ing out of the abundance of his heart. Hear the religious mother when the system is in view, and all are indiscriminately, except a certain few, corrupt, vile, with nothing good in them, heirs of ruin. But hear her talk unguardedly of her own children. They have the frailties, weaknesses, common faults of childhood; but they have no vice in them: there is nothing base or degraded in her children! When the embraces of her child are round her neck, it will require more eloquence than you possess to convince her that she is nursing a little demon in her lap. The heart of the mother is more than a match for the creed of the Calvinist.

There are some, however, who do not shrink from consistency, and develop their doctrine in all its consequences. The children follow out their instructions with fearful fidelity. Taught that they are not the children of God till certain feelings have been developed in them, they become by degrees bewildered, or else lose their footing on reality. They hear of certain mystic joys and sorrows; and unless they fictitiously adopt the language they hear, they are painfully conscious that they know nothing of them as yet. They hear of a depression for sin which they certainly have never experienced a joy in God, making His service and His house the gate of heaven; and they know that it is excessively irksome to them-a confidence, trust, and assurance of which they know nothing-till they take for granted what has been told them, that they are not God's children. Taught that they are as yet of the world, they live as the world; they carry out their education, which has dealt with them as children of the devil, to be converted; and children of the devil they become.

Of these two views, the last is by far the most certain to undermine Christianity in every Protestant country. The first at least assumes God's badge to be an universal one, and in education is so far right, practically: only wrong in the decision of the question how the child was created a child of God. But the second assumes a false, partial, party badge-election, views, feelings. No wonder that the children of such religionists proverbially turn out ill.

III. We pass to the doctrine of the Bible and (I believe) of the Church of England.

He abolished

Christ came to reveal a name-the Father. the exclusive "my," and He taught us to pray, "our Father." He proclaimed God the Father-man the Son: revealed that the Son of Man is also the Son of God. Man, as man, God's child. He came to redeem the world from that ignorance

of the relationship which had left them in heart aliens and unregenerate. Human nature, therefore, became, viewed in Christ, a holy thing and divine. The revelation is a common humanity, sanctified in God. The appearance of the Son of God is the sanctification of the human race.

The development of this startled men. Sons of God! Yes; ye Jews have monopolized it too long. Is that Samaritan, heretic and alien, a child of God? Yes. Yes. The Samaritan, but not these outcasts of society? Yes, these outcasts of society. He went into the publican's house and proclaimed that "he too was a son of Abraham.” He suffered the sinful penitent to flood His feet with tears. He saw there the Eternal Light unquenched-the eye, long dimmed and darkened, which yet still could read the Eternal Mind. She, too, is God's erring, but forgiven, beloved, and "much-loving child. One step farther. He will not dare to say-the Gentiles?-the Gentiles who bow down to stocks and stones? Yes, the Gentiles too. He spake to them a parable. He told of a younger son who had lived long away from his father's home. But his forgetfulness of his father could not abrogate the fact of his being his son, and as soon as he recognized the relationship, all the blessings of it were his own.

Now this is the revelation. Man is God's child, and the sin of the man consists in perpetually living as if it were false. It is the sin of the heathen, and what is your mission to him but to tell him that he is God's child, and not living up to his privilege? It is the sin of the baptized Christianwaiting for feelings for a claim on God. It was the false life which the Jews had led: precisely this, that they were living coerced by law. Christ had come to redeem them from the law, that they might receive the adoption of sons. But they were sons already, if they only knew it. "Because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, whereby ye cry Abba, Father." To be a son of God is one thing; to know that you are, and call Him Father, is another-and that is regeneration.

Now there was wanted a permanent and authoritative pledge, revealing and confirming this: for, to mankind in the mass, invisible truths become real only when they have been made visible. All spiritual facts must have an existence in form for the human mind to rest on. This pledge is baptism. Baptism is a visible witness to the world of that which the world is forever forgetting. A common humanity united in God. Baptism authoritatively reveals and pledges to the individual that which is true of the race. Baptism takes the child and addresses it by name: Paul-no longer

Saul-you are a child of God. Remember it henceforth. It is now revealed to you, and recognized by you; and to recognize God as the Father is to be regenerate. You, Paul, are now regenerate; you will have foes to fight-the world, the flesh, and the devil: but remember, they only keep you out of an inheritance which is your own-not an inheritance which you have to win by some new feeling or merit in yourself. It is yours; you are the child of God-you are a member of Christ-you are an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.

Observe then-baptism does not create a child of God. It authoritatively declares him so. It does not make the fact, it only reveals it. If baptism made it a fact then and there for the first time, baptism would be magic. Nay, faith does not create a child of God any more than baptism, nor does it make a fact. It only appropriates that which is a fact already. For otherwise see what inextricable confusion you fall into. You ask a man to believe, and thereby be created a child of God. Believe what-that God is his Father? But God is not his Father. He is not a child of God, you say, till he believes. Then you ask him to believe a lie.

