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baptism by Paul and Silas at Philippi; and, also briefly, two conspicuous cases of strictly private baptism, that, namely, of Paul by Ananias, and that of the Ethiopian Eunuch by Philip. Peter most conspicuously, after him Paul, but in the wide sweep of the period and events, all the Apostles and the whole Church of Christ in its origin and during its first age, stand before us. After so many centuries and amidst so great conflict of human opinion, these all recall us to the simple and indisputable facts of the inspired record. They all demand of us the exercise of our best judgment and our spiritual insight, and afterwards our honest and enlightened verdict, according to the law and the testimony; for if we speak not according to this word, God has told us, it is because there is no light in us. For my part, I never gave a verdict of this kind, after more careful examination, or with deeper conviction of its truth. It seems beyond doubt that the Scriptures do teach that Baptism with water, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is a permanent sacrament of the Christian Church, wherein the ingrafting of the believer into Christ, his purification by the Holy Ghost, and the pardon of his sins, are signified and sealed to all who worthily receive it; that it is the undeniable right of the infant seed of believers to have this sacrament administered to them, and the sacred duty of believing parents to have it done; that while any endurable mistake in the mode of administering this sacrament does not nullify the ordinance, the only true mode of administration is that intended by Christ, practised by his Apostles, and recorded in the sacred Scriptures, which is by a minister of the word, applying the water to the subject, by pouring or sprinkling it on him: and, finally, that true baptism being once administered, must not be repeated under any circumstances whatever. On the other hand, I find nothing in the Scriptures to warrant the assertion that there is any sacramental commemoration by the mode of baptism of the burial of the body of Jesus, nothing to warrant the practice of immersion in the administration of baptism, nothing to warrant the refusal of baptism to the infant seed of believers, nothing to warrant the addition of any ceremonies, any adjuncts, any powers, any principles, by any authority under heaven, to this sacrament. As held forth in the Scriptures, and as practised by the Apostles,

1 Isaiah, viii. 20.

the sacrament of Baptism is a most simple, complete, spiritual, and glorious ordinance of God; and whenever the followers of Christ content themselves with it as he instituted it, and his Apostles understood and practised it, they find that it is still, both a divine sign of God's eternal Covenant of Grace, and a divine seal of its great and precious promises.

CHAPTER XXX.

THE SACRAMENT OF THE LORD'S SUPPER: CONSIDERED IN ITS INSTITUTION, NATURE, USE, AND END.

I. 1. Relation of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ to the more ancient Sacrament of the Passover.-2. Divine account of its Institution by Christ. 3. Its General Nature and ordinary Use, as taught in the Scriptures.-4. Matter and Elements of this Sacrament; what it signifies, and of what it is a Seal.— II. 1. The blood of the New Testament.-2. The Broken Body of Christ.-3. The Body and Blood of Christ given for us on the Cross, and sacramentally given to us.-4. The Cup the Communion of the Blood, and the Bread the Communion of the Body of Christ.-5. The sense in which the Bread is the Body of Christ, and the Cup is the blood of Christ.-6. Efficacy of the Body and Blood of Christ in our Sacramental Nourishment.-7. Relation of this Sacrament to the Worship, the Word, and the Spirit of God.-8. Relation of this continual showing of the Lord's Death, to his Second Coming.-III. 1. Strict Relation of Christ's sacramental action and Word, to the Nature and Definition of this Ordinance.-2. Relation of this Sacrament to the whole Question of the Church.

I.-1. How great was the honour put on the Jewish dispensation, that the Son of God scrupulously observed every ordinance of it! Not only did he obey the whole law of commandments contained in ordinances peculiar to it; but he respected the manner of use required by it, of those institutions more ancient and permanent than itself, upon which it had been ingrafted, and which it had in some degree modified. He did not come to destroy but to fulfil, the law and the prophets. And his sermon on the mount is, to a great extent, a development of this great and pervading truth in its application not only to the Mosaic Institutions, but to the whole compass of prophecy, to the true nature of the moral law, to all the duties of life, and to the way of salvation and the pursuit thereof by men. Thus it was in connection with his last celebration of the great annual sacrament of the Passover, that he instituted the Gospel Sacrament of his own broken body and shed blood. By means of that seal of God's special covenant with themthe heirs of promise, during the Mosaic dispensation of the Covenant of Grace, and back into the closing years of the Patriarchal

