BAPTISM OF THE SICK WIFE AND HER CHILDREN, 272
BERTHA
AND HER BAPTISM.
Chapter First.
PROBABILITIES OF AN ORDINANCE FOR CHILDREN.
'Tis aye a solemn thing to me
To look upon a babe that sleeps,
Wearing in its spirit-deeps
The unrevealed mystery
Of its Adam's taint and woe.--MISS BARRETT.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.--WORDSWORTH.
It is generally believed that, of those who have gone to heaven from
this world, by far the larger part have been infants and young children.
Born here, they were by one man's disobedience made sinners; born of the
Spirit, at their early translation to heaven, they hold an important
place in the plan of salvation by Christ. Very beautiful, as well as
sublime, is the thought of so large a contribution, to the heavenly
world, of human beings in the dawn of their existence, enhancing, as we
may suppose, the happiness of heaven by such large admixture of exotic,
youthful nature, and illustrating, by their redemption from a helpless
state of sin and misery, the unsearchable riches of wisdom and grace.
Has God done anything, in this world, to mark his regard for that class
of the human race constituting, thus far, the greater part of the
redeemed? We naturally look for something reminding the world of his
interest in these subsidiaries of his kingdom. Has he confined his
notice to those that are full-grown, and who have, thus far, the larger
part of them, withheld from him the fruit of his vineyard? God has a
church on earth, with ordinances, symbols, covenant signs: among them is
there not some sign, symbol, or ordinance, recognizing those who, more
than any other of the race, have, till now, been swelling the numbers of
that church in heaven?
Like those elements of astronomical calculation which require and lead
men to expect undiscovered planets in a certain quarter of the
firmament, analogy, and the known intercourse of God with mankind, and
our moral sense, incline us to look for some symbolic recognition of
this earthly constituency of heaven by him who ordained and is
redeeming to himself a church from among men. Words of interest and love
toward them on the part of God, we all know, are not wanting in the
Bible. Acts of loving-kindness, also, proving the sincerity of those
words, and reaching even to a thousand generations of them that love
God, are everywhere seen in sacred history.
But is there no great, conspicuous symbol of these things,--no type, no
rite? Symbols appear to be inseparable attendants of God's manifested
favor to men. He cannot enter into covenant with an individual, much
less a people, but there is at least a stone set up, or a
threshing-floor is bought for him, an altar is built, or they pour out a
horn of oil. He invites Ahaz to ask of him a sign of his promise: "Ask
it," he says, "either in the depths, or in the height above;" and, when
that man refuses, God gives him a sign. Emblems, seals and types, in the
early dispensation, burst forth like images in the waters of everything
along the banks, and even of things far off. Everything has its
memorial, its rite; are the children, is the parental relation,
forgotten?
Here let us consider that God began with the first parents and the
first children of the human race to set forth that great law of his
administration, the connection of children with parents for good or
evil. Every descendant of Adam is an example under that law. Thus it was
for nineteen generations,--from Adam to Abraham.
When, therefore, God reëstablished his church at the call of Abraham, it
was no new thing to connect parents and their children in covenant
promises and blessings. It had its origin in the very nature of man.
Abraham, and the covenant made with him for all believers and their
children, are, indeed, a striking illustration of a principle recognized
and applied by the Most High; but the principle itself is older than
Abraham,--it is coëval with the moral constitution of man. In making a
covenant with Noah, God included his children; so with David, making
mention of his house, "for a great while to come."
As soon, therefore, as religion was established in the earth, by
securing its perpetuity through the conservative influences of one
selected line of descent, the child was taken, as being the object of
the covenant, and the means of its perpetuation, and received its seal.
God designed to perpetuate religion in the earth, thenceforward,
chiefly by means of the parental relation; for the parent represents God
to the child more than any other fellow-creature, or thing, can
do,--more than any instituted influence, whether of prophet, priest,
church, or ritual. Setting up his church for all future time, with
Abraham for its founder, God included children with parents who
covenanted with him, as the objects of special regard and promise, and
he appointed a rite to mark and seal that covenant. Thus it was from
Abraham to Christ, during three times fourteen generations.
But the day of types and symbols was succeeded by another era, in which
the church of God comes forth with the glory of God risen upon her, and
all the nebulous matter of types and ceremonies is gathered together
into two permanent sacraments; for human nature was not beyond the need
and help of outward signs. Now, in the earlier of the two ages of the
church, the child was recognized by a rite of the church; the child,
with that rite inscribed on him, was the sign-bearer of the church's
perpetuity. Yet, in the age following, the child was as dear to the
parent as ever; the Christian parent was as much concerned to have
religion flow through his seed, as were his predecessors; the salvation
of the child was regarded with the same solicitude, and the principle of
perpetuating religion by the family constitution was still the same.
But did God withdraw from the children of his servants, from the most
hopeful of all the sources of his church's increase on earth and in
heaven, all token of his regard in any sacramental act? Is parental
affection, under the reign of Immanuel, debarred the enjoyment of one of
its most valuable privileges, the sealing of the child to be the Lord's
by the use of a divinely-appointed symbol? Had no ordinances and symbols
been allowed after the institution of Christianity, this question would
not arise; the inference would have been that human nature, under the
Gospel, will no more need the aid of rites in religion. But there are
Christian rites, expressly and solemnly instituted. Is not that most
important relation of a believer's child to God perpetuated; and is it
not still to be sealed by the use of one of the Christian ordinances?
In considering this question, and the many interesting topics connected
with it, the writer will be allowed to take his own way, following an
historical order in the occurrences which may be supposed to have made
the subject interesting and clear to the minds of two parents.
Chapter Second.
THE GRANDFATHER'S LETTER.
THE NATURE, GROUNDS, AND INFLUENCE, OF INFANT BAPTISM.
If temporal estates may be conveyed
By cov'nants, on condition,
To men, and to their heirs; be not affraid,
My soule, to rest upon
The covenant of grace by mercy made.
GEORGE HERBERT,--"_The Font._"
--No finite mind can fully comprehend the mysteries into which his
baptism is the initiation.--COLERIDGE,--"_Aids_," &c.
Christian faith is the perfection of human reason.--IBID.
MY DEAR DAUGHTER BERTHA:--I am glad that you think of taking your little
namesake to the house of God for baptism. You wish to know my views
about it in full. My new colleague having relieved me of many cares and
labors, I shall hope to write more frequently; but not often so long a
letter as I fear this will be; for I wish to tell you of some
conversations which I have had on the subject in question. This will
show you the common difficulties, in which, perhaps, you share, and my
way of removing them; and also set before you the privileges and
blessings connected with the baptism of your child.
A man and his wife--sensible, plain people--came to our house one
evening last July, when the "vines with the tender grape gave a goodly
smell," through that trellis which you and Percival have such pleasant
reason to remember. We were all sitting there in the moonlight, when
this Mr. Benson and his wife came up the door-way, and were welcomed
into our little group. After a few words of mutual inquiry and answer,
he said:
"Wife and I, sir, thought that we would make bold to come and trouble
you a little to tell us about baptizing our boy. He is getting to be
four months old, and we are not willing to put it off much longer.
Still, we would like to know the grounds of it a little better. People,
you know, do not think much about it till it comes to be a case in hand.
"But I do not know," said he, looking round on your mother and the
children, "but that we do wrong to take this time for it. It will be
rather a dry subject for these young friends to hear."
_Pastor._ Not at all. They owe too much to what was done for them when
they were little children, to dislike it. Besides, there is nothing dry
about it, as I view the subject. It is one of the most beautiful things
in religion.
_Mrs. Benson._ It is next to the Lord's Supper, I always thought, if
people take the right view of it.
_Pastor._ It makes you love God the Father in some such way as the
Lord's Supper makes you love the Saviour. I think, sometimes, that the
baptism of children is our heavenly Father's Sacrament.
_Mr. B._ I like that; but there is so much to study and learn about the
"Abrahamic covenant," that I feel a little discouraged. I have had books
lent me on the Abrahamic covenant, and I began to read them; but they
looked hard; so I told my wife that perhaps you would make the thing
more clear, and bring it home to our feelings, and that we would come
and get your ideas about it.
_Pastor._ How glad I am that you came! But tell me what you take the
Abrahamic covenant to mean.
_Mr. B._ I suppose it means that God told Abraham to circumcise his
children, and infant baptism comes in the place of it, and we must do it
if we are Abraham's spiritual children. But I wish to see the use of it.
I am willing to do it, but I should like to feel it more; and I want to
know how baptism comes in the place of circumcision, and a great many
other things.
_Pastor._ I think that you may possibly have what may be called some
Jewish notions about the Abrahamic covenant, though I trust you are
right in the main. That phrase sounds foreign and mysterious, and I
never use it except in talking with people who I know have the thing
itself already in their hearts.
I called Helen to me, and told her to say the hymn which she had
repeated to me the last Sabbath evening.
She cleared her voice, leaned against me, and twisted her fingers in my
hair behind, and, with her eyes fixed there, she said this hymn:
"Begin, my tongue, some heavenly theme,
And speak some boundless thing;
The mightier works or mightier name
Of our eternal King.
"Tell of his wondrous faithfulness,
And sound his power abroad;
Sing the sweet promise of his grace,
And the performing God.
"Proclaim salvation from the Lord
For wretched, dying men;
His hand has writ the sacred word
With an immortal pen.
"Engraved as in eternal brass
The mighty promise shines;
Nor can the powers of darkness rase
Those everlasting lines.
"He who can dash whole worlds to death,
And make them when he please,
He speaks, and that Almighty breath
Fulfils his promises.
"His very word of grace is strong
As that which built the skies:
The voice that rolls the stars along
Speaks all the promises.
"He said, 'Let the wide heavens be spread;'
And heaven was stretched abroad.
'Abra'am, I'll be thy God,' he said;
And he was Abra'am's God.
"O, might I hear thy heavenly tongue
But whisper, 'Thou art mine!'
Those gentle words should raise my song
To notes almost divine.
"How would my leaping heart rejoice,
And think my heaven secure!
I trust the all-creating voice,
And faith desires no more."
_Pastor._ What a happy man Abraham must have been when the Almighty made
this engagement and promise: "I will be a God to thee!" That was the
"Abrahamic covenant," in part.
"Does covenant mean that?" said Mrs. B.
"What?" I inquired.
"Why, sir, what you have just said,--engagement, promise?"
"Nothing more," said I. "But what a happy man, I say, Abraham must have
been! 'A God to thee!' To have the Almighty say to one, 'I will be a God
to thee!' You know that this is everything."
"That is a fact," said Mr. B., wiping his eyes; "for, when I went to my
store, the morning after I became a Christian, I went along the street,
saying to myself, 'Now I have a God. God is God to me. Thou art my
God.'
"Yes," said his wife; "Deacon B., the post-master, heard you, as you
went by his side-window, and he made an excuse to bring me up a paper,
that forenoon, and asked whether you had not met with a change in your
feelings on the subject of religion."