Herein lies the error, in basis identical, of the Romanist and the Calvinist. Faith is to one what baptism is to the other, the creator of a fact; whereas they both rest upon a fact, which is a fact whether they exist or not-before they exist; nay, without whose previous existence both of them are unmeaning and false.

The Catechism, however, says: In baptism. ... I was made a child of God. Yes, coronation makes a sovereign; but, paradoxical as it may seem, it can only make one a sovereign who is a sovereign already. Crown a pretender, that coronation will not create the king. Coronation is the authoritative act of the nation declaring a fact which was fact before. And ever after coronation is the event to which all dates back, and the crown is the expression used for all royal acts: the crown pardons, the prerogatives of the crown, etc.

Similarly with baptism. Baptism makes a child of God in the sense in which coronation makes a king. And baptism naturally stands in Scripture for the title of regeneration and the moment of it. Only what coronation is in an earthly way, an authoritative manifestation of an invisible earthly truth, baptism is in a heavenly way: God's authoritative declaration in material form of a spiritual reality. In other words, no bare sign, but a Divine sacrament.

Now for the blessings of this view,

1. It prevents exclusiveness and spiritual pride, and all condemnation and contempt of others; for it admits those who have no spiritual capacity or consciousness to be God's children. It proclaims a kingdom, not for a few favorites, but for mankind. It protests against the idea that sonship depends on feelings. It asserts it as a broad, grand, universal, blessed fact. It bids you pray with a meaning of added majesty in the words, Our Father.

Take care. Do not say of others that they are unregenerate, of the world. Do not make a distinction within the Church of Christians and not-Christians. If you do, what do you more than the Pharisees of old? That wretched beggar that holds his hat at the crossing of the street is God's child as well as you, if he only knew it. You know it-he does not: that is the difference. But the immortal is in him too, and the Eternal Word speaks in him. That daughter of dissipation whom you despise, spending night after night in frivolity, she too has a Father in heaven. "My Father and your Father, my God and your God." She has forgotten Him, and, like the prodigal, is trying to live on the husks of the world—the empty husks which will not satisfy-the degrading husks which the swine did eat. But whether she will or not, her baptism is valid, and proclaims a fact-which may be, alas! the worse for her, if she will not have it the better.

2. This doctrine protests against the notion of our being separate units in the Divine life. The Church of Calvinism is merely a collection of atoms, a sand-heap piled together, with no cohesion among themselves, or a mass of steel filings cleaving separately to a magnet, but not to each other. Baptism proclaims a church. Humanity joined in Christ to God. Do not say that the separating work of baptism, drawing a distinction between the Church and the world, negatives this. Do not say, that because the Church is separated from the world, therefore the world are not God's children. Rather that very separation proves it. You baptize a separate body, in order to realize that which is true of the collective race, as in this text, "There is neither Jew nor Greek." In all things it is the same. If you would sanctify all time, you set apart a sabbath-not to show that other days are not intended to be sacred, but for the very purpose of making them sacred. If you would have a "nation of priests," you set apart a priesthood; not as if the priestly functions of instruction and assisting to approach God were exclusively in that body, but in order, by concentration, to bring out to greater perfection the priestly character which

is shared by the whole, and then thereby make the whole more truly "priests to God to offer spiritual sacrifices." In the same way, if God would baptize humanity, He baptizes a separate Church, in order that that Church may baptize the race. The Church is God's ideal of humanity realized.

Lastly, This doctrine of baptism sanctifies materialism. The Romanist was feeling his way to a great fact when he said that there are other things of sacramental efficacy besides these two-Baptism and the Supper of the Lord. The things of earth are pledges and sacraments of things in heaven. It is not for nothing that God has selected for His sacraments the commonest of all acts—a meal, and the most abundant of all materials water. Think you that He means to say that only through two channels His Spirit streams into the soul? Or is it not much more in unison with His dealings to say that these two are set apart to signify to us the sacramental character of all nature? Just as a miracle was intended not to reveal God working there, at that death-bed and in that storm, but to call attention to His presence in every death and every storm. Go out at this spring season of the year; see the mighty preparations for life that Nature is making; feel the swelling sense of gratefulness, and the pervasive expanding consciousness of love for all Being; and then say, whether this whole form which we call nature is not the great Sacrament of God, the revelation of His existence, and the channel of His communications to the spirit?

IV.
BAPTISM.

"The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us."-1 Peter iii. 21.

LAST Sunday we considered the subject of baptism in ref erence to the Romish and modern Calvinistic views. The truth seemed to lie not in a middle course between the two extremes, but in a truth deeper than either of them. For there are various modifications of the Romish view which soften down its repulsive features. There are some who hold that the guilt of original sin is pardoned, but the tendencies of an evil nature remain; others who attribute a milder meaning to "regeneration," understanding by it a change of state instead of a change of nature; others who acknowledge