The mould of doctrine : a study of Romans VI. 17 : as a bearing on the meaning and value of the specific form of baptism, as appointed by our Lord

■IS

if

#1

The Mould of Doctrine

A Study OF

LSSE B/niOMAS,]).D.

Jf'o.

J-

^^'^^^^►^iiiw^ir'iPifj^^i*^^^:

£ibrarj(> of t:he theological ^tmxnwy

PRINCETON . NEW JERSEY
PRESENTED BY

Clarence L, Le crone

Bvsi

.T45

1420

1, Penn'a.

■m MOK 18 tHE PROWm »f
^gjyjEHCEL.LECRO«E

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

A STUDY OF

ROMANS VI. 17,

AS BEARING ON THE MEANING AND VALUE OF THE SPECIFIC
FORM OF BAPTISM, AS APPOINTED BY OUR LORD.

JESSE B. THOMAS, D. D.,

Pastor of the Fjrst Baptist Church in Pierrepont St., Brooklyn, N. Y.

PHILADELPHIA :

AMEPJCAN BAPTIST PUBLIC ATIOX SOCIETY,

1420 CHESTNUT STREET.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, by the

AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

RKPEINTKD rSOM THB " EXAMINEK.

CONTENTS,

CHAPTEll I.

The Baptists and the Bible 5

Fidelity or Stubbornness — AYhich? 8 — The
Charge of Ritualism, 12 — The Specific Case
Considered, 13 — The Question of Catholicity,
17— The War About a Word, 21.

CHAPTER II.

Baptism the Mould of Doctrine 23

A Tendency to Guard Against, 24 — What the
'• Mould " Signifies, 27 — How Theories Some-
times Grow, 30 — A Curious Hypothesis, 33 —
Applying the Survival Theory, 34.

CHAPTER III.

Baptism, the Resurrection, and Historic Chris-
tianity 40

Things to be Explained, 43 — Baptism and the
Resurrection, 46 — Baptism a Historic Witness,
49.

CHAPTER lY.

Baptism and the New Birth. — Modern Theories 57
The First Great Question, Does Baptism Re-
generate ? 57 — The Second Great Question,
Does Baptism Symbolize Regeneration ? 69.

CHAPTER V.

Baptism and the New Birth. — The Apostolic

Idea 73

Analogy of Roman to Jewish Beliefs, 76 — Paul
Against these Beliefs, 78 — The Central Truth
of Christianity, 82 — Baptism Not a Purifica-
tion, 85.

3

4 CONTENTS.

CHAPTER YI.

Baptism axd the New Birth — Perversions and

TIIKIR SouRc?:s 90

The Symbolism of the Ordinances, 91 — What
Does Infant Baptism Mean ? 94 — llow Sprink-
ling is Defended, 98 — An Enormous (Contradic-
tion, 101 — How Infant Baptism Arose, 104.

CHAPTER VII.

Baptism and the New Birth — Results of Per-

VERSI.^N 101

Unitarianism and its Orisrin, 113 — Luther's
Great Inconsistency, 115 — Spiritual Baptism
and the New Birth, 119 — Evolution Fallacies
Anticipated, 122.

CHAPTER VIII.

Baptism and Loyalty — The Historic Idea 127

Luther's Prophecy Historically Realized, 132 —
Freedom, Civil and Intellectual, Demanded, 135
— The Anabaptists and this Demand, 139 — Re-
formers of the Reformation, 14].

CHAPTER IX.

Baptism and Loyalty — Debasing the Standards 147
A Remnant of Rome, 151-— First, The Revision
of Formularies, 153 — Second, The Warping of
Interpretation, 158 — Some Illustrative In-
stances, 160.

CHAPTER X

Baptism and Loyalty — The Ultimate Issue 168

First, The Parable of the Disobedient Son,
171 — Second, The Parable of the Rebellious
Tenants, 175— Third, The Parable of the Con-
temptuAis Servants, 176 — Baptism the Test of
Loyaltv, 181 — A Linguistic Agnosticism, 182
—The Witnessing Word. 188.

The Mould of Doctrine.

CHAPTER I.

THE BAPTISTS AND THE BIBLE.

IN the Autobiography of Dr. Lyman Beeclier
(vol. ii., p. 87), in a letter addressed by him
to his son Edward, then preparing for the Con-
gregational ministry, occurs this curious passage:
*^ There is only one thing which you will have
to watch and pray against; that is the morbid
sensibility of what may be termed a nervous
conscience; by which I mean a conscience made
preternaturally sensitive and fearful. This I
have reason to believe has w^orried many a
man till he became a Baptist through excess of
conscience." So wholesome a recoil did this
paternal caution produce from "excess of con-
science," that not only did the young student
abandon his growing Baptist predilections, but
no one of Dr. Beecher's household has ever
siuce been driven thus by conscience into the
Baptist ranks.

The notion here insinuated, that Baptist con-

6 THE MOULD OF DOCTlilJSE.

scientiousness is at bottom only scrupulosity,
highly flavored with obstinacy, is not unusual,
and perhaps under all the circumstances not un-
natural, in the casual observer. The skillful
partisan knows how to seize an apt point of cir-
cumstance, to present an imposing front by mar-
shalling his meagre facts into a battle-line long
though thin, and so to win by impression rather
than by measuring weapons. In the court of
prejudice the brilliancy of the indictment is
accepted as conclusive of the facts, and judicial
inquiry is dispensed with.

Such an opportunity has been afforded, and
abundantly improved, in the recent dealings
between the Baptists and the American Bible
Society. Consider how formidable a case may
be made by the bare statement of a few facts,
with plausible inferences therefrom, viz. :

1. The real question at issue is the translation
of a single word, and that in a single sense —
the Bible Society being willing to translate the
Greek word by a "generic" term, or to transfer
it untranslated. — Did ever "jot and tittle'^ breed
60 great a controversy before?

2. Because the Society will not concede this
point, the Baptists alone of all the co-operating
denominations withdraw. — What a wanton
breach of the "Unity of Christendom," because

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 7

an unsectarian Society will not violate its organic
and fundamental principle !

About these two main positions now deploy
a skirmish line of supplementary suggestions,
such as:

3. The Baptists cling tenaciously to immersion
as the only baptism. — How absurd to obstruct
the coming reign of "sweetness and light '^ by
thus superstitiously exalting the " letter '' above
the "spirit" of the ordinance!

4. The Baptists stand almost alone "against
the Western world ^^ in this. — How presump-
tuous in them to condemn the ancient church
by rejecting infant baptism! How arrogant to
reflect upon the present church by their
"close communion'' doctrine!

6. The Baptists, as known in history, have
somehow been pretty uniformly "in the oppo-
sition."— This seems to suggest some inherent
waywardness of temper, or obliquity of doctrine,
tending to the theory that the only way to
"please God" is to be "contrary to all men."

Probably the above counts would be regarded
by the most rancid anti-Baptist as sufficiently
vigorous and comprehensive to present the case
in its strongest features, (and perhaps in his
judgment to close it in the opening.) But patient
examination will often show how a statement

8 THE MOULD OF DOC THINE,

even of undeniable facts may, by an omission, a
misconstruction, or the suggestion of a mis-
leading inference, tend to a conclusion specious,
but utterly false.

Let us begin then with the last of the charges,
which being at that end of the case naturally
carries the sting, is most venomous, and first felt.

FIDELITY OR ST aBBORNNESS — WHICH?

Some recent New England monographs upon
the early Baptists of that realm seem devoted to
the establishment concerning them of Elihu's
thesis against Job, "What man is like Job, who
drinketh up scorning as water? '^ Now if supe-
rior success in getting before magistrates, behind
prison bars, into the pillory, or out of the com-
monwealth, fairly demonstrates a craving for
misery and hate, then some of our forefathers
seem to have had a really cavernous appetite for
that kind of luxury, and no stinted supply. And
by the same rule so did the early martyrs. But
before concluding so uncharitably, in either case,
it is well to consider the reasonableness of their
own explanation ; that the suifering was endured
rather than coveted, as a logical necessity of
fidelity to a doctrine precious above life to them,
but sought to be exterminated by others.

But how can fidelity concerning a mere iso-

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 9

lated rite create any logical necessity in realms
of conduct and controversy so wide and so
distant? Because this necessity is not at once
obvious, its existence has been too often ignored
or denied, and loyalty to principle has been
mocked as stubbornness of self-will.

"It is the singular and distinguished honor of
the Baptists,'' says Herbert Skeats, in his History
of the Free Churches of England ^ " to have repu-
diated, from their earliest history, all coercive
power over the consciences and the actions of
men with reference to religion. No sentence is
to be found in all their writings inconsistent with
those principles of Christian liberty and willing-
hood which are now equally dear to all the free
Congregational Churches of England. They
were the proto-evangelists of the voluntary prin-
cipled' Mr. Skeats adds in a note, that he is
not himself a Baptist. This adds value to his
testimony as impartial, but it suggests also a
further and pertinent thought. One would
suppose that so unique and persistent a coinci-
dence, of peculiar doctrinal tenets and allegiance
to a peculiar principle, would have hinted some
possible causal relation between the two. But
he appears to have no suspicion, even, that the
alliance is more than accidental. In like manner

^ London edition, 1869, p. 24.

