LIBRARY

OF THE

University of California.

Mrs. SARAH P. WALSWORTH.

Received October, i8g4.

^Accessions ^o.J^iHXo - Class No.

_„ —

Lectures on Baptist History.

LECTURES

ON

Baptist History.

BY

WILLIAM K. WILLIAMS.

1/

;Uiri7BRSIT7]

PHILADELPHIA:
AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY,

1420 CHESTNUT STREET.

I ^

\A/6

5 7/f (,

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by the

AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY,

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

WkSTCOTT k ThOMSOH, OBAVT, FAIRRtt, k RoDOKta,

8t«reotyper$ and EUetrotypert, rhilada, Prinier», rkilada.

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CONTENTS.

I.

PAGB

JOHN THE BAPTIST, THE LORD'S HARBINGER 9

ii;

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST 39

III.
BAPTISM AND REGENERATION 65

IV.

THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST AND AS MADE
BY MAN 91

V.
OUR CHURCHES UNDER THE BAN OF ANTICHRIST 119

VI.
THE ANABAPTISTS OF THE CONTINENT AND ENGLAND. 141

VII.

RATIONALISM IN ITS RELATION TO OUR CHURCHES.... 169
1* 6

6 CONTENTS.

VIII.

PAGK

THE BAPTISTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 203

IX.

THE BAPTISTS OF THE COMMONWEALTH AND PRO-
TECTORATE 231

X.

JOHN BUNYAN 263

XI.
BAPTISTS AND MISSIONS 291

XII.
BAPTISTS AND THE FUTURE 321

I.
JOHN THE BAPTIST,

OUE LORD'S HAEBIIfGEE.

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johnthTbaptist,

OUE LORD'S HARBINGER,

The introduction of Christianity into onr world has
been recognized by a modern French writer, who has
discoursed upon society and philosophy, as being the
greatest moral revolution recorded in the annals of our
race.

Such estimate is the more remarkable, as coming from
a scholar who is regarded as doubting the existence of a
God, and who cannot therefore be charged as biased by
religious prejudice in favor of the faith which he dis-
cerns to have been, and acknowledges frankly to have
been, thus signally potent. M. Vacherot — for it is to him
that we refer — has in glowing utterances presaged and
depicted the future spread of democracy. Writing in
the days of Napoleon III., he presented to France and
to Europe our own people as the truest republic then
on the face of the globe, and very distinctly does he
attribute the prosperit}'', and even the very possibility
of the existence, of free institutions amongst us to the
influence of the Bible upon our nation. It is interesting,
amid the acclaims of our national centenary, thus to hear
the judgment of a foreign scholar, not a believer — his judg-

10 LECTUBES ON BAPTIST HISTOBY.

.ment upon the sources of our strength and of our success,
in achieving and preserving liberties, that, in so many
other lands and through so many experiments made
in former ages, have speedily or ultimately collapsed.
Yet this same eulogist of our freedom looks forward to
a time when our Bible shall be outgrown and superseded.
From a foreigner thus free from patriotic partialities such
as an American might feel, and chargeable with no
traditional or professional leanings toward the gospel, we
may accept gratefully so strong a testimony as to the
high power of the Scriptures on national well-being;
whilst we withhold our assent from his auguries as to
the ultimate displacement of the volume from the school,
the library, and the sanctuary. Admitting his analysis
of the past, we fail to subscribe to his omens respecting
the future.

The book which, scepticism itself being witness, has
thus colored the history of our race, and moulded so
visibly and so happily our own national career, is a vol-
ume of peculiar structure. It has an Old Testament and
a New. Between the writing of the last portion of the
older part and the composition of the earliest Gospel in
the New, Matthew's, there intervened a chasm of nearly
four centuries. This is a larger interval than yawns be-
tween our times and those of Christopher Columbus.
During that long spasm of silence from Malachi onward
no prophet appeared in Israel. Yet writings so remote in
date of origin and in the circumstances of their writers,
the two Testaments, one of them closing just when the
Jew had emerged from his captivity to the Chaldean and

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 11

the Persian, and the other, the New, taking up the inter-
rupted strain four centuries after, when the Jew had
passed under the sceptre of the Roman ; the book in
Hebrew, whose last scribes had not so very long left
Euphrates, in the far East, where their harps hung on its
willows ; and the book in the Greek, the earliest of whose
penmen had been tax-gatherer under magistrates who
came from the banks of the Tiber, in the far West, — these
books, so dissevered in date of their origin, are by a
divine wisdom wondrously made to cohere with each
other in the closest interdependence.

Old English conveyancers, in preparing the record of
the transfer of some important estate, drew up two copies
of the same deed upon the opposite ends of one and the
same parchment. Then the scrivener's knife severed the
skin into two separate documents, b}^ a line which was
jagged like the teeth of a saw% or undulating like the
hollows in the water of a lake rippling before the breeze.
The old name "Indenture" survives to this day at the
head of our deeds, when the old usage of actual " dent-
ing " or " indenting " has been generally abandoned. One
party, the original grantor, kept the one copy ; the other,
the purchaser, retained the counterpart. Was there in
after-times doubt as to the genuineness of the document,
antique simplicity soon determined the doubt by laying
the two indented portions of the one original vellum
together. If tooth met tooth, if the indenture tallied
without shrinkage and without overlapping, there was
tangible, visible demonstration of the original unity.
There was the same grain in the skin, and there was

12 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

exact coadaptation in the line of severance. The inden-
ture stamped the genuineness. Now, in our Bible, the Old
and the New are not bare verbal transcripts the one of
the other ; but the same Divine Author who furnished
both made the ancient to fit as by a line indented in
divine exactness and symmetry into the New; the wave
in the low trough of it upon the one parchment meeting
another wave in the answering crest of that wave as
upon the other parchment, so that the two covenants
thus authenticated showed the same Supreme Mind. It
was a Mind, one in its several dispensations, and har-
monious through all ages of the world's history. Proph-
ecy, or " history in anticipation," responds to history, or
prophecy become fact, across the two sides of a vast
chasm ; just as, in the days of Joshua, Ebal pealed back
to Gerizim and Gerizim pealed back to Ebal the alternate
snatches of the same law, and the strophe and antistrophe
swelled up together, praising the same Jehovah, Leader
of their exodus and Giver of all their victories. Prom-
ise, warning, and unfinished history upon the one side,
tallied with and matched fulfilment and retribution
and completed history on the other side. "Comparing
spiritual things with spiritual" is the apostle's enuncia-
tion, as to the rule of successful interpretation laid down
by the Holy Ghost, the Inspirer of the entire record.
Collate the origins with the results — lay the pledges of
Eden and Sinai against the achievements of Bethlehem
and Calvary — and see illustrated, as over the stormy
tides of human commotion, and over the wide chasms
of earthly centuries, the unity and inflexibility of him

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 13

who is in one mind and none can turn him, the Far-
sighted and the Infallible Sovereign who, amid the heav-
ings of primeval chaos, saw distinctly the welterings of the
final conflagration and the orderings of the last judgment.
He, in this, his unity of purpose, which he had main-
tained through all varieties of utterance, and all rela3^s
of successive scribes, and all mutations in the outer form
of his providence, had indented the Old Testament, so
that it required and necessitated the New ; and then,
resuming, after the interval of a dozen generations of
mankind, his unwavering, unforgetting scheme, he had
indented the New Testament to supplement and to verify
and to perfect the Old Testament.

Now, the very last sentence in the very last prophet of
the Old Testament is such pendant fringe and indenta-
tion, awaiting and demanding a new advent and a novel
herald, who shall usher in the steps of that grand and yet
dread Visitant, the Hero of the expected advent. "Be-
hold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming
of the great and dreadful day of the Lord : and he shall
turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart
of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the
earth with a curse." For four centuries had that banner
of the long-expected Forerunner been hung, fluttering over
the uttermost edge of the finished Hebrew canon. The Old
Testament had, as regards the same harbinger, still earlier
pendants hanging out. Not merely four, but seven cen-
turies before, the day that Zechariah received the promise
of a son, God had, by Isaiah, pledged that there should be
lifted up the " voice of one crying in the wilderness " and

14 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

calling men to " prepare the way of the Lord." Let us en-
deavor, by nearer and more modern measurements, to appre-
ciate the dignity bestowed, in these far-dated promises, upon
John the Baptist, by those prophecies going so long before
his birthday. No earthly prince, Plantagenet or Bourbon,
ever had his cradle thus foretold for hundreds of years.
More than four centuries separate us in our age from the
times when Columbus turned his prow toward our conti-
nent. Supposing that God had by divine illumination
prompted the Genoese to erect, when touching the rim of
this western continent, a tablet describing the character
and mission of our own Washington, how would the
ancient oracle have shed a new and dread majesty over
the career of him who led our fathers to freedom. Such,
and even larger, was the interval between Malachi and
John the Baptist. But a yet broader chasm severed John
from Isaiah : this was a span of more than seven hundred
years. Let us look back, from our homes and sanctuaries,
to a period of modern history seven hundred years re-
moved. We reach the times, in British and Syrian history,
of the Crusades, of Saladin the brave Saracen, and of
Richard Coeur de Lion of England; and in the history
of the Anglo-Saxon people, whose blood so largely makes
our national life, we find a little nearer yet, what to us
ordinarily looks so far, the days of John and of the Eng-
lish barons who extorted from a craven and heartless
monarch the glorious sanctions of Magna Charta — a doc-
ument underlying so largely our ancestral liberties and
laws. That was not full seven hundred years from us.
Suppose that when Richard fought in Palestine or John

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 15

surrendered at Runnymede there had been erected a me-
morial, that the God of nations intended to bring about,
in the far West and among a new people, the setting up of
what we now see, a home of welcome for the exiles of
many lands — a banner of hope for the rights of the long
oppressed — a sanctuary for his own truth and his own
Zion from the persecutions that hounded both in the old
Europe so fiercely and so long, — how would a prophecy
so long since recorded, and after the weary interval of
ages so strangely and exactly fulfilled, make our country
all the dearer and the holier — august, ancient, and sacred ?
It is by such feeble illustrations from our own modern
times that we can understand in some degree the peculiar
honor put on John the Baptist. He was a prophet and —
as the Master whom he heralded pronounced — "more
than a prophet ;" for no seer merely human, from Enoch
to Samuel, from Samuel to Isaiah or Daniel or Habakkuk,
had thus, four centuries — ay, seven centuries — before his
cradle swung, been the subject of solemn and written pre-
dictions — predictions registered in the most venerable and
sacred annals of the nation. But besides these there were,
as to his great Master and Lord, pledges running back to
Eden, when the serpent's transitory triumph was, as God
promised, to be followed by the birth of the Seed of the
woman, crushing the head of the tempter. With the
history of man's blight was intertwined the covenant of
God's predestined balm. Abraham was to have not only
a favored nation spring from him ; but in him all nations,
Gentile as well as Hebrew, were to be blessed. David was
not only to have a sure throne, but ultimately a Divine

16 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

Progeny, whose should be an immovable kingdom.
Hosea told of a time when Israel should have neither
priest, ephod, nor temple, nor sacrifice. Moses, the leader
of the Exodus, foretold a distress for Israel when the
mother should in famine sacrifice her own babe, and told
also of a prophet like unto himself, whom Israel was to
hear as reverently, as they had heard him when yet fresh
from the glories of Sinai, and when standing at the foot
of the cloudy pillar out of which God's own voice spake.
Isaiah told of the Lord's Servant rejected, yet suffering for
the sins of others and b}' his knowledge justifying many.
Bethlehem, the place of his birth ; his kingdom, a stone
cut out of the mountain without hands and towering to
fill the earth and to shatter all other empire, — were pre-
dictions by Micah and Daniel. Upon how many tags and
projecting indentations of the ancient record, had God
required that the new history of the world, as his Messiah
should shape and rule that history, was necessarily to fit,
in order to show the identity of the authorship, and the
eternal symmetry and immutability of the grand scheme
of revelation and redemption.

Thus foreseen and indicated, not only before Herod had
commenced his restoration of the existing temple, but
before the heroic strife of the Maccabees and before the
persecutions of an Antiochus, and before even an Alexan-
der had led Greece over so wild and so wide a career of
invasion and domination, before a Cyrus and a Nehemiah
had rebuilt temple and city from desolation, and before
even a Nebuchadnezzar had flung down fane and city into
the desolation whence they were thus restored, anticipat-

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 17

ing the national ruin and the national recovery,— God had
put upon the national annals his pledges, as to the work
which John should do and as to the scene where this his
servant should labor. As Isaac, the great stock of the
national tree, had been the child of a long-childless home,
born to a sire and a mother of great age, so was John
born to Zachariah and to his wife Elizabeth. Not only
had Isaiah and Malachi received commission to predict
of the harbinger: but, as the hour neared, an angel.
Gabriel, came down to announce the close approach of
the long-predicted messenger of the Messiah. Although
John himself wrought no miracle, yet, as Hume has well
said, a prophecy is itself a miracle. A prediction pre-
cise and fixed, promptly and literally fulfilled, of what
man could not foresee, of what man unaided could not
achieve, is a miracle. In that light, the prophecies of
Isaiah and Malachi and Gabriel, culminating upon the
head of the babe whom Elizabeth clasped as the child of
her old age, made his birth in itself a transcendent mira-
cle. Seven centuries before, four centuries before, and
then, but in the very year, divine oracles, and in the last
date an angelic messenger, stamped the infant's career as
one on which the eyes of Heaven were intently fastened,
and to which were summoned the eyes of God's elect
people, not only in their native Palestine, but through all
the far lands of the Gentiles into which exile and com-
merce and adventure had scattered the far-travelled
Hebrew.

