a condition of salvation, or of receiving the Holy Ghost. Well, we in turn ask, What do they mean? Do they mean that baptism is regeneration? is an expiation for or ground of the remission of sins? is a washing away of sins? is a condition of salvation? They do or they do not mean this. Is it wise to insist that they mean this or they mean nothing?

If we insist upon taking this class of texts in their most literal acceptation, without seeking to comprehend their relation to other Scriptures and to the general plan of salvation, our course is plain. We are no longer Baptists, or even Protestants. We are sacramentarian ritualists, and it is not easy to see how we shall stop short of the head and centre of ritualism, Rome,

We do not propose to enter into an exegesis of these texts. In our apprehension it is a strong argument against the reception of these views that no new or original exegesis of any scripture is needful for their refutation. It is no new discovery that these texts are in the New Testament. They have been before us now for near two millenniums, and intelligible and consistent ways of explaining them without resorting to the sacramental theory have never been wanting. Almost any one of them which still holds to the evangelical character of baptism as an ordinance of Christ to be observed by all his disciples is preferable to this.

Is it still insisted that the conception of baptism, merely as an ordinance of Christ, a symbol, and a sign, is below the language used in the New Testament in reference to it, and inadequate to account for the Bible representations of it? This objection is only another proof of the tardiness of the Christian mind to enter into nearcommunion with Christ-hów far it is even now from a conscious, intelligent, believing union with him. Such a felt relation to Christ could not disparage baptism, considered as a sign, a symbol, and an ordinance. As an ordinance of Christ, what is baptism? It is the very first fruit of faith, having, as such, that pre-eminence among all subsequent and possible fruits of faith which the first fruits had among all offerings under the Jewish ritual. It is not a confession of Christ-one of a thousand which may and should be made at all fit times and places-but the confession of Christ, made, not for the hour or the single occasion, to endure while the present impulse lasts, but public, before three worlds, for life, for death, and for eternity. In all the teachings of Christ, how strongly confession of him before men is everywhere insisted upon, almost as an essential to salvation, and certainly as much so as baptism ever is, yet without mentioning baptism, for the plain reason that baptism, though important as

the first confession, is yet not the only one, and yet as the first, manifestly included, as, in our denominational teachings, we have always held and justly insisted upon.

As an illustration of this precise point, let us look for a moment at one example of the estimate put by our Lord upon confession of him before men, when Peter, not as Simon Barjona, but as representative of the collective apostolic body, speaking for them and in their name, and by that very fact representative and exemplar of all believers to the end of time, made his memorable and comprehensive confession of Christ as revealed by the Father in heaven, and received therefor, as all confessors of him may expect to receive, his special blessing and open recognition, with the declaration, "On this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it "-not on Peter as one man, not on the confession made by Peter apart from Peter the confessor, but the living confession of the living man Peter, as representative of all living men who confess to the world the Christ revealed in their souls by the Father in heaven. On such confession by such confessors, as a rock against which the gates of hell cannot prevail, has Christ built his church as a visible body in the world, and such a confession is baptism, administered and received according to its law and interest. It is more than words. It is action most significant and decisive. It is the disciple lifting up the banner of the cross, the flag he will never furl, will never desert, will never betray, will never cease to hold up, until he falls in death. Such is baptism as an ordinance, and such the confession implied in obedience to it. Its full import as an ordinance can be discerned only as we keep in view its character as symbol. The confession in baptism is never fully made unless the symbolical import of baptism is seen and recognized. As symbol it at once folds up in itself and publishes to the world the entire evangelical doctrine of Christ, in his person and work, the great facts on which salvation rests, the substance of salvation itself as a personal experience, and its final and endless results. And so the disciple, with a true faith in Christ and in obedience to his ordinance, makes, in the act itself of baptism, confession to the world of this entire body of evangelical truth. "On this rock"on such confession by such confessors-has the Lord built his church, and the gates of hell shall not, because they cannot, prevail against it. Like the two apocalyptic witnesses, which in fact they are-two agreeing in one and as one-they may even be slain and exposed in the streets of the great city, spiritual Sodom and Egypt, where the Lord was crucified before them, to the seeming triumph of hell, yet

shall they rise again, to the discomfiture and shame of all their and their Lord's enemies.