10 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

Gervinus, in his Introduction to Uie History of the-
Niiideeiith Cerdury^ writing of the Anabaptists,
couples together their "refusal to baptize infants^'
by State command, and their "return to the fun-
damental maxims of liberty and equality for
■which men were redeemed by Christ," "antici-
pating principles which could only be established
in later times" — but he does not recognize any
mutual dependence of the two ideas. Bogue
and Bennett, in their History of Dissentet^s,^
notice it as a ''singular fact that Baptists have
universally been independents, when in the nature
of things there might have been Episcopal or Pres-
byterian Baptists^' Even within a few months
the New York Independent asked editorially, in
a puzzled way, why the rejection of infant bap-
tism and of sprinkling should so uniformly have
clung together.

Since men act from motives, and motives arise
out of beliefs, it is but just and charitable first
to seek an explanation of conduct in some cog-
ency of conviction; and only when that resource
fails to attribute it to caprice or some baser
motive.

Reverting now to the suggestion that the great
body of Christendom are united against the Bap-

' London, 1866, pp. 29, 30.
» London, 1808, vol. I., p. 142.

TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 11

tists as to their peculiar views, it is enough to cite
in response Bishop Jewell's words in his apology, ^
" Unity is not a sign of truth. There was per-
fect unity among the Israelites when they wor-
shipped the golden calf." " The old Arians called
themselves CatJiolic, and stigmatized the Ortho-
dox as Ambrosians and Athanasians/^ If ma-
jorities alone establish "catholicity/^ then is
Rome really more catholic than Protestantism,
and Paganism more so than all of us together.
If divergence from the majority, either in the
past or the present, seems to savor of presump-
tion or arrogance, it is still the inevitable penalty
of trying to do right. Luther sometimes felt
the seeming rashness of the attitude he and his
comrades had assumed toward "the Pope and
the Doctors, and the whole body of the Church,'^
while, as he quaintly said, "there is not wit
enough among us to cure a spavined horse.''
But he did not flinch, and the Reformation be-
came secure. If an honest effort to improve
upon the decayed or perverted habits of the
community be a reflection upon one's neighbor,
who can measure the arrogance of a man who
buys a new hat before his neighbors are supplied.
"Master, saying this, thou reproachest us also,"

1 Cited in Hunt's History of Religious TJwught in
England (London, 1870), p. 44.

12 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

siiid the lawyer to our Lord, as though such a
consequence must lead him to review or with-
draw his words. But the words stand.

THE CHARGE OF RITUALISM.

Turning the wheel one notch further back,
we come to the third charge against the Baptists
as specified above — ^the familiar charge, (so " fa-
miliar" indeed as to have bred "contempt/')
that they value form above essence, and so be-
come mere ritualists. The freedom of dealing
with the ordinance by others is applauded by
way of contrast, as exalting the "spirit'' above
the "letter." Probably those who follow this
line of suggestion do not see that they are ad-
vocating the entire abolition, and not the modi-
fication, of the external ordinances. Was the
Apostle in contrasting the terms " letter" and
"spirit" contending for literal circumcision on a
reduced scale? Coleridge, criticizing Jeremy
Taylor's discussion in this line, says^ "his only
plausible arguments apply equally to the Pedo-
baptists and the Baptists, and prove the Quakers
right if anybody." But Neander^ tells us that
George Fox, the chief interpreter of the Quak-
ers, went further, and argued the subordination

1 Works (N. Y., 1853), vol., Aids to Re/., p. 336.
^History of Chrislian Dogmas (Bohn, 1858), vol. II.,
p. G33.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 13

of all the "letter" of Scripture to the "inward
light," on the same grounds that the Catholics
subject it to the authority of the " Church," and
Meier and his followers to that of "reason."
Socinus, too, the early herald of Unitarianism,
denieii the permanence of water baptism, re-
garding its early observance a concession to the
carnalism of Jews and heathen. Along this
same drift went Ralph Waldo Emerson, trans-
cendentalizing the Scripture, and breaking finally
from the Unitarians, because he would not par-
ticipate in the superstitious prolongation of a
"mere form" in the Lord^s Supper.

A command to do a particular thing is not
obeyed by doing some other thing, however
similar. And as its issuance implies wisdom
and authority, to attempt to improve upon it is
to assume superior wisdom, and to release from
it is to arrogate superior authority. The Bap-
tists are simply guilty of refusing to do either.

THE SPECIFIC CASE CONSIDERED.

But to consider the more specific case in hand,
as set forth in the second of the above com-
plaints. Baptists, it is alleged, having entered
with others into a "catholic" and " unsectarian "
organization, sought to induce its managers to
violate the original agreement between the par-

14 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE,

ties, and prostitute the institution to a sectarian
end, and failing in this, they have broken up
the unity of American Christians in Bible work.
The managers of the Bible Society in the leading
article of their official paper. The liecoi^d (for
June 15, 1882), which was intended to be a kind
of irenicon to the Baptists, have not been able by
a most courteous and dexterous statement of the
ciise to avoid the virtual renewal of this heavy
cliarge. They say "the Society was formed in
1816 with one specific object," which the mana-
gers have since aimed to carry out " in a manner
entirely free from sectarianism and partisanship."
In illustration of this they add, that the Society
^' has never printed or circulated the Douay Bible
or the Rhemish Testament, or appropriated funds
for this purpose ; " that " it is a principle of the
Society to circulate no versions except those
which are made from the original Greek and
Hebrew, and this rule excludes from its list certain
versicms in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and
Italian, translated from the Vuk/ateJ^

Beferring to the request of the Missionary
Union for funds to publish " two versions of the
Bible whixih have been long in use in Burmah/^
one of them ''well knoum as Dr. Judson's version,
the early editions of tohich had been printed at the
Socieiy^s expeTise/^ the other "Dr. Mason's Karen

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 15

Bible/* they add that having been examined "in
regard to their catholicity and the fidelity of their
translation/^ they were found ^^defixiiefnt in the
quality of catholicity, and therefore could not he
lyroperly recommended for adoption J' This lack
of catholicity, they explain, is evidenced by the
fact that some of those using Dr. Judson's ver-
sion do so " under protest, being constrained, for
conscience sake, in the public reading of Scrip-
ture to substitute other words for those selected
by Dr. Judson to indicate the rite of baptism."
They further remind the public, that "as long
ago as 1836'' they offered "$5,000 to those who
were then interested in Dr. Judson's work, to
promote the circulation of any versions which
all the denominations represented in the Society
could consistently use and circulate in their several
schools and communities, and the offer was de-
clined." The article in question is entitled
"Limitations," and its whole aim is to show,
as above indicated, that the Baptists have
ignorantly or craftily attempted to betray the
Managers into trangressing the Society's or-
ganic "limitations," and this being refused, have
unreasonably, if not dishonorably, revolted.

But before accepting this as a new illustration
that the Baptists are like porpoises, with their
heads always instinctively to the wind, let us ask

3fi TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE,

wliether, in this as in many other cases, it may
not be the wind that has changed instead of the
porpoises.

What, then, was the "specific object '' for
which tlie Bible Society was established? As
stated in its own documents, it was the circula-
tion^ of "received versions where they exist,"
and the "most faithful translations" where there
are no received versions. Under that original
compact they recognize to this day their obliga-
tion to print only King James' English version,
without inquiring into its "catholicity," or the
superior " faithfulness " of later revisions. Their
" limitations " as rigidly still bind them to spread
that as to reject others. Under the plain letter
of their mutual contract (to which the Roman
Catholics were not a party, either), they published,
at least up to 1840, Roman Catholic translations
of the Vulgate. A report in their minutes of
that year, referring to this fact, says : ^ " In for-
eign countries we were to publish 4n received
versions where they exist, and in the most faith-
ful translations where they do not.' These ^re-
ceived versions' alluded to were no doubt the
French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian,
Arabic, Syriac, Armenian, etc., as old or older

^ A. B. Society Report, 1840.
2 lb., pp. 33, 34.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 17

tlian the English, and which the Society could
not expect to alter." Now in this group are the
very versions mentioned by the Managers in 1882
as excluded from their list by a " principle of the
Society," to " circulate no versions " made " from
the Vulgate," but only those '^made from the
original Greek and Hebrew." When and how
this ^^ principle" came in does not appear.

If their being "received versions" be denied
or ignored, and the question turn on their being
" faithful and catholic translations," it may well
be answered: 1. That they fully meet the So-
ciety's standard of catholicity, their only test
being the treatment of the word for baptism;
2. That if translations based on the Vulgate be
presumably inferior — ^the stream being less pure
than the fountain — ^those based on the English
must be still worse, as coming from still lower
in the stream — the English itself being derived
chiefly through the Vulgate from the Greek. ^

Whether under its obligation to print "re-
ceived versions" or "faithful translations" does
not appear, but under one head or the other the
Society did print Dr. Judson's version at the

^ See Eadie History English Bible (London, 1876),
vol. I., p. 402 ; vol. II., pp. 70, 191, et passim.
li

18 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

first. If it was the "received version '^ then, it
is now; for there is no other. If it was a
"faithful translation" then", it is noAv; for it has
not changed. If the original compact ever
required its publication under either head, it
does now; for it is a first principle of equity
that no compact once entered upon can be
changed, or new terms added, except by com-
mon consent. And four partners can no more
do this as against one, than one as against four.