His childhood and youth were not idle, though they
were comparatively lonely. He^gj^ FTO gs^^serts until

ffUlTIVERSITY)!

18 LECTUKES OK BAPTIST HISTORY.

the day of hisj showing unto Israel. Nurtured in solitary
communings with Scripture and with nature, and with
God, the Author of both, he was of hardy frame and
schooled in self-denial, simplicity, and endurance; his
robe was of camel's hair ; and his diet the rudest fare of
the rude wilderness, "locusts and wild honey." But a
prophet withal is he, of God's own rearing and God's
own prompting.

Of this class of divine ambassadors, some were men
whom God meant to make, by the written word, teachers
of generations long after their own time. They were the
prophets of the pen. Such was Isaiah, and such proba-
bly Habakkuk, in their main ministry scribes rather than
heralds* For others, whom their Sender intended fur
direct and prompter results, and that thc}^ should arouse
the multitudes of their contemporaries, a fitter designation
was prophets of the voice. They might leave little of a
permanent literature of their own composing, but they
spoke face to face with their hearers, and lifting up their
voice, as of a trumpet, denounced the crying sins of one
age and announced the impending woes of the next age.
As a man of kindred spirit, in Britain, long after, said
respecting this very mode of rousing and mending
society — it is Jolm Wycliffe that we quote — " It was by
preaching that he, Christ, conquered the world out of the
fiend's hand." And as Christ himself, the Great Teacher,
left no writing; his forerunner was preacher, not writer; a
prophet, not of the pen, but a prophet of the voice. But
why did he proclaim his message in the wilderness, and
not, as did Jonah, in the streets and squares of the great

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 19

capitals, amid the hungry rabble and the crowding
traders and the jostling pilgrims come to worship ? The
wilderness where he spoke, was not utterly desolate, but
only sparsely settled. It lay in the line of travel both
for traffickers and caravans and worshippers. And it
allowed, which thronged metropolitan streets did not
allow, opportunities for leisurely meditation. The atten-
tion, fixed on solemn themes, might be held there till it
issued in right action. That desert, the scene of Joshua's
incursions upon the Canaanites, and afterward of David's
flights and raids and victories, with two seas, the great
Mediterranean on the west and the Dead Sea on the east,
the last sea sad and dark with its brooding memories of
the eternal scar which God had in his anger there put on
his own chosen land, where sin had been especially rife
and fierce, with Sinai on the south, and Zion and Carmel
and Hermon and Lebanon to the far north, — how did the
environment lift the soul out of its ruts and summon it
to solemn reflection on death and eternity and the inev-
itable judgment ?

What was the burden ? In part, of the Great Stranger
whose goings forth were from everlasting, and who was
soon to make in lowliness his long-expected appearance
upon earth. That advent is rushing on. He, John, the
herald of it, was to prepare the way of the Lord and
make his paths straight. A nation that would profit by
their Messiah must put away its idols. In part, the
prophet's burden was to turn the thoughts of his hearers
upon themselves. The times were out of joint; they
needed a dire and deep wrench to bring them back.

20 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

They were called to repentance. The heart of the fathers
was to be turned to their children, and the heart of the
children to their fathers. Some read one of these phrases
as a mere repetition of the other. But, in Hebrew paral-
lelism, the second use of the same word is often an en-
largement of the kindred but narrower thought contained
in the first use of the term. When Christ said, " Let the
dead bury their dead," the parallel was not a repetition.
The first "dead" meant spiritually dead — men careless
and ignorant of God, but having bodily life ; the second
" dead " meant those who had lost even this, and the new
use of an old word described corporeal death, the stiff
form of an earthly kinsman, out of whom had gone the
last gasp and sob of an earthly life. So, in Malachi's
phrase, the heart of fathers turned to children meant a
recovered sense in the fathers of that generation as to
their own social duties to households, to their own off-
spring, and to the wives and mothers in whose care the
common progeny were especially left. As Josephus, their
own historian, testifies, it was to Israel, as it was to their
Roman masters and their Greek teachers, a time of great
social profligacy. This might be rectified. When, cen-
turies after, Rousseau launched the volume of the Social
Contract, as he called it, in which he appealed to men,
his neighbors, upon the rights and duties of society as
founded upon a sort of mutual bargain and compact, he
made an appeal that, as all thinkers allow, had very
much to do in bringing on the great French Revolution.
But he, as a writer, had his heart so engrossed with his
compatriots and fellow-citizens, that it was hardened as a

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 21

father's heart against his own children; and he, the
mender of the ways of nations, sent the offspring of his
own life to the foundling hospital to be reared or to be
slain by strangers, as the chance might be, in the savage
heedlessness and heartlessness that has too often governed
such institutions. John the Baptist called the Elis of his
age not to overlook their Hophnis and their Phinehases.
He would not have a David even, to rear by slovenly ten-
derness and criminal indifference Amnons and Absaloms
for mutual hate and fratricide and parricide. He would
carry home, as did Nathan to the paramour of Bathsheba,
God's terrible ban against household sin.

John dealt with all social sins, wrongs of the rich to
the poor, wrongs of the powerful to the feeble, and again
of the feeble and dependent, in their envy and discontent
toward their more opulent neighbors. Publican and sol-
dier, Pharisee and Sadducee, all were summoned to re-
pentance, each of his class-sins and his own personal mis-
deeds. It was an age in Rome and in Caesarea and in
Jerusalem of relaxed social ties. He preached the sanc-
tity of marriage. The Herodian family had been es-
pecially reckless in this matter. Without fear and with-
out favor, this herald of God came out of the desert in
prophet's garb and with primeval sternness; the ascetic
dares to put down, simply and rigorously, the require-
ments of the law of Sinai, unrepealed and irrepealable.
To Herod he said, " It is not lawful to have thy brother's
wife." That speech bred a grudge which rankled in the
heart of the queen. Thus censured, Herod felt reverence
and compunction, but anger and wounded pride as well.

22 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

But as we said, " children " and " fathers " had, by the
law of Scripture parallelism, yet larger meanings in the
second and recurring use of the old phrase. The most
aged of John's contemporaries were, by descent or by
intermarriage and adoption, the children of earlier gen-
erations. They were summoned to turn back, in their
estimates of duty and virtue and freedom and blessed-
ness, to the ancestral patterns and the memories of the
Exodus, the law-giving, the temple songs of David and
the temple structure of Solomon, and, yet behind these
even, to the memory of Abraham, the father of the faith-
ful, and of Enoch, who walked with God. A nation who
aim to reform their households, the very seed-plots of
national order and freedom and unity, must cultivate the
memory of ancestral glories and of primitive innocence.
The child of Adam must trace back his pedigree till it
ends in saying that he is the handiwork, the child, and
the servant of God. He may not forget, much less abjure,
his Maker. If he must renounce all such high parentage,
if he be sprung of the moUusk, how dare he devour, in
cannibal greed, his ancestral oyster ? If the ape were his
sire, will he lift pistol to shoot the kinsman chimpanzee,
or look derisively out of his parlor window, in unnatural
contempt, on the antics of a poor relative, capering
grotesquely to the music of a hand-organ and craving
pennies on the sidewalk ? Man, to be free and true and
noble, must be kindly and reverent, and begin far back to
make a genuine progress far forward. He may not forget
Eden, and the Creator who placed Adam and Eve there.
If of God's making, he must stoop to invite and accept

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 23

God's teaching and ruling. The great social problems of
John's day and of our day must, to be rightfully solved,
carry back the hearts of us, their children, to our remotest
forefathers; and back of all ages, geological and astro-
nomical, show us our origins. Woe worth the race if.
in their science and their greed, they find no Maker and
Heavenly Father at the head of the ladder along which
they patiently or impatiently clamber, or down which
they swing to find the worm and the protoplasm as their
first parents at the bottom of the deep abysm I

John came, and Elijah, not, as the Jews of his day man}^
of them ignorantly interpreted it, a transmigration — a
return of the old prophet, who had worried Ahab's court
and wrung Jezebel's heart, in his actual personalty. That
actual personage did come down to the Mount of Trans-
figuration with Moses — the one the receiver and the
other the restorer of the law — to glorify Christ. This
identit}^ with Elijah John denied. He revived no wild
Oriental fable of transmigration ; Elijah's self he was not.
But as Christ explained it, he was Elijah in reproduced
temper and in the reduplication of the old seer's fearless
simplicity and rugged energy, just as Jefferson said of
Nathaniel Macon, one of our own early Baptists, a states-
man of his own party, that he was "the last of the
Romans," not meaning that he, Macon, had Latin blood
in his veins, or could, perchance, have held a Latin dia-
logue with an old Roman Brutus or Cicero had they
returned to the earth, but that, in his antique sternness
and dignity of character, he recalled the Cato and the
Camillus, sturdy and upright men, who stood when

24 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

others wilted and crawled. Yet John was not a courtier
wearing soft robes and sharing dainty meals. These were
to be found in kings' houses. But in the desert was fitter
haunt for a prophet and a seer of the old heroic and saintly
mould of an Elijah, such as was John the Baptist. Thus
was John an Elias in his mood and bearing. His genera-
tion had revered him as a prophet. Did he reciprocate
the reverence paid him by courting and guarding popu-
larity; and thus fear man ? No. The Herod who sold him
to death feared the chief estates of Galilee, who had heard
his rash promises, and feared the scorn of the damsel who
had danced with such dazzling gracefulness, and feared
the imperious Herodias, whose affection had been the
blight of his own household and palace. And when the
poor homeless prophet quailed not, true as steel and un-
appeasable as conscience ; on the other hand this prince,
amid splendor and wealth and courtiers and soldiery,
poor weakling as he was, feared, wavered, and broke
down, and gave God's ambassador to a sudden and igno-
minious death. A craven ma}^ head armies and wield
richest exchequers; and the martyr, who finds but the
fare and garb and death of a Lazarus, may out-face and
out-brave and out-live the despot that dooms him. As
said the French Jansenist poet, Racine, long after, " Fear
God, and fear none else." Thus did John.

But if God's appointed and long-predicted precursor, to
besom the pathway for God's own only begotten Son, why
is he, the man of Elijah's mould, not blessed in his de-
parture from earth with such a heavenward wafting as
Elijah received, and as had in antediluvian days been

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 25

accorded to Enoch, walking with God, and then missed
of men, for God had taken him ? Had not this son of
Zacharias earned such fiery chariot and angelic escorts,
bearing him to the Father's welcome on high? No.
The higher dispensation needed to begin in a lower hu-
miliation. It was enough that the disciple should be as
his Lord. He had preached repentance and the remission
of sins. How the last was to come — a true and large
remission of sins — how the penitents whom he charged
home with guilt, and summoned to an immediate and
utter change, were to be pardoned and to receive absolu-
tion from their sins, he had intimated rather than plainly-
expounded when he pointed to the greater Prophet out of
Nazareth. Was it with an allusion to the Passover victim,
whose blood sprinkled on each returning year the door-
posts of each Hebrew dwelling and recalled the dread
night in Egypt when the angel of vengeance slew each
first-born of the Egyptian homes, but spared and passed
over the gore-bedabbled doors of their Hebrew bondsmen ?
Or was it also a reference to the daily oblation, yet nearer
and more frequent, of the lambs presented in the temple
in each day's sacrifices? John said, in one or both of
these aspects, turning to his kinsman Saviour, "Behold
the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world !"
By abnegation and suff'ering, by the ignominious and
agonizing sacrifice on Calvary, that great Prince was to
become the Redeemer of the world. If the faith of the
forerunner had for the time faltered in his own dungeon,
or if, perchance, he sought only to reinforce, by personal
conference with Christ, the faith of the disciples whom he

26 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

had sent on this message, — ^John had asked, "Art thou he
that should come, or look we for another?" — simply and
sublimely had the Christ responded, " Blessed is he who-
soever shall not be offended in me." The disciple who
accepts meekly the Master's cross and who prefigures
right loyally and right fearlessly the Master's tremendous
and incommunicable agonies is "not offended." In an
early day, Elijah's chariot; in the day of Christ's ap-
proaching slaughter, the headsman's block and the heads-
man's descending sword, are a grander chariot for the
second Elijah, putting him yet closer to his Prince. In
the path of lowliness and loneliness and resolute endur-
ance to the end, John was thus honored to win a higher
distinction even than had been accorded to his great pro-
totype and model, Elijah. On Carmel that stalwart and
older servant had said, " If the Lord God be God, follow
him;" and Israel had exclaimed, "The Lord, he is the
God." In the low dungeon of Machaerus, when the har-
binger bowed his neck to the flashing falchion that the
daughter of Herodias and the craven fear of Herod had
sent against him, the later prophet had virtually pro-
claimed again, " ' If the Lord be God, follow him.' And
follow him will I, though it be to a culprit's death and
with the dunghill of a Liizarus awaiting my headless
corpse." And he who afterward promised to the penitent
thief beside his own cross a remembrance in his, the Mes-
siah's kingdom, had not overlooked, we may well believe,
the welcome and the place of honor in that same kingdom
for his fellow-suflCerer and for his precursor, John the
Baptist. And turning to the blended histories of both

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 27

servant and Lord, we the Christians of so many lands and
so many centuries justify and congratulate the servant in
his meek trust, and we magnify and confide in the Master in
his unparalleled oblation, and we, too, take up the outcry
at the foot of Carmel, " The Lord, he is the God." Yea,
verily, then ; yea, verily, now ; yea, verily, for evermore.
And the deeper his humiliation, all the loftier is his love,
and all the surer the final victories and the compensatory
glories of all the martyr-train who have preceded him or
followed him to the sacrifice. The love, stronger than
death, is glorified by death, as his saints confront and
defy that terror.