"Did he?" said Mr. B. "Well, I did not mean to be heard, and yet I was
willing that everybody should know how happy I was in having one whom I
could call my God. How I had lived so long without God for my God,
amazed me."
_Pastor._ You make me think of a man who, one night, on reaching his
house, after having attended a lecture in a school-room, was filled with
such surprising views and feelings, with respect to the greatness and
goodness of God, that he saddled his horse, rode three miles, waked up
the minister, and, as he came to the door, took hold of each arm, and
said, "O, my dear sir, what a God we've got!" He would not go in, but
soon hastened back. It was the substance of all that he wished to say;
he desired to pour out his soul to some one who would understand him. He
was like a thirsty land when at last the great rain is descending.
_Mr. B._ I suppose many people would have thought him crazy.
"I suspect the minister did, at first," said Mrs. B.
"And yet I suppose," said I, "he was never more rational. Just think
what it is for a poor sinner all at once to feel that the eternal God is
his; that He will be a God to him! We hear of some people dying at the
receipt of good news; and I have seen some so happy at this experience,
of having a God to love and to love them, that, if the thing itself did
not, as it always does, bring peace and inward strength with it, nature
could not have sustained it."
"Joy unspeakable," said Mr. B. "And full of glory," said his wife,
waiting a moment for him to finish the quotation.
"Now, my dear friends," said I, "that man on horseback, at his
minister's door at midnight, had, at that moment, the first part of what
is meant by the 'Abrahamic covenant.' How little way do these words go
toward expressing the thing itself, and a man's feelings under it! There
was a time when God made Abraham far more happy even than he did you on
your way to the post-office that morning."
Helen came along, just then, with a fruit-basket of apples, and I said
to her, as she was going round with them, "Say again that verse in your
hymn, which has these words in it, 'Thou art mine.'"
So, while Mr. B. was paring his apple, Helen stood before him, and said:
"O, might I hear thy heavenly tongue
But whisper, 'Thou art mine!'
Those gentle words should raise my song
To notes almost divine."
Mr. B. put his apple and knife down, and took his red bandanna
handkerchief from under his plate, and, wiping his eyes, said:
"Hymns always make me feel a good deal, especially Watts's. I've read
that hymn in meeting before the exercises began."
_Pastor._ You know, by happy experience, what it is when that heavenly
tongue whispers, "Thou art mine."
_Mr. B._ I do, sir, if I know anything.
_Pastor._ Now, my dear friends, there is something awaiting you, which
you seem not to have experienced, but which is as good as that.
"We would like to hear about it," they both replied.
"How should you like, Mrs. B.," said I, "to have your little boy become
a sailor?"
"O dear!" said she, "I should have no peace from this time, if I thought
he was to be a sailor."
"But that," said I, "may be God's chosen occupation for him,--the way in
which he will employ him to bring him to himself, and then use him to be
a preacher to seamen, for example, and so to scatter the truth in many
parts of the earth. We are not our own, Mrs. B., and this dear boy was
not given you, as we say, to keep. 'For thou hast created all things,
and for thy pleasure they are and were created.'"
"I want him brought up at college," said Mrs. B., looking at your
mother, who, she probably thought, would understand her motherly
anticipations about her boy so far ahead.
"Well," said I, "let us send him to college. I suspect that you would
feel a good deal the morning he left you, would you not?"
"O," said she, "I should so want him to be good first! If he should not
be a good man, I would not have him get learning to do harm with it, and
make himself more miserable hereafter."
The little gate, with its chain and ball, swung to at this moment, and
a woman and girl came up the walk. It was Mrs. Ford, who used to be your
dress-maker, and her daughter Janette, now about thirteen. It was a
farewell call from Janette, who was going to the neighborhood of
Philadelphia, into a coach-lace manufactory.
"So Janette is going to leave us, to-morrow, Mrs. Ford?" said your
mother.
"Yes, madam, and I feel sorely about it; so young, and such a way off,
and all strangers except the foreman, who spoke to me about her coming!
O, sir," said she, changing her undertone, and turning to me, "what
should we do without that promise, 'I will be a God to thee and to thy
seed after thee'?"
I looked at Mr. and Mrs. B., and we all smiled, while I said:
"Now we have got the second part of the 'Abrahamic covenant.' So now we
have the whole of it. Mrs. Ford, when you came in, we were talking about
baptizing children, and about the 'Abrahamic covenant.' What do you
understand by that covenant?"
"I understand by it, sir," said she, slowly gathering her words into
proper order; "why, I think I understand by it, that God promises to be
a God to a believer's child, as he was in such a wonderful way to
Abraham's people."
_Pastor._ Well, that is the substance of one part of it, at least. Did
you know, Mrs. Ford, that when you came in we were just entering Mrs.
Benson's son at college?
_Mrs. Ford._ Not this Mrs. Benson, of course. Whom do you mean, sir?
_Pastor._ This Mrs. Benson;--her little son.
_Mrs. Ford._ O, I understand! Well, you will send him to P., I suppose,
it is so near.
"We had not fixed on the college," said Mrs. Benson, with a laugh.
"Janette," said I, "how do you like the thought of going off so far from
us all?"
Janette pulled the ends of her plain cotton gloves, and her heart was
full, so that she could not speak for a moment. I was sorry that I had
asked the question, and therefore added:
"You will not go where God cannot take care of you and bless you the
same as at home, will you, dear?"
She lifted her white apron to her eyes, while Mrs. Ford said for her:
"I tell Janette that I gave her up to God in baptism; and when her
father lay sick, he said, 'That child was given to God in his house; I
leave her destitute, and with nothing but her hands, but I leave her to
a covenant-keeping God.'"
"Now," said I, "here is a dear daughter going to a strange place to
learn a trade. She knows not a soul in the place but the foreman who has
hired her. A boy is going to college, another to sea, another to a
distant city. Here is a daughter, who receives particular attentions
from certain young friends, and the probability is that she will be
asked in marriage; and here is a son, who with his parents are in doubt
with regard to his future occupation and course of life. God only knows
the feelings of parents at such times. What prayers are made in
secret,--what vows! One wrong step may embitter life. A right step may
lead to prosperity and great happiness. I sometimes wish that we could
gather our children together, in some of these emergencies and critical
periods of their lives, and offer up prayers and vows, as parents and
friends, in their behalf. There would not be many meetings more
interesting than these, Mr. Benson. How the parents of such children
would love everybody that came at such times to pray for their children;
and what prayers would go up to God!"
"Can we not have some such meetings?" said Mr. Benson. "Every parent
would like it, I am sure."
_Pastor._ Well, we do have some such meetings occasionally, I remember.
"Our minister loves to use parables," said Mrs. Benson, looking at your
mother, "so as to make us understand the meaning better, and remember
it."
"I must ask you to explain," said Mr. Benson.
_Pastor._ As often as we bring a child to the house of God for baptism,
Mr. Benson, we have such a meeting, if Christians will but understand it
so. We come with the parents, and say, "Lord God, here is this dear
child, with a momentous history pending upon thy favor and blessing. In
all future time, in the critical moments and eventful steps of its life,
or in its early death, or in its orphanage, be thou a God to this
child." If God should to-night, Mrs. Ford, say to you, "I will be
Janette's God," would you not send her away with a light heart?
"He should have her for life, dear child!" said she; "and I do feel that
he is a God to her."
"He is," said I, "if you have really made a covenant with him about your
daughter."
"I have, sir," said Mrs. Ford.
_Pastor._ Did the covenant have any seal? Some good people, you know,
think it enough to covenant with God about their children, without using
any special act to mark and seal it. Now it is only in consecrating
children to God that they omit the seal from the covenant. We practise
adult baptism, joining the church, confirmation, and we partake of the
Lord's Supper, feeling the propriety and the use of acts and testimonies
in the form of an ordinance. What seal had your covenanting with God
about your child?
_Mrs. Ford._ I see it now clearer than ever. As we stood with this child
in our arms, we both said, afterwards, we made a public profession of
religion anew; and, when the minister said those sacred names over her,
I felt more than before that I was having transactions with God about
the child. But people used to say to me, "Why not wait and let Janette
be baptized when she is old enough to understand it?" How little they
knew about it! Just as though, I told them, if I had money to put into
the savings-bank for Janette, I would wait and let her put it in herself
(it is so pleasant to put it in when you know all about it!), instead of
laying it up for her in the funds, and let it count up while she is
growing.
_Pastor._ Those friends who advised you so, think, perhaps, too much of
the ceremony itself, and not so much of what it signifies. Now the
pleasure of being baptized is nothing compared with having God enter
into a covenant in your behalf when you knew nothing about it.
_Mrs. Ford._ They said to me, also, "What right have you to do it,
instead of letting her have the choice and privilege of doing it herself
hereafter?" I told them that, if we acted on that principle, in the
treatment of our children, there would be a long list of useful things,
which we do for them, to be postponed.
_Pastor._ We can benefit another without his consent. The question is,
whether it is a benefit to a child for God and its natural guardians to
make a covenant together in its behalf.
_Mr. Benson._ It surely is so, if God truly is a party to such a
covenant. But where is the proof that he is? That is my trouble. They
tell me that this covenanting with God for a child, and sealing it with
an ordinance, ceased with Abraham, who was a Jew; that it was a Jewish
custom, which died out.
_Pastor._ Abraham a mere Jew! God's covenant with a believer and his
children a Jewish covenant! Never was there a greater mistake. Paul
tells us expressly it was not so. Get me a Bible, Helen, and bring me a
lamp. I read these words: "And the promise that he should be heir of the
world was not to Abraham and his seed through the law, but through the
righteousness of faith." His relation to the world was independent of
dispensations; it grew out of that faith which he had in common with all
believers to the end of time. "And he received the sign of circumcision,
a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had yet being
uncircumcised, that he might be the father of all them that believe,
though they be not circumcised." Christ also says: "Moses, therefore,
gave unto you circumcision; (not because it is of Moses, but of the
fathers.)" Abraham was not a Jew when God covenanted with him, any more
than you, madam, were Mrs. Ford, when, at the age of sixteen, as you
have told me, you entered into covenant with God. That covenant had
chief respect to your immortal soul, and yet it reached in its
influences to all the conditions of that soul while here in the flesh.
So God covenanted with Abraham as a believer, not as a mere national
ancestor; yet temporal and spiritual blessings came in rich measures
upon his immediate descendants. But we read, "So then as many as be of
faith are blessed with faithful," that is, believing, "Abraham." "And if
ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the
promise." Can anything be plainer than this?
_Mrs. Ford._ My father was a minister, you know, sir, and he used to
preach a great deal on this subject.
_Pastor._ Let us hear your understanding of these passages, Mrs. Ford.
"I am afraid," said she, "I cannot tell you just what he used to say.
But my idea of it is this: Though Abraham was the founder of the Hebrew
people, he was no more a Jew than a Gentile in his covenant with God,
for it was as believer the great believer, that God made a covenant
with him. So that he was not circumcised as a Jew, but, as the Bible
says, to have a seal of the righteousness which he had by faith. God
made a covenant with him as a believer, to be his God and the God of his
children, as the children of a believer, not a Jew; so that all
believers are blessed with believing Abraham, by having the same
covenant extended to them. Then, I take it, God gave him a sign and seal
as a pledge, and to remind him of it, and to keep his children in
remembrance." She paused, and I said:
"Please to go on." You remember, Bertha, how you used to make this Mrs.
