between these two verses in the original, like what would be felt if they were thus translated ’For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, except they wash their hands oft, eat not; and when they come from the market, except they bathe, they eat not’ "To proceed. Since, now, there is a plain difference between these two cases of washing, as suggested both by the occasions and by the different verbs employed in the original, what was the precise difference between them? Was it that, on common occasions, they washed their hands only; while, on the occasion of returning from market, they immersed, or bathed, their whole persons? So thought Vatablus, a distinguished professor of Hebrew at Paris, for whom the Jews of his acquaintance entertained a very high regard. ’They bathed,’ says he, on Mark 7:4, ’their whole persons.’ So thought Grotius, who says, on Mark 7:4, ’They cleansed themselves more carefully from defilement contracted at the market, to wit, by not only washing their hands, but even by immersing their body. In conformity to this, may the passage in Mark be rendered, without the least violence to its language. In conformity with this, too, were the conveniences among the Jews: accommodations for frequent ablutions were everywhere ready. Nor, with their mode of dress, would the practice be so cumbersome as it would be among us.’ "That some of the stricter sort, that many, enough to justify the Evangelist’s general expression, did practise total ablution on the occasion mentioned, is altogether credible. Kuinoel, however, in his commentary, asserts that the existence of such a custom among the Pharisees is not sustained by sufficient arguments. In the absence of clear, satisfying proof, it is not becoming to make any positive assertions. However striking the language of Mark may, by some, be considered, as recognising such a practice, (and the language is certainly coincident with such a practice, especially when we look at it by the investigations respecting baptizo on the preceding pages,) yet I am not disposed to urge it. But, assuming the ground that the Evangelist did not intend to distinguish a total bathing from a partial washing, I again inquire, did he distinguish one sort of partial washing from another sort of partial washing, one of which sorts was performed by the dipping of the hands into water, and thus was properly expressed by the peculiar term (baptizo) which he has employed? If so, this word is here used in its radical, proper meaning; and, consequently, examined in its connection, is so far from requiring or justifying Professor Stuart’s view of its meaning, that it is a decisive instance against his view. "I have already said that the word (baptisoontai) in this passage may, without any violence, be considered as distinguishing a total immersion from a washing of the hands. I am by no means satisfied, however, that this is a necessary view of the passage. The verb is in the middle voice; and, as there is no object expressed after it, it would be lawful, in order to express the Greek, to employ, as Professor Stuart has, the word themselves, as being contained in the verb itself; so that the translation would be, ’except they immerse or bathe themselves.’ Still, as the verb (nipsoontai) in the former part of the passage has, in the middle voice, an object (cheiras, hands) after it, it is certainly justifiable, though not necessary, to maintain that the verb in the latter part of the passage (baptisoontai) has the same word understood after it for its object. The passage would then read, ’The Pharisees . . . except they wash their hands oft, eat not, . . . and when they come from the market, except they immerse or bathe their hands, they eat not.’ The ambiguity in the Greek is much the same as there is in the following English sentence: ’The Pharisees . . . except they wash their hands oft, eat not . . . and when they come from the market, except they bathe, they eat not.’ The word hands may be considered as understood after the word bathe, or the word themselves may be understood. The illustration is a complete one, because we are not in the habit of distinguishing between different modes of washing the hands. "I proceed now to the inquiry, whether there were two sorts of washing of the hands, and what the distinction between them? The following quotations exhibit all that I have to offer; and I present them the more readily, as they are selected from Pedobaptist writers:-- "Jahn, in his Biblical Archaeology, section 320, makes the following statement: ’The washing of hands before the meals (a custom which originated from the practice of conveying food to the mouth in the fingers) was eventually made a religious duty; on the ground that, if any one, though unconscious of the circumstance at the time, had touched any thing, whatever it might be, which was unclean, and remained unwashed, when he ate, he thereby communicated the contamination to the food also.’ The Pharisees judged the omission of this ablution to be a crime of equal magnitude with fornication, and worthy of death. "They taught that, if a person had not departed from the house, the hands, without the fingers being distended, should be wet with water poured over them, and then elevated so that the water might flow down to the elbows; furthermore, the water was to be poured a second time over the arms, in order that (the hands being held down) it might flow over the fingers. This practice is alluded to in Mark 7:3. On the contrary, those who had departed from the house, washed in a bath, or, at least, immersed their hands in water with the fingers distended. The ceremony in this case (Mark 7:4) is denominated ean me baptisoontai, (except they immerse, or bathe.) "Dr. George Campbell, on Mark 7:3-4, says, ’For illustrating this passage, let it be observed, first, that the two verbs, rendered wash in the English translation, are different in the original. The first is nipsoontai, properly translated wash; the second is baptisoontai, which limits us to a particular mode of washing; for baptizo denotes to plunge, to dip. This is more especially the import when the words are, as here, opposed to each other. Otherwise, niptein, like the general word to wash in English, may be used for baptizein, to dip, because the genus comprehends the species; but not conversely, baptizein for baptein, the species for the genus. By this interpretation, the words which, as rendered in the common version, are unmeaning, appear both significant and emphatical; and the contrast in the Greek is preserved in the translation.’ Accordingly, Dr. Campbell translates the passage thus: ’For the Pharisees . . . eat not until they have washed their hands, by pouring a little water upon them; and if they be come from the market, by dipping them.’ "Rosenmuller, in his notes on this passage, speaks of two modes of washing the hands; namely, ’immersion of the hands in water, and when one hand is washed by the other.’ "Kuinoel, also, speaking of the opinion entertained by some, that a total ablution was performed in case of returning from the market, says, ’But an immersion of the hands, duly performed, would have abundantly sufficed for this end;’ that is, for purification from contact with the multitude. "Spencer, on the Ritual Laws of the Hebrews, speaks thus: ’Some of the Jews, ambitious for the credit of superior purity, frequently immersed their whole persons in water; the greater part, however, following a milder discipline, frequently washed only their hands, when they were about to take food. That the greater part, and especially the Pharisees, attended to this rite privately, at home, and considered it a very important part of religion, is sufficiently evident from Mark 7:3-4. Hence it was that stone vessels for water water-pots, [John ii: 6] were provided for every house of the Hebrews; so that all, when about to take food, might perform the frequent washings, according to the discipline of the Pharisees. These vessels were very unsuitable for performing these daily purifications of the Jews; for it was customary among the Jews, sometimes to wash the hands by water poured upon them; at other times, to immerse the hands in water up to the wrist.’ "From Lightfoot, I gather the following: On Mark 7:4, he says, ’The Jews used "the washing of hands," and "the plunging of the hands." And the word nipsoontai, "wash," in our Evangelist seems to answer to the former,--and baptisoontai, "baptize," to the latter . . . ’Those that remain at home, eat not . . . "unless they wash the fist." But those that come from the market eat not, . . . "unless they plunge their fist into the water," being ignorant and uncertain what uncleanness they came near unto in the market.’ ’The phrase, therefore,’ Lightfoot adds ’seems to be meant of the immersion or plunging of the hands only.’ But I remark, though it were only the hands that were plunged, yet the meaning of baptizo is sufficiently obvious." "The preceding copious examination helps us, of course, rightly to understand the quotation from Luke 11:48, which is next brought forward to sustain the meaning to wash, ascribed to baptizo: ’But the Pharisee, seeing him, wondered that he had not first washed himself (baptisthe) before dinner.’ Common version, ’And when the Pharisee saw it, he marvelled that he had not first washed before dinner;’ that he had not first immersed, that is, himself, or his hands. By the preceding part of the chapter, it appears that our Lord and his host had been exposed to a great mixture of company; and, therefore, needed, in the judgment of the Pharisee, the more formal and thorough sort of washing. On this passage, too, Lightfoot observes, ’There is a washing of the hands, and there is a dipping of the hands.’ This clause we are upon, refers to this latter. The Pharisee wonders that Christ had not washed his hands; nay, that he had not dipped them all over in the water, when he was newly come from the people that were gathered thick together." The laborious and numerous attempts from this passage to make out a case where, in the judgment of the authors of the common version, the verb baptize means to wash, as a primary meaning, demands a particular and full exposure of this bewilderment of some men of learning in their zeal for affusion. I have, therefore, gone into these details. I wonder no little, indeed, to see a man of Professor Stuart’s learning and candour do so little honour to his own learning and critical acumen, as in this case is most apparent. His own party--I mean the more profound scholars of his own party--are themselves here arrayed against him. Here stand Drs. Campbell, Rosenmuller, Kuinoel, Spencer, and Lightfoot, in evidence against his reasonings and conclusions. There are, in the common version, some two or three other occurrences of this erroneous translation, which are disposed of by these investigations. To quote still farther from Professor Ripley: "To sustain the meaning to wash, three other passages are produced by Professor Stuart, which contain the substantive derived from the verb baptizo:-- "Mark 7:4 : The washings (baptismous) of cups and pots, and brazen vessels, and couches, (klinoon.) "Mark 7:8 : The washings (baptismous) of pots and cups. "Hebrews 9:10 : Only in meats and drinks, and divers washings, (baptismous.) "That the word rendered washings in these passages ought, so far as philology is concerned, to be rendered immersions, would be a plain inference from the preceding investigations. And even though a difficulty should seem to arise from the nature of some of the things mentioned by Mark, we ought, before we decide that the word must have another meaning, to inquire whether the supposed difficulties really existed in practice among the Jews. It is by no means satisfactory to refer to customs among ourselves, as suggesting difficulties in respect to what the Jews are said to have done; and especially what they are said to have done by the influence of a misguided religious scrupulosity; for it was from religious, though mistaken considerations, that they practised these observances. Nor were such observances entirely without foundation in the statutes of Moses. In Leviticus 11:32, it is directed that any vessel upon which the dead body of an unclean animal had fallen, ’whatsoever vessel it be, wherein any work is done, it must be put into water,’ in order to be cleansed. The only exception was in respect to earthen vessels, which, being thus polluted, were to be broken in pieces, (Leviticus 11:33) Now, how credible it is, and how accordant with the language of Mark, that the superstitious spirit of the Jews, in subsequent times, extended this requisition to other cases besides that of pollution by the touch of the dead; so that even on ordinary occasions, when they thought religion required the articles to be cleansed, the cleansing must be performed by immersing them in water. "And who can wonder, if this same spirit led them, carefully to cleanse by immersion even the couches on which they reclined at meals? for it is these, probably, which are meant by the word translated tables in our version. It would certainly accord well with their superstitious disposition. And so far as the writings of distinguished men among the Jews enable us to form a judgment, those writings contribute altogether to the belief that there was usually performed an immersion of these articles, when they needed special purifying. The Jewish rules which Dr. Gill quotes in his commentary on Mark 7:4, are precise in requiring such articles to be cleansed by being covered in water; and the regulations are exceedingly strict in regard to this washing, so that should there be any thug adhering to these articles, such as pitch, which might prevent the water from touching the wood in a particular spot, the washing would not be duly performed. The same Jewish authority requires even beds to be cleansed by immersion, when they had become defiled. "And what should hinder us from employing the word immersions in Hebrews 10:9? Immersions were practised by the Jews in accordance with the Mosaic ritual; and why may we not consider the Apostle, when naming the immersions, as taking a part for the whole of the legal purifications, and consequently as not departing from the specific original meaning of the word he has employed?" These matters of private or sectarian interpretation being disposed of, there remains scarcely the semblance of any other excuse for the practice of sprinkling, as derived from any word or circumstances named in the whole New Testament. True, indeed, there are words and circumstances seized by some adult babes or babe adults, and dwelt on with a zeal and perseverance worthy of a martyr; but in this case, they only prove how strong in prejudice and how weak in reason some men of high pretensions may be; when they have unfortunately identified their fortune and their fame with the maintenance of a tenet for which there is neither reason nor faith. Such, for example, is the frequent appeal to the case of Paul’s baptism, as reported by Luke, Acts 22:16 : "Arise and be baptized;" and again, chap. 9: 18: "He arose and was baptized." Now, say they, as Paul was baptized standing, he must have been sprinkled, and not immersed. But does it say he was baptized standing?--! No, indeed; but "Arise, and be baptized." What is this but the usual style--"Arise, let us go hence!" Could he not have been sprinkled sitting, or on his knees, as well as standing up! In the same chapter, 10th verse, the Lord said to Saul, "Arise, and go into Damascus." Why not infer that rising and going into Damascus are one and the same thing, or inseparably connected, as that rising up and being baptized are one and the same act, because connected in the same message or precept. When candidates present themselves for baptism, we are all wont to say, "Arise, let us go to the water," &c. This, then, if there be any argument in it, is doubtless in favour of immersion. For Ananias would rather have called for water to be brought, than to have commanded Paul to rise up and be baptized, if he intended sprinkling or pouring. In truth, this is an idiomatic expression, common to the East and the West. On a thousand occasions, we all say, "Rise, and let us go to work"--"Arise, and act like men"--not meaning that we are about to engage in something that must be done in a standing position; but that we must change our position in reference to some object, whether mental or corporeal. Next to the passage in Mark, there is one in Ezekiel, that has been quoted a thousand times by a few writers and speakers on the subject of "sprinkling water" on infants and adults. It is Ezekiel 36:25 : "Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your filthiness, and from all your idols I will cleanse you." This promise alludes to the separation of the Jews, through faith in Christ, from pagan idols and from pagan nations, to be fulfilled in their conversion. So the context indicates. The words preceding are: "For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land. Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you," &c. &c. One would think, from the frequency and, emphasis with which these words are quoted by a certain class of ultra sprinklers, that Ezekiel was foretelling and developing the ordinance of Christian baptism as practised by some modern communities. But a more irrational play upon a word from grave men, or from those who ought to be grave men, is not, in my opinion, to be found in modern literature. Let no one be startled by the boldness I assume when I challenge the whole world of sprinklers to show that water alone was, by divine authority, ever sprinkled upon person, place, or thing, in any religious, moral, political, or physical sense whatever. I deny that ever water alone was sprinkled on any person or thing, by divine authority, for any sort of purification, legal or evangelical, under any dispensation of religion, Patriarchal, Jewish, or Christian. It is an assumption superlatively gratuitous and unprecedented. Blood, and oil, and water mixed with the ashes of a blood-red heifer, have been sprinkled for legal and ceremonial purposes. Blood alone, oil alone; but never water alone, was divinely ordained for such purposes. The water of cleansing, or the water of purification, sometimes called "the water of separation," was, indeed, in certain cases, of legal uncleanness, divinely appointed. Hence a prescription for the manufacture of it is delivered by Moses, engrossing the 19th chapter of the book of Numbers. Yet even this "clean water," or "water of cleansing," to which Ezekiel alludes, when sprinkled upon a person pronounced legally unclean, did not, without baptism, or a "bathing himself in water," effect any legal purification. So ignorant are they of the Law and the Prophets, who substitute the Roman Catholic notion of "holy water" and a hair sprinkler, for either Jewish or Christian cleansing of person, place, or thing. Bathing the whole person after this sprinkling of water and ashes, was in every case essential to any legal benefit. This abuse of reason, of authority, and of Holy Scriptures, needs only to be clearly propounded to any one that reveres Bible authority, to appear, as it is in truth, a superstitious and unwarranted custom. But to quote a Jewish Prophet, of the times of the captivity, addressing his countrymen on the subject of their restoration to their own land, as though he had been teaching Christian ordinances with respect to admission into the church, has no parallel in sophistry on this side the assumptions of Roman Catholic manufacturers of "holy water," to be dashed on every one that comes within the sweep of a hyssop or hair sprinkler in the hand of a priest, neither of the tribe nor sense of a son of Levi. I trust the candid reader will excuse me for adverting to customs so unfounded in Christianity, and so revolting to an educated and intelligent community. I find my own justification, and I hope my readers will find my pardon, in the fact that some ministers of our own day have been dubbed Doctors of Divinity for no other or better reason, that I can see, than their quoting, with an air of glorious triumph on their brow, Ezekiel 26: 25, in proof of their own dear custom of baptizing the tip of their fingers in a bason of water, that they may sprinkle a few drops of it on the brow of a babe, in the name of the Lord, to sanctify and cleanse it for some end or purpose which no one can define, much less defend. I must conclude this essay on punctilios, consecrated by great names, with an extract from Dr. Wall, the most learned and candid of Pedobaptist Episcopalian ministers. The advocates of sprinkling will hear their brother Pedobaptist with more pleasure than myself. I will, therefore, courteously dismiss the topic with a few words from Dr. Wall. He says:-- "That our climate is no colder than it was for those thirteen or fourteen hundred years from the beginning of Christianity here, to Queen Elizabeth’s time: and not near so cold as Muscovy and some other countries, where they do still dip their children in baptism, and find no inconvenience in it. "That the apparent reason that altered the custom, was not the coldness of the climate, but the imitation of Calvin, and the church of Geneva, and some others thereabouts. "That our reformers and compilers of the liturgy (even of the last edition of it) were of another mind. As appears both by the express order of the rubric itself, and by the prayer used just before baptism, ’Sanctify this water,’ &c., ’and grant that this child to be baptized therein,’ &c.; (if they had meant that pouring should have always, or most ordinarily, have been used, they would have said therewith;) and by the definition given in the Catechism of the outward visible sign in baptism: ’Water, wherein the person is baptized.’ I know that in one edition it was said, ’is dipped or sprinkled with it.’ I know not the history of that edition; but as it is a late one, so it was not thought fit to be continued. The old edition had the prayer beforesaid in these words, ’baptized in this water.’ ’That if it be the coldness of the air that is feared, a child, brought in loose blankets, that may be presently put off and on, need be no longer naked, or very little longer, than at its ordinary dressing and undressing--not a quarter or sixth part of a minute. "If the coldness of the water, there is no reason, from the nature of the thing--no order or command of God or man, that it should be used cold; but as the waters in which our Saviour and the primitive Christians, in those hot countries which the Scripture mentions, were baptized, were naturally warm by reason of the climate, so if ours be made warm, they will be the liker to them. As the inward and main part of baptism is God’s washing and sanctifying the soul, so the outward symbol is the washing of the body, which is as naturally done by warm water as cold. It may, I suppose, be used in such a degree of warmth as the parents desire. "As to those of the clergy who are satisfied themselves, and do in their own minds and opinions approve of the directions of the liturgy, and would willingly bring their people to the use of it, it is too apparent what difficulties lie in the way. So that this quarreller has no ground in his assuming way to demand, ’Why do they continue,’ &c. "The difficulty of breaking any custom which has got possession among the body of the people (though that custom be but two or three generations) is known and obvious. And there being a necessity of leaving it to the parents’ judgment whether their child may well endure dipping or not; they are ver apt to think or say not; and there is no help for it. For none, I think, will pretend that the minister should determine that, and dip the child whether they will or not. He can but give his opinion--the judgment must be theirs; and they are for doing as has been of late usual. "But there are, beside this general, two particular obstacles, which it may be fit to mention:-- "1st. One is from that part of the people in any parish who are presbyterianly inclined. As the Puritan party brought in this alteration, so they are very tenacious of it; and, as in other church matters, so in this particularly, they seem to have a settled antipathy against the retrieving of the ancient customs. Calvin was, I think, (as I said in my book,) the first in the world that drew up a form of liturgy that prescribed pouring water on the infant, absolutely, without saying any thing of dipping. It was (as Mr. Walker has shown) his admirers in England, who, in Queen Elizabeth’s time, brought pouring into ordinary use, which before was used only to weak children. But the succeeding Presbyterians in England, about the year 1644, (when their reign began,) went farther yet from the ancient way, and, instead of pouring, brought into use in many places sprinkling, declaring at the same time against all use of fonts, baptisteries, godfathers, or any thing that looked like the ancient way of baptizing. And as they brought the use of the other sacrament to a great and shameful infrequency, (which it is found difficult to this day to reform,) so they brought this of baptism into a great disregard. Now, I say, a minister in a parish, where there are any considerable number inclined to this way, will find in them a great aversion to this order of the rubric. They are hardly prevailed on to leave off that scandalous custom of having their children, though never so well, baptized out of a basin or porringer in a bedchamber, hardly persuaded to bring them to church; much farther from having them dipped, though never so able to endure it. "2d. Another struggle will be with the midwives and nurses, &c: These will use all the interest they have with the mothers, (which is very great,) to dissuade them from agreeing to the dipping of the child. I know no particular reason, unless it be this:--A thing which they value themselves and their skill much upon, is, the neat dressing of the child on the christening day; the setting all the trimming, the pins, and the laces, in their right order. And if the child be brought in loose clothes, which may presently be taken off for the baptism, and put on again; this pride is lost. And this makes the reason. So little is the solemnity of the sacrament regarded by many, who mind nothing but the dress and the eating and drinking. But the minister must endeavour to prevail with some of his people who have the most regard for religion, and possibly their example may bring in the rest." We will also hear Dr. Wall reprove his brethren for their quibbles about sprinkling:-- "This [immersion] is so plain and clear by an infinite number of passages, that, as one cannot but pity the weak endeavours of such Pedobaptists as would maintain the negative of it, so we ought to disown and show a dislike of the profane scoffs which some people give to the English Antipedobaptists [Baptists] merely for the use of dipping; when it was, in all probability, the way by which our blessed Saviour, and, for certain, was the most usual and ordinary way by which the ancient Christians did receive their baptism. ’Tis a great want of prudence, as well as of honesty, to refuse to grant to an adversary what is certainly true, and may be proved so. It creates a jealousy of all the rest that one says. The custom of the Christians in the near succeeding times [to the Apostles] being more largely and particularly delivered in books, is known to have been generally or ordinarily a total immersion." He might have said always, rather than "ordinarily." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 41: 01.06.08. THE EVIL OF INFANT BAPTISM ======================================================================== CHAPTER VIII. THE EVIL OF INFANT BAPTISM. HAVING been able to find no good in infant baptism, nor in infant sprinkling, (for I must always consider them as distinct things,) I now proceed to inquire, Is there any evil in it? In answering this question, I desire to be guided by three things only--Scripture, reason, and fact: neither by passion nor by prejudice; nor, I trust, will the fear of the frown of any mortal ever deter me from declaring the truth on this, or any other topic on which I am fairly called to express my sentiments. I answer the question now proposed, with the utmost coolness and deliberation; and feel no hesitation in declaring that infant sprinkling is a manifold evil. This I shall instance in a few respects:-- 1st. It is "will-worship." By the term will-worship, I understand worship founded upon the will of man, and not on the will of God. "In vain do they worship me," saith Christ, "teaching for doctrines the commandments of men." The preceding pages show that the rite of infant sprinkling is as much a tradition of men as the scrutiny, the exsufflation by which devils are expelled, the insufflation by which the Spirit of God is communicated, the consecration of the wafer, the chrismal unction, the lighted taper, and the milk and honey, which are but seven of the twenty-two appendages to infant sprinkling, made by the church of Rome. Now, as all will-worship is a disparagement of the worship appointed of God, it is, consequently, a reflection upon his wisdom, and obnoxious to his displeasure. It is as contrary to his revealed will as the presenting of "strange fire" upon his altar was in the days of Nadab and Abihu. And, indeed, every religious practice which is not founded upon an explicit revelation of the will of Heaven, is will-worship. The language of it is this, "Thou shouldst have appointed this, and we are supplying a defect in thy wisdom or goodness." Such is the spirit of every innovation in divine worship. 2d. It has carnalized and secularized the church more than any other innovation since the first defection from Christianity. The actual tendency of infant sprinkling is to open the gates of the church as wide as the gates of the world, and to receive into its bosom all that is born of woman. That this may appear as obvious as the light of the sun, the reader has only to reflect that if the Pedobaptist system prevailed so that all the fathers and mothers in any country, or in all countries, were determined to have their infant offspring "initiated into the church" as soon as born, by the rite of sprinkling, then, in that country, or in all countries so acting, the discrimination between the world and the church would be lost; its gates would be as capacious as those of the world, and, without the necessity of a spiritual renovation, every member of the human family, in that region or country, would have a place in the church. About one hundred years ago, the whole kingdom of Scotland, with the exception of, say, two or three thousand individuals, was one great Pedobaptist society. In those days, the church engrossed all that were born, and initiated them into it. Of course, all the enormities committed in the realm were committed by members of the church; so that none of the apostolic admonitions, in which the difference between the church and the world is pointed out, would apply to them. In the year 1300, and for several centuries before, all the citizens of Germany, France, Spain, England, and, indeed, the whole Western Roman Empire, with the exception of a few Baptists, were initiated into what was then called the Church, as soon as the parents could have the rite performed. In those days, and whilst those principles prevailed, the church was secularized, the church and state completely amalgamated, and all the follies and vices of childhood, manhood, and old age were engrafted upon the stalk of Christianity. In those days, Pedobaptist principles triumphed, and there never was a period in which the church was so completely and universally carnalized and secularized. Let it not be said that this was owing more to other traditions than to infant baptism or sprinkling; for, when we grant that there were many other innovations and traditions besides this, we must insist that this contributed more than they all to introduce that awfully corrupt system, called the Man of Sin--to nurture, to mature, and to perfect it. It introduced all, good and bad, into the church; and as bad men invented errors and propagated heresies in the church, we have only to ask how they got in, and then the true cause of the enormous mass of error of those days appears. It is a fact, evident from church history, that the prevalence of corruption in the church bore pace with the prevalence of infant baptism, and the triumphant days of the one were the triumphant days of the other. The description we have of the church, in the Scriptures, leads us to consider all the members of it as a "peculiar people"--as born from above--as being all taught of God. Hence we read, "A willing people, in the day of thy power, will come to thee." "All thy children shall be taught of God, and great shall be the peace of thy children." "Every one that hath heard and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me." "To as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name; which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." Power or privilege to become the sons of God was given to such only as were born of God. How unlike this to the practice of Pedobaptists, who endeavour to crowd all into the church which are born, not of God, but of the will of the flesh, and the will of man! Again, when we read the descriptions given of the churches of the saints in the Epistles, they will not apply to a church that admits all the infants, born of the members, to membership. The majority of any such church must be of a character essentially dissimilar to the following descriptions of the church of Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 6:11 : "Ye are washed, ye are sanctified, ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God." 2 Thessalonians 2:13 : "Brethren beloved of the Lord, God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation, through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth." 1 Peter 2:5 : "Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God by Jesus Christ." 9th verse: "But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people; that you should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light: which, in time past, were not a people, but are now the people of God; which had not obtained mercy, but have now obtained mercy." These, and a hundred other addresses to the Christian church, are totally inapplicable to any Pedobaptist church, composed of a great many members incapable of distinguishing their right hand from the left. When the question is proposed, What has rendered the Pedobaptist churches unworthy to be addressed in this way? the answer is, Because they have received so many members, very many, that were merely children of the flesh; nay, the nine-tenths of all Pedobaptist churches became members by natural birth; and, as the children of the flesh, were constituted members. Infant sprinkling has, then, carnalized and secularized the church; and, hence, all Pedobaptist sects have become national churches when they had it in their power; for their views of the church are carnalized as well as the members: hence papacy is the established religion of Italy, Spain, France, &c.; Episcopacy of England and Ireland; and Presbyterianism of Scotland. In the United States, the principles of civil polity being better understood than in any other country in the world, not any form of religion has obtained the exclusive patronage of the state; and may it continue so, till all sects shall be abolished, and all the children of God, united in faith, and hope, and love, shall know no bond of union but Christ--when party names, party love, and party zeal shall all be buried in one common grave, to rise no more for ever! The second evil I have specified, being sufficiently stated and established, I proceed to mention a third evil resulting from, and inseparably connected with, infant sprinkling, viz.:-- 3d. Infant sprinkling imposes a religion upon the subjects of it before they are aware of it, and thus deprives them of exercising the liberty of conscience in choosing that which they have examined, and in refusing that which they disapprove. It is despotism of the worst kind, to impose upon the conscience. It is the most despotic act in the life of the greatest despot, to impose a religion upon his new-born infant before it is aware; and, as soon as it can reason, to tell it that it vowed so and so in baptism, and that it would be a sin of the deepest dye if it should not, as soon as possible, attend to the things it had vowed. This is to fetter the exercise of reason, to rivet on the conscience a superstition of the worst kind, and, as fir as the parent can, for ever deprive it of any thing worthy to be called liberty of conscience. Hence it is, that all Pedobaptist sects increase more by natural generation than by any other means. Very few are added to Romanists, Episcopalians, Seceders, &c., in any other way than by ordinary generation. There is nothing more congenial to civil liberty than to enjoy an unrestrained, unembargoed liberty of exercising the conscience freely upon all subjects respecting religion. Hence it is that the Baptist denomination, in all ages and in all countries, has been, as a body, the constant asserters of the rights of man and of liberty of conscience. They have often been persecuted by Pedobaptists; but they never politically persecuted, though they have had it in their power. If the conscience becomes once enslaved by any undue or early imposition upon it, it is impossible, or next to impossible, ever to assume or enjoy any thing like that noble independence of hind which our Saviour taught in these words, "Call no man Master or Father upon earth; for one is your Father in heaven; and all ye are brethren." This was in a conscientious point of view. The dearest liberty on earth is liberty of conscience; and this lost, all other liberty is but a name--"a charm that lulls to sleep." It is an awful encroachment to encroach on the liberty of conscience; and how awful to encroach upon, yea, deprive an infant of its liberty, before it can appreciate the greatness of the blessing, or calculate the magnitude of the loss. Could Pedobaptists but reflect on the cruelty of their practice, and observe what an engine of despotism it is in the hands of some of those sects they despise, how would they blush and for ever abandon the tradition! Can they suppose it is the Spirit of God that adds one million annually to the church of Rome? Or that it is the Spirit of God that adds a hundred thousand annually to the church of England? Or can they believe that it is the same Spirit that adds a hundred thousand to the different grades of Presbyterians in the same space of time?--seeing they are all aided by natural generation and infant sprinkling! No; if they think as rational beings, they cannot think so. It is this rite, and the vows they are taught to consider themselves under thereby, that is the powerful cause of such extensive additions. Infant sprinkling is, then, an enthralling, despotic, and cruel rite, destructive of liberty of conscience and injurious to civil liberty. This will be farther manifest from the following item:-- 4th. Infant sprinkling has uniformly inspired a persecuting spirit. This is a heavy charge, and requires to be well supported. I do not, however, mean to say that every Pedobaptist has a persecuting spirit; or that every such church is necessarily a persecuting church. No; for I know many honourable exceptions; but I mean to say that infant sprinkling has, as a system, inspired all the parties that have embraced, it with a persecuting spirit at one time or other, and they have manifested it as far as the civil authority supported them. Nor do I mean to go back to tell of the persecutions of the church of Rome in old times, which everybody knows: nor of the persecutions of countries far remote; but I will support the fact with documents more striking, because more modern, and because more within our country. I shall begin with my own State--the good old State of Virginia. Anno Domini 1659, 1662, and 1663, several acts of the Assembly of this State made it penal in parents to refuse to have their children baptized; and prohibited the Quakers from assembling; and made it penal for any master of a ship to bring a Quaker into the State. By the laws passed about this time, every person was compelled to go to church every Sunday, under the penalty of fifty pounds of tobacco. But Quakers and non-conformists were liable to the penalties of the 23d Elizabeth, which was £20 sterling for every month’s absence; and, moreover, for every twelve months’ absence, to give security for their good behaviour. Quakers were farther liable to a fine of two hundred pounds of tobacco for each one found at one of their meetings; and in case of insolvency of any of them, those who were able, to pay for the insolvents.1 The persecution of the Baptists in Virginia did not extend so far as in some other States--at least, I can find no documents to authorize me to say that it extended farther than fines, imprisonments, and the unguarded use of the tongue. James Ireland, a Baptist, was imprisoned in Culpepper jail, and treated very ill in other respects, for his tenets. A Mr. Thomas also, an active and useful minister, was much persecuted. The object of the above laws and persecution was to protect the Episcopal church, the salary of whose minister was first settled at sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco, in the year 1696, to be levied by the vestry on the tithables of the parish, and so continued to the Revolution. So late as the year 1768, John Waller, Lewis Craig, James Childs, and others, were seized by the sheriff and hauled before three magistrates, who stood in the meeting-house yard, and who bound them in the penalty of one thousand pounds to appear at court two days after. At court, they were arraigned as disturbers of the peace. On their trial, they were vehemently accused by a lawyer, who said to the court, "May it please your worships, these men are great disturbers of the peace; they cannot meet a man on the road, but they must ram a text of Scripture down his throat." As they were moving through the streets of Fredericksburg, they sang the hymn, "Broad is the road that leads to death." Waller and his companions continued in jail forty-three days, and were discharged without any conditions. While in prison, they continually preached through the grates; and, although the mob prevented the people from hearing as much as possible, yet many heard to their permanent advantage. After their discharge, they preached as before. Sometimes their enemies rode into the water to mock them baptizing; and often mocked them when preaching, by playing cards and drinking spirits while they were preaching. "Two noted sons of Belial, who were notorious for these practices, named Kemp and Davis, both died soon after, ravingly distracted, each accusing the other for having led him into these crimes." "In Goochland county, these persecutions raged vehemently. On the 10th of August, 1771, while a Mr. Webster was preaching from these words, ’Show me thy faith without thy works, and I will show thee my faith by my works, a magistrate pushed up, and drew back his club to knock him down. Some person caught the club and prevented mischief. Being backed by two sheriffs, he seized Messrs. Webber, Waller, Greenwood, and Ware. They were committed to prison. They were retained thirty days in close confinement and fed on bread and water. As they preached through the grates and made many converts, they were glad to let them go on their giving bond for good behaviour. A thousand false reports from the pulpit and the press, misrepresenting the doctrines and practices of these holy men, were among the means employed to keep up this fiery trial. But the Revolution took the power out of the hands of their persecutors, and their cause triumphed." This is a small specimen of the Pedobaptist persecution of the Baptists in Virginia, which will suffice my purpose in the mean time.--(See Benedict’s History of the Baptists, vol. 2, pp. 63-73.) I shall now quote a few facts from history in support of this item, to show that not only the Pedobaptists of the Episcopacy, but those of other Protestant sects, manifested the same spirit. In the good State of Massachusetts, (which I select not as the only State in which persecution raged, but as eminent for the exercise of this zeal;) the Baptists suffered much for many years. In this State, in the year 1644, we are informed by Mr. Hubbard, that a poor man, by the name of Painter, suddenly became a Baptist; and having a child born, would not suffer his wife to carry it to be baptized. He was complained of to the court, and was enjoined by it to suffer his child to be baptized. He had the impudence to tell them that infant baptism was an antichristian ordinance: for which he was tied up and whipped! About this time, a law was passed for the suppression of the Baptists. After a long preamble, in which the Baptists were accused of two great crimes--the one, for denying that the civil magistrate could lawfully inspect or punish men for any breach of the laws in the first table of the law; the other, for saying that infants should not be baptized; it concludes with these words: "It is ordered and agreed, that if any person or persons within this jurisdiction shall either openly condemn or oppose the baptism of infants, or go about secretly to seduce others from the approbation thereof, or shall purposely depart the congregation at the ministration of the ordinance, or shall deny the ordinance of the magistracy, or their lawful right to make war, or to punish the outward breaches of the first table, and shall appear to the court wilfully and obstinately to continue therein, after due time and means of conviction, every such person shall be sentenced to banishment." Of this act, Mr. Hubbard, their own historian, says, "But with what success, it is hard to say, all men being naturally inclined to pity them that suffer; and the clergy, doubtless, had a hand in framing this shameful act, as they, at this time, were the secretaries and counsellors of the legislature." About this time, the Westminster Divines sat in London. A book written by one of the Baptist ministers was dedicated to the Westminster Divines. Soon after the news reached England of the law to banish the Baptists, Mr. Tombes sent a copy of this work to the ministers of New England, and, with it, an epistle dated from the Temple in London, May 25, 1645, "hoping thereby to put them upon a more exact study of that controversy, and to allay their vehemency against the Baptists." "But the Westminster Assembly," says Backus, "were more ready to learn severity from this country, than these were to learn lenity from any." All letters and remonstrances proved ineffectual with the New-England divines. They held fast their integrity; and in 1651 the Baptists were unmercifully whipped, and, not long after, the Quakers were murderously hung.2 The non causa pro causa, or the assigning of a false cause for a true one, is a form of sophistry into which our best educated theologians not unfrequently fall. We have a very striking illustration of a refined species of this sophism in the following extracts from a very interesting writer and tourist, George B. Cheever, D.D., an author of deserved reputation. He gives to a second cause what is really due to the first. The union of Church and State with him appears to be the entire cause of religious persecution. But who pleads far and institutes the union of Church and State? In other words, what is the cause of this union? Pedobaptism!--I affirm, PEDOBAPTISM. The Pedobaptists, one and all, unite the Church and the State. They would, if they could, bring the whole world into the church by the sheer force of natural birth, without a second birth. Hence, so far as their influence goes, the Church and State are united. In Roman Catholic countries it is all Church and no State. The Jewish commonwealth is their beau ideal of a Christian Church State. The whole nation sealed as soon as born with the seal of God’s covenant. Hence, every Pedobaptist church has persecuted in the ratio of its power. The formal union of Church and State is but the natural operation of infant baptism. Whatever, then, we now cite from Dr. Cheever as the fruit of a Church and State institution, is to be ascribed, not to this effect, but to its cause--Pedobaptism. With this in mind, we shall now read a few extracts from the doctor, taken from his Wanderings of a Pilgrim in the Shadow of Mont Blanc and the Jungfrau Alp:-- "The history of Geneva is singular, as containing within itself a demonstration that, under every form, both of truth and error, the State and Church united are intolerant. The State oppresses the Church--the Church, in her turn, tempted by the State, oppresses those who differ from her, and so the work goes on. At first it was the State and Romanism--the fruit, intolerance; the next, it was the State and Unitarianism--the fruit, intolerance; next, it was the State and Calvinism--the fruit, intolerance; in the Canton de Vaud, it is the State and democratic infidelity--the fruit, intolerance. The demonstration is such that no man can resist its power. Inoculate the Church, so to speak, with the State, and the same plague invariably follows; no constitution, not the most heavenly, is proof against the virus. "John Knox, escaping from the caste of St. Andrews in Scotland, and compelled to flee the kingdom for his life, found security in Geneva, because there his religion was the religion of the State. If it had not been, he would merely have gone out from one fire for another fire to devour him. Servetus, escaping in like manner from a Roman Catholic prison in France, where he would otherwise have been burned in person, as he was in effigy, fled also to Geneva; but his religion not being the religion of the State, the evangelical republic burned him. And thus the grand error of the Reformers in the union of Church and State occasioned what perhaps is the darkest crime that stains the annals of Reformation. The burning of Servetus in Roman Catholic fires would have added but an imperceptible shade to the blackness of darkness in a system which invariably has been one of intolerance and cruelty. But the man was permitted by Divine Providence to escape, and come to Geneva to be burned alive there, by a State allied to a system of faith and mercy, to show to all the world that even that system cannot be trusted with human power, that the State, in connection with the Church, though it be the purest church in the world, will bring forth intolerance and murder. The union is adulterous, the progeny is sinful works, even though the mother be the imbodied profession of justification by faith. God’s mercy becomes changed into man’s cruelty. So in the brightest spot of piety then on the face of the earth, amidst the out-shining glory of the great doctrine of the gospel, justification by faith, God permitted the smoke and the cry of torture by fire to go up to heaven, to teach the nations that even purity of doctrine, if enforced by the State, will produce the bitterest fruits of a corrupt gospel and an infidel apostasy; that is the lesson read in the smoke of the funeral pyre of Servetus, as it rolls up black against the stars of heaven, that the union of Church and State, even of a pure church in a free State, is the destruction of religious liberty. "It was this pestiferous evil that at one time banished from the Genevese State its greatest benefactor, Calvin himself: the working of the same poison excludes now from the pulpit of the State some of the brightest ornaments of the ministry of modern times--such men as Malan, D’Aubigne, and Gaussen. It is true that it is the corruption of doctrine and hatred of Divine truth that have produced this last step; but it could not have been taken had the Church of Christ in Geneva been, as she should be, independent of the State. Such measures as these are, however, compelling the Church of Christ to assume an independent attitude, which, under the influence of past habit and example, she would not have taken. Thus it is that God brings light of darkness and good out of evil. "These are the views of great men in Switzerland--Vinet and Burnier, D’Aubigne and Gaussen; and in this movement it may be hoped that the evangelical church in Geneva will yet take the foremost place in all Europe. But as yet, says Merle D’Aubigne, ’we are small and weak. Placed by the hands of God in the centre of Europe, surrounded with Popish darkness, we have much to do, and we are weak. We have worked in Geneva; and we maintain there the evangelical truth on one side against Unitarian Rationalism, and on the other side against Papistical Despotism. The importance of the Christian doctrine is beginning to be again felt in Geneva. Our canton is becoming a mixed one, and we are assailed by many Roman Catholics coming to our country to establish themselves there.’ Nevertheless, our hope is strong in the interposition of God by his good Spirit, which will yet take the elements of evil and change their very nature into good. "Dr. Gaussen, the able coadjutor of D’Aubigne, and author of the admirable work on Inspiration, entitled Theopneustia, was pastor of the parish of Santigny, in the canton of Geneva, in the year 1815. It was about this time that he likewise became a Christian, and preached the way of salvation through faith in Christ crucified. In his teachings among his flock, Dr. Gaussen, becoming dissatisfied with the Catechism imposed for instruction by the national church, principally because it had no acknowledgment of the great fundamental truths of the gospel, laid it aside, and proceeded to teach the children and candidates for communion in his own way. For this he was brought before the "Venerable Company of Pastors," and finally was by them censured, and suspended for a year of his right to sit in the Company. "But Dr. Gaussen and his friends, D’Aubigne and others, nothing terrified by their adversaries, proceeded still farther. They framed the Evangelical Society of Geneva, took measures for the preaching of the gospel in the city, and established, though in weakness and fear and in much trembling, yet in reliance upon God, the Evangelical Theological Seminary. Finding that all efforts and threatenings to prevent or stay their career was in vain, the Venerable Company proceeded, in 1831, to reject Mr. Gaussen from the functions of pastor of Santigny, and to interdict Messrs. Gaussen, Galland, and Merle from all the functions of the pulpit in the churches and chapels of the canton. What a spectacle was this! It recalls to mind the action of the Genevese republic three hundred years before, in the banishment of Calvin and Farel from the city. The result has been happy in the highest degree. Forced out of the national church, these men have been made to feel what at first it is so difficult to be convinced of, that the church of Christ belongs to Christ, and not to any nation. They see that there is a new transfiguration, a new approximating step of glory for the reformed church in Europe, in which she shall become free in Christ--shall assume her true catholicity, her supremacy, her independence; becoming for ever and everywhere a church in the spirit, the truth, and the liberty of Christ. "In Geneva the church is in subjection. The people cannot choose their pastors; their pastors are compelled to receive every man to Christian communion as an indiscriminate right of citizenship. At a certain age, every young man comes into the church by law,3 no matter how depraved and declares in the most solemn manner that he believes, from the bottom of his heart, the dogmas in which his pastor has instructed him; that he will still hold to them, and renounce the world and its pomps. For entering the army, for becoming an apprentice, for obtaining any employ, the young man must take the communicant’s oath. Have you been to the communion? is the test question first and implacable. Hence, if a pastor should refuse the communion to a young libertine, the candidate and the whole family would regard it as the highest insult and injustice, debarring the young man from rights sacred to him as a citizen, shutting indeed the door of all civil advancement against him. To say nothing of piety, how can even morality itself be preserved in a church in such degrading subjection to the civil power? "The constitution of Geneva is such, that by its provisions there is no liberty of instruction or congregation but only by authority of the Council of State. The ninth and tenth articles provide that liberty of instruction shall be guarantied to all Genevese, only under the reserve of dispositions prescribed by the laws for the interest of public order and good manners; and also that no corporation or congregation can be established without the authority of the Council of State. It is easy to see that with such a constitution of Church and State, the Romanists have every thing made easy to their hand in Geneva, and only need a civil majority, when, by appointing their own Council of State, they can put every heretical congregation to the torture, and forbid, by law, any school or assembly of instruction or worship other than pleases them, under whatever severity of penalty they may choose to impose. No wonder that the cry of every Christian patriot in Geneva should be, Separate Church and State! Separate Church and State! May God help them in their struggle after liberty!" So, then, whether in connection with Orthodoxy or Heterodoxy, Papalism, Protestantism, High Church, or Low Church, Trinitarianism or Unitarianism, Pedobaptism becomes Church and State, and, as such, persecutes to confiscation of goods, banishment, and death. 1 See Henning’s Statutes at Large, volumes 1 and 2, for the above laws, as quoted by Mr. Semple. 2 Benedict, page 364. 3 Do not all come into the church by baptism--infant baptism, though ’in the flesh,’ and ’naturally depraved.!’ A. C. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 42: 01.06.09. DR. C. TAYLOR, EDITOR OF CALMET'S DICTIONARY OF THE BIBLE ======================================================================== CHAPTER IX. DR. C. TAYLOR, EDITOR OF CALMET’S DICTIONARY OF THE BIBLE. APOSTOLIC BAPTISM. "Facts" and "Evidences" on "the Subjects and Mode" of Christian Baptism, by C. Taylor, Editor of Calmet’s Dictionary of the Bible, Stereotype edition. New York, 1850. Published by M. W. Dodd. THIS is a boastful and boasted performance. It is affirmed by the publisher that "the American Baptists, like their British brethren, have not ventured either to dispute the FACTS,1 or to invalidate the EVIDENCES." Again: it is affirmed "that an erudite polemic cannot be found, who will seriously controvert Mr. Taylor’s oracular position. Baptism, from the day of Pentecost, was administered by the apostles and evangelists to infants, and not by submersion. Therefore, the subsequent FACTS and EVIDENCES are as irrefutable as the truth in Jesus." Such is the frontispiece to this learned duodecimo of 236 pages. And so confident is the author of his positions, that he says, "for his facts and evidences he desires neither grace nor favour." P. 7. Again: he says that the more learned Baptists now confess that infants are included in the term oikos, family, as used in the New Testament; while it is curious to observe the difficulties to which they are reduced, who contend that infants are excluded from the term "family,"2 and that the word must be restricted to adults. If our translators had employed the term FAMILY, instead of the words HOUSE and HOUSEHOLD, the sect of Baptists never would have existed! What a misfortune, that the English word "family" had not been adopted by the Greeks, Romans, French, Germans, and all other nations, since its mere "adoption" by our translators, would have for ever prevented the existence of that deluded sect called Baptists! This disquisition on oikos and oikia, with no less than twelve pictures, (hallowed number!) engravings of ancient baptisms in the porticos of Roman cathedrals or Greek churches, exhibiting some water or oil being poured on the head of the subject, is the sum total of the volume. As to the disquisition on oikos and oikia, we have already demonstrated that it is wholly gratuitous. If we should admit that oikos and oikia meant family, and always family, and nothing but family, unless it was proved that every family must necessarily have infants in it, it is of no logical force whatever. It is mere mockery of reason and argument--a puerile assumption, of which any scholar ought to be ashamed. We will most cheerfully concede that some families were baptized in the apostolic age, even many more than reported. What then! We still have among us family baptisms. But two family baptisms are reported in the New Testament--Lydia’s and the jailer’s. Other households of baptized persons are named--the household of Stephanas; that of Cornelius, the Centurion; that of Onesiphorus; the house of Chloe; the house of Philip; the house of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus; the house of Priscilla and Aquila. In not one of which there is the slightest evidence that there was an infant; but, on the contrary, we have all the internal and circumstantial evidence in each, that in all the points in which they are considered or alluded to, there was not an infant in one of them. No man that has a proper respect for his head and his heart, or his education, can, so far as we ought to judge, argue from oikos, oikia, family, house, or household, in favour of infant baptism. This argument from oikos or oikia was very satisfactorily disposed of almost thirty years ago, in my debate with Dr. McCalla. This was proved, as Christianity itself is sometimes proved, not merely by the first acclamation, but by the thousands and the myriads of intelligent Pedobaptists that have, in our own time, repudiated it, and, by overt acts, have renounced family and infant baptism, and voluntarily put on Christ by an immersion into his death. But, besides the argument in favour of infant baptism, deduced from the family baptisms alluded to, we have no less than twelve pictures on the subject, collected from the vestibules and domes of the Greek and Roman Catholic churches. The first is that of the baptism of Christ, placed at the entrance of the great church at Pisa. Pisan tradition says this marble ornament was carried from Jerusalem by the Crusaders, about the commencement of the twelfth century. The Baptist stands with his hand upon the Saviour’s head. The second is the baptism of the same subject in Jordan, taken from the church on the Via Ostiensis at Rome. The door which it covers is dated 1070. The third is from the door of the church at Beneventum, in Italy. Here Jesus is standing in a bath up to the middle, and the Baptist is pouring water on his head. The fourth is that of Jesus standing in the Jordan, with the Baptist pouring water, in streams, on his head. There is a centrepiece in the dome of the baptistery at Ravenna, A. D. 454. Here the Baptist stands on the bank of the river, pouring water out of a shell on the Saviour’s head. Over his head is a crown of glory, and a dove, personating the Holy Spirit, descending from heaven to his person. The fifth is a representation, in Mosaic, of the Saviour’s baptism in Jordan. Here, again, a patera, or a shell, is employed in pouring water on his person. This stands in the church in Cosmedin, at Ravenna, erected A. D. 401. The sixth is a representation of a bath, or baptismal fount, standing in the baptistery of Constantine, in Rome, near the Lateran. This is too shallow for immersion. The seventh argument is the baptism of a heathen king and queen, in a family bath at Chigi, near Naples, with a priest standing as if taking aim at the king’s head, with a pitcher in his hand, A. D. 591. The eighth proof is that of a kneeling candidate, with a priest holding a vase, or pitcher, at his head. He seems to be on the dry ground. The ninth is that of a boy, unclothed, receiving a stream from a pitcher. This is found in Rome, though the work of a Greek artist. The tenth is Laurentius, in the church of St. Lawrence, in Rome, or near it--extra muros--receiving a stream from a vase. The eleventh, that of Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome, being immersed in a bath; but also receiving a stream of oil or water falling upon his head from a vial, held by a long-robed priest. The twelfth is that of Jesus Christ, baptized by John in the Jordan, standing on the bank, with one hand on or near to his head. No shell nor vial is seen in the picture. Probably, the baptizer had dipped his finger in the Jordan. This stands in the chapel of the baptistery, in the small church of the Catacomb Pontianus, with a lamb at his foot. The baptizers, though I have called them priests, from their costume, are said to have been laymen; and Mr. Taylor admits the allegation, and quiets all scruples by the concession, that, in all extreme cases, baptism by the hand of laymen is of Divine authority, and, consequently, canonical and valid. Now, the grand and solemn question is, What does all this prove? It proves not when the custom began, nor when these pictures were made; and if it did, they are all hundreds of years too late to prove primitive apostolic baptism. No one can, with any measure of self-respect, deny this. And this admitted, places these twelve arguments on the shelf, lettered, "OLD WIVES’ FABLES!" In the next place, statuaries, sculptors, and painters are always fond of catering to public taste and fashion, and will make to order any number of marble or other ornaments, just as Mr. Sartain, in his pictorial magazine, or as printers do in the Family Bible--make such representations of angels, men, costumes, and customs, as will command the highest admiration, secure the largest sale, and the most liberal price. Thus, we see in one New Testament, in an orthodox pulpit, quite as sacred as the vestibule of St. Peter’s, or the dome of St. Paul’s, a pictorial representation of Paul’s conversion. The admiration and taste of the artist conceived that it would be more pleasing to present Paul as a fine, athletic-looking man, mounted on a fiery Arabian courser, on his way to Damascus. And when arrested on his journey, by a glance of the Lord and the majesty of his voice, the affrighted steed, springing like a deer from its lair, in frenzied mood plunging in the desert, unsaddles his rider and flings him over his head; while the unhorsed apostle, pertinacious of his hold of the bridle, brings him to the ground, and appears as if about to rise, whip in hand, with full intent, in sad distraction, wildly looking hither and thither, as if to lay upon him the weight of his indignant arm. How suitable to such an event is such a scene, however well executed and elegantly decorated by the hand of a gifted artist! Again: open our elegant Family Bibles of the nineteenth century, and what idea do they give of the Saviour’s baptism in the Jordan! You will see opposite to the account of his baptism, or on the frontispiece of the volume, John the Immerser, alias, John the Baptist, standing upon a bluff bank of the Jordan, or, in other pictures, standing ankle-deep in its margin, lifting up a handful, or pouring a hornful, of the water of the river upon his head; while a dove, on its wing, is descending from an open sky, in the direction of the imposing scene. Now, what does this prove, but the ignorance or impiety of painters of the present day? And just so much, neither more nor less, do these twelve pictures, the twelve unanswerable arguments of C. Taylor, in favour of the pagan rite of sprinkling holy water, under the imposing name of Christian baptism, alias, Roman rantism! It is a fearful deception practised upon the credulity of an untaught and unteachable population. "O my people, they which lead thee (or call thee blessed) cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths!"3 "They have spoken lying words in my name, which I have not commanded them; even I know and am a witness, saith the Lord."4 1 The "Facts and Evidences" is the title of a pamphlet published by the Editor of Calmet’s Dictionary, in 1815, "on the mode of baptism," and addressed to a Deacon of a Baptist Church, with two plates, "showing some ancient baptisms, in the porticos of churches." 2 No Baptist author, known to me, has ever affirmed that infants are excluded from the terms oikos or oikia, but only from the families, so called, in which baptism is named. 3 Isaiah 3:12. 4 Jeremiah 29:23. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 43: 01.06.10. ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY FOUR QUESTIONS ON INFANT BAPTISM ======================================================================== CHAPTER X. ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-FOUR QUESTIONS ON INFANT BAPTISM. WE design this essay especially for the most uneducated portion of the reading community: embracing in its details the whole subject, action, and design of baptism. We, therefore, adopt the method of question and answer, as most instructive and impressive; only premising that our answers shall always be those, and those only, which the Holy Scriptures, history, and human experience authenticate and sustain. Query 1. Who was the first Baptist? Answer. John, the harbinger of Christ, called "John the Baptist." Q. 2. From whom did he receive authority to baptize? A. Not from men, but from God. He was sent by God to baptize, and did not institute it himself, nor learn it from the Jews. John 1:33. Q. 3. Where did he baptize? A. In the Jordan, and at Enon, "because there was much water there." Q. 4. Did those he baptized make confession? A. They "were baptized by him in the Jordan, confessing their sins." Q. 5. Were they led or carried to his baptism? A. "There went out to him Jerusalem, and all Judea, and all the region round about the Jordan, and were baptized by him in the Jordan." Q. 6. Who was the most distinguished person whom he baptized? A. The Saviour of the world. Q. 7. For what purpose was he baptized? A. Neither for confessing his sins, nor for receiving remission of them; but "to fulfil all righteousness," or to honour the righteous institutions of God. "Thus," said he, "it becomes us to fulfil all righteousness," or observe every Divine institution. Q. 8. How old was Jesus when baptized? A. About thirty years old. Q. 9. Had Jesus been circumcised when an infant? A. He was circumcised the eighth day. Q. 10. Had all those that John baptized been circumcised? A. Yes: they were all Jews. Q. 11. What do you infer from this fact? A. That baptism did not come in the room of circumcision; otherwise no Jews would have been baptized. Q. 12. When was Christian baptism introduced? A. Not till John the Baptist had been beheaded, and Jesus Christ crucified; almost four years after the baptism of John. Q. 13. Where was it instituted? A. On a mountain of Galilee. Q. 14. By whom? A. By the Saviour in person. Q. 15. In what words? A. "Go, teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you;" or, according to the Evangelist Mark, "Go ye into all the world; preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned." Q. 16. To whom was this commission given? A. To the Apostles of Christ. Q. 17. When and where did they begin to act under it? A. On the first Pentecost after the ascension of Jesus into heaven, and in the city of Jerusalem. Q. 18. How many were, there and then, baptized? A. Three thousand souls. Q. 19. What qualification was required by the Apostles acting under this commission? A. Repentance. Q. 20. Repeat the words. A. "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of the Lord Jesus." Q. 21. Any other indication implying whether none but professed, believing penitents were baptized on that occasion? A. "They that gladly received his word were baptized." Acts 2:41. Q. 22. Are infants capable of understanding, believing, and gladly receiving a preached gospel? A. Not such as we have in this age of the world. Q. 23. What, then, would you infer concerning the first three thousand persons baptized by the Apostles of Christ? A. That there were no infants, nor families having infants, baptized by the Apostles in establishing the first Christian church ever planted on earth. Q. 24. Had all the males baptized by, the Apostles on this occasion been circumcised? A. Being Jews, they must have been circumcised; for the Jews were called "THE CIRCUMCISION." Q. 25. And what would you infer from this? A. That baptism was not a substitute for circumcision, as some vainly imagine; for, then, how could the Apostles have baptized those who had been circumcised? Q. 26. What accommodations were there for baptism in Jerusalem? A. There were pools of water, public and private baths in Jerusalem, as well as the brook Kedron, near the public garden where Jesus oft resorted with his disciples. Q. 27. Where did the second great baptism occur? A. In Samaria. Q. 28. How is it reported? A. Philip, an Evangelist, went down from Jerusalem, after many thousands had been baptized there, to the city of Samaria, and preached to them the same gospel. Many of the Samaritans, we are informed, "hearing, believed and were baptized, both men and women." Q. 29. Why did not the history say, "Men, women, and children?" A. Because, I presume, there were no children; for, in being so particular in detailing who heard, believed, and were baptized, so far as to respect the sea of the parties, the same particularity would have induced him to have added children, had children been amongst them. Thus it is that silence, by force of circumstances, is sometimes equivalent to a negative. Q. 30. But is not this clearly indicated in the context? A. Yes. In the qualifications of those baptized, there are enumerated those which exclude the conception of speechless babes. We are informed that they believed Philip, hearing and seeing the miracles which he performed, before they were baptized. They were capable of seeing or contemplating a miracle, of perceiving the meaning of it, and of believing the preacher before they were baptized. Q. 31. Were the Samaritans circumcised persons? A. Yes: they were the circumcised children of the covenant that God made with Abraham; for, though at this time a mongrel people, they practised circumcision. Q. 32. Having, then, found, neither amongst the Jews at Jerusalem, nor amongst the mongrel Jews of Samaria, a single instance of baptism without a previous hearing and believing, or professing of faith in the Messiah, we have all scriptural evidence against infant sprinkling or infant baptism.; to whom shall we next look? A. To the next case reported. Q. 33. And what is the neat case reported? A. It is that of the Ethiopian officer, treasurer of an Ethiopian queen, who heard Philip preach the same gospel, and was, on profession of that faith, baptized in a certain water to which they came on their journey. Q. 34. And what was the neat baptism reported in the Acts of the Apostles? A. It is that of Saul of Tarsus. Doubtless, he was a believing subject. Q. 35. And how was he baptized? A. Neither while sitting nor standing. We are not informed in what place, but that he was commanded to arise, and, of course, to accompany Ananias somewhere. "Arise," said he, "why tarriest thou, and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling upon the name of the Lord." He, accordingly, arose and accompanied him to a suitable place, and was baptized. Q. 36. Having now seen, from an induction of the first converts in Jerusalem, Samaria, Damascus, and Ethiopia, that all baptized persons were first taught and instructed in the way of the Lard before their baptism, and not one indication of a different practice, what is wanting to complete this chapter of evidences? A. We must look from the Jews--whether in Jerusalem, Samaria, Damascus, or Ethiopia--to the Gentiles. Perhaps, there was a different dispensation of baptism to the Gentiles. Q. 37. And what were the circumstances of the baptism or conversion of the aliens? A. The Gentiles were, indeed, aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise. But admission to the new dispensation was proposed to Jews and Gentiles on the same premises, because God is not a God of the Jews, but of the Gentiles also; and he made no difference, says an Apostle, between them, "purifying their hearts by faith:’ Q. 38. But give us a case. Where was the first baptism of Gentiles? A. At Cesarea. Cornelius, an Italian captain, an intelligent, pious, and prayerful soldier, with his family and personal friends, were the first-fruits of the nations to Christ. All the converts of that day heard, believed, and received the Holy Spirit before they were baptized. It was in reference to these that Peter challenged the Jews, his companions from Joppa, asking if any of them dare refuse baptism to these enlightened and sanctified pagans. He then commanded them, so distinguished with knowledge, faith, and the Holy Spirit, to be baptized in the name, or by the authority, of the Lord. Such Gentiles, then,, as believed and were enlightened, were to be baptized by the authority of the Lord. Q. 39. Have we any other public baptisms reported among the Gentiles? A. We have the baptism of the Corinthians, under the ministry of the Apostle Paul. Q. 40. What are the details of their baptism? A. We are solemnly told, that many of the Corinthians, hearing, believed, and were baptized. Q. 41. Had infant baptism been preached in those days, how would it have read? A. "Many infants, being baptized, believed and heard." Q. 42. Would it not be incongruous to say, that they first believed and then heard? A. Not in the least more unprecedented or more unreasonable than to say, that they were first baptized and then believed. According to the Acts of the Apostles, and the tenor of the New Testament, it is as good sense, as good style, and as fully authorized, to say, many infants first believed and then heard the gospel, as to say, many infants were baptized and then believed the gospel. Q. 43. But is it generally true, in fact, that baptized infants do afterwards believe the gospel? A. It may sometimes happen: but experience or accurate observation would prove, according to our observation, that,, taking, Pedobaptist Christendom into the account, not a tithe of baptized infants do really ever believe the gospel. Q. 44. Of sixty millions of Russian baptized infants--of one hundred millions of Roman sprinkled infants--and of fifty millions of Lutheran, and Episcopal, and Presbyterian,, and Methodistic sprinkled or poured infants, can any one reasonably conclude, from all published data, that, in the aggregate, ten or eleven millions of them really and truly believe the gospel to the salvation of their souls? A. If so, surely the millennium must be at the door. Q. 45. Waiving all matters of doubtful disputation on the premises, what is laid down in the Acts of the Apostles as the indispensable qualifications necessary to baptism? A. "If thou believest with all thy heart, thou mayest." Q. 46. Did you ever read of the baptism of any infants in the Scriptures? A. No. Q. 47. Did you ever read of the sprinkling of any infants in the Scriptures? A. No. Q. 48. Whose commandment, then, do we obey in having our infants baptized or sprinkled? A. The commandment of the clergy. Q. 49. Do we transgress any Divine command in neglecting to have our infants baptized? A. No: I never read of any one being accused of this sin in the Bible, nor of any commandment that was thereby transgressed. Q. 50. Did you ever read of any sponsors in the Bible? A. No. Q. 51. What do you mean by a sponsor? A. I mean one that promises and engages for another in baptism. Q. 52. Did you ever read in the Scriptures of any one promising any thing for another in baptism? A. No: no promise of parent nor child, at baptism, is ever mentioned in the Bible. Q. 53. Whence originated the custom of promising and vowing in baptism? A. From the clergy. Q. 54. Did you ever read in the Scriptures of any vows that minors or adults were under in consequence of baptism? A. None. Q. 55. What are the promises given to baptized infants or minors, in the New Testament? A. None. Q. 56. What are the threats denounced against them that neglect to have their infants baptized? A. Many from the clergy, but none from the Bible. Q. 57. Is Baptism a command? A. Yes: "Be baptized, every one of you." Q. 58. Should not every Divine command be obeyed? A. Yes. Q. 59. In what does religious obedience consist? A. In a voluntary act of an intelligent agent. Q. 60. Is a person active or passive in obeying a command? A. Active. Q. 61. Is an infant active or passive, conscious or unconscious, in, receiving baptism? A. It is passive and unconscious. Q. 62. Can a being that is passive and unconscious in suffering an action, be said to be obeying a command in that same action? A. By no means. Q. 63. Can those persons who have been baptized in infancy be said, on the foregoing principles, to have obeyed the Divine command, "Be baptized?" A. No: impossible. Q. 64. Is baptism an act of religious worship? A. Yes all Divine ordinances were appointed for us to worship God thereby. Q. 65. How must acceptable worship be performed? A. "In spirit and in truth." "God is a Spirit; and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." Q. 66. Can unthinking and unconscious infants worship God inspirit and in truth? A. No. Q. 67. Can they, then, in conformity with these principles, be baptized as an act of religious worship? A. No. Q. 68. Is baptism appointed for the benefit of the subject? A. Yes. Q. 69. Are there any benefits resulting from baptism in this life? A. Many. Q. 70. What are the benefits resulting from baptism in this life? A. They are briefly comprehended in one sentence--viz. "The answer of a good conscience towards God." 1 Peter 3:21. Q. 71. In what does the answer of a good conscience consist? A. In three things:--1st. The knowledge of the meaning of baptism. 2d. A belief of the fact and import of the death and resurrection of Christ, to which baptism refers. 3d. In the consciousness of our own minds that we have voluntarily and intelligently obeyed the Divine command. See Romans 6:1-6; 1 Peter 3:20-22. Q. 72. Can any infant be conscious of these things in baptism; or can it afterwards reflect that it intelligently, voluntarily, and cheerfully obeyed the Divine command? A. It is utterly impossible. Q. 73. Is there, then, no way in which an infant can obtain by reflection or otherwise, the answer of a good conscience from baptism? A. None. Q. 74. Can an adult, when instructed in the import of baptism, receive any consolation from reflecting that his parents had him baptized when an infant? A. No, unless it be a delusive consolation; for the answer of a good conscience can only be enjoyed through an inward consciousness that the subject has intelligently and voluntarily obeyed a Divine commandment. Q. 75. How does any adult know that he was baptized in infancy? A. By the report of others. Q. 76. Is there any duty inculcated in the New Testament that requires us only to have the testimony of others for our having performed it ? A. Not one. Q. 77. Is there any promise accompanying our obedience to the commands of God? A. Yes: "In keeping of them there is a great reward." Psalms 19:11; Proverbs 3:16-18; Proverbs 11:18; Proverbs 29:18; Hebrews 11:6-26; James 1:25. Q. 78. Is there any reward accompanying infant baptism? A. None, except "the praise of men." Q. 79. Is there any peculiar promise accompanying baptism? A. Yes; the promise of the Divine Spirit as a "Comforter." Acts 2:38; Acts 19:2-7. Q. 80. What were the immediate duties of those baptized? A. Union with the church and obedience to all the commandments and ordinances. Q. 81. How soon were the baptized added to the church? A. "That same day," "and they continued steadfastly in the Apostles’ doctrine, in breaking of bread, in fellowship, and in prayers." Acts 2:41-42. Q. 82. Is this true of any infants after baptism? A. No; it never was, nor in the nature of things can it ever be. Q. 83. What is the necessary qualification to all parts of Christian practice? A. Faith. Q. 84. Is there no Christian duty to be performed without faith in the subject? A. None. Q. 85. Why so? A. Because "without faith it is impossible to please God." Hebrews 11:6. Q. 86. Can it then be pleasing to God to baptize or sprinkle infants? A. No, seeing that without faith it is impossible to please God. Q. 87. Can the infant itself, in receiving this rite, please God? A. No; for it is destitute of faith. Q. 88. How do you know that infants are destitute of faith? A. Because they cannot believe in him of whom they have never heard! As saith the Apostle, Romans 10:14, "How shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard?" Q. 89. But may there not be two kinds of baptism--one suited to believers, and one to infants destitute of faith? A. No; for the Scriptures speak only of one baptism. Q. 90. Why did John baptize at Enon? A. "Because there was much water there." Q. 91. Would not a few quarts of water baptize hundreds? A. No; a few quarts might sprinkle hundreds, but could not baptize one. Q. 92. Who appointed the sprinkling of infants? A. The clergy. Q. 93. When did sprinkling become general among Roman Pedobaptists? A. The Pope, in the year 1311, declared sprinkling or immersion as indifferent--either would do very well. But in England, it did not become general till after the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Q. 94. Why do you sprinkle water upon the face? A. Because thus the Clergy have ordained. Q. 95. Why do they not sprinkle the foreskin, seeing the Jews circumcised it? A. Because it would be indecent and impolite. Q.96. Was not, then, circumcision indecent and impolite? A. No; for it was commanded of God. Q. 97. Can you give no better reason for sprinkling the face than that given? A. No; the clergy have pitched upon it, and perhaps they had some reason for it. Q. 98. To what is baptism compared in the New Testament? A. To a burial and resurrection. Romans 6:4-6. Q. 99. Does sprinkling the face represent a burial? A. No. Q. 100. Does immersing the whole person resemble a burial? A. Yes; "We are buried with him in baptism." Q. 101. Does a child carrying away from the preacher resemble a resurrection? A. No. Q. 102. How, then, is the resurrection exhibited? A. After the subject has been immersed in water and completely overwhelmed in it, his rising up out of the water is an emblem of a resurrection. Q. 103. Is baptism compared to any thing else in the Scriptures? A. Yes; to the regenerating influences and operation of the Spirit of God. Hence we read of "the washing of regeneration" and of the "baptism of the Holy Spirit." Q. 104. Is sprinkling an emblem of the operation of the Spirit? A. No. Q. 105. What is there in immersion in water that is an emblem of the regenerating operation of the Spirit? A. The application of water to the whole person of the subject, and the consequent "putting off of the filth of the flesh," is an emblem of the operation of the Spirit upon the whole soul of man, affecting the understanding, will, and affections, and the consequent "putting off of the sins of the flesh," or "the old man with his deeds." This, immersion beautifully exhibits; but sprinkling cannot. Q. 106. How shall an illiterate man know the meaning of the Greek word baptism? A. By inquiring how the Greek church practise this rite. It is certain they ought to understand their own language best. Q. 107. And how does the Greek church administer this ordinance ? A. Even to this day they immerse every subject, in all climes, and in all cases in which they may be placed. Q. 108. Has not immersion in cold water been a dangerous practice? A. No; in the frozen regions of Russia and Canada, in the midst of the coldest winters, and in the warmest climates of the torrid zone, it has been practised without danger, and with manifest safety to the administrators and subjects. Q. 109. Why was sprinkling substituted for Immersion? A. To gratify the caprice, the pride, and the carnality of the human mind. Q. 110. Why were infants baptized or sprinkled, seeing there is no such command or precedent in the Bible? A. Why did the Israelites make a golden calf--Uzzah touch the sacred ark--and Nadab and Abihu offer strange and uncommanded fire upon the altar of the Lord? From the same principle, and for the same reason, was this practice first introduced. Q. 111. Did you ever read of infant church membership? A. Yes, in books of baptism, but never in the Bible. Q. 112. What do you understand by "infant church membership?" A. I understand the phrase to mean, that infants are members of the visible church. Q. 113. Are there any directions given in the Scriptures for the proper discipline and management of infant members? A. None; the Bible knows of no such members; it addresses all members as equally qualified by faith and grace to attend to all the ordinary duties of Christianity. Q. 114. Do we ever read of any members of the church who are qualified for one or two of the ordinances of the church, and disqualified for attendance on the other institutions of it? A. None. Q. 115. Can infants, then, be considered as members of the visible church, seeing they are not qualified for the observance of the ordinances of it? A. By no means. Q. 116. Is Jesus Christ represented as King of his kingdom or church? A. Yes. Revelation 19:16. Q. 117. Wherein does the honour and glory of a king consist? A. In reigning over a willing people; a people who love and esteem him, and serve him as volunteers, and in governing them in wisdom and justice. Q. 118. Where is Christ spoken of as a King? A. Psalms 110:1-3; John 18:37. Q. 119. What is the character of his subjects? A. They are said to be "a willing people"--" of the truth"--"taught of God"--"born from above"--and "true and faithful." Q. 120. Are infants of such a character? A. No; consequently cannot be subjects of his visible kingdom. Q. 121. In what point of view are we to consider infants? A. As inheriting an evil nature--"conceived in sin"--" brought forth in iniquity"--"prone to evil"--guilty, and subject to death, "the wages of sin." See Psalms 58:3; Psalms 11:5; Job 14:4; John 3:6; Ephesians 2:3. Q. 122. Can any or all of them be saved who die before they are capable subjects of instruction ? A. Yes; by the merits and atonement of Christ. Q. 123. As our greatest concern is with them that live, how should we manage them during childhood with regard to their spiritual concerns? A. We should "bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord"--that is, we should make them well acquainted with the Scriptures of truth; make them commit to memory the most plain and striking parts of it, respecting their present state and condition, the character of God, and of his son Jesus Christ our Lord, and the doctrine of Christ. Above all, we should exhibit a good example before them for their illumination, renovation, and salvation, without endeavouring to force a profession of religion upon them, or the views of any particular party or sect. Q. 124. Should we ever urge them to profess Christianity? A. No. We should teach them what it is to be a Christian, and the awful consequences of rejecting the gospel and dying in infidelity; but leave it to their own conscience when and how to profess Christianity. Q. 125. Would the sprinkling of them in infancy tend to accelerate their conversion,--would it secure that they ever would be Christians, or confer upon them any Christian benefit? A. Not in the least. Q. 126. Have not many Christians had their infants sprinkled or baptized in infancy? A. I make no doubt but there were, and there are Christians in this practice. Q. 127. But would you make this a reason why we, who are convinced that the thing is a mere tradition of men, should practise it? A. No; for then might we pray to the Virgin Mary, believe in purgatory, make the sign of the cross in baptizing, swear to "the solemn league," believe the doctrine of consubstantiation, or transubstantiation, go into a monastery, or take the vow of celibacy; because some good men have done some of these things. Q. 128. Is not the same action alike good or bad to all who practise it? A. No; for there is a great difference between a person performing an action, thinking it right, and one performing the same action, doubting of its propriety or knowing it to be wrong. The former is a simple mistake; the latter, a wilful transgression. Even civil law discriminates between the different degrees of demerit in the action, arising from the knowledge and determination of the agent. Hence, we have different kinds of murder, and different punishments annexed to each, according to circumstances. Q. 129. Are there not two kinds of sins of ignorance? A. Yes; there is an unavoidable ignorance and a wilful ignorance. The former exists where the subject has no possible means of information--such as the Indian’s ignorance of the Saviour: the latter exists where the subject might know, if he would avail himself of the means of knowledge which he possesses--such as the Pedobaptist’s ignorance of the true subject and action of baptism. Whatever excuse can be plead for the former, there is no extenuation of the latter. Q. 130. If infant baptism be an evil thing, as it is often represented, it appears strange that the Almighty should have tolerated its continuance so long, and suffered it to extend so far with impunity. How do you account for this? A. The Almighty has suffered many errors to exist for a much longer time. The whole system of Antichrist is now more than 1200 years old, and paganism is several thousand years old. The future state only will exhibit the reasons of this. Q. 131. How do you view all Pedobaptists with regard to this ordinance of baptism? Can you, according to the Scriptures, consider them baptized persons, or do you consider them as unbaptized? A. There is but one baptism; and all who have not been immersed into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, after having professed the faith of the gospel, have never been baptized, and are now in an unbaptized state. Q. 132. What is the design of baptism? A. Besides our putting on of Christ, and having the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit put upon us, we are baptized for the remission of all past sins, through faith in his blood. Thus Peter, Acts 2:38, commanded three thousand Jews "to be baptized, every one for himself, for the remission of sins;" thus, Ananias told Paul to" be baptized and wash away his sins." Hence, baptism "is the washing of regeneration:" thus the church is cleansed through the bath of water by the word, and thus, "the like figure" to Noah’s being saved by water in the ark, "baptism does also now save us, not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience towards God, through the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, Christ." Q. 133. Why are many good people so much divided in their views of Scripture, seeing they have but one Bible, and all read it in the same language? A. Because they belong to different sects and have different systems, and they rather make the Bible bow to their own systems, than make their systems bow to the Bible; or, in other words, each man, too generally, views the Bible through the medium of his system; and, of course, it will appear to him to favour it. Just as if A, B, and C should each put on different coloured glasses: A puts on green spectacles; B, yellow; and C, blue. Each of them, through his own glasses, looks at the Bible. To A, it appears green; to B, yellow; and to C, blue. They begin to debate on its colour. It is impossible for any one of them to convince another that he is wrong; each one feels a conviction, next to absolute certainty, that his opinion is right. But D, who has no spectacles on, and who is standing by during the contest, very well knows that they are all wrong. He sees the spectacles on each man’s nose, and easily accounts for the difference. Thus, one professor reads the Bible with John Calvin on his nose; another, with John Wesley; a third, with John Gill; and a fourth, with some one else. Thrice happy the man who lifts the Bible as if it had dropped from heaven into his hand alone; and who, with a single eye, reads for himself! Q. 134. Who is most likely to understand it? A. He who practises what he already knows. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 44: 01.08.01. APPENDIX. ======================================================================== SINCE writing the preceding queries and answers, I have read with approbation a passage in "Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection" on the Baptismal Rite, which I deem worthy to add, by way of confirmation of the views given in this treatise on the scriptural subjects of Christian baptism. To the learned reader I need not say, that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was not merely a poet and a philosopher of the highest order, but, by concession, the most talented theologian in the English church, of his day. Some of the London reviews have pronounced him "the greatest theologian in the world, of the first quarter of the present century." That he was a man of the most philosophic and discriminating mind, as well as of prodigious theological attainments, no one who has read his various works, and especially his "Aids to Reflection," can reasonably doubt. As a member of the Episcopal church, his opinion and his testimony will weigh more with the multitude than any thing that a Baptist could say on our premises or reasonings. While admitting that infant baptism, as a discretionary and prudential custom of the church, may subserve some good purpose to both parents and children, as other human expedients, he boldly takes the ground that there is no authority for it in the Sacred Scriptures. His words are:--"I am of the opinion that the divines in your side" (that is, the Episcopal church) "are chargeable with a far more grievous mistake--that of giving a carnal and Judaizing interpretation to the various gospel texts in which the terms baptism and baptize occur, contrary to the express and earnest admonitions of the Apostle Paul." "The tests appealed to, as commanding or authorizing infant baptism, are all, without exception, made to bear a sense neither designed nor deducible; and likewise, (historically considered,) there exists no sufficient positive evidence that the baptism of infants was instituted by the Apostles, in the practice of the apostolic age." Page 322, Burlington edition, 1840. Of the two main foundations on which "sectarians" found the practice of infant baptism, "household baptisms," and of circumcision, he says:--"If I should inform any one that I had called at a friend’s house, but had found nobody at home--the family having all gone to the play; and if he, on the strength of this information, should take occasion to asperse my friend’s wife for unmotherly conduct in taking an infant, six months old, to a crowded theatre, would you allow him to press on the word ’nobody,’ and ’all the family,’ in justification of the slander? Would you not tell him that the words were to be interpreted according to the nature of the subject, the purpose of the speaker, and their ordinary acceptation; and that he must, or might have known that infants of that age would not be admitted into the theatre? Exactly so with regard to the words, ’he and all his household.’ Had baptism of infants, at that early period of the gospel, been a known practice, or had this been previously demonstrated, then, indeed, the argument that, in all probability, there were infants or young children in so large a family, would be no more objectionable than as being superfluous, and a sort of anticlimax in logic. But, if the words are cited as the proof, it would be a clear petitio principii, (a begging of the question,) though there had been nothing else against it. But when we turn back to the Scriptures preceding the narrative, and find repentance and belief demanded as the terms and indispensable conditions of baptism, then the case above imagined applies in its full force. "Equally vain is the pretended analogy from circumcision, which was no sacrament at all, but the means and mark of a national distinction." "Nor was it ever pretended that any grace was conferred by it, or that the rite was significant of any inward or spiritual operation." P. 320. So unanswerably this greatest of men and theologians carries away the long-cherished foundations of infant baptism. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 45: 01.60.06. REVIEW OF DR. KURTZ AND REV. MR. HALL ======================================================================== CHAPTER VI. REVIEW OF DR. KURTZ AND REV. MR. HALL. IN our preceding reviews, we have already attended to a portion of their plea drawn from the Jewish institution, or from the supposed identity of the Jewish and Christian institutions. But what remain are a few passages selected from the apostolic writings, almost universally alleged by Pedobaptist writers in favour of infants, and which have had more influence on the imperfectly instructed readers of the New Testament than any other arguments urged by the advocates of this ancient rite. The first of these is found in the discourses of our Lord as reported by some of the Evangelists. It is in the following words:--"Then were there brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray: and the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 19:13-14. This important incident is also reported by Mark, and in the words following, to wit:--"And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them; and his disciples rebuked those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you; Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein. And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them." Mark 10:13-16. So important is this incident, that it is also noticed by Luke in the words following, viz. "And they brought unto him also infants, that he would touch them: but when his disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily, I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, shall in no wise enter therein." Luke 18:15-17. We have given the common version of this important incident, because this is due to those who argue from it, and because it gives to them all the advantages they can claim. The first point made on this passage is, that it is thrice repeated in the New Testament. The second is, that the inspired writers did not use the word pais, but paidion; because, as they allege, the former word (pais) indicates a young man and a servant of mature age and reason; whereas the latter (paidion) denotes an infant, a very young child, a speechless babe. So also the word brephos is used once in Luke. The third point is, that the Lord declared the kingdom of God to be composed of such. Therefore, infants have a right to baptism and to consequent admission into the kingdom of God, or the New Testament church. That I have done justice to the Pedobaptists, I will quote Rev. Edwin Hall, A. M., of Connecticut--1810--one of the most recent and learned writers on the subject:-- "Some parents once brought little children (infants, says Luke 18:15) to Christ, that he should lay his hands on them and bless them. His disciples forbade them. They understood that Christ’s kingdom was to rest upon faith in the soul, and upon the intelligent obedience of men to his precepts; but how could children have this faith or this knowledge? They appear to have come to the same conclusion concerning bringing little children to Christ that he might touch them, that many In these days arrive at concerning the baptism of little children:--’What good can it do to an unconscious babe?’ At all events, they forbade these parents to bring their infants to Christ, for this purpose. But Christ rebuked them; he called the little children to him; he took them in his arms; he blessed them; he said, ’Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.’ He meant, by the kingdom of heaven, either his earthly church or his heavenly; it matters not which, for the argument. If the heavenly church is, in part, made up, of such, then this was a sufficient reason for Christ why he should take them in his arms and bless them, and rebuke those who would forbid them to be brought to him. It is the very reason that he alleged: and he himself drew these conclusions from the reason. What an argument for bringing little children to Christ now--that he may seal them as his own; and that visibly, as he did when he took them in his arms! But if by ’kingdom of heaven’ he meant his earthly church, then the argument is at an end: they are to be baptized on this express warrant. "Those who wish to prevent this passage from bearing on the question at issue, say, that by the words ’of such’ our Lord meant--not of such infants, but of such ’simple-hearted and humble persons’ is the kingdom of heaven. This would be a good reason why ’simple-hearted and humble persons’ should not be forbidden to come to Christ;--but the fact that ’simple-hearted and humble’ adults belong to the kingdom of God, is no reason why Christ should take infants in his arms and bless them. "It is said, we forget that Jesus did not baptize them. No, we do not forget that ’Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples.’ It is not necessary for us to assert or to suppose that these infants were baptized at all. Christ’s disciples were sent at first to preach, not a redemption completed, but to preach, saying, ’The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Their final commission was after the resurrection of our Lord; and at that time he instituted his baptism; which appears to be essentially different from the baptism practised before. The disciples of Christ baptized newly made disciples before this, but it seems to have been John’s ’baptism of repentance,’ Acts 19:4, and not the baptism instituted by Christ as the new seal of his covenant. Grant it, if our brethren please, that these infants were not baptized. This conduct of Christ, and this rebuke which he administered to those who would forbid infants, would at least teach his disciples no more to reject infants from the blessings of the Christian religion, under the notion that infants cannot believe. It would teach them no more to forbid parents to bring them to Christ for his blessing. It would teach them to be cautious how they forbade infants from the privileges which God had chartered to them in his covenant. It was designed to teach how Christ regarded infants; and the remembrance of this would necessarily bear upon the interpretation which they would give with regard to the application of the new seal, whether to apply it to infants or not." This is justly regarded an important incident reported by three of the four Evangelists. But as it was spoken before Christian baptism was instituted, it can have no logical nor rational bearing on that subject. 1st. And, indeed, the avowed object of those who brought these children to the Saviour is declared to be not to receive an ordinance, but to obtain a blessing. Jesus did lay his hands upon them and bless them, or pray for them; and, therefore, the intention of those who brought them was gained; which was not baptism, but a blessing. But, in the second place; as to the words used to indicate the age of those children, they are alleged to be terms indicative of perfect infancy, such as brephos and paidion. But while these terms do sometimes indicate very young children, they are also used to represent those of some years--indeed, of years capable of learning the Scriptures. Timothy, while a brephos, or child, says Paul, knew the holy Scriptures. For this is the word selected by him when speaking of the early attainments of Timothy, 2 Timothy 3:15 :--"From a brephos, a child, thou hast known the holy Scriptures." Such a brephos is, with us, a proper subject of baptism. The same is true of paidion, often translated a "little child;" but John and the other Apostles call adult persons, as well as striplings and damsels, paidia. Jesus says, "Behold I and the children, paidia, whom God has given me." This term, with him, indicates all the family of God. Indeed, a girl, said by Mark to be twelve years old, is called a paidion. See Mark 5:39, Mark 5:43, Many such instances could be given, but surely these will suffice to show what fallacious guides these are who would lead the people to imagine that these were speechless babes and senseless infants brought to Jesus to be blessed--when children from one to twelve years and more are so denominated!! But there are in these passages themselves evident indications that they were not babes--perfect infants. "Suffer little children to come to me." He does not say carry them to me, but let them come. Again, in Mark and Luke, he says, "Suffer the little children to come to me." They were, then, capable of hearing, learning, and coming to him. Yet he does not say that "of them is the kingdom of heaven;" but "of such!"--of those as humble, docile, and ingenuous as they--of such is the kingdom of God. Abraham, and Moses, and David, the Prophets and Apostles, are in character and spirit as teachable and subordinate as babes--and so are all the children of God. But more than enough has been said to show how entirely inapposite to the case before us are these quotations from the Evangelists, which have respect to the imposition of the Saviour’s hands and his benedictions on children, before Christian baptism was at all instituted, as all agree that Christian baptism was instituted after the resurrection of Christ. We, therefore, proceed to another, yet a somewhat similar argument, deduced from a passage in Acts of Apostles, Acts 2:38-39. "Repent and be baptized, every one of you"--"for the promise is to you and your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord your God shall call." On this, Rev. Benjamin Kurtz, of Baltimore, says-- "Observe here, that the children spoken of were ’little children;’ according to Mark 10:16, they were so young that our Saviour ’took them up in his arms;’ and in Luke 18:15, they are expressly called ’infants.’ They must accordingly have been children, not only in temper, docility, &c., but also and emphatically in age and stature. Notice next, that our Lord positively affirms respecting them, that, ’of such is the kingdom of heaven;’ that is, of such little children is the kingdom of heaven,--to them it belongs, or theirs this kingdom is. ’It is well known,’ says Professor Smucker, ’to those acquainted with the phraseology of the New Testament, that the expressions "kingdom of God" and "kingdom of heaven" are familiarly used to designate the church of God under the New Testament economy. Thus, John the Baptist preached, saying, Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. It will not be supposed that heaven was literally descending to the earth and had almost arrived among us; but the Saviour evidently meant, that the time for remodelling his church into its New Testament form was at hand.’ Robert Hall, a distinguished and learned Baptist minister, explains this phrase in the same manner. His words are, ’The kingdom of God, a phrase which is constantly employed in Scripture to denote that state of things which is placed under the avowed administration of the Messiah.’ If, then, the expression, ’kingdom of heaven,’ signifies the visible church of God, as distinguished both from the heathen world and the old economy, and the church, as Christ declares, is composed in part of ’little children,’ or embraces them as members, then, of course, they are entitled to baptism as the sign of their membership. "It is worthy of notice that the Apostle here uses the definite article the,--not a, but ’THE promise,’ that is, the promise of God to Abraham, ’to be a God unto thee and unto thy seed after thee,’ is equally ’unto you and to your children.’ Now, in order to decide what Peter meant by the expression, ’your children,’ it is only necessary to ascertain the import of the words ’thy seed’ in the promise referred to. It is universally admitted, and has never been denied, that the latter comprises small children, ’eight days old,’ and hence it follows, with all the clearness and certainty of a mathematical demonstration, that the former embraces the same description of individuals. Every one knows that the word seed means children; and that children means seed; and that they are precisely the same. The promise, then, in which God engages to be our God and to constitute us his people, extends equally to our children; and, of course, gives them, as well as us, a right to the privileges of his people. And if they have a right to those privileges, what further argument need we to show that they are entitled to the outward token and seal of those privileges? "It will avail nothing here to inform us, that tekna, children, means posterity;--suppose it does,--sperma, seed, also means posterity; but both include our earliest as well as our latest posterity, our youngest children as well as our most distant successors. Admitting that the word children does not always signify infants, the question is, whether it can mean any thing else but infants in this passage? Peter speaks to all who are capable of understanding him. These he calls you. Now, whom can he possibly mean by the children of these hearers but the infant offspring which they either had or might have? And if the promise to the adults be a reason for submitting to be baptized, it must also be a reason for baptizing the children; since the promise is said to be equally to both; and this is made the foundation of their baptism." By what law or laws of interpretation Dr. Kurtz could make "the promise" here named "the covenant of circumcision," or the promise to be a God to Abraham and his seed after him, and to make it to children of eight days, I confess my entire inability to perceive. To my mind, no assumption in any system, Papal or Protestant, is more destitute of any form of even specious proof. This is the more arbitrary and illogical, inasmuch as "the promise" is expressly said by Peter to be "the promise of the Holy Spirit," which is extended to all that are near and "afar off, even to as many as the Lord our God shall call." It is Joel that Peter quotes, and not Moses, as Dr. Kurtz imagines. The gift of the Holy Spirit is the immediate antecedent to "the promise"--as any one may see from the slightest attention to the passage. Again, both the children named in the text and those afar off are restricted by Joel to "as many of both as the Lord our God shall call." It appears unnecessary to show how perfectly imaginative these expositors are in their comments. The term "children" here used applies no more to infants than to the present generation of the Jews; for these are all the children of Abraham, though from eight days to eighty years old! I need scarcely again, except for formality, allude to the household or family baptisms reported in Acts of Apostles. These have already been, we think, fully disposed of. We name them here in making a full exhibit of all that is alleged from the New Testament on this subject. Much reliance has been placed upon them by the defenders of infant church membership, although the circumstances and details of their families forbid the presumption that there was an infant in one of them; and if there were even a plausible presumption, we have shown that to found a positive institution upon such a presumption would be alike without reason and authority from God’s own Book. I have sometimes alluded to the fact that, were half the families in a given district baptized, there would not be an infant in one of them. This would have always been the case around my residence and in most of the neighborhoods of my acquaintance. It is, therefore, the most precarious basis on which any one could found an argument for infant baptism. The only remaining passage in the New Testament on, which the advocates of this rite rely, is 1 Corinthians 7:14 : "Else were your children unclean, but now they are holy;" a passage which, in our review of Dr. Miller of Princeton, we have shown to be against, rather than in favour of infant baptism. The sophism, we have unanswerably shown, in that case, is the Pedobaptist assumption that the children here named were the children of those married to an unbelieving party; whereas the letter of the passage is not their children, but "else were your children unclean," Corinthians, "but now they are holy!" Consequently they were unbaptized, else the Apostle’s argument is a palpable sophism: for to prove that an unbelieving and unbaptized wife was sanctified to the other party by the fact that a baptized child was holy or sanctified, would be as glaring a sophism as the annals of criticism record. There is not, then, in all the passages adduced from the New Testament, the shadow of a reason or argument for infant baptism. But, before dismissing this subject from our pages for the present, there are two arguments against the position of our Pedobaptist friends, to which I specially invite their attention. The first of these respects their method of constructing an argument for a positive institution; and the other is an apostolic inhibition of their whole system of reasoning from the Old Testament or Covenant in favour of infant church membership. A word or two on these may yet be apposite on the present occasion. First, then, as to the method of constructing an argument for a positive rite. Be it, then, emphatically stated, that their method is not to produce either a precept or a precedent for infant baptism; but to infer it from sundry passages of Scripture; never presuming to find, in any one passage, premises for the whole rite, but for a part of it. Then, by putting these parts together, supposed to be logically inferred from sundry sayings, they construct positive authority for a positive right. This is, most certainly, as unprecedented among men as it is inconclusive in point of logical propriety. Who ever heard, in any other case, of inferring a part of an ordinance from one sentence in one passage, and from another sentence in another passage, referring to something else; and then, by converting these two inferences into one, make it a positive and explicit authority for a Christian institution? Were lawyers and public debaters to act in this way, they would expose themselves to the derision rather than to the admiration of their opponents. One scripture saith, "Judas went and hanged himself;" another saith, "Go and do likewise." Put these together, and what an inference! These special pleaders for infant baptism, in one passage, find the Messiah "blessing little children;" in another, they find him commanding his Apostles to "convert the nations," and observing little children in nations, and the Saviour blessing them, they found an ordinance called infant baptism! They even go beyond one testament: for, finding Abraham circumcising his boys in one dispensation, and Peter, in Jerusalem, commanding thousands of men and women to be baptized, they infer that Christ intended infant baptism. The law of circumcision they find in one testament, and the law of baptism in another; and, because the cutting off of flesh is somewhat adumbrative of separation, and because water in baptism takes away the filth of the flesh, putting these together, they infer the latter came in room of the former, and immediately set about instituting a new divine ordinance for putting away the filth of the flesh! Can any one name a passage that either commands infant baptism or gives a precedent for it! Can any one give an instance of a divine ordinance founded on two passages of Scripture, and resting upon the relevancy of two inferences? Can any one adduce two passages, spoken or written a thousand years apart, as being on any occasion made the foundation of a divine institution? We fearlessly challenge Christendom for such a case. Until that is produced, we must regard infant baptism as we do "extreme unction," "clerical celibacy," "prayers for the dead," or any other papal fancy sustained by cardinals, popes, and œcumenical councils. When I see learned bishops and hoary doctors carrying one limb of an institution from Ur of Chaldea; another, from a mountain in Galilee; and a third, from a Philippian jailer; and hear them, with a Westminster Assembly, call it "a New Testament ordinance, ordained by Jesus Christ," I am led to pray for another Luther to take the veil off the face of such blear-eyed Rabbies--to make a new scourge of very small cords, and drive them out of the temple! For it has never happened, from the days of Adam till now, that God gave a positive institution to man, whose scattered members were spread over a field of revelation fifteen hundred years from end to end, and then to be gathered, ploughed, and grooved by modern theologians, who never had the use of tools, or were taught by God on Sinai’s summit, to rear a new tabernacle for pilgrims to worship at. I have neither time nor space to push this matter farther. Since it has occurred to me, I only wonder why it is that these new authors of divine institutions were not long since called to give some authority for this their new art and mystery of manufacturing them. But, when all argument fails, it is gravely said, "Infants were once members of the Jewish church, which was a church of God, and that by virtue of a Divine covenant. Now the question is, When were they cast out." Infants were never cast out of the Jewish church, as some call it; because it was a commonwealth, and the only excommunication from it was death. It was a church of this world, a great community, called out of Egypt; and, under Moses in the wilderness, God made a covenant with them, after they had all--men, women, and children--been "baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea;" yet with many of them God was not well pleased, for "there fell in one day three thousand souls." There was no regeneration preached by Moses in order to an adoption which was national and political as well as religious. They were all, in virtue of natural birth, without regeneration or a second birth, entitled to the rank and relation of members of the Jewish national church. Flesh, and not faith, was the only prerequisite. It was, therefore, a "worldly sanctuary,"--a kingdom of this world--a holy nation, or a people outwardly sanctified or set apart for a special purpose. They were as political as the English nation. Their saints were kings, generals, and military captains. Their ministers, priests, and high-priest were men in the flesh, and they served in the "oldness of the letter," and not in newness of spirit. They were, however, a typical people, and their institutions, national existence, privileges, and honours were all shadows of good things to come. God has, however, provided some better things for us, that they, without us, Christians, "should not be perfect" He promised that he would one day, "make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like that at Sinai, made with their fathers." It is, then, very easy for us to answer the question, "If infants were once members of the Jewish church, when were they cast out?" First, then, they were cast out when the whole nation were divorced or separated from their covenant relation to God. When the nation ceased to be God’s only nation and people; then were parents and children cast off or cast out. We shall, then, hear Paul discuss the question, in his masterly and divinely authorized way:--"Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law? For it is written, that Abraham had two sons; the one by a bondmaid, the other by a free-woman. But he who was of the bond-woman was born after the flesh; but he of the free-woman was by promise. Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar. For this Agar is mount Sinai, in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all. For it is written, Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband. Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise. But, as then, he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now. Nevertheless, what saith the Scripture? Cast out the bond-woman and her son: for the son of the bond-woman shall not be heir with the son of the free-woman. So then, brethren, we are not children of the bond-woman, but of the free." Here, in the person, relations, and history of Sarah, Hagar, Isaac, and Israel, are described with peculiar, circumstantial exactness the two covenants, the two churches, the privileges, honours, and immunities of the subjects of these two divine institutions. Abraham, as a son of God and the father of all believers, is introduced as the founder of both churches. He had two wives--one free, and one a bond-woman. These two women, Paul says, represent two institutions or two covenants--constitutions of society--and are by him converted into an allegory. They are allegorized in the following manner:--The two women, both wives, one free, the other bond, have each a son to Abraham. One is supernaturally, the other naturally born. Sarah never would have been, by the course of nature, a mother. By grace, through faith, and not by nature, she brought forth Isaac, the son of promise. Hagar’s son was born, like the Jews, according to the flesh. He was, by simple nature, without grace, a son of Abraham. But, according to immemorial usage, the son follows the mother, as respects freedom or bondage; therefore, Isaac was free-born--Ishmael a bond servant. Next were introduced two Jerusalems--one resembling Sarah and her son; the other, Hagar and her son: the latter, earthly; the former, heavenly. Like Hagar and her son, the Jerusalem on earth was in bondage when Paul wrote to the Galatians. Like Sarah and her son, the Jerusalem above was then free. She, the Lord be praised, is the mother of all Christians, as the former was the mother of all Jews. Isaiah lends his aid to Paul, just at thus point, when portraying in heavenly strains the great increase, the superior progeny of the barren Sarah, in contrast with that of the youthful fleshly Hagar; "Rejoice, thou barren woman, that bearest not; break forth and shout, thou that travailest not" in birth; for thou, the deserted woman, forsaken for a time by Abraham for the sake of Hagar, now "hast many more children than she who had (your) husband." "We then, brethren," says Paul, "as Isaac was, are the children of promise." We are children by believing the promise--they were children without faith--children of the flesh. Such was the Jewish church by virtue of the old Sinai church covenant, Paul being judge and expositor. It deserves to be emphatically noted here, as both illustrative and corroborative of one of the characteristics already noted, of a community that embraces, as members of the church, all born of woman. I allude to its persecuting character. We have Paul with us here; "for," says he, "as then," in the case of Ishmael’s insults to Isaac and Sarah, "he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now." The Jewish church, as such, with her elders, scribes, and priests, persecuted even to death the Lord of glory, some of his Apostles and Evangelists, and ultimately drove the whole church out of the Jerusalem that then was, scattering its members throughout Judea and Samaria, even to foreign cities. What a correspondence and in how many points! But, adds Paul, "What saith the Scripture?"--the old Scripture, coeval with Moses, and detailing the affairs of the Abrahamic family--"What saith the Scripture? Cast out the bond-woman and her son, for the son of the bond-woman shall not be heir with the son of the free-woman." Where now is the Jewish covenant, church and people! Is the Christian church but the Jewish church enlarged and improved?! "What saith the Scripture? Cast out the bond-woman"--one of the covenants--"and her son"--the people under it--from being, as such, the Christian church; "for the sons of the bond-woman"--the offspring of the old Jewish covenant, the fleshly seed--"shall not inherit" or be heir with the children of the new institution, or the "free-woman"--who is the mother of us all--Jews and Gentiles, not as such, but as born of the Spirit. What could be more conclusive? Abraham the root of the Jewish nation, was great in faith and great in flesh. He was the fleshly father of many nations, and of one nation great, and mighty, and prolific. But he is also the father of all that believe, circumcised or uncircumcised, because of his mighty faith. He was the root of the Jewish church by flesh. He is the root of the Christian church by faith. Jesus, the Messiah, both in flesh and spirit, was his son, and was the author and founder of a new church, whose members are not born after the flesh, but after the Spirit--not of blood, nor of flesh, nor of the will of man, but of the power or will of God. The same Apostle to the Romans 11:1-36, reasons on this matter farther, and, in some points, more fully and satisfactorily. The nucleus or germ of the Christian church were Jews as respects flesh, but not as such, but, by faith in Jesus as the Christ, they became the germ of the Christian church. "Thou standest by faith." The other branches of the Abrahamic stock were broken off from any special relations to God. The nation, as such, was rejected. The believing members of it only were made participants of the root and fatness of God’s spiritual olive-tree. Gentiles, not as such, but such of them as "had obtained like precious faith," were grafted in among the believing Jews, and made participants with them of all spiritual privileges--of "the root and fatness," the benefits and blessings spiritual of "the good olive-tree." The Jews, then, not as such, were broken off, but because of unbelief,--and the Gentiles, not because of flesh, but of faith, were grafted is among them. So Paul reasons with the Romans, and, in another figure and with other illustrations than those presented to the Galatians, establishes the same great fact--that the Jewish church is not the Christian church, either in covenant on citizenship, either in immunities or honours. The members of the former were born of the flesh--the members of the latter, by faith. The privileges and honours of the one were worldly and temporal--of the other, spiritual and eternal. Let no one, then, count on parentage, natural birth, or worldly covenants guarantying lands and tenements, worldly riches, and honours, for introduction to the church of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the son of Abraham; for "without faith it is impossible to please God," and "unless a man be born of the Spirit and of water, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God," now established and administered by Jesus Christ. Let all Pedobaptists remember "what saith the Scripture"--" not the children of the flesh, but of the Spirit, are now counted for the seed." "Cast out," then, "the bond-woman and her son; for the son of the bond-woman shall not be heir with the son of the free-woman. So then, brethren, we (Christians) are not sons of the bond-woman, but of the free." We are not baptized because of our fleshly descent from members of any church, but because "born from above--born of the Spirit." "Stand fast, then, in the liberty wherewith the Messiah has made us free, and be not again entangled with the bondage and tyranny of a law of outward rites and ceremonies. For we are the true circumcision, which worship God in spirit, rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh." We have, then, not only attempted to show that infant baptism has no authority in the New Testament, direct or indirect, in the form of precept or of precedent--in the form of allusion or reference, expressed or implied; but we have gone farther--we have attempted to show that it is impliedly contrary to some of the clearest developments, statements, and reasonings of Apostles, Evangelists, and Prophets; and, still farther, we presume to say, that it is, in all its assumptions and pretences, not only void of authority, but expressly in conflict with many testimonies of the holy Scriptures, and with, the whole genius, spirit, and letter of Christianity, as revealed to us in that Holy Book by which we are all to be judged in the great and glorious day of the Lord. Of course it remains; then let it remain with every reader to say whether, on a careful and impartial examination of the whole premises before him, we have succeeded in all that we have attempted, and scripturally and logically formed our judgment, and expressed in justifiable terms our convictions, sustained by reasons and authorities on which we can safely rely. If so, then let him see to it that he consistently acts in conformity to his own convictions, and as he would wish to have done when he appears before the Searcher of all hearts, who will render to him according to his opportunity and his works. There yet remains another argument, with which we shall close this branch of the subject. It springs from the remarks just now made. It is founded on our personal responsibility. Every man must answer for himself; and, in doing this, his talents, opportunities, and dispositions will be taken into the account. If, then, the future and final judgment is to be according to every man’s work, personal liberty and personal responsibility are established on such premises as make it absolutely indispensable that every one think and examine for himself, and act from his own convictions. Need I ask, how, then, can any one act by proxy in the things of salvation? or how can any one be finally justified or condemned for that which is not his own act? A grave question then must be, Are parents or their children to answer for neglect in the case of baptism? It must be the duty of parents to have their children baptized; or it is the duty of the children to be baptized on their own responsibility. It cannot be the duty of both. Pedobaptists contend it is the duty of parents, and not of their offspring. But where is the precept or the example so obliging parents? No one can show a word in the New Testament on the subject. It is, indeed, the duty of the subject of baptism himself to be baptized. If so, then he must be an intelligent, voluntary, or moral agent; and such an infant is not: therefore, he cannot be a subject of baptism in his own right. But the doctrine of Christ constitutes the subject of baptism an intelligent, voluntary, and accountable agent, and, therefore, commands him to believe, repent, and be baptized on his own conviction of duty and interest. Personal liberty of choice is, on all hands, admitted to be essential to personal responsibility. Christ’s people are all free men; therefore, no one, by parent, by sponsor, or by priest, can be carried or compelled into the kingdom of Jesus Christ. If so, they may be physically carried to the Lord’s table and to heaven, and neither illumination nor volition, neither the conscience nor the heart, have any thing to do with our entrance into the church or our participations of its spiritual blessings. He that assumes this ground is not to be reasoned with by anyone that "trembles at the word of God." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 46: 02.01. DELUSIONS ======================================================================== DELUSIONS. AN ANALYSIS OF THE BOOK OF MORMON WITH AN EXAMINATION OF ITS INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL EVIDENCES, AND A REFUTATION OF ITS PRETENCES TO DIVINE AUTHORITY BY ALEXANDER CAMPBELL WITH PREFATORY REMARKS BY JOSHUA V. HIMES. BOSTON: BENJAMIN H. GREENE. 1832 ======================================================================== CHAPTER 47: 02.02. PREFATORY REMARKS ======================================================================== Prefatory Remarks It is well known to some of our fellow-citizens, that two preachers of the Mormonites, a fanatical sect, which originated a few years since in the western part of New York, have recently come to this city to propagate their strange and marvellous doctrines. I have had several interviews with these men, and have examined their book, called the ’Book of Mormon’, have endeavored to acquaint myself with the details of their history and principles, have put the result of my inquiries in writing, and am satisfied of the delusion and absurdity of their system, and of its evil tendency. After this investigation, I felt a desire to have the system exposed, immediately in public print. But upon consulting with some judicious friends upon the subject, it was thought best not to take public notice of it at that time, as the system was so unreasonable and ridiculous, that no person of good common sense would believe it. But having witnessed the progress of the delusion among some of our respectable citizens, some of whom were considerd worthy members of the religious societies to which they belonged, I have felt it my indispensable duty, to use my exertion against its spreading and contaminating influence. However strange to relate, about fifteen persons, in this city have been led away by these false doctrines, have been baptised and joined the Mormon church. And some of these persons ave set out for the promised land, the place of refuge for the house of Israel, and for all the Gentile world, who will take warning and flee thither for safety. [FOOTNOTE #1: This place is situated in Jackson county, Missouri, ten miles from the town of Independence.] Two individuals who have gone, are defenceless females. They had acquired by their hard industry $2300, one of them having $800, the other $1500, which they have given up to go into the general stock. One of these females was in a consumption, and her friends thought she would not live to reach her destined place. Her afflicted sister told me, that if she had been buried here, before she had been led away by these errors, and had left satisfactory evidence that she was prepared to die, her grief would have been far less than it is now. The remaining persons who were baptised and joined the church, and contemplate going to the west, possess between $3000 and $4000, which they also are going to put with the general fund, and which they can never draw out again, should they get sick of Mormonism and wish to return home to their friends. Thus are our friends swindled out of their property and drawn from their comfortable homes, to endure the perils of a journey about two thousand miles, by these ignorant fanatics; and when arrived at their earthly paradise, to become the miserable dupes of these temporal and spiritual lords. In view of these evils, and after waiting impatiently for some time, hoping that some person better qualified than myself to do justice to the subject, would undertake it; but not hearing of any, I had concluded to publish the result of my inquiries of these men, with some strictures upon their book. But at this time I was informed by a friend, that a faithful review of the book had been published by one of the most able writers in our country. I immediately sent 600 miles for the review, and have received and perused it. In my apprehension it is the best thing that can be written upon the subject, and will be of inestimable use in preventing and rescuing many from the evils of Mormonism. This review of Mr. Campbell came out first in the ’Millennial Harbinger’, a monthly periodical published by him in Bethany, Virginia, under date of February 7th, 1831. This work is but little known to that class of persons whom I design to benefit. My object, therefore, in publishing it in a pamphlet by itself, is to circulate it among the people of New England, [FOOTNOTE # 2:These preachers intend visiting the cities and principal towns in New England.] that they may receive the same benefit that the people of the south and west have, where the above periodical is extensively circulated. And I doubt not that its gifted author would not only be willing, but much gratified, in having it thus republished and circulated. And with sympathetic feelings for those friends who have been grieved and afflicted in consequence of the delusion, and to prevent others from similar trials in future, by having their friends torn from their embraces, and swindled out of their property, and if possible, to prevent others from becoming the miserable subjects and dupes of these singular fanatics, I have determined to republish this review of Mr. Campbell, with these prefatory remarks; and would recommend the review to the perusal of my fellow citizens, and an enlightened public. JOSHUA V. HIMES. Boston, Aug. 14, 1832. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 48: 02.02.12. CONVERTIBLE TERMS ======================================================================== CHAPTER XII. ARGUMENT 12.--Convertible Terms. FOR the special benefit of the more uneducated, I shall deduce my twelfth argument for immersion from the first precept of the decalogue of philology. That precept, according to my copy, reads thus:--The definition of a word and the word itself are always convertible terms. For example:--a law is a rule of action--is equivalent to saying, a rule of action is a law. Philanthropy is the love of man--is equivalent to saying, the love of man is philanthropy. Now, if a definition, or translation, (which is the same thing,) be correct, the definition, if substituted for the term defined, will always make good sense, and be congruous with all the words in construction. In order, then, to test the correctness of any definition or translation, we have only to substitute it in the place of the original word defined or translated. If, in all places, the definition makes good sense, that is, if it be convertible with the word defined, it is correct; if not, it is incorrect. Let any one unacquainted with Greek take a New Testament, beginning with the first occurrence of baptizo, or any of its family, and always substitute for it the definition or translation given, and, if it be the correct one, it will make sense; good, intelligible sense, in every instance. We, then, read--"In those days, the Jews of Jerusalem and Judea went out to John, and were sprinkled by him in the Jordan, confessing their sins." To perceive the impossibility of such an occurrence, it is only necessary to know that the word sprinkle is always followed by the substance sprinkled, and next by the object. We can sprinkle ashes, dust, water, or blood, &c., because the particles can be severed with ease; but can we sprinkle a man? We may sprinkle something upon him; but it is impossible for any man to sprinkle another in a river; and it is equally so to sprinkle the river upon him. The same reasoning will apply to pour. This verb is also to be followed by the substance poured. Now, was it not impossible to pour the Jews in the Jordan, or anywhere else? And to pour the Jordan upon them would be as unacceptable to them as it would have been impossible for the Baptist. It remains, then, that we try the word immerse. That, too, is followed by the substance to be immersed. Now, a man can be immersed in water, in oil, in sand, in grief, in debt, or in the Spirit; though it is impossible to pour him into any one of these. Having, then, subjected these three to the same law of trial, two are condemned and reprobate: one only is possible, desirable, and reasonable. This test will hold to the end of the volume; even where the association may appear strange and uncouth in style, it will always be not only practicable in fact, but good in meaning. For example: Jesus was to baptize in the Holy Spirit. The influence of the Spirit poured out fills some place; into that persons may be immersed: as we are said to be immersed in debt, in affliction, in any special trouble; but a person cannot be poured or sprinkled into these. Such an operation is always impossible, under any view, literal or figurative. Let it be carefully noted, in this most useful test, that the three words are all to be subjected to the same laws. 1st. The material is always to follow the verb. 2d. The place, or thing, or relation into which the action is to be performed is to follow the material. In baptism, the material is a man; the element, water. Now, as John cannot pour the material James, neither can he sprinkle him; but he can immerse him in a river, in debt, in grief, &c. It is highly improper and ungrammatical to use such a phrase, unless by special agreement of the parties present. Some persons, accustomed to a very loose style, see no impropriety in the phrase, "sprinkle him--pour him," because of the supplement in their own minds. They think of the material which is sprinkled or poured upon him, and, for brevity’s sake, say sprinkle him; that is, sprinkle dust or water upon him. But, in testing the propriety of such phrases, the ellipsis must be supplied. There is no ellipsis in "immerse him;" but there is always in sprinkle or pour him. The material is suppressed, because it is supposed to be understood as in the case--sprinkle clean water upon him. Now, while the abbreviation may be tolerated, so far as time is concerned, it is intolerable in physical and grammatical propriety; because it is physically impossible to scatter a man into particles like dust, or to pour him out like water; and it is grammatically improper to suppress the proper object of the verb, and to place after it a word not governed by it. Before submitting my next argument on this proposition, I beg leave to introduce the special testimony of one of America’s most eminent classic scholars. I believe I only accord with enlightened public opinion, when I introduce Professor Charles Anthon, of Columbia College, New York, as one of the most distinguished Greek scholars in the Union. His long devotion to the study and teaching of this language is not the only reason of this superiority. His laborious researches in ancient literature, his critical collation of copies, various readings, marginal notes, general criticisms, as editor of so many of the classics already in our colleges, and his excellent classical dictionary, have obtained for him this high reputation. Being addressed by Dr. Parmly, of Now York, on the subject of this proposition, last spring, he favoured him with the following answer. I shall quote the correspondence, that the subject may come fairly before the reader. NO. 1, BOND STREET, N. Y., March 23, 1843. Professor Charles Anthon: In conversation with Dr. Spring, last evening, he stated, that in the original the word baptism, which we find in the New Testament, has no definite or distinct meaning;--that it means to immerse, sprinkle, pour, and has a variety of other meanings--as much the one as the other, and that every scholar knows it;--that it was the only word that could have been selected by our Saviour, having such a variety as to suit every one’s views and purposes. May I ask you, if your knowledge of the language from which the word was taken has led you to the same conclusion? And may I beg of you to let the deep interest I take in the subject plead my apology. I have the honour to be, with great respect, most respectfully yours, E. PARMLY. COL. COLLEGE, March 27, 1343. My dear Sir: There is no authority whatever for the singular remark made by the Rev. Dr. Spring, relative to the force of baptizo. The primary meaning of the word is to dip or immerse; and its secondary meanings, if it ever have any, all refer in some way or other to the same leading idea. Sprinkling, &c. are entirely out of the question. I have delayed answering your letter, in the hope that you would call and favour me with a visit, when we might talk the matter over at our leisure. I presume, however, that what I have here written will answer your purpose. Yours truly, CHARLES ANTHON. Like all our testimonies, this comes from one who is not of us. I believe, Dr. Anthon is a member of the Episcopal Church in New York, of which his brother, Dr. Anthon, is pastor. We have yet another argument to offer on this subject, and shall then leave it with our readers. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 49: 02.03. DELUSIONS ======================================================================== DELUSIONS DELUSIONS. EVERY age of the world has produced imposters and delusions. Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, and were followed by Pharaoh, his court, and clergy. They for some time supported their pretensions, much to the annoyance of the cause of the Israelites and their leader Moses. To say nothing of the false prophets of the Jewish age, the diviners, soothsayers, magicians, and all the ministry of idols among the Gentiles, by which the nations were so often deceived, the imposters which have appeared since the Christian era would fill volumes of the most lamentable details ever read. The false Messiahs which have afflicted the Jews since the rejection of Jesus of Nazareth, have more than verified all the predictions of the Faithful and True Witness. No less than TWENTY-FOUR distinguished false Messiahs have disturbed the Jews. Many were deceived, and myriads lost their lives through their impostures. Some peculiar epochs were distinguished for the number and impudence of these impostors. If the people had fixed upon any year as likely to terminate their dispersions, and as the period of their return, that year rarely failed to produce a Messiah. Hence in the twelfth century no less than TEN false Messiahs appeared. The year 1666, was a year of great expectation, and gave birth to one of the most remarkable of the false Christs. ’Great multitudes marched from unknown parts, to the remote deserts of Arabia, and they were supposed to be the ten tribes of Israel, who had been dispersed for many ages. It was said that a ship was arrived in the north part of Scotland, with sails and cordage of silk, that the mariners spoke nothing but Hebrew, and on the sails was this motto; ’The Twelve Tribes of Israel.’ Then it was said that Sabati Levi appeared at Smyrna and professed to be the Messiah. The Jews gave up their business and attended to him. He obtained one Nathan in Jerusalem to pass for his Elias, or forerunner. Nathan prophesied for him, and the Jews became very penitent, and reformed under the expectation that the Messiah would appear in two years. ’Some fasted so long that they died - some endured melted wax to be dropped on their flesh - some rolled in snow - many whipped themselves. Superfluities in dress and household were dispensed with; property was sold to large amounts, and immense contributions were made to the poor. Though he met with much opposition, his followers increased, and began in large numbers to prophesy and fall into ecstacies. Four hundred men and women prophesied of his growing kingdom, and young infants who could hardly speak, would plainly pronounce, "SABATI, MESSIAH, and Son of God." The people were for a time possessed, and voices were heard from their bowels. Some fell into trances, foamed at the mouth, recounted their future prosperity, their visions of the Lion of Judah, the triumphs of SABATI.’ ’When he was brought before the magistrates, some affirmed they saw a pillar of fire between him and the Cadi or Magistrates, and others actually swore that they saw it. This the credible Jews believed; those who would not believe in him, were shunned as excommunicated persons, and all intercourse with them was prohibited. ’The Grand Seignor, determined to try his faith by stripping him naked and setting him a mark for his archers; but rather than subject himself to this test, he turned Mahometan, to the great confusion of the Jews.’ We have been thus particular in giving a view, of the incidents of the life of this impostor, as a specimen of the others; and because of some remarkable analogies between him and the present New York imposter. Numerous have been the imposters among christians since the great apostacy began; especially since, and at the time of the Reformation. Munzer, Stubner and Stork, where conspicuous in the beginning of the 16th century.’ These men taught that among christians, who had the precepts of the Gospel to guide them, and the spirit of God to direct them, the office of magistracy was not only unnecessary, but an unlawful encroachment on their spiritual liberty; that the distinctions occasioned by birth, rank, or wealth, should be abolished; that all christians should put their possessions into one common stock, and live together in that state of equality, which becomes members of the same family, and that polygamy was not incompatible with either the Old or New Testament. They related many visions and revelations which they had from above, but failing to propagate their views by these means, they attempted to propagate them by arms. Many Catholics joined them, and in the various insurrections which they effected, 100,000 souls are said to have been sacrificed.’ Since the Millennium and the evils of sectarianism have been the subjects of much speaking and writing, impostures have been numerous. In the memory of the present generation, many delusions have been propagated and received. The shakers, a sect instituted by Anna Lesse, in 1774, have not yet quite dwindled away. This elect Lady, as they style her, was the head of this party, and gave them a new bible. ’They assert that she spoke seventy-two languages, and conversed with the dead. Through her all blessings flow to her followers - she appointed the sacred dance and the fantastic song, and consecrated shivering, swooning and falling down, acts of acceptable devotion. They are for a common stock, and rank marriage among the works of the flesh, - they are plain in their apparel, and assume the aspect of the friars and nuns of Catholic superstition.’ The Barkers, Jumpers, and Mutterers of the present age, need not be mentioned here. Nor need we detail the history of Miss Campbell, who in Good Old Scotland a year or two since came back from the dead and had the gift of tongues, who was believed in by several ministers of the Scotch Church. But we shall proceed to notice the most recent and the most impudent delusion which has appeared in our time. The people that have received this imposture are called, THE MORMONITES. I have just examined their bible, and will first notice its contents. It is called the ’Book of Mormon’, an account written by the hand of Mormon upon plates taken from the plains of Nephi, wherefore it is an abridgement of the record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites, written to the Lamanites, which are a remnant of the House of Israel, and also to Jew and Gentile. Written by way of commandment, and also by the spirit of prophecy and of Revelation.’ - ’By Joseph Smith, Junior, Author and proprieter. From plates dug out of the earth, in the township of Manchester, Ontario, New York. - Palmyra, printed by E.B. Grandin, for the Author, 1830. It is a collection of books said to have been written by different persons during the interval of 1020 years - the 1st and second books of Nephi occupy 122 pages; the Book of Jacob the brother of Nephi occupies 21; that of Enos 3; that of Jarom 2; that of Omin 4; the words of Mormon 3; the book of Mosiah 68; that of Alma 186; that of Helaman 44; that of Nephi the son of Helaman 66; that of Mormon 20; that of Ether 35; and that of Morom 14 pages; making in all 588 octavo pages. This romance - but this is for it a name too innocent - begins with the religious adventures of one Lehi, whose wife was Sariah, and their four sons, Laman, Lemuel, Sam, and Nephi. Lehi lived in Jerusalem all his life, up to the first year of Zedekiah, King of Judah, and when the prophets appeared foretelling the utter destruction of Jerusalem, Lehi humbled himself, and after various visions and revelations, started with his sons into the wilderness. Lehi, before his departure, forgot to bring with him the records of his family, and that of the Jews; but Nephi, his younger son, with much pious courage returned and succeeded in getting upon plates of brass the records of the Jews from the creation down to the first year of Zedekiah, King of Judah, and also the prophets including many prophecies delivered by Jeremiah. From the records it appeared that this Lehi was a son of Joseph. He prevailed on one Ishmael and his family to accompany him into the wilderness, whose daughters the sons of Lehi took for wives. Lehi was a greater prophet than any of the Jewish prophets, and uttered all the events of the christian era, and developed the records of Matthew, Luke, and John, six hundred years before John the baptist was born. - These pilgrims travelled several days journey in some wilderness, ’a south, south-east direction, along the borders of the Red Sea.’ A ball with pointers on it, inscribed with various intelligence, legible at proper times, was the pillar and index in passing through the wilderness for many, very many days. By their bow and arrow they lived for eight years, travelling an easterly course from Jerusalem, until they came to a great sea. By divine revelation Nephi constructed a ship, and although opposed by his unbelieving brethren, being greatly assisted by the Holy Spirit, he succeeded in launching her safely, and got all his tribe, with all their stock of seeds, animals, and provisions, safely aboard. They had ’a compass’ which none but Nephi knew how to manage; but the Lord had promised them a fine land, and after many perils and trials, and a long passage, they safely arrived in the land of promise. Nephi made brazen plates soon after his arrival in America, for that was the land of promise to them, and on these plates be marked their peregrinations and adventures, and all the prophecies which God gave to him concerning the future destinies of his people, and the human race. After his father’s death, his brethren rebelled against him. They finally separated in the wilderness, and became the heads of different tribes, often in the lapse of generations making incurations upon each other. The Nephites, like their father, for many generations were good christians, believers in the doctrines of the Calvinists and Methodists, and preaching baptism and other christian usages hundreds of years before Jesus Christ was born! Before Nephi died, which was about fifty-five years from the flight of Lehi from Jerusalem, he had preached to his people every thing which is now preached in the state of New York, and anointed or ordained his brother Enos ’in the nurture and admonition of the Lord,’ gave him the plates, and left him successor in office over the people of Nephi. Enos says ’there came a voice to me, saying, Enos thy sins are forgiven thee, and thou shalt be blessed. And, I sayeth, Lord how it is done. And he sayeth unto me, Because of thy faith in Christ, whom thou hast not heard nor seen.’ p. 143. Enos died one hundred seventy-nine years from the hegira of Lehi; consequently, this happened four hundred thirty-one years before Jesus Christ was born. He was a contemporary with Nehemiah, and may we not say how much wiser and more enlightened were the Nephites in America than the Jews at their return to Jerusalem! Enos gave the plates to Jarom, his son. In his time ’they kept the law of Moses and the sabbath day holy to the Lord.’ During the priesthood and reign of Enos, there were many commotions and wars between his people and the Lamanites. Then the sharp pointed arrow, the quiver, and the dart were invented. Jarom delivered his plates to his son Omni, and gave up the ghost two hundred thirty-eight years from the flight of Lehi. Omni died two hundred seventy-six from the hegira, and gave the plates to his son Amaron, who in the year three hundred and twenty, gave them to his brother Chemish; he, to his son Abinadom; he to his son Amaleki; and he having no son, gave them to the just and pious King Benjamin. King Benjamin had three sons, Mosiah, Helorum, and Helaman, whom he educated in all the learning of his fathers. To Mosiah he delivered up the plates of Nephi, the ball which guided them through the wilderness, and the sword of one Laban, of mighty renown. King Benjamin addressed his people from the new temple which they had erected, for they had, even then, built a temple, synagogues, and a tower, in the New World. King Benjamin assembled the people to sacrifice according to the law around the new temple; and he enjoined upon them, at the same time, the christian institutions, and gave them a Patriarchal valedictory. After they had heard him speak, and had offered up their sacrifices, they fell down and prayed in the following words: ’O have mercy, and apply the atoning blood of Christ, that we may receive forgiveness of our sins, and our hearts may be purified; for we believe in Jesus Christ the son of God, who created heaven and earth and all things, who shall come down upon the children of men.’ Then the spirit of the Lord fell upon them and they were filled with joy, having received a remission of their sins.’ p. 162. King Benjamin ordered his people to take upon them the name of Christ, and in these remarkable words, - ’There is no other name given whereby salvation cometh; therefore I would that you should take upon you the name of Christ, all you that have entered into the covenant with God that ye should be obedient unto the end of your lives. - page 166. They all took upon them the name of Christ, and he having ordained them priests and teachers, and appointed his son, Mosiah, to reign in his stead, gave up the Ghost 476 years after Lehi’s escape from Jerusalem, and one hundred twenty-four before Christ was born, Mosiah gave up the plates of brass, and all the things which we had kept, to Alma the son of Alma, who was appointed ’chief judge and high priest,’ the people willing to have no king, and Mosiah died five hundred sixty-nine years from the time Lehi left Jerusalem. In the 14th year of the Judges, and 69 years before the birth of Jesus, they sent out missionary priests, who preached through all the tribes of the country against all vices, holding ’forth the coming of the soul of God, his sufferings, death and resurrection, and that he should appear unto them after his resurrection: and this the people did hear with great joy and gladness.’ - p. 268. Alma’s book reaches down to the end of the 39th year of the Judges. These were wonderful years - many cities were founded, many battles were fought, fortifications reared, letters written, and even in one year a certain Hagoth built an exceeding large ship, and launched it forth into the west sea. in this embarked many of the Nephites. This same ship-builder the next year built other ships, one was lost with all its passengers and crew. - p.406. Many prophecies were pronounced; one that in 400 years after the coming of Christ, the Nephites would lose their religion. During the time of the Judges, many were called christians by name, and ’baptism unto repentance’ was a common thing. ’And it came to pass that they did appoint priests and teachers through all the land, and over all the churches.’ - p.349. ’And those who did belong to the church were faithful, yea all those who were true believers in Christ took upon them gladly the name of Christ, or christians, as they were called, because of their belief in Christ.’ - Page 301. ’And it came to pass that there were many who died firmly believing that their souls were redeemed by the Lord Jesus Christ: thus they went out of the world rejoicing.’ - p. 353. The word was preached by Helaman, Shiblon, Corianton, Amnon, and his brethren, &c. yea and all those, who had been ordained by the holy order of God, being baptized unto repentance, and sent forth to preach unto the people.’ Page 623. This happened in the nineteenth year of the Judges, seventy-two years before the birth of Jesus. Before this time synagogues with pulpits were built, ’for the Zoramites,’ a sort of Episcopalians, ’gathered themselves together on one day of the week, which day they called the day of the Lord.’ - ’And they had a place which was high and lifted up, which held but one man, who read prayers, the same prayers every week; and this high place was called Rameumpton, which being interpreted, is the holy stand.’ - p.311. The book of Helaman reacheth down to the ninetieth year of the Judges, and to the year preceding that in which the Messiah was born. During the period embraced in Helaman’s narrative, many ten thousands were baptized. ’And behold the holy spirit of God did come down from heaven, and did enter into their hearts, and they were filled as with fire, and they could speak forth marvellous words.’ - p. 421. Masonry was invented about this time; for men began to bind themselves in secret oaths to aid one another in all things, good or evil. - p.424. Powers of loosing and binding in heaven were conferred upon Nephi, the son of Helaman, and all miraculous power, such as the apostles possessed. One Samuel, also foretold that ’the Christ would be born in five years, and that the night before should be as light as day; and that the day of his death should be a day of darkness like the night.’ - p.445. The book of this Nephi commences with the birth of the Messiah, six hundred years from the departure of Lehi from Jerusalem. In the midst of the threats of the infidels to slaughter the faithful, the sun set; but lo! the night was clear as mid-day, and from that period they changed their era, and counted time as we do. A star also appeared, but it is not stated how it could be seen in a night as bright as day; but it was universally seen throughout all the land, to the salvation of the pious from the threats of their enemies. The terrors of the day of his death are also stated, and in the thirty-fourth year from his nativity, after his resurrection, he descended from heaven and visited the people of Nephi. Jesus called upon them to examine his hands and his sides, as he did Thomas, though none of them had expressed a doubt. Two thousand five hundred men, women and children, one by one, examined him, and then worshipped him. He commanded Nephi to baptize, and gave him the words which he was to use, viz: ’Having authority given me, of Jesus Christ, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.’ He commissioned eleven others, who with Nephi, were his twelve American Apostles, and promised himself to baptize their converts ’with fire and with the Holy Spirit.’ He delivers them the sermon upon the mount, and some other sayings recorded in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; He healed all their diseases, and prayed for their children; but the things spoken were so great and marvellous that they could not be spoken nor written. He ordained one to administer the supper, who alone had authority to dispense it to the disciples baptized in his name. The only new commandments which were given to the American christians on his occasional visits which were repeated, were - ’Pray in your families unto the Father, always in my name, that your wives and your children may be blessed.’ ’Meet often, and forbid no man from coming unto you when you shall meet together.’ - p. 492. Nephi was chief among the twelve apostles: he baptized himself, and then baptized the eleven, whose names were Timothy, Jonas, Mathoni and Mathoninah, Kumen, Kumenonhi, Jeremiah, Shimnon, Jonas, Zedekiah, and Isaiah, They were baptized in fire and the Holy Ghost.’ Not a new word, however, should be written in addition to those found in the New Testament; for although he spake for several days to these American disciples, none of the new and marvellous sayings could be uttered or written! He inspected the plates of Nephi, and only found one omission, which was that he failed to mention the resurrection of many saints in America at the time of the tempest and earthquake. He commanded these Nephites to be called Christians. The book of Nephi the son of Nephi, gives, in four pages, the history of 320 years after Christ. In the thirty-sixth year, all the inhabitants of the land were converted; there was a perfect community and no disputations in the land for one hundred seventy years. Three of the American apostles were never to die, and were seen four hundred years after Christ; but what has become of them no one can tell, except Cowdery, Whitmer and Harris, the three witnesses of the truth of the plates of Nephi, be these three immortal men. Towards the close of the history of Nephi or the record Ammaron, sects and divisions and battles became frequent, and all goodness had almost left the continent in the year three hundred and twenty. Mormon appears next in the drama, the recording angel of the whole matter, who, by the way, was a mighty general and great christian; he commanded in one engagement forty-two thousand men against the Lamanites!!! He was no Quaker! This dreadful battle was fought A.D. 330. The Lamanites took South America for themselves, and gave North America to the Nephites. Mormon was very orthodox, for he preached in these words, A.D. 362: - ’That Jesus was the very Christ and the very God.’ He must have heard of the Arian controversy by some angel!! Moroni finishes what Mormon his father, left undone, and continues the history, till A.D. 400. He pleads that no one shall disbelieve his record because of its imperfections!! and declares that none who receive it will condemn it on account of its imperfections, and for not doing so, the same shall know greater things. p. - 532. ’He that condemneth it shall be in danger of hell fire.’ He laments the prevalency of free masonry in the times when his book should be dug up out of the earth, and proves that miracles will never cease; because God is the same yesterday, to day, and forever - consequently must always create suns, moons, and stars, every day!! He exhorted to ’take heed that none be baptized without telling their experience, nor partake of the sacrament of Christ unworthily?!! - p.537. Moroni, in the conclusion of his book of Mormon, says if his plates had been larger we should have written in Hebrew; but because of this difficulty he wrote in the ’Reformed Egyptian,’ being handed down and altered unto us according to our manner of speech. - p.538. ’Condemn me not,’ says he, ’because of mine imperfections; neither my father, because of his imperfections, neither them which have written before him; but rather give thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you our imperfections, that you may learn to be more wise than we have been.’ - p.538. A very necessary advice, indeed!! Moroni writes the book of Ether, containing an account of the people of Jared, who escaped from the building of the tower of Babel unconfounded in his language. These people of Jared, God marched before in a cloud, and directed them through the wilderness, and instructed them to build barges to cross seas; and finally they built eight barges, air tight, and were commanded to make a hole in the top to admit air, and one in the bottom to admit water, and in them were put sixteen windows of molten stone, which when touched by the finger of Jesus, became as transparent as glass, and gave them light under ’the mountain waves,’ and when above the water. He that touched these stones, appeared unto the brother of Jared, and said, behold I am Jesus Christ, I am the father and the son.’ Two of these stones were sealed up with the plates and became the spectacles of Joseph Smith, according to a prediction uttered before Abraham was born. It was also foretold in the book of Ether, written by Moroni, that he that should find the plates should have the privilege of showing the plates unto those who shall assist to bring forth this work, and unto three shall they be shown by the power of God: wherefore they shall of a surety known that these things are true. - p.548. And the 8 barges, air-tight, made like ducks, after swimming and diving 334 days, arrived on the coasts of the land of promise. The book of Ether relates the wars and carnage amongst these people. In the lapse of generations, they counted two millions of mighty men, besides women and children, slain; and finally, they were all killed but one, and he fell to the earth as if he had no life. So ends the book of Ether. -p.573. The book of Moroni details the manner of ordaining priests and teachers, the manner of administering ordinances, and the epistles of Mormon to his soon Moroni. Moroni seal up the record A.D. 420, and assures the world that spiritual gifts shall never cease, only through unbelief. And when the plates of Nephi should be dug out of the earth, he declares that men should ask God the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, ’If these things were not true.’ ’If with a sincere heart and real intent, having faith in Christ, such prayers are made, ye shall know the truth of all things.’ -p.586. The testimony of Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris, asserting that they saw the plates, is appended. They also testify that they know that they have been translated by the gift and power of God, for his voice has declared it unto them. Another testimony is appended signed by four Whitmers, one Hiram Page, and three Smiths, affirming that they saw the plates, handled them, and that Smith has got the plates in his possession. Such is an analysis of the book of Mormon, the bible of the Mormonites. For noticing of which I would have asked forgiveness from all my readers, had not several hundred persons of different denominations believed in it. On this account alone has it become necessary to notice it, and for the same reason we must examine its pretensions to divine authority; for it purports to be a revelation from God. And in the first place, we shall examine its internal evidences. INTERNAL EVIDENCES. It admits the Old and New Testaments to contain the revelations, institutions and commandments of God to Patriarchs, Jews, and Gentiles, down to the year 1830, and always, as such, speaks of them and quotes them. This admission at once blasts its pretensions to credibility. Admitting the bible now received to have come from God, it is impossible that the book of Mormon came from the same author. For the following reasons: - 1. Smith, its real author, as ignorant and impudent a knave as ever wrote a book, betrays the cloven foot in basing his whole book upon a false fact, or a pretended fact, which makes God a liar. It is this: - With the Jews, God made a covenant at Mount Sinai, and instituted a priesthood and a high priesthood. The priesthood he gave to the tribe of Levi, and the high priesthood to Aaron and his sons for an everlasting priesthood. He separated Levi, and covenanted to give him this office irrevocably while ever the temple stood, or till the Messiah came. ’Then, says God Moses shall appoint Aaron and his sons, and they shall wait on their priest’s office, and the stranger, (the person of another family,) who cometh nigh, shall be put to death.’ Numbers 3:10. ’And the priests, the sons of Levi, shall come near; for them the Lord thy God hath chosen to minister unto him, and to bless in the name of the Lord, and by their word shall every controversy and every stroke be tried.’ Deuteronomy 21:5. Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, with 250 men of renown, rebelled against a part of the institution of the priesthood, and the Lord destroyed them in the presence of the whole congregation. This was to be a memorial that no stranger invade any part of the office of the priesthood. Numbers 16:40. Fourteen thousand and seven hundred of the people were destroyed by a plague for murmuring against this memorial. In Numbers 18:1-32 the Levites are again given to Aaron and his sons, and the priesthood confirmed to them with this threat - ’The stranger that cometh night shall be put to death.’ ’Even Jesus, says Paul, were he on earth, could not be a priest, for he was of a tribe concerning which Moses spake nothing of priesthood.’ Hebrews 7:13. So irrevocable was the grant of the priesthood to Levi, and of the high priesthood to Aaron, that no stranger dare approach the altar of God which Moses established. Hence, Jesus himself was excluded from officiating as priest on earth according to the law. This Joseph Smith overlooked in his impious fraud, and makes his hero Lehi spring from Joseph. And just as soon as his sons return with the roll of his lineage, ascertaining that he was of the tribe of Joseph, he and his sons acceptably ’offer sacrifices and burnt offerings to the Lord.’ - p.15. Also it is repeated, p. 18 - Nephi became chief artificer, ship-builder and mariner; was scribe, prophet, priest and king unto his own people, and ’consecrated Jacob and Joseph, the sons of his father, priests to God and teachers - almost six hundred years before the fulness of the times of the Jewish economy was completed. p.72. Nephi represents himself withal as ’under the law of Moses,’ p. 105. They build a temple in the new world, and in 55 years after they leave Jerusalem, make a new priesthood which God approbates. A high priest is also consecrated, and yet they are all the while ’teaching the law of Moses, and exhorting the people to keep it! - p.146,209. Thus God is represented as instituting, approbating and blessing a new priesthood from the tribe of Joseph, concerning which Moses gave no commandment concerning priesthood. Although God had promised in the law of Moses, that if any man, not of the tribe and family of Levi and Aaron, should approach the office of priest, he would surely die; he is represented by Smith as blessing, approbating, and sustaining another family in this approbated office. The God of Abraham or Joseph Smith must then be a liar!! And who will hesitate to pronounce him an imposter? This lie runs through his records for the first six hundred years of his story. 2. This ignorant and impudent liar, in the next place, makes the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, violate his covenants with Israel and Judah, concerning the land of Canaan, by promising a new land to the pious Jew. If a company of reprobate Jews had departed from Jerusalem and the temple, in the days of Zedekiah, and founded a new colony, it would not have been so incongruous. But to represent God as inspiring a devout Jew and a prophet, such as Levi and Nephi are represented by Smith, with a resolution to forsake Jerusalem and God’s own house, and to depart from the land which God swore to their fathers so long as they were obedient; and to guide by a miracle and to bless by prodigies a good man in forsaking God’s covenant and worship - is so monstrous an error, that language fails to afford a name for it. It is to make God violate his own covenants, and set at nought his own promises, and to convert his own curses into blessings. Excision from the commonwealth of Israel, and banishment from Jerusalem and the temple, were the greatest curses the law of Moses knew. But Smith makes a good and pious Jew the subject of this curse, and sends him off into the inhospitable wilderness, disinherits him in Canaan, and makes him more happy in forsaking the institutions of Moses, more intelligent in the wilderness, and more prosperous in adversity, than even the Jews in their best days, in the best of lands, and under the best of all governments!!! The imposter was too ignorant of the history of the Jews and the nature of the covenants of promise, to have even alluded to them in his book, if he had not supposed that he had the plates of Moses in his own keeping, as he had his ’molten plates’ of Nephi. To separate a family from the nation of Israel, was to accumulate all the curses of the law upon that family. - Deuteronomy 29:21. 3. He has more of the Jews, living in the new world, than could have been numbered any where else, even in the days of John the Baptist; and has placed them under a new dynasty. The sceptre, with him, has departed from Judah, and a lawgiver from among his descendants, hundreds of years before Shiloh came; and king Benjamin is a wiser and more renowned king than king Solomon. He seems to have gone upon an adage which saith, ’the more marvellous, the more credible the tale,’ and the less of fact, and the more of fiction, the more intelligible and reasonable the narrative. 4. He represents the temple worship as continued in his new land of promise contrary to every precept of the law, and so happy are the people of Nephi as never to shed a tear on account of the excision, nor turn an eye toward Jerusalem or God’s temple. The pious Jews in their captivity turned their faces to Jerusalem and the holy place, and remembered God’s promises concerning the place where he recorded his name. They hung their harps upon the willow, and could not sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land; but the Nephites have not a single wish for Jerusalem, for they can, in their wigwam temple, in the wilderness of America, enjoy more of God’s presence than the most righteous Jew could enjoy in that house of which David had rather be a doorkeeper, than to dwell in the tabernacles of men. And all this too, when God’s only house of prayer, according to his covenant with Israel, stood in Jerusalem. 5. Malachi, the last of the Jewish prophets, commanded Israel to regard the law of Moses till the Messiah came. And Moses commanded them to regard him till the Great Prophet came. But Nephi and Smith’s prophets institute ordinances and observances for the Jews, subversive of Moses, 500 years before the Great Prophet came. 6. Passing over a hundred similar errors, we shall next notice his ignorance of the New Testament matters and things. The twelve Apostles of the Lamb, are said by Paul, to have developed certain secrets, which were hid for ages and generations, which Paul says were ordained before the world to their glory, that they should have the honor of announcing them. But Smith makes his pious hero Nephi, 600 years before the Messiah began to preach, and disclose these secrets concerning the calling of the Gentiles, and the blessings flowing through the Messiah to Jews and Gentiles, which Paul says were hid for ages and generations, ’which in these ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto us the holy Apostles and prophets, by the spirit; that the Gentiles should be fellow heirs and of the same body and partakers of his promise in Christ by the Gospel.’ Smith makes Nephi express every truth found in the writings of the Apostles concerning the calling and blessing of the Gentiles, and even quotes the 11th chapter of Romans, and many other passages before he had a son grown in the wilderness able to aim an arrow at a deer. Paul says these things were secrets and unknown until his time; but Smith makes Nephi say the same things 600 years before Paul was converted! One of the two is a false prophet. Mormonites, take your choice! 7. This prophet Smith, through his stone spectacles, wrote on the plates of Nephi, in his book of Mormon, every error and almost every truth discussed in N. York for the last ten years. He decides all the great controversies - infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of freemasonry, republican government, and the rights of man. All these topics are repeatedly alluded to. How much more benevolent and intelligent this American Apostle, than were the holy twelve, and Paul to assist them!!! He prophesied of all these topics, and of the apostacy, and infallibly decided, by his authority, every question. How easy to prophecy of the past or of the present time!! 8. But he is better skilled in the controversies in New York than in the geography or history of Judea. He makes John baptize in the village of Bethabara, (page 22) and says Jesus was born in Jerusalem, p. 240. Great must be the faith of the Mormonites in this new Bible!!! The mariners compass was only known in Europe about 300 years ago; but Nephi knew all about steam boats and the compass 2400 years ago. 9. He represents the Christian institution as practised among his Israelites before Jesus was born. And his Jews are called Christians while keeping the law of Moses, the holy sabbath, and worshipping in their temple at their altars, and by their high priests. 10. But not to honor him by a too minute examination and exposition, I will sum up the whole of the internal evidence which I deem worthy of remark, in the following details: - The book professes to be written at intervals and by different persons during the long period of 1020 years. And yet for uniformity of style, there never was a book more evidently written by one set of fingers, nor more certainly conceived in one cranium since the first book appeared in human language, than this same book. If I could swear to any man’s voice, face or person, assuming different names, I could swear that this book was written by one man. And as Joseph Smith is a very ignorant man and is called the author on the title page, I cannot doubt for a single moment that he is the sole author and proprietor of it. As a specimen of his style the reader will take the following samples - Page 4th. In his own preface: - ’The plates of which hath been spoken.’ In the last page, ’the plates of which hath been spoken.’ In the certificate signed by Cowdery and his two witnesses, he has the same idiom, ’which came from the tower of which hath been spoken;’ page 16, ’we are a descendant of Joseph.’ ’The virgin which thou seest is the mother of God.’ ’Behold the Lamb of God the Eternal Father,’ p. 25; ’Ye are like unto they,’ ’and I saith unto them,’ p.44. ’We did arrive to the promised land;’ p.49, ’made mention upon the first plate,’ p.50. Nephi 2400 years ago hears the saying of a Pagan who lived 634 years after him - ’The God of nature suffers.’ p.51. ’The righteous need not fear, for it is they which shall not be confounded.’ p.58. Shakespeare was read by Nephi 2200 years before he was born - ’The silent grave from whence no traveller returns,’ 61. ’Your own eternal welfare’ was a phrase then common in America, p.62. ’Salvation is free’ was then announced. ’That Jesus should rise from the dead’ was repeatedly declared on this continent in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. And at the same time it was said, ’Messiah cometh in the fullness of time that he might redeem the children of men from the fall;’ p.65. ’The fall’ was frequently spoken of at the Isthmus of Darien 2400 years ago. I had no object, says Nephi, in the reign of Zedekiah, ’but the everlasting salvation of your souls.’ 66. ’I had spake many things,’ ’for a more history part are written upon mine other plates.’ 69. ’Do not anger again because of mine enemies,’ p. 70. ’For it behoveth the Great Creator that he die for all men.’ ’It must needs be an infinite atonement.’ ’This flesh must go to its mother earth.’ ’And this death must deliver up its dead,’ p.70, were common phrases 2300 years ago - ’for the atonement satisfieth the demands of his justice upon all those who have not the law given them,’ p. 81. The Calvinists were in America before Nephi. ’The Lord remembereth all they,’ 85. The atonement is infinite for all mankind,’ p.104. The Americans knew this on the Columbo 2400 years ago. ’His name shall be called Jesus Christ the Son of God.’ An angel told this to Nephi 545 years before it was told to Mary, p.105. ’And they shall teach with their learning and deny the Holy Ghost which giveth them utterance;’ this prophecy was at that time delivered against us, p.112. ’My words shall hiss forth unto the ends of the earth,’ p.115. ’Wherein did the Lamb of God fill all the righteousness in being baptized by water,’ 118. This question was discussed 2300 years ago. ’The baptism by fire and the Holy Ghost was preached in the days of Cyrus,’ p.119. ’The only true doctrine of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost which is one God without end. Amen,’ p.120. This was decided in the time of Daniel the Prophet. ’I glory in plainness,’ says Nephi. ’Christ will show you that these are his words in the last day,’ p.122. Too late to prove your mission, Mr. Nephi! ’After that ye have obtained a hope in Christ, ye shall obtain riches if you seek them.’ So spoke Jacob in the days of Ezekial the Prophet. ’They believed in Christ and worshipped the Father in his name,’ p.129. This was said by Jacob in the time of Daniel. ’Do as ye hath hitherto done,’ says Mosiah, page 158. These Smithisms are in every page. ’And his mother shall be called Mary.’ p.160. ’The Son of God and Father of heaven and earth.’ p.161. ’The infant perisheth not, that dieth in his infancy.’ ’For the natural man is an enemy of God and was from the fall of Adam, and will be forever and ever,’ p.161. This was spoken by King Benjamin 124 years before Christ. He was a Yankee, too, for he spoke like Smith, saying, ’I who ye call your king.’ ’They saith unto the king,’ p.182. This was another Joseph Smith called Mosiah. ’They were baptized in the waters of Mormon, and were called the church of Christ,’ p.192. This happened 100 years before Christ was born. ’Alma, why persecuteth thou the church of God,’ p.222. ’Ye must be born again; yea, born of God - changed from their carnal and fallen state to a state of righteousness,’ 214. This was preached also 100 years before Christ was born. ’These things had not ought to be,’ 220. ’I, Alma, being consecrated by my father Alma to be a high priest over the church of God, he having power and authority from God to do these things (p. 232) say unto you, except ye repent ye can in no wise enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.’ 237. ’He ordained priests and elders, by laying on his hands, to watch over the church’ - ’Not so much as a hair of the head shall be lost in the grave’ - ’The holy order of the high priesthood.’ p.250. The high priesthood of Alma was about 80 years before Christ. ’The Lord poured out his spirit to prepare the minds of the people for the preaching of Alma, preaching repentance.’ p.268. Alma was a Yankee of Smith’s school, for he saith: ’The light of everlasting light was lit up in his soul.’ p.47. During the pontificate of Alma men prayed thus: ’If there is a God, and if thou art God wilt thou make thyself known unto me.’ p.286. Alma ’clapped his hands upon all they which were with him.’ p.313. ’Instruments in the hand of God’ were the preachers of Alma. p.323. Modest and orthodox men, truly! ’If ye deny the Holy Ghost when it once hath place in you, and ye know that ye deny, behold this is the unpardonable sin.’ p.332. So Alma preached. ’And now my son, ye are called of God to preach the Gospel.’ p.340. ’They were high priests over the church.’ p.350. ’The twenty and second year of the Judges this came to pass.’ p.364. ’They were valiant for courage.’ p.376. These are but as one drop out of a bucket compared with the amount of Smithisms in this book. It is patched up and cemented with ’And it came to pass’ - ’I sayeth unto you’ - ’Ye saith unto him’ - and all the King James’ HATHS, DIDS and DOTHS - in the lowest imitation of the common version; and is, without exaggeration, the meanest book in the English language; but it is a translation made through stone spectacles, in a dark room, and in the hat of the prophet Smith from the REFORMED EGYPTIAN!! It has not one good sentence in it, save the profanation of those sentences quoted from the Oracles of the living God. I would as soon compare a bat to the American eagle, a mouse to a mammoth, or the deformities of a spectre to the beauties of Him whom John saw in Patmos, as to contrast it with a single chapter in all the writings of the Jewish or Christian prophets. It is as certainly Smith’s fabrication as Satan is the father of lies, or darkness the offspring of night. So much for the internal evidences of the Book of Mormon. Its external evidences are, first, the testimony of the prophets Cowdery, Whitmer, and Harris; who saw the plates and heard the voice of God; who are disinterested retailers of the books. I would ask them how they knew that it was God’s voice which they heard - but they would tell me to ask God in faith. THAT IS, I MUST BELIEVE IT FIRST, AND THEN ASK GOD IF IT BE TRUE! ’Tis better to take Nephi’s proof which is promised to us in the day of final judgment! They say that spiritual gifts are continued to the end of time among the true believers. They are true believers - have they wrought any miracles? They have tried, but their faith failed. Can they show any spiritual gift? Yes, they can mutter Indian and traffic in new Bibles. ’But Smith is the wonder of the world.’ So was the Apocalyptic beast! ’an ignorant young man.’ That needs no proof. Gulliver’s travels is a heroic problem in comparison of this book of Smith. ’But he cannot write a page.’ Neither could Mahomet, who gave forth the Alcoran. ’Smith is an honest looking fellow.’ So was Simon Magus, the sorcerer. ’But he was inspired.’ So was Judas, by Satan. Its external evidences are also the subscriptions of four Whitmers, three Smiths, and one Page, the relatives and connexions of Joseph Smith, junior. And these ’men handled as many of the brazen or golden leaves as the said Smith translated.’ So did I. But Smith has got the plates of which hath been spoken. Let him show them. Their certificate proves nothing, save that Smith wrote it, and they signed it. But Smith gives testimony himself. There is one who says, ’If I bear testimony of myself, my testimony ought not to be regarded.’ If this prophet and his three prophetic witnesses had aught of speciosity about them or their book, we would have examined it and exposed it in a different manner. I have never felt myself so fully authorized to address mortal man in the style in which Paul addressed Elymas the sorcerer as I feel towards this Atheist Smith. His three witnesses, I am credibly informed, on one of their horse- swapping and prophetic excursions in the Sandusky country, having bartered horses three times for once preaching, represented Walter Scott and myself as employed in translating these plates, and as believers in the book of Mormon. If there was any thing plausible about Smith, I would say to those who believe him to be a prophet, hear the question which Moses put into the mouth of the Jews, and his answer to it - ’And if thou say in thine heart, HOW SHALL WE KNOW THE WORD WHICH THE LORD HATH NOT SPOKEN?’ - Does he answer, ’ASK THE LORD AND HE WILL TELL YOU?’ - Does he say ’Wait till the day of judgment and you will know?’ Nay, indeed; but - ’When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken; the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: THOU SHALT NOT BE AFRAID OF HIM.’ Deuteronomy 18:8. Smith has failed in every instance to verify one of his own sayings. Again, I would say in the words of the Lord by Isaiah, ’Bring forth your strong reasons, saith the King of Jacob: let them bring them forth and show us what shall happen: let them show the former things what they mean, that we may consider them, and know the latter end of them - show the things which are to come hereafter, that we may know that you are prophets: yea, do good or do evil, that we may be dismayed and behold it together. Behold you are nothing, and your work of naught: an abomination is every one that chooseth you.’ Isaiah 41:21-23. Let the children of Mormon ponder well, if yet reason remains with them, the following passage from Isaiah 44:1-28; and if they cannot see the analogy between themselves and the sons of ancient imposture, then reason is of as little use to them as it was to those of whom the prophet spake - ’The carpenters having chosen a piece of wood framed it by rule and glued the parts together, and made it in the form of a man, and with the comeliness of a man, to set it in a house. He cut wood from the forest which the Lord planted - a pine tree, which the rain had nourished, that it might be fuel for the use of man: and having taken some of it he warmed himself; and with other pieces they made a fire and baked cakes, and of the residue they made gods and worshipped them. Did he not burn half of it in the fire, and, with the coals of that half bake cakes: and having roasted meat with it did he not eat and was satisfied; and when warmed say, "Aha! I am warmed, I have enjoyed the fire?" Yet of the residue he made a carved god, and worshipped it, and prayeth to it, saying, "Deliver me, for thou art my God." ’They had not sense to think; for they were so involved in darkness that they could not see with their eyes, nor understand with their hearts: nor did any reason in his mind, nor by his understanding recollect, that he had burned half of it in the fire, and on the coals thereof baked cakes, and had roasted flesh and eaten, and of the residue had made an abomination; so they bow themselves down to it. Know thou that their heart is ashes, and they are led astray and none can deliver his soul. Take a view of it, will you not say, "There is indeed a lie in my right hand?" ’Remember these things, O Jacob, even thou Israel, for thou art my servant. I have made thee my servant; therefore O Israel do not thou forget me. For, lo! I have made thy transgressions vanish like a cloud - and thy sins like the murky vapor. Return to me, and I will redeem thee.’ A. CAMPBELL. February 10, 1831. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 50: 03.00. THE CHRISTIAN SYSTEM ======================================================================== THE CHRISTIAN SYSTEM, IN REFERENCE TO THE U N I O N O F C H R I S T I A N S, AND A RESTORATION OF P R I M I T I V E C H R I S T I A N I T Y, AS PLEAD IN THE CURRENT REFORMATION BY A. CAMPBELL, BETHANY, VA. PRINTED BY A. CAMPBELL. PUBLISHED BY Forrester & Campbell, PITTSBURG. 1839 ======================================================================== CHAPTER 51: 03.000. TABLE OF CONTENTS. ======================================================================== TABLE OF CONTENTS Title Page. Preface. Preface to the Second Edition. Chapter I: The Universe. Chapter II: The Bible. Chapter III: God. Chapter IV: The Son of God. Chapter V: The Spirit of God. Chapter VI: Man As He Was. Chapter VII: Man As He Is. Chapter VIII: The Purposes of God Concerning Man. Chapter IX: Religion for Man, and Not Man for Religion. Chapter X: Sacrifice for Sin. Chapter XI: The Attributes of a Real Sin-Offering. Chapter XII: Christ the Light of the World. Chapter XIII: The Lordship of the Messiah. Chapter XIV: Faith in Christ. Chapter XV: Repentance. Chapter XVI: Baptism. Chapter XVII: The Christian Confession of Faith. Chapter XVIII: Conversion, Regeneration. Chapter XIX: Christians Are Persons Pardoned, Justified, Sanctified, Adopted, Saved. Chapter XX: The Gift of the Holy Spirit. Chapter XXI: The Christian Hope. Chapter XXII: The Doom of the Wicked. Chapter XXIII: Summary of the Christian System of Facts. Chapter XXIV: The Body of Christ. Chapter XXV: The Christian Ministry. Chapter XXVI: The Christian Discipline. Chapter XXVII: Expediency. Chapter XXVIII: Heresy. Foundation of Christian Union. Kingdom of Heaven. Remission of Sins. Regeneration. Breaking the Loaf. Concluding Addresses. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 52: 03.0000. PREFACE ======================================================================== P R E F A C E. SINCE the full development of the great apostasy foretold by Prophets and Apostles, numerous attempts at reformation have been made. Three full centuries, carrying with them the destinies of countless millions, have passed into eternity since the Lutheran effort to dethrone the Man of Sin. During this period many great and wonderful changes have taken place in the political, literary, moral, and religious conditions of society. That the nations composing the western half of the Roman empire have already been greatly benefited by that effort, scientifically, politically, and morally, no person acquainted with either political or ecclesiastical history can reasonably doubt. Time, that great arbiter of human actions, that great revealer of secrets, has long decided that all the reformers of the Papacy have been public benefactors. And thus the Protestant Reformation is proved to have been one of the most splendid eras in the history of the world, and must long be regarded by the philosopher and the philanthropist as one of the most gracious interpositions in behalf of the whole human race. We Americans owe out national privileges and our civil liberties to the Protestant reformers. They achieved not only an imperishable fame for themselves, but a rich legacy for their posterity. When we contrast the present state of these United States with Spanish America, and the condition of the English nation with that of Spain, Portugal, and Italy, we begin to appreciate how much we are indebted to the intelligence, faith, and courage of Martin Luther and his heroic associates in that glorious reformation. He restored the Bible to the world A. D. 1534, and boldly defended its claims against the impious and arrogant pretensions of the haughty and tyrannical See of Rome. But, unfortunately, at his death there was no Joshua to lead the people, who rallied under the banners of the Bible, out of the wilderness in which Luther died. His tenets were soon converted into a new state religion, and the spirit of reformation which he excited and inspired was soon quenched by the broils and feuds of the Protestant princes and the collisions of rival political interests, both on the continent and in the islands of Europe. While Protestant hatred to the Roman Pontiff and the Papacy continued to increase, a secret lust in the bosoms of Protestants for ecclesiastical power and patronage worked in the members of the Protestant Popes, who gradually assimilated the new church to the old. Creeds and manuals, synods and councils, soon shackled the minds of men, and the spirit of reformation gradually forsook the Protestant church, or was supplanted by the spirit of the world. Calvin renewed the speculative theology of Saint Augustine, and Geneva in a few years became the Alexandria of modern Europe. The power of religion was soon merged in debates about forms and ceremonies, in speculative strifes of opinion, and in fierce debates about the political and religious right of burning heretics. Still, however, in all these collisions much light was elicited; and had it not been for these extremes, it is problematical whether the wound inflicted upon the Man of Sin would have been as incurable as it has since proved itself to be. Reformation, however, became the order of the day; and this, assuredly, was a great matter, however it may have been managed! It was a revolution, and revolutions seldom move backward. The example that Luther set was of more value than all the achievements of Charles V., or the literary and moral labors of his distinguished contemporary, the erudite Erasmus. It is curious to observe how extremes begot extremes in every step of the reformation cause, to the dawn of the present century. The penances, works of faith and of supererogation, of the Roman church, drove Luther and Calvin to the ultraism of "faith alone." After the Protestants had debated their own principles with one another till they lost all brotherly affection, and would as soon have "communed in the sacrament" with the Catholics as with one another; speculative abstracts of Christian Platonism, the sublime mysteries of Egyptian theology, became alternately the bond of union and the apple of discord, among the fathers and friends of the reformation. The five great dogmas of the Geneva reformer were carried to Amsterdam, and generated in the mind of James Arminius in 1591 five opposite opinions; and these at the synod of Dort, in 1618, formed a new party of Remonstrants. Into Britain, with whose history we are more immediately concerned, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Arminianism were soon imported; and, like all raw materials there introduced, were immediately manufactured anew. They were all exotics, but easily acclimated, and soon flourished in Britain more luxuriantly than in their native soil. But the beggarly elements of opinions, forms, and ceremonies to which they gave rise, caused the "Spirit alone" to germinate in the mind of George Fox, in little more than half a century after the introduction of the Leyden theology. In Lord Chatham’s days, the Episcopal church, as his Lordship declares, was a singular compound--"A Popish liturgy, Calvinistic articles, and an Arminian clergy." But every few years caused a new dissension and reformation, until the kirk of Scotland and the church of England have been compelled to respect, in some good degree, the rights of conscience, even in dissenters themselves. Abroad it was no better. The Saxon reformer had his friends; John of Picardy, lived in the grateful remembrance of the Geneva family; and James of Amsterdam, speculated in a very liberal style amongst all the Remonstrants at home and abroad. In Sweden, Holland, Germany, England, Scotland, the debate varied not essentially: the Pope against the Protestants--the Lutherans against the Calvinists--the Calvinists against the Arminians--the Bishops against the Presbyters--and the Presbyterians among themselves; until, by the potency of metaphysics and politics, they are now frittered down to various parties. While philosophy, mysticism, and politics drove the parties to every question into antipodal extremes; while justification by metaphysical faith alone; while the forms and ceremonies of all sects begat the "Spirit alone" in the mind of George Fox, while the Calvinian five points generated the Arminian five points; and while the Westminster Creed, though unsubscribed by its makers, begot a hundred others--not until within the present generation did any sect or party in Christendom unite and build upon the Bible alone. Since that time, the first effort known to us to abandon the whole controversy about creeds and reformations, and to restore primitive Christianity, or to build alone upon the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ himself the chief corner, has been made. Tired of new creeds and new parties in religion, and of the numerous abortive efforts to reform the reformation; convinced from the Holy Scriptures, from observation and experience, that the union of the disciples of Christ is essential to the conversion of the world, and that the correction and improvement of no creed, or partizan establishment in Christendom, could ever become the basis of such a union, communion, and co-operation, as would restore peace to a church militant against itself, or triumph to the common salvation; a few individuals, about the commencement of the present century, began to reflect upon the ways and means to restore primitive Christianity. This led to a careful, most conscientious, and prayerful examination of the grounds and reasons of the present state of things in all the Protestant sects. On examination of the history of all the platforms and constitutions of all these sects, it appeared evident as mathematical demonstration itself, that neither the Augsburg articles of faith and opinion, nor the Westminster, nor the Wesleyan, nor those of any state creed or dissenting establishment, could ever improve the condition of things, restore union to the church, peace to the world, or success to the gospel of Christ. As the Bible was said and constantly affirmed to be the religion of Protestants, it was for some time a mysterious problem why the Bible alone, confessed and acknowledged, should work no happier results than the strifes, divisions, and retaliatory excommunications of rival Protestant sects. It appeared, however, in this case, after a more intimate acquaintance with the details of the inner temple of sectarian Christianity, as in many similar cases, that it is not the acknowledgment of a good rule, but the walking by it, that secures the happiness of society. The Bible in the lips, and the creed of the head and in the heart, will not save the church from strife, emulation, and schism. There is no moral, ecclesiastical, or political good, by simply acknowledging it in word. It must be obeyed. In our ecclesiastical pilgrimage we have occasionally met with some vehement declaimers against human written creeds, and pleaders for the Bible alone, who were all the while preaching up the opinions of saint Arius or saint Athanasius. Their sentiments, language, style, and general views of the gospel were as human as auricular confession, extreme unction, or purgatorial purification. The Bible alone is the Bible only, in word and deed, in profession and practice; and this alone can reform the world and save the church. Judging others we once judged ourselves, there are not a few who are advocating the Bible alone, and preaching their own opinions. Before we applied the Bible alone to our views, or brought our views and religious practice to the Bible, we plead the old theme,--"The Bible alone is the religion of Protestants." But we found it an arduous task, and one of twenty years’ labor, to correct our diction and purify our speech according to the Bible alone; and even yet we have not wholly practically repudiated the language of Ashdod. We only profess to work and walk by the rules which will inevitably issue in a pure speech, and in right conceptions of that pure, and holy, and celestial thing called Christianity--in faith, in sentiment, and in practice. A deep and an abiding impression that the power, the consolations, and joys--the holiness and happiness--of Christ’s religion were lost in the forms and ceremonies, in the speculations and conjectures, in the feuds and bickerings of sects and schisms, originated a project many years ago for uniting the sects, or rather the Christians in all the sects, upon a clear and scriptural bond of union--upon having a "thus saith the Lord," either in express terms, or in approved precedent, "for every article of faith, and item of religious practice." This was offered in the year 1809, in the "Declaration and Address" of the Washington Association, Pennsylvania. It was first tendered to the parties that confessed the Westminster creed; but equally submitted to the Protestants of every name, making faith in Christ and obedience to him the only test of Christian character, and the only bond of church union, communion, and co-operation. It was indeed approved by all; but adopted and practiced by none, except the few, or part of the few, who made the overture. None of us who either got up or sustained that project, was then aware of what havoc that said principle, if faithfully applied, would have made of our views and practices on various favorite points. When we take a close retrospective view of the last thirty years, (for we have a pretty distinct recollection of our travel’s history for that period,) and of the workings of that principle in heart and life, with which we commenced our public career in the work of the Lord; we know not how to express our astonishment better than in the following parable:-- A citizen of the West had a very promising young vineyard on a fruitful hill. He had no practical knowledge in the cultivation of the grape; but had read much and largely upon the dressing, pruning, and managing of the vine. He built himself a wine-vat, and prepared all the implements for the vintage. But he lacked practical skill in using the pruning knife. His vines flourished exceedingly, and stretched forth their tendrils on every side; but he had no vintage. A vine-dresser from Oporto one day presented himself as he was musing upon his disappointments. He was celebrated in his profession, and the most skilful in all the affairs of the vineyard. The owner of the vineyard having employed him to dress and keep his vineyard, set out on a long journey for a few weeks. On his return and visit to his farm, he walked out one day to his vineyard; when, to his amazement, he saw the ground literally covered with prunings of his vines. The vine-dresser had very skillfully and freely used the pruning hook, and had left little more than the roots and naked stems of the vines standing by the frames. ’My vineyard is ruined! My hopes blighted! I am undone! I am ruined!’ exclaimed the unhappy husbandman. ’Unhappy wretch! you have deceived me; you have robbed me of the labors of five years, and blasted, in one single moon, all my bright hopes for years to come!’ The vine-dresser stood appalled; but soon as the tempest subsided, ventured to say,--’Master, I will serve you five years for nothing, if we gather not more grapes and have not a better vineyard this year, than you have gathered in all the years since you planted these vines.’ The proprietor of the vintage withdrew, saying,--’It is impossible! It is impossible!’ and visited it not again till invited by his vine-dresser about the middle of autumn; when, to his still greater astonishment, and much more to his gratification, he found incomparably more grapes than hitherto gathered from his vines, and of a much more delicious quality. So in the case before us, the application of the principle already stated trimmed us so naked, that we strongly inclined to suspect its fallacy, and had well nigh abandoned it as a deceitful speculation. Time, however, the great teacher, and Experience, that great critic, have fully assured us that the principle is a salutary one, and that although we seemingly lose much by its application, our loss consists only of barren opinions, fruitless speculations, and useless traditions, that only cumber the ground and check the word, so that it is in a good measure unfruitful. We flatter ourselves that the principles are now clearly and fully developed by the united efforts of a few devoted and ardent minds, who set out determined to sacrifice everything to truth, and follow her wherever she might lead the way: I say, the principles on which the church of Jesus Christ--all believers in Jesus as the Messiah--can be united with honor to themselves, and with blessings to the world; on which the gospel and its ordinances can be restored in all their primitive simplicity, excellency, and power, and the church shine as a lamp that burneth to the conviction and salvation of the world:--I say, the principles by which these things can be done are now developed, as well as the principles themselves, which together constitute the original gospel and order of things established by the Apostles. The object of this volume is to place before the community in a plain, definite, and perspicuous style, the capital principles which have been elicited, argued out, developed, and sustained in a controversy of twenty-five years, by the tongues and pens of those who rallied under the banners of the Bible alone. The principle which was inscribed upon our banners when we withdrew from the ranks of the sects, was, ’Faith in Jesus as the true Messiah, and obedience to him as our Lawgiver and King, the ONLY TEST of Christian character, and the ONLY BOND of Christian union, communion, and co-operation, irrespective of all creeds, opinions, commandments, and traditions of men.’ This cause, like every other, was first plead by the tongue; afterwards by the pen and the press. The history of its progress corresponds with the history of every other religious revolution, in this respect--that different points, at different times, almost exclusively engrossed the attention of its pleaders. We began with the outposts and vanguard of the opposition. Soon as we found ourselves in the possession of one post our artillery was turned against another; and as fast as the smoke of the enemy receded we advanced upon his lines. The first piece that was written on the subject of the great position, appeared from the pen of THOMAS CAMPBELL, Senior, in the year 1809. An association was formed that year for the dissemination of the principles of reformation; and the piece alluded to was styled "The Declaration and Address of the Christian Association of Washington, Pennsylvania." The constitutional principle of this "Christian Association" and its object are clearly expressed in the following resolution:--"That this society, formed for the sole purpose of promoting simple evangelical Christianity, shall, to the utmost of its power, countenance and support such ministers, and such only, as exhibit a manifest conformity to the Original Standard, in conversation and doctrine, in zeal and diligence; only such as reduce to practice the simple original form of Christianity, expressly exhibited upon the sacred page, without attempting to inculcate any thing of human authority, of private opinion, or inventions of men, as having any place in the constitution, faith, or worship of the Christian church; or any thing as matter of Christian faith or duty, for which there cannot be produced a ’thus saith the Lord,’ either in express terms or by approved precedent." The ground occupied in this resolution afforded ample documents of debate. Every inch of it was debated, argued, canvassed, for several years, in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio. On this bottom we put to sea, with scarcely hands enough to man the ship. We had head winds and rough seas for the first seven years. A history of which would be both curious and interesting. But to contradistinguish this plea and effort from some others almost contemporaneous with it, we would emphatically remark, that, while the remonstrants warred against human creeds, evidently because those creeds warred against their own private opinions and favorite dogmas, which they wished to substitute for those creeds,--this enterprise, so far as it was hostile to those creeds, warred against them, not because of their hostility to any private or favorite opinions which were desired to be substituted for them; but because those human institutions supplanted the Bible, made the word of God of non-effect, were fatal to the intelligence, union, purity, holiness, and happiness of the disciples of Christ, and hostile to the salvation of the world. Unitarians, for example, have warred against human creeds, because those creeds taught Trinitarianism. Arminians, too, have been hostile to creeds, because those creeds supported Calvinism. It has, indeed, been alleged that all schismatics, good and bad, since the days of John Wickliffe, and long before, have opposed creeds of human invention because those creeds opposed them. But so far as their controversy resembles them in its opposition to creeds, it is to be distinguished from them in this all-essential attribute, viz.--that our opposition to creeds arose from a conviction, that whether the opinions in them were true or false, they were hostile to the union, peace, harmony, purity, and joy of Christians; and adverse to the conversion of the world to Jesus Christ. Next to our personal salvation, two objects constituted the summum bonum, the supreme good, worthy of the sacrifice of all temporalities. The first was the union, peace, purity, and harmonious co-operation of Christians--guided by an understanding enlightened by the Holy Scriptures; the other, the conversion of sinners to God. Our predilections and antipathies on all religious questions arose from, and were controlled by, those all-absorbing interests. From these commenced our campaign against creeds. We had not at first, and we have not now, a favorite opinion or speculation, which we would offer as a substitute for any human creed or constitution in Christendom. We were not, indeed, at first apprised of the havoc which our principles would make upon our opinions. We soon, however, found our principles and opinions at war on some points; and the question immediately arose, Whether shall we sacrifice our principles to our opinions, or our opinions to our principles? We need not say that we were compelled to the latter; judging that our principles were better than our opinions. Hence, since we put to sea on board this bottom, we have been compelled to throw overboard some opinions once as dear to us as they now are to those who never thought of the difference between principle and opinion. Some of these opinions--(as the most delicate and tender buds are soonest blighted by the frost)--immediately withered, and died under the first application of our principles. Infant baptism and infant sprinkling, with all infantile imbecility, immediately expired in our minds, soon as the Bible alone was made the only measure and standard of faith and duty. This foundation of the Paidobaptist temple being instantly destroyed, the whole edifice leaning upon it became a heaps of ruins. We explored the ruins with great assiduity, and collected from them all the materials that could be worked into the Christian temple; but the piles of rubbish that remained were immense. Other topics became the theme of discussion; and as the public mind became more intelligent and candid, the great principles of the Law and Gospel, the Patriarchal, the Jewish, and Christian Institutions were gradually unfolded. To the development of these, other publications in 1816 and 1820 greatly contributed; and so fully explored were ancient and modern Christianity, that, in 1823, the design was formed of commencing a periodical and establishing a press to contend for the original faith and order, in opposition to all the corruptions of fifteen centuries. As we are not writing a history of this struggle from its commencement till the present time, but simply informing the reader that the principles stated in the following pages have been maturely considered, and have passed through a long, complicated, and vigorous oppositions,--we shall hasten to the object of this book, which is to lay before the reader a miniature view of the principles already noticed. To say nothing of the periodicals which have already been commenced, and which have been for some time our fellow-laborers, in this all-important work, besides our debtors of 1820, 1823, and 1829, four editions of the new version of the New Testament, with prefaces, various tables, notes, criticisms, etc.; there have been issued from our press twelve volumes in illustration and defence of these principles; in hearing and answering objections from all sects, and from many of the most learned and talented of our country. The CHRISTIAN BAPTIST, in seven annual volumes, being the first of these publications, and affording such a gradual development of all these principles as the state of the public mind and the opposition would permit, is, in the judgment of many of our brethren who have expressed themselves on the subject, better adapted to the whole community as it now exists, than our other writings. In this judgment I must concur; and to it especially, as well as to all other publications since commenced, I would refer the reader who may be solicitous to examine these principles more fully, and to consider the ordeal through which they have passed. Having paid a very candid and considerate regard to all that has been offered against these principles, as well as having been admonished from the extremes into which some of our friends and brethren have carried some points, I undertake this work with a deep sense of its necessity, and with much anticipation of its utility, in exhibiting a concentrated view of the whole ground we occupy--of rectifying some extremes--of furnishing new means of defence to those engaged in contending with this generation for primitive Christianity. Having also attentively considered the most vulnerable side of every great question, and re-examined the terms and phrases which have occasioned most opposition and controversy, whether from our own pen or that of any of our brethren,--our aim is now to offer to the public a more matured view of such cardinal principles as are necessary to the right interpretation of the Holy Scriptures--both in acquiring and communicating a correct knowledge of the Christian Institution, of such principles as are requisite to the discovery of truth and the exposure of error; as well as in a revised and corrected republication of the principal Extras of the Millennial Harbinger, to lay before the reader the elements of the gospel itself, and of the worship most acceptable to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord. The work, then, naturally divides itself into three parts:--The first, THE PRINCIPLES BY WHICH THE CHRISTIAN INSTITUTION MAY BE CERTAINLY AND SATISFACTORILY ASCERTAINED: the second, THE PRINCIPLES ON WHICH ALL CHRISTIANS MAY FORM ONE COMMUNION: and the third, THE ELEMENTS OR PRINCIPLES WHICH CONSTITUTE ORIGINAL CHRISTIANITY. Whether this arrangement be most in the order of nature, or of importance, is not the question; it is the order in which we have from necessity been compelled to consider these subjects. A. CAMPBELL. BETHANY, VA., January 2, 1835. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 53: 03.01. THE UNIVERSE ======================================================================== The Christian System. CHAPTER I. THE UNIVERSE. ONE God, one system of nature, one universe. That universe is composed of innumerable systems, which, in perfect concert move forward in subordination to one supreme end. That one end of all things is the sovereign and infinite pleasure of Him who inhabits eternity and animates the universe with his presence. So worship and adore the heavenly hierarchies, saying:--"Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." The universe is a system of systems, not only as respects the seventy-five millions of suns and their attendant planets, which fill up the already discovered fields of ethereal space; but in reference to the various systems, separate, though united; distinct, though amalgamated; heterogeneous, though homogeneous; which are but component parts of every solar system--of every planet in that system, and of every organic, and every inorganic mass on each planet. Thus in the person of a single individual man, we have an animal system, an intellectual system, a moral system, running into each other, and connecting themselves with every thing of a kindred nature in the whole universe of God: just as we have in the human body itself a system of solids, and a system of fluids; and these again forming themselves into a system of bones, a system of nerves, a system of arteries, a system of veins, etc. Now as no one system is insular and independent, no system can be understood abstractly. Every particular system must be viewed in reference to that system which is proximate to it in nature and use. Thus we view the bones in the human body as connected with the muscles, the muscles as connected with the nerves, the nerves as connected with the arteries, the arteries as connected with the veins--and these all as connected with all the human frame, and with the fluids evolved by them, or circulated through them, etc. As, then, the systems of the universe and the sciences which treat of them, run into each other and mutually lend and borrow light, illustration, and development; it is a mark of imbecility of mind, rather than of strength; of folly, rather than of wisdom; for any one to dogmatize with an air of infallibility, or to assume the attitude of perfect intelligence on any one subject of human thought, without an intimate knowledge of the whole universe. But as such knowledge is not within the grasp of feeble mortal man, whose horizon is a point of creation, and whose days are but a moment of time, it is superlatively incongruous for any son of science, or of religion, to affirm that this or that issue is absolutely irrational, unjust, or unfitting the schemes of eternal Providence, or the purposes of the supreme wisdom and benevolence, only as he is guided by the oracles of infallible wisdom, or the inspirations of the Almighty. Who could pronounce upon the wisdom and utility of a single joint, without a knowledge of the limb to which it belongs; of that limb, without an understanding of the body to which it ministers; of that body, without a clear perception of the world in which it moves, and of the relations which it sustains; of that world, without some acquaintance with the solar system of which it is but a small part; of that particular solar system, without a general and even intimate knowledge of all the kindred systems; of all these kindred systems, without a thorough comprehension of the ultimate design of the whole creation; of that ultimate design, without a perfect intelligence of that incomprehensible Being by whom, and for whom all things were created and made? How gracefully, then, sits unassuming modesty on all the reasonings of man. The true philosopher and the true Christian, therefore, delight always to appear in the unaffected costume of humility, candor, and docility-- "He who through the vast immensity can pierce, See worlds on worlds compose one universe; Observe how system into system runs, What other planets circle other suns, What varied beings people every star, May tell why God has made us as we are." POPE. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 54: 03.02. THE BIBLE ======================================================================== CHAPTER II. THE BIBLE. One God, one moral system, one Bible. If nature be a system, religion is no less so. God is "a God of order," and that is the same as to say he is a God of system. Nature and religion, the offspring of the same supreme intelligence, bear the image of one father; twin sisters of the same Divine parentage. There is an intellectual and a moral universe as clearly bounded as the system of material nature. Man belongs to the whole three. He is an animal, intellectual, and moral being. Sense is his guide in nature, faith in religion, reason in both. The Bible contemplates man primarily in his spiritual and eternal relations. It is the history of nature, so far only as is necessary to show man his origin and destiny; for it contemplates nature, the universe, only in relation to man’s body, soul, and spirit. The Bible is to the intellectual and moral world of man, what the sun is to the planets in our system;--the fountain and source of light and life, spiritual and eternal. There is not a spiritual idea in the whole human race, that is not drawn from the Bible. As soon will the philosopher find an independent sunbeam in nature, as the theologian a spiritual conception in man, independent of THE ONE BEST BOOK. The Bible, or the Old and New Testaments, in Hebrew and Greek, contains a full and perfect revelation of God and his will, adapted to man as he now is. It speaks of man as he was, and also as he will hereafter be; but it dwells on man as he is, and as he ought to be, as its peculiar and appropriate theme. It is not, then, a treatise on man as he was, nor on man as he will be, but on man as he is, and as he ought to be; not as he is physically, astronomically, geologically, politically, or metaphysically; but as he is and ought to be morally and religiously. The words of the Bible contain all the ideas in it;--these words, then, rightly understood, and the ideas are clearly perceived. The words and sentences of the Bible are to be translated, interpreted, and understood according to the same code of laws and principles of interpretation by which other ancient writings are translated and understood; for when God spoke to man in his own language, he spoke as one person converses with another, in fair, stipulated, and well established meaning of the terms. This is essential to its character as a revelation from God; otherwise it would be no revelation, but would always require a class of inspired men to unfold and reveal its true sense to mankind. We have written frequently and largely upon the principles and rules of interpretation, as of essential importance and utility in this generation of remaining mysticising and allegorizing. From our former writings, we shall here only extract the naked rules of interpretation, deduced from extensive and well digested premises; fully sustained, too, by the leading translators and most distinguished critics and commentators of the last and present century. Rule 1. On opening any book in the sacred Scriptures, consider first the historical circumstances of the book. These are the order, the title, the author, the date, the place, and the occasion of it. The order in historical compositions is of much importance; as, for instance,--whether the first, second, or third, of the five books of Moses, or any other series of narrative, or even epistolary communication. The title is also of importance, as it sometimes expresses the design of the book. As Exodus--the departure of Israel from Egypt; Acts of Apostles, etc. The peculiarities of the author--the age in which he lived--his style--mode of expression, illustrate his writings. The date, place, and occasion of it, are obviously necessary to a right application of any thing in the book. Rule 2. In examining the contents of any book, as respects precepts, promises, exhortations, etc., observe who it is that speaks, and under what dispensation he officiates. Is he a Patriarch, a Jew, or a Christian? Consider also the persons addressed; their prejudices, characters, and religious relations. Are they Jews or Christians--believers or unbelievers--approved or disapproved? This rule is essential to the proper application of every command, promise, threatening, admonition, or exhortation, in Old Testament or New. Rule 3. To understand the meaning of what is commanded, promised, taught, etc., the same philological principles, deduced from the nature of language; or the same laws of interpretation which are applied to the language of other books, are to be applied to the language of the Bible. Rule 4. Common usage, which can only be ascertained by testimony, must always decide the meaning of any word which has but one signification;--but when words have according to testimony (i. e. the dictionary,) more meanings than one, whether literal or figurative, the scope, the context, or parallel passages must decide the meaning: for if common usage, the design of the writer, the context, and parallel passage fail, there can be no certainty in the interpretation of language. Rule 5. In all tropical language, ascertain the point of resemblance, and judge of the nature of the trope, and its kind, from the point of resemblance. Rule 6. In the interpretation of symbols, types, allegories, and parables, this rule is supreme: ascertain the point to be illustrated; for comparison is never to be extended beyond that point--to all the attributes, qualities, or circumstances of the symbol, type, allegory, or parable. Rule 7. For the salutary and sanctifying intelligence of the Oracles of God, the following rule is indispensable-- We must come within the understanding distance. There is a distance which is properly called the speaking distance, or the hearing distance; beyond which the voice reaches not, and the ear hears not. To hear another, we must come within that circle which the voice audibly fills. Now we may say with propriety say, that as it respects God, there is an understanding distance. All beyond that distance cannot understand God; all within it, can easily understand him in all matters of piety and morality. God, himself, is the centre of that circle, and humility is its circumference. The wisdom of God is as evident in adapting the light of the Sun of Righteousness to our spiritual or moral vision, as in adjusting the light of day to our eyes. The light reaches us without an effort of our own; but we must open our eyes, and if our eyes be sound, we enjoy the natural light of heaven. There is a sound eye in reference to spiritual light, as well as in reference to material light. Now, while the philological principles and rules of interpretation enable many men to be skillful in biblical criticism, and in the interpretation of words and sentences; who neither perceive nor admire the things represented by those words; the sound eye contemplates the things themselves, and is ravished with the moral scenes which the Bible unfolds. The moral soundness of vision consists in having the eyes of understanding fixed soley on God himself, his approbation and complacent affection for us. It is sometimes called a single eye, because it looks for one thing supremely. Every one, then, who opens the Book of God, with one aim, with one ardent desire--intent only to know the will of God; to such a person, the knowledge of God is easy: for the Bible is framed to illuminate such, and only such, with the salutary knowledge of things celestial and divine. Humility of mind, or what is in effect the same, contempt for all earth-born pre-eminence, prepares the mind for the reception of this light; or, what is virtually the same, opens the ears to hear the voice of God. Amidst the din of all the arguments from the flesh, the world, and Satan, a person is so deaf that he cannot hear the still small voice of God’s philanthropy. But receding from pride, covetousness, and false ambition; from the love of the world; and in coming within that circle, the circumference of which is unfeigned humility, and the centre of which is God himself--the voice of God is distinctly heard and clearly understood. All within this circle are taught by God; all without it are under the influence of the wicked one. ’God resisteth the proud, but he giveth grace to the humble.’ He, then, that would interpret the Oracles of God to the salvation of his soul, must approach this volume with the humility and docility of a child, and meditate upon it day and night. Like Mary, he must sit at the Master’s feet, and listen to the words which fall from his lips. To such a one there is an assurance of understanding, a certainty of knowledge, to which the man of letters alone never attained, and which the mere critic never felt. The Bible is a book of facts, not of opinions, theories, abstract generalities, nor of verbal definitions. It is a book of awful facts, grand and sublime beyond description. These facts reveal God and man, and contain within them the reasons of all piety and righteousness; or what is commonly called religion and morality. The meaning of the Bible facts is the true biblical doctrine. History is therefore the plan pursued in both Testaments; for testimony has primarily to do with faith, and reasoning with the understanding. History has, we say, to do with facts--and religion springs from them. Hence, the history of the past, and the anticipations of the future, or what are usually called history and prophecy, make up exactly four-fifths of all the volumes of inspiration. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 55: 03.03. GOD ======================================================================== CHAPTER III. GOD. "I AM THAT I AM." "I lift up my hand to heaven and say, I live for ever." "The everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary; there is no searching of his understanding." "His understanding is infinite." "Do not I fill heaven and earth, saith the Lord?" "For thus saith the high and lofty one that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy, I dwell in the high and holy place; with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones." "I beseech thee, show me thy glory, and he said I will make all my goodness pass before thee; and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee; and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy." "And the Lord passed by before him1 and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and sin, and that by no means aquits the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation"--"and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments." "O Lord God of Israel, who dwellest between the cherubims, thou art the God, even thou alone, thou hast made heaven and earth. Hear, O Israel--Jehovah our Aleim is one Jehovah2--the Lord our God is one Lord." "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which wast, and art, and art to come." "Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty, just and true are thy ways, thou king of saints." "Who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name, for thou only art holy," "He is the Rock, his work is perfect; for all his ways are judgment; a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he." "Glorious in holiness, fearful in praise, doing wonders." Such are a few--a specimen of the Divine declarations concerning himself; repeated and re-echoed by the purest and most intellectual beings in heaven and earth. It is from his word and his works we learn the being and perfections of God. As we form a character of man from what he says and what he does, so learn we the Divine character. "The heavens declare his glory, and the firmament showeth forth his handy work: day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge." Creation reveals the power, the wisdom, and the goodness of God. Providence proclaims also his justice, truth, and holiness. Redemption develops his mercy, condescension, and love; and all these are again characterized by infinity, eternity, immutability. Nature, then, attests and displays the knowledge, wisdom, power, and goodness of God. The law and the providence of God especially declare his justice, truth, and holiness--while the gospel unfolds his mercy, condescension, and love; and all these proclaim that God is infinite, eternal, and immutable. God appears before the universe of intellectuals, in the threefold attitude of Creator, Lawgiver, and Redeemer; and although each of these involves and reveals many of his excellencies, still in each department three are most conspicuous. As Creator, knowledge, wisdom, power, and goodness; as Lawgiver, justice, truth, and holiness; as Redeemer, mercy, condescension, and love. In each and all of which departments, he is infinite, immutable, and eternal. But the Scriptures speak of his divinity or godhead, as well as of the unity, spirituality, and eternity of his being. We have not, indeed, much said upon this incomprehensible theme; for--who by searching can find out God, or know the Almighty to perfection? The knowledge of him is high as heaven, what canst thou do? deeper than hell, what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea. Paul and Peter indeed speak of the divine nature in the abstract, or of the divinity or godhead. These are the most abstract terms found in the Bible. Eternity and divinity are however equally abstract and almost equally rare in holy writ. Still, they are necessarily found in the divine volume; because we must abstract nature from person before we can understand the remedial system. For the divine nature may be communicated or imparted in some sense; and indeed while it is essentially and necessarily singular, it is certainly plural in its personal manifestations. Hence we have the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit equally divine, though personally distinct from each other. We have in fact, but one God, one Lord, one Holy Spirit; yet these are equally possessed of one and of the same divine nature. Some conceive of God as mathematical unit; and as a thing cannot be both mathematically singular and plural, one and three, at the same time and in the same sense, they deny the true and proper divinity of the Son of God and of the Spirit of God. But it would seem to us, that they reason not in harmony with the sacred style of inspiration. But why should we imagine that there cannot be a plurality of personal manifestations in the divine nature any more than in the angelic or human, especially as man was created in the image of God? The relations in human plurality are indeed limited to three. For while all the human nature was at one time originally and wholly in the person of Adam, it was afterwards found equally in the person of Eve--and again in the person of their first born. Now as to its derivation and mode of existence, it was diverse in the three. In Adam it was underived as respected human nature, in Eve it was derived from Adam, and in Cain it was again derived from Adam and Eve. Here the matter ends; for while Eve proceeded from Adam in one mode, and Cain proceeded from Adam and Eve in another, all the residue of human nature is participated without any new relation or mode of impartation. While, then, our nature is plural as to its participation, it is limited to three relations or modes of existence. Now as man was made in the image of God, we must conceive of him as having plurality, relation, and society in himself--though far be it from us to suppose that the divine nature either is, or can be fairly or fully exhibited by any resemblance or illustration drawn from angel or from man, or from any created thing. Still, there is a resemblance between God and the sun that shines upon us--between God and an angel--between God and man; and even in the mode of his existence, and in the varieties of relation and personal manifestation, there is so much resemblance as to peremptorily forbid all dogmatism as to what is, or is not, compatible with the unity, spirituality, and immutability of God. But of this more fully and intelligibly when we shall have examined the record concerning the WORD and the SPIRIT of God. 1 Moses. 2 So reads the Hebrew. Deuteronomy 6:4. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 56: 03.04. THE SON OF GOD ======================================================================== CHAPTER IV. THE SON OF GOD. “The holy progeny (or thing) which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." "Unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace." "This is my Son, the beloved, in whom I delight." "This is my Son, the beloved, hear him." "No person has ascended into heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven," or whose abode is in heaven. "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son; the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." "No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten Son who is the bosom of the Father has declared him." "Rabbi, thou art the Son of God, thou art the king of Israel." "Glorify thou me with thine ownself, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was." "In him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead1 bodily," or substantially. "He is the first and the last." "All things were created by him and for him." "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. All things were made by him, and without him was not any thing made that was made." "The word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory: the glory as of an only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." So speak the Divine oracles of the supreme Deity and excellency of the author and perfecter of the Christian system. "By him and for him" all things were created and made; and "he is before all things, and by him all things consist." But "he became flesh." Who? He that existed before the universe, whose mysterious, sublime, and glorious designation was the WORD of God. Before the Christian system, before the relation of "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" began to be, his rank in the divine nature was that of the WORD OF GOD. Wonderful name! Intimate and dear relation! The relation between a word and the idea which it represents is the nearest of all relations in the universe: for the idea is in the word--and the word is in the idea. The idea is invisible, inaudible, unintelligible, but in and by the word. An idea cannot be without an image or a word to represent it--and therefore God was never without his word, nor was his word without him. "The word was with God, and the Word was God"--for a word is the idea expressed--and thus "the word that was made flesh," became "the brightness of his glory" and "the express image of his person," insomuch that "he who has seen the Son has seen the Father also." While, then, the phrase "Son of God" denotes a temporal relation, the phrase "the word of God" denotes an eternal, unoriginated relation. There was a word of God from eternity, but the Son of God began to be in the days of Augustus Cesar. "Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee." He was by his resurrection from the dead declared to be the Son of God with a power and evidence extraordinary and divine. The WORD incarnate or dwelling in human flesh, is the person called our Lord and Redeemer, Jesus Christ--and while, in the system of grace, the Father is the one God, in all the supremacy of his glory--Jesus is the one Lord in all the divine fulness of sovereign, supreme, and universal authority. The Lord of Shem, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is the God and the Lord of Christians: for "the child" that has been born to us--and "the son" that has been given, according to another prophet, came from eternity. "His goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting."2 Such is the evangelical history of the author of the Christian system as to his antecedent nature and relation in the Deity or Godhead. He became a true and proper SON OF MAN." "A body hast thou prepared me." But the "me" was before "the body." It dwelt forever "in the bosom of the Father." "I came forth from God," said "the Incarnate Word." Great beyond expression and "without controversy, great is the mystery--the secret of godliness." "God was manifest in the flesh." "He that has seen me has seen the Father also." The Son of Man was and is the Son of God--"Emmanuel, God with us." Adored be his name! The one God in the person of the Father, has commanded all men to worship and honor the one Lord, as they would honor him that sent him: for now in glorifying the Son, we glorify the Father that sent him and that dwells in him. "Know yet not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me." Thus spake our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 The Apostle here used the word Theotees. Colossians 2:9, which is but once found in the New Testament. We have, indeed, Theiotees, Romans 1:20, from the same Apostle, also found but once, translated "Godhead." We have also Theios, Theion, three times; once Acts 17:29, translated divinity, and by Peter, (2 Peter 1:3-4), twice, once in connection with power and once with nature. "His divine power"--"a divine nature." "The fulness of the Deity," or Godhead, indicates all divine excellency--all the perfections of God. The term Deity imports the divine nature, state, or being of God. "The fulness" of that divine nature is here contrasted with an empty and deceitful philosophy, (Colossians 2:8) and the term bodily superadded, shows that God is in Christ not as he was in the tabernacle or temple, typically, but substantially, literally, and truly. 2 Micah 5:2. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 57: 03.05. THE SPIRIT OF GOD ======================================================================== CHAPTER V. THE SPIRIT OF GOD. As there is man and the spirit of man, so there is God and the spirit of God. They are capable of a separate and distinct existence. "What man knoweth the things of a man," says Paul, "but the spirit of man that is in him; even so the things of God knoweth no man but the Spirit of God." There is in this case an image of God in man--not, indeed, an exact image, but an image; for as Paul says of the law, so say we of man; "For the law had a shadow, (a resemblance) of good things to come, and not the very (or exact) image of the things." So man was made an image of God, though not the exact image--the active power of man is in his spirit: so John the Baptist came in the power of Elijah, because he came in his spirit. The spirit of God is therefore often used for his power; though it is not an impersonal power, but a living, energizing, active, personal existence. Hence, in all the works of God, the spirit of God is the active, operating agent. Thus in the old creation, while ancient chaos yet remained--when "the earth was without form, and void, and darkness brooded on the bosom of the vast abyss," "the spirit of God moved"--(incubated and energized)--"upon the face of the waters." "The hand of the Lord has made me, and the spirit of the Almighty has given me life." "The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee;" and thus was chaos subdued, man vitalized, "the heavens garnished," and the body of Jesus made by the spirit of God. The Spirit is said to do, and to have done all that God does and all that God has done. It has ascribed to it all divine perfections and works; and in the New Testament it is designated as the immediate author and agent of the new creation, and of the holiness of Christians. It is therefore called the Holy Spirit. In the sublime and ineffable relation of the Deity, or godhead, it stands next to the Incarnate Word. Anciently, or before time, it was GOD, the WORD of God, and the SPIRIT of God. But now, in the development of the Christian scheme, it is "the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit"--one God, one Lord, one Spirit. To us Christians there is, then, but one God, even the Father; and one Lord Jesus Christ, even the Saviour; and one Spirit, even the Advocate, the Sanctifier, and the Comforter of Christ’s body, the church. Jesus is the head, and the Spirit is the life and animating principle of that body. The whole systems of creation, providence, and redemption, are founded upon these relations in the Deity. Destroy these, blend and confound these, and nature, providence, and grace, are blended, confounded, and destroyed. The peerless and supreme excellency of the Christian system is, that it fully opens to the vision of mortals the Divinity--the whole Godhead employed in the work of man’s regeneration and ultimate glorification. God is manifest in human flesh, and is justified and glorified by the Spirit, in accomplishing man’s deliverance from ruin. Each name of the sacred three has its own peculiar work and glory in the three great works of Creation, Government, and Redemption. Hence, we are by divine authority, "immersed into the name of the FATHER, the SON, and the HOLY SPIRIT," in coming into the kingdom of grace; and while in that kingdom the supreme benediction is--"The Grace of the LORD JESUS CHRIST, and the love of GOD, and the communion of the HOLY SPIRIT be with you!" Indeed in the old church that was in the wilderness, while matters were comparatively in the shadows of a moonlight age, the high priest of Israel was commanded to put "the name of God" upon the children of Israel--in the same relation of the scared three. "The Lord1 bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee. The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace."2 Jehovah bless thee--is equal to "the love of God." Jehovah be gracious unto thee, answers to "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ"--and Jehovah lift up his countenance upon thee and give thee peace, corresponds to "the communion of the Spirit." The divine doctrine of these holy and incomprehensible relations in the Divinity, is so inwrought and incorporated with all the parts of the sacred books--so identified with all the dispensations of religion, and so essential to the mediatorship of Christ, that it is impossible to make any real and divine proficiency in the true knowledge of God--of man--of reconciliation--or remission of sins--of eternal life--or in the piety and divine life of Christ’s religion--without a clear and distinct perception of it, as well as a firm and unshaken faith and confidence in it, as we trust still to make more evident in the sequel. 1 In the Hebrew Bible it is Jehovah each time. 2 Numbers 6:24-27. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 58: 03.06. MAN AS HE WAS ======================================================================== CHAPTER VI. MAN AS HE WAS. The original man was the rational and moral ultimatum of the mundane system. Naturally, or as he came from God’s hand, he was the perfection of all terrestrial creations and institutions. In the elements of his constitution, he was partly celestial and terrestrial, of an earthly material as to his body, but of a spiritual intelligence and a divine life. Made to know and to enjoy his Creator, and to have communion with all that is divine, spiritual, and material in the whole universe, he was susceptible of an almost boundless variety of enjoyments. And God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in his own image created he him; a male and a female created he them." Genesis 1:26-27. Man, then, was a companion of his Father and Creator, capable of admiring, adoring, and enjoying God. Having made the earth for him, God was fully glorified in all his sublunary works, when they made man happy, grateful, and thankful to himself. Man, then, in his natural state, was not merely an animal, but an intellectual, moral, pure, and holy being. His position or state in this creation, was that of a lord tenant. The earth is, indeed, the Lord’s; but he gave it to man on a very easy and liberal lease; and so it became his property. He was, therefore, a free and responsible agent, capable of managing his estate and paying his rent; and consequently was susceptible of virtue and vice, of happiness and misery. In order to freedom, virtue, and happiness, it was expedient and necessary to place him under a law; for where there is no law, there can be no liberty, virtue, or happiness. The law became a test of his character, a guarantee of his continued enjoyment of the life and property which God had leased to him on the condition of his obedience to that precept. That the temptation to disobedience might be weak, and the motive to obedience strong, single, and pure, the precept given here was simple, positive, and clear. It could not be a moral precept, because other reasons than simple submission to the will of his Lord and King might have co-operated and prevented the display of pure loyalty by which his character was to be tried and his future fortunes governed. It was therefore a positive law. The requisition was so little as to present the least conceivable restraint upon liberty of thought and action, and yet it was the most infallible test of his loyalty. The Adamic constitution was therefore admirably designed and adapted to happiness. It placed only one restriction in the way of universal liberty, and that at such a distance as to make the circle of his free and unrestrained movements within a single step of the last outpost of all intellectual, moral, and sensible enjoyment. The whole earth was his to use, one single fruit alone excepted. Truly, God was superlatively good and kind to man in his peculiar condition and state. "Thou madest him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands. Thou hast put all things under his feet:--all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passes through the paths of the sea. O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!" Psalms 8:5-9. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 59: 03.07. MAN AS HE IS ======================================================================== CHAPTER VII. MAN AS HE IS. "God made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions." Adam rebelled. The natural man became preternatural. The animal triumphed over the human elements of his nature. Sin was born on earth. The crown fell from his head. The glory of the Lord departed from him. He felt his guilt, and trembled, he saw his nakedness and blushed. The bright candle of the Lord became a dimly smoking taper. He was led to judgment. He was tried, condemned to death, divested of his patrimonial inheritance, but respited from immediate execution. A prisoner of death, but permitted to roam abroad and at large till the King authorized his seizure and destruction. The stream of humanity, thus contaminated at its fountain, cannot in this world ever rise of itself, to its primitive purity and excellence. We all inherit a frail constitution, physically, intellectually, but especially morally frail and imbecile. We have all inherited our father’s constitution and fortune: for Adam, we are told, after he fell "begat a son in his own image," and that son was just as bad as any other son ever born into the world: for he murdered his own dear brother, because he was a better man than himself. "Thus, by one man sin entered into the world, and death by that one sin, and so death, the wages of sin, has fallen upon all the offspring of Adam," because in him they have all sinned, or been made mortal--and consequently are born under condemnation to that death which fell upon our common progenitor, because of his transgression. In Adam, all have sinned; therefore "in Adam all die." Your nature, gentle reader, not your person, was in Adam when he put forth his hand to break the precept of Jehovah. You did not personally sin in that act; but your nature then in the person of your father, sinned against the Author of your existence. In the just judgment, therefore, of your heavenly Father, your nature sinned in Adam, and with him it is right, that all human beings should be born mortal, and that death should lord it over the whole race as he has done in innumerable instances even "over them that have not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression;" 1:e., by violating a positive law. Now it must be conceded, that what God can righteously and mercifully inflict upon a part of mankind, he may justly and mercifully inflict upon all; and therefore those that live one score or four score years on this earth, for the sin of their nature in Adam, might have been extinguished the first year as reasonably as those who have in perfect infancy perished from the earth. Death is expressly denominated by an Apostle, "the wages of sin." Now this reward of sin is at present inflicted upon at least one fourth of the human race who have never violated any law, or sinned personally by any act of their lives. According to the most accurate bills of mortality, from one third to one fourth of the whole progeny of man die in infancy, under two years, without the consciousness of good or evil. They are thus, innocent though they be, as respects actual and personal transgression, accounted as sinners by him who inflicts upon them the peculiar and appropriate wages of sin. This alarming and most strangely pregnant of all the facts in human history, proves that Adam was not only the common father, but the actual representative of all his children. There is, therefore, a sin of our nature as well as personal transgression. Some inappositely call the sin of our nature our "original sin;" as if the sin of Adam was the personal offence of his children. True, indeed, it is, our nature was corrupted by the fall of Adam before it was transmitted to us; and hence that hereditary imbecility to do good, and that proneness to do evil, so universally apparent in all human beings. Let no man open his mouth against the transmission of a moral distemper, until he satisfactorily explain the fact--that the special characteristic vices of parents appear in their children as much as the color of their skin, their hair, or the contour of their faces. A disease in the moral constitution of a man is an clearly transmissible as any physical taint, if there be any truth in history, biography, or human observation. Still, man, with all his hereditary imbecility, is not under an invincible necessity to sin. Greatly prone to evil, easily seduced into transgression, he may or may not yield to passion and seduction. Hence the differences we so often discover in the corruption and depravity of man. All inherit a fallen, consequently a sinful nature; though all are not equally depraved. Thus we find the degrees of sinfulness and depravity are very different in different persons. And although without the knowledge of God and his revealed will, without the interposition of a mediator, and without faith in him, "it is impossible to please God;" still, there are those who, while destitute of the knowledge and belief, are more noble and virtuous than others. Thus admits Luke when he says, "The Jews in Berea were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the Scriptures daily whether these things were so. Therefore, many of them believed." Acts 17:11. But until man in his present preternatural state, believes the gospel report of his sins and submits to Jesus Christ as the only Mediator and Saviour of sinners, it is impossible for him to do any thing absolutely pleasing or acceptable to God. Condemned to natural death, and greatly fallen and depraved in our whole moral constitution though we certainly are, in consequence of the sin of Adam; still, because of the interposition of the second Adam, none are punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, but those who actually and voluntarily sin against a dispensation of mercy under which they are placed: for this is "the condemnation of the world, that light has come into the world, and men choose darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 60: 03.08. THE PURPOSES OF GOD CONCERNING MAN ======================================================================== CHAPTER VIII. THE PURPOSES OF GOD CONCERNING MAN. The universe issued from the goodness of God. Not to display his power and wisdom, but to give vent to his benignity, God created the heavens and the earth, and peopled them with all variety of being. Infinite wisdom and almighty power do but execute the designs of eternal love. Goodness is the impulsive attribute which prompted all that the counsel and hand of the Lord have executed. The current of the universe all runs on the side of benevolence. "Abundant in goodness and truth," all God’s designs are for the diffusion of bliss on the largest possible scale. Evil there is; but, under the benevolent administration of the Father of mercies, there will be as much good, with as little evil, as almighty power, guided by infinite wisdom, and goodness, can achieve. We may conjecture much, but can know little of the origin of moral evil in God’s dominion. Its history on earth is faithfully detailed in the Bible; and that, in the divine prudence, is all that is necessary to our successful warfare against its power, and blissful escape from its penal consequences. It is not necessary that we should analyze and comprehend the origin and nature of darkness in order to enjoy the light of the sun. The influences of light and darkness upon our system are quite sufficient, without any theory, to induce us to eschew the former, and delight in the latter. "By one man sin entered into the world," says Paul; and "by one tempter sin entered into man," says Moses; and "lust when it conceives brings forth sin, and sin when it is perfected brings forth death," says James the Apostle, and these are the land-marks of our knowledge of the matter. To limit the contagion of sin, to prevent its recurrence in any portion of the universe, and to save sinners from its ruinous consequences, are the godlike purposes of the common Father of all. The Gospel, or Christian system, is that only scheme which infinite intelligence and almighty love could devise for that benignant and gracious end. This purpose, like all God’s purposes, is eternal and immutable. The scheme or theory was, therefore, not only arranged before the Jewish and patriarchal ages, but before the foundation of the world. The promises made to Eve, to Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, David, etc., are positive proofs that the plan was laid and the purposes perfected before the world began. For why, we ask, could God promise the conquest of Satan by the son of Eve, the blessing of all nations, by the son of Abraham, etc. etc., if a scheme if this import had not been previously established? The moment that Adam, Eve, and the serpent were judged dates the first promise of a glorious conquest over our adversary by a descendant of Eve. That promise, and the consequent institution of sacrifice--the altar, the victim, and the priest, are ample proofs that the plan was completed and a remedial system adopted antecedent to the trial of our first parents. But this is not to be inferred even from the premises clear and forcible as these are. It is expressly and repeatedly declared. Two things are evident as demonstration itself:--The first,--that all the purposes and promises of God are in Christ--in reference to him, and consummated in and by him; and, in the second place, they were all contemplated, covenanted, and systematized in him and through him before the foundation of the world. These two propositions are so intimately connected, that they are generally asserted in the same portions of Scripture. For example: "He hath saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began; but is now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ." 2 Timothy 1:9-10. Again, "Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, in hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began; but has in due time manifested his word through preaching." Titus 1:1-16; Titus 2:1-15; Titus 3:1 "He has chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love." Ephesians 1:4. Indeed, Jesus himself intimates that the whole affair of man’s redemption, even to the preparation of the eternal abodes of the righteous, was arranged ere time was born: for, in his own parable of the final judgment, he says, "Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit a kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." Matthew 25:34. And Peter settles the matter forever by assuring us that we "were redeemed by the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world." Christ, then, is the Lamb that was foreordained, and "slain from the foundation of the world." Therefore, says Jesus to his Father, speaking doubtless in contemplation of his work, "Thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world;" and thus, as Matthew quotes a Prophet speaking of him, "he uttered things which had been kept secret from the foundation of the world." Evident then it is, that the whole remedial or gospel system was purposed, arranged, and established upon the basis of the revealed distinctions of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and by these, in reference to one another, before the foundation of the world; and that all the institutions and developments of religion in the different ages of the world, were, in pursuance of that system, devised in eternity, and consummated some two thousand years ago. Jesus of Nazareth, the promised Messiah, was elected, or rather was always the elect, the beloved of God, and appointed to be the foundation of the new creation. "Behold," said Jehovah, seven centuries before his birth, "I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner, a sure foundation," called by Peter "an elect stone," though disallowed by the Jewish builders. Again, by the same Prophet he is called the elect of God: "Behold my servant whom I uphold, mine elect in whom my soul delights! I have put my spirit upon him: he shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles," etc. "He shall be for salvation to the ends of the earth." In consequence of these gracious purposes of God, the WORD was made flesh, and dwelt among us--the Son of God was sent by his Father--became a Prophet, a High Priest, and a King over men, that he might be the mediator and administrator of an Institution of Grace. He became the righteous servant of Jehovah, a voluntary sacrifice for us--died, was buried, and rose again--ascended where he had been before--then, in union with his Father, sent the Holy Spirit, who proceeded forth from the presence and by the authority of the Father and the Son, to consummate the sanctification of his people. He is now placed upon the throne of God--head over all things to complete the triumphs of his cause--to lead many sons to glory--to raise the dead, judge the world, and revenge Satan and all that took part with him in his rebellion, whether angels or men--to create new heavens and a new earth, and to establish eternal peace, and love, and joy through all the new dominions which he shall have gained, and over which he shall have reigned: for he must reign till all his and our enemies shall have been subdued forever. Then he shall resign into the hands that gave him his empire, all that species of authority which he exercised in this great work of human deliverance. Then God himself, in his antecedent character and glory, as he reigned before sin was born and his administration began, shall preside over all things in all places for ever and ever. The present elect of God are, then, those who are in Christ, and not those out of him: for it was in him that God has set his affection upon them, and chose them to eternal life before the world began. God is not, indeed, in this whole affair a respecter of persons. It is at character, and not at person, that God looks. He has predestinated all that are in Christ "to be holy and without blame before him in love," and, at his coming, to be confirmed to him in all personal excellency and beauty, and to share with him the bliss of a glorious immortality. So that "we shall be like him"--he is the first born, and we his junior brethren, bearing his image in our persons as exactly as we now bear the image of the earthly Adam, the father of us all. In all these gracious purposes of God, two things are most remarkable:--First, that he has elected and called certain persons to high and responsible stations as parts of a grand system of practical philanthropy--such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, David, Paul, etc. These were chosen and elevated not for their own sakes, so much as for public benefactors and blessings to the human race. It is not for its own sake that the eye is so beautiful, or performs the functions of vision; nor that the ear is so curiously fashioned, and performs the office of hearing; but for the general comfort and safety of the whole body. So stand in the family of God--in the body of Christ, all apostles, prophets, preachers, reformers, and all specially called and chosen persons. As the Lord said to Saul of Tarsus, so may it be said of all those sons of oil--those elect ones--"I have appeared to you to make you a minister and a witness for me--to send you to the Gentiles," etc.--to make you a public benefactor. Next to this remarkable fact is another still more remarkable;--that, according to the purposes of God in reference to the whole human race, things are so arranged and set in order, that all enjoyments shall be, as respects human agency, conditional; and that every man, in reference to spiritual and eternal blessings, shall certainly and infallibly have his own choice. Therefore, life and death, good and evil, happiness and misery, are placed before man as he now is, and he is commanded to make his own election and take his choice. Having chosen the good portion, he is then to "give all diligence to make his calling and election sure." 1 In the original the phrase in these two passage sis pro chronoon aionoon, translated sometimes "before the time of ages"--before the Jewish jubilees or ages began; and means that God’s purpose to call the Gentiles was antecedent to the covenants with Abraham and the Jews. Thus understood, it only proves that the purposes and promises of God in Christ were formed and expressed before the days of Abraham. But it is equally true as respects the beginning of time: for the phrase pro and apo katabole kosmou, found ten times in the New Testament, literally indicates the foundation of the world. We quote Ephesians 1:4.-- Matthew 25:34.-- 1 Peter 1:19-20.--as unequivocally declarative of this. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 61: 03.09. RELIGION FOR MAN, AND NOT MAN FOR RELIGION ======================================================================== CHAPTER IX. RELIGION FOR MAN, AND NOT MAN FOR RELIGION. Religion, as the term imports, began after the Fall; for it indicates a previous apostasy. A remedial system is for a diseased subject. The primitive man could love, wonder, and adore as angels now do, without religion; but man, fallen and apostate, needs religion in order to his restoration to the love, and worship, and enjoyment of God. Religion, then, is a system of means of reconciliation--an institution for bringing man back to God--something to bind man anew to love and delight in God.1 It consists of two departments;--the things that God has done for us, and the things that we must do for ourselves. The whole proposition of necessity in this case, must come from the offended party. Man could propose nothing, do nothing to propitiate his Creator, after he had rebelled against him. Heaven, therefore, overtures; and man accepts, surrenders, and returns to God. The Messiah is a gift, sacrifice is a gift, justification is a gift, the Holy Spirit is a gift, eternal life is a gift, and even the means of our personal sanctification is a gift from God. Truly, we are saved by grace. Heaven, we say, does certain things for us, and also proposes to us what we should do to inherit eternal life. It is all of God: for he has sent his Son; he has sent his Spirit; and all that they have done, or shall do, is of free favor; and the proposition concerning our justification and sanctification is equally divine and gracious as the mission of his Son. We are only asked to accept a sacrifice which God has provided for our sins, and then the pardon of them, and to open the doors of our hearts, that the Spirit of God may come in, and make its abode in us. God has provided all these blessings for us, and only requires us to accept of them freely, without any price or idea of merit on our part. But he asks us to receive them cordially, and to give up our hearts to him. It is in the kingdom of grace, as in the kingdom of nature. Heaven provides the bread, the water, the fruits, the flowers; but we must gather and enjoy them. And if there be no merit in eating the bread which Heaven has sent for physical life and comfort, neither is there merit in eating the bread of life which came down from heaven for our spiritual life and consolation. Still, it is true, in grace, as in nature--that he that eats shall not die. Hence, there are conditions of enjoyments, though no conditions of merit, either in nature or grace. We shall therefore speak in detail of the things which God has done, and of the things that we must do, as essential to our salvation. First, of the things that God has done:-- 1 The verb religio, with all its Latin family, imports a binding again, or tying fast that which was dissolved. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 62: 03.10. SACRIFICE FOR SIN ======================================================================== CHAPTER X. SACRIFICE FOR SIN. The history of sacrifice is the history of atonement, reconciliation, redemption, and remission of sins. These are not, at least in the Jewish and Christian style, exactly synonymous terms. Sacrifice atones and reconciles. It propitiates God, and reconciles man. It is the cause, and these are its effects on heaven and earth, on God and man. For form’s sake, and perhaps, for the sake of perspicuity, four questions ought here to be propounded and resolved, at the very threshold of our inquiries. 1. What is sacrifice? 2. To whom is it to be offered? 3. For whom is it to be offered? 4. By whom is it to be offered? The answers are as prompt and as brief as the interrogations. 1. In its literal primary acceptance, it is "the solemn and religious infliction of death upon an innocent and unoffending victim, usually by shedding its blood." Figuratively, it means the offering of any thing, living or dead, person or animal, or property, to God. 2. Religious sacrifice is to be offered to God alone. 3. It is to be offered for man. 4. It is to be offered by a priest. The greater part of sacrifices were lambs. Hence Christ is called the LAMB OF GOD, not because of his innocence or patience, but because "he taketh away," or beareth "the sin of the world." It is rather, then, with a reference to his death than to his life, that he is called the Lamb of God. Neither his example nor his doctrine could expiate sin. This required the shedding of blood: for without shedding of blood, there never was remission of sin. Priests are mediators in their proper place and meaning. But at first every man was his own priest. For as it was once right for a man to marry his sister, because he could find no other person for a wife, so was it lawful and expedient for every man to be his own priest. Thus, Adam, Abel, Noah, etc., were their own priests. In the next chapter of time, the eldest sons--then the princes of tribes, were priests for their respective tribes and people. But finally, God called, and appointed such persons as Melchizedek and Aaron to those offices. Sacrifice, doubtless, is as old as the Fall. The institution of it is not recorded by Moses. But he informs us, that God had respect for Abel’s offering, and accepted from him a slain lamb. Now had it been a human institution, this could not have been the case for a divine warrant has always been essential to any acceptable worship. The question, "Who has required this at your hands?" must always be answered by a "Thus saith the Lord," before an offering of mortal man can be acknowledged by the Lawgiver of the universe. "In vain," said the Great Teacher, "do you worship God, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men." God accepted the sacrifices of Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc., and in the Jewish system gave many laws and enactments concerning it. Now as sacrifice may be contemplated in different aspects, in reference to what it is in itself, to whom it is tendered, for whom and by whom it is offered; so in each of these relations, it may be represented under different names. Hence, it is a "sin offering," a thank offering, a propitiation,1 a reconciliation, a redemption. Contemplated in reference to God, it is a propitiation; in reference to mankind, it is a reconciliation; and in another point of view, it may even be regarded as a redemption or ransom. On each of these it may be expedient to make a few remarks. Sacrifice, as respects God, is a propitiation; as respects sinners, it is a reconciliation; as respects sin, it is an expiation; as respects the saved, it is a redemption. These are aspects of the thing of cardinal value in understanding the Scriptures. As a propitiation or atonement2 it is offered to God; not, indeed, to move his benevolence or to excite his mercy, but to render him propitious according to law and justice. It sprang from everlasting love, and is the effect and not the cause of God’s benevolence to sinners. But without it God could not be propitious to us. The indignity offered his person, authority, and government, by the rebellion of man, as also the good of all his creatures, made it impossible for him, according to justice, eternal right, and his own benevolence, to show mercy without sacrifice. True, indeed, he always does prefer mercy to sacrifice, as he prefers the end to the means. But divine mercy forever sits upon the propitiatory; upon law and justice. Thus affirms Paul of Jesus, "Whom God has set forth as a propitiatory through faith in his blood, for a declaration of his justice--that he might be just, and the justifier of the ungodly, or of him that believeth in Jesus." In this sense only, God could not be gracious to man in forgiving him without a propitiation, or something that could justify him both to himself and all creatures. In this acceptation of the term atonement, it is found often in the law, not less than twenty-five times in the single book of Leviticus. As respects the sinner, we have said it is a reconciliation. Indeed, the term reconciliation very appropriately applies to sacrifice, inasmuch as it brings forth the offended and the offender together. So far as it honors law and justice, it reconciles God to forgive; and so far as it displays to the offender love and mercy, it reconciles him to his offended Sovereign. It is, in this view, a reconciliation indeed. It propitiates God and reconciles man. God’s "anger is turned away;" (not a turbulent passion, not an implacable wrath); but "that moral sentiment and justice," which demands the punishment of the violated law, is pacified or well pleased; and man’s hatred and animosity against God, is subdued, overcome, and destroyed in and by the same sacrifice. Thus, in fact, it is, in reference to both parties, a reconciliation. Still, however, when we speak according to scriptural usage, and with proper discrimination, sacrifice, as respects God, is atonement or propitiation, and as respects man, it is reconciliation. These are its reasons and its effects. "For this cause," says Paul, "Jesus is the mediator of a new institution, that by means of death for the redemption of the transgressions under the first institution, those who have been called might receive the promise of the eternal inheritance."3 Again, the same writer makes the death of Christ the basis of reconciliation, saying, "Be reconciled to God: for he has made Christ a sin offering for us;" and now "God is in Christ, reconciling the world to himself."4 As respects sin, it has been observed, sacrifice is an expiation. The terms purification or cleansing, are in the common version preferred to expiation. Once, at least (Numbers 35:33,) we have a need of a better word to represent the original than the term cleansing. "There can be no expiation for the land" polluted with blood, "but by the blood of him that shed it." Still, if any one prefer purification to expiation, or even cleansing to either, so long as we understand each other, it is indeed a matter of very easy forbearance. The main point is, that sacrifice cancels sin, atones for sin, and puts it away. "He put away sin," says Paul, "by the sacrifice of himself." This is expiation. "The redemption, then, which is in Christ Jesus," is a moral, and not a commercial consideration. If sin were only a debt, and not a crime, it might be forgiven without atonement. Nay, if sin were a debt, and sacrifice a payment of that debt, then there could be no forgiveness at all with God! For if the Redeemer or Ransomer of man, has paid the debt, justice, and not mercy or forgiveness, commands the release, not the pardon of the debtor. Some there are, however, who from inattention of the sacred style, and the meaning of biblical terms, have actually represented the death of Christ, rather as the payment of an immense debt, than as an expiation of sin, or a purification from guilt, and have thus made the pardon of sin wholly unintelligible, or rather, indeed, impossible. Every one feels, that when a third person assumes a debt, and pays it, the principal must be discharged, and cannot be forgiven. But when sin is viewed in the light of a crime, and atonement offered by a third person, then it is a question of grace, whether the pardon or acquittal of the sinner shall be granted by him against whom the crime has been committed; because, even after an atonement or propitiation is made, the transgressor is yet as deserving of punishment as before. There is room, then, for both justice and mercy; for the display of indignation against sin, and the forgiveness of the sinner, in just views of sin, and of the redemption there is in and through the Lord Jesus Christ. Redemption, however, is the deliverance from sin, rather than the expiation or atonement for it. Thus, Christ is said "by his own blood, to have obtained an eternal redemption for us."5 Thus pardon, sanctification, and even the resurrection of the bodies of the saints, are severally contemplated as parts of our redemption, or deliverance from guilt to sin, from the power of sin, and from the punishment of sin.6 There is a number of incongruities and inaccuracies in the controversy about the nature and extent of the atonement, which, as the mists of the morning retire from the hills before the rising sun, disappear from out mental horizon, when the light of scriptural definition breaks in upon our souls. The atonement or propitiation has no "extent," because God alone is its object. It contemplates sin as a unit in the divine government, and therefore the "Lamb of God beareth away the sin of the world," and his death is a "sin offering." As to its value, it is unspeakable. Commensurate it is, indeed, with the sin of the world; for it makes it just on the part of God, to forgive and save every one that believeth in Jesus. Reconciliation and redemption, have, however, a certain limited extent. Reconciliation is not universal, but partial. All do not believe in Jesus, all are therefore not reconciled to God through him. Redemption, or deliverance from the guilt, pollution, power, and punishment of sin, is only commensurate with the elect of God, 1: e., with those who believe in Jesus and obey him. They who affirm that one drop of Christ’s blood could expiate the sin of the whole world, teach without knowing it, that Christ has died in vain: for, surely, the Messiah might have shed many drops of blood and still have lived. They make his death an unmeaning superfluity or redundancy, who reason thus. They also agree, without intending it, with those who view sin merely as a debt, and not a crime, and therefore say that there is no need of sin offerings, or sacrifice, or of a divine Saviour, in order to its forgiveness. They, too, seem to mistake the matter, and I am sorry to find such names among them as Butler, Whitby, and Macknight, who, while they contend, that the death of Christ, was a sacrifice or a propitiation for sin, wholly resolve its efficacy into the mere appointment of God. According to them, God might have saved the whole world without the appearance of his Son: for the merits or efficacy of Christ’s death arises not from his dignity of person, but from the mere appointment or will of God! Now we cannot think that it was possible for God himself to save sinners in any other way than he has chosen: for to have paid an overprice for our redemption, savors rather of prodigality. than of divine wisdom and prudence. And if mere appointment was sufficient, why not, then, have continued the legal sacrifices, and have made the blood of bulls and of goats efficacious to take it away?! To conclude, sacrifice is essential to remission of sins, and is therefore old as the fall of man. But the sacrifices of the patriarchal and Jewish dispensations could not, and did not, take away sin. They were but types of the real sacrifice: for as Paul says, "It was not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sin." And again, "If the blood of bulls, and of goats, with the ashes of a heifer, did cleanse to the purification of the flesh; how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through an eternal spirit offers himself to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?" Christ’s death is, therefore, a real and sufficient sacrifice for sin, and stands in the attitudes of propitiation, reconciliation, expiation, and redemption; from which spring to us, justification, sanctification, adoption, and eternal life. The sacrifice of Christ, as before affirmed, is, as respects God, a propitiation; as respects man, a reconciliation; as respects sin, an expiation; as respects the penitent, a redemption; but the attributes that apply to it in any of these aspects do not apply to it in the others; and this oversight has in our opinion been the fruitful source of interminable controversies concerning the "atonement," as it is most usually denominated. It is indeed, infinite in value, as respects the expiation of sin, or its propitiatory power; but as respects the actual reconciliation and redemption of sinners, it is limited to those only who believe on and obey the Saviour. While, also, it is as universal as the sin of the world, the peculiar sins only of the obedient are expiated by it. Its design, then, is necessarily limited to all who come to God by it; while its value and efficacy, are equal to the salvation of the whole world, provided only, they will put themselves under the covering of its propitiatory power. The "doctrine of the cross" being the great central doctrine of the Bible, and the very essence of Christianity--which explains all the peculiarities of the Christian system, and of the relation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as far as mortals can comprehend them, and as it has been to sceptics and to many professors, "a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence," for the sake of some of the speculative and cavilling, who ask why are these things so, I subjoin an extract from the writings of Mr. Watson, on this point, which may suggest to them some useful reflections on this cardinal and all absorbing subject:-- "How sin may be forgiven,” says Mr. Watson, “without leading to such misconceptions of the divine character as would encourage disobedience, and thereby weaken the influence of the divine government, must be considered as a problem of very difficult solution. A government which admitted no forgiveness, would sink the guilty in despair; a government which never punishes offence, is a contradiction, it cannot exist. Not to punish the guilty, is to dissolve authority; to punish without mercy, is to destroy, and where all are guilty, to make the destruction universal. That we cannot sin with impunity, is a matter determined. The Ruler of the world is not careless of the conduct of his creatures; for that penal consequences are attached to the offence, is not a subject of argument, but it is matter of fact, evident by daily observation of the events and circumstances of the present life. It is a principle, therefore, already laid down, that the authority of God must be preserved; but it ought to be remarked, that in that kind of administration which restrains evil by penalty, and encourages obedience by favor and hope, we and all moral creatures are the interested parties, and not the Divine Governor himself, whom, because of his independent and all sufficient nature, our transgressions cannot injure. The reasons, therefore, which compel him to maintain his authority, do not terminate in himself. If he treats offenders with severity, it is for our sake, and for the sake of the moral order of the universe, to which sin, if encouraged by a negligent administration, or by entire and frequent impunity, would be the source of endless disorder and misery; and if the granting of pardon to offence be strongly and even severely guarded, so that no less a satisfaction could be accepted than the death of God’s own Son, we are to refer to the moral necessity of the case, as arising out of the general welfare of accountable creatures, liable to the deep evil of sin, and not to any reluctance on the part of our Maker to forgive, much less to any thing vindictive in his nature, charges which have been most inconsiderately and unfairly said to be implied in the doctrine of Christ’s sacrificial sufferings. If it then be true, that the release of offending man from future punishment, and his restoration to the divine favor, ought, for the interest of mankind themselves, and for the instruction and caution of other beings, to be so bestowed, that no license shall be given to offence; that God himself, while he manifests his compassion, should not appear less just, less holy than he really is; that his authority should be felt to be as compelling, and that disobedience should as truly, though not unconditionally, subject us to the deserved penalty, as though no hope of forgiveness had been exhibited;--we ask, On what scheme, save that which is developed in the New Testament, are those necessary conditions provided for? Necessary they are, unless we contend for a license and an impunity which shall annul all good government in the universe, a point for which no reasonable man will contend; and if so, then we must allow, that there is strong internal evidence of the truth of the doctrine of Scripture, when it makes the offer of pardon consequent only upon the securities we have mentioned. If it be said, that sin may be pardoned, in the exercise of the divine prerogative, the reply is, that if this prerogative were exercised towards a part of mankind only, the passing by of the rest would be with difficulty reconciled to the Divine character; and if the benefit were extended to all, government, would be at an end. This scheme of bringing men within the exercise of a merciful prerogative, does not, therefore, meet the obvious difficulty of the case; nor is it improved by confining the act of grace only to repentant criminals. For if repentance imply a "renewal in the spirit of the mind," no criminal would of himself thus repent. But if by repentance be meant merely remorse and terror, in the immediate view of danger, what offender, surrounded with the wreck of former enjoyments, feeling the vanity of guilty pleasures, now past forever, and beholding the approach of the delayed penal visitation, but would repent? Were the principle of granting pardon to repentance to regulate human governments, every criminal would escape, and judicial forms would become a subject of ridicule. Nor is it recognized by the Divine Being, in his conduct to men in the present state, although in this world punishments are not final and absolute. Repentance does not restore health injured by intemperance; property wasted by profusion; or character once stained by dishonorable practices. If repentance alone could secure pardon, then all must be pardoned, and government dissolved, as in the case of forgiveness by the exercise of mere prerogative; but if a merely arbitrary selection be made, then different and discordant principles of government are introduced into the divine administration, which is a derogatory supposition. The question proposed abstractedly, How may mercy be extended to offending creatures, the subjects of the divine government, without encouraging vice by lowering the righteous and holy character of God, and the authority of his government in the maintenance of which the whole universe of beings are interested? is, therefore, at once one of the most important, and one of the most difficult that can employ the human mind. None of the theories which have been opposed to Christianity affords a satisfactory solution of the problem. They assume principles either destructive of moral government, or which cannot, in the circumstances of man be acted upon. The only answer is found in the holy Scriptures. They alone show, and indeed, they alone profess to show, how God may be "just," and yet the "justifier" of the ungodly. Other schemes show how he may be merciful; but the difficulty does not lie there. The gospel meets it, by declaring "the righteousness of God," at the same time that it proclaims his mercy. The voluntary sufferings of the divine Son of God, "for us," "the just for the unjust," magnify the justice of God; display his hatred to sin; proclaim "the exceeding sinfulness" of transgression, by the deep and painful manner in which they were inflicted upon the Substitute; warn the persevering offender of the terribleness, as well as the certainty, of his punishment; and open the gates of salvation to every penitent. It is a part of the same divine plan, also, to engage the influence of the Holy Spirit, to awaken penitence in man, and to lead the wanderer back to himself; to renew our fallen nature in righteousness, at the moment we are justified through faith, and to place us in circumstances in which we may henceforth "walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." All the ends of government are here answered--no license is given to offence--the moral law is unrepealed--a day of judgment is still appointed--future and eternal judgments still display their awful sanctions--a new and singular display of the awful purity of the divine character is afforded--yet pardon is offered to all who seek it; and the whole world may be saved. With such evidence of the suitableness to the case of mankind, under such lofty views of connection with the principles and ends of moral government, does the doctrine of the atonement present itself. But other important considerations are not wanting to mark the united wisdom and goodness of that method of extending mercy to the guilty, which Christianity teaches us to have been actually and exclusively adopted. It is rendered, indeed, "worthy of all acceptation," by the circumstance of its meeting the difficulties we have just dwelt upon--difficulties which could not otherwise have failed to make a gloomy impression upon every offender awakened to a sense of his spiritual danger; but it must be very inattentively considered, if it does not further commend itself to us, by not only removing the apprehensions we might feel as to the severity of the Divine Lawgiver, but as exalting him in our esteem, as "the righteous Lord, who loveth righteousness," who surrendered his beloved Son to suffering and death, that the influence of moral goodness might not be weakened in the hearts of his creatures; and as a God of love, affording in this instance a view of the tenderness and benignity of his nature, infinitely more impressive and affecting, than any abstract description could convey; or than any act of creating or providential power and grace could exhibit, and, therefore most suitable to subdue that enmity which had unnaturally grown up in the hearts of his creatures, and which, when corrupt, they so easily transfer from a law which restrains their inclination, to the Lawgiver himself. If it be important to us to know the extent and reality of our danger, by the death of Christ it is displayed, not in description, but in the most impressive action; if it be important that we should have an assurance of the divine placibility toward us, it here receives a demonstration incapable of being heightened; if gratitude be the most powerful motive of future obedience, and one which renders command on the one part, and active service on the other, "not grievous, but joyous," the recollection of such obligations as those which the "love of Christ" has laid us under, is a perpetual spring to this energetic affection, and will be the means of raising it to higher and more delightful activity forever. All that can most powerfully illustrate the united tenderness and awful majesty of God, and the odiousness of sin; all that can win back the heart of man to his Maker and Lord, and render future obedience a matter of affection and delight, as well as duty; all that can extinguish the angry and malignant passions of man to man; all that can inspire a mutual benevolence, and dispose to a self-denying charity for the benefit of others; all that can arouse by hope, or tranquilize by faith, is to be found in the sacrificial death of Christ, and the principles and purposes for which it was endured." 1 The Hebrew term translated in the Greek Old Testament, of the ilasmsos, and in the common English version, atonement or propitiation, is copher, which signifies a covering. The verb COPHER "to cover," or "to make atonement" denotes the object of sacrifice; and hence, Jesus is called the ilasmos, the covering, propitiation or atonement for our sins. 1 John 2:2; 1 John 4:10. It is a curious and remarkable fact, that God covered Adam and Eve with the skins of the first victims of death, instead of their fig leaf robes. This may have prefigured the fact, that while sin was atoned or expiated as respects God by the life of the victim, the effect as respects man was a covering for his nakedness and shame, or his sin, which divested him of his primitive innocence and beauty, and covered him with ignominy and reproach. 2 Kattallagee, translated once atonement; Romans 5:11, occurs in the New Testament four times. In Romans 5:11, it ought to have been reconciliation, as in Romans 11:15, 2 Corinthians 5:18-19. It is not ilasmos, atonement, in the Jewish sense, but katallagee, reconciliation. God receives the atonement, and men the reconciliation. It is preposterous, then, to talk to the extent of the atonement, but not so of the reconciliation. 3 Hebrews 9:15. 4 2 Corinthians 5:18-21. 5 Hebrews 9:12. 6 See Ephesians 1:7, Colossians 1:14, 1 Peter 3:18, Isaiah 59:20, Romans 8:23, Ephesians 1:14; Ephesians 4:30. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 63: 03.11. THE ATTRIBUTES OF A REAL SIN-OFFERING ======================================================================== CHAPTER XI. THE ATTRIBUTES OF A REAL SIN-OFFERING. A single action or event often involves, in weal or woe, a family, a nation, an empire. Who can count the effects or bearings of the elevation or fall of a Cesar, a Hannibal, a Napoleon? A single victory, like that of Zama, or of Waterloo; a single revolution, like that of England, or America, sometimes involves the fortunes of a world. Neither actions nor events can be appreciated but through their bearings and tendencies upon every person and thing with which they come in contact. The relations, connections, and critical dependencies in which persons and actions stand are often so numerous and so various, that it is seldom, or perhaps, at all, in the power of man to calculate the consequences, or the value of one of a thousand of the more prominent actions of his life. Who could have estimated, or who can estimate, the moral or the political bearings of the sale of Joseph to a band of Ishmaelites--of the exposure of Moses in a cradle of rushes on the Nile--of the anointing of David king of Israel--of the schism of the twelve tribes under Rehoboam--of the treachery of Judas, the martyrdom of Stephen, the conversion of Paul, the accession of Constantine the Great, the apostasy of Julian, the crusades against the Turks, the reformation of Luther, the revival of letters, or any of the great movements of the present day? How difficult, then, is it to estimate the rebellion of Satan, the fall of Adam, the death of Christ, in all their bearings upon the destinies of the universe! Before a remedy for sin could either be devised or appreciated a knowledge of its bearings upon God and man, upon time and eternity, upon heaven and earth, is an indispensable prerequisite. But who possesses this knowledge, or what uninspired man can attain it? At best we know but in part; and, therefore, can but partially explain any thing. How difficult, then, to form a satisfactory view of sin and its remedy--of the fall of Adam and the death of Christ! It would, however, greatly aid our conceptions of the death of Christ, and illustrate the nature and use of sin-offerings, could we obtain just and scriptural views of sin in its necessary consequences, or in its prominent bearings upon the universe. Indeed, some knowledge of these aspects of sin is essential to our perception and appreciation of the wisdom, justice, and grace of the Christian system. It is not enough that we entertain a few vague and indistinct notions of its tendencies, or of the attitudes in which it stands to God, ourselves, and our fellows: we must have clear and definite views of the relations in which God stands to us, and we to him and to one another, and how sin affects us all in these relations: for that it bears a peculiar aspect to each of us in all these relations will, we doubt not, be conceded without debate. God stands in diverse relations to the intellectual and moral creation. He is our Father, our Lawgiver, and our King. Now his feelings as a father, and his character as a lawgiver and sovereign, are equally involved in the bearings and aspects of sin. The influence of sin upon ourselves is also various and multiform. It affects the heart the conscience, the whole soul and body of man. It alienates our affections, and even works hatred to our minds both towards God and man. As an ancient adage says, "We hate those we have injured;" and having offended God our Father, we are, for that very reason, filled with enmity against him. It also oppresses and pollutes the conscience with its guilt and dread, and enslaves the passions as well as works the destruction of the body. It also alienates man from man, weakens the authority and destroys the utility of the law; and, if not subdued, would ultimately subvert the throne and government of God. If not restrained and put down, it would fill the universe with anarchy and disorder--with universal misery and ruin. To go no farther into details, it may, on the premises already before us, be observed:--1st. That every sin wounds the affection of our heavenly Father--2d. Insults and dishonors his law and authority in the estimation of his other subjects--3d. Alienates our hearts from him--4th. Oppresses our conscience with guilt and dread--5th. Severs us from society by its morbid selfishness and disregard for man--5th. Induces to new infractions and habitual violations of right--And, 7th. Subjects us to shame and contempt--our bodies to the dust, and our persons to everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord. Not as the full tale, but rather as a specimen of the loss sustained, and of the mischief done, by our transgression, we have made these seven specifications. These only serve to show in how many aspects sin must be contemplated before we can form a just estimate of a suitable and sufficient sin offering or remedy. Now, so far as we have been able to trace the tendencies and bearings of transgression in the above enumeration, we must find in the sin offering a remedy and an antidote which will fully meet all these aspects; otherwise it will be utterly valueless and unavailing in the eye of enlightened reason, as well as in the righteous judgment of God, to expiate sins, to put it away, and to prevent its recurrence. Need, we demonstrate that man himself cannot furnish such a sin offering! Need we again propound Micah’s question--"Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before him, with burnt offerings; with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of river of oil? Shall I give my first born for my transgression; the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul." Will repentance for the past, and future amendment place things as they were; raise the murdered dead; repair wasted fortunes, and recruit broken constitutions? Will tears, and groans, and agonies, honor a violated law, sustain a righteous government, vindicate the Divine character, and prevent future and further enormities? Have the ever done it? Can they ever do it? Surely, we shall be excused for not attempting to prove that we have neither a tear, nor a sigh, nor an agony, nor a lamb, nor a kid of our own creation, to offer to the Lord, even were such a sacrifice available to meet all the bearings of the case! Every transgression, even the least, the eating of a forbidden apple, subjects the transgressor to destruction. One sin, of one man, has involved the whole race in death. The life of the transgressor is demanded in the very mildest accents of insulted justice. Hence, in the law of the typical sin offerings, we find it thus written: "The life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar, to make an atonement for your souls: FOR IT IS THE BLOOD THAT MAKETH AN ATONEMENT FOR THE SOUL."1 But such blood, such lives as the law required could not, Paul and Common Sense being judge, take away sin. They could only prefigure a life and a blood that could truly, and justly, and honorably expiate it. Thus, the death of Christ is forced upon our attention by the law, by the prophets, by the necessity of the case, enlightened Reason being in the chair, as the only real, true, and proper sin-atoning offering. It does, indeed, meet not only the above seven particulars, but all others which have occurred to the human mind; and thus secures the union and harmony of things on earth, and of things in heaven, in the inviolable bonds of an everlasting brotherhood. 