As an expression of the repentance that he preached,
.John administered baptism in Jordan. Was it before
known to the Jews? Scholars have been divided as to
this. We think the weight of evidence to be that Jewish
proselyte baptism was unknown before John's time. That
it was before unknown seems implied also in the question
from Jerusalem brought to him: "If not the Messiah,
wherefore baptizest thou then?" He pointed to it, as
commanded him by the Jehovah who had trained him
for his work and now launched him upon his mission —
the Jonah of a spiritual Nineveh and the Daniel to a race
in spiritual captivity. When Christ, manifested as such
by the same Heavenly Power that had sent the forerunner,
applied also for baptism, John declined it, as if to admin-
ister it would imply inferiority on the part of the recip-
ient of the rite to himself, the administrator. Christ
insisted on it as needed " to fulfil all righteousness." It
did not bespeak repentance as needed by him, but it

28 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

bespoke the perfect righteousness with which his volun-
tary humiliation was accepted and proclaimed — how he,
the Prince, honored his servitor and that servitor's loyal
proclamation and that servitor's legitimate ordinance.

But' to the rest of its recipients John professed to give
it as a baptism of the penitent acknowledging un worthi-
ness and renouncing his sin ; not as though due to them
as a race, for he said to men of warring creeds but a com-
mon Hebrew nationality — to the Pharisee, who so accu-
mulated and magnified tradition, and to the Sadducee.
who rejected all tradition, and even exscinded much
also of sacred Scripture ; to the easy-going liberalist and
rationalist on the one side and to the strict and bigoted
ritualist and traditionalist on the other side — Alike you
need a change of nature. The Abrahamic covenant will
not lift you into the kingdom of Abraham's God. " Gen-
eration of vipers," bring forth fruits meet for repentance —
a change you need that shall be thorough and radical.
The axe, brandished in rightful severity, has not yet
felled the tree which it threatens, but its keen, bright
edge lies against the root of the tree. All national calam-
ities and household sorrows are but the chippings and
blazings of that "two-handed engine" which lies ready to
smite once, and smiting once needs smite no more. And
barrenness, if inveterate, is the seal of the inevitable burn-
ing. I, John, demand the repentance. It is the prerog-
ative of another, now on his way, to give repentance and
the remission of sins. I baptize you with water ; but he
gives the baptism of the Holy Ghost, creative and re-
newing. And if opportunity be wasted and warning be

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 29

spurned, then he sends the deluge of fire. The fruitless
tree goes to the furnace.

Some scholars, and not of our own denominational
affinities, have supposed that in pagan mysteries, eagerly-
sought and long and widely practiced, a purification by
water and by blood had become familiarly known, as the
emblem of a great change in character and soul and pur-
pose, before John's age. Moses had found the ark in the
pagan Egyptian ritual far more ancient than the day of
his own adoption by the daughter of Pharaoh. He had
continued this emblem in the Jewish economy, not as the
loan of paganism, but as a memorial of patriarchal ism,
which paganism had borrowed and perverted, and which
he rightfully reclaimed. Men like Melchizedec and like
Job had preserved much, in Gentile lands and lineages,
of patriarchal truth and history. The ark among such a
people had been the emblem of the escape of the world's
grey fathers, sons of Noah, in the days of the Deluge. It
was a memorial of God-planned and God-wrought deliv-
erance, of a provision of the divine grace riding triumph-
ant over the wreck of a world weltering under the floods
of a divine wrath. And as Moses honored the fragments
of a patriarchal faith in transmitting and consecrating the
Gentile ark, so might John, divinely taught, accept and
reinaugurate the emblems of supernatural lustration in
the old Gentile mysteries. If Satan, " the ape of God,"
as an old Father so justly called him, had used these frag-
ments and splinters of the shattered old faith of the patri-
archs for many most crafty and wicked purposes, God
might snatch his own truths out of the gripe of the great

3*

30 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

counterfeiter, and vindicate and re-establish in their
primitive and celestial majesty the great, the primitive
verities, that a flood of the divine wrath threatened an
apostate and revolted race, that, even as an incensed ven-
geance of Heaven against earth had once poured Noah's
flood, so was it now about to send its second and more
dread instalment, the world's final deluge of fire. Mean-
while, as mercy framed the ark of Noah to ride the first
deluge, so in the ark of Moses was seen the mercy-seat,
the throne of the divine benignity, set over the tablets of
the law, the embodiment of divine justice. And so in
baptism, the penitent acknowledging that justice had
rightfully let loose its flood of wrath, might yet hope and
plead that mercy could now rejoice against judgment.
For Christ was to die, the Lamb of God, taking away the
sin of the world, by death foiling and spoiling him that
had the power of death ; and now by heralds and ordi-
nances proclaiming hope for the lost, and pardon for the
guilty, and the return of the exile, and the welcome of
the prodigal. A repentance that wrenched itself loose
from the old idols; a contrition that acknowledged the
breadth of the law and the depth of man's despair as to
any right of his own ; and a trust that clasped in the God-
given atonement its one and its sufficient hope, and a
filial appeal that implored passionately the divine Spirit,
freely promised and graciously outpoured, — such repent-
ance, such contrition, such trust, such filial rush of a soul
in its despair, "one alone to the only One," as an old
philosopher phrased the soul's turning desolately to God, —
all these feelings found striking expression when the

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 31

floods met over the bowed head of the disciple, whether
that head so descended beneath the waters under the
hand of the forerunner John or under the hand of the
apostle. The proselyte thus and there stooped to the
death of the old, and accepted in tears of glad faith the
birth of the new — a new Master, a new life of service
under the cross upon the earth, and a new life of unutter-
able joy through that Redeemer's resurrection, ascension,
and mediation at the right hand of his Father — his Father
and ours — in the world of higher gladness and fuller
union, where patriarch and harbinger, and apostle and
prophet, martyr and confessor, sit down together in the
presence of him who, as the Lamb, is alike the Temple and
the Sun of his New Jerusalem beyond these terrestrial
scenes.

And both John the harbinger, servant of our Lord, and
the Christ, John's Divine Master — each of them a prophet
of the Voice — yet bid us alike not to neglect, but to pon-
der, the sayings of the prophets of the Pen. The fore-
runner appealed to the oracles penned by Isaiah and to
the histories preserved by Abraham. His Divine Follower
and Prince said, " Search the Scriptures ; they testify of
me." Some would claim great and paramount value for
the voice of tradition, apart from the inspired and written
Bible. The history of the churches and the nations, in
the very case of John himself, illustrates significantly the
snares and perils of such unwritten memory, enhance-
ment, transfiguration, and distortion of the old utterances.
In apostolic times, the beloved apostle, John, namesake
of the harbinger, records — but whilst recording discoun-

32 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

tenances — the tradition then current of himself, that he,
the son of Zebedee, was to survive in the body on the
earth until the return of our Lord in his second advent.
It is an early tradition, and, in an apostolical age even,
many credited the tradition ; but, as an apostolical hand
testifies, old as was its date and wide as was its cur-
rency, it was a departure from the Master's actual words,
and so was a figment. So, in the case of our theme, John,
the son of Zacharias, the Lord's harbinger, has had for
many j^ears, and centuries even, a set of professed disciples,
who, on the base of their own traditions, have called them-
selves disciples of John, and were known, to a recent time,
as Zabians, but whose faith is really without a gospel and
without a Christ. Tradition really floated them away from
John and Christ. His real genuine disciples were content
With their teacher's testimony, that he must decrease and
his Lord increase ; and like Peter and James and John,
they left the harbinger, in order to swell the train of the
Prince. Others of them, when Herodias had secured the
martyrdom of their beloved instructor, buried the corpse
and went and told Jesus. That Saviour testified that
never had there been a greater prophet than was this, his
own loyal forerunner ; but he added, " He that is least in
the kingdom of heaven is greater than he." Just as the
flagman, bearing his red pennon in front of a railway
train through one of our city streets, carries not one of the
passengers or an ounce of the freight which the engine
and cars have undertaken to transport. He is not in the
line which they keep. His movement is on the feet of the
steed which he backs ; theirs is by wheels and cogs and

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 33

steam upon the rail. Yet the distinctness of the work
does not argue the uselessness of the preliminar}^ service.
The last poor convert from heathenism that, on the faith
of Christ's gospel, moved yesterday, under the Mas-
ter's welcome, into the Master's heavenly kingdom, was
" greater " while here in the body, in privileges, in the full
amount of insight, and the clear foundations of hope
given by a finished gospel, than the son of Zachariah,
living in a less enlightened stage of God's revelations.
But he was not '' greater " in holiness or " greater " in his
heavenly recompense than the illustrious harbinger.
When Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot and orator, came
to these shores, he was, in national privileges, outranked
here by the ragged, unkempt, and untaught newsboy
who jostled through the skirts of the pageants, and who
was an American, whilst the illustrious visitor was an
alien. In this sense the inferior in endowment and in-
trinsic worth and in enduring fame was yet the greater in
immediate privileges and native citizenship. Such we
suppose the force of " greater " in our Lord's use of the
word regarding his herald and loyal martyr. He was
outranked, in immediate privileges and in earthly instruc-
tions enjoyed whilst he was yet in the body, by multi-
tudes of Christ's simple followers, w^ho yet, in the world
of greater elevation and fuller vision, acknowledged them-
selves far outranked, in grace and in reward and in mas-
siveness of services, by the illustrious prophet whom a
dance bought for the shambles, in order to fatten the
grudge of a heartless adulteress, and to seal the craven
weakness and the final perdition of the poor kingling

c

34 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

who played a more modern and meaner Aliab toward
his truculent and glittering Jezebel.

Now, the existence of such misguided believers in tra-
dition as the Zabians, that call themselves by the name
of a prophet who would impatiently disavow and
denounce them, is not the whole lesson against that error
furnished by the story of John. A Scottish historian,
Burton, not wanting in research or in acuteness, records it
in the first volume of his work on the annals of his
nation, that there are, in the different portions of Chris-
tendom, not less than eighteen heads of John the Baptist
presented as inviting the reverence of the faithful. For
each, tradition would lift up its testimony. Certainly
there is little reason to believe in its asseveration as to
any one of the honored relics. But if, to preserve unim-
peached the honors claimed for an ancient and far-descend-
ed tradition, we accord equal honors to the entire num-
ber, in what a condition must the morning of the resur-
rection place Christ's harbinger. If he accept all, he will
be more than rival to the Cerberus of pagan mythology ;
and will he not rank with Kalee, the popular goddess of
Hindustan, who appears before her frenzied devotees with
a necklace of human skulls swinging down to her girdle?

No. He who with such resolute sternness besomed
away the ecclesiastical tradition of the Pharisee, and the
rationalistic tradition of the Sadducee, uplifts for himself
as out of his grave, with force all the stronger from these
vagaries of human fancy and these wild contradictory-
legends of ecclesiastical tradition, the old and blessed
memorial, ''It is written." Not "It is currently re-

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 35

ported," " It is very widely believed," but, " It is written ;"
and a louder and more august Speaker takes up the
herald's unfinished testimony, and his outgiving is this :
" Heaven and earth shall pass away, but one jot or one
tittle of my word shall not pass away." It is the utter-
ance of him who was Builder of both heaven and earth,
and knows the exact number of all their constituent atoms,
and the full date, precise to a moment, for their continu-
ance and for their removal. It is the utterance of him
who, as he is the Theme, so he is the Prompter, of all
Scripture ; whose blood bought us all ; whose grace invites
us all; whose word warns us all; whom John, having
worthily served on the earth, serves now more earnestly
and loves j^et more reverently in the upper worlds of light
to which his testimony and his example point us, that
through the faith and patience of the saints we too may
endure and overcome and attain. Thanks be unto God,
who gave him the victory; and who will to us give, if
w^e look to the Lamb whom he heralded, the sight of
that common glory and a share for ever in all that
unspeakable blessedness.

John the Baptist closes the Old Testament and opens
the New. Christ, his Lord and our Lord, both begins the
Old and rounds and shuts the New. The promised Seed
of the woman in Eden just when sin entered it, he is
the Light of the world and the Opener of that New
Jerusalem into which sin shall find no entrance, sealing
to his church a Paradise regained which shall never be
forfeited ; and as out of its gates he proclaims, " Whoso-

36 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

ever will, let him come and take of the water of life
freely." And from the harbingers and from the followers,
the saints of all ages and all dispensations, comes the
thunder of that one acclaim, " Behold the Lamb of God
that taketh away the sin of the world."

II.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD

AS SET UP BY OHEIST.

THE KINGDOM OF GOD

AS SET UP BY OHEIST

The time of our Lord's appearance in the world was
one of general suspense, of widespread and intense ex-
pectation. Caesar, in the person of Julius, the greatest of
the name, had laid the foundations of an empire wider
than Alexander's. Augustus, retaining cautiously the
names and shows of the old republic, had given that im-
perial power inherited from his uncle the unity and con-
solidation and energy of an absolute despotism, varnished
over with the memories and titles of a patrician aristoc-
racy and of a plebeian democracy, which, though wearing
their old titles and flaunting their old badges, did — more
meekly than begrudgingly — their stipulated service in the
pay and under the banners of a virtual autocrat. Old
and independent kingdoms had become dependencies of
this central empire. Peace had in a certain sense been
secured, and the temple of Janus, at the capital, had its
gates closed — a token of the rare event. But what was
to be the result of the general submission when now no
power, however remote, sturdy, or barbarous, seemed able
to make head against the invincible legions of Rome?
Was it the repose of a new and riper order, or the stagna-

39

40 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

tion and decay of a confessed imbecility and despair?
Did' it pledge the harvesting of a fresher life, or was it the
torpor of corruption creeping into the vitals of the state
and suffusing the nations with death ?

