quainted, nay, in some measure, how they are impressed with it; and so on, with regard to every means wherewith one person is entrusted to promote the soul's health of others. The blessed communion of our Lord's Body and Blood in like manner is made in some way dependant upon the ministry of the Church, since she is entrusted with the power of dispensing it more or less frequently; and so upon her faithfulness depends, in some measure, the richness and fulness of the blessing which her members enjoy. But all this is again a priori and rationalistic arguing. For why should not the spiritual blessings of one man depend upon others? and do they not most manifestly? The Jewish child, if not circumcised on the eighth day, was to be cut off. Did not its inferior privileges depend upon the obedience of its parents? Are not pious parents a high spiritual blessing? and if so, why should not the simple obedience to God's ordinance be a means of obtaining the blessings of that ordinance for our children?
The comparison with Circumcision, which is generally found united with this theory, occasionally served to extol that sign, whence it was asserted to convey regeneration[1] as well as the other privileges of the Christian covenant, (only as was sometimes said, in a lesser fulness than now): for the most part its effect was to bring down Baptism from a Sacrament of Christ to the character of the signs of the older Dispensation[2]. Thus
- ↑ Ainsworth's Censure upon a Dialogue of the Anabaptists, p. 49. "They to whom God giveth the signe and seale of righteousness by faith, and of regeneration, they have faith and regeneration; for God giveth no lying signe; Hee sealeth no vaine or false Covenant. But God gave to infants circumcision, which was the signe and seale of the righteousnesse of faith and regeneration. Gen. xvii. 12; Rom. iv. 11, and ii. 28, 29; Col. ii. 11. Therefore infants had (and, consequently, now have) faith and regeneration, though not in the crop and harvest by declaration, yet in the bud and beginning of all Christian graces. They that deny this reason, must either make God the author of a lying signe and seale of the Covenant to Abraham and his infants, or they must hold, that infants had those graces then, but not now; both which are wicked and absurd to affirme. Or they must say, that circumcision was not the signe and seale of the righteousness of faith, and then they openly contradict the Scripture. Rom. iv. 11." Comp. Calv. Institt. iv. 16. 4.
- ↑ See note K, at the end.