But the Managers of the Bible Society have
not only Violated the rights of their copartners
by the forcible insertion of the words "and
catholic ^^ ill the original compact, but have gone
on to define that word in a sense most invidious
and exclusive, ahd so most contradictory. If an
unsectarian be a comprehensive and a sectarian a
divisive spii'it, then has the Bible Society chosen
for itself a most sectarian attitude.

It was scarcely worthy of a scholar like Dean
Trench, in his work on Bihle Revision,^ to
suggest that the "so-called Baptists" could not
be invited to co-operate, "seeing that they de-
mand, not a translation of the Scripture, but an
interpretation, and that in their own sense." It
is no more worthy of a great Christian organiza-
tion like the American Bible Society to brand as

'New York, 18r)8, p. 1T9.

THE MOULD OF D0CTJiI2i'E. 19

non-catholic a version of the Scripture, which in
its rendering of the particular word criticized
follows exactly in the footsteps of "all the im-
portant ancient Oriental versions/' made b fore
our modern sects came into beinfr. Was tlic
ancient Syriac made by a Baptist for partisan
ends? Was Ulfilas a sectarian, or Luther, or
Henry Martyn, whose Persian Bible this Society
has probably circulated? But in all these trans-
lations the word is "immerse," or its equivalent.^
But the question of catholicity, we are re-
minded, is in this case a practical one. The
Society comprises various denominations, and it
must circulate no versions save those which all
alike can "consistently use and circulate." But
what can they ^^ consistently^^ use and circulate?
Since all versions are still to be conformed "to
the principles upon which the American Bible
Society was originally founded," it is fair to
interpret the word in the light of those prin-
ciples as then announced and acted on. It
appears, then, that in 1816 the Society thought
it "consistent" for all parties to "use and cir-
culate" versions rendering baptize "immerse";
for they promised to circulate and did circulate

1 Cf. Bosworth, Gothic and Anglo-Saxon Versions
(London, 1874).

20 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

such versions then and for a long time after,'
By what rule do the Managers decide that it is
inconsistent for a High Churchman or a Broad
Churchman to use such a version, when these do
not for a moment dispute the meaning of the
word, but rest their divergent practice solely on
the authority, the one of the Church, the other,
with Dean Stanley, of the Zeitgeist According
to the scholarship of Bishop Titcomb's own
Church, it is just as easy to prove that "im-
merse'' means "sprinkle'' as that ^'JBaptizo^^
does, and he need not be more " embarrassed "
by the one than by the other.

But he is embarrassed by the "public reading"
of one word and the public doing of another and
different thing, and "consistency" must be re-
stored by conforming the word translated to the
thing done. At this writing, therefore, transla-
tors must, in order to reach the "catholicity"
required by the American Bible Society, subject
their work to three successive processes of refine-
ment : 1 . Start Avith Greek and Hebrew text ; 2.
Correct by the English version ; 3. Modify so as
not to conflict with current customs. It was the
Komanist, Albert Pighius, who said the Scrip-
tures are like "a nose of wax which may be
twisted every way." They are certainly never

1 See Bible Society's Record, June 15, 1882.

THE MOULD OF DOCTBII^E, 21

more pliable than when fluent in the process of
translation.

THE WAR ABOUT A WORD.

But as something more is hereafter to be said
on this particular theme, it is well to pass on to
the only remaining point — the supposed folly of
war about a word. It is quite open to some of
our good-natured critics to urge that the English
title, ^^ Particular Baptists ^^ be now relinquished
to the Americans in memory of this controversy.
But it will be remembered that it was the Board
and not the Baptists who first struck at the word.
It had been left untranslated, or rendered by
divers terms colorless or misleading, as the Bap-
tists believed, without revolt by them. They
asked for themselves only what they conceded to
others, a charitable reciprocity of judgment and
dealing. But this was decided not to be " catho-
lic.'' And they "were made offenders for a
word."

This event will have served a good purpose,
however, if it compels renewed attention to some
questions involved in or cognate to the matter of
Scripture translation. Whether the Scripture
shall be translated at all is no longer a question,
at least among Protestants; but it was once hotly
contested, and great epochs of religious history

22 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

grew out of the contest. Whether it shall all be
translated, and if not, what and hoAv many words
shall still be kept in the original shadow — this,
though seemingly a smaller question, has also had
its not insignificant place among the problems of
the past. The inevitable narrowing of the issue
here and now to a single word may well set us
inquiring also as to whether that word, and the
rite it describes, have had their due consideration
as formative and conservative forces in Christian
history, and whether they are worth contending
for.

A sentence of the apostle Paul is eminently
suggestive in this connection, occurring in Romans
6: 17. In the New Revision it reads, "Ye
became obedient from the heart to that form
(margin "pattern'') of teaching whereunto ye
were delivered." It is noticeable that, in fidelity
to the original, the marginal rendering in the
commou version is the exclusive, form in the New.
If the ^^ mould of doctrine^^ here alluded to be, as
will here be maintained, the ordinance of baptismy
then the significance of the present issue will be
manifest. For, in that case, he Avho breaks the
mould imperils the doctrine.

CHAPTER II.

BAPTISM TBE MOULD OP VOCTBIXE.

TWO master sayings from great men will be
found pertinent in current religious discus-
sion The one is from Lord Bacon's Essay on
Superstition,' viz.: "There is a superstition in
avoiding superstition, when men think to do best
if they go farthest from the supei-stition formerly
received; therefore care should be h'-<l t^^* the
good be not taken away with the bad. The
other is from Bishop Butler in his Anahgy of
Beligion,' viz.: "As it is one of the peculiar
weaknesses of human nature when, upon a com-
parison of two things, one is found to be ot
greater importance than the other, to consider
this other as of scarcely any importance at all;
it is hio-hly necessary that we remind ourselves
how gr^t presumption it is in ns to make light
of any institutions of divine appointment."
i-Whately's Annotated Bacon (Boston, 1863), p. 178.
J (London, 1852), Pt. II., ch. 1, p. 209.

24 TUB MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

A TENDENCY TO GUARD AGAINST.

The reactionary tendency to an irrational ex-
treme is perceptible in much that has lately been
said in disparagement of ^institutional religion.''
Luther found people in his day who thought the
greater part of Protestantism consisted in show-
ing their contempt for Rome by eating meat on
Friday. There are some who measure their
spirituality to-day by the magnificence of their
contempt for all religious forms. Now it is to be
hoped that tlie essence of neither Protestantism
nor spirituality consists in stupidity; and if not,
it will be worth while to notice that the really
contemptible thing in Christian history has been,
not the introduction of forms, which was divine;
but their unauthorized multiplication, and per-
version to base ends, which was wholly human.
Let the parasites suffer, and not the tree they
have infested. Because baptism, for instance,
was once wrongly counted necessary to salvation,
we need not now, as though "reverse of wrong
were right," conclude that it is in every sense
unnecessary. Because, like its Divine Origi-
nator, it has been disfigured and loaded with
tawdry mockeries, we are not bound to crucify
it between two thieves.

Bishop Butler's caution as to over-disparage-

TUE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 25

ment by contrast reminds us likewise of the
frequent suggestion that baptism, being less
important than other things, is I'eally u7iimpo7^-
tant. Here the illicit expansion of the partial
into an universal conclusion seems to arise from
a lurking fallacy in the statement of the case.
For unless it be less important in every sense
than all other things, it cannot be unimportant.
To say, for instance, that baptism is of less
consequence than faith, because it does not save,
is like saying that brains are of less account than
breath, because life does not come through them.
Breath and brains are not rivals, but alike
essential in their rcsjjective spheres — the one that
life may exist, the other that it may report itself.
Comparing baptism with Christ^s only other
ordinance, it is indeed '^difficult," as Dean Stan-
ley remarks, "to see what is the difference in
principle in the Roman Church which has ren-
dered the practice with regard to one sacrament
so exceedingly lax, with regard to the other so
exceedingly rigid "^ and the observation need
not be confined to Home.

However superciliously treated by men, the
Kew Testament unquestionably gives baptism a
preeminent place. In the order of time it is

* Article on ''Baptism," Nineteenth Centiry Magor
vine, VI., p. '<04.

26 THE MOULD OF DOCTMINE.

first. The two great transitional epochs of the
early world, when Noah Avent through the flood,
and Israel through the Red Sea, beginning the
world's life anew, are specialized as the true
prototypes of baptism.^ Through it our Lord
was " manifested " and found entrance to his pub-
lic ministry.^ Through it Christianity became
visible on the day of Pentecost, and the external
church began to be.^

Not less significant is its primary place in the
order of symbolism ; for according to Archbishop
Whately it "denotes spiritual birth" as the
Lord's Supper does "the continual support of
the Christian life."*

But a still deeper primacy of significance is
attributed to this sacred ordinance in the title
given it by the apostle Paul, and which has
suggested these articles. Bishop Wordsworth
renders the verse in question (Rom. 6 : 17) as
follows: "You readily obeyed the mould of
Christian faith and practice into which at your
baptism you were poured, as it were, like soft,
ductile, and fluent metal, in order to be cast and

»1 Peter 3: 21. 1 Cor. 10: 2.