How magnificent was the sweep of that Roman Empire,
and over its broad domains with what a lordly supremacy
did it set up and did it put down. A living English jurist,
of high reputation and wide experience both in the East-
ern colonies and home-schools of Britain, speaks, in his
lectures on law, as if not loth to acknowledge the lights
thrown on the history of civilization by the pages of scrip-
tural prophecy. Sir Henry Maine mentions the Roman
Empire as accurately described in the prophecy of Daniel :
"It devoured, broke in pieces, and stamped the residue
with its feet." Its influence was marked, says the same
writer, "by the comminution which it effected." "The
Roman Commonwealth from very early times was distin-
guished from all other dominions and powers in that it
broke up more thoroughly that which it devoured." Was
it in its tremendous work of trituration prepared to give
the unity and compactness of a new life, a legal symme-
tr}^ and a moral soundness to the peoples and tongues
and societies which it thus ground into a compulsory
assimilation ?

The first Napoleon, with that massiveness of thought
which distinguished some of his utterances, spoke of the
Mediterranean as fitted, and as he hoped destined, to be-
come a "French lake." Thoroughly, it seemed in the
days of our Lord's advent, had the old Roman imperial-
ism made this great inland sea to become merely a Latin

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 41

lake. The histories, the religions, the literatures, the arts,
the commerce, and the navigation of all precedent ages
had to a great extent gathered around its shores, its isles,
and its havens. Just as in the huge amphitheatres which
antiquity knew so well how to construct, tier rising on tier
till the population of a whole city might find room on the
benches, and thence might look down on the centre, which,
by waters let in, was often made into a lake and the scene
of a great mimic sea-fight,— so, as over a grander amphithe-
atre, did the empire survey that great inner sea washing so
many lands. Over that old sea had scudded the builders
of the Pyramids and the lords of old Etruscan soil —
merchant-sails of Sidon, Tyrian fleets, and Carthaginian
traders ; the vessels of the old Argonaut in quest of the
Golden Fleece; the pirate-keels of early Greece; the be-
siegers of Troy; the prows of republican Greece that won
the battle of Salamis; Egyptian galleys; the ships of Tar-
shish; the keels of Alexander; and the Romans that won
the great sea-fight of Actium. That old sea, upon whose
blue waters looked down so many centuries and so many
nationalities and kindreds and languages, imperial Rome,
we say, seemed to have made her own home-preserve
but a grander amphitheatre for the display of her vast
resources and energies. From the Pillars of Hercules on
the far West to the Bosphorus on the North-east and to
the mouths of the Nile on the far South-east, none dared,
upon all the outlined coast, to contest the power of the
great Roman Empire. To the brooding eye of the poet it
might seem as if the three great continents which made
up the chief subjects of thought to the ancient world had

4*

42 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

each, by its tutelary genius, sat down to bathe its feet in
those azure waters. Africa and Europe and Asia, each
with Roman collar on the neck and Roman fetter on the
ankle, subjugated if not loyal, all looked up to the eagles
of Csesar as the symbols of a mighty and incontestable
sovereignty. With what jealousy do modern nationalities
watch the divided power over the same great waters.
Britain is holding the western keys in Gibraltar and
Malta, and eyeing France enviously as in her Algerine
dependency she seems seeking to control the desert, or
as she at the mouths of the Nile or by the Suez Canal
threatens English communications with India; and fore-
casting anxiously the results should Russia replace Turkey
at the gates of the Bosphorus, in the old city of Constan-
tine. The shores thus parcelled out and begrudged by
modern civilization were, in our Lord's day, all gathered
under the rule of the one Caesar.

But if outwardly the vast empire were at peace, it was
not at rest. Augustus himself had felt the necessity of a
moral renewal of the realm that he governed. Marriage
had become discredited, and it was hoped by enactment
and reward to make it again popular or unavoidable.
The sovereign's own household was in such condition
that the father's heart, as he turned to his own child, was
saddened and stung within him. The legislator knew,
that, if the old homes of Rome were not restored with
something of their antique order and sacredness, Roman
greatness must perish on its own crumbling and dese-
crated hearthstones. His only child, Julia, died in dis-
graced exile. Tiberius, who had submitted to a reluctant

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 43

divorce from a wife whom he loved, to become the hus-
band of this imperial daughter, succeeded, as the recom-
pense of this union, to the throne of his father-in-law,
but upon the wreck, as it were, of his own household
peace and honor. The Augustus who could subjugate an
empire could not reform its households, or even guide
wisely his own. And how ineffectual edicts and penalties
and exiles were, to make the home secure and the conju-
gal union blessed, was illustrated in the very days com-
memorated in the Acts of the Apostles. The Claudius in
whose times occurred the famine predicted by the prophet
Agabus had, before reaching the purple, been twice mar-
ried and divorced. When emperor, he was twice mar-
ried again. Under the pressure of that scarcity of bread
which Agabus had foreseen and which the charity of
early Christians sought at Jerusalem to relieve, Claudius,
in his passage through the streets of the metropolis, had
been pelted with crusts of bread by the populace, who had
learned to depend on imperial largesses for their suste-
nance, and who were provoked at the delay in the arrival
of the expected supplies. When, at last, the long-desired
keels from Egypt, the granary of the empire, had brought
bread, this same Claudius selected, as one of the rewards
for the mariners who had come up with timely and wel-
come supplies, the expressive and singular privilege that
they should be exempted from obedience to the law of
the empire making marriage compulsory. It was a ludi-
crous yet most lamentable confession, how the homes of
the empire had become hopelessly forlorn and loveless,
when bachelordom should be proclaimed as the emperor's

44 LECTUEES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

own singular recompense for the hardy voyagers who had
fed the hordes of a famishing capital.

The great historian Tacitus has told us how general
was the expectation of a great Deliverer from the East,
who should set up an universal dominion. And the pages
of the chief Roman poet, Virgil, a favorite of Augustus,
had, in one of his eclogues addressed to Pollio, heaped on
a child born to his friend images and anticipations of
coming good, that the best critics now agree in supposing
to have been derived from the phrases and pledges of
Hebrew prophecy concerning the Messiah. Palestine, the
land of our Lord's birth, was one of the outlying depend-
encies of the great pagan Empire of Rome. The God who,
by Daniel, had foretold the growth of Latin imperialism
and the peculiar force that it should wield in crushing its
subject populations, had pledged the rise of a kingdom
that, like a stone cut out of the mountain without hands,
should become a great power and fill the earth. Not of
man's shaping, it should defy and outgrow man's curbing.
In the child that at Bethlehem was laid in a manger;
in the youth that as an artisan aided at Nazareth in the
workshop of his reputed father, Joseph the carpenter; but
who had been proclaimed by his forerunner with such
directness and solemnity as one taking away sin — the sin,
not of Israel, but of all people ; the guilt, not only that
with which, under Ahab and Manasseh and Herod, Pales-
tine had been drenched, but the sins of the outer Gentile
world, not merely far as Tyre had discovered it, or far as
Rome had conquered it, but to shores never reached by
Phoenician keel, never overshadowed by Roman eagle.

THE KINGDOM OP GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. '45

over the entire globe, — in him God had prepared the offer-
ing of an oblation that could, in the energy of its efficacy,
span all the continents and travel down the entire course of
the world's centuries. This Deliverer was to be the moral
Renewer, the mighty Conqueror, the Divine Redeemer,
adequate to meet such a task, however cumbrous and
complicated ; to rise up to the dignity and vastness of an
enterprise so blessed; but seemingly so hopeless, from the
very extent of its compass and the countless multitudes
of its perishing beneficiaries.

" The kingdom of God," said the Saviour at an early
period of his ministry, " is within yoii ; other legislators
deal with the outer act, and visit with the corporal pen-
alty, and can follow the refractory but to the scaffold and
the tomb. I deal with the soul ; I go to the root of the
evil to be remedied in the stem and centre of the human
character. Come from the unseen and eternal world, I
wield its retributions, as I open its blessedness. Fear not
those who can kill the body and find their puny power
there all exhausted ; but fear him who casts the soul into
hell." Make the tree good, that its fruit may be good, is
the philosophy of Heaven. The laws of the kingdom
that he came to establish were spiritual, and the energies
that he came to wield were not tangible and visible, to be
counted on the ten fingers, and to be entered on tablets
and in exchequer rolls. Sacrifice was the price of his own
free boon to a guilty and ingrate race. Lifted on the cross,
he would draw all men to him, but the love that made
him willing at such a price to rescue his very m aligners,
blasphemers, and murderers, was a love that, when it was

46 LECTURES ON BABnST HISTORY.

kindled by reflection from him in their hearts, would
make them strong to compassionate and brave to endure.
They would become resolute and meek and glad cross-
bearers in the train of a crucified Redeemer, and freely
receiving would freely give. Continuing and deepening
the work of his harbinger John, he by his Spirit turned
the hearts of the fathers to the children, when he, in the
very hour of his advent, taught by his prescient Spirit an
aged Zacharias and an exultant P]lizabeth, and a Simeon
and an Anna in their feeble and decrepid isolation, to
look hopefully toward the days of relief now begun for
Israel and for all mankind; to see in cradles now ten-
anted converts and messengers, trophies and apostles, of
him, the coming Hope of Palestine and of all the earth.
When he took up little children into his arms ; when he
bade his disciples remember that those coming into his
kingdom needed to come as with the docility and gentle-
ness and submission of the infant, he inaugurated a new
era for the childhood of humanity. And when, in near
prospect of his own bitter and lonely passion, he turned
to commiserate the women weeping, by bidding them look
forward to those days of national woe and retribution,
when the childless mother, now generally in Palestine so
commiserated, should be rather felicitated and envied;
when the infant in its captive mother's arms should be
doubly forlorn in the desolation of exile, bondage, and
penury, — how did he illustrate his own deep regard, and
how did he by example inculcate a keen and special ten-
derness in the heart of the elder to the younger. So when,
in the sermon on the mount, he expounded the spirituality

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 47

and breadth of the law, relieving it from the narrow, ex-
scinding glosses of the Pharisees and vindicating the utter-
ances of the old Scripture from the crippling and belittling
rationalism of the Sadducees, how did he victoriously
turn the hearts of the children of Abraham in that age
to the sounder and fuller views of their earliest fore-
fathers. When he expounded the law of marriage,
carrying it back, beyond the indulgences and tolerations
of divorce permitted by Moses, to the institution as it was
in the beginning, when Adam and Eve walked the alleys
of Eden under the eye of the Father and Maker, how did
he vindicate the original integrity of the first and fore-
most institution of human society, from all the interpola-
tions that had been made upon it by the weaknesses of
man, and the relaxations of it by divine sufferance, allow-
ing at certain times and for certain surroundings a remiss-
ness which was not to be permanent or universal, as it
had not been the primitive and original type.

His forerunner had called to repentance. He proclaim-
ed the remission of sins ; and by parables of the greatest
simplicity, pathos, and power, he bade the prodigal take
heart, and the outcast to look with penitent hope upon
the celestial home and the parental heritage which he
had wilfully forfeited, but which a Divine Father was
willing yet to reopen. The publican and harlot, the dregs
and off-scoured scum, so to speak, of all human society, he
does not seal to despair ; but his readiness to instruct and
recover the very classes upon whom the hypocritical
Pharisee had branded utter reprobation was one of the
very reproaches his enemies flung on his character, when

48 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

it marked him, in reality, as the true Rebuilder of the
moral desolation that strewed with ruins contemporary
Hebrew society. Not upraising this refuse of the com-
monwealth to license and impunity, but encouraging
them to contrition and recovery, he showed himself thus,
indeed, the Refiner that early seers had portrayed for their
coming Messiah — one who could out of the refuse-heaps
bring forth the true silver. As he had made a Manasseh
in the old dispensation an exemplar of his bounteous
grace, so in this his new dispensation a Magdalen was
the herald of his resurrection, and she, out of whom had
gone seven devils, now saw the vision of the angels who
guarded the vacated sepulchre and witnessed of the Lord,
as being on his way to a victorious ascension. The lever
of a new-found hope was put below the sunken courses of
the Hebrew Commonwealth. The opening of the prison-
house to those spiritually bound was part of his preroga-
tive ; and the earnest of his joyous triumph, as Destroyer
of the power and kingdom of Satan.

Among the thronging rabble that hooted him on his
way to the cross might have been some, then in their
childhood, who in the days of their manhood writhed
in agony upon the crosses which Titus, when pressing
close his siege of the fated city, planted in ghastly lines
about the Hebrew capital. If impenitent mothers of
these impenitent Jews survived to behold the fulfilment
of Christ's rejected warnings, how, amid their keenest and
most rancorous despair, must there have come back even
to their souls some sense, that the far-seeing Christ who
had, so many years before, felicitated the barren and child-

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHEIST. 49

less wife, was as kind in sympathy as he was piercing in
his divine forecast. Out of the deepening gloom of his
own impending passion he had foreseen, and he had pitied
the woes of the nursling in the days of the Roman siege,
and the pangs of the frighted and famishing and cap-
tive mothers on whose necks those puny nurslings clung.
Eyes, that had been dimmed with the bloody sweat of
Gethsemane but a few hours before, could bend compas-
sionate glances on the maternal hearts that were to be
wrung, when the Latin siege-lines should surround the
Hebrew sanctuary.