1. "In bringing many sons to glory," it soothes and delights the wounded love of our kind and benignant heavenly Father— 2. "It magnifies and makes honorable" his violated law and insulted government— 3. It reconciles our hearts thoroughly and forever to God, as a proof and pledge incontrovertible of his wonderful and incomprehensible love to us— 4. It effectually relieves our conscience by "cleansing us from all sin," and produces within us a divine serenity, a peace and joy "unspeakable and full of glory"— 5. It also reconciles us to our fellows, and fills us with brotherly affection and universal benevolence, because it makes us all one in faith, in hope, in joy, as joint heirs of immortality and eternal life— 6. It is the most effectual guard against new infractions of the divine law, and superlatively deters from sin, by opening to us its diabolical nature and tremendous consequences; showing us in the person of God’s only begotten and well beloved Son, when a sin offering, the impossibility of escape, from the just and retributive punishment of insulted and indignant Heaven--and 7. It is a ransom from death, a redemption from the grave, such a deliverance from the guilt, pollution, power, and punishment of sin, as greatly elevates the sons of God above all that they could have attained or enjoyed under the first constitution. It presents a new creation to our view;--new heavens, new earth, new bodies, new life, new joys, new glories. He that vanquished death by dying, who now sits upon the throne says, "Behold, I make all things new." "He has become the Author of an eternal salvation to all that obey him." Let no one imagine that in this exemplification of the aspects in which sin and sin offerings must be contemplated before we can rationally judge of the necessity, the suitableness, and the sufficiency of the death of Christ, we have attempted to present a full view of these aspects. We are incompetent to the task. The life is too short, and our opportunities too limited, to learn all the bearings of transgression upon ourselves, the throne and government of God, and his other subjects. We only intend a specimen of the points to be met in a proper sin offering. These put it out of the reach of all human, of all angelic, of all created mediators, victims, or sacrifices to expiate sin. So far as we can comprehend this wonderful subject, we are more and more deeply penetrated with the conviction, that nothing inferior to the voluntary sacrifice of the Son of God, could put away sin; and make it both just, and merciful, and honorable, and safe, on the part of his God and Father, to forgive and save one of his rebel race. Nor would it then have been just, according to our conception, to have compelled him to bear our iniquities, or to suffer the just for the unjust; to inflict on an innocent person, the chastisement of our offences; but it was both just and kind on the part of our heavenly Father, to accept for us the voluntary surrender of his Son, as a willing sacrifice for our sins. "Thanks be to God, for his unspeakable gift!" 1 Leviticus 17:11. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 64: 03.12. CHRIST, THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD ======================================================================== CHAPTER XII. CHRIST THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. As Abraham said to Isaac on his way to Mount Moriah, "God," my son, "will provide himself a lamb for the burnt offering," so has it come to pass. In order to the redemption of man from sin and all its penal consequences, God has provided a lamb, for a sin offering. He sent his Son, who on coming into the world, said, "Sacrifice and offering thou wouldst not, but a body hast thou prepared me; in burnt offerings and sacrifices for sins thou has had no pleasure; then said I, Lo, I come to do thy will, in the volume of the book it is written of me." But he did more than offer himself as a sin offering; he was more than the Lamb of God; he was the "prophet of Jehovah," and revealed to man the character and the will of God. He disclosed secrets hid from the foundation of the world. In one word, he is THE ORACLE, as well as the SACRIFICE which God had provided for us. As the INCARNATE WORD, he is the interpreter of his will. The New Testament is then, the gift of Christ--and was written by his guidance and inspiration. For all that the Spirit of God has done has been through his instrumentality. The Spirit is Christ’s gift. Jesus is now as much "Lord of the Spirit" as he is the Lord of life and glory. The New Testament is a volume written by his servants. Six of his Apostles and two of his Evangelists wrote it all. That book is to us now in the stead of the personal presence of the Lord and his Apostles. He gave gifts to men after he left their abode. "He gave Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors, Teachers." As a means of our salvation; as one of the things which God has done for us, we place the New Testament, the living oracles, or gospel of Christ, as next in order, as it is in importance, to his sacrifice. To the sacrifice of Christ, we always look for the basis of our pardon; to his blood that cleanses from all sin, for justification and personal acceptance; and to his Word we look for counsel and instruction in Christian piety and righteousness. We are as dependent on his Word for light, as we are upon his blood for pardon. "I am," said he, "THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD; he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." "In him was life, and the life was the light of men." "That was the true light," said John, "which coming into the world, enlighteneth every man." "As long as I am in the world," says Jesus, "I am the light of the world." Thus Isaiah spake of him: "I will also give thee as a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation to the ends of the earth." "I will give thee for a covenant of the people, or light of the Gentiles, to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison; and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house." "His going forth is prepared as the morning." "The sun of righteousness will arise with healing under his wings." "I witness," said Paul, "both to small and great, that the Messiah should show light to the people and to the Gentiles." The Word of Christ, is the light of Christ; and therefore the Christian Scriptures are the light of the world; and he that followeth them shall have the light of life. "If you continue in my doctrine," says the Messiah, "you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." "If the Son make you free, you shall be free indeed." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 65: 03.13. THE LORDSHIP OF THE MESSIAH ======================================================================== CHAPTER XIII. THE LORDSHIP OF THE MESSIAH. We are seeking to apprehend the things done for us in the Christian system. "Christ, our passover, has been sacrificed for us." As such, "not a bone was broken." Yet, "he died for us." In the second place, he has become our prophet, as well as our priest; and has declared to us the will of God; the whole will of God concerning us. He is our light, as well as our sin offering. But in the third place, he has been made Lord for us. To make Christ Lord for us, as well as of us--was the last act of the sublime drama of man’s redemption from sin. The last secret of the mystery of Christ, which Peter promulged on the day of Pentecost, was, "Let all the house of Israel know, that God has made that same Jesus, whom you crucified, both LORD and CHRIST." To make him Lord for us, was to invest him with universal authority, that he might have it in his power to give eternal life to all his people. Jesus, in one of his prayers, in anticipation of his investiture, says, "Thou hast given him power over all flesh that he might give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him." But after his resurrection from the dead, and ascension into heaven, he was crowned Lord of angels, as well as Lord of men; and therefore he said, "all authority," or lordship, "in heaven and on earth is given to me." He is now the LORD OF HOSTS: legions of angels, the armies of the skies, are given to him:--for what? That he might be able to do all for us that our condition needs. It was for us he became a Prophet, for us he became a priest, for us he has been made Lord of hosts, King of the universe, Judge and avenger of all. He is Lord of life, Lord of the Spirit, Lord of all. We need sacrifice--and therefore we need a priest. We need a Leader, a Luminary, a Sun of Righteousness; and we want one who can always help us in time of need, when we wrestle not with flesh and blood, but with the rulers of the darkness of this world; with wicked spirits living in the air. In Jesus himself, in one of the conflicts, needed an angel to minister to him, we need it more. Three things are done for us; a sin offering is presented; a lamp of life is put into our hands; and all the active powers and energies in the wide universe are placed at the command of our King whenever we need them. These are things already done. Hence, the Holy Spirit, and all the angels of heaven are now at the disposal of our Saviour: for in him all the promises of God are laid up; all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and all the fulness of the Deity, reside fully and truly in him. All these things, it is true, might be comprehended in one gift--the gift of Jesus as our Mediator; our Prophet, Priest, and King. Still it is expedient to view the things done for us, severally and distinctly in the Christian system. Other things are promised to be done for us: but these are the things already done for us, and before we shall speak of the things yet to be done for us, and done in us, we shall summarily consider the things to be done by us, before any thing more can be done for us, or done in us. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 66: 03.14. FAITH IN CHRIST ======================================================================== CHAPTER XIV. FAITH IN CHRIST. The things done for us will truly be to us as though they were not, unless they are believed. Hence, to the untutored and unbelieving barbarian or infidel, the universe is without a sin offering, a Sun of Righteousness, a Lord, Redeemer, and a Holy Spirit. Faith is necessary only as a means of attainment; as a means of enjoyment. It is not, then, an arbitrary enactment or requisition, but a gracious means of salvation. Faith in Christ is the effect of belief. Belief is the cause; and trust, confidence, or faith in Christ, the effect. "The faith," sometimes means the truth to be believed. Sometimes it means "the belief of the truth;" but here we speak of it metonymically, putting the effect for the cause--or calling the effect by the name of the cause. To believe what a person says, and to trust in him are not always identical. True, indeed, they often are; for if a person speaks to us concerning himself, and states to us matters of great interest to ourselves, requiring confidence in him, to believe what he says, and to believe or trust in him, are in effect, one and the same thing. Suppose a physician present himself to one that is sick, stating his ability and willingness to heal him; to believe is to trust in him, and to put ourselves under his guidance; provided, only, we love health rather than sickness, and life rather than death. While, then, faith is the simple belief of testimony, or of the truth, and never can be more nor less than that; as a principle of action it has respect to a person or thing interesting to us: and is confidence or trust in that person or thing. Now the belief of what Christ says of himself, terminates in trust or confidence in him: and as the Christian religion is a personal thing, both as respects subject and object, that faith in Christ which is essential to salvation is not the belief of any doctrine, testimony, or truth, abstractly, but belief in Christ; trust or confidence in him as a person, not a thing.1 We take Paul’s definition of the term and of the thing, as perfectly simple, intelligible, and sufficient. For the term faith, he substitutes the belief of the truth. "God has from the beginning chosen you to salvation, through the sanctification of the spirit; through the belief of the truth."2 And of the thing, he says, "Faith is the confidence of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."3 And John says, it is "receiving testimony," for "If we receive the testimony of man," as a principle of action, or put trust in it, "the testimony of God is greater," and of course will produce greater confidence.4 Any belief, then, that does not terminate in our personal confidence in Jesus as the Christ, and to induce trustful submission to him, is not faith unfeigned; but a dead faith, and cannot save the soul. 1 See the Essay on the Foundation of Christian Union, on the terms fact, testimony, faith, etc., where this subject is treated at large. 2 2 Thessalonians 2:13. 3 Hebrews 11:1. 4 1 John 5:9. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 67: 03.15. REPENTANCE ======================================================================== CHAPTER XV. REPENTANCE. Repentance is an effect of faith: for who that believes not that God exists, can have "repentance towards God"? Repentance is sorrow for sins committed; but it is more. It is a resolution to forsake them; but it is more. It is actual "ceasing to do evil, and learning to do well." This is "repentance unto life," or what is truly called reformation. Such is the force of the command, "Repent every one of you." It is not merely, Be sorry for what you have done wrong; nor is it, Resolve to do better; nor even, Try to amend your ways: but it is actual amendment of life from the views and the motives which the gospel of Christ exhibits. Gospel repentance is the offspring of gospel light and gospel motive, and therefore, it is the effect, and not the cause, of belief of the testimony of God. True repentance is, then, always consummated in actual reformation of life. It therefore carries in its very essence, the idea of restitution. For no man can cordially disallow or reprobate his sinful course of life, who does not redress the wrongs he has done to the utmost limit of his power. To God, he can make no restitution, only as he refunds to his creatures, whom he has injured. If, then, any one is convinced in his own mind, that he has injured the person, the character, or the property of his neighbor, by word or deed, and has it in his power, by word or deed, to undo the evil he has done, or to restore what he has unjustly taken away, he will certainly do it, if his repentance be according to either the law of Moses or the Gospel of Christ. Otherwise his repentance is of no value: for God cannot, without trampling on his own law, and dishonoring his own character, forgive any man who is conscious of any sin he has done to any man, unless to the utmost extent of his power, he make good the injury he has done. Thus saith the Lord, "If a soul sin and commit a trespass against the Lord, and lie unto his neighbor in that which was delivered him to keep, or in fellowship, (i. e., trading,) or in anything taken away by violence, or has deceived his neighbor, or have found that which was lost, and lieth concerning it, or sweareth falsely; in any or all these that a man doeth, sinning therein: Then it shall be, because he hath sinned and is guilty, that he shall restore that which he took violently away, or the thing which he has deceitfully gotten, or that which was delivered him to keep, or that lost thing which he found, or all that about which he has sworn falsely, he shall even restore it in the principal, and shall add a fifth part more thereto, and give it to him to whom it appertaineth, in the day of his trespass offering, and he shall bring his trespass offering to the Lord, and the priest shall make atonement for him before the Lord, and it shall be forgiven him." Leviticus 6:1-7. Sin offerings without repentance, and repentance without sin offerings, are equally ineffectual before God. We sin against God always, when we sin against man; and therefore, after making all things right with man, we can only, through sacrifice, which makes the matter right with God, obtain forgiveness. To the same effect, Jesus speaks, Matthew 5:23-24, "Be reconciled to your brother," first make the matter right with him, "and then come and offer your gift."1 1 See my essays on Regeneration, on the words repentance and reparation. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 68: 03.16. BAPTISM ======================================================================== CHAPTER XVI. BAPTISM. There are three things to be considered in baptism:--1. The action commanded to be done;--2. The subject specified;--3. The meaning or design of that action. Jesus commanded a certain character to be the subject of a certain action, for a certain specific purpose or design. The questions, then, are, What that action? What that subject? What that design? OF THE ACTION OF BAPTISM The action is indicated by a word as definite, clear, and unequivocal, as any word in any language ever spoken by the many-tongued sons of Adam. Besides, in all laws and institutions, and more especially in those that are of a positive, rather than a moral nature, all words having both a literal and a figurative meaning, a common and a special signification, are to be understood in their literal and common, and not in their figurative and uncommon import and acception. So have decided all the judges of law and language, from time immemorial. That definite and unambiguous word, as almost universally known in these days of controversy, is baptisma, or baptismos, anglicised, not translated, baptism. The primary means by which the meaning of this word is ascertained are the following: 1. The ancient lexicons and dictionaries;--2. The ancient and modern translations of the New Testament;--3. The ancient customs of the church;--4. The place and circumstances of baptizing, as mentioned in the New Testament;--and 5. The allusions to this ordinance and the expositions of it in the apostolic epistles. To each of these we shall do little more than simply advert on the present occasion. 1. The ancient lexicons with one consent give immersion as the natural, common, and primary sense of this word. There is not known to us a single exception. Nor is there a received lexicon, ancient or modern, that does ever translate this word by the terms sprinkling or pouring. And as there are but three actions allowed to be Christian baptism; and as the original words, both verbs and nouns are translated immerse and immersion, in all lexicons, and never sprinkle or pour; follows it not then, that neither sprinkling, nor pouring is Christian baptism? The question is not, whether these words are ever, like other words, used figuratively: whether they may not metonymically mean, wetting or washing; for these may be the effects of either sprinkling, pouring, or dipping. The question is not, whether these words may be so used: but the question is, whether the action commanded in baptizo, be sprinkling, pouring, or immersing a person. All authorized Greek dictionaries, ancient and modern, with one consent, affirm that action to be immersion; and not sprinkling or pouring. 2. All Latin, English, German and French versions which we have seen, and we believe on the testimony of others, all that we have not seen, sometimes translate these words, their derivatives, or compounds, by words equivalent to immersion: but on no occasion ever translate them by sprinkling, or pouring, or any other word equivalent to these terms. This is an evidence of great moment: for if these versions, have nineteen times in twenty been made by those who practice sprinkling or pouring in the name of the Lord; and if these words occur about one hundred and twenty times in the New Testament, is it not very singular that never once have such translators rendered the words by sprinkling, or pouring? a decisive proof in our judgment that it could not be so translated. Indeed, a mere English scholar, who has only heard that baptism is a Greek word, may indubitably ascertain that it means neither sprinkling nor pouring, by substituting the definition of the term, and trying its sense in all places where the ordinance is spoken of. This is an infallible canon of interpretation. The proper definition of a term substituted for it will always make as good sense as the term itself. Now, if an English reader will try sprinkling or pouring in those places where he finds the word baptism, he will soon discover that neither of these words can possibly represent it, if the above canon be true. For instance, we are told, that all Judea and Jerusalem went out to John and were baptized of him in the Jordan. Sprinkled them in the Jordan! poured them in the Jordan! immersed them in the Jordan. Can any doubt, which of these truly represents the original in such passages? I may sprinkle or pour water upon a person; but to sprinkle or pour them into water is impossible. It is not said he baptized water upon them, but he baptized them in water, in the river. 3. The ancient church, it is admitted on all hands, practiced immersion. It did so, Roman, Greek and English historians being worthy of any credit. 4. The places where baptism was anciently administered, being rivers, pools, baths, and places of much water, show that it was not sprinkling or pouring. They went down into the water, and came up out of it, etc. And John baptized where there were many waters or much water. And even Paul and Silas went out of the Philippian jail to baptize the jailor at night, rather than send for a cup of water! 5. It is also alluded to and explained under the figure of a burial and resurrection, as relating to the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, etc. Romans 6:1-23 : and Colossians 2:1-23 : From these topics many clear and conclusive arguments may be drawn, on which it is not now our business to dwell. If, indeed, any one of these five topics be correct, the action that Christ commands is forever decided. How much more, when they all concur in asserting the same interpretation! There is, then, but one baptism, and not two under the Christian administration. THE SUBJECT OF BAPTISM. Characters, not persons, as such, are the subjects of baptism. Penitent believers--not infants nor adults, not males nor females, not Jews nor Greeks; but professors of repentance towards God, and faith in Jesus Christ are the proper subjects of this ordinance. "To as many as received him, to them he granted privilege of becoming the sons of God, to them that believed on his name, which were born not of flesh, nor of blood, nor of the will of man, but of God." "He that believeth, and is baptized--not he that is baptized and believeth, shall be saved." "Many of the Corinthians hearing, believed and were baptized," not many of the Corinthians were baptized and then believed, and finally heard the Gospel! "for without faith it is impossible to please God," etc. THE MEANING OF BAPTISM. "In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, the baptism of repentance, for the remission of sins." "And Jesus said that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem." Therefore, Peter said to the penitent Pentecostians, "Repent, and be baptized every one of you, in the name of the Lord Jesus, for the remission of sins." Again, "As many of you as have been baptized or immersed into Christ, have put on Christ, have been immersed into his death;" "have risen with him." Baptism is, then, designed to introduce the subjects of it into the participation of the blessings of the death and resurrection of Christ; who "died for our sins," and "rose again for our justification." But it has no abstract efficacy. Without previous faith in the blood of Christ, and deep and unfeigned repentance before God, neither immersion in water nor any other action can secure to us the blessings of peace and pardon. It can merit nothing. Still to the believing penitent it is the means of receiving a formal, distinct, and specific absolution, or release from guilt. Therefore, none but those who have first believed the testimony of God and have repented of their sins, and that have been intelligently immersed into his death, have the full and explicit testimony of God, assuring them of pardon. To such only as are truly penitent, dare we say, ’Arise and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling upon the name of the Lord;’ and to such only can we say with assurance, "You are washed, you are justified, you are sanctified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of God." But let the reader examine with care our special essay on the Remission of Sins, in which this much debated subject is discussed at considerable length. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 69: 03.17. THE CHRISTIAN CONFESSION OF FAITH ======================================================================== CHAPTER XVII. THE CHRISTIAN CONFESSION OF FAITH. The only apostolic and divine confession of faith which God, the Father of all, has laid for the church--and that on which Jesus himself said he would build it, is the sublime and supreme proposition: THAT JESUS OF NAZARETH IS THE MESSIAH, THE SON OF THE LIVING GOD. This is the peculiarity of the Christian system: its specific attribute. The antediluvian Abel, Enoch, etc., believed that a Son of Eve would bruise Satan’s head. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob believed that a peculiar son of theirs would be the child of blessings, the Son of promise to the human race. Indeed, Jesse, David, and all the Prophets, looked for one from the sceptred tribe, who would be king of all the earth, and a benefactor of humanity. John the Baptist, in his day, preached and believed that the Messenger of the covenant of eternal peace was immediately to appear. But the disciples of Jesus, son of Mary, believed and confessed that he was the identical person. "We have found him of whom Moses in the law, and all the Prophets did write; Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of David, the King of Israel." "Rabbi," said Nathaniel, "thou art the Son of God, thou art the King of Israel." But yet it remained for Peter to speak fully and expressly, the very proposition which contains the whole matter. "We believe and are sure that thou art the Messiah, the Son of the living God." "On this rock," responded he, with a blessing upon Peter’s name and head: "On this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it." Of this foundation Paul has said, "other foundation can no man lay than that which is already laid, which is Jesus Christ." God himself laid this corner, this tried and precious stone, as the foundation of the temple of grace; and therefore with his own lips pronounced him his beloved Son; and sealed him by the visible descent and impress of his Spirit, as his Messiah, the Messenger of Life and Peace to a condemned and rebellious world. This confession of faith has in it two distinct ideas--the one concerning the person, the other concerning the office of the Son of Man. The one asserts his divine relations, the other, his official rank and glory. No one can intelligently believe this proposition, and not turn to God with all his heart: for there is in it a thousand thoughts and motives, to bind the soul to God, and melt it into the most affectionate devotion. There is also in it the strongest bond to secure the affections of all Christians to one another. There is no other confession of faith, on which the church can be built, on which it can possibly stand one and undivided, but on this one. With the heart man believes this proposition in order to justification; and with his mouth he maketh this confession of it in order to his salvation. So Paul explains it, Romans 10:1-21; and thus we have one Lord, one faith, and one baptism, among the immutable reasons why Christians should maintain unity of spirit in the bonds of peace.1 1 See the essay on the Foundation of Christian Union and Communion. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 70: 03.18. CONVERSION AND REGENERATION ======================================================================== CHAPTER XVIII. CONVERSION, REGENERATION. The change which is consummated by immersion, is sometimes called in sacred style, "being quickened," or "made alive," "passing from death to life," "being born again," "having risen with Christ," "turning to the Lord," "being enlightened," "conversion," "reconciliation," "repentance unto life." These, like the words propitiation, atonement, reconciliation, expiation, redemption, expressive of the various aspects which the death of Christ sustains, are expressive of the different relations in which this great change, sometimes called a "new creation," may be contemplated. The entire change effected in man by the Christian system, consists in four things:--a change of views; a change of affections; a change of state; and a change of life. Now, in respect of each of these separately or in combination, it is called by different names. As a change of views, it is called "being enlightened;" "Once you were darkness, now you are light in the Lord; walk as children of the light;" "After that you were enlightened," etc. As a change of the affections, it is called "being reconciled;" thus, "for if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more being reconciled we shall be saved through his life." As a change of state, it is called "being quickened;" "passing from death to life," "being born again," "having risen with Christ," "And you hath he quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins," "By this we know we have passed from death to life, because we love the brethren," "Being born again, not of corruptible, but of incorruptible seed, the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever." "If you be," or "since you are risen with Christ, set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth." As a change of life it is called "repentance unto life," "turning to the Lord," "conversion;" "Then God has granted to the Gentiles repentance to life." "And all that dwelt in Lydda and Saron saw Eneas and turned to the Lord." "Except you be converted, and become as children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven." "When thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren." "He that converts a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death and hide a multitude of sins." Great confusion has been introduced into the Christian community by a confounding of these terms, making only one of them to mean all the others. Witness the controversy about regeneration; as if that word were used in sacred Scripture in reference to the entire change effected by the Christian system; whereas, in strict propriety, it is never used by itself in the Bible to represent any part of this change, much less the whole of it. We have the phrase "washing of regeneration" once, in contradistinction from the "renewal of the Holy Spirit," (Titus 3:5.,) but never, by itself, as indicative of this four-fold change. But suppose it should be conceded, that the term regeneration might be just equivalent to "being born again," it could even then only represent so much of this change as respects mere state: for the figure of a new birth applies merely to admission into a family or nation; and not to the process of quickening or making alive of the person so admitted. It can, then, in strict propriety, only apply to the fourth part of that change which the gospel of salvation proposes and effects. Being born again is, or may be the effect of a change of views, of a change of affections; or it may be the cause of a change of life; but certain it is, it is not identical with any of them, and never can represent them all. But may it not include them all? It is impossible: for however we might extend the figure and suppose it to include its causes, it cannot also include its effects. If it should include a change of views, a change of affections, and a change of state, it cannot include a change of life, or of character. We ought then to use this word in its strict and scriptural acceptance, if we would escape the great confusion now resting upon this subject. The sophistry or delusion of this confusion is, that making regeneration equivalent to the entire change instead of to be one-fourth part of it, the community will always be imposed on and misled by seeking to find the attributes of conversion in the new birth, or of the new birth in conversion; and so of all the others. Being born again is not conversion, nor a change of views, nor a change of affections, but a change of state. True, indeed, that of the person who is born again we may suppose a change of views, a change of heart, and we may infer a change of character, and may therefore say he is enlightened, renewed in heart, converted as well as born again; but this license respecting the person, the subject of the change, is not allowed in talking of the change itself. A Christian is, indeed, one whose views are enlightened, whose heart is renewed, whose relations to God and the moral universe are changed, and whose manner of life is according to righteousness and true holiness. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 71: 03.19. CHRISTIANS ARE PERSONS PARDONED, JUSTIFIED, SANCTIFIED, ADOPTED, SAVED. ======================================================================== CHAPTER XIX. CHRISTIANS ARE PERSONS PARDONED, JUSTIFIED, SANCTIFIED, ADOPTED, SAVED. While adjusting the most important terms and phrases in the Christian system, in order to a more perspicuous and comprehensive intelligence of it, it is expedient that we should also advert to other predicates of the genuine Christian. The five terms at the head of this chapter are all indicative of his state; and do not include any attributes of his character. These predicates are but so many counterpart aspects of a new state in reference to an old one; or they represent the gospel as affecting the position of man in the universe in all those points in which sin affected him. Was he guilty, condemned, unholy, alien, and lost, in Adam the first? When in Adam the second, he is just in an opposite state;--he is pardoned wherein he was guilty--justified wherein he was condemned--sanctified wherein he was unholy--adopted wherein he was alien--and saved wherein he was lost. Sin, then, condemns, pollutes, alienates, and destroys its subjects. Grace justifies, sanctifies, adopts, and saves its subjects in reference to these points. Pardon has respect to guilt; justification, to condemnation; sanctification, to pollution; adoption, to alienation; and salvation, to destruction. Those out of Christ, are then, in their sins, condemned, unholy, alien, and lost; while those in Christ are pardoned, justified, sanctified, adopted into the family of God, and saved. In former dispensations, and in the present, two things are immutable as respects the preparation for a change of state, while the act by which that change is formally consummated is not necessarily immutable. Thus, in reference to actual transgression, faith and repentance, in all dispensations of religion, were necessary to forgiveness, justification, sanctification, adoption, salvation. In one word, God cannot forgive an impenitent and unbelieving transgressor. But whether this or that act shall consummate a change of state, as respects man’s relations to the moral universe; whether that act shall be circumcision, animal sacrifice, baptism, confession, prayer, etc., is not from any necessity, either in the divine or human nature, immutable. It has been changed; but faith in God’s appointments, and repentance for past transgressions, are now, always were, and ever more shall be, necessary to forgiveness. The philosophy or reason of this is, that faith and repentance change the state of man’s heart to God; and if there was no universe beyond God and the sinner, all farther acts respecting it would be uncalled for. But as respects the condition of sinners in the universe, and their views, affections, relations, and manner of life, more than faith and repentance, or a change of views and feelings, is necessary to actual, and sensible, and formal pardon, justification, sanctification, adoption, and the salvation of the soul from sin. Hence came the ordinances of baptism, confession, prayer, fasting, and intercession. It is wise and kind on the part of Heaven to ordain such acts, or to institute such ordinances as will assure ourselves and others of our new relations; and to suspend our enjoyment of the favor and love of God, not merely upon faith and penitence, or any other mental operation; but upon certain clear, overt acts, such as baptism, confession, prayer, etc., which affect ourselves and others, much more than they possibly can affect God himself; being the fruit of our faith, or perhaps, rather, only the perfecting of our faith in the promises of God. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 72: 03.20. THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT ======================================================================== CHAPTER XX. THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. Having spoken of three things which God has done for us, and of three things which we must do for ourselves, we are now come to the proper place to consider other aids which our heavenly Father tenders to us, just at this point. "He has provided a Lamb for a sin offering," and "Jesus has full atonement made." He has also given to us "the light of life"--the words of Jesus faithfully written out; and he has invested him as the Son of Man, with all authority, celestial and terrestrial, that he may lead many sons to glory, and give eternal life to all that are given him. We also have believed all this; repented of our sins, and been immersed into Christ. We have assumed him as our Leader--our Prophet, Priest, and King; and put ourselves under his guidance. Having disowned the great apostate and his ranks, and enlisted under the Messiah, and taken sides with the Lord’s Anointed; he now proposes to put his Holy Spirit within us, to furnish us for the good fight of faith, and to anoint us as the sons and heirs of God. Some will ask, Has not this gift been conferred on us to make us Christians? True, indeed, no man can say, that Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Spirit. As observed in its proper place, the Spirit of God is the perfecter, and finisher of all divine works. "The Spirit of God moved upon the waters;" "The hand of the Lord has made me, the Spirit of the Almighty has given me life;" "By his Spirit he has garnished the heavens, his hand has formed the crooked serpent," the milky way; "The Spirit descended upon him;" "God himself bore the Apostles witness, by divers miracles and gifts of the Holy Spirit according to his will;" "Holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit;" "When the Spirit of truth, the Advocate is come, he will convict the world of sin, because they believe not on me, and of justification, because I go to my Father;" "God was manifest in the flesh and justified by the Spirit." The Spirit of God inspired all the spiritual ideas in the New Testament, and confirmed them by miracles; and he is ever present with the word that he inspired. He descended from heaven on the day of Pentecost, and has not formally ascended since. In the sense in which he descended he certainly has not ascended: for he is to animate and inspire with new life the church or temple of the Lord. "Know you not," you Christians, "that your bodies are temples of the living God;" "The temple of God is holy, which temple you are;" "If the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, God shall quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you," etc. Now we cannot separate the Spirit and word of God, and ascribe so much power to the one and so much to the other; for so did not the Apostles. Whatever the word does, the Spirit does; and what ever the Spirit does in the work of converting men, the word does. We neither believe nor teach abstract Spirit nor abstract word--but word and Spirit, and Spirit and word. But the Spirit is not promised to any persons out of Christ. It is promised only to them that believe in and obey him. These it actually and powerfully assists in the mighty struggle for eternal life. Some, indeed, ask, ’Do Christians need more aid to gain eternal life--than sinners do to become Christians? Is not the work of conversion a more difficult work than the work of sanctification?’ Hence, they contend more for the work of the Spirit in conversion, than for the work of the Spirit in sanctification. This, indeed, is a mistaken view of the matter, if we reason either from analogy or from divine testimony. Is it not more easy to plant, than to cultivate the corn, the vine, the olive? Is it not more easy to enlist in the army, than to be a good soldier, and fight the battles of the Lord; to start in the race, than to reach the goal; to enter the ship than cross the ocean; to be naturalized, than to become a good citizen; to enter into the matrimonial compact than to be an exemplary husband; to enter life, than to retain and sustain it for three score years and ten? And while the commands, "believe," "repent," and "be baptized," are never accompanied with any intimation of peculiar difficulty; the commands to the use of the means of spiritual health and life; to form the Christian character; to attain the resurrection of the just; to lay hold on eternal life; to make our calling and election sure, etc., are accompanied with such exhortations, admonitions, cautions, as to make it a difficult and critical affair, requiring all the aids of the Spirit of our God, to all the means of grace and untiring assiduity and perseverance on our part; for it seems, "the called" who enter the stadium are many, while "the chosen" and approved "are few;" and many, says Jesus, "shall seek to enter into the heavenly city, and shall not be able;" "Let us labor, therefore, to enter into that rest lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief." Sanctification in one point of view, is unquestionably a progressive work. To sanctify is to set apart; this may be done in a moment, and so far as mere state or relation is concerned, it is as instantaneous as baptism. But there is the formation of a holy character: for there is a holy character as well as a holy state. The formation of such a character is the work of means; "Holy Father," said Jesus, "sanctify them, through the truth; thy word is the truth;" "And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly," says Paul to the Thessalonians, "and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." Christians, then, are to "follow peace with all men, and sanctification, without which no one shall see the Lord." Therefore, it is the duty and the work of Christians, "to perfect holiness in the fear of the Lord." This requires aid. Hence, assistance is to be prayed for; and it is promised. Now as the Spirit of God, under the administration of Christ, is the author of all holiness in us--he is called the "Holy Spirit," "the Spirit of holiness." Hence, while we have the phrase "Holy Ghost" or Spirit, ninety-four times in the Christian Scriptures, it is found only three times in all the Jewish writings. The Holy Spirit is, then, the author of all our holiness; and in the struggle after victory over sin and temptation, "it helps our infirmities," and comforts us by seasonably bringing to our remembrance the promises of Christ, and "strengthens us with all might, in the new, or inner man." And thus "God works in us to will and to do of his own benevolence," "while we are working out our own salvation with fear and trembling." Christians are, therefore, clearly and unequivocally temples of the Holy Spirit; and they are quickened, animated, encouraged, and sanctified by the power and influence of the Spirit of God, working in them through the truth. God "gives his Holy Spirit to them who ask him," according to his revealed will; and without this gift no one could be saved or ultimately triumph over all opposition. He knows but little of the deceitfulness of sin, or of the combatting of temptation, who thinks himself competent to wrestle against the allied forces of the world, the flesh and the devil. Hence, the necessity of "supplications, deprecations, intercessions, and thanksgivings," or praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Holy Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance, and of making supplication for all saints, our fellow soldiers in this good warfare. To those, then, who believe, repent, and obey the gospel, he actually communicates of his Good Spirit. The fruits of that spirit in them, are "love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, fidelity, meekness, temperance." The attributes of character which distinguish the new man, are each of them communications of the Holy Spirit, and thus we are the sons of God in fact, as well as in title, under the dispensations of the Holy Spirit. We have, then, every thing done for us, after our conversion, which we need in order to that "holiness without which no one shall see the Lord." Thus God has provided for us a sin offering; a prophet to expound it; a priest to present it; a king, with universal dominion, to govern, and protect all that by it are reconciled to God. And when through faith, repentance, and baptism, we have assumed him as our rightful Sovereign, by his Holy Spirit, in answer to our prayers, he worked in us, and by us, and for us, all that is needful to our present, spiritual, and eternal salvation. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 73: 03.21. THE CHRISTIAN HOPE ======================================================================== CHAPTER XXI. THE CHRISTIAN HOPE. "Beloved, now are we the sons of God; and it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him--that we shall see him as he is. And every one that has this hope in him, purifies himself even as he is pure." "God has predestinated us to be conformed to the image off his Son." "I reckon that the sufferings of this life are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us." "He hath begotten us again to a lively hope; to an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away." So testify three Apostles--John, Paul, and Peter. The whole hope of the Christian may, indeed, be summed up in one sentence; "If children, then heirs--heirs of God, JOINT HEIRS WITH CHRIST." Immortality, eternal life, the riches of Christ, the glory, honor, wealth, and bliss of God’s only begotten Son are to be equally participated with all his saints. The remedial system is, therefore, a moral creation in progress--a new creation of men unto good works, still advancing; but its termination will be the stereotyping of individual moral excellence by an instantaneous physical new creation of men at the resurrection of the just: or a manifestation of the sons of God in full redemption from the whole entail of sin; raised, refined, immortalized glorified, and invested with eternal life. Hope differs from faith, in that it looks only forward to future objects. It looks not back, nor does it contemplate the present: "for," says Paul, "what a man sees, why does he yet hope for?" Nor looks it on all the future; but only on future good. It desires and expects good and nothing else. There is not one dark cloud, not one dark speck, in all the heavens of Christian hope. Every thing seen in its wide dominions, in the unbounded prospect yet before us, is bright, cheering, animating, transporting. It is all desirable and desired. It is all expected. It is all "earnest expectation;" not a doubtful, but a "confident expectation of things" desirable, and to be "hoped for." It is not what some in this age call "the hope," 1: e., the desirable expectancy of pardon of their past transgressions: for none but those who are actually pardoned are the subjects of this hope. "If our heart condemn us, then indeed, we have no confidence;" so no confident expectation, no hope of eternal life. The mere possibility of an event is no foundation of hope. Hope deals not in possibilities, nor indeed much in probabilities--unless they are very strong probabilities. Conjectures, peradventures, possibilities, probabilities, are not of the essence of Christian hope. It rests on covenants, charters, promises, oaths, tendered by the Eternal Source of almighty truth and love. These are good securities; and produce assurance. Hence, hope is the assurance of future good in expectation. There are, indeed, various degrees of hope; but in the least degree of it there is desire combined with expectation. Things expected are not always desirable, nor are things desirable always to be expected: but hope embraces promises that are desirable, and also expects the enjoyment of them. Hence, hope, like faith and love, may grow exceedingly. When based on the promises of God, and on an habitual patient conformity to his will, it will keep pace with our growing intelligence of the character of God; of the fulness and richness of the promises, and in the persuasion of our actual devotion to the manifestations of that will. But the things hoped for by the Christian are beyond description. Eye, indeed, has not seen, ear has not heard, the human heart has not conceived the glories of the resurrection of the just;--the new bodies, the new heavens, the new earth, the new Jerusalem, the new society, the new pleasures: for according to his promise we look for (expect) new heavens and new earth in which righteous persons alone shall dwell. Thus terminates the remedial system on all its happy subjects. "It lifts the beggar from the dust, and the wretched from the dunghill, and sets them among princes, amongst the nobles of the universe;" the thrones, hierarchies, and lordships of the skies; in the presence of God, too, "where there is fulness of joy, and at his right hand, where there are pleasures forever more." Such are the things to be done for those, for whom such things have already been done as constitute the remedial system: for with Paul we must say: "He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up to the death for us all; how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?" "All things are yours, whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come, all are yours; and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 74: 03.22. THE DOOM OF THE WICKED ======================================================================== CHAPTER XXII. THE DOOM OF THE WICKED. There are two classes of men in this world. They are often and in various manners contradistinguished from each other. They are called the righteous and the wicked, the saints and the sinners, the holy and the unholy, the good and the bad, he that feareth God, and he that feareth him not. Of the one class many things are predicated which are not predicated of the other. Of the one it is said, that they "in Christ," justified, sanctified, saved, children of God, heirs of God, joint heirs with Christ, an elect race, a royal priesthood, a peculiar people. Of the other class, these things are never predicated in the Bible. They are not in Christ, not justified, not sanctified, not saved; children of the devil, "children of wrath," not an elect race, not a royal priesthood, not a peculiar people. These have not been reconciled to God through the propitiation of his Son. They are still enemies of God in heart. And for them that loved darkness rather than light, and would not have God’s Son to be their Saviour, he has appointed a day of judgment; a day for the ultimate perdition of ungodly men. Then they shall perish "with an everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power, when he shall come to be glorified in all his saints, and to be admired by all the believers." Then will the King say to them on his left hand, "Depart, you cursed into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels." They are the allies of Satan in his rebellion against God, and have spent their energies and fortunes on his side of the question; and therefore it is reasonable that they should have their ultimate portion with him. Of this judgment, Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, "Behold the Lord cometh with ten thousand of his saints, to execute judgment upon all, and to convict all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds, which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him." God had, then, long before the Christian era--from the foundation of the world, "appointed a day in which he will judge THE WORLD, (the whole world,) righteously by Jesus Christ," whom he has constituted Judge of all the dead as well as of the living. "It is, indeed, appointed to men once to die, and after this the judgment." The judgment consequent upon death, is not the general but the particular judgment of individuals, as the phrase would seem to indicate, whose spirits returning to God are judged and instantly rewarded, so far as in a separate state they can be the subjects of reward or punishment. But the "judgment of the great day," is for another purpose: not, as some profanely say, "to bring men out of heaven and hell to judge and remand them back again;" but in the presence of an assembled world to vindicate the administration of the moral government and providence of God, to develop the real characters of angels and of men, and to pronounce an irrevocable sentence upon all according to their works. For, says Paul, "we must all appear before the tribunal of Christ, that every one may receive, in his body, the things he has done, whether good or bad." It is, then, because of the actual and public pronunciation and execution of this judgment, that the last day is called "THE DAY OF JUDGMENT," and that the judgment itself if called "THE JUDGMENT OF THE GREAT DAY." The final judgment and "perdition of ungodly men" is set forth by the Lord himself, as well as by his Apostles, in the clearest and strongest terms, and in the boldest and most appalling imagery which human speech and human knowledge can afford. Indeed, to place this awfully sublime and glorious day in full array before the perceptive powers of man, is impossible. The best efforts have exhausted the powers of nature in all her wonted energies. John, in his sublime visions of the last acts of the great drama of human existence, says, "I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face earth and heaven fled away, and there was found no room for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is called the Book of Life; and the dead were judged out of the things that were written in those books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and the grave1 gave up the dead which were in them; and they were judged every one according to his works: and death and the grave were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the BOOK OF LIFE was cast into the lake of fire." Surely "it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." 1 Hades. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 75: 03.23. SUMMARY OF THE CHRISTIAN SYSTEM OF FACTS ======================================================================== CHAPTER XXIII. SUMMARY OF THE CHRISTIAN SYSTEM OF FACTS. God alone is self-existent and eternal. Before earth and time were born he operated by his WORD and his SPIRIT. GOD, THE WORD OF GOD, and THE SPIRIT OF GOD, participants of one and the same nature, are the foundations of Nature, Providence, and Redemption. In Nature and Providence, it is GOD, the WORD, and the SPIRIT. In Grace, it is the FATHER, the SON, and the HOLY SPIRIT. All creations, providences, and remedial arrangements display to us the co-operation of THREE DIVINE PARTICIPANTS, of one self-existent, independent, incommunicable nature. These are fundamental conceptions of all the revelations and developments of the Divinity, and necessary to all rational and sanctifying views of religion. In the Law and in the Gospel these sacred and mysterious relations and personal manifestations of God are presupposed and assumed as the basis of the whole procedure. "God created all things by Jesus Christ, and for him." "The Word was in the beginning with God," "before all things," and "by him all things consist." "God created man upright." Man sinned: all became mortal: our nature became susceptible of evil. It is in this respect fallen and depraved. "There is none righteous--no, not one." God the Father has chosen men in Christ to salvation "through the sanctification of the Spirit unto obedience, and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus;" and "promised," to such, "eternal life before the foundation of the world." Therefore, in "the fulness of time"--"in due time, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman"--for "the WORD became flesh, and dwelt among us; and we beheld his glory, the glory as of an only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." "He showed us the Father." He died as a sin-offering--was buried, rose again the third day--ascended to heaven--presented his offering in the true Holy Place--made expiation for our sins--"forever sat down on the right hand of the Supreme Majesty in the heavens"--sent down his Holy Spirit--inspired his Apostles, who "preached with the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven"--persuaded many Jews and Gentiles that he was made "the author of an eternal salvation to all who obeyed him." He commanded faith, repentance, and baptism to be preached in his name for remission of sins to every nation and people under heaven. All who "believe in him are justified from all things;" because this faith is living, active, operative, and perfected by "obeying from the heart that mould of doctrine delivered to us." Hence such persons repent of their sins, and obey the gospel. They receive the Spirit of God, and the promise of eternal life--walk in the Spirit, and are sanctified to God, and constituted heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. They shall be raised from the dead incorruptible, immortal, and shall live forever with the Lord; while those "who know not God, and obey not the gospel of his Son, shall perish with an everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 76: 03.24. THE BODY OF CHRIST ======================================================================== CHAPTER XXIV. THE BODY OF CHRIST. That institution which separate from the world, and consociates the people of God into a peculiar community; having laws, ordinances, manners, and customs of its own, immediately derived from the Saviour of the world, is called the congregation or church of the Lord. This is sometimes technically called the mystical body of Christ, contradistinguished from his literal and natural body. Over this spiritual body he is the Head, the King, Lord, and Lawgiver, and they are severally members of his body, and under his direction and government. The true Christian church, or house of God, is composed of all those in every place that do publicly acknowledge Jesus of Nazareth as the true Messiah, and the only Saviour of men; and, building themselves upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, associate under the constitution which he himself has granted and authorized in the New Testament, and are walking in his ordinances and commandments--and of none else. This institution, called the congregation of God, is a great community of communities--not a community representative of communities; but a community composed of many particular communities; each of which is built upon the same foundation, walks according to the same rules, enjoys the same charter, and is under the jurisdiction of no other community of Christians; but is to all other communities as an individual disciple is to every other individual disciple in any one particular community meeting in any given place. Still, all these particular congregations of the Lord, whether at Rome, Corinth, or Ephesus, though equally independent of one another, as to the management of their own peculiar affairs; are, by virtue of one common Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one common salvation, but one kingdom or church of God; and, as such, are under obligations to co-operate with one another in all measures promotive of thee great ends of Christ’s death and resurrection. But, in order to this holy communion and co-operation of churches, it is indispensable that they have an intimate and approving knowledge of one another, which can only be had and enjoyed in the form of districts. Thus the "congregations in Judea" intimately knew one another, and co-operated. Those in Galatia also knew one another, and co-operated. And while some of the churches or brethren in each district being mutually acquainted with some in another, made the churches of both districts acquainted with one another, they were enabled to co-operate, to the ends of the earth. These districts are a part of the circumstances of Christ’s kingdom, as well as the manner of maintaining correspondence and co-operation among them, and the occasions and incidents requiring concert and conjoint action. For these, as well as for the circumstantials of any particular community, the Apostles gave no specific directions. It was, indeed, impossible they could: for as the circumstances of particular communities, and of the whole church, vary at different times and places, no one set of particular, sectional, or intersectional regulations could suit all these peculiarities and emergencies. These, then, are necessarily left to the wisdom and discretion of the whole community, as the peculiar exigencies and mutations of society may require. But in granting to the communities of the saints this necessary license of deciding what is expedient, orderly, decent, and of public and practical utility in the circumstantials of Christianity, no allowance is implied authorizing any interference with a single item of the Christian institution. Hence the necessity of a very clear discrimination, not between "the essentials and non-essentials," for in Divine Christianity there are no non-essentials; but between the family of God and its circumstances--between the Christian institution and its accidents. Certain it is that there is a very manifest difference between any individual man, family, community, or institution, and its circumstances. What more evident than the difference between a man and his apparel, his house, his neighborhood, his associations and connections? The Christian institution has its facts, its precepts, its promises, its ordinances, and their meaning or doctrine. These are not matters of policy, of arrangement, of expediency; but of divine and immutable ordination and continuance. Hence the faith, the worship, and the righteousness; or the doctrine, the piety, and the morality of the gospel institution are not legitimate subjects of human legislation, alteration, or arrangement. No man nor community can touch these and be innocent. These rest upon the wisdom and authority of Jehovah; and he that meddles with these, presumes to do that which the cherubim and seraphim dare not. Whatever, then, is a part of the Christian faith or the Christian hope--whatever constitutes ordinances or precepts of worship, or statutes of moral right and wrong, like the ark of the covenant, is not to be touched with uninspired and uncommissioned hands. But whether we shall register the churches in a given district, or the members in a particular church; whether we shall meet oftener than once on the Lord’s day, or at what hour, and in what sort of house; whether we shall commemorate the Lord’s death forenoon or afternoon, before day or after night; whether we shall sit round one board, or in our respective pews; whether we shall sing from book or from memory, prose or verse, etc. etc., are matters in which our conceptions of expediency, decency, and good order may have free scope. Also, whether the churches in a given district shall, by letter, messengers, or stated meetings, once or twice per annum, or oftener, communicate with one another; whether they shall send one, two, or twenty persons, or all go and communicate face to face, or send a letter; and whether they shall annually print, write, or publish their statistics, etc. etc. etc., are the mere circumstantials of the Christian institution. But co-operation itself is one thing, and the manner of co-operation another. Co-operation, as much as the intercommunion of Christians, is a part of the Christian institution. We must "strive together in our prayers" for one another, and for the salvation of men; and this, if there were no scriptural example nor precept on the subject, is enough. To pray for one another as individuals or communities, implies that we shall assist one another in very way for which we pray for one another: otherwise our prayers and thanksgivings for each other are mere hypocrisy. He that would pray for the progress of the truth at home and abroad, having it in his power to contribute a single dollar to that end, and yet withholds it, shows how little value he sets upon his own prayers, and how much upon his money. From the days of the Apostles till now co-operative associations of churches have uniformly followed the political distributions of the earth. Those "in Judea, Galatia, Achaia, Pontus, Cappadocia, Macedonia, Asia, Bithynia," etc. etc. are designations of churches and brethren familiar to all New Testament readers. This is a matter of convenience, rather than of necessity; just as the churches in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, etc. can generally more conveniently and successfully co-operate by states and territories, than by any other divisions or precincts. I say, this is matter of convenience, rather than of necessity. It is of necessity that we co-operate, but of convenience that the churches in one county, state, or nation, form regular ways and means for co-operation. The necessity of co-operation is felt every where and in all associations of men. It is a part of the economy of Heaven. What are mountains, but grains of sand! What are oceans, but drops of water! And what the mightiest and most triumphant armies, but collections of individual men! How much more good or ill can be done by co-operation, than by individual enterprise, the history of the world, both civil and ecclesiastic, does little more than detail. One hundred churches, well disciplined, acting in concert, with Christian zeal, piety, humanity--frequently meeting together in committees of ways and means for building up Zion, for fencing in the deserts, cultivating the enclosed fields, watering the dry and barren spots, striving together mightily in prayer, in preaching the word, in contributing to the necessities of the saints, in enlightening the ignorant, and in devising all practicable ways of doing good--would, in a given period, do more than twice the same number acting in their individual capacity, without concert, without co-operation, and that united energy, always the effect of intelligent and cordial combination. But, in order to this, Christians must regard the church, or body of Christ, as one community, though composed of many small communities, each of which is an organized member of this great national organization; which, under Christ, as the supreme and sole Head, King, Lord, and Lawgiver, has the conquest of the whole world in its prayers, aims, plans, and efforts. Hence, there must be such an understanding and agreement between these particular congregations as will suffice to a recognition and approval of their several acts; so that the members, or the measures of one community shall be treated with the respect due to them at home, in whatever community they may happen to be presented. On this principle only can any number of independent and distinct communities of any sort--political, commercial, literary, moral, or religious--act in concert with mutual advantage to themselves, and with a proper reference to the general good. Any one who seeks apostolic sanctions for these view of co-operation, will find ample authority in the Acts and Epistles of the Apostles. Paul addresses "all the saints in Rome" in his Epistle to the Romans. Now in Rome there were sundry churches, as appears from Romans 16:5, Romans 16:10-11, Romans 16:14-15. These all he addresses as one single community. Again he represents "all the churches of the Gentiles" as uniting in thanks to Priscilla and Aquila, Romans 16:4. He also represents "the churches of Christ" as uniting salutations by him to the Romans, Romans 16:16. In his letters to the Corinthians he addresses the church of Corinth, "All the saints which are in all Achaia," and "all them in every place who call upon the name of Jesus Christ." 1 Corinthians 1:2; 2 Corinthians 1:1. There he exhorts to "be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgments." 1 Corinthians 1:10. "The churches in Asia united in their salutations to the Corinthians," 1 Corinthians 16:19. He speaks in the 2d Epistle of all the churches in Achaia, as "helping together in prayer for him" and his companions, and of their helping him on his way in the work of the Lord. In 2 Corinthians 8:1-24 he informs them of the grace of God bestowed on "all churches in Macedonia," evinced by the liberality of their united contributions to the saints. He also speaks of an equality in the mutual contributions of churches in one co-operation--and of a brother chosen by sundry communities to travel with the Apostles, 2 Corinthians 8:14, 2 Corinthians 8:18-19; and of his accompanying brethren as "messengers of the churches." The 2 Corinthians 9:1-15 speaks of the co-operation of the churches in public contributions for common objects. Paul, and all the brethren with him, unite in the epistle to "all the churches in Galatia." These he commands to "bear one another’s burdens, and thus to fulfil the law of Christ." But, indeed, all the catholic epistles are unequivocal proofs that co-operation is of the very essence of the Christian institution. Such are some of Paul’s epistles, both the epistles of Peter, the 1st of John, and that of James and Jude. The very basis of such general or universal letters is the fact, that all the communities of Christ constitute but one body, and are individually and mutually bound to co-operate in all things pertaining to a common salvation. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 77: 03.25. THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY ======================================================================== CHAPTER XXV. THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. "He gave some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers for the perfecting of the saints for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ; till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ," etc. For the setting up of the Christian institution officers extraordinary were needed. So was it in the Jewish, and so is it every institution, human and divine. But when an institution is set up, it only requires an ordinary ministry or administration of its affairs. All the extraordinary gifts vouchsafed to Moses, and to the Apostles and Prophets of the gospel institution, ceased when these institutions were fully developed and established. Still a regular and constant ministry was needed among the Jews, and is yet needed among the Christians; and both of these by divine authority. Natural gifts for a natural state of things, and supernatural gifts for a supernatural state of things, are, in the wisdom of both God and man, apposite and needful. Hence, even in the apostolic age, there were officers without, as well as with, miraculous endowments. "Having, then, gifts differing according to the office, or grace that is given to us--if prophecy, let us prophesy according to the measure of our faith; or ministry, let us attend on our ministering; he that teacheth, on teaching; he that exhorteth, on exhortation; he that distributeth, with simplicity; he that ruleth, with diligence." God has therefore conferred various gifts on the church for the effectual administration of its affairs. He has placed in it "helps and governments," as well as Apostles and Prophets. The standing and immutable ministry of the Christian community is composed of Bishops, Deacons, and Evangelists. Of each of these is but one order, though possessing great diversities of gifts. There have been bishops, deacons, and evangelists, with both ordinary and extraordinary gifts. Still the office is now, and ever was, the same. In ancient times official and unofficial persons sometimes possessed miraculous gifts. Those in high office were also generally of those most eminently gifted with extraordinary powers. Superficial readers have, therefore, sometimes concluded that, inasmuch as bishops, deacons and especially evangelists, frequently possessed these manifestations of the Holy Spirit, with the ceasing of those gifts, the offices themselves also expired. This is a great mistake. Officers there must be while there are offices, or services to be performed. So long as the human system needs sight, hearing, and feeling, there will be eyes, ears, and hands. So long also as the Christian body is an organized body, having many services to perform, it must have organs or officers by which to enjoy itself and operate on society. There are, indeed, necessarily as many offices in ever body as there are services to be performed to it, or by it. This is the root and reason of all the offices in all the universe of God. Our planet needs diverse celestial services to be performed to it. Hence, the sun, moon, and stars are celestial officers ministering to it. The eye, the ear, the tongue, the hand, the foot, are, for the same reason, officers in the human body, essentially serving it in its vital interests and enjoyments; and by means of these organs, it performs important functions to other bodies. Experience, as well as observation, has taught us that "practice makes perfect," and that "whatever is every person’s business is no person’s business." Hence arose the custom among men of communicating certain offices to particular individuals. The philosophy of such elections and ordinances is found in the fact, that special services are best performed by special organs or agents, whose special province and duty is to attend to them. As the Christian system is a perfect system, it wisely provides for its own perpetuity and prosperity by creating all necessary offices and filling them with suitable persons. We have said these offices are three, and of perpetual, because of necessary existence. Bishops, whose office it is to preside over, to instruct, and to edify the community--to feed the church of the Lord with knowledge and understanding--and to watch for their souls as those that must give account to the Lord at his appearing and his kingdom, compose the first class. Deacons, or servants--whether called treasurers, almoners, stewards, door-keepers, or messengers, constitute the second. For the term deacon originally included all public servants whatever, though now most commonly confined to one or two classes; and improperly, no doubt, to those only who attend to the mere temporal interests of the community. They are distinguished persons, called and commissioned by the church, (and consequently are always responsible to it,) to serve in any of these capacities. Evangelists, however, though a class of public functionaries created by the church, do not serve it directly; but are by it sent out into the world, and constitute the third class of functionaries belonging to the Christian system. As there is more scrupulosity on some minds concerning the third class of Evangelists, than concerning either Bishops or Deacons, we shall take occasion to speak more explicitly and fully upon the nature and necessity, as well as upon the authority of this office. Evangelists, as the term indicates, are persons devoted to the preaching of the word, to the making of converts, and the planting of churches. It is, indeed, found but three times in the New Covenant; but the verb from which it comes--viz. to evangelize, is in some of its branches found almost sixty times in that volume. "To evangelize" and "to do the work of an evangelist" are phrases of equal import, and indicate the same duties, rights, and privileges. Among the offices which were comprehended in the apostleship, none required more varied endowments than that of the Evangelist. The gift of tongues was amongst the qualifications necessary to those who, after the ascension, first undertook this work. But the qualifications for this office, so far as the gift of tongues or the knowledge of language is concerned, are not immutably fixed. It depends upon the field of labor which the Evangelist is to occupy, whether he must speak on language or more. His work is to proclaim the word intelligibly and persuasively--to immerse all the believers, or converts of his ministry--and to plant and organize churches wherever he may have occasion; and then teach them to keep the commandments and ordinances of the Lord. Take, for example, the sketch given us by Luke of the labors of Philip the Evangelist, one of the first who wore that designation. One of the seven ministers of the Jerusalem church, after his diaconate was vacated by the dispersion of that community, he commenced his evangelical labors. He turned his face towards Samaria, and preached and baptized amongst the Samaritans: for, we are told, when the Samaritans believed Philip preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God and the Lord Jesus, they were baptized, both men and women. He also converted the Ethiopian Eunuch; and then, passing from Azotus, he "preached in all the cities till he came to Cesarea," where he afterwards resided. The next notice we have of him is found in Acts 21:8. "We," says Luke, "who were of Paul’s company, departed, and came into Cesarea, and entered into the house of Philip the Evangelist, one of the seven, and abode with him. He had four virgin daughters that did prophesy." Evident, then, it is that he obtained the title Evangelist from his itinerant labors in the gospel and in the converting of men. His possession of the gift of the Holy Spirit was no more peculiar to him as an evangelist, than as deacon of the church in Jerusalem; for while in the diaconate of that church he seems to have been as full of the Holy Spirit as when visiting all the cities from Azotus to Cesarea. Convening converts into societies, and organizing them into worshipping assemblies, are inseparably connected with the right of converting them. Casually, in his letters to Timothy, Paul seems to define the work of an Evangelist. He says, "Preach the word; be instant in season, and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long-suffering and teaching; endure affliction; do the work of an Evangelist; fulfil thy ministry." "Let no man despise thy youth. Till I come give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to teaching. Neglect not the gift that is in thee, according to prophecy--by the laying on the hands of the presbytery or eldership." "Meditate upon these things; give thyself wholly to them, that thy profiting may appear to all: take heed to thyself and to thy teaching; continue in them: for in doing this, thou shalt both save thyself and them that hear thee."1 This seems to be the office of an Evangelist which the Lord gave the church after his ascension. Setting things in order in the churches--the committing the same office to faithful men, who shall be able to instruct others--the ordaining of elders, and a general superintendence of the affairs of churches, seem to have been also lodged in the hands of Timothy and Titus as agents of the Apostles. How far these works are yet necessary, and how far the superintendence of them may be safely lodged in the hands of select Evangelists as respects infant communities, may be, with many a question of dubious interpretation. But that Evangelists are to separate into communities their own converts, teach and superintend them till they are in a condition to take care of themselves, is as unquestionably a part of the office of an Evangelist as praying, or preaching, or baptizing. But we shall be asked, ’Is not preaching and baptizing, and even teaching, the common privilege of all disciples, as they have opportunity?’ And we also ask in answer, ’Is it not the privilege of all fathers to teach their own children, and to preside over their own families?’ But who will thence infer, that all fathers are teachers and presidents, does not more shock common sense, than he who infers that all disciples, as such, are evangelists, pastors, and teachers, because we concede that in certain cases it is the privilege of all citizens of Christ’s kingdom to preach, baptize, and teach. Every citizen of Christ’s kingdom has, in virtue of his citizenship, equal rights, privileges and immunities. So has every citizen of the United States. Yet all citizens are not legislators, magistrates, judges, governors, etc. Before any community, civil or religious, is organized, every man has equal rights to do what seemeth good in his own eyes. But when organized, and persons appointed to office, then whatever rights, duties, privileges are conferred on particular persons, cannot of right belong to those who have transferred them; any more than a person cannot both give and keep the same thing. But there are some duties and privileges we cannot wholly communicate to others. Parents cannot wholly transfer the education of their children to others; neither can a master transfer all his duties to a steward or overseer. No more can the citizens of Christ’s kingdom wholly transfer their duties to preach and teach Christ. To enlighten the ignorant, to persuade the unbelieving, to exhort the disobedient when they fall in our way and we have the ability or the opportunity, is an intransferable duty. Even the church of Rome, with all her clerical pride, commands and authorizes lay baptism, when a Priest is not convenient. A Christian is by profession a preacher of truth and righteousness, both by precept and example. He may of right preach, baptize, and dispense the supper, as well as pray for all men, when circumstances demand it. This concession does not, however, either dispense with the necessity of having evangelists, bishops, and deacons; not, having them, does it authorize any individual to assume to do what has been given in charge to them. Liberty without licentiousness, and government without tyranny, is the true genius of the Christian institution. While, then, the Christian system allows every man "as he has received a gift to minister as a good steward of the manifold grace of God," it makes provision for choosing and setting apart qualified persons for all its peculiar services, necessary to its own edification and comfort, as well as to its usefulness in the world. It provides for its own perpetuity and its growth in the wisest and most practical manner. Its whole wisdom consists in four points:--1st. It establishes the necessary offices for its perpetuity and growth. 2d. It selects the best-qualified persons for those offices. 3d. It consecrates or sets those persons apart to those offices. 4th. It commands them to give themselves wholly to the work, that their improvement may keep pace with the growth of the body, and be apparent to all. Can any person point out an imperfection in this plan?--! All its officers, whether for its services at home or abroad, when fully proved, are to be formally and solemnly set apart by the imposition of the hands of the presbytery or eldership of the church. The whole community chooses--the seniors ordain. This is the apostolic tradition. Let those unacquainted with the volume examine the apostolic law and usage; Acts 6:2-6. So the Christian system in its elections and ordinations began. It is immutable. Therefore this system obtains in all cases. The qualifications for any office are always founded in the nature of the office. They are generally detailed, but not always, because the work to be done is the best guide in ascertaining the qualifications of the doer of it. We say the seniors of elders always ordain. Popery says, ’None but those on whom the apostolic hands have been laid can of right ordain.’ Such an idea is not in the Christian system. The seniors always lay on hands, whether hands have been laid on them or not. This is true Protestantism. Better still, it is true Bibleism. Nay, it is the Christian System. The Apostles laid on hands because seniors, and not because apostles. This is the jet of a controversy of fifteen hundred years’ standing. It has been very generally, almost universally misstated and overlooked. Protestants are as much Papists in this, as the Papists are Protestants in disowning Protestantism. It is assumed by Romanists, and conceded by Protestants, that "holy hands" are official hands by a jure Divino. They are sometimes, but not always. But Christian elders, (for I do not mean mere old men,) who have long walked in the ways of the Lord, have holy hands, and much more power with and from the Lord, then ever dwelt in any pontiff or pretended vicar of Christ, in twelve hundred and sixty years. In proof that seniors lay on hands, we appeal to the fact, Acts 6:1-15 :, for the Apostles were the oldest converts in Jerusalem. We appeal also to the fact that the presbytery or eldership laid hands on Timothy, and gave him the gift or office of an evangelist. And are there two rules of ordination in one system! Paul and Barnabas, though Apostles, were themselves ordained by the church of Antioch by its presbytery. Consequently, seniors in Christ, as such, can, of divine warrant, lay hands on any persons, for any office to which the church has elected them. It must be done also by prayer and fasting. See Acts 6:6; Acts 13:3; Acts 14:23. Persons may be juniors in years and seniors in Christ. Timothy, says Paul, "lay hands suddenly on no man." This implies that the ordained were juniors in the Lord; and until they had attained some character and standing as seniors, (even Timothy himself,) were not to consent to their ordination. Perhaps it may be necessary to say that classic presbytery and the presbytery of a single church are very different institutions. The Apostles ordained elders (a presbytery) in every church. They did not make young men old, but set apart those that were seniors in the Lord to the office of overseers. They did not make juniors seniors, but they made elders bishops. The community, the church, the multitude of the faithful, are the fountain of official power. This power descends from the body itself--not from its servants. Servants made by servants are servants of servants; and such are all the clergy of the Man of Sin. But the body of Christ, under him as its head, animated and led by his spirit, is the fountain and spring of all official power and privilege. How much surer and purer is ecclesiastic authority thus derived from Christ the head, immediately through his body, that when derived through a long, doubtful, corrupt dynasty of bishops or pontiffs! The church is the mother of all the sons and priests of God; and to look for authority to her servants or creatures, as do all sorts of Papists, whether Catholic or Protestant, is to worship and serve the creature more than the Creator--a species of idolatry worthy only of the darkest night of the darkest day of the dark ages. But the church needs messengers for special occasions--not only her stated deacons and ministers, but ministers extraordinary. These too are selected by the church or churches in a given district, and commissioned by their letters. They are not consecrated by imposition of hands, but approved by letters from the community. Are we asked for authority? We produce it with pleasure. 1 Corinthians 16:3., is just to the point: "And," says Paul to the saints in Corinth, "when I come whomsoever you shall approve by letters, them will I send to bring your liberality to Jerusalem." This is the apostolic usage in such cases. In the second epistle Paul says, "We have sent Titus the brother (Luke, we opine) whose praise is in the gospel, (written by him,) throughout all the churches--who was also chosen by the churches to travel with us this bounty," etc. The Christian system demands for its perpetuity and for its prosperity at home and abroad, bishops, deacons, and evangelists. Its bishops teach, preside, and execute the laws of Christ in all its convocations. The deacons, a large and diverse class of functionaries, composed of stewards, treasurers, almoners, door-keepers, etc., as the case may require, wait continually upon its various services. Its evangelists, possessed of proper qualifications, ordained and consecrated to the work of the Lord in converting sinners and planting churches, by a presbytery, or a board of seniors competent to the prudent discharge of the duty, are constantly engaged in multiplying its members. These ministers of the word are commanded to be wholly engrossed in this work, and consequently to be fully sustained by their brethren in it. They are held responsible to all the holy brethren, and to the Lord at his appearing and his kingdom, for the faithful discharge of that sacred trust confided in them. What an efficient institution is that over which Christ presides, when well understood and fully carried out in all its details! With its bishops and deacons at home, and its evangelists abroad, wholly devoted to the faithful discharge of their respective trusts; men of experience, faith, piety, morality, full of zeal, energy, benevolence, co-operating with all similar institutions, supported by the prayers and free-will offerings of all the united people, having the love of God in their hearts, and heaven in their eye, what may they not achieve of glory to God, of good to men, and honor to themselves! Of such an army of the faith, in full operation and concert, it might indeed be asked, "Who is this that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners!" 1 1 Timothy 4:1-16 : 2 Timothy 4:1-22 :. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 78: 03.26. THE CHRISTIAN DISCIPLINE ======================================================================== CHAPTER XXVI. THE CHRISTIAN DISCIPLINE. Members should be publicly received into all societies. They are so in the state. It is matter of record. When a person is regenerated, and desires to be enrolled among the disciples meeting in any one place, if his confession to salvation or immersion has not been publicly known to the brethren, reason says those who have been privy to the fact, who can attest his confession, ought to introduce him to the congregation, and he ought to be saluted or received as such by the brethren with whom he unites. This the slightest attention to propriety, the reason and nature of things, fully and satisfactorily demonstrate. Letters of recommendation are the expedient which, in apostolic times, was substituted for this formal introduction, when a citizen of the kingdom visited any community where he was unknown personally to the brethren. A person cannot be under the oversight or under the discipline of a congregation, unless he voluntarily associate with the brethren meeting in that place, and unless it be a matter of notoriety or of record among the brethren that he is one of them. There can be no formal exclusion if there be no formal reception. If there be no visible and formal union, there can be no visible and formal separation. In truth, there can be no discipline in any congregation, unless it be an organized body; and no body can be organized unless it is known who are members of it. On a matter of such plain common sense perception we have seldom thought it necessary to say a word, and should not now have noticed it at all, had we not found some societies which cannot tell their own members, which even hesitated about the necessity of a formal reception of any person into them, or of having it on record who belonged to them. They demanded a positive commandment or precedent for such a reception. They might as pertinently have demanded a positive commandment for persons to be formally married before they could be recognized as husband and wife, as to ask for a positive commandment for one of the most common dictates of reason, though, indeed, every commandment addressed to the Christian congregations on relative duties and privileges, assumes the principle that those who belong to any society are known to each other to belong to it, else they could not even perform the first day to one another--they could not know when they were assembled--they could not "tarry for one another." Whether there shall be a record in print, in writing, or on the memory of all the congregation, is a question which must depend on circumstances. If all the members are blessed with infallible memories, so as never to forget who are members, when they became such, when any one was received, when any one was rejected--I say, if every brother and sister can so well remember these matters, as, when the discipline of the congregation or any particular question respecting any case of discipline may arise, they can infallibly remember all about it; then, and in that case, it is unnecessary to have any record, church book, secretary, or any thing written or printed. But if otherwise, there must be a record; because questions involving peace and good order of society may arise, and have arisen, which require infallible testimony, or the most satisfactory evidence on questions of fact; such as, Was A B ever a member of your community? When did he become a member of it? When was he excluded? When was he restored? When did he forsake the assembly of the brethren? Was he a husband at the time of his removal? etc. Two things are paramount in all cases of discipline before brought into the congregation--the Fact and the Law. The fact is always to be established by good testimony or by the confession of the transgressor. The thing said to have been done, or the fact being established, the next question is, What is the law in the case? The president of the congregation states the fact proved, and lays the law before the brethren. They are to be judges both of the fact and the law, and when both are clearly propounded the questions is put. The congregation decides.--This is the oracle of reason--of civil law in all civilized countries; and it is the oracle of the Saviour and his Apostles. Private offences, public offences, and those that are mixed, are to be decided according to what is written in the Book. This must be known; therefore, after the formation of a congregation, the first lessons to be learned are those which concern the relative duties of the brethren; and discipline amongst these first lessons stand conspicuous. It is too late to have to learn the law after a case occurs. When there are no cases of discipline in a congregation, then is the time for the brethren to be taught the will of the Lawgiver, that they may be prepared to act with promptness and prudence when required. "Offences must come;" and, if possible, they must be healed. To cut off an offender, is good; to cure him, is better; but to prevent him falling, is best of all. The Christian spirit and system alike inculcate vigilance in preventing; all expedition in healing offences; and all firmness in removing incorrigible offenders. Its disciplinary code is exceedingly simple, rational, and benevolent. It teaches us to regard all offences as acts of impiety, or acts of immorality; sins against our brethren, or sins against God alone; the omission of right, or the commission of wrong. Trespasses against our brethren are all matters of aggression upon their persons, property, or character. They are either private or public. We can only offend against the person, the property, or the character of a brother; and we can do this only privately or publicly. Christ’s legislation on private or personal offences, as recorded in the 18th chapter of Matthew, commends itself to the approbation of Jew and Gentile all over the world. It is as plain and as excellent as his golden rule of moral feeling. Without giving any rules to decide who is the aggressor, or the aggrieved, allowing either of the parties to view the matter as he pleases, he commands him that supposes himself to be aggrieved to go to the aggressor and tell him his fault privately. If restitution is made and reconciliation effected, the matter ends. If not, he takes with him a second or a third person, states the facts of the case, reasons and remonstrates. If this also fails, then he is commanded to inform the church of the matter; and if the aggressor will not hear the church, then he is to be as a heathen man or a publican. Some, indeed, imagine a difficulty in this case; for after "tell" there is no it in the original; and ask, ’What is to be told to the church--the original fault, or simply that the aggressor will not make restitution?’ The most natural construction of the sentence favors the simple statement of the fact--that an offence had been committed and restitution refused, without going into the details of the trespass. But a second difficulty has been suggested on the manner in which the congregation is to be informed. Is it to be told to the whole community in full assembly met? or to those appointed by the congregation to hear and adjudicate such matters? Certainly the congregation has ears as well as a tongue, and it is not all ears nor all tongue. Every well-organized church has its eldership, who hear all such matters, and who bring them before the whole assembly only when it is absolutely necessary, and even then at a convenient season. The elders hear the matter; and if the case be one that requires a special committee, which Paul calls "secular seats of judicature," 1 Corinthians 6:4., they appoint it; then, and not till then, if their decision of the matter be refused, they bring it before the whole congregation, and he is excluded from among them, that he may be as a heathen man and a publican--one entitled only to civil, and not to Christian respect--one whose company is to be eschewed rather than courted. The whole community can act, and ought to act, in receiving and in excluding persons: but in the aggregate, it can never become judges of offences and a tribunal trial. Such an institution was never set up by divine authority. No community is composed only of wise and discreet full grown men. The Christian church engrosses old men, young men, and babes in Christ. Shall the voice of a babe be heard, or counted as a vote in a case of discipline! What is the use of bishops in a church, if all are to rule--of judges, if all are judges of fact and law! No wonder that broils and heart-burnings, and scandals of all sorts disturb these communities ruled by a democracy of the whole--where every thing is to be judged in public and full assembly. Such is not the Christian system. It ordains that certain persons shall judge and rule,1 and that all things shall "be done decently and in order." Besides matters of private trespass between brethren, there are matters of public wrong, or acts of injustice towards the whole Christian community, and also towards them that are without. Drunkenness in a professor, for example, is a sin against God and against all the Christian brotherhood. It is, moreover, a public nuisance to all men, so far as it is witnessed or known. The transgressor in such a case, if he be not penitent and reform, must be convicted of the offence. An attempt at convicting him of the offence is not to be made till he fail to acknowledge it. A failure to acknowledge, or an attempt to deny, calls for conviction, and precludes the idea of repentance. In all cases of conviction the church is to be addressed through its rulers. No private individual has a right to accuse any person before the whole community. The charge, in no case, is to be preferred before the whole congregation. Such a procedure is without precedent in the Law or in the Gospel--in any well regulated society, church, or state. If, then, any brother fall into any public offence, those privy to it notify the elders of the church, or those for the time being presiding over it, of the fact, and of the evidence on which they rely. The matter is then in the hands of the proper persons. They prosecute the investigation of it; and on the denial of the accused, seek to convict him of the allegation. When a person is convicted of any offence, he is unworthy of the confidence of the brethren; for conviction supposes concealment and denial; and these, of course, are evidence of impenitence. We do not say that such a one is never again to be worthy of such confidence; but that until he has given satisfactory proofs of genuine repentance, he is to be treated as one not of the body of Christ. In all case of hopeful repentance the transgressor is to be restored with admonition. The acknowledgment of an offence, and of repentance for it, are, in all cases, to be as public as the sin itself. Peter’s sin and repentance are as public as his name. So was David’s. So should be those of all transgressors. Those who have caused the Saviour and his faithful followers to blush, ought themselves to be made to blush before the world; and if their sorrow and amendment be genuine, they will do it cheerfully and fully. "Them that sin rebuke before all, that others also may fear." 1 Timothy 5:20.2 On the subject of exclusion, or what is commonly called excommunication, which places the subject of it in the attitude of a pagan or publican to the whole Christian community, all the Protestant sects seem to be of one mind. The Baptist Discipline, appended to the Confession of Faith taken from the works of Dr. John Owen, Dr. Goodwin, and other Congregationalists and Independents, speaks in full harmony with our views--9th edition, 1798, p. 20.--"The manner of proceeding unto this great and awful instituted ordinance, is, the church being gathered together, the offender also having notice to come to make his answer and defence (if he comes not, he aggravates his offence by despising the authority of Christ in his church) the body of the church is to have knowledge of the offender’s crime fully, and the full proof thereof as of plain matter of fact; and after mature deliberate consideration, and consulting the rules of direction given in the word of God, whether the offender be present or absent, the minister or elder puts the question to the whole church, whether they judge the person guilty of crime now proved upon him, is worthy of the censure of the church for the same? To which the members in general give their judgment; which, it be in the affirmative, then the judgment of the members in general being had, or the majority of them, the pastor, minister, or elder, sums up the sentence of the church, opens the nature of the crime, with the suitableness of the censure, according to gospel rule; and having thus proceeded, a proper time is fixed to put the sentence in execution; at which time the pastor, minister, or elder of the church, as his place and duty require, is to lay open the heinousness of such a sin, with all the aggravating circumstances thereof, and showing what an abominable scandal such an offender is become to religion, what dishonor it is to God, etc. applying the particular places of scripture that are proper to the case, in order to charge the offence home upon the conscience of the offender, if present, that others also may fear; showing also the awful nature of this great censure, and the main end thereof, for the salvation and not the destruction of the soul, and with much solemnity in the whole society, calling upon God for his gracious presence, and his blessing upon this his sacred ordinance, that the great end thereof may be obtained. Still expressing the deep sense the church hath of the fall of this brother, with the great humiliation of the church, and great sorrow for, and detestation of, the sin committed. The said pastor, minister, or elder, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, in the presence of the congregation, and by and with the consent, and according to the judicial sentence of the church, cuts off, and secludes such an offender by name, both from the union and communion of the church, because of his offences; so that such a person is not thenceforth to be looked on, deemed, or accounted as a brother or member of such a church, until God shall restore him again by repentance." Whether it may be always prudent in the incipient stages of every case of discipline to have open doors, or whether some cases may not require closed doors, are questions referred to human prudence; but in the case of the ultimate decision of the congregation, and in that of exclusion, there can be but one opinion on the necessity and utility of its being done in the presence of all who may please to attend. 1 1 Timothy 3:5; 1 Timothy 5:17. Acts 20:28-31. Hebrews 13:17, etc. etc. 2 By a reference to an Extra on ORDER, published 1835, the curious reader may find other useful hints on the subject of discipline. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 79: 03.27. EXPEDIENCY ======================================================================== CHAPTER XXVII. EXPEDIENCY. "All things lawful are not expedient, because all things lawful edify not." So Paul substantially affirmed. A position of licentious tendency, if not well qualified. As defined by its author, it is perfectly safe. He only assumed that there were many things which he might lawfully do, which were not expedient for him to do. He might, for example, have married a wife, eat the flesh of either Jewish or Pagan sacrifices, or drunk the wine of their libations, etc. etc., according to the Christian law; but in the circumstances of his peculiar vocation and localities, to have done these things would have been inexpedient. Law itself is, indeed, at best but an expedient--a means, supposed at the time of its promulgation, suitable to some rational end. But, owing to the mutability of things, laws often fail to be the best means to the ends proposed; and are therefore abolished, or, for the time being, suspended. This is true of all laws and institutions prescribing the modes and forms of action, whether in religion or morality. Moral laws, properly so called, are, indeed, immutable; because the principle of every moral law is love, and that never can cease to be not only a way and means, but the only way and means, to rational, to human happiness. Positive precepts, however, prescribing the forms of religious and moral action, emanating from God himself, have been changed, and may again be changed, while all the elements of piety and morality are immutable. It would now, for example, be immoral to marry a natural sister; yet it was for a time done by divine authority. It became inexpedient to continue the practice, and the law was changed. There is, therefore, a law of expediency, as well as the expediency of law. This law of expediency, as it is, indeed, the basis of the expediency of law in the divine government, has been, as in the case of David eating the loaves of the presence, and the priests profaning the Sabbath by the labors of the Temple, occasionally elevated above the precepts that prescribe the forms of religious and moral action. True, indeed, that such cases are exceedingly rare; and they are rare reasoners who can safely decide when any particular precept prescribing the form of action, may, for the sake of the action itself, be waived or suspended. It is, moreover, exceedingly questionable, whether, under the more perfect institution of Christianity, the law of expediency can ever clash with any moral or religious precept in the New Covenant. Still there are many things left to the law of expediency, concerning which no precepts are found in the apostolic writings. To ascertain these is the object of this chapter. They are, then, in one sentence, those things, or forms of action, which it was impossible or unnecessary to reduce to special precepts; consequently they are not faith, piety, nor morality; because whatever is of the faith, of the worship, or of the morality of Christianity, was both possible and necessary to be promulged; and is expressly and fully propounded in the sacred scriptures. The laws of expediency, then, has no place in determining the articles of faith, acts of worship, nor principles of morality. All these require a "thus saith the Lord" in express statements, and the sacred writings have clearly defined and decided them. But in other matters that may be called the circumstantials of the gospel and of the church of Christ, the people of God are left to their own discretion and to the facilities and exigencies of society. Many things, indeed, that are of vital importance to the well-being and prosperity of the kingdom of Christ, are left to the law of expediency. A few examples will suffice:--Can any one imagine any measure of more consequence than the safe-keeping of the apostolic writings, the multiplication of copies, the translation of them into different languages, and the mode of distributing them throughout the whole world? Now, who can show a positive or special precept on any one of these four vital points? Scribes or copyists, paper-makers, printers, book-binders, and venders of the oracles of God, are as unknown to the apostolic writers as mails, post-offices, rail-roads, and steam-engines. So negligent, too, has the kingdom of Christ been on some of these points, that she has not at this hour a received copy of the Living Oracles. We American and English people have a received version by authority of a king; but we have not a RECEIVED ORIGINAL by the authority of any king or government civil or ecclesiastic. A startling fact, truly! But who dares to deny it? Next to these are meeting-houses, baptisteries, Lord’s tables, the emblematic loaf and cup, times of convocation, arrangements for the day, etc. etc. Acts of Parliament, decrees of synods and councils, but no apostolic enactments, statutes, or laws, are found for any of these important items. There is neither precept nor precedent in the New Testament for building, hiring, buying, or possessing a meeting-house; for erecting a baptismal bason, font, or bath; for chancel, altar, table, leavened or unleavened bread, chalice, cup, or tankard, and many other things of equal value. There is no law, rule, or precedent for the manner of eating the Lord’s supper, no hint as the quantity of bread and wine to be used by each participant; nothing said about who shall partake first, or how it shall be conveyed from one to another. These are all discretionary matters, and left to the prudence and good sense of the Christian communities--in other words, to the law of expediency. Touching these and very many other such matters and things, nothing is enacted, prescribed, or decided by apostolic authority; but all the things to be done are enjoined in the very clear and broad precepts, or in very striking and clear apostolic precedents. General laws and precepts, embracing the whole range of religious and moral action, are often found in the sayings of the Lord and his ministers of the New Institution, from which also our duties and obligations may be clearly ascertained. That "marriage is honorable in all" is clearly taught; but who ever read a verse on the manner in which the most important of all social institutions is to be performed? No age is fixed at which the covenant shall be made or ratified--on time of life prescribed for its consummation--nothing said about who shall perform the service, the formula, the witnesses, the record, etc. And, still more singular, there is no table, no law, or statute in all the New Covenant saying who may, or who may not, enter into that relation on any principle of consanguinity or affinity. By the consent of the Christian church the Jewish law obtains in this matter. The communion of saints, of all Christian churches--the co-operation of churches as one holy nation, a kingdom of priests, as a peculiar people in all common interests and benefits--an efficient gospel ministry, supported justly and honorably by the whole community--are matters clearly and fully taught by both apostolic precept and authority; but the forms, the ways and means by which these ends shall be attained, are left to the law of expediency. But here arises a practical and all-important question, viz.--Who shall ascertain and who shall interpret this law of expediency? We all agree that expedients are to be chosen with regard to times, seasons, and other circumstances. Changes in these must always change expedients. The mariner’s compass, the art of printing, new modes of travelling, Banks and their commercial operations, new forms of government, etc. etc., have changed the order of society and all human expedients. Now the law of expediency is the law of adopting the best present means of attaining any given end. But this is a matter which the wisdom and good sense of individuals and communities must decide. This is not, this cannot be, a matter of standing revelation. Now if the church was always unanimous in opinion as in faith--if all the accumulated wisdom gave one uniform decision on all such questions, then the whole church is by one voice to ascertain the law of expediency on any given point. But this is not the case. No class of men--apostles, teachers, privates, ever did agree on questions of expediency. Paul and Barnabas dissented and differed, without any breach of communion, on a question of this sort. Hence arises the necessity of the spirit of concession, subordination, bearing, forbearing submitting to one another. When there are two views or opinions on any question of expediency entertained by two parties, one of them must yield, or there are two distinct systems of operation, and ultimately two distinct parties. According to the law of expediency, then, the minors in age, experience, or numbers, must give place to the majors in age, experience, or numbers. But as numbers are supposed to represent the ratios of age, wisdom, and knowledge, it is expedient that a clearly ascertained majority of those whose province it is to decide any matter, shall interpret the law of expediency; or, in other words, the minority shall peaceably and cordially acquiesce in the decisions of the majority. Since the age of social compacts began till now, no other principle of co-operation, no other law of expediency, can secure the interests, the union, harmony, and strength of any people, but that of the few submitting to the many. He that asks of unanimity asks for what is not often attainable in a small number of persons. He asks for the liberty of one or two to govern or to control a whole community--for the government of a minority, however small, over a majority, however large. This is virtually, though not formally, and not often intentionally, the demand of all the advocates of unanimity in ascertaining or interpreting the law of expediency in any given case. The law of expediency enacts that a majority of the seniors shall decide in all cases what is most expedient to be done in attaining any of the ends commanded in the Christian Institution, the means to which are not divinely ordained in the written laws of that institution; and that the minority shall cheerfully and conscientiously acquiesce in such decisions. The law of love is the supreme law of religion, morality, and expediency. No code of laws, without it, could make or keep any people pure, peaceable, and happy; and, with it, we only want, in most matters, but general laws.--This is the spirit, and soul, and body of the Christian Institution. We cannot love by law, but we can walk in love with no other law but that of love. The Christian system contemplates love as supreme, and makes no arrangements nor provisions for keeping together a carnal, worldly, selfish, self-willed population. Better such a confederacy had burst into as many particles as persons, by the repellent principle of selfishness, than to be hooped together by all the laws of expediency from Noah to John Wesley. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 80: 03.28. HERESY ======================================================================== CHAPTER XXVIII. HERESY. Schisms and heresies are matters strongly reprobated in the Christian Scriptures. That they may be guarded against with due care, they must be contemplated and understood in their true and proper scriptural attributes. We shall therefore first attempt to define them. The term schism is found but eight times in the apostolic writings. When applied to a garment, Matthew 9:16., Mark 2:21., it is properly translated rent; applied to a concourse of people, John 7:43; John 9:16; John 10:19, it is translated division; when applied to the church by Paul, 1 Corinthians 1:10; 1 Corinthians 11:18; 1 Corinthians 12:25., it denotes division or alienation--not on account of faith, doctrines, or opinions--but on account of men as leaders or chiefs among the brethren. So the connections in which it is found always indicate. It is a division as respects internal union, or the union of heart and affection, only tending to a breach of visible or outward union, and therefore reprobated by the Apostle. Such are its New Testament acceptations. Schisms may then exist where there is the most perfect agreement in faith, in doctrine, in all religious tenets. Undue attachment to certain persons, to the disparagement of others, partial regards because of personal preferences, are the true elements of schism or division as it appeared in Corinth, and as the word is used in the New Testament. But few persons, now-a-days, can correctly appreciate the force of the word schisms in the apostolic age, because but a very few experimentally know the intimacies, the oneness of heart and soul, that obtained and prevailed in the Christian profession, while all was genuine and uncorrupt. A union formed on Christian principles--a union with Christ and his people, in views, sentiments, feelings, aims, and pursuits--a real co-partnery for eternity, almost annihilated individuality itself, and inseparably cemented into one spirit all the genuine members of Christ’s body. Kindred drops do not more readily mingle into one mass, than flowed the souls of primitive Christians together in all their aspirations, loves, delights, and interests. Hence arose the jealousy in the Apostle Paul when first he learned that particular persons in Corinth began to attract to themselves notice and attachment for mere personal, individual, and fleshly considerations, as leaders or chiefs in the Christian family. In these indications he already saw the dissolution of the church. Although yet but one visible community, having one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one table, one ostensible supreme and all-controlling interest; still, in these attachments to particular persons he not only saw a real division or breach in the hearts of the people, but foresaw that it would issue in positive, actual, and visible disunion or heresy. And here we are led to inquire into the scriptural import of the word heresy. Hairesis, strictly and literally indicative of choice or option, is anglicised heresy, and properly rendered sect or faction, and by implication discord and contention. It is found only nine times in the New Testament. In the Acts of the Apostles, Acts 5:17, we have it rendered "the sect of the Sadducees;"-- Acts 15:5., "the sect of the Pharisees;"-- Acts 24:5, "the sect of the Nazarenes;"-- Acts 14:14, "after the way which they call heresy (sect,) so worship I," says Paul;-- Acts 26:5, "after the most strict sect of our religion I lived a Pharisee;"-- Acts 28:22, "as for this sect (of the Christians) we know that it is everywhere spoken against." Besides these six occurrences we find it twice used by Paul in his epistles, and once by Peter. 1 Corinthians 11:19., "For there must be heresies (sects) among you." Galatians 5:20., "Sedition, heresies." 2 Peter 2:1., "Shall bring in damnable heresies." In the common version it is, then, five times rendered sect, and four times heresy. As the word sect or heresy, found only in the Acts of the Apostles and Epistles, does not always in the former simply mean a party, without any regard to its tenets, the term has nothing in it either reproachful or honorable--nothing virtuous or vicious. Hence it is equally applied to Pharisees, Sadducees, Nazarenes, or Christians, without any insinuation as the character of the party. It is only once rendered heresy in the "Acts," and in that place it ought most obviously to have been sect. Paul had been accused by Tertullus (Acts 24:6.) with the crime of being "a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes." Now in vindicating himself from any censure in this case, he ought to have met the charge under the same title. This he did in the original; for in verse 5th, in the indictment, and in verse 14th, in his defence, we have the same word hairesis. How injudicious, then, was it on the part of our translators and the Vulgate to make Tertullus accuse Paul of a sect, and to make Paul defend himself of a heresy, when both Tertullus and Paul used the same word in their speeches as reported by Luke in the original! In the new version this word is, as it should be, uniformly rendered sect. In the Epistles, and apparently once in Acts, it is used as though it included an idea of censure or guilt. Paul defends himself from the accusation of Tertullus. Here, then, a question arises--"Why should the term hairesis import blame in its Christian, and none in its Jewish acception! We answer, Because among the Jews sects or parties did not terminate as among Christians, in separate communities or communions. They resembled the high and low church parties in the Episcopalian communion; or the different and numerous sects among the Romanists, viz.--Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, etc. which never terminate in a breach of communion or co-operation as one church. Thus the Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, etc. frequented the same temple, altar, priesthood, and united in all the same acts of worship. Not so the Jews and Samaritans: they were real sects in the Christian sense. Again, among the Jews the bond of union was national and fleshly; and, therefore, parties could not destroy it. With us it is spiritual, social, cordial--one faith, one hope, one spirit; and parties are destructive in the superlative degree. To this view there is but one plausible objection; and that we meet in the answer to the question, ’Why did Paul defend himself from the accusation of Tertullus as indicating censure, if sects among the Jews were such harmless and inoffensive things?’ We answer, There is no blame in the simple imputation of a sect, but in the ideas which Tertullus connected with it. The Romans had agreed to protect the Jews in the enjoyment of their religion, and they wished in the presence of Felix to make Paul appear an apostate from that religion--"a pestilent fellow, a mover of sedition, a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes"--that he might be from under the protection granted to the Jews’ religion. From this view only can we see the wisdom of Paul’s defence. He admits the charge of being a sectary, but in no criminal sense--worshipping the same God with them, believing also every word in their law and Prophets, and cherishing the same hope of a future life in the resurrection of the dead; and thus evinces that nothing offensive or criminal could be imputed to him on account of his being a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes. In the Christian epistles it is, however, used in a bad sense, and is always connected with censure. This may have been the reason why King James’ version changes the translation into heresies, or as in the case of baptism, bishop, etc., anglicises rather than translates the word. It is not, however, a good or sufficient reason, because it necessarily imposes upon the English reader that heresy in the epistles, and sect in the Acts of the Apostles, are two distinct and different things; and this, of course, not only obscures those passages, but also prevents the clear intelligence of a matter essential to our duty and our happiness. The acceptation, however, is not materially different in the epistles, except in the relation of things. When the word sect is connected with a proper name, such as the sect of the Pharisees, the sect of the Sadducees, or the sect of the Christians, it is used in a middle sense, neither as intimating truth or error, good or evil; but if it be applied to a party formed in a community which admits of no division or subdivision in its nature, because necessarily tending to its corruption and destruction; then, in that relation and sense, a sect is a destructive and condemnable thing. Now in the Epistles it is always taken in this sense, and is ranked with factions, as a work of the flesh, carnal and destructive, and doomed to the judgments of Heaven. Still, in its scriptural application, whether used by Luke, Paul, or Peter and it is found in no other writer, it never relates to doctrine, tenet, opinion, or faith. There is not, in sacred usage, any tenet, or doctrine, which is called heresy or sect. Hence that ecclesiastical definition, viz.--"Heresy denotes some erroneous opinion, tenet, or doctrine obstinately persisted in," is without any countenance from the New Testament. Heresy and heretical, in the lips of Paul and Peter, and in the lips of an ancient or modern schoolman, or churchman, are to very different things. But some allege that any doctrine that makes division is heretical, and therefore condemnable. It may be admitted, for the sake of argument, that any doctrine or action that makes division is heretical or divisive; but on this account it is not condemnable; because in that sense Jesus Christ was a heretic and his gospel heresy: for he came to make divisions on earth, and did make a sect; and of course, his doctrine is divisive or heretical. Now if we say Jesus was a heretic, and his gospel heresy, and his followers sectaries, does not this divest the word of any bad or culpable significance, and make both heretics, heresies, and sects innocent things! It does, so far as all without Christ’s kingdom or institution are concerned. But this is the all-important difference in this place; Christians, contradistinguished from Jews, Mussulmen, Pagans, Infidels, are lawfully, righteously, and innocently a sect, a heresy: but a sect among these is corrupt, treasonable, and most reprehensible, according to every precept, doctrine, and saying of the New Institution. Thus a man may be a Christian, or of the sect of the Nazarenes, but not a Lutheran, a Calvinist, an Arminian, without blame. The words schisms and heresy so far explained, may we not regard schism as the cause, and heresy as the effect? or, in other words, must we not regard sects as the effects of schisms? The philosophy of the whole matter, then, is, that separation is the effect of alienation of heart, alienation the fruit of rival attachments, which in the church generally begin in personal sympathies or personal antipathies, and end in detaching the subjects of them from the body of Christ. In this view of the matter Paul seems to reason, 1 Corinthians 11:18-19.--"There are schisms among you--for there must be sects among you, that the approved may be made manifest." The schisms in Corinth began in particular predilections for great teachers; such as Paul, Apollos, Cephas. These preferences violated that unity of spirit, that oneness of heart essential to one body in Christ; and that led to parties in the church, displayed in the manner they celebrated the supper. The same spirit in other communities ultimately led to visible separations and distinct sects, as among the professed members of Christ’s body at the present day. Paul, in commenting on this most ancient schism, further observes, that there must, of necessity, be sects in such a state of things, that "the approved may be made manifest." So true it is that all strifes, contentions, parties, and sects grow out of corruption. Sects are the egress of corruptions. The approved hold to Christ, and thus become manifest; the disapproved follow human leaders, and are also made manifest. There appears no other cure for a corrupt and mixed community than heresies or sects. It is as wise and benevolent a provision in a remedial system, that incurable corruption should work out in this way, as that law in the animal kingdom which forces to the surface all unfriendly humors, and congregates into swellings and biles those vicious particles which would otherwise vitiate the whole system, and fatally terminate in the ruin of the body. Men, indeed, do not fall in love with Paul, Peter, and Cephas, in the partizan sense, till they have lost some of their love for Christ. Hence the first indication of personal regards, or of sectarian attachment, is the first proof of declension, backsliding, or apostasy. The partizan attachment is of the essence of the first sin, and carries deeply concealed in its core the first element of hatred. Thus we observe that he loves that Wesley for any sectarian attribute, hates Calvin just in ratio of his attachment to his leader; as he who loves Calvin for his humanisms hates Wesley for opposing them. While he that loves only what is Christian in the two, in no sense hates either; but grieves for the errors and delinquencies of both. If for no other reason, we ought most devoutly and ardently to eschew partyism; for this it ought to be abjured, viz.--that our hatred of one party will always be in the ratio of our love for its antagonist; and in all such cases both our love and our hatred are obnoxious to the reprobation of God, and lie, indeed, under the doom of his express condemnation. On this account we presume it is that the next place we find this word hairesis, and the only time it is again found in Paul’s epistles, it stands immediately after "factions" and before "envyings" and "murders," in Paul’s enumeration and classification of the works of the flesh, Galatians 5:20-21., the perpetrators of which Paul strongly and repeatedly affirmed, shall not "enter into the kingdom of God." He says, "The works of the flesh are manifest, which are these--fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, sorcery, enmities, strifes, emulations, wraths, brawlings, factions, sects, envyings, murders, intoxication," etc. etc. Every sectary is, then, Paul being in the chair of judgment, a fleshly man, and without the precincts of the kingdom of God. A severe judgment, truly! How shall we understand it?--! It is now still more evident that heresies are not mere opinions, tenets, doctrines, or theories; for who will affirm that opinions, tenets, or theories, as such, are works of the flesh? Or who will say that fleshly principles are the roots or reasons of mere opinions, tenets, or theories, etc.? Corrupt opinions, indeed, may be more naturally propagated or received by corrupt men; but to make opinions or tenets, even those sectarian opinions on which some parties are founded, works of the flesh, is to confound mental imbecility or a defective education, with depravity of heart; for nothing can be called a work of the flesh that partakes not of the corruptions of the heart. Hairesis in this place, then, means sects, as it always does in the New Testament. Still the question recurs, Are all religious sects works of the flesh? Paul makes no exceptions. We dare not. He speaks not of philosophic, political, or foreign factions and sects; but of those appertaining to the Christian institution. Among the Jews Paul himself was a Pharisee; among the political castes he was a Roman; but in religion he was a Christian; not a Calvinist, Arminian, or Methodist; but a Christian. Indeed, Paul himself, in his history of sectaries, or of the founders and makers of religious parties, traces all their zeal and effort to the stomach, rather than to the conscience, or love of truth. "Mark them," says he, "who cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which you have received, and avoid them; for such persons do not serve our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by flattery and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple." Surely such sectaries and sects are "the works of the flesh." But here we ought to define a factionist and a sectary, since now a days we have some sectarians that are not factionists, and some factionists and factions that are more than mere sectaries. The factionist, or as Paul calls him, the "heretic," makes the faction. The faction are those who take part with him. While the ordinary sectaries are those who are simply led by the heretic, beguiled by his flatteries and fair speeches, without any sinister motive impelling their course. There are many sectarians who, in the simplicity of their hearts, imagine their party to be the true and only church of Christ, and therefore conscientiously adhere to it. There are others who think that no party is the church of Christ, but that he has a church in all parties--an invisible church--to which they think themselves to belong, and therefore fraternize with all of a similar stamp in all parties so far as known to them. These differ much from the schismatics, heretics, and factionists of Paul. Those either made, or labored to keep up, a party or a sect; and all such persons are corrupt fleshly men; because, from pride of their own opinion, from emulation, ambition, or the love of money, they are prompted to create or to keep up a faction or sect favorable to their views and interests. These serve their own appetites and mind earthly things. But a great mass of sectaries are following, as they imagine, Jesus Christ and his Apostles, under the name and tenets of Luther, Calvin, Wesley, etc. They are, without knowing it, the mere followers of men: for they examine nothing for themselves by a constant and habitual reference to the Bible. Now, what may be the amount of carnality and fleshly or worldly influence that keeps them there, and what may be the amount of long-suffering and forgiveness exercised towards them from heaven, I presume not to dogmatize; but that the factionist--the person who makes a party, and he who labors to keep it up, are certainly earthly, sensual, and demoniacal; and, as such, not of the kingdom of God, we cannot but assert as a conviction deep and rational, derived from the most impartial examination of the sacred scriptures--from the clearest and most ample testimony of the Holy Spirit, speaking to us in the words of Prophets and Apostles. The Christian party are "built on the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, and on Jesus the Messiah, himself the chief corner stone," and therefore on the Christian Scriptures alone; not, indeed, as contradistinguished from the Jewish, but as the development and full revelation of all that concerns Christ and his kingdom contained in those scriptures. Now, all other parties that are in any way diverse from the Christian party are built upon some alloy--some creed, formula, or human institution supplementary to the apostolic laws and customs. This alloy is what makes the party. So many items of the Apostles’ doctrine and so many notions of Calvin combined produce the compound called Calvinism. So many items of Luther’s opinions, compounded with the Apostles’ teaching, make Lutheranism. And so many portions of Wesley’s speculations, compounded with certain portions of the New Testament, make the compound called Methodism. The Christian ingredients in these compounds, so far as they are not neutralized by the human alloy, make the Christians among them; while the alloy makes the sectary. Take away all that belongs to the founder of the sect in all these parties, and they would certainly coalesce and form one community. Now, we do not suppose that there is the same guilt in forming a new Protestant party that there was in first of all forming the Roman Catholic, the Greek, or any of the ancient sects. The modern sects have been got up with the desire of getting back to primitive Christianity; the ancient sects arose directly from the lust of power--from fleshly, selfish, and worldly motives. Now, however, since we have so largely eaten of the gall and wormwood, of the bitter fruits of sects and parties; and have learned the cause, the cure, and the preventive of sectarianism, alas for all that are found keeping up the old landmarks of strife, or laying the foundation for new rivalries, partialities, and antipathies, to arise and pollute many, to retard the progress of the gospel abroad, and to foster the spirit of infidelity at home. There remains another occurrence of hairesis (sect) in the writings of Peter, not yet formally examined. We shall now specially consider it. This Apostle says, "There shall be false teachers among you, who will privately introduce destructive sects, denying even the Lord that bought them, bringing on themselves swift destruction; and many will follow their bad practices." Paul, in his valedictory to the Ephesians, also speaks of "grievous wolves devouring the flock, and of men rising out of their own society to draw away disciples after them, speaking perverse things." From these intimation we learn that the Apostles Paul and Peter foresaw the rise of sectaries and sects; and both of them, it is worthy of remark, distinctly connected the sects with sectarian teachers: for all sects have been originated by false teachers or by corrupt men. Sectaries, it would appear, occupy the same place under Christ that false Prophets filled under Moses. Need we, then, infer the danger of keeping up religious sects, or go on to prove that every one who builds up a party is a partaker of the crime with him who set it up? It behooves all men, then, who wish to be approved by the Lord at his coming, to be up and doing to purge and cleanse the Christian profession from every root and branch of sectarianism, and to endeavor to destroy those destructive sects that have been a sort of Pandora’s box to the human race; that have filled the profession with hypocrites, the world with infidels, and retarded for so many centuries the conversion of both Jews and Gentiles to the Christian faith. Finally, while endeavoring to abolish the old sects, let us be cautious that we form not a new one. This may be done by either adding to, or subtracting from, the apostolic constitution a single item. Our platform must be as long and as broad as the New Testament. Every person that the Apostles would receive, if present, we must receive; and therefore the one faith, one Lord, one baptism, one hope, one body, one Spirit, one God and Father of all, must be made the reason of one, and only one table. Factionists, or opinionists, or those who seek to attach men to themselves, because of their opinions or talents, or personal accidents, whatever they may be, are to be regarded as the very roots of bitterness in the Christian church--as seeking their own interests, honors, and profits, and not the things of Jesus Christ. By such spirits as these the ancient schisms and sects began; and by kindred spirits, of which every generation can furnish its proper ratios, they are kept alive. All such persons have not the power of effecting much; but now and then arises and succeeds in drawing away disciples after him. We can suggest no better remedies or preventives than those commanded by the Apostles. Let us hold fast their traditions; contend only for the faith; allow differences of opinion; suffer no dogmatists; countenance none of the disciples of Diotrephes; and walk by love, guided by that wisdom which is "first pure, then peaceable, gentle, easy to be persuaded, full of mercy and of good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy." From the preceding inductions, it will appear, we presume, very evident to all, that we need neither telescopes nor microscopes to detect heresies in the New Testament sense of that word. They are neither more nor less than sects--plain, palpable sects and parties. Every party in Christendom, without respect to any of its tenets, opinions, or practices, is a heresy, a schism--unless there be such a party as stands exactly upon the Apostles’ ground. Then, in that case, it is a sect just in the sense of the old sect of the Nazarenes, afterwards called Christians, and all others are guilty before the Lord, and must be condemned for their opposition to Christ’s own party; whose party we are, provided we hold fast all, and only all apostolic traditions, and build upon the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 81: 03.29. FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN UNION - INTRODUCTION ======================================================================== Introduction Fact Testimony Faith Confirmation of the Testimony Fundamental Fact Purity of Speech Foundation of Christian Union. ’I pray------for those who shall believe on me through their teaching, that all may be one; that as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, they also may be in us, that the world may believe that thou hast sent me, and that thou gavest me the glory, which I have given them, that they may be one, as we are one; I in them, and thou in me, that their union may be perfected: and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and that thou lovest them as thou lovest me.’ Thus Messiah prayed; and well might he pray thus, seeing he was wise enough to teach that, ’If a kingdom be torn by factions, that kingdom cannot subsist. And if a family be torn by factions, that family cannot subsist. By civil dissensions, any kingdom can be desolated; and no city or family, where such dissensions are, can subsist.’ If this be true--and true it is; if Jesus be the Messiah--in what moral desolation is the kingdom of Jesus Christ!--Was there at any time, or is there now, in all the earth, a kingdom more convulsed by internal broils and dissensions, than what is commonly called the church of Jesus Christ! Should any one think it lawful to paganize both the Greek and Latin churches--to eject one hundred millions of members of the Greek and Roman communions, from the visible and invisible precincts of the Christian family or kingdom of Jesus Christ; and regard the Protestant faith and people as the only true faith and the only true citizens of the kingdom of Jesus;--what then shall we say of them, contemplated as the visible kingdom, over which Jesus presides as Prophet, Priest, and King! Of forty millions of Protestants, shall we constitute the visible kingdom of the Prince of Peace? Be it so, for the sake of argument; and what then? The Christian army is forty millions strong. But how do they muster? Under forty ensigns?--Under forty antagonist leaders? Would to God there were but forty! In the Geneva detachment alone, there is almost the numbers of petty chiefs. My soul sickens at the details! Take the English branch of the Protestant faith,--I mean England and the United States and all the islands where the English Bible is read; and how many broils, dissensions, and anathemas, may we compute? I will not attempt to name the antagonizing creeds, feuds, and parties, that are in eternal war, under the banners of the Prince of Peace. And yet they talk of love and charity, and of the conversion of the Jews, the Turks, and Pagans!!! Shall we turn from the picture, lay down our pen, and languish in despair? No! For Jesus has said, ’Happy the peace-makers, for they shall be called Sons of God.’ But who can make peace, when all the elements are at war? Who so enthusiastic, as to fancy that he can stem the torrent of strife, or quench the violence of sectarian fire! But the page of universal history whispers in our ears, If you tarry till all the belligerent armies lay down their arms, and make one spontaneous and simultaneous effort to unite; you will be as very a simpleton, as he that sat by the Euphrates, waiting till all its waters run into the sea. We are so sanguine--perhaps many will say, so visionary, as to imagine that a nucleus has been formed, or may be formed; around which may one day congregate all the children of God. No one, at all events, can say that it is either impious or immoral,--that it is inhuman or unchristian, to think about the present state of Christ’s kingdom; or to meditate upon the possibility or practicability of any scheme of gathering together the children of God, under the ensign of the Cross alone. No one can say that such an enterprise is absolutely chimerical, unless he affirms the negative of the Messiah’s proposition, and declares that the present wars and strifes must extend and multiply through all time, and that God will convert the whole world, without answering the prayer of his Son; or rather, on a plan adverse to that promulgated by him, and in despite of all the moral desolations which have ensued upon all the broils and battles of five hundred sects, and fifteen hundred years! Dare any one say, or even think in unphilanthropic or malevolent, to make an effort to rally the broken phalanxes of Zion’s King, and to attempt to induce them to turn their arms from one another, against the common foe? With such a one, it were worse than hopeless to reason, or to exchange a single argument. Shall we not rather esteem it to be the most honorable, acceptable, and praiseworthy enterprise, that can be dared or undertaken by mortal man on this earthly stage of action? And as God has ever effected the most splendid revolutions by the most humble agents, and by means the most unlikely in the wisdom of all human schools; we think it not amiss or incongruous to make an effort, and to put out hands to the work of peace and love. From Messiah’s intercession above quoted, it is incontrovertible that union is strength, and disunion, weakness; that there is a plan founded in infinite wisdom and love, by which, and which alone, the world may both believe and know, that God has sent his Son to be the Saviour of the world. And like all the schemes of Heaven, it is simple to admiration. No mortal need fancy that he shall have the honor of devising either the plan of uniting Christians in one holy band of zealous co-operation, or of converting Jews and Gentiles to the faith that Jesus is that seed, in whom all the families of the earth are yet to be blessed. The plan is divine. It is ordained by God; and, better still, it is already revealed. Is any one impatient to hear it? Let him again read the intercessions of the Lord Messiah, which we have chosen for our motto. Let him then examine the two following propositions, and say whether these do not express Heaven’s own scheme of augmenting and conversating the body of Christ. First. Nothing is essential to the conversion of the world, but the union and co-operation of Christians. Second. Nothing is essential to the union of Christians, but the Apostles’ teaching or testimony. Or does he choose to express the plan of the Self-Existent in other words? Then he may change the order, and say, First. The testimony of the Apostles, is the only and all-sufficient means of uniting all Christians. Second. The union of Christians with the Apostles’ testimony, is all-sufficient, and alone sufficient, to the conversion of the world. Neither truth alone, nor union alone, is sufficient to subdue the unbelieving nations; but truth and union combined, are omnipotent. They are omnipotent, for God is in them and with them, and has consecrated and blessed them for this very purpose. These two propositions have been stated, illustrated, developed,--and shall I say proved, in the Christian Baptist, and Millennial Harbinger, to the conviction of thousands. Indeed, one of them is as universally conceded, as it has been proposed, viz: That the union of Christians is essential to the conversion of the world; and though, perhaps, some might be found who would question, whether, if all Christians were united, the whole world could be converted to God; there is no person, of whom we have heard, who admits a general or universal prevalence of the gospel--in what is usually called the millennial age of the world--and who admits that moral means will have any thing to do with its introduction, who does not also admit that the union of Christians is essential to that state of things. Indeed, to suppose that all Christians will form one communion in that happy age of the world, and not before it, is to suppose a moral effect without a cause. The second proposition, viz.--That the word or testimony of the Apostles is itself all-sufficient, and alone sufficient, to the union of all Christians, cannot be rationally doubted by any person acquainted with that testimony, or who admits the competency of their inspiration to make them infallible teachers of the Christian institution. And, indeed, all who contend for those human institutions called creeds, contend for them as necessary only to the existence of a party, or while the present schisms, contentions, and dissensions exist. Therefore, all the defences of creeds, ancient and modern, while they assert that the Bible alone is the only perfect and infallible rule of faith and morals; not only concede that these symbols called creeds, are imperfect and fallible,--but, also, that these creeds never can achieve what the Bible, without them, can accomplish. But how to do without them, appears to be an insuperable difficulty to many well disposed Christians. To labor this point would be foreign to our present purpose; especially as it has already been fully discussed in the present controversy.1 It is, perhaps, altogether sufficient at present to propose the question, How has, what is called the church, done with them? Have they not been the fruitful cause or occasion of all the discords, schisms, and parties, now existing in Christendom? And will not a very superficial observation, and a little experience, convince every man that the rivers tend not more certainly to the sea, than creeds and human devices in religion, tend to discords and divisions. Take, for example, two of the most popular creeds of the present day--the Westminster, and that of the Methodist--with whose history American society is better acquainted than with that of any other, and test the tree of its fruits,--judge their tendency by their practical effects upon society. To say nothing of the lesser schisms in the party, that once formed one communion on the platform of the Westminster creed, we can now enumerate no less than nine separate communions--all professing the Westminster articles, in substance or in form. These are the General Assembly in Scotland and the United States, the Cameronians or Solemn League and Covenant Presbyterians, the Burghers or Unionists, the Anti-Burghers or Seceders, the Relief Presbyterians, the Cumberland Presbyterians, and the New School, now upon the eve of being born. To these might be added those called English Presbyterians, who are now more generally known by the name of Independents and Congregationalists; and, indeed, the Glassites or Sandemanians, who came out of the synod of Angus and Mearns in the year 1728. Thus in one hundred and ninety years, have nine or ten distinct communions originated out of the Westminster creed. Some of them, too, as discordant and aloof from each other, as were the Jews and Samaritans. Nor have the Methodists in England, Canada, and the United States done much better for their age. They now form five or six separate communions, under different names. To say nothing of the Whitefieldite Methodists, those of John Wesley, are, the Wesleyan Methodists, the New Connection of Methodists, the Methodist Episcopal church, the O’Kelly Methodists, the Radicals, etc. And what shall I say of the twelve or fourteen sects of Baptists--many of whom have as much affection for the Greek and Roman church, as for one another! It were useless to furnish other evidence in proof that human opinions, inferential reasonings, and deductions from the Bible, exhibited in the form of creeds, can never unite Christians; as all their fruits are alienation, repulsion, bickering, and schism. No human creed in Protestant Christendom can be found, that has not made a division for every generation of its existence. And I may add--the more thinking, inquisitive, and intelligent the community which owns a creed, the more frequent their debates and schisms. But the Bible will do not better, if men approach it with a set of opinions, or a human symbol in their minds. For then it is not the Bible, but the opinions in the mind, that form the bond of union. Men, indeed, had better have a written than an unwritten standard of orthodoxy, if they will not abandon speculation and abstract notions, as any part of Christian faith or duty. But all these modes of faith and worship are based upon a mistake of the true character of Revelation, which it has long been our effort to correct. With us, Revelation has nothing to do with opinions, or abstract reasonings; for it is founded wholly and entirely upon facts. There is not one abstract opinion, not one speculative view, asserted or communicated in Old Testament or New. Moses begins with asserting facts that had transpired in creation and providence; and John ends with asserting prophetic or prospective facts, in the future displays of providence and redemption. Facts, then, are the alpha and the omega of both Jewish and Christian revelations. But that the reader may have before his mind in one summary view, the whole scheme of union and co-operation, which the Living Oracles and the present state of the Christian religion in the world demand; which has been, at different times and in various manners, illustrated and sustained in the present controversy, against divisions,--we shall here submit it in one period. Let THE BIBLE be substituted for all human creeds; FACTS, for definitions, THINGS, for words; FAITH, for speculation; UNITY OF FAITH, for unity of opinion; THE POSITIVE COMMANDMENTS OF GOD, for human legislation and tradition; PIETY, for ceremony; MORALITY, for partisan zeal; THE PRACTICE OF RELIGION, for the mere profession of it;--and the work is done. For the illustration of the leading terms, and their correlates found in this project, and for a full development of our meaning, (as we may nor may not be understood, if interpreted by the polemic vocabulary of this age,)--we shall introduce some extracts from the Christian Baptist and Millennial Harbinger, developing our meaning, and containing some of the capital positions which have been fully elicited and canvassed, in a controversy of twelve years. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 82: 03.30. FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN UNION - FACT ======================================================================== FACT Fact means something done. The term deed, so common in the reign of James the First, is equivalent to our term fact. Truth and fact, though often confounded, are not the same. All facts are truth, but all truths are not facts. That God exists, is a truth, but not a fact; that he created the heavens and the earth, is a fact and a truth. That Paul was the Apostle of the Gentiles, is a truth, but not a fact; and that he preached Christ to the Gentiles is both a fact and a truth. The simple agreement of the terms of any proposition with the subject of that proposition, or the representation of any thing as it exists, is a truth. But something must be done, acted, or effected, before we have a fact. There are many things true in religion, morals, politics, and general science, which are not facts; but these are all but the correspondence of words and ideas with the things of which they treat. Facts have a power which logical truth has not; and therefore, we say, that facts are stubborn things. They are things, not words. The power of any fact, is the meaning; and therefore the measure of its power is the magnitude of its import. All moral facts have a moral meaning; and those are properly called moral facts, which either exhibit, develop, or form moral character. All those facts, or works of God, which are purely physical, exhibit what have been commonly called his natural or physical perfections; and all those facts or works of God, which are purely moral, exhibit his moral character. It so happens, however, that all his works, when properly understood, exhibit both his physical and moral character, when viewed in all their proper relations. Thus the deluge exhibited his power, his justice, and his truth; and therefore, displayed both his physical and moral grandeur. The turning of water into wine, apart from its design, is purely a demonstration of physical power; but when its design is apprehended, it has a moral force equal to its physical majesty. The work of redemption is a system of work, or deeds, on the part of Heaven, which constitutes the most splendid series of moral facts which man or angel ever saw. And they are the proof, the argument, or the demonstration, of that regenerating proposition which presents God and love as two names for one idea. When these facts are understood, or brought into immediate contact with the mind of man, as a moral seal or archetype, they delineate the image of God upon the human soul. All the means of grace are, therefore, only the means of impressing this seal upon the heart; of bringing these moral facts to make their full impression on the soul of man. Testimony and faith are but the channel through which these facts, or the hand of God, draws the image on the heart and character of man. If then the fact and the testimony are both the gift of God, we may well say that faith and eternal life are also the gift of God, through Jesus Christ our Lord. To enumerate the gospel facts would be to narrate all that is recorded of the sayings and doings of Jesus Christ, from his birth to his coronation in the heavens. They are, however, concentrated in a few prominent ones, which group together all the love of God in the gift of his Son. He died for our sins, He was buried in the grave, He rose from the dead for our justification, and is ascended to the skies to prepare mansions for his disciples, comprehend the whole, or are the heads to the chapters which narrate the love of God, and display his moral majesty and glory to our view. These moral facts unfold all the moral grandeur of Jehovah, and make Jesus the effulgence of his glory, the express image of his substance. These are the moral seal which testimony conveys to the understanding, and faith brings to the hearts of sinners, by which God creates them anew, and forms them for his glory. It is the Spirit which bears witness--the Spirit of God and of Christ which gives the testimony, and confirms it in the disciples. But let us next proceed to testimony. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 83: 03.31. FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN UNION - TESTIMONY ======================================================================== TESTIMONY. The Romans, from whom we have borrowed much of our language, called the witness the testis. The declaration of this testis is still called testimony. In reference to the material system around us, to all objects and matters of sense, the eye, the ear, the smell, the taste, the feeling, are the five witnesses. What we call the evidence of sense, is, therefore, the testimony of these witnesses, which constitute the five avenues to the human mind from the kingdom of nature. They are figuratively called witnesses, and their evidence, testimony. But the report or declaration of intelligent beings, such as God, angels, and men, constitute what is properly and literally called testimony. As light reflected from any material object upon the eye, brings that object into contact with the eye, or enables the object to make its image on the eye, so testimony concerning any fact, brings that fact into contact with the mind, and enables it to impress itself, or to form its image upon the intellect, or mind of man. Now, be it observed, that as by our five external senses we acquire all information of the objects of sense around us, so by testimony, human or divine, we receive all our information upon all facts which are not the objects of immediate exercise of our five senses upon the things around us. To appreciate the full value of testimony in divine work of regeneration, we have only to reflect, that all the moral facts which can form moral character, after the divine model, or which can effect a moral or religious change in man, are found in the testimony of God: and that no fact can operate at all, where it is not present; or where it is not known. The love of God in the death of the Messiah, never drew a tear of gratitude or joy from any eye, or excited a grateful emotion in any heart among the nations of our race to whom the testimony never came. No fact in the history of six thousand years, no work of God in creation, providence, or redemption, has ever influenced the heart of man or woman, to whom it has not been testified. Testimony is, then, in regeneration, as necessary as the facts of which it speaks. The real value of any thing, is the labor which it cost, and its utility when acquired. If reason and justice arbitrated all questions upon the value of property, the decision would be, that every article is worth the amount of human labor which is necessary to obtain it; and when obtained, it is again to be tried in the scales of utility. Now, as all the facts, and all the truth which can renovate human nature, are in the testimony of God; and as that testimony cost the labor and the lives of the wisest and best that ever lived, that testimony, to us, is just as valuable as the facts which it records, and the labors and the lives which it cost, and just as indispensable in the process of regeneration, as were the labors and the lives of Prophets, Apostles, and the Son of God. History, or narrative, whether oral or written, is only another name for testimony. When, then, we reflect how large a portion of both Testaments is occupied in history, we may judge of how much importance it is in the judgment of God. Prophecy, also, being the history of future facts, or a record of things to be done, belongs to the same chapter of facts and record. Now if all past facts, and all future facts, or all the history or testimony concerning them, was erased from the volumes of God’s inspiration, how small would the remainder be! These considerations, added together, only in part exhibit the value and utility of testimony in the regeneration of mankind. But its value will be still more evident, when the proper import of the term faith is fully set before us. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 84: 03.32. FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN UNION - FAITH ======================================================================== FAITH. No testimony, no faith: for faith is only the belief of testimony, or confidence in testimony as true. To believe without testimony, is just as impossible as to see without light. The measure, quality, and power of faith, are always found in the testimony believed. Where testimony begins, faith begins; and where testimony ends, faith ends. We believe Moses just as far as Moses speaks or writes: and when Moses has recorded his last fact, or testified his last truth, our faith in Moses terminates. His five books are, therefore, the length and breadth, the height and depth, or, in other words, the measure, of our faith in Moses. The quality or value of faith is found in the quality of value of the testimony. If the testimony be valid and authoritative, our faith is strong and operative. ’If,’ says John, ’we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater,’ stronger, and more worthy of credit. The value of a bank bill, is the amount of the precious metals which it represents, and the indisputable evidence of its genuineness; so the value of faith is the importance of the facts which the testimony presents, and the assurance afforded that the testimony is true. True, or unfeigned faith, may be contrasted with feigned faith; but true faith is the belief of truth: for he that believes a lie, believes in vain. The power of faith is also the power, or moral meaning of the testimony, or of the facts which the testimony represents. If by faith I am transported with joy, or overwhelmed in sorrow, that joy or sorrow is in the facts contained in the testimony, or in the nature and relation of those facts to me. If faith purifies the heart, works by love, and overcomes the world, this power is in the facts believed. If a father has more joy in believing that a lost son has been found, than in believing that a lost sheep has been brought home to his fold, the reason of this greater joy is not in the nature of his believing, but in the nature of the facts believed. Here I am led to expatiate on a very popular and pernicious error of modern times. The error is, that the nature, or power and saving efficacy of faith, is not in the truth believed, but in the nature of our faith, or in the manner of believing the truth. Hence all that unmeaning jargon about the nature of faith, and all those disdainful sneers at what is called "historic faith,"--as if there could be any faith without history, written or spoken. Who ever believed in Jesus Christ, without hearing the history of him? ’How shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard?’ Faith never can be more than the receiving of testimony as true, or the belief of testimony; and if that testimony be written, it is called history--though it is as much history when flowing from the tongue, as when flowing from the pen. Let it be again repeated, and remembered, that there is no other manner of believing a fact, than by receiving it as true. If it is not received as true, it is not believed; and when it is believed, it is no more than regarded as true. This being conceded, then it follows, that the efficacy of faith is always in the fact believed, or the object received, and not in the nature or manner of believing. "Faith was bewildered much by men who meant To make it clear, so simple in itself. A thought so rudimental and so plain, That none by comment could it plainer make. All faith was one. In object, not in kind, The difference lay. The faith that saved a soul, And that which in the common truth believed, In essence, were the same. Hear, then, what faith, True Christian faith, which brought salvation, was: Belief in all that God revealed to men; Observe, in all that God revealed to men, In all he promised, threatened, commanded, said, Without exception, and without a doubt."2 This holds universally in all the sensitive, intellectual, and moral powers of man. All our pleasures and pains, all our joys and sorrows, are the effects of the objects of sensation, reflection, faith, etc., apprehended or received, and not in the nature of the exercise of any power of capacity with which we are endowed. We shall illustrate and confirm this assertion by an appeal to the experience of all. Let us glance at all our sensitive powers. If, on surveying with the eye a beautiful landscape, I am pleased, and on surveying a battle field strewed with the spoils of death, I am pained,--is it in accordance with truth to say, that the pleasure or the pain received was occasioned by the nature of vision, or the mode of seeing? Was it not the sight, the thing seen, the object of vision, which produced the pleasure and the pain? The action of looking, or the mode of seeing, was in both cases the same; but the things seen, or the objects of vision, were different;--consequently, the effects produced were different. If on hearing the melody of the grove I am delighted, and on hearing the peals of thunder breaking to pieces the cloud, dark with horror, hanging over my head, I am terrified,--is the delight or the terror to be ascribed to the manner or nature of hearing, or to the thing heard? Is it not the thing heard, which produces the delight or the terror? If I am refreshed by the balmy fragrance of the opening bloom of spring, or sickened by the fetid effluvia of putrid carcasses,--are these effects to be ascribed to the peculiar nature or mode of smelling, or to the thing smelt? Or when the honey and the gall come in contact with my taste,--is the sweet or the bitter to be regarded as the effect of my manner of tasting, or to the object tasted? And when I touch the ice, or the blazing torch,--is the effect or feeling produced to be imputed to the manner of feeling them, or to the thing felt? May we not, then, affirm that all the pleasures and pains of sense; all the effects of sensation; are the results, not of the manner in which our five senses are exercised, but of the objects on which they are exercised? it may be said, without in the least invalidating this conclusion, that the more intimate the exercise of our senses is with the things on which they are exercised, the stronger and more forcible will be the impressions made: but still it is the object seen, heard, smelt, tasted, or felt, which affects us. Passing from the outward to the inward man, and on examining the powers of intellection one by one, we shall find no exception to the law which pervades all our sensitive powers. It is neither the faculty of perception, nor the manner of perception, but the thing perceived, that excites us to action: it is not the exercise of reflection, but the thing reflected upon: it is not memory, nor the exercise of recollection, but the thing remembered: it is not imagination, but the thing imagined: it is not reason itself, nor the exercise of reason, but the thing reasoned upon, which affords pleasure or pain--which excites to action--which cheers, allures, consoles--which grieves, disquiets, or discommodes us. Ascending to our volitions and our affections, we shall find the same universality. In a word, it is not choosing, nor refusing; it is not loving, hating, fearing, desiring, nor hoping; it is not the nature of any power, faculty, or capacity of our nature, nor the simple exercise of them, but the objects or things upon which they are exercised, which give us pleasure or pain; which induce us to action, or influence our behavior. Faith, then, or the power of believing, must be an anomalous thing; a power sui generis; an exception to the laws under which every power, faculty, or capacity of man is placed, unless its measure, quality, power, and efficacy be in the facts which are testified, in the objects on which it terminates. There is no connection of cause and effect more intimate; there is no system of dependencies more closely linked; there is no arrangement of things more natural or necessary, than the ideas represented by the terms fact, testimony, faith, and feeling. The first is for the last, and the two intermediates are made necessary by the force of circumstances, as the means for the end. The fact, or the thing said to be done, produces the change in the frame of mind. The testimony, or the report of the thing said or done, is essential to belief; and belief of it is necessary to bring the thing said or done to the heart. The change of heart is the end proposed in this part of the process of regeneration; and we may see that the process on the part of Heaven is, thus far, natural and rational; or, in other words, consistent with the constitution of our nature.3 ======================================================================== CHAPTER 85: 03.33. FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN UNION - CONFIRMATION OF THE TESTIMONY ======================================================================== CONFIRMATION OF THE TESTIMONY. All revealed religion is based upon facts. Testimony has respect to facts only; and that testimony may be credible, it must be confirmed. These points are of so much importance as to deserve some illustration, and much consideration. By facts we always mean something said or done. The works of God and the words of God, or the things done and spoken by God, are those facts which are laid down and exhibited in the Bible as the foundation of all faith, hope, love, piety, and humanity. All true and useful knowledge is an acquaintance with facts. And all true science is acquired from the observation and comparison of facts. But he that made the heart of man and gave him an intelligent spirit. knows that facts alone can move the affections and command the passions of man. Hence the scheme of mercy which he has discovered to the world, is all contained in, and developed by, the works of mercy which he has wrought. Facts have a meaning which the understanding apprehends, and the heart feels. According to the meaning or nature of the fact, is its effect upon us. If a friend have risked his life, or sacrificed his reputation or fortune to relieve us, we cannot but confide in him and love him. If an enemy have attempted our life, invaded our property, or attacked our reputation, we cannot, naturally, but hate him. Nothing but the command of a benefactor, or the will of some dear friend, who had laid us under obligation to himself, can prevent us from hating our enemies. If a beloved relative have sustained some great misfortune, we must feel sorry; or if he have been rescued from some impending calamity, we must feel glad. Our joy in the latter case, and our sorrow in the former, arise from the meaning or nature of the fact. The feelings corresponding with the nature of the fact, are excited or called into existence the moment the fact is known or believed. It is known when we have witnessed it ourselves, and it is believed when reported to us by credible persons who have witnessed it. This is the chief difference between faith and knowledge. As existence or beings must precede knowledge, so facts must precede either knowledge or belief. An event must happen before it can be known by man--it must be known by some before it can be reported to others--it must be reported before it can be believed, and the testimony must be confirmed, or made credible, before it can be relied on. Something must be done before it can be known, reported, or believed. Hence, in the order of nature, there is first the fact, then the testimony, and then the belief. A was drowned before B reported it--B reported it before C believed it, and C believed it before he was grieved at it. This is the unchangeable and universal order of things as respects belief. In this example when we reason from effect to cause, it is grief, belief, testimony, fact--and from cause to effect, it is fact, testimony, belief, grief. We ascend from grief to belief--from belief to testimony--from testimony to fact. We descend from fact to testimony--from testimony to belief--and from belief to grief. To this there is no exception, more than against the universality of the law of gravity. If, then, there was nothing said or done, there could be no testimony, and so no faith. Religious affections spring from faith; and, therefore, it is of importance, that this subject should be disintricated from the mysticism of the schools. Laws call for obedience, and testimony for belief. Where there is no law, there can be no obedience; and when there is no testimony, there can be no faith. As obedience cannot transcend law, so faith cannot transcend testimony. John’s testimony went to so many facts. On his testimony we can believe only as far as he has testified. And so of all the other witnesses. The certainty of faith depends upon the certainty or credibility of the witnesses. But not so its effects. The effects depend upon the facts believed--the certainty upon the evidence. I may be equally certain that John was beheaded--that Jesus was crucified. Nay, I may be as certain of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, as I am of his death on Calvary. The testimony may be equally credible, and the faith equally strong; but the effects produced are not the same. The facts believed have not the same meaning, are not of the same nature, and do not produce the same feelings or effects. I may be as certain of the assassination of Cesar in the Senate House, as I am of the crucifixion of Jesus on Calvary: but as the facts believed are as diverse in their nature, meaning, and bearings upon me, as the East and the West; so the effects or fruits of my faith are as different as Julius Cesar and Jesus Christ. The more ordinary the fact, the more ordinary the testimony necessary to establish it. That A B, aged 90, and confined for some time with sickness, died last night, requires only the most ordinary testimony to render it credible. But that C D lived to 140, enjoying unabated vigor of mind and body, requires stronger testimony. But still, all facts happening in accordance with the ordinary and natural laws of things, require but good human testimony to make them worthy of credence. It is only extraordinary and supernatural facts which require supernatural testimony, or testimony supernaturally confirmed. This is the point to which we have been looking in this essay. And now that we have arrived at it, I would ask, How has the testimony of the Apostles and Evangelists been confirmed? To confirm a testimony is neither more nor less than to make it credible to those to whom it is tendered; or, to express the same idea in other words, it is to give men power to believe. Now, it will not require the same amount of evidence to persuade an astronomer that the earth’s shadow struck the moon last eclipse, as it would to convince an Indian; nor would it require the same amount of evidence to convince a chemist that combustion was effected by pouring water on a certain composition of mineral substances, as it would an unlettered swain. To make any testimony credible to any order of beings, regard must therefore be had to the capacity, attainments, and habits of those beings. To confirm the testimony of the Apostles concerning the Messiah’s death, resurrection, ascension into heaven, and coronation as the Lord and King of the Universe, imports no more nor no less than that it should be rendered every way credible to such things as we are, or that we should be made able to believe. A testimony confirmed, and yet incredible to those to whom it is tendered, is a contradiction in terms. But why emphasize on the word confirmed? Because the holy Apostles have emphasized upon it. It is therefore necessary that we should pay a due regard to the confirmation of the testimony. The testimony is one thing, and the confirmation is another. It is necessary, in all important occasions in human affairs, that the testimony which is received between man and man should be confirmed by some sanction. Hence an oath for confirmation of testimony is an end of all strife. The highest confirmation which men require in all questions of facts, is a solemn oath or affirmation that the things affirmed are true. But supernatural facts require supernatural confirmations. Hence when the confirmation of the gospel is spoken of in the apostolic writings, it is resolved into the doings or works of the Holy Spirit. ’Demonstrations of the Holy Spirit, are the confirmatory proofs of the gospel. When Paul delivered the testimony of God, or the testimony concerning Jesus, to the Corinthians, he says, ’It is was confirmed among them.’ And if we examine into the confirmation of the testimony as Paul explained it, we shall find that he makes the spiritual gifts, or those extraordinary and miraculous powers which the Apostles themselves displayed, and which so many of their converts also possessed, an assurance or confirmation of what he promulged. We shall only attend to the light which one of his epistles to the Corinthians throws upon this subject. After thanking his God for the favor bestowed upon the disciples of Corinth when he first visited them, he proceeds to specify the special favors bestowed upon the disciples in that renowned city. ’You were enriched (says he, 1 Corinthians 1:5) with every gift by him, even with all speech and all knowledge when the testimony of Christ was confirmed among you: so that you come behind in no gift.’ ’There are diversities of gifts, (says he, 1 Corinthians 12:1-31) for to one disciple is given the word of wisdom; to another, the word of knowledge; to another, faith, (to be healed;) to another, the gift of healing; to another, the ability of working in others the power of working miracles; to another, prophecy; to another, discerning of spirits; to another, divers kinds of foreign tongues; and to another, the interpretation of foreign tongues.’--Now, the Corinthians were put in possession of these (for they came behind in no gift) ’when the testimony of Christ was confirmed among them.’ For, says Paul, I came not to you with the excellency of speech, or the persuasive eloquence of the schools, but with the demonstration of the Spirit and of power; that your belief of my testimony, or your faith, might not rest, or be founded upon human wisdom or eloquence, but upon the power of God evinced in the demonstrations of the Spirit which confirmed my testimony among you. For had it not been for these demonstrations of the Spirit and power, your faith could not have rested upon an immoveable basis. To those desirous to understand this subject, an examination of this first letter to the Corinthians cannot fail to be most instructive; for it most clearly and unequivocally teaches us that the visible, audible, sensible demonstration of the Spirit and of power, was that supernatural attestation of the testimony of Christ which made it credible, so that no man could have acknowledged Jesus of Nazareth to be the Almighty Lord, but by this demonstration of the Holy Spirit. Thus was the testimony confirmed--thus was Jesus demonstrated to be the only begotten Son of God-- and thus, and thus only, are men enabled to believe in him.4 ======================================================================== CHAPTER 86: 03.34. FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN UNION - FUNDAMENTAL FACT ======================================================================== FUNDAMENTAL FACT.5 Amidst the uncertainty, darkness, and vice, that overspread the earth, the Messiah appears, and lays a foundation of hope, of true religion, and of religious union, unknown, unheard of, unexpected among men. The Jews were united by consanguinity, and by agreement in a ponderous ritual. The Gentiles rallied under every opinion, and were grouped, like filings of steel around a magnet, under every possible shade of difference of thought, concerning their mythology. So long as unity of opinion was regarded as a proper basis of religious union, so long have mankind been distracted by the multiplicity and variety of opinions. To establish what is called a system of orthodox opinions as the bond of union, was, in fact, offering a premium for new diversities in opinion, and for increasing, ad infinitum, opinions, sects, and divisions. And what is worse than all, it was establishing self-love and pride as religious principles, as fundamental to salvation; or a love regulated by similarity of opinion, is only a love to one’s own opinion; and all the zeal exhibited in the defence of it, is but the workings of the pride of opinion. When the Messiah appeared as the founder of a new religion, systems of religion consisting of opinions and speculations upon matter and mind, upon God and nature, upon virtue and vice, had been adopted, improved, reformed, and exploded time after time. That there was always something superfluous, something defective, something wrong, something that could be improved, in every system of religion and morality, was generally felt, and at last universally acknowledged. But the grandeur, sublimity, and beauty of the foundation of hope, and of ecclesiastical or social union, established by the author and founder of Christianity, consisted in this, that THE BELIEF OF ONE FACT, and that upon the best evidence in the world, is all that is requisite, as far as faith goes, to salvation. The belief of this ONE FACT and submission to ONE INSTITUTION expressive of it, is all that is required of Heaven to admission into the church. A Christian, as defined, not by Dr. Johnson, nor any creed-maker, but by one taught from Heaven, is one that believes this one fact, and has submitted to one institution, and whose deportment accords with the morality and virtue of the great Prophet. The one fact is expressed in a single proposition--that Jesus the Nazarene is the Messiah. The evidence upon which it is to be believed is the testimony of twelve men, confirmed by prophecy, miracles, and spiritual gifts. The one institution is baptism into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Every such person is a disciple in the fullest sense of the word, the moment he has believed this one fact, upon the above evidence, and has submitted to the above mentioned institution; and whether he believes the five points condemned, or the five points approved by the synod of Dort, is not so much as to be asked of him; whether he holds any of the views of the Calvinists or Arminians, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, or Quakers, is never once to be asked of such persons, in order to admission into the Christian community, called the church. The only doubt that can reasonably arise upon these points, is, whether this one fact, in its nature and necessary results, can suffice to the salvation of the soul, and whether the open avowal of it, in the overt act of baptism, can be a sufficient recommendation of the person, so professing, to the confidence and love of the brotherhood. As to the first of these, it is again and again asserted, in the clearest language, by the Lord himself, the Apostles Peter, Paul, and John, that he that believes the testimony that Jesus is the Christ, is begotten by God, may overcome the world, has eternal life, and is, on the veracity of God, saved from his sins. This should settle the first point; for the witnesses agree that whosoever confesses that Jesus is the Christ, and is baptized, should be received into the church; and not an instance can be produced of any person being asked for any other faith, in order to admission, in the whole New Testament. The Saviour expressly declared to Peter, that upon this fact, that he was the Messiah, the Son of God, he would build his church; and Paul has expressly declared that "other foundation can no man lay (for ecclesiastical union) than that JESUS IS THE CHRIST." The point is proved that we have assumed; and this proved, every thing is established requisite to the union of all Christians upon a proper basis. It must strike every man of reflection, that a religion requiring much mental abstraction or exquisite refinement of thought, or that calls for the comprehension or even apprehension of refined distinctions and of nice subtleties, is a religion not suited to mankind in their present circumstances. To present such a creed as the Westminster, as adopted, either by Baptists or Paido-Baptists; such a creed as the Episcopalian, or, in the fact, any sectarian creed, composed as they all are, of propositions, deduced by logical inferences, and couched in philosophical language, to all those who are fit subjects of the salvation of Heaven--I say, to present such a creed to such for their examination or adoption, shocks all common sense. This pernicious course is what has paganized Christianity. Our sects and parties, our disputes and speculations, our orders and castes, so much resemble any thing but Christianity, that when we enter a modern synagogue, or an ecclesiastical council, we seem rather to have entered a Jewish sanhedrim, a Mohometan mosque, a Pagan temple, or an Egyptian cloister, than a Christian congregation. Sometimes, indeed, our religious meetings so resemble the Areopagus, the Forum, or the Senate, that we almost suppose ourselves to have been translated to Athens or Rome. Even Christian orators emulate Demosthenes and Cicero. Christian doctrines are made to assume the garb of Egyptian mysteries, and Christian observances put on the pomp and pageantry of pagan ceremonies. Unity of opinion, expressed in subscription to voluminous dogmas imported from Geneva, Westminster, Edinburgh, or Rome, is made the bond of union: and a difference in the tenth, or ten thousandth shade of opinion, frequently becomes the actual cause of dismemberment or expulsion. The New Testament was not designed to occupy the same place in theological seminaries that the carcases of malefactors are condemned to occupy in medical halls--first doomed to the gibbet, and then to the dissecting knife of the spiritual anatomist. Christianity consists infinitely more in good works than in sound opinions; and while it is a joyful truth, that he that believes and is baptized shall be saved, it is equally true that he that says, ’I know him, and keeps not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.’6 ======================================================================== CHAPTER 87: 03.35. FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN UNION - PURITY OF SPEECH ======================================================================== PURITY OF SPEECH. If I were to classify in three chapters the whole Christian institution, after the fashion of the modern schools, for the sake of being understood, I would designate them Christian faith, Christian worship, and Christian morality. To these the moderns have added two others, which, using the same licence, I would call human philosophy, and human traditions. Now, in the first chapter, we, and all Christians, are agreed: for as Christian faith has respect to the matters of fact recorded--to the direct testimony of God found in the New Testament concerning himself--concerning his Son and Spirit--concerning mankind--what he has done, and what he will do, on it there is no debate. I find all confessions of FAITH, properly so called, like the four gospels, tell the same story so far as matters of fact or faith are concerned. In the second chapter we are also agreed, that God is to be worshipped through the Mediator--in prayer, in praise, public and private--in the ordinances of Christian baptism, the Lord’s day, the Lord’s supper, and in the devotional study of his word and of his works of creation and providence. In the third chapter we all acknowledge the same moral code. What is morality, is confessed and acknowledged by all; but in the practice of it there are great subtractions. We repudiate the two remaining chapters as having any place in our faith, worship, or morality; because we think we have discovered that all the divisions in Protestant Christendom--that all the partyism, vain jangling, and heresies which have disgraced the Christian profession, have emanated from human philosophy and human tradition. It is not faith, nor piety, nor morality; but philosophy and tradition that have alienated and estranged Christians, and prevented the conversion of the world. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, deserved not the reputation of philosophers, if Calvin, Arminius, and Wesley, were not worthy of it. The former philosophised morally on nature and ancient tradition--the latter, on the Bible, and human society. Religious philosophers on the Bible have excogitated the following doctrines and philosophical distinctions:-- ’The Holy Trinity,’ ’Three persons of one substance, power, and eternity,’ ’Co-essential, co-substantial, co-equal,’ ’The Son eternally begotten of the Father,’ ’An eternal Son,’ ’Humanity and divinity of Christ,’ ’The Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son,’ ’God’s eternal decrees,’ ’Conditional and unconditional election and reprobation,’ ’God out of Christ,’ ’Free will,’ ’Liberty and necessity,’ ’Original sin,’ ’Total depravity,’ ’Covenant of grace,’7 ’Effectual calling,’ ’Free grace,’ ’Sovereign grace,’ ’General and particular atonement,’ ’Satisfy divine justice,’ ’Common and special operations of the Holy Ghost,’ ’Imputed righteousness,’ ’Inherent righteousness,’ ’Progressive sanctification,’ ’Justifying and saving faith,’ ’Historic and temporary faith,’ ’The direct and reflex acts of faith,’ ’The faith of assurance, and the assurance of faith,’ ’Legal repentance,’ ’Evangelical repentance,’ ’Perseverance of the saints,’8 and ’Falling from grace,’9 ’Visible and invisible church,’ ’Infant membership,’ ’Sacraments,’ ’Eucharist,’ ’Consubstantiation,’ ’Church government,’ ’The power of the keys,’ etc. etc. Concerning these and all such doctrines, and all the speculations and phraseology to which they have given rise, we have the privilege neither to affirm nor deny--neither to believe nor doubt; because God has not proposed them to us in his word, and there is no command to believe them. If they are deduced from the Scriptures, we have them in the facts and declarations of God’s Spirit; if they are not deduced from the Bible, we are free from all the difficulties and strifes which they have engendered and created. We choose to speak of Bible things by Bible words, because we are always suspicious that if the word is not in the Bible, the idea which it represents is not there; and always confident that the things taught by God are better taught in the words, and under the names which the Holy Spirit has chosen and appropriated, than in the words which man’s wisdom teaches. There is nothing more essential to the union of the disciples of Christ than purity of speech. So long as the earth was of one speech, the human family was united. Had they been then of a pure speech as well as of one speech, they would not have been separated. God, in his just indignation, dispersed them; and before he scattered them, he divided their language. One of his Prophets, who lived in a degenerate age, who prophesied against the corruptions of his day, when he spoke of better times, of an age of union and communion, was commanded to say in the name of the Lord, ’Then will I turn to the people a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the Lord, to serve him with one consent.’10 Purity of speech is here declared to be prerequisite to serving the Lord with one consent. ’The words of the Lord are pure words.’11 To have a pure speech we must choose the language of Canaan, and abandon that of Ashdod. And if we would be of one mind, we must ’speak the same thing.’ This was Paul’s scheme of union, and no man can suggest a better. It requires but little reflection to discover that the fiercest disputes about religion, are about what the Bible does not say, rather than about what it does say--about words and phrases coined in the mint of speculative theology. Of these the homousios and the homoousios of the ever-memorable Council of Nice are a fair sample. Men are neither wiser, more intelligent, nor better after, than before, they know the meaning of these words. As far as known on earth, there is not, in ’the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,’ the name of any person who was either converted or sanctified to God by any of these controversies about human dogmas, nor by anything learned from the canons or creeds of all the Councils, from that of Nice to the last Methodistic Conference. It is a virtue, then, to forget this scholastic jargon, and even the names of the dogmas which have convulsed Christendom. It is a concession due to the crisis in which we live, for the sake of peace, to adopt the vocabulary of Heaven, and to return the borrowed nomenclature of the schools of its rightful owners--to speculate no more upon the opinions of Saint Austin, Saint Tertullian, Saint Origen--to speak of the Father, and the Son, and of the Holy Spirit--of the gospel, of faith, of repentance, of baptism, of election, of the death of Christ, of his mediation, of his blood, of the reconciliation, of the Lord’s supper, of the atonement, of the church of God, etc. etc., in all the phrases found in the Record, without partiality--to learn to love one another as much when we differ in opinion as when we agree, and to distinguish between the testimony of God, and man’s reasonings and philosophy upon it. I need not say much upon the chapter of human traditions. They are easily distinguished from the Apostles’ traditions. Those of the Apostles are found in their writings, as those of men are found in their own books. Some human traditions may have a show of wisdom, but only an appearance. So long as it is written, ’In vain to they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men,’ so long will it be presumptuous folly to add the commandments of men to the precepts of Jesus Christ. I know of but one way in which all believers in Jesus Christ, honorably to themselves, honorably to the Lord, and advantageously to all the sons of Adam, can form one communion. All have two chapters too many in their present ecclesiastic constitutions. The contents of the aforesaid two chapters are various and different in all the sects, but they all have these two chapters under some name. In some they are long, and in some they are short; but whether long or short, let every one agree to tear them out of his book and burn them, and be satisfied with faith, piety, and morality. Let human philosophy and human tradition, as any part of the Christian institution, be thrown overboard into the sea, and then the ship of the church will make a prosperous, safe, and happy voyage across the ocean of time, and finally, under the triumphant flag of Immanuel, gain a safe anchorage in the haven of eternal rest. I would appeal to every honorable, good, and loyal citizen of the kingdom of Heaven,--to every one that seeks the good of Zion, that loves the kingdom and the appearing of our common Lord and Saviour, whether such a concession be not due to the Lord, to the saints in heaven and on earth, and to the whole human race in the crisis in which we are now placed; and whether we could propose less, or ought to demand more, than to make one whole burnt offering of all our "empty and deceitful philosophy,"--our "science, falsely so called,"--and our traditions received from our fathers. I would leave it to the good sense of every sane mind to say, whether such a whole burnt offering would not be the most acceptable peace offering, which, in this our day, could be presented on the altar of the Prince of Peace; and whether, under the teachings of the Apostles of the Great Prophet, the church might not again triumphantly stand upon the holy ground, which she so honorably occupied before Origen, Austin, Athanasius, or the first Pope was born!12 1 Christian Baptist, vol. 2, pp. 66, 67. Essays on the Westminster creed, vol. 2. Review of Dr. Noel’s Circular, vol. 5. 2 Pollock’s Course of Time, Book 8: p. 189. 3 Millennial Harbinger--Extra, No. 6, pp. 340-345. 4 Millennial Harbinger, vol. 1, pp. 8-12. 5 The fundamental proposition is--that Jesus is the Christ. The fact, however, contained in this proposition is--that God has anointed Jesus of Nazareth as the only Saviour of sinners. He is the promised Christ: ’God has constituted him Lord and Christ.’--PETER. 6 Christian Baptist, vol. 1, pp. 167-169. 7, 8, 9 These are examples of scriptural phrases misapplied: for the corruption of Christianity has been consummated by the incursions of barbarian language, and by the new appropriations of the sacred style. 10 Zephaniah 3:9. 11 Psalms 12:6. 12 Millennial Harbinger, vol. 6, pp. 109-113. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 88: 03.36. KINGDOM OF HEAVEN - TABLE OF CONTENTS ======================================================================== Patriarchal Age of the World Abraham Two Promises Covenant of Circumcision Sinaitic Covenant Two Seeds The Blessing of Abraham The Jewish Institution The Elements of a Kingdom The Name Constitution The King The Subjects of the Kingdom The Laws of the Kingdom The Territory Manner and Customs Induction into the Kingdom of Heaven The Coming of the Kingdom The Ascension of the Messiah Coronation of the Messiah Present Administration Kingdom of Heaven. GENERAL ESSAYS1 ======================================================================== CHAPTER 89: 03.37. KINGDOM OF HEAVEN - PATRIARCHAL AGE OF THE WORLD ======================================================================== PATRIARCHAL AGE OF THE WORLD. The world has its infancy as well as man. Families preceded nations. Family worship was, therefore, the first religious institution. At the head of this institution naturally stood the father of every family. From necessity and from choice, he was the prophet, the priest, and the king of his household. As a prophet, he instructed his household in the knowledge of God, and in the history of man. As a priest, he officiated at his family altar, interceded for those under his care, and pronounced benedictions upon his children. As a lawgiver and king, he commanded his children and servants, and rewarded them according to merit. By a divine ordinance, the first fathers of mankind were thus constituted prophets, priests, and kings. Hence, the first religious and political institution is properly called ’the Patriarchal.’ Family worship was, then, the first social worship; and during the first ages of the world (for at least 2500 years) it was the only social worship, of divine authority. Though other institutions have since been added, this has never been superseded. Having its foundation in the matrimonial compact, the most ancient of all religious and political institutions, and this being founded on nature itself, it never can be superseded. While the forms of this worship have always been adapted to the genius of the various revelations of God vouchsafed to mankind, it has continued through all the changes of six thousand years, and will continue till the day when men, like angels of God, shall neither marry nor give in marriage. Family worship, so long as it continued the only social worship, underwent no material change; and this is the period which is properly called the Patriarchal age of the world. So long as the descendants of one man and one woman continued under the paternal roof, or until they became heads of families themselves, they continued under this religious and political administration. And if, after marriage, they did not migrate to a great distance from the patrimonial inheritance, the paternal authority was still acknowledged and acquiesced in. Thus, in process of time, he who at first was only the head of a single family, if his days were prolonged and his progeny multiplied, became the paternal prince, or chief patriarch of a tribe. In the youth of time and freshness of human nature, families soon became large; and as the father and head could not always be present while he lived, and as he might die before all his children could have become heads of families, it became necessary that a substitute in his absence, and a successor in case of his premature death, should be appointed to fill his place and administer the affairs of the family. Nature and reason alike pointed to the first born son, and religion consecrated him his vicegerent. Hence, the privileges and honors of the first born son were both religious and political; and thus the duties devolving upon him gave him a right to a double portion of the inheritance. Esau was, therefore, both prodigal and profane in selling his birthright for a meal of pottage. The antiquity of this arrangement appeared from the envy and jealousy of Cain, roused at the rejection of his offering and the acceptance of that of Abel. That jealousy seems to have been kindled into rage because of his birthright. This is fairly implied in God’s address to Cain, when that address is fairly translated and understood. "If ye do well, shall you not have the excellency; and if you do not well, sin precludes you (from the excellency.) And (Abel shall be subject to you) to you shall be his desire, and you shall rule over him."2 The moral and religious institutions of the patriarchal or family worship, which continued from the fall of Adam to the covenant of circumcision, were the Sabbath, the service of the altar, oral instruction, prayer, praise, and benediction. With the addition of circumcision in the family of one patriarch, for special purposes these were the parts of that system which continued for two thousand five hundred years. The religious observance of weeks or Sabbaths in commemoration of Creation, and prospective of an eternal rest, to arise out of the sacrificial and typical institution, was religiously observed to the giving of the law, or the erection of the Jewish institution. Thus the law of the Sabbath commences with the words, "Remember the sabbath." The righteous always remembered the weeks, and regarded the conclusion of the week as holy to the Lord. Hence, even after the apostasy, which issued in the neglect of family worship, in consequence of the sons of God intermarrying with the daughters of men, and which brought a flood of water upon the world of the ungodly--we find Noah religiously counting his weeks even while incarcerated in the ark. In the wilderness of Sin, before the giving of the law, we also find the Jews observing the Sabbath. And to facilitate the observance of it, God wrought three special miracles during the peregrinations of Israel. He gave two days’ portion of manna on the sixth day--none on the seventh--and preserved from putrefaction that portion laid up for the Sabbath.3 Sin offerings and thank offerings, on altars both of stone and earth, were presented to the Lord--the former in faith of the promise concerning the bruising the serpent’s head by the offspring of the woman--the latter in grateful acknowledgment of the goodness of God in creation and providence. Cain, without faith in the promised redemption, like many deists and natural religionists in our time, did acknowledge the goodness and care of God by a thank-offering; but Abel, by faith in that promise, not only offered his thank offering, but a lamb as a sin offering: therefore, while God respected not Cain’s oblation without faith in that promise, he testified in favor of the gifts of Abel--he accepted his sin offering and his thank offering. In the very brief and general outlines of almost two thousand five hundred years given us in the book of Genesis, we find sundry allusions to this part of the patriarchal institution. Immediately after his egress from the ark, we find Noah rearing his altar upon the baptized earth, and of every clean bird and beast offering to the Lord whole burnt offerings. Thus began Noah, after the deluge, to worship the Lord according to the patriarchal institution. And thus we find Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Job, and other patriarchs presenting their sacrifices to the Lord, while the family worship was the only religious institution to the world. Even libations, drink offerings, and anointing as token of gratitude and consecration, are found in this most ancient and venerable, institution. "Jacob rose up early in the morning, took the stone which he had put for his pillow, set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it."4 "And Jacob set up a pillar in the place where God talked with him, even a pillar of stone, and he poured a drink offering thereon, and he poured oil thereon."5 A beautiful and instructive instance of ancient family worship, and of the sacredotal functions, as exercised by the patriarchs in reference to the altar, we have in that most ancient of books, supposed by many to have been written by Moses while in the land of Midian; but according to others, by Job himself, who was certainly contemporary with Eliphaz the Temanite. Eliphaz was the son of Teman, who was the son of Eliphaz, who was the first son of Esau, the son of Isaac, the son of Abraham. He therefore lived before Moses. Thus we find him also officiating at the altar. We are told that "his sons went and feasted in each other’s houses, every one his day, and sent and called for their sisters to eat and drink with them. And it was so, that when the days of their feasting had gone about, that Job sent and sanctified them, and rose up early in the morning and offered burnt offerings according to the number of them all: for Job said, It may be that my sons have sinned and cursed God in their hearts. Thus acted Job continually."6 The same Job, by divine appointment, acted as priest or intercessor in behalf of his three friends, princes of Edom: for having spoken amiss, they were commanded to take seven bullocks and seven rams, and go to Job, the servant of God, and to offer them up for themselves; and "Job my servant shall pray for you." "Job prayed for them, and the Lord accepted his prayer, and forgave Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar." "The Lord also accepted and blessed Job after he had prayed for these his friends, and the Lord turned again the captivity of Job."7 During this period of the world, there was but one high or general priest, specially called and sent by God. "He was King of Salem and Priest of the Most High God." To him the patriarch Abraham paid tithes or gave the tenth of the spoils taken in war, and Melchisedeck blessed him. He was of an order of his own sort. He had no predecessor, successor, nor equal in the age of family worship. From all these facts and documents we learn that the service of the altar belonged first to the father of the family--next, to his eldest son--that it consisted in presenting sin offerings and thank offerings of various sorts in behalf of himself or family--that all pious sons and individuals might for themselves erect altars, offer sacrifices, and pour out libations and thank offerings to the Lord;--that these sacrificial observances were generally, if not always, accompanied with prayer, intercession, and thanksgivings;--and that intercession in behalf of those under the care of any father or patriarch was a part of the first institution. Benediction also was one of the first duties of this office. Fathers pronounced blessings on their children. Superiors in age and standing blessed their inferiors. Melchisedeck blessed Abraham, Isaac blessed Jacob, and Jacob blessed the twelve patriarchs. The invocations of blessings and the imposition of hands upon the head, were parts of the family worship institution. Concerning prayer and praise, as we cannot imagine a religion without them, it is unnecessary to speak particularly of them as parts of the patriarchal institution. Jubal soon taught men to handle the harp and organ, and piety soon consecrated them to the praise of God. The melodies of nature soon taught men to tune his voice to God. Isaac went into the fields at eventide for secret prayer. Abraham interceded for Sodom until he was ashamed to push his importunities farther; and for Abimelech, king of Egypt, and his family, he made his requests to God. Of him and his patriarchal character God said, "I know Abraham that he will command his children, and his household after him, and they shall keep the ways of the Lord, to do justice and judgment, that the Lord may bring upon Abraham that which he has spoken of him."8 Prophets of a public character were occasionally raised up to bring men back to the primitive simplicity of the patriarchal institution, as well as to lead them forward to the future developments of God’s purposes in reference to this work of redemption. Amongst these the most conspicuous were Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. To all these were given new visions of the future, and thus they were all preachers of righteousness and reformers in their respective generations. From these gleanings from the book of Genesis, one may learn that the family worship institution, which was divinely instituted in the first age of the world, embraced the observance of the Sabbath, the service of the altar, oral instruction, prayer, intercession, thanksgiving, and benediction. It contemplated no other bond of union than the marriage covenant, and the relations springing out of it. Doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God, were enforced in all its maxims, and in the examples of those whom God honored and approved. There was, during the long period of this family institution, no community separated from the world larger than a single household--no public altars--no temples--no established order of public teachers; therefore, there were no initiating or separating institutions. There was no circumcision for the infant, nor washing of regeneration for the instructed. These institutions of latter times had respect to public professing communities; and therefore, for two thousand years there was no initiating rite or ordinance amongst men. Wherever the family curtains were spread and a tent erected, the devout father built his own altar to the Lord, gathered his own children and domestics around him, instructed them in the knowledge of God the creator and preserver of all; and in the history of man, his origin and destiny, as far as revealed to them. They offered their thank offerings, acknowledgments of favors received; and when conscious of sin, they presented their sin offering, with confessions, and in faith of God’s promise, supplicated pardon. Such are the essential attributes of the patriarchal institution, and of the family worship, as learned from the writings of Moses. But as the root of all subsequent dispensations of God’s mercy and favor to man was planted in the patriarchal institution, it is necessary to our plan, before we advance farther, to pay some attention to one of the patriarchs, whose fame is eternal, on whom God bestowed an honor above all earthly honor, and who stands enrolled in the annals of time as THE FRIEND OF GOD. The intelligent reader needs not to be informed that we now call his attention specially to Abraham. ABRAHAM. Reader, attend! "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob: this is my name forever, and this is my memorial to all generations." And shall not the name, the calling, the blessing, and the history of Abraham always occupy large space in the records of God’s government of man, and in all the details of his redemption! Because of his unprecedented faith in God’s promises and exalted piety, he was constituted the father of all believers; and his whole life is made a model for all the children of God, as far as walking by faith in God’s promises is an ornament to human character. Sufficient, then, to our present purpose, we observe, that during the family worship institution, a little after the commencement of the third Millennium, about the 75th year of his life, God appeared to Abraham while he yet lived in Ur of Chaldea, and commanded him to depart out of that country, and that he would do for him certain things. Abraham obeyed. God gratuitously tendered him two promises, not only interesting and valuable to Abraham himself, but to all the human race. These two promises were intended to be the basis of a two-fold relation to God, and the foundation of two distinct religious institutions, called "the Old Testament and the New," "the Old Covenant and the New," "the Two Covenants," and "the Covenants of Promise." These are contemplated in them the constitution for a temporal and spiritual kingdom of God--a kingdom of God of this world, and a kingdom of God not of this world. Be it, therefore, always remembered, when we attempt to form correct views of the whole economy of God’s redemption, that these two promises were made while the patriarchal institution was yet standing and several centuries before its close. What, then, it will be asked, are these two promises? TWO PROMISES? We find them in their most simple form in the beginning of the 12th chapter of Genesis. The first--"I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee and make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing. I will bless them that bless thee, curse them that curse thee." The second--"In thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed." These promises, when fully developed, contained numerous blessings. They are, however, in all their details separate and distinct from each other. Abraham’s family alone are personally concerned in the first--all families of the earth in the second. Temporal and earthly are the blessings of the former--spiritual and eternal are the blessings of the latter. Paul calls the second, "The gospel preached to Abraham," and "The covenant confirmed by God in reference to the Messiah, four hundred and thirty years before the giving of the law." The Jewish kingdom in all its glory was but the development of the first--the Christian kingdom in its present and future blessings is the consummation of the second. COVENANT OF CIRCUMCISION. In pursuance of the first promise, and in order to its exact and literal accomplishment, about twenty-four years after its promulgation of "Covenant of Circumcision" was established. This "covenant in the flesh," marked out and defined the natural descendants of Abraham, and gave to the world a full proof of the faithfulness of God, putting it in the power of every one to ascertain how God keeps his covenant of promise with his people. This gave to the descendants of Abraham the title of "The Circumcision," and beautifully represented the separation of God’s people from the children of this world. The land of Canaan, as the inheritance of this nation, is repeatedly promised to Abraham; and as soon as Isaac, the child of promise, is born and circumcised, the promise of the "SEED" in which all nations were to be blessed, is confined to him. Not in Ishmael, but "in Isaac, shall thy seed be called."9 After the death of Abraham and towards the close of the life of Isaac, his father’s God gave him a second edition of these two promises. The first is considerably amplified in its details, while the second is repeated almost in the same words. That which was first to be accomplished is first developed, and its provisions pointed out. "I will be with thee and will bless thee; for unto thee and to thy seed I will give all these countries, and I will perform all the oath which I sware to Abraham thy father; and will make thy seed to multiply as the stars of heaven, and will give to thy seed all these countries; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed: because Abraham obeyed my voice, and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws."10 The same two promises are repeated in almost the same words to Jacob, the son of Isaac at the time he had the vision of the ladder reaching from earth to heaven, while, in obedience to a command given him by his parents, he was on his way to Padan-aram in quest of a wife. On these three great occasions--to Abraham--to Isaac--to Jacob--these two promises are solemnly pronounced; always standing in the same order--never confounded; but as distinct as earth and heaven--as time and eternity. Four hundred and thirty years after the first solemn declaration of these promises, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in virtue of the promise, were redeemed out of bondage, in Egypt, and saved from the tyranny and cruelty of Pharaoh. Then, in order to the full completion of its stipulations, God, by the hand of Moses, proposed a covenant with all Israel at Sinai; in which he guarantees to do all for them contemplated in the promise, confirmed by an oath to Abraham, in being a God to his seed after him. SINAITIC COVENANT. This Sinaitic constituted them a kingdom of God, a holy nation, a peculiar people. All the blessings comprehended in the first promise to Abraham, or that could grow out of the relation to God, which it contemplated, were in full detail carried out into this transaction, and secured to the whole nation. The relation was, however, temporal, and its blessings temporal and earthly. The second promise made no part of the Jewish institution or covenant at Sinai, more than it did of the patriarchal or antecedent institution. The typical or figurative part of the family worship, enlarged and improved, was translated into the national institution and made a part of it; and whatever spiritual privilege was enjoyed by the Jew, was enjoyed upon the same principle with the patriarch--by faith in the second promise, and by an intelligent and believing attendance upon all the appointed means which either prefigured the coming redemption, or realized the blessings which were to be derived through the promised seed. The SEED in which all the families of the earth were to be blessed, was in the nation, but in no other sense than as it was in the people while in Egypt, or in the patriarchs before they went down into Egypt. It was in the nation, but no element of the national institution. They had the second promise made to their fathers, and all the faithful and approved among them believed that promise, and acted conformably to it. Thus amongst the Jews, even before the coming of the Messiah, they were TWO SEEDS, The natural and the spiritual children of Abraham. The whole nation were his literal and natural children; and such of them as believed the second promise and understood it were not only his natural children, but his children in the same sense in which all believing Gentiles are by virtue of the second promise constituted the children of Abraham. The first, like Ishmael, were born according to the flesh--the fleshy seed of Abraham; the second, like Isaac, were the children of faith in the promise: and thus Abraham is the constituted father of all who believe in that promise, whether of his flesh or not. But the second promise was not fulfilled for nearly one thousand five hundred years after the first, or after the national institution was confirmed at Sinai; and therefore THE BLESSING OF ABRAHAM, Which as to come on the nations through his seed, through faith in the accomplished promises, was to be the basis and the substance of a new institution. This "blessing of Abraham" includes all the spiritual and eternal blessings which are laid up in his seed, who is the ark of this new constitution, in whom all the promises of God are verified, and in whom they are deposited for the comfort and salvation of all the faithful children of God. Whatever concerned the family of Abraham, coming through the first promise, descended upon the family principle which is only flesh; but whatever concerns all saints of all nations descends upon the new principle of faith. "They who are of faith," says Paul, "are blessed with believing Abraham." And "If you be Christ’s, then" and only then, "are you Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise." The blessing of Abraham was then promised in the patriarchal age antecedent to the Jewish national institution, and independent of it; therefore that institution cannot affect, much less disannul, the blessings promised in the covenant, confirmed before by God, respecting the Messiah, in the time of family worship, and four hundred and thirty years before the Jewish institution began. In calling Abraham, and in making him the father of many nations, and the depository of still more precious promises and revelations, God did not supersede the family worship. He only added to the stock of religious knowledge, strengthened the faith, and enlarged the hopes of that single family. The family institution continued without the slightest change, except in one particular specified in the covenant of circumcision, as respected the single family of Abraham, for four hundred and thirty years after the charter concerning his seed and that concerning the Messiah were secured to this renowned patriarch. Thus we have traced the continuance of the family religion, or patriarchal economy, for two thousand five hundred years, and are now prepared to make a few remarks on the Jewish national institution, though we have already anticipated almost all that is necessary to our present object. Still, however, we shall make it the object of a distinct notice. (See Next Essay) ======================================================================== CHAPTER 90: 03.38. KINGDOM OF HEAVEN - THE JEWISH INSTITUTION ======================================================================== THE JEWISH INSTITUTION. In this age of improvement of divine institutions, we read and hear much of "two dispensations of the covenant of grace;" thus making the Jewish and the Christian institutions dispensations of one "covenant of grace." Why not make the patriarchal, (still more venerable for its antiquity, and which continued a thousand years longer than the Jewish,) also a dispensation of the covenant of grace, and then we should have had three dispensations of one covenant? This is but a "show of wisdom." The Holy Spirit calls them "two covenants," or "two institutions," and not two modifications of one covenant; and it speaks of each as established upon promises. The Jewish was established upon temporal and earthly promises, contained in the first promise made to Abraham; but the new, says Paul, "is established upon better promises," growing out of that concerning the blessing of the nations in the promised seed.11 The Jewish institution commenced and continued about 1500 years before the Reign of Heaven began. It was not substituted for the family worship, but added to it; affecting, however, the patriarchal institution in some respects, as far as concerned the single family of Abraham. The individual families of the nation of the Jews, as such, had still their family worship--still the worship of God was heard in the dwellings of the righteous; and, like Joshua, every good Israelite said, "As for me and my family, we will serve the Lord." In four hundred years the family of Abraham had, in the line of Isaac and Jacob, in fulfilment of the first promise, grown up into millions. Not less than two millions12 came up out of Egypt under the conduct of Moses. The heavenly Father, in progressive development of his plan of blessing all nations, leaves all the world under the family worship institution, and erects the whole progeny of Abraham that came up out of Egypt into one great national institution. He condescends to appear in the character of King of the Jews, and to make them a kingdom of God, as preparatory to the appearance of his Son, who is predestined to be the King of the whole earth, and to have a kingdom which shall ultimately embrace all the nations of the world. The twelve tribes were brought into the form of one great worshipping family, presenting through the common High Priest their united worship to God. This gave rise to the erection of one public house consecrated to the Lord, as the place of meeting in their social and national character. A constitution, political, moral, and religious, was submitted to the people; and on their adoption of it, they became the covenanted people of God. This constitutional kingdom was built upon precepts and promises; and its worship when fully developed was little more than the extension of the family worship to one great national family. They had one king, one high priest, one national altar, one national house of God, one morning and evening service, one great national sacrifice, and one great annual atonement. The nation was a family of families, and whatever pertained to a single family in its family worship was extended and accommodated to this great confederate family. Various mystic and significant institutions distinguished this nation from all others; for it was one principal object of its institution to keep its subjects separate and distinct from all other people till Messiah (the promised seed) should come. Another object was, to picture out in appropriate types the spiritual worship of the kingdom of heaven, and to exhibit the great doctrines of faith, repentance, remission, adoption, and inheritance, by picturesque images, ingeniously devised to adumbrate the whole doctrine of reconciliation and sanctification to God. The Jewish institution is not to be regarded only in its political, moral, and religious aspects, but especially in its figurative and prospective character. God so wisely and benevolently contrived it from its origin to its close, that its whole history--the fates and fortunes of its subjects from their descent into Egypt, their travels thence to Canaan and settlement in the land of promise--their fortunes in that land to their final catastrophe, should exactly and impressively shadow forth the new institution with the fates and fortunes of the subjects of this new and more glorious order of things. "All these things happened to them for types," (examples,) says Paul, "and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world have come." The same great commentator on this institution not only presents the history of its subjects as instructive to the citizens of the new institution, but of the tabernacle he says, "It was a figurative representation for the time then present," and the furniture thereof "the patterns of things in the heavens." "The law," he adds, "contained only a shadow of the good things to come." A shadow, indeed, proceeding from a man, a house, a tree, is not, and cannot be, an exact image or representation of them; yet, when explained by a verbal description, it greatly facilitates an easy and correct conception of them. So full of the doctrine of the new institution was the old, that we find all the Apostles and Christian writers unceremoniously applying every thing they quote from the law, the prophets, and the psalms, to the Messiah, his kingdom, and the fortunes of his people; as if the Jewish writings had no other object than to unfold the kingdom of heaven. Jesus begins with Abraham seeing his day on Mount Moriah in the typical resurrection of Isaac. Paul regards Hagar, Ishmael, Sarah, Isaac, as the best illustration of the two institutions; and John ends with the description of the descent of Jerusalem from heaven. Every one, then, who would accurately understand the Christian institution must approach it through the Mosaic; and he that would be a proficient in the Jewish, must make Paul his commentator. While the mere politician, moralist, or religionist, contemplate the one without the other, though he may find much to admire in both, he will never understand either. A veil, thick as that which concealed the glory of the face of Moses from the Israelites, will hide the glory of the Jewish and Christian institutions from his view. Not only did the tabernacle, the temple, their furniture, the service of both, the priests, the sacrifices, the festivals, the convocations, and all the ordinances of that Ritual, together with the history of that people, assume the picturesque and figurative character, but almost all the illustrious and highly distinguished personages of that institution were made prophetic or typical of the Messiah or of the great incidents of his life, sufferings, and triumphs, and the leading affairs of his government. Amongst persons in the patriarchal and Jewish ages who, in one or more prominent characters or incidents, or in their general history adumbrated the Messiah and his reign, the following group occupy a lofty eminence:--Adam, Abel, Noah, Melchisedeck, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Samson, David, Jonah. Of things of this class, as well as persons highly figurative and instructive, are the visions of Jacob’s ladder--the burning bush--the pillar of cloud and fire--the manna--the rock Horeb, a fountain of living water in the wilderness--the veil of Moses--the brazen serpent--the victory over the nations of Canaan, and the land of Canaan itself. And of ordinances, the passover, the scape goat, the red heifer, the year of jubilee, the law of the leper, the kinsman redeemer, the cities of refuge; together with all the sacrifices, washings, anointings, and consecrations of the holy nation. But a third object of the Jewish institution, of paramount importance to the world, was the furnishing of a new alphabet and language (the elements of heavenly science,) without which it would appear to have been almost, if not altogether, impossible to learn the spiritual things, or to make any proficiency in the knowledge of those relations which Christianity unfolds. The language of the new institution is therefore explained by that of the old. No one can understand the dialect of the kingdom of heaven who has not studied the dialect of the antecedent administrations of heaven over the patriarchs and Jews. The most striking and characteristic attribute of the sacred dialect is, that the elements of it are composed of the incidents of history, or what we call remarkable providences. I cannot explain myself better, not render my readers a more essential service, than by illustrating by an actual detail of sacred history, the following proposition, viz.:--That sacred history or the remarkable instances of God’s providence to the Jews and Patriarchs, are the foundation of the sacred dialect of the new institution. Or, if the reader will understand it better, it may be expressed--All the leading words and phrases of the New Testament are to be explained and understood by the history of the Jewish nation and God’s government of them. Take the following as a mere specimen:-- God called Abram out of Ur, and changed his name into Abraham; and the name of his wife Sarai into Sarah. He promised Isaac as the person in whom his seed should be called. God did tempt Abraham, commanding him to offer Isaac for a burnt offering--Isaac had two sons--Esau the elder, and Jacob the younger. Esau despised his birthright and sold it to Jacob. Jacob wrestled with God, and prevailed; he obtained a blessing, and was therefore called Israel. He had twelve sons: of these Joseph was his favorite. His brethren envied him, and sold him for twenty pieces of silver. Joseph found grace in the sight of his master. The Lord was with Joseph. He was cast into prison, and from thence was elevated to the governor of Egypt under Pharaoh. A famine in Canaan compelled Jacob and his sons into Egypt for bread, and Joseph was made known to his brethren. Joseph died in Egypt and left his father’s house in the land. They multiplied exceedingly, and the Egyptians greatly afflicted and oppressed the Israelites. Moses was born and exposed: Pharaoh’s daughter found him and adopted him for a son. Moses fled into Midian, and married the daughter of the priest or prince of Midian, and kept his father-in-law’s flock in the desert, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. The Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire in a bush. The bush burned and was not consumed. Moses drew near, and then first stood on holy ground. God sent him to Egypt to lead his people out of bondage. God made him say to the children of Israel, ’I AM has sent me to you. Gather the elders of Israel and say to them, The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham,’ etc., ’has sent me to you. I will smite Egypt with my wonders, and bring you up out of the afflictions of Egypt. Tell Pharaoh, Israel is my son--my first born. Take Aaron with thee, and thou shalt put words into his mouth; and I will be with thy mouth and with his mouth: he shall be to thee instead of a mouth, and thou shalt be to him instead of God. Take thy rod in thy hand. The Lord sent Aaron to Moses: he met him in the mount and kissed him. And the Lord visited his people. And the people believed when they heard that the Lord had looked upon their affliction. Pharaoh oppressed them still more. The Lord said, with a strong hand shall he let them go. I will redeem them with a stretched out arm, and with great judgments. I will give you Canaan for a heritage; I will take you to me for a people. I will be your God.’ Moses said, I am a man of uncircumcised lips, and how shall Pharaoh hearken to me? I have made thee a god to Pharaoh, and Aaron thy prophet. I will multiply my signs, and bring out my people, and harden Pharaoh’s heart. When he says, "Show me a miracle," cast your rod before him, and it shall become a serpent. Still Pharaoh refused, and hardened his heart. The magicians overcome with the signs, said, This is the finger of God. The God of the Hebrews said, Let my people go. I have roused thee up (as a lion) to show in you my power, and to make my name known through all the earth. The Lord slew all the first born of Egypt after he had plagued them exceedingly. Pharaoh commanded them to depart; but he pursued them to the Red Sea. Israel fainted at the sight before and behind them. Moses said, Stand still and see the salvation of God. The sea was divided. Covered with a cloud, Israel marched through as on dry ground. The waters stood on either side as a wall. Pharaoh pursued with his chariots and horsemen, but the waters returned, and they were drowned. Thus the Lord redeemed, saved, delivered, and brought Israel out of bondage. After this deliverance, Moses and the children of Israel sang, "The Lord is become my salvation; he is my God. Thou hast overthrown them that rose up against thee. Thou hast led forth thy people whom thou hast redeemed. Thou hast guided them in thy strength to thy holy habitation. The inhabitants of Canaan shall be still as a stone till thy people pass over, O Lord, the people thou hast purchased. Thou shalt plant them in the mountain of thine inheritance; in the sanctuary which thy hands have established." They came into the wilderness of Sin. They cried for bread, and God rained bread from heaven upon them, that he might prove them whether or not they would walk in his law, and they did eat manna forty years till they came to the borders of Canaan. They complained for water, and tempted God. And Moses smote the rock in Horeb, and water gushed out. But Moses was wroth, and smote the rock twice, and he and Aaron thus rebelled against God, and fell in the wilderness. The Lord made a covenant with the whole nation at Sinai, and made them a peculiar treasure above all people--a kingdom of priests, a holy nation; and God spake all the words of the law, written on two tables of stone; and spake to Israel from heaven. The Lord, by Moses, gave them directions for rearing a tabernacle, and a pattern for all its furniture. And as a ransom for his soul, every man, rich and poor, was to pay half a shekel as an offering to the Lord to make an atonement for his soul; and it was given for the service of the tabernacle. When the tabernacle was reared and finished, the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle and the cloud covered it. And when the cloud was taken up, they journeyed; but until it was taken up, they journeyed not. The cloud was on the tabernacle by day, and fire was on it by night, in the sight of all Israel throughout all their journeys. And before Moses died he laid his hands upon Joshua, and gave him a charge as the Lord commanded; and thus put honor upon him, that the children of Israel might be obedient to him as their saviour. "As I was with Moses, so will I be with thee," saith God: "I will not fail thee nor forsake thee." Could we thus proceed with the history of this people, and add to their history the observance of their religious institutions, we should find out the true meaning of the sacred style of the New Testament with more accuracy and certainty, than from all the commentators of ancient and modern times. This, as a sample, must suffice for our present purpose. From the premises now before us, the specifications of the outlines of the Sinaitic and national institution, and the terms and phrases found in the history of this people, we may discover in what relation they stood to God, and what favors he bestowed upon them in that relation. They were called and chosen, or the elect of God as a nation. As such, they were delivered, saved, bought, or purchased, and redeemed. God is said to have created, made, formed, and begotten them. As such he is called their Father, their God, their Redeemer, their King, their Saviour, their Salvation; and they are called his children, sons and daughters; born to him, his house, people, inheritance, family, servants. As a chartered and congregated people, they are called the city, the holy city, the city of the Lord, Jerusalem, Zion, Mount Zion, the city of David. Other nations in contrast with them, are called not a people, aliens, strangers, enemies, far off, unclean. Various similitudes expressive of the kind relation in which they stood to God are also found in the pages of the ancient institutions--such as husband and wife, shepherd and flock, vine and vineyard, mother and children. They are said to be written or enrolled in the book of God; to be planted, washed, sanctified, clean, separated to God; they are called the house, building, sanctuary, dwelling place of God; a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, a peculiar people, saints, etc. Those who are curious to trace these phrases descriptive of the relation and privileges of this ancient kingdom of God, had better (in addition to the passages quoted in their history from Egypt to the Jordan,) examine the following passages:-- Exodus 14:30; Exodus 15:16; Exodus 19:6; Deuteronomy 4:37; Deuteronomy 7:6; Deuteronomy 10:15; Deuteronomy 14:1; Deuteronomy 1:31; Deuteronomy 7:5; Deuteronomy 32:6; Deuteronomy 32:18-19; Deuteronomy 18:7; Deuteronomy 3:18; Deuteronomy 3:20; Deuteronomy 12:9. 1 Kings 3:8. Psalms 105:6; Psalms 33:13; Psalms 105:43; Psalms 106:5; Psalms 106:21; Psalms 124:2; Psalms 149:2. Isaiah 41:8-9, Isaiah 43:1; Isaiah 43:3; Isaiah 43:5; Isaiah 43:7; Isaiah 51:2; Isaiah 51:4. Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Psalms of David throughout, etc. Unless we should write a full treatise on these antecedent institutions, we cannot with propriety descend farther into details. The outlines, as far as subordinate to the theme of this essay, are now before the reader; and with this preparation we shall now invite his attention to THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 91: 03.39. KINGDOM OF HEAVEN - THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN ======================================================================== THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN And why, an American would say, is it not called the Republic of Heaven, and the Chief called the President of a Celestial Republic? Certainly there were the Republics of Greece and Rome before the doctrine of this Kingdom was first promulged, and the Gentiles as well as the Jews could have understood the figure of a Republic as well as that of a Kingdom. It was not, then, because there was not in society a model or type of this sort; but because such a type would have been inapposite to the nature of this institution. History testifies that Republics are better adapted to peace than war, and that they are forced and unnatural organizations of society. Aristocracies and Republics owe all their attractions to the excessive corruptions of the governments under which they have originated. They are the reaction of force and fraud, of cruelty and oppression, and are sustained by the remembrance and apprehension of the evils which occasioned them. They have always been extolled or admired either in contrast with vices and enormities of degenerate and profligate monarchies, or in the freshness of the recollections of the wrongs and outrages which have occasioned them; and men have generally tired of them when they became corrupt and forgetful of the oppressions and crimes which forced them into being. So that the corruptions of monarchies have given birth to Republics, and the corruptions of these have originated monarchies again. In these last days of degeneracy, Republics are great blessings to mankind, as good physicians are blessings in times of pestilence; but yet it must be confessed that it would be a greater blessing to be without plagues and doctors. While men are, however, so degenerate, and while selfishness and injustice are so rampant in society, republican officers are better than kings--because we can get rid of them sooner. They are indeed, kings under another name, with a short-leased authority; and our experience fully demonstrates that in these degenerate days the reigns of our republican kings are nearly long enough. Till the King of kings comes, we Christians ought to be good republicans, under the conviction that human governments seldom grow better, and that the popular doctrine of our country is true--that political authority generally makes a man worse, and public favors almost invariably corrupt the heart. Rapid rotation in office is the practical influence of the republican theory; and the experiment proves that, brief as republican authority is, it is sometimes too long for republican virtue to sustain without deterioration. Now if this be true of republican virtue, the brightest and the best, what earthly virtue can long resist the contamination of long protracted authority! Monarchy is the only form of government, however, which nature recognizes. It was the first, and it will be the last. A government with three or thirty heads is a monster; and therefore the beast that represents it comes out of the sea with a plurality of horns as well as heads. The most approved theory of human nature and of human government now current wherever the English language is spoken, either in the Old World or in the New, is that a monarchy would be always the best government, because the cheapest, the most efficient, and the most dignified; provided only, that the crown was placed on the wisest head and the sceptre wielded by the purest hands. Could we always secure this we would be monarchists: because we cannot, we are all republicans. But, after this apology for the phrase Kingdom of Heaven, we would recall the attention of the reader to the concession, made by republicans themselves, that a kingdom is better adapted to a state of war, than a republic; and that this beautiful, though most appropriate figure, which occurs in the New Testament more than one hundred and fifty times, and very often in the Old, presupposes a state of war as existing in the universe. But for the reasons assigned in preference of a monarchy, the natural government of the universe always was, is, and evermore shall be monarchy. God himself is of necessity absolute monarch of the universe. Had he not essentially sustained that relation to all his creatures, there never could have been rebellion nor sin in his dominions. The systems of nature are all after this model. Every sun is a king over the system which it controls; and in every sphere there is one controlling and supreme principles. It will be the last government; for when the episode in the great drama of rational existence which sin occasioned, shall have been completed, the government of the universe will assume its ancient order, and God be supreme monarch again. But this will not be till Jesus gives up the kingdom to God which a preternatural state of things put into his hands. This cannot be till he has subdued man to his rightful allegiance, or destroyed forever every opponent to the absolute monarchy of the Eternal Supreme: "for Jesus must reign till all his enemies be put under his feet." The kingdom which Jesus has received from his Father, however heavenly, sublime, and glorious it may be regarded, is only temporal. It had a beginning, and it will have an end; for he must reign only till all enemies are put under his feet. But the transition of the sceptre into the hands of Emmanuel has not changed the government. He is now the hereditary Monarch of the universe, as well as the proper King of his own kingdom. He now reigns as absolutely over all principalities, hierarchs, and powers, celestial and terrestrial, as did the great God and Father of the universe, before he was invested with the regal authority. We have said it was a preternatural state of things which originated the kingdom of Jesus: therefore the object of this remedial reign is to destroy that preternatural state of things--to put down sin. Now as all human governments presuppose disorder, and as the kingdoms of this world generally have risen out of confusion and war, the kingdom of heaven of which we are to speak owes its origin to the celestial and terrestrial apostacies--the revolt of Satan and of Adam. Were there no justice within, or violence without, civil government would be wholly unnecessary, and its appendages an excresence upon society. Had there not been such a revolt and rebellion as sacred history records, there would have been no such kingdom of heaven as that over which Jesus the Messiah now presides. Now as both this King and kingdom, and all that appertains to them, were occasioned by such a preternatural state of things, we must view them in all their attributes and details, with reference to those circumstances which called them into being. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 92: 03.40. KINGDOM OF HEAVEN - THE ELEMENTS OF A KINGDOM ======================================================================== THE ELEMENTS OF A KINGDOM. We must understand the type, or we cannot understand the antitype. We must understand that which is natural before we can understand that which is spiritual. What, then are the essential elements of a kingdom as existing among men? They are five, viz: King, Constitution, Subjects, Laws, and Territory. Such are the essential parts of every political kingdom, perfect in its kind, now existing on earth. In forming a state, the essential elements are people and country. The people make a constitution, and this makes a President or King, citizens or subjects, and every thing else belonging to a state. It is, then, the relation into which the people resolve themselves, which make it a republic, an aristocracy, a monarchy. Do they choose a monarchy? They first make a constitution, and this places one upon the throne--makes them subjects, and then gives them laws. Although the constitution is first, in the order of nature, of all the elements of a kingdom, for it makes one man a king and the rest subjects; yet we cannot imagine a constitution in reference to a kingdom, without king and subjects. In speaking of them in detail, we cannot then speak of any one of them as existing without the others--we must regard them as correlates, and as coming into existence contemporaneously. There is no husband nor wife before marriage, neither can there be a husband without a wife; yet one of the parties must be made before the other. Marriage makes a husband out of a bridegroom, and a wife out of the bride. So the constitution makes the king or the governor; the citizens or subjects, out of the people, as the case may be; for there never can be a king or subject without a constitution, or, what is the same thing, an agreement, verbal or written, for certain privileges stipulated and conditioned. In every well regulated political kingdom, in the order of nature, the elements stand thus. 1. Constitution; 2. King; 3. Subjects; 4. Laws; 5. Territory. In the kingdom which God set up by Moses, the elements stood in this order. The constitution was first proposed under which God condescended to be their King, and they were to be regarded as his people or subjects; he then gave them laws and established them in the territory before promised. But in the kingdom of nature, or in the original kingdom of God, the elements are only four, and the order in which they stand are: 1. King; 2. Subjects; 3. Laws; 4. Territory. As Father and Creator of the kingdom, God himself was absolute Sovereign, whose will is the supreme law of the whole realm of nature. Having ascertained the essential elements of a kingdom, and marked the order in which they stand, before we particularly attend to those elements in order, we shall ask, Why this kingdom is called the kingdom of Heaven? THE NAME Heaven, and the Kingdom of Heaven are not one and the same thing. God is not the Kingdom of God. But as the kingdom of God is something pertaining to God, so the Kingdom of Heaven is something pertaining to heaven, and consequently to God. Whether always the phrases "the Kingdom of God" and the "Kingdom of heaven" exactly represent the same thing, certain it is that both phrases are often applied to the same institution.13 This is true of them, whether translated reign or kingdom; and it is very evident that frequently the original world basileia ought in preference to be rendered reign, inasmuch as this term better suits all those passages where coming or approaching is spoken of: for while reigns or administrations approach and recede, kingdoms have attributes and boundaries which are stationary. Reign and Kingdom of God, though sometimes applicable to the same subject, never contemplate it in the same light. They are, indeed, as intimately connected as the reign of king William and the kingdom of Great Britain. The former represents the administration of the kingdom, and the latter the state over which this administration extends. Two good reasons may be offered why Matthew, the oldest Christian writer, generally prefers Kingdom or Reign of Heaven, to the phrase Kingdom or Reign of God: I say generally, for he occasionally uses both designations.14 He wrote to Jews in Judea who expected a Messiah, a King, and a Kingdom of God on earth, a mere improvement of the Jewish system; and therefore to raise their conception he delights to call it the Reign or Kingdom of Heaven, in contrast with that earthly Kingdom of God, of which they were so long in possession. He also found a good reason in the idiom of the Jewish prophets for using the word Heaven (both in the singular and plural form) for God. Daniel told the Assyrian monarch that his kingdom would be sure to him when he would have learned that "the Heavens do rule;" yet in the preceding verse he says, "Till thou knowest that the Most High rules in the kingdom of man,"--thus using Heavens and the Most High as synonymous. The Psalmist says, "The wicked set their mouths against the Heavens." The Prodigal confesses that he had "sinned against Heaven," and Jesus himself asked whether the baptism of John was "from Heaven or from men." Thus he was authorized from the Jewish use of the word to regard it as equivalent to God. If, then, Matthew had meant no more by the phrase "Kingdom of Heaven" and the "Kingdom of God," he was justified by the Jewish use of the word heaven, to apply it in that sense. Some may object to all these remarks upon Matthew’s manner, that it was Jesus Christ and the preachers he commissioned who called it the Kingdom of Heaven, and not Matthew Levi. To such we reply that the other sacred writers uniformly, in reciting all the same parables and incidents, use the phrase "Kingdom of God," and never the phrase "the Kingdom of Heaven." From the use of the phrase "Kingdom of God," we must, I think, regard him as having special reference to the reason first assigned. He does not say the Kingdom of Heaven shall be taken from the Jews; but "The Kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits of it:" for although it might with propriety, in his acceptation, he said that the Jews already had the kingdom of God, it could not be said that they had the kingdom of Heaven as proclaimed by Matthew 15:1-39 When compared with the earthly Kingdom of God among the Jews, it is certainly the Kingdom of Heaven; for Jesus alleges that his kingdom is not of this world; and Daniel affirmed that in the days of the last worldly empire the God of heaven would set up a kingdom unlike all others then on earth; in which, as Paul teaches, men are "blessed with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places in Christ;"16 for he has raised us Jews and Gentiles, and "has set us down together in the heavenly places by Christ Jesus."17 There is, in the superior and heavenly privileges and honors bestowed upon the citizens of this kingdom, the best reason why it should have first been presented to the world under this title, rather than any other; and for the same reasons which influenced Matthew to usher it into notice in Judea, under this designation, we ought now to prefer it, because many of our contemporaries, like the ancient Jews, see as much of heaven and glory in the veiled grace of the Mosaic institution, as in the unveiled grace of the Christian kingdom. The pertinency of this title will appear still more evident as we develop the constitutional privileges of this kingdom. But most evidently the kingdom of heaven is "the Kingdom of Christ and of God."18 It is the kingdom of God, because he set it up,19 gave the constitution and King, and all the materials out of which it is erected.20 It is the kingdom of Christ, because God the Father gave it to him as his Son, and as the heir of all things, and therefore, "all that is the Father’s is mine," says Jesus, "and I am his."21 God created all things BY Jesus Christ and FOR him. Having, then, noticed the reasons for the characteristic titles of this kingdom, and having already ascertained what are the elements absolutely essential to a kingdom, distinguished from those merely circumstantial or accidental, we shall now proceed to consider in the order suggested, the Constitution, King, Subjects, Laws, and Territory of the Kingdom of Heaven. CONSTITUTION. God himself, after the gracious counsels of his own will, proposed and tendered the constitution of this kingdom to his own Son. This "glory he had with the father before the world was." He that was "in the beginning with God"--"the wisdom and power of God"--was set up from everlasting, or ever the earth was. "Then was I with God, as one brought up with him; I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him--rejoicing in the habitable parts of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men."22 Therefore, he who was to be "ruler in Israel" was with God in counsel "in the beginning of all his ways;" for "his goings forth were from of old, even from the day of eternity."23 It was TO DO THE WILL, or fulfil the items of this constitution, that "the WORD was made flesh and dwelt among us." I came to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish "the work given me to do." "I have power to lay down my life, and I have power to resume it; this commandment I received from my Father." The Father "commissioned and sent him forth into the world." He "came down from heaven." "Thou hast given me power over all flesh, that I might give eternal life to all that thou hast given me." These, and many other passages, which the reader will easily remember, unequivocally evince that an understanding and agreement existed ere time began between God and the WORD of God--or, as now revealed, between the FATHER and the SON, respecting the kingdom. In consequence of which, "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us"--in consequence of which "he divested himself" of his antecedent glory--"took upon him the form of a bond-servant"--"was made in the likeness of sinful flesh"--"took part with us in flesh and blood." In consequence of which agreement, and the promised glory, for "the joy set before him in the promise," of "seeing his seed the travail of his soul, and being satisfied," he "endured the cross, despising the shame," and was "made perfect through sufferings to lead many sons to glory." To the stipulations concerning eternal life, propounded in the constitution of the Kingdom of Heaven, frequent allusions are made in the Apostle’s writings. Thus the believers were "elected in him before the foundation of the world," and "eternal life was promised before the times of the ages," "according to the benevolent purposes which he purposed in himself for the administration of the fulness of the appointed times, to gather together all under Christ--all in the heavens and all on the earth, under him. He formerly marked us out for an adoption through Jesus Christ to himself, according to his purpose, who effectually works all things according to the counsel of his will.24 From all these sayings and allusions, we must trace the constitution of this kingdom into eternity--before time began. We must date it from everlasting, and resolve it into the absolute gracious will of the eternal God. In reference to all the prospective developments of time, "known to God from the beginning," it proposed to make the WORD flesh, and then to make the Incarnate Word, called Emmanuel, of Jesus Christ, the King, to give him all who should be reconciled to God by him for subjects, to put under him all the angelic hosts, and constitute him monarch of earth, lawgiver to the universe; and thus make him heir and Lord of all things. As a constitution brings all the elements of a kingdom into a new relation to one another, so it is the measure and guarantee of all the privileges, immunities, and obligations accruing to all the parties in that relation. It prescribes, arranges, and secures all the privileges, duties, obligations, honors, and emoluments of the King and the subjects. Neither of them can claim more than it stipulates and guarantees, and neither of them can rightfully be deprived of any of them. From the premises now before us, and the light given to us in these scriptures and those in the margin, we learn-- First. That God is the author of the constitution of the Kingdom of Heaven; that he propounded it to the WORD that was made flesh, before the world was, in prospect of all the developments of creation. Second. That the WORD accepted it, because the will of God was always his delight; therefore he said, "I come to do thy will, O God!" Hence "God has so loved the world as to give his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes on him may not perish, but obtain eternal life." Third. That in consequence "all authority in heaven and earth" was given to Jesus Christ, and all orders of intelligence subjected to him, that he might be King over all, and have the power of giving eternal life to his people.25 Fourth. That the earth is now the Lord’s, the present temporal territory of his kingdom; that the heathen people are given to him for his inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for his possession; that all ends of the earth are his, and all dominions, kindreds, tribes, tongues, and people shall yet serve him on earth and glorify him in heaven.26 Fifth. That all that he redeems are his seed--his subjects: that he will have their faith, confidence, esteem, admiration, and gratitude forever; that he will be worshipped, honored, and revered by them in a world without end: that God, angels, and saints will delight in him for ever and ever.27 He has, therefore, to raise the dead, judge the world, and to present the redeemed pure, holy, happy, and triumphant before his Father, and then to give up his kingdom to God. To comprehend in any adequate idea, the constitution of this kingdom, we must learn more than its history, or the way in which it was introduced and propounded. We must regard all the elements of the kingdom as constitutional elements--the King as constitutional King; the subjects, laws, and territory, including the ultimate inheritance, as constitutional subjects, laws, territory, inheritance; and, therefore, we shall speak of them in detail. THE KING. The Lord Jesus Christ is the constitutional monarch of the Kingdom of Heaven. The privileges guaranteed to him in reference to the kingdom are as follows: As King, he is to be the oracle of God--to have the disposal of the Holy Spirit--to be Prophet and High Priest of the Temple of God--to have the throne of his Father--to be governor of all nations on earth, and head of all hierarchs and powers in heaven--the supreme Lawgiver, the only Saviour--the resurrection and the life, the ultimate and final Judge of all, and the Heir of all things. These honors, privileges, and powers, are secured to him by the irrevocable grant of the God and Father of all; therefore, as said Isaiah, "The Lord cometh with a strong hand, and his arm shall rule for him. Behold his reward is with him, and his work before him." "I have set my King upon my holy hill of Zion." "Ask of me, and I will give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." "I have made him a leader and commander of the people"--"a light to the Gentiles"--"salvation to the ends of the earth"--"a Priest forever after the order of Melchisedeck," "Sit thou at my right hand till I make thy foes thy footstool." "The government shall be upon his shoulders." "All things are delivered to me by my Father." "He is Lord of the dead and living." "Angels, authorities, and powers are subjected to him." "The Father gave the Spirit without measure to him." "He received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit." "The kingdom is the Lord’s, and he is the governor among the nations." "He shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the Euphrates to the ends of the earth." "They shall fear thee as long as sun and moon endure to all generations." "The Father has committed all judgments to the Son." But, not to weary the reader with quotations and proofs, we shall give but another:--"Behold my servant, whom I uphold; my elect, in whom my soul delights. I have put my Spirit upon him. He shall bring forth judgment unto truth. He shall not fail nor be discouraged till he have set judgment in the earth; and the Isles shall wait for his law."--"I, the Lord, have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thy hand and keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light to the Gentiles--to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house."28 THE SUBJECTS OF THE KINGDOM. They are all born again. Their privileges and honors are the following:-- First. Their constitutional King is the only begotten Son of God; whose titles and honors are--Image of the invisible God--Effulgence of the Father’s glory--Emmanuel--Upholder of the universe--Prophet of the Prophets--High Priest of the temple of God--King of kings--Lord of lords--the only Potentate--Commander and Covenant of the people--Captain of Salvation--Counsellor, Lawgiver, Redeemer, Deliverer, Mediator, Saviour, Advocate, Judge. He is the Sun of Righteousness, Prince of Peace, Lamb of God, Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root and Offspring of David, the Bright and Morning Star, Light of the World, the Faithful and True Witness, Bishop of Souls, Great Shepherd of the Sheep, Head of the Church, Lord of all, Heir of the Universe, the Resurrection and the Life, the Son of Man, the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the end, the Amen, etc., etc. Such is the Christian’s King, whose assistance in all these characters, offices, and relations, as exhibited, under all these figures, is guaranteed to him in the Constitution. Indeed it is all expressed in one promise--"I will be your God, and you shall be my people." Second. It is guaranteed that "their sins and iniquities are to be remembered no more." "There is no condemnation to them who are under Christ." "Sin shall have no dominion, nor lord it over them." The Lord imputeth to them no sin. They are all pardoned, justified, and saved from sin. Third. They are adopted into the family of God; made sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty, children of God, and heirs--joint heirs with Christ. They have an Advocate in the heavens, through whom their persons and prayers are accepted. Fourth. They all know the Lord. "All thy children shall be taught of God." The Holy Spirit of God writes the law of God upon their hearts, and inscribes it upon their understanding: so that they need not teach every one his fellow citizen to know the Lord, "for they all know him from the least to the greatest." They are sanctified through the truth--separated and consecrated to God. Fifth. They have the promise of a resurrection from the dead, and eternal life; an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and unfading--new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness alone shall dwell forever. Such are the constitutional rights and privileges of the citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven. All these have obtained for them the following titles and honors:--Kingdom of Heaven; Israel of God; chosen generation; body of Christ; children of God; habitation of God; family of God; Jerusalem from above; Mount Zion; peculiar people; the elect of God; holy nation; temple of the Holy Spirit; house of God; city of the living God; pillar and ground of the truth; living stones; seed of Abraham; citizens of heaven; lights of the world; salt of the earth; heirs of God; joint heirs with Christ, etc. The privileges, honors, and emoluments belong to every citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven. Indeed, they are all comprehended in the summary which Paul (from Jeremiah) lays before the believing Hebrews:--"This is the constitution which I will make with the house of Israel for those days: I will put my laws into their mind, and inscribe them upon their hearts; and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people. And they shall not teach every man his fellow citizen, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord; for all shall know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them; because I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and iniquities I will remember no more."29 To this summary the reader may add those scriptures in the margin, as confirmatory of the above.30 THE LAWS OF THE KINGDOM. The supreme law of the kingdom is love--love to the King and love to each other. From this law all its religious homage and morality flow. Precepts and examples innumerable present this to the mind of all the citizens. The Kingdom of Heaven is divided into small societies, called churches, or congregations of the Lord. Each of these communities in the reception of members, in the education and discipline of them, or in excluding them when necessary, is to be governed by the apostolic instructions: for to the Apostles the Saviour committed the management of his kingdom. After they had made citizens by preaching the gospel and baptizing, they were commanded to teach them to observe whatsoever the Saviour had commanded them. These laws and usages of the Apostles must be learned from what the Apostles published to the world, after the ascension and coronation of the King, as they are recorded in the Acts of the Apostles and Epistles: for we shall see in the sequel that the gospel was fully developed, and the whole doctrine of the Reign of Christ began to be proclaimed in Jerusalem, on the first Pentecost after the ascension. The old or Jewish constitution was promulged first on Sinai on the first Pentecost after the redemption of Israel from Egyptian bondage; and from that day, and what is written after it in Exodus and Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, all the laws, manners, and customs authorized by the national constitution are to be found. They are not to be sought after in Genesis, nor in the antecedent economy. Neither are the statutes and laws of the Christian kingdom to be sought for in the Jewish scriptures, nor antecedent to the day of Pentecost; except so far as our Lord himself, during his life time, propounded the doctrine of his reign. But of this when we ascertain the commencement of this kingdom. There is one universal law of naturalization, or for making citizens out of all nations, enjoined upon those citizens of the kingdom who are engaged in the work of proselytism; but the laws of this kingdom, like the laws of every other kingdom, are obligatory only on the citizens. The weekly celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the weekly meeting of the disciples of Christ for this purpose, and for the edification of one another in their most holy faith, are the only positive statutes of the kingdom; and, therefore, there is no law, statute, or observance in this kingdom, that in the least retards its extension from East to West, from North to South, or that can prevent its progress in all nations of the world. It is, however, worthy of observation, that every part of the Christian worship, in the small communities spread over the territory of the Kingdom of Heaven, like so many candlesticks in a large edifice, are designed to enlighten and convert the world; and, therefore, in all the meetings of the family of God, they are to keep this supremely in view; and to regard themselves as the "pillar and ground of the truth." Concerning the details of the laws of the kingdom, we cannot now speak particularly. "The favor of God which brings salvation, teaches all the citizens of heaven, that, denying all ungodliness and worldly lusts, they should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world, expecting the blessed hope--namely, the appearing of the glory of the great God, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify to himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works." These things the Bishops of every community should teach and enforce; for such is the spirit, and such is the object of all the laws and statutes of the Kingdom of Heaven. THE TERRITORY. In all other kingdoms, except the Kingdom of Heaven, the territory is the national domain and inheritance. It was so in the first Kingdom of God under the constitution from Sinai. But in the typical kingdom they lived at a distance from their inheritance for one generation. During these forty years, in which they pitched their tents in the wilderness, God was their inheritance. He rained bread from heaven upon them, and sent them flesh upon the east wind. He made the flinty rock Horeb a living spring, whose stream followed them all the way to Jordan. He renewed their garments every day, so that for forty years they grew not old, not needed a single patch. A pillar of fire by night and a cloud by day guided them towards Canaan, the land of their inheritance. The whole earth is the present territory of the Kingdom of Heaven, but the new heavens and earth are to be its inheritance. The earth, indeed, is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; but the children of God and the children of the wicked one--the wheat and the darnel, are both planted in it, and must grow till the harvest. The righteous have their bread and water guaranteed to them while they live; for "godliness is profitable to all things, having promise of the life that now is, as well as of that which is to come." But the joint heirs of Christ are never taught to regard the earth as their inheritance. They may indeed, say, though poor and penniless, "All things are ours; whether Paul or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come--all are ours, and we are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s." But, like the Jews on their journey to Canaan, "they seek a better country"--"they seek a city yet to come." "My kingdom," says Jesus, "is not of this world." And, therefore, in the world, Christians are strangers and pilgrims, and may expect tribulation. There earth is the present theatre of war; therefore all Christians in the territory are soldiers. Their expenses, their rations are allowed, the arms and munitions of war are supplied them from the magazines in Mount Zion, the strong hold and fortress of the kingdom; where the King, the heads of departments, and all the legions of angels are resident. So that on entering the Army of the Faith every soldier is panoplied with the armor of God; and when inducted into the heavenly tactics under the Captain of Salvation, he is expected to be a good soldier of Jesus Christ, and to fight the good fight of faith courageously and victoriously. The Kingdom of Heaven on this territory is greatly opposed by the kingdom of Satan, which ever seeks to make an inheritance out of the territory of the militant kingdom of righteousness; and therefore, the citizens have not to wrestle with flesh and blood, but with the rulers of the darkness of this world--with spiritual wickedness in high places. Ever since the commencement of this kingdom, the governments of this world have either been directly opposed to it, or at best, pretended friends; and therefore their influence has always been opposed to the true Spirit and genius of the Christian institution. Christians have nothing to expect from them except liberty of conscience and protection from violence, while leading peaceable and quiet lives, in all godliness and honesty, till Jesus take to himself his great power, and hurl all these potentates from their thrones and make his cause triumphant--a consummation devoutly to be wished, and which cannot now be regarded as far distant. MANNER AND CUSTOMS. Touching the manners and customs of the Kingdom of Heaven, they are such as generally obtained in the land of Judea and in the East at the time of its erection: or, rather, they are the simple manners and customs of the family worship age of the world. These are consecrated by simply performing them with a regard to Jesus Christ, or from the motives prompted by the doctrine of the Reign of Heaven. As we treat our natural brothers and sisters in public and in private--as we address, salute, and converse with them--as we transact all family business, and conduct the affairs of the household--so are Christians to treat one another. There is no other virtue or utility in these, than as they cherish brotherly kindness and love, and are regarded to the Lord. INDUCTION INTO THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. Into every kingdom, human or divine, there is a legal door of admission. That is, in the statute book of Heaven, called a birth. Into the kingdom of nature we are born. Into the future and ultimate kingdom of glory we enter, soul and body, by being born from the grave. As Christ, the first born from the dead, entered the heavenly kingdom, so must all his brethren. And as to this kingdom of which we speak, as now existing in this world, Jesus himself taught that into it no person can legally enter who is not born again, or "born of water and the Spirit."31 The analogy is complete between the kingdoms of nature--of grace--and of glory. Hence we have natural birth, metaphorical or spiritual birth, and supernatural birth. There is a being born of the flesh--born of the Spirit--born of the grave; and there is a kingdom for the flesh--a kingdom for the Spirit--and a kingdom for the glorified man. This second, or new birth, which inducts into the Kingdom of God, is always subsequent to a death and burial, as it will be into the everlasting kingdom of glory. It is indeed, a literal death and burial before a literal resurrection, into the heavenly and eternal kingdom. It is also a metaphorical or figurative death and burial, before the figurative resurrection or new birth into the Kingdom of Heaven. Water is the element in which this burial and resurrection are performed, according to the constitutional laws of the Kingdom of Heaven. Hence Jesus connects the water and the Spirit when speaking of entering the Kingdom of God. In naturalizing aliens, the commandment of the King is first--submit to them the Constitution, or preach to them the gospel of the kingdom, Soon as they understand and believe this, and are desirous of being translated into the Kingdom of Christ and of God, that "they many receive the remission of sins and inheritance among all that are sanctified," they are to be buried in water into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and raised out of it confessing their death to sin, their faith in Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection: and thus they are born of water and the Spirit, and constituted citizens of the kingdom of heaven. To as many as thus receive him he gives privilege to become the children of God; for they are "born of God"--born of God, when born of water and the Spirit, because this is the institution of God. In these days of apostasy men have sought out many inventions. Some have attempted to get into the Kingdom of Heaven without being born at all. Others imagine that they can be born of the Spirit, without water, and that the king is well pleased with them who have been born without a mother, as those who are lawfully born of father and mother. Others think that neither Spirit nor water is necessary; but if they are politically born of the flesh, they can enter the kingdom as rightfully as the Jewish circumcised infants enter the earthly kingdom of Israel. But as we have no faith in any modern improvements of the gospel, change or amendment of the constitution of the Kingdom of Heaven, we must leave them to account to the King himself, who "have transgressed the law, changed the ordinance, and broken the everlasting covenant;"32 and proceed to the question, “When did the Kingdom of Heaven commence?” (See next essay) ======================================================================== CHAPTER 93: 03.41. KINGDOM OF HEAVEN - THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM ======================================================================== THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM. When did the Kingdom of Heaven commence? "With the ministry of John," says one: "With the ministry of Jesus," says another: "With the first sending out of the Twelve Apostles," says a third: "At the resurrection of Jesus," says a fourth: "At none of them; but by degrees from the baptism of John till the fall of Jerusalem," says a fifth. The reader will please remember that there are at least five elements essential to a perfectly organized kingdom, and that it may be contemplated in reference to one or more of these component parts. Hence the numerous and various parables of the Saviour. Sometimes he speaks of the administration of its affairs--of its principles in the heart--of its subjects--of its King--of its territory--of its progress--of various incidents in its history. Hence the parable of the sower--of wheat and darnel--of the leaven--of the merchant seeking goodly pearls--of the grain of mustard seed--of the sweep net--of the marriage of a king’s son--of a nobleman going into a far country--of the ten virgins--of the talents--of the sheep and goats, present to our view the Kingdom of Heaven in different attitudes, either in its elements or in its history--its commencement or its close. The approaching or the coming of the Reign of Heaven, can properly have respect only to one or two of the elements of a kingdom; or to the formal exhibition of that whole organization of society which we call a kingdom. It can have no proper allusion to its territory; for that was created and located before man was created. It cannot allude either to the persons who were constituted subjects, for they too were in existence before the kingdom commenced. It cannot allude to the birth or baptism of the King, for it was not till after these that Jesus began to proclaim its coming or approach. It cannot have reference to the ministry of John or of Jesus, any more than to the patriarchal or Jewish dispensations; because Jesus did not begin to proclaim the coming of this reign till after John was cast into prison. This is a fact of so much importance, that Matthew, Mark, and Luke distinctly and substantially declare, that, in conformity to ancient predictions, Jesus was to begin to proclaim in Galilee, and that he did not commence to proclaim the doctrine or the gospel of the coming of the Reign, till after John’s ministry ceased and he was cast into prison. In this assertion the Evangelists agree: "Now Jesus hearing that John was imprisoned, retired into Galilee; and having left Nazareth, resided at Capernaum. For thus saith the Prophet," etc. From that time Jesus began to proclaim, saying, "Reform for the Reign of Heaven approaches;" or, "The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand," as says the common version.33 Some Baptists, for the sake of immersion, and some of our brethren in the Reformation, for the sake of immersion for the remission of sins, seem desirous to have John in the Kingdom of Heaven, and to date the commencement of the Christian dispensation with the first appearance of John the Immerser. They allege in support of this hypothesis that Jesus said, "The Law and the Prophets continued till John," (the only instructors of men;) "since that time the Kingdom of God is preached, and every man presses into it." "Publicans and harlots show you the way into the Kingdom of Heaven," said Jesus to the Pharisees. Again, "Alas! for you Scribes and Pharisees! for you shut the Kingdom of Heaven against men, and will neither enter yourselves, nor permit others that would to enter." "The Kingdom of God is within you." "The Kingdom of Heaven has overtaken you." From these premises they infer that the Kingdom of Heaven was actually set up by John the Baptist: "For," say they, "how could men and women enter into a kingdom which was not set up? And did not John immerse for the remission of sins, and call upon men to repent and reform in order to baptism?" The Paidobaptists, too, will have Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses, David, and all the circumcised Jews in the Kingdom of Heaven, because Jesus said, "Before Abraham was, I am;" "Abraham saw my day and was glad;" and Paul says Moses esteemed the reproach of Christ greater riches than all the treasures of Egypt, and forsook Egypt in faith of the Christian recompense of reward. Yes, and Paul affirms that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their families, who dwelt in tents in the promised land, looked not only to the rest in Canaan, but they sought a heavenly country, and expected the city of foundations, whose builder and maker is God. Thus the Jews had Christ in the manna and in the rock, and baptism in the cloud and in the sea. The mistake is specifically the same. Christ was promised and prefigured before he came, and the Kingdom of Heaven was promised and preached by John, by Jesus, the Twelve, and the Seventy, (who went about proclaiming the glad tidings of the Reign), before the Reign of Christ, or Kingdom of Heaven commenced. Because Christ was promised and prefigured in the patriarchal and Jewish ages, the Paidobaptists will have the Kingdom of Heaven on earth since the days of Abel; and because the glad tidings of the Reign and Kingdom of Heaven and the principles of the new and heavenly order of society were promulged by John, the Baptists will have John the Baptist in the Kingdom of Heaven, and the very person who set it up. Let us, then, examine this matter with all candor: and first, we shall place the passages above quoted out of the testimonies of the Evangelists on one side, and the following passages on the other side; and then see if we can reconcile them. John says, "Reform, for the Reign of God approaches." Jesus began to proclaim, saying "Reform, for the Reign or Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." He also commanded the Twelve and the Seventy to peregrinate all Judea, making the same proclamation.34 Of John the Baptist he said, though greater than all the Prophets, "The least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he." Thus, after John was beheaded, we have some eighty-four preachers daily proclaiming the nigh approach of the Reign of God; and Jesus often assuring his disciples that the Kingdom of God was soon to appear, and that some of his companions would see him enter upon his Reign before they died--and yet the Kingdom was set up by John! Scribes and Pharisees were shutting the kingdom against men, when Jesus had only given the keys to Peter! John the Baptist was in the kingdom, and the least in the kingdom is greater than he! More than eighty preachers say, "Reform, for the Reign of Heaven is at hand;" and John the Baptist before he died, introduced all Judea and Jerusalem into it! How, then, shall we reconcile these apparent contradictions? Make both sides figurative, and it may be done. Regard both sides literally, and it cannot be done! To say that the kingdom came in one point of view at one time, and in another point of view at another time, is only to say that it came in different senses--literally and figuratively. For our part, we must believe that the Kingdom of Heaven began, or the Reign of Heaven literally and truly commenced in one day. Many of its principles were developed by the ancient Prophets; David, Isaiah, and others wrote much concerning it; John the Baptist proclaimed its immediate and near approach, and more fully developed its spiritual design; therefore he was superior to them. Jesus often unfolded its character and design in various similitudes; and every one who understood and received these principles was said to "press into the kingdom," or to have "the kingdom within them;" and wherever these principles were promulged, "the Kingdom of Heaven" was said to "come nigh" to the people, or to have "overtaken them;" and those who opposed these principles and interposed their authority, to prevent others from receiving them, were said to "shut the Kingdom of Heaven against men;" and thus all these scriptures must of necessity be understood from the contexts in which they stand: for it is impossible that the Reign of Heaven could literally commence "till Jesus was glorified," "received the promise of the Holy Spirit," was "made Lord and Christ," and "sat down with his Father upon the throne"--for he left the earth to receive a kingdom.35 To make this, if possible, still more evident, we ask When did the Kingdom of God, established by Moses amongst the seed of Abraham, cease? This question penetrates the whole nature and necessity of the case: for will any one suppose that there were two Kingdoms of God on earth at one and the same time? Certainly the one ceased before the other began. Now, that the kingdom of God, ministered by Moses, had not ceased during the personal ministry of the Messiah on earth, is, we think, abundantly evident from the following facts and documents: First. Jesus was to have appeared, and did appear, "in the end of the world," or last days of the first Kingdom of God. "In the conclusion of the age has he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself." The "world to come" was one the names of the gospel age. He has not subjected "the world to come" to angels, as he did the world past, says Paul to the Hebrews. He appeared, then, not in the beginning of the gospel age, but in the end of the Jewish age. Second. The Temple was the house of God to the very close of the life of Jesus. For it was not till the Jewish ministry conspired to kill him that he deserted it. At the last festival of his life, and immediately before he fell into their hands, on walking out of the Temple, he said, "Behold your house is deserted, for you shall not see me henceforth till you shall say, Blessed be he that comes in the name of the Lord!" It was his Father’s house, the house of God, till that moment. Then, indeed, the glory departed. Third. The Jewish offerings and service, as a divine institution, continued till the condemnation of Jesus. He sent the cleansed leper to the priest to make the offering commanded in the law. He commanded the people to hear the doctors of the law who sat in Moses’ chair. He paid the didrachma. He was a minister of the circumcision. He lived under, not after the law. He kept all its ordinances, and caused all his disciples to regard it in its primitive import and authority to the last passover. Indeed, it could not be disannulled, for it was not consummated till on the cross he said, "IT IS FINISHED." Fourth. When he visited Jerusalem the last time, and in the last parable pronounced to them, he told them plainly that "the Kingdom of God should be taken from them" and given to a nation who should make a better use of the honors of the kingdom; consequently at the time the Jews had the Kingdom of God. Fifth. It was not until his death that the veil of the Temple was rent; that the things "which could be shaken were shaken." It was then, and not till then, that he nailed the legal institution to the cross. Then, and not till then, was the middle wall of partition broken down. The last Sabbath he slept in the grave. From the moment of his death there was no life in the old Kingdom of God. The Temple was deserted, its veil rent, its foundation shaken, the city devoted, the ritual abolished, and as after death the judgment--the Temple, city, and nation waited for the day of his vengeance. The Kingdom of God was evidently in the Jewish institution till Jesus died. Hence the Kingdom of Heaven came not while Jesus lived. In anticipation, they who believed the gospel of the kingdom received the Kingdom of God, just as in anticipation he said, "I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do" before he began to suffer; and as he said, "This cup is the new testament in my blood, shed for the remission of the sins of many," before it was shed. So while the doctrines of this reign--faith, repentance, baptism, and a new principle of sonship to Abraham were promulging by John, the Twelve, the Seventy, and by Himself, the Kingdom of Heaven was approaching; and those who received these principles by anticipation were said to enter into the kingdom, or to have the kingdom within them. The principles of any reign or revolution are always promulged, debated, and canvassed before a new order of things is set up. A party is formed upon these principles before strength is acquired, or a leader obtained competent to the commencement of a new order of things. In society, as in nature, we have first the blade, next the stem, and then the ripe corn in the ear. We call it wheat, or we call it corn, when we have only the promise in the blade. By such a figure of speech, the Kingdom of God was spoken of, while as yet only its principles were promulging. When these American states were colonial subjects of the king of England, and long before the setting up of a republic, republican doctrines were promulged and debated. The believers and advocates of these doctrines were called republicans, while as yet there was not a republic on this continent. He who dates the commencement of the Kingdom of Heaven from the ministry of John the Baptist sympathizes with him who dates the American republics from the first promulgation of the republican principles, or from the formation of a republican party in the British colonies. But as a faithful and intelligent historian, in writing the history of the American republics, commences with the history of the first promulgation of these principles, and records the sayings and deeds of the first promulgers of the new doctrines; so the sacred historians began their history of the Kingdom of Heaven with the appearance of John in the wilderness of Judea, preaching the Messiah, faith, repentance, a holy life, and raising up a new race of Israelites on the principle of faith rather than of flesh; for this in truth was the "blade" of the Kingdom of Heaven. Having from all these considerations seen that until the death of the Messiah his kingdom could not commence; and having seen from the record itself that it did not commence before his resurrection, we proceed to the development of things after his resurrection, to ascertain the day on which this kingdom was set up, or the Reign of Heaven began. The writer to whom we are most indebted for an orderly and continued narrative of the affairs of the Kingdom of Heaven is the Evangelist Luke. His history begins with the angelic annunciations of the nativity of John and Jesus, and ends with the appearance of the great standard-bearer of the Cross in Imperial Rome, A.D. 64. That part of the history to which we now look as a guide, to the affairs of the commencement of the Reign, is the notices which he makes of the forty days which the Lord spent in his crucified body, previous to his ascension. The reader ought not to be told (for he ought to know) that Jesus rose in the same body in which he was crucified, and in the reanimated fleshly body did eat, drink, and converse with his Apostles and friends for forty days. That body was not changed till, like the living saints who shall be on the earth at his second personal coming, it was made spiritual, incorruptible and glorious at the instant of his ascension. So that the man Christ Jesus was make like to all his brethren in his death, burial, resurrection, transfiguration, ascension, and glorification; or, rather, they shall be made to resemble him in all these respects. The Apostles testify that they saw him ascend--that a cloud received him out of their sight--that angels descended to inform them that he was taken up into heaven, not to return for a long time--that he ascended far above the visible heavens, and now fills all things. Stephen, when dying, saw him standing on the right hand of God. Much attention is due to all the incidents of these forty days--as much at least, as to the forty days spent by Moses in the Mount with God in the affairs of the preceding Kingdom of God. For the risen Messiah makes the affairs of his approaching kingdom the principal topic of these forty days.36 Towards the close of these days, and immediately before his ascension, he gave the commission to his Apostles concerning the setting up of this kingdom. "All authority in heaven and in earth is given to me: go, therefore," said he, "convert the nations," "immersing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all the things which I have commanded you; and, behold! I am with you always, even to the conclusion of this state."37 "But continue in the city of Jerusalem until you be invested with power from on high." Thus according to his promise and the ancient prophecy, it was to "begin at Jerusalem."38 The risen Saviour thus directs our attention to Jerusalem as the place, and to a period distant "not many days" as the time, of the beginning of his reign. The great facts of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, not being yet fully developed to his Apostles, they were not qualified to take any steps to the setting up of a kingdom which was to be founded upon Christ crucified. They needed an interpreter of these facts, and a supernatural advocate of the pretensions of the King, before they could lay the foundation of his kingdom. Again, the King himself must be glorified before his authority could be established on earth; for till he received the promise of the Spirit from his Father, and was placed on his throne, the Apostles could not receive it; so that Christ’s ascension to heaven, and coronation were indispensable to the commencement of this Reign of Heaven. Here let us pause for a moment--leave the earth, and on the wings of faith in the testimony of Prophets and Apostles, the two witnesses for Jesus, let us follow him to heaven and ascertain his reception into the heaven of heavens, and exaltation to the right hand of God. THE ASCENSION OF THE MESSIAH. Prophets and Apostles must now be heard. David, by the Spirit, says, "The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands of angels; the Lord is among them as in Sinai in the holy place. Thou hast ascended on high; thou hast led captivity captive; thou has received gifts for men; yea, for the rebellious, that the Lord God might dwell among them."39 The same Prophet in speaking of the solemn and joyful procession at the carrying up of the ark of the ancient constitution to Mount Zion, turns his eye from the type to the antitype, and thus describes the entrance of the Messiah into Heaven:--"Who shall ascend into the hill of God?" The attendant angels in the train of the Messiah, approaching the heaven of heavens, shout, "Lift up your heads, O you gates! be lift up, you everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in." Those within, filled with astonishment that any one should so confidently demand admission into those gates so long barred against the sons of men, responsive shout, "Who is the King of glory?" The angels in attendance upon the Messiah reply in strains as triumphant, "The Lord, strong and mighty! the Lord, mighty in battle!" and still more exultingly triumphant, shout, "Lift up your heads, O you gates! even lift them up, you everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in. Who is the King of glory? He is the Lord of hosts! he is the King of glory!"40 CORONATION OF THE MESSIAH. Every thing in its proper place. He that ascended first descended. Jesus died, was buried, raised from the dead, ascended, and was crowned Lord of all. In the presence of all the heavenly hierarchs, the four living creatures, the twenty-four seniors, and ten thousands times ten thousand angels, he presents himself before the throne. So soon as the First Born from the dead appears in the palace royal of the universe, his Father and his God, in his inaugural address, when anointing him Lord of all, says, "Let all the angels of God worship him"--"Sit thou at my right hand, till I make thy enemies thy footstool." "Jehovah shall send out of Zion the rod of thy strength: rule thou in the midst of thine enemies, "Thy people, willing in the day of thy power, shall come to thee. In the beauty of holiness, more than the womb of the morning, shalt thou have the dew of thy progeny. The Lord hath sworn, and will not repent. Thou art a Priest forever after the order of Melchisedeck. The Lord at thy right hand shall strike through kings in the day of his wrath." "Thy throne, O God, endures forever: the sceptre of thy kingdom is a sceptre of rectitude. Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore God, thy God, has anointed thee with the oil of joy above thy fellows. Thou Lord in the beginning hast laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the works of thy hand: they shall perish, but thou remainest; and they shall all grow old as does a garment, and as a vesture, shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail."41 Thus God highly exalted him, and did set him over all the works of his hands, and gave him a name and an honor above every name in heaven and on earth, that at the name of Jesus glorified every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess, to the glory of God. "Now we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, that he might taste death for all, on account of the sufferings of death, crowned with glory and honor"--Now "angels, authorities, principalities, and powers are subjected to him." "His enemies will I clothe with shame, but upon himself shall his crown flourish." The Holy Spirit sent down by Jesus from heaven, on the Pentecost after his resurrection, to the disciples in attendance in Jerusalem, informs the Apostles of all that had been transacted in heaven during the week after his ascension, and till that day. Peter now filled with that promised Spirit, informs the immense concourse assembled on the great day of Pentecost, that God had made that Jesus whom they had crucified both Lord and Christ--exalted him a PRINCE and a Saviour to grant repentance to Israel and remission of sins. The first act of his reign was the bestowment of the Holy Spirit, according to the Prophecy of Joel and his own promise. So soon as he received the kingdom from God his Father, he poured out the blessings of his favor upon his friends; he fulfilled all his promises to the Apostles, and forgave three thousand of his fiercest enemies. He received pardons and gifts for them that did rebel, and shed forth abundantly all spiritual gifts on the little flock to whom it pleased the Father to give the kingdom. Thus commenced the Reign of Heaven, on the day of Pentecost, in the person of the Messiah, the Son of God, and the anointed Monarch of the universe. Under him his people, saved from their sins, have received a kingdom which cannot be shaken nor removed. But as the erection of the Jewish tabernacle, after the commencement of the first Kingdom of God, was the work of some time, and of united and combined effort, on the part of those raised up and qualified for the work; so was the complete erection of the new temple of God. The Apostles, as wise master builders, laid the foundation--promulged the constitution, laws, and institutions of the King, and raised the standard of the kingdom in many towns, cities, and countries, for the space of forty years. Some of them not only saw "the Son of Man enter upon his reign," and the Kingdom of God commence on Pentecost, and carry his conquests over Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth; but they saw the Lord "come with power" and awful glory, and accomplish all his predictions on the deserted and devoted temple, city and people. Thus they saw a bright display of the golden sceptre of his grace in forgiving those who bowed to his authority, and an appalling exhibition of the iron rod of his wrath in taking vengeance on his enemies who would not have him to reign over them. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 94: 03.42. KINGDOM OF HEAVEN - PRESENT ADMINISTRATION OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN ======================================================================== PRESENT ADMINISTRATION OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. During the personal absence of the King, he has committed the management of this kingdom to stewards. These were first Apostles; next to them, Prophets; next, teachers; then, assistants, or helpers; then directors or presidents, all furnished with gifts, knowledge, and character, suited to their respective functions. Besides these, many persons possessed of miraculous powers--gifts of healing and speaking foreign languages, were employed in setting up and putting in order the communities composing the Kingdom of Heaven. Angels also were employed, and are still employed, under the great King in administering to them who are heirs of salvation. For Jesus now, as Lord of all, has the Holy Spirit at his disposal, and all the angels of God; and these are employed by him in the affairs of the kingdom.42 The Apostles were plenipotentiaries and ambassadors for Jesus, and had all authority delegated to them from the King. Hence every thing was first taught and enjoined by them. They were the first preachers, teachers, pastors, overseers, and ministers in the kingdom, and had the direction and management of all its affairs.43 The communities collected and set in order by the Apostles were called the congregation of Christ, and all these taken together are sometimes called the Kingdom of God. But the phrases "church of God," or "congregation of Christ," and the phrases "Kingdom of Heaven" or "Kingdom of God," do not always nor exactly represent the same thing. The elements of the Kingdom of Heaven, it will be remembered, are not simply its subjects, and therefore not simply the congregations of disciples of Christ. But as these communities possess the oracles of God, are under the laws and institutions of the King, and therefore enjoy the blessings of the present salvation, they are in the records of the Kingdom, regarded as the only constitutional citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven; and to them exclusively belongs all the present salvation. Their King is now in heaven, but present with them by his Spirit in their hearts and in all the institutions of his kingdom. Every immersed believer, of good behaviour, is, by the constitution, a free and full citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven, and entitled to all the social privileges and honors of that kingdom. Such of these as meet together statedly in one place in obedience to the King, or his ambassadors the Apostles, for the observance of all the institutions of the King, compose a family, or house, or congregation of Christ; and all these families or congregations, thus organized, constitute the present Kingdom of God in this world. So far the phrases Kingdom of Heaven and the congregation or body of Christ are equivalent in signification.44 Now in gathering these communities, and in setting them in order, the Apostles had, when alive, and when dead, by their writings still have, the sole right of legislating, ordering, and disposing of all things. But it is not the will of Jesus Christ, because it is not adapted to human nature, nor to the present state of his kingdom as administered in his absence, that the church should be governed by a written document alone. Hence in every city, town, and country where the Apostles gathered a community by their own personal labors, or by their assistants, in setting them in order, for their edification, and for their usefulness and influence in this world, they uniformly appointed elders, or overseers to labor in the word and teaching, and to preside over the whole affairs of the community. To these also were added deacons, or public ministers of the congregation, who, under the direction of the overseers, were to manage all the affairs of these individual families of God. This the very names Bishop and Deacon, and all qualifications enjoyed, fairly and fully import. But as all the citizens of the kingdom are free men under Christ they all have a voice in the selection of the persons whom the Apostles appoint to the offices. The Apostles still appoint all persons so elected, possessing the qualifications which they by the Holy Spirit prescribed. And if a congregation will not elect to these offices the persons possessing these qualifications; or if by a waywardness and selfishness of their own, they should elect those unqualified, and thus disparage those marked out by the possession of those gifts; in either case, they despise the authority of the Ambassadors of Christ and must suffer for it. It is, indeed, the Holy Spirit, and not the congregations, which creates Bishops and Deacons. The Spirit gives the qualifications, both natural and acquired; and, speaking to the congregations in the written oracles, commands their ordination or appointment to the work.45 In the present administration of the Kingdom of God, faith is the PRINCIPLE, and ordinances the MEANS of all spiritual enjoyment. Without faith in the testimony of God, a person is without God, without Christ, and without hope in the world. A Christless universe, as respects spiritual life and joy, is the most perfect blank which fancy can create. Without faith, nothing in the Bible can be enjoyed; and without it, there is to man no Kingdom of Heaven in all the dominions of God. In the kingdom of nature sense is the principle, and ordinances the means, of enjoyment. Without sense, or sensation, nothing in nature can be known or enjoyed. All the creative, recuperative, and renovating power, wisdom, and goodness of God, exhibited in nature, are contained in ordinances. The sun, moon, and stars--the clouds, the air, the water, the seasons, day and night, are therefore denominated the ordinances of heaven, because God’s power, wisdom, and goodness are in them, and felt by us only through them.46 Now sense, without the ordinances of nature, like faith without the ordinances of religion, would be no principle of enjoyment; and the ordinances of nature, without sense, would be no means of enjoyment. These are the unalterable decrees of God. There is no exception to them; and there is no reversion of them. To illustrate and enforce the doctrine of this single paragraph is worthy of a volume. The essence, the whole essence of that reformation for which we contend, is wrapped up in this decree as above expressed. If it be true, the ground on which we stand is firm and unchangeable as the Rock of Ages; if it be false, we build upon the sand. Reader, examine it well! In the Kingdom of Heaven, faith is, then, the principle, and ordinances the means of enjoyment; because all the wisdom; power, love, mercy, compassion, or grace of God, is in the ordinances of the Kingdom of Heaven; and if all grace be in them, it can only be enjoined through them. What, then, under the present administration of the Kingdom of Heaven, are the ordinances which contain the grace of God? They are preaching the gospel--immersion in the name of Jesus, into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit--the reading and teaching the Living Oracles--the Lord’s day--the Lord’s supper--fasting--prayer--confession of sins--and praise. To these may be added other appointments of God, such as exhortation, admonition, discipline, etc.: for these also are ordinances of God; and indeed all statutes and commandments are ordinances:47 but we speak not at present of those ordinances which concern the good order of the Kingdom, but of those which are primary means of enjoyment. These primary and sacred ordinances of the Kingdom of Heaven are the means of our individual enjoyment of the present salvation of God. Without the sun, there is no solar influence; without the moon, there is no lunar influence; without the stars, there is no sidereal influence; without the clouds, there can be no rain; and without the ordinances of the Kingdom of Heaven, there can be no heavenly influence exhibited or felt. There is a peculiar and distinctive influence exerted by the sun, moon, and stars; yet they all give light. So in the ordinances of the Kingdom of Heaven--although they all agree in producing certain similar effects on the subjects of the kingdom, there is something distinctive and peculiar in each of them, so that no one of them can be substituted for another. Not one of them can be dispensed with; they are all necessary to the full enjoyment of the Reign of Heaven. In nature and in religion, all the blessings of God bestowed on man are properly classed under two heads. These may be called, for illustration, antecedent and consequent. The antecedent include all those blessings bestowed on man to prepare him for action and to induce him to action. The consequent are those which God bestows on man through a course of action correspondent to these antecedent blessings. For example, all that God did for Adam in creating for him the earth and all that it contains, animal, vegetable, mineral; in forming him in his own image; giving him for all his physical, intellectual, and moral powers, and investing him with all the personal and real estate which elevated him above all sublunary beings, were antecedent to any act of Adam; and these furnished him with inducements to love, honor, and obey his Creator and benefactor. All that God did for Abraham in promises and precepts before his obedience--all that he did for the Israelites in bringing them up out of Egypt, and redeeming them from the tyranny of Pharaoh, was antecedent to the duties and observances which he enjoined upon them. And all the blessings which Adam, Abraham, the Israelites enjoyed through conformity to the institutions under which they were placed, were consequent upon that state of mind and course of action which the antedecent favors demanded and occasioned. God never commanded any being to do any thing, but the power and motives were derived from something God had done for him. In the Kingdom of Heaven the antecedent blessings are the constitution of grace, the King, and all that he did, suffered, and sustained for our redemption. These were finished before we came upon the stage of action. This is all favor, pure favor, sovereign favor: for there can be no favor that is not free and sovereign. But the remission of our sins, our adoption into the family of God, our being made heirs and inheritors of the kingdom of glory, are consequent upon faith and the obedience of faith. Organization and life of any sort are of necessity the gifts of God; but health and continued enjoyment of life, and all its various and numerous blessings are consequent upon the proper exercise of these. He that will not breathe, eat, drink, sleep, exercise, cannot enjoy animal life. God has bestowed animal organization and life antecedent to any action of the living creature; but the creature may throw away his life by refusing to sustain it by the means essential to its preservation and comfort. God made but one man out of the earth, and one earthly nature of every sort, by a positive, direct, and immediate agency, of wisdom, power, and goodness. He gave these the power according to his own constitution or system of nature, of reproducing and multiplying to an indefinite extent. But still this life is transmitted, diffused, and sustained by God operating through the system of nature. So Jesus in the new creation, by his Spirit sent down from heaven after his glorification, did by a positive, direct, and immediate agency, create one congregation, one mystical, or spiritual body; and, according to the constitution or system of the Kingdom of Heaven, did give to that mystical body, created in Jerusalem, out of the more ancient earthly Kingdom of God, the power of reproducing and multiplying to an indefinite extent. But still this new and spiritual life is transmitted, diffused and sustained by the Spirit of God, operating through the constitution, or system of grace, ordained in the Kingdom of Heaven. Hence, in setting up the Kingdom of Heaven, as in setting up the kingdom of nature, there was a display of divinity, compared with every thing subsequent, properly supernatural. Hence the array of Apostles, prophets, extraordinary teachers, gifts, powers, miracles, etc., etc. But after this new mystical body of Christ was created and made, it had, and yet has, according to the system of grace under the present administration of the Kingdom of Heaven, the power of multiplying and replenishing the whole earth, and will do it; for as God breathed into the nostrils of Adam the spirit of life, after he had raised him out of the dust; and as he bestowed on his beloved Son Jesus, after he rose out of the water, the Holy Spirit without measure; so on the formation of the first congregation, figuratively called the body of Christ, Jesus did breathe into it the Holy Spirit to animate and inhabit it till he come again. The only temple and habitation on earth, since Jesus pronounced desolation on that in Jerusalem, is the body of Christ. Now, the first congregation of Christ, thus filled with the Spirit of God, had the power of raising other congregations of Christ; or, what is the same thing, of causing the body of Christ to grow and increase. Thus we see that other congregations were soon raised up in Judea and Samaria by the members of the Jerusalem body. Many were begotten to God by the Spirit of God, through the members of the first congregation. And since the Spirit himself ceased to operate in all those splendid displays of supernatural grandeur, by still keeping the disciples of Christ always in remembrance of the things spoken by the holy Apostles, and by all the arguments derived from the antecedent blessings bestowed, working in them both to will and do according to the benevolence of God, he is still causing the body of Christ to grow and increase in stature, as well as in knowledge and favor of God. Thus the church of Christ, inspired with his Spirit, and having the oracles and ordinances of the Reign of Heaven, is fully adequate to the conversion of the whole world, if she prove not recreant to her Lord. In the work of conversion, her Evangelists, or those whom she sends beyond the precincts of her weekly meetings, have, under the influence of the Spirit of God, simply to propose the constitution, or the glad tidings of the Reign, to those without; and by all the arguments which the oracles of God, and the times and occasions suggest, to beseech and persuade men to be reconciled to God, to kiss the Son, to accept the constitution, to bow to him who is ordained a Prince and a Saviour to grant repentance and remission of sins to all who submit to his government. Thus they, and the congregation who sends them forth and sustains them in the work, beget children to God by the gospel, and enlarge the body of Christ. With all these documents before us, may we not say, that, as Eve was the mother of all living, so "Jerusalem is the mother of us all?" And thus, to use the language of Paul, "Men are begotten to God by the gospel" through the instrumentality of the congregations of Christ. Under the present administration of the Kingdom of Heaven, a great apostasy has occurred, as foretold by the Apostles. As the church, compared to a city, is called "Mount Zion," the apostate church is called "Babylon the Great." Like Babylon the type, "Mystery Babylon" the antitype, is to be destroyed by a Cyrus that knows not God. She is to fall by the sword of infidels, supported by the fierce judgments of God. "The Holy City" is still trodden under foot, and the sanctuary is filled with corruptions. It is, indeed, a den of thieves; but strong is the Lord that judges the apostate city. Till that great and notable day of the Lord come, we cannot, from the prophetic word, anticipate a universal return to the original gospel, nor a general restoration of all the institutions of the Kingdom of Heaven in their primitive character; and, consequently, we cannot promise to ourselves the universal subjugation of the nations to the sceptre of Jesus. But were we to enter upon the consideration of the administration of the affairs of the kingdom after the fall and overthrow of the apostate city and the conversion of the Jews, we should have to launch upon a wide and tempestuous ocean, for which our slender bark is not at this time sufficiently equipped. This may yet deserve the construction of a large vessel in a more propitious season. Meanwhile the original gospel is extensively proclaimed, and many thousands are preparing for the day of the Lord; and these are taught by the "Faithful and True Witness" that the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, and that their happiness and safety alike consist in being prepared for his second advent. 1 These essays do not appear in the order in which they were written and published. We place the last-written first; because, in the natural order of things, general views of the nature of the Christian kingdom ought to precede the special development of its peculiar institutions. They appeared first in the form of extras to the regular series of the Millennial Harbinger; and as we thought it expedient to preserve them, as much as possible, in their original form, this will apologize for several repetitions which may appear in them. All the leading and characteristic principles of that reformation for which we plead, as far as the gospel institution is concerned, may be learned from them. Much, indeed, of the proof of some of the propositions found in these essays, lies scattered over the face of several volumes; but such a miniature view of the evidence by which they are sustained, as, in most cases, is sufficient to the conviction of the reader, will be found embodied in them. Those, however, who may not be perfectly satisfied with the arguments offered, must be referred to the various discussions of these principles found in the Christian Baptist and Millennial Harbinger. 2 Genesis 4:7. 3 Exodus 16:15-27. 4 Genesis 28:18. 5 Genesis 35:14. 6 Job 1:4-5. 7 Job 42:8-10. 8 Genesis 18:19. 9 Genesis 21:12. 10 Genesis 26:3-5. 11 Jeremiah 31:31. 12 Men fit for war are never more than the third or fourth part of any population. There were six hundred thousand men of this class when they came to Mount Sinai. 13 If the following passages are carefully examined and compared, it will appear that both these phrases often represent the same thing: Matthew 3:2. Mark 1:14. Luke 4:43.-- Matthew 13:11. Mark 4:11. Luke 8:10,-- Matthew 11:11. Luke 7:28. To these three distinct evidence many more might be added. What Matthew calls "the Kingdom of Heaven," Mark and Luke call "the Kingdom of God." 14 See chapters 6: 33. 12: 28. 19: 24. 21: 31, 43. 15 Matthew 21:43. 16 Ephesians 1:3. 17 Ephesians 2:6. 18 Ephesians 5:5. 19 Daniel 2:44. 20 Jeremiah 31:31; Jeremiah 31:34. 21 John 17:18. 22 Proverbs 8:23-31. 23 Micah 5:2. 24 Ephesians 1:3-12. 25 Matthew 28:18. Luke 24:47. Matthew 11:27. 26 Psalms 2:6-8; Psalms 72:2-18. 27 Revelation 5:9-14; Revelation 14:1-5; Revelation 16:3-4; Revelation 21:9-27. Ephesians 1:20-21. 28 Isaiah 62:1-7. 29 Hebrews 8:10-13. 30 Romans 6:5-6; Romans 6:14; Romans 8:1; Romans 8:33-39. 1 Corinthians 6:11. Ephesians 1:7; Ephesians 2:6; Ephesians 2:19; Ephesians 2:21-22. Colossians 1:13-14. 1 Peter 2:5; 1 Peter 2:7. 2 Peter 1:10-11. 1 John 2:2. 31 John 3:5. Titus 3:5. 32 Isaiah 24:5. 33 Matthew 4:12. Mark 1:14. Luke 3:30; Luke 4:14. 34 Matthew 10:7. Luke 10:1-11. When eating the last supper he distinctly said that the Reign of God was then future. Luke 22:18. 35 Luke 19:11-15. 36 Acts 1:3. 37 Matthew 28:17-20. Mark 16:15. Luke 24:47-48. 38 Isaiah 2:3. Micah 4:2. 39 Psalms 68:17-18. 40 Psalms 24:1-10 : 41 Hebrews 1:1-14 42 1 Corinthians 12:28. Ephesians 4:11. Hebrews 1:14. 43 2 Corinthians 3:6; 2 Corinthians 5:18-20. 44 Romans 12:4-8. 1 Corinthians 12:27. Hebrews 3:6. 45 Acts 6:2-7; Acts 14:23; Acts 20:17-36. Php 1:1. 1 Timothy 3:1-16. Titus 1:5-10. Hebrews 13:7; Hebrews 13:17; Hebrews 13:24. 46 Jeremiah 31:35-36. Job 38:31-33. Jeremiah 33:25. 47 James 1:25. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 95: 03.43. REMISSION OF SINS - TABLE OF CONTENTS ======================================================================== Remission of Sins. Proposition I. Proposition II. Proposition III. Proposition IV. Proposition V. Proposition VI. Proposition VII. Proposition VIII. Proposition IX. Proposition X. Proposition XI. Proposition XII. Objections and Refutations Recapitulation Conclusion Effects of Modern Christianity Immersion Not a Mere Bodily Act Justification Ascribed to Seven Causes Peter in Jerusalem, and Paul in Philippi, Reconciled Remission of Sins. Luther said that the doctrine of justification, or forgiveness, was the test of a standing or falling church. If right in this, she could not be very far wrong in any thing else; but if wrong here, it was not easy to suppose her right in any thing. I quote from memory, but this was the idea of that great reformer.1 We agree with him in this as well as in many other sentiments. Emerging from the smoke of the great city of mystical Babylon, he saw as clearly and as far into these matters as any person could in such a hazy atmosphere. Many of his views only require to be carried out to their legitimate issue, and we should have the ancient gospel as the result. The doctrine of remission is the doctrine of salvation: for to talk of salvation without the knowledge of the remission of sins, is to talk without meaning. To give to the Jews, "a knowledge of salvation by the remission of their sins," was the mission of John the Immerser, as said the Holy Spirit. In this way he prepared a people for the Lord. This doctrine of forgiveness was gradually opened to the people during the ministry of John and Jesus, but was not fully developed until Pentecost, when the secrets of the Reign of Heaven were fully opened to men. From Abel to the resurrection of Jesus, transgressors obtained remission at the altar, through priests and sin offerings; but it was an imperfect remission as respected the conscience. "For the law," says Paul, (more perfect in this respect than the preceding economy,) "containing a shadow only of the good things to come, and not even the very image of these things, never can, with the same sacrifices which they offer yearly forever, make those who come to them perfect. Since being offered, would they not have ceased? because the worshippers being once purified, should have no longer conscience of sins." The good things to come were future during the reign of Moses and his institution. They have come; and a clear, and full, and perfect remission of sins is the great result of the new economy in the consciences of all the citizens of the kingdom of Jesus. The perfection of the conscience of the worshippers of God under Christ, is the grand distinguishing peculiarity in them compared with those under Moses. They have not only clearer views of God, of his love, of his character, and of immortality; but they have consciences which the Jewish and Patriarchal ages could not produce. If faith only were the means of this superior perfection and enjoyment, and if striking symbols or types were all that were necessary to afford this assurance and experience of pardon, the Jewish people might have been as happy as the Christian people. They had as true testimony, as strong faith, and as striking emblems as we have. Many of them through faith obtained a high reputation, were approved by God, and admired by men for their wonderful achievements. The difference is in the constitution. They lived under a constitution of law--we under a constitution of favor. Before the law their privileges were still more circumscribed. Under the government of the Lord Jesus there is an institution for the forgiveness of sins, like which there was no institution since the world began. It was owing to this institution that Christians were so much distinguished at first from the subjects of every former institution. Our political happiness in these United States is not owing to any other cause than to our political institutions. If we are politically the happiest people in the world, it is because we have the happiest political institutions in the world. So it is in the Christian institution. If Christians were, and may be, the happiest people that ever lived, it is because they live under the most gracious institution ever bestowed on men. The meaning of this institution has been buried under the rubbish of human traditions for hundreds of years. It was lost in the dark ages, and has never been, till recently disinterred. Various efforts have been made, and considerable progress attended them; but since the Grand Apostasy was completed, till the present generation, the gospel of Jesus Christ has not been laid open to mankind in its original plainness, simplicity, and majesty. A vail in reading the New Institution has been on the hearts of Christians, as Paul declares it was upon the hearts of the Jews in reading the Old Institution towards the close of that economy. The object of this essay is to open to the consideration of the reader the Christian institution for the remission of sins; to show by what means a person may enjoy the assurance of a personal and plenary remission of all his sins. This we shall attempt to do by stating, illustrating, and proving the following twelve propositions: (See next chapter) ======================================================================== CHAPTER 96: 03.44. REMISSION OF SINS - PROPOSITION 01 ======================================================================== PROP. I.--The Apostles taught their disciples, or converts, that their sins were forgiven, and uniformly addressed them as pardoned or justified persons. John testifies that the youngest disciples were pardoned. "I write to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you on account of his name."2 The young men strong in the Lord and the old men steadfast in the Lord, he commends for their attainments; but the little children, the youngest converts, he addressed as possessing this blessing as one common to all disciples, "Your sins are forgiven you, on account of his name." Paul, in his letter to the Hebrews, asserts, that one of the provisions of the New Institution is the remission of the sins of all under it. "Their sins and iniquities I will remember no more."3 From this he argues, as a first principle, in the Christian economy, "Now where remission of these is, no more offering for sin is needed."4 The reason assigned by the Apostles why Christians have no sin offering is, because they have obtained remission of sins as a standing provision in the New Institution. The same Apostle testifies that the Ephesian disciples had obtained remission. "Be to one another kind, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, even as God for Christ’s sake has forgiven you."5 Here, also, in the enumeration of Christian privileges and immunities under Christ, he asserts forgiveness of sins as the common lot of all disciples. "In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his favor."6 In his letter to the Colossians, he uses the same words--"By whom we have the forgiveness of sins."7 Figurative expressions are used by the same Apostle, expressive of the same forgiveness common to all Christians. "And such (guilty characters) were some of you; but you are washed; but you are sanctified; but you are justified by the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of God."8 Peter, also, is a witness here. "Seeing you have purified your souls by obeying the truth through the Spirit."9 But there is no need of foreign, or remote, or figurative expressions, when so literally and repeatedly the Apostles assert it as one of the adjuncts of being a disciple of Jesus. Had we no other testimony than that found in a single letter to the Colossians, it would be sufficient to sustain this position. The command as given in Colossians 3:13, assumes it as a principle. "As Christ forgave you, so also do you." But in the second chapter he makes this an inseparable adjunct of being in Christ. "You are complete in him--circumcised--buried with him--raised with him--made alive with him--HAVING FORGIVEN YOU ALL TRESPASSES." These explicit testimonies from the most illustrious witnesses, sustain my first proposition. On these evidences I rely, and I shall henceforth speak of it as a truth not to be questioned, viz.; that all the disciples of Christ converted in the apostolic age, were taught by the Apostles to consider themselves as pardoned persons. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 97: 03.45. REMISSION OF SINS - PROPOSITION 02 ======================================================================== PROP. II.--The apostolic converts were addressed by their teachers as justified persons. We know that none but innocent persons can be legally justified; but it is not in the forensic sense this term is used by the Apostles. Amongst the Jews it imported no more than pardoned; and when applied to Christians, it denoted that they were acquitted from guilt--discharged from condemnation, and accounted as righteous persons in the sight of God. Paul, in Antioch in Pisidia, assured the Jews, that in or by Jesus all that believed were justified from all things, (certainly here it is equivalent to pardoned from all sins,) from which they could not be justified by the law of Moses. The disciples are said to be justified by faith.10 By favor or grace.11 In or by the blood of Christ.12 By the name of the Lord Jesus.13 By works.14 It is God who justifies.15 Christians are said to be justified by God, by Christ, by favor, by faith, by the blood of Jesus, by the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of God--also by works. Pardon and acquittal are the prominent ideas in every application of the term. God is the justifier. Jesus also, as his Messiah, justifies, and the Spirit declares it. As an act of favor it is done, by the blood of Jesus as the rightful and efficient cause--by the faith as the instrumental cause--by the name of Jesus the Lord as the immediate and connecting cause, and by works, as the demonstrative and conclusive cause. Nothing is more plain from the above testimonies than that all Christians are declared to be justified under the Reign of Jesus Christ. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 98: 03.46. REMISSION OF SINS - PROPOSITION 03 ======================================================================== PROP. III.--The ancient Christians were addressed by the Apostles as sanctified persons. Paul addressed all the disciples in Rome as saints or sanctified persons. In his first letter to the Corinthians, he addresses them all as the sanctified under Christ Jesus. "To the congregation of God which is at Corinth, to the sanctified under Christ Jesus." Paul argues with the Hebrews that "by the will of God we are sanctified by the offering of Jesus Christ once only." "For by this one offering he has forever perfected (the conscience of) the sanctified." So usual was it for the Apostles to address their disciples as sanctified persons, that occasionally they are thus designated in the inscription upon their epistles. Thus Jude addressing indiscriminately the whole Christian community, inscribes his catholic epistle--"To the sanctified by God our Father and to the preserved (or saved) by Jesus Christ; to the called." "The sanctifier and the sanctified are all of one family," says the Apostle to the Gentiles. And therefore the sanctifier addressed the sanctified as his brethren, and the brethren the disciples as sanctified. But once more we must hear Paul, and hear him connecting his sanctification with the name of the Lord Jesus. He says, "But now you are sanctified by the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God."16 ======================================================================== CHAPTER 99: 03.47. REMISSION OF SINS - PROPOSITION 04 ======================================================================== PROP. IV.--The ancient Christians, the apostolic converts, were addressed as "reconciled to God." Paul repeatedly declares that the disciples were reconciled to God. "When enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son."17 To the Corinthians, he says, "God has reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ;"18 and to the Colossians, he asserts, "It pleased the Father by him to reconcile all things to him, having made peace by the blood of his cross; I say whether they be things on the earth, or things in the heavens. Even you who were formerly alienated in mind, and enemies by works which are wicked, he has now, indeed, reconciled in the body of his flesh through death."19 To the Ephesians he declares, that though "once they were without God and without hope in the world, far off, they are now, through the blood of Christ, made nigh." He has made the believing Jews and Gentiles one, that he might, under Christ, reconcile both in one body to God, through the cross, having slain the enmity between both thereby. Indeed, he represents God as in Christ, reconciling a world to himself; and so all under Christ are frequently said to be reconciled to God through him; which was the point to be proved. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 100: 03.48. REMISSION OF SINS - PROPOSITION 05 ======================================================================== PROP. V.--The first disciples were considered and addressed by the Apostles, as "adopted into the family of God." This adoption is presented by the Apostle as the great reason which called forth the Son of God. "God," he says, "sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, that he might buy off those under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons." "And because you are sons, he sent forth the spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying Abba, Father."20 "You are, therefore, now sons of God." Indeed, the same writer, in his letter to the Ephesians, goes still farther, and represents this adoption of Jews and Gentiles into the rank and dignity of the sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty, as the great object contemplated in God’s predestination. "Having," says he, "predestinated, or beforehand determinately pointed us out, for an adoption into the number of children by Jesus Christ, for himself, according to the good pleasure of his will."21 Another testimony must suffice on this point. "Beloved," says the Apostle John, "now are we the sons of God; and what manner of love God has bestowed upon us, that we should be called sons of God!" "If sons, then we are heirs of God--joint heirs with Christ." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 101: 03.49. REMISSION OF SINS - PROPOSITION 06 ======================================================================== PROP. VI.--My sixth proposition is, that the first Christians were taught by the inspired teachers to consider themselves as saved persons. Because of some ambiguity in the popular import of the term saved, when applied to the disciples of Christ, we shall define it as used in this proposition. I need not here descant upon the temporal saviours and temporal salvations which are so conspicuous in sacred history. I need not state that Noah and his family were saved from the judgment inflicted upon the Old World; the Israelites from the Egyptians, and from all their enemies--that Paul’s companions were saved from the deep, and God’s people in all ages, in common with all mankind, from ten thousand perils to which their persons, their families, and their property have been exposed: It is not the present salvation of our bodies from the ills of this life; but it is the salvation of the soul from the guilt, pollution, and dominion of sin. "Thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." It is the salvation of the soul in the present life of which we speak. And here it ought to be clearly and distinctly stated that there is a present and a future salvation, of which all Christians are to be partakers. The former is properly the salvation of the soul, and the latter is the salvation of the body, at the resurrection of the just. There are few professing Christianity, perhaps none, who do not expect a future salvation--the glory of salvation to be revealed in us at the last time. Peter who uses this expression in the beginning of his first epistle, and who invites the saints to look forward to the salvation yet future, in the same connection reminds them that they have now received the salvation of the soul. Indeed, the salvation of the soul is but the first fruit of the Spirit, and but an earnest until the adoption, "the redemption of the body" from the bondage of corruption. It was in this sense of the word that salvation was announced to all who submitted to the Lord Jesus, and hence it is in this connection equivalent to a deliverance of the soul from the guilt, pollution, and dominion of sin. Having thus defined the present salvation of the soul, I proceed to the proof of my sixth proposition, viz.; that the first Christians were taught by their inspired teachers to consider themselves as saved persons. Peter, on Pentecost, exhorted the Jews to save themselves from that untoward generation, by reforming and being "immersed for the remission of their sins, in the name of the Lord Jesus." Luke, in recording the success attendant on Peter’s labors, expresses himself thus: "And the Lord added, daily, the saved to the congregation."22 Those who obeyed the gospel, were recorded by Luke as "the saved." The King’s translators, supplied out of their own system the words "should be." They are not in any copy of the Greek Scriptures. Such is the first application of the words, "the saved" in the Christian scriptures. Paul uses the same words in the first letter to the Corinthians, and applies them to all the disciples of Jesus. "To the destroyed, the doctrine of the cross is foolishness; but to us, the saved, it is the power of God."23 In the same letter, he says of the Gospel, "By which you are saved, if you retain in your memory the word which I announce to you."24 In his second letter he uses the same style, and distinguishes the disciples by the same designation: "We are through God a fragrant odor of Christ among the saved, and among the destroyed." The Ephesians he declares are saved through favor; and to Titus, he says, "God has saved us not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his own mercy"--by what means we shall soon hear Paul affirm. Promises of salvation to the obedient are to be found in almost every public address pronounced by the Apostles and first preachers. For the Saviour commanded them to assure mankind that every one who believed the gospel, and was immersed, should be saved. And, connecting faith with immersion, Peter averred that immersion saved us, purifying the conscience through the resurrection of Jesus.25 While the Christians are taught to expect and hope for a future salvation--a salvation from the power of death and the grave--a salvation to be revealed in the last time--they receive the first fruit of the Spirit, the salvation of the soul from guilt, pollution, and the dominion of sin, and come under the dominion of righteousness, peace, and joy. This is what Peter affirms of all the Christians in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia Minor, and Bithynia, to whom he thus speaks: "Jesus, having not seen, you love; on whom, not now looking, but believing, you rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory, receiving the reward of your faith, the salvation of your souls."26 These six propositions being each and every one of them, clearly sustained by the unequivocal testimony of God, now adduced, and, as is well known to the intelligent disciple, by many more passages, equally plain and forcible, not adduced; we shall now engross them into one leading proposition, which we shall in this essay consider as not to be questioned--as irrefragably proved. The converts made to Jesus Christ by the Apostles were taught to consider themselves pardoned, justified, sanctified, reconciled, adopted, and saved; and were addressed as pardoned, justified, sanctified, reconciled, adopted, and saved persons, by all who first preached the Gospel of Christ. While this proposition is before us, it may be expedient to remark that all these terms are expressive not of any quality of mind--not of any personal attribute of body, soul, or spirit; but each of them represents, and all of them together represent a state or condition. But though these terms represent state and not character, there is a relation between state and character, or an influence which state has upon character, which makes the state of immense importance in a moral and religious point of view. Indeed, the strongest arguments which the Apostles use with the Christians to urge them forward in the cultivation and display of all the moral and religious excellencies of character, are drawn from the meaning and value of the state in which they are placed. Because forgiven, they should forgive; because justified, they should live righteously; because sanctified, they should live holy and unblameably; because reconciled to God, they should cultivate peace with all men, and act benevolently towards all; because adopted, they should walk in the dignity and purity of sons of God; because saved, they should abound in thanksgivings, praises, and rejoicings, living soberly, righteously, and godly, looking forward to the blessed hope. As this essay is designated for readers of the most common capacity and most superficial education, I trust I may be permitted to speak still more plainly upon the difference between state and character. Childhood is a state; so is manhood. Now, a person in the state of childhood may act sometimes like a person in the state of manhood, and those arrived at the state of manhood may in character or behaviour resemble those in a state of childhood. A person in the state of a son, may have the character of a servant; and a person in the state of a servant may have the character of a son. This is not generally to be expected, though it sometimes happens. Parents and children, masters and servants, husbands and wives, are terms denoting relations or states. To act in accordance with these states or relations is quite a different thing from being in any one of these states. Many persons enter into the state of matrimony, and yet act unworthily of it. This is true of many other states. Enough, we presume, is said to contradistinguish state and character, relations and moral qualities. It is scarcely necessary to remark here, that as the disciples of Christ are declared to be in a pardoned, justified, sanctified, reconciled, adopted, and saved state, they are the only persons in such a state; and all others are in an unpardoned, unjustified, unsanctified, unreconciled, unadopted, and lost state. When, then, is a change of state effected, and by what means? This is the great question soon to be discussed. We are constrained to admit that a change in any one of these states necessarily implies, because it involves, a change in all the others. Every one who is pardoned is justified, sanctified, reconciled, adopted and saved, and so every one that is saved is adopted, reconciled, sanctified, justified, and pardoned. To illustrate what has already been proved, let us turn to some of the changes which take place in society as a present constituted. A female changes her state. She enters into the state of matrimony. So soon as she has surrendered herself to the affectionate government and control of him who has become her husband, she had not only become a wife, but a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a niece, etc.; and may stand in many other relations in which she before stood not. All these are connected with her becoming the wife of a person who stands in many relations. So when a person becomes Christ’s, he is a son of Abraham, an heir, a brother, or is pardoned, justified, sanctified, reconciled, adopted and saved. To be in Christ, or under Christ, then, is to stand in these new relations to God, angels, and men; and to be out of him, or not under his mediatorship or government, is to be in, or under Adam under. It is to be in, what is called "the state of nature," unpardoned, unjustified, unsanctified, unreconciled, and an alien from the family of God, lost in trespasses and sins. These things premised, the question presents itself, When are persons in Christ? I choose this phrase in accommodation to the familiar style of this day. No person in a house, in a ship, in a state, in a kingdom, but he that has gone or is introduced into a house, into a ship, into a state, into a kingdom; so no person is in Christ but he who has been introduced into Christ. The scripture style is most religiously accurate. We have the words "in Christ," and the words "into Christ," often repeated in the Christian Scriptures; but in no place can the one phrase be substituted for the other. Hence in all places, where any person is said to be in Christ, it refers not to his conversion, regeneration, or putting on Christ, but to a state of rest or privilege subsequent to conversion, regeneration, or putting on Christ. But the phrase into Christ is always connected with conversion, regeneration, immersion, or putting on Christ. Before we are justified in Christ, live in Christ, or fall asleep in Christ, we must come, be introduced, or immersed into Christ. Into belongs only to verbs implying motion towards; and in to verbs implying rest, or motion in. He eats, sleeps, sits in the house. He walks into the field; he rides into the city. "Into Christ" is a phrase only applicable to conversion, immersion, or regeneration, or what is called putting on Christ, translation into his kingdom, or submission to his government.27 Presuming on the intelligence of our readers, so far as to suppose them assured that this is no mere verbal criticism, but a discrimination that detects one of the pillars of an apostate church, I proceed to another preliminary proposition, which I choose to submit in the following word, to wit: ======================================================================== CHAPTER 102: 03.50. REMISSION OF SINS - PROPOSITION 07 ======================================================================== PROP. VII.--A change of views, though it necessarily precedes, is in no case equivalent to, and never to be identified with, a change of state. In all the relations of his life, in all states or conditions of men, we feel the truth of this; and I would to Heaven that our readers could see as plainly what is of infinitely more importance to them, that no change of heart is equivalent to, or can be substituted for, a change of state! A change of heart is the result of a change of views, and whatever can accomplish a change of views may accomplish a change of heart or feeling, but a change of state always calls for something more.28 Lavinia was the servant of Palemon, and once thought him a hard master. She changed her views of him, and her feelings were also changed towards him; still, however, she continued in the state of a hand maid. Palemon offered her first his heart, and then his hand, and she accepted them. He vowed and she vowed before witnesses, and she became his wife. Then, and not till then, was her state changed. She is no longer a servant--she is now a wife. A change of views and of feelings led to this change in state; but let it be noted that this might not have issued in a change of state; for Maria, who was another handmaid of Palemon, and changed her views of him and her feelings towards him as much--nay, more than did Lavinia; yet Maria lived and died the servant maid of Palemon and Lavinia. William Agricola and his brother Thomas, both Canadians, were once much opposed to the constituted government of New England. They both changed their views, and, as a matter of course, their feelings were changed. William became a citizen of Rhode Island; but Thomas, notwithstanding his change of heart, lived and died a colonial subject of a British king. John and James Superbus became great enemies to each other. They continued irreconciled for many years. At length a change of views brought about a change of heart: but this change for more than a year was concealed in the heart, and by no overt act appeared. They were not reconciled until mutual concessions were made and pledges of a change of feeling were tendered and reciprocated. From enemies they became friends. A thousand analogies might be adduced, to show that though a change of state often--nay, generally results from a change of feelings, and this from a change of views, yet a change of state does not generally follow, and is something quite different from, and cannot be identified with a change of heart. So in religion, a man may change his views of Jesus, and his heart may be changed towards him; but unless a change of state ensures, he is still unpardoned, unjustified, unsanctified, unreconciled, unadopted, and lost to all Christian life and enjoyable. For it has been proved that these terms represent states and not feelings, condition and not character; and that a change of views or of heart, is not a change of state. To change a state is to pass into a new relation, and relation is not sentiment nor feeling. Some act, then, constitutional, by stipulation proposed, sensible, and manifest, must be performed by one or both the parties before such a change can be accomplished. Hence, always, in ancient times, the proclamation of the gospel was accompanied by some instituted act proposed to those whose views were changed, by which their state was to be changed, and by which they were to stand in a new relation to Jesus Christ. This brings us to "the obedience of faith." From the time the proclamation of God’s philanthropy was first made, there was an act of obedience proposed in it by which the believers in the proclamation were put in actual possession of its blessings, and by conformity to which act a change of state ensued. To perceive what this act of faith is, it must be remarked that where there is no command there can be no obedience. These are correlate terms. A message or proclamation which has not a command in it, cannot be obeyed. But the gospel can be obeyed or disobeyed, and therefore in it there is a command. Lest any person should hesitate in a matter of such importance, we will prove, ======================================================================== CHAPTER 103: 03.51. REMISSION OF SINS - PROPOSITION 08 ======================================================================== PROP. VIII.--The gospel has in it a command, and as such must be obeyed. And here I need only ask, Who are they who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord? Paul replies, ’They who know not God, and obey not the gospel of his Son.’29 To ’obey the gospel,’ and to ’become obedient to the faith,’ were common phrases in the apostolic discourses and writings. ’By whom we have received apostleship, in order to the obedience of faith in all nations, on account of his name.’30 ’By the commandment of the everlasting God, the gospel is made known to all nations for the obedience of faith.’31 ’A great company of the priests became obedient to the faith’ 32 ’But they have not all obeyed the gospel;’33 and, ’What shall be the end of them who obey not the gospel’?34 From these sayings it is unquestionably plain, that either the gospel itself, taken as a whole, is a command, or that in it there is a command through the obedience of which salvation is enjoyed. The obedience of the gospel is called the obedience of faith compared with the obedience of law. Faith in God’s promise through Jesus Christ being the principle from which obedience flows. To present the gospel in the form of a command is an act of favor, because it engages the will and the affections of men, and puts it in their power to have an assurance of their salvation from which they would be necessarily excluded if no such act of obedience were enjoyed. Whatever the act of faith may be, it necessarily becomes the line of discrimination between the two states before described. On this side, and on that, mankind are in quite different states. On the one side they are pardoned, justified, sanctified, reconciled, adopted and saved: on the other, they are in a state of condemnation. This act is sometimes called immersion, regeneration, conversion; and, that this act may appear obvious to all, we shall be at some pains to confirm and illustrate it. That a relation or a state can be changed by an act, I need scarcely at this time attempt to prove; especially to those who know that the act of marriage, of naturalization, adoption, and their being born, changes the state of the subject of such acts. But, rather than attempt to prove that a state is or may be changed by an act, I should rather ask if any person has heard, knows, or can conceive of a state being changed without some act? This point, being conceded to us by all the rational, we presume not to prove. But a question may arise whether faith itself, or an act of obedience to some command or institution, is that act by which our state is changed. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 104: 03.52. REMISSION OF SINS - PROPOSITION 09 ======================================================================== PROP. IX.--That it is not faith, but an act resulting from faith, which changes our state, we shall now attempt to prove. No relation in which we stand to the material world--no political relation, or relation to society, can be changed by believing, apart from the acts to which that belief, or faith, induces us. Faith never made an American citizen, though it may have been the cause of many thousands migrating to this continent, and ultimately becoming citizens of these United States. Faith never made a man a husband, a father, a son, a brother, a master, a servant, though it may have been essentially necessary to all these relations, as a cause, or principle preparatory, or tending thereunto.--Thus, when in scripture men are said to be justified by faith, or to receive any blessing through faith, it is because faith is the principle of action, and, as such, the cause of those acts by which such blessings are enjoyed. But the principle without those acts is nothing; and it is only by the acts which it induces to perform, that it becomes the instrument of any blessings to man. Many blessings are metonymically ascribed to faith in the sacred writings. We are said to be justified, sanctified, and purified by faith--to walk by faith, and to live by faith, etc. etc. But these sayings, as qualified by the Apostles, mean no more than by believing the truth of God we have access into all these blessings. So that as Paul explains, ’By faith we have access into the favor in which we stand.’ These words he uses on two occasions,35 when speaking of the value of this principle, contrasted with the principle of law; and in his letter to the Hebrews, when he brings up his cloud of witnesses to the excellency of this principle, he shows that by it the ancients obtained a high reputation--that is, as he explain, by their acts of faith in obedience to God’s commands. That faith by itself neither justifies, sanctifies, nor purifies, is admitted by those who oppose immersion for the forgiveness of sins. They all include the idea of the blood of Christ. And yet they seem not to perceive, that, in objecting to immersion as necessary to forgiveness in connection with faith, their own arguments preclude them from connecting the blood of Christ with faith. If they admit that faith, apart from the blood of Christ, cannot obtain pardon, they admit all that is necessary to prove them inconsistent with themselves in opposing immersion for the remission of sins; or immersion, as that act by which our state is changed. The Apostle Peter, when first publishing the gospel to the Jews, taught them that they were not forgiven their sins by faith; but by an act of faith, by a believing immersion into the Lord Jesus. That this may appear evident to all, we shall examine his Pentecostian address, and his Pentecostian hearers. Peter now holding the keys of the kingdom of Jesus, and speaking under the commission of converting the world, and by the authority of the Lord Jesus; guided, inspired, and accompanied by the Spirit--may be expected to speak the truth, the whole truth, plainly and intelligibly, to his brethren the Jews. He had that day declared the gospel facts, and proved the resurrection and ascension of Jesus to the conviction of thousands. They believed and repented--believed that Jesus was the Messiah, had died as a sin-offering, was risen from the dead, and crowned Lord of all. Being full of this faith, they inquired of Peter and the other Apostles what they ought to do to obtain remission. They were informed, that though they now believed and repented, they were not pardoned; but must ’reform and be immersed for the remission of sins.’ Immersion for the forgiveness of sins, was the command addressed to these believers, to these penitents, in answer to the most earnest question; and by one of the most sincere, candid, and honest speakers ever heard. This act of faith was presented as that act by which a change in their state could be effected; or, in other words, by which alone they could be pardoned. They who ’gladly received this word were that day immersed;’ or, in other words, the same day were converted, or regenerated, or obeyed the gospel. Those expressions, in the Apostle’s style, when applied to persons coming into the kingdom, denote the same act, as will be perceived from the various passages in the writings of Luke and Paul. This testimony, when the speaker, the occasion, and the congregations are all taken into view, is itself alone sufficient to establish the point in support of which we have adduced it. But the second discourse, recorded by Luke from the lips of the same Peter, pronounced in Solomon’s Portico, is equally pointed, clear, and full in support of this position. After he had explained the miracles which he had wrought in the name of the Lord Jesus, and stated the same gospel facts, he proclaims the same command--"Reform and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out;" or, "Reform and turn to God, that so your sins may be blotted out; that season of refreshment from the presence of the Lord may come, and that he may send Jesus whom the heavens must receive till the accomplishment of all the things which God has foretold," etc. Peter, in substituting other terms in this proclamation, for those used on Pentecost, does not preach a new gospel, but the same gospel in terms equally strong. He uses the same word in the first part of the command, which he used on Pentecost. Instead of "be immersed," he has here "be converted," or "turn to God;" instead of "for the remission of your sins," here it is, "that your sins may be blotted out;" and instead of "you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit," here it is, "that seasons of refreshment from the presence of the Lord may come."36 On Pentecost, it was, 1st. "Reform." 2d. "Be immersed." 3d. "For the remission of sins." And 4th. "You shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." In Solomon’s Portico, it was, 1st. "Reform." 2d. "Be converted." 3d. "That your sins may be blotted out." And 4th. "That seasons of refreshment from the presence of the Lord may come;" that "you may have righteousness, peace, and joy in a holy spirit." So read the different clauses in those two discourses to the Jews, expressive of the same acts. There is yet, in this discourse in the Portico, a very strong expression, declarative of the same gracious connection between immersion and remission. It is the last period in the discourse. "Unto you, first, brethren of the Jews, God having raised up his Son Jesus, sent him to bless you, every one of you, in the act of turning from your iniquities;" or, as we would say, in the act of conversion. Why the Apostle Peter should have used "converted," or "turning to God," instead of "be immersed," is, to the candid and unprejudiced reader of this narrative, very plain. After Pentecost, the disciples immersed on that day, having turned to God through Jesus, were spoken of by their brethren as discipled or converted to Jesus. The unbelieving Jews, soon after Pentecost, knew the disciples called the immersed "converted;" and immersion being the act of faith which drew the line of demarcation between Christians and Jews, nothing could be more natural than to call the act of immersion the converting of a Jew. The time intervening between these discourses was long enough to introduce and familiarize this style in the metropolis; so that when a Christian said, "Be converted," or "Turn to God," every Jew knew, the act of putting on the Messiah to be that intended. After the immersion of some Gentiles into the faith, in the house and neighborhood of Cornelius, it was reported that the Gentiles were converted to God. Thus, the Apostles in passing through the country, gave great joy to the disciples from among the Jews, "telling them of the conversion" or immersion of the Gentiles.37 Indeed, in a short time it was a summary way of representing the faith, reformation, and immersion of disciples, by using one word for all. Thus, "All the inhabitants of Sharon and Lydda turned," or "were converted, to the Lord."38 While on the subject of conversion, we shall adduce, as fourth testimony, the words of the Lord Jesus to Paul, when he called him. Paul is introduced by Luke in the Acts, telling what the Lord said to him when he received his apostleship. "I send you Paul, by the faith that respects me, to open their eyes; to turn or convert them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God; that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and an inheritance among the saved."39 Every thing to be accomplished among the Gentiles was to be effected by the faith or truth in Christ. The Saviour connected that with opening their eyes; their conversion from the ignorance and tyranny of sin and Satan; their forgiveness of sins; and finally, an inheritance among the saved or sanctified. First, faith or illumination; then, conversion; then, remission of sins; then, the inheritance. All these testimonies concur with each other in preaching the act of faith--Christian immersion, frequently called conversion, as that act, inseparably connected with the remission of sins; or that change of state, of which we have already spoken. One reason why we would arrest the attention of the reader to the substitution of the terms convert and conversion, for immerse and immersion, in the apostolic discourses and in the sacred writings, is not so much for the purpose of proving that the forgiveness of sins, or a change of state, is necessarily connected with the act of faith called "Christian immersion:" as it is to fix the minds of the biblical students upon a very important fact, viz.; that no person is altogether discipled to Christ until he is immersed. It is true, that this view of the matter bears strongly upon the question; but it bears upon other great matters pertaining to the present and ancient order of things. Discovering that much depends upon having correct views on this point, we have carefully examined all those passages where "conversion" either in the common version, or in the new version, or in the original, occurs; and have found a uniformity in the use of this term, and its compounds and derivatives, which warrants the conclusion, that no person was said to be converted until he was immersed; and that all persons who were immersed were said to be converted. If any apostatized, and were again converted, it was in that sense in which our Lord applied the word to Peter, "When you are converted, strengthen your brethren," or, as James used it in his letter when he said, "If any of you err from the truth, and one convert him, let him know that he who converts a transgressor from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and hide a multitude of sins." The commission for converting the world teaches that immersion was necessary to discipleship; for Jesus said, "Convert the nations, immersing them into the name," etc., and "teaching them to observe," etc. The construction of the sentence fairly indicates that no person can be a disciple, according to the commission, who has not been immersed: for the active participle in connection with an imperative, either declares the manner in which the imperative shall be obeyed, or explains the meaning of the command. To this I have not found an exception:--for example.-- "Cleanse the house, sweeping it." "Cleanse the garment, washing it," shows the manner in which the command is to be obeyed, or explains the meaning of it. Thus, "Convert (or disciple) the nations, immersing them, and teaching them to observe," etc., expresses the manner in which the command is to be obeyed. If the Apostles had only preached and not immersed, they would not have converted the hearers according to the commission: and if they had immersed, and not taught them to observe the commands of the Saviour, they would have been transgressors. A disciple, then, according to the commission, is one that has heard the gospel, believed it, and has been immersed. A disciple, indeed, is one that continues in keeping the commandments of Jesus.40 ======================================================================== CHAPTER 105: 03.53. REMISSION OF SINS - PROPOSITION 10 ======================================================================== PROP. X.--I now proceed to show that immersion and washing of regeneration are two Bible names for the same act, contemplated in two different points of view. The term regeneration occurs but twice in the common version of the New Testament, and not once in the Old Testament. The first is Matthew 19:28. "You that have followed me in the regeneration, when the Son of Man shall sit on the throne of his glory, you also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel." Dr. George Campbell, following the punctuation adopted by Griesbach, and substituting the word renovation instead of regeneration, renders it, "That, at the renovation, when the Son of Man shall be seated on his glorious throne, you, my followers, sitting also upon twelve thrones," etc. Genesis, being the term used for creation, palingenesia, denotes the new creation--either literally at the resurrection of the dead, or figuratively at the commencement of the Christian era, or at the commencement of the Millennium. Josephus, the Jew, called the return of Israel to their own land and institution, "The Regeneration" or "Palingenesia." No writer of any note, critic or expositor, supposes that regeneration in Matthew 19:1-30 : applies to what is, in theology, called the new birth, or regeneration of the soul--not even the Presbyterian Matthew Henry, nor Dr. Whitby, Campbell, Macknight, Thompson; nor, indeed, any writer we recollect ever to have read. Regeneration in this passage denotes a state, a new state of things. In the same sense we often use the term. The American revolution was the regeneration of the country or the government. The commencement of the Christian era was a regeneration--so will be the creation of the new Heavens and new Earth. As this is so plain a matter, and so generally admitted, we proceed to the second occurrence of this term. "God saved us by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Spirit."41 God has saved us through the bath of regeneration, and the renewing of the Holy Spirit. This is the second time the word regeneration is found in the New Testament; and here it is conceded by the most learned Paidobaptists and Baptists, that it refers to immersion. Though I have been led to this conclusion from my views of the Christian religion, yet I neither hold it myself, nor justify it to others on this account. I choose rather to establish it by other testimonies than by those who agree with me in the import of this institution. Among these I shall place Dr. James Macknight, formerly prolocutor or moderator of the Presbyterian church of Scotland, and translator of the Apostolic Epistles. One of his notes upon Titus 3:5, is in the following words:--"Through the bath of regeneration." "Through baptism, called the bath of regeneration, not because any change in nature" (but I would not say in the state) "of the baptized person is produced by baptism; but because it is an emblem of the purification of his soul from sin." He then quotes in proof, (Acts 22:16.) "Arise, and be immersed, and wash thee from thy sins."--Paul. He supports this view also from Ephesians 5:26, and John 3:5. "The bath of regeneration," is then according to this learned Paidobaptist, Christian immersion. Parkhurst, in his Lexicon, upon the word loutron, connects the same phrase, the washing or bath of regeneration, with Ephesians 5:26, and John 3:5, as alluding to immersion. So say all the critics, one by one, as far as I know. Even Matthew Henry, the good and venerable Presbyterian commentator, concedes this point also, and quotes Ephesians 5:26, Acts 22:16, and Matthew 28:19-20, in support of the conclusion that the washing of regeneration refers to baptism. Our opponents themselves being judges, we have gained this point, viz., that the only time that the phrase washing of regeneration occurs in the New Testament, with reference to a personal change, it means, or is equivalent to, immersion. Washing of regeneration and immersion, are therefore only two names for the same thing. Although I might be justified in proceeding to another topic, and in supposing this point to be fully established, I choose rather, for the sake of the slow to apprehend, to fortify this conclusion by some other testimonies and arguments. As regeneration is taught to be equivalent to "being born again," and understood to be of the same import with a new birth, we shall examine it under this metaphor. For if immersion be equivalent to regeneration, and regeneration be of the same import with being born again, then being born again and being immersed are the same thing; for this plain reason, that things which are equal to the same thing, are equal to one another. All must admit, that no person can be born again of that which he receives. For as no person is born naturally--so no person can be born again, or born metaphorically--of that which he receives. It destroys the idea, the figure, the allusion, and every thing else which authorizes the application of these words to any change which takes place in man, to suppose that the subject of the new birth, or regeneration, is born again of something which he has received. This single remark shows the impropriety, and inaccuracy of thought; or, perhaps, the want of thought which the popular notions of regeneration sanction and sanctify. In being born naturally there is the begetter, and that which is begotten. These are not the same. The act of being born is different from that which is born. Now the Scriptures carry this figure through every prominent point of coincidence. There is the begetter. "Of his own will he hath begotten or impregnated us;" says James the Apostle. "By the word of truth," as the incorruptible seed; or, as Peter says, "We are born again, not from corruptible, but from incorruptible seed, the word of God which endureth forever." But when the act of being born is spoken of, then the water is introduced. Hence, before we come into the kingdom we are born of water. The Spirit of God is the begetter, the gospel is the seed; and being thus begotten and quickened, we are born of the water. A child is alive before it is born, and the act of being born only changes its state, not its life. Just so in the metaphorical birth. Persons are begotten by the Spirit of God, impregnated by the word, and born of the water. In one sense a person is born of his father; but not until he is first born of his mother. So in every place where water and the Spirit, or water and the Word, are spoken of, the water stands first. Every child is born of its father, when it is born of its mother. Hence the Saviour put the mother first, and the Apostles follow him. No other reason can be assigned for placing the water first. How uniform this style! Jesus says to Nicodemus, "You must be born again, or you cannot discern the reign of God." Born again! What means this? "Nicodemus, unless you are born of water and the Spirit you cannot enter into the Kingdom of God." So Paul speaks to the Ephesians 5:26, "He cleansed the church," or the disciples, "by a bath of water, and the Word." And to Titus he says, "He saved the disciples by the bath of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Spirit." Now, as soon as, and not before, a disciple, who has been begotten of God, is born of water, he is born of God, or of the Spirit. Regeneration is, therefore, the act of being born.42 Hence its connection always with water. Reader, reflect--what a jargon, what a confusion, have the mystic doctors made of this metaphorical expression, and of this topic of regeneration. To call the receiving of any spirit, or any influence, or energy, or any operation upon the heart of man, regeneration, is an abuse of all speech, as well as a departure from the diction of the Holy Spirit, who calls nothing personal regeneration, except the act of immersion.43 Some curious criticisms have been offered, to escape the force of the plain declaration of Jesus and his Apostles, upon this subject. Some say, that the words, "Except a man be born of water and Spirit," are not to be understood literally. Surely, then, if to be born of water does not mean to be born of water, to be born of the Spirit must mean something else than to be born of the Spirit. This is so fanatical and extravagant as to need no other exposure. He who cannot see the propriety of calling immersion a being born again, can see no propriety in any metaphor in common use. A resurrection is a new birth. Jesus is said to be the first born from the dead; because the first who rose from the dead to die no more. And, surely, there is no abuse of speech, but the greatest propriety in saying, that he who has died to sin, and been buried in water, when raised up again out of that element, is born again or regenerated. If Jesus was born again, when he came out of a sepulchre, surely he is born again who is raised up out of the grave of waters. Those who are thus begotten and born of God, are children of God. It would be monstrous supposition, that such persons are not freed from their sins. To be born of God, and born in sin, is conceivable. Remission of sins is as certainly granted to "the born of God," as life eternal, and deliverance from corruption, will be granted to the children of the resurrection, when born from the grave. To illustrate what has, we presume to say, been now proved, we shall consider political regeneration. Though the term regeneration is laxly employed in this association; yet, by such a license of speech, we may illustrate this subject to the apprehension of all. Yes, the whole subject of faith, change of heart, regeneration, and character. All the civilized nations and kingdoms have constitutions; and in their constitutions they have declared who are members of the social compact. Besides those who compose the community at the time a constitution is adopted, they say who shall participate its blessings in all time coming; that is, who shall be admitted into it, and by what means they shall become members of it. They have always decreed that their own posterity shall inherit their political rights and immunities. But they have, also ordained that foreigners; that is, members of other communities, may become, by adoption, or naturalization, citizens, or fellow members of the same community. But they have, in their wisdom and benevolence, instituted a rite or form of adoption, which form has much meaning; and which when submitted to, changes the state of the subject of it. Now, as the Saviour consented to be called a King, and to call the community over which he presides a Kingdom, it was because of the analogy between these human institutions and his institution; and for the purpose not of confounding, but of aiding the human mind in apprehending and comprehending the great object of his mission to the world. And it is worthy of the most emphatic attention, that it was WHEN SPEAKING OF A KINGDOM, HE SPOKE OF BEING BORN AGAIN. Yes, on that occasion, and on that occasion only, when he spoke of entering into his kingdom, did he speak of the necessity of BEING BORN AGAIN. And had he not chosen that figure he would not have chosen the figure of a new birth. With these facts and circumstances before us let us examine political regeneration as the best conceivable illustration of religious regeneration. A. B. was born in the island of Great Britain, a native subject of George III. king of Great Britain. He was much attached to his native island, to the people, the manner and customs of his ancestors and kinsmen. With all these attachments still increasing, he grew up to manhood. Then he heard the report of this good land, of this large, fertile, and most desirable country. The country, the people, and the government, were represented to him in the most favorable light. Sometimes these representations were exaggerated; but still he could separate the truth from the fable: and was fully persuaded not only of the existence of these United States, but also of the eligibility of being a citizen thereof. He believed the testimony which he heard, resolved to expatriate himself from the land of his nativity, to imperil life and property, putting himself aboard of a ship, and bidding adieu to all the companions of his youth, his kinsmen, and dear friends. So full was his conviction, and so strong his faith, that old Neptune and King Eolus, with all their terrors could not appal him. He sailed from his native shores, and landed on this continent. He was, however, ignorant of many things pertaining to this new country, and government; and on his arrival, asked for the rights and immunities of a citizen. He was told, that the civil rights of hospitality to a stranger could be extended to him as a friendly alien; but not one of the rights, or immunities of a citizen could be his, unless he were born again. "Born again!" said he, in a disappointed tone to Columbus, with whom he had his first conversation on the subject. "What do you mean by being born again?" Columbus.--You must be naturalized, or adopted as a citizen; or, what we call born again. A. B.--I do not understand you. How can a man be born when he is grown? Col.--That which is born of Great Britain is British, and that which is born of America is American. If, then, you would be an American citizen, you must be born of America. A. B.--’Born of America!’ You astonish me. I have come to America, well disposed towards the people and the country. I was once attached to England, but I became attached to the United States; and because of my faith and attachments I have come here; and will you not receive me into your kingdom because I could not help being born in England? Col.--Well disposed as I am, and we are, to receive you, most assuredly I say to you, unless you are regenerated in a court-house, and been enfranchised by and before the judges, you can never become a citizen of these United States. A. B.--Yours is an arbitrary and despotic government. What airs of sovereignty you have assumed! Col.--By no means. Right, reason, wisdom, policy, and benevolence for you; as well as the safety, dignity, and happiness of the whole community, require that every alien shall be naturalized, or made a citizen, before he exercise or enjoy the rights of a citizen. A. B.--You are certainly arbitrary--if not in the thing itself, of regeneration--in the place and manner in which it shall be done. Why, for instance, say that it must be done in a court-house? Col.--I will tell you; because there are the judges, the records, and the seal of the government. A. B.--I understand you. Well, tell me, how is a man born again? Tell me plainly and without a figure. Col.--With pleasure. You were born of your mother and of your father, when you were born in England; and you were born legitimately, according to the institutions of England. Well, then, you were born of England, as well as born in it; and were, therefore, wholly English. This was your first birth. But you have expatriated yourself, as your application here proves--I say sentimentally you have expatriated yourself; but we must have a formal solemn pledge of your renunciation; and we will give you a formal pledge of your adoption. You must, ex animo, in the presence of the Judges and the Recorders, renounce all allegiance to every foreign prince and potentate, and especially to His Majesty the King of Great Britain. A. B.--Is that the thing? I can, with all my heart, renounce all political allegiance to every foreign prince and government. Is that all? I have, then, no objection to that. Col.--There is this also:--You are not only to renounce all political allegiance; but you must also, from the soul, solemnly vow, in the presence of the same Judges and Recorders, that you will adopt and submit to the constitution and government of these United States. A. B.--I can do that also. I can renounce, and I can adopt; nor do I object to the place where it shall be done. But, pray, what solemn pledge will you give me! Col.--So soon as you have vowed renunciation and adoption in the presence of the Judges and Recorders, we will give you a certificate, with a red seal, the seal of the state, attached to it; stating that you, having now been naturalized, or born according to our institutions, are born of America; and are now a son, an adopted son, of America, And that red seal indicates that the blood, the best blood of this government, will be shed for you, to protect you and defend you; and that your life will, when called for, be cheerfully given up for your mother, of whom you have been politically born; as it would have been for your own natural political mother, of whom you were first born. A. B.--To this I must subscribe. In my mother tongue it all means that I give myself up politically to this government, and it gives itself up to me, before witnesses too. How soon, pray, after this new birth may I exercise and enjoy all the rights of a citizen? Col.--They are yours the first breath you breathe under your new mother. It is true, we have not, in these United States, any symbol through which a person is politically regenerated. We only ask a solemn pledge, and give one. Some nations have symbols. But we understand that the moment the vow is taken, the person is politically born again. And as every other child has all the rights of a child which it can exercise, so soon as it inhales the air; so have all our political children all political rights, so soon as the form of naturalization is consummated. But, remember, not till then. A. B.--You say some nations had their symbols. What do you mean by these? Col.--I mean that the naturalized had to submit to some emblematic rite, by which they were symbolically detached from every other people, and introduced among those who adopted them, and whom they adopted. The Indian nations wash all whom they adopt in a running stream, and impose this task upon their females. The Jews circumcised and washed all whom they admitted to the rights of their institutions. Other customs and forms have obtained in other nations; but we regard simply the meaning of the thing, and have no symbol. A. B.--In this I feel but little interested. I wish to become a citizen of these United States; especially as I am informed I can have no inheritance among you, nor a voice in the nation, nor any immunity, unless I am born again. Col.--You must, then, submit to the institution; and I know that as soon as you are politically born again, you will feel more of the importance and utility of this institution than you now can; and will be just as anxious as I am to see others submit to this wise, wholesome, and benevolent institution. A. B.--As my faith brought me to your shores, and as I approve your constitution and government, I will not (now that I understand your institutions) suffer an opportunity to pass. I will direct my course to the place where I can be born again. I ought here to offer an apology for a phrase occurring frequently in this essay and in this dialogue. When we represent the subject of immersion as active, either in so many words or impliedly, we so far depart from that style which comports with the figure of "being born." For all persons are passive in being born. So, in immersion, the subject buries not himself, raises not himself; but is buried and raised by another. So that in the act the subject is always passive. And it is of that act alone of which we thus speak. From all that has been said on regeneration, and from the illustration just now adduced, the following conclusions must, we think, be apparent to all:-- First. Begetting and quickening necessarily precede being born. Second. Being born imparts no new life; but is simply a change of state, and introduces into a new mode of living. Third. Regeneration, or immersion--the former referring to the import of the act, and the latter term to the act itself--denote only the act of being born. Fourth. God, or the Spirit of God, being the author of the whole institution, imparting to it its life and efficiency, is the begetter, in the fullest sense of that term. Yet, in a subordinate sense, every one skilful in the word of God, who converts another, may be said to have begotten him whom he enlightens. So Paul says, ’I have begotten Onesimus in my bonds:’--and ’I have begotten you, Corinthians, through the gospel.’ Fifth. The gospel is declared to be the seed;--the power and strength of the Holy Spirit to impart life. Sixth. And the great argument, pertinent to our object, in this long examination of conversion and regeneration, is that which we conceive to the most apparent of all other conclusions, viz:--that remission of sins, or coming into a state of acceptance, being one of the present immunities of the Kingdom of Heaven, cannot be scripturally enjoyed by any person before immersion. As soon can a person be a citizen before he is born, or have the immunities of an American citizen while an alien; as one enjoy the privileges of a son of God before he is born again. For Jesus expressly declares, that he has not given the privilege of sons to any but those born of God.44 If, then, the present forgiveness of sins be a privilege, and a right of those under the new constitution, in the kingdom of Jesus; and if being born again, or being born of water and of the Spirit, is necessary to admission; and if being born of water means immersion, as clearly proved by all witnesses; then, remission of sins cannot, in this life, be constitutionally enjoyed previous to immersion. If there be any proposition regarding any item of the Christian institution, which admits a clearer proof, or fuller illustration than this one, I have yet to learn where it may be found. But before we dismiss the sixth evidence, which embraces so many items, I beg leave to make a remark or two on the propriety of considering the term "immersion," as equivalent to the term "conversion." "Conversion" is, on all sides, understood to be a turning to God. Not a thinking favorably of God, nor a repenting for former misdeeds; but an actual turning to God, in word and in deed. It is true, that no person can be said to turn to God, whose mind is not enlightened, and whose heart is not well disposed towards God. All human actions, not resulting from previous thought or determination, are rather the actions of a machine, than the action of a rational being. "He that comes to God," or turns to him, "must believe that God exists, and that he is a rewarder of every one who diligently seeks him." Then he will seek and find the Lord. An "external conversion" is no conversion at all. A turning to God with the lips, while the heart is far from him, is mere pretence and mockery. But though I never thought any thing else since I thought upon religion; I understand the "turning to God," taught in the New Institution, to be a coming to the Lord Jesus--not a thinking about doing it, nor a repenting that we have not done it;--but an actual coming to him. The question then is, Where shall we find him? Where shall we meet him? No where on earth but in his institutions. "Where he records his name," there alone can he be found; for there only has he promised to be found. I affirm, then, that the first institution, in which we can meet with God, is, the institution for remission. And here it is worthy of notice, that the Apostles, in all their speeches and replies to interrogatories, never commanded an inquirer to pray, read or sing, as preliminary to coming; but always commanded and proclaimed immersion as the first duty, or the first thing to be done, after a belief of the testimony. Hence, neither praying, singing, reading, repenting, sorrowing, resolving, nor waiting to be better, was the converting act. Immersion alone was the act of turning to God. Hence, in the commission to convert the nations, the only institution mentioned after proclaiming the gospel, was the immersion of the believers, as the divinely authorized way of carrying out and completing the work. And from the day of Pentecost to the final Amen in the revelation of Jesus Christ, no person was said to be converted, or to turn to God, until he was buried and raised up out of the water. If it were not to treat this subject as one of doubtful disputation, I would say, that had there not been some act, such as immersion agreed on all hands, to be the medium of remission and the act of conversion and regeneration; the Apostles could not, with any regard to truth and consistency, have addressed the disciples as pardoned, justified, sanctified, reconciled, adopted, and saved persons. If all this had depended upon some mental change, as faith; they could never have addressed their congregations in any other way than as the moderns do: and that is always the language of doubt and uncertainty--hoping a little, and fearing much. This mode of address and the modern compared, is proof positive, that they viewed the immersed through one medium, and we through another. They taught as the disciples to consider not only themselves as saved persons; but all whom they saw, or knew to be immersed into the Lord Jesus. They saluted every one, of his coming out of the water, as saved, and recorded him as such. Luke writes, "The Lord added the saved daily to the congregation."45 Whenever a child is born into a family, it is a brother or a sister to all other children of the family; and its being born of the same parents, is the act causative and declarative of its fraternity. All is mental and invisible before coming out of the water; and as immersion is the first act commanded, and the first constitutional act; so it was in the commission, the act by which the Apostles were commanded to turn or convert those to God, who believed their testimony. In this sense, then, it is the converting act. No man can, scripturally, be said to be converted to God until he is immersed. How ecclesiastics interpret their own language is no concern of ours. We contend for the pure speech, and for the apostolic ideas attached to it. To resume the direct testimonies declarative of the remission of sins by immersion, we turn to the Gentiles. Peter was sent to the house of Cornelius to tell him and his family "words by which they might be saved." He tells these words. He was interrupted by the miraculous descent of the Holy Spirit. But it is to be noticed, that the testimony, to which the Holy Spirit there affixed its seal, was the following words:--"To him gave all the prophets witness, that every one who believes on him shall receive remission of sins by his name." While speaking these words, concerning remission of sins by, or through his name, the Holy Spirit in its marvellous gifts of tongues, fell upon them. Many, seeing so much stress laid upon faith or belief, suppose that all blessings flow from it immediately. This is a great mistake. Faith, indeed, is the principle, and the distinguishing principle of this economy: but it is only the principle of action. Hence, we find the name, or person of Christ always interposed between faith and the cure, mental or corporeal. The woman who touched the tuft of the mantle of Jesus had as much faith before as after; but though her faith was the cause of her putting forth her hand, and accompanied it; she was not cured until the touch. That great type of Christ, the brazen serpent, cured no Israelite simply by faith. The Israelites, as soon as they were bitten, believed it would cure them. But yet they were not cured as soon as bitten; nor until they looked to the serpent. It was one thing to believe that looking at the serpent would cure them; and another to look at it. It was the faith, remotely; but, immediately, the look, which cured them. It was not faith in the waters of Jordan that healed the leprosy of Naaman the Syrian. It was immersing himself in it, according to the commandment. It was not faith in the pool of Siloam that cured the blind man, whose eyes Jesus anointed with clay; it was his washing his eyes in Siloam’s water. Hence, the imposition of hands, or a word, or a touch, or a shadow, or something from the persons of those anointed with the Holy Spirit, was the immediate cause of all the cures recorded in the New Testament. It is true, also, that without faith it is impossible to be healed; for in some places Jesus could not work many miracles, because of their unbelief. It is so in all the moral remedies and cures. It is impossible to receive the remission of sins without faith. In this world of means, (however it may be in a world where there are no means) it is as impossible to receive any blessing through faith without the appointed means. Both are indispensable. Hence, the name of the Lord Jesus is interposed between faith and forgiveness, justification and sanctification, even where immersion into that name is not detailed. It would have been unprecedented in the annals of the world, for the historian always to have recorded all the circumstances of the same institution, on every allusion to it; and it would have been equally so far the Apostles to have mentioned it always in the same words. Thus, in the passage before us, the name of the Lord is only mentioned. So in the first letter to the Corinthians, the disciples are represented as saved, as washed, as justified, sanctified by the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God. The frequent interposition of the name of the Lord between faith and forgiveness, justification, sanctification, etc., is explained in a remark in James’ speech in Jerusalem.46 It is the application of an ancient prophecy, concerning the conversion of the Gentiles. The Gentiles are spoken of as turning to, or seeking the Lord. But who them are thus converted? "Even all the Gentiles upon whom my name is called." It is, then, to those upon whom the name of the Lord is called, that the name of the Lord communicates remission, justification, etc. Some captious spirits need to be reminded, that as they sometimes find forgiveness, justification, sanctification, etc., ascribed to grace, to the blood of Christ, to the name of the Lord, without an allusion to faith; so we sometimes find faith, and grace, and the blood of Christ, without an allusion to water. Now, if they have any reason and right to say, that faith is understood in the one case; we have the same reason and right to say, that water or immersion is understood in the other. For their argument is, that in sundry places this matter is made plain enough. This is, also, our argument--in sundry places this matter is made plain enough. This single remark cuts off all their objections drawn from the fact, that immersion is not always found in every place where the name of the Lord, or faith is found connected with forgiveness. Neither is grace, the blood of Christ, nor faith, always mentioned with forgiveness. When they find a passage where remission of sins is mentioned without immersion, it is weak, or unfair, in the extreme, to argue from that, that forgiveness can be enjoyed without immersion. IF THEIR LOGIC BE WORTH ANY THING, IT WILL PROVE, THAT A MAN MAY BE FORGIVEN WITHOUT GRACE, THE BLOOD OF JESUS, AND WITHOUT FAITH: FOR WE CAN FIND PASSAGES, MANY PASSAGES, WHERE REMISSION, OR JUSTIFICATION, SANCTIFICATION, OR SOME SIMILAR TERM, OCCURS, AND NO MENTION OF EITHER GRACE, FAITH, OR THE BLOOD OF JESUS. As this is the pith, the marrow, and fatness, of all the logic of our most ingenious opponents on this subject, I wish I could make it more emphatic than by printing it in capitals. I know some editors, some of our Doctors of Divinity, some of our most learned declaimers, who make this argument, which we unhesitatingly call a genuine sophism, the Alpha and the Omega of their speeches against the meaning, and indispensable importance of Christian immersion. The New Testament would have been a curious book, if, every time remission of sins was mentioned or alluded to, it had been preceded by grace, faith, the blood of Jesus, immersion, etc., etc. But now the question comes, which, to the rational, is the emphatic question--WHETHER DO THEY THINK, BELIEVE, TEACH, AND PRACTICE MORE WISELY AND MORE SAFELY, WHO THINK, BELIEVE, AND TEACH, THAT GRACE, FAITH, THE BLOOD OF JESUS, THE NAME OF THE LORD, AND IMMERSION, ARE ALL ESSENTIAL TO IMMEDIATE PARDON AND ACCEPTANCE;--OR THEY WHO SAY, THAT FAITH ONLY, GRACE ONLY, THE BLOOD OF CHRIST ONLY, THE NAME OF THE LORD ONLY--AND IMMERSION NOT AT ALL? To all men, women, and children, of common sense, this question is submitted. It is, however, to me admirable, that the remission of sins should be, not merely unequivocally, but so repeatedly declared through immersion, as it is in the apostolic writings. And here I would ask the whole thinking community, one by one, whether, if the whole race of men had been assembled on Pentecost, or in Solomon’s portico, and had asked Peter the same question, which the convicted proposed, would he, or would he not, have given them the same answer? Would he not have told the whole race to reform, and be immersed for the remission of their sins? or, to reform and be converted, that their sins might be blotted out?--to arise and be immersed, and wash away their sins? If he would not, let them give a reason; and if they say he would, let them assign a reason why they do not go and do likewise. Some have objected against the "seasons of refreshment," or the comforts of the Holy Spirit being placed subsequent to "conversion," or "regeneration," or "immersion;" (for when we speak scripturally, we must use these terms as all referring to the same thing,) because the gifts of the Holy Spirit were poured out upon the Gentiles before immersion. They see not the design of thus welcoming the Gentiles into the kingdom. They forget the comparison of the Gentiles to a returning prodigal, and his father going out to meet him, even while he was yet a good way off. God had welcomed the first fruits of the Jews into his kingdom, by a stupendous display of spiritual gifts, called the baptism of the Holy Spirit, before any one of the Jews had been immersed into the Lord Jesus. And, as Peter explains this matter in Cornelius’s case, it appears that God determined to make no difference between the Jews and Gentiles in receiving them into his kingdom. Hence, says Peter, "he gave them the same gift which he gave to us Jews at the beginning," (never since Pentecost.) Thus Peter was authorized to command those Gentiles to be immersed by the authority of the Lord, no man daring to forbid it. But these gifts of the Holy Spirit, differed exceedingly from the seasons of refreshment, from the righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, the common enjoyment of all who were immersed into the name of the Lord Jesus for the remission of sins.47 Let it be noted here, as pertinent to our present purpose, that as the Apostle Peter was interrupted by the baptism of the Holy Spirit, when he began to speak of the forgiveness by the name of the Lord Jesus; so soon as he saw the Lord had received them, he commanded them to be immersed by the authority of the Lord. And here I must propose another question to the learned and the unlearned. How comes it to pass, that though once and only once, it is commanded that the nations who believe should be immersed into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; and though we read of no person being immersed into this name in this way; I say, how comes it to pass, that all sects use these words without a scruple, and baptize or sprinkle in this name; when more than once persons are commanded to be immersed for the remission of sins, and but few of the proclaimers can be induced to immerse for the remission of sins, though so repeatedly taught and proclaimed by the Apostles? Is one command, unsupported by a single precedent, sufficient to justify this practice of Christians; and sundry commands and precedents from the same authority insufficient to authorize, or justify us in immersing for the remission of sins? Answer this who can; I cannot, upon any other principle than, that the tyrant Custom, who gives no account of his doings, has so decreed. I come now to another of the direct and positive testimonies of the Apostles, showing that immersion for the remission of sins is an institution of Jesus Christ. It is the address of Ananias to Saul: "Arise and be immersed and wash away your sins, calling upon the name of the Lord." On this testimony we have not as yet descanted in this essay. It has been mentioned, but not examined. Paul, like the Pentecostian hearers, when convinced of the truth of the pretensions of the Messiah, asked what he should do. He was commanded to go into Damascus, and it should be told him there what to do. It was told him in the words now before us. But, say some, this cannot be understood literally. For experiment, then, take it figuratively. Of what was it figurative? Of something already received? Of pardon formerly bestowed? A figure of the past?! This is anomalous. I find one writer, and but one, who converts this into a commemorative baptism, like Israel’s commemorating the escape from Egypt, or Christians commemorating the Lord’s death. And, if I do not mistake, some preacher said it was a figurative expression, similar to "This is my body!" One, whom I pressed out of all these refuges, was candid enough to say, he really did not know what it meant; but it could not mean that Paul was to "be baptized for the remission of his sins!" "To wash away sins" is a figurative expression. Like other metaphoric expressions, it puts the resemblance in place of the proper word. It necessarily means something analogous to what is said. But we are said to be washed from our sins in, or by the blood of Christ. But even "washed in blood" is a figurative expression, and means something analogous to washing in water. Perhaps we may find in another expression a means of reconciling these strong metaphors. Revelation 7:14. "They have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb." Here are two things equally incomprehensible--to wash garments white in blood, and to wash away sins in water! An efficacy is ascribed to water which it does not possess; and, as certainly, an efficacy is ascribed to blood which it does not possess. If blood can whiten or cleanse garments, certainly water can wash away sins. There is, then, a transferring of the efficacy of blood to water; and a transferring of the efficacy of water to blood. This is a plain solution of the whole matter. God has transferred, in some way, the whitening efficacy, or cleansing power of water, to blood; and the absolving or pardoning power of blood to water. This is done upon the same principle as that of accounting faith for righteousness. What a gracious institution! God has opened a fountain for sin, for moral pollution. He has given it an extension far and wide as sin has spread--far and wide as water flows. Wherever water, faith, and the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are, there will be found the efficacy of the blood of Jesus. Yes, as God first gave the efficacy of water to blood, he has now given the efficacy of blood to water. This, as was said, is figurative; but it is not a figure which misleads, for the meaning is given without a figure, viz., immersion for the remission of sins. And to him that made the washing of clay from the eyes, the washing away of blindness, it is competent to make the immersion of the body in water efficacious to the washing away of sin from the conscience. From the conscience, I say; for there its malignity is felt; and it is only in releasing the conscience from guilt, and its consequences--fear and shame, that we are released from the dominion of sin, or washed from its pollution in this world. Thus immersion, says Peter, saves us, not by cleansing the body from its filth, but the conscience from its guilt; yes, immersion saves us by burying us with Christ, raising us with him, and so our consciences are purified from dead works to serve the living God. Hence our Lord gave so much importance to immersion in giving the commission to convert the world--"He that believes and is immersed shall be saved." But, while viewing the water and blood as made to unite their powers, as certainly as Jesus came by water and blood, we ought to consider another testimony given to this gracious combination of powers, by Paul the Apostle: "Being sprinkled in heart from an evil conscience, and being washed in body with clear water."48 The application of water, the cleansing element, to the body, is made in this gracious institution to reach the conscience, as did the blood of sprinkling under the law. Some ask, How can water, which penetrates not the skin, reach the conscience? They boast of such an objection, as exhibiting great intellect, and good sense. But little do they think, that in so talking, they laugh at, and mock the whole Divine Economy, under the Old and New Institutions: for, I ask, did not the sacrifices, and Jewish purifications, some way reach the conscience of that people!! If they did not, it was all mere frivolity throughout. And can eating bread, and drinking wine, not influence nor affect the soul! And cannot the breath of one man pierce the heart of another, and so move his blood, as to make his head a fountain of tears! He, who thus objects to water, and the import of immersion, objects to the whole remedial institution, as taught by Moses and by Christ, and insults the wisdom and goodness of God in the whole scheme of salvation. And he, who objects to water, because it can only take away the filth of the flesh, ought rather to object to blood; because it rather besmears and pollutes than cleanses the body, and cannot touch the soul. But all such reasoners are foolish talkers. To submit to God’s institution is our wisdom, and our happiness. The experience of the myriads who were immersed for the remission of their sins, detailed in the Christian scriptures, to say nothing of those immersed in our times, is worth more than volumes of arguments from the lips and pens of those who can only regard, and venerate the traditions of their fathers; because it is presumed their fathers were wiser and more able to judge correctly, than their sons. But as it is not our object to quote, and expatiate upon, all the sacred testimonies, direct and allusive, to immersion for the remission of sins, we shall close the proof and illustration of this proposition with an incidental allusion to the cleansing efficacy of this institution, found in the 2d Epistle of Peter.49 After enumerating the additions to faith necessary to secure our calling and election, of which courage is the first, and charity, or universal love, the last; the Apostle says, that "he who has not these things is blind, shutting his eyes, and forgetting that he was purified from his old sins." I need not here say, that this is, perhaps, (and certainly as far as I know,) universally understood to refer to Christian immersion. The "old sins," or "former sins," can, we presume, mean no other sins than those washed away in immersion. No person has yet attempted to show that these words can import any thing else. It is one of the most unequivocal, and, because incidental, one of the most decisive proofs, that, in Peter’s judgment, all former sins were remitted in immersion. With Peter we began our proof of this position, and with Peter we shall end our proof of it. He first proclaimed reformation for the remission of sins; and in his last and farewell letters to the Christian communities, he reminds them of that purification from sin, received in, and through immersion; and in the strongest terms cautions them against forgetting that they were so purified. Were any person to reason upon the simple import of the action commanded by Jesus, I think it might be made apparent from the action itself, in its two parts, the burial and the resurrection, that it must import every thing which we have heard the Apostles ascribe to it. Corruption goes down into the grave literally; but does corruption come forth out of it? Is there no change of state in the grave? Who is it that expects to come forth from the grave in the same state in which he descends into it? The first born from the dead did not; nor shall any of them who fall asleep in him. How, then, can it be, that any person buried with Christ in immersion, can rise with Christ, and not rise in a new state!! Surely the Apostle exhorts to a new life from the change of state effected in immersion. "Since, indeed, you have risen with Christ, set your affections on things above." Walk in a new life. Again, and in the last place here--Is a child in the same state after as before its birth? Is not its state changed? And does it not live a new life, compared with its former mode of living? As new born babes desire the milk of the breast, so let the newly regenerate desire the unadulterated milk of the Word, that they may grow thereby. Call immersion, then, a new birth, a washing of regeneration, or a resurrection, and its meaning is the same. And when so denominated, it must import that change of state which is imported in putting on Christ, in being pardoned, justified, sanctified, adopted, reconciled, saved, which was the great proposition to be proved and illustrated, and which we think, has been proved and illustrated by the preceding testimonies and reflections. Though no article of Christian faith, nor item of Christian practice, can, legitimately, rest upon any testimony, reasoning or authority, out of the sacred writings of the Apostles, were it only one day after their decease; yet the views and practices, of those who were the contemporaries, or the pupils, of the Apostles and their immediate successors, may be adduced as corroborating evidence of the truths taught, and the practices enjoined, by the Apostles; and, as such, may be cited; still bearing in mind, that where the testimony of Apostles ends, Christian faith necessarily terminates. After this preliminary remark, I proceed to sustain the following proposition:-- ======================================================================== CHAPTER 106: 03.54. REMISSION OF SINS - PROPOSITION 11 ======================================================================== PROP. XI.--All the Apostolic Fathers, as they are called; all the pupils of the Apostles; and all the ecclesiastical writers of note, of the first four Christian centuries, whose writings have come down to us; allude to, and speak of, Christian immersion, as the "regeneration" and "remission of sins" spoken of in the New Testament. This proposition I shall sustain by the testimony of those who have examined all Christian antiquity, and by citing the words of those usually called the apostolic Fathers, and other distinguished writers of the first four hundred years. We shall first summon one whose name is familiar throughout Christendom. Whether the writing be genuine or spurious, it is on all hands admitted to be a fragment of the highest antiquity:-- BARNABAS, In his catholic Epistle, chapter 11: says, "Let us now inquire whether the Lord took care to manifest any thing beforehand, concerning water and the cross. Now, for the former of these, it is written to the people of Israel, how they shall not receive that baptism which brings to forgiveness of sins; but shall institute another to themselves that cannot. For thus saith the Prophet, "Be astonished, O Heavens! and let the earth tremble at it; because this people have done two great and wicked things: They have left me, the fountain of living waters, and have digged for themselves broken cisterns that can hold no water. Is my holy mountain Zion, a desolate wilderness? For she shall be as a young bird when its nest is taken away."--"Consider how he hath joined both the cross and the water together. For this he saith, "Blessed are they, who, putting their trust in the cross, descend into the water; for they shall have their reward in due time; then, saith he, will I give it them." But as concerning the present time, he saith, "Their leaves shall not fail." Meaning thereby, that every word that shall go out of your mouth, shall through faith and charity be to the conversion and hope of many. In like manner does another Prophet speak: "And the land of Jacob was the praise of all the earth;" magnifying thereby the vessels of his Spirit. And what follows? "And there was a river running on the right hand, and beautiful trees grew up by it; and he that shall eat of them shall live forever." The signification of which is this:--that we go down into the river full of sins and pollutions; but come up again bringing forth fruit; having in our hearts the fear and hope which are in Jesus by the Spirit: "And whosoever shall eat of them shall live forever." That is, whosoever shall hearken to those that call them, and shall believe, shall live forever." CLEMENT AND HERMAS. The former gives no testimony on the subject. The latter deposes as follows.50 In speaking of a tower built upon the water by which he signified the building of Christ’s church, he thus speaks:--"Hear, therefore, why the tower is built on the waters:--Because your life is saved, and shall be saved, by water." In answer to the question, "Why did the stones come up into this tower out of the deep?" he says it was necessary for them to come up by (or through) water, that they might be at rest; "for they could not otherwise enter the kingdom of God; for before any one receives the name of the Son of God, he is liable to death; but when he receives that seal, he is delivered from death and assigned to life. Now, that seal is water, into which persons go down, liable to death, but come out of it assigned to life; for which reason to these also was the seal preached; and they made use of it, that they might enter the Kingdom of God." Both Clement and Hermas wrote about the end of the first, or beginning of the second century. Hermas, moreover, deposes as follows, in another work of his, called "The Commands of Hermas."51 "And I said to him, I have even now heard from certain teachers, and there is no other repentance besides that of baptism, when we go down into the water, and receive the forgiveness of sins, and after that we should sin no more, but live in purity. And he said to me, Thou hast been rightly informed." Having closely and repeatedly examined the Epistles of Clement; of Polycarp, to the Philippians; of Ignatius, to the Ephesians; that to the Magnesians; that to the Trallians, the Romans, the Philadelphians, the Smyrnians, and his Epistle to Polycarp; together with the Catholic Epistle of Barnabas, and the genuine works of Hermas, I can affirm that the preceding extracts are the only passages in all these writings that speak of immersion. Having heard the apostolic Fathers, as they are called, depose to the views of the pupils of the Apostles, down to A.D. 140; I will summon a very learned Paidobaptist antiquarian, who can bring forward every writer and Father, down to the fifth century; and, before we hear any of his witnesses, we shall interrogate him concerning his own convictions after he had spent many years in rummaging all Christian antiquity:-- TESTIMONY OF DR. W. WALL, AUTHOR OF THE HISTORY OF INFANT BAPTISM. Pray, Doctor, have you examined all primitive writers from the death of John down to the fifth century? W. Wall.--I have. And will you explicitly avow what was the established and universal view of all Christians, public and private, for four hundred years from the nativity of the Messiah, on the import of the saying, (John 3:5,) "Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God?" W. Wall.--"There is not any one Christian writer, of any antiquity in any language, but who understands it of baptism; and, if it be not so understood, it is difficult to give an account how a person is born of water, any more than born of wood."52 Did all the Christians, public and private, and all the Christian writers from Barnabas to the times of Pelagius, (419,) as far as you know, continue to use the term regenerate as only applicable to immersion? W. Wall.--"The Christians did, in all ancient times, continue the use of this name "regeneration," for baptism; so that they never use the word ’regenerate,’ or ’born again,’ but they mean, or denote by it, baptism. And almost all the quotations which I shall bring in this book, shall be instances of it."53 Did they also substitute for "baptism" and "baptize," the words renewed, sanctified, sealed, enlightened, initiated, as well as regenerated? W. Wall.--"For to baptize, they used the following words:--Most commonly, anagennao, to regnerate; sometimes, kainopoieo, or anakainiozo, to renew, frequently, agiazo, to sanctify. Sometimes they call it the seal; and frequently, illumination, as it is also called, Hebrews 6:4, and sometimes, teliosis, initiation."54 "St. Austin, not less than a hundred times, expresses baptized by the word sanctified.55 We shall now see some of Mr. Wall’s witnesses; and I choose rather to introduce them from his own pen, as he cannot be supposed partial to the views I have presented in this essay:-- JUSTIN MARTYR. Justin Martyr wrote about forty years after John the Apostle died, and stands most conspicuous among the primitive Fathers. He addressed an apology to the Emperor Antoninus Pius. In this apology he narrates the practices of the Christians, and the reasons of them. Concerning those who are persuaded and believe the things which are taught, and who promise to live according to them, he writes-- "Then we bring them to some place where there is water, and they are regenerated by the same way of regeneration by which we were regenerated: for they are washed in water (en to udati) in the name of God the Father and Lord of all things, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit; for Christ says, Unless you be regenerated you cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; and everybody knows it is impossible for those who are once generated (or born) to enter again into their mother’s womb." "It was foretold by Isaiah, as I said, by what means they who should repent of their sins might escape them; and was written in these words, ’Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil,’ etc." "And we have been taught by the Apostles this reason for this thing. Because we being ignorant of our first birth, were generated by necessity (or course of nature) and have been brought up in all customs and conversation; that we should not continue children of that necessity and ignorance, but of will (or choice) and knowledge, and should obtain forgiveness of the sins in which they have lived, by water (or in water). Then is invoked over him that has a mind to be regenerated, the name of God the Father, etc. And this washing is called the enlightening." As you trace the history of infant baptism, Mr. Wall, as nigh the apostolic times as possible, pray, why do you quote Justin Martyr, who never mentions it? W. Wall.--"Because his is the most ancient account of the way of baptizing, next the scripture; and shows the plain and simple manner of administering it. Because it shows that the Christians of those times (many of whom lived in the days of the Apostles) used the word, ’regeneration’ (or ’being born again’) for baptism; and that they were taught to do so by the Apostles. And because we see by it that they understood John 3:5. of water baptism; and so did all the writers of these 400 years, NOT ONE MAN EXCEPTED."--p. 54. Did any of the ancients use the word matheteueo (to disciple) as it is used in the commission; or did they call the baptized discipled? W. Wall.--"Justin Martyr, in his second apology to Antoninus, uses it. His words are:--’Several persons among us, of sixty and seventy years old, of both sexes, who were discipled (matheteuio) to Christ, in or from their childhood, do continue uncorrupted.’"--p. 54. So soon as they began to mysticize, they began to teach that immersion without faith, would obtain remission of sins, and that immersion without faith was regeneration. Then came the debates about original sin: and so soon as original sin was proved, then came the necessity of infant immersion for the remission of original sin. And so undisputed was the import of baptism for remission, that when the Pelagians denied original sin, pressed with difficulty, "why immerse those who have no sins?" they were pushed to invent actual sins for infants; such as their crying, peevishness, restlessness, etc., on account of which sins they supposed that infants might with propriety be immersed, though they had no original sin. TERTULLIAN. Tertullian, the first who mentions infant baptism, flourished about A. D. 216. He writes against the practice: and among his most conclusive arguments against infant immersion, (for then, there was no sprinkling,) he assumes, as a fundamental principle not to be questioned, that immersion was for the remission of sins; and, this being universally conceded, he argues as follows:-- "Our Lord says, indeed, ’Do not forbid them to come to me;’ therefore, let them come when they are grown up--let them come when they understand--when they are instructed whither it is that they come. Let them be made Christians when they can know Christ. What need their guiltless age make such haste to the forgiveness of sins? Men will proceed more warily in worldly goods; and he that should not have earthly goods committed to him, yet shall have heavenly! Let them know how to desire this salvation, that you may appear to have given to one that asketh." p. 74. ORIGEN. Origen, though so great a visionary, is, nevertheless, a competent witness in any question of fact. And here I would again remind the reader, that it is as witnesses in a question of fact, and not of opinion, we summon these ancients. It is not to tell their own opinions, nor the reasons for them, but to depose what were the views of Christians on this institution in their times. There was no controversy on this subject for more than four hundred years, and therefore we expect only to find incidental allusions to it; but these are numerous, and of the most unquestionable character. Origen, in his homily upon Luke, says:-- "Infants are baptized for the forgiveness of their sins. Of what sins? Or when have they sinned? Or how can any reason of the law, in their case, hold good, but according to that sense that we mentioned even now? (that is) none is free from pollution, though his life be but the length of one day upon the earth." And in another place he says, that-- "The baptism of the church is given for the forgiveness of sins." And again-- "If there were nothing in infants that wanted forgiveness and mercy, the grace of baptism would be needless to them." In another place he says-- "But in the regeneration, (or new birth,) by the laver (or baptism,) every one that is born again of water and the Spirit, is clear from pollution: clear (as I may venture to say) as by a glass darkly."--p. 82. But now let me ask Dr. Wall,--Do Gregory Nazianzen, Basil, Ambrose, Chrysostom, and St. Austin, concur with all their predecessors in those views of regeneration and remission? W. Wall.--"Yes, exactly. I have observed, among the several names which the ancients give to baptism, they often, by this phrase, ’the forgiveness of sins,’ do mean the sacrament of baptism."--p. 179. And as for Chrysostom, he expressly says, "In baptism, or the spiritual circumcision, there is no trouble to be undergone but to throw off the load of sins, and to receive pardon for all foregoing offences." p. 182. And again; "There is no receiving or having the bequeathed inheritance before one is baptized; and none can be called a son till he is baptized."--p. 183. The controversies about infant baptism and original sin were contemporaneous; and just so soon as they decided the nature and extent of original sin, baptism for the remission of sins was given to infants because of this pollution, and defended because of the necessity of regeneration and forgiveness to salvation; and because immersion was universally admitted to be the scriptural regeneration and remission. In this way, there is no reasonable doubt, but infant baptism began; and for convenience’ sake, as Dr. Wall contends, it was substituted by infant sprinkling. Unless we were to transcribe all the testimonies of antiquity, one by one, no greater assurance can be given, that for more than four hundred years after Christ, all writers, orthodox and heterodox, Pelagius and Austin not excepted, concurred in the preceding views. Were I to summon others--Eusebius, Dupin, Lightfoot, and Hammond, cum multis aliis--will depose the same. This proposition we will dismiss with the testimony of the most renowned of the Bishops of Africa. I extract it from a work now generally read, called the "History of Martyrs." It is from the account Cyprian gives of his conversion.--p. 317. CYPRIAN. "While (says he) I lay in darkness and uncertainty, I thought on what I had heard of a second birth, proposed by the divine goodness; but could not comprehend how a man could receive a new life from his being immersed in water, cease to be what he was before, and still remain the same body. How, said I, can such a change be possible? How can he who is grown old in a worldly way of living strip himself of his former inclinations and inveterate habits? Can he, who has spent his whole time in plenty, and indulged his appetite without restraint, ever be transformed into an example of frugality and sobriety? Or he who has always appeared in splendid apparel, stoop to the plain, simple, and unornamented dress of the common people? It is impossible for a man, who has borne the most honorable posts, ever to submit to lead a private and obscure life: or that he who was never seen in public without a crowd of attendants, and persons who endeavored to make their fortunes by attending him, should ever bear to be alone. This (continues he) was my way of arguing: I thought it was impossible for me to leave my former course of life, and the habits I was then engaged in, and accustomed to: but no sooner did the live-giving water wash the spots off my soul, than my heart received the heavenly light of the Holy Spirit, which transformed me into a new creature; all my difficulties were cleared, my doubts dissolved, and my darkness dispelled. I was then able to do what before seemed impossible; could discern that my former life was earthly and sinful, according to the impurity of my birth; but that my spiritual birth gave me new ideas and inclinations, and directed all my views to God." Cyprian flourished A. D. 250. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 107: 03.55. REMISSION OF SINS - PROPOSITION 12 ======================================================================== PROP. XII.--But even the reformed creeds, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist, substantially avow the same views of immersion, though apparently afraid to carry them out in faith and practice. This proposition will be sustained by an extract from the creed of each of these sects. EPISCOPALIAN. The clergy are ordered, before proceeding to baptize, to make the following prayer.56 "Almighty and everlasting God, who of thy great mercy, didst save Noah and his family in the Ark from perishing by water; and also didst safely lead the children of Israel thy people through the Red sea; figuring thereby the holy baptism; and by the baptism of thy well-beloved Son Jesus Christ in the river Jordan, didst sanctify the element of water, in the mystical washing away of sin; we beseech thee, for thine infinite mercies, that thou wilt mercifully look upon these thy servants; wash them and sanctify them with the Holy Ghost; that they being delivered from thy wrath, may be received into the Ark of Christ’s Church; and being steadfast in faith, joyful through hope, and rooted in charity, may so pass the waves of this troublesome world, that finally they may come to the land of everlasting life; there to reign with thee, world without end, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen." After reading a part of the discourse with Nicodemus they are ordered to make the following exhortation.57 "Beloved, ye hear in this gospel the express words of our Saviour Christ, that except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God. Whereby ye may perceive the great necessity of this sacrament, where it may be had. Likewise immediately before his ascension into heaven, (as we read in the last chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel,) he gave command to his disciples, saying, Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. Which also showeth unto us the great benefit we reap thereby. For which cause of St. Peter, the Apostle, when, upon his first preaching of the gospel, many were pricked at the heart, and said to him and the rest of the Apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do? replied, and said unto them, Repent and be baptized every one of you, for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost: for the promise is to you and your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call. And with many other words exhorted he them, saying, Save yourselves from this untoward generation. For, as the same Apostle testifieth in another place, even baptism doth also now save us, (not the putting away the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience towards God,) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Doubt ye not, therefore, but earnestly believe, that he will favorably receive these present persons, truly repenting, and coming unto him by faith; that he will grant them remission of their sins, and bestow upon them the Holy Ghost; then he will give them the blessings of eternal life, and make them partakers of his everlasting kingdom." This, I need not add, is in accordance with the sentiments advanced in this essay. What a pity that the Episcopal church does not believe and practice her own creed! PRESBYTERIAN. The Presbyterian Confession, on Baptism, chap. 28: sec. 1. declares that-- "Baptism is a sacrament of the New Testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, not only for the solemn admission of the party baptized into the visible church; but also to be unto him a sign and seal of the covenant of grace, of his engrafting into Christ, of regeneration, of remission of sins, and of his giving up unto God, through Jesus Christ, to walk in newness of life: which sacrament is, by Christ’s own appointment, to be continued in his church until the end of the world." "A sign and seal of remission of sins!!" This is much nigher the truth than this church seems to be apprised of. However, she cannot believe her own creed; for she does not believe that baptism is a sign and a seal of remission of sins, nor of regeneration in her own sense of it, to her baptized or sprinkled infants, but in paying any regard to the Scriptures, she could not say less than she has said. It is no wonder that many sectaries cannot be persuaded to think, that the scriptures mean what they say: for they are so much accustomed to say what they do not mean, that they cannot think God does mean what he says. METHODIST. The Methodist Creed says-- "Dearly beloved, forasmuch as all men are conceived and born in sin, (and that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and they that are in the flesh cannot please God but live in sin, committing many actual transgressions:) and that our Saviour Christ, saith, None shall enter into the Kingdom of God, except he be regenerate and born anew of water and of the Holy Ghost; I beseech you to call upon God the Father, through our Lord Jesus Christ, that of his bounteous goodness he will grant to these persons, that which by nature they cannot have; that they may be baptized with water and the Holy Ghost, and received into Christ’s holy church, and made lively members of the same." Then it is ordained that the minister say, or repeat the following prayer:-- "Almighty and immortal God, the aid of all that need, the helper of all that flee to thee for succor, the life of them that believes, and the resurrection of the dead: We call upon thee for these persons; that they, coming to thy holy baptism, may receive remission of their sins, by spiritual regeneration. Receive them, O Lord, as thou hast promised by thy well beloved Son, saying, Ask, and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock, and it shall be opened unto you, so give unto us that ask; let us that seek, find; open the gate unto us that knock; that these persons may enjoy the everlasting benediction of the heavenly washing, and may come to the eternal kingdom which thou hast promised by Christ our Lord. Amen."--Dis. p. 105. Thus the Methodist Creed and Church are nearly as scriptural as the church from which they sprang. She prays for those to be baptized, that in baptism they may receive the remission of sins! Does she believe what she says? BAPTIST. Chapter XXX. Section 1.— "Baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, to be unto the party baptized a sign of his fellowship with him in his death and resurrection; of his being engrafted into him; of remission of sins, and of his giving up unto God, through Jesus Christ, to live and walk in newness of life." The Baptist follows the Presbyterian church as servilely as the Methodist church follows the English hierarchy. But she avows her faith that immersion is a sign of remission. A sign of the past, the present, or the future! A sign accompanying! The Confession of Bohemia.— "We believe that whatsoever by baptism--is in the outward ceremony signified and witnessed, all that doth the Lord God perform inwardly. That is, he washeth away sin, begetteth a man again, and bestoweth salvation upon him; for the bestowing of these excellent fruits was holy baptism given and granted to the church." The Confession of Augsburg.— "Concerning baptism, they teach that it is necessary to salvation, as a ceremony ordained of Christ; also, by baptism the grace of God is offered." The Confession of Saxony.— "I baptize thee--that is I do witness that by this dipping thy sins be washed away, and that thou art now received of the true God." The Confession of Whittenberg.— "We believe and confess that baptism is that sea, into the bottom whereof, as the Prophet saith, God doth cast all our sins." The Confession of Helvetia.— "To be baptized in the name of Christ, is to be enrolled, entered, and received into the covenant and family, and so into the inheritance of the sons of God; that is to say, to be called the sons of God, to be purged also from the filthiness of sins, and to be endued with the manifold grace of God, for to lead a new and innocent life." The Confession of Sueveland.— "As touching baptism, we confess that it is the font of regeneration, washeth away sins, and saveth us. But all these things we do understand as St. Peter doth interpret them. 1 Peter 3:21." Westminster Assembly.— "Before baptism the minister is to use some words of instruction--showing that it is instituted by our Lord Jesus Christ; that it is a seal of the covenant of grace, of our engrafting into Christ, and of our union with him, of remission of sins, regeneration, and life eternal." The Roman Catholic and the Greek church say, "We believe in one baptism for the remission of sins." Calvin makes remission the principal thing in baptism.58 "Baptism," says he, "resembles a legal instrument properly attested, by which he assures us that all our sins are cancelled, effaced, and obliterated, so that they will never appear in his sight, or come into his remembrance, or be imputed to us. For he commands all, who believe, to be baptized for the remission of their sins. Therefore, those who have imagined that baptism is nothing more than a mark or sign by which we profess our religion before men, as soldiers wear the insignia of their sovereign as a mark of their profession, have not considered that which was the principal thing in baptism; which is that we ought to receive it with this promise--’He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved.’" "The ancient Christian church, from the highest antiquity, after the apostolic times, appears generally to have thought that baptism is absolutely necessary for all that would be saved by the grace of Jesus Christ."59 "Most of the ancients concluded that baptism was no less necessary unto salvation than faith or repentance itself."60 John Wesley, in his comment on the New Testament, (p. 350,) speaks plainer than earlier the Methodist Discipline or the Regular Baptist Confession. His words are:-- "Baptism, administered to real penitents, is both a means and a seal of pardon. Nor did God ordinarily in the primitive church bestow this (pardon) on any, unless through this means." This is almost, if not altogether, as much as we have said on the forgiveness of sins through immersion. May we not say, that we have sustained this last proposition to the full extent of the terms thereof? With the testimony of John Wesley, the last of the reformers, I close my list of human vouchers for the import of Christian immersion. This list I could swell greatly; for, indeed, I have been quite disappointed in looking back into creeds, councils, commentators, and reformers, ancient and modern. I begin to fear that I shall be suspected to have come to the conclusions which I have exhibited, from consulting human writings, creeds, and reformers. My fears are not that we, who plead for reformation may appear to have nothing original to offer in this reformation; that we are mere gleaners in the fields which other minds have cultivated. It is not on this account our fears are excited, for the reformation we plead is not characterized by new and original ideas, or human inventions; but by a return to the original ideas and institutions developed in the New Institution. But we fear lest any should suspect the views offered, to be a human invention or tradition; because we have found so much countenance for them in the works of the most ancient and renowned Christian writers, and the creeds of ancient and modern reformers. We can assure our readers, however, that we have been led to these conclusions from the simple perusal, the unprejudiced and impartial examination, of the New Testament alone. And, we may add, that we are as much astonished, as any reader of this essay can be, to find such a cloud of witnesses to the truth and importance of the views offered. The propositions now proved, and illustrated, must convince all that there is some connection between immersion and the forgiveness of sins. What the connection is, may be disputed by some: but that such a connection exists, none can dispute, who acknowledge the New Testament to contain a divine communication to man. With John Wesley we say, it is "to the believing the means and seal of pardon for all previous offences;" and we not only say we think so, but we preach it as such, and practice it as such. Those who think of any other connection, would do well to attempt to form clear ideas of what they mean: for we are assured there is no meaning in any other connection. To make it a commemorative sign of past remission is an outrage upon all rules of interpretation, and a perfect anomaly in all revelation of God. To make it, prospectively, the sign of a future remission, is liable to the same exceptions. Nothing remains, but that it be considered, what it is in truth--the accompanying sign of an accompanying remission; the sign and the seal, or the means and the seal, of remission then granted through the water, connected with the blood of Jesus, by the divine appointment, and through our faith in it. We have heard some objections, and we can conceive of others which may be presented to immersion for the remission of sins. There can be objections made to any person, doctrine, sentiment, or practice, natural, moral, political, or religious, that ever existed. But notwithstanding all the objections made to every thing, there are thousands of matters and things we hold to be facts and truths indubitable. Amongst these certain and sure things, not to be shaken, is the Christian institution. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 108: 03.56. REMISSION OF SINS - OBJECTIONS ======================================================================== OBJECTIONS We will state and examine some objections partially noticed already; but, because they are the most common, or may become common, we will bestow upon them a formal statement and a formal refutation. Objection 1.--"To make the attainment and the enjoyment of present salvation, pardon, justification, sanctification, reconciliation, adoption, dependent upon the contingency of water being present, or accessible, is beneath the dignity and character of a salvation from God." And to make the attainment, and the enjoyment of present salvation, pardon, etc. dependent upon the contingency of faith being present or accessible--upon the blood of Jesus Christ being heard of, or known, is equally objectionable;--for what is faith but the belief of testimony? Or what is it in the most popular sense but something wrought in the heart, a compound of knowledge and feeling, of assent and consent? And are not both blood and faith less accessible to mankind than the element of water? How much more water than faith, or than candidates for immersion? And is there not as much power, wisdom, and goodness of God in creating water, as sin creating air, words, letters, faith, etc.? Is not water more universal than language, words, books, preachers, faith, etc.? This objection lies as much against any one means of salvation as another; nay against all means of salvation. Whenever a case shall occur of much faith and little water; or of a little faith and no water, we will repel it by other arguments than these. Objection 2.--"It makes void the value, excellency, and importance of both faith and grace." By no means. If a man say, with Paul, we are justified by faith; does it follow that grace is made void? Or, if one say we are justified by grace, does it make the blood of Christ of non-effect? Or, if with Paul, a man say we are justified by his blood; does it make faith, repentance, and grace of no effect? Nay, indeed, this gives to faith its proper place and its due value. It makes it the principle of action. It brings us to the water, to Christ, and to heaven. But it is a principle of action only. It was not Abel’s faith in his head, or heart; but Abel’s faith at the altar, which obtained such reputation. It was not Enoch’s faith in principle, but Enoch’s faith in his walk with God, which translated him to heaven. It was not Noah’s faith in God’s promise and threatening; but his faith exhibited in building an ark, which saved himself and family from the Deluge, and made him an heir of a new world, an heir of righteousness. It was not Abraham’s faith in God’s call; but his going out in obedience to that call, that first distinguished him as a pilgrim, and began his reputation. It was not faith in God’s promise that Jericho should fall, but that faith carried out in the blowing of rams’ horns, which laid its walls in ruins, etc. It is not our faith in God’s promise of remission; but our going down into the water; that obtains the remission of sins. But any one may see why faith has so much praise, and is of so much value. Because, without it, Abel would not have offered more sacrifices than Cain; Enoch would not have walked with God; Noah would not have built an ark; Abraham would not have left Ur of the Chaldees, nor offered his son upon the altar. Without it, Israel would not have passed through the wilderness, nor crossed the Jordan; and without it, none receive the remission of their sins in immersion. And, again, we would remind the reader that, when he talks of being saved by faith, he should bear in mind that grace is not lost sight of; nor blood, nor water, nor reformation, discarded. We enter the kingdom of nature by being born of the flesh. We enter the kingdom of heaven, or come under the reign of Jesus Christ, in this life, by being born of water, and the Spirit. We enter the kingdom of eternal glory by being born again from the earth, and neither by faith, nor the first regeneration. Neither by faith, nor baptism; but by being counted worthy of the resurrection of the just. "I was hungry, and you fed me." Not because you believed, or were born of water; but because "I was hungry, and yet fed me," etc. There are three births, three kingdoms, and three salvations. One from the womb of our first mother, one from the water, and one from the grave. We enter a new world on, and not before, each birth. The present animal life, at the first birth; the spiritual, or the life of God in our souls, at the second birth; and the life eternal in the presence of God, at the third birth. And he who dreams of entering the second kingdom, or coming under the dominion of Jesus, without the second birth, may, to complete his error, dream of entering the kingdom of glory without a resurrection from the dead. Grace precedes all these births--shines in all the kingdoms; but will be glorified in the third. Sense is the principle of action in the first kingdom; faith, in the second; and sight spiritual, in the third. The first salvation is that of the body from the dangers and ills of life, and God is thus "the Saviour of all men." The second salvation is that of the soul from sin. The third is that of both soul and body united, delivered from moral and natural corruption, and introduced into the presence of God, when God shall be all in all. Objection 3.--"It is so uncharitable to the Paidobaptists!" And how uncharitable are the Paidobaptists to the Jews, Turks, and Pagans!! Will they promise present salvation from the guilt, pollution, and dominion of sin, with the well grounded hope of heaven, to Jews, Turks, Pagans, or even Roman Catholics? Or will the Roman Catholics to them!! How uncharitable are they who cry "uncharitable" to us! Infants, idiots, deaf, and dumb persons, innocent Pagans wherever they can be found, with all the pious Paidobaptists, we commend to the mercy of God. But such of them as wilfully despise this salvation, and who, having the opportunity to be immersed for the remission of their sins, wilfully despise or refuse, we have as little hope for them, as they have for all who refuse salvation on their own terms of the gospel. While they inveigh against us for laying a scriptural and natural stress upon immersion, do we not see that they lay as great, though an unscriptural and irrational stress, upon their baptism or sprinkling; so much so as to give it without faith, even to infants, so soon as they are born of the flesh? Objection 4.--"But do not many of them enjoy the present salvation of God?" How far they may be happy in the peace of God, and the hope of heaven, I presume not to say. And we know so much of human nature as to say, that he that imagines himself pardoned, will feel as happy as he that is really so. But one thing we do know, that none can rationally, and with certainty enjoy the peace of God, and the hope of heaven, but they who intelligently, and in full faith are born of water, or immersed for the remission of their sins. And as the testimony of God, and not conceit, imagination, nor our reasoning upon what passes in our minds, is the ground of our certainty, we see and feel, that we have an assurance which they cannot have. And we have this advantage over them; we once stood upon their ground, but their hopes, felt their assurance; but they have not stood upon our ground, nor felt assurance. Moreover, the experience of the first converts shows the difference between their immersion, and the immersion, or sprinklings, of modern gospels. Objection 5.--"This has been so long concealed from the people, and so lately brought to our view, that we cannot acquiesce in it." This objection would have made unavailing every attempt at reformation, or illumination, of the mind, or change in the condition and enjoyments of society, ever attempted. Besides, do not the experience of all the religious--the observation of the intelligent--the practical result of all creeds, reformations, and improvements--and the expectations, and longings of society, warrant the conclusion that either some new revelation, or some new development of the revelation of God, must be made, before the hopes and expectations of all true Christians can be realized, or Christianity save and reform the nations of this world? We want the old gospel back, and sustained by the ancient order of things: and this alone by the blessing of the Divine Spirit, is all that we do want, or can expect, to reform and save the world. And if this gospel, as proclaimed and enforced on Pentecost, cannot do this, vain are the hopes, and disappointed must be the expectations of the so called Christian world. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 109: 03.57. REMISSION OF SINS - RECAPITULATION ======================================================================== RECAPITULATION. As Christian faith rests upon, and Christian practice proceeds from, the testimony of God, and not from the reasonings of men;--I will, in this recapitulation, only call up the evidences on one single proposition, assumed, sustained, and illustrated in the preceding pages; that that is the ninth proposition, as sustained by the apostolic testimony. We wish to leave before the mind of the diligent reader the great importance attached to Christian immersion, as presented in the Evangelists, the Acts, and the Epistles. 1. In the Evangelists--it is called the forgiveness of sins. Matthew and Mark introduce the Messiah in his own person in giving the commission. Luke does not. Matthew presents Jesus, saying, "Go, convert the nations, immersing them into the name of the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things which I have commanded you." This, of course, in order to salvation. Mark presents him saying, "Go into all the world, proclaim the glad tidings to the whole creation; and he who believes, and is immersed, shall be saved; but he who believes not, shall be condemned." Luke, however, does not introduce the Lord in his own person in giving the charge; but records it, in his own conception of it, in the following words:--That "reformation and forgiveness of sins should be announced in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem." No person, we presume, will question but that Luke thus records the commission;--and, if so, then it is indisputable, that as Luke neither mentions faith nor immersion, he substitutes for them the received import of both, when and where he wrote. Metonymically he places repentance, or rather reformation, for faith; and remission of sins, for immersion. In Luke’s acceptation and time forgiveness of sins stood for immersion, and reformation for faith--the effect for the means or cause. The only reference to the commission found in John, occurs John 20:21. "As the Father has sent me, so send I you:--whose sins soever you remit, are remitted to them; and whose sins soever you retain are retained." Here is neither faith, repentance, nor baptism; but the object, remission of sins, is literally proposed. In the commission, salvation is attached by the Lord Jesus to faith and immersion into his name. He that believes and is immersed, shall be saved. Thus immersion is taught in the testimonies of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. 2. In the Acts of the Apostles--Sermon 1, Peter says, "Reform and be immersed, every one of you, in the name of the Lord Jesus, for the remission of your sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." Sermon 2, he says, "Reform and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out; that seasons of refreshment from the presence of the Lord may come, and that he may send Jesus," etc. In the same discourse, he says, "God having raised up his Son Jesus, has sent him to bless you, every one of you, turning from his iniquities." In his 3d Sermon, recorded Acts 10:1-48 : he says, "To him all the Prophets bear witness, that every one who believes in him shall receive remission of sins by his name." Paul at Antioch, in Pisidia, declares, that through Jesus was proclaimed the remission of sins; and by him all that believe are justified from all things. Ananias commanded Paul to arise and be immersed, and to wash away his sins, calling upon the name of the Lord. Thus it is spoken of in the acts of the Apostles. 3. In the Epistles.--The Romans are said to have been immersed into Christ Jesus--into his death; to have been buried with him, and consequently to have risen with him, and to walk in a new life. The Corinthians are said to have been washed, justified, and sanctified by the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. The Galatians "were immersed into Christ, and had put him on." The Ephesians were married to Christ, by immersion, as brides were wont to be washed in order to their nuptials. The assembly of the disciples, called the congregation of the Lord, making the bride of Christ, were said to be cleansed by the bath of water and the word. The Colossians were buried with Christ, raised with him, and are said to have been forgiven all trespasses, when they were raised with him, where their resurrection with Jesus and their having all sins forgiven are connected.61 All the saints are said to be saved by immersion, or, "the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit."62 The believing Jews had their hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and their bodies washed with clean water, or water which made clean. Peter taught all the saints in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, that the water of baptism saved them, as water of the deluge saved Noah in the ark; and that in immersion a person was purged from all his former sins. And John the Apostle represents the saved as having "washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb," and all the baptized little children as "having their sins forgiven." Such are the evidences found in the Epistles. How numerous! how clear! and how unequivocal! Are we not, then, warranted to say, Except a man be regenerated of water, and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God? and that all who, believing, are immersed for the remission of their sins, have the remission of their sins in and through immersion? ======================================================================== CHAPTER 110: 03.58. REMISSION OF SINS - CONCLUSIONS ======================================================================== CONCLUSION. A word to the regenerated.--You have experienced the truth of the promise; and being introduced by that promise, you have become like Isaac, children of promise. You heard the testimony of God concerning Jesus of Nazareth, and you believed it. You were, in consequence of your faith, so disposed towards the person of Jesus, as to be willing to put yourselves under his guidance. This faith, and this will, brought you to the water. You were not ashamed, nor afraid to confess him before men. You solemnly declared you regarded him as God’s only Son, and the Saviour of men. You vowed allegiance to him. Down into the water you were led. Then the name of the Holy One upon your faith, and upon your person, was pronounced. You were then buried in the water under that name. It closed itself upon you. In its womb you were concealed. Into the Lord, as in the water, you were immersed. But in the water you continued not. Of it you were born, and from it you came forth, raised with Jesus, and rising in his strength. There your consciences were released; for there your old sins were washed away. And although you received not the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which confirmed the testimony of the first disciples, you felt the powers of the world to come, were enlightened, and tasted the bounty of God: for seasons of refreshment from the presence of God came upon you. Your hearts were sprinkled from evil consciences, when your bodies were washed in the cleansing water. Then into the kingdom of Jesus you entered. The King of righteousness, of peace, and joy, extended his sceptre over you, and sanctified in state, and in your whole person, you rejoiced in the Lord with joy unspeakable and full of glory. Being washed, you were sanctified, as well as acquitted. And now you find yourselves under the great Advocate, so that sin cannot lord it over you; for you always look to the great Advocate to intercede for you; and thus, if sin should overtake you, you confess and forsake it, and always find mercy. Adopted thus into the family of God, you have not only received the name, the rank, and the dignity; but also the spirit of a son of God, and find, as such, that you are kings, priests, and heirs of God. You now feel that all things are yours, because you are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s. The hope of the coming regeneration of the heavens and the earth, at the resurrection of the just, animates you. You look for the redemption, the adoption of your bodies, and their transfiguration. For this reason, you purify yourselves even as he is pure. Be zealous, then, children of God; publish the excellencies of him, who has called you into this marvellous light and bliss. Be diligent, that you may receive the crown that never fades, and that you may eat of the tree of life, which grows in the midst of the Paradise of God. If you suffer with Jesus, you will reign with him. If you should deny him, he will deny you. Add, then, to your faith, courage, knowledge, temperance, patience, brotherly kindness, and universal benevolence; for if you continue in these things and abound, you shall not be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. But should you be deficient in these things, your light will be obscured, and a forgetfulness that you have been purified from your old sins, will come upon you. Do, then, brethren, labor to make your calling and election sure; for thus practising, you shall never fall; but shall have an easy and abundant entrance into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. A word to the unregenerate.