2 John 1 : 31.

s Acts 2 : 38.

* Corruptions of Christianity (N. Y., 1880), p. 109.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 27

take its form." ^ Adding that the metaphor
suggests itself to the apostle naturally in Corinth,
wtee he was writing— a city famous for its
castings in bronze. Conybeare and Howson^
translate the closing words of the verse "liter-
ally" as "the mould of teaching into which you
are transmitted." In a note they remark of the
context :

St. Paul's view of the Christian life, throughout the
sixth, seventh, and eighth chapters, is that it consists of
a death and a resurrection; the new-made Christian dies
to sin, to the world, to the flesh and to the law; this
death he undergoes at his first entrance into communion
with Christ, and it is both typified «^^ realized when he
is buried beneath the baptismal waters. But no sooner
is he thus dead with Christ than he rises with him ; he
is made partaker of Christ's resurrection; he is united
to Christ's body ; he lives in Christ, and to Christ ; he
is no longer in the flesh, but in the spirit.

W^HAT THE "mould" SIGNIFIES.

The authority of these leaders of the English
Church, so eminent for learning and candor,
will be assumed as sufficient to justify at least
the preliminary assumption that the apostle in
this vei-se refers to baptism as the "mould of

^Commentary on New Testament (London, 1877).
p. 232.

2 Life and Epistles of Paul (New York, 1869),
vol. II., p. 170.

2R THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

doctrine." The word here rendered mould
{tupos) carries three shades of significance, as is
recognized in our authorized version of the New
Testament, viz.:

1. Historic. The mould has itself been cast,
and records unerringly the features of the matrix
that formed it. Thus the unbelieving disciple
demanded to see not simply marks (stigmata) in
the hands of the Crucified, but the unmistakable
print (tupos) of the nails.

2. Symbolic. The mould bears a distinct out-
line which has a meaning; always the same out-
line, and hence always the same meaning. The
correspondence here is not of Tact and fact, but
of fact and idea. In this sense Adam was the
^^jigure (tupos) of him who is to come."

3. Formative. The mould fixes its character-
istic outlines upon all its fabrics, so that their
genuineness is proved by their being exact re-
productions of itself. So Moses was to make all
things "according to the pattern (tupos) shown
him in the mount."

The constant idea throughout is that of per-
manent and verifiable coincidence of outline
between counterparts. But to break a single
line of the mould is to destroy this coincidence.
It no longer faithfully records its origin, its
device is blurred, and all its products marred.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 29

Precisely this significance the apostle here attri-
butes to the baptismal mould.

1. Historically. It is the memorial of the
dominant fad of Christianity — Our Lord's
Resurrection from the dead. It bears the
"print" of that event as unmistakably as his
hands did the outline of the nails. ^'Like as
Christ," says the apostle in verse 4, "so we."

2. Symbolically. It is the palpable "figure"
of the dominant idea of Christianity — ^the New
Birth. This indisputable emblematic force of
baptism forms the crisis and justification of his
whole argument. "Are ye ignorant" of this,
asks the apostle, in verse 3, as though such
obtaseness were incredible.

3. Formatively. It is the faithful exponent
and enforcer of the dominant principle of Chins-
tianity — the surrender of the whole man through
faith. " Ye became obedient from the heart," he
says, therefore "your members" are all included.
The "yielding up" in baptism is the "pattern"
of the whole subsequent life.

The Epistle to the Romans is indisputably the
great doctrinal Epistle of the New Testament.
That Epistle is but an elaboration of these three
elements of doctrine. They appear at once in
the introduction (ch. 1 : 1-7), viz. : the resurrection
of Christ, as the "declaration" of his Sonship;

30 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE,

saintship [i. e,, separatedness to a new life) as
the characteristic of discipleship; and "obedi-
ence of faith '^ as the shaping force in Christian
character. But all these again, in distinct though
germinal outline, are enclosed in the single rite of
baptism. If it seems absurd to us that so great
issues can lie hid in so insignificant a thing as a
"mere rite/^ let us remember that he who out of
infinite possibilities selected that single form, is
the same who has chosen the acorn to hold un-
counted forests, and — a significant parallel —
birth to hold all the marvels and still unexplored
mysteries of life. Recent philosophic and his-
toric discussions remind us how little danger of
exaggeration there is in attributing so tremen-
dous a force to symbolism. "Men are guided
by type, and not by argument," says Dr. New-
man. " Every idea vividly before ns/' says Bage-
hot, "soon appears to be true, unless we keep up
our perceptions of the arguments which prove it
untrue, and voluntarily coerce our minds to re-
member its falsehood."

HOW THEORIES SOMETIMES GROW.

The Puritans maintained, says Hardwick in
his History of the Thirty-Nine Articles,^ "with
as much sagacity as malice," that "the right

iBohn's Edition (London, 1876), p. 206. •

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 31

government of the Church cannot be separated
from the doctrine.^' It is significant that their
quarrel ^vith the English Church, Luther's with
Rome, and nearly all the controversies in the
Church, have grown out of the questions per-
taining to the external, which were seen to
involve inevitably the internal also. Archbishop
Whately's Essay on the Corruptions of Borne
Traced to their Origin in Human Nature is a
book w^ell w^orthy of careful study, and bearing
directly on the present theme. He there says,^
^' It is a mistake, and a very common and practi-
cally not unimportant one, to conclude that the
wngin of each tenet or practice is to be found in
those arguments or texts which are urged in
support of it; that they furnish the cause, on
the removal of Avhich the effects w^ill cease of
course; and that when once those reasonings are
exploded, and those texts rightly explained, all
danger is at an end of falling into similar errors.
The fact is, that in a great number of instances,
and by no means exclusively in questions con-
nected with religion, the eii^oneous belief or prac-
tice has arisen first, and the theory has been devised
afterwards for its support.'^ Dr. Newman's book
on the Development of the Doctrine in the Church

^ Cited iu Annotations on Bacon, p. 183.

S2 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

of Rome ^ is a precise illustration of this state-
ment. He himself describes it as containing a
"hypothesis to account for a difficulty;" the
"difficulty" being that the "successor of the
Apostles" has plainly repudiated the apostolic
precedents by which he assumes to be bound.
Many modern theories as to the nature and
import of baptism, and the Scriptural terms
describing it, may justly be described by the
same title. Inherited practices as to mode and
subject, and notions as to symbolism do not
coincide with Scriptural language ; hence " hypo-
theses" ever springing to account for the "diffi-
culty." Two of these theories — the Romish and
the Broad Church — distinctly admit that the
"mould" Paul speaks of has been broken.
Bossuet says, " We are able to make it appear
by the acts of councils and by ancient ritual,
that for thirteen hundred years baptism was
administered by plunging." Wall in his History
of Infant Baptism says further, that this has never
ceased in any except a Papal nation.^ Dean
Stanley, who may stand for the Broad Church,
says, "No existing ritual of any European
Church offers any likeness " to the apostolic ordi-
nance. " The change from immersion to sprink-

1 London, 1845.

2 Ed., Nashville, 1860, p. 728.

TUB MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 33

ling has sd aside the large)' part of the apostolic
laiiguage regarding baptism, and lias altered the
very meaning of the word.'^ ^ For this frankly
admitted boldness in reconstructing the original
rite, the Romanist offers as a justification the
supremacy and infallibility of the Church. Dean
Stanley proposes instead the sanction of "the
spirit which lives and moves in human society,
and can override even the most sacred ordi-

But there is still a third, and both curiously
and unfortunately, a far more modem theory.
Curiously, because if true, it is wonderful that it
was never discovered by those who wrote the
primitive Greek, as it has never yet occurred to
those who inherit the language. Unfortunately,
because of the acres of apology and casuistry it
might have saved if broached before. This " hy-
pothesis" removes the "difficulty" by a simple
expedient. "The ^ mould' never was broken," it
mildly suggests, " for it was made of material so
elastic and flexible as to be incapable of being
broken." A word was sagaciously chosen, as it
appears, to describe it, so plastic, that into what-
ever country the gospel should come, its messen-
gers might inquire what particular form may be

^ Nineteenth Century Magazine, VI., p. 698.
C

34 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

most congenial to the customs, convenience, or
tastes of the people, and thereupon answer, "the
word means that/' We have heard of the Judge
who left it to the prisoner to say " w^hat day w^ould
be convenient for him to be hanged " — but never
of a law ambiguously framed for the express pur-
pose of leaving it to the prisoner's comfort or
caprice how he should be hanged, or whether he
should be hanged at all. Devotion to such a
theory w^ould soon produce for us a genuinely
"limp-back" Bible — limp, not as to binding only,
but all the way through.

These theories, so extraordinary and so perilous
in their tendencies, have all grown out of a com-
mon exigency. First practically departing from
the "pattern" Christ had given — ^then "willing
to justify," rather than to rectify, that departure
=— men have successfully substituted for his
supremacy that of the Infallible Pope, or the
infallible nineteenth century; or reduced his
sceptre to a mocking "reed" by the application
of the " flexible-interpretation " to his w^ords of
command.