But he. thus divine in knowledge, in compassion, in
stainless holiness, and in miraculous powers, is an Obla-
tion. But he is Priest as well as Victim, and, gone up on
high, he pleads, in the most high and holy place of his
present celestial exaltation, the cause of his people. He
is Prophet; and in his own fresh prediction, and in his
symmetric and unexampled accomplishment of the older
prophecies, that from earliest days had gone before con-
cerning him, how had he set himself, not only before the
nation, but also before all Gentiles, as the Desire of all
nations, the Prophet and the Helper and the Teacher of
all people.

John the Baptist had confined himself to the Jewish
nation in his ministry. The greater Prince also, for whose
way John prepared, limited his immediate ministrations
generally to the seed of Israel. But in his expositions, at
the synagogue, of Elijah's errand of mercy to the Gentile
widow of Zarephath, and of Elisha's miracle of healing
for Naaman the Gentile soldier and ruler; in his refer-

5 D

60 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

ences to Jonah and to Daniel, each of these great seers
laboring partly for, and largely amongst, other than a
Hebrew population, — how had our Saviour brought forth
into clear prospect the purpose which he cherished of
making the gospel of his kingdom to be glad tidings unto
all nations. Reappearing after his resurrection, he had
declared that all power in heaven and in earth was given
into his hands, and that his truth was to be preached to
every creature. A heaven-wide benefit demanded a world-
wide testimony.

In all this how signally, yet how unexpectedly to his
own countrymen and even to his own apostles, did he
fling down in his new empire the old barriers of exclu-
sivencss, the middle wall of partition between the uncir-
cumciscd heathen, and the children of Abraham with the
rites of the law sealed upon them. And how did he illus-
trate the breadth not only, but the bounteousness, of the
new kingdom. It was not for his own kingly lineage or
for the tribe of Judah ; for the learned, the wealthy, and
the mighty: his gospel was pre-eminently for the poor.
In the imagery of the Apocalypse, the roll which the
angels were not adequate to open and read, and which the
Lamb only was competent to free from its seven prisoning
seals, was written, as the apostle says, not only within, but
on the outside as well. The classical antiquarian tells,
how the rolls of ancient ages sold in the booksellers' stiills
were, when intended for the affluent, written on parch-
ment and only upon the inner side ; but cheaper copies
of the favorite classics, demanded for students of narrower
means, were on rolls of paper, and the writing there was

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 51

not only upon the front of the roll, but upon the back as
well. A volume of this character, whatever its seals and
its Divine Holder, was, from this aspect of the lines in-
scribed on it, — without as well as within, — denoted by
that single feature, as being the contribution of a new and
divine literature, not for the select and affluent and lux-
urious few, but for the multitudes whose longings after
knowledge poverty could not repress. The classic of the
skies was to be edited for the masses. Philosophies and
inquisitions might seek to hold it back; but God's book
challenged the hungering eyes of the multitude. As into
the world of light, our Divine Teacher carried this emblem
of his benign thoughtfulness for the vast masses, just as
he had said, when his harbinger John from Herod's
prison inquired for new credentials of the mission of the
Emmanuel ; and he, the Divine Enfranchiser, put as the
crown and culmination of all his evidences this, that the
poor had the gospel preached to them.

The poor rabble of Rome had from their pagan lord
their doles of bread and their games in the amphitheatre.
They saw the wild beasts tear each other and the glad-
iators stab one another; and, hungry for human gore, they
howled in gladness over the large provision an emperor,
chary of his own blood, but profuse in shedding the blood
of his victims, provided for the imbruted populace of
Rome in the circus. When an Augustus died, one of his
supple courtiers asseverated, that he had seen the spirit
of the deceased ruler mounting to the skies; and so the
obsequious senate voted the deceased emperor a god.
With armies, and navies, and treasures, and laws, and

52 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

magistrates, and largesses, and games, all at their com-
mand, why should not Rome's pagan emperors, thus
voted into a godhead, set up a permanent, a world-quell-
ing dominion ? Human nature in its baser promptings
and instincts was all on their side. The literature and
poetry and oratory and philosophy of the age were all in
their pay. If old powers bore continuous sway, is there
any doubt that pagan Rome, backed by an impenitent
Judaism, by a temple that cast out the Heir and Lord of
that temple to be slain, strong under Sadducean and
Pharisean guidance, with its cry of " Crucify him I" against
a new claimant for universal royalty, — is there, we ask,
any doubt, that pagan Rome in its imperial might, thus
seconded by an impenitent Judaism, must crush the new
faith, and this Claimant of a heavenly kingdom, into
obscurity and irremediable defeat? Is not all secular
might, thus banded, sure to triumph over the fishermen
and tent-makers that claim, unarmed and poor, to
announce everywhere the reign of this Man of sorrows,
returning as Judge of quick and dead ? Meanwhile, these
strange heralds announce, that, in his grave, the second
remove from a cross, there lies the only hope of the race
for renewal and life everlasting. The poor, the denounced,
the prisoned, the tortured, the martyred, went everywhere
attesting that this King of Israel met all earth's real neces-
sities and aspirations — was the Desire of all nations. Call
him rather, the world might scoffingly respond, the Scorn
of all people. The vilest contumely, now gathered on the
images of halter and scaffold, then was grouped as
intensely on the cross, accursed to the Jew, and to the

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 63

Roman so odious that the most abandoned culprit, if of
Roman citizenship, was accorded some less forlorn and
villainous a death. But they who follow him have
counted the cost, and are ready to tread in his footsteps
their own meek, resolute way to the cross. Who will fol-
low, at such risks and against such odds, the Claimant that
says, " I am the way, the truth, and the life," speaking as
from a gibbet whence his disciples had so recently lowered
his lifeless corpse, speaking as out of a tomb where ene-
mies had but lately sealed him, and as they thought
effectually and finally quashed his mission ?

A great company will be his believing disciples, and
eager witnesses to his recovered life and his experienced
grace. Priests, who had once hounded the rabble to
extort from the reluctant Pilate the consummation of the
sacrifice, will become themselves obedient to this faith, a
great company of them recanting their blasphemies, and
adhering to the faith of the maligned and excommuni-
cated Nazarene. A Nicodemus and a Joseph of Arimathea,
out of the very Sanhedrim, will show their adhesion to
his cause. A Saul fresh from the school of Gamaliel,
and from the scene of a Stephen's martyrdom, will
become a convert and an apostle. And the story of
Jerusalem and the Jewish people, as Josephus wrote it,
their siege and their overthrow and their dispersion, will
blaze forth the working of a divine power, to show the
truth of the warnings which this rejected Prophet had
delivered. A pagan Rome will come to accord, however
reluctantly, its testimony to the same inexplicable fore-
sight and unerring prevision, in his foretelling the fates of
6*

64 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

the church as he had built it. No power in the cabinets
and camps of earth, no power couched in the gates of
hell, has proved able to withstand this King's edicts, and
to falsify the pledges of this strange Potentate, emergent
from the sepulchre and preaching immortality as from
its dark shadow.

The history of Koman imperialism has been written in
the days of its decline and fall with signal ability and
great research, by an infidel scholar of Britain. Gibbon
has endeavored to show, how causes merely human
account for the overthrow of Paganism, and the triumph-
ant diffusion and general reception of the new faith. But
his reasonings have not, to the candid and dispassionate,
seemed adequate or self-consistent. A Scotch jurist, Lord
Hailes, of acuteness and erudition, promptly replied to
the inadequate explanations of the sceptical historian.
Christian scholars like Guizot, the eminent French states-
man, not long since departed, and like Milman, the Eng-
lish poet and theologian, have to their several editions of
Gibbon appended notes and comments explaining, at less
or greater length, the insufficiency of the evasions which
Gibbon employs to sheathe the force of Scripture proph-
ecies, and to lessen the wonders of Christ's new and spir-
itual sway. In days yet more recent, the Comte de Cham-
pagny, a Frencli scholar and statesman, son of one of the
ministers of state to the first Napoleon, himself a devout
Romanist, has presented the story of the closing days of
the Jewisli State and of tlie earlier ages of the Roman
Empire, with a thoroughness, a vividness, and an elo-
(luence, that stir the reader's soul. This work it is, prob-

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 55

ably, that has procured for him the honor of an admission
to that eminent literary body, the great French Academy,
whose membership is among the foremost distinctions of
all modern scholarship. As a very decided Ultramontan-
ist, he cannot carry with him in some of his views and
conclusions the sympathy of his Protestant readers : but in
a presentation of the inner constitution of the Roman im-
perial State, of its modes of enveloping and adopting the
cities and peoples that it conquered, of Paganism sick to
the death, and Philosophy unable to palliate the social
evils it must confess, it is a book of great merit, and de-
serving close study. We have nowhere else seen a state-
ment of the gradual interpenetration of the Roman liter-
ature and the Roman jurisprudence and the popular phil-
osophy of the Empire, by the principles of the gospel,
that approaches, in fulness, in clearness and force, this
work of De Champagny, well worthy of an English ver-
sion by some competent and faithful scholar.

Into the catacombs — places of burial, but of shelter
also — went the hunted and proscribed followers of the
Nazarene, and out of these catacombs the confessors of
this faith one day emerged, to see the Empire awed and
many of its nationalities won, by the spiritual doctrine
which once these Gentile rulers had endeavored to con-
sume by martyr-fires, and to drown out in the blood of its
hapless proselytes.

Now, what had been Daniel's imagery of this great and
widespreading power? It was not to be some statue, like
the figure seen in Nebuchadnezzar's dream, bespeaking
the sculptor's toil of hand and the c ritic's ed ucated eye,

U^JLm. M ^ an IPi ^^y m TT \\

66 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

and exhibiting, it might be, all the symmetry of art.
Like the unhewn stones of the first altars of the Mosaic
economy, without mark of graver upon them, it was to
be a growth, and not a fabric; heaven's boon, and not
man's device.

So the Spirit of God, working when and where he
would, had made, on the one side and on the other, this
truth to take hold on fresh converts and win new accre-
tions of proselytism, until, insensibly, the rock became a
cliff, and the cliff a towering mountain-range, that com-
manded the regard of every eye, and crossed the path of
the most heedless and unobservant traveller.

But if Christ be a king, what are his prerogatives as a
monarch? Now, earthly governments are generally re-
garded in their threefold arrangements as to the legisla-
tive, the judicial, and the executive power. Under certain
forms, and by assemblies or counsellors chosen or deputed
to the end, the laws are framed, amended, enlarged, or
revoked. The Parliaments of our British kinsmen, and
the Congresses of our own country and people, are the de-
positories of this law-making power to the Anglo-Saxon
race. To judges, of longer or briefer tenure of their office,
is committed the power of interpreting and applying these
laws to the various cases respecting which they may need
explanation and adaptation. But to the judge a free
country is jealous of allowing any direct or large share
in tlie law-making. The executive, though the minister
of the law, is himself amenable to the legislator and the
judge, yet in certain posts he may be their equal or supe-
rior in dignity. The constitutional republic depends for

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 5/

its perpetuity and success on the harmonious and uncol-
liding interaction of these great depositories of power, the
law in its making, the law in its uttering, and the law in
its enforcing. No republic but must fail, as old republican
Rome failed centuries ago, if its town slums usurp and
absorb and intermingle these distinct branches of govern-
ment;, and the rabble of yesterday arrogate to make the
law of to-day, with no certainty that it shall please them
to regard it as the law of to-morrow. A kingdom of hu-
man administration, we dread as liable to corruption and
revolution. But a kingdom, if divine and in the hands of
an Infallible and Undying and Omnipresent King, every-
where near to the cry of his petitioners, and every hour
wielding an omnipotence that neither stumbles nor tires,
is the more blessed for its subjects, and the more perfect
in its character, when its legislation and its judgment are
grouped into the hands and heart of one Potentate, the
Lord God Almighty.

We read the New Testament, and read it as collated
with the Old, its precursor. In its imperfect and frag-
mentary measure, the elder book is the counterpart and
earnest of the newer, its complement and its crown. And
there, in the indented and corresponding portion of each
record, we find Christ the one Lawgiver. And no gather-
ing of men, however august or venerable, as synod or as
council, has right to add as legislators one jot or one tittle
to the law-book as the apostles and the prophets left it.
So ripe a scholar, and so staunch a churchman, as the
great Archbishop Ussher, said to Richard Baxter, " Coun-
cils are not for government, but for concord." So, as

58 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

to judicial power, we suppose the canon laws, as men
style them, to be the voluntary adjudications of those to
whom the Master has in his oracles left no such author-
ity. AVe dispute and repudiate their judgment. As to
the executive power, we find God in his book setting up
the congregation, a local assemblage of true disciples and
their pastors, as servants to him, the present Ruler of
Israel, and as, under him, office-bearers, watching spirit-
ually over and for each other. They go safely only as
they implore the Spirit's guidance and as they apply the
Scripture teachings. To the end of the world, the King
has pledged his presence with his people in the assem-
blies that number but their two or their three. Trusting
in his veracity and invoking his fulness of counsel, they
cannot fail. What is their safeguard ? Not the unity of
a great human ecclcsiasticism, not the unity of some
provincial or national convocation, but the "unity" of
the " Spirit." The Paraclete, who cannot deny himself,
boundless in resources and covenanted to take of the
things of the Father and of the Son in his divine immu-
tability and infallibility, overspreads all the jostlings of
the schools and clasps together all the wide chasms of
the centuries. An Augustine's Confessions, a Pascal's
Thoughts, a Bunyan's story of the pilgrims, or his graphic
tale of his own vivid experience in " Grace Abounding "
meet yet an answering throb and waken the pulses of a
heaven-lit sympathy in the readers whose own earthly
training has been, it may be, under widely dissimilar in-
stitutions of human origin. The one Spirit weaves his
bond of peace across the hurtling warp and woof of mor-

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CIIRIST. 59

tal dissonances and earth-born controversies. Through
Christ, the one way, the children of many various civiliza-
tions, with skins blanched by arctic frosts or blackened
by the tropical heats, subjects of political despotisms or
self-governed in political democracies, have access in com-
mon to one Father, and breathe in blessed anticipation
the airs of a common Paradise awaiting them, when the
death-day shall have ended the exile and gathered in the
household.

