benefits." Such persons, being wiser in their own conceit than seven men who can render a reason, pause not a moment; for they experience no pain in declaring the myriads of the churches of Europe in the wrong, the holy army of martyrs mistaken, and themselves alone lawfully baptized. "What, all these regenerate?" say they: "are not the gifts and calling of God without repentance; and do not thousands of them deny Christ in every act of their lives?" To such persons I have been accustomed to put the following brief question, "What is regeneration?" They immediately answer, "The same as conversion;" or words to that effect. "And have you seriously believed until now," I ask them, "have you gravely thought, even until now, that our Church ever meant to call every tiny infant brought to the font a converted character," a 66 convert?" 66 Of course, the Church of England, in the passage above quoted, uses the term "regenerate" in a different sense from that which we moderns are often pleased to affix to it. In good old English, and generally speaking in the language of the present day, the word GENERATION (which is the term universally employed in the original of the Scriptures, unless only in Titus iii. 5) signifies, by way of distinction, "a life not yet manifested to our senses: for example, as in a bird's egg, and in the seeds of plants, or in any other thing possessing a life not yet active, nor as yet obvious to human observation. Every living thing has at its commencement, for a longer or a shorter period, possessed its life without giving any discernible token thereof. Now, the very commencement of individual lives is called generation," with no less, or rather with more, propriety than the development and outward manifestation thereof at a later period. When the life of a seed becomes active and discernible, when the first pulse vibrates in a bird's egg, when a mother first perceives any sensible movement in her offspring, when the life from above, long since implanted in the baptized child, exhibits to our observation new and lively energies, we call it, not generation, but growth in the seed, incubation in the egg, quickening in animals, and conversion in the child of God. In Titus iii. 5 we read of the laver of regeneration; in James i. 13 we read that "God of his own will begat, or generated, us;" in 1 Pet. i. 23, "that we are again begotten, or generated, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of the living God." And so Christ taught us: Luke viii. 11, "The SEED is the WORD of God;" (in Matt. xiii. 18, "The good seed is the children of the kingdom*"); in John vi. 60, "The WORDS "Ye are our epistle" (2 Cor. iii. 2, 3). that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life;" and throughout the 1st Epistle of John we are said to be begotten, or "generated," as "little children," although the same word is very improperly also translated "born," in ch. v. 1, and elsewhere; but in Col. ii. 13, and Eph. ii. 1, we are spoken of as quickened," and in Psalm cxix. 93, "With thy precepts thou hast quickened me." 66 The Church of England, therefore, is not absurd and ridiculous in believing the youngest infant regenerate, and begotten from above, (when she speaks within the limits of what the believer sees: 66 SEEING NOW, dearly beloved brethren, that this child is regenerate ;")—for it hath received that "WORD" which is "the incorruptible seed" of the living God, being made, in symbolical act and deed, a child of the resurrection, and a proprietor of God's name. Being a child of the resurrection," it is (quo ad hoc) "a child of God" (Luke xx. 36). If we know not the heart of the infant, neither do we know that of the adult. The outward and visible ceremony of baptism is only the momentary display of a transaction intrinsically eternal; it is actually and honestly the transaction itself, but no more comprehends it exclusively, than the menace of Gen. iii. 15 or the promise of Gen. xii. 3 (although quoted as "the Gospel," Gal. iii. 8) exclusively comprehends all the glad tidings of our salvation. Since it is the good pleasure of his Divine Majesty to command all the nations to be baptized;-Since he dealt with us in our early youth, and still deals with every baptized person, as he dealt with Israel of old: "In all their afflictions he was afflicted, and the Angel of his Presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old. But they rebelled and vexed his Holy Spirit ; therefore he was turned to be their enemy, and he fought against them. Then he remembered the days of old, Moses and his people; saying, Where is he that brought them out of the sea, with the Shepherd of his flock? Where is he that put his Holy Spirit within him? that led them by the right hand of Moses, with his glorious arm, dividing the water before them, to make himself an everlasting name? that led them through the deep as an horse in the wilderness, that they should not stumble? As a beast goeth down into the valley, the Spirit of Jehovah caused him to rest; so didst thou lead thy people, to make thyself a glorious name. Look down from heaven, and behold from the habitation of thy holiness and of thy glory. Where is thy zeal and thy strength, the sounding of thy bowels, and thy mercies towards us? are they restrained? Doubtless thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknow 66 ledge us not. Thou, O Jehovah, art our Father; Our Redeemer from everlasting is thy name;"-Since God himself be continually saying, in every feature of his providence, to every individual, Why, why will ye die, O house of Israel?" and dealing with all alike as his dear children, saying to these, "My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord;" to others, or to the same in due season, "As the wine is found in the cluster, and one saith, Destroy it not, for a blessing is in it; so will I do for my Servant's sake, that I may not destroy them all;"-Since he commands us to "account that the long-suffering of God is salvation," and instructs us that " as many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ;"-who or what are we, that we should presume to discriminate, or choose amongst us, which be the tares, and which be the wheat? * God hath said, "Let both grow together until the harvest," "while ye root up the tares, ye root up the wheat also ; lest, "What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord." And this is the rule which hath been vouchsafed to us, "That we love one another, as he loved us;"-" Suffer long, and be kind; envy not; vaunt not thyself; be not puffed up; behave not thyself unseemly; seek not thine own; be not easily provoked; think no evil; rejoice not in iniquity, but rejoice in the truth; bear all things, hope all things, endure all things; never fail." And if God deal with all as his children, and speak to all and speak of all as of babes over whom his bowels yearn; shall the church speak other than the words of her Lord, and forbid his little ones because they are small? The testimony of our Creator in all nature is not to be despised, wherein he shews in every kind of seed, whether of vegetables, reptiles, fish, the birds, or the mammalia, so great a waste that not a tenth, nor a thousandth, part is prolific. And we must not overlook the word of inspiration, "As a snail that melteth, let them every one pass away; like the untimely birth of a woman, which shall not see the sun " (Psalm lviii. 