But if the original command w^as in fact ex-
plicit, and the original rite distinct and uniform,
what rational explanation can be given of diver-

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 35

sities so early and so great? Here again we are
reminded at once of Archbishop Whately's sug-
gestion, and bidden to ask if there be any
radical and constant *' tendencies of human na-
ture" likely to furnish a clew. Dean Stanley's^
article (in the Nineteenth Century Magazine) on
Baptism, begins with the remark that he intends
to consider "what is the inner meaning which
has more or less survived all the changes through
which it has passed.'^ Dr. G. A. Jacob (also of
the English Church) remarks of the baptism of
infants, that it is "not to be found in the New
Testament," but that we find there " the funda-
mental idea from which it was afterwards de-
vdoped."^ These words "survival" and "de-
velopment" are "half in the speech of Ashdod."
To Ashdod let us go, therefore, for interpre-
tation.

A "survival," in scientific parlance, is a cus-
tom or notion which has come over from a
former state of society, but is no longer in-
telligible, because from gradual loss of its origi-
nal form or otherwise, its original meaning has
also been lost.^ The habit, like a Fourth of

' Nineteenth Century Magazine, YI., p. 685.

2 Ecclesiastical Polity of New Testament (New York,
1872), pp. 270, 271.

3 Tylor's Primitive Culture (New York, 1874), voL
I., p. 70, seq.

36 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

July pin-wheel, goes on Avhirling after its fire is
burnt out. The Tyrolese peasant crosses him-
self when he yawns, the Italian says Felicita
when his neighbor sneezes, and wise people
everywhere are troubled at overturning the salt-
cellar. But if you ask why, all will answer
with the stolid Mexican, "Who knows?" The
modern soldier thinks the hair streaming from
his helmet a mere ornamental device; but Mr.
Ruskin says it is a reminiscence of the mane
that once hung down the back of the savage,
who donned the skin of the wild beast he had
killed, to steal its courage.^

'^Development" in the scientific sense is that
process of change through which, whether by
accretion or decretion, by improvement or degen-
eration, customs, and all things else, have come
to their present form. Every existing fact is to be
studied as a fossil, whose features, enlarged, con-
fused, or worn down in petrifaction, assimilation,
and wave-tossing, still may be dimly read;
remembering that the forces that shaped it are
constant and calculable. The history of words,
for instance, may be traced Avith considerable
certainty, according to Professor Sayce,^ by the
recognition of three universal tendencies, viz. : " 1.

^Ragle's Nest (N. Y., 1873), p. 190. ^Introduction to
Science of Language (Loiidou, 1880), vol. I., p. 163, seq.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 37

Imitation or anaIogy^\' e.g., the Chinese trying
to speak English falls into Pigeon-English; the
Frenchman Gallicizes our words into ros-bif and
bif-teck; and the temporary Parisian perpetually
throws his small force of badly drilled French
words into a hc>llow square, so as not to seem too
exotic. "2. A vnsh to be dear and emphatie.^'
This taxes the inventive faculty. It invents new
words, or new meanings for old words. The
modern use of "evolution'' is an illustration.
Every political campaign produces new epithets
and catch-words, which sometimes live. In John
Wesley's time "sentimental" was new. He
wrote of Sterne's Sentimental Journey, '' Sentl-
mnental is not English." He might as well have
said Continental. But one fool makes many.
The Avord has become fashionable, though it
means nothing." "3. Laziness/^ leading to
"phonetic decay." This clips the ears and tail,
and sometimes cuts through the body of words,
as in the slovenly "gent" and "bus." It loses
good words, or spills the meaning out of them.
So "Magdalen" becomes "Maudlin" — and a
"simple" man a fool. Through this unhappy
mutilation and defacing of the coin of speech we
are cut off from commerce with former ages, as
with foreign countries, except through the inter-
vention of the philological money-changer.

58 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

Unliappy it certainly is, for as Dean Trench
once remarked, "Hardly any original thoughts
on mental or social subjects ever make their way
among mankind . . until aptly selected words or
phrases have, as it were, nailed them down and
held them fastJ^ ^ Elsewhere he likens words to
ships which " convey the mental treasures of one
period to the generations that follow : and laden
with this, their precious freight, they sail across
gulfs of time in which empires have suffered
fchipwreck.'^ ^ How harmful then to tear up the
fixed symbol — to wreck the freighted ship.

Now all that is here said of words, which are
forms of speech, is true of rites, which are forms
of action, meant to serve a like end, and subject
to peril from like causes. To be like the heathen,
Jeroboam made a golden calf, through which to
worship the true God. In like spirit Rome has
since borrowed the mass from Buddhists, and
holy water from Pagan temples. Israel "forgot
his Maker,^' but emphasized his religiosity by
"building temples.'^ Rome "shortened the Deca-
logue, but lengthened the Creed ; " she took the
cup from the laity — but added the elevation and

1 On the Study of Words, (New York, Twenty.fifth
Ed.), p. 26.

2/6., p. 28.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 39

adoration of the host, and multiplied idle cere-
monies.

To satisfy the people's love of ease she has, in
Dean Stanley's words, had the ^' boldness " to
*' substitute a few drops of water for the ancient
bath." "Through the history of sacrifice," says
Mr. Tylor, in his Primitive Culture^ "it has
occurred to many nations that cost may be
economized without impairing efficiency." Ac-
cordingly, " in Madagascar the head of the sacri-
ficed beast is set upon a pole, and the blood and
fat are rubbed on the stones of the altar" (in
lieu of the gift of the whole beast, as formerly) ;
"and Scotchmen still living remember the corner
of a field being left untilled for the Goodman's
croft {i. e., the devil's); but the principle of
^clieating the deviV was already in vogue, and the
piece of land allotted was hut a worthless scraps ^

lEd., New York, 1874, vol. II., pp. 370, 399-402.

CHAPTER III.

BAPTISM, THE RESURRECTION, AND HISTORIC
CHRISTIANITY.

BAPTISM is defined by the Congregational
Union of England and Wales in their de-
liverance of 1833, to be "the application of water
to the subject" in the name of the Trinity.^ The
whole significance of the rite, according to this
definition, is in the natural symbolism of water
as a cleansing agent, " putting away the fihh of
of the flesh." The writer of Ecce Homo inter-
prets the Lord's Supper by a similar rule. " The
meal consisted of bread and wine, the simplest
and in those countries most universal elements of
of food." "A common meal is the most natural
and universal way of expressing, maintaining,
and as it were ratifying relations of friendship."
The primary idea being therefore the expression
of mutual friendship, " The Christian communion
is a club-dinner J^^

Accepting these suggestions as quite in their line,

1 Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, vol. III., p. 732.

2 Ecce Homo (Boston, 1868), pp. 187, 188.

40

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 41

the modern "evolution" school push them to their
logical issue in the denial of any authoritative
institution or historic significance in either ordi-
nance. Mr. Herbert Spencer devotes his book
on Ceremonial Institutions mainly to "reasons
for rejecting the current hypothesis that cere-
monies originate in conscious symbolization, and
for enteitaining the belief that in evei^y case they
originate by evolution J' ^ Mr. Tylor in his Prim-
itive Culture concludes that according to the
" ethnographic method in theology," " a vast pro-
portion of doctrines and rites knowTi among
mankind are not to be judged as direct pr'oducts
of the particular religious systems which give them
sanction; for they are in fact more or less modi-
fied results adopted from previous systems.^ He
instances baptism, assuming it to consist simply
in the "application of water," as a mere prolong-
ation of heathen lustration — water being in
either case the natural and universal symbol of
purifying agency.^ By parity of reasoning the
Lord's Supper would find its origin and sufficient
explanation in the primitive custom of " eating
salt" together as a pledge of mutual fidelity.

By this process all reminiscence of Christ or
his work is boldly purged out of both ordinances,
and the historic relations of Christianity are

» (New York, 1880.) 2 YqI. II., p. 451. ^ /^.^ pp, 430,
441.

42 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

practically treated as unreal or insignificant. If
the characteristic symbols of our faith express
only or mainly the present and isolated fact of
our purification through water, and our fellow-
ship through bread and wine, why busy ourselves
with a past to which they do not point us? What
to us, then, more than to Festus, are those ^^ques-
tions of their own superstition," especially "of
one Jesus which was dead, whom Paul affirmed
to be alive." The Scotch Sermom of 1880 plainly
state that the great battle of the last century over
the credibility of the miraculous was "an affair
of outposts altogether," and touched "no vital
point of revelation." Strauss flattered himself
at first that liis view w^as "more Christian than
the old Christian one itself," for although he had
sought to obliterate the historic Christ, it was
only that he might substitute for the transient
person an eternal idea. "Not by immersion;"
says Canon Curteis, in considering what conces-
sions the Church of England may make to win
back Dissenters, "in that point the Church's
freedom must be unflinchingly maintained in
order to teach the spirituality of the Lord's sacra-
ments, by using the drop of water and the frag-
ment of bread to represent the regenerating bath
and the eucharistic feast." ^ That is to say, the
^ Damp. Lee, isn. ''Dissent., etc" (London),]). 289.

TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 43

idea is only truly to be propagated by effacing
the formative fact, the "spirit" only by defacing
the significant " letter."

THINGS TO BE EXPLAINED.

