LESSONS TAUGHT BY CHURCH HISTORY. 113 cause, while meditating on these apparent discrepancies and contradictions, I have been led, more than at any other time, to understand the nature of Christ's kingdom; the necessity of institutions to uphold it; the weakness and partiality of human judgments; the wonderful method in which the Spirit of God has overruled that very weakness and partiality and made them the means of bringing out mightily the portion of truth needed in each period; the connection of the truths strongly realized by one set of men, with those as strongly realized by another; the certainty that truth is, whether we acknowledge it or no; the certainty that all who submit to the guidance of God's Spirit, and do his will, shall apprehend it in its integrity and fulness; the impertinence of any limb of Christ's body saying to any other limb, I have no need of thee;' the difference between the charity which flies from truth as an enemy, and that which is the twin sister of truth, and in life or death cannot be parted from her. In such sweet and melancholy tones the History of the Church Speaks to the ear of faith; and there are times, What coherency it adds to this idea, to believe that God has preserved a set of forms from age to age, teaching persons to express in them more than they themselves understood, and to preserve H 114 THE BAPTISMAL SERVICE that which their own notions would have led them to abandon, till a time arrived when circumstances ascertained their meaning, and proved their necessity, I shall have to explain in a future letter. At present, without requiring your assent to any such opinion, I shall merely call your attention to the fact, that the forms of our church do recognize every portion of that idea of Baptism which I have been setting forth, and do not recognize one of those notions, by which I maintain that each portion of it has in turn been mystified and corrupted. If you read our Baptismal Service, you will find the strongest and plainest assertion, that the baptised child is regenerate; that it is a child of God. You will not find the phrase change of nature,' or any phrase which can, without violence, be construed into a synonime of it. The High Church idea is distinctly brought out, that the child is taken into covenant with God, and that it is really and truly a spiritual creature, redeemed by Christ, and adopted into union with Himself. The High Church attempt to explain the mystery is in nowise sanctioned, and the need for it is entirely superseded, by the declaration, that the child's reception into the Ark of Christ's Church, is its deliverance from the evil of a fallen world. The Evangelical principle, that we are only holy in Christ, and that all individual holiness is a contradiction, is fully asserted, and made the ground of the child's future life. The Evange 1 A RECONCILING SERVICE. 115 lical notion, that the Ark of Christ's Church means merely an outward congregation, endowed with certain outward privileges, is utterly repudiated by the express declaration that the child is made a member of Christ's mystical body. The idea of Mr. Budd's party, of a promise which God, on his part, will most assuredly keep and perform, to guide the child into a knowledge of the glorious position into which it has been brought, and of the Father who has owned it, is recognized again and again. The notion of Mr. Budd, that the promise rests upon an assumption, and not upon an actual fact, or that it is contingent upon the faith of parents, is nowhere even suggested, and is set at nought by the whole principle of the service. The more you study it, the more you will understand what we mean when we say, that Baptism is a sacrament, grounded upon the atonement made for mankind by Christ, -therefore, of living force and application to every period of life, and not merely an act conferring a blessing at the moment, which future acts of the person receiving it may nullify and destroy. You may then study the rest of our services in this light; and you will see, that if those passages, which Dr. Pye Smith says are so excruciating to honest minds, were left out, every other passage in them would be unintelligible and unmeaning. If these passages be false in principle, every word that we speak, every act that we do as Churchmen, is false in principle. It is 116 THE OTHER CHURCH SERVICES. monstrous for any person to say, 'there are a few lines in the Baptismal Service and in the Catechism, to which we object; if these were taken away, we would be very good Churchmen.' You might as well say, remove half the single line from the Turkish Confessional,- There is one God, and Mahomet is his prophet,' — and we could be very good Mussulmans. If men are not children of God, then they have no right to confess their sins to God as their Father; they have no right to believe that he pardons them their sins for Christ's sake. If they are not children of God, all their prayers, thanksgivings, adorations, confessions, are downright mockery. I do not wish to drive good men to an extremity. I know they hold the truth in their hearts, even when with their understandings and lips they seem to contradict it. But, I must say that either on the Calvinistic hypothesis, that a few men only become children of God in consequence of some process which takes place in them in mature life, or upon the pseudo-Catholic doctrine, that men had this privilege once, but are continually apt to lose it, every part of our Liturgy, the whole manner of our worship, seems to me a contradiction. Yes, and no part of our forms is more a contradiction, than that Commination (pronounced by us every Ash Wednesday,) in which either of these parties might hope to find the confirmation of its views. Throughout that beautiful service, there is not one passage indicating that those who are so terribly warned, have not entered into the privileges of God's covenant, or have lost them. From first to last, it presumes that they have the privileges, and that having them, their sin is, that they do not use them, and live according to them,—their future judgment, that light came into the world, and that they loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.' 6 Again, on any one of the partial views which I have set forth, our sponsorial system is quite unintelligible. Supposing Baptism to be an instantaneous act, producing a change of nature; supposing Baptism to be merely an admission into a body, possessing certain nominal privileges; supposing Baptism to be merely a promise on the part of God, hereafter to confer a certain blessing, why does the sponsor, in the name of the child, renounce the devil and all his works, &c.? If the words contained, (as so many imagine, who are instructed by dissenting teachers, and never read the service,) a promise on the sponsor's part to keep the child from the devil, &c., we might understand how his office would square with Dr. Pusey's theory,—he would be a guardian for the child's baptismal purity. If he merely said some formal words, befitting the formal representative of a formal corporation, admitting a new member, into the formal enjoyment of formal privileges, we might acknowledge that he was not a much more useless person than any other who took part in the unmeaning ceremony, which some modern Churchmen hold Baptism to be. If he |