It was the grand and kindly purpose of the Monarch
who is also the ransoming Elder Brother of his people to
commend the statute-book of his laws and judgments to
their reverence, their credence, and their diligent study,
by giving it the name, variously rendered, of covenant
and testament. Take it in the sense of a covenant or
solemn compact, it is the league, sacred and mutual, of
the King of saints with all his vast flocks of the various
centuries. It is a covenant, according to the imagery of
this volume, ratified with blood. Abraham, father of the
faithful, entering into covenant with his God, had for
himself to pass, and the Maker who entered into pledge
with him went, by the symbol of a smoking lamp — Divine
Grantor and human grantee — both went between the
severed portions of a slain victim. The covenant was
ratified by sacrifice. And when the Redeemer on the
cross was giving up the ghost, the great inner veil of the
temple, with its lofty webs of gorgeous tissue and thick
stout folds, was rent in twain from the top to the bottom,
as if the indwelling Jehovah, before hidden in remote
seclusion, came out to attest the nearer, clearer manifes-

60 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

tation of his nature and character; and that into the Most
Holy Place was now given free access, not as before to
priest only, but to each worshipper as well. As the apos-
tle phrases it, a new and living way was thus opened for
us. We were made kings and priests to God by a new
and loftier consecration, and we may not forego, we may
not forget, this covenant through which the Father, God,
til us came out to be nearer than ever before to us, and
through which we, the worshippers, come near unto him,
the Father. The blood of that oblation bedews the vol-
ume from Genesis to Malachi and from Matthew to John's
Apocalypse. The cross tore down for evermore that veil.
But take the term in the sense which others prefer
giving to it. It is a testament, a last will, reciting the
final and unamendable instructions of a Brother who
has bequeathed a pardon here and eternal life hereafter.
It was of necessity that the Testator should die ere the
instrument could obtain its validity. Has he really shot
the gulf and taken hold on the immortality beyond?
The Fall of Jerusalem responds no less than the scenes of
the crucifixion and resurrection. The Jewish people had,
a few years earlier than the time when the old fane of the
Hebrew went down in blood and ashes before the batter-
ing-rams and the torches of the Roman, invoked, as in a
solemn moral suicide, by their high priests Caiaphas and
Annas, by their Sanhedrim, by their populace filling the
lanes of Jerusalem and demanding the crucifixion of
their King — had implored deliberately the adjudication
of Heaven, as between the nation dooming this Sufferer
and the Sufferer whom they had so doomed, so assured

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 61

were they of his guilt and of their own innocent indigna-
tion as being a holy zeal — had invoked and implored that
the blood of their Victim should rest on them and their
children. The invasion of the Gentile ; the devastation
of their land and the erasure of their sanctuary; their
long exile from the place of their ancestral offerings and
sacrifices; their wide dispersion from the one spot where
God had set in that dispensation his name — are a terrible
response of the divine Nemesis to the fearful appeal which
then and there they had made, and a very significant en-
dorsement that the Lord of the vineyard had not disowned
the Son and Heir whom these, the keepers of that vineyard,
thus undertook to repudiate and to condemn. Like the
earlier Abel's blood bringing down Cain's mark, the gore
of this blasphemed but redeeming Abel is yet crying across
the ages to the Justice above. As the English jurist. Lord
Erskine, one of the greatest and acutest of their advocates,
has said, the dispersion of the Jewish people is among the
most convincing evidences of the truth of Scripture.

A covenant over the severed Lamb of God, a testament
sealed with the blood of the generous and loving Elder
Brother, the Bequeather as well as Earner of its legacies,
has indeed the highest claims as the law-book of God's
people henceforth ; its statutes not to be enlarged, amended,
or retouched ; its judgments to be accepted as perfect in
equity and wisdom ; and the legatees and the covenanters
recognizing in no human authority the competency to
revoke or to revise the arrangements God has thus indited.

This kingdom faces the mythologies and the philoso-
phies and the governments of the race. It claims per-

62 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

petuity of dominion and universality of acceptance. The
Christ confronts the world's other masters. Which of
them shall withstand him successfully ? or which present
a plausible claim to replace the Man of Nazareth as the
Light of the world and the Judge of the eternities ?

III.
BAPTISM AND REGENERATION.

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION.

As into the sliding tubes of a telescope, narrow as they
may seem, are yet compressed the prospects of the further-
most fields of heavenly space which man's eye can reach,
so it may be said that into three words of no very great
length are shut up the entire hopes of our race for both
worlds. For the relief of the lone, forlorn sufferer, and
for the elevation and betterment of the corrupted and
degraded masses; to make oppression impossible and to
bring wars to an end ; and to banish ignorance and pau-
perism and vice, all sorrow and sin, from our globe, how
have statesmen schemed and sages pondered and patriots
toiled and martyrs bled. The wail of Need and the shout
of Hope have seemed to unite in that word. Reform. But
obvious and unquestionable as may have appeared the
necessity for reform in our neighbors, it has been hard to
convince ourselves that Reform needed to make its knock-
ing heard at our own door. The man with the beam dark-
ening his own eye has officiously been seeking to remove
from his neighbor's eye the mote, as our Lord's gentle sar-
casm paints it. Legislators have devised reforms in law,
and socialists have projected vast reforms in the innermost
layers and most sacred bonds of society. A Lycurgus has

bequeathed his iron reforms to Sparta; an Augustus, in
6* E 65

66 lectukUs on baptist history.

our Lord's own time, has inaugurated what seemed his
golden reforms in the vast imperial domains of Rome.
But how limited was the scope and how superficial the im-
pression made by reforms that have come from the ruling
classes down upon the subject masses of the population.
In Jewish history, how soon after a Joshua had been laid
in the tomb or an Elijah had been caught up into the
clouds of heaven have the old evils recurred, and the vows
of grandsires been forgotten in the revels of their grand-
children.

To make that word reform potent, the great Father and
Ruler on high has seen it necessary to show^ behind it the
shadow of a more portentous word, Revolution. When
saintly seers could not divorce the Hebrew people from
their unworthy craving for the idols of the Gentiles, God
called in those heathen whose foul deities these his own
people had coveted, to be the inaugurators of a revolution
that taught the ingrate tribes, in captivit3\ impoverish-
ment, and oppression, the infatuation of their choice and
how ruinous the exchange had proved. And so, in mod-
ern times, when a nation would not otherwise learn or
practice reform, God has let loose upon them the interior
forces of class hatred, or, from beyond the national boimd-
aries, the greed and ravin of some powerful invaders.
And in British liistory some of the greatest and most
successful of statesmen have been those who heard in
season the tramp of a coming revolution ; and averted it
by such change of measures as calmed discontent, ap-
peased the strife of parties, and inaugurated a partial or
a widespread amendment. In the days of the later

BAPTISM AND KEUENEflATION. 67

Stuarts the people of Cornwall, a stalwart race, then
known to be hardy and fearless both as miners and as
wreckers, heard that the chief of one of their own noble
families — a Trelawney — was in danger, at London, of
losing not only his freedom, but his head. They organ-
ized their masses, and the county resounded with the
rude refrain —

"And shall Trelawney die? and shall Trelawney die?
Then thirty thousand Cornish boys will know the reason why."

And these omens of a revolution that might burst forth
were among the influences, as w\as thought at the time,
that aided to obtain for Trelawney and his fellow-prison-
ers their speedy discharge by jury and judge. In our
own days the Reform Bill, as it was called, establishing a
more general representation in Parliament, and the Cath-
olic Emancipation Bill for Ireland, were both regarded as
necessities, quenching by timely concessions widespread
discontents, that might else have flamed out into revolu-
tionary excesses. In our own national history it was to
methods of this high and extraordinary class that our
fathers resorted when they severed the ties of colonial
dependence on the mother-country. When France, with
vast masses of wrong to be redressed and wild hopes of
amendment and enfranchisement proclaimed, but under-
standing not man and fearing not God, rushed into her
great Revolution, whatever the evils that she corrected and
the wrongs that she avenged, yet how much, too, she suf-
fered and how vainly, and what ravages she blindly com-
mitted at home and abroad. After empire and monarchy

bo LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

and republic, each twice tried and twice renounced with
fickle restlessness, how difficult is it even yet for jurist or
for philanthropist, for ruler or for voter, to determine
where and when and how the reform may be made gen-
uine, thorough, and permanent, and thus revolution be
effectually stayed. The communist and the absolutist
each would have his methods adopted; but, like the squir-
rel shut in its ever-revolving wheel, after all the din and
the whirl of the varied experiments the bars remain, and
the citizen often feels himself cooped up at the last revolv-
ing, neither free nor safe nor content.

For great as is Reform and dread as is Revolution, a
third word was launched on the world centuries ago, yet
greater in significance and surely and only blessed in
its workings. That word is the utterance of the Christ
whose it was to set up the kingdom of God in the world.
It is Regeneration ; it contains in itself the pledge of a
reform that shall be thorough and enduring. It is the
first stir of an avalanche-revolution that shall travel with
augmented might and with ever-growing massiveness
adown all the centuries, and on for the obedient beyond
the judgment-day into the far and blessed eternities, and
for the disobedient into exile boundless and hopeless.
The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. It is
within you, its seat in the renewed heart, its aims lifted
heavenward, and taking its hold on the brother's heart of
the Incarnate Christ and on the throne of the Everlasting
and Omnipotent Father.

Ye must be "born again" was his, the King's, exposi-
tion of the first principles of his rule to the startled and

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION. 69

perplexed Nicodemus. By an agency invisible as the air,
but, though untraceable in its origin and its issues to the
bodily eye, felt and heard in the oracles it uttered and in
the new principles and feelings it infused ; by the Spirit,
omniscient and unerring and omnipotent as on the dawn
when it wrought out the present creation of our globe, —
were men now to be made over again. It was to the re-
proach of this earthly doctor in the Sanhedrim, receiving
and arrogating the honors of a master in Israel, that he
did not lay to heart the old lesson which had been recited
afresh in his ears and passed anew over his own lips every
time that in synagogue or in closet he had read, had lis-
tened to, or had uttered the prayer of the Psalmist king,
" Create in me, God, a new heart, and renew a right
spirit within me."

Let men philosophize and refine as they will about the
processes, there was the principle recognized wherever a
holy man of either one of the earlier dispensations, patri-
archal or Levitical, had walked with God. Such unison
and accord could not be until the human spirit worship-
ping and the Divine and Worshipped One were brought
into one mind. He who shed his creative energies to
brood over chaos when Eden was framed, presided yet
over the outbreaking and upbuilding of his own renewed
image in the lapsed and chaotic soul of man. God in his
providential kingdom had ruled over all precedent ages
of darkness in the world's annals. Now he was to set up
more manifestly his own empire, brushing aside earth's
particolored and shattered dominions, and smelting down
into true purity and unity a church that should gather

70 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

the many-tongued Gentiles and rule all the far future of
the world's history. Reform of the grandest, for it went
into the roots of the character ; revolution of the widest,
for it altered the man's relations, not merely to his fel-
lows, but to his old tempter and despot, Satan, and to-
ward the true and recovered Father on high — a reform
that accomplished changes which the ethics of earthly
moralists and the speculations of Eastern and Western
sages were alike incapable of projecting, much less in-
competent to achieve — a revolution that should ulti-
mately beat earth's swords into ploughshares and make
the Britons, once the stupid slaves over whose incapacity
as household helpers and whose cheapness in the market
a Roman orator could with serene scorn dilate, the heirs
of a civilization beside which the vaunted Latin valor and
the Greek wisdom and the old lore of the far Orient were
to look poor. Such reform and such revolution was the
Nazarene to make the grand hope of the race in the re-
generation which he proclaimed to be his indispensable
requisition for the citizens of his new empire, but the
bcstowment of which he made free to all who honestly
asked it. If earthly parent gave good gift to his child,
though the parental hand outstretching the gift were
soiled with grime or were red with slaughter; if men,
being evil, yet retained sufficient tenderness to give good
gifts to their children, — much more would the Father on
high, only and evermore good, give the Holy Spirit with-
out mistake and without counterfeit to all men who asked
it of him.
The evangelist John is, wo believe, now very generally

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION. 71

recognized as writing to fill up the voids left in the three
earlier Gospels by a fuller recital of our Lord's teachings.
In the first sentences of this apostle's Gospel we are told
how the Light making its entrance into the world was yet
disowned and refused, in his incarnate manifestation, by the
race who were his own handiwork, and by the Jewish peo-
ple, who were the chosen depositories of his prophetic or-
acles and his regal pedigree and his world-wide title-deeds.
" He came unto his own, and his own received him not."
But when the chief builders thus disallowed and rejected
the chief Corner-stone of the spiritual fabric which Heaven
was to rear as the final fane for earth's worshippers and
the crowning dome of all human aspirations, this very
refusal by the human builders was the seal of predestined
identification on the part of the Divine Architect. By
every page of prophecy, every offering, every prayer, that
had gone up, were the nation and their ritual and religion
all ''his own." "His own received him not." Aaron's
line would not veil mitre in his honor ; Herod's mongrel
progeny had no purpose to grant this peasant from Naz-
areth an inch on the lowermost steps of the throne which
they had usurped from David's true descendants ; hoary
scribes muttered, with Isaiah's warning placed as under
their gray eyebrows, " We hide our faces from him ; we
esteem him not," and thought themselves, forsooth, thus
defeating the very Emmanuel whom they were thus
according the very reception which their own Isaiah had
foreseen for him. " Come unto his own. Of his own not
received." The evangelist goes on to add, with a divine
equanimity, " but as many as received him to them gave

72 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

he power to become the sons of God, even to them that
believe on his name." As Christ at quitting the world
said virtually, belief is salvation, unbelief is perdition,
so has John declared, that the hinge of regeneration, the
seal of sonship to a new adoption b}^ God the Father, is
belief or faith in Christ. "To them that believe on his
name, which were born not of blood nor of the will of the
flesh nor of the will of man, but of God."