Ford discuss doctrinal matters when she was sewing for you.
_Mrs. Ford._ I remember that father said that God took the rainbow as a
sign and seal of his promise, to Noah and all future generations, that
there should never be another universal deluge. So he appointed a
children's ordinance to mark his covenant with believers to the end of
time. Only there was this difference; the way of signing and sealing the
covenant not being coupled with the laws of nature, but conforming to
the kind of symbols successively in use, it was changed, at the time
that the Sabbath was changed, and the whole of the old dispensation; but
father used to say, Is the commonwealth and citizenship broken up
because the legislature adopts a new state seal? Does that destroy all
the old public documents?
_Pastor._ Good! So the United States' mint is from time to time changing
its dies; lately it has abolished copper, and substituted equivalent
coins of different composition. But money does not perish. A cent is a
cent still, red or white. So, whether the seal be blood or water, the
great ordinance which it seals remains the same.
"And now I will tell you," said I, "how it seems to me God's covenanting
with parents for their children came to pass. He wished to give Abraham
a token and seal of his love to him. So he took his child, the thing
which he loved best, and would see oftenest, and thought of most, and
made the child, as it were, the tablet on which to write his covenant
with the father. That was one reason. 'Because he loved the fathers,
therefore he chose their seed.' But this is the least of the reasons in
the case.
"Here is one of vastly greater importance. God wished to perpetuate
religion in the earth. He knew that the family constitution would be
the principal means of doing this, parents teaching and commanding their
children, and so transmitting religion. Because he knew that Abraham
would do this, he gave it as a reason for his love and confidence in
him, in not concealing from him his purpose to destroy Sodom. 'Shall I
hide from Abraham that thing which I do? For I know him that he will
command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep
the ways of the Lord.' So, in order to remind Abraham of what was
expected by the Most High in making his children the presumptive heirs
of grace, and to remind the children of it when they came to years of
understanding, God gave him and them this mark and seal."
"Well, then," said Mr. Benson, "it seems to me Abraham was better off
than we, if he had God in covenant with him for his children, and we
have not. I sometimes wish that I could have God covenant with me about
my boy, as Abraham had about Isaac."
"I should like," said Mrs. B., "to hear him say, 'I will be a God to
him,' and then tell us to do something of his own appointment that
should be like our signing and sealing a covenant together, as the
Lord's Supper enables us to do with Christ."
"If we have no such blessed privilege," said I, "then, as Abraham
desired to see our day, I should, in this respect, rejoice to see
Abraham's day. I cannot forego the privilege of having God in covenant
with me for my children as he was with Abraham for his; and I crave some
divine seal affixed to it.
"You said, Mrs. Benson, that you would like to have God promise to be
the God of your child, and then command you to do something which would
be like God and you signing and sealing it together. But do you think,
Mrs. B., that this is necessary? Why is it not enough for God to make a
promise, and you make one, and let it be without any sign or seal?"
"People don't do things in that way," said Mr. Benson, with a decided
motion, two or three times, with his head. "They call a wedding a
ceremony, it is true, and some say, 'So long as people are engaged to be
man and wife, the ceremony makes little difference.' But it does make
all the difference in the world,--this mere ceremony, as they call it.
They never like to dispense with it themselves, at least; because, you
see, it makes all the difference between unlawful, sinful union, and
marriage. It makes married life; which could not exist, without the
ceremony, among decent people. It gives a title and ground to a thing
which could not be without it. So, I begin to see and feel, it is with
regard to what some call the ceremony of baptism. But excuse me, wife, I
took the answer out of your mouth."
"Well," said Mrs. Benson to me, "I must wait upon you, sir, to answer
the question further."
"Mr. Benson has the right view of the subject," I replied. "We make too
little of signs and seals, from a morbid fear and jealousy of those
which are invented by man and added to religion. But God's own seals are
safe and good. We cannot make too much of them.
"God never did anything with men, from the beginning, without signs and
seals. The tree of life was one, and so was the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil. Adam and Eve knew better, at first, than to say, 'So long
as we love and obey God, of what use are these symbols?' By not
regarding symbols afterward, they brought death into our world and all
our woe. Even before that, God had appointed a symbol of his authority,
and a seal of a covenant between him and man forever, in the appointment
of the Sabbath. The mark on Cain's forehead, the rainbow, the lamp
passing between the severed parts of Abraham's sacrifice, Jacob's
ladder, the burning bush, the passover, and things too numerous to
mention, show how God loves signs and seals.
"There are many good people, at the present day, who say to me, I am
willing to consecrate my child to God in prayer, and bring him up for
God; but I do not see the necessity of an ordinance. Why bring the child
to baptism? I can do all which is required and signified, without the
sign."
"What do you say to them?" said Mrs. Ford.
_Pastor._ I tell them they are on dangerous ground. Will they be wiser
than God? He knows our natures, and what to prescribe to us in our
intercourse with him. I would as soon meddle with a law of nature, as
with God's ordinances. I might as well neglect a law of nature, and
think to be safe and well, as to neglect one of God's ordinances, and
expect his blessing.
People, moreover, may as well object to family prayer, and say that
they try to live in a spirit of prayer all day. Why do they have special
seasons for retirement, if they walk with God? Why do they hardly feel
that they have prayed if company, or a bedfellow, on a journey, keeps
them from using oral prayer? It is a bitter grief, also, when no funeral
solemnities lead the way to the grave with a beloved object; yet, where
in the word of God are they commanded? As Mr. Benson said, "Who is
willing to dispense with the wedding ceremony, except in cases where
sadness and trouble seek concealment?"
People cannot give full evidence that they are Christians unless they
make a public profession of religion. They cannot properly remember
Jesus without partaking of his body and blood. Depend upon it, my dear
friends, God sets great value on ordinances, and our observance of them.
God has given us two sacraments, and he who dispenses with them because
he undervalues them, or undertakes to say that they are not necessary to
him, or to any in this age of the world, is in peril. The only danger
from forms and ordinances is when they are of human origin. We must take
care and not let our revulsion from Romanism carry us to the extreme of
neglecting or setting aside the ordinances of God's appointment. "There
are three that bear record on earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the
blood; and these three agree in one." A man may, with equal propriety,
dispense with the blood, and its symbol the wine, or with the Spirit, as
with the water, if God has appointed it with the other two as a witness
between him and us. You notice that the Spirit is named with the two
inanimate things, the blood and the water. Take care, I say to my
friends, lest, in setting aside the water, you shut out that divine
Spirit, who, knowing how to deal with our nature, chooses the blood and
the water to be used by us in connection with our most spiritual
religious exercises of the mind and heart. We have no more right to
interfere with God's ordinances than with the number of the persons in
the Trinity.
"All this affects me so," said Mr. Benson, "that I shall not fail to
offer my child to be baptized, if I am allowed to do so. Now, there is
my difficulty. Why do you think, and how do you show, that baptism must
now be used as God's sign and seal of his covenant with believers for
their children? When circumcision was dropped, some insist that the
covenant was dropped with it, and, therefore, that there is no warrant
in Scripture for baptizing children."
"Why," said Mrs. Ford, "if the coming in of Moses' dispensation did not
abolish the arrangement with Abraham, why should its going out? I am
inclined to think that Abraham and his seed are, to Moses and his
dispensation, something like that vine to the trellis, running over it
to the top of the piazza, bending itself in, you see, to accommodate
itself, but having a root and a top, the one below, the other above, the
short frame, which only guides it up to the roof. In the eleventh of
Romans does not Paul say that Jews and Gentiles have one and the same
'root'? I always supposed that root to be Abraham and his covenant."
I did not quote Latin to my friends, but I thought of the old law-maxim,
_Manente ratione, manet ipsa lex_--which, if your scholarship is not at
hand to translate it, Percival will tell you, means, "The reason for a
law remaining, the law itself also remains." It is used in such cases as
the following: When one would insist that a law was intended to be
repealed by the operation of another law, not directly or expressly
aimed to repeal it, it is a good reply. If the original reason for
enacting the old law can be shown still to exist, it is strong
presumptive evidence that there was no intention to repeal that law. I
explained this, in as simple language as I could, to my excellent
friends, and told them, "If God's covenant, which circumcision sealed,
were Mosaic, and therefore national, Jewish, we should presume that it
ceased with the Jewish nation; or, if it continued, that it was
restricted to their posterity. But why should God bestow his inestimable
blessing on the father of the faithful, and take it away from the
faithful themselves? We love our children, as Abraham did his. It is as
important to us that God should be the God of our seed, as it was to
Abraham. My heart yearns after that covenanting God in behalf of my
children."
"I will give up thinking of Abraham as a Jew," said Mrs. Benson.
"What was he, then?" said I, "or what will he be to you, from this
time?"
"He was the head of believers," said she, "just as Adam was the head of
men. As Mrs. Ford said, he was the great believer; and I am persuaded
that all who are of faith have his privileges, and more too; but
certainly all that he had."
"But, my dear," said your mother, "you have forgotten the question.
Supposing that the covenant still remains, why do you take baptism for
the seal of it? The old way of sealing it is given up. What authority do
you show for using baptism in its place?"
"I take the initiating ordinance of religion for the time being," said
I, "whatever it may be. Is not baptism the initiating ordinance, as
circumcision was? When they built our long bridge, and the ferry-boats
ceased running, did the town put up a great sign over the gate, saying,
'It is enacted that this river shall continue to be crossed'? Did they
add, 'This bridge is hereby appointed as the way of getting over the
river'? Or, did not people take it for granted, when the bridge was
opened and the ferry-boats were withdrawn, that the bridge was designed
to be the way by which they were to pass over the river?
"Now, suppose so impossible a thing as this, that hereafter baptism
should, by divine revelation, be changed for anointing with oil, and
nothing were said about children. I would anoint the child with oil,
instead of baptizing it with water. We are to use the initiatory rite of
the church for the time being."
"But," said Mrs. Benson, "is there any resemblance between circumcision
and baptism?"
"There need be none," said I. "Resemblance does not give it efficacy,
but God's appointment of it. If marking the flesh in some way should be
appointed to succeed baptism, we need not look for a likeness between it
and baptism before we complied with the divine requirement."
"I do wish," said Mrs. Benson, "that the authority to baptize children
were more expressly stated in the Bible, to satisfy all who were not
brought up as we have been."
_Pastor._ The overwhelming majority of those who now receive the Bible
as the word of God find it there.
_Mrs. Benson._ But why did not Paul receive a revelation about it, as he
did about the Lord's Supper?
_Pastor._ Did that make the thing any more authoritative with us than
the original appointment? We will not prescribe to God how to teach us.
We will not make up our minds how he ought to have made a revelation,
but we will take that revelation and try to understand it.