dispensation of it, had kept alive the remembrance of their bondage in Egypt and their miraculous deliverance from it; and had kept alive also the sense of their bondage under sin, of which their bondage in Egypt was so sharp a type, and of their everlasting deliverance through the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world, to whom every paschal lamb slain during so many centuries had continually directed their faith.' It is Christ our passover sacrificed for us,-the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, by whose blood not only all the first born who were saved alive in Egypt, but every one of the first born whose names are written in heaven, have been redeemed." And so from year to year through all generations, they kept their feast of unleavened bread, and ate by households with bitter herbs, the lamb slain by the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel. And so Christ with his Apostles, his immediate attendants, ate the passover the night before his crucifixion. And when the supper was ended, and Judas had been exposed and had departed to betray him, he instituted that sacrament in bread and wine which superseded the ancient sacrament; commencing where it closed, by the same authority which had created and sustained it for so many centuries. Thus it has continued to the present hour— according to his command. The Gospel Church by its congregations, by that organic manifestation which is elemental to its form of the Church visible on earth-does and has always done, essentially what the ancient Church by its families had done year by year from the night before its departure out of Egypt. And so it will do-attesting on one side the sacrifice, the faithfulness, and the second coming of the Lord-and on the other the ruin and the redemption of fallen man, till the Son of man shall come. The difference lies in this, that the ancient sacrament preceded the incarnation of the Son of God, while the present sacrament is immediately connected with his crucifixion. The substance, namely Christ and redemption through his sacrifice, is the same; the form is changed to make its correspondence complete with the state of grace and truth under the Gospel Dispensation.

2. There are three detailed accounts preserved of what oc

1 John, i. 29; Rev., v. 6–9; Exod., xii. passim.

1 Cor., v.7; Heb., xii. 23; Exod., xii. 12, 13; Rev., xiii. 8.

* John, xiv. 3; xxi. 22; Acts, i. 11; iii. 19-21; 1 Cor., iv. 5; xv. 25, 26.

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curred at the institution of this sacrament, and of the circumstances immediately connected with it: one by the Apostle Matthew, the other two by the Evangelists Mark and Luke. To these the Apostle Paul has added a distinct but condensed statement of what Christ said and did concerning the sacrament when he instituted it, with which he has connected the commands of the Lord to him concerning the proper celebration of it. The Apostle John, whose Gospel was written long afterwards, devotes his narrative of what occurred at the Last Supper, chiefly to circumstances which had been omitted or only partially stated in the previous accounts. He occupies five chapters of the twentyone which compose his Gospel, with the acts and the teachings of Jesus, during the few hours which elapsed from the ending of the paschal supper, to his going forth with his disciples over the brook Cedron to the garden of Gethsemane3-where he endured his agony-was arrested during the night-crucified the day following, and already dead by the middle of the afternoon. In a very peculiar manner John has preserved the mind of the Lord concerning this wonderful ordinance; for besides what has just been intimated, the full and clear account of the relation between our inward spiritual life, and our participation of the body and blood of Christ, is preserved by him in the words of Christ in an earlier chapter of his Gospel. Besides these numerous and explicit statements, the Old Testament Scriptures teach nothing more clearly than the whole nature, and use of the Passover and the allusions of the New Testament Scriptures to the nature and use of the Lord's Supper are constant. It may be justly asserted, therefore, that nothing but voluntary ignorance, the seductions of false teachers, and the delusions of the Devil, can prevent any one who has the word of God in his hands, from knowing all that is needful for us to know concerning this solemn, affecting, and powerful ordinance of God. Of this let all judge from the following divine statement of the institution of this sacrament, which is one of the four to which I have alluded: For I have received of the Lord that which I have delivered unto you. That the Lord Jesus, the same night in which he was betrayed, took bread: and when he had given thanks he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you : 1 Matt., xxvi. 1–35; Mark, xiv. 1–25; Luke, xxii, 1–38. 1 Cor., xi. 20-34. 3 John, xiii.-xviii.

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4 John, vi. 26-71.