If now to this confessional element in baptism, with its unspeakably important bearings upon the glory of Christ in the world, considered also as including its wonderful symbolical character, we add its use as a sign and a seal, we have a sufficient basis for all the representations made of it in the Scriptures. Considering that baptism is the sign which marks, both to the church and the world, the disciple of Christ as his, that it recognizes as existing fact that whereas he was by nature an heir of hell, being alien from the commonwealth of Israel, stranger to the covenant of promise, having no hope and without God in the world, he is now an heir of heaven and a redeemed child of God-considering that the visible church, being the body of Christ in the world in which the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, dwells, is in truth Christ in the world, into visible union with which baptism brings him, thus sealing to him all the promises and all the blessings which God has pledged to the church-what more do we need to account for the terms and expressions by which baptism is set forth to us in the New Testament?

We have here the gospel content of the ordinance of baptism-a single act, and yet a fourfold combination, beautiful and impressive in each of its elements, each by itself, and altogether in entire consistency with the spiritual and evangelical system of religion, and each requiring that one act of immersion in water which holds them all in combination, a confession of Christ, a symbol so full and so expressive as almost to preclude the necessity in the church of any written symbol or creed of faith, a sign of union to Christ in his church, and a seal to its believing recipient of all the promises pledged to and all the privileges conferred upon the church, and with all this what more do we need in order "earnestly to honor baptism as the most prominent ordinance of the New Testament"?

WARWICK NECK, R. I.

J. T. SMITH.

I

PROPOSE to speak of Christ the Architect, to argue his divinity with no datum but the existence of the Christian church— a datum which the most ardent skeptic cannot refuse to grant me. Mark, it is the divinity, not the deity, I aim to establish, the express and supernatural image of God in Christ, not the inherent Godhead. No line of argument but a scriptural one can establish the latter, and the scriptural argument is of force with the skeptical only when you have first established scripture. The divinity of Christ, the centre of the supernatural, is the citadel of our religion; on it all skeptical attacks converge; here opposing methods are harmonious-Pilate and Herod are at one. Hume impeaches all testimony, that he may invalidate that for miracles; undermines all the foundations for knowledge and belief, that he may reach faith in the supernatural. Strauss, with German patience, dissolves every statement of the New Testament in his crucial alembic, that, at last, he may sublimate the pure gold of the historic Christ into a dim myth in the likeness of pagan legends. Renan rejects every supernal lineament, and portrays a thoroughly human, faulty, and even Frenchy Christ. The whole school of Positivists stickle at no stretch of credulity save toward achievements of Jesus. Thus destructive criticism ever seeks to shatter the whole structure of Revelation only to reach the enshrined Redeemer.

But, while the object of infidel attack must remain the same, the tactics of assault have been of late totally changed. Hitherto direct

onslaught with argument has been the rule; the Christian advocate was called upon to expose fallacies, to disprove assertions, to repel arguments. Now they no longer condescend to argue; the question is settled on their side; the debate is closed, the victory is won. It was time to try new tactics; they had gone on from age to age, each skeptical generation demolishing Christianity, yet each succeeding generation forced not only to demolish anew, but also to show why their predecessors had failed. We had but patiently to wait for our enemies to destroy each other. Skeptics were evidently ill at ease; they could not trust their own demonstrations. Now all is changed. We have no longer to do with skepticism arguing and trembling; we are confronted by skepticism triumphant, boasting itself, and laying aside the helmet for the laurel wreath, the sword for the palm-branch. Infidel books are no longer batteries-they are pæans. What serene complacency of superior knowledge, what buoyant confidence of accomplished triumph! So assured is their victory, they can be generous to the vanquished. With fraternal tenderness they forbear to force their strong meat on their weaker brethren, veiling their full belief in ambiguous formulas. In impartial indifference they admit that Buddhism and Christianity and Confucianism have done something for the unthinking part of mankind and the darkened era of history; or in æsthetic love of olden stories they handle tenderly our fragile fables, and give the palm of all legendary lore to the Christian myths.

Such imperial impudence dumbfounds us. How have they acquired so genuine and so robust a skepticism? Are they not thus secure and confident because they think they have only to do with certain ancient records? Do they anywhere betray a suspicion that those records are backed by anything that takes them out of the category of antique legend? Do they not always deal with Christ as if he were still imprisoned in the New Testament, as if they had only to pull that down to overwhelm him in its ruins ?-unconscious of the fact that he long ago went forth from that hiding-place of his power to march through the ages in ever-increasing majesty, until now he stands before the nineteenth century more nobly and palpably than before the first. Crush him in the New Testament, and your task is only begun; before it is finished you must demolish his work in all the subsequent centuries. Only when you have done this may you pause to shout Io triumphe! Even then your jubilant utterance will ring out over a desert era, for you will have stripped the whole tract of modern history of every noble monument and of every green and beautiful thing.