--Amongst you are sundry classes of character. Some of you who believe the gospel, and are changed in heart, quickened by the Spirit, are not generally ranked among the unregenerate. In the popular sense of this term you are regenerate. But we use it in its scriptural acceptation. Like Nicodemus, and like Joseph of Arimathea, you believe in Jesus, and are willing to take lessons from him in the chambers. You have confidence in his mission, respect and venerate, and even love his person; and would desire to be under his government. Marvel not that I say to you, You must be born again. Pious as you are supposed to be, and as you may think yourselves to be, unless you are born again, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God. Cornelius and his family were as devout and pious as any of you. "He feared God, gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God continually." Yet, mark it well, I beseech you, it was necessary "to tell him words by which himself and his house might be saved." These words were told him: he believed them, and received the Holy Spirit, yet still he must be born again. For a person cannot be said to be born again of any thing which he receives; and still less of miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit. He was immersed, and into the Kingdom of God he came. He was then saved. You need not ask, how or why these things are so. Do as Cornelius did, and then you will think of it in another light--then you would not for the world be unregenerate. To have the pledge, the promise, and seal of God, of the remission of all your sins, to be adopted into his family, and to receive the spirit of a son of God, be assured, my pious friends, are matters of no every day occurrence; and when you feel yourselves constitutionally invested with all these blessings, in God’s own way, you will say, that "his ways are not as our ways, nor his thoughts as our thoughts; for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are his ways higher than our ways, and his thoughts than our thoughts." It is hard to make a slave feel and act as a freeman. As difficult, we often find it, to make the unregenerate feel and know the value and importance of regeneration. But the regenerate would not be unregenerate for the universe. God has one way of bestowing every thing. We cannot gather grapes off thorns, nor figs off thistles. The reason is, there they do not grow. We can tell no other reason why they cannot grow there, but that they do not grow there. We cannot have any blessing, but in God’s own way of giving it. We cannot find wool save on the back of the sheep, nor silk save from the worm which spins it from itself. Corn and wheat cannot be obtained save from the plants which yield them. Without the plant, we cannot have the fruit. This is the economy of the whole material system. And in the world of spirits, and spiritual influences, is it not the same? Moral law is as unchangeable as the laws of nature. Moral means and ends are as inseparable as natural means and ends. God cannot bestow grace upon the proud, and cannot withhold it from the humble. He does not do it, and that is enough. He could shower down wheat and corn, and give us rivers of milk and wine, were it a question of mere power. But taking all together, his wisdom, power and goodness, he cannot do it. So neither can he give us faith without testimony, hope without a promise, love without an amiable object, peace without purity, nor heaven without holiness. He cannot give to the unborn infant the light of the sun, the vivacity which the air imparts, nor the agility and activity which liberty bestows. He does not do it, and, therefore, we say, he cannot do it. Neither can he bestow the blessings of the Reign of Heaven upon those, who are the children of disobedience. I know how reluctant men are to submit to God’s government; and yet they must all bow to it at last. "To Jesus every knee shall bow, and to him every tongue confess." But they will object to bowing now, and torture invention for excuses. They will tell me, all that I said is true of natural and moral means and ends; but immersion is not a moral means, because God forgave sins and saved men before immersion was appointed. "It is a positive, and not a moral institution." And is there no moral influence connected with positive institutions? A written law is a positive institution: for moral law existed before written law. But because it has become a positive institution, has its moral power ceased? The moral influence of all positive institutions is God’s WILL expressed in them. And it matters not, whether it be the eating or not eating of an apple, the building of an altar, or the building it with, or without the aid of iron tools; the offering of a kid, a lamb, a bullock, or a pigeon: it is just as morally binding, and has the same moral influence, as "You shall honor your father and mother;" or "You shall not kill." It is THE WILL OF GOD in any institution, which gives it all its moral and physical power. No man could now be pardoned as Abel was--as Enoch was--as David was--as the thief upon the cross was. These all lived before the second will of God was declared. He took away "the first will," says Paul, "that he might establish the second will," by which we are sanctified. We are not pardoned as were the Jews or the patriarchs. It was not till Jesus was buried and rose again, that an acceptable offering for sin was presented in the heavens. By one offering up of himself, he has perfected the conscience of the immersed or sanctified. Since his oblation, a new institution for remission has been appointed. You need not flatter yourselves, that God will save or pardon you except for Christ’s sake; and if his name is not assumed by you, if you have not put him on, if you have not come under his advocacy, you have not the name of Christ to plead, nor his intercession on your behalf--and therefore, for Christ’s sake you cannot be forgiven. Could Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Aaron, think you, if living now--could they, I ask, find forgiveness as the altar? And will you imagine, that he, who honored every institution by Moses, by connecting rewards and punishments with the obedience or disobedience of his commands, be less jealous for the honor of the institution of his Son? And will that Son who for no other purpose than to honor his Father’s institution, was immersed in the Jordan, bestow pardon or salvation upon any, who refuse to honor him, and him that sent him? He has been graciously pleased to adapt means to ends. He has commanded immersion for the remission of sins; and, think you, that he will change his institutions, because of your stubborn or intractable dispositions? As well, as reasonably might you pray for loaves from heaven, or manna, because Israel ate it in the desert; as to pray for pardon, while you refuse the remission of sins by immersion. Demur not because of the simplicity of the thing. Remember how simple was the eating of the fruit of that tree, "whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe." How simple was the rod in the hand of Moses, when stretched over Egypt and the Red Sea? How simple was looking at the brazen serpent? And how simple are God’s institutions? How simple the aliments of nature;--the poisons too, and their remedies? Where the will of God is, there is omnipotence. It was simple to speak the universe into existence. But God’s will gives efficacy to every thing. And obedience ever was, and ever will be the happiness of man. It is the happiness of heaven. It is God’s philanthropy which has given us something to obey. To the angels who sinned he has given no command. It was gracious to give us a command to live--a command to reform--a command to be born again--to live forever. Remember light and life first came by obedience. If God’s voice had not been obeyed, the water would not have brought forth the earth, nor would the sun have blessed it with his rays. The obedience of law was goodness and mercy; but the obedience of faith is favor, and life, and glory everlasting. None to whom this gospel is announced will perish, except those who know not God, and obey not the gospel of his Son. Kiss, then, the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish for ever. To the unregenerate of all classes, whose education and prejudices compel them to assent to the testimony of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, James, and Jude.--You own the mission of Jesus from the bosom of the Eternal--and that is all you do! Each of you is living without God, and without hope in the world--aliens from the family of God--of various ranks and grades among men; but all involved in one condemnation, because light has come into the world, and you love darkness, and the works of darkness, rather than light. To live without hope is bad enough; but to live in constant dread of the vengeance of Heaven, is still worse. But do you not tremble at the word of God? If you can be saved here, or hereafter, then there is no meaning in language, no pain in the universe, no truth in God--death, the grave, and destruction have no meaning. The frowns of Heaven are all smiles, if you perish not in your ways. But you purpose to bow to Jesus, and to throw yourselves upon his mercy at last. Impious thought! When you have given the strength of your intellect, the vigor of your constitution, the warmth of your affections, the best energies of your life, to the world, the flesh and the devil; you will stretch out your palsied hands and turn your dim eyes to the Lord and say, "Lord, have mercy upon me!" The first fruits, and fatlings of the devil, the lame and the blind for God, is the purpose of your heart; and the best resolution you can form! The thief upon the cross, had he done so, could not have found mercy. It is one thing to have known the way of salvation, assented to it, and to have in deliberate resolution rejected it for the present, with a promise of obeying it at some future period; and to have never known it, or assented to it, to the end of life. Promise not, then, to yourselves, what has never happened to others. The devil has always said, "You may give to morrow to the Lord--only give to me to-day." This has been all that he has asked, and this is what you are disposed to give. Promise not to-morrow to the Lord, for you will be still less disposed to give it when it comes; and the Lord has not asked you for to-morrow. He says, TO-DAY, when you shall hear his voice, harden not your hearts. But you say, you are willing to come to the Lord to day if you knew the way, or if you were prepared! Well, what does the Lord require of you as preparation? He once said, "Let the wicked man forsake his ways, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and let him turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God for he will abundantly pardon." He says also, "Draw nigh to me, and I will draw nigh to you;" "Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you men of two souls;" "Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings;" "Reform and be converted;" "Turn to the Lord;" "Be immersed for the remission of your sins;" and "Submit to the government of Jesus." "What! just as I am!" Pray, how are you? Have you such a persuasion in your heart of the mission of Jesus, as God’s own Son, and the only Saviour; and have you so much confidence in his personal character, as to be willing to surrender yourself to him for the present and future--for time and eternity? "I have," you say. As one that has heard his voice, I say, then, Come and be regenerated, and seasons of refreshment from the Lord will come to you. "But I thought I ought to feel like a Christian first, and to have the experience of a Christian before I came to the Lord." Indeed! Did the Lord tell you so? "His ministers taught me so." It is hard knowing who are his ministers now-a-days. His commissioned ministers taught you not so. They were not taught to say so. The Master knew that to wait for health before we went to the physician--to seek for warmth before we approached the fire--to wait till we ceased to be hungry before we approached the table--was not reasonable. And therefore he never asked, as he never expected, any one to feel like a Christian before he was immersed and began to live like a Christian. None but the citizens of any country can experience the good or evil of the government which presides over it. None but the married can experience the conjugal relation and feelings. None but sons and daughters can have the experience of sons and daughters; and none but those who obey the gospel can experience the sweets of obedience. I need not add, that none but the disobedient can experience the pains, the fears, and terrors of the Lord--the shame and remorse which are the first fruits of the anguish and misery, which await them in another world. As the disobedient, who stumble at the word, have the first fruits of the awful destruction from the presence of the Lord which awaits them; so the disobedient have the first fruits of the Spirit--the salvation of their souls, as an earnest of the salvation to be revealed at the coming of the Lord. And now let me ask all the unregenerate, What do you propose to yourselves by either delaying or refusing to come to the Lord? Will delaying have any tendency to fit you or prepare you for his salvation? Will your lusts have less power, or sin have less dominion over you, by continuing under their control? Has the intoxicating cup, by indulgence, diminished a taste for it? Has the avarice of the miser been weakened, or cured, by yielding to it? Has any propensity been destroyed by gratifying it, in any other way than as it destroyed the animal system? Can you, then, promise yourselves that, by continuing in disobedience, you will love obedience, and be more inclined to submit when you have longer resisted the Spirit of God! Presume not on the mercy of God, but in the way that mercy flows. Grace has its channels, as the waters have their courses; and its path, as the lightning of the clouds. Each has its law, as fixed as the throne of God; and think not God will work a miracle for your salvation. Think you that the family of Noah could have been saved, if they had refused to enter into the Ark? Could the first born of Israel have escaped the destroying angel, but in houses sprinkled with blood? or could Israel have escaped the wrath of Pharaoh, but by being immersed into Moses in the cloud and in the sea? These things are written for our admonition, upon whom the consummation of past ages has come. Arise, then, and be immersed and wash away your sins, calling upon the name of the Lord. The many who refuse grace will neither prove you wise nor safe in disobedience. "Multitudes are no mark That you will right be found; A few were saved in the Ark, For many millions drown’d. Obey the gospel call, And enter while you may; Christ’s flock have long been small, Yet none are safe but they." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 111: 03.59. REMISSION OF SINS - EFFECTS OF MODERN CHRISTIANITY ======================================================================== EFFECTS OF MODERN CHRISTIANITY.63 Our greatest objection to the systems which we oppose, is their impotency on the heart. Alas! what multitudes of prayerless, saintless, Christless, joyless hearts, have crowded Christianity out of the congregations by their experiences before baptism! They seem to have had all their religion before they professed it. They can relate no experience since baptism, comparable to that professed before the "mutual pledge" was tendered and received. It was the indubitable proofs of the superabundance of this fruit, which caused me first to suspect the far-famed tree of evangelical orthodoxy. That cold-heartedness--that stiff and mercenary formality--that tithing of mint, anise, and dill--that negligence of mercy, justice, truth, and the love of God, which stalked through the communions of sectarian altars--that apathy and indifference about "thus saith the Lord"--that zeal for human prescriptions--and, above all, that willing ignorance of the sayings and doings of Jesus Christ and his apostles, which so generally appeared, first of all created, fostered, and matured my distrust in the reformed systems of evangelical sectaries. Communion, with me, was communion of kindred souls, immersed into one God, that celestial magnet which turns our aspirations and adorations to him who washed us from our sins in his own blood, and made us kings and priests to God. To sit in the same pew; to gather round the same pulpit; to put our names to the same covenant, or subscription list: to contribute for a weekly sermon; to lisp the same opinions, extracted from the same creed, always appeared to me unworthy bonds of union or communion, and therefore my soul abhorred them as substitutes for the love of God shed abroad in the heart, for the communion of the Holy Spirit. "If a man would give all the substance of his house as a substitute for love, it should be utterly contemned." The Divine Philosopher preached reformation by addressing himself to the heart. We begin with the heart. "Make the tree good," and then good fruit may be expected. But this appears to be the error of all sects in a greater or less degree; they set about mending the heart, as preliminary to that which alone can create a new heart. Jesus gives us the philosophy of his scheme in an address to a sinner of that time--"Your sins," says he, "are forgiven you: go, and sin no more." He first changes the sinner’s state, not external but internal, and then says, "Go, and sin no more." He frankly forgave the debt. The sinner loved him. There was much of this philosophy in question, "Who loves most--he that was forgiven five hundred pence, or he that was forgiven fifty? How much does he love who is not forgiven at all?" Aye, that question brings us onward a little to the reason why the first act of obedience to Jesus Christ should be baptism into his name, and that for the remission of sins. But now we speak of the exercises of the heart. While any man believes the words of Jesus, "Out of the heart proceed the actions which defile the man," he can never lose sight of the heart, as the object on which all evangelical arguments are to terminate, and as the fons et principium, the fountain and origin, of all piety and humanity. Once for all, let it be distinctly noted, that we appreciate nothing in religion which tends not directly and immediately, proximately and remotely, to the purification and perfection of the heart. Paul acts the philosopher fully once, and, if we recollect right, but once, in all his writings upon this subject. It has been for many years a favorite topic with me. It is in his first epistle to Timothy--"Now the end of the commandment is love out of a pure heart--out of a good conscience--out of faith unfeigned." Faith unfeigned brings a person to remission, or to a good conscience; a good conscience precedes, in the order of nature, a pure heart; and that is the only soil in which love, that plant of celestial origin, can grow. This is our philosophy of Christianity--of the gospel. And thus it is the wisdom and power of God to salvation. We proceed upon these as our axiomata in all our reasonings, preachings, writings--1st. unfeigned faith; 2d. a good conscience; 3d. a pure heart; 4th. love. The testimony of God, apprehended, produces unfeigned or genuine faith; faith obeyed, produces a good conscience. This Peter defines to be the use of baptism, the answer of a good conscience. This produces a pure heart, and then the consummation is love--love to God and man. Paul’s order or arrangement is adopted by us as infallible. Testimony--faith unfeigned--remission, or a good conscience--a pure heart--love. Preaching, praying, singing, commemorating, meditating, all issue here. "Happy the pure in heart, for they shall see God." IMMERSION NOT A MERE BODILY ACT. Views of baptism, as a mere external and bodily act, exact a very injurious influence on the understanding and practice of men. Hence, many ascribe to it so little importance in the Christian economy. "Bodily exercise," says Paul, "profits little." We have been taught to regard immersion in water, into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as an act of the whole man;--body, soul, and Spirit. The soul of the intelligent subject is as fully immersed into the Lord Jesus, as his body is immersed in the water. His soul rises with the Lord Jesus, as his body rises out of the water; and into one spirit with all the family of God is he immersed. It is not like circumcising a Hebrew infant or proselyting to Moses a Gentile adult.--The candidate believing in the person, mission, and character of the Son of God, and willing to submit to him, immediately, upon recognizing him, hastens to be buried with the Lord, and to rise with him, not corporeally but spiritually, with his whole soul. Reader, be admonished how you speak of bodily acts in obedience to divine institutions. Remember Eve, Adam, and all transgressors on the one hand. Remember Abel, Noah, Enoch, Moses, Abraham, down to the harlot Rahab, on the other; and be cautious how you speak of bodily acts! Rather remember the sacrifice of a body on mount Calvary, and talk not lightly of bodily acts. There is no such things as outward bodily acts in the Christian institution; and less than in all others, in the act of immersion. Then it is that the spirit, soul, and body of man become one with the Lord. Then it is that the power of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, come upon us. Then it is that we are enrolled among the children of God, and enter the ark, which will, if we abide in it, transport us to the Mount of God. JUSTIFICATION ASCRIBED TO SEVEN CAUSES. In examining the New Testament, we find that a man is said to be "justified by faith," Romans 5:1; Galatians 2:16; Galatians 3:24. "Justified freely by his grace," Romans 3:24; Titus 3:7. "Justified by his blood," Romans 5:9. "Justified by works," James 2:21; James 2:24-25. "Justified in or by the name of the Lord Jesus," 1 Corinthians 6:11. "Justified by Christ," Galatians 2:16. "Justified by knowledge," Isaiah 53:11. "It is God that justifies," Romans 8:33, viz: by these seven means--by Christ, his name, his blood, by knowledge, grace, faith, and by works. Are these all literal? Is there no room for interpretation here? He that selects faith out of seven must either act arbitrarily or show his reason; but the reason does not appear in the text. He must reason it out; he must infer it. Why, then, assume that faith alone is the reason of our justification? Why not assume that the name of the Lord alone is the great matter, seeing his name "is the only name given under heaven by which any man can be saved;" and men "who believe receive the remission of sins by his name:"64 and especially, because the name of Jesus, or of the Lord, is more frequently mentioned in the New Testament, in reference to all spiritual blessings, than any thing else!! Call all these causes, or means of justification, and what then? We have the grace of God as the moving cause, Jesus Christ for the efficient cause, his blood the procuring cause, knowledge the disposing cause, the name of the Lord the immediate cause, faith the formal cause, and works for the concurring cause. For example: a gentleman on the sea shore descries the wreck of a vessel at some distance from land, driving out into the ocean, and covered with a miserable and perishing sea-drenched crew. Moved by pure philanthropy, he sends his son in a boat to save them. When the boat arrives at the wreck, he invites them in, unto this condition, that they submit to his guidance. A number of the crew stretch out their arms, and seizing the boat with their hands, spring into it, take hold of the oars, and row to land, while some, from cowardice, and others because of some difficulty in coming at the boat, wait the expectation of a second trip; but before it is returned, the wreck went to pieces, and they all perished. The moving cause of their salvation who escaped was the good will of the gentleman on the shore; the son who took the boat, was the efficient cause; the boat itself, the procuring cause; the knowledge of their perishing condition and his invitation, the disposing cause; the seizing the boat with their hands, and springing into it, the immediate cause; their consenting to his condition, the formal cause; and their rowing to shore, under the guidance of his son, was the concurring cause of their salvation.--Thus men are justified or saved by grace, by Christ, by his blood, by faith, by knowledge, by the name of the Lord, and by works. But of the seven causes, three of which are purely instrumental, why choose one of the instrumental, and emphasize upon it as the justifying or saving cause, to the exclusion of, or in preference to, the others? Every one in its own place is essentially necessary. If we examine the word saved in the New Testament, we shall find that we are said to be saved by as many causes, though some of them differently denominated, as those by which we are said to be justified. Let us see: we are said to be "saved by grace," Ephesians 2:5; "saved through his life," Romans 5:9-10; "saved through faith," Ephesians 2:8, Acts 16:31; "saved by baptism," 1 Peter 3:21; or "by faith and baptism," Mark 16:16; or "by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit," Titus 3:5; or "by the gospel," 1 Corinthians 15:2; or "by calling upon the Lord," and by "enduring to the end," Acts 2:21, Romans 10:13, Matthew 10:22. Here we have salvation ascribed to grace, to Jesus Christ, to his death and resurrection--three times to baptism, either by itself or in conjunction, once with faith, and once with the Holy Spirit; to works, or to calling upon the Lord, or to enduring to the end. To these we might add other phrases nearly similar, but these include all the causes to which we have just now alluded. Saved by grace the moving cause; by Jesus the efficient cause; by his death, and resurrection, and life, the procuring cause; by the gospel, the disposing cause; by faith, the formal cause; by baptism, the immediate cause; and by enduring to the end, or persevering in the Lord, the concurring cause. PETER IN JERUSALEM, AND PAUL IN PHILIPPI, RECONCILED. Thousands ask Peter, What shall we do? The Jailor asks Paul, What shall I do? TO BE SAVED, if the reader pleases. Peter says, Reform, and be baptized every one of you, etc. Paul answers, "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, with thy family." How is this, Paul and Peter? Why do you not preach the same gospel, and answer the same question in the same or similar terms? Paul, do you preach another gospel to the Gentiles, than Peter preached to the Jews? What sayest thou, Paul? Paul replies--"Strike, but hear me. Had I been in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, I would have spoken as Peter did. Peter spoke to believing and penitent Jews; I spoke to an ignorant Roman jailor. I arrested his attention after the earthquake, by simply announcing that there was salvation to him and all his family, through belief in Jesus."--But why did you not mention repentance, baptism, the Holy Spirit? "Who told you I did not?" Luke adds nothing about it; and I concluded you said nothing about them.--Luke was a faithful historian, was he not? "Yes, very faithful: and why did you not faithfully hearken to his account? Does he not immediately subjoin that as soon as I got the jailor’s ear, I spoke the word of the Lord to him, and to all that were in his house?" Why you reason like a Paidobaptist. You think, do you, that the jailor’s children were saved by his faith! I spoke the whole gospel, or word of the Lord to the jailor and to his family. In speaking the word of the Lord, I mentioned repentance, baptism, remission, the Holy Spirit, the resurrection, judgment, and eternal life: else why should I have baptized him and all his house; and why should he have rejoiced afterwards with all his family!" Paul, I beg your pardon. I will not interrogate Peter, for I know how he will answer me: he would say--"Had I been in Philippi, I would have spoken to an ignorant Pagan as Paul did, to show that salvation flowed through faith in Jesus; and when he believed this and repented, I would then have said, Be baptized for the remission of your sins." 1 The reformer also said: "If the article of justification be once lost, then is all true Christian doctrine lost." Preface to the Ep. Gal, Phil, ed. 1800. 2 1 John 2:12. 3 Hebrews 10:17. 4 Hebrews 10:18. 5 Ephesians 4:32. 6 Ephesians 1:7. 7 Colossians 1:14. 8 1 Corinthians 6:11. 9 1 Peter 1:22. 10 Romans 5:1. 11 Romans 3:24. 12 Romans 5:9. 13 1 Corinthians 6:11. 14 James 2:24. 15 Romans 8:33. 16 1 Corinthians 6:11. 17 Romans 5:10. 18 2 Corinthians 5:18. 19 Colossians 1:19-22. 20 Galatians 4:6. 21 Ephesians 1:5. 22 Acts 2:47. 23 1 Corinthians 1:18. 24 1 Corinthians 15:2. 25 1 Peter 3:21. 26 1 Peter 1:1; 1 Peter 1:8-9. 27 To prevent mistakes, I shall here transcribe a part of a note found in the Appendix to the second edition of the new version of the Christian Scriptures, p. 452. "I am not desirous of diminishing the difference of meaning between immersing a person in the name of the Father, and into the name of the Father. They are quite different ideas. But it will be asked, Is this a correct translation? To which I answer most undoubtedly it is. For the preposition eis is that used in this place, and not en. By what inadvertency the king’s translators gave it in instead of into in this passage, and elsewhere gave it into when speaking of the same ordinance, I presume not to say. But they have been followed by most modern translators, and with them they translate it into in other places where it occurs, in relation to this institution: For example:-- 1 Corinthians 12:13. For by one spirit we are all immersed into one body; Romans 6:3. Don’t you know that so many of you as were immersed into Christ, were immersed into his death? Galatians 3:27. As many of you as have been immersed into Christ, have put on Christ. Now, for the same reason they ought to have rendered the following passages the same way. Acts 8:16. Only they were immersed into the name of the Lord Jesus. Acts 19:3. Into what name were you then immersed? When they heard this, they were immersed into the name of the Lord Jesus. 1 Corinthians 1:13. Were you immersed into the name of Paul? Lest any should say I had immersed into my own name. 1 Corinthians 10:1. Our fathers were all immersed into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. Now in all these places it is eis and en is clearly marked in the last quotation. They were immersed into Moses--not into the cloud, and into the sea, but in the cloud and in the sea. To be immersed into Moses is one thing, and in the sea is another. To be immersed into the name of Father, and in the name of the Father, are just as distinct. "In the name" is equivalent to, "by the authority of." In the name of the king, or commonwealth, is by the authority of the king or commonwealth. Now the question is, Did the Saviour mean that the disciples were to be immersed by the authority of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? If by the authority of the Father, for what purpose were they immersed? The authority by which any action is done is one thing, and the object for which it is done is another. Now who that can discriminate, can think that it is one and the same thing to be immersed in the name of the Lord, and to be immersed into the name of the Lord Jesus. The former denotes the authority by which the action is performed--the latter the object for which it is performed. Persons are said to enter into matrimony, to enter into and alliance, to get into debt, to run into danger. Now to be immersed into the name of the Lord Jesus was a form of speech, in ancient usage, as familiar and significant as any of the preceding. And when we analyze these expression, we find they all import that the persons are either under the obligations or influence of those things into which they are said to enter, or into which they are introduced. Hence those immersed into one body, were under the influences and obligations of that body. Those immersed into Moses, assumed Moses as their lawgiver, guide, and protector, and risked every thing upon his authority, wisdom, power, and goodness. Those who were immersed into Christ put him on, and acknowledged his authority and laws, and were governed by his will: and those who were immersed into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, regarded the Father as the fountain of all authority--the Son as the only Saviour--and the Holy Spirit as the only advocate of the truth, and teacher of Christianity. Hence such persons as were immersed into the name of the Father, acknowledged him as the only living and true God--Jesus Christ as his only begotten Son, the Saviour of the world--and the Holy Spirit, as the only successful advocate of the truth of Christianity upon earth." 28 State here has respect to the whole person. It may be argued that state is as pertinently applied to the mind or heart as to the whole person; and that when the state of the mind is changed by a belief of God’s testimony, the subject of that change is brought into as near a relation to God as he can be in this life; and as the kingdom of Jesus is a spiritual kingdom, he is as fit for admission into it, and for the enjoyment of its blessings, whenever his heart is changed from enmity to love, as he ever can be; nay, in truth, is actually initiated into the kingdom of Jesus the moment his mind is changed--and that to insist upon any personal act as necessary to admission, because such acts are necessary to admission into all the social and political relations in society, is an over-straining the analogies between things earthly and things heavenly. Not one of our opponents, as far as we remember, has thus argued. We have sometimes thought that they might have thus argued with incomparably more speciosity than appears in any of their objections. But without pausing to inquire whether the state of the heart can be perfectly changed from enmity to love, without an assurance of remission on some ground, or in consequence of some act of the mind prerequisite thereunto;--without being at pains to show that the truth of this proposition is not at all essential to our argument, but only illustrative of it; we may say, that as Christ has redeemed the whole man, body, soul, and spirit, by his obedience even to death--so in coming into his kingdom on earth, and in order to the enjoyment of all the present salvation, the state of the whole person must be changed; and this is what we apprehend Jesus meant by his saying, "Unless a man is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God," and what we mean in distinguishing a change of heart, or of views and feelings, from a change of state. 29 2 Thessalonians 1:8. 30 Romans 1:5. 31 Romans 16:26. 32 Acts 6:7. 33 Romans 10:16. 34 1 Peter 4:17. 35 Romans 5:2. Ephesians 3:12. 36 There is no propriety in the common version of this member of the sentence--when, instead of that, "seasons of refreshment." Some make modern revivals "seasons of refreshment," such as these here alluded to. Then it would read, ’That your sins may be blotted out in times of revivals’--when revivals shall come! The term is opos, which, in this construction, as various critics have contended, is equivalent to ’that’ in our tongue. To promise a future remission is no part of the gospel, nor of the apostolic proclamation. All Christians experience seasons of refreshment in cordially obeying the gospel. 37 Acts 15:3. 38 Acts 9:1-43 : 39 Acts 26:17-18. 40 The following examples of the above general rule illustrate its value and certainty:--"Let us offer up the sacrifice of praise to God, confessing to his name." Hebrews 13:15. "Let us go forth to him out of the camp, bearing his reproach." Hebrews 13:13. "Be an approved workman, rightly dividing the word of truth." 2 Timothy 2:15. "Guard the precious deposit, avoiding profane babblings." 1 Timothy 6:20. "Observe these things without prejudice, doing nothing by partiality." 1 Timothy 5:21. "Pray every where lifting up holy hands." 1 Timothy 2:8. "Walking in wisdom to them that are without, gaining time." Col. iv: 5. "Do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God." Colossians 3:17. "Speak the truth, putting away lying." Ephesians 4:25. "Be not vainglorious, provoking one another. Galatians 5:26. "Convert the nations, baptizing them," etc. etc. Now, do not all these participles define their respective imperatives, or show the way and manner in which this command should be obeyed! Many similar examples may be found in all the sacred writings. This rule has passed through a fiery trial. I have only been more fully convinced of its generality and value. There is no rule in the English syntax more general in its application. I would only add, that the participle does not always express every thing in the command; but it always points out something emphatically in the intention of the imperative, and without which the injunction cannot be suitably and fully performed. We have, however, no need of this rule, nor of anything not generally conceded, to establish the point before us: for the New Testament and all antiquity teach, that so long as the Apostles lived, no one was regarded as a disciple of Christ who had not confessed his faith and was immersed. 41 Titus 3:5. 42 See the following essay on Regeneration. 43 That John 3:5, and Titus 3:5, refer to immersion, is the judgment of all the learned Catholics and Protestants of every name under heaven. The authors and finishers of the Westminster creed--one hundred and twenty-one Divines, ten Lords, and twenty Commissioners of the Parliament of England, under the question 165, "What is baptism?" quote John 3:5, Titus 3:5, to prove that baptism is a washing with water, and a "sign of remission of sins." Michaelis, Horne, Lightfoot, Beveridge, Taylor, Jones of Nayland, Bp. Mant, Whitby, Burkit, Bp. Hall, Dr. Wells, Hooker, Dr. C. Ridley, Bp. Ryder:--but why attempt a list of great names? There are a thousand more who assert it. Bp. White says, that "regeneration, as detached from baptism, never entered into any creed before the 17th century." Whitby, on John 3:5, says, "That our Lord here speaks of baptismal regeneration, the whole Christian church from its earliest times has invariably taught." Our modern "great divines," even in America, have taught the same. Timothy Dwight, the greatest Rabbi of Presbyterians the New World has produced, says, vol. 4: pp. 300, 301, "to be born again, is precisely the same thing as to be born of water and the Spirit."--"To be born of water is to be baptized." And how uncharitable!--He adds, "He who understanding the nature and authority of this institution, refuses to be baptized, WILL NEVER ENTER INTO THE VISIBLE NOR INVISIBLE KINGDOM OF GOD." Vol. 4: p. 302. So preached the President of Yale. George Whitefield, writing on John 3:5, says, "Does not this verse urge the absolute necessity of water baptism? Yes, when it may be had. But how God will deal with persons unbaptized, we cannot tell." Vol. 4: p. 355. I say with him, we cannot tell with certainty. But I am of the opinion, that when a neglect proceeds from a simple mistake of sheer ignorance, and when there is no aversion, but a will to do everything the Lord commands, the Lord will admit into the everlasting kingdom those who by reason of this mistake never had the testimony of God assuring them of pardon or justification here, and consequently never did fully enjoy the salvation of God on earth. But I will say with the renowned President of Yale, that "he who, understanding the nature and authority of this institution, refuses to be baptized, will never enter the visible nor invisible kingdom of God." By the "visible and invisible kingdom," he means the kingdom of grace and glory. He adds on the same page, "He who persists in this act of rebellion against the authority of Christ, will never belong to his kingdom." Vol. 4: p. 302. John Wesley asserts, that by baptism we enter into covenant with God, an everlasting covenant, are admitted into the church, made members of Christ, made the children of God. By water as the means, the waters of baptism, we are regenerated or born again." 44 John 1:12. 45 Acts 2:1-47 : 46 Acts 15:17. 47 See Christian Baptist, vol. 6, p. 268. 48 Hebrews 10:24. 49 2 Peter 1:9. 50 Book of Similitudes, chap. 16: 51 Com. 4, chap. 3: 52 4th London edition, p. 116, vol. 1, A. D. 1829. 53 Vol. 1, p. 24. 54 Vol. 1, p. 8. 55 Page 194. 56 Common Prayer, p. 165. 57 Page 165. 58 Inst. 50: 4, 115: p. 327. 59 Vitringa, tom. 1. 50. 2: 100: 6. 9. 60 Owen on Justification, 100: 2: p. 183. 61 Colossians 2:11; Colossians 2:13-14. 62 Titus 3:5. 63 A second Essay, called the "Extra Defended," on this same subject, in reply to a pamphlet from Elder Andrew Broaddus, of Virginia, titled the "Extra Examined," appeared in October, 1831. From our Defence, we here insert only four extracts. The subject as defended, being fully expressed in the preceding essay. 64 Acts 10:43. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 112: 03.60. REGENERATION - INTRODUCTION ======================================================================== Regeneration. Repentance Reformation Regeneration The Bath of Regeneration New Birth Renewing of the Holy Spirit The New Life Physical Regeneration The Use of the Theory of Regeneration The Regeneration of the Church The Regeneration of the World Regeneration of the Heavens and the Earth A Word to the Moral Regenerators of the Age Regeneration. "I create New Heavens and a New Earth." Isaiah 65:18. "Behold, I make all things new." Revelation 21:5. We intend an essay of "the seeds of things." The topic is a common one, a familiar one, and yet an interesting one. Much has been said, much has been written upon it; and yet it is no better understood than it ought to be. Few give themselves the trouble of thinking much on the things which they think they understand; and many would rather follow the thoughts of others, than think for themselves. Suspense is painful, much study is a weariness of the flesh; and, therefore, the majority are content with the views and opinions handed to them from those who have gone before. We wish to treat this subject as if it were a new one; and to examine it now, as if we had never examined it before. It is worthy of it. Generation is full of wonders, for it is full of God’s physical grandeur; yet regeneration is still more admirable, for in it the moral attributes of Jehovah are displayed. But we aim not at a development of its wonders, but at a plain common sense scriptural exposition of its import. We have not learned our theology from Athanasius, nor our morality from Seneca; and, therefore, we shall not call upon them for illustration, argument, or proof. To the Sacred Records, in which alone Christianity yet remains in all its freshness, we look for light; and thither would we direct the eyes of the readers. It is not the regeneration of the schools in which Christianity has been lowered, misapprehended, obscured, and adulterated, of which we are to write; but that regeneration of which Jesus spoke, and the Apostles wrote. A few things must be premised--a few general views expressed--before we, or our readers, are prepared for the more minute details: and to approach the subject with all unceremonious despatch, we observe, that-- Man unregenerate is ruined in body, soul, and spirit; a frail and mortal creature. From Adam his father he inherits a shattered constitution. He is the child of a fallen progenitor; a scion from a degenerate stock. Superior to Adam, the exile from Eden, in physical, intellectual, and moral nature, none of his descendants can rise. It is not in nature to improve itself; for above its fountain the stream cannot rise. Cain, the first born of Eve, was in nature the image and likeness of him that begat him. Education failed to improve him, while Abel, his younger brother, obtained the excellency which faith in God’s promise alone bestows. The first born, it will be conceded, was at least equal to his younger brother: and who can plead that in nature he excels Eve’s eldest son! Man in his ruins is, however, a proper subject of a remedial system. He is susceptible of renovation. Therefore God has placed him under a regenerating economy. This economy contemplates the regeneration of the whole human constitution, and proposes as its consummation the transformation of spirit, soul, and body. The destiny of the regenerate is described by Paul in one sentence: "As we now bear the image of the earthly Adam, we shall then bear the image of the heavenly Adam." God’s own Son is proposed as a model. Conformity to him in glory, honor, and immortality, as the perfection of the regenerate, is the predestination of him who speaks of things that are not, as though they were. Regeneration is, therefore, moral and physical: or, in other words, there is now a renovation of the mind--of the understanding, will, and affections;--and there will hereafter be a renovation of the body: "For this corruptible body shall put on incorruption, and this mortal body shall put on immortality." The renovation of the mind and character is, therefore, that moral regeneration which is to be effected in this life; for which the remedial system, or kingdom of heaven, was set up on earth; and this, therefore, first of all, demands our attention. Before we attempt an answer in detail to the question, How is this moral regeneration effected? we shall attend to the principle on which the whole remedial system proceeds. The grand principle, or means which God has adopted for the accomplishment of this moral regeneration, is the full demonstration and proof of a single proposition addressed to the reason of man. This sublime proposition is, THAT GOD IS LOVE. The reason and wisdom of this procedure will suggest itself to every one, who can understand the views and feelings of all unregenerated man. Man in a state of alienation and rebellion, naturally suspects, that if he be a sinner, and if God hate sin, he must hate him. As love begets love; so hatred begets hatred; and if a sinner suspects that God hates him, he cannot love God. He must know that God loves him, before he can begin to love God. "We," says an Apostle, "love God because he first loved us."--While alienated in heart, through the native darkness of his understanding, the sinner misinterprets every restraint which God has placed in his way to prevent his total ruin, as indications of the wrath of Heaven. His transgression of these restraints, and his consciousness of having defied the veracity and power of God, only increase his enmity, and urge him onward to his apostasy and wanderings from his Creator. The goodness of God being misunderstood, furnishes to him no incentive to repentance and reformation. Guilt, and fear, and shame, the fruits of his apostasy, becloud his understanding, and veil from his eyes all the demonstrations of benevolence and goodness, with which the creation abounds. Adam under a tree, hiding from God, trembling with fear, suspicious of the movements of every leaf, and covered with shame as a garment, is both an illustration and proof of these views of the state of mind, which obtains in the unregenerate. Neither the volume of creation, nor that of God’s providence, is sufficient to remove from the natural man these misconceptions and the consequent alienation of heart. The best proof that these two volumes cannot do this, is, that they never have, in any one instance, yet done it. From the nature of things it is indeed evident that they cannot do it. The elements are too often at war with the happiness of man. The ever changing attitude of the natural world in reference to health, and life, and comfort, render it at best doubtful, whether the laws of nature, which ultimately bring man down to the grave, are the effect of benevolence, or of malevolence towards mankind. A third volume explanatory of both, and replete also with supernatural developments, is wanting, to furnish the most diligent student of nature and providence, with the means of learning the true and full character of him, against whom we have rebelled. That volume is the Bible. Holy Prophets and Apostles spake as they were moved by the Spirit of Knowledge and Revelation. Its records, its history, it prophecy, its precepts, its laws, its ordinances, and its examples, all develop and reveal God to man, and man to himself. But it is in the person and mission of the INCARNATE WORD, that we learn that God is love. That God gave his Son for us, and yet gives his Spirit to us--and this gives us himself--are the mysterious and transcendent proofs of the most august proposition in the universe. The gospel, Heaven’s wisdom and power combined, God’s own expedient for the renovation of human nature, is neither more nor less, than the illustration and proof of this regenerating proposition. Thus we hasten to our subject. Having glanced at the great landmarks of the plantations of nature and grace, now that we may, in the light of truth, ascertain the true and heaven-taught doctrine of regeneration, we shall cautiously survey the whole process, as developed by the commissioned teachers of the deep counsels of the only true God. The certain things, parts of this great progress, may be well understood, certain terms, which are wont to use to represent them, must be well defined, and accurately apprehended. These terms are Fact, Testimony, Faith, Repentance, Reformation, Bath of Regeneration, New Birth, Renewing of the Holy Spirit, Newness of Life.1 "All things are of God" in the regeneration of man, is our motto; because our Apostle affirmed this as a cardinal truth. He is the author of the facts and of the testimony which declares them; and being the author of these, he is the author of all the effects produced by these facts. The Christian is a new creation, of which God is the Creator. The change of heart and of character, which constitute moral regeneration, is the legitimate impression of the facts, or things which God has wrought. The facts constitute the moral seal which stamps the image of God upon man. In the natural order, we must place them first, and, therefore, we must first define the term. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 113: 03.61. REGENERATION - REPENTANCE ======================================================================== REPENTANCE. Repentance is usually defined "sorrow for any thing that is past;" and in the religious vocabulary it is simply "sorrow for sin." This is one, but it is only one of the natural effects of the belief of the testimony of God. The gospel facts, testimony, and faith, contemplate more than this. But yet it is necessary that this point of faith should be distinctly apprehended, especially in this age, when it occupies so large a space in the systems of theology. Repentance, in our current acceptation, is sorrow for sin; and certainly there is no man who believes the revealed facts found in the testimony of God, who will not be sorry for his sins. But simple sorrow for the past, is but a feeling of the heart; which, unless it excite to reformation or the abandonment of sin, is of no more use than the regrets of Judas after he had sold his Master for fifteen dollars. Repentance must, however, precede reformation; for unless we are sorry for the past, and grieved with ourselves, we will not think of a change of conduct. Repentance is to reformation, what motive is to action, or resolution to any undertaking. It was well for David to resolve to build the temple; and so it is well to form any good design; but much better to execute it. To feel sorry for the poor and the afflicted, and to resolve to assist and comfort them, is well; but to go and do it is better: and, indeed unless our sorrow for the past, terminate in reformation for the future, it is useless in the estimation of heaven and earth; as useless as to say to the hungry, Be filled; or to the naked, Be clothed. Genuine repentance does not always issue in reformation. Judas was sorrowful even to death, but could not reform. Many have been so genuinely sorry for their sins, as to become suicides. Speak we of "a godly sorrow?" No: this is not to be expected from unconverted and ungodly persons. Christians, Paul teaches, when they err, may repent with a godly sorrow; but this is not to be expected from the unregenerate, or from those who have not reformed. It is not, then, the genuineness of repentance that is to be appreciated, unless by genuine repentance is meant more than simple sorrow for the past--unless by genuine repentance is meant reformation. Yet without sincere or unfeigned repentance, there cannot be real or genuine reformation. This leads us to observe, that the only unequivocal evidence of sincere repentance, is the actual redress of the injury done; not only a cessation from the sin, but a restitution for the sin, as far as restitution can possibly be made. No restitution, no repentance--provided restitution can be made. And I may be permitted to add, that without repentance and restitution, when possible, there can be no remission. The preachers of repentance--of the necessity of repentance in order to remission, ought to set this matter fairly and fully before sinners. Do they represent repentance as sorrow for the past, and a determination to reform? How then will the sinner know that he is sorry for his sins against men, or how will the community know that he has repented of such sins, unless full restitution was made? It is impossible that either the sinner himself, or the community who know his sins against man, can have any certain evidence that he is penitent, unless by making all possible restitution. Peccator wounded the reputation of his neighbor Hermas, and on another occasion defrauded him of ten pounds.--Some of the neighborhood were apprised that he had done both. Peccator was converted under the preaching of Paulinus, and, on giving in a relation of his sorrow for his sins, spoke of the depth of his convictions, and of his abhorrence of his transgression. He was received into the congregation, and sat down with the faithful to commemorate the great sin offering. Hermas and his neighbors were witnesses of all this. They saw that Peccator was penitent, and much reformed in his behaviour; but they could not believe him sincere, because he had made no restitution. They regarded him either as a hypocrite or self-deceived; because, having it in his power, he repaid not the ten pounds, nor once contradicted the slanders he had propagated. Peccator, however, felt little enjoyment in his profession, and soon fell back into his former habits. He became again penitent, and on examining the grounds of his falling off, discovered that he had never cordially turned away from his sins. Overwhelmed in sorrow for the past, he resolved on giving himself up to the Lord; and, reflecting on his past life, set about the work of reformation in earnest. He called on Hermas, paid him his ten pounds, and the interest for every day he had kept it back, went to all the persons to whom he had slandered him, told them what injustice he had done him, and begged them, if they had told it to any other persons, to contradict it. Several other persons whom he had wronged in his dealings with them, he also visited; and fully redressed all these wrongs against his neighbors. He also confessed them to the Lord, and asked him to forgive him. Peccator was then restored to the church; and better still, he enjoyed a peace of mind, and a confidence in God, which was a continual feast. His example, moreover, did more to enlarge the congregation at the Cross-roads, than did the preaching of Paulinus in a whole year. This was, unequivocally, sincere repentance. This is the repentance which Moses preached, and which Jesus approbated. Under the law, confession to the priest, and the presenting of a trespass offering, availed nothing to forgiveness without restitution. But the law went into details still more minute than these; for provision is made for the case in which the sinner could not find the person against whom he had sinned. In such a case, the penitent sinner was to seek out the kindred of the injured party, and if he could find any kinsman, he was to recompense this kinsman; but if he could not find a kinsman, he must recompense it to the Lord, besides offering his trespass offering. It was to go into the Lord’s treasury.2 The principle uniformly, in all cases of sin against man, was, the sinner "shall make amends for the harm he has done, and shall add the fifth part thereto."3 If any one suppose that repentance is to be less sincere or unequivocal under the gospel, let him remember that Zaccheus proposed more than adding a fifth; he would restore fourfold, and that Jesus approbated him for so doing. Indeed, John the Immerser demanded fruits worthy of repentance or of reformation, and Paul proclaimed that those who turned to God should do works meet for, or worthy of, repentance.4 "Works, worthy of repentance," is a phrase which can be understood in no other sense than those works which make amends for the harm done to men and the dishonor done to God, as far as both are possible. Can any man think that he is sorry for that sin or wrong which he has done, when he makes no effort to make amends to him who was injured in person, character, or property, by it? Works worthy of his professed repentance are wanting, so long as any being whom he has injured in person, property, or reputation, is unredressed to the utmost extent of his ability. One of our most popular commentators says--and with much truth--"No man should expect mercy at the hand of God, who having wronged his neighbor, refuses, when he has it in his power, to make restitution. Were he to weep tears of blood, both the justice and mercy of God would shut out his prayer, if he make not his neighbor amends for the injury he has done him. He is a dishonest man, who illegally holds the property of another in his hands."5 Every preacher of repentance should insist upon these evidences of sincerity both for the satisfaction of the penitent himself, and for the good of the community. "Many that believed came and confessed, and showed their deeds; many of them also, who used curious arts, bringing their books together, burnt them before all; and they computed the value of them and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver."6 This was making restitution, in their case, as far as possible; and the principle here evinced is applicable in every other case. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 114: 03.62. REGENERATION - REFORMATION ======================================================================== But in pursuing this subject so far, we have passed over the boundaries of repentance, and sometimes confounded it with reformation. This is owing to the licentious use of language, to which modern theology has so richly contributed. We shall, however, redress this wrong, as far as practicable, by a few remarks on REFORMATION. The word metanoia, used by the sacred writers and heaven-taught preachers of the New Economy, as indicative of the first effect of faith, as has been often showed, is different from that which our word repentance fitly represents. It literally imports a change of mind; but, as Parkhurst, Campbell, and many others say, "such a change of mind as influences one’s subsequent behaviour for the better." "It has been observed by some, and, I think with reason, that the former (matanoeo) denotes properly a change to the better: the latter (matamelomai) barely a change, whether to the better or to the worse; that the former marks a change of mind that is durable, and produces consequences; the latter expresses only a present uneasy feeling of regret, without regard to duration or effects: in fine, that the first may be translated into English, I reform; the second, I repent, in the familiar acceptation of the words." Now as every one who reforms repents; but as every one who repents does not reform, this distinction is necessary and proper; and there is nothing hazarded, nothing lost by translating the former I reform, and the latter I repent. There is something gained, especially in all places where we have the word in the imperative mood, because then it is of importance to know precisely what is intended. If we are commanded only to change our mind, or to be sorry for the past, we have obeyed when we feel regret; but if more than mere change of mind or regret is intended, we have not obeyed the commandment until we change for the better. Now it is, we think, very evident from various passages of the sacred writings of the Apostles, and from their speeches, that they commanded more than a simple change of mind as respected past conduct, or mere sorrow for the past. Peter commanded the thousands assembled on the day of Pentecost, who had changed their minds, and who were sorry for the past, to do something which they had not yet done; and that something is in the common version rendered repent; and in the new version, reform; and in the old English Bible, amend your lives. The word here used is the imperative of metanoeo. Judas repented, and many like him, who never reformed; and, therefore, it is of importance that this distinction should be kept in view."7 Repentance is not reformation, but it is necessary to it; for whoever reforms must first repent. Reformation is, indeed, the carrying out of the purpose into our conduct. But as reformation belongs rather to another part of our essay than the present, we shall, on the premises already before us, pause and offer a few reflections. In the preceding definition of words and ideas, it would appear that we have a literal and unfigurative representation of the whole process of what is figuratively called regeneration. For, as we shall soon see, the term regeneration is a figure of speech which very appropriately, though analogically, represents the reformation or renovation of life of which we have now spoken. That the preceding arrangement is not arbitrary, but natural and necessary, the reader will perceive, when he reflects, that the thing done, or the fact, must precede the report or testimony concerning it; that the testimony concerning it must precede the belief of it; that belief of the testimony must precede any feeling in correspondence with the fact testified; and that feeling must precede action in conformity to it. Fact, testimony, faith, feeling, action, are therefore bound together by a natural and gracious necessity, which no ingenuity can separate. And will not every Christian say, that when a person feels and acts according to the faith, or the testimony of God, he is a new creature--regenerate--truly converted to God? He that believes the facts testified in the record of God, understands them, feels according to their nature and meaning, and acts in correspondence with them--has undergone a change of heart and of life which makes him a new man. This is that moral change of heart and life, which is figuratively called regeneration. We are not to suppose that regeneration is something which must be added to the faith, the feeling, and the action or behaviour, which are the effects of the testimony of God understood and embraced; or which are the impress of the divine facts attested by Prophets and Apostles. It is only another name for the same process in all its parts. It may also be observed that numerous figures and analogies are used by the inspired writers to set forth this change, as well as other leading truths and lessons in the Bible. In their collective capacity, Christians are called a kingdom, a nation, a generation, a family, a house, a flock, a city, a temple, a priesthood, etc. In their individual capacity they are called kings, priests, soldiers, citizens, children, sheep, branches, stones, etc. They are said to be begotten, born, regenerated, builded, engrafted, converted, created, planted. Now, under whatever figure they are considered or introduced, reason argues that everything said of them should be expressed in conformity with the figure under which they are presented. Are they called sheep?--then he that presides over them is called a Shepherd; their enemies are wolves and dogs; their sustenance is the green pasture; their place of safety and repose, the sheepfold; their errors are wanderings and strayings; their conversion, a return; and their good behaviour a hearing of the voice, or a following, of the Shepherd. Are they called children?--then collectively they are a family; they are begotten and born again; God is their Father; their separation is an adoption; Jesus is their elder brother; they are heirs of God; they live and walk with God. Are they priests?--Jesus is their High Priest; the church their temple; the Saviour is their altar; their songs, their praises, are incense ascending to heaven; and their oblations to the poor, their works of love, are sacrifices most acceptable to God. Are they called citizens?--the church is then the kingdom of heaven; Jerusalem is the mother of them all; formerly they were aliens, and their naturalization is regeneration. Are they called branches?--then Jesus is the true vine; his Father the vine dresser; their union with Christ, an engrafting; the discipline of the gospel, a pruning; and their good works are fruits of righteousness. Thus there is no confusion of metaphor in the Scriptures of truth--in the dialect of heaven. It is the language of Ashdod; it belongs to the confusion of Babel, to mingle and confound all figures and analogies. Hence are so often hear of being born again, without any allusion to a family or a kingdom! and of regeneration as antecedent to faith or repentance! Had a modern assembly of Divines been employed to accommodate the scripture style to their orthodox sentiments, we should not have had to read all the Old Testament and all the historic books of the New, to find the subject of regeneration but once proposed to an alien, as the fact is; but then we should have found it in the history of Abel, of Enoch, of Noah, and of Abraham, if not in every section of the law of Moses, in the Prophets, and in the Psalms. John the Baptist, Jesus, and the Holy Twelve, would have had it in every sermon; and truth faith would have been always defined as the fruit of regeneration. But Jesus had a kingdom in his eye and in his discourse before he ever mentioned being ’born again’ to Nicodemus; for unless there was a family, a state, or a kingdom to be born into, it is impossible for any one to be born into it. And if the kingdom of heaven only began to be after Jesus entered into heaven; or, if it is was only approaching from the ministry of John to the day of Pentecost, then it would have been preposterous indeed--an incongruity of which no inspired man was every guilty--to call any change of heart or life, a regeneration, or a new birth. It is true that good men in all ages were made such by facts, testimony, faith, and feeling, by a change of heart, by the Spirit of God; but the analogy or figure of being born, or of being regenerated, only began to be preached, and when men began to press into it. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 115: 03.63. REGENERATION - REGENERATION ======================================================================== We are now, perhaps, better prepared to consider the proper import and meaning of ’regeneration’ in general, and of ’the bath of regeneration’ in particular. REGENERATION. This word is found but twice in all the oracles of God--once in Matthew 19:28. and once in Titus 3:5. In the former it is almost universally understood to mean a new state of things, not of persons--a peculiar era, in which all things are made new:--such as the formation of a new church on the day of Pentecost, or the commencement of the Millennium, or the general resurrection. The biblical critics of eminence have assigned it to one or other of these great changes in the state of things. So we use the word revolution, and the phrase the Revolution, to express a change in the political state of things. The most approved punctuation and version of this passage renders it altogether evident that a new era is alluded to. ’Jesus answered, Indeed, I say to you, that at the renovation when the Son of Man shall be seated on his glorious throne, you, my followers, sitting also upon twelve thrones, shall judge the twelve tribes of Israel.’ This being so evident, and so often alluded to in our former writings, we shall proceed to the remaining occurrence, Titus 3:5. All the new light which we propose to throw on this passage will be gathered from an examination of the acceptation of the word generation in the sacred writings. Our reason for this is, that we object to a peremptory decision of the meaning of a word which occurs only in the passage under discussion, from our reasonings upon the isolated passages in which it is found. In such a case, if we cannot find the whole word in any parallel passages, the proper substitute is the root or branches of that word, so far as they are employed by the same writers. Moreover, we think it will be granted, that, whatever may be the scriptural acceptation of the word generation, regeneration is only the repetition of that act or process. After a close examination of the passages in which generation occurs in the writings of the Hebrew Prophets and Apostles, we find it used only in two acceptations--as descriptive of the whole process of creation and of the thing created. A race of man, or a particular class of men, is called a generation; but this is its figurative, rather than its literal meaning. Its literal meaning is the formation or creation of any thing. Thus it is first used in the Holy Scriptures. Moses calls the creation, or whole process of formation of the heavens and the earth, ’The generations of the heavens and the earth.’8 The account of the formation of Adam and Eve, and also the account of the creations of Adam and Eve, are, by the same writer, called ’The book or record of the generations of Adam.’9 This is the literal import of the word; consequently, regeneration literally indicates the whole process of renovating or new-creating man. This process may consist of numerous distinct acts; but it is in accordance with the general usage to give to the beginning, or consummating act, the name of the whole process. For the most part, however, the name of the whole process is given to the consummating act, because the process is always supposed incomplete until that act is performed. For example: In the process of tanning, fulling, forging, etc. the subject of these operations is not supposed to be tanned, fulled, forged, until the last act is performed. So in all the processes of nature--in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, the last act consummates the process. To all acquainted with the process of animalization, germination, crystallization, etc., no farther argument is needed. But in the style of our American husbandmen, no crop nor animal is made, until it come to maturity. We often hear them say of a good shower, or a few clear days, "This is the making of the wheat or corn." In the same sense it is, that most Christians call regeneration THE NEW BIRTH; though being born is only the last act in natural generation, and the last act in regeneration. In this way the new birth and regeneration are used indiscriminately by commentators and writers on theology, and by a figure of speech, it is justified on well established principles of rhetoric. This leads us to speak particularly of (the next chapter) ======================================================================== CHAPTER 116: 03.64. REGENERATION - THE BATH OF REGENERATION ======================================================================== THE BATH OF REGENERATION. By ’the bath of regeneration’ is not meant the first, second, or third act; but the last act of regeneration, which completes the whole; and is, therefore, used to denote the new birth. This is the reason why our Lord and his Apostles unite this act with water. Being born of water, in the Saviour’s style, and the bath of regeneration, in the Apostles’ style, in the judgement of all writers and critics of eminence, refer to one and the same act--viz: christian baptism. Hence it came to pass, that all the ancients (as fully proved in our first Extra on Remission) used the word regeneration as synonymous in signification with immersion. In addition to the numerous quotations made in our Essay on Remission, from the creeds and liturgies of Protestant churches, we shall add another from the Common Prayer of the Church of England, showing unequivocally that the learned Doctors of that church used the words regeneration and baptism as synonymous. In the address and prayer of the minister after the baptism of the child, he is commanded to say,-- "Seeing now, dearly beloved brethren, that this child is regenerate, and grafted into the body of Christ’s church, let us give thanks unto Almighty God for these benefits, and with one accord make our prayer unto him that this child may lead the rest of his life according to this beginning." "Then shall be said, all kneeling--" "We yield thee hearty thanks, most merciful Father, that it hath pleased thee to regenerate this infant with thy Holy Spirit, to receive him for thine own child by adoption, and to incorporate him into thy holy church. And humbly we beseech thee to grant that he, being dead unto sin, and living unto righteousness, and being buried with Christ in his death, may crucify the old man, and utterly abolish the whole body of sin; and that as he is made partaker of the death of thy Son, he may also be partaker of his resurrection; so that finally, with the residue of the holy church, he may be an inheritor of thine everlasting kingdom, through Christ our Lord. Amen!" Eusebius, in his life of Constantine, page 628, shows that St. Cyprian, St. Athanasius, and, indeed, all the Greek Fathers, did regard baptism as the consummating act; and therefore they call it teliosis, the consummation. These authorities weigh nothing with us; but, as they weigh with our opponents, we think it expedient to remind them on which side the Fathers depose in the case before us. By these quotations we would prove no more than that the ancients understood the washing of regeneration, and indeed used the term regeneration, as synonymous with baptism. But were we asked for the precise import of the phrase, ’washing or bath of regeneration,’ either on philological principles, or as explained by the Apostles, we would give it as our judgment, that the phrase is a circumlocution or periphrasis for water. It is loutron, a word which more properly signifies the vessel that contains the water, than the water itself; and is, therefore, by the most learned critics and translators, rendered bath, as indicative either of the vessel containing the fluid or of the use made of the fluid in the vessel. It is, therefore, by a metonymy, the water of baptism, or the water in which we are regenerated. Paul was Hebrew, and spoke in the Hebrew style. We must learn that style before we fully understand the Apostle’s style. In other words, we must studiously read the Old Testament before we can accurately understand the New. What more natural for a Jew accustomed to speak of ’the water of purification,’ of ’the water of separation,’10 to speak of ’the bath of regeneration?’ If the phrase ’water of purification’ meant water used for the purpose of purifying a person--if ’the water of separation’ meant water used for separating a person, what more natural than that ’the bath of regeneration’ should mean water used for regenerating a person? But the New Testament itself confirms this exposition of the phrase. We find the word loutron once more used by the same Apostle, in the same connection of thought. In his letter to the Ephesians, he affirms that Jesus has sanctified (separated, purified with the water of purification,) the church by a loutron of water--’a bath of water, with the word’--’having cleansed it by a bath of water, with the word.’11 This is still more decisive. The king’s translators, so fully aware that the sense of this passage agrees with Titus 3:5. have, in both places, used the word washing, and Macknight the term bath as the import of loutron. What is called the washing or bath of regeneration, in the one passage, is, in the other, called ’the washing’ or ’bath of water.’ What is called ’saved’ in one, is called ’cleansed’ in the other; and what is called ’the renewal of the Holy Spirit’ in the one, is called ’the word’ in the other; because the Holy Spirit consecrates or cleanses through the word. For thus prayed the Messiah, ’Consecrate them through the truth: thy word is the truth.’ And again, ’You are clean through the word that I have spoken unto you.’ To the same effect, Paul, to the Hebrew Christians, says ’Having your hearts sprinkled from a guilty conscience, and your bodies washed with pure water’--the water of purification, the water of regeneration: for the phrase ’pure water’ must be understood not of the quality of the water, but metonymically of the effect, the cleansing, the washing, or the purifying of the person--’having your bodies, or persons washed with pure water,’ or water that purifies or cleanses. No one, acquainted with Peter’s style, will think it strange that Paul represents persons as saved, cleansed, or sanctified by water; seeing Peter unequivocally asserts that ’we are saved’ through water, or through baptism, as was Noah and his family through water and faith in God’s promise. ’The antitype immersion does also now save us.’ Finally, our great Prophet, the Messiah, gives to water the same place and power in the work of regeneration. For when speaking of being born again--when explaining to Nicodemus the new birth, he says, ’Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." May not we, then, supported by such high authorities, call that water of which a person is born again, the water or bath of regeneration? ======================================================================== CHAPTER 117: 03.65. REGENERATION - NEW BIRTH ======================================================================== NEW BIRTH. We have already seen that the consummation of the process of generation or creation is in the birth of the creature formed. So it is in the moral generation, or in the great process of regeneration. There is a state of existence from which he that is born passes; and there is a state of existence into which he enters after birth. This is true of the whole animal creation, whether oviparous and viviparous. Now the manner of existence, or the mode of life, is wholly changed; and he is, in reference to the former state, dead and to the new state alive. So in moral regeneration. The subject of this great change before his new birth, existed in one state; but after it, he exists in another. He stands in a new relation to God, angels, and men. He is now born of God, and has the privilege of being a son of God, and is consequently pardoned, justified, sanctified, adopted, saved. The state which he left was a state of condemnation, what some call "the state of nature." The state into which he enters is a state of favor, in which he enjoys all the heavenly blessings through Christ: therefore, it is called ’the kingdom of heaven.’ All this is signified in his death, burial, and resurrection with Christ; or in his being born of water. Hence, the necessity of being buried with Christ in water, that he may be born of water, that he may enjoy the renewal of the Holy Spirit, and be placed under the reign of favor. All the means of salvation are means of enjoyment, not of procurement. Birth itself is not for procuring, but for enjoying the life possessed before birth. So in the analogy--no one is to be baptized, or to be buried with Christ; no one is to be put under the water of regeneration for the purpose of procuring life, but for the purpose of enjoying the life of which he is possessed. If the child is never born, all its sensitive powers and faculties cannot be enjoyed; for it is after birth that these are fully developed, and feasted upon all the aliments and objects of sense in nature. Hence all that is now promised in the gospel, can only be enjoyed by those who are born again and placed in the kingdom of heaven under all its influences. Hence the philosophy of that necessity which Jesus preached--’Unless a man be born again, he cannot discern the kingdom of heaven’--unless a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into it. But let no man think that in the act of being born, either naturally or metaphorically, the child purchases, procures, or merits either life or its enjoyments. He is only by his birth placed in circumstances favorable to the enjoyment of life, and all that makes life a blessing. ’To as many as receive him, believing in his name, he grants the privilege of being children of God, who derive their birth not from blood, nor from the desire of the flesh, nor from the will of man, but from God.’ ======================================================================== CHAPTER 118: 03.66. REGENERATION - RENEWING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT ======================================================================== RENEWING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. ’He has saved us,’ says the Apostle Paul, ’by the bath of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit, which he poured on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour; that being justified by his favor, we might be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.’ Thus, and not by works of righteousness, he has saved us. Consequently, being born of water and the renewing of the Holy Spirit are not works of merit or of righteousness, but only the means of enjoyment. But this pouring out of the influences, this renewing of the Holy Spirit, is as necessary as the bath of regeneration to the salvation of the soul, and to the enjoyment of the hope of heaven, of which the Apostle speaks. In the kingdom into which we are born of water, the Holy Spirit is as the atmosphere in the kingdom of nature--we mean that the influences of the Holy Spirit are as necessary to the new life, as the atmosphere is to our animal life in the kingdom of nature. All that is done in us before regeneration, God our Father effects by the word, or the gospel as dictated and confirmed by his Holy Spirit. But after we are thus begotten and born by the Spirit of God--after our new birth--the Holy Spirit is shed on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour; of which the peace of mind, the love, the joy, and the hope of the regenerate is full proof; for these are amongst the fruits of that the Holy Spirit of promise of which we speak. Thus commences (The next chapter) ======================================================================== CHAPTER 119: 03.67. REGENERATION - THE NEW LIFE ======================================================================== THE NEW LIFE. ’Newness of life’ is a Hebraism for a new life. The new birth brings us into a new state. ’Old things have passed away; all things have become new,’ says an Apostle: ’for if any one be in Christ, he is a new creature.’ A new spirit, a new heart, and an outward character, corresponding to this change, are the effects of the regenerating process: ’for the end of the change,’ the grand results of the remedial system, is ’love out of a pure heart, a good conscience, and faith unfeigned.’ ’Love is the fulfilling of the whole law,’ and the fruit of the whole gospel. It is the cardinal principle of all Christian behaviour, the soul of the new man, the breath of the new life. Faith works by no other rule. It is a working principle, and love is the rule by which it operates. The Spirit of God is the spirit of love and the health of a sound mind. Every pulsation of the new heart is the impulse of the spirit of love. Hence the brotherhood is beloved, and all mankind embraced in unbounded good will. When the tongue speaks, the hands and the feet move and operate under the unrestrained guidance of this principle, we have the Christian character drawn to the life. For meekness, humility, mercy, sympathy, and active benevolence, are only the names of the various workings of this all-renovating, invigorating, sanctifying, and happifying principle. ’He that dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him.’ The Christian, or the new man, is then a philanthropist to the utmost extent of the meaning of that word. Truth and love have made him free from all the tyrannies of passion, from guilt, and fear and shame; have filled him with courage, active and passive. Therefore, his enterprise, his capital enterprise, to which all others minister, is to take part with our Saviour in the salvation of the world. ’If by any means I may save some,’ are not the words of Paul only, but of every new man. Are they merchants, mechanics, husbandmen?--are they magistrates, lawyers, judges, or unofficial citizens?--are they masters, servants, fathers, sons, brothers, neighbors?--whatever, or wherever they may be, they live for God and his city, for the King and his empire. They associate not with the children of wrath--the miser, the selfish, the prodigal, the gay, the proud, the slanderer, the tattler, the rake, the libertine, the drunkard, the thief, the murderer. Every new man has left these precincts; has broken his league with Satan and his slaves, and has joined himself to the family of God. These he complacently loves--those he pities--and does good to all. The character of the new man is an elevated character. Feeling himself a son and an heir of God, he cultivates the temper, spirit, and behaviour, which corresponds with so exalted a relation. He despises every thing mean, grovelling, earthly, sensual, devilish. As the only begotten and well beloved Son of God is to be the model of his future personal glory, so the character which Jesus sustained amongst men, is the model of his daily imitation. His everyday aspiration is-- "Thy fair example will I trace, To teach me what I ought to be; Make me by thy transforming grace, Lord Jesus, daily more like thee." The law of God is hid in his heart. The living oracles dwell in his mind; and he grows in favor with God as he grows in the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ his Lord. As a new born babe he desires the unadulterated milk of the word of God, that he may grow by it; for as the thirsty hart pants after the brooks of water, so pants his soul after God. Thus he lives to God, and walks with him. This is the character of the regenerate--of him that is born of God--of the new man in Christ Jesus. This is the change of heart, of life, and of character, which is the tendency and the fruit of the process of regeneration, as taught and exemplified by the Apostles, and those commended by God, in their writings. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 120: 03.68. REGENERATION - PHYSICAL REGENERATION ======================================================================== We now proceed to offer a few remarks on physical regeneration, the second part of our subject. PHYSICAL REGENERATION. Our mortal bodies are yet to feel the regenerating power of the son of God. This is emphatically called ’the glory of his power.’ ’The redemption of the body’ from the bondage of corruption, is the consummation of the new creating energy of him who has immortality. Life and incorruptibility were displayed in and by his resurrection from the dead. It was great to create man in the image of God--greater to redeem his soul from general corruption; but greater of all, to give to his mortal frame incorruptible and immortal vigor. The power displayed in the giving to the dead body of the Son of God incorruptible glory and endless life, is set forth by the Apostle Paul, as incomparably surpassing every other divine work within the reach of human knowledge. He prays that the mind of Christians may be enlarged to apprehend this mighty power--that the Father of glory would open their minds, ’that they might know the exceeding greatness of his power in relation to us who believe--according to the working of his mighty power, which he wrought in Christ when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places.’ Faith in this wonderful operation of God--hope for the riches of the glory of the inheritance of the saints in light, are in the most powerful principles of action, which God has ever planted in the human breast. This is the transcendent hope of the Christian calling, which imparted such heroic courage to all the saints of eternal renown. This better resurrection in prospect, has produced heroes which make cowards of all the boasted chiefs of worldly glory. As the magnetic needle ever points to the pole, so the mind, influenced by this hope, ever rises to the skies, and terminates in the fulness of joy, and the pleasures for evermore, in the presence and at the right hand of God. To raise a dead body to life again, is not set forth as more glorious, than by a touch to give new vigor to the palsied arm, to impart sight to the blind, or hearing to the deaf; but to give that raised body the deathless vigor of incorruptibility, to renovate and transform it in all its parts, and to make every spirit feel that it reanimates its own body, that it is as insusceptible of decay, as immortal as the Father of eternity, is a thought overwhelming to every mind, a development which will glorify the power of God, as the sacrifice of his Son now displays his righteousness, faithfulness, and love to the heavens and to the earth. This new birth from the dark prison of the grave, is fitly styled ’the redemption of the body’ from bondage, ’the glorious liberty of the sons of God.’ As in our watery grave the old man is figuratively buried to rise no more, so in the literal grave, the prison of the body, we leave all that is corrupt; for he that makes all things new, will raise us up in his own likeness, and present us before his Father’s face in all the glory of immortality. Then will regeneration be complete. Then will be the full revelation of the sons of God. Immortality, in the sacred writings, is never applied to the spirit of man. It is not the doctrine of Plato which the resurrection of Jesus proposes. It is the immortality of the body of which his resurrection is a proof and pledge. This was never developed till he became the first born from the dead, and in a human body entered the heavens. Jesus was not a spirit when he returned to God. He is not made the Head of the New Creation as a Spirit, but as the Son of Man. Our nature in his person is glorified; and when he appears to our salvation, we shall be made like him: we shall see him as he is. This is the Christian hope. "A hope so great and so divine May trials well endure, And purge the soul from sense and sin, As Christ himself is pure." Thus matters stand in the economy of redemption. Thus the divine scheme of regeneration is consummated: the moral part, by the operation of moral means; the physical part, by the mighty power of God operating through physical means. By the word of his power he created the heavens and the earth; by the word of his grace he reanimates the soul of man; and by the word of his power he will again form our bodies anew, and reunite the spirit and the body in the bonds of an incorruptible and everlasting union. Then shall death "be swallowed up forever" "Where now thy victory, boasting grave?" But for this we must wait. ’We know not what we shall be.’ We only know, that when he appears, we shall be like him; that we shall see him as he is. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 121: 03.69. REGENERATION - THE USE OF THE THEORY OF REGENERATION ======================================================================== THE USE OF THE THEORY OF REGENERATION. One would imagine, from the voluminous arguments, debates, and sermons upon the theory of regeneration, that a sound theory was essential to salvation: that it must be preached in every sermon, in order to regenerate the hearers. Nothing can be more preposterous. Who can think that any theory of the resurrection or regeneration of the body can affect the body in the grave! As little can any theory affect the unregenerate, or those dead in trespasses and in sins. A sermon upon generation, or upon natural birth, would be as efficacious upon those unborn, in bringing them into this life, as a sermon upon moral or physical regeneration. This explains the fact, that in all the accounts of apostolical preaching to Jew and Gentile--in all the extracts of their sermons and speeches found in the New Testament, the subject of regeneration is not once mentioned. It is, in all the historic books of the New Testament, but once propounded, but once named; and that only in a private conference with a Jewish Senator, on the affairs of Christ’s kingdom. No theory understood or believed by the unregenerate; no theory proposed to them for their acceptance, can avail any thing to their regeneration. We might as reasonably deliver a theory of digestion to a dyspeptic, to cure his stomach--or a theory of vegetation to a scion, to hasten its growth, as to preach any view of regeneration to a sinner, to make him a Christian. Of what use, then, are the previous remarks on this subject? I will first candidly inform the reader, that they were not written for his regeneration, either of mind or body; but the benefit of those who are employed in the work of regenerating others, and for the conviction of such Christians as may have been induced to regard us as aiming at nothing, but the mere immersion of persons, as alone necessary to the whole process of conversion or regeneration, in their acceptation of the words.12 The use of this theory, if it have any, is, as a guide to those who are laboring publicly or privately for the regeneration of sinners. If we have assigned a proper place to facts, testimony, faith, feeling, action, the bath of regeneration, the renewing of the Holy Spirit, and a new life, the course is fairly marked out. They are to present the great facts, to declare the whole testimony of God to sinners, in order to their conversion or regeneration. Like Paul, in his account of his labors in Corinth, they must go out, not in the strength of human philosophy, ’but declaring the testimony of God,’ and laying before their hearers ’the wonderful works of God.’ This is the use, and the only proper use of sound theory on any subject. It is to guide the operator, not the thing operated on. I would hope, under the Divine blessing, to be the means of regenerating more persons in one year, never once naming regeneration, nor speculating upon the subject, by stating and enforcing the testimony of God, than by preaching daily the most approved theory of regeneration ever sanctioned by any sanhedrim on earth.13 With these views, we have, then, offered the preceding remarks; and shall now briefly turn our attention to (the next chapter) ======================================================================== CHAPTER 122: 03.70. REGENERATION - THE REGENERATION OF THE CHURCH ======================================================================== rTHE REGENERATION OF THE CHURCH. The word regeneration, we have found once used in the sense of a new state of things, or of the introduction of a new state of things.14 In this application of the word, we would turn the attention of our readers to the necessity of the regeneration of the church. I speak not of the regeneration of any sectarian establishment. They are built upon another foundation--upon the foundation of decrees of councils, creeds, formularies, or acts of Parliament. But we speak of those societies that professedly build upon the foundation of Apostles and Prophets, without any human bond of union, or rule of life--our brethren of the reformation, or regeneration, now in process. Should any one imagine that the state of things to which we have attained, is the sole, or ultimate object of our aspirations or our efforts, he would do us the greatest injury. Societies, indeed, may be found amongst us, far in advance of others, in their progress towards the ancient order of things; but we know of none that has fully attained to that model. It is, however, most acceptable to see so many societies formed and forming, under the banners of reformation, with the determination to move onwards in conformity to the sacred oracles, till they stand perfect and complete in all the will of God. Our opponents cannot, or will not, understand how any society can be in progress to a better order of things, than that under which they may have commenced their pilgrimage. Their sectarian policies were soon formed, and the limits of their reformation were soon fixed; beyond which it soon became heretical to move. The founders of all new schisms not only saw through a glass darkly, but their horizon was so circumscribed with human traditions, that they only aimed at moving a few paces from the hive in which they were generated. A new creed was soon adopted, and then their stature was complete. They bounded from infancy to manhood in a few days, and decided, if any presumed farther to advance, they should be treated as those who had refused to move from the old hive. Hence it became as censurable to grow beyond a certain standard, as not to grow at all. This never was our proposition, and never can be our object. We have no new creed to form, no rules of discipline to adopt. We have taken the Living Oracles as our creed, our rules and measures of faith and practice; and in this department, have no additions, alterations, nor amendments to propose. But in coming up to this standard of knowledge, faith, and behaviour, we have something yet before us, to which we have not attained. That we may be distinctly understood on this subject, we shall speak particularly on the things wanting in our individual characters, and of the things wanting in our church order, to give to our meetings that interest and influence which they ought to exert on the brotherhood and on society at large. It will be understood, that our remarks on the things which are wanting in the disciples, are applicable not to every individual, but to the general mass. And first of all, there is wanting a more general and particular knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, than is possessed by a great majority of the reformers. There is, perhaps, wanting a taste or disposition for that private devotional reading of the oracles of God, which is essential to a growth in that knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ, which constitutes the most striking attributes in Christian character. We thus reason from the proficiency which is discoverable in the bounds of our acquaintance, which is large enough to afford data for every general conclusion. To read the Scriptures for the sake of carrying out into practice all that we learn, and to read them for the sake of knowing what is written, are very different objects, and will produce very different results. Their influence on the temper and behaviour, in the former case, will very soon become manifest to all with whom we associate; while, in the latter case, there is no visible improvement. David said that he ’hid the word of God in his heart,’ or laid it up in his mind, ’that he might not sin against God;’ and that he had ’more understanding than all his teachers, because God’s testimonies were his meditation.’ It will be admitted that the sacred writings of the Apostles and Evangelists of Jesus Christ ought to be as precious and as delightful to the Christian, as were the ancient oracles to the most pious Jews. Now as an example of what we mean by a private devotional reading and study of the oracles of Christ, we shall permit a Jew to tell his experience:-- ’The law of thy mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver. With my whole heart have I sought thee; my soul breaketh for the longing that it has to thy judgments at all times. Thy testimonies are my delight and my counsellors. Teach me, O Lord, the way of thy statutes, and I will keep it to the end. Give me understanding, and I shall keep thy law; yes, I will observe it with my whole heart. Make me to go in the path of thy commandments, for in it do I delight. Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage. At midnight I will rise to give thanks to thee, because of thy righteous judgments. Oh, how I love thy law; it is my meditation all the day! How sweet are thy words to my taste; sweeter than honey to my mouth! Thy testimonies have I taken as a heritage forever, for they are the rejoicing of my heart. Great peace have they that love thy law--nothing shall cause them to stumble.’ These are only a few extracts from one piece, written by a king three thousand years ago. One another occasion he pronounced the following encomium on the testimony of God:-- ’The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple: the statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart: the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold--yea, than much fine gold; sweeter also than honey, and the honey-comb. By them is thy servant warned, and in keeping of them there is great reward.’ This fully reveals all that we mean by a devotional private study of the Holy Scriptures. Every Christian who can read, may every day thus refresh, strengthen, and comfort his heart, by reading or committing to memory, and afterwards reflecting upon some portion of the book. He may carry in his pocket the blessed volume, and many a time through the day take a peep into it. This will preserve him from temptation, impart courage to his heart, give fluency to his tongue, and the graces of Christianity to his life. In this age, when ignorance of the Christian Scriptures is so characteristic, and the rage for human opinions and traditions so rampant, it is a duty doubly imperative on our brethren, to give themselves much more to the study of the book; and then one of them will put a host of aliens to flight; and, what is still more desirable, he will have communion with God all the day, and ever rejoice in his salvation. In the second place, there is wanting among disciples, who are heads of families, more attention, much more effort, to bring up their children ’in the correction and instruction of the Lord.’ The children of all disciplines should be taught the oracles of God from the first dawning of reason. The good seed should be sown in their hearts, before the strong seeds of vice can take root. From a child Timothy knew the Holy Scriptures, and they were able to make him wise to salvation, through the Christian faith. How many more Timothies might we have, if we had a few more of the daughters of Lois, and a few more mothers like Eunice! Most saints, in this generation, appear more zealous that their children should shine on earth, than in heaven--and that they may be rich here, at the hazard of eternal bankruptcy. They labor to make them rich and genteel, rather than pure and holy; and spend more time in fashioning them to the foolish and wicked taste of polished society, than in teaching them by precept and example, the word that is better than gold and more precious than rubies. Well, they sow darnel, and cannot reap wheat. They may have a mournful harvest, and years of bitterness and sorrow may reward them for their negligence and error. If only a tithe of the time, and the labor, and expense that it costs to fit a son or a daughter to shine in the middle or front ranks of genteel society, were spent in teaching them to fear God and to keep his commandments, how many more virtuous, solid, and useful citizens--how many more valuable members of the family of God--how many more faithful and able witnesses for the truth of God, would be found in all corners of the land! Every Christian family ought to be a nursery for God. Their offspring should be trained for the skies. For such are the promises of God, such are the facts on record, and such is the experience of Christians, that every parent who does his duty to his children may expect to see them inherit the blessing. Their didactic labors, aided by their example and their constant prayers, will seldom or never fail of success in influencing their descendants to walk in their ways. The very command to bring up their children in the Lord, implies its practicability. And both Testaments furnish us with all assurance that such labors will not be in vain. The men of high renown in sacred history, were generally the sons of such parentage. The sons of God were found among the sons of Seth, while the daughters of men were of the progeny of Cain. Abraham was the descendant of Shem; Moses and Aaron were the sons of believing parents; Samuel was the son of Hannah, and David was the son of Jesse. John the harbinger was the son of Zachariah and Elizabeth; and it pleased the heavenly father, that his Son should be the child of a pious virgin. But it is under Christ that the faithful are furnished with all the necessary means of bringing up their offspring for the Lord. The numerous failures which we witness, are to be traced either to great neglect, or to some fatal notion which paralyzes all effort; for some think that the salvation or damnation of their offspring was a matter settled for all eternity, irrespective of any agency on their part: that some are born ’vessels of wrath,’ and other ’vessels of mercy;’ and hence the instructions, examples, and prayers of parents are of no avail. Among the descendents of such, it will no doubt often happen that become vessels of wrath fitted for destruction, while others become vessels of mercy, predestinated to glory. When God gave a revelation to Jacob, and commanded a law to Israel, he gave it in charge that they should ’teach it to their children, that they might put their trust in God, and might not be, like their fathers, a rebellious race.’ The Apostles of Christ have also taught the Christians the same lesson. This is our guide, and not our own reasonings. Now let the disciples make this their business, morning, noon, and evening, and then we shall see its effects. We are sorry to see this great duty, to which nature, reason, revelation alike direct, so much neglected by many of our brethren--to find amongst their children those who are no better acquainted with the Scriptures than the children of their neighbors, who believe in miraculous conversions, or think it is a sin to attempt what they imagine to be the work of God alone--never suspecting that God works by human means, and employs human agency in his works of providence and redemption. I never knew but a very few families that made it their daily business to train up their children in the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, to cause them every day to commit to memory a portion of the living oracles; but these few instances authorize me to think, and to say, that such a course persisted in, and sustained by the good example of parents, will very generally, if not universally, issue in the salvation of their children. And before any one says, I have found an exception to the proverbs of Solomon, which says, ’Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it,’--let him show that this child was ’trained up in the way he should go.’ In the third place, there is wanting among the disciples, a stricter regard to relative duties--we mean, not only the duties which justice, truth, and moderation claim; but all relative duties. So long as Christians live after the manner of men in the flesh, according to the fashion of this world, they must, like other men, contract debts which they cannot promptly pay, make covenants and bargains, give promises which they cannot fulfil, and stake pledges which they are unable to redeem. All this is wholly incompatible with our profession. Such were not the primitive disciples. Sceptics of every name, men of the world, who have ever read the New Testament, know that such behaviour is utterly incompatible with the letter and spirit of Christianity. A Christian’s word or promise ought to be, and is, if Christ be honored, as solemn and obligatory as any bond. And as for breach of bargain or covenant, even where it is greatly or wholly to the disadvantage of the Christians, it is not even to be thought of--’he changes not, though to his hurt he covenants.’ How much has the gospel lost of its influence, because of the faithlessness of its professors! O! when shall it be again said of Christians in general, that ’they bind themselves, as with a solemn oath, not to commit any kind of wickedness--to be guilty neither of theft, robbery, nor adultery--never to break a promise, or to keep back a deposit when called upon.’ Pliny writes to the Emperor Trajan that such was the character of Christians A.D. 106-7, as far as he could learn it from those who were not Christians. Were all the common (now-a-days rather uncommon) virtues of justice, truth, fidelity, honesty, practiced by all Christians, how many mouths would be stopped, and how many new arguments in favor of Jesus Christ could all parties find! But even were these common virtues as general as the Christian profession, there are the other finer virtues of benevolence, goodness, mercy, sympathy, which belong to the profession, expressed in taking care of the sick, the orphan, the widow--in alleviating all the afflictions of our fellow-creatures. Add these virtues, or graces, as we sometimes call them, to the others, and then how irresistible the argument for the divine authenticity of the gospel! Let industry, frugality, temperance, honesty, justice, truth, fidelity, humility, mercy, sympathy, appear conspicuous in the lives of the disciples, and the contrast between them and other professors will plead their cause more successfully than a hundred preachers. In the last place, there is wanting a more elevated piety to bring up the Christian character to the standard of primitive times. We want not fine speeches nor eloquent orations on the excellencies of Christian piety and devotion. These are generally acknowledged. But we need to be roused from our supineness, from our worldly-mindedness, from our sinful conformities to an apostate generation, to the exhibition of that holiness in speech, in behaviour, without which no one shall see the Lord. What mean the numerous exhortations of the Apostles to watchfulness and prayer, if these are not essential to our devotion to God and consecration to his service? If our affections are not placed on things above, we are unfit for the kingdom of glory. To see the folly of a profession of Christianity without the power of godliness, we have only to put the question, How is that person fit for the enjoyment of God and Christ, whose heart is filled with the cares, anxieties, and concerns of this life--whose whole life is a life of labor and care for the body--a life of devotion to the objects of time and sense? No man can serve God and Mammon. Where the treasure is, the heart must also be. Thither the affections turn their course. There is no room for the residence of the Spirit of God in a mind devoted to the affairs of this life. The spirit of the policies of this world, and the Spirit of God, cannot dwell in the same heart. If Jesus or his Apostles taught any one doctrine clearly, fully, and unequivocally, it is this doctrine, that ’the cares of this world, the lusts of other things, and the deceitfulness of riches, stifle the word, and render it unfruitful.’ If any one would enjoy the power of godliness, he must give up his whole soul to it. The business of this life will be performed religiously, as a duty subordinate to the will of God. While his hands are engaged in that business which his own wants, or those of his household make necessary, his affections are above. He delights in God, and communes with him all the day. A Christian is not one who is pious by fits and starts, who is religious or devout one day of the week, or for one hour of the day. It is the whole bent of his soul--it is the beginning, middle, and end of every day. To make his calling and election sure, is the business of his life. His mind rests only in God. He places the Lord always before him. This is his joy and delight. He would not for the world have it otherwise. He would not enjoy eternal life, if he had it at his option, in any other way than that which God himself has proposed. He accedes to God’s arrangements, not of necessity, but of choice. His religious services are perfect freedom. He is free indeed. The Lord’s commandments are not grievous, but joyful. The yoke of Christ to him is easy, and his burthen light. He will sing, with David-- The love that to thy laws I bear, No language can display; They with fresh wonders entertain My ravish’d thoughts all day. The law that from thy mouth proceeds, Of more esteem I hold, Than untouch’d stores, than thousand mines Of silver and of gold. Whilst in the way of thy commands, More solid joy I found, Than had I been with vast increase Of envied riches crown’d. Thy testimonies I have kept, And constantly obey’d; Because the love I bore to them Thy service easy made. In the same ratio as Christians devoutly study the oracles of God, teach them to their children, practice all relative duties to society at large, and rise to a more elevated piety, they will increase their influence in the great and heavenly work of regenerating the world. A few remarks on the things wanting in the order of Christian assemblies, to give to their public meetings that influence on themselves and on society at large, will finish this section of our essay. Our heavenly Father wills our happiness in all its institutions. His ordinances are, therefore, the surest, the simplest, and the most direct means of promoting our happiness. The Lord Jesus gave himself for the church that he might purify and bless it; and, therefore, in the church are all the institutions which can promote the individual and social good of the Christian community. In attending upon these institutions on the Lord’s day, much depends upon the preparation of heart in all who unite to commemorate the death and resurrection of the Son of God. In adverting to the most scriptural and rational manner of celebrating or observing the day of the Lord, both for their own comfort and the regeneration of the world, we would first of all remark, that much depends upon the frame of mind, or preparation of heart, in which we visit the assemblies of the saints. Suppose two persons, A and B, if you please, members of the same church, take their seats together at the Lord’s table. A, from the time he opened his eyes in the morning, was filled with the recollections of the Saviour’s life, death, and resurrection. In his closet, in his family, and along the way, he was meditating or conversing on the wonders of redemption, and renewing his recollections of the sayings and doings of the Messiah. B, on the other hand, arose as on other days, and finding himself free from all obligations arising from the holiness of the time, talks about the common affairs of every day, and allows his thoughts to roam over the business of the last week, or, perhaps, to project the business of the next. If he meet with a neighbor, friend, or brother, the news of the day is inquired after, expatiated upon, discussed; the crops, the markets, the public health, or the weather--the affairs of Europe, or the doings of Congress, or the prospects of some candidate for political honor--become the theme of conversation. As he rides or walks to the church, he chats upon all, or any of these topics, till he enter the door of the meeting house. Now, as A and B enter the house in very different states of mind, may it not be supposed that they will differ as much in their enjoyments, as in their morning thoughts? Or can B, by a single effort, unburthen his mind, call in the wanderings of his thoughts, and in a moment transport himself from the contemplation of things on earth to things in heaven? If this can be imagined, then meditation and preparation of heart are wholly unnecessary to the acceptable worship of God, and to the comfortable enjoyment of his institutions. But is it compatible with experience, or is it accordant to reason, that B can delight in God, and rejoice in commemorating the wonders of redemption, while his thoughts are dissipated upon the mountains of a thousand vanities?--while, like a fool’s eyes, his thoughts are roaming to the ends of the earth? Can he say, with a pious Jew, ’How amiable are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts! My soul longs--yes, even faints, for the courts of the Lord! My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. Happy they who dwell in thy house; they will be still praising thee! A day in thy courts is better than a thousand. I had rather be a door-keeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness.’--’One thing have I desired of the Lord, and that I will seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple. O send out thy light and thy truth! Let them lead me, let them bring me to thy holy hill and to thy tabernacles. Then will I go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy; yes, I will praise thee, O God, my God!’ Or had the Jew a sublimer worship, more exalted views of God’s salvation, and more piety, than a Christian? Or were the ordinances of the Jewish sanctuary more entertaining and refreshing than the ordinances of the Christian church? This will not be alleged; consequently, B, and all of that school, are utterly at fault when they approach the house of God, in such a state of mind as they approach the market place, the forum, or the common resorts of this present world. Christians need not say, in excuse for themselves, that all days are alike, that all places and times are alike holy, and that they ought to be in the best frame of mind all the time. For even concede them all their own positions, they will not contend that a man ought to speak to God, or to come into the presence of God, as they approach men. They will not say that they ought to have the same thoughts or feelings in approaching the Lord’s table, as in approaching a common table; or on entering a court of political justice, as in coming into the house of God. There is, in the words of Solomon the Wise, a season and time for every object and for every work: There is the Lord’s day, the Lord’s table, the Lord’s house, and the Lord’s people; and there are thoughts, and frames of mind, and behaviour compatible and incompatible with all these. In the public assembly the whole order of worship ought to do justice to what is passing in the minds of all the worshippers. That joy in the Lord, that peace and serenity of mind, that affection of the brethren, that reverence for the institutions of God’s house, which all feel, should be manifest in all the business of the day. Nothing that would do injustice to all or any of these ought ever to appear in the congregation of Jesus Christ our Lord. No levity, irreverence, no gloom, no sadness, no pride, no unkindness, no severity of behaviour towards any, no coldness, nothing but love, and peace, and joy, humility, and reverence, should appear in the face, in the word, or action of any disciple. These are not little matters. They all exert a salutary influence on the brethren and the strangers. These are visible and sensible displays of the temper and spirit of Christians; and if Paul thought it expedient to write of veils and long hair when admonishing a church "to do all things decently and in order," we, in this day of degeneracy, may be allowed to notice matters and things as minute as those before us. We intend not now to go into details of church order or Christian discipline, nor to expatiate on the necessity of devoting a part of the time to singing, praying, reading, teaching, exhorting, commemorating, communicating; nor on how much of this or that is expedient. Times and circumstances, must decide how much time shall be taken up in these exercises, and when it shall be most fitting to meet, to adjourn, etc. Nor is it necessary now to say, that there must be scriptural order, and presidency, and proper discipline, and due subordination to one another in the fear of God. We now speak rather of the manner in which all things are to be done, and of the things themselves, their necessity or value. After noticing what in some instances appear to be wanting in the manner of coming together on the Lord’s day, we proceed to notice in order the things wanting in many congregations, for the purposes already specified. And first of all, be it observed, that in some churches there appears to be wanting a proper method of handling the Scriptures, to the edification of the brethren. It is admitted by all the holy brethren, that the Scriptures of truth, called the living oracles, are the great instrument of God for all his purposes in the saints on earth. Through them they are converted to God, comforted, consecrated, made meet for an inheritance among the sanctified, and qualified for every good word and work. Every thing, then, depends upon the proper understanding of these volumes of inspiration. They can only operate as far as they are understood. The system of sermonizing on a text is now almost universally abandoned, by all who intend that their hearers should understand the testimony of God. Orators and exhorters may select a word, a phrase, or a verse; but all who feed the flock of God with knowledge and understanding, know that this method is wholly absurd. Philological lectures upon a chapter are only a little better. The discussion of any particular topic, such as faith, repentance, election, the Christian calling, may sometimes be expedient: but in a congregation of Christians, the reading and examining the different books in regular succession, every disciple having the volume in his hand, following up the connection of things, examining parallel passages, interrogating and being interrogated, fixing the meaning of particular words and phrases, by comparison with the style of that writer or speaker, or with that of others; intermingling these exercises with prayer and praises, and keeping the narrative, the epistle, the speech, so long as before the minds of all, as is necessary for the youngest disciple in the congregation to understand it, and to become deeply interested in it, will do more in one year, than is done in many, on the plan of the popular meetings of the day. Great attention should be paid to all allusions, in any composition, to the particularities of time, place, and circumstance, to the geographical, historical, and chronological particulars of all questions of fact connected with all persons of note in the narratives: for these are often the best interpreters of style, and expositors of the meaning of what is written. This searching, examining, comparing, and ruminating upon the Holy Scriptures in private, in the family, in the congregation, cannot fail to make us learned in the knowledge of God, and in the knowledge of man. The Bible contains more real learning than all the volumes of men. It instructs us in all our natural, moral, political, and religious relations. Though it teaches us not astronomy, medicine, chemistry, mathematics, architecture, it gives us all that knowledge which adorns and dignifies our moral nature, and fits us for happiness. Happy the person who meditates upon it day and night! He grows and flourishes in moral health and vigor, as the trees upon the water courses. His leaf never fades--his fruit never fails. The congregations of the saints want system in furthering the knowledge of this book. The simple reading of large portions in a desultory manner, is not without some good effect; for there is light, and majesty, and life, in all the oracles of God; no man can listen to them without edification. But the profit accruing from such readings, is not a tithe of that which might be obtained in the proper systematic reading and examination of them. The congregation is the school of Christ, and every pupil there should feel that he has learned something every day he waits upon his Master. He must take the Master’s book with him, and, like every other good and orderly pupil, he must open it and study it, with all the helps that the brotherhood, his school-fellows, can furnish for his more comprehensive knowledge of all its salutary communications. A Christian scribe, well instructed in its contents, or a plurality of such, who can bring out of their intellectual treasury things new and old, will greatly advance the students in this heavenly science; but, in the absence of such, the students must be self-taught; and self-taught scholars are generally the best taught: for they cannot progress, unless they study with diligence, and carefully learn the rudiments of every science. To give some idea of the diligence and attention to the minutest matters, which are necessary to proficiency in the knowledge of all that is written in the New Testament, we shall suppose that the disciples have for their lesson, on some particular day, the Nativity of the Messiah. The second chapter of Matthew is read. After reading this chapter, or the whole of the first section of Matthew’s Testimony, the elder or president for the day asks some brother, a good reader, to read what the other evangelists have testified on this subject. Mark and John being silent on the nativity, he reads Luke 2:1-41. After the reading of this chapter, the following points are the subject of inquiry, and most of them are proposed to the brethren for solution:-- 1. Who was Cesar Augustus, and over what people did he reign? 2. At what period of his reign was the edict of enrolment issued, or when did the first register take effect? 3. What did Syria include, and what were its boundaries? 4. Who presided over Syria at the time of the first register? 5. Who was king in Judea at this time? 6. How far did Judea extend, or in what part of the Holy Land was it situated? 7. In what country was Jerusalem, where situated, and by what other names was it known? 8. What was the native city of Joseph? 9. Where was Nazareth situated, and in what district? 10. What was the boundary of Galilee, and what were its principal towns? 11. In what canton or district was Bethlehem, and how far from Jerusalem? 12. Who were the magians? 13. Why was ’Herod alarmed, and all Jerusalem with him,’ when the magians reported the Star in the East? 14. What were the scribes and chief priests assembled by Herod, and why were they called together? 15. By what means did they decide the questions referred to them? 16. On what Prophet do they rely, and where shall the quotation be found? 17. Of what family and lineage were Joseph and Mary? 18. By what means did the magians find the house in which the Messiah was born? 19. Why did the magians not return to Herod? 20. Whether did the shepherds of Bethlehem, or the eastern magians, first pay their respects to the Messiah? 21. In what quarter of the globe does Egypt lie? 22. How far from Bethlehem? 23. How long was the Messiah kept in Egypt? 24. Who predicted his return from Egypt, and where shall it be found? 25. Who foretold the slaughter of the male infants in Bethlehem, and what instigated Herod to this cruel massacre? 26. Who succeeded Herod in the throne of Judea? 27. Why did Joseph retire to Nazareth? 28. What Prophet foretold this circumstance, and where shall it be found? These matters being all ascertained, to which the maps, geographical and chronological indexes, and the appendix to the Family Testament, will greatly contribute, some moral reflections will naturally occur; for in all these incidents are manifest the wisdom, care, and economy of our heavenly Father, his faithfulness, condescension, and love; the great variety of his instruments, and agents; the ease with which he frustrates the evil counsels and machinations of his enemies; the infallible certainty of his foreknowledge; the perfect free agency of men, good and evil; the deep humiliation of his only-begotten Son in all the circumstances of his nativity. Irresistible arguments in favor for his pretensions may be drawn from these ancient prophecies, from their minuteness of time, place, and circumstance; many eloquent and powerful lessons on human pride, vanity, and arrogance may be deduced from the birth-place, cradle, and family connections of the Heir of the Universe; and many other touching appeals to the heart, which the birth, circumcision, and dedication of the Messiah, with all the incidents in Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and the Temple, connected with his first appearance on earth furnish, will present themselves, with unfading freshness and beauty, to the brotherhood of Christ. A hint to the wise is sufficient. Were this method pursued only two hours every Lord’s day, every disciple giving his heart to the work; and were the results then compared with the products of the scrap Doctors or sermonizers to sleeping and dreaming hearers, no man, having any regard for his reputation for good sense, could give his vote for the popular system. A reformation in the manner of handling the living oracles is much wanting; and the sooner and more generally it is attempted, the greater will be the regenerating influence of the brotherhood on the world. Intelligent in the Holy Scriptures, clothed with the armor of light, every disciple going forth will be a David against the Philistines--a host against the armies of the aliens. And better still, the words of heavenly favor dwelling in his heart, he will carry with him into every society a fragrance like the rose of Sharon--a sweetness of perfume like a garden which the Lord has blessed. There appears to be wanting in some congregations a proper attention to discipline, and a due regard to decorum, in the management of such cases as occur. In every family, and in every congregation, there is occasional need of discipline. Offences, delinquencies, and apostacies, did occur in the congregations over which the apostles either were, or had been, presidents; and they will happen again in this state of discipline and trial, in which we are all placed. They must be expected; and every congregation ought to be prepared to act upon the emergency with intelligence and decorum. Much injury has been done to the progress of churches, by a remission in attention to such cases, and in the manner they have been disposed of when taken up. Nothing can be more preposterous and revolting to every sentiment of good order and decorum, than that every offender and offence should, at the very offset, be dragged into the public assembly. Persons who have the care of a congregation, the seniors whose age and experience have taught them prudence, ought to be first informed of such cases; and they ought to present the matter to the congregation. Every novice is not to feel himself at liberty to disturb the congregation by presenting, on his own responsibility, and at his own discretion, a complaint against a brother, whether it be of a public or private nature. But we are now speaking of the manner of procedure in such cases. The most tender regard for the feelings of all, the utmost sympathy for the offender, the most unyielding firmness in applying the correctives which the Head of the church has commanded, and the necessity of acting promptly in accordance with the law in the case, are matters of much importance. No passion, no partiality, no bad feeling--nothing but love and piety, but faithfulness and truth; nothing but courtesy and gentleness, should ever appear in the house of God. And when any one is found guilty and excluded from the society, it should be done with all solemnity, and with prayer that the institution of Christ may be a blessing to the transgressor. But evil-doers, or those that act not honorably according to the law of Christ, ought not to be tolerated in the professed family of God. Such persons are a dead weight on the whole society--spots in every feast of love, and blemishes upon the whole profession. One sinner destroys much good; yet separation or abscission, like amputation, is only to be used in the last stage, when all other remedies, of remonstrance and admonition, expostulation and entreaty, have failed. To prevent gangrene, or an injury to the whole body, amputation is necessary, an indispensable remedy. More strictness, more firmness, and more tenderness in such cases, would add greatly to the moral influence of every society. A few persons walking together in the bonds of Christian affection, and under the discipline of Christ, is better than the largest assembly in which there are visibly and manifestly, many who fear not God, and keep not his commandments. In the house of God, all should be purity, reverence, meekness, brotherly kindness, and love. Confidence in the honesty and sincerity of our brethren, is the life of communion. To feel ourselves united with them who are determined for eternal life, and resolved to seek first of all, chief of all, above all, the kingdom of heaven: and the righteousness required in it, is most animating, comforting, exhilarating. But to be doubtful whether we are uniting with a mass of ignorance, corruption, and apathy, is a rottenness in the bones; love waxes cold, and then we have the form, without the power of godliness. That the church may have a regenerating influence upon society at large, there is wanting a fuller display of Christian philanthropy in all her public meetings; care for the poor, manifested in the liberality of her contributions; the expression of the most unfeigned sympathy for the distresses of mankind, not only among the brotherhood, but among all men; and an ardent zeal for the conversion of sinners proportioned to her professed appreciation of the value of her own salvation, and to her resources and means of enlightening the world, on the things unseen and eternal. The full display of these attributes, is the most efficient means of causing the gospel to sound abroad, and to achieve new conquests among our fellow citizens. The Christian health and vigor of every church, is to be estimated more by her exertions and success in bringing sinners home to God, than by all her other attainments. Too long has it been considered the duty, the almost exclusive duty of the preacher, to convert the world. He must spend his time, and wear out his constitution in journeyings and preachings, while the individual members of the church are to mind their own business, seek their own wealth and domestic comfort. He must endure the heat and the cold, forsake his wife and family, and commit the management of his affairs to others, while they have only to look on and pray for his success. Strange infatuation! Has he received a commission from the skies--has he been drafted out of the ranks to go to war, and they all left at home to take care of their wives and children! Some may believe this--some may imagine that it is his duty alone to spend his time and his talents in this work, and theirs daily to labor for their own interest and behoof; but surely such are not the views and feelings of our brethren! The work of the Lord will never progress--or in other words, the regenerating influence of the church will amount to little or nothing, so long as it is thought to be not equally the duty of every member, or the special duty of one or two, denominated preachers, to labor for the Lord. There is either a special call, a general call, or no call at all, to labor for the conversion of the world. If there be a few specially called, the rest have nothing to do but to mind their own concerns; ’to seek their own things, and not the things of Jesus Christ.’ If none be called, then it is the duty of none, and the Lord has nothing for his people to do--no world to convert; or, at least, nothing for them to do in that work. None of us are prepared for the consequences of either of these assumptions. It follows, then, that it is the duty of all to labor according to their respective abilities in this work. All are called to labor for the Lord. I hold that every citizen in Christ’s kingdom is bound to take up arms for the King, as much as I am; and if he cannot go to the fight the battles of the Lord, he must take care of the wives and children of those who can, and will fight for their King and country. But the expense of the war must be borne by the subjects of the crown; and as the Lord will not have any tax-gatherers in his kingdom, but accepts only voluntary contributions, he makes a mark over against the names of those who do nothing, and he will settle with them at his return. He calls even the contributions for the gospel, made by those at home, ’a fragrant odor, a sacrifice acceptable, well pleasing to God.’ But we are afraid of doing any thing of this sort, lest we should be like some other people, who we think have acted imprudently. Strange, indeed, that when any thing has been once abused, it is never again to be used! But I have inadvertently strayed off from my purpose. The manner in which the brethren labor for the salvation of the world, is all that comes within our prescribed limits. On this enough has been said. Let the brethren solemnly consider the things that are wanting to give to their meetings that influence which they ought to exert upon themselves and upon society at large. We are susceptible of receiving moral and religious advantages, from our own good order and decorum in the congregation, as those who attend our meetings as spectators. And in this instance, as well as sin all the variety of doing good, he that waters others is again watered in return; for he that blesses others, is always blessed in blessing them. None enjoy the blessings of the gospel more fully, than they who are most active and influential in blessing others. What happy seasons are those in which we see many turning to the Lord! Now if we would have a perpetual feast, we must be perpetually devoted to the promotion of the happiness of others. We must live for God, as well as live to God. In filling up these outlines, other matters still more minute, but, perhaps, equally important, will present themselves to the attention of the brethren. Now we cannot set about these matters too soon. The time has again come, when judgment must begin at the house of God. The people who have long enjoyed the word of the life and the Christian institutions must soon come to a reckoning. They must give an account of their stewardship, for the Lord has promised to call them to a judgment. An era is just at the door, which will be known as the Regeneration for a thousand years to come. The Lord Jesus will judge that adulterous brood, and give them over to the burning flame, who have broken the covenant, and formed alliances with the governments of the earth. Now the cry is heard in our land, ’Come out of her, my people, that you partake not of her sins, and that you may not receive of her plagues.’ The Lord Jesus will soon rebuild Jerusalem, and raise up the tabernacle of David which have so long been in ruins. Let the church prepare herself for the return of her Lord, and see that she make herself ready for his appearance. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 123: 03.71. REGENERATION - THE REGENERATION OF THE WORLD ======================================================================== THE REGENERATION OF THE WORLD. All the kingdoms of this world shall soon become the kingdoms of our Lord the King. He will hurl all the present potentates from their thrones. He will grind to powder the despotisms, civil and ecclesiastic; and with the blast of his mouth, give them to the four winds of heaven. The antichristian power, whether it be called Papistical, Mahomedan, Pagan, or Atheistic, will as certainly be destroyed, as Jesus reigns in heaven. No trace of them shall remain. The best government on earth, call it English or American, has within it the seeds of its own destruction--carries in its constitution a millstone, which will sink it to the bottom of the sea. They acknowledge not that God has set his Christ upon his throne. They will not kiss the Son. Society under their economy is not blessed. The land mourns through the wickedness of those that sit in high places. Ignorance, poverty, and crime abound, because of the injustice and iniquities of those who guide the destinies of nations. Men that fear not God, and love not his Son, and that regard not the maxims of his government, yet wear the sword, and sway the sceptre in all lands. This is wholly adverse to the peace and happiness of the world. Therefore, he will break them in pieces like a potter’s vessel, and set up an order of society in which justice, inflexible justice, shall have uncontrolled dominion. Jesus will be universally acknowledged by all the race of living men, and all nations shall do him homage. This state of society will be the consummation of the Christian religion, in all its moral influences and tendencies upon mankind. How far this change is to be effected by moral, and how far by physical means, is not the subject of our present inquiry. But the preparation of a people for the coming of the Lord must be the result of the restoration of the ancient gospel and order of things. And come when it may, the day of the regeneration of the world will be a day as wonderful and terrible as was the day of the deluge, of Sodom’s judgment, or of Jerusalem’s catastrophe. Who shall stand when the Lord does this? ======================================================================== CHAPTER 124: 03.72. REGENERATION - REGENERATION OF THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH ======================================================================== But all the regenerations, physical and moral, individual, congregational, or national, are but types and shadows, or means of preparation for the-- REGENERATION OF THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH. The Bible begins with the generations of the heavens and the earth; but the Christian revelation ends with the regenerations, or new creation of the heavens and the earth. This the ancient promise of God, confirmed to us by the Christian Apostles. The present elements are to be changed by fire. The old or antediluvian earth, was purified by water; but the present earth is reserved for fire, with all the works of man that are upon it. It shall be converted into a lake of liquid fire. But the death in Christ will have been regenerated in body, before the old earth is regenerated by fire. The bodies of the saints will be as homogeneous with the new earth and heavens as their present bodies are with the present heavens and earth. God recreates, regenerates, but annihilates nothing; and, therefore, the present earth is not to be annihilated. The best description we can give of this regeneration, is in the words of one who had a vision of it on the island of Patmos. He describes it as far as it is connected with the New Jerusalem, which is to stand upon the new earth, under the canopy of the new heaven:-- ’And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the former heaven and the former earth were passed away; and the sea was no more. And I, John, saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem, descending from God out of heaven, prepared like a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven, saying, Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall pitch his tent among them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be among them--their God. And he shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and death shall be no more, nor grief, nor crying; nor shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.’ A WORD TO THE MORAL REGENERATORS OF THE AGE. God, our heavenly Father, works by means, as we all confess. His means are wisely adapted to the ends he has in view. His agents are the best agents for the work he has to accomplish. He employs not physical means nor agents, for moral ends and purposes. Nor does he produce physical effects, by moral means and agents. He has been pleased to employ not angels, but men in the work of regenerating the world. Men have written, printed, and published the gospel for nearly two thousand years. They have perpetuated it from generation to generation. They have translated it from language to language, and carried it from country to country. They have preached it in word and in deed, and thus it has come down to our days. During the present administration of the reign of Heaven, no change is to be expected; no new mission is to be originated, no new order of preachers is to be instituted. The King has gone to a far country; and before his departure, he called together his servants, and committed to them the management of his estate till he return. He has not yet come to reckon them. They were commanded first to proclaim the doctrine of his reign; then to write it in a book, and to commit it to faithful men, who should be able to teach it correctly to others. By these faithful men the records have been kept; and through their vigilance and industry they have been guarded from corruption, interpolation, and change. One generation handed them over to the next; and if ignorant and unfaithful copyists neglected their duty, others more faithful have corrected them; and now we are able to hear the words which Jesus spoke, and to read the very periods penned by the Apostles. Thus, whatever the Prophets and the Apostles have achieved since their death, has been accomplished by human agents like ourselves. Where men have not carried this intelligence in speech or writing, not one of our race knows God or his anointed Saviour. No angel nor Holy Spirit has been sent to the Pagan nations: and God has exerted no power out of his word to enlighten or reclaim savage nations. These indisputable facts and truths have much moral meaning, and ought to give a strong impulse to our efforts to regenerate the world. The best means of doing this is the object now before us; and this is one, the importance of which cannot be easily exaggerated. There are three ways of proceeding in this case, which now seem to occupy a considerable share of public attention. These are properly called theorizing, declaiming, and preaching; on each of which we may offer a remark or two in passing. The theorizers are those who are always speculating upon correct notions, or the true theory of conversion. They are great masters of method, and with some of them it is a ruinous error to place faith before regeneration, or repentance after faith. Heresy, with these, is the derangement of the method, which these have proposed for God to work by in converting the sinner. And the true faith which is connected with salvation, is an apprehension of this theory and acquiescence in it. These are all theorists, heady, or speculative Christians; and with them the whole scheme of redemption is a splendid theory. Our maxim is, Theory for the Doctors, and medicine for the sick. Doctors fatten on theories, but patients die who depend on theory for cure. A few grains of practice is worth a pound of theory. The mason and the carpenter build the house by rule; but he that inhabits it, lives by eating and drinking. No man ever was cured physically, politically, morally, or religiously, by learning a correct theory of his physical, political, moral, or religious malady. As soon might we expect to heal an ulcer on the liver by a discourse upon that organ, its functions, its diseases, and their cure, as to restore a sinner by means of the theory of faith, repentance, regeneration, or effectual calling. But on this enough has already been said, and more than is necessary to convince those who can think, and who dare to reason on such themes. The declaimers are not those only who eulogize virtue and reprobate vice; but that large and respectable class who address themselves to the passions, to the hopes and fears of men. They are those who are so rhetorical upon the joys of heaven, and the terrors of hell: who horrify, terrify, and allure by the strength of their descriptions, the flexions of their voices, the violence of their gestures, and their touching anecdotes. Their hearers are either dissolved in tears, or frantic with terror. These talk much about the heart; and, on their theory, if man’s heart was extracted, all his religion would be extracted with it. The religion of their converts flows in their blood, and has its foundation in their passions. The preachers, properly so called, first address themselves to the understanding, by a declaration or narrative of the wonderful works of God. They state, illustrate, and prove the great facts of the gospel; they lay the whole record before their hearers; and when they have testified what God has done, what he has promised and threatened, they exhort their hearers on these premises, and persuade them to obey the gospel, to surrender themselves to the guidance and direction of the Son of God. They address themselves to the whole man, his understanding, will, and affections, and approach the heart by taking the citadel of the understanding. The accomplished and wise proclaimer of the word will find it always expedient to address his audience in their proper character; to approach them through their prejudices, and never to find fault with these prepossessions, which are not directly opposed to the import and design of the ministry of reconciliation. He will set before them the models found in the sacred history, which show that the same discourse is not to be preached in every place and to every assembly, even when it is necessary to proclaim the same gospel. Paul’s address to the Athenians, Lycaonians, Antiochians, to Felix, the Jailor, and king Agrippa, are full of instruction on the topic. Augustine has written a treatise on preaching, which Luther proposed to himself as a model; but it is said that Augustine fell as far short of his own precepts, as did any of his contemporaries. We all can with more facility give precepts to others, than conform to them ourselves. In Augustine’s treatise, which in some respects influenced and formed the style and plan of Luther, and through him all the Protestants, there is much said on the best rhetorical mode "of exhibiting the truth to others;" but it savors more of the art of the schoolmen, than of the wisdom of the Apostles. He labors more on the best style and mode of expressing one’s self, than on the things to be said. Our best precepts in this matter are derived rather from the books of Deuteronomy and Nehemiah, than from any other source out of the New Testament. The book of Deuteronomy may be regarded as a series of sermons or discourses, delivered to the Jews by their great teacher, Moses, rather than as a part of the Jewish history. Two things in this book deserve great attention. The first is the simplicity, fulness, and particularity of his narratives of the incidents on the journey through the wilderness;--God’s doings and theirs, for the last forty years, are faithfully and intelligibly laid before them. The next is the use made of these facts; the conclusions deduced, the arguments drawn, and the exhortations tendered from these facts. For a fair and beautiful specimen of this, let the curious reader take up and carefully read Deuteronomy 1:1-46, Deuteronomy 2:1-37, Deuteronomy 3:1-29, Deuteronomy 4:1-49. The fact and the application, the argument and the exhortation after the manner of Moses, cannot fail to instruct him. The writings of the scribes during the captivity, teach us how to address a people that have lost the true meaning of the oracles of God. The readings, expositions, exhortations, and prayers of Ezra and Nehemiah, are full of instruction to Christians in these days of Babylonish captivity. To address a people long accustomed to hearing the Scriptures, yet ignorant of them, and consequently disobedient, is a matter that requires all the wisdom and prudence which can be acquired from Jewish and Christian records. The manner of address, next to the matter of it, is most important. The weightiest arguments, the most solemn appeals, the most pathetic expostulations, if not sustained by the gravity, sincerity, and piety of the speaker, will be like water spilled upon the ground. A little levity, a few witticisms, a sarcastic air, a conceited attitude, or a harsh expression, will often neutralize all the excellencies of the most scriptural and edifying discourse. The great work of regenerating men is too solemn, too awfully grave and divine, to allow any thing of the sort. Humility, serenity, devotion, and all benevolence in aspect, as well as in language, are essential to a successful proclamation of the great facts of the Living Oracles. He that can smile in his discourse at the follies, need not weep over the misfortunes, of the ignorant and superstitious. He that can, while preaching the gospel, deride and ridicule the errors of his fellow professors, is, for the time being, disqualified to persuade them to accept of truth, or gladly to receive the message of salvation. Those preachers have been sadly mistaken, who have sought popularity by the eccentricities, and courted smiles rather than souls;--who, by their anecdotes and foolish jests, told with the Bible before them, have thought to make themselves useful by making themselves ridiculous--and to regenerate men by teaching them how to violate the precepts of the gospel, and to disdain the examples of the Great Teacher and his Apostles. It will not do. These are the weapons of this world, and no part of the armor of light. Jesus and his Apostles never sanctioned, by precept or example, such a course; and it is condemned by all sensible men, whether Jews or Gentiles, professors or profane. In attempting to regenerate men, we must place before them the new man, not the old man, in the preacher as well as in the discourse; and while we seek out arguments to convince and allure them, we must show them in our speech and behaviour, that we believe what we preach. So did the Apostles and Evangelists. They commended themselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of Jesus Christ. Error must be attacked. It must be opposed by the truth. But it may be asked, whether the darkness may not be more easily dissipated by the introduction of light, than by elaborate discourses upon its nature and attributes. So with moral darkness, or error. To dissipate it most effectually, the easiest and readiest way is to introduce the light of truth. No preacher is obliged to learn all the errors of all ages, that he may be able to oppose them; nor is the congregation enlightened in the knowledge of God by such expositions of error. Present opposing errors may require attention; but, to attack these most successfully, it is only necessary to enforce the opposing truths. This is a very grave subject, and requires very grave attention. Much depends upon a rational and scriptural decision of the question, Which is the most effectual way to oppose and destroy error? To aid us in such an inquiry, it is necessary to examine how the Prophets and Apostles opposed the errors of their times. The world was as full of error in those days as it has ever been since. The idolatries of the Pagan world, and the various doctrines of the sects of philosophers, in and out of the land of Israel, threw as much labor into their hands, as the various heresies of apostate Christendom have thrown into ours. Their general rule was to turn the artillery of light, and to gather into a focus the arrows of day, upon the dark shades of any particular error. Their philosophy was;--The splendors of light most clearly display the blackness of darkness, and scatter it from its presence. Thus they opposed idolatry, superstition, and error of every name. Going forth in the armor of light, as the sun in the morning, the shades of the night retired from their presence, and the cheering beams of day so gladdened the eyes of their converts, that they loved darkness no more. Let us go and do likewise. An intimate acquaintance with the Holy Scriptures is the best apparatus for the work of regenerating men. The best piece I have found in the celebrated treatise of Augustine on preaching is the following:-- "He, then, who handles and teaches the word of God, should be a defender of the true faith, and a vanquisher of error; and in accomplishing this, the object of preaching, he should conciliate the adverse, excite the remiss, and point out to the ignorant their duty and future prospects. When, however, he finds his audience favorably disposed, attentive, and docile, or succeeds in rendering them so, then other things are to be done, as the case may require. If they are to be instructed, then, to make them acquainted with the subject in question, narration must be employed; and to establish what is doubtful, resort must be had to reasoning and evidence. If they are to be moved rather than instructed, then, to arouse them from stupor in putting their knowledge into practice, and bring them to yield full assent to those things which they confess to be true, there will be need of the higher powers of eloquence; it will be necessary to entreat, reprove, excite, restrain, and do whatsoever else may prove effectual in moving the heart. "All this, indeed, is what most men constantly do, with respect to those things which they undertake to accomplish by speaking. Some, however, in their way of doing it, are blunt, frigid, inelegant; others, ingenious, ornate, vehement. Now he who engages in the business of which I am treating, must be able to speak and dispute with wisdom, even if he cannot do so with eloquence, in order that he may profit his audience; although he will profit them less in this case, than if he could combine wisdom and eloquence together. He who abounds in eloquence without wisdom, is certainly so much the more to be avoided, from the very fact that the hearer is delighted with what it is useless to hear, and thinks what is said to be true, because it is spoken with elegance. Nor did his sentiment escape the notice of those among the ancients, who yet regarded it as important to teach the art of rhetoric; they confessed that wisdom without eloquence profited states but very little, but that eloquence without wisdom profited them not at all, and generally proved highly injurious. If, therefore, those who taught the precepts of eloquence, even though ignorant of the true, that is, the celestial wisdom ’which cometh down from the Father of lights,’ were compelled by the instigations of truth to make such a confession, and that too in the very books in which their principles were developed; are we not under far higher obligations to acknowledge the same thing, who are the sons and daughters of this heavenly wisdom? Now a man speaks with greater or less wisdom according to the proficiency he has made in the sacred Scriptures. I do not mean in reading them and committing them to memory, but in rightly understanding them, and diligently searching into their meaning. There are those who read them and yet neglect them--who read them, to remember the words, but neglect to understand them. To these, without any doubt, those persons are to be preferred, who retaining less the words of the Scriptures, search after their genuine signification with the inmost feelings of the heart. But better than both is he, who can repeat them when he pleases, and at the same time understands them as they ought to be understood."15 Luther’s favorite maxim was, "Bonus Textuarius, Bonus Theologus;" or, One well acquainted with the Scriptures makes a good theologian. There is one thing, above all others, which must never be lost sight of by him, who devotes himself to the work of regeneration. This all-important consideration is, that the end of the object of all his labors is to impress the moral image of God upon the moral nature of man. To draw this image upon the heart, to transform the mind of man into the likeness of God in all moral feeling, is the end proposed in the remedial system. The mould into which the mind of man is to be cast is the Apostles’ doctrine; or the seal by which this impression is to be made is the testimony of God. The gospel facts are like so many types, which, when scientifically arranged by an accomplished compositor, make a complete form, upon which, when the mind of man is placed by the power which God has given to the preacher, every type makes its full impression upon the heart. There is written upon the understanding, and engraved upon the heart, the will, or law, of character of our Father who is in heaven. The Apostles were these accomplished compositors, who gave us a perfect ’form of sound words.’ Our instrumentality consists in bringing the minds of men to this form, or impressing it upon their hearts. To do this most effectually, the preacher or evangelist must have the word of Christ dwelling in him richly, in all wisdom; and he must ’study to show himself an approved workman, irreproachable, rightly dividing the word of truth.’ He that is most eloquent and wise in the Holy Scriptures, he who has them most at command, will have the most power with men; because being furnished with the words of the Holy Spirit, he has the very arguments, which the Spirit of God chooses to employ in quickening the dead in converting sinners. For to the efficacy of the living word not only Paul deposes, but James and Peter also bear ample testimony. ’Of his own will he has begotten us, by the word of truth, that we might be a kind of first fruits of his creatures.’16 ’Having been regenerated, not by corruptible seed, but by incorruptible, through the word of the living God, which remains."17 To the fruits of his labors, such a preacher with Paul may say, ’To Jesus Christ, through the gospel, I have regenerated, or begotten you.’ Thus, in the midst of numerous interruptions, we have attempted to lay before the minds of our readers the whole doctrine of Regeneration, in all its length and breadth, in the hope, that after a more particular attention to its meaning and value, by the blessing of God, they may devote themselves more successfully to this great work; and not only enjoy more of the Holy Spirit themselves, but be more useful in forwarding the moral regeneration of the world. To God our Father, through the great Author of the Christian faith, who has preserved us in health in this day of affliction and great distress, be everlasting thanks for the renewing of our minds by the Holy Spirit, and for the hope of the regeneration of our bodies, of the heavens and of the earth, at the appearance of the Almighty Regenerator, who comes to make all things new! Amen. 1 For Fact, Testimony and Faith, see pp. 109-121. 2 Numbers 5:7-8. 3 Leviticus 5:16. 4 Acts 26:20. 5 Adam Clarke on Genesis 42:1-38 : 6 Acts 19:18-20. 7 See Family Testament, Note 39, p. 74. 8 Genesis 2:4. 9 Genesis 5:1. 10 See Numbers 8:7.--xix. 9, 13, 20, 21.--xxxi. 23. 11 Ephesians, chap. 5: 26. 12 It may again be necessary in this fastidious age, to remark, that in this essay, in order to disabuse the public mind on our use and acceptation of the term regeneration, we have taken the widest range, which a supreme regard for the apostolic style could, in our judgment, allow. While we argue that the phrase bath of regeneration, (Titus 3:5.) is equivalent to immersion, as already explained, and as contradistinguished from the renewing of the Holy Spirit, of which the immersed believer is a proper subject; we have spoken of the whole process of renovation, not in the strict application of the phrase, Titus 3:5, but rather in the whole latitude of the figure employed by the Apostle. It is not the first act of begetting, nor the last act of being born, but the whole process of conversion alluded to in the figure of generation, to which we have directed the attention of our readers. For, as often before stated, our opponents deceive themselves and their hearers, by representing us as ascribing to the word immersion, and the act of immersion, all that they call regeneration. While, therefore, we contend that being ’born again,’ and being immersed, are, in the Apostle’s style, two names for the same action, we are far from supposing, or teaching, that in forming the new man, there is nothing necessary but to be born. If any ask, why this matter was not fully developed in our first essays on this subject, our answer is, Because we could not anticipate, that our opponents would have so represented or misrepresented our views. Were a General asked, why he did not arrange all his troops in the beginning of the action, as he had them arranged when he triumphed over his enemy, he would reply, That the manoeuvres and assaults of the enemy, directed the disposition of his forces. Our opponents contend for a regeneration, begun and perfected, before faith or baptism--a spiritual change of mind by the Holy Spirit, antecedent to either knowledge, faith, or repentance, of which infants are as susceptible as adults; and, therefore, as we contend, make the gospel of no effect. By way of reprisals, they would have their converts to think, that we go for nothing but water, and sarcastically call us the advocates of "water regeneration." They think there is something more sublime and divine in "spirit regeneration;" and therefore claim the title of orthodox. This calumny has been one occasion of the present essay, and it has occasioned that part of it, which gives the fullest latitude to the term regeneration, which analogy gives to the figure used by the Apostle. But when we speak in the exact style of the living oracles on this subject, we must represent being born again, (John 3:5,) and regeneration, (Titus 3:5,) as relating to the act of immersion alone. See Extra Defended, pp. 24-36. 13 August 1st.--I have just now opened the Cincinnati Baptist Journal of 26 July, from which I read an approved definition of regeneration. It is orthodox, spiritual, physical, mystical, and metaphysical Regeneration. It is quoted from the "STANDARD." Regeneration, in the Evangelical Standard, is thus defined:-- "Is the sinner active in regeneration? Certainly he is. His mind is a thinking rational principle, which never ceases to act; and, therefore, when the word passive is applied to it, by Old Divines, or by Calvinists, they do not mean that it is literally dead, like inert matter, which requires a physical impulse to put it in motion. They only mean to convey the scriptural idea, that the Holy Spirit is the sole agent in regeneration, and that the sinner has no more efficient agency in accomplishing it, than Lazarus had in becoming alive from the dead. Still they grant that his mind is most active, but unhappily its activity is all against the Divine influence; as the Scriptures assure us, unregenerated persons ’do always resist’ the strivings of the Spirit. ’Every imagination of the thoughts of man’s heart is only evil continually.’ ’There is none that doeth good, no, not one.’ The sinner, therefore, instead of voluntarily co-operating with the Holy Spirit, does all he can to resist his divine influence, and prevent his own regeneration, until he is made willing by almighty power." What a comfortable thing is this theory of regeneration! The sinners to be regenerated when actively striving against the Divine influence. At the moment of regeneration, "he has," in one sense, "no more efficient agency in accomplishing it, than Lazarus had in becoming alive from the dead;" and in another sense, he is not passive, but "does all he can to resist the Divine influence, and prevent his own regeneration, until he is made willing by almighty power." This is standard divinity; and he that preaches this divinity, is a pious, regenerated, Regular Orthodox Baptist Christian Minister! Of how much value on this theory, is all the preaching in Christendom? The Holy Spirit may be busily at work upon some drunken sot, or some vile debauchee, who is as dead as Lazarus on one side, and on the other resisting the Spirit, with all his moral and physical energy, up to the moment that the Almighty arm pierces him to the heart with a sword, and makes him alive by killing him!!! The absurdity and licentiousness of such a view of the great work of renovation, we had thought so glaring, that no editor in the West would have had boldness to have published it. This is a proof of the necessity of our present essay, and will explain to the intelligent reader why we have given to the whole process of renovation, the name of regeneration, which properly belongs to the last act. 14 Matthew 19:28. 15 From the Biblical Repository, p. 574. Translated from the Latin by A. O. Taylor, of Andover, Mass. 16 James 1:18. 17 1 Peter 1:23. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 125: 03.73. BREAKING THE LOAF - INTRODUCTION ======================================================================== Breaking the Loaf Proposition I. Proposition II. Proposition III. Proposition IV. Proposition V. Proposition VI. Proposition VII. Objections and Answers Breaking the Loaf Man was not made for the Christian institution; but the Christian Institution for man. None but a master of the human constitution--none but one perfectly skilled in all the animal, intellectual, and moral endowments of man, could perfectly adapt an institution to man in reference to all that he is, and to all that he is destined to become. Such is the Christian Institution. Its evidences of a divine origin increase and brighten in the ratio of our progress in the science of man. He who most attentively and profoundly reads himself, and contemplates the picture which the Lord of this Institution has drawn of him, will be most willing to confess, that man is wholly incapable of originating it. He is ignorant of himself, and of the race from which he sprang, who can persuade himself that man, in any age, or in any country, was so far superior to himself as to have invented such an Institution as the Christian. That development of man, in all his natural, moral, and religious relations, which the Great Teacher has given, is not farther beyond the intellectual powers of man, than is the creation of the Sun, Moon, and Stars beyond his physical strength. The eye of man cannot see itself; the ear of man cannot hear itself; nor the understanding of man discern itself: but there is one who sees the human eye, who hears the human ear, and who discerns the human understanding. He it is, who alone is skilled in revealing man to himself, and himself to man. He who made the eye of man, can he not see? He who made the ear of man, can he not hear? He who made the heart of man, can he not know? It is as supernatural to adapt a system to man, as it is to create him. He has never thought much upon his own powers, who has not seen as much wisdom on the outside, as in the inside of the human head. To suit the outside to the inside, required as much wisdom as to suit the inside to the outside, and yet the exterior arrangement exists for the interior. To fashion a casement for the human soul exhibits as many attributes of a creator, as to fashion a human spirit for its habitation. Man, therefore, could as easily make himself, as a system of religion to suit himself. It will be admitted, that it calls for as much skill to adapt the appendages to the human eye, as the human eye to its appendages. To us it is equally plain, that it requires as much wisdom to adapt a religion to man, circumstanced as he is, as to create him an intellectual and moral being. But to understand the Christian Religion, we must study it; and to enjoy it, we must practice it. To come into the kingdom of Jesus Christ is one thing, and to live as a wise, a good, and a happy citizen is another. As every human kingdom has its constitution, laws, ordinances, manners, and customs; so has the kingdom of the Great King. He, then, who would be a good and happy citizen of it, must understand and submit to its constitution, laws, ordinances, manners, and customs. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 126: 03.74. BREAKING THE LOAF - PROPOSITION 01 ======================================================================== The object of the present essay is to develop one of the institutions or ordinances of this kingdom; and this we shall attempt by stating, illustrating, and sustaining the following propositions:-- PROP. I.--There is a house on earth, called the house of God. The most high God dwells not in temples made with human hands; yet he condescended in the age of types to have a temple erected for himself, which he called his house, and glorified it with the symbols of his presence. In allusion to this, the Christian community, organized under the government of his Son, is called his house and temple. ’You are God’s building,’ says Paul to a Christian community. This building is said to be ’built upon the Apostles and Prophets--Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone.’ ’Know you not that you are the temple of God? The temple of God is holy, which temple you are.’1 But in allusion to the Jewish temple, the Christian church occupies the middle space between the outer court and the holiest of all. ’The holy places made with hands were figures of the true.’ The common priests went always into the first tabernacle or holy place, and the high priest once a year into the holiest of all. Thus, our Great High Priest went once for all into the true ’holiest of all,’ into the real presence of God, and has permitted us Christians as a royal priesthood, as a chosen race, to enter always into the only holy place now on earth--the Christian church. ’As living stones we are built up into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices most acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.’2 But all we aim at is to show that the community under Christ is called ’the house of God.’ Paul once calls it a house of God, and once the house of God. An individual or single congregation, he calls ’a house of God.’3 I have written to you, ’that you may know how to behave yourself in a house of God, which is the congregation of God.’4 And in his letter to the Hebrews 5:1-14 speaking of the whole Christian community, he calls it the house of God.6 ’Having a Great High Priest over the house of God, let us draw near," etc. It is, then, apparent, that there is under the Lord Messiah, now on earth, an institution called the house of God; and this resembles the holy place between the outer court and the holiest of all, which is the position to be proved. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 127: 03.75. BREAKING THE LOAF - PROPOSITION 02 ======================================================================== PROP. II.--In the house of God there is always the table of the Lord. As there is an analogy between the Jewish holy place, and the Christian house of God; so there is an analogy between the furniture of the first tabernacle or holy place, and those who officiated in it; and the furniture of the Christian house of God, and those who officiate in it. ’In the first tabernacle, said Paul, which is called holy, there were the candlestick, and the table, and the showbread,’ or the loaves of the presence. On the golden table every Sabbath day were placed twelve loaves, which were exhibited there for one week, and on the next Sabbath they were substituted by twelve fresh loaves sprinkled over with frankincense. The loaves which were removed from the table, were eaten by the priests. These were called in the Hebrew, ’the loaves of the faces,’ or the loaves of the presence. This emblem of the abundance of spiritual food in the presence of God for all who dwell in the holy place, stood always upon the golden table furnished by the twelve tribes, even in the wilderness. The light in the first tabernacle was not from without, but from the seven lamps placed on the golden candlestick; emblematic of the perfect light not derived from this world, which is enjoyed in the house of God. If, then, in the emblematic house of God, to which corresponds the Christian house of God, there was not only a table overlaid with gold, always spread, and on it displayed twelve large loaves, or cakes, sacred memorials and emblems of God’s bounty and grace; shall we say that in that house, over which Jesus is a Son, there is not to stand always a table more precious than gold, covered with a richer repast for the holy and royal priesthood which the Lord has instituted, who may always enter into the holy place consecrated by himself. But we are not dependent on analogies, nor far fetched inferences, for the proof of this position. Paul, who perfectly understood both the Jewish and Christian Institutions, tells us, that there is in the Christian temple a table, appropriately called the Lord’s Table, as a part of its furniture. He informs those who were in danger of being polluted by idolatry, ’that they could not be partakers of the Lord’s table, and of the table of demons.’7 In all his allusions to this table in this connection, he represents it as continually approached by those in the Lord’s house. ’The cup of the Lord’ and ’the loaf,’ for which thanks were continually offered, are the furniture of this table, to which the Christian brotherhood have free access. The Apostle Paul reminds the saints in Corinth of their familiarity with the Lord’s table, in speaking of it as being common as the meetings of the brotherhood. ’The cup of blessing for which we bless God, is it not the joint participation of the blood of Christ? The loaf which we break, is it not the joint participation of the body of Christ?’ In this style we speak of things common and usual, never thus of things uncommon or unusual. It is not the cup which we have received with thanks; nor is it the loaf which we have broken; but which we do break. But all that we aim at here is now accomplished; for it has been shown that, in the Lord’s house there is always the table of the Lord. It is scarcely necessary to add, that if it be shown, that in the Lord’s house there is the Lord’s table, as a part of the furniture, it must always be there, unless, it can be shown that only some occasions require its presence, and others its absence; or that the Lord is poorer or more churlish at one time than at another; that he is not always able to keep a table, or too parsimonious to furnish it for his friends. But this is in anticipation of our subject, and we proceed to the third proposition. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 128: 03.76. BREAKING THE LOAF -PROPOSITION 03 ======================================================================== PROP. III.--On the Lord’s table there is of necessity but one loaf. The necessity is not that of a positive law enjoining one loaf and only one, as the ritual of Moses enjoined twelve loaves. But it is a necessity arising from the meaning of the Institution as explained by the Apostles. As there is but one literal body, and but one mystical or figurative body having many members; so there must be but one loaf. The Apostle insists upon this, ’Because there is one loaf, we, the many, are one body; for we are all partakers of that one loaf.’8 The Greek word artos, especially when joined with words of number, says Dr. Macknight, always signifies a loaf, and is so translated in our Bibles, ’Do you not remember the five loaves?’9 There are many instances of the same sort. Dr. Campbell says, "that in the plural number it ought always to be rendered loaves;" but when there is a numeral before it, it indispensably must be rendered a loaf or loaves. Thus we say one loaf, seven loaves; not one bread, seven breads. ’Because there is one loaf,’ says Paul, we must consider the whole congregation as one body. Here the Apostle reasons from what is more plain, to what is less plain; from what was established, to what was not so fully established in the minds of the Corinthians. There was no dispute about the one loaf; therefore, there ought to be none about the one body. This mode of reasoning makes it as certain as a positive law: because that which an Apostle reasons from must be an established fact, or an established principle. To have argued from an assumption or a contingency to establish the unity of the body of Christ, would have been ridiculous in a logician, and how unworthy of an Apostle! It was, then, an established institution, that there is but one loaf, inasmuch as the Apostle establishes his argument by a reference to an established fact. Our third proposition is, then, sustained that on the Lord’s table there is of necessity but one loaf. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 129: 03.77. BREAKING THE LOAF - PROPOSITION 04 ======================================================================== PROP. IV.--All Christians are members of the house or family of God, are called and constituted a holy and a royal priesthood, and may, therefore bless God for the Lord’s table, its loaf, and cup--approach it without fear and partake of it with joy as often as they please, in remembrance of the death of their Lord and Saviour. The different clauses of this proposition, we shall sustain in order--’all Christian are members of the family or house of God:’10 ’But Christ is trusted as a Son over his own family; whose family we are, provided we maintain our profession and boasted hope unshaken to the end;’--’are called and constituted a holy and a royal priesthood.’11 You, also, as living stones are built up a spiritual temple, a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices most acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.’ In the 9th verse of the same chapter he says, ’But you are an elect race, a chosen generation, a royal priesthood;’ and this is addressed to all the brethren dispersed in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia. May not, then, holy and royal priests thank God for the Lord’s table, its loaf, and cup of wine? May they not, without a human priest to consecrate the way for them, approach the Lord’s table and handle the loaf and cup? If the common priests did not fear to approach a golden table, and to place upon it the loaves of the presence; if they feared not to take and eat the consecrated bread, because priests according to the flesh--shall royal priests fear, without the intervention of human hands, to approach the Lord’s table and to partake of one loaf? If they should, they know not how to appreciate the consecration of Jesus, nor how to value their high calling and exalted designation as kings and priests to God. And may we not say, that he who invested with a little clerical authority, derived only from ’the Man of Sin and Son of Perdition,’ if borrowed from the Romanists, says to them, ’stand by, I am holier than thou’--may we not say that such a one is worse than Diotrephes, who affected a pre-eminence, because he desecrates the royal priesthood of Jesus Christ, and calls him common and unclean, who has been consecrated by the blood of the Son of God? Such impiety can only be found amongst them who worship the beast, and who have covenanted and agreed that none shall buy or sell, save those who receive a mark on their foreheads, and letters patent in their hands. But allow common sense to whisper a word into the ears of priests’ "laymen," but Christ’s ’royal priests.’ Do you not thank God for the cup while the priest stands by the table; and do you not handle the loaf and cup when they come to you? And would not your thanksgiving have been as acceptable, if the human mediator had not been there, and your participating as well pleasing to God, and as consolatory to yourself, if you had been the first that had handled the loaf or the cup, as when you are the second, or the fifty-second, in order of location? Let reason answer these two questions, and see what comes of the haughty assumptions of your Protestant clergy!! But this only by the way. I trust it is apparent that the royal priesthood may approach the Lord’s table without fear, inasmuch as they are consecrated to officiate by a blood, as far superior to that which consecrated the fleshly priesthood, as the Lord’s table, covered with the sacred emblems of the sacrifice of the Lord himself, is superior to the table which held only the twelve loaves of the presence; and as they are, to say the least, called by as holy and divine an election, and are as chosen a race of priests, as were those sprung from the loins of Levi. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 130: 03.78. BREAKING THE LOAF - PROPOSITION 05 ======================================================================== PROP. V.--The one loaf must be broken before the saints feast upon it, which has obtained for this institution the name of "breaking the loaf." But some, doubtless, will ask, ’Is it not called the Lord’s supper?’ Some have thought, amongst whom is Dr. Bell, that 1 Corinthians 11:20. applies to the feasts of love or charity, rather than the showing forth the Lord’s death. These may read the passage thus:--’But your coming together into one place is not to eat a Lord’s supper; for in eating it every one takes first his own supper; alluding, as they suppose, to a love feast eaten before the breaking the loaf.’ But this Lord’s supper is contradistinguished from their own supper. And might it not as reasonably be said, you cannot call your showing forth the Lord’s death a Lord’s supper; for before eating it you have eaten a supper of your own, which prevents you from making a supper of it? You do not make it a Lord’s supper, if you first eat your supper. Nor, indeed, could the Corinthians call any eating a "Lord’s supper," conducted as was the eating of their own suppers; for one ate and drank to excess, while another who was poor, or had no supper to bring, was hungry and put to shame. Could this be called a supper in honor of the Lord! But as the Lord had eaten a religious supper, had partaken of the paschal lamb with his disciples, before he instituted the breaking of the loaf, and drinking of the cup, as commemorative of his death, it seems improper to call it a supper; for it was instituted and eaten after a supper. Not in the sense of one of the meals of the day, can it be called either dinner or supper; for it supplies the place of no meal. Deipnos, here rendered supper, in the days of Homer, represented breakfast.12 It also signified food in general or a feast. In the times of Demosthenes, it signified a feast or an evening meal. But it is of more importance to observe, that it is in the New Testament used figuratively as well as literally. Hence, we have the gospel blessings compared to a supper. We read of the ’marriage supper of the Lamb,’ and ’the supper of the Great God.’ Jesus says, ’If any man open to me, I will (deipneso) take supper with him and he with me.’ When thus used it neither regards the time of day, nor the quantity eaten. If applied, then, to this institution it is figuratively, as it is elsewhere called "the feast." For not only did the Lord appoint it, but in eating it we have communion with the Lord. The same idiom with the addition of the article occurs in Revelation 1:10. ’he kuriake hemera,’ the Lord’s day. Upon the whole it appears more probable that the Apostle uses the words kuriakos deipnos, or Lord’s supper, as applicable to the breaking of the loaf for which they gave thanks in honor of the Lord, than to their own supper or the feasts of love, usual among the brethren. If we say in accordance with the Apostle’s style, the Lord’s day, the Lord’s table, the Lord’s cup, we may also say the Lord’s supper. For in the Lord’s house these are all sacred to him. As the calling of Bible things by Bible names is an important item in the present reformation, we may here take the occasion to remark, that both "the Sacrament" and "the Eucharist" are of human origin. The former was a name adopted by the Latin church; because the observance was supposed to be an oath or vow to the Lord; and, as the term sacramentum signified an oath taken by a Roman soldier, to be true to his general and his country, the presumed to call this institution a sacrament or oath to the Lord. By the Greek church it is called the Eucharist, which word imports the giving of thanks, because before participating, thanks were presented for the loaf and the cup. It is also called the communion, or "the communion of the saints;" but this might indicate that it is exclusively the communion of saints; and, therefore, it is more consistent to denominate it literally ’the breaking of the loaf.’ But this is the only preliminary to the illustration and proof of our fifth proposition. We have said that the loaf must be broken before the saints partake of it. Jesus took a loaf from the paschal table and broke it before he gave it to his disciples. They received a broken loaf, emblematic of his body once whole, but by his own consent broken for his disciples. In eating it we then remember that the Lord’s body was by his own consent broken or wounded for us. Therefore, he that gives thanks for the loaf should break it, not as the representative of the Lord, but after his example; and after the disciples have partaken of this loaf, handing it to one another, or while they are partaking of it, the disciple who brake it partakes with them of the broken loaf--thus they all have communion with the Lord and with one another in eating the broken loaf. And thus they as priests feast upon his sacrifice. For the priests ate of the sacrifices and were thus partakers of the altar. The proof of all that is found in the institution given in Matthew 26:1-75 : Mark 14:1-72 : Luke 22:1-71 : and 1 Corinthians 11:1-34 : In each of which his breaking of the loaf, after giving thanks, and before his disciples partook of it, is distinctly stated. It is not, therefore, strange, that the literal designation of this institution should be, what Luke has given it in his Acts of Apostles thirty years after its institution. The first time he notices it is Acts 2:42. when he calls it emphatically te klasei tou artou, the breaking of the loaf, a name at the time of his writing, A.D. 64, universally understood. For, says he, in recording the piety and devotion of the first converts, ’they continued steadfast in the teaching of the Apostles, in the fellowship, in the breaking of the loaf, in the prayers--praising God.’ It is true, there is more than breaking a loaf in this institution. But, in accordance with general, if not universal usage, either that which is first or most prominent in laws, institutions, and usages, gives a name to them. Thus we have our Habeas Corpus, our Fieri Facias, our Nisi Prius, our Capias, our Venditioni Exponas, names given from the first words of the law. But to break a loaf, or to break bread, was a phrase common amongst the Jews to denote ordinary eating for refreshment. For example, Acts 2:46. ’Daily, with one accord, they continued in the temple and in breaking bread from house to house. They ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart.’ Also, after Paul had restored Eutychus at Troas, we are informed he brake a loaf and ate. Here it must refer to himself, not only because it is used indefinitely, but because he that eats is the same number with him that breaks a loaf. But when an established usage is referred to, the article or some definite term ascertains what is alluded to. Thus, Acts 2:42. it is ’the breaking of the loaf.’ And Acts 20:7. it is ’They assembled for the breaking of the loaf.’ This loaf is explained by Paul, 1 Corinthians 10:16. ’The loaf which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ.’ This proposition being now, as we judge, sufficiently evident, we shall proceed to state our sixth. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 131: 03.79. BREAKING THE LOAF - PROPOSITION 06 ======================================================================== PROP. VI.--The breaking of the loaf and the drinking of the cup are commemorative of the Lord’s death. Upon the loaf and upon the cup of the Lord, in letters which speak not to the eye, but to the heart of every disciple, is inscribed, "When this you see, remember me." Indeed, the Lord says to each disciple, when he receives the symbols into his hand, ’This is my body broken for you. This is my blood shed for you.’ The loaf is thus constituted a representation of his body--first whole, then wounded for our sins. The cup is thus instituted a representation of his blood--once his life, but now poured out to cleanse us from our sins. To every disciple he says, For you my body was wounded; for you my life was taken. In receiving it the disciple says, "Lord, I believe it. My life sprung from thy suffering; my joy from thy sorrows; and my hope of glory everlasting from thy humiliation and abasement even to death." Each disciple, in handing the symbols to his fellow-disciple, says, in effect, "You, my brother, once an alien, are now a citizen of heaven; once a stranger, are now brought home to the family of God. You have owned my Lord as your Lord, my people as your people. Under Jesus the Messiah we are one. Mutually embraced in the everlasting arms, I embrace you in mine: thy sorrows shall be my sorrows, and thy joys my joys. Joint debtors to the favor of God and the love of Jesus, we shall jointly suffer with him, that we may jointly reign with him. Let us, then, renew our strength, remember our King, and hold fast our boasted hope unshaken to the end." "Blest be the tie that binds Our hearts in Christian love; The fellowship of kindred minds Is like to that above." Here he knows no man after the flesh. Ties that spring from eternal love, revealed in blood, and addressed to his senses, draw forth all that is within him of complacent affection and feeling, to those joint heirs with him of the grace of eternal life. While it represents to him ’the bread of life’--all the salvation of the Lord--it is the strength of his faith, the joy of his hope, and the life of his love.13 This institution commemorates the love which reconciled us to God, and always furnishes us with a new argument to live for him who died for us. Him who feels not the eloquence and power of this argument, all other arguments assail in vain. God’s goodness, developed in creation and in his providence, is well designed to lead men to reformation. But the heart, on which these fail, and to which Calvary appeals in vain, is past feeling, obdurate, and irreclaimable, beyond the operation of any moral power known to mortal man. Every time the disciples assemble around the Lord’s table, they are furnished with a new argument also against sin, as well as with a new proof of the love of God. It is as well intended to crucify the world in our hearts, as to quicken us to God, and to diffuse his love within us. Hence it must in reason be a stated part of the Christian worship, in all Christian assemblies; which leads us to state, illustrate, and sustain the following capital proposition, to which the preceding six are all preliminary. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 132: 03.80. BREAKING THE LOAF - PROPOSITION 07 ======================================================================== PROP. VII.--The breaking of the one loaf, and the joint participation of the cup of the Lord, in commemoration of the Lord’s death, usually called "the Lord’s Supper," is an instituted part of the worship and edification of all Christian congregations in all their stated meetings. Argument 1. The first Christian congregation which met in Jerusalem, and which was constituted by the twelve Apostles, did as statedly attend upon the breaking of the loaf in their public meetings, as they did upon any other part of the Christian worship. So Luke records, Acts 2:42. ’They continued steadfast in the Apostles’ doctrine, in the fellowship, in the breaking of the loaf, and in the prayers.’ Ought we not, then, to continue as steadfast in the breaking of the loaf, as in the teaching of the Apostles, as in the fellowship, as in the prayers commanded by the Apostles? Argument 2. The Apostles taught the churches to do all the Lord commanded. Whatever, then, the churches did by the appointment or concurrence of the Apostles, they did by the commandment of Jesus Christ. Whatever acts of religious worship the Apostles taught and sanctioned in one Christian congregation, they taught and sanctioned in all Christian congregations, because all under the same government of one and the same King. But the church in Troas met upon the first day of the week, consequently all the churches met upon the first day of the week for religious purposes. Among the acts of worship, or the institutions of the Lord, to which the disciples attended in these meetings, the breaking of the loaf was so conspicuous and so important, that the churches are said to meet on the first day of the week for this purpose. We are expressly told that the disciples at Troas met for this purpose; and what one church did by the authority of the Lord, as a part of his instituted worship, they all did. That the disciples in Troas met for this purpose is not to be inferred; for Luke says positively, Acts 20:7.) ’And on the first day of the week, when the disciples came together for the breaking of the loaf, Paul, being about to depart on the morrow, discoursed with them, and lengthened out his discourse till midnight.’ From the manner in which this meeting of the disciples at Troas is mentioned by the historian, two things are very obvious--1st. That it was an established custom or rule for the disciples to meet on the first day of the week. 2d. That the primary object of their meeting was to break the loaf. They who object to breaking the loaf on the first day of every week when the disciples are assembled, usually preface their objections by telling us, that Luke does not say they broke the loaf every first day; and yet they contend against the Sabbatarians, that they ought to observe every first day to the Lord in commemoration of his resurrection. The Sabbatarians raise the same objection to this passage, when adduced by all professors of Christianity to authorize the weekly observance of the first day. They say that Luke does not tell us, that they met for any religious purpose on every first day. How inconsistent, then, are they who make this sentence an express precedent for observing every first day, when arguing against the Sabbatarians, and then turn round and tell us, that it will not prove that they broke the loaf every first day! If it does not prove the one, it is most obvious it will not prove the other; for the weekly observance of this day, as a day of the meeting of the disciples, and the weekly breaking of the loaf in those meetings, stand or fall together. Hear it again: ’And on the first day of the week, when the disciples assembled to break the loaf.’ Now all must confess, who regard the meaning of words, that the meeting of the disciples and the breaking of the loaf, as far as these words are concerned, are expressed in the same terms as respects the frequency. If the one was fifty-two times in a year, or only once; so was the other. If they met every first day, they broke the loaf every first day; and if they did not break the loaf every first day, they did not meet every first day. But we argue from the style of Luke, or from his manner of narrating the fact, that they did both. If he had said that on a first day the disciples assembled to break the loaf, then I would admit that both the Sabbatarians, and the semiannual or septennial communicants, might find some way of explaining this evidence away. The definite article is, in the Greek and in the English tongue, prefixed to stated fixed times, and its appearance here is not merely definitive of one day, but expressive of a stated or fixed day. This is so in all languages which have a definite article. Let us illustrate this by a very parallel and plain case. Suppose some 500 or 1000 years hence the annual observance of the 4th of July should have ceased for several centuries, and that some person or persons devoted to the primitive institutions of this mighty Republic, were desirous of seeing the 4th of every July observed as did the fathers and founders of the Republic during the hale and undegenerate days of primitive republican simplicity. Suppose that none of the records of the first century of this Republic had expressly stated, that it was a regular and fixed custom for a certain class of citizens to pay a particular regard to the 4th day of every July; but that a few incidental expressions in the biography of the leading men in the Republic spoke of it as Luke has done of the meeting at Troas. How would it be managed? For instance, in the life of John Quincy Adams it is written, A.D. 1823, "And on the 4th of July, when the republicans of the city of Washington met to dine, John Q. Adams delivered an oration to them." Would not an American, a thousand years hence, in circumstances such as have been stated, find in these words one evidence that it was an established usage, during the first century of this Republic, to regard the 4th of July as aforesaid. He would tell his opponents to mark, that it was not said that on a fourth of July, as if it were a particular occurrence; but it was, in the fixed meaning of the English language expressive of a fixed and stated day of peculiar observance. At all events, he could not fail in convincing the most stupid, that the primary intention of that meeting was to dine. Whatever might be the frequency or the intention of that dinner, it must be confessed, from the words above cited, that they met to dine. Another circumstance that must somewhat confound the Sabbatarians, and the lawless observers of the breaking of the loaf, may be easily gathered from Luke’s narrative. Paul and his company arrived at Troas either on the evening of the first day, or on Monday morning at an early hour; for he departed on Monday morning, as we term it, at an early hour; and we are positively told that he tarried just seven days at Troas. Now, had the disciples been Sabbatarians, or observed the seventh day as a Sabbath, and broke the loaf on it as the Sabbatarians do, they would not have deferred their meeting till the first day, and kept Paul and his company waiting, as he was evidently in a great haste at this time. But his tarrying seven days, and his early departure on Monday morning, corroborates the evidence adduced in proof, that the first day of the week was the fixed and stated day, for the disciples to meet for this purpose.14 From Acts 2:1-47, then, we learn that the breaking of the loaf, was a stated part of the worship of the disciples in their meetings; and from Acts 20:1-38 we learn, that the first day of the week was the stated time for those meetings; and above all, we ought to notice that the most prominent object of their meeting was to break the loaf. Other corroborating evidences of the stated meeting of the disciples on the first day for religious purposes, are found in the fact, that Paul says he had given order to all the congregations in Galatia, as well as that in Corinth, to attend to the fellowship, or the laying up of contributions for the poor saints on the first day of every week. ’On the first day of every week let each of you lay somewhat by itself, according as he may have prospered, putting it into the treasury, that when I come there may be no collections’15 for the saints. Kata mian Sabbaton Macknight justly renders, ’the first day of every week;’ for every linguist will admit that kata polin means every city; kata menan, every month; kata ecclesian, every church; and, therefore, in the same usage, kata mian Sabbaton means the first day of every week. Now this prepares the way for asserting not only, that the disciples in Troas assembled on the first day of every week for ’the breaking of the loaf,’ but also for adducing a third argument:-- Argument 3. The congregation in Corinth met every first day, or the first day of every week, for showing forth the Lord’s death. Let the reader bear in mind that he has just heard that Paul commanded the church in Corinth, or every saint in Corinth, to contribute according to his ability, by putting into the treasury every first day his contributions to avoid collections when Paul came. This is agreed on all hands to prove the weekly meeting of the saints. Now, with this concession in mind, we have only to notice what is said, 1 Corinthians 11:20. ’When you come together in one place, that is, every week at least, this is not to eat the Lord’s supper.’ To act thus is unworthy of the object of your meeting. To act thus is not to eat the Lord’s supper. It is not to show forth the Lord’s death. Thereby declaring that this is the chief object of meeting. When a teacher reproves his pupils for wasting time, he cannot remind them more forcibly of the object of coming to school, nor reprove them with more point, than to say, ’When you act thus, this is not to assemble to learn.’ This is the exact import of the Apostle’s address, ’When you assemble thus, it is not to eat the Lord’s supper.’ We have seen, then, that the saints met every first day in Corinth; and when they assembled in one place it was to eat the Lord’s supper, a declaration of the practice of the primitive congregations as explicit as could incidentally be given, differing only from a direct command in the form in which it is expressed. But it is agreed on all hands, that whatsoever the congregations did with the approbation of the Apostles, they did by their authority. For the Apostles gave them all the Christian institutions. Now as the Apostle Paul approbated their meeting every week, and their coming together into one place to show forth the Lord’s death;--and only censured their departure from the meaning of the institution, it is as high authority as we could require for the practice of the weekly meeting of the disciples. But when Acts 2:42; Acts 20:7. 1 Corinthians 11:20 and 1 Corinthians 16:1-2, are compared and added together, it appears that we act under the influence of apostolic teaching and precedent, when we meet every Lord’s day for the breaking of the loaf. But this is still farther demonstrated by a fourth argument drawn from the following fact:-- Argument 4. No example can be adduced from the New Testament of any Christian congregation assembling on the first day of the week, unless for the breaking of the loaf. Let an example be adduced by those who teach that Christians ought to meet on the first day of the week not to break the loaf, and then, but not till then, can they impugn the above fact. Till this is done, a denial of it must appear futile in the extreme. The argument, then, is, Christians have no authority, nor are under any obligations to meet on the Lord’s day, from any thing which the Apostles said or practiced, unless it be to show forth the Lord’s death, and to attend to those means of edification and comfort connected with it. Argument 5. If it be not the duty and privilege of every Christian congregation to assemble on the first day of every week to show forth the Lord’s death, it will be difficult, if not impossible, from either scripture or reason, to show that it is their duty or privilege to meet monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, annually, or indeed, at all, for this purpose. For from what premises can any person show that it is a duty or privilege to assemble monthly, which will not prove that it is obligatory to meet weekly? We challenge investigation here, and affirm that no man can produce a single reason, why it should or could be a duty or a privilege for a congregation to meet monthly, quarterly, or annually, which will not prove that it is its duty and privilege to assemble every first day for this purpose. Argument 6. Spiritual health, as well as corporeal health, is dependent on food. It is requisite for corporeal health, that the food not only be salutary in its nature, and sufficient in its quantity, but that it be received at proper intervals, and these regular and fixed. Is it otherwise with moral health? Is there no analogy between the bread which perishes, and the bread of life Is there no analogy between natural and moral life--between natural and moral health? and, if there be, does it not follow, that if the primitive disciples only enjoyed good moral health, when they assembled weekly to show forth the Lord’s death, that they cannot enjoy good moral health who only meet quarterly or semi-annually for this purpose? Argument 7. But in the last place, what commemorative institution, in any age, under any religious economy, was ordained by divine authority, which had not a fixed time for its observance? Was it the commemoration of the finishing of creation signified in the weekly Sabbath? Was it the Passover, the Pentecost, the Feast of Tabernacles? Was it the Feast of Purim either? What other significant usage was it, the times or occasion of whose observance were not fixed. How often was circumcision to be administered to the same subject? How often Christian immersion? Is there a single institution commemorative of any thing, the meaning, or frequency, of the observance of which, is not distinctly, either by precept or example, laid down in the Holy Scriptures? Not one of a social character, and scarcely one of an individual character. The commemoration of the Lord’s death must, then, be a weekly institution--an institution in all the meetings of the disciples for Christian worship; or it must be an anomaly--a thing sui generis--an institution like no other of divine origin. And can any one tell why Christians should celebrate the Lord’s resurrection fifty-two times in a year, and his death only once, twice, or twelve times? He that can do this will not be lacking in a lively imagination, however defection he may be in judgment, or in an acquaintance with the New Testament. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 133: 03.81. BREAKING THE LOAF - OBJECTIONS ======================================================================== Having written so much on this subject formerly, I shall now introduce a few persons out of the many men of renown who, since the Reformation, have pled this cause. We shall not only introduce them to our readers, but we shall let them speak to them.-- John Brown, of Haddington, author of the Dictionary of the Bible, and teacher of theology for that branch of the Presbyterian church called the "Secession," has written a treatise on this subject. We shall give him the task of stating and removing the objections to this apostolic institution. The reader will perceive that there are many impurities in his style; and although his speech betrays that he has been in Ashdod, still his arguments are weighty and powerful. He offers various arguments for the weekly observance of this institution, and states and refutes nine objections to the practice. A few of the strongest we shall quote:-- "All the arguments I ever knew advanced in support of the unfrequent administration of the Lord’s supper, appear to me altogether destitute of force. The following are the principal:-- Objection 1. The frequent administration of this ordinance, in the apostolic and primitive ages of Christianity, was commendable and necessary, because the continual persecutions that then raged, gave them ground to fear that every Sabbath might be their last; whereas now we are not in such danger, and therefore need not so frequent use of this ordinance. Answer. Ought we not still to live as if every Sabbath were to be our last? Have we now a lease on our life more than these had? Did not many Christians in these times live to as great an age as we do now? Indeed, is it not evident, from the best historians, that the church was generally under no persecution above one-third of the time, that weekly communion was practiced? But, say they had been constantly exposed to the cruelest persecution, the objection becomes still more absurd. If they attended this ordinance weekly at the peril of their lives does it follow that now, when God gives us greater and better opportunity for it, we ought to omit it? Does God require the greatest work at his people’s hands, when he gives least opportunity? Or does he require least work, when he gives the greatest opportunity for i? What kind of a master must God be, if this were the case? Besides, do not men need this ordinance to preserve them from the influence of the world’s smiles as much as of its frowns?--"Let us invert this objection, and try if it has more force. It would then run thus: The primitive Christians received the Lord’s supper weekly, as their souls were in greater danger from the smiles and allurements of the world, which are usually found more hurtful to men’s spiritual concerns than its frowns; and as they had greater opportunity for doing so by their enjoying peace and liberty; yet this frequency of administering and partaking is not requisite now, as we, being under the world’s frowns, are in less hazard as to our spiritual concerns; and especially, as we cannot attend upon it but at the peril of our lives, God having expressly declared that he loves mercy better than sacrifice. Objection 2. The primitive and reforming times were seasons of great spiritual liveliness, and of large communications of divine influences to the souls of believers; whereas it is quite otherwise now. Therefore, though frequent administration was then commendable; yet, in our languishing decayed state, it is unnecessary. Answer. Ought we to repair seldom to the wells of salvation, because we can bring but little water at once from them? Ought we seldom to endeavor to to fill out pitchers at the fountain of living waters, because they are small? Is not this ordinance a cordial for restoring the languishing, strengthening the weak, recovering the sick, and reviving the dying believer? How reasonable, then, is it to argue that languishing, weak, sick, and dying believers, must not have it often administered to them, just because they are not in perfect health?"--"Would not the objection inverted read better? The primitive Christians had this ordinance frequently administered to them, because, being decayed and withered, weak and sickly, and receiving only scanty communications of divine influence at once, it was necessary for them to be often taking new meals: whereas, we being now strong and lively Christians, and receiving on these occasion such large supplies of grace, as are sufficient to enable us to walk many days under this powerful influence, have no occasion for so frequently attending on that ordinance, which is especially calculated for strengthening languishing, weak, sickly believers. Objection 3. If the Lord’s supper were frequently administered, it would become less solemn, and, in time, quite contemptible, as we see is the case with baptism, through the frequency of the administration of that ordinance. Answer. Is this means of keeping up the credit of the Lord’s supper, of God’s devising or not? If it is, where is that part of his word that warrants it? The contrary I have already proved from Scripture. Since, then, it is only of man’s invention, what ground is there to hope it will really maintain the credit and solemnity of the ordinance? Did not the Papists of old, pretend to maintain and advance its solemnity, by reduction of the frequency of administration? Did they not take away the cup from the people, which Calvin says was the native consequence of the former? Did they not annex the administration of this ordinance to those seasons which superstition had aggrandized; namely, Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas? Did they not annex a world of ceremonies to it? Did they not pretend that it was a real sacrifice, and that the elements were changed by consecration, into the real body and blood of Christ? And, did all this tend to the support of the proper credit of this ordinance? On the contrary, did it not destroy it? Though the doctrine of transubstantiation procured a kind of reverence for it, yet, was this reverence divine? or, was it not rather devilish, in worshipping the elements? Now, how are we sure that our unfrequent administration of this ordinance will more effectually support its solemnity? Is it not strange that we should have so much encouragement from the practice of the Apostles, the primitive Christians, and the whole of the reformed churches, to profane this solemn ordinance; while the most ignorant and abandoned Papists are our original pattern, for the course that tends to support its proper honor and credit? What a strange case this must be, if, in order to support the credit of God’s ordinance, we must forsake the footsteps of the flock, and walk in the paths originally chalked out by the most ignorant and wicked antichristians? "Besides, if our unfrequent administration of this ordinance render it solemn, would it not become much more so, if administered only once in seven, ten, twenty, thirty, sixty, or a hundred years?"--"Shall we not then find, that those who pray once a month or hear a sermon once-a-year, have their minds far more religiously impressed with solemn views of God, than those who pray seven times a day, and hear a hundred sermons within the year? "Let us invert this objection, and see how it stands. All human devices to render God’s ordinances more solemn, are impeachments of his wisdom, and have always tended to bring the ordinances into contempt. But unfrequent administration of the supper is a human device, first invented by the worst Papists, and therefore it tends to bring contempt on this ordinance, as we see sadly verified in the practice of those who voluntarily communicate seldom." The means by which the weekly observance of the supper was set aside, Mr. Brown states in the following words:-- "The means by which the unfrequent administration of this ordinance appears to me to have been introduced into the church, do not savor of the God of truth. The causes that occasioned its introduction appear to have been pride, superstition, covetousness, and carnal complaisance. The eastern hermits, retiring from the society of men, had taken up their residence in deserts and mountains, and, being far removed from the places of its administration, seldom attended. This, though really the effect of their sloth and distance, they pretend to arise from their regard and reverence for this most solemn ordinance. It being easy to imitate them in this imaginary holiness, which lay in neglecting the ordinance of God, many of the eastern Christians left off to communicate, except at such times as superstition had rendered solemn, as at pasch; and contented themselves with being spectators on other occasions. On account of this practice, we find the great and eloquent Chrysostom, once and again, bitterly exclaiming against them as guilty of the highest contempt of God and Christ; and calls their practice a most wicked custom." An objection not formally stated by Mr. Brown, which I have frequently heard, is drawn from the words, ’as often as you do this, do it in remembrance of me.’ From these words, it is pled that we are without law in regard to the time how often; and consequently cannot be condemned for a partial or total neglect: for ’where there is no law, there is no transgression.’ ’As often’ is used not to license the frequency, but to denote the manner. ’Always do it in remembrance of me.’ The connection in which these words occur regarding the manner or design of the observance, and not how often it may, or may not be celebrated, it is a violation of every rule of interpretation to infer another matter from them, which was not in the eye of the Apostle. Besides, if the words ’as oft’ leave it discretionary with any society how often, they are blameless if they never once, or more than once in all their lives, show forth the Saviour’s death. This interpretation makes an observance without reason, without law, without precedent, and consequently without obligation. Next to Mr. Brown, we shall introduce a few extracts from William King, Archbishop of Dublin. The Editors of the Christian Examiner presented a very valuable extract from Mr. King, in their 7th of May number of the first volume, from which I quote the following, pp. 163, 165, 166, 167:-- "The following remarks on this institution of our Saviour, are copies from a ’Discourse concerning the Inventions of Men in the Worship of God,’ by William King, of Ireland. He was born at Antrim, 1650; educated at Trinity College, Dublin; and held successively the dignities of Dean of St. Patrick’s, Bishop of Derry, and Archbishop of Dublin. He died in 1729. His method, in this discourse is to examine and compare the worship of God, as taught in the Scriptures, with the practice of the different religious sects of the day:-- ’Christ’s positive command to do this in remembrance of him, etc., must oblige us in some times and in some places; and there can be no better way of determining when we are obliged to do it than by observing when God in his goodness gives us opportunity; for either we are then obliged to do it, or else we may choose whether we will ever do it or no; there being no better means of determining the frequency, than this of God’s giving us the opportunity. And the same rule holding in all other general positive commands, such as those that oblige us to charity, we may be sure it holds likewise in this. Therefore, whoever slights or neglects any opportunity of receiving which God afford him, does sin, as certainly as he, who, being enabled by God to perform an act of charity, and invited by a fit object, neglects to relieve him, or shuts up his bowels of compassion against him, concerning whom the Scriptures assure us that the love of God dwells not in him. And the arrangement is rather stronger against him who neglects this holy ordinance; for how can it be supposed that man has a true love for his Saviour, or a due sense of his sufferings, who refuses or neglects to remember the greatest of all benefits, in the easiest manner, though commanded to do it by his Redeemer, and invited by a fair opportunity of God’s own offering. "It is manifest that if it be not our own fault, we may have an opportunity every Lord’s day when we meet together; and therefore that church is guilty of laying aside the command, whose order and worship doth not require and provide for this practice. Christ’s command seems to lead us directly to it: for, ’Do this in remembrance of me,’ implies that Christ was to leave them, that they were to meet together after he was gone, and that he required them to remember him at their meetings whilst he was absent. The very design of our public meetings on the Lord’s day, and not on the Jewish Sabbath, is, to remember and keep in our minds a sense of what Christ did and suffered for us till he come again; and this we are obliged to do, not in such a manner as our own inventions suggest, but by such means as Christ himself has prescribed to us, that is, by celebrating this holy ordinance. ’It seems then probable, from the very institution of this ordinance, that our Saviour designed it should be a part of God’s service in all the solemn assemblies of Christians, as the passover was in the assemblies of the Jews. To know, therefore, how often Christ requires us to celebrate this feast, we have no more to do, but to inquire how often Christ requires us to meet together; that is, at least every Lord’s day.’" Next we shall introduce an American Rabbi of very great celebrity, Dr. John Mason, of New York. The passages which I quote are found in a note attached to page 188th of the New York Edition of Fuller’s Strictures on Sandemanianism. "Mr. Fuller does not deny that the Lord’s Supper was observed by the first Christians every Lord’s day, (nor will this be denied by any man who has candidly investigated the subject,) but he seems to think that Acts 20:7. does not prove that it was so; others, eminent for piety and depth of research, have considered this passage as affording a complete proof of the weekly observance of the Lord’s supper. Dr. Scott, in his valuable Commentary, observes on this passage, ’Breaking of bread, or commemorating the death of Christ in the eucharist, was one chief end of their assembling; this ordinance seems to have been constantly administered every Lord’s day, and probably no professed Christians absented themselves from it, after they had been admitted into the church; unless they lay under some censure, or had some real hindrance.’ "Dr. Mason, of this city, in his Letters on Frequent Communion, speaks on this subject with still greater decision. ’It is notorious, that during the first three centuries of the Christian era, communions were held with the frequency of which, among us, we have neither example nor resemblance. It is also notorious, that the original frequency of communions declined as carnality and corruption gained ground. And it is no less notorious, that it has been urged as a weighty duty by the best of men, and the best churches, in the best of times.’ "Weekly communion did not die with the Apostles and their contemporaries. There is a cloud of witnesses to testify that they were kept up by succeeding Christians, with great care and tenderness, for above two centuries. It is not necessary to swell these pages with quotations. The fact is indisputable. "Communion every Lord’s day, was universal, and was preserved in the Greek church till the seventh century; and such as neglected three weeks together were excommunicated. "In this manner did the spirit of ancient piety cherish the memory of the Saviour’s love. There was no need of reproof, remonstrance, or entreaty. No trifling excuses for neglect were ever heard from the lips of a Christian; for such a neglect had not yet degraded the Christian’s name. He carried in his own bosom sufficient inducements to obey, without reluctance, the precepts of his Lord. It was his choice, his consolation, his joy. These were days of life and glory; but days of dishonor and death were shortly to succeed; nor was there a more ominous symptom of their approach, than the decline of frequent communicating. For as the power of religion appears in a solicitude to magnify the Lord Jesus continually, so the decay of it is first detected by the encroachments of indifference. It was in the fourth century, that the church began very discernibly to forsake her first love. "The excellent Calvin complains that in this day, professors, conceiting that they had fully discharged their duty by a single communion, resigned themselves for the rest of the year, to supineness and sloth. ’It ought to have been,’ says he, ’far otherwise. Every week, at least, the table of the Lord should have been spread for Christian assemblies; and the promises declared, by which, partaking of it, we might be spiritually fed.’"16 We shall now hear the celebrated John Wesley. After fifty five years’ reflection upon the subject, he decides that Christians should show forth the Lord’s death every Lord’s day. He prefaces 106th Sermon, Luke 22:19, with this remark:-- "This discourse was written above fifty and five years ago, for the use of my pupils at Oxford. I have added very little, but retrenched much; as I then used more words than I now do. But I thank God, I have not yet seen cause to alter my sentiments in any point which is therein delivered." The Sermon is titled "The Duty of Constant Communion," concerning which the Reformer says-- "It is no wonder that men who have no fear of God, should never think of doing this. But it is strange that it should be neglected by any that do fear God, and desire to save their souls; and yet nothing is more common. One reason why many neglect it it, they are so much afraid of eating and drinking unworthily, that they never think how much greater the danger is, when they do not eat or drink at all." In speaking of constantly receiving the supper, Mr. Wesley says-- "I say constantly receiving. For as to the phrase frequent communion, it is absurd to the last degree. If it means any thing else but constant, it means more than can be proved to be the duty of any man. For if we are not obliged to communicate constantly, by what argument can it be proved that we are obliged to communicate frequently? yea, more than once a year? or once in seven years? or once before we die? Every argument brought for this, either proves that we ought to do it constantly, or proves nothing at all. Therefore that undeterminate unmeaning way of speaking, ought to be laid aside by all by all men of understanding. Our power is the only rule of our duty. Whatever we can do, that we ought. With respect either to this, or any other command, he that, when he may obey if he will, does not, will have no place in the kingdom of heaven." Though we may have some objections to the style in which John Wesley speaks of the meaning of this institution, as we have indeed to that of all the others from whom we have quoted, yet we would recommend to the whole Methodistic community the close perusal of the above Sermon. It will be found in vol. 3, pp. 171-179. The Elders among the Methodists, with whom John Wesley is such high authority, we would remind of his advice, found in his Letters to America, 1784, lately quoted in the Gospel Herald, Lexington, Kentucky. "I ALSO ADVISE THE ELDERS TO ADMINISTER THE SUPPER OF THE LORD ON EVERY LORD’S DAY." So much for John Brown, John Mason, and John Wesley, and the authorities which they quoted. While quoting the sayings of the Johns, I am reminded of something said by the great John Milton, the "immortal bard" of England. In his posthumous works, he says; "The Lord’s supper (which the doctrine of transubstantiation, or rather anthropophagy, has well nigh converted into a banquet of cannibals,) is essential to be observed, and may be administered by any one with propriety, as well as by an appointed minister. There is no order of men which can claim to itself either the right of distribution, or the power of withholding the sacred elements, seeing that in the church we are all alike priests." "The master of a family, or any one appointed by him, is at liberty to celebrate the Lord’s supper from house to house, as was done in the dispensation of the passover"--"all Christians are a royal priesthood: therefore any believer is competent to act as an ordinary minister according as convenience may require, provided only he be endowed with the necessary gifts, these gifts constituting his commission." Thus did the famous John Milton make way for the weekly observance of the supper, by divesting it of the priestly appendages and penances of the dark ages. A cloud of witnesses to the plainness and evidence of the New Testament on the subject of the weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper, might be adduced. But this we think unnecessary; and as we would avoid prolixity and tediousness, we shall only add a few extracts from the third volume of the Christian Baptist, 2d edt. p. 254, in proof of the assertion--all antiquity is on the side of the disciples meeting every first day to break the loaf.-- All antiquity concurs in evincing that, for the three first centuries, all the churches broke bread once a week. Pliny, in his Epistles, Book 10: Justin Martyr, in his Second Apology for the Christians, and Tertullian, De Ora. page 135, testify that it was the universal practice in all the weekly assemblies of the brethren, after they had prayed and sung praises— ’Then bread and wine being brought to the chief brother, he taketh it and offereth praise and thanksgiving to the Father, in the name of the Son and Holy Spirit. After prayer and thanksgiving, the whole assembly saith, Amen! When thanksgiving is ended by the chief guide, and the consent of the whole people, the deacons (as we call them) give to every one present part of the bread and wine, over which thanks are given.’ "The weekly communion was prepared in the Greek church till the seventh century; and, by one of their canons, ’such as neglected three weeks together, were excommunicated.’17 "In the fourth century, when all things began to be changed by baptized Pagans, the practice began to decline. Some of the councils in the western part of the Roman Empire, by their canons, strove to keep it up. The council held at Illiberis in Spain, A. D. 324, decreed that ’no offerings should be received from such as did not receive the Lord’s Supper.’18 "The council at Antioch, A. D. 341, decreed that ’all who came to church, and heard the Scriptures read, but afterwards joined not in prayer, and receiving the sacrament, should be cast out of the church, till such time as they gave public proof of their repentance.’19 "All these canons were unable to keep the carnal crowd of professors in a practice for which they had no spiritual taste; and, indeed, it was likely to get out of use altogether. To prevent this, the Council of Agatha, in Languedoc, A. D. 506, decreed that ’none should be esteemed good Christians who did not communicate at least three times a year--at Christmas, Easter, and Whitsunday.’20 This soon became the standard of a good Christian, and it was judged presumptuous to commune oftener. "Things went on in this way for more than 600 years, until they got tired of even three communications in one year; and the infamous Council of Lateran, which decreed auricular confession and transubstantiation, decreed that ’an annual communion at Easter was sufficient.’ This association of the ’sacrament’ with Easter, and the mechanical devotion of the ignorant at this season, greatly contributed to the worship of the Host.21 Thus the breaking of bread in simplicity and godly sincerity once-a-week, degenerated into a pompous sacrament once-a-year at Easter. "At the Reformation this subject was but slightly investigated by the reformers. Some of them, however, paid some attention to it. Even Calvin, in his Institutes, lib. 4. chap. 17: sect. 46, says, ’And truly this custom, which enjoins communicating once-a-year, is a most evident contrivance of the Devil, by whose instrumentality soever it may have been determined.’ "And again (Inst. lib. 6, chap. 18: sect. 56,) he says, ’It ought to have been far otherwise. Every week, at least, the table of the Lord should have been spread for Christian assemblies, and the promises declared by which, in partaking of it, we might be spiritually fed.’ "Martin Chemnitz, Witsius, Calderwood, and others of the reformers and controversialists, concur with Calvin; and, indeed, almost every commentator on the New Testament concurs with the Presbyterian Henry in the remarks on Acts 20:7. ’In the primitive times it was the custom of many churches to receive the Lord’s supper every Lord’s day.’ "The Belgic reformed church, in 1851, appointed the supper to be received every other month. The reformed churches of France, after saying that they had been too remiss in observing the supper but four times a year, advise a greater frequency. The church of Scotland began with four sacraments in a year; but some of her ministers got up to twelve times. Thus things stood till the close of the last century. "Since the commencement of the present century, many congregations in England, Scotland, Ireland, and some in the United States and Canada, both Independents and Baptists, have attended upon the supper every Lord’s day, and the practice is every day gaining ground. "These historical notices may be of some use to those who are ever and anon crying out Innovation! Innovation! But we advocate the principle and the practice on apostolic grounds alone. Blessed is the servant, who, knowing his Master’s will, doeth it with expedition and delight! "Those who would wish to see an able refutation of the Presbyterian mode of observing the sacrament, and a defence of weekly communion, would do well to read Dr. John Mason’s Letters on Frequent Communion, who is himself a high toned Presbyterian, and consequently his remarks will be more regarded by his brethren than mine." Thus our seventh proposition is sustained by the explicit declarations of the New Testament, by the reasonableness of the thing itself when suggested by the Apostles, by analogy, by the conclusions of the most eminent reformers, and by the concurrent voice of all Christian antiquity. But on the plain sayings of the Lord and his Apostles, we rely for authority and instruction upon this and every other Christian institution. It does, indeed, appear somewhat incongruous, that arguments should have to be submitted to urge Christians to convene weekly around the Lord’s table. Much more in accordance with the genius of our religion would it be, to see them over solicitous to be honored with a seat at the King’s table, and asking with intense interest, might they be permitted so often to eat in his presence, and in honor of his love. To have to withstand their daily convocations for this purpose, would not be a task so unnatural and so unreasonable, as to have to reason and expostulate with them, to urge them to assemble for weekly communion. But as the want of appetite for our animal sustenance is a symptom of ill health, or approaching disease; so a want of relish for spiritual food is indicative of a want to spiritual health, or of the presence of a moral disease, which, if not healed, must issue in apostasy from the Living Head. Hence among the most equivocal prognosis of a spiritual decline, the most decisive is a want to appetite for the nourishment, which the Good Physician prepared and prescribed for his family. A healthy and vigorous Christian, excluded from the use and enjoyment of all the provisions of the Lord’s house cannot be found. But much depends upon the manner of celebrating the supper, as well as upon the frequency. The simplicity of the Christian institution runs through every part of it. While there is the form of doing every thing, there is all attention to the thing signified. But there is the form as well as the substance, and every thing that is done, must be done in some manner. The well bred Christian is like the well bred gentleman--his manners are graceful, easy, artless, and simple. All stiffness and forced formality are as graceless in the Christian as in the gentleman. A courteous and polite family differs exceedingly from a soldier’s mess mates or a ship’s crew, in all the ceremonies of the table. There is a Christian decency and a Christian order, as well as political courtesy and complaisance. Nothing is more disgusting than mimicry. It is hypocrisy in manners, which, like hypocrisy in religion, is more odious than apathy or vulgarity. There is a saintishness in demeanor and appearance, which differs as much from sanctity, as foppery from politeness. The appearance of sanctimoniousness is as much to be avoided as actual licentiousness of morals. An austere and rigid pharisaism sits as awkwardly upon a Christian, as a mourning habit upon a bride. Cheerfulness is not mirth--solemnity is not pharisaism--joy is not noise--nor eating, festivity. But to act right in any thing we must feel right. If we would show love, we must first possess it. If a person would walk humbly, he must be humble: and if one would act the Christian on any occasion, he must always live the Christian. Persons who daily converse with God, and who constantly meditate upon his salvation, will not need to be told how they should demean themselves at the Lord’s table. The following extract from my Memorandum Book furnishes the nighest approach to the model, which we have in our eye, of good order and Christian decency in celebrating this institution. Indeed, the whole order of that congregation was comely:-- "The church in -------- consisted of about fifty members. Not having any person whom they regarded as filling Paul’s outlines of a Bishop, they had appointed two senior members, of a very grave deportment, to preside in their meetings. These persons were not competent to labor in the word and teaching; but they were qualified to rule well, and to preside with Christian dignity. One of them presided at each meeting. After they had assembled in the morning, which was at eleven o’clock, (for they had agreed to meet at eleven and to adjourn at two o’clock during the Winter season,) and after they had saluted one another in a very familiar and cordial manner, as brethren are wont to do who meet for social purposes; the president for the day arose and said: ’Brethren, being assembled in the name and by the authority of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, on this day of his resurrection, let us unite in celebrating his praise.’ He then repeated the following stanza:-- "Christ the Lord is risen to-day! Sons of men and angels say; Raise your joys and triumphs high, Sing, O heavens! and, earth, reply!" "The congregation arose and sang this psalm in animating strains. He then called upon a brother, who was a very distinct and emphatic reader, to read a section of the evangelical history. He arose and read, in a very audible voice, the history of the crucifixion of the Messiah. After a pause of a few moments, the president called upon a brother to pray in the name of the congregation. His prayer abounded with thanksgivings to the Father of Mercies, and with supplications for such blessings on themselves and for all men as were promised to those who ask, or for which men were commanded to pray. The language was very appropriate; no unmeaning repetitions, no labor of words, no effort to say any thing and every thing that came into his mind; but to express slowly, distinctly, and emphatically, the desires of the heart. The prayer was comparatively short; and the whole congregation, brethren and sisters, pronounced aloud the final Amen. "After prayer a passage in one of the Epistles was read by the president himself, and a song was called for. A brother arose, and after naming the page, repeated-- "’Twas on that night when doom’d to know That eager rage of every foe; That night in which he was betray’d The Saviour of the world took bread." "He then sat down, and the congregation sang with much feeling. "I observed that the table was furnished before the disciples met in the morning, and that the disciples occupied a few benches on each side of it, while the strangers sat off on seats more remote. The president arose and said that our Lord had a table for his friends, and that he invited his disciples to sup with him. ’In memory of his death, this monumental table,’ said he, ’was instituted; and as the Lord ever lives in heaven, so he ever lives in the hearts of his people. As the first disciples, taught by the Apostles in person, came together into one place to eat the Lord’s supper, and as they selected the first day of the week in honor of his resurrection, for this purpose; so we, having the same Lord, the same faith, the same hope with them, have vowed to do as they did. We owe as much to the Lord as they; and ought to love, honor, and obey him as they.’ Thus having spoken, he took a small loaf from the table, and in one or two periods gave thanks for it. After thanksgiving, he raised it in his hand, and significantly brake it, and handed it to the disciples on each side of him, who passed the broken loaf from one to another, until they all partook of it. There was no stiffness, no formality, no pageantry; all was easy, familiar, solemn, cheerful. He then took the cup in a similar manner, and returned thanks for it, and handed it to the disciples sitting next to him, who passed it round; each one waiting upon his brother, until all were served. The thanksgiving before the breaking of the loaf, and the disturbing of the cup, were as brief and pertinent to the occasion, as the thanks usually presented at a common table for the ordinary blessing of God’s bounty. They then arose, and with one consent sang-- "To him that lov’d the sons of men, And washed us in his blood; To royal honors rais’d our heads, And made us priests to God!" "The president of the meeting called upon a brother to remember the poor, and those ignorant of the way of life, before the Lord. He kneeled down and the brethren all united with him in supplicating the Father of Mercies in behalf of all the sons and daughters of affliction; the poor and the destitute, and in behalf of the conversion of the world. After this prayer the fellowship, or contribution, was attended to; and the whole church proved the sincerity of their desires, by the cheerfulness and liberality which they seemed to evince, in putting into the treasury as the Lord had prospered them. "A general invitation was tendered to all the brotherhood if they had any thing to propose or inquire, tending to the edification of the body. Several brethren arose in succession, and read several passages in the Old and New Testaments, relative to some matters which had been subjects of former investigation and inquiry. Sundry remarks were made; and after singing several spiritual songs selected by the brethren, the president, on motion of a brother who signified that the hour of adjournment had arrived, concluded the meeting by pronouncing the apostolic benediction. "I understand that all these items were attended to in all their meetings; yet the order of attendance was not invariably the same. On all the occasions on which I was present with them, no person arose of speak without invitation, or without asking permission of the president, and no person finally left the meeting before the hour of adjournment, without special leave. Nothing appeared to be done in a formal or ceremonious manner. Every thing exhibited the power of godliness as well as the form; and no person could attend to all that passed without being edified and convinced that the Spirit of God was there. The joy, the affection, and the reverence which appeared in this little assembly, was the strongest argument in favor of their order, and the best comment on the excellency of the Christian institution." 1 1 Corinthians 3:16-17. 2 1 Peter 2:5. 3 1 Timothy 3:15. 4 Greek, oikos Theou. 5 Hebrews 10:21. 6 Greek, ho oikos Theou. 7 1 Corinthians 10:21. 8 1 Corinthians 10:17. 9 Matthew 16:9. 10 Hebrews 3:6. 11 1 Peter 2:5. 12 Iliad 2, line 381-399. and 8, line 53-66. 13 Christian Baptist, vol. 3, No. 1. In that volume, in the Fall of 1825, were written four essays on the breaking of bread, which see. 14 C. B. pp. 211-212. 15 1 Corinthians 16:2. 16 Mason’s Letters on Frequent Communion, pp. 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, and 42. Edinburgh Edition, 1799. 17 Erskine’s Dissertations, p. 271. 18 Council Illib. Can. 28. 18 Council Antioch. Song of Solomon 2:1-17. 20 Coun, Agatha, Can. 18. 21 Bingham’s Ori., B. 15: C. 9. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 134: 03.82. CONCLUDING ADDRESS - ADDRESS TO THE CITIZENS OF THE KINGDOM ======================================================================== Concluding Addresses. Address to the Citizens of the Kingdom A Word to Friendly Aliens Address to Belligerent Aliens Concluding Addresses. ADDRESS TO THE CITIZENS OF THE KINGDOM. Fellow Citizens, Your rank and standing under the reign of the Prince of Peace have never been surpassed--indeed, have never been equalled by any portion of the human race. You have visions and revelations of God--his being and perfections--developments of the depths of his wisdom and knowledge, of the counsels of his grace, and the purposes of his love, which give you an intellectual and moral superiority above all your predecessors in the Patriarchal and Jewish ages of the world. Secrets of God, which were hid from ages and generations, have been revealed to you by the Apostles of the Great Apostle and High Priest of your confession.--What Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses, David, Isaiah, Daniel, and all the Prophets, down to John the Harbinger, rejoiced to anticipate, you have realized and enjoyed. The intellectual pleasures of the highest and most sublime conceptions of God and of Christ vouchsafed to you, so far transcend the attainments of the ancient people of God, that you are comparatively exalted to heaven, and may enjoy the days of heaven upon earth. You have a book which contains not only the charter of your privileges, but which explains a thousand mysteries in the antecedent administrations of God over all the nations of the earth. In it you have such interpretations of God’s past providences in the affairs of individuals, families, and nations, as open to you a thousand sources of rational and sentimental enjoyment from incidents and things which puzzled and perplexed the most intelligent and highly favored of past ages. Mountains are, indeed, levelled; valleys are exalted; rough places are made plain, and crooked ways straight to your apprehension; and, from these data, you are able to form more just conceptions of the present, and more lofty anticipations of the future, than fell to the lot of the most highly favored subjects of preceding dispensations. And, indeed, so inexhaustible are the deep and rich mines of knowledge and understanding in the Christian revelations, that the most comprehensive mind in the kingdom of heaven might labor in them during the age of a Methuselah, constantly enriching itself with all knowledge and spiritual understanding, and yet leave at last vast regions and tracts of thought wholly unexplored. But this decided superiority over the most gifted saints of former ages you unquestionably enjoy. Among all the living excellencies with which they were acquainted, they wanted a perfect model of all human excellence. Bright as were the virtues and excellencies of an Abraham, a Joseph, a David, there were dark spots, or, at least, some blemishes in their moral character. They failed to place in living form before their contemporaries, or to leave as a legacy to posterity, every virtue, grace, and excellence that adorn human nature. But you have Jesus, not only as ’the image of the invisible God,’ ’an effulgence of his glory, and an exact representation of his character;’ but as a man, holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sin, exhibiting in the fullest perfection every excellence which gives amiability, dignity, and glory to human character. You have motives to purity and holiness, a stimulus to all that is manly, good, and excellent, from what he said and did, and suffered as the Son of Man, which would have added new charms and beauties to the most exemplary of all the saints of the olden times. Means and opportunities of the highest intellectual and moral enjoyments are richly bestowed on you, for which they sighed in vain: God having provided some better things for Christians than for Jews and Patriarchs. Shall we not, then, fellow citizens, appreciate and use, as we ought, to our present purity and happiness, to our eternal honor and glory, the light which the Sun of Righteousness has shed so richly and abundantly on us? Remember that we stand upon Apostles and Prophets, and are sustained by Jesus, the light of the world, and the interpreter and vindicator of all God’s ways to man in creation, providence, and redemption. All suns are stars; and he that is now to us in this life ’the Sun of Righteousness,’ in respect of the future is ’the Bright and Morning Star.’ Till the day of eternity dawn, and the day-star of immortality arise in our hearts, let us always look to Jesus. But it is not only the felicity of superior heavenly light, though that is most delectable to our rational nature, which distinguishes you the citizens of this kingdom; but that personal, real, and plenary remission of all sin, which you enjoy through the blood of the Lamb of God, bestowed on you through the ordinances of Christian immersion and confession of sins. The Jews, indeed, had sacrifices under the law, which could, and did take away ceremonial sins; and which so far absolved from the guilt of transgressing that law, as to give them a right to the continued enjoyment of the temporal and political promises of the national compact; but farther Jewish sacrifices and ablutions could not reach.--This benefit every Jew had from them. But as respected the conscience, Paul, that great commentator on Jewish sacrifice, assures us they had no power. ’With respect to the conscience,’ says he, ’they could not make him who did the service perfect.’ The entrance of the law gave the knowledge of sin. It gave names to particular sins, and ’caused the offence to abound.’ The sacrifices appended to it had respect to that institution alone, and not to sin in general, nor to sin in its true and proper nature. The promise made to the patriarchs, and the sacrificial institution added to it, through faith in that promise, led the believing to anticipate a real sin-offering; but it appears the Jewish sacrifices had only respect to the Jewish institution, and, excepting their typical character, gave no new light to those under that economy on the subject of a true and proper remission of sins, through the real and bloody sacrifice of Christ. The Patriarch and the believing Jew, as respected a real remission of sins, stood upon the same ground; for, as has been observed, the legal institution, or, as Paul says, ’the supervening of the law,’ made no change in the apprehensions of remission, as respected the conscience. But a new age having come (for ’these ordinances for cleaning the flesh were imposed only till the time of reformation’,) and Christ having, by a more perfect sacrifice, opened the way into the true holy places, has laid the foundation for perfecting the conscience by a real and full remission of sins, which, by the virtue of his blood, terminates not upon the flesh, but upon the conscience of the sinner. John, indeed, who lived at the dawn of the Reformation, preached reformation with an immersion for the remission of sins; saying that ’they should believe in him that was to come after him.’ Those who believed John’s gospel, and reformed, and were immersed into John’s reformation, had remission of sins through faith in that was to come; but you, fellow-citizens, even in respect of the enjoyment of remission, are greatly advanced above the disciples of John. You have been immersed, not only by the authority of Jesus, as Lord of all, into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, but into the death or sacrifice of Christ. This no disciple of Moses or of John knew anything about. This gives you an insight into sin, and a freedom from it, as respects conscience--a peace and a joy unutterable and full of glory, to which both the disciples of Moses and of the Harbinger were strangers. So that the light of the risen day of heaven’s eternal Sun greatly excels, not only the glimmerings of the stars in the patriarchal age, and the faint light of the moon in the Jewish age, but even the twilight of the morning. Your new relation to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, into which you have been introduced by faith in the Messiah and immersion into his death, verifies, in respect of the sense and assurance of remission, all that John and Jesus said concerning the superiority of privilege, vouchsafed to the citizens of the kingdom of heaven. You can see your sins washed away in the blood that was shed on Mount Calvary. That which neither the highly favored John, nor any disciple of the Messiah could understand, till Jesus said ’it is finished,’ you not only clearly perceive, but have cordially embraced. You can feel, and say with all assurance, that ’the blood of Jesus Christ now cleanses you from all sin;’ and that by faith you have access to the Mediator of the New Institution, and to the blood of sprinkling which speaks glad tidings to the heart. You have an Advocate with the Father; and, when conscious of any impurity, coming to him by God, confession your sins, and supplicating pardon through his blood, you have the promise of remission. You now know how God is just as well as merciful, in forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin. But superior light and knowledge, and enlarged conceptions of God, with such an assurance of real and personal remission as pacifies the conscience and introduces the peace of God into the heart, are not the only distinguishing favors which you enjoy in the new relation of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, into which you are introduced under the reign of Heaven; but you are formally adopted into the family of God, and constituted the sons and daughters of the Father Almighty. To be called ’the friend of God,’ was the highest title bestowed on Abraham; to be called the friends of Christ, was the peculiar honor of the disciples of Christ, to whom he confided the secrets of his reign; but to be called ’the children of God through faith in Jesus Christ,’ is not only the common honor of all Christians, but the highest honor which could be vouchsafed to the inhabitants of this earth. Such honor have you, my fellow-citizens, in being related to the only-begotten Son of God: ’For as many as received him he gave the privilege of becoming the sons of God.’ These, indeed, were not descended from families of noble blood, nor genealogies of high renown; neither are they the offspring of the instincts of the flesh, nor made the sons of God ’by the will of man,’ who sometimes adopts the child of another as his own; but they are ’born of God’ through the ordinances of his grace. ’Behold how great love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called the children of God!’ ’The world, indeed, does not know us, because it did not know him. Beloved, now are we the children of God. It does not yet appear what we shall be.’ ’Because you are sons, God has sent forth the spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.’ And if sons, it follows you ’are heirs of God through Christ’--the heir of all things. Is this, fellow-citizens, a romantic vision, or sober and solemn truth, that you are children of God, possessing the spirit of Christ, and constituted heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ of the eternal inheritance! What manner of persons, then, ought you to be! How pure, how holy and heavenly in your temper; how just and righteous in all your ways; how humble and devoted to the Lord; how joyful and triumphant in your King! Permit me, then, to ask, Wherein do you excel?--nay, rather, you will propose this question to yourselves. You will say, How shall we still more successfully promote the interest, the honor, and the triumphs of the gospel of the kingdoms? Is there any thing we can do by our behaviour, our morality, our piety, by our influence, by all the earthly means with which God has furnished us? Is there any thing we can do more to strengthen the army of the faith, to invigorate the champions of the kingdom, to make new conquests for our King? Can we not increase the joy of the Lord in converting souls--can we not furnish occasions of rejoicing to the angels of God--can we not gladden the hearts of thousands who have never tasted the joys of the children of God? In the present administration of the kingdom of God, during the absence of the King, he has said to the citizens, ’Put on the armor of light’--’Contend earnestly for the faith’--’convert the world’--’occupy till I come’--’let your light shine before men, that they, seeing your good works, may glorify your Father in heaven’--’that the Gentiles may, by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation.’ He has thus entrusted to the citizens the great work for which he died--the salvation of men. Let us, then, brethren, be found faithful to the Lord and to men, that he may address us at his coming with the most acceptable plaudit, ’Well done, good and faithful servants; enter into the joy of your Lord!’ Great as the opposition is to truth and salvation, we have no reason to despond. Greater are our friends and allies, and infinitely more powerful than all our enemies. God is on our side--Jesus Christ is our King--the Holy Spirit is at his disposal--angels are his ministering servants--the prayers of all the prophets, apostles, saints, and martyrs are for our success--our brethren are numerous and strong--they have the Sword of the Spirit, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness, the artillery of truth, the arguments of God, the preparation of the gospel of peace--our Commander and Captain is the most successful General that ever entered the field of war--he never lost a battle--he is wonderful in counsel, excellent in working, valiant in fight--the Lord of hosts is his name. He can stultify the machinations of our enemies, control all the powers of nature, and subdue all our foes, terrestrial and infernal. Under his conduct we are like Mount Zion, that can never be moved. Indeed, under him we are come to Mount Zion, the strong hold and fortress of the kingdom, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to myriads of angels, the general assembly and congregation of the first born, enrolled in heaven--to God the Judge of all--to the spirits of just men made perfect--to Jesus the Mediator of the New Constitution--and to the blood of sprinkling, which speaks such peace, and joy, and courage to the heart. Ought we not, then, brethren, ’to be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might?’ If in faith, and courage, and prayer, we put on the heavenly armor, and march under the King, sounding the gospel trumpet, the walls of Jericho will fall to the ground, and the banners of the Cross will wave over the ruins of Paganism, Atheism, Scepticism, and sectarianism--Nil desperandum, te duce, Christe. If a Roman could say, ’Nothing is to be feared under the auspices of Cesar,’ may not the Christian say, There is no despair under the guardianship of Messiah the King? But, fellow-citizens, though clothed with the whole panoply of heaven, and headed by the Captain of Salvation, there is no success in this war to be expected, without constant and incessant prayer. When the Apostles began to build up this kingdom, notwithstanding all the gifts they enjoyed, they found it necessary to devote themselves to prayer as well as to the ministry of the word. And when Paul describes all the armor of God, piece by piece, in putting it on he says, ’Take the Sword of the Spirit--with all supplication and deprecation, pray at all seasons in spirit, watch with all perseverance and supplication for all the saints.’ This was most impressively and beautifully pictured out in the wars of ancient Israel against their enemies. While Moses lifted up his holy hands to heaven, Israel prevailed; and when he did not, Amalek prevailed. So is it now. When the disciples of Christ, the heaven born citizens of the kingdom, continue instant in prayer and watchfulness, the truth triumphs in their hearts and in the world. When they do not, they become cold, timid, and impotent as Sampson shorn, and the enemy gains strength over them. Then the good cause of the Lord languishes. It is not necessary that we should understand how prayer increases our zeal, our wisdom, our strength, our joy, or how it gives success to the cause, any more than that we should understand how our food is converted into flesh, and blood, and bones. It is only necessary that we eat; and it is only necessary that we should pray as we are taught and commanded. Experience proves that the outward man is renewed day by day by our daily bread, and experience proves that the inward man is renewed day by day prayer and thanksgiving. The Lord has promised his Holy Spirit to them that ask him in truth; and is it not necessary to our success? If it be not necessary to give new revelations, it is necessary to keep in mind those already given, and to bring the word written seasonably to our remembrance. Besides, if the Spirit of the Lord was necessary to the success of Gideon and Barak, and Sampson and David, and all the great warriors of Israel according to the flesh, who fought the battles of the Lord with the sword, the sling, and the bow; who can say that it is not necessary to those who draw the Sword of the Spirit and fight the good fight of faith? In my judgment it is as necessary now as then--necessary, I mean, to equal success--necessary to the success of those who labor in the word and teaching, and necessary to those who would acquit themselves like men, in every department in the ranks of the great army of the Lord of hosts. Though the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but spiritual, they are mighty (only, however, through God, to the overturning of strong holds,) to the overturning of all reasonings against the truth, and every high thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and in leading captive every thought to the obedience of Christ. Let us then, fellow-citizens, whether as leaders or as private soldiers, abound in prayer and supplications to God night and day. If sincere, and ardent, and incessant prayers to God for every thing that he has promised; for all things for which the Apostles prayed were offered us by all the congregations, and by every disciple in his family and in his closet, for the triumphs of the truth, then would we see the army of the Lord successful in fight against atheism, infidelity, and sectarianism--then would we see disciples growing in knowledge and in favor with God and man. And is not the conversion of the world and our own eternal salvation infinitely worthy of all the effort and enterprise in man, seeing God himself has done so much in the gift of his Son and Holy Spirit, and left for us so little to do--nothing, indeed, but what is in the compass of our power? And shall we withhold that little, especially as he has given us so many and so exceedingly great and precious promises to stimulate us to exertion? Has not Jesus said, ’The conqueror shall inherit all things’--that he ’will not blot out his name out of the book of life’--that he will confess it before his Father and his holy angels--that he will place him ’upon his throne, and give him the crown of life that shall never fade away’? Rise up, then, in the strength of Judah’s Lion! Be valiant for the truth! Adorn yourselves with all the graces of the Spirit of God! Put on the armor of light: and, with all the gentleness, and meekness, and mildness there is in Christ--with all the courage, and patience, and zeal, and effort, worthy of a cause so salutary, so pure, so holy, and so divine, determine never to faint nor to falter till you enter the pearly gates--never to lay down your arms, till, with the triumphant millions, you stand before the throne, and exultingly sing, "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and might, and honor, and glory, and blessing!"--"To him who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb be blessing, and honor, and glory and strength forever and forever!" Amen. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 135: 03.83. CONCLUDING ADDRESS - A WORD TO FRIENDLY ALIENS ======================================================================== A WORD TO FRIENDLY ALIENS. Whether to regard you in the light of Proselytes of the Gate, who refused circumcision, but wished to live in the land of Israel, to be in the suburbs of the cities of Judah, and to keep some of the institutions of the ancient kingdom of God, without becoming fellow-citizens of that kingdom; or whether to regard you as the Samaritans of old, who built for themselves a temple of God upon Mount Gerizim, held fast a part of the ancient revelation of God, and rejected only such parts of it as did not suit their prejudices--worshipped the God of Israel in common with the idols of the nations, from which they sprang--I say, whether to regard you in the light of the one or the other of those ancient professors of religion, might require more skill in casuistry than we possess--more leisure than we have at our disposal--and more labor than either of us have patience to endure. One thing, however, is obvious, that if, under the Reign of Heaven it behooved so good a man as Cornelius (’a man of piety, and one that feared God with all his house, giving also much alms to the people, and praying to God continually,’) to ’hear words by which he might be saved,’ and to put on Christ by immersion into his death, that he might enter the kingdom of heaven, and enjoy the remission of sins, and the hope of an inheritance among all the sanctified--certainly it is both expedient and necessary that you also go and do likewise. Every sectarian in the land, how honest and pious soever, ought to bury his sectarianism, and all his other sins of omission and commission, in ’the bath of regeneration.’ It is a high crime and misdemeanor in any man, professing to have received the Messiah in his proper person, character, and office, to refuse allegiance to him in any thing; and to substitute human inventions and traditions in lieu of the ordinances and statutes of Prince Immanuel. Indeed, the keeping up of any dogma, practice, or custom, which directly or indirectly supplants the constitution, laws, and usages of the kingdom over which Jesus presides, is directly opposed to his government; and would ultimate in dethroning him in favor of a rival, and in placing upon his throne the author of that dogma, practice, or usage which supplants the institution of the Saviour of the world. It is to you, then, who, in the name of the King, are changing his ordinances, and substituting your own expedients for the wisdom and authority of the Judge of all, we now propose the following considerations:-- Every kingdom has one uniform law or institution for naturalizing aliens; and that institution, of whatever sort it be, is obligatory, by the authority of the government, upon every one who would become a citizen. We say it is obligatory upon him who desires to be a citizen to submit to that institution. But does not your practice and your dogma positively say that it is not the duty of an alien to be born again, but that it is the duty of his father or guardian to have him naturalized? Now, although many things are in common the duty of brother, father, and child, yet those duties which belong specifically to a father cannot belong to his child, either in religion, morality, or society. If it be the father’s duty to ’offer his child to the Lord,’ to speak in your own style, it is not the duty of the child to offer himself. It was not Isaac’s duty to be circumcised, but Abraham’s duty to circumcise him. If, then, it was your father’s duty to have made you citizens of the kingdom of heaven, it is not your duty to become citizens, unless you can produce a law saying that in all cases where the father fails to do his duty, then it shall be the duty of the child to do that which his father neglected. Again--if all fathers, like yours, had, upon their own responsibility, without any command from the Lord, baptized their children, there would not be one in a nation to whom it could be said, ’Repent and be baptized;’ much less could it be said to every penitent, ’Be baptized, every one of you, by the authority of the Lord, for the remission of sins.’ These remarks are only intended to show that your institutions do, in truth, go to the subversion of the government of Christ, and to the entire abolition of the institutions of his kingdom. On this account alone, if for no other reason, you ought to be constitutionally naturalized, and be legally and honorably inducted into the kingdom of heaven. It is a solemn duty you owe the King and his government; and if you have a conscience formed by the oracles of God, you can have no confidence in God, nor real peace of mind, so long as you give your support, your countenance, example, and entire influence to break down the institutions of Jesus Christ, to open his kingdom to all that is born of the flesh, and to prevent, as far as you can, every man from the pleasure of choosing whom he shall obey--of confessing him before men--of taking his yoke--of dying, being buried, and raised with Christ in his gracious institution. If Jesus himself, for the sake of fulfilling all righteousness, or of honoring every divine institution, though he needed not the reformation for remission of sins which John preached, was immersed by John--what have you to say for yourselves--you who would claim the honors and privileges of the kingdom of heaven, refusing to follow the example of Jesus, and who virtually subvert his authority by supporting a system which would, if carried out, not allow a voluntary agent in the race of Adam, to do that which all the first converts of Christ did, by authority of the commission which Jesus gave to his Apostles? Again--whatever confidence you may now possess, that you are good citizens of the kingdom of Messiah, that confidence is not founded upon a "THUS SAITH THE LORD," but upon your own reasonings, which all men must acknowledge may be in this, as in many other things, fallacious. Jesus has said, ’He that believes and is immersed shall be saved;’ and Peter commanded every penitent to be immersed for the remission of his sins. Now he who hears the word, believes it, and is on his own confession immersed, has an assurance, a confidence, which is impossible for you to have. Let me add only another consideration, for we are not now arguing the merits of your theory, or that of any party: it is your duty, as you desire the union of (what you call) the church, and the conversion of the world, forthwith to be immersed and to be born constitutionally into the kingdom; because all Protestants, of every name, if sincere believers in Jesus as the Christ, irrespective of every opinion found in any human creed, could if they would, honor and obey his institutions, come into one fold, and sit down together under the reign of the Messiah. If all would follow your example, this would necessarily follow; if they do not, you have done your duty. In being thus immersed, all the world, Catholic and Protestant, admit that you are truly and scripturally baptized; for all admit that an immersed penitent is constitutionally baptized into Christ; but only a part of the professing world can admit that rite of infant affusion on which you rely as introducing you, without previous knowledge, faith, or repentance, into the family of God. Acquit, then, your conscience; follow the example of Jesus; honor and support his authority; promote the union and peace of the family of God; do what in you lies for the conversion of the world; enter into the full enjoyment of the blessings of the kingdom of heaven by confessing the ancient faith, and by being immersed in the name of Jesus into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, for the remission of sins. Then you may say as Jesus said to the Samaritan woman, Although the Samaritans have a temple on Mount Gerizim, a priesthood, and the five books of Moses, ’Salvation is of the Jews.’ Although the sects have the Oracles of God, human creeds, many altars, priests, and religious usages, the enjoyment of salvation is among them who simply believe what the Apostles wrote concerning Jesus, and who from the heart obey that mould of doctrine which the Apostles delivered to us. In so doing you will, moreover, most wisely consult your own safety and security from the signal calamities that are every day accumulating, and soon to fall with overwhelming violence on a distracted, divided, alienated, and adulterous generation. If you are ’the people of God,’ as you profess, and as we would fain imagine, then you are commanded by a voice from heaven, ’Come out of her, my people, that you partake not of the sins of mystic Babylon, and that you receive not a portion of her plagues.’1 If affliction, and shame, and poverty, and reproach, were to be the inalienable lot of the most approved servants of God, it is better, infinitely better for you to suffer with them, than to enjoy for a season all that a corrupted and apostate society can bestow upon you. Remember who it is that has said, ’Happy are they who keep his commandments, for they shall have a right to the tree of life, and they shall enter in through the gates into the city!’ ======================================================================== CHAPTER 136: 03.94. CONCLUDING ADDRESS - ADDRESS TO BELLIGERENT ALIENS ======================================================================== ADDRESS TO BELLIGERENT ALIENS. To him who, through the telescope of faith, surveys your camp, there appears not on the whole map of creation such a motley group, such a heterogeneous and wretched amalgamation of distracted spirits, as are found in actual insurrection and rebellion, in a mad and accursed alliance against the reigning Monarch of creation. In your lines are found every unclean and hateful spirit on this side the fathomless gulf, the dark and rayless receptacle of fallen and ruined intelligences, who, in endless and fruitless wailings, lament their own follies, and through an incessant night of despair anathematize themselves, and their coadjutors in the perpetuation of their eternal suicide. Yes, in your ranks are found all who wilfully reject the Son of God, and will not have him to reign over them; whether they are styled the decent moralist, the honest deist, sceptic, atheist, infidel, the speculating Sadducee, the boasting Pharisee, the supercilious Jew, the resentful Samaritan, or the idolatrous Gentile. All ranks and degrees of men in political society--the king and the beggar--the sage philosopher and the uneducated clown--the rich and the poor, who disdain the precepts of the Messiah, unite with you in this unholy alliance against the kingdom of heaven. You may boast of many a decent fellow-soldier in the crusade against Immanuel; many who, when weighed in the balances of the political sanctuary, are not found wanting in all the decencies of this present life; but yet look at the innumerable crowds of every sort of wretches, down to the filthiest, vilest matricide, who in your communion are fighting under your banners--stout-hearted rebels!--leagued with you in your attempts to dethrone the Lord’s Anointed. If you boast of one Marcus Aurelius, you must fraternize with many a Nero, Domitian, Caligula, and Heliogabalus. If you rejoice in the virtues of one Seneca, you must own the vices of the ten thousand murderers, robbers, adulterers, drunkards, profane swearers, and lecherous debauchees, who have rejected the counsels of heaven, because the precepts of righteousness and life forbade their crimes. If, then, my friends, (for I now address the most honorable of your community,) you boast that you belong to a very large and respectable synagogue; remember, I pray you, that to this same synagogue in which you have your brotherhood, belongs every thing mean, and vile, and wretched, in every land where the name of Jesus has been announced. What a group! Have you so much of the reflex light of the gospel falling upon your vision as to flush your cheek with the glow of shame when you look along the lines of your alliance, and survey the horrible faces, the ragged, and tattered, and squalid, and filthy wretches, your companions in arms--members with you in the synagogue of Satan--and confederates against the Prince of Peace! If you cannot blush at such a spectacle, you are not among them to whom I would tender the pearls of Jesus Christ. What do you then say? "I am ashamed of such an alliance--of such a brotherhood; and therefore I have joined the Temperance Society--I belong to the Literary Club--and I carry my family regularly to church every Sunday." And do you think, O simpleton! that these human inventions, which only divide the kingdom of Satan into castes, and form within it various private communications, honorable and dishonorable associations, learned and unlearned fraternities, moral and immoral conventicles, change the state of a single son of Adam as respects the Son of God!! Then may Whig and Tory, Masonic and Antimasonic clubs and conclaves--then may every political cabal, for the sake of elevating some demagogue, change the political relations in the state, and make an unmake American citizens according to fancy, in despite of constitution, law, and established precedents. No, sir; should there be as many parties in the state, as there are days in a month, membership in any one of these affects not, in the least, the standing of any man as a citizen in relation to the United States, or to any foreign power. And by parity of reason, as well as by all that is written in the New Testament, should you join all the benevolent societies on the checkered map of Christendom, and fraternize with every brotherhood born after the will of man, this would neither change nor destroy your citizenship in the kingdom of Satan--still you would be an alien from the kingdom of the Messiah--a foreigner as respects all its covenanted blessings--and, in the unbiassed judgment of the universe, you would stand enrolled amongst its enemies. In character there are many degrees, as respects any and every attribute which enters into its formation; but as respects state, there are no degrees. In the nature of things it is impossible. Every man is either married or single, a brother, a master, a citizen, or he is not. Every man is either Christ’s or Belial’s; there is no middle power, and therefore no neutral state. Hence the King himself, when on the present theatre of war, told his companions to regard every man as his enemy who was not on his side. Amongst his professed friends, they who in works deny him, are even counted as enemies. What a hopeless struggle is that in which you are engaged! Discomfiture, soon or late, awaits you. Have you counsel and strength to oppose the Sovereign of the Universe? Do you think you can frustrate the counsels of Infinite Wisdom and overcome Omnipotence? Your master is already a prisoner--your chief is in chains. The fire of eternal vengeance is already kindled for Satan and all his subjects. Mad in his disappointed ambition, and implacable in his hatred of him against whom he rebelled, he only seeks to gratify his own malice, by involving with himself in irremediable ruin the unhappy victims of his seduction. He only seeks to desolate the dominions of God, and to ruin forever his fellow creatures. Will you, then, serve your worst enemy, and war against your best friend? But your rebellion can effect nothing against God. His arm is too strong for the whole creation. You cannot defeat his counsels nor stay his almighty hand. The earth on which you stand trembles at his rebuke; the foundations of the hills and mountains are moved and shaken at his presence. You fight against yourselves. God’s detestation of your course arises not from any apprehension that you can injure him; but because you destroy yourselves. Every triumph which your inordinate desires and passions gain over the remonstrances of reason and conscience only precipitates you into deeper and deeper misery, matures you for perdition, and makes it essential to the good order and happiness of the universe, you should suffer an ’everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power.’ What, then, infatuates you, that you should choose death rather than life, and prefer destruction to salvation? "I am not sure that the gospel is true; I love my companions, and cannot see any criminality in gratifying those passions and appetites which my creator has planted in my constitution." You admit there is a God, your Creator; but you doubt whether the gospel is true! What an abuse of reason and evidence! Can you infer from any premises in your possession, that HE, whose creation man is, who has exhibited to the eye and ear of man so much wisdom, power, and goodness, in all his grand designs already accomplished, and daily accomplishing, in the heavens and in the earth, teaching men to sustain the present life, to anticipate the future, and to provide for it, has never intelligibly addressed him on a subject of incomparably more importance--his own ultimate destiny! That God should have been at so much pains to elevate man in nature--to furnish him with such an organization--to bestow on him reason and speech--admirably qualifying him to acquire and communicate instruction, on all things necessary to his present animal enjoyments; and, at the same time, to have never communicated to him any thing relative to his intellectual nature--never to have addressed him on the themes, which, as a rational creature, he must necessarily most of all desire to know; to have done every thing for his body, and for the present--and nothing for his mind, nor for the future--is, to say the least of it, the most improbable conceit that the most romantic fancy can entertain. That the Creator could not enlighten him on these topics, is wholly inadmissible. That he could, and would not, is directly contrary to every analogy in creation--contradictory to every proof we have of his benevolence, an inexplicable exception to the whole order of his government: for he has provided objects for every sense--objects for every intellectual power--objects for every affection, honorable passion, appetite and propensity, in our constitution; but, on your hypothesis, he has only failed in that which is infinitely more dear to us, more consonant to our whole rational nature, and most essential to our happiness!! It is most contrary to reason. But the folly of your scepticism is still more glaring when we open the book of the gospel of salvation. In the history of Jesus you have the fulfillment of a thousand predictions, expressed by numerous Prophets for 1500 years before he was born. These recorded prophecies were in the possession of his and our most bitter enemies, when he appeared, and are still extant in their hands. How can you dispose of these? All antiquity confirms the existence of Jesus of Nazareth in the times of Augustus and Tiberius Cesar. No contemporary opponent denied his miracles: they explained them away, but questioned not the wonderful works which he wrought. His character was the only perfect and unexceptionable one the world ever saw, either in print, or in real life; and yet you imagine him to have been the greatest liar and most infamous imposter that ever lived. You must admit him to have been the teacher of every thing moral, and pure and godlike--to have lived the most exemplary life--to have employed his whole life in doing good--while, to countenance your scepticism, you must imagine him to have been the greatest deceiver and most blasphemous pretender the world ever saw! Truly, you are fond of paradox! His Apostles, too, for the sake of being accounted the offscourings of the world, and the filth of all society--for the sake of poverty, contumely, stripes, imprisonment, and martyrdom, you imagine travelled over the earth teaching virtue and holiness--discountenancing every specifies of vice and immorality, while telling the most impudent lies, and that too about matters of palpable fact, about which no man having eyes and ears could be mistaken! How great your credulity! How weak your faith! And to consummate the whole, you admit that in the most enlightened age, and amongst the most disputatious and discriminating population, both Jewish, Roman, and Grecian, in Jerusalem itself, the very theatre of the crucifixion of Christ, and in all Judea and Samaria, and in all the great towns and cities of the whole ancient Roman Empire, Eastern and Western, these rude and uncultivated Galileans did actually succeed in persuading hundred of thousands of persons, of all ranks, sexes, ages, and intellects, to renounce their former opinions and practices--to encounter proscription, confiscation of goods, banishment, and even death itself in numerous instances, through faith in their testimony, while every thing was fresh, and when the detection of any fiction or fraud was most easy! Now, if it were possible to place your folly in an attitude still more inexcusable, I would ask you to show what there is in the gospel, that is not infinitely worthy of God to bestow, and of man to receive? And where under the canopy of the skies, in any country, language, or age of time, is there any thing that confers greater honor on man, or proposes to him any thing more worthy of his acceptance, than the gospel? Can there have been a more acceptable model proposed, after which to fashion man, than that after which he was originally created? When he was beguiled and apostatized from God, could there have been deputed a more honorable personage to effect his reconciliation to God, than his only begotten and well beloved Son? And could there even be imagined a more delectable destiny allotted to man, than an immortality of bliss in the palace of this vast universe, in the presence of his Father and his God forever and forever? Now, with all these premises, will you object to this religion, that it requires a man to be pure and holy, in order to his enjoyment of this eternal salvation? Then lay your hand upon your face, and blush, and be ashamed forever! But you say you love you companions! And who are they? Your fellow-rebels, foolish and infatuated like yourselves. The drunkard, the thief, the murderer, love their companions, the partners of their crimes. Conspirators and partizans in any undertaking, kindred spirits in guilty and daring enterprise, confirm each other in their evil machinations, and either from mutual interest, or from some hateful affinity in evil dispositions, coalesce and league together in bands of malicious depredation. A Cataline, a Jugurtha, a Robespierre, had their confederates. The rakes, the libertines, the freebooters of every color, form their own fraternities, and have a liking of some sort for their companions. And wherein does your attachment to your companions differ from theirs? A congeniality of disposition, a similarity of likings and dislikings, all springing from you love of the world, and your dislike of the authority of the Messiah. And will not a change of circumstances convert your affections into hatred? Soon or late, if you do not repent and turn to God, you that are leagued in the friendships of the world, those friendships arising from the lusts of the flesh, the lusts of the eye, and the pride of life, will not only become enemies, but mutual tormentors of one another. Your warmest friends in your opposition to the Son of God will become King’s evidence against you, and exasperate the flame that will consume you forever and ever. Break off, then, every friendship, alliance, and covenant, which you have formed with them that disdain the grace of God, and condemn the Saviour of the world, and form an everlasting covenant with the people of God, which shall never be forgotten. Then, indeed, you may love your companions with all the affection of your hearts, and indulge to the utmost every sympathy and social feeling of your nature. Then may you embrace, in all the ardor of fraternal love, those kindred spirits that with you have vowed eternal allegiance to the gracious and rightful Sovereign of all the nations of the redeemed, in heaven and on earth. Such companions are worth possessing, and their friendship worth cultivating and preserving through all the journey of life; for it will be renewed beyond the Jordan, and flourish with increasing delight through the endless ages of eternity. But you have said that the gratification of all the impulses and propensities of your nature must be innocent, because they are the creation of God, and were sown in the embryo of your physical constitution. If under the control of that light and reason, under which God commanded your affections and appetites to move, your reasoning would be sound and safe; but if they have usurped a tyranny over your judgment, and captivated your reason, they are not to be gratified. They are like successful rebels that have dethroned their sovereign; and, because by violence and fraud in possession of the throne, they plead a divine right to wield the sceptre over their dethroned Prince. Such is the meaning of the plea which you urge in favor of your rebellious affections. When man rebelled against his Creator, the beasts of the field, till then under his dominion, rebelled against him; and all his passions, affections, and propensities partook of the general disorder--of that wild and licentious anarchy which ensued upon man’s disobedience. And have you not in your daily observation--nay, have you not in your own experience, irrefragable evidence that the uncontrolled indulgence of even the instinctive appetites, as well as the gratification of inordinate passions and affections, necessarily issue in the destruction of the physical constitution of man? Is not the control of reason, is not the exercise of discretion in the licence of every animal indulgence, essential to the health and life of man? Then why crave an exemption from the universal law of human existence, in favor of that demoralizing course of indulgence, which you would fain call innocent in morals, though in physics evidently destructive to animal organization? When reconciled to God through the gospel, the peace of God which passes understanding reigning in the heart, all is order and harmony within. Then, under the control of enlightened and sanctified reason, all the passions, appetites, and instincts of our nature, like the planets round the sun, move in their respective orbits in the most perfect good order, preserving a perfect balance in all the principles and powers of human action. Pleasures without alloy are then felt and enjoyed from a thousand sources, from which, in the tumult and disorder of rebellion, every transgressor is debarred. It is then found, that there is not a supernumerary passion, affection, nor appetite in man--not one that adds not something to his enjoyment--not one that may not be made an instrument of righteousness, a means of doing good to others, as well as of enjoying good ourselves. Why not, then, lay down the weapons of your rebellion, and be at peace with God, with your fellow-creatures, and with yourselves? "Admitting, then, that the gospel is true--that in my present state and standing I am an alien from the kingdom of heaven, and that I wished to become a citizen, where shall I find this kingdom of heaven, and how shall I be constituted a citizen thereof?" Well, indeed, may you admit the gospel to be true, both on account of what it is in itself, and the evidence which sustains it. Only suppose it to be false--extinguish all the light which it sheds on the human race--make void all its promises--annul all its hopes--eradicate from the human breast all the motives which it imparts--and what remains to explain the universe, to develop the moral character of God, to dissipate the gloom which envelopes the eternal night the destiny of man, to solace and cheer him during the incessant struggle of life, to soothe the bed of affliction and death, and to countervail the inward dread and horror of falling into nothing--of being forever lost in the promiscuous wreck of nature--of sinking down into the grave, the food of worms, the prey of an eternal death? It is like annihilating the sun in the heavens. An eternal night ensures. There is no beauty, form, nor comeliness in creation. The universe is in ruins. The world without the Bible is a universe without a sun. The Atheist is but an atom of matter in motion, belonging to no system, amenable to none, without a destiny, without an object to live or to die. He boasts there is none to punish him: but then there is none to help him--none to reward him. He has no Father, proprietor, or ruler--no filial affection, no sense of obligation, no gratitude, no comfort in reflection, no joy in anticipation. If he cannot be blamed, he cannot be praised--if he cannot be praised, he cannot be honored--and man without honor is more wretched than the beasts that perish. Unenviable mortal! What an abortion is the system of nature, if man lives not again! It is a creation for the sake of destruction. It is an infinite series of designs, ending in nothing. It is a universe of blanks, without a single prize. It cannot be. The Bible is necessary to the interpretation of nature. It is the only comment on nature--on providence--on man. Man without it, and without the hope of immortality, has nothing to rouse him into action. He is a savage, a Hottentot, a cannibal, a worm. You are compelled, then, to admit that the gospel is true, unless you put out the eye of reason, and refuse to hear the voice of Nature. But is it not a happy necessity which compels your belief in God, and in his Son the renovator of the Universe? It opens to you all the mysteries of creation, the arcana of the temple of nature, and inducts you to the fountain of being and of bliss. It inspires you with motives of high and lofty enterprise, stimulates you to manly action, and points out a prize worthy of the best efforts of body, soul, and spirit. Is it not, then, ’a credible saying, and worthy of universal acceptance, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, even the chief?’ But you ask, ’Where shall the kingdom of heaven be found, and how may you be constituted a citizen of it?’ The Prophets and Apostles must be your guide in deciding these great questions. Moses in the law, all the Prophets, and all the Apostles point you to the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world--the Apostle of the Father Almighty--the divinely constituted Chief of the kingdom of heaven. He has submitted his claims to your examination--he has invited you to test all his pretensions--and to the humble and docile he has tendered all necessary assistance, in deciding upon his person and mission. His character is so familiar, so condescending, so full of all grace and goodness, that all may approach him. The halt, the maimed, the deaf, the dumb, the blind, found in him a friend and physician indeed. None importune his aid in vain. His ears are always open to the tale of woe. His eyes streams with sympathy on every object of distress. He invites all the wretched and repulses none who implore relief. He chides only the proud, and kindly receives and blesses the humble. He invites and beseeches the weary, the heavy laden, the broken hearted, the oppressed, and all the sons of want and misfortune, to come to him, and tenders relief to all. In his official dignity he presides over the universe. He is the High Priest of God and the Prophet and Messenger of Peace. He has the key of David; he opens and shuts the Paradise of God. He is the only Potentate, and has the power of granting remission of all sins to all who obey him. To receive him in his personal glory and official dignity and supremacy, as the Messiah of God, the only begotten of the Father--to know him in his true and proper character, is the only prerequisite to the obedience of faith. He that thus accredits him is not far from the kingdom of heaven. To assume him as your Prophet, your High Priest, and your King; to submit to him in these relations, being immersed into his death, will translate you into the kingdom of heaven. Why not, then, gladly and immediately yield him the admiration of your understanding, and the homage of your heart? Why not now enter into the possession of all the riches, and fulness, and excellence of the kingdom? He commands all men to repent--he beseeches every sinner whom he addresses in his word, to receive pardon and eternal life as a gracious gift. Can you doubt his power to save, to instruct, and to sanctify you for heaven? Can you doubt his condescending mercy and compassion? Will not he that pitied the blind Bartimeus, that condoled with the widow of Nain, that wept with Mary and Martha at the grave of Lazarus, that heard the plea of the Syrophenician woman, that cleansed the supplicating leper, that compassionated the famishing multitudes, that looked with pity (even in the agonies of the cross) upon an importuning thief, have pity upon you, and every returning prodigal, who sues for mercy at the gate of his kingdom? Is there in the universe, one whom you can believe with more assurance, than the Faithful and True Witness, who, in the presence of Pontius Pilate, witnessed a good confession at the hazard of his life? Is there any person in heaven, on earth, or under the earth, more worthy of your confidence, than the sinner’s friend--than he who, always, and in all circumstances, bore testimony to the truth? When did he ever violate his word, or suffer his promise to fail? Who ever repented of his confidence in Jesus, or of relying implicitly upon his word? Who ever was put to shame because of confidence in him? Who can offer such inducements to obedience by his authority as the Saviour of the world? Who has such power to bless? He has all authority in heaven and on earth. He has power to forgive sins, to raise the dead, to bestow immortality and eternal life, and to judge the living and the dead. And has he not tendered a participation of his official authority to every one who submits to his government, and who, by him, is reconciled to God? If he have wisdom and power divine, has he not pledged these to the relief, guidance, and benefit of his people? Who can injure them under his protection--condemn whom he justifies--criminate whom he pardons--or snatch out of his hands, those who betake themselves to his mercy? Was there ever love like his love--compassion like his compassion--or condescension like his condescension! Who ever could--who ever did humble himself like the Son of God? On whose cheek ever flowed tears of purer sympathy for human woe, than those he shed? Whose bowels ever moved with such compassion, as that which dissolved his heart in tender mercies for the afflicted sons and daughters of men? Who ever for his friends, endured such contradiction of sinners against himself; submitted to such indignities; sustained such accumulated sorrows and griefs; suffered such agonies of mind and body; as those which he endured in giving his life an offering for his enemies? Forsaken by his God, abandoned by his friends, deserted of every stay, surrounded by the fiercest enemies, the most implacable foes, whose hearts were harder than adamant, insulting the very pangs which they inflicted, he expired on the accursed tree! The heavens blushed at the sight--the sun covered his face--the earth trembled--the rocks split--the veil of the temple was rent from top to bottom--and graves opened. All nature stood horror-stricken, when Roman soldiers, urged by blood-thirsty priests, nailed him to the cross--when the chief priests, scribes, and elders in derision said, ’He saved others: cannot he save himself?’ The person who perceives not, who feels not the eloquence of his love consummated in his death--the tenderness of his entreaties and expostulations, is not to be reasoned with--is not to be moved by human power. Will you not, then, honor your reason by honoring the Son of God--by giving up your understanding, your wills, your affections, to the teachings of the Good Spirit--to the guidance of his love? Then, and only then, can you feel yourselves safe, secure, and happy. Need you to be reminded how much you are indebted to his long suffering patience already--to his benevolence in all the gifts and bounties of his providence vouchsafed to you? How many days and nights has he guarded, sustained, and succoured you? Has he not saved you from ten thousand dangers--from the pestilence that walks in darkness secretly, and from destruction that wastes at noon day? Who can tell but he has lengthened out your unprofitable existence to this very hour, that you might now repent of all your sins, turn to God with your whole heart, be baptized for the remission of your past transgressions, be adopted into the family of God, and yet receive an inheritance among the sanctified. Arise, then, in the strength of Israel’s God--accept salvation at his hands--enter into his kingdom, and be forever blessed. You will not, you cannot repent of such a step, of such a noble surrender of yourself while life endures; in the hour of death, in the day of judgment, nor during the endless succession of ages in eternity. To-day, then, hear his voice: to-morrow may be for ever too late! All things are ready----Come.----Saints on earth, and angels in heaven--apostles, prophets, and martyrs will rejoice over you--and you will rejoice with them for ever and for ever. Amen! 1 Revelation 18:1-24 :, Revelation 18:4-5 Alexander Campbell The Christian System, 2d ed. (1839) ======================================================================== CHAPTER 137: S. DEMONOLOGY ======================================================================== D E M O N O L O G Y. AN ADDRESS delivered to the Popular Lecture Club, Nashville, Tennessee, March 10, 1841. MR. PRESIDENT, AND GENTLMEN MEMBERS OF THE POPULAR LECTURE CLUB, WHILE the antiquary is gathering up the mouldering ruins of ancient temples, palaces, and cities; or poring over the coins, medals, and statues of other ages, seeking to prove or to embellish some theory of the olden times: while the astronomer is directing his largest telescope to some remote ethereal field, far beyond the milky way, in search of new nebulæ, unseen before, in hope to find the nucleus of some incipient solar system: while the speculative geologist is delving down to the foundations of the eternal mountains, in quest of new evidences of his doctrine of successive and long protracted formations of the massy strata of Mother Earth, "rock-ribbed and ancient as the Sun:" while the sceptic is exultingly scanning the metaphysical dreams of some imaginary system of Nature, or seeking in the desolations of the ancient Mythologies arguments against the mighty facts and overwhelming demonstrations of the Christian faith--may I be indulged, gentlemen, to invite you into the precincts of Demonology, and to accompany me in a brief excursion into the land of demons, whence, dark and mysterious though it be, we may, perhaps, guided by some friendly star, elicit some useful light on that grand and awful world of spirits, which, as we descend the hill of life, rises higher and higher in its demands upon our time and thoughts, as embracing the all-absorbing and transcendent interests of human kind. Think not, however, that I intend to visit the fairy realms and enchanting scenes of wild romance; or that I wish to indulge in the fascinating fictions of poets, ancient or modern; think not that I am about to ascend with old Hesiod into his curious theogony of gods and demigods, or to descend with our late Sir Walter Scott to the phantasmatic realms of his Celtic and Scottish ghosts and demons. I aim at more substantial entertainment, at more sober and grave realities, than the splendid fancies of those gifted and fortunate votaries of popular applause, rather than of the approvals of the conscientious and sedate. It is the subject of demons, as forming a portion of the real antiquities of the world--as connected with Pagan, Jewish, and Christian theology;--it is the subject of demons, sometimes called devils, not in their fictitious, but true character, that I propose to discuss: for even here there is the fact and the fable, the true and the false, the real and the imaginary, as in every thing else. The extravagant fancies of the poets, the ghosts and spectres of the dark ages, have spread their sable mantles upon this subject, and involved it all either in philosophical dubiety, or in a blind indiscriminate infidelity. The inductive and Christian philosopher in this department, as in most others, finds both truth and fable blended in the same tradition; and, therefore, neither awed by authority, nor allured by the fascinations of novelty, he institutes an examination into the merits of a subject, which, if true, cannot but deeply interest the thoughtful; and which, if false, should be banished from the minds of all. That a class of beings of some sort, designated demons, has been an element of the faith, an object of the dread and veneration of all ages and nations, as far back as all memory reaches, no one who believes in a spiritual system--no one who regards the volumes of divine inspiration, or who is only partially acquainted with Pagan and Jewish antiquity, can reasonably doubt. But concerning these demons, of what order of intelligences, of what character and destiny; of what powers intellectual and moral, or immoral, there has been much debate, and still there is need of farther and more satisfactory examination. Before entering either philosophically or practically into this investigation, it is necessary that we define the true and proper meaning of the term demon. This word, it is said, is of Grecian origin and character--of which, however, we have not full assurance. In that language it is written and pronounced daimoon; and, according to some etymologists, is legitimately descended from a very ancient verb pronounced daioo, which means to discriminate, to know. Daimoon, or demon, therefore, simply indicates a person of intelligence--a knowing one. Thus before the age of philosophy, or the invention of the name, those were called demons, as a title of honor, who afterwards assumed the more modest title of philosophers. Aristotle, for his great learning was called demon, as was the celebrated Thucydides: hence among the Platonists it was for some time a title of honor. But this, it must be observed, was a special appropriation, like our use of the words divine and reverend. When we apply these titles to sinful men, who, because of their calling, ought to be not only intelligent, but of a divine and celestial temper and morality, we use them by a special indulgence from that sovereign pontiff with whom is the jus et norma loquendi. But as some of the Platonists elevated the spirits of departed heroes, public benefactors, and distinguished men, into a species of demigods or mediators between them and the Supreme Divinity, as some of our forefathers were accustomed to regard the souls of departed saints, this term began to be used in a more general sense. Among some philosophers it became the title of an object of worship; while, on the other hand, it degenerated into the genii of poetry and imagination. In tracing the popular transitions and transmigrations of words, permit me, gentlemen, to say that we are not to imagine that they very ceremoniously advance, as our naval and military officers, from one rank to another, by some systematic or conventional agreement, amongst the heads of the departments in the army of words and phalanxes of human speech. On the contrary, the transitions are exceedingly anomalous, and sometimes inverted. In this instance the term demon, from simply indicating a knowing one, became the title of a human spirit when divested of the appendages of its clay tenement, because of its supposed initiation into the secrets of another world. Thus a separated spirit became a genius, a demigod, a mediator, a divinity of the ancient superstition according to its acquirements in this state of probation. But we shall better understand the force and import of this mysterious word from its earliest acceptation among the elder Pagans, Jews, and Christians, than from the speculations of etymologists and lexicographers. Historical facts, then, and not etymological speculations, shall decide not only its meaning, but the character and rank of those beings on whom, by common consent, this significant title was conferred. To whom, then, among Pagan writers shall we make our first appeal? Shall we not at once carry up the question to the most venerable Hesiod, the oldest of Grecian bards, whose antique style even antedates that of Homer himself almost one hundred years? Shall we not appeal to the genealogist of all the gods, the great theogonist of Grecian mythology? Who than he more likely to be acquainted with the ancient traditions of demons? And what is the sum of his testimony in the case? Hear him speak in the words of Plutarch:--"The spirits of mortals become demons when separated from their earthly bodies." The Grecian biographist not only quotes with approbation the views of Hesiod, but corroborates them with the result of his own researches, avowing his conviction that "the demons of the Greeks were the ghosts and genii of departed men; and that they go up and down the earth as observers, and even rewarders of men; and although not actors themselves, they encourage others to act in harmony with their views and characters." Zenocrates, too, as found in Aristotle, extends the term to the souls of men before death, and calls them demons while in the body. To the good demons and the spirits of deceased heroes they allotted the office of mediators between gods and men.1 In this character Zoroaster, Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, Plutarch, Celsus, Apuleius, and many others contemplated The demons of their times. Whoever, indeed, will be at pains to examine the Pagan mythologies, one and all, will discover that some doctrine of demons, as respects their nature, abodes, characters, or employments, is the ultimate foundation of the whole superstructure; and that the radical idea of all the dogmata of their priests, and the fancies and fables of their poets, are found in that most ancient and veritable tradition--that the spirits of men survive their fallen tabernacles, and live in a disembodied state from death to the dissolution of material nature. To these spirits in the character of genii, gods, or demigods, they assigned the fates and fortunes of men and countries. With them a hero on earth became a demon in hades; and a demigod, a numen, a divinity in the skies. It is not without some reason that the witty and ingenious Lucian makes his dialogist, in the orthodoxy of his age, thus ask and answer the following questions:--What is man? A mortal god! And what is God? An immortal man. In one sentence, all Pagan antiquity affirms that from Titan and Saturn, the poetic progeny of Coelus and Terra, down to Esculapius, Proteus, and Minos, all their divinities, were the ghosts of dead men, and were so regarded by the most erudite of the Pagans themselves. Think not, gentlemen, that because we summon the Pagan witnesses first, that we regard them either as the first in point of age or character. Far from it. They were a pack of plagiarists, from Hesiod to Lucian. The Greeks were the greatest literary thieves and robbers that ever lived, and they had the most consummate art of concealing the theft. From these Pagans, whether Greeks or Romans, we ascend to the Jews and to the Patriarchs, whose annals transcend those of the most ancient Pagans many centuries. In the times of the Patriarchs, in the infancy of the Abrahamic family, long before the time of their own Moses, we learn that in the land of Canaan, almost coeval with the promise of it to Abraham, demons were recognized and worshipped. The consultation of the spirits of the dead, the art and mystery of necromancy, the species of familiar spirits, and wizzards, are older than Moses, and spoken of by him as matters of ancient faith and veneration. Statutes, indeed, are ordained, and laws are promulged from Mount Sinai in Arabia, from the voice of the Eternal King, against the worship of demons, the consultation of familiar spirits, the practice of necromancy, and all the arts of divination; of which we may speak more particularly in the sequel. Hence we affirm that the doctrine of a separate state--of disembodied ghosts, or demons--of necromancy and divination, is a thousand years older than Homer or Hesiod, than any Pagan historian, philosopher, or poet whatsoever. And so deeply rooted in the land of Canaan, so early and so long cherished and taught by the seven nations was this doctrine in all its branches, that, notwithstanding the severe statutes against it, traces of it are found among the Jews for almost a thousand years after Moses. Of the wicked Jeroboam it is said, "He ordained priests for the high places, and for the demons.2 Even David admits that his nation "learned the works of the heathen, served their idols, and sacrificed their sons and daughters to demons;" and he adds, "they ate the sacrifices of the dead;" a clear intimation that worshipping demons was worshipping the dead. Isaiah, too, lamenting their idolatry, asks the mortifying question, "Shall a people seek the living to the dead?" But there is a peculiarity in the acceptation of this term among Jews and Pagans which demands special attention. Amongst them the term demon generally, if not universally, denoted an unclean, malign, or wicked spirit: whereas amongst the Pagans it as often represented a good as an evil spirit. Who has not heard of the good demon of Socrates, and of the evil genius of Brutus? While among Jews and Christians so commonly are found the akatharta pneumata, or the ponera pneumata--the unclean and malign spirits, that our translators have almost uniformly translated them devils. In the Christian scriptures we meet the term demon, in one form or other, 75 times, and in such circumstances, as, with but one or two exceptions, constrain us to regard it as the representative of a wicked and unclean spirit. So general is this fact, that Beelzebub is dignified "The Prince of the Demons"--unfortunately rendered devils. This frequency of immoral and wicked associations with the word daimoon may have induced our translators to give us so many devils in their authorized version. But this misapprehension is now universally admitted and regretted: for while the Bible teaches many demons, it no where intimates a plurality of Devils or Satans. There is but one Devil or Satan in the universe, whose legions ’of angels and demons give him a sort of omnipresence, by acting out his will in all their intercourse with mortals. This evil spirit, whose official titles are the Serpent, the Devil, and Satan, is always found in the singular number in both the Hebrew and Greek scriptures; while demon is found in both numbers, indicating sometimes one, and sometimes a legion. But that we may not be farther tedious in this dry work of definition, and that we may enter at once upon the subject with a zeal and spirit worthy of a topic which lays the axe at the root of the tree of modern Sadduceesism, Materialism, and Scepticism, we shall proceed at once to sum up the evidence in proof of the proposition which we shall state as the peculiar theme of this great literary adventure.