"I agree to that," said they all.
_Pastor._ It appears to me that God prefers, on certain subjects, that
the world shall reason by inferences. It is a wise way of educating
children and youth, to leave some things to be learned in this way, and
not by setting everything before them, like too many examples in the
arithmetic wrought out.
We have changed the Sabbath from the seventh to the first day in the
week. It gives me a sublime idea of our Sabbath, that by some great,
silent alteration, it has come to pass that all the world keep the day
of Christ's resurrection, instead of the day which commemorated the work
of creation. I feel toward it as I do with regard to the noiseless
changes of the seasons, and the conformity of our habits and practices
to them. I left New York late in winter for the Azores, and, before I
expected it, the warm southern airs came one morning into my cabin
window. So the Christian Sabbath, with its beautiful associations,
flowed in upon the world without a formal proclamation. I feel thankful
to God for so regarding our intelligent natures, as to leave some
things, relating to ordinances, modes, and forms, to be inferred,
bringing great changes over the moral and spiritual world, and leaving
us to adjust ourselves and the administration of the appointed
ordinances to them. We can add nothing, we take nothing away from an
express, divine command; but, as the first disciples were left to infer
that a Sabbath was as necessary after Christ brought in the new creation
as before, and adjusted it to the celebration of the Saviour's rising
from the dead, so we infer that God's covenant with believing parents
for their children is as desirable now as ever; that all the original
reasons for it now exist; and, therefore, we take the initiating
ordinance of religion now, as the church in former ages did, and apply
it to the children. All church-members did it before Christ; all
church-members may do it now. God saw fit to make every adult member, at
least, of the Jewish family, a church-member; if he has changed and
restricted the terms of church-membership now, that is a sufficient
reason for not making the sealing of children as universal now as it was
before. That is to say, in both cases, it is a church-member's
privilege.
Without detailing the conversation at this point, let me say, I take it
for granted that Abraham, as my great spiritual ancestor, my
representative before God, my commissioner to receive for me and
transmit my privileges and blessings, continues in that relation unless
expressly set aside. Christ did not set him aside. How wonderfully he is
brought forward under the new dispensation, when it is said to us, "And
if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to
the promise." But, pray, why should Abraham be intruded in connection
with Christ, if he with his covenant is like a lapsed legacy, or a
superseded act of Congress? Why comes he here, in connection with the
Saviour, and tells me that if I am Christ's, then am I his, Abraham's,
seed? Hear this: "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law,
being made a curse for us, that the blessing of Abraham might come on
the Gentiles through Jesus Christ." Wonderful elevation of Abraham and
his blessing, as the great type of all that Christ was to procure for
us! If Abraham and his covenant ceased with the Jewish people, how does
the blessing of Abraham fully come upon us, the Gentiles? But give me
his covenant for my children; then I see that Christ is executor of the
testament made with Abraham for his children; and I am one of the heirs;
as indeed I am, even if I have no children, but if I have, all of
Abraham's privileges and his covenanting God are mine and theirs.
So that, I said to my friends, I go to the Bible not to say, "Must I
baptize my children?" but, "Am I forbidden to baptize them?"
All my predecessors in the church of God, before Christ, had the
privilege of bringing their children into the bonds of the covenant with
themselves. If they felt as we do about it (and strict usage, and the
rich experience which they had had of its benefits, must have made it
inestimably precious to them), it is incredible that a sudden and total
discontinuance of it, at the beginning of Christianity, should not have
occasioned great clamor. The formalists, at least, would have
remonstrated at the seeming violation, by this new order of things, of
natural affection. For, as Doddridge well observes, "What would have
been done with the infants, or male children, of Christians?"--that is,
of converted Jews, as well as others. They could not circumcise them;
but their teachers, being spiritually-minded men, knew that circumcision
was a seal of faith, not merely of nationality, and must not the
converts have required some sign and symbol still for their children?
Now they had long been used to the baptism of proselytes and their
children; so that baptizing their own children, as a substitute for
circumcising them, could not have been a violent change with those whom
Peter's vision of the sheet had taught that the Gentiles should be
fellow-heirs. And when he, in one of his first sermons, said to the
whole house of Israel, "Ye are the children of the covenant," and "The
promise is unto you and to your children," we can account for their
utter silence as to any revocation by Christianity of the right and
privilege of applying the initiatory ordinance of religion, for the time
being, to a believer's child.
"But," said Mr. Benson, "the Saviour said, 'He that believeth, and is
baptized, shall be saved.' The apostles said, 'Repent and be baptized,
every one of you.' Show us, now, why this does not prove that repentance
and faith were not thus made essential to baptism. According to these
passages, none could be baptized who had not repented and believed.
This would exclude infants. 'Believe, and be baptized;' how do you
dispose of that, sir?"
"Very easily," said I.
Mrs. Benson exclaimed, "O, sir, if you can, all my difficulty is at an
end!"
"Well, then," said I, "in the first place, there is no such requirement
in the Bible. You see the expression very often, but it is not found in
Scripture. But tell me exactly what your difficulty is."
"Why," said she, "my husband has just stated it. People tell us the
Bible says, 'He that believeth, and is baptized, shall be saved.' So
they insist that no one should be baptized who is not old enough to
believe."
I told her that I could remove her difficulty in very few words.
"Suppose," said I, "that Abraham is preaching to full-grown men in
Canaan, and is trying to proselyte them from their idolatry to the
worship of God. He would say to them, 'Believe and be circumcised,'
would he not? for God ordained that certain proselytes should be
circumcised."
"Yes, sir," said two or three voices at once.
"Well, then," said I, "must it follow that children could not be
circumcised because Abraham said to men, 'Believe and be circumcised'?
How will that reasoning answer? Is it true? No. Little Isaac refuted it,
for he was circumcised even when his father was saying to his pagan
neighbors, 'Believe and be circumcised.'"
"True enough, all who believed, in Christ's day and the apostles',
needed to be baptized, because they were not children, but were grown
up, when Christian baptism began. Had an apostle, however, lived to see
the jailer's family, and that of Lydia, and of Stephanas, grown up, and
any in those families had remained unconverted, and then he had said to
them, 'Believe and be baptized,' there would be some force in saying
that believing and baptism must always go together."
"One other thing always troubled me," said Mr. Benson, "and that is,
that there was no seal of the covenant for any but male children. Now,
if the initiatory rite of Christianity be used for the same purpose as
that given to Abraham, why not confine it, as formerly, to males?"
"How interesting it is," said I, "and it is full of instruction, to see
God paying regard to the world's knowledge and progress, in all his
measures, and doing nothing prematurely. There is a very striking
illustration of this in the account of the fall.
"God knew the history of the tempter during his agency in Paradise; for
angels had sinned and fallen from heaven. But the existence and agency
of fallen spirits had not been disclosed in the Bible,--the time for the
disclosure had not come,--and therefore it is said, with beautiful
simplicity, 'Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field
which the Lord God had made;' and the narrative has respect only to the
external appearance of the tempter, the serpent, because it would have
been premature as yet to bring in the story of fallen angels, or make
allusion to them.
"So, for reasons belonging to the early ages of the world, woman was
included in man, who acted for her.[1]
"But, however the arrangement began, God regarded that organic law of
society, and, in giving Abraham a seal of a covenant for his children,
he restricted it to the sons, they in all things standing and acting as
the representatives of the house, according to the existing custom. God
did not go far beyond the world's advancement, in his ordinances, but,
with condescension and in wisdom, suited the one to the other. But, as
things were then generally represented by types, so the male child was a
type and representative of the more full and complete form, which was
reserved till the fulness of time, and till the world should know the
fulness of Him that filleth all in all. For 'in Christ Jesus there is
neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female.'"
[Footnote 1: A curious reason for this, in the minds of some, appears to
be that, when man was created, woman was included in him. For, they say,
in the first chapter of Genesis, and in the account of the sixth day,
before woman was made, the plural word _them_ is used: "male and female
created he them." They say that the blessing was pronounced on the man
and woman in Adam. For they think it improbable that Moses would
anticipate his history so much as to bring in woman, and, withal, her
blessing, too, at the sixth day, when the narrative teaches that she was
made some time afterwards. Hence, they say, it was that woman was for
ages treated as included in man. There is something pleasing in this
fancy, but it seems like one of Origen's allegories, he being the father
of allegorical interpretation. It had its origin in an ancient
Rabbinical sentiment.]
So I discoursed with my visitors till between ten and eleven o'clock,
and when they rose to go, we all stood up together and joined in
prayer. We commended Janette to her covenant-keeping God, whose name
had been inscribed upon her. We remembered the little boy who had been
the occasion of all this pleasant conversation, and prayed that his
consecration might be accepted, and the sign and seal of it be owned and
blessed to him and his parents. As I walked down to the gate with my
friends, I said to them, that, when God was covenanting with Abraham, he
bade him look up into the heavens, and count the stars, and told him
that his seed, like them, should be innumerable. So I told them
frequently to look up to those old heavens, and remember that the
covenant-keeping God is there, the same who, in blessing Abraham,
included his seed; and that, because Abraham was so good a man, God
calls his posterity "the seed of Abraham my friend." And so we said
good-night.
In reading over what I have written, there are a few things more which I
feel disposed to add, because I know that Percival will make good use of
them in talking with others in your congregation.
I feel, more than I can express, that the state of mind in parents which
will make them prize and use the ordinance of baptism for their children
is the great want of our day. Bringing children to church, and
baptizing them, unless the parents are themselves in covenant with God,
is as wrong as it was for those earthly-minded Corinthians, whom Paul
rebukes, to eat the Lord's Supper. They made a feast, or a meal, of the
supper; and some use baptism just to give a child a name,--to "christen"
it, as they say,--in mere compliance with a custom. But the abuse of a
thing is no valid argument against it. The last supper is the subject of
far more perversion; it gives occasion to a vast amount of superstition
and folly. The procession of the host, the elevation of the host, the
laying of the wafer on the tongue, the solemn injunctions against
spitting for a certain time after receiving it, are no valid arguments
against the Lord's Supper, and no Christian is led by them to disregard
the words of the Lord Jesus, "This do in remembrance of me." Much of the
practical benefit of the Supper comes through the feelings which it
awakens, the conduct which it promotes. So with infant baptism. The
child must be truly consecrated to God, beforehand, and afterwards; and
the ordinance must be used as a sign and seal on our part, as it is on
the part of God,--an act and testimony, a memorial, a vow. Hannah lent
her child to the Lord from the beginning, and then brought him to the
temple, with her offerings. We must take the child from baptism as
though God had placed it a second time in our hands, to be trained up
for him.
But, still, the ordinance is God's, and not man's. He has a work to do
in us by means of it, while it also helps our feelings, fixes them,
makes them vivid, and imposes solemn obligations upon us by its
signified vow. So it is with the Lord's Supper. In each case it is God's
memorial, and not ours; and its benefit does not consist so much in
showing forth the state of our hearts at the time of administration, as
in sealing to us the promises of God.
