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commanded his disciples'. The Gospel covenant, therefore, is a covenant of grace on God's part, and of belief and obedience on the part of man; and, consequently, it contemplates the Christian life as a real and unsophisticated state of probation, in which free grace and free obedience, justification in God's sight, and repentance and holiness of life, are correlatives, and imply each other; and man, who has been redeemed, and pardoned, and endowed with the Holy Ghost, has duties to perform, and conditions to fulfil, must continue stedfast in the faith, and must endeavour to walk in all the commandments of the Lord blameless 2, and to have a conscience void of offence toward God and toward man 3

But the doctrine of Regeneration in Baptism fixes the commencement of the Christian life in the right place, and secures the doctrine of universal grace within the pale of the Church, and the comprehension of the covenant, against every system which savours of necessity or favouritism, of absolute decrees, or capricious preferences. out pretending to account for the gradual development of the truth, and the partial propagation of the Gospel, or for remarkable instances of God's special grace, which must be resolved into his unsearchable purposes, it teaches us, that such

With

1

Matt. xxviii. 20.

2 Luke i. 6.

3

Acts xxiv. 16.

baptized adults as are believers and penitents, and baptized infants, who can present no bar of unbelief and impenitence, receive in this sacrament the forgiveness of sins, and the gift or earnest of the Holy Ghost, as a principle of new and spiritual life; and are placed in a state of salvation, of which nothing but human negligence and default can deprive them. Still, however, it teaches us that this state is not only a state of grace, but a state of discipline and trial; and that the child of God and inheritor of the kingdom of heaven, if he is wanting to his own soul, or is neglected and undone by the guardians of his early days, will become the child of the devil, and the inheritor of everlasting misery.

We may collect, indeed, from the passages of St. John's first Epistle, which have been referred to in a former part of this treatise, that this doctrine was soon perverted to bad purposes, and the history of the Church will furnish us with other instances of its misapplication and perversion. And it may be asked, what doctrine has not in its turn been corrupted and abused? But I am confident that no man who really understands this doctrine, and is not prejudiced against it either by a strange misapprehension of its drift and nature, or by an attachment to some favourite hypothesis, can discover in it any dangerous or immoral tendency, or any aptness to produce formality, security, presumption, or self-conceit. With us at least, in

our public formularies, it is guarded against every misconstruction, and intimately connected with the probationary life, and the necessity of religious exertion and growing holiness. Such too is the use to which it is applied by the ministers of our Church in public and private, in the school, the pulpit, and all their pastoral instructions. A variety of practical lessons are built upon it in their addresses to parents and children, to the young, the old, the sinner, the penitent, and the confirmed Christian; and it is pressed on the memories and consciences of their hearers, as a motive to vigilance, self-jealousy, resistance to temptation, repentance, exertion, and perseverance. They firmly believe and thankfully acknowledge that the children whom they have baptized have been grafted into Christ's body, and constituted and declared children of God; and their labours are directed to these points that they may be reared and educated as spiritual and immortal creatures: that the children of God may not become children of wrath and children of the devil; and that those Christians who have fallen away from God's grace, and forfeited the hopes and privileges of their calling, may be renewed again to repentance, and restored to the household and family of Christ.

Whilst the Christian minister makes this use and practical application of it, he need not fear to advocate a doctrine grounded on the sure basis

of Scripture, witnessed by all antiquity, and unequivocally asserted by our own Church. Security, presumption, self-conceit, and the other vices which have been strangely characterized as its natural consequences, he must expect to find in abundance. They are owing to the want of that religious education which forms an important part of our Christian trial, where the interests of the young are intrusted, according to the known analogy of God's natural and moral government, to the care of other persons; and their spiritual welfare, without the continual interference of miraculous causes, must necessarily be involved in the good conduct and fidelity of their parents and instructors. They are occasioned by evil habits and bad examples, by the cares of this world and the lusts of the flesh, by inattention to the concerns of religion, and by an imperfect acquaintance with the nature of Christianity, and of the privileges and obligations of the baptismal covenant; and, not unfrequently, by those fanatical notions of Regeneration, which are no uncommon fruits of a departure from orthodox opinion. But I am persuaded that he will seldom, I may almost say, will never, within the sphere of his own duties, find them grounded on any misconstruction of this important doctrine.

The minister of the Church, therefore, who has no wish to sacrifice the simple and plain meaning

of its public offices to refined speculations and subtle evasions, whilst he yields hearty thanks to God in the prayers of the Church, "that it hath pleased him to regenerate" the child that has been baptized" with his Holy Spirit," and " humbly beseeches him to grant that he may thenceforth crucify the old man, and in the end utterly abolish the whole body of sin," will speak the same language, and inculcate the same doctrine in his discourses. He will follow up in his ministerial labours the tenour of those sound and pious exhortations, with which he has dismissed the sponsors and guardians of the infant, and will look forward with a mixture of hope and fear to his future renovation and improvement :-" Remembering alway that Baptism doth represent unto us our profession, which is to follow the example of Christ, and to be made like unto him, that as he died and rose again for us, so should we, who are baptized, die from sin, and rise again unto righteousness, continually mortifying our evil and corrupt affections, and daily proceeding in all virtue and godliness of living '."

1 Office for public baptism (concluding exhortation).

THE END.

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