The Holy Ghost is the author of the new birth. Faith
in the name of the Divine and Atoning Son as the channel
of the regeneration; and a common heirship this side the
grave and beyond the grave in the household of faith
with the other children of divine grace, and hereafter
among the sharers of the celestial glory, as the prospect
set before those renewed in nature and born to a higher
and better and purer life, — such is John's statement of
regeneration.

Until the great work of his passion was consummated,
and the final culminant miracle of his resurrection and
his ascension was superadded as the counterpoise and the
enhancement of Christ's humiliation to death, it was not,
in the harmonious order of the divine economy, as yet
fitting that the Holy Ghost should be given in the full
measure of his influence. After its outgushing in Pente-
cost, the apostles were prepared for carrying their world-
wide testimony to all people. The Saviour had himself
honored in the centurion and in the Syro-phoenician
woman and in the Samaritan a faith that as from Gentile
homes was stretching out its hands to the Hebrew
Messiah, who was also to show himself the Desire of

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION. 73

all nations and the Light of the entire world. The book
called the Acts of the Apostles seems to some a disordered
and fragmentary treatise; but it appears to lis framed
with a divine symmetry. It begins at Jerusalem with a
Hebrew apostate. It wheels around to Antioch, a centre
of Greek cultivation, where the disciples were first called
Christians, and where the question is raised. Should
Jewish proselytism be required to membership from Gen-
tile converts in the new kingdom universal and eternal ?
From Jerusalem inspired apostles attest and sanction as
right the course of Paul. The Gentile believer need not
enter Christian privileges through Jewish portals. Then
that great apostle of the Gentiles is dropped at the con-
clusion of the history in Rome, the pagan heart of that
great Gentile civilization, there to deliver before Csesar
and his motley household, and his many-tongued
garrison, and the polyglot traders and courtiers and visit-
ors of that metropolis, a faith that demands the credence
and the homage, and that propounds the salvation, of all
people under the whole heavens.

Citizenship in Christ's empire begins with regeneration.
Faith in him is the very first outgush of the new-found
spiritual life. The new heirs of Jehovah are born into
the household of faith with brotherhood to the Man of
Nazareth on their birth registers. True religion is not a
matter of heritage. God's new progeny are not such
by virtue " of blood," be it that of Abraham or that of
Caesar or that of Japheth. It is not " of the will of the
flesh, nor of the will of man." Carnal parentage cannot
secure it, nor can pastor or apostle, saintly man though he
7

74 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

be, assure it to his most cherished and kindly pupils.
The divine power stamps the images, the divine grace
widens the invitation. All may ask from the bounty that
is of Heaven's bestowing; none may presume from the
nationalities and the kinships, the objects of man's con-
fident reckoning.

We said of the three great words, reform, revolution,
and regeneration, Christ's was the greatest. The Jew had
been warned by our Lord's harbinger that the axe was
uplifted in vengeance; and, unless there was reform, there
would come revolution. The mass of the nation were
heedless of the warning and reckless of the impending
retribution. Caiaphas had said that unless Christ were
taken out of the way, the Roman would soon strip them
of home and nationality. In the quick rush of the divine
arbitrament on this great quarrel, and as against this sin-
ning people, the Roman came, soon after they had taken
off their Christ, to take from them fane and priesthood,
city and home, and the independence and unity of the
national life. Refusing reform, they incurred revolution.
In how tremendous a shape the last came, as the alterna-
tive of a proffered but a spurned regeneration, the pages
of Hebrew and Roman writers tell. Twelve thousand
Jewish captives labored to build that massive Coliseum
begun by the father, Vespasian, and completed by the son,
Titus, under whose valor Judea incurred her largest and
worst captivity. That Coliseum, in its ruins, stands to
our own times, so vast and strong, though plundered of
its materials and layers of stone, that pilgrims had learned
to say long since,

BAPTISM AND REGENEEATION. 75

" While stands the Coliseum, Kome shall stand ;
"When falls the Coliseum, Eome shall fall ;
And when Rome falls — the world."

But Rome has yet another great monument commem-
orative that Christ— however improbable, at the time of
its utterance, his warning seemed — spoke as One having
authority over times and empires, over civiHzations and
barbarisms, classic, mediaeval, and contemporaneous.
The Arch of Titus, reared in honor of the waster of the
temple and the subjugator of Judea, has been, at the
hands of one of our own denominational worthies, Robert
Haldane, in his treatise on the Evidences of Christianity,
discussed with singular force as one of the monuments
of the truth of the gospel. We allude to it now only in
another light. The Great Teacher, who announced regen-
eration as the condition of life, and ruin as the dread,
inevitable alternative for the rejection of it, hired no
sculptor and enlisted no soldiers, and with not a roof to
shelter his head had seemingly little reason to expect that
art and history and architecture should give bond "in
marble and enduring stone " as to the verity and gravity
of his solemn admonitions. Yet when on the moulder-
ing tablets of that arch the traveller sees depicted the
spoils of the temple, how strangely does it seem ap-
pointed that the chisel of the heathen who reared the
emblems of Hebrew rite kept no trace of altar where bul-
locks bled or other altar where incense smoked; but he
framed the golden seven-branched candlestick and the
table of shew-bread and the two silver trumpets of jubilee
and passover. In the candelabrum seems preserved by

76 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

credible and authentic tradition the image of that which
Moses framed for the tabernacle, and that which Solo-
mon and Nehemiah and Herod renewed for the temple.
When Judaism of the past gave place to the novel ordi-
nances of this new Messiah and his new kingdom, did
not architect and sculptor " build more wisely than they
knew " when they fixed before the eyes of long-succeeding
generations of pilgrims, that were to gaze upon the blurred
outlines after traversing the wide Atlantic and coming
from homes on the edge of the far Pacific, such emblems,
that befitted not so much the old but rather the grander
dispensation that abolished the temple ? He proclaimed
himself "the Light of the world," and his apostle John
saw in the seven lamps of the Apocalypse the Spirit of
God in his sevenfold energies, as the power, to all after
ages, replacing and representing Christ. The Christ pro-
claimed himself the Bread of heaven, and the faith that
fed on his flesh spiritually had life for evermore ; and the
enginery to which he committed the overthrow of an im-
penitent Judaism and an imbruted Paganism, the subver-
sion of the old fetiches of Europe and of Asia and of
Africa and of America, the contradiction and the refraga-
tion of all the philosophers and all the sciences, falsely
so called, that would dispute and contradict him. His
device was the trumpet of preaching. For the past, it
announced the resurrection, and the jubilee of a finished
redemption; for the future, it blows steadily the louder
blast of a second resurrection and a universal judgment
and a final and irreversible retribution.
The very trophies of stone that heathen conquerors

BAPTISM AND KEGENERATION. 77

reared in their triumphs over Christ's Jewish compatriot
slayers unconsciously, but most impressively, typified that
if a Levitical dispensation had gone to wreck, a Christian
dispensation had followed, . an antitype outshining its
ancient typical lights, renewing and surpassing its conse-
crated food, and publishing a most welcome jubilee; but
if it were unheeded, then behind it the advent of the
world's doomsday in the general resurrection. On the
Mount of Olives had he wept over a city knowing not the
time of her visitation and senselessly careless to her prof-
fered redemption. As from the figures that tell of the
dire victories of the grim legions of Titus there comes
forth to the Christian's brooding eye the light and table
and trumpet, the memory of him who gathers to his ban-
quet of the regenerate of all people, the rays of whose
mercy stream over all coasts and all kindreds, the light
of all earth's hidings and mysteries, and out of whose
gospel, heed it or scorn it as we may, blows steadily the
peal to make us a new heart and a right way ; or failing
this, to abide as best we may the unalterable ruin of
those who would brand falsehood on the Incarnate Truth,
and who scoffed at the world's Judge when they might
have had in him the world's Eedeemer and Regenerator.
The figure, veiled and sad, of Judsea the captive, on the
Roman coin minted when Titus conquered Palestine,
seems the image of a remorse that had wasted opportu-
nity, and of a despair that had cancelled grace.

Now, what are the relations of this great truth, the new
birth of regeneration, the only true gate for admission
into the church and kingdom of the Christ, and of that
7*

78 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTOEY.

ordinance which, in the general judgment of all Chris-
tians, stands as the first symbol, on the convert's part, of
his accession to the ranks of the militant church, and as
the humble avowal of his hope, through the merits of his
great Captain, to share one day the joys of the triumphal
Church on high, the general assembly and church of the
first-born ?

As to its mode, we suppose that the form of the original
word, its classic use in heathenism, and the connections
in which that term is employed by the inspired evangel-
ists and apostles, lead alike to the inference that it was to
betoken a great moral wrench in the penitent's life, break-
ing him away from old associations and habits, and land-
ing him, as by an irrecoverable consecration, under the
command of a new Master, and set apart to the toils and
sacrifices of a new and blessed conquest. The Lord,
whose voice he had heard, and the Spirit, whose touch
he had experienced, called him to remember that the
Lord God, the Emmanuel, had said, " Behold, I make all
things new." He, the loyal follower, bade deliberate fare-
well, not only to the hostile, but to the indifferent ; not
merely to the open scoffer, but to the waverer halting be-
tween two opinions. As for him, he was the cross-bearing
recruit, who had accepted earnest-money and livery from a
cross-bearing Leader. Bought with the Redeemer's own
blood, he accepted the purchase-price, confessing himself
no longer his own, but ransomed as with the precious
blood of that sacrificed and atoning Victim.

In the language of Paul, he was buried as into the
grave of Christ, and he emerged as if to share in the rising

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION. 79

again of him who in his own rent tomb had proclaimed
and legitimated his claims to be the Kesurrection and the
Life. His soul's hope was not extinction with a crushed
Victim, but the new life of a spirit planted as in the like-
ness of that exultant and invincible Conqueror who had
said to death, " I will be thy destruction," and who had
thus defied the ancient destroyer, not for himself only, but
for the vast host of his regenerate and elect followers, and
also for his enemies as well, whom death was not to hide
from the just recompense of their impenitent and ingrate
rejection of his appeals, his sympathies, and his media-
tion. Judge of quick and dead, the humblest disciple
might look to share one day in the high prerogative of
those who, as Paul pithily says, are to judge the world,
assessors at the doomsday of this the Great Dispenser of
man's endless condition and recompense. He was a scion
grafted into the stem of Christ's life, and a fellow-heir
made participant in the glories of the Elder Brother's
royalties.

Now, many of the forms and rites of earthly orders
have a touching significance, which the later generation
who come after the founders might too easily forget.
When, in the old chivalry, a young knight received his
spurs, he put his clasped hands between the joined hands
of his baron who conferred the distinction, and professed
himself "the man," the vassal, in all honor, of this his
feudal lord. Whilst his palms thus met betwixt the
clasping palms of his elder those fingers could not grasp
sword or spear; he was defenceless in the control and
keeping of his superior. So the believer, participant of a

80 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

new and recovered life, has consecrated himself to Christ
as the Lord's liege follower. If that better Captain, in-
stead of hands meekly joined, ask a surrender as of arm
and head and breast and feet, in the entirety of consecra-
tioQ to the loving Deliverer who, by cross and grave and
sealed tombstone, redeemed him, is it a servile act that the
convert should evade ? On the contrary, it is his joy to
proclaim that he has foresworn his old and degrading en-
slavement to self and the world and Satan. The Lord's
full freedman he would be in everj^ member of his bodily
frame and in every faculty of the inhabiting soul — sur-
rendered to the providence and Scripture and Spirit of
this enfranchising Brother. The Greek communion, in-
heriting the language of the New Testament, has for
eighteen centuries put upon the term one meaning. The
Latin communion for nigh twelve centuries used ordi-
narily immersion as its method. Bossuet, one of the
highest authorities in the Romish Church, allows its an-
cient and general prevalence. Campion the Jesuit, ex-
ecuted in England on account of treason in the days of
Elizabeth (1581), regarded by his own order as a martyr
and proposed for canonization, had been in Ireland, and
wrote an account of the Irish as he had seen them. He
represents them as leaving in baptism the right arm of
the boy-babe unbaptized, to allow its giving a more cruel
stroke, and a more deadly, when the boy should be a grown
man, whilst the rest of his body was covered with the
baptismal waters. Elizabeth herself is said in her infancy
to have received baptism by immersion. In the life of
Cardinal Ximenes, the great statesman of Spain, who did

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION. 81

SO much in the days of that monarchy's greatness to ag-
grandize his sovereign and to compel the exile or the con-
version of the Moor and the Jew, is said by one of his old
biographers to have been obliged, in consequence of the
number of his reluctant neophytes who to shun exile ac-
cepted Christianity, to omit the old and established usage
of immersion, and to have substituted affusion or asper-
sion. With three thousand Moors in one day, or four
thousand as some state it, to receive the ordinance, it be-
came easier for the cardinal by a new mode of baptism to
gather in his compulsory neophytes.