True, our feelings are awakened and strengthened, ordinarily, by the
ordinances; but that neither explains nor limits the meaning of them. We
are wrong if we suppose that the Lord's Supper has done no good unless
our feelings are vivid at the time of partaking. If we were sincere, our
act had the effect to engage and seal blessings from God of which we
were not aware, and may never be able to trace them back to that
transaction. So with regard to baptism.
Some call this sacerdotalism, and are afraid to allow that the
sacraments have any influence or use, except as a testimony from us to
God. Romanism has driven us to the opposite extreme in our ideas of
sacraments. We do not vibrate back again too far toward Romanism, if now
we conclude that God employs his sacraments, properly received by us, as
seals from him of love and promises. Many Christians derive less comfort
and help from the Lord's Supper than they may, because they regard it as
profitable only so far as they can offer it to God with vivid feelings
on their part; and, when their frames are not as they desire, they
conclude that the ordinance is unprofitable. But let us also consider
who appointed this ordinance. It is the appointment of Christ, not ours;
and at his table we are his guests, not he ours. The Saviour is well
represented as saying to us,
"Thou canst not entertain a king!
Unworthy thou of such a guest;
But I my own provision bring,
To make thy soul a heavenly feast."
There is a divine side to sacraments, as there is a divine side in
conversion. While we are active in regeneration, there is a work of God
wrought in us, distinct from our faith and repentance, yet inseparable
from it. So, while sacraments are vows on our part to God, they are,
primarily, gifts, pledges, seals, on his part to us. Therefore, when one
says, "I can bring up my children, I can be a Christian, without the use
of sacraments," it is a proper reply, "But can God do his part toward
your children, and toward you, without them?" For, not only is prayer
"the offering up of our desires to God for things agreeable to his
will," but there is the additional truth, which is well expressed in
those lines of a hymn:
"Prayer is appointed to convey
The blessings God designs to give."
So with sacraments; they convey gifts from God, not primarily gifts from
us to God.
He, then, who declines to have his children baptized, on the ground that
it is useless, may, in so doing, interrupt the communication of a
divinely-appointed medium between God and his child. For he need not be
told that the faith of parents brought blessings from the Saviour, when
on earth, to their children, nor be reminded that the benefits of
circumcision were bestowed on the ground of the parental relation to
God.
One further illustration occurs to me of the power which resides in the
sacraments themselves, in distinction from their being a testimony from
us to God. Let me call to your remembrance notices which you sometimes
see, of young people going, in a frolic, before a clergyman or justice
of the peace, to be married, when they intended nothing but sport, and
found, afterward, that they had brought themselves into difficulty, and
were legally held to be married.
You see by this that covenants do not, by any means, derive all their
efficacy from the feelings of a contracting party. Covenants and their
seals are the most sacred of all human transactions, and cannot be
lightly regarded, or trifled with. God reveals himself often under the
name of the God that keepeth covenant. So that we may not set aside the
sacraments, nor undervalue them. This leads me to say, furthermore, that
children, who doubt whether their parents sincerely and truly offered
them to God in baptism, the parents being in an unregenerate state, as
it afterward appeared, when they came with their children to the
ordinance, may be greatly comforted and encouraged by taking this view
of the divine sacrament of baptism as having a force and application in
their behalf, by the goodness of God, irrespective of their parents'
character. God will not let his sacraments depend, for their efficacy,
on the character either of the administrator or of the parents. For, if
the character of an administrator affected the baptism, it might so
happen that one could never really be baptized, since every successive
hand which applied it might prove, in turn, to be that of an unworthy
person. If a child is baptized on the profession of parents who
afterward show that they were not sincere, the child shall not suffer
thereby, if he recognizes the transaction, and makes it his own act. In
the case of a converted husband or wife, while one companion remained a
heathen, the children were, nevertheless, counted "holy," because the
Gospel leaned to the side of mercy, and gave the children the benefit of
the believing parent's faith, instead of attainting them through the
heathen parent. So, when a child is baptized in error, he shall not
suffer, nor even lose anything, if he will accept the covenant with its
seal. No one can justly reply to all this, that, therefore, every one
even though not of the church, may offer his child for baptism. No; for
these are exceptional cases, in which it is true that a covenant, even
if it be not fulfilled, has force, and things may enure under it which
one who does not make the required profession cannot receive. The
covenant, if but the outward conditions be complied with, places all,
who are in any way related to it, under various contingencies, which
sometimes, to some of the parties, may be productive of good. We see
illustrations of this in the great tenderness and love which we feel
toward a child whose parent has brought a stain upon himself and his
family. We find an echo, in our hearts, of those kind words of the Most
High, "The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father;" and, if that
son behaves himself worthily, every good man is doubly careful to
protect and help him. In this way the broken, or unfulfilled, covenant
operates, with God and with man, to the good of some related to it. But
shall we, therefore, break our covenant? Shall the unworthy be
promiscuously admitted to its privileges? "Shall we continue in sin that
grace may abound?"
In speaking of the influence of sacraments, I am aware that we approach
enchanted ground. The human heart loves a religion of forms and
ceremonies, which professes to renew and save without self-denial,
breathing around us the quietism of ordinances, and lulling us to drowsy
forgetfulness of duty in the luxurious enjoyment of an irresponsible
religion. While, therefore, we cannot too carefully guard against the
abuse of ordinances, we must not forget that God, who made man, body and
soul, chooses to convey some of his gracious operations to us by the
help of the two simple sacraments, and that they are intended to act
upon us, in the hands of his Spirit, in the first instance; not merely
serving as offerings to God.
It is not that there are fewer children baptized now than formerly (if
such indeed be the case), that awakens sorrow and apprehension; but that
parents are deficient in the feelings which make us prize and use
baptism. This is the evil sign, and it is greatly to be deplored. One
must have intelligent views of the Scriptures as a whole,--of both
Testaments,--most fully to understand and value infant baptism; for its
roots were planted in the Old Testament. I always feel deep respect for
a church-member who comprehends this subject in its wide relations, and
is not swayed by the popular demand for an express sign at every step,
but can reason inferentially as well as when proofs are demonstrative
and palpable; and who has in his mind the whole system of redemption,
with its various economies, interdependent, and none made perfect
without the rest. When all our church-members come to understand and
feel the power of this subject in this manner, what times of enlightened
religious prosperity, and a high state of religious culture, it will
indicate. I pray and wait for the time when all our Pædobaptist
churches, of every name, will conspire to promote spiritual views of
children's baptism, holding it forth as the expression of spiritual
feelings, and discountenancing formalism in connection with it. Though I
was never an Episcopalian in my preferences, and though the appointment
of godfathers and godmothers may, like every good thing, relapse into
mere form, I honor it for its excellent and pious design of surrounding
the parents and the children with admonition and help. For there are
sponsors, I am happy to know, who are not mere formalists, but who make
it a rule to have an interview with their godchildren on or near their
birthdays, or the anniversaries of their baptisms, and, in an
affectionate, faithful manner, they endeavor to fulfil the vows which
they took upon themselves at the baptism. Blessings on such faithful
Christian friends! Happy the children who have them for helpers of their
faith and piety. Let us all, as church-members, be sponsors, at least by
prayers and a kind interest for it, to every child of a Christian
brother or sister, when we witness its baptism. Suppose a church-member,
after witnessing the baptism of an infant, its parents, perhaps, entire
strangers, goes to his place of private prayer, and, moved with
disinterested love toward those parents and the child, supplicates the
blessing of God upon them. Could Christian love be more pure than this,
or prayer more pleasing to God? In the revelations of eternity such
prayers will not only be rewarded openly by Him who saw those doors shut
with that secret love and piety, but blessings upon parents and child
without measure may be traced to such petitions as their procuring
cause. How good it is to perform such acts, knowing that they can never
come abroad in this world! Should every Christian who witnesses the
baptism of a child, afterward pray for that immortal soul in secret,
with special petitions, what an increased privilege and blessing it
would be esteemed to offer a child in baptism, and in God's house,
before a witnessing church, rather than at home! I hope, my dear
daughter, that you and Percival, as private Christians, will do good to
your own souls, and to the souls of baptized children, and to their
parents, by making it one of your private rules to pray in secret, on
the Sabbath, for every child whose baptism you witness.
The effort to promote and enforce infant baptism, by ecclesiastical
enactments merely, is absurd. We must fertilize the soil, not spread
glass sashes over the plants. Give Christians right views and feelings
about their covenant privileges and duties; disabuse them of their
mistakes about the severance of the Old Testament from the New; teach
them to look at Abraham, not as a decayed peer, or an old Jew, but as
the founder of the church of all ages, to whom Almighty God virtually
said, 'On this rock I will build my church,'--Abraham being the first
foundation stone, waiting for apostles to be added with him, and, as our
great representative, bearing in his hand the covenant made with him for
us, as well, as for the other great branch of the family of God; show
them that baptism is now the initiating ordinance, and that the old
covenant was never repealed, though the seal be changed; let them see
what it is to have God in covenant with them to be the God of their
seed; and, withal, let us correct, or modify, the intense anti-papal
jealousy of the Christian rites, which makes us all, unconsciously,
verge to the opposite extreme, thus missing the divinely-appointed
intention and use which there is in our two simple ordinances; and then,
with the revival of such spiritual views and feelings, and, as a
consequence, with greater reference in the prayers of Christians, public
and private, to the subject, the practice of children's baptism will
increase, as surely as accessions to the Lord's table increase when
people come to have Christ in them the hope of glory.
We, ministers, can do very much to promote a love for the ordinance in
many ways. We ought to make it convenient and pleasant by all the
expedients within our power. I like the practice which you speak of, in
your church, of the mother remaining with the child in the anteroom till
the introductory services and the loud organ-playing are over. Does
your pastor pour water into the child's face and eyes, and then begin
the words of baptism? I presume not; but I have seen it done. We should
not touch the child's head till near the close of the baptismal formula;
and then so that the child will not see the arm move toward it.
Much can be done by these simple expedients to promote a quiet and
pleasant attendance upon the delightful rite. I like the practice, in
your church, of chanting low some appropriate words of Scripture before
and after the baptism.
I am constrained to say, though with diffidence, that I fear some of my
good brethren give erroneous impressions by what they say of the
church-membership of children. They push it to extremes. They discuss
the question, What shall be done with baptized children, who, on
arriving at years of understanding, refuse to enter into covenant with
God? Church censures are asserted by some to be proper in such cases,
even to excommunication, or interference in some judicial way by the
church. So long as I believe in regeneration by the Holy Spirit, I
cannot feel that baptized children, as such, are, in any sense
whatever, in which the term is generally received among men, _members_
of the church of Christ; while, in another and most important sense,
they do belong to the church, hold a relation to it, and are a part of
it. Strictly speaking, and in the highest spiritual sense, they are not
even "the lambs of Christ's flock;" for lambs have the nature of sheep;
but the children of believers are, by nature, children of wrath, even as
others. And yet, in another sense, they hold a most important relation
to the flock of Christ, as no other children do. In its most important
sense, they are not to the church even what they are to the state; they
have no place whatever in the invisible church,--the church which is
saved,--till they are born again. If children are regenerated by the act
of baptism, of course it is otherwise; but, not believing this, I am
clear that the baptized child of a believer differs from any other
unregenerate child, who is not baptized, only in this: that God looks
upon it with peculiar interest and love, and that it is surrounded with
special and peculiar privileges, opportunities, promises, and hopes,
with regard to its being brought to repentance and saving faith in
Christ; and by baptism it is initiated into special relationship to the
people of God. The church also has special duties with regard to it.