But facts are not destroyed by supercilious
treatment, and it is unavailing to attempt the
ideal reconstruction of a history which has not
first been actually abolished. The primary
question is one, not of theory, but of testimony.
The assailant of Christianity from the side of
historic criticism is therefore called to explain the
following indisputable circumstances:

1. The continuous and uniform belief of the
church, from the first century, that it had its
origin in the facts narrated in the New Testa-
ment.

2. The existence, as acknowledged even by
the most extravagant criticism, of at least four of
Paul's letters (viz. : to the Galatians, the Romans,
and the two to the Corinthians), within a short
generation of the alleged occurrence of the facts
therein cited.

3. The general observance to this day of a rite
which, as the Apostle reminds the Corinthians,
had been instituted by our Lord "on the night
in which he was betrayed" as an enduring testi-
mony of his crucifixion.

44 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

The value of this last link in the chain has
been often urged by writers on the evidences of
Christianity, and will not be underrated by those
who are familiar with the principles of historic
inquiry. For 1. It reaches back to the event
itself, and is of the nature of contemporaneous
testimony. 2. Being a concrete act participated
in by many, its testimony was unequivocal. 3.
It was not only the reminder of a fact, but a
scenic rehearsal of its very form. It was not a
feast, for it was established at a feast. The bread
and wine were present, and were being shared in ;
but they told no story, until he put the hrealdng
of the one and pouring of the other into emblem-
atic association with the breaking of his body
and the shedding of his blood, and so bade them
^^ show the Lord's death till he come.'' This
ceremonial is forever sundered from all heathen
feasts, therefore, not by the use of bread and
wine, which is common to both, but by the form
of that use with which no heathen rite has any-
thing in common.

But the question of the historic reality of our
Lord's death is not, after all, the cardiiial one in
the battle with the skeptics. Serious critica
have rarely doubted that, or cared much for it.
For that death, in itself, involved no supernat-
ural element, and could not, however devoutly

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 45

believed, fairly account for Christian history.
The true crisis of faith is not at the cross, but
at the sepulchre. Did Jesus really rise from the
dead? "This," says Strauss, "is the centre of
the centre — the real heart of Christianity;"
"with it the truth of Christianity stands or
falls." ^ "If I could believe the resurrection,"
says Spinoza, "I would become a Christian at
once." Ewald says "It is the culmination of all
the miraculous events which are conceivable from
the beginning of history to its close."

To this respond affirmatively such defenders
of the faith as Christlieb, "The resurrection is
the proof of all other dogmas, the foundation of
our Christian life and hope, the soul of the entire
apostolic preaching, the corner-stone on which
the church is built."^ Westcott says: "We must
place it in the very front of our confession, with
all that it includes, or we must be prepared to
lay aside the Christian name." ^ " To preach the
fact of the resurrection was the first function of
the Evangelists; to embody the doctrine of the
resurrection is the great office of the church ; to
learn the meaning of the resurrection is the task,
not of one age only, but of all." Fairbairn

1 Christlieb, Modern Doubt, (New York, 1874), p. 455.

2 /&., p. 448.

3 Gospel of the Resurrection (London, 1881), p. 7.

46 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

says, " It created the church." " It is a resumi
of historical yet supernatural Christianity."

There are, therefore, two great Christian facts :
the death and resurrection of Christ. There
are also two great Christian ordinances: the
Lord's Supper and Baptism. Of these facts, the
first would seem lea^ to need historic witnessing,
since it does not trench on the supernatural, and
since its significance is mainly for the believer,
revealing the inner secrets of salvation. Yet for
its perennial confirmation, as well as illustration,
provision is confessedly made in the Lord's
Supper, the inward fronting rite of the church.
The other fact, on the contrary, fronts the world,
challenging its scrutiny as miraculous, and de-
manding its assent as verified by reliable testi-
mony. To this fact, therefore, so pre-eminent
and decisive, it might reasonably be expected
that baptism, the only other Christian rite, and
also the outward fronting one, would lend its
needed and confirmatory testimony.

BAPTISM AND THE RESURRECTION.

The candid skeptic, however, will be surprised,
on reading in the Westminster Catechism that
*' baptism is rightly administered by pouring or
sprinkling water upon the person." To this he
will find Dr. R. J. Breckeuridge, of Kentucky,

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 47

naturally adding, "I find nothing in the Scrip-
tures to warrant the assertion that there is 7;ny
tsacramentcU commemoration by the mode of bap-
tism of the burial of the body of Jesus.-^^ Hav-
ing further learned from Dr. John Eadie, of
Glasgow, that believers "eyen in immersion do
not go through a process having any semblance
to the burial and resurrectimi of Christ^^;"^ and
from Dr. Charles Hodge, of Princeton, that in
PauFs words (Rom. 6: 4) — ^'buried with him by
baptism into death" — "it is not necessary to as-
sume that there is any reference, to the immersion
of the body in baptism, as though it were a
burial; " ^ he will probably be puzzled to account
for the zeal and ingenuity put forth in dis-
proving concerning one ordinance what is so
eagerly claimed for the other, and is equally
presumable of both — that they Avere meant to
be commemorative as well as symbolic. This
probative function may be lightly valued now^,
but "from the beginning it was not so."

The peculiar evidential value of PauFs state-
ments concerning the facts and institutions of
early Christianity has been more and more
recognized of late. He was at the time of his

1 Knowledge of God Subjectively Considered, p. 572.

2 Commentary on Colossians (London, 1856), p. 154.

3 Commentary on Romans (Philadelphia, 1864), p.
305.

48 THE MOULD OF BOCTIIINE,

oonvei'sion a mature man, of too high culture and
too wide observation to be charged with super-
stition or shallowness. He had too much at
stake to be risked on the unverified assumption
of so stupendous a fact as the resurrection of
Christ from the dead. He saw as clearly as
niaoteen centuries have proved to us, that on the
reality of that fact all else hung — for without it
he declared his "faith was vain." His letters
are among the earliest, if not the very earliest, of
the New Testament documents, and four of them
stand, as before remarked, unchallenged to this
day. In two of these (Romans and 1 Corinthians),
written to be publicly read in metropolitan heathen
cities within about twenty-five years of its
alleged occurrence, he distin(;tly claims the reality
of the resurrection as an established and com-
monly admitted fact. As justifying this, he
refers implicitly to the testimony of " the greater
part" of "more than five hundred brethren" still
surviving the event; and explicitly to that of the
abiding ordinance which, as he reminds the
Romans, is the " likeness of Christ's resurrection,"
and which he assures the Corinthians is meaning-
less, if it do not mean that. For so, according
to the uniform custom of the early interpreters,
we are to interpret 1 Cor. 15: 29.^

* Stanley, Commentary on Corinthians (London, 1876),
p. 304.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 49

BAPTISM A HISTORIC WITNESS.

Baptism, bearing this legible "imprint/* was
in Paul's esteem a historic monument^ 1. Of the
fact that Christ had risen. 2. Of the preeminence
of the fact, and its consequent primary place in
Christian doctrine. 3. Of the corporeality of the
fact, as against all mysticizing tendencies. It
follows, therefore, that by the abandonment of
its appointed form, baptism ceases to be a witness
to the reality of the resunrdion. Of Paul's allu-
sion in Rom. 6 ; 4, 5, Conybeare and Howson say,
" This passage cannot be understood unless it be
borne in mind that the primitive baptism was by
immersion.'' Dr. Schaff says, '^All commefntators
of note (except Stuart and Hodge) expressly ad-
mit or take it for granted that in this verse ....
the ancient prevailing mode of baptism by
immersion is implied, as giving force to the idea
of going down of the old and rising up of the new
man.'^^ The obviousness of the parallelism is
implied in the continual coupling together of tlio
two ideas in Scripture, and in the writings and
emblematism of the early Christians. Christ's
Messiahship was "manifested" by his baptism,
his Sonship was "declared'^ by his resurrection?

> Lange's Commentary on Romans (New York, 1869),
Note, p. 202. ' John 1 : 31 ; Rom. 1 : 4.
D

50 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

The apostles were ordained to be "witnesses of
his resurrection," "beginning with the baptism
of John." If, as Peter says, the "figure" of
baptism "saves us," it is "by the resurrection of
Jesus Christ." So Cyril, of Jerusalem, says,
" Thou going down into the water, and in a man-
ner buried in the waters as he in the rock, art
raised again, walking in newness of life."
Chrysostom says, "For as his body, buried in
the earth ; bore for fruit the salvation of the world,
so also ours buried in baptism bore for fruit right-
eousness .... and will bear also the final gift of
the resurrection." Tertullian says "For by an
image we die in baptism; but we truly rise in
the flesh, as did also Christ." Many of the early
baptisteries were in the shape of sarcophagi, or
octagonal, in reference to the number 8, the sym-
bol of resurrection. " Remove the resurrection,"
says Fairbairn substantially, "and the Lord's Bay,
the Supper, and Baptism would be inexplicable." ^
Observe the force of these statements. The
" application of water," as significant of cleans-
ing, would have introduced no new idea, nor
demanded any new fact to explain its origin. It
was the familiar and immemorial symbol both
of Jews and heathen. But it was far otherwise

^Studies in Life of Christ (N. Y., 1882), p. 359. Cf .
also Westcott, Gospel of the Resurrection^ p. 128.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 51

if the idea portrayed were one so novel and
startling as that of a Messianic resurrection from
the dead.

