of addressing them as members of Christ with the same certainty with which the Apostles addressed the baptized in their day.1

This point should be thoroughly understood. Baptism is not spoken of in the New Testament as if it were an edifying ceremony, or a solemn dedication. Very peculiar terms are applied to the thing, whatever that thing be, which God confers in it. Whatsoever benefit Baptism is the instrument for conferring upon adults, it must convey the same to infants, or it is a different thing.

II. I would remark, in the second place, that if conscious Faith be essential to the reception of Regeneration, either in, or apart from, Baptism, then we have no right to baptize children, much less to pronounce them regenerate when baptized.

If we baptize children on Scripture grounds, we must do so, not that they may make a profession, or be dedicated to God, but that they may receive the gift which God has annexed to the right reception of the Sacrament. Now if conscious Faith be essential before they can receive this gift, then Baptism does not belong to them, because they cannot receive the gift which Baptism was designed to convey, so long as they cannot, by an act of their own minds, appropriate Christ's work to themselves.

It is no vindication of our practice of baptizing infants, and pronouncing them regenerate therein, to say that we do this as sealing them, or signing them as fit to receive some blessing afterwards—say, if they are of the number of the elect, or after they have fulfilled certain conditions; for

1 Those who deny Baptismal Regeneration seem conscious of this, for they seldom, if ever, make use of such terms as "members of Christ:" never certainly in their exhortations to purity. They habitually eschew the use of the highest term which St. Paul employs to denote the union of Christians with their Saviour.

we baptize them, not that they may receive Regeneration in after life, but that they may receive it there and then in their unconscious state; and after baptizing them we pronounce that they have received the gift; for Christians in Scripture are held to have been sealed in Baptism with the Spirit-not sealed to receive Him afterwards, but sealed with the Spirit at the time.

I now proceed to consider Infant Baptism, with especial reference to the Regeneration of infants therein.

We are told that there is no command in the New Testament to baptize infants, and no instance recorded therein of the Baptism of any infant.

We deny this, and say that we find both the one and the other.

We find, first of all, the Redeemer giving the charge, "Go ye and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." We say that, taking into account the whole religious education of the Apostles, the words "all nations would be understood by them to comprehend persons of every age in those nations.

In the next place, we say that there is a command to baptize infants in the first Christian sermon ever preached, where St. Peter says, "Repent, and be baptized, every one of you for the remission of sins for the promise is to you and to your children."

...

We say, in the third place, that we have the record of the Baptism of three households (Acts xvi. 15, 33; 1 Cor. i. 16); and when a household is baptized, the immense probability is, that such a household would consist mainly of children, who would come under Baptism in right, not of their own personal Faith, but of that of the head of the household; for if we suppose that these households con

sisted of adults, we have the difficulty of accounting for the fact that a number of responsible persons suddenly consented to join a despised and persecuted sect because the head of the family did so.

Then, in the fourth place, in two Epistles addressed to members of Christ as such, we find children exhorted as if they were as much members of Christ, and as much a part of His Church as their elders, which they could not possibly be, unless they had been baptized, and had by Baptism been grafted into Christ.

In Eph. vi. 1, a message is sent to children that they are to "obey their parents in the Lord." Now, all the precepts of holiness with which this Epistle abounds, are addressed to the Ephesian Christians on the specific ground that they are members of Christ's mystical body. In the latter part of the fifth chapter, for instance, husbands are to love their wives, and wives to reverence and obey their husbands, because Christ is the Head of the Church, and the Saviour of the body. Immediately following upon this, there is the message to children, assuming that they are as certainly grafted into the Church as those whose faith, because of their more mature age, would necessarily have a more distinct intellectual apprehension of the truths of Christianity.

Children, then, are addressed by the Apostle as if they were amongst baptized members of Christ's body.

In another passage (Col. iii. 20), children are assumed to have been buried with Christ in Baptism, for, as I have shown above, if we compare Col. ii. 12 with iii. 1—4, we find that all the holy precepts addressed to Christians in the third chapter are addressed to them on the assumption that they had been buried with Christ in Baptism, and so grafted into His Church, and so they are addressed as "called in one body" (ch. iii. 13). Now, if amongst

precepts addressed specially to baptized members of Christ there is one addressed to children, it is thereby assumed that children are baptized members of Christ.

We have, then, four plain New Testament warrants for baptizing Infants.

Now, it lies upon those who oppose Infant Baptism, to show distinctly that our Lord did not contemplate the admission of Infants to discipleship in His words, “ Go ye and disciple all nations, baptizing them;"—that St. Peter did not contemplate the baptism of children when he preached to the Jews, "Repent, and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins . . for the promise is to you and to your children;"--that there were no children in the whole households said to have been baptized;-and that the children were yet unbaptized whom St. Paul addressed as integral parts of Churches, all the members of whom had been baptized into Christ, or the Apostle could not have addressed them as all members of Christ. Of course this cannot be shown.

In order, then, fully to ascertain the certainty of what we hold on this point, we must fall back upon principles.

Are there any principles laid down in the word of God which would lead us to believe in the Baptism of Infants, or which remove any supposed difficulties out of its way?

We have at least two such principles.

First we have the analogy between the two Adams, which bears with startling effect in favour of Infant Baptism, provided that that Baptism be joined with Regeneration.

God has so ordered the course of things in this world, that we all derive our being from one stock, and with our being we derive from our progenitor a principle of evil,

and so are by nature," children of wrath." We inherit from Adam a depraved nature-we each one of us receive this evil nature in the womb. We receive this taint before we can exercise conscious Faith. We receive it passively-in a state of utter helplessness, not knowing what we receive.

Such is our generation and our first birth. If God has provided a second birth or Regeneration, to be a remedy, or even the commencement of a remedy, for the evils of our first birth, it would seem peculiarly fitting that we should receive the second birth and its attendant benefit in an unconscious and infantile state; seeing that we have received our first birth and its attendant evil in an unconscious or infantile state.

Again, if the essence of this second birth be a grafting into Christ, and a putting on of Christ as the Second Adam (seeing that by our first birth we partake of the sin and condemnation of the first Adam); and if there be a rite specified by which we are to be made partakers of this second birth, it seems only natural and fitting that we should receive this rite and its remedial blessing under the same condition of infantile helplessness under which we received the curse and taint transmitted to us from the first Adam. The Second Adam, the Lord from heaven, Who has made a full atonement for all sin, cannot be supposed, in the communication of His good things, to come short of the first Adam in the communication of his evil things, which Christ, the Second Adam, would do if infants, as such, are debarred from being "born of water and of the Spirit" into Him, though as infants they have all been "born of the flesh" into the stock of the first Adam.

The reader cannot but perceive that this argument is in favour of Infant Baptism, solely because it is in favour of the doctrine of Regeneration of infants in Baptism.

H