8); and again in It is impossible for any candid mind to study the First Epistle to the Corinthians (among whom were the crimes of incest, schism, inebriation at the Lord's Table, &c.) without observing the profusion with which the inspired Apostle ascribes to them all, as one congregation, the most ample prerogatives of the true believer. He calls them in general, and without discrimination, 66 sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, enriched by their Lord in all utterance, and in all knowledge, coming behind in no gift" (i. 2, 5, 7); "the temple of God, the Spirit of God dwelling in them, the holy temple of God" (ii. 16, 17); "washed, sanctified, justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God;"-their bodies, "members of Christ, temples of the Holy Ghost; their bodies and spirits "God's" (vi. 15, 19, 20); themselves, "the Lord's freedmen, the Lord's servants, brethren." Nor does he withhold from them the deepest mysteries and most inviolable privileges of our faith, hope, and regeneration. Jude, "Trees whose fruit withereth, twice dead." How can they be twice dead, unless as having virtually received a second life? It ought not to be called heresy to say that the incorruptible seed of God, even his WORD, whether in nature, in the book, in the voice of his sacraments, or that of his Spirit, is not prolific nine times out of ten; for so we find it in the parable of the Sower, Matt. xiii., Mark iv., and Luke viii. "His WORD shall not return unto him void, for it must prosper in the work whereto he sends it ;"-but this work is sometimes "The savour of death unto death;" as the Scripture saith before birth unto Esau; and again unto Pharoah," For this same cause have I raised thee up, to shew forth my power in thee" (Rom. ix. 13-17). Baptism is truly an eternal thing; and it is fitting that He who inhabiteth eternity should alone foreknow its secrets; and that its actuality in his sight should remain hidden till eternity reveals it in "that day. Suffice it for us, in the momentary twinkle of the light of this evil life, that we cannot be wrong in calling those" children of God, members of Christ, and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven," whom he himself calls "children of the Lord your God" (Deut. xiv. 1), "though with many of them God was not well pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness" (1 Cor. x. 5): and again, in Deut. xxxii. 20, "children in whom is no faith;" in Isai.i. 4, " children that are corrupters;" Isai. xxx. 9, "Lying children;" Jer. iii. 14, "backsliding children;" Jer. iv. 22," sottish children;" in Ezek. ii. 4, impudent children;" Eph. v. 6 and Col. iii. 6, "children of disobedience;" and 2 Pet. ii. 14, "having eyes full of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin; beguiling unstable souls an heart they have exercised with covetous practices cursed children;" and 1 Tim. i. 19: "having put away a good conscience, and concerning the faith made shipwreck; not to mention very numerous texts to the like effect, with which the Holy Scripture abounds. : 66 But where is the human being on earth who hath wandered like the Prodigal and spent his patrimony, exhausting his Father's tributes of affection; that would fain fill his belly with the husks which the swine do eat, no man having pity on him; let him look at the "deed," the " TITLE DEED "of his inheritance. Is it not a true one? Was it not executed at his command? by his own appointed delegates, and in his presence? Take courage, wanderer: thou art even the heir of a King; although hitherto a beggar before men, and before thine own conscience a brute. To the very last of this life, to the very last pulse-(in my opinion, even after the pulse ceases)-and until that inscrutable moment when life becomes extinct, and the tree falls, the deed is a good deed, and the reputed son an heir. "There is a sin unto death: I do not say that ye should pray for it." But if there be a heart, miscalled a human one, so dead, so cold, so livid in its fault-wait till the resurrection, and what better proof can you have that it is a misbegotten bastard from the beginning? No child of God is he, who through all the various cases and eloquent vicissitudes of this eventful life *, and through the critical moments or hours of his death, shall still persist to the last, to the very last, in denying the Father's boundless love," the love of God, in that He laid down his life for us" (John iii. 16). But if in that awful hour, where eternity alone is presented before us, and temptations nullified, there be not in his heart enough of love to apprehend the revelation that "GOD IS LOVE," and that "in HIM is no darkness at all;" let him learn thereafter that he was but a beast, in the place "where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched (Eccles. iii. 18). There shall he learn, too late, that he was, indeed, possessed during his mortal career of the word of the resurrection life, or adoption in Christ-even of God's incorruptible seed-as truly as of his mortal body; and memory, then unveiled, shall shew him that he was treated as possessed of it by the saints on earth, the angels of heaven, and God in Jesus; and that through his own fault he would not believe it so, but profanely sold his birthright for the sodden mess of this world's porridge. There also shall he own the justice of the Eternal Majesty of heaven, who left him to possess that word no otherwise than as the bush of Horeb possessed the burning fire, or Sinai the thousands of angels, and the fiery law. Therefore during the fleeting moment of his life on earth he was not consumed, because JESUS the I AM involved him throughout it: "I am Jehovah, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed." Therefore to everlasting he is consumed, because his flinty heart, though glistening in the holy flame, was warmed, and was not kindled with its light. But who are we, that we should impiously presume to forestall the decisions of that day in the which He will judge the world, and to usurp the jealous prerogative of the Most High, in attempting before the time and the season appointed (Mal. iii. 18) to discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not?"There is no difference" amongst us, that we should sit in judgment (Rom. iii. 22): therefore Judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come who both will bring "Per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum Eneid paraphd. |