The superior evidential value of a rite is not
always recognized. It is an acUd faith, con-
spicuous, unequivocal. It was vain, said Paul,
for Peter to preaxih the equality of the Gentiles
while he would not eat with tliem. Peter, on
the day of Pentecost, having set forth the pro-
phecy and the correspondent fact of Christ's
resurrection, demanded not only a verbal assent,
but a baptism in the "likeness" of that resurrec-
tion, as a visible avowal of their faith in it.
'* Belief expressed in action," says Canon West-
cott, "is for ihQ most part the strongest evidence
one can have of any historic event." How tre-
mendous therefore is the significance of the fact
that on that day, less than two months after the
alleged transaction, in the very city where it was
said to have taken place and where the evidence
could best be sifted, three thousand people by a
public and unequivocal symbolic act " set to their
seal " that the resurrection had really occurred ;
and thereby not only boldly challenged all skep-
ticism, but irrevocably announced their separa-
tion from all the old ties of friendship and faith.
If the value of testimony depend on its having
been contemporaneous, contiguous, from many

52 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

witnesses, unequivocally expressed, and impartial,
or against interest, then may that be more truly
said of the resurrection as evidenced in baptism,
which has been said of the crucifixion as con-
firmed by the Lord's Supper, viz.: "0/" no other
event in the history of man have we an equal
guarantee of the historic truth of the facts/' ^

The immense damage done to Christianity by
the obliteration of the original features of bap-
tism is manifest in the fact that it has not only,
where so changed, lost all present witnessing
power, but that it has led men, as we have seen,
to deny that it ever had such power; and so to
seek to invalidate the earliest and most authori-
tative testimony to the most vital fact in Chris-
tian history. The conservative power of a care-
fully preserved rite is enormous. "It serves,"
in the language of Sir George Cornewall Lewis,
"to stereotype an oral tradition, and preserve it
from the license of imagination or the distor-
tions of forgetfulness." Like the arrowhead
inscriptions of Babylon, and the hieroglyphics of
Egypt, its definite message is cut into the visible
life of men, as theirs is cut in stone, and remains
like them, changeless amid the changing.

It remains to speak of baptism as meant to
bear witness, 2. Of the primary and jyreemineni

^ Cf Westcott, Gospel of the Resurrection, p. 133.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 63

place of the resuirecticm in the Christian system.
The Acts significantly precede the Epistles.
The announcement of the fact of the resurrec-
tion, and the possibility of salvation, historically
preceded tlie unfolding of the tJieory of the
atonement and the method of salvation logically
involved therein. Baptism, correspondingly, the
first appointed act of the believer, was a joyful
acceptance of the fact preached with all its yet
unrevealed implications. The early catacombs
had no crucifix or sorrowful inscriptions, but
many-blended and cheerful symbols of baptism
and the resurrection. To-day we find the
Eucharist jealously guarded (having been by
the Council of Trent declared "above all other
sacraments," because while they may sanctify,
"in this is the Author himself of sanctity'^) while
baptism is made the toy of ecclesiasticism and
"convenience." By a precise parallelism we
find Rome occupying the whole horizon with
her realistic and purposely painful visions of
the suffering or dead Christ; and Protestantism
giving fifty-one weeks in the year to philosoph-
izing about the atonement, and Easter Sunday
only to the definite and emphatic proclamation
of the atonement itself, as a fact completed and
made real to us by the resurrection of Christ.
There is no room here for a detailed review

54 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

of the steps by which this result has been
reached. Suffice it to say that the gradual
ignoring of the primary function of baptism as
a witness entailed a parallel subsidence from
view of the fact to which it witnessed. Priestly
incantations and scholastic subtleties crowded the
foreground, and the risen Christ slowly faded
into the distance, where he seems to the be-
wildered masses still to hang on the cross, sad,
severe, and inaccessible.

Finally, and only by way of hint, we must
consider a subject most momentous in our time:
the value of the definite and inflexible form of
baptism as a witness, 3. Of the corporeal actu-
ality of Christ's resurrection. The idea of
immortality was common to all men, but that
of a bodily resurrection was mocked as absurd
by the Athenians, or refined into a metaphor as
in its literal form too gross by the Gnostics
[Knowers). Curiously, the Gnostics of that day
and the Agnostics of this are closely akin : and
the spreading eaves of their roof shelter thou-
sands between, who, through various degrees of
real though perhaps unsuspected consanguinity,
are bound up with them in a common thought.
Among these are the Mystics, Quakers, Sweden-
borgians, Transcendentalists, and a large part of
that school who worship the Aurora Borealis

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 55

under the name of Liberalism. To them the
primal curse is subjection of the idea to formal
expression. The formal church, the formal rite,
the formal Scripture, formal knowledge, and
even formal existence, are vulgar, and must be
volatilized. Listen to Matthew Arnold's ren-
dering of the plain Gospel narrative: "To the
mind of Jesus, his own resurrection after a short
sojourn in the grave was the victoi^y of his cause
after his death, and at the price of his death.
His disciples materialized his resurrection, and
their version of the matter falls day by day to
ruin.'' He "lived in the eternal order, and the
eternal order neve)" dies.'' This, he argues, is our
only possible immortality.

Now the noticeable fact is that over against all
theories falsely calling themselves "spiritual,"
because they rejected "form" in his day, the
Apostle set the statement that Christianity is
primarily and characteristically a historic religion
— resting on the concrete manifestation of Christ
" in the flesh," and his formal and sensible resur-
rection— and bodying forth in vivid and graphic
outline, in the permanent rite he had ordained,
the literalness of that resurrection. It is not sur-
prising to find among most of the Gnostic sects,
as among modern "Liberals," indifference to, or
aversion for, tlie formal, alike in baptism and in

5C THE MOULD OF DOCTMIJVE,

resurrection. Nor can it surprise us much more
if the habitual blurring of the ordained outline
of the one, to make it more "spiritual/' should
everywhere tend to melt the revealed outline of
the other into a mere gauzy metaphor. But if it
be a metaphor, says Paul, the dead "are per-
ished'' and "ye are yet in your sins."

CHAPTER ly.

BAPTISM AND THE NEW BIRTH.^MODEJlN
THEORIES.

N

O department of religious literature would
^ probably yield an anthology so rare in its
variety, and so marvellously delicate in its shad-
ings, as the discussion of the relations of Bap-
tism and Regeneration. Its range is so wide, its
relations so complex, its bulk so voluminous,
that it would be impossible to compress into an
essay like this a statement of it which should do
justice to every local or individual phase of
opinion. Nothing is aimed at but a compendious
statement, which it is hoped may escape the
suspicion of at least intentional unfairness either
as to accuracy or proportion.

There are two great questions involved.

THE FIRST GREAT QUESTION.

1. Does baptism itsdf regenerate f

This question brings to the stand at once all
advocates of infant baptism to explain a custom
which, if it do not imply regeneration inde-

' 57

58 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE,

pendent of faith, very much needs explanation.
Fairly representative of the divers responses are
{a) The Theory of Rome, This seems to be
unequivocal. The Council of Trent declared
that " in baptism, not only remission of original
sin was given, but also all which properly has the
nature of sin is cut off." It makes one "a
Christian, a child of God, and an heir of heaven."
As to faith, Cardinal Wiseman says, "The
Church teaches that it is a virtue essentially in-
fused of God in baptism ; and such must be more
or less the belief of every Church that adopts the
practice of infant baptism." ^ The whole efficacy
of baptism, however, is made to depend on the
intent of the administrator. The doctrine of
Rome, therefore, renders only one thing certain,
viz. : the perdition of the unbaptized. It leaves
'the salvation of the baptized both uncertain and
incomplete, for it depends for its validity on the
secret "intent" of the administrator, and for its
consummation, even in the holiest person, on mass
and penancje here and purgatory hereafter. Rome
therefore teaches that cleansing grace, the counter-
part of sanctification, is wrought in baptism, but
not regeneration, the counterpart of justification;

^Lectures on Doctrine and Practice of Roman
Catholic Chu-ch (Baltimore, 1862), p. 74.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 69

neither of which latter ideas has a place in her
theology.

(6) Luther^s Theory. Luther launched the
Reformation from the Koman stocks with a
single lever; the doctrine of "justification by
faith alone." "Faith," he says, "must appro-
priate the divine; all other things can be only
signs for the operation and formation of faith." ^
The heavenly talisman was thus at once trans-
ferred from the covetous and despotic hand of
the priest to the heart of the believer : for the
sacraments, which had been reckoned the "Keys
of Heaven," could no longer shut up that king-
dom which Christ had set "open to all believers."

Protestantism, which repudiated the authority
of tradition, and rested the validity of every-
thing in the Christian life on faith, inherited
therefore a Trojan horse in infant baptism.
"The Zwickau enthusiasts," says Neander,^
"who came to Wittenburg in A. D. 1522, were
zealous opponents of infant baptism ; they raised
a controversy upon it, and placed the Witten-
bergers in a state of embarrassment. Mel-
ancthon, in writing to the Elector, declared that
"Satan had attacked them in a weak place,

1 Neander, History of Christian Dogmas (Bohn, 1868),
vol. II., p. 688.
2/6., vol. II., p. 692.

60 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

for he knew not how he should refute these
enthusiasts."