--That proposition is--The demons of Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity were the ghosts of dead men. But some of you may say, You have proposed to dismiss this work of definition too soon: for here is the horrible word ghost! Of what is that term the sign in your style? Well, we must explain ourselves. Our Saxon forefathers, of whom we have no good reason to be ashamed, were wont to call the spirits of men, especially when separated from their bodies, ghosts. This, however, they did, not with the terrible associations which arise in our minds on every pronunciation of that startling term. Guest and ghost, with them, if not synonyms, were, at least, cousins-german. They regarded the body as the house, and therefore called the spirit the guest; for guest and ghost are two branches from the same root. William Tyndale, the martyr, of excellent memory, in his version of the New Testament, the prototype of that of king James, very judiciously makes the Holy Spirit of the Old Testament the Holy Ghost of the New; because, in his judgment, it was the promised guest of the Christian temple. Still it is difficult, I own, to hear the word ghost, or demon, without the recollection of the nursery tales and fictions of our irrational systems of early education. We suffer little children to hear so much of -- -- --"Apparitions tall and ghastly, That take their stand o’er some new-opened grave, And, strange to tell, evanish at the crowing of the cock," till they become not only in youth, but often in riper years, the prey and sport of idle fears and terrors "which scarce the firm philosopher can scorn." Not only the graveyard, -- -- --"But the lonely tower Is also shunn’d, whose mournful chronicles hold, So night-struck fancy dreams, the yelling ghost!" Imagination once startled, "In grim array the nightly spectres rise! Oft have we seen the school-boy, with satchel in his hand, When passing by some haunted spot, at lonely ev’n, Whistling aloud to bear his courage up. Suddenly he hears, Or thinks he hears, the sound of something purring at his heels: Full fast he flies, nor does tie took behind him, Till out of breath he o’ertake his fellows, Who gather round and wonder at the tale!" Parents are greatly at fault for permitting such tales to disturb the fancies of their infant offspring. The love of the marvellous and of the supernatural is so deeply planted in human nature, that it needs but little cultivation to make it fruitful in all manner of fairy tales, of ghosts and spectres. But there is an opposite extreme--the denial of spirits, angels, demons, whether good or bad. Here, too, media ibis tutissima--the middle path the safer is. But to our proposition: We have, from a careful survey of the history of the term demon, concluded that the demons of Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity were the ghosts of dead men. But we build not only upon the definition of the term, nor on its philological history; but upon the following seven pillars:-- 1. All the Pagan authors of note, whose works have survived the wreck of ages, affirm the opinion that demons were the spirits or ghosts of dead men. From Hesiod down to the more polished Celsus, their historians, poets, and philosophers occasionally express this opinion. 2. The Jewish historians, Josephus and Philo, also avow this conviction. Josephus says, "Demons are the spirits of wicked men, who enter into living men and destroy them, unless they are so happy as to meet with speedy relief.3 Philo says, "The souls of dead men are called demons." 3. The Christian Fathers, Justin Martyr, Ireneus, Origen, &c. depose to the same effect. Justin, when arguing for a future state, alleges, "Those who are seized and tormented by the souls of the dead, whom all call demons, and madmen."4 Lardner, after examining with the most laborious care the works of these, and all the Fathers of the first two centuries, says, "The notion of demons, or the souls of dead men, having power over living men, was universally prevalent among the heathen of these times, and believed by many Christians.5 4. The Evangelists and Apostles of Jesus Christ so understood the matter. As this is a very important, and of itself a sufficient pillar on which to rest our edifice, we shall be at more pains to illustrate and enforce it. We shall first state the philological law or canon of criticism, on the generality and truth of which all our dictionaries, grammars, and translations are formed. Every word not specially explained or defined in a particular sense, by any standard writer of any particular age and country, is to be taken and applied in the current or commonly received signification of that country and age in which the writer lived and wrote. If this canon of translation and of criticism be denied, then we affirm there is no value in dictionaries, nor in the acquisition of ancient languages in which any book may be written; nor is there any confidence in any translation of any ancient work, sacred or profane: for they are all made upon the assumption of the truth of this law. We have then only to ask first for the current signification of this term demon in Judea at the Christian era; and, in the second place, Did the inspired writers ever give any special definition of it? We have already found an answer to the first in the Greeks and Jews of the apostolic age--also, in the preceding and subsequent age. We have heard Josephus, Philo, Lucian, Justin, and Lardner, from whose writings and affirmations we are expressly told what the universal acceptation of the term was in Judea and in those times; and in the second place, the Apostles and our Lord, as already said, use this word in various forms 75 times, and on no occasion give any hint of a special, private, or peculiar interpretation of it; which was not their method when they used a term either not generally understood, or understood in a special sense. Does any one ask the meaning of the word Messiah, prophet, priest, elder, deacon, presbytery, altar, sacrifice, sabbath, circumcision, &c. &c.? We refer him to the current signification of these words among the Jews and Greeks of that age. Why, then, should any one except the term demon from the universal law? Are we not, therefore, sustained by the highest and most authoritative decision of that literary tribunal by whose rules and decrees all works sacred and profane are translated from a dead to a living tongue? We are, then, fully authorized to say that the demons of the New Testament were the spirits of dead men. 5. But as a distinct evidence of the historic kind, and rather as confirmatory of our views than of the authority of the inspired authors, I adduce as a separate and independent witness a very explicit and decisive passage from the epistle to the Smyrneans, written by the celebrated Ignatius, the disciple of the Apostle John. He quotes the words of the Lord to Peter when Peter supposed he saw a spirit or a ghost. But he quotes him thus--"Handle me and see, for I am not a daimoon asomaton--a disembodied demon;"--a spirit without a body. This places the matter above all doubt that with them of that day a demon and a ghost were equivalent terms. 6. But we also deduce an argument from the word angel. This word is of Bible origin, and confined to those countries in which that volume is found. It is not found in all the Greek poets, orators, or historians, so far as known to me. Of that rank of beings to whom Jews and Christians have applied this official title, the Pagan nations seem never to have had the first conception. It is therefore certain that they could not use the term demon as a substitute interchangeable with the word angel--as indicative of an intermediate order of intelligent beings above men, and between them and the Divinity. They had neither the name nor the idea of an angel in their mythology. Philo the Jew has, indeed, said that amongst the Jews the word demon and the word angel were sometimes used interchangeably; and some have thence inferred lapsed angels were called demons. But this is not a logical inference: for the Jews called the winds, the pestilence, the lightnings of heaven, &c., angels, as indicative of their agency in accomplishing the will of God. In this sense, indeed, a demon might be officially called an angel. But in this sense demon is to angel as the species to the genus: we can call a demon an angel, but we cannot call an angel a demon--just as we can call every man an animal, but we cannot call every animal a man. Others, indeed, have just as fancifully imagined that the old giants and heroes, said to have been the fruit of the intermarriage of the sons of God with the daughters of men before the flood, were the demons of all the world--Pagans, Jews, and Christians. Their most plausible argument is, that the word heroes and the word love are the same; and that the loves of the angels for the daughters of men, was the reason that their gigantic offspring were called heroes. Whence the term was afterwards appropriated to persons of great courage as well as of great stature. This is sublimely ridiculous. But to return to the word angel. It is a Bible term, and not being found in all classic, in all mythologic antiquity, could not enter into the Pagan ideas of a demon. Now that it is not so used in the Christian scriptures is evident for the following reasons:-- 1st. Angels were never said to enter into any one. 2d. Angels have, no affection for bodies of any sort, either as habitations or vehicles of action. 3d. Angels have no predilection for tombs and monuments of the dead. In these three particulars angels and demons stand in full contrast, and are contradistinguished by essentially different characteristics: for-- 1st. Demons have entered into human bodies and into the bodies of inferior creatures. 2d. Demons evince a peculiar affection for human bodies, and seem to desire them both as vehicles of action and as places of habitation. 3d. Demons also evince a peculiar fondness for their old mortal tenements: hence we so often read of them carrying the possessed into the grave-yards, the tombs, and sepulchres, where, perchance, their old mortalities lay in ruins. From which facts we argue, as well as from the fact that the Pagans had neither Devil, nor angel nor Satan, in their heads before the Christian times, that when they, or the Christians, or the Jews spoke of demons, they could not mean any intermediate rank of spirits, other than the spirits of dead men. Hence in no instance in holy writ can we find demon and angel used as convertible terms. Is it not certain, then, that they are the ghosts of dead men?--But there yet remains another pillar. 7. Among the evidences of the papal defection intimated by Paul, he associates the doctrine concerning demons with celibacy and abstinence from certain meats, as chief among the signs of that fearful apostacy. He warrants the conclusion that the purgatorial prisons for ghosts and the ghostly mediators of departed saints, which, equally with commanding to abstain from lawful meats, and forbidding to marry, characterize the times of which he spoke, are attributes of the same system, and indicative of the fact that demons and ghosts are two names for the same beings. To this we add the testimony of James, who says the demons believe and tremble for their doom. Now all eminent critics concur that the spirits of wicked men are here intended; and need I add that oft-repeated affirmation of the demoniacs, "We know thee, Jesus of Nazareth; art thou come to torment us before the time?" Thus all the scriptural allusions to this subject authorize the conclusion that demons are ghosts, and especially wicked and unclean spirits of dead men. A single saying in the Apocalypse makes this most obvious. When Babylon is razed to its foundation it is said to be made the habitation of demons--of the ghosts of its sepulchred inhabitants. From these seven sources of evidence, viz.--the Pagan authors, the Jewish historians, the Christian fathers, the four Evangelists, the epistle of Ignatius, the acceptation of the term angel in its contrast with demon, and the internal evidences of the whole New Testament, we conclude that the demons of the New Testament were the ghosts of wicked men. May we not henceforth reason from this point with all assurance as a fixed and fundamental principle? It ought, however, to be candidly stated that there have been in latter times a few intellectual dyspeptics, on whose nervous system the idea of being really possessed by an evil spirit, produces a phrensied excitement. Terrified at the thought of an incarnate demon, they have resolutely undertaken to prove that every single demon named in holy writ is but a bold eastern metaphor, placing in high relief dumbness, deafness, madness, palsy, epilepsy, &c.; and hence demoniacs then and now are a class of unfortunates laboring under certain physical maladies called unclean spirits. Credat Judæus Appella, non Ego. On the principle that every demon is an eastern metaphor, how incomparably more eloquent than Demosthenes or Cicero, was he that had at one time a legion of eastern metaphors within him struggling for utterance! No wonder, then, that the swineherds of Gadara were overwhelmed by the moving eloquence of their herds as they rushed with such pathos into the deep waters of the dark Galilee! Great men are not always wise. The seer of ’Mesopotamia was not only admonished, but reformed by the eloquence of an ass; and I am sure that the Gadarene speculators were cured of their belief in eastern metaphors when they saw their hopes of gain forever buried in the lake of Gennesereth. It requires a degree of gravity bordering on the superlative, to speculate on an hypothesis so singularly fanciful and baseless as that which converts both reason and eloquence, deafness and dumbness, into one and the same metaphor. Without impairing in the least the strength of the arguments in favor of actual possession by the spirits of dead men, it may be conceded, that because of the similarity of some of the effects of demoniacal possession with those maladies of the paralytic and epileptic character, it may have happened on some occasions that persons simply afflicted with these diseases, because of the difficulties of always discriminating the remote causes of these maladies, were, by the common people, regarded as demoniacs, and so reported in the New Testament. Still the fact that the Great Teacher himself distinguishes between demons and all human maladies, in commanding the Apostles not only to "heal all manner of diseases--to cleanse the lepers, and raise the dead;" but also to "cast out demons;" and the fact still more palpable, that in number and power these demons are represented as transcending all physical maladies, precludes the possibility of contemplating them as corporeal diseases. "When I read of the number of demons in particular persons," says a very distinguished Biblical critic," and see their actions expressly distinguished from those of the man possessed; conversations held by the demons about their disposal after their expulsion; and accounts given how they were actually disposed of; when I find desires and passions ascribed peculiarly to them; and similitudes taken from their manners and customs, it is impossible for me to deny their existence, without admitting that the sacred historians were themselves deceived in regard to them, or intended to deceive their readers." Were it not in appearance like killing those that are dead, I should quote at length sundry passages which speak of "unclean spirits crying with loud voices" as they came out of many that were possessed, which represent unclean spirits falling down before Jesus, and crying, "Thou art the Son of God," and of Jesus "charging them not to make him known;" but I will only cite a single parable framed upon the case of a demoniac. It is reported by Matthew and Luke, and almost in the same words. "When the unclean spirit," says Jesus, "is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest and finding none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then he goeth and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first. Even so shall it be also to this wicked generation." On which observe, that "unclean spirits" is another name for demons--that is, a metaphor of a metaphor; for if demons are metaphors for diseases, the unclean spirits are metaphors of metaphors, or shadows of shades. Again, the Great Teacher is found not only for once departing from himself, but also from all human teachers of renown, in basing a parable upon a parable, or a shadow upon a shade, in drawing a similitude from a simile. His object was to illustrate the last state of the Jews. This he attempts by the adventures of a demon--first being dispossessed, finding no rest, and returning with others more wicked than himself to the man from whom he was driven. Now if this was all a figure to illustrate a figure, the Saviour has done that which he never before attempted, inasmuch as his parables are all founded not upon fictions, but upon facts--upon the actual manners and customs, the incidents and usages of society. That must be a desperate position to sustain which degrades the Saviour as a teacher below the rank of the most ordinary instructors of any age. The last state of the Jews compared to a metaphor!--compared to a nonentity!--compared to a fiction! This is even worse than representing a trope coming out of a man’s mouth, "crying with a loud voice," "wandering through dry places"--unfigurative language, I presume--seeking a period, and finding a comma. At length, tired and fatigued, returning with seven fiercer metaphors more wickedly eloquent than himself, re-possessing the orator, and making him internally more eloquent than before. It will not help the matter to say that when a disease leaves a man it wanders through dry or wet places--through marshes and fens--through deserts and prairies--and finding no rest for its foot, takes with him seven other more violent diseases, and seeks for the unfortunate man from whom the Doctors expelled it; and, re-entering his improved constitution, makes that its eternal abode. In one sentence, then, we conclude that there is neither reason nor fact--there is no canon of criticism, no law of interpretation--there is nothing in human experience or observation--there is nothing in all antiquity, sacred or profane, that, in our judgment, weighs against the evidence already adduced in support of the position, that the demons of Pagans, Jews, and Christians were the ghosts of dead men; and, as such, have taken possession of men’s living bodies, and have moved, influenced, and impelled them to certain courses of action. Permit me, gentlemen, to demonstrate that this is no abstract and idle speculation, by stating a few of the practical aspects and bearings of this doctrine of demonology:-- 1st. It relieves the Bible from the imputation of promulging laws against non-entities in all its legislation against necromancers, diviners, soothsayers, wizzards, fortune-tellers, &c. When Jehovah gave this law to Israel, he legislated not against mere pretences, saying, "You shall not permit to live among, you any one that useth divination, an enchanter, a witch, a consulter of familiar spirits, a wizzard, or a necromancer; for all that do these things are an abomination to the Lord: and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive these nations out before thee." A divine law demanding capital punishment because of a mere pretence! The most incredible thing in the world! The existence of such a statute, as before intimated, implies not merely the antiquity of the fact of demoniacal influence, but supposes it so palpable that it could be proved by at least two witnesses, and so satisfactorily as to authorize the taking away of human life without the risk of shedding innocent blood. That there have been pretenders to such mysterious arts, impostors and hypocrites in necromancy, witchcraft, and divination, as well as in every thing else, I doubt not; but if the pretence to work a miracle, or to utter a prediction, be a proof that there were true miracles and true prophets, the pretence of necromancy, witchcraft, and divination, is also a proof that there were once true necromancers, wizzards, and diviners. The fame of the Egyptian Jannes and Jambres who withstood Moses in the presence of Pharaoh--the fame of the woman of Endor, who evoked Samuel, or some one that personated him--and of the Pythonic damsel that followed Paul and Barnabas, and who enriched her master by her divination, stand on the pages of eternal truth imperishable monuments not merely of the antiquity of the pretence, but of the reality of demoniacal power and possession. May I be permitted farther to observe on this mysterious subject, that necromancy was the principal parent of all the arts of divination ever practised in the world, and was directly and avowedly founded on the fact, not only of demoniacal influence, but that demons are the spirits of dead men, with whom living men could, and did form intimacies. This the very word necromancy intimates. The necromancer predicted the future by means of demoniacal inspiration. He was a prophet inspired by the dead. His art lay in making or finding a familiar spirit, in evoking a demon from whom he obtained superhuman knowledge. So the Greek term imports and all antiquity confirms. There are two subjects on which God is silent, and man most solicitous to know--the world of spirits, and his own future destiny. On these two subjects ghosts who have visited the unseen world, and whose horizon is so much enlarged, are supposed to be peculiarly intelligent, and on this account originally called demons, or knowing ones. But this knowledge being forbidden, kindly forbidden man, to seek it at all, and especially by unlawful means, has always been obnoxious to the anathema of Heaven. Hence the popularity of the profession of evoking familiar spirits, and hence also the indignation of Heaven against them who consulted them. Still we will be asked, Has any spirit of man, dead or alive, power to foresee and foretell the future? Does any one know the future but God? To which we cheerfully respond, The living and inspired prophets only knew a part of the future. God alone knows all the future. But angels or demons may know much more of it than man. How this may be analogy itself may suggest Suppose, for example, that one man possessed the discriminating powers of a Bacon, a Newton, or a Locke, only of a more capacious and retentive memory, had been coeval with Cain, Noah, or Abraham, and with a deathless vigor of constitution had lived with all the generations of men since their day till now, an inductive philosopher of course; what would be his comparative power of calculating chances and contingencies--the laws of cause and effect--and of thence anticipating the future? Still, compared with one who had passed that mysterious bourne of time, he would be but the infant of a day, knowing comparatively nothing of human destiny. But, indeed, the powers of knowing peculiar to disembodied spirits, are to us as inscrutable as the very elements of their spiritual forms and existence. But that they do know more of a spiritual system and more of human destiny than we, all antiquity sacred and profane fully reveals and confirms. 2. But a second practical aspect of this theory of demons demands our attention. It is a palpable and irrefragable proof of a spiritual system. The gross materialists of the French school, when Atheism triumphed over reason and faith, proclaimed from their own metropolis, and had it cut deep in marble too, that death was an eternal sleep of body, soul, and spirit, in one common unconsciousness of being. Since that time we have had the subject somewhat refined and sublimated into an intermediate sleep of only some six or seven thousand years, between our earthly exit and the resurrection morn. These more speculative materialists convert demons into metaphors, lapsed angels, or devils--into any thing rather than the living spirits of dead men. They see that our premises being admitted, there must be a renunciation not only of the grosser, but of the more ethereal forms of materialism of those who lull the spirit to repose in the same sepulchre with its kindred mortality, in their opposition to the inhabitation of the human body by any other spirit than its own. They make but little argumentative gain who assume that demons are lapsed angels rather than human ghosts: for who will not admit that it may be more easy for a demon than an angel who has a spiritual body of his own, to work by the machinery of a human body, and to excite the human passions to any favorite course of action! Were not this the fact, they must have tenanted the human house to little purpose, if a perfect stranger to all its rooms and doors could, on its first introduction, move through them as readily as they. "If weak thy faith, why choose the harder side?" To allegorize demoniacal influences, or to metamorphose them into rhetorical imagery, is the shortest, though the most desperate escape, from all spiritual embarrassment in the case. But the harder you press the sceptical philosopher on the subject of his peculiar idolatry, the more bold his denial of all spiritual influences, celestial or infernal; and the more violently he affirms that demoniacal possessions were physical diseases; that necromancy, familiar spirits, and divination, though older than Moses, and the seven nations of Canaan, were but mere pretences; an imposition on the credulity of man, as idle as the legends of Salem witchcraft, or the fairy tales of the mother-land of sprites and apparitions. But this, let me tell you, sceptical philosopher, relieves not the hard destiny of your case. Whether necromancy in all its forms was real or pretended, true or false, affects not the real merits of the question before us. To me, in this branch of the argument, it is perfectly indifferent whether it was a pretence or a reality: for, mark it well, had there not been a senior and more venerated belief in the existence of a spiritual system--a general persuasion that the spirits of the dead lived in another world while their bodies lay in this, and that disembodied spirits were demons or knowing ones on those peculiar points so interesting and so unapproachable to man; who ever could have thought of consulting them, of evoking them by any art, or of pretending in the face of the world to any familiarity with them! I gain strength by the denial or by the admission of the thing, so long as its high antiquity must be conceded. I do indeed contend, and will contend, that a belief in demons, in a separate existence of the spirits of the dead, is more ancient than necromancy, and that it is a belief and a tradition older than the Pagan, the Jewish, or the Christian systems--older than Moses and his law--older than any earthly record whatever. Not a few of our modern sages ascribe to a Pagan origin that which antedates Paganism itself. They must have a Grecian, Roman, or Egyptian origin for ideas, usages, and institutions existent ages before the founders of these states or the inventors of their superstitions were born. No earthly record, the Bible alone excepted, reaches within hundreds of years of the origin of the idea of demons, necromancy, and of infernal as well as of supernal agency. Others there are who have more faith in what is modern than in what is ancient. They would rather believe their children than their fathers. The moderns, indeed, in most of the physical sciences, and in some of the physical arts, greatly excel the ancients. I say, in some of the useful and fine arts we may, perhaps, excel them as much as they excelled us in geometry, architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, &c. &c. But though we excel them so much in many new discoveries and arts--in correct, traditionary, and spiritual knowledge they greatly excelled us; except always that portion of the moderns fully initiated into the mysteries of the Bible. Some seem to reason as if they thought that the farther from the fountain the waters are more pure--the longer the channel the freer from pollution. With me the reverse is the fact. Man was more intelligent at his creation and his fall in his own being and destiny than he has ever been since, except so far as he has been the subject of a new revelation. Would it not appear waste of time to attempt to prove that our national government is purer now than it was while its founders were all living amongst us? Equally prodigal of time the man who attempts to prove that the Patriarchal, Jewish and Christian institutions were purer five hundred or a thousand years after, than at, their commencement. With Tertullian I will say, that in faith, religion, and morality, whatever is most ancient is most true. Therefore the Patriarchs knew more of man living and dead, of the ancient order of things in nature, society, and art, than we their remote posterity. The age of philosophy was the era of hypotheses and doubts. Man never began to form hypothesis till he lost his way. Now having traced the belief in demons and necromancy beyond the age of conjecture and speculative reasoning, and located it amongst the oldest traditions in the world, we are compelled by the dicta of our own inductive and sounder philosophy to admit its claims to an experience, observation, and testimony properly authenticated and documented amongst the earliest fathers of mankind. One of the oracles of true science is, that all, our ideas are the result of sensation and reflection, or of experience and observation; that the archetypes of all our natural impressions and views are found in material nature; and therefore man could as easily create a world as a ghost, either by imagination, volition, or reason. Supernatural ideas must therefore have a supernatural origin. So speaks the Baconian system, and therefore its author believed in demons, spirits, and necromancy, as much as your humble servant, or any other living Baconian. When any man proves he can have faith without hearing and testimony--the idea of color without sight--or of hardness and softness, of heat and cold, without feeling, and understand all the properties of material nature, without any of his five senses, then, but not till then, he may explain how, without a supernatural influence of any sort, he may form either the idea or the name of a spirit, a ghost, or a demon--of a spiritual, invisible, and eternal system of intelligences of a supernatural mould and temper. He that can create out of himself the idea of an abstract spirit, or of a spiritual system of any sort, may create matter by volition, and a universe out of nothing. Dispose of the matter as she may, we affirm it as our conviction that Philosophy herself is compelled to admit the existence of demons, familiar spirits, and the arts of necromancy and divination, which all ancient literature and ancient tradition--all Patriarchal, Jewish, and Christian records assert. In this instance, as in many others, faith is easier than unbelief; and Reason voluntarily places herself by the side of Faith as her handmaid and coadjutor in sustaining a spiritual system, of which demons in their proper nature and character are an irrefragable proof. 3. A third practical tendency of this view of demoniacal influence is to exalt in our esteem the character of the Supreme Philanthropist. We will be asked, Whence have all the demons fled? What region do they now inhabit! Have they not power to possess mankind as formerly? Is necromancy, divination, and witchcraft forever exiled from the abodes of men? Many such questions there may be propounded, which neither philosophy, nor experience, nor religion do infallibly determine. But we may say in general and in truthful terms, that the heralds of salvation, from the day of their first mission to the end of their evangelical labors, were casting out demons, restraining Satanic influence, and making inroads upon the power and empire of Beelzebub, the Prince of the Demons. The mighty chieftain of this holy war had a personal rencounter with the malignant chief of all unclean spirits, angelic and human, and so defeated his counsels and repelled his assaults as to divest him of much of his sway, as a presage and earnest of his ultimate triumph over all the powers of darkness. His success and that of his ambassadors on two occasions called from his lips two oracles of much consolation to all his friends; "I saw," said he, "Satan fall like lightning from heaven." This he spake when they told him, "The demons are subject to us through thy word." "Behold," he adds, "I give you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and on all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you." The partial dethronement of Satan, Prince of the Demons, is here fully indicated. The Roman orator uses this style when speaking of Pompey’s overthrow. His words are, "He has fallen from the stars." And again, of the fall of the colleague of Antonius--"Thou hast pulled him down from heaven." So spake the Messiah: "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." His empire over men from that day began to fall. And on another occasion he says, "Now is the Prince of this world cast out." These, together with other similar indications, allow the conclusion that the power of demons is wholly destroyed as far as Christians are concerned; and if not wholly, greatly restrained in all lands where the gospel has found its way. With an old prophet or diviner who tried his hand against God’s people once, we may say, "There is no enchantment against Jacob--there is no divination against Israel." Some arrogate to human science what has been the prerogative of the gospel alone. They say the light of science has driven ghosts and witches from the minds of men; whereas they ought to have said, the gospel and power of its Author have driven demons out of the hearts, and dispossessed them of their power over the bodies of men. The error of these admirers of human science is not much different from that of some European theologists concerning Mary Magdalene. They suppose her to have been an infamous, rather than an unfortunate woman, out of whom were driven seven devils. They have disgraced her memory by erecting ’Magdalene Hospitals’ for infamous, rather than for unfortunate females; not knowing that it was the misfortune, rather than the crime of Mary of Magdala, that seven demons had been permitted to assault her person for the glory of the Messiah and her own eternal fame. As to the abodes of the demons, we are taught in the Bible what the most ancient dogmatists have said concerning their residence in the air: I say we are taught that they dwell pro tempore in the ethereal regions. Satan, their Prince, is called "the Prince of the power of the air." The great Apostle to the Gentiles taught them to wrestle against "wicked spirits that reside in the air;" for, says he, "you fight not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world; against spiritual wickedness in high places"--properly rendered, ’ Against wicked spirits in the regions of the air.’ Paul’s shipwreck at Malta by the Euroclydon, and Job’s misfortunes by an Arabian tempest, demonstrate the aerial power of this great antagonist when permitted to exert it against those he envies and calumniates. Evident it is, then, from such testimonies, facts, and allusions, that the atmosphere, or rather the regions above it, the ethereal or empyreal, and not heaven, nor earth, nor hell, is the proper residence of the ghosts of wicked men. They have repeatedly declared their perfect punishment or torment as yet future, and after the coming of the Lord, when he shall send the Devil and his emissaries into an eternal fire. How often did they say to Jesus, "Art thou come to torment us before the time?" That they are miserable, wretchedly miserable, is inferrible from the abhorrence of the nudity and awful forebodings of their present position. They vehemently desire to be embodied again. They seek rest, but find none; and would rather possess any bodies, even the swine, than continue naked and dispossessed. Their prison is called by the Messiah, "outer darkness;" by Paul it is called epourania, high places, aerial regions. This is the, Hebrew-Greek name of that region where there is neither atmosphere nor light; for, strange though it may appear to uneducated minds, the limits of our atmosphere are the limits of all terrestrial light. These intervals between the atmospheres of the planets is what we would call "outer darkness." Could a person ascend only some fifty miles above this earth, he would find himself surrounded with everlasting night--no ray from sun, or moon, or stars could find him where there is no medium of reflection. That they may still inspire oracles, as they were wont before the Christian era--(this, too, has been counterfeited)--and possess living men in heathen lands, or in places where Christianity has made little progress, is not altogether improbable. Of this, indeed, we have not satisfactory evidence, and therefore ought not to speak dogmatically. I know many affect to regard the whole matter as a piece of childish superstition, as did our two last great poets, Scott and Byron; who, nevertheless, like them, are under the influence of that same childish superstition. One thing is abundantly evident and satisfactory--that although the number of such spirits is vast and overwhelming, and although their hatred to the living is intense and enduring, the man of God, the true Christian, has a guardian angel, or a host of sentinels around him that never sleep; and, therefore, against him the fiery darts of Satan and the wiles of the roaring lion are employed in vain. For this we erect in our hearts a monument of thanks to Him who has been, and still is, the Supreme Philanthropist and Redeemer of our race. This view of demonology not only vindicates the law of Moses from the imputation of catering to the superstitious prejudices of mankind, by regarding as real the most idle fictions and pretences; and justifies Paul in placing witchcraft amongst the works of the flesh; it not only affords to weak and doubting minds new and striking evidences of a spiritual system; it not only develops our great indebtedness to the Author of the Christian faith in rescuing man from the tyranny of the arch apostate, the Prince of Demons; but it also inducts us into still more grand and sublime views of the magnitude, variety, and extent of the world of spirits--of our relations to them--and throws some light upon our present liabilities to impressions, suggestions, and influences from classes of agents wholly invisible and inappreciable by any of those senses which connect us with external and sensible existence. That we are susceptible of impressions and suggestions from invisible agents sometimes affecting our passions and actions, it were foolish and infidel to deny. How many thousands of well authenticated facts are found in the volumes of human experience of singular, anomalous, and inexplicable impulses and impressions wholly beyond all human associations of ideas, yet leading to actions evidently essential to the salvation of the subjects of them, or of others under their care, from imminent perils and disasters; to which, but for such kind offices, they must inevitably have fallen victims. And how many in the midst of a wicked and foolish career have, by some malign agency, been suddenly and unexpectedly led into the most fatal coincidences and suddenly precipitated to ruin, when such unprecedented exigencies are exceptions to all the known laws of cause and effect, and inexplicable to all their wonted courses of action! To assign to these any other than a spiritual cause, it seems to me, were to assign a non causa pro causa; for on no theory of mind or body can they be so satisfactorily explained, and so much in harmony with the Bible way of representing such incidents. Thus the angel of the Lord smote Herod that he died, and in various dreams admonished the faithful of the ways and means of escaping impending evils. Will it not be perceived and admitted that if evil demons can enter into men’s bodies, and even take away reason, as well as excite to various preternatural actions, and if in legions they may crowd their influences upon one unhappy victim, spirits, either good or bad, may make milder and more delicate approaches to the fountains of human action, and stir men up to efforts and enterprizes for weal or woe, according to their respective characters and ruling passions. Certain it is that angels, beings, too, of a more embodied and less abstract existence, have not only demonstrated their ability to assume the human form, but to exert such influence upon the outward man as to prompt him to immediate action--as in the case of Peter, who was suddenly stricken on the side by the hand of an angel when fast asleep between a Roman guard, and roused to action. The gates and bars of the prison open at his approach and shut on his escape, touched by the same hand; and thus the Apostle is rescued from the malice of his foes. What an extended view of the intellectual and moral universe opens to our contemplation from this point! We see an outward, visible, and immense expanse every where, studded with constellations of suns and their attendant systems, circling in unmeasured orbits around one invisible and omnipotent centre that controls them all. Amazed and overwhelmed at these stupendous displays of creative power, wisdom, and goodness, in adoring ecstacy we inquire into the uses of these mighty orbs, which, in such untold millions, diversify and adorn those undefined fields of ethereal beauty that limit our ideas of an unbounded and inconceivable space. Reasoning from all our native analogies, and from the scattering rays of supernal light that have from suns unseen reached our world, we must infer that all these orbs are the mansions of social beings, of every conceivable variety of intelligence, capacity, and employment; and that in organized hierarchies, thrones, principalities, and lordships, they constitute each within itself an independent world; of which societies we are allowed to conclude that there are as many varieties of intellectual and moral organization and development as there are planets for their residence. In all these intellectual assemblages, spread over the area of universal being, there are but two distinct and essentially diverse confederations--one under the rightful sovereignty of Messiah the Lord of all, and the other under the usurped dominion of that antagonist spirit of insubordination and self-will which has spread over our planet all the anarchy and misrule, all the darkness and gloom, all the sorrow and death which have embittered life, and made countless millions groan in spirit and sigh for a discharge from a conflict between good and evil, pleasure and pain, so unequal and oppressive. This rebel angel, of such singular and mysterious character, is always found in the singular number--as the Satan, the Devil, and the Apollyon of our race. With him are confederate all disloyal spirits that have conspired against Heaven’s own will in adoration of their own. In reference to this usurper and his angelic allies against the Lord’s Anointed, we are obliged to consider those unhappy spirits, who, during their incarnation, took sides with him in his mad rebellion against the Eternal King. The number of angels that took part with him in his original conspiracy remains amongst the secrets of eternity, and is not to be divulged till the Devil and his angels, for whom Tophet was of old prepared, shall be separated from the social systems of the universe, and publicly sentenced to the bottomless gulph of irremediable ruin. The whole human race, at one time or other, have been involved in this war against Heaven. Many have, indeed, deserted the dark banners of Beelzebub, and have become sons of light. Hitherto, alas! the great majority have perished in the field of rebellion, and gone down to the pit with all their armor on. These spirits, shown to be the demons of all antiquity, sacred and profane, are now a component part of the empire of Satan, and as much under his control as the original conspirators that took part with him in his primeval defection and rebellion. How numerous they are, and how concentrated in their efforts, may be gleaned from sundry allusions in the inspired writings, especially from the melancholy history of the unfortunate Gadarene who dwelt among the tombs, tortured by a legion of them--not, perhaps, by six thousand demons in full tale, according to the full standard of a Roman legion; but by an indefinite and immense multitude. How innumerable, then, the agents demoniacal and angelic on Satan’s side! What hosts of fallen men and fallen angels have conspired against the happiness of God’s moral empire! No wonder that Satan is sometimes spoken of as omnipresent! If Napoleon in the day of his power, while in the palace of the Thuilleries, was said to be at work in Spain, in Portugal, in Belgium, and in France at the same time--with how much less of the figurative, and more of the literal, may Satan, whose agents are incomparably more multitudinous and diversified, as well as of vastly superior agility and power, be represented as wielding a sort of omnipresent power in all parts of our terraqueous habitation? And how malignant too!! The fabled Furies themselves were not more fierce than those unclean and mischievous spirits whose sweetest pleasure it was to torture with the most convulsive agonies those unhappy victims whom they chose to mark out for themselves. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 138: S. IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT SANCTIONED BY DIVINE AUTHORITY? ======================================================================== Alexander Campbell IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT SANCTIONED BY DIVINE AUTHORITY? THE true philosophy of man, even amongst philosophers themselves, is yet a desideratum. We are all agreed that neither the Egyptians nor the Chaldeans, neither the Medes nor the Persians, neither the Greeks nor the Romans, had attained to the true science of man. They had their astrologers, soothsayers and magicians. They had their sages, philosophers and poets, as they had their great generals, heroes and conquerors. They had their sciences and arts, both useful and ornamental; but they had not the knowledge of themselves; they had not the Bible. Hence their proper origin, relations, obligations and destiny, were to them alike unknown and unknowable. The profound Socrates, the learned and acute Aristotle, the splendid and erudite Plato, the still more enlightened and eloquent Cicero, were as profoundly ignorant of their own moral constitution and moral relations to the great unknown and eternal God, as they were of the grand discoveries and inventions of the present century. We may, indeed, have as exaggerated views of our own attainments in this our "age of reason," "march of mind," and brilliant advances into the mysteries of nature, as they had of themselves and their attainments. Posterity, too, may look back upon our age as we are wont to contemplate ages long since passed away, and wish, as "duteous sons, their fathers had been more wise." Certain it is, that we are not satisfied with ourselves, and that a spirit of inquiry, revolution and change is now abroad in the land, which no man can limit or restrain. We live in the midst of a great moral revolution. Opinions held sacred by our fathers, usages consecrated by the devotion of ages, institutions venerated by the most venerable of mankind are now subjected to the same cold, rigid analysis, and made to pass through the same unsparing ordeal, to which the most antiquated errors and the most baseless hypotheses of the most reckless innovators are now so unmercifully doomed. Few, indeed, of the most popular theories of the Pagan schools on the great subject of man’s social and moral relations, have, when cast into this fiery furnace, like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, come out unscathed. Times of revolution are, however, more or less, dangerous times. For, as in the tumultuous rage of passions long pent up, and in the fitful frenzy of an inflamed multitude long down-trodden, the innocent with the guilty are sometimes immolated on the same altar, reared to the presiding genius at revolt; so truths rightfully enthroned in the judgment of the intelligent, and deeply cherished in the hearts of the faithful, are, in times of great excitement, and in the reign of skepticism, repudiated as reprobate silver, and sacrificed at the shrine of a licentious and indiscriminating spirit of innovation. Ours, however, is an age of invention, rather than of discovery: the arts, more than the sciences, are cultivated and improved. The invention of printing, the discovery of America, and the Protestant reformation, have imparted to the human mind an impulse so vigorous and so enduring, that neither time nor space seem able to impair it. Stimulated by former conquests over error, and the new discoveries since made, the human mind seems intent on carrying on war against false assumptions and unwarranted conclusions--as if determined to advance from victory to victory over every species of error and delusion: so that we may not unreasonably anticipate a day when the last error shall be exploded, and the last baseless assumption shall be entombed in the same unfathomable abyss with the vortices of Descartes, or in the nethermost hollow sphere of the speculative and hypothetical, though ingenious, Captain Symmes. But there are many things already established. The human mind is not wholly at sea without pilot or compass. The mariner’s compass has been invented. And many truths are immovably fixed and certain in every well-cultivated and intelligent mind. Physical nature is, indeed, still open to investigation in some of her most interesting and sublime departments. Astronomy is yet in progress of development. Geology is a new science, still incomplete and imperfect. The physical constitution of man has yet numerous mysteries sealed from the most discriminating eye. Not only several of its most sublime and delicate tissues are unexplored, but the design as well as the peculiar structure of some of its organs are unappreciated and unknown. The human head has only recently been explored and developed by the mighty genius and indefatigable toils of a Gall and a Spurzheim. That men have souls as well as bodies, and spirits as well as souls, seems likely soon to be satisfactorily proved, not by metaphysical reasoning, but by ocular and sensible demonstrations. Nor is the day far distant when it is presumed that all parties will agree that, as God has made the world, he should govern it. There are, indeed, two sciences, and but two, wholly unsusceptible of improvement. These, the Author of the Universe, by a patent which no man can invade but at the peril of his eternal destiny, has both wisely and kindly reserved to himself. I need not say that these are the sciences of religion and morality. No angelic being, unable to survey the universe in its infinite and eternal dimensions, nor man, in all his mysterious and sublime organization and capacities, could possibly project or develop these. They are sciences which, by an insuperable and stern necessity, are not merely superhuman, but supernatural and divine. There is a world above us and a world within us for which no man or angel could legislate. There is a moral code beyond the capacity and supervision of man--extending, too, in its requisition into a kingdom over which no human tribunal can find any jurisdiction, and which is as necessary to moral government as oxygen to combustion, or caloric to human life. There is an empire in the human heart over which no man or angel can preside, and a throne in the midst of it on which no king can sit but the King of Eternity. For this one reason alone, which is as good as a thousand, and to which the addition of a thousand could give no weight, religion and morals are sciences wholly supernatural and divine. Civil government is itself a divine appendix to the volumes of religion and morality. Though neither Caesar nor Napoleon, Nicholas nor Victoria, were, "by the grace of God," king, emperor or queen; still the civil throne, the civil magistrate, and, therefore, civil government, are, by the grace of God, bestowed upon the world. Neither the church nor the world could exist without it. God himself has, therefore, benevolently ordained magistrates and judges. Men may call them kings, emperors or presidents, (for much of politics, like much of speculative theology, is but a mere logomachy--a war of ill-assorted words,) but they are God’s ministers, executors of his will and of his vengeance, ordained to wait upon him and to execute his mandates. They are a sort of viceroys--vicegerents under law to God, and to govern according to his revealed will. The Bible is of right, and it ought to be, just as much a law to kings and governors and presidents, as it is to masters and servants, to husbands and wives, to parents and children. Those magistrates, therefore, who will not be governed and guided by it in the faithful execution of God’s laws, God himself, in his own proper person, will judge and punish. Since the days of Plato, men have conceived republics. They have invented new orders of society, new theories of socialism, and new names for things. But these are mere demonstrations of human weakness and of human skepticism. The Bible has sanctioned republics, and commonwealths and kingdoms, without affixing any peculiar name to them. It prescribes no form of human government, because no one form of government would suit all the countries, climes and people of the earth. But the Bible, in the name and by the authority of its Author, demand of all persons in authority that they protect the innocent, that they punish the guilty, and that they dispense justice to all. It also demands of the governed that they submit to "THE POWERS THAT BE," however denominated, as an ordinance of God; not through the fear of the sword, but for the sake of conscience. It inhibits them also from treason, insubordination and rebellion. In the freedom of debate, and in harmony with that spirit of innovation of which we have just spoken, a question has been mooted, and is now before the American public a matter of very grave discussion. A question, too, than which, in my humble judgment, no one pertaining to this life is worthy of a more profound deliberation, nor whose decision is fraught with more fearful and important results, affecting the whole community, involving the foundation of civil government, all the fixtures of society, the extent of all earthly sovereignty, and all the principles of international law, commerce and responsibility. That question is propounded in the solemn interrogatory, IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT SANCTIONED BY DIVINE AUTHORITY? or, in other words, Has man a right to take away the life of man on any account whatever? If he have not a divine right, I frankly admit that he has no human right--no warrant or authority derived from man--that will authorize such a solemn and fearful act. Though we should not, in the first instance, take into account the consequences of any decision, as having direct authority in influencing our reasonings upon the question, still it is important that we have some respect for them as arguments and incentives to a calm, discreet and patient investigation of the premises from which are to be adduced conclusions so deeply involving the interests of the world. And what, let me inquire, would be the consequences should it be decided that man has no right to take away the life of man on any account whatever? Is not the right to inflict upon him any penal pain whatever involved in this question? A single stripe may kill; nay, a single stripe, inflicted by an officer of justice, and that no very violent one, has sometimes killed. A man has no right to punish at all in any way, if he may not in that punishment lawfully take away the life of him that is subjected to it. He has not even the right to imprison or confine a person in a jail, workhouse or penitentiary, if he have not, in any case whatever, the right to kill. How many die in jails, workhouses and penitentiaries, from causes to which they would not have been exposed but in those places of punishment! But, further, if man has not the right to kill, nations have no right to go to war in any case, or for any purpose whatever. We argue that whatever power a Government has is first found in the people; that men cannot innocently or rightfully do that conventionally, or in states, which they cannot do in their individual capacities. True, when a Government is organized, the citizens or subjects of it cannot use or exercise the powers to legislate, to judge, to punish, which, by the social compact, they have, for wise purposes, surrendered or transferred to the Government. Still, the fundamental fact must not be lost sight of--that nations have the right to do those things only which every individual man had a right to do anterior to the national form of society. If, then, man had not originally a right to kill him who killed his brother, society never could, but from a special law of the Creator, have such a right. And such, we may hereafter show, was originally the divine law. The natural reason of man, or a divine law, enacted that the blood of the murdered should be avenged by the blood of the murderer, and that the brother of the murdered was pre-eminently the person to whom belonged the right of avenging his blood. Wars are either defensive or aggressive. But, in either point of view, they are originated and conducted on the assumption that man has a right, for just cause, to take away the life of man. For it needs no argument to convince anyone, however obtuse, that man cannot rightfully kill a thousand or a million of persons, if lie cannot lawfully kill one! I wonder not, then, that peace-men are generally, if not universally, in favor of the total abolition of capital punishment. What an immense train of consequences hang upon the final and correct decision of this question! Wars would, from an insuperable necessity, cease. We should then, indeed, "beat our swords into ploughshares and our spears into pruning-hooks." We would hang the war-trumpet in the halls of peace, and study war no more. Cannon, military establishments, standing armies, mighty navies, extensive arsenals, and all the other munitions of war, would no longer be the ultima ratio regum. No longer would Governments rely upon the arm of flesh for self-defense or for redress of wrongs. What millions of gold would be saved, and what oceans of blood would be prevented! It is true, however, that wars might cease and universal peace spread its halcyon wings over the earth, and still the murderer be rightfully, and by the supreme authority of the state, put to death. There is no incompatibility whatever in the argument of settling national controversies by another way than by war. We may settle them as we pacifically settle individual and corporate misunderstandings, and still argue against the abolition of capital punishment. But our argument is, that there would be an end of all wars, offensive and defensive, in the national mind, if men have no right to kill those who have killed their neighbors. Certainly, no one would place himself in the absurd attitude of defending wars for territory--for mere depredations on trade and commerce--in defense of chartered rights or violated treaties, if it can be shown that we ought not to wage war against the most savage tribes and barbarous nations for having butchered our wives and children. Again, if nations may not rightfully go to war--if man cannot, in any case, lawfully take away the life of man, in how dishonorable an attitude stand the patriots of all Christian lands--the Hampdens, the La Fayettes, the Washingtons! And where stand the men of faith, the men of sacred fame--the Joshuas, the Samsons, the Baraks, the Gideons, the Davids? And what shall we say of the morality of those who do honor to their memory? Of those who are always approbating, applauding and eulogizing our own Revolutionary heroes and those who distinguished themselves in the Indian wars--in wars against untutored savages, desirous to retain and to defend their patrimonial inheritance from European invasion and aggression--of those, a very numerous host of patriotic contemporaries, who have no civil honors to bestow, no civic wreath prepared, but to adorn the brows of military chieftains whose garments have been rolled in the blood of vanquished enemies--and especially of those who desire new wars for manufacturing new generals and new heroes, the idols of a nation’s worship, to fill the empty niches in the temple of our heroic fancies! Such are a few of the consequences that must follow the decision of the question before us in the negative. Still, as before said, we only use these as arguments for a calm, dispassionate and thorough investigation of the subject. It must be tried by some law and before some tribunal having supreme authority in the case. But what shall be that law, and where shall that tribunal be found? It is not the law of phrenology--of expediency--of tradition--of our common statute-books--of even public opinion. None of these have legitimate jurisdiction over a question that has so much of the temporal and eternal fortunes of human kind at stake. We may, indeed, listen, either for instruction or amusement, to the pleasing fancies of poets--to the visions of enthusiastic philanthropists--to the decisions of various sects of philosophers, or to the codes and enactments of olden times and of fallen empires; but from their speculations or their decisions we can derive neither argument nor authority. Some of the most dogmatical of the new schools of philosophy assume that the sole end of punishment is the reformation of the offender; that the murderer must be sent to a school of repentance and be better educated, and, when properly instructed and honorably graduated, he shall have his passport into the confidence of society, and be permitted to develop himself in the midst of more favorable circumstances. Such is one of the most popular substitutes for capital punishment. Plato’s favorite dogmas--that man made for philosophy, and not philosophy for man--that a perfect civil code would make a nation virtuous--and that offenders could be reformed by wise and benevolent exhortations--are not more whimsical and ridiculous than the theories of such abolitionists of capital punishment. They are, indeed, but an ingenious preface to the Elysian hell of some Universalian philanthropists, who imagine that place of punishment to be but a portico to heaven--a sort of purgatorial ante-chamber, in which men are to be purified by gentle flames for an induction into the innermost sanctuary of the universe. We agree with those who affirm that punishments ought, in all cases, to be enacted and enforced with a special regard to the reformation of transgressors; but we cannot say with an exclusive regard. Emphatic and special, but not exclusive, regard, should be shown to the reformation of the criminal. There must also be a special and a supreme regard to the safety of the state, and the protection of the innocent and unoffending. The laws of every civilized community should unite as far as possible the reformation of the offender with the safety of the state. But how these two may be best secured, is a matter not yet agreed. A sentence of perpetual imprisonment is no guarantee of protection or safety to the state. The sentence, in the first place, may not be executed. It seldom is, in the case of persons holding high places in society. Governors sometimes reprieve. Political demagogues, too, will not very conscientiously demur at the offer of many suffrages for a gubernatorial chair, on a private understanding that certain persons of influential connections sentenced to perpetual imprisonment shall on their elution be pardoned. But, further, it is no guarantee that the monster who has been guilty of one murder may not murder some of his attendants or fellow-prisoners in hope of escape, or that he may not fire his prison or in some way elope. He may be confined for life, and yet may again perpetrate the same foul crime. Are there not numerous instances of this kind on record? And has not the professedly reformed and pardoned criminal at times been guilty of a second, and sometimes of a third, murder? Such instances have been known in our own country and in our own memory. A sentence of perpetual confinement is not an adequate security against a murderer, in any view that can be taken of it. Society demands a higher pledge of safety--a more satisfactory guarantee. It demands the life of the murderer. And, strange as it may seem, we affirm the conviction that the certainty of death is, upon all the premises, the most efficient means of reformation. When--I do not say the unfortunate, (a name too full of sophistry, though unfortunate he may be,) but--the malignant and wicked murderer has been tried, convicted and sentenced to die after the lapse of so many days or weeks, when all hope of pardon is forever gone, then evangelical instruction is incomparably more likely to effect a change than are the chances of a long or short life within the walls of a penitentiary. It is, therefore, I must think, more rational and humane, whether we consider the safety of the state or the happiness of the individual, to insist that the sentence of death be promptly and firmly executed. So we reason against the assumptions of those who would abolish capital punishment, on the ground that all punishment should be for the salvation of the transgressor, and that his imprisonment for life, or till evident reformation, is an ample pledge for the safety and security of the state. They reason as illogically against capital punishment who assume that imprisonment for life is a greater punishment than death. Satan, more than three thousand years ago, reasoned more logically than they. He then argued in the face of high authority, on the trial of a very distinguished person, that a man would give the world for his life. "Skin for skin, all that a man hath," said the devil, "will he give for his life." I am reminded of one of the fables of Aesop in the only speech I ever read in favor of capital punishment, so far as my memory bears witness. The writer, in disproof of the assumption that imprisonment for life is a greater punishment than death, adduces the following fable:--"Aesop has finely satirized the prevalent disposition to complain of life as a burden when we are oppressed by the ills to which humanity is heir. We are all familiar with the fable of the poor man who was groaning under the weight of the fagots which he was carrying to his home. Weary and exhausted, he threw his load from his shoulders, sat down by the wayside, and loudly invoked Death to come and relieve him from his misery. Instantly the greedy tyrant stood before him, and, with uplifted dart, inquired, ’What wouldst thou have with me?’ ’Good Death,’ exclaimed the poor man, in terrified amazement, ’I want thee to help me get this bundle of sticks upon my back.’ The fable needs no interpreter. Its moral is obvious."1 Were imprisonment for life a severer punishment than death, it would not be lawful to exact it, so far as the divine law indicates what is just and equal. Neither the lex talionis, nor the Bible, nor right reason, so far as I can judge, would authorize any punishment severer than death. But we can very sincerely sympathize with many good men in their aversion to capital punishment for any other crime than murder. Indeed, much of the excitement and indignation against capital punishment arises from two sources:--the many crimes that have been judged worthy of death; and the fact that the innocent sometimes suffer while the guilty escape. In noticing the various topics from which men reason against the justice of demanding life for life, our design is to show how doubtful and inconclusive all mere human reasonings and statutes on this subject must be, rather than to enter into a full investigation of all that may be alleged from these sources of reason and argumentation. We cheerfully admit that our criminal code is not in unison with the spirit of the age, nor with the presiding genius of European and American civilization. Christian justice, humanity and mercy have, indeed, in some countries, and in none more than in our own, greatly modified and improved political law and political justice. Public opinion has for more than a century been vacillating between two extreme systems of punishment--one of which punishes more than a hundred varieties of offence with death, while the other inflicts death on no transgressor for any crime whatever. During the reign of sanguinary law in England, as Blackstone very correctly observes, "It is a melancholy truth, that among the variety of actions which men are daily liable to commit, no less than a hundred and sixty have been declared by act of Parliament, to be felonies without benefit of clergy; or, in other words, to be worthy of instant death. So dreadful a list," adds the learned jurist, "instead of diminishing, increases the number of offenders." Such a criminal code was, indeed, very likely to lead to another extreme. It has, therefore, been yielding in severity to the more humane genius of modern civilization. The human mind, ocean-like, has its ebbings and its flowings, its high tides and its low tides, on all exciting subjects. Time was when an Englishman forfeited his life for a very paltry theft--for the mere purloining of twelve pence sterling. That there ought to be a correspondence between offences and their punishment, is an oracle of reason and justice, so obvious to all, that it may be regarded in the light of a primary truth--a sort of self-evident proposition, that needs only to be stated to any person of reflection to secure his immediate assent. We advocate a discriminating tariff of penalties and punishments, not for the sake of revenue alone, but for the sake of protecting innocence and virtue. We have no faith either in the justice or expediency of a horizontal tariff, awarding one and the same punishment to each and to every one of a hundred crimes. We would not hang one man for stealing a shilling, and inflict the same punishment for treason sacrilege, rape or murder. We believe in the scriptural phrases, "worthy of stripes," "worthy of a sorer punishment," and "worthy of death." These forms of speech occur in both Testaments, but more frequently in the New than in the Old. They are phrases from which a sound and irrefutable argument in support of capital punishment may be deduced, and which no one opposed to it will dare on any occasion to employ. With the profound Montesquieu, I argue that "the severity of laws prevents their execution; and, therefore, whenever punishment transcends reasonable limits, the public will not unfrequently prefer impunity to inhumanity or to excessive punishment." Nay, with a greater than Montesquieu, I believe that an eye should not be taken for a tooth, nor a few years’ imprisonment for a man’s whole life. The penal code of every community should be an index of its moral sense and of its moral character. It ought to be regarded as a licensed exposition of its views upon the comparative criminality and malignity of every action affecting the life, the liberty, the character or the prosperity of its citizens,--a polished mirror from which may be reflected upon its own citizens and upon the world at large a nation’s intelligence, moral taste and moral excellency. Should it affix the same punishment to various and numerous offences, irrespective of their grade in criminality, it will confound and bewilder the moral perceptions of the people, and exhibit to the world a very fallacious test of the comparative atrocity and malignity of human actions. It may, indeed, be assumed that all sins are equally violations of the law of God--equally dishonorable to his majesty--equally obnoxious to his displeasure--and, therefore, equally to be punished. But be this view abstractly right or wrong, it is alien to our subject; for it is only with sin as it respects man in its injurious tendency that human legislation and human punishment have to do. The Lord has reserved to himself the right to punish sin as committed against himself, and has delegated to man the authority to punish sin only in so far as it is fraught with evils to the human race. In this view alone are sins to be estimated more or less atrocious, and more or less severely to be punished. The doctrine of sound reason, as well as that of revelation, is, "that every transgression and disobedience of the divine law should receive a just and adequate recompense of reward." From such considerations and reasonings as these, we would advocate a scalp of punishments in harmony with the most correct views of the criminality and wickedness of human actions, rising up to capital punishment only in the case of willful and deliberate murder, not to be extenuated in any case by passion, intemperance, or any temptation whatsoever. To obviate the exception not unfrequently taken to capital punishment on the ground that sometimes the innocent may suffer while the guilty escape, might there not be such legal provision, as would prevent the possibility of any one being convicted without such strength of testimony and proof of guilt as would not leave the shadow of a doubt? We doubt not the practicability of such a provision. Thus we reason with those who reason from their conceptions of the congruity, expediency and rational propriety of human theories and codes as respects penal statutes in general, and capital punishment in particular. Should we, then, claim no more authority for our reasonings than those who differ from us claim for theirs, (though, of course, we suppose we have the stronger and the better reasons,) we have gained this point, that, in demurring to our conclusions, we must both appeal to a higher court, and await the decision of the Supreme Lawgiver and Judge of the universe. This is all we have sought in these preliminary views and reasonings; and certainly it will be conceded to us by those who may dissent from the positions we have already assumed. In this resent erratic world there are two ultra-schools of philosophy:--the one takes nothing, the other takes almost everything, on credit. With the one, the fathers are wiser than their sons; with the other, the sons are wiser than their fathers. The antiquity of an opinion is a passport to the favor of one; the novelty of an opinion secures for it a favorable introduction to the confidence of the other. The tendency of the one school is to a blind devotion; that of the other to an absolute skepticism. We will not abide by the decision of either school. We prefer to carry this question up to a higher court--to a Judge who perfectly comprehends the whole constitution of man as an animal, intellectual and moral being--by whom the fundamental laws of the moral universe, and man in all his mysterious and sublime relations to that universe, are contemplated--not in the dim light of time, but in the clear and bright effulgence of a glorious and awful eternity. We, therefore, appeal from all human reasonings and from all human codes to the infallible decisions of that court as registered in the faithful records of the Old and New Testaments. The question before us is, What punishment does the Supreme Lawgiver and Judge award to the murderer? This is a mere question of fact, and not of a philosophic theory. We must, then, decide it by testimony. We shall, therefore, make a direct appeal to the Divine Record, and endeavor to find an answer for it from an induction of the cases and statutes therein recorded; or, at least, so many of them as will satisfactorily indicate the Divine will on the subject. The first case in the annals of time brought before this court was that of Cain, indicted for the murder of his brother Abel. Abel’s blood, thus shed, in the judgment of God called for vengeance on him that shed it. His words are, "The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground." He immediately added, "Thou art cursed from the earth," dooming him to become "a fugitive and a vagabond." This excommunication beyond the pale of the Divine protection, Cain understood to be a license given to any person to kill him. His language clearly indicates this:--"It shall come to pass," said he, "that everyone who findeth me shall kill me." A single question on this case, it seems, might decide the matter: viz. Was this the voice of reason, the voice of conscience, or the voice of God? Rather, was it not the voice of them all? If so, then, is not the crime of murder, on its first appearance, judged worthy of death? Does anyone doubt it? Let him place the matter before his own mind in the form of a trilemma. Either Cain’s own natural reason and conscience, or an antecedent law, or the sentence God pronounced upon him, decreed his death for that crime. Can anyone assign any other reason than some one of these three as extorting from Cain the declaration that "everyone who findeth me will kill me"? The whole three may, indeed, have conspired to produce the conviction; but certainly some one of them did; and this is enough to prove that, in the sight of God, his crime was worthy of death: for none of the three could exist without a revelation from God. Such was the decision of the first case. God, indeed, for reasons growing out of the condition of the world at that period, was pleased to reprieve him for the time-being, and gave him a pledge that no one should kill him. Some may ask, Why did not God himself immediately kill Cain, seeing that his brother’s blood called for vengeance? To which several answers may be given; such as--God, who knows the hearts of all men, and whose prerogative it is to show mercy, may have known that Cain did not intend to kill his brother, but only to humble him; or he may have judged it expedient to give proof of his mercy in the exercise of his sovereignty in the beginning of the world, waiting till further developments of the violence of human passion would justify him before the universe in inflicting adequate penalties upon transgressors; and also in demonstration of another truth, viz. that a government all mercy would not promote the safety or happiness of man; for this experiment resulted in the earth’s being so filled with violence that God was finally constrained to punish the antediluvians by one common death inflicted by his own hand. This was capital punishment in the superlative degree. What numerous and various acts of violence characterized the antediluvian world we are not informed. What laws were promulged by Divine authority we are not told. But the silence of antiquity is no proof that such laws were not enacted. For, although we have no published code of antediluvian laws, we have allusions to existing institutions which could not have been introduced without laws. A priesthood, altars, victims and sacrifices could not have existed without positive law. The distribution of animals into clean and unclean with regard not to food, but to sacrifice, presupposes very clear and positive enactments. Neither Abel, nor Seth, nor Enoch, could have pleased God, or walked with God, without law. The light of nature could not have originated altars, victims and priests. Indeed, the fact that the earth was filled with violence, is no inconsiderable argument that the will of God had been revealed; for where no law is, there is no transgression. But, besides what is affirmed of vengeance in the case of Cain, we have, so late as the time of his great-great-grandson, Lamech, another very direct reference to the punishment of murder. Lamech, of the family of Cain; was the first of polygamists known to history. His wives, Adah and Zillah, being apprehensive of the vengeance threatened, called forth from him the oldest poem in the world. It may be translated as follows:-- "Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; Wives of Lamech, hearken to my speech;-- For I have slain a man for wounding me, A young man for having beaten me. If Cain be avenged sevenfold, Surely Lamech seventy-and-seven." This, being written in hemistichs in the original, is generally, by the learned, regarded as the oldest poetry in the literature of the world. There is, to my mind, but one ambiguity in the passage. It respects the punctuation of the third line. It may be read interrogatively or indicatively:--either, "I have slain a man for wounding me," or, "Have I slain a man for wounding me, A young man for having bruised me?" Read indicatively, it intimates that Lamech killed a man in self-defense. Read interrogatively, it denies that he killed any person. In either case, he rebukes the evil forebodings of his wives; for if anyone killed him, not being guilty of murder, sevenfold vengeance would be inflicted upon him more than on Cain,--than which we know of nothing more terrible. On the above version I may say I have the Jewish Targums, Adam Clarke, and other rabbis of distinction with me. The whole case, taken complexly, indicates that death for murder was the penalty affixed by the justice of the antediluvian world. From this fragment of antediluvian history, we shall turn to the more copious details of the postdiluvian. It is worthy of special consideration that the first act of legislation in the new world, while the whole human race was in Noah’s family, was an act against murder. This was a law not for Jew or Gentile--not for Egyptian, Chaldean, Greek or Roman--but, being enacted before any of them existed, for the whole human race. It was not an act against any particular kind of murder--such as parricide or fratricide--but an act against murder simply on its own account. The occasions and circumstances accompanying the enactment of many laws are explanatory of them. These are worthy of special attention. The whole world, one household excepted, had been destroyed by the immediate hand of God. This destruction was made necessary because of the unparalleled violence that filled the earth. One family was wholly destroyed. This family was that of Cain, to which all cases of murder, or of punishment for it, named in the old world, belonged. The earth being thus depopulated, the family of Cain and of Lamech being wholly destroyed--to prevent the increase of crime and the necessity of a similar catastrophe, God gave to man, by a positive and express precept, the power, the authority and the injunction to cut off all murderers. The occasion of this act of legislation, and the positive and peremptory terms in which it is expressed, alike commend it to our consideration and regard. It is expressed in the following words:--"At the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man." No statute was ever more free from ambiguity, or more intelligible, than this one. I never have met with one who misunderstood it. Why, then, is its Divine obligation not universally felt and acknowledged? To one unacquainted with the power of sympathy, especially when its victim is seized with a morbid philanthropy or charmed with the fascinations of a new theory, it will appear somewhat mysterious how a precept so express, so authoritative and peremptory could be disposed of or evaded. It is done by the magic of a single assumption:--"Christianity is more mild and generous and philanthropic than the law of Moses." But that this is a provision of the law of Moses, is an assumption which rests on the simple ground that Moses the lawgiver wrote the book of Genesis. One might as justly assume that Noah’s ark or Melchizedek’s pontificate was a part of the law of Moses, because Moses is the only person who wrote their history. From the age of spiritual Quakerism until now, the abolitionists of capital punishment generally occupy this ground. As there is no dispute about the meaning of the precept, the only way to dispose of it is to locate it amongst the Jewish rites and usages which have been abolished. But the simple fact that this precept was promulged in the year of the world 1658, and that Moses gave not the law till the year 2513--that is, full eight hundred and fifty-five years after--is a fact so prominent and so indisputable as to render any other refutation of the assumption a work of the most gratuitous supererogation. I wonder why the same romantic genius that embodied with the Jewish code a precept given to the whole human family almost a thousand years before there was a Jewish nation, did not also embody with the same code, and appropriate to the same people, the right to eat animal food, then for the first time given to man--the covenant of day and night, of summer and winter, of seedtime and harvest, indicated and confirmed by the celestial arch which God erected upon the bosom of a cloud in token of his "covenant with all flesh." The constitution that guarantees the continuance of day and night and the seasons of the year also secures and protects the life of man from the violence of man, by a statute simultaneously promulged and committed to the father of the new world for the benefit of the whole human race. Why not also represent this, too, as done away, and thus place the world without the precincts of the covenanted mercies given to Noah for his family and recorded by Moses the man of God? There is not, then, the shadow of a reason for the assumption that the present human family is not obliged to enforce the statute above named. The right to eat animal food, to expect the uninterrupted succession of seasons, and the obligation to put the murderer to death, are of equal antiquity and of the same Divine authority. Every one claiming any interest in the world, because of his relation to Noah, and God’s charter of privileges granted to him, must either show, by some authority equally express and incontrovertible, that God has abolished one part of it and perpetuated the remainder, or advocate capital punishment upon Divine authority. But still more convincing and decisive is the reason assigned by the divine Author of the statute commanding capital punishment. It is in these words:--"FOR IN THE IMAGE OF GOD MADE HE MAN." A reason, indeed, for the statute, worthy of God to propound and worthy of man to honor and regard. Why a reason so forcible and so full of eloquence and authority could be so frequently disparaged by an intelligent and Christian community, is, to my mind, indicative not merely of the want of piety, but of that of humanity and self-respect. The reason here assigned for this precept places the crime of murder in an entirely new attitude before the mind. Much, indeed, has been said of this crime--of its enormous dimensions--of its moral turpitude--its appalling guilt--its diabolical malignity; but here it is presented to us as the greatest insult which man can offer to his Creator--to the Supreme Majesty of the universe, apart from all its bearings upon human society and its unfortunate victim. On one occasion the Messiah said of Satan that he "was a liar and a murderer from the beginning." It is impossible, then, that we can exaggerate the wickedness and malignancy of murder. No one has yet been able to do it justice. It desecrates in effigy, and, as far as the impotent arm of flesh has power, destroys, the once brightest image of the invisible and eternal God that adorns any province of his vast and glorious universe. Man is still great in his ruins. Once the most exact and beautiful similitude of the Great Original of universal being, he is still to be reverenced; and, when renewed in the moral image of his Maker, he is to be loved and admired not only as the noblest work of almighty power, but as the special and exclusive object of redeeming grace and mercy. But it is enough for our present purpose to know that in making it the duty of society to avenge this crime, God makes its dishonor to his own image the paramount reason why the life of the murderer should be taken from him. The Most High does not give many reasons for his precepts; but, when he gives one, it is worthy of himself and of the occasion, and claims the profound respect of every discerning and moral man. Before we dismiss this divine statute, which has never been repealed, which never can be abolished, we must add one other remark, in the form of an argument against the possibility of its abrogation. The reason given for slaying the murderer is one of perpetual validity. If it was ever good and obligatory, it must always be so. So long as it stands true that man was created in the image of God, so long it will bind every religious and moral people to take away the life of the murderer. It is, therefore, of immutable and perpetual obligation. We shall now briefly glance at the criminal code of the Jewish nation, merely to see whether it harmonizes with the prominent statutes of the postdiluvian, if not of the antediluvian, age. It is often very properly observed that the Jewish nation was placed under a theocracy. Punishment by death was, under it, somewhat extended beyond the single crime of murder. Various crimes affecting human life, endangering or implying murder, were, under the special government of God, amongst a people whose ecclesiastic and political constitutions were one and the same, punishable by death. According to the latest and one of the most respectable treatises yet written on the "Elements of Moral Science," by one of the living ornaments of Trinity College, Cambridge, the Jewish code took a proper view of polity. For, as Mr. Whewell very profoundly observes,2 "It is to be recollected that one requisite for our advancing towards a state of society so generally satisfactory, is the establishment of moral rules as realities; and to this, at present, there appears to be no way except by making ignominious death, the climax of our scale of punishments." It is, indeed, the climax of several categories in the Jewish code. Not only he that mortally smote a fellow-citizen, but he that smote his father or his mother, whether mortally or not; he that stole a man and sold him; he that cursed his parents; the reckless owner of an animal that killed, when through his neglect life was lost; all that practiced witchcraft, blasphemy, incest, sodomy, bestiality, &c. were deemed worthy of death. Both the letter and the spirit of the Jewish code on the subject of murder, and the reasons given for exacting life for life, demand our special attention: we shall therefore copy a few of the more prominent statutes of that institution. The fullest summary of the ordinances concerning manslaughter and murder, enjoined upon the Jews, is found in the book of Numbers, with some of the reasons annexed, indicative of the philosophy of the Divine requisitions. We shall read the whole passage:-- 9. And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, 10. Speak unto the children, of Israel, and say unto them, When ye be come over Jordan into the land of Canaan, 11. Then ye shall appoint you cities to be cities of refuge for you; that the slayer may flee thither which killeth any person at unawares. 12. And they shall be unto you cities for refuge from the avenger; that the manslayer die not until he stand before the congregation in judgment. 13. And of these cities which ye shall give, six cities shall ye have for refuge. 14. Ye shall give three cities on this side Jordan, and three cities shall ye give in the land of Canaan, which shall be cities of refuge. 15. These six cities shall be a refuge both for the children of Israel, and for the stranger, and for the sojourner among them; that every one that killeth any person unawares may flee thither. 16. And if he smite him with an instrument of iron so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death. 17. And if he smite him with throwing a stone, wherewith he may die, and he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death. 18. Or if he smite him with an hand-weapon of wood, wherewith he may die, and he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death. 19. The revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer: when he meeteth him he shall slay him. 20. But if he thrust him of hatred, or hurl at him by laying of wait, that he die; 21. Or in enmity smite him with his hand, that he die; he that smote him shall surely be put to death; for he is a murderer: the revenger of blood shall slay the murderer when he meeteth him. 22. But if he thrust him suddenly without enmity, or have cast upon him any thing without laying of wait, 23. Or with any stone, wherewith a man may die, seeing him not, and cast it upon him, that he die, and was not his enemy, neither sought his harm; 24. Then the congregation shall judge between the slayer and the revenger of blood, according to these judgments; 25. And the congregation shall deliver the slayer out of the hand of the revenger of blood, and the congregation shall restore him to the city of his refuge, whither he was fled; and he shall abide in it unto the death of the high-priest, which was anointed with the holy oil. 26. But if the slayer shall at any time come without the border of the city of his refuge, whither he was fled; 27. And the revenger of blood find him without the borders of the city of his refuge, and the revenger of blood kill the slayer; he shall not be guilty of blood; 28. Because he should have remained in the city of his refuge until the death of the high-priest; but after the death of the high-priest the slayer shall return into the land of his possession. 29. So these things shall be for a statute of judgment unto you, throughout your generations, in all your dwellings. 30. Whoso killeth any person, the murderer shall be put to death by the mouth of witnesses: but one witness shall not testify against any person to cause him to die. 31. Moreover, ye shall take no satisfaction for the life of a murderer which is guilty of death; but he shall be surely put to death. 32. And ye shall take no satisfaction for him that is fled to the city of his refuge, that he should come again to dwell in the land, until the death of the high-priest. 33. So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are; for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it. (Numbers 35) The ordinance for erecting the cities of refuge and the police under which they were placed, like every other part of the Mosaic institution, commend the wisdom, justice and benevolence of the Lawgiver and King of Israel. Two great objects were contemplated and secured by that institution--a refuge for the innocent, and a caveat against manslaughter. When any one killed another by mere accident, without any malice or evil intent on the part of him that did it, he was, when admitted into any one of these cities, legally secure against the avenger of blood. The right of avenging blood, from Adam to Moses, during the whole patriarchal age, seems to have been, with the Divine approbation, conferred upon the nearest kinsman of the deceased. It is very evident, not merely from the silence of the law, but from the retention of the ancient official name, that the erection of these cities created no officer in the land other than he to whom, from the beginning, the duty had belonged. The next in blood still retained the right to avenge his murdered relative. These cities were, therefore, intended to protect the innocent from rash and unjust executions. Before that time, the altar, it appears, (Exodus 21:14) had been the sanctuary of refuge for the unfortunate manslayer. But, in the second place, the cities of refuge were not unlike penitentiaries, to which even an innocent manslayer was required, at the peril of his life, to be confined until the death of that high-priest under whose administration the event had taken place. This sometimes happened to be for life. If at any time during the pontificate of the high-priest he presumed to go out of the city, it was at the hazard of his life. This was placing a new guard around human life. A wise provision, truly, against manslaughter! He that was so unfortunate as to kill any person by the veriest accident, incurred two imminent risks--that of being killed, before he got into the city of refuge, by the avenger of blood; and, if not killed, that of being confined for years--perhaps all his life--within its walls, away from his family and home. But in case of murder, whether premeditated or from the rage of passion, the cities of refuge afforded no asylum whatever. On trial and conviction the criminal was, in all cases, taken from them and put to death. For the guilty murderer there was no asylum. If he escaped the hand of the avenger of blood while fleeing to the city, if, perchance, he fled there for trial, he always expiated the blood that he had shed by his own. It is scarcely necessary to remark how often and with what clearness and authority it is promulged--"The murderer shall surely be put to death;" and again, "The avenger of blood himself shall kill him when he meeteth him." No one will, I presume, after a single reading of this statute, require any other evidence that capital punishment was divinely ordained during the whole period of Old Testament history--that it was an essential part of the Jewish institution, and during its continuance extended much beyond the patriarchal requisition. But there is a reason connected with these ordinances that demands our special consideration. Like that given to Noah, it has no respect to time, place or circumstance. It belongs exclusively to no age, to no nation or people. It is a reason, too, why murder shall not be pardoned, and why the Lord so solemnly and so positively said, "You shall take no satisfaction for the life of a murderer"--he must not be ransomed at any price. Does anyone ask why there should be no ransom, no commutation, no pardon? The answer, the reason, is one of fearful import. It is this:--"The land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein BUT BY THE BLOOD OF HIM THAT SHED IT." So God Almighty has ordained in his infinite wisdom, justice and benevolence. It is enough. He has said it. No tears of repentance, no contrition of heart, no agony of soul, can expiate the sin of murder. Lebanon is not sufficient, nor all the beasts thereof, to afford one burnt-offering to cleanse from defilement a land polluted with the blood of one unexpiated murder. As soon could the breath of a mortal melt the polar mountains of ice, dissolve the Siberian snows and fill the dreary wastes with the verdure, the beauty and the fragrance of ancient Eden, as soon would the sigh of remorse quicken into life the ashes of the murdered dead, or a single penitential tear extinguish the fires of hell, as any expiation or ablution of mortal hand, other than the blood of the murderer, atone to God’s violated law, do honor to his insulted majesty and purify the land from the dark defilement of unavenged blood. I cannot but tremble for our country, if this be the decision of the Governor of nations, when I reflect upon the multitude that have in single combat sacrificed each other, in purpose or in fact, at the shrine of a false and factitious honor; and upon those who, in the sullen rage and malice of the dastardly assassin, avenged their imaginary wrongs by the blood of their fellow-citizens; and upon those who sought to conceal their infamous crimes of lust and passion--of burglary, arson and rapine--with the blood of those who might have been witnesses against them; I say, when I reflect upon the hundreds and the thousands thus murdered, whose blood yet unexpiated still pollutes our soil, and through the vagueness and ambiguity of our laws, the venality, corruption or incompetency of our tribunals, or the servility or self-willedness of our chief magistrates, yet cries to heaven for vengeance, not merely upon the head of those that shed it, but upon the Government and the people that still suffer them to live, methinks I see a most portentous cloud, dark, swollen and lowering, surcharged with the fires of divine indignation, ready to burst in accumulated vengeance upon our blood-polluted land. But, in extenuation of our apathy or as an apology for our indifference, it is sometimes assumed that the Messiah has forever abolished the bloody code of Moses and the patriarchs, and has preached a larger benevolence and forgiveness to the nations. What a baseless assumption! What an outrage upon the character of the Messiah! True, indeed, he came not to judge the world, to act the civil magistrate, the civil lawgiver, or to assume regal authority over any nation or people of this world. His kingdom was spiritual and heavenly. In it, he would not have an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or stripe for stripe. He would not have his followers go to law for any violence, fraud or wrong inflicted on them on his account. They might, indeed, sue those out of his kingdom for civil wrongs in civil courts, or they might consent to be sued for unjust demands upon them in their political and civil relations; but any wrong, violence or compulsion inflicted on them for their religion, their conscientious allegiance to him, they were to endure cheerfully, and rejoice that they were counted worthy to suffer wrong or even shame for his name’s sake. But he that hence argues for the abolition of civil government, of civil penalties, or for the abrogation of the statutes given to mankind by God himself, founded on his own perfections and the immutable relations of things, not merely typical and adumbrative in their nature, but jurisprudential and for the safety of society, shocks all common sense. As well might we say that morality and the moral character of God re mutable things. The New Testament abolished nothing that was not in its own nature temporal, local and prospective of better things. It enacts no civil statutes. It does not even designate the persons between whom the institution of marriage may be consummated. It abrogates nothing in the Old Testament that was not substantiated in Christ, or that was not peculiar to the twelve tribes. But we have shown that the precept in discussion belonged not to any institution, Patriarchal, Jewish or Christian, but to the whole family of man. Does not an apostle say that "the law is good if a man use it lawfully"? Does he not say that "the law was not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient: for murderers, man-slayers, man-stealers, thieves, liars, perjured persons," &c. ? And surely for all these evil-doers it has, or ought to have, its penalties. In executing these on their proper subjects the law is used lawfully. Again, does not Paul teach that the "powers that be are ordained of God"?--that the magistrate "is his minister," and that he rightfully wears a sword not his own, but God’s? And, in the name of reason, why have a sword in the state, and worn by the civil magistrate, if it be unlawful or unchristian to put any one to death on any account whatever? That would, indeed, be to "bear the sword in vain;" a thing which the apostles themselves would have reprobated. Christians, then, must remember that the magistrate is God’s armed minister, and that he must be obeyed by every Christian man, not merely through the fear of his wrath, or of his avenging sword, but for the sake of a conscientious regard to God’s authority, whose minister of justice he is. The civil magistrate is now the civil avenger of blood. Paul calls him "a messenger of wrath upon him that doeth evil." There is not, then, a word in the Old Testament or the New inhibiting capital punishment, nor a single intimation that it should be abolished. On the contrary, reasons are given as the basis of the requisition of life for life, which never can be set aside--which are as forcible at this hour as they were in the days of Cain, Noah, Moses and Jesus Christ. We reiterate the statute with clearer conviction of its obligation and utility on every consideration of the broad, deep, solid and enduring premises on which it is founded:--"Then shalt take (no ransom) no satisfaction for the life of the murderer."--"He that sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made he man."--"The land cannot be cleansed from blood but by the blood of him that shed it." For this purpose the magistrate is "God’s minister, an avenger, to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil." The necessity, utility and importance of capital punishment, we must regard, on the premises already considered, as unequivocally and irrefragably established, so far as divine authority can require or establish anything. And although the most plain and striking passages, found in the Patriarchal, Jewish and Christian institutions, have been adduced and partially considered, the half has not been told, nor the argument fully developed. A single address on such an occasion as the present is not sufficient for a subject so comprehensive and important. It would, indeed, require a volume rather than one short lecture. Conscious of our inability fully to discuss such a question on such an occasion, we shall therefore add but a few remarks further. It has been said, not by those of old time, but by those of our time, that the sixth precept of the Decalogue, "Thou shalt not kill," inhibits all taking away of human life. A sect of extreme pietists on Long Island, it is reported, gave to the precept a broader interpretation, and forbade the killing of any living creature for food. They are as consistent as he who says the precept "thou shalt not kill" prohibits capital punishment. It is the very precept which calls for the blood of him that violates it. Moses did not himself so interpret this precept; for on the very day he descended from the mount with the autograph in his hand, he commanded the sons of Levi to gird on their swords and kill the idolaters who had eaten and drunk and danced to an idol--of whom no less than three thousand fell that day. I introduce this case for another purpose--to repudiate an objection urged against capital punishment. It is asked, What Christian man, or what man of delicate moral sensibility, could execute such a sentence--could dispatch to the judgment-seat a criminal crimsoned with the blood of his fellow-man? It is not the sheriff’s hand--it is not the sword of the executioner. It is the hand of God--it is the sword of his justice that takes away that life which he himself gave, because the criminal has murderously taken away a life which he could not give. Is the hand of a man purer than the hand of an angel? And who was it that, in one memorable night, passing through the land of Egypt, by a single stroke smote to death the first-born of all the realms of Pharaoh, from the royal palace down to the cottage of the meanest serf that breathed upon his soil! And who was it that, on another fatal night, while passing through the camp of the insolent Assyrian chief, killed one hundred and eighty-five thousand of his most valiant men? Was it not an angel of the Lord? Nay, rather, who was it that in the days of Noah inflicted with his own hand capital and condign punishment upon a world filled with violence and with blood? Who was it that rained down fire and brimstone from the heavens on the devoted cities of the Plain, saving, as in the former case, but a single family? Was it not the Lord himself in person? And what shall we say of the father of the faithful, returning from the slaughter of the confederate kings?--of Moses, as the messenger of God, slaying not merely a single Egyptian, but smiting with his rod, in the depths of the Red Sea, the strength, the pride and the glory of Egypt?--of Joshua, the son of Nun, destroying seven idolatrous nations?--of Samuel, the pure and pious Samuel, hewing to pieces with his own hand the king of Amalek?--of David and his hundred battles? Time would fail me to name all the instances in which God has made the purest, the holiest and the best of men, as well as angels, the executioners of his justice. I shall mention another case--the case of Joab--one that, before I understood the statutes of the Lord on the subject of murder, often perplexed me. There lay king David, the beloved of his God, on the bed of death; and while making his last will and testament, he remembered Joab--the brave, the valorous, the mighty Joab--than whom no king could boast of a truer friend or a greater or more successful general--his own kinsman, too--his own sister’s son. He names him to his son Solomon, his successor of the sceptre of Israel. And what is his will concerning Joab? What honors or rewards has he in store for him? Hearken to his words:--"Solomon, my son--thou knowest also what Joab, the son of Zeruiah, did to me, and what he did to the two captains of the hosts of Israel to Abner, the son of Ner, and to Amasa, the son of Jether, whom he slew, and shed the blood of war in peace, and put the blood of war upon his girdle that was about his loins, and in the shoes that were upon his feet. Do, therefore, according to thy wisdom, and let not his hoary head go down to the grave in peace." So willed the dying David. And what did Solomon his son? There was no city of refuge for Joab, but, flying into the tabernacle and taking hold of the horns of the altar, Joab said, "Here will I die." And what said the king? "Go, Benaiah, do as he hath said. Fall upon him and bury him, that," adds the king, "thou mayest take away the innocent blood which Joab shed from me and from the house of my father." Was there ever such a comment on such a text as the following?--"The land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it." But we have yet a stronger case--the case of David’s son and David’s Lord. His words are oracles from which there is no appeal; his example is an argument to which there is no response. Is he, or is he not, on the side of capital punishment? While on earth he was a saviour. In heaven he is now a king. Hereafter he will appear in the character of a judge and an avenger. We ask not what he will do then in finally and eternally punishing the impenitent. We ask not what he did while on earth as a Saviour; for then "he came to save men’s lives, and not to destroy." But we ask, What did he do when he became king, when exalted to be the prince and the governor of the universe? He intimated the leading principles of his government before he was crowned Lord of all, to those Jews who were intent on his destruction. "I will," said he, "send you prophets, wise men and scribes. Some of them you will kill and crucify, others you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily, I say to you, all these things shall come on this generation." Did he when king execute this threat? Ask Josephus, Tacitus and a hundred other witnesses. As governor of the world, he dispatched Titus with a Roman army, and laid siege to Jerusalem and other cities in Judea. In the whole of these various wars and sieges--in the destruction of the city, and the temple, he killed more than one million of the rebellious Jews, and sent the remainder into exile. But this is not the only case. It is but the first one of notoriety in his reign of justice. Ever since he ascended the throne his promise is, "All that take the sword shall perish with the sword." As king of nations and governor of the world, he executes wrath by his "ministers of justice" upon wicked men and nations, in the temporal punishments which he awards. According to king David, in the second Psalm, when the Messiah should be placed as king on Mount Zion, he was to "rule the nations with a rod of iron, and to break them in pieces like a potter’s vessel." This he has already done in more than one instance, and will yet do in many more. But he does it not in person, but by his "ministers." Still, he does it. It being evident, as we suppose, that capital punishment is not only countenanced by innumerable Biblical precedents, but that it is also most positively enjoined upon all persons to whom God has revealed his will, who are entrusted with the government of the world, we shall henceforth regard it as a divine precept and requisition, to which we are bound to yield our cordial assent; not because it chances to fall in with our theories of what is expedient, useful or consonant to the genius of our age and government, but because of the supreme authority that enacts it--because it is a decree of the King of the universe, the ultimate Judge of the living and the dead, and because he himself has practiced it, and still continues to practice it, as moral governor of the world. Though not disposed to appear paradoxical, I hesitate not to avow the conviction that the divine ordinance is as merciful as it is just--that, for example, it was most humane and merciful on the part of David to command his son Solomon to take away the life of Joab. I cite this race and avow this conviction, for the sake of those opposers of capital punishment, who, under the pretense of a more refined and enlarged philanthropy, are, nowadays, declaiming both eloquently and impassionedly against capital punishment because of its alleged cruelty and inhumanity. That those who thus inveigh against it are philanthropic in purpose and feeling, I doubt not. But that they are so in fact, is not quite so evident. In seeking to abolish capital punishment, do they not divest human life of one of its main pillars of defense? In all countries, and, I believe, in all ages, murders increase and diminish in the ratio of the certainty or uncertainty of the exaction of life for life. It must, in the nature of things, be so. Every thing is safe or unsafe as it is guarded or not guarded by education--by law--by the magnitude and certainty or uncertainty of rewards and punishments. In abolishing capital punishment, the main bulwark against the perpetration of murder falls to the ground. The broad shield of a nation’s safety and defense from violence and blood is broken to pieces, and the honorable and virtuous citizen, naked and defenseless, left exposed to the murderous assaults of malice and envy. Of what avail is the bare possibility of a punishment infinitely less than the injury inflicted on the individual and the state,--enfeebled, too, as it must be, by a hundred chances of escape against one of apprehension and conviction? Who could feel himself safe under a government where there is no protection of his life against the furious passions which not unfrequently display themselves in the most appalling forms, in some of those terrific monsters with which human society more or less abounds? Exile, confinement in prisons or workhouses, are to such demons as an act of Congress to a South American tiger, or as the stubble to Job’s Leviathan. In saving a murderer from death, through a morbid compassion, society acts with more indiscretion than the fabled husbandman who, in commiseration, carried home to his hearth a congealed serpent, which, when warmed into life, fatally struck the children of its benefactor. In saving from the penalty of God’s law a single murderer, society sins against itself, as well as against God, and occasions, or may occasion, the destruction of one or more of its citizens. If every one convicted of murder in any of its various forms was infallibly put to death, can any intelligent citizen imagine that crimps of this sort would not rather diminish than increase? The strong probability of escape disarms every legal punishment of its terror to evil-doers. It has been observed that murder and robbery more frequently accompany each other in all states that punish the robber as well as the murderer by death, than in those that never visit theft or highway-robbery with capital punishment. As true it is that in those states where murder is very seldom punished with death, the crime, so far as my reading and observation go, is more frequently perpetrated than in those states, in which its proper punishment is much more certain. We cannot therefore, but think that the court of Judge Lynch would not have held its sessions so frequently in late years, had it not been that other courts so often failed to hold their sessions, with that certainty of capital punishment for capital offences which right reason, human prudence and God’s holy law so clearly and authoritatively demand. We cannot but trace the present appalling increase of murders in our country to those morbid philanthropists who, in the form of judges, juries and chief magistrates, in these days of new theories, experiments, and irreverence for God’s law and authority, are ever and anon making void our laws, lame though they be, by suffering the convicted murderer to live. The master-spirits of France, now, and at former times, have been much addicted to theorize against capital punishment. Robespierre in early life published a treatise against capital punishment, but when he rose to power, he became the presiding genius of the guillotine. Strange that such a theory should have been popular in France before the reign of terror began! France, however, is not the only country that has theorized against the Bible and its justice. Nor is it the only one that suffers for it. Indeed, all states that have more or less theorized against capital punishment have been signally punished by an increase of the crime. In truth, it is as some poet says-- "Mercy murders in pardoning him that kills." The protection and safety of human life is the first and paramount concern of every intelligent and moral community on earth. The first statute ever enacted by the heavenly Father in the present world, as before observed, was a statute for preserving life. I am not singular, I hope, in judging of the civilization of every community by the care it takes of human life. May not the religious and moral character of a community be very fairly estimated by the value it puts upon human life, and the care it takes of it, as indicated in its statute-books, its courts of justice, its general police, and its numerous and various means of defense against the accidents and dangers which may imperil it? And may not these be learned from its public highways, its public conveyances, its public buildings, and from the character and capacities of the officers to whose fidelity these great interests are committed, as well as from the various exactions of service, and the extent of the penalties inflicted upon them for delinquency or malfeasance in the discharge of their duties? In countries long settled, do we see the public highways bordered with dead trees, whose ponderous and decaying branches are bending over our heads? Are the streams that cross them unbridged, or, if bridged, are these bridges, decayed and dilapidating under the wasting hand of time, permitted to betray the unwary traveller into danger? Are their dread precipices unwalled, their deep ravines uncovered, their miry sloughs unpaved? Are their public conveyances by land and sea, by lake and river, uncomfortable or unsafe, as far as science or art can promote either safety or comfort? If so, must we not regard such a people as imperfectly educated--as but partially civilized--as essentially defective in the pure and excellent morality of the Christian religion? If the Lawgiver of the Universe, when acting as King of Israel, found that man guilty of blood on the roof of whose house there was no defense against falling over, when it became necessary to walk upon it--if he said to every subject of his kingdom, "When thou buildest a house, then shalt thou make a battlement for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thy house, should any man fall from thence," and if he hold every man liable for the damage accruing from a pit which he had digged and left uncovered, what should we think of those Christian philanthropists that pay so little regard to the life of man as not only to subject him to all the dangers of bad roads, bad bridges, bad coaches, bad boats, and bad officers, but, when his life is taken by the hand of a duelist or an assassin, extenuate the offence, and abolish the proper punishment, and allow this wretch again to go at large and hazard other deeds of violence and blood? In conclusion, we would only ask, who can form a just estimate of the value of the life of one man, either to himself or to society? No one lives or dies to himself alone. The unhappy victim of a murderer’s fear or hate has not only lost his life, but the world has lost it too. And what is life? Ay, what is life, to its possessor, to his relatives, to his country and to the world? How much would he himself take for it? Ask not the princes and the nobles of the earth in the morning of life--in the enjoyment of all the honors, pleasures and possessions of earth that imagination can body forth, or passion can desire. Ask not the men of genius, who dwell in enchanted palaces, who drink the pleasures of imagination from the purest and the loftiest fountains of creation. Ask not poets, orators and philosophers, who find a heaven in the admiration of their contemporaries, and an eternal reward in the worship and envy of posterity. Ask not the military chieftain, returning from the field of blood, flushed with the victories he has won, and crowned with the laurels of a hundred battles. But ask that poor, old, decrepit galley-slave, who has seen his fourscore years, what posthumous fame he would accept, what sum of money would satisfy him, for the pittance of days that might yet be allotted to him. One’s life might be safely staked on it, that neither the wealth of a Croesus nor the fame of a Napoleon would be accepted by him for his chances of another year. Again, what immense stakes has society in the lives of some men! What great interests are often wrapped up in the life of a single individual! It is not the interest of one city, one state, or one empire; it is not the interest of one age or of one generation of men; but the interests of a world, and of ages yet to come, that sometimes providentially hang upon the life of a single individual. Let anyone conversant with the history of the last three or four centuries consider how much interest had the world in a few individuals--in such men as Christopher Columbus, Martin Luther, Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Fulton, and George Washington. Suppose that each of these had met with some Aaron Burr, as did Alexander Hamilton, (a name of no inferior fame--whose death, as a national misfortune, no living man can estimate:) what would have been the present condition of the world? Can any man form a proper estimate? Can anyone subtract from science, and art, and society, the exact amount of our indebtedness to any one of them, much less to them all? It is from such a sacrifice as this, laid upon the altar of the implacable demon of a false honor, immolated at the promptings of malice and envy, that we learn the demerit of the murderer--what the world may lose by permitting him to live, and why the fiercest thunderbolts of Almighty wrath are treasured up for him. From this view of the subject, (and who that venerates the authority of the Bible can reasonably dissent from it?) may we not entreat every patriot, philanthropist and Christian in our country to use his best endeavors to create a sound public opinion on the obligations resting on every State government to exterminate the crime of murder by a firm, persevering and uniform execution of the murderer according to the Divine precept? Every one can aid in this cause, more or less. And now is a most important crisis. While so many are for taking away the greatest restraint and for substituting a less one, under the preposterous assumption that man is wiser than God, and that a minor punishment will be more effectual than a greater one, it is high time that the real friends of man should speak out. And should I not more especially address myself to the softer, more sensitive and humane portion of my audience--to that sex to whose soul-subduing counsels and fostering hands the God of nature and of society has so wisely and kindly assigned the formation of human character, and to whose influence, direct and indirect, he has almost entirely consigned the destiny of man under the most endearing and fascinating of all titles and associations--those of Mother, Wife and Sister? If the ladies in this our age of civilization will only concur with us in opinion, and lend their mighty aid in propagating right views on this subject--if they will combine their irresistible energies in this cause of genuine humanity, and frown from their presence not only the reckless duelist, but everyone who pleads his cause or countenances in any way his factitious code of ignoble honor--if they will forever discard from their admiration and esteem every candidate for their favor who is known to wear upon his person any weapon whatever, fabricated with a view to violence against the life of man--the mighty work is done. Then may be averted the vials of Divine indignation which must be poured out on every government and country deaf to the demands of God’s righteous law and regardless of the true safety and happiness of society. I can only add my earnest prayer that a timely repentance may dissipate that dark and portentous cloud that yet lowers over our beloved country; that by a just consideration of the dignity of man as created in the image of God, the value of human life as respects the eternal destiny of its possessor, the interest which the state has in all its citizens, the solemn requisitions of the Divine law, exacting in all cases the life of the murderer--those having it in their power to form, direct and govern society may perceive that it is alike an oracle of reason, of justice and of mercy that "whosoever sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed," and that, therefore, no ransom or substitute shall be taken for the life of the murderer, inasmuch as, by the eternal and immutable law of God, "the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein but by the blood of him that shed it." 1 Rev. Dr. Berg, as reported in the Philadelphia "Saturday American" for December 12, 1845. 2 Vol. 2: p. 329, sect. 1058. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 139: S. THE MISSIONARY CAUSE ======================================================================== The Missionary Cause He that winneth souls is wise.—Proverbs 11:30. The missionary cause is older than the material universe. It was celebrated by Job—the oldest poet on the pages of time. Jehovah challenges Job to answer Him a few questions on the institutions of the universe. “Gird up now thy loins,” said He; “and I will demand of thee a few responses. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding. Who has fixt the measure thereof? Or who has stretched the line upon it? What are the foundations thereof? Who has laid the corner-stone thereof when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Who shut up the sea with doors when it burst forth issuing from the womb of eternity—when I made a cloud its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band? I appointed its limits, saying, Thus far shalt thou come, but no farther; and here shall the pride of thy waves be stayed. “Has the rain a father? Who has begotten the drops of the dew? Who was the mother of the ice? And the hoar-frost of heaven, who has begotten it? Can mortal man bind the bands of the Seven Stars, or loose the cords of Orion? Can he bring forth and commission the twelve signs of the Zodiac, or bind Arcturus with his seven sons? “Knowest thou, oh man, the missionaries of the starry heavens? Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee? Canst thou command the lightnings, so that they may say to thee, Here we are? Who can number the clouds in wisdom? Or who can pour out the bottles of heaven upon the thirsty fields?” If such be a single page in the volume of God’s physical missionaries, what must be its contents could we, by the telescope of an angel, survey one single province of the universe, of universes, which occupy topless, bottomless, boundless space! We have data in the Bible, and, in the phenomena of the material universe, sufficient to authorize the assumption that the missionary idea circumscribes and permeates the entire area of creations. Need we inquire into the meaning of a celestial title given to the tenantries of the heaven of heavens? But you all, my Christian brethren, know it. You anticipate me. The sweet poet of Israel told you long since, in his sixty-eighth ode, that the chariots of God are about twenty thousand of angels*. [Note: This is an exact literal version of Rebotayim alphey shenan. The Targum says, “The chariots of God are two myriads—and two thousand angels draw them.” A myriad is 10,000—two myriads 20,000. “To know this,” Adam Clarke says, “we must die.”] And what is an angel but a messenger, a missionary? Hence the seven angels of the seven churches in Asia were seven missionaries, or messengers, sent to John in his exile; and by these John wrote letters to the seven congregations in Asia. Figuratively, God makes the winds and lightnings his angels, his messengers of wrath or of mercy, as the case may be. But we are a missionary society—a society assembled from all points of the compass, assembled, too, we hope, in the true missionary spirit, which is the spirit of Christianity in its primordial conception. God Himself instituted it. Moses is the oldest missionary whose name is inscribed on the rolls of time. He was the first divine missionary, and, if we except John the Baptist, he was the second in rank and character to the Lord Messiah Himself. Angels and missionaries are rudimentally but two names for the same officers. But of the incarnate Word, God’s only begotten Son, He says, “Thou art my son, the beloved, in whom I delight.” And He commands the world of humanity to hearken to Him. He was, indeed, God’s own special ambassador, invested with all power in heaven and on earth—a true, a real, an everlasting plenipotentiary, having vested in Him all the rights of God and all the rights of man. And were not all the angels of heaven placed under Him as His missionaries, sent forth to minister to the heirs of salvation? His commission, given to the twelve apostles, is a splendid and glorious commission. Its preamble is wholly unprecedented—”All authority in heaven and on earth is given to me.” In pursuance thereof, he gave commission to His apostles, saying, “Go, convert all the nations, immersing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; teaching them to observe all things whatever I have commanded you; and, lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world.” Angels, apostles and evangelists were placed under this command, and by Him commissioned as His ambassadors to the world. The missionary institution, we repeat, is older than Adam—older than our earth. It is coeval with the origin of angels. Satan had been expelled from heaven be fore Adam was created. His assault upon our mother Eve, by an incarnation in the most subtle animal in Paradise, is positive proof of the intensity of his malignity to God and to man. He, too, has his missionaries in the whole area of humanity. Michael and his angels, or missionaries, are, and long have been, in conflict against the devil and his missionaries. The battle, in this our planet, is yet in progress, and therefore missionaries are in perpetual demand. Hence the necessity incumbent on us to carry on this warfare as loyal subjects of the Hero of our redemption. The Christian armory is well supplied with all the weapons essential to the conflict. We need them all. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against wicked spirits in the regions of the air.” Hence the need of having our “loins girded with the truth”; having on the breastplate of righteousness, our feet shod with the preparation to publish the gospel of peace, taking the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God, always praying and making supplication for our fellow-missionaries and for all saints. The missionary fields are numerous and various. They are both domestic and foreign. The harvest is great in both. The laborers are still few, comparatively very few, in either of them. The supply is not a tithe of the demand. The Macedonians cry, “Come over and help us;” “Send us an evangelist;” “Send us missionaries;” “The fields are large, the people are desirous, anxious, to hear the original gospel. What can you do for us?” Nothing! Nothing! My brethren, ought this so to be? Schools for the prophets are wanting. But there is a too general apathy or indifference on the subject. We pray to the Lord of the harvest to send our reapers to gather it into His garner. But what do we besides praying for it? Do we work for it? Suppose a farmer should pray to the Lord for an abundant harvest next year, and should never, in seed-time, turn over one furrow or scatter one handful of seed: what would we think of him? Would not his neighbors regard him as a monomaniac or a simpleton? And wherein does he excel such a one in wisdom or in prudence who prays to the Lord to send out reapers—missionaries, or evangelists—to gather a harvest of souls, when he himself never gives a dollar to a missionary, or the value of it, to enable him to go into the field? Can such a person be in earnest, or have one sincere desire in his heart to effect such an object or purpose? We must confess that we could have no faith either in his head or in his heart. The heavenly missionaries require neither gold nor silver, neither food nor raiment. Not so the earthly missionaries. They themselves, their wives and children, demand both food and clothing, to say nothing of houses and furniture. Their present home is not “The gorgeous city, garnish’d like a bride, Where Christ for spouse expected is to pass, The walls of jasper compass’d on each side, And streets all paved with gold, more bright than glass.” If such were the missionary’s home on earth, he might, indeed, labor gratuitously all the days of his life. In an humble cottage—rather an unsightly cabin—we sometimes see the wife of his youth, in garments quite as unsightly as those of her children, impatiently waiting “their sire’s return, to climb to his knees the envied kiss to share.” But, when the supper table is spread, what a beggarly account of almost empty plates and dishes! Whose soul would not sicken at such a sight? I have twice, if not thrice, in days gone by, when travelling on my early missionary tours—over not the poorest lands nor the poorest settlements, either—witnessed some such cases, and heard of more. I was then my own missionary, with the consent, however, of one church. I desired to mingle with all classes of religious society, that I might personally and truthfully know, not the theories, but the facts and the actualities, of the Christian ministry and the so-called Christian public. I spent a considerable portion of my time during the years 1812, ‘13, ‘14, ‘15, ‘16, traveling throughout western Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. I then spent seven years in reviewing my past studies, and in teaching the languages and the sciences—after which I extended my evangelical labors into other States and communities, that I might still more satisfactorily apprehend and appreciate the status, or the actual condition, of the nominally and profest religious or Christian world. Having shortly after my baptism connected myself with the Baptist people, and attending their associations as often as I could, I became more and more penetrated with the conviction that theory had usurped the place of faith, and that consequently, human institutions had been, more or less, substituted for the apostolic and the divine. During this period of investigation I had the pleasure of forming an intimate acquaintance with sundry Baptist ministers, Bast and West, as well as with the ministry of other denominations. Flattering prospects of usefulness on all sides began to expand before me and to inspire me with the hope of achieving a long-cherished object—doing some good in the advocacy of the primitive and apostolic gospel—having in the year 1820 a discussion on the subject of the first positive institution enacted by the Lord Messiah, and in a.d. 1823 another on the same subject— the former more especially on the subject and action of Christian baptism, the latter more emphatically on the design of that institution though including the former two. These discussions, more or less, embraced the rudimental elements of the Christian institution, and gave to the public a bold relief outline of the whole genius, spirit, letter and doctrine of the gospel. Its missionary spirit, though not formally propounded, was yet indicated, in these discussions; because this institution was the terminus of the missionary work. It was a component element of the gospel, as clearly seen in the commission of the enthroned Messiah. Its preamble is the superlative fact of the whole Bible. We regret, indeed, that this most sublime preamble has been so much lost sight of even by the present living generation. If we ask when the Church of Jesus Christ began or when the reign of the Heavens commenced, the answer, in what is usually called Christendom, will make it either to be contemporaneous with the ministry of John the Harbinger, or with the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. We will find one of these two opinions almost universally entertained. The Baptists are generally much attached to John the Baptist; the Pedobaptists, to the commencement of Christ’s public ministry. John the Baptist was the first Christian missionary with a very considerable class of living Baptists; the birth of Christ is the most popular and orthodox theory at the respective meridians of Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Arminianism. But, by the more intelligent, the resurrection, or the ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ, is generally regarded as the definite commencement of the Christian age or institution. Give us Paul’s or Peter’s testimony, against that of all theologians, living or dead. Let us look at the facts. Did not the Savior teach His personal pupils, or disciples, to pray, “Thy kingdom”—more truthfully, “Thy reign—come”? Does any king’s reign or kingdom commence with his birth? Still less with his death? Did not our Savior Himself, in person, decline the honors of a worldly or temporal prince? Did He not declare that His kingdom “is not of this world”? Did He not say that He was going hence, or leaving this world, to receive or obtain a kingdom? And were not the keys of the kingdom first given to Peter to open, to announce it? And did he not, when in Jerusalem, on the first Pentecost, after the ascension of the Lord Jesus, make a public proclamation, saying, “Let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made (or constituted) the identical Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary, both the Lord and the Christ, or the anointed Lord”? Do kings reign before they are crowned? Before they are anointed? There was not a Christian Church on earth, or any man called a Christian, until after the consecration and coronation of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ of God. The era of a son’s birth was never, since the world began, the era of his reign or of the commencement of it. It is a strange fact, to me a wonderful fact, and, considering the age in which we live, an overwhelming fact, that we, as a community, are the only people on the checkered map of all Christendom, Greek, Roman, Anglican or American, that preach and teach that the commonly called Christian era is not the era or the commencement of the Christian Church or kingdom of the Lord Jesus the Christ. The kingdom of the Christ could not antedate His coronation. Hence Peter, in announcing His coronation, after His ascension, proclaimed, saying, “Let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made—touton ton Ieesoun—the same, the identical Jesus whom you have crucified, both Lord and Christ”; or, in other words, has crowned Him the legitimate Lord of all. Then indeed His reign began. Then was verified the oracle uttered by the royal bard of Israel, “Jehovah said to my Jehovah”—or, “the Lord said to my Lord,”—”Sit thou on my right hand till I make thy foes thy footstool.” Hence He could say, and did say, to His apostles, “All authority in the heavens and on the earth is given to me.” In pursuance thereof, “Go you into all the world, proclaim the gospel to the whole creation; assuring them that everyone who believes this proclamation and is immersed into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, shall be saved.” Here, then, the missionary field is declared to be the whole world—the broad earth. They were, as we are afterwards informed, to begin at the first capital in the land of Judea, then to proceed to Samaria, the capital of the ten tribes, and thence to the last domicile of man on earth. There was, and there is still, in all this arrangement, a gracious and a glorious propriety. The Jews had murdered the Messiah under the false charge of an impostor. Was it not, then, divinely grand and supremely glorious to make this awfully bloodstained capital the beginning, the fountain, of the gospel age and mission? Hence it was decreed that all the earth should be the parish, and all the nations and languages of earth the objects, and millions of them the subjects, of the redeeming grace and tender mercies of our Savior and our God. What an extended and still extending area is the missionary field! There are the four mighty realms of Pagandom, of Papaldom, of Mohammedandom and of ecclesiastic Sectariandom. These are, one and all, essentially and constitutionally, more or less, not of the apostolic Christendom. The divinely inspired constitution of the Church contains only seven articles. These are the seven hills, not of Rome, but of the true Zion of Israel’s God. Paul’s summary of them is found in the following words: “One body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father of all.” The clear perception, the grateful reception, the cordial entertainment of these seven divinely constructed and instituted pillars, are the alone sufficient, and the all-sufficient, foundation—the indestructible basis—of Christ’s kingdom on this earth, and of man’s spiritual and eternal salvation in the full enjoyment of himself, his Creator, his Redeemer, and the whole universe of spiritual intelligence through all the circles and the cycles of an infinite, an everlasting future of being and of blessedness. The missionary spirit is, indeed, an emanation of the whole Godhead. God the Father sent His Son, His only begotten Son, into our world. The Son sent the Holy Spirit to bear witness through His twelve missionaries, the consecrated and Heaven-inspired apostles. They proclaimed the glad tidings of great joy to all people—to the Jews, to the Samaritans, to the Gentiles, of all nations, kindreds and tongues. They gave in solemn charge to others to sound out and proclaim the glad tidings of great joy to all people. And need we ask, is not the Christian Church itself, in its own institution and constitution, virtually and essentially a missionary institution? Does not Paul formally state to the Thessalonians in his first epistle that from them sounded out the Word of the Lord not only in Macedonia and in Achaia, but in every place? No man can really or truthfully enjoy the spiritual, the soul-stirring, the heart-reviving honors and felicities of the Christian institution and kingdom, who does not intelligently, cordially and efficiently espouse the missionary cause. In other words, he must feel, he must have compassion for his fellow man; and, still further, he must practically sympathize with him in communicating to his spiritual necessities as well as to his physical wants and infirmities. The true ideal of all perfection—our blest and blissful Redeemer—went about continually doing good—to both the souls and the bodies of his fellow men; healing all that were, in body, soul or spirit, opprest by Satan, the enemy of God and of man. To follow his example is the grand climax of humanity. It is not necessary to this end that he should occupy the pulpit. There are, as we conceive, myriads of Christian men in the private walks of life, who never aspired to the “sacred desk,” that will far outshine, in eternal glory and blessedness, hosts of the reverend, the boasted and the boastful right reverend occupants of the sacred desks of this our day and generation. But Solomon has furnished our motto:—”He that winneth” or taketh “souls is wise” (Proverbs 11:30). Was he not the wisest of men, the most potent and the richest of kings, that ever lived? He had, therefore, all the means and facilities of acquiring what we call knowledge—the knowledge of men and things; and, consequently, the value of men and things was legitimately within the area of his understanding; or, in this case, we might prefer to say, with all propriety, within the area of his comprehension. Need I say that comprehension incomparably transcends apprehension? Simpletons may apprehend, but only wise men can comprehend anything. Solomon’s rare gift was, that both his apprehension and his comprehension transcended those of all other men, and gave him a perspicacity and promptitude of decision never before or since possest by any man. His oracles, indeed, were the oracles of God. But God especially gave to him a power and opportunity of making one grand experiment and development for the benefit of his living contemporaries, and of all posterity, to whom God presents his biography, his Proverbs and his Ecclesiastes. “The winning of souls” is, therefore, the richest and best business, trade or calling, according to Solomon, ever undertaken or prosecuted by mortal man. Paul was fully aware of this, and therefore had always in his eye a “triple crown”—”a crown of righteousness,” a “crown of life,” a “crown of glory.” And even in this life he had “a crown of rejoicing,” in prospect of an exceeding and eternal weight of glory, imperishable in the heavens. There is, too, a present reward, a present pleasure, a present joy and peace which the wisdom, and the riches, and the dignity, and the glory, and the honors of this world never did, never can, and consequently never will, confer on its most devoted and persevering votaries. There is, indeed, a lawful and an honorable covetousness, which any and every Christian, man and woman, may cultivate and cherish. Paul himself justifies the poetic license, when he says, “Covet earnestly the best gifts.” The best gifts in his horizon, however, were those which, when duly cultivated and employed, confer the greatest amount of profit and felicity upon others. We should, indeed, desire, even covet, the means and the opportunities of beatifying and aggrandizing one another with the true riches, the honors and the dignities that appertain to the spiritual, the heavenly and the eternal inheritance. But we need not propound to your consideration or inquiry the claims—the paramount, the transcendent claims—which our enjoyment of the gospel and its soul-cheering, soul-animating, soul-enrapturing influences present to us as arguments and motives to extend and to animate its proclamation by every instrumentality and means which we can legitimately employ, to present it in all its attractions and claims upon the understanding, the conscience and the affections of our contemporaries, in our own country and in all others, as far as our most gracious and bountiful Benefactor affords the means and the opportunities of co-operating with Him, in the rescue and recovery of our fellow men, who, without such means and efforts, must forever perish, as aliens and enemies, in heart and in life, to God and to His divinely-commissioned ambassador, the glorious Messiah. We plead for the original apostolic gospel and its positive institutions. If the great apostles Peter and Paul—the former to the Jews and the latter to the Gentiles—announced the true gospel of the grace of God, shall we hesitate a moment on the propriety and the necessity, divinely imposed upon us, of preaching the same gospel which they preached, and in advocating the same institutions which they established, under the plenary inspiration and direction of the Holy Spirit? Can we improve upon their institutions and enactments? What means that singular imperative enunciated by the evangelical prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 8:1-22), “Bind up the testimony, seal the law among my disciples?” What were its antecedents? Hearken! The prophet had just foretold. He, the subject of this oracle, viz: “The desire of all nations,” was coming to be a sanctuary; but not a sanctuary alone, but for a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense (as at this day) to both the houses of Israel—for a gin and for a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. The Church, therefore, of right is, and ought to be, a great missionary society. Her parish is the whole earth, from sea to sea, and from the Euphrates to the last domicile of man. But the crowning and consummating argument of the missionary cause has not been fully presented. There is but one word, in the languages of earth, that fully indicates it. And that word indicates neither less nor more than what is represented—literally, exactly, perspicuously represented—by the word philanthropy. But this being a Greek word needs, perhaps in some cases, an exact definition. And to make it memorable we will preface it with the statement of the fact that this word is found but twice in the Greek original New Testament (Acts 28:2, and Titus 3:4.). In the first passage this word is, in the common version, translated “kindness,” and in the second, “love toward man.” Literally and exactly, it signifies the love of man, objectively; but, more fully exprest, the love of one to another. The love of God to man is one form of philanthropy; the love of angels to one man is another form of philanthropy; and the love of man to man, as such, is the true philanthropy of the law. It is not the love of one man to another man, because of favors received from him; this is only gratitude. It is not the love of one man to another man, because of a common country: this is mere patriotism. It is not the love of man to man, because of a common ancestry: this is mere natural affection. But it is the love of man to man, merely because he is a man. This is pure philanthropy. Such was the love of God to man as exhibited in the gift of His dearly beloved Son as a sin-offering for him. This is the name which the inspired writers of the New Testament give it. So Paul uses it, Titus iii. and iv. It should have been translated, “After that the kindness and philanthropy of God our Savior appeared.” Again, Acts 28:2, “The barbarous people of the Island of Melita showed us no little philanthropy.* They kindled a fire for us on their island, because of the impending rain and the cold.” [Note: So we have always translated this term, in this passage.] There are, indeed, many forms and demonstrations of philanthropy. For one good man another good man might presume to die. But the philanthropy of God to man incomparably transcends all other forms of philanthropy known on earth or reported from heaven. While we were sinners, in positive and actual rebellion against our Father and our God, He freely gave up His only begotten and dearly beloved Son, as a sin-offering for us, and laid upon Him, or placed in His account, the sin, the aggregate sin, of the world. He became in the hand of His Father and our Father a sin-offering for us. He took upon Himself, and His Father “laid upon him, the iniquity of us all.” Was ever love like this? Angels of all ranks, spirits of all capacities, still contemplate it with increasing wonder and delight. This gospel message is to be announced to all the world, to men of every nation under heaven. And this, too, with the promise of the forgiveness of sins and of a life everlasting in the heavens, to everyone who will cordially accept and obey it. ======================================================================== Source: https://sermonindex.net/books/writings-of-alexander-campbell/ ========================================================================