Some of my brethren give great occasion to those who resist children's
baptism, to argue against it as Romish in its nature and effect, by not
discriminating clearly in using the words members and membership in
connection with children. Read almost any modern book against infant
baptism, and you will find that its main force is directed against the
practice as a "church and state" institution, and as making persons
members of the church by means of sacraments. Let us who are really free
from such imputation, assert the truly spiritual nature and object of
this ordinance. I wish to see it divested of all that does not belong to
it, made eminently spiritual, expressed in terms which cannot easily be
misunderstood, and appealing to the natural affections, the
understandings, the consciences, of spiritual men and women, as, in its
sober and legitimate use, God's great appointment, from the call of
Abraham to the millennium, for the increase and perpetuity of his
church.[2]
[Footnote 2: This subject is discussed by itself, and more at large, in
another part of this book.]
You are aware that the great question, which has made most of the
trouble in the Christian church from the beginning, relates to the
meaning and use of sacraments and ordinances, or what we call Symbolism.
The tendency of the human mind, even in Paul's day, as indicated by him,
with other things belonging to it, under the name of "the mystery of
iniquity, which doth even now work," was, to increase the number of
sacraments and ordinances, and make them bear an essential part in the
work of regeneration. The right to multiply or extend them, and the
claim that they possess a saving efficacy, characterizes one great
division of the professed Christian church, while those who are called
Protestants and the Reformed, regard them chiefly as signs; though of
these, some seem to have much of that appetency after undue reliance on
forms which Paul seeks to correct in the Epistle to the Galatians, while
others go to an opposite extreme, and undervalue the two
divinely-appointed sacraments, which they think have no efficiency as
used by the Spirit of God, but only as signs used by us to represent
something.
Between these divisions of the Christian church lies the battle-ground
of great ecclesiastical controversies from the beginning, as the
Netherlands were, for a long time, the battle-field of Europe.
Archbishop Leighton seems to strike the balance between formalism and
sacramental grace in ordinances, as well as any writer, in commenting on
these words of Peter, "The like figure whereunto, even baptism, doth
also now save us." He says:
"Thus, then, we have a true account of the power of this, and so of
other, sacraments, and a discovery of the error of two extremes. (1.) Of
those who ascribe too much to them, as if they wrought by a natural,
inherent virtue, and carried grace in them inseparably. (2.) Of those
who ascribe too little to them, making them only signs and badges of our
profession. Signs they are, but more than signs merely representing;
they are means exhibiting, and seals confirming, grace to the faithful.
But the working of faith and the conveying Christ into the soul, to be
received by faith, is not a thing put into them to do of themselves, but
still in the supreme hand that appointed them; and he indeed both causes
the souls of his own to receive these his seals with faith, and makes
them effectual to confirm that faith which receives them so. They are
then, in a word, neither empty signs to them who believe, nor effectual
causes of grace to them that believe not."
Let me make the distinction very clear to your mind, for it is of great
practical importance. The "mystery of iniquity" in Paul's time, and
since his day, did not, and does not, consist in making too much of
God's ordinances in their purity and proper use. That cannot be done,
any more than you can intelligently love the Bible too much, or the
Sabbath. But, to pervert them, or to make additions to them, or to rely
upon them wholly, is Romanism. But can men make too much of having a
seal on a deed? Is the deed good for anything without the seal? Can they
make too much of having three witnesses to their wills? Those three
witnesses, instead of two, make an otherwise worthless writing, a man's
last will and testament. Thus, a true sign, ordinance, or seal, among
men, has inherent efficacy of some sort. Shall we deny it to the
ordinances and seals of Heaven? He who lays claim to the covenant, but
rejects the seal, deceives himself. They must go together.
But will you not think me older even than I claim to be, because I am so
garrulous? I have many things to say, but will not say them with pen and
ink, hoping to see you shortly. Farewell, my dear daughter, to you and
your beloved husband, with abundant kisses for your little namesake,
who, I pray, may be spared to you, if God has any work for her to do on
earth. Dedicate her sincerely and entirely, beforehand, to God, and then
in his house, with baptism, before the assembled brethren in Christ; and
let your subsequent treatment of her be a repetition of the whole.
Baptizing a child, with right views and feelings, leads to much prayer
for it. Renew the consecration of your child daily, in little, sudden
acts of prayer, as well as in more deliberate offices of devotion. Thus
surround it with an atmosphere of faith and consecration, not forgetting
the public transaction in which you covenanted with God, before many
witnesses, for the child, and He, my dear daughter, with you, in its
behalf. For, a covenant implies two parties; and God is one, and you are
the other; and Jesus is the mediator, who said of children, "Of such is
the kingdom of God." "He that came down from heaven," had seen, in
heaven, how largely that world is peopled with them. "Of such is the
kingdom of heaven." Peace be with you. All send love.
Your affectionate Father.
Chapter Third.
BERTHA'S BAPTISM.--CHANTING AT BAPTISMS.--PUBLIC AND PRIVATE
BAPTISMS.--WEEK-DAY BAPTISMS.--A DAUGHTER'S LOVE.--BAPTISM OF A
DEAF-MUTE INFANT.--FIDELITY OF A BAPTIZED CHILD.--SUBJECTS OF
BAPTISM.--THE MODE.--IMPROBABILITY OF IMMERSION, IN THE NEW
TESTAMENT.--ON BEING BURIED IN BAPTISM.--NEW VERSION OF THE
SCRIPTURES.--OUR DIVISION INTO SECTS.--A MOTHER'S PLEA FOR INFANT
BAPTISM.
Where is it mothers learn their love?
In every church a fountain springs,
O'er which th' eternal Dove
Hovers on softest wings.
O, happy arms, where cradled lies,
And ready for the Lord's embrace,
That precious sacrifice,
The darling of his grace!
KEBLE.
We took Bertha to church when she was two months old. The minister,
being fond of music, had, for some time, requested the choir to chant
select passages of Scripture at baptisms.
So, as we came up the aisle with the child, the choir breathed out those
words, "And I will establish my covenant between thee and me, and thy
seed after thee, in their generations, for an everlasting covenant; to
be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee." "Suffer the little
children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the
kingdom of God." "And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon
them, and blessed them." And, as we turned away from the font, they
added, "So shall he sprinkle many nations." "The Lord shall increase you
more and more, you and your children." "But the mercy of the Lord is
from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him, and his
righteousness unto children's children; to such as keep his covenant,
and to those that remember his commandments, to do them."
How I loved that choir, and the congregation! for, many a face did I see
bathed in tears, and others beaming with smiles and love, as, with
respectful, half-turned looks, they seemed to give us their blessing.
"Do you not think, more than ever," I said, to the beloved grandmother
of my child, after church, as we watched the little sleeper in her
cradle, "that people lose very much in having their children baptized at
home?"
"It makes a different thing of it," she replied. "I felt that all the
congregation loved Bertha and you. How many prayers you obtained for her
and for yourselves, which you would have missed by a private baptism!"
"Besides," I remarked, "'God loveth the gates of Zion more than all the
dwellings of Jacob.' I think that for that reason, and on the same
principle, namely, that he is more honored, he regards our public
dedication of children with more favor than a private baptism, except,
of course, where sickness makes the public service impossible. But it is
some trouble to mothers, and no doubt many shrink from it."
"The trouble is more in anticipation than reality," she replied. "That
pastor's room, where they stay till the introductory services are over,
makes it more convenient and agreeable. But all the trouble, even if it
were far greater, is nothing compared with the satisfaction of having
taken your offering and come into His courts. You have paid your vows
unto the Lord, in the presence of all his people. You will remember
those prayers, those words of Scripture which were chanted, and your
feelings as you took the child into your arms to be presented to God,
and as you heard those adorable names pronounced upon her and then
received her back into your arms, as it were, from the hands of God."
"What do you think," said I, "of the practice of having children
baptized in the church on a week-day? It enables the parents to attend
meeting on the Sabbath with more composure than when they bring their
children on the Sabbath."
"But O," said she, "what is that, compared with the privilege of
bringing the child before the whole church of God, in his house, on the
Lord's day, and so identifying its baptism with the most solemn acts of
public worship? I do not like those week-day baptisms. Where they have
the communion lecture in the afternoon of a week-day, there may be
reasons of convenience for bringing the children for baptism then,
rather than on the Sabbath; but there is a great loss of enjoyment, and
also of impressiveness, in the ordinance, in doing so, I think. I was at
a place, several years ago, when fourteen children were baptized on a
Wednesday afternoon, in the church. I went to see it, but it was not
solemn at all. I could not help thinking what an impressive and useful
sight that would have been on the Sabbath, before all the people, and
how much more good, probably, it would have done the parents, even if
they had given up half the Sabbath in going and returning with the
children."
"If people," said I, "thought more of the spiritual meaning and
privileges of baptism, and viewed it as they do in times of sickness and
death, they would think less of inconveniences and discomforts, and see
that the ordinance is something more than giving a child a name."
* * * * *
Some time after this, I called upon a cousin of ours, a young married
lady of our congregation, who, within a year, had come to us from
another place, she having been married to an educated, intelligent
member of another congregation, and who, from his great love for her,
had come with her to our place of worship from another denomination,
this having been made a condition of their marriage. For she felt that
she could not be debarred the privilege of sitting at the Lord's table
with her mother, three sisters, and brother, as she would be if she
united herself with her friend's church. The idea of going to any table
of Christ on earth where they could not come, thus seeming to
disfranchise her whole family whom Christ had gathered into his fold,
and some of them into heaven, did violence to her feelings. At one time,
it seemed likely that the engagement of marriage would be terminated, on
this ground alone. Some one of the gentleman's persuasion, who thought
that she "ought to follow Christ in ordinances," and "take up her cross"
in this instance, whispered to her that she was, perhaps, in danger of
denying Christ, from love to her kindred, and he said to her, "He that
loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me." This had the
opposite effect from that which was intended, for it showed her, in the
strongest light, the error of supposing that love to Christ could ever
require her to separate from herself, at the table of Christ, such
friends of Jesus as the members of her dear Christian home,--a home
which had been like that of Bethany to many of the Saviour's friends.