So, when an apostle, speaking of the deluge, declares
that a like figure thereto, even baptism, doth now save
us — baptism, not the putting away of the filth of the
flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God —
does not he imply that the burial as of a flood was the
natural form of baptism? And how does it enhance the
honors of Christ's law when it is seen thus, not only to
recall the crowning mercy of his subjugation of himself
to the temporary bondage of the grave, but to receive the
yet more ancient wonders of his mercy, when in the days
of the deluge his care rode the entombing waters, and
mercy rejoiced against judgment, and the ark, built by
the prevision of the Sender of the deluge, saved his own
elect from the general ruin, and over the ruins of an old
effete, sin-scarred, and death-branded civilization made to
ride the seed of a new economy and the ancestry of a
freshly-peopled world, who, thus scourged and thus
schooled, might be expected to learn wisdom and dread
fresh relapses into sin.

P

82 l^ECrURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY..

In these, it has its connections with the dispensation that
Christ opened by his gospel, and with the dispensation
that Noah had centuries before reopened in quitting the
ark and pressing his feet on Ararat. Baptism has, we say,
very solemn intimations. The Great Architect who pre-
scribed the keel that was to float the few saved from the
deluge ; and the Great Deliverer who foresaw as from the
edge of the crib at Bethlehem the cross where he was
himself to hang, drawing all men unto him, — set up a rite
in its retrospects, alike of the recent Calvary and of the
remoter Ararat, which should speak of the new King's
investiture of his soldiers with their livery, their badge,
and their letters of registration, by something impressive
and august. And we read in the ordinance as the Sover-
eign Saviour bequeathed it, in the yielding waters that
bury and then restore the loyal disciple, the cenotaph of our
great Leader, the persistent tomb perpetually erected by
which lie would have his death set forth to the end of the
world, and his exulting triumph over death and his
jubilant entrance into Paradise as well. And if it would
be thought temerity for a follower of Michel Angelo or of
Christopher Wren to pull down the tomb of either of
these great architects on the plea of substituting a better,
is it less temerity to innovate on the design in the gate of
his own church, reared by the Great Architect? Bury us
into the tomb he occupied. Plant us into the new-emerg-
ing life that he there displayed; nor think it shame to
stand loyally by the ways that he has opened, and tbat
none in all the world may better.

But who are the rightful recipients of this ordinance ?

BAPTISM AXD REGENERATION. 83

In the case of John, his harbinger, we find that he did
not regard mere descent from Abraham as entitling men
to pass to his ordinance. They were to be penitent, and
to have the tree good, if they would have the fruit good ;
else, a generation of vipers, they were banned from the
privileges of the kingdom which he announced. Was
Christ's a new baptism ? In larger privileges and clearer
views of the truth, it might be. But we have no traces in
Scripture that the apostles who had received John's bap-
tism were required to accept a new rite in joining them-
selves to the Prince as they quitted the herald of that
Prince. And when John the Evangelist declares the son-
ship given to Christ's true people to be not after the will
of the flesh nor the will of man, but to be for those who
believe in the name of Christ, it seems a simple and inev-
itable inference that regeneration belongs, only in the
way of faith upon Christ, to the souls who personally see,
know, and welcome Christ.

Now, to put the ordinary expression of regeneration out-
wardly before the actual and internal experience of such
regeneration in the enlightened, discipled, penitent, and re-
newed follower of Christ, seems a most dangerous assump-
tion of power in the church, and also a most rash ascription
of intrinsic and magical efficacy to the outer emblem.

The churches early, but most unrightfully, learned to
annex not only the remission of sins to the ordinance, but
the regeneration itself — to attach pardon from Christ and
new life from the Holy Ghost as sequents to an external
rite. Priestly hands and church lavers were thus em^
ployed, by an assumption that not one page of Scripture

84 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTOKY.

warrants, to usurp the prerogatives of God the adopting
Father, and Christ the mediating Brother, and the Para-
clete, the renewing and illumining Teacher.

Some were induced, like Constantine and like Theodo-
sius, long after becoming in conscience and judgment con-
vinced of the truth of the gospel, to delay submission to
the rite from the fancy that by deferring to a late day
their baptism they should thus ensure the cancelment
and the remission of all sins that had been before com-
mitted ; whereas they had learned to think sins wrought
after baptism especially likely to miss pardon and to
ensure hell. Thus they had been taught to look away
from the Atoner and the Regenerator to the rite, and the
sacerdotal hands and the consecrated walls connected with
the administration of the rite.

Others, believing again that the infant dying without
baptism was beyond the reach of regeneration and re-,
pelled hopelessly and evermore from the precincts of Par-
adise, urged the speedy bestowal of the rite upon helpless,
untaught, wailing, and protesting infancy. And a council,
which Hefele declares it probable to have issued such a
canon (a. d. 418) in the beginning of the fifth century,
pronounced its anathema on all holding that children
dying unbaptized might possibly be saved, and might, if
missing Paradise, reach at least some intermediate region
of peace and painlessness. This sixteenth synod of Car-
thage pronounced the kingdom of heaven and life ever-
lasting beyond the reach of the little child dying so
without church rit^s.

The anger of church and church-rulers, in the Middlr

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION. 85

Ages, was especially enkindled against all who, reading
their Bibles, held that the rites of the church were due
only to the willing, the believing, and the regenerate, and
that the eternal interests of the little child, be it of hea-
then or of Christian parents, dying in its age of helpless-
ness, were very safe in the keeping of him who could do
no wrong. The bitter and the murderous rage of perse-
cution flamed against those who held thus to the salvation
of infants, entirely apart from the church ordinances of
which they were as yet incapable. Augustine himself
who had wavered as to the spiritual prospects of such
babes early dying, was silent after the voice of the council.
Jansenism itself, so noble and glorious a memory in its
defence of the great doctrines of grace, has yet its sad
record in this very matter. The great volume that Jan-
senius prepared on the doctrines of Augustine, and whose
posthumous appearance awakened so memorable and pro-
tracted a conflict, the effects of which are not yet spent,
has attached to it, in some of its editions, the treatise of,
an Irish ecclesiastic, a fellow-student of the great founder
of the Jansenist school, and who afterward became an
archbishop of Tuam, Florence Coury. Its theme is, " The
State of the Little Children who die Unbaptized ;" their
outlook in the world beyond. In monastic establishments
the middle meal of the day was often accompanied with
some religious reading, one of the brotherhood reading
aloud whilst his brothers were at the board. St. Beuve,
the last accomplished historian of Port Royal, speaks of
this treatise with its gloomy forebodings as to the despair
awaiting all children who die unbaptized, whether in

S6 LECTURES OX BAPTIST HISTORY.

Christian or heathen lands, as being made, in the early
days of the Jansenist movement, the reading of monastic
schools in Belgium, where, while partaking of their noon-
day repast, the youthful theologians were invited to muse
as they ate on these sad dwelling-places of exile return-
less and of despair unappeasable, that, according to their
false views of baptismal regeneration, awaited so many
hapless myriads. All pagan infants so dying, it is held,
go beyond the range of hope.

Now, the pontiff awarded to Henry VIII. of England —
though he and his successors in wearing the tiara had- bit-
ter occasion to regret the bestowal — the title of Defender
of the Faith. Ghastly and ludicrous seemed often its as-
sociations when contrasted with the character, morally, of
some of the royal wearers. Especially baleful and deplor-
able must it have seemed to a devout Romanist when this
same Henry, defending the faith, hounded to the death
zealous Romanist champions, like Bishop Fisher and his
own accomplished chancellor, Sir Thomas More; more
sad even to a devout thinker of Protestant sympathies
must it have seemed when flaunted by a Charles II. in his
harem, or a James II. in the butcheries that he required of
a Jeff'reys against his innocent Protestant subjects.

Earlier than its permanent bestowal on Henry VIII.,
that title, " Defender of the Faith," had been occasionally
bestowed on individuals of the Lancastrian royal house
who had brought into use against Wycliffe and the Lol-
lards the terrible writ for the burning of heretics. He
who had rebuked his own apostles, when they would have
called down fire on the village not receiving him, with the

BAPTISM AND EEGENERATION. 87

calm reproof that these over-zealous disciples knew not
the spirit which they breathed when thus avenging in-
juries to him who came not to destroy men's lives, but to
save them, — he gave no such patterns as to the mode of
guarding his own truth and saving faith.

And whatever claim, regal or pontifical, rulers have arro-
gated, to confer or wear the distinction of being truly and
heartily the defenders of the faith, we doubt not that the
verdict of honest history and the sentence of tlie eternal
judgment will be, that the epithet belongs rightfully and
loyally to those who, standing on the ancient ways, have
refused the innovations, and resisted meekly and fearlessly
the usurpations, that would entrench on the laws Christ
left for his own churches.

To preserve the honor of his cause it is needed that the
confessors who call none other than him their Master
should jealously guard the integrity and the spirituality
of the churches of the twice-born, the regenerate. While
asserting, that the infant should be shielded with all ten-
derness, and taught early and faithfully the gospel as
Christ gave it, how many of our fellow-confessors have
resolutely held that only those taught of the Spirit and
regenerate had right to the ordinance of Christ's house.
They have also taught with resolute simplicity that the
souls of those dying in early childhood — so large a por-
tion as they formed of the trophies of Death from our
race — died as safely without church ordinances as if they
had been admitted to them, unconscious of their meaning.
They have held that to expect, for the unconverted and
unholy, remission of sins and a true regeneration from

88 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

outer ordinances and priestly manipulations, was to cheat
the soul thus misguided, and to degrade the ordinances
thus misapplied. They have dared to ask that those
bearing the vessels of the Lord, the Holy One, should be
holy ; to assert that none, unless born again, had right to
stand in Christian membership.

But for just these professions of hope and confessions
of doctrine they have been put under ban, harried,
exiled, proscribed, and incarcerated. Some have been
drowned ; others flung to vermin in foul and untended
dungeons; others burned alive; others buried, like the
Belgian sister of our own faith, Anna van den Hove, who,
as the sixteenth century was going out, was attended by
Jesuits as the grave was gradually filled over her, and
urged to recant that she might have life spared her.
When she persisted in her meek confession and then and
there refused the apostasy, was not hers a defence of the
faith which many a learned apologist can never hope to
rival? And in the great day of rising and of awarding,
they who thus avouched the truth, and scorned to accept
deliverance at the cost of renouncing and surrendering
that apostolic verity, will shine when he, the Christ, shall
lead the full and final regeneration of his people.

A new Pentecost, bringing the churches to a higher con-
secration and putting the Christ in his rightful supremacy
over conscience and creed and character, is the hope of the
world for abiding reform ; for peaceful and general revolu-
tions, that shall enfranchise, exalt, and unite the nations ;
for a regeneration such as God waits to bestow, and which
man should habitually and reverently implore.

IV.

THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST

AND MADE BY MAS".

«

THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST

AND MADE BY MAN.

It may to some have seemed that church histor}^ begins
where the Bible ends ; that it is more properly the annals
of the people of God after the Master in his bodily pres-
ence had quitted them, and after the Holy Spirit had pro-
nounced the last sentences of the New Testament with a
solemn ban upon the rash adventurousness that should
either on the one hand mutilate the record, or on the other
hand assume to amplify and supplement that Revelation.
But if the church be, in truth, a kingdom whose Divine
Founder and Ruler is still in his omnipresence at what-
ever spot, in whatever land, and in whatever century,
but two or three of his meanest disciples gather in his
name ; if his Scripture be her unamendable, unimpeach-
able law, and his Spirit her perpetual and indispensable
life, — then no safe history of her can be outlined with-
out hearing first his own claims and tracking his earthly
career, or without pondering the traits and laws of the
first churches in the first Christian century as the New
Testament paints them. Go to the Christian Fathers as
dissevered from the inspired evangelists and apostles;
turn over the voluminous and dreary records of the so-

91

92 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.

called councils, and the inquirer is floundering as in a
pathless forest, where trees obstruct on every side the
vision and show no pathway — a very Dismal Swamp,
where the foot sinks and the miasma ascends and the
snake lurks. In the fight between the adherents of Absa-
lom and the loyal soldiers of his father it is said, that
"the wood devoured that day more people than the sword
devoured." Church history, severed from the New Testa-
ment and from the Christ whom that Testament presents,
is such mere morass and pestilent jungle, alike perplex-
ing and destructive, where a man learns to plunge for-
ward into passive credulity or to start back into sheer
skepticism and despair.

But learn from the book, as Heaven has completed and
sealed it, the character and promises of the great Captain
of our salvation ; find there the hint given of the plans
on which he has inaugurated his campaigns for the con-
quest of the race by the few, the poor, the persecuted, and
proscribed ; see there his precise and emphatic announce-
men