She felt more sure of being actuated by right motives in giving up her
marriage, and not withdrawing fellowship from her mother and the family,
than she would be in sacrificing that fellowship to gratify a new
affection. Her next younger sister was baptized after the father's
death. She was a deaf-mute. The mother was a very beautiful woman. She
had borne severe trials for her religion with a spirit of patience and
Christian propriety which won the love and esteem of the community. She
went to the altar of God, a widow, with the little deaf and dumb child,
and presented it for baptism. It was as though the impending calamity of
its father's death had shut up some of the senses of the child, and God
had placed it in the mother's hand as a silent memorial to her, for
life, of his chastising love. She left her fatherless flock in the
family pew, and went with her nursling, not merely to give it to God,
but to receive for it the seal of his covenant, bowing submissively to
his inscrutable appointment, and imploring the God of Abraham to be
still her God, and the God of this her seed. That scene had not failed
to make deep impressions upon the other children; and now it was
proposed to one of them that she should, by connecting herself in
marriage, disavow her mother's right to cling, in those hours of
anguish, to that asylum of the fatherless, infant baptism,--that very
present help in trouble, the covenant of God with believers and their
offspring. The little child, moreover, had become a Christian, and had
sat with her sister, side by side, at the communion-table, for several
years. "Forbid it," she prayed with herself, "that I should go where I
cannot be allowed to follow Christ till I have separated this dear one
from my side."
She once wrote a letter on the subject to the gentleman, which he
showed, after their marriage, to some of his friends. There will be no
impropriety in its appearing here. It ran thus:
"MY DEAR MR. E.: Though I am not willing to deny that Roger
Williams was, as you say, raised up to illustrate some important
principles, and to help on the general cause of truth, I must say
that he strikes me as a very unreasonable man in much of his
behavior. Our puritan fathers did not come to this wilderness with
French, atheistic, idolatrous love for a goddess of liberty. They
came here, it is true, for liberty of conscience and freedom to
worship God. With a great sum they purchased this freedom. But
infidels could as well claim to be absolved by the laws from all
recognition of God, under the plea of liberty, as Mr. Williams and
his friends could make his demands for toleration. To insist that
our fathers, in their circumstances, should have opened their doors
wide to every doctrine, and to the denial of everything professed
by them, is unreasonable. They came here with an intense love for
certain truths and practices, which persecution had only served to
make exceedingly precious to them. To have proclaimed at once
universal toleration of every wind of doctrine, would have proved
them libertines in religion. Because they did not so, reproach is
cast upon them by some, who seem to me to be free-thinkers on the
subject of religious liberty. If other men wished to found a
community with doctrines and practices adverse to those of the New
England fathers, the land was wide, and it would have been the part
of good manners in Mr. Williams to have gone into the wilderness at
once, to subdue it and to fight the savages, all for love and zeal
for his own tenets, instead of poaching upon the hard-earned soil
of those who had laid down their all for what they deemed to be the
truth. It seems to me unphilosophical in some of our historians to
reflect, as they do, upon our forefathers for not being so totally
indifferent to what they deemed error, as to allow it free course.
Their strict, and, if you please, rigid ways, were the necessary
defences of their principles, which were just taking root here.
They did right in passing stringent laws to protect them; and
religious liberty was no more violated in doing so than is the
liberty of our town's people here, who, by the law of the State
protecting game, cannot take fish, or kill birds, during certain
seasons.
"Besides, I never saw any proof that Mr. Williams was himself the
great apostle of toleration. I remember reading to father, during
his sickness, some remarks of the late John Quincy Adams, in which
he vindicates the New England fathers for banishing Roger Williams
as a 'nuisance.'[3] Mr. Adams surely cannot be accused of bigotry,
nor of being an enemy to the cause of freedom; and his remarks
seemed to me more just than the eulogies, by historians and
orators, of Mr. Williams. Father once showed me an old book of Mr.
Williams's, which we have now, called 'George Fox digg'd out of his
Burrowes,' in which Mr. W. inveighs against the Quakers for their
want of 'civil respect,' and for using 'thee' and 'thou,' in
addressing magistrates and others. He says, on the two hundredth
page, 'I have therefore publickly declared myself, that a due and
moderate restraint and punishing of these incivilities (though
pretending conscience) is as far from persecution, properly so
called, as that it is a duty and command of God unto all mankinde,
first in families, and thence unto all mankinde societies.'--It is
also a matter of history that the colony settled by Mr. Williams
refused their franchise to Roman Catholics, though even then the
Roman Catholics of Maryland were tolerating people of his own
faith, and Quakers also. Mr. Williams always seemed to me like one
of our pious, zealous 'come-outers.' He even forsook his own
denomination in three months after he had been baptized, and for
forty years denied the validity of their sacraments, and the
scripturalness of their churches and ministry. Such a man would
even at this day be excommunicated by every society, unless it
were some association for the encouragement of radical notions of
liberty. I no more see in him the impersonation of religious
freedom, than in some other good people who go or stay where they
are not wanted. I am not disposed to deny that you and your
friends, with their principles, of which you, erroneously, I think,
claim Mr. Williams as the great exponent, 'have a mission,' as you
say, to perform; but I do not feel called upon to join in it. Some
of your writers seem to me--shall I say it?--a little too sure of
having just the right pattern and patent-right in ordinances, and
somewhat too complacent in not being liked by other denominations,
and perhaps a little disposed to look for persecution. Now I was
pleased with a remark of Matthew Henry's, on Mark 10:28, that 'It
is not the suffering, but the cause, that makes the martyr.' But we
were brought up under different associations, and cannot see just
alike in all things. I cannot, however, contradict, by any step
which my feelings would incline me to take, the Christian
citizenship of those who are dear to Christ, and are so precious to
me. As much as I love you, I think you should feel perfectly free
to leave me in my happy home, if you cannot allow me to retain my
fidelity to my own conscientious convictions of truth, and to the
sacred rights of those whom nature and grace have conspired to make
inseparable from my own Christian hopes and joys."
[Footnote 3: "Can we blame the founders of the Massachusetts Colony for
banishing him from their jurisdiction? In the annals of religious
persecution is there to be found a martyr more gently dealt with by
those against whom he began the war of intolerance; whose authority he
persisted, even after professions of penitence and submission, in
defying, till deserted even by the wife of his bosom; and whose utmost
severity of punishment upon him was only an order for his removal as a
nuisance from among them?"--_Discourse before Mass. Hist. Soc._, 1843,
pp. 25-30.--[ED.]]
The gentleman agreed to allow her the largest liberty, and they were
married. He knew that she had a mind and heart that were more precious
than rubies, and that the heart of a husband could safely trust in her.
The sequel will show, however, how good it is to be matched as well as
mated, and, in the conjugal relation, to be "perfectly joined together
in the same judgment."
The object of my call, that evening, was to rejoice with her, and to be
the bearer of some congratulations at the recovery of their infant,
whose death had been expected for some time. The child was now perfectly
restored.
As I stood in the entry, not having rung the door-bell, and was hanging
up my hat and coat, some one in the parlor said:
"What good can it do the child or us to sprinkle a little water on its
head?"
"Good-evening, Mr. M.," said the husband, as I went in. I was
interrupted in my expression of a fear that I had intruded upon their
conversation, by their assurances to the contrary. "I am glad you came
in," said Mr. Kelly, "for perhaps you can help us. You heard, I suppose,
what I was saying as you came in. If I am not mistaken, Mr. M., you
yourself are not very strenuous about infant baptism, for I have heard
of your making inquiries on the subject."
"Not only have all my doubts been removed," said I, "but the baptism of
my child has been the source of the richest instruction and comfort."
"I am glad to hear you say so," said Mrs. K.
"But," said Mr. K., "you do not, of course, derive your warrant for it
from the word of God. That is our only guide, you know. There is no more
authority in the Bible for baptizing children than there is for praying
to saints. You are probably aware that the practice originated in the
third century of the Christian era."
_Mr. M._ It originated with a man by the name of Abraham, I believe,
sir, two or three thousand years before Christ.
_Mr. K._ O, then, you go to Judaism for it!
_Mr. M._ Judaism comes to me with it, and hands it over to me. There was
something good in Judaism, we all think. Judaism was not a Mormonism, as
certain ways of speaking of it not unfrequently would make us think it
to have been; it was not an exploded folly, but the form which the
church of God bore for two thousand years. But it began before Judaism;
it is older than Moses. Judaism received it from Abraham. It is like a
great river rising in a desert place, and seeming to lose itself in a
lake, but flowing out again into another lake, and thence to the sea. So
Judaism was only a great lake, which took and seemingly held this river
of baptism for a time, but its current went on and flowed into another
lake, the Christian dispensation. But you cannot say that a river which
makes a chain of lakes, rises, for that reason, in the first lake. No,
its head spring, in this case, was antecedent to the lake.
_Mr. K._ Did Abraham or the Jews baptize children, Mr. M.?
I answered, "Every male child of Abraham's descendants, who should not
receive the sign of consecration to God, was to be cut off from among
the people. Proselytes of the covenant and their children were baptized,
very early."
_Mr. K._ But where is the command to apply baptism to children?
_Mr. M._ Where, my dear sir, is the command to discontinue that which
was enjoined upon the founder of the race of believers for all time? I
believe in the perpetuity of Abraham's relation to us as the father of
the faithful, as I believe in Adam's relation to us as the
representative of the race, and in the Saviour's relation to us as our
representative. God seems to love these federal headships, as we call
them. Abraham did not receive circumcision being a Jew, but, as the
apostle says, "as a seal of the righteousness which is by faith, which
he had while he was yet uncircumcised." We have Scripture for that, Mr.
Kelly. And "the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after," did
not disannul that covenant "that was confirmed before of God in Christ."
How can you call circumcision a Jewish ordinance, when the Bible so
explicitly denies it to be of Jewish origin?
_Mr. K._ O, I do not understand this Abrahamic covenant. I take the New
Testament for my guide.
_Mr. M._ You think well of the book of Psalms, I presume, as a help to
prayer and pious feelings?
_Mr. K._ Yes; but in all matters of faith and practice, the New
Testament, like the doings of the latest session of the legislature, is
the rule for New Testament believers. You might as well have tried to
govern the ancient Jews with the New Testament, as enforce the laws of
the Old Testament on us.
_Mr. M._ Is the privilege of having God stand in a special relation to
my child an Old Testament ordinance, in the same sense with ceremonial
observances?
_Mr. K._ Not exactly that, but it is a superstition to baptize children,
now that circumcision is done away, and believers' baptism is enjoined.
_Mr. M._ Believers' baptism is enjoined, but children's baptism is not
therefore prohibited.
_Mr. K._ But where is it enacted?
_Mr. M._ If the original form of dedicating children is essential, why
is not the original form of the Sabbath essential, the very day which
was first appointed? How dare we change a day which God himself ordained
from the beginning, until he makes the change as peremptory as the
institution itself? Have we any right to infer, in such an important
matter? Where is the express, divine command,--not precedent, example,
usage, but where is the enactment,--making the first day of the week the
Christian Sabbath?
_Mr. K._ So long as we may keep the thing, observing one day in seven,
it makes no difference which day we keep, if we can all agree on one and
the same day. We do not all agree to retain circumcision in any way.
_Mr. M._ So long as we may retain the thing signified by circumcision,
it makes but little difference what form is used to express it.
_Mr. K._ The apostles, who changed the Sabbath from the seventh to the
first day, knew the mind of Christ.
_Mr. M._ And so the men, who first practised infant baptism, knew the
minds of the inspired apostles, and they knew the mind of Christ. But to
go a step further back, the only ground for inferring that the Sabbath
is rightly changed from the seventh to the first day of the week, is the
incidental mention of Christ's meeting his assembled disciples a few
times after his resurrection on the first day. On that slight ground we
are all content to rest our present observance of the Sabbath. Now, I
say that the mention of the baptism of households eight times, in one
form and another, is as good a warrant for infant baptism, as those two
or three Sabbath-evening meetings were for the institution of the
Lord's-day Sabbath.
_Mr. K._ I cannot agree with you, Mr. M., in putting circumcision on the
same level with the Sabbath.
_Mr. M._ I myself see a resemblance in the changes made in the two
cases. I have no wish to proselyte you to my views. I have only answered
your polite inquiries.
_Mr. K._ O, I know that; we shall be good friends still; but I see no
grounds for baptizing children on the faith of their parents.
_Mr. M._ We look at the thing from different points of view. I see it as
clearly as I see that the church of God is essentially the same in all
ages, with its variety of forms. This matter of children's baptism is
with me a spiritual thing, and is independent of dispensations. You know
that a river may have, in one district of the earth through which it
flows, one name, and in another district another name, while it is the
same river. Now, the divine recognition of believers' children, as
standing in a special covenanted relation with God, is the headspring of
infant dedication by the use of a rite. The object of this recognition
is, that He may have a godly seed. God does not perpetuate religion
directly by natural descent, it is true, but he seeks to promote it by
descent from a pious parentage, and he therefore endows that parentage
with special privileges and promises. The inclusion of children with
their believing parents has been the great means of perpetuating
religion in the earth. It is a stream which washed the shores of Judaism
under the name of circumcision; now it washes the shores of the Gentiles
under the name of baptism. For the Saviour or the apostles to have
reäppointed infant dedication, with the use of the cotemporary
initiating ordinance, would, to my mind, be as superfluous as for the
allied powers to have agreed that the Danube should still run through
Austria.
_Mr. K._ Your principle of interpretation, Mr. M., has brought in all
the darkness which has covered the earth in the Romish apostacy. There
will be no end to human inventions in religion, if this principle
prevails.
_Mr. M._ But, my dear sir, there certainly has been an end at the very
beginning; for what inventions in Protestant worship have non-prelatical
Pædobaptists made? Surely that practice has not been prolific of
superstitions. I often hear this alleged, Mr. K., and we are called
Romish and Popish because we baptize infants. But will it not be best
for Christian sects to allow each other entire liberty of conscience,
and not accuse each other of tendencies to Romanism, when all are
zealously Protestant? Here is a piece, which I cut from a newspaper
lately, which describes the baptism by immersion of some females and
others, one Sabbath in January, the thermometer below zero, a place
being cut through the ice for the purpose, and a boy watching with a
pole to keep the floating ice from the opening. Shall I call this
Romish, superstitious, fanatical? Shall I say, How can we, consistently
with such practices among Protestants, say anything about the doctrine
of penances? No. I prefer to think that those who do these things are as
good Protestants as myself, and I will not impeach their rigid adherence
to their belief, by imputing Romish tendencies to their modes of
worship and their ordinances; for no people are further from Romanism in
their principles than they (unless it be some of us Pædobaptists, Mrs.
Kelly).
_Mr. K._ Well, there is no quarrelling with you; but let me say that
when another sect sees you employing an ordinance which has no warrant
in the Bible,--sprinkling water upon people, on proper subjects and
improper subjects for baptism, when we know that the word _baptize_
means to _immerse_, and that believers only are properly baptized,--how
can we be silent? Would you be silent if Episcopalians should set up
Latin prayers, or the confessional; or the Methodists turn their
love-feasts into the old Passover?
_Mr. M._ We must tolerate the mistakes and errors of those who, in the
main, are confessedly good, and are conscientious in what we deem their
errors. When the noble array of great and good men in the Episcopal Low
Church, and among the Methodists, fall into such mistakes as you have
specified, there will be opportunity for other Christians to express
themselves. But you are rather rhetorical in your reasoning, to compare
the practice of infant baptism by Owen, and Watts, and Doddridge, and
Leighton, and Baxter, and all like them, with Latin prayers and a return
to the Passover.
_Mr. K._ There is not a case of sprinkling in the New Testament. You are
too well-informed to deny this.
_Mr. M._ Mr. K., there is not one instance of baptism, in the New
Testament, where there does not appear to me to be an improbability of
its having been administered by immersion.
By this time Mrs. K., who had been called away to attend to her child,
returned, and hearing my last remark, said, with a significant look at
her husband:
"We shall require you to prove that, Mr. M."
"Most willingly," said I. "Do you think, cousin Eunice, that the
multitudes who came to John and the apostles to be baptized, brought
changes of raiment with them?"
"No," said she; "and there were no conveniences for making a change of
dress in those places, I presume."
_Mr. M._ Were they immersed in the clothes which they had on?
_Mrs. K._ That does not seem probable. Some of them, at least, had
valuable garments, we may suppose, and few, if any, would wish to have
their apparel wet through, or to keep it on them, if wet.
_Mr. M._ They were not immersed without clothing, of course,
promiscuously, and, therefore, I believe that they were all baptized by
sprinkling or pouring, their loose upper garments allowing them to step
into the water, or very near it; and John, standing there (and the
apostles, also, when they administered baptism), and laying on the water
with his hand, or, which is not impossible, with the long-accustomed
bunches of hyssop. The Episcopal mode of administering the Lord's
Supper, enables me to conceive how baptism by sprinkling could be
administered rapidly. As six or more people are kneeling, the Episcopal
minister gives each his portion of the bread, and repeats the formula,
not to each one, but once only while his hand is passing over the six.
So, I imagine, John repeated whatever form he had (and the apostles
theirs) to companies, while, in rapid succession, he applied the water
to them. It is impossible to account for the performance of such
incredible labor as John must have undergone, unless we adopt some such
supposition as this, or confess that John's baptism was, throughout, a
miracle. But "the people said, John did no miracle." If the apostles
sprinkled three thousand in this way, by companies, in one day, as they
could easily have done, we can see how the same day there could be
"added unto them about three thousand souls," even if "added" meant
being baptized. That the apostles had assistance in administering
baptism at this early period, is not probable. They had not yet proposed
to have helpers in taking care of the poor, much less to share with them
the first administration of Christian baptism. If any church were to
require me to believe, before admitting me to the Lord's table, that the
apostles immersed three thousand people at the day of Pentecost, after
nine o'clock in the morning, in the midst of necessary labors, and at
that driest season of the year, or in tanks, I could no more believe it
than I could confess that the earth is flat.
_Mrs. K._ But "John was baptizing in Enon, near to Salim, because there
was much water there."
_Mr. M._ "Much water," in those countries, was on a smaller scale than
in North America. They would have needed all the lake-shore or river
banks that could be found, to witness the baptisms, and to pass in and
out of, or to and from, the water, conveniently, while John stood to
receive them in or near the water. A fountain or small body of water
would not have accommodated those multitudes; not because the water
would not suffice, for a small running stream would be enough, and would
have afforded "much water;" but think what inconvenience there would
have been in baptizing a crowd around a small stream. Baptism by
immersion, among us, though a few gallons of water only are needed, is
more conveniently done where there is "much water;" because the
spectators can spread themselves along the banks, and then there is no
confusion. The most convenient and rapid way of baptizing multitudes by
sprinkling would be, for the administrator to stand in the water, and
let the people pass by him. Besides, those multitudes who came to John's
baptism needed "much water" for themselves and their beasts.
_Mrs. K._ But the Saviour went down into the water, and came up out of
the water.
_Mr. M._ So did John, in the same sense; and so did "both Philip and the
Eunuch;" but John and Philip did not, therefore, go under the water. But
Mr. Kelly will tell you that _down in_ to, and _up out_ of, might as
well have been translated to and from, in the case of the Eunuch. If you
insist that going down into the water involves immersion, it follows
that Philip went under the water with the Eunuch, and there baptized
him.
_Mr. K._ We shall set those matters right in that new version of the
Bible which you were complaining of the last time I saw you. Down into,
and up out of, are required by the word baptize, which means immerse.
_Mr. M._ No, my dear sir, not always, even in the New Testament. The
word had come, even in the Saviour's time, to signify purification, or
consecration, irrespective of the mode. The Pharisees, in coming from
the market-places, except they wash, eat not. The word is baptize. But
they did not bathe at such times; they "baptized" themselves by washing
their bodies. We read of the baptism of beds, which was merely washing
them. The Israelites were baptized unto Moses. There the word means,
simply, inaugurated, or set apart, with no reference to the mode; for,
they were not immersed, but bedewed, if wet at all; they were not buried
in that cloud, for the other cloud that led them was in sight; they were
not buried in the sea, which was a wall to them on either hand.
There is a good illustration, it seems to me, of the change in words
from their literal meaning, in the passage where Christ is called the
"first-born of every creature." He was not _born first_, before all men,
but he has the "preëminence" over all creatures, as the first-born had
among the children. Here is an illustration, from the New Testament, of
the way in which _baptism_ may cease to denote any mode, and refer only
to an act of consecration.
As to that new version of the Bible, Coleridge says, that the state
ought to be, to all religious denominations, like a good portrait, which
looks benignantly on all in the room. So the Bible now seems to look
kindly upon all Christian sects; and, for one, I love to have it so.
But, some of you, good brethren, who are in favor of this new version to
suit your particular views, are trying to alter the eyes of the portrait
so that they shall look only on you, and to your part of the room. We
think that you ought to be satisfied with the present kind look which
you get from them. There is one comfort--you will make a new picture to
please yourselves, and we shall keep the old portrait.
"Please do not be too severe on my husband for that mistake of his,"
said Mrs. K.; "I think that he is getting better of it, in a measure."
_Mr. K._ I will make you a present of the book when it arrives, and,
perhaps, you will agree with me. But I am surprised to hear you say that
you do not believe the Saviour to have been immersed by John.
_Mr. M._ It was not Christian baptism, at any rate, if he were; for the
names of the Trinity are essential to Christian baptism, and those names
had not been thus applied.
Besides, John could not have plunged and lifted those thousands without
superhuman strength and endurance, which we know he did not possess. The
same reasoning applies, in the baptism of the three thousand at the day
of Pentecost, both as respects what I have said of raiment, and the time
and strength of the apostles.
The baptism of the Eunuch was, to my mind, most probably by sprinkling,
making no change of raiment necessary. "See, here is water,"--a spring,
or stream, by the road-side, quite as likely (and, travellers now say,
more probably) as a pond. Yes, sir, Philip went down into the water just
as much as the Eunuch did, if we follow the Greek literally. I think
that _down_ refers to the chariot, the act of leaving it to go to the
water. But the English version, as it now stands, makes strongly for
your view of the case in the mind of the common reader.