But principles outrun practice, as the clouds
fly swifter than the ships in the heavier sea
below. There is scarcely a better illustration
of the conservative power of established custom
than in the tergiversations to which it brought a
man so candid and strong as Luther, in his
efforts to defend the retention of an old practice,
directly contradictory of the very principle he
was at the time trying to establish. Infant
baptism is not taught in Scripture, he said, but
neither can it be proved to be against Scripture.
Baptism of course presupposes faith, he admit-
ted, but "who can tell whether God does not
implant faith in early childhood as in sleep?"
Faith, he further urged, is negative; infants
therefore do have faith, because they do not
resist the truth. "He knew how to relieve
himself," says Neander, "though he put down
objections more by bold Assertions than by ar-
guments." ^

The Augsburg Confession therefore distinctly

reads, "concerning baptism, they teach that it

is necessary to salvation . . . and condemn the

Anabaptists who hold . . . that infants can be

saved without it." ^ Luther himself wrote that

^ Neander, Hist, of Chris. Dogmas, vol. II., p.
2 Ihid, p. 693.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 61

"baptism is the bath of regeneration, because in
it we are born again/' Practically, therefore, he
only substituted sacramental for sacerdotal grace
— transferring the shaping of eternal destiny
from the inward whim of the priest to the out-
ward whim of the parent or friend. For the
sake of rescuing those little ones, whom Christ
had appointed to the "kingdom of heaven,'' out
of the " limbo deep and broad " which God had
"prepared for the devil and his angels," but
which "the Fathers" had appropriated to un-
baptized children, he sacrificed the broad prin-
ciple of the Reformation at the shrine of a
narrow and cruel tradition.

(c) Calvin^ s Theory. "It is to be no means
easy," says Bishop Browne,^ "to define his doc-
trine of baptism. Inconsistency is very little his
character; yet on baptism he seems to have been
somewhat inconsistent with himself." To Calvin
the one overwhelming and only creative fact in
the universe was the definite, prevenient purpose
of God. To conceive of the eternal fiat of that
sovereign will as in any way dependent for its
completion or change on the temporal accident
of sacrament or personal intent, seemed to him
as absurd as to expect the flame to be mastered
by the moth that is shrivelled in it. Baptism

1 On the Thirty-nine Articles (London, 1865), p. 651.

62 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

cannot, therefore, make one a Christian, but only
declare the elect to be so (to whom alone the
ordinance belongs). Bat since the purpose of
God is secret, how are the truly elect to be ascer-
tained? This is not so difficult in the case of
adults, plain tests being supplied in Scripture
(see 1 Thess. 1 : 4, 5; 1 Peter 1 : 2). But "elect
infants'^ are not to be so discerned. To escape a
dilemma, therefore, Calvin, revolting alike at
Home's sacerdotal and Luther's sacramental, fled
to hereditary grace. He decided that the Chris-
tian church was not a '^ new birth " from, but a
prolongation of, the Jewish. Diifering from
Paul, who thought the Abrahamic with the old
covenants "pertained to his kinsmen according
to the flesh," he concluded that the measure and
margin of electing grace are still plainly trace-
able along the outline of genealogical descent.
"The children,"^ says Dr. John Hall, "are born
into the church. . . It is a mediaeval superstition
that represents the child as ^christened,' or made
a Christian in the rite." "Our Confession of
Faith," says the Presbyterian Assembly's Digest,
"recognizes the right of baptism of the infant
children only of such parents as are members
of the church."^ To these were added, under

» Questions of the Day, (New York, 1873), p. 263.
2 (Ed., Philadelphia, 1855), p. 106.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 63

exigency, still after the Abrahamic idea, the
"infant slaves of Christian Mastei-s.'^ ^

But now again the "Trojan horse'' disgorges
discord within the Genevan ramparts. If elec-
tion is already determined by birth, and the
salvation of the elect assured by immutable
decree, baptism cannot add to the certainty of the
one or the security of the other. The "elect
infant" will be saved without baptism: the non-
elect cannot be helped by it. If baptism do not
"convey'' as well as affirm grace, it is nugatory,
and its omission involves neither peril nor sin.
Moreover, since the elect cannot apostatize, there
is serious peril in positively and solemnly desig-
nating as "children of God" those who may
after\N^ard give every indication of being "chil-
dren of the Devil " rather.^

Since Calvin thought with the other Reformers,
however, that (in the language of the English
Church) infant baptism was "in any wise to be
retained," he boldly made a place for it by
knocking out the corner-stone of his entire
system. For in his Gatechi^i for the Genevan
children he taught it to be "certain that pardon
of sins and newness of life is offered to us in

1 Presbyterian Assembly's Digest, p. 107.

2Cf. Bossuet, Variations (Dublin, 1829), vol. 1.
p. 360.

64 TUE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

baptism." '^We must take heed not to tie Gocl\s
grace to the sacraments ; " he writes again in his
Coimnentary on the Acts, " for the administmtion
of baptism profits nothing except where God
thinks fit. " The efficacy of baptism/' according
to the Westminster Confession, ^4s not tied to
that moment of time wherein it is administered ;
yet, notwithstanding, by the right use of this
ordinance the grace promised is not only offered
but really exhibited and conferred by the Holy
Ghost to such (whether of age or infants) as
that grace belongeth unto, according to the
counsel of God's own will in his appointed
time." ^ The Presbyterian doctrine, as Dr. Charles
Hodge, of Princeton, says, is midway between
Rome and Zwingle in this : that baptism always,
the other that it never, conveys grace. Presby-
terians hold only that it "does not uniformly or
always at the time do so." Since "regeneration"
is expressly mentioned (in Ch. 28, Art. 1 of the
Confession) as included in the " grace promised,"
and therefore " really exhibited and conferred " in
baptism, it is plainly taught that baptism does
regenerate, only not exclusively, always, nor
instantly.^

How narrow a rim of hope is thus left even

1 Schaff, Creeds of Christendom (London), vol. III.,
p. 663. 2 lb., vol. III., p. .

THE MOULD OF DOCTRIJSE. 65

to Calvin's elect infant world, to sav nothing: of
the awful shadow left on those who lie outside
the circuit of the ^^ birth covenant/' For be-
lievers' children also, as it seems, may die un-
regenerate, being unbaptized; and the like may
happen even after baptism, if grace be delayed
or fail to be given therein. Now, since the un-
regenerate cannot "see the kingdom of God," it
follows either that the elect may perish after all,
or that believers' children do not certainly com-
pose the elect, and ought not to monopolize the
rite of baptism. Either of these propositions
admitted is fatal to Calvin's theory of grace;
either of them denied is fatal to his theory of
baptism.

(d) Zwingys Theory. Zwingle alone, of the
three great leaders of the Reformation, con-
sistently and at every point repudiated the
saving efficacy of rites in themselves. "If the
sacraments were the things they signified," he
argued, "then they could not be signs. For
the sign and the thing signified cannot be the
same." "External baptism with water con-
tributes nothing to the washing away of sin."
"Original sin," he strangely added, however,
"does not deserve damnation if a person has
believing parents."^ And still more strangely,

^ Browne on Tliirty-Nine Articles, p. 657.
E

6G THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

maintaining that the ^^hing signified" in bap-
tism was a pledge "to be a hearer and disciple
of God, and to obey his laws," he held that ft jeh
a pledge might be fitly administered to infants.

{c) Current Theories. Of these four theories,
the Romish, or sacerdotal, lies at the foundation
of the English Church, filtering down thence
through the Methodist; the Lutheran, or sacra-
mental, largely pervades the Continental
churches; the Calvinistic, or hereditary, has
shaped the Scotch and other Presbyterian
churches; and the Zwinglian, or dedicatory,
though not distinctly avowed, has deeply im-
pressed the history of Congregationalism.

The English Articles of 1536 were undis-
guisedly Romish.^ They endorsed penance, con-
fession, purgatory^ image-worship, and other
superstitions. They plainly declared baptism
"a thing necessary for the attaining of ever-
lasting life," "insomuch as that infants and
children dying in their infancy shall undoubtedly
be saved thereby, and otherwise not." Sub-
sequent revisions show the traces of Lutheran
and Calvinistic pressure, the latter being espe-
cially anti-sacerdotal and democratic as embodied
in Puritanism. The Thirty-Nine Articles as
finally revised still describe the baptized as

*Hardwick, History of Thirty-Nine A 'tides, p. 50.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 67

"christened," and baptism as '^a sign of re-
generation, or the new birth, whereby as by an
instrument they that receive it rightly are grafted
into the Church;" and the Catechism charac-
terizes it as a proceeding whereby the baptized
is "made a member of Christ, the child of God,
and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven" —
words varied only trivially in form and not at
all in sense from the Romish formula from
Avhich they came. The diversity of strata in
her growing formularies and literature give pre-
text enough for the multiplication of theoretic
conflicts in the English Church, and point
enough to the not quite accurate quip of Lord
Chatham that she has "Calvinistic Articles, a
Papistical service, and an Arminian clergy."

The Methodist Articles were based on those
of the English Church, since often revised in
minor points. Concerning them John Wesley
wrote, " It is certain our Church supposes that
all who are baptized in their infancy are at the
same time born again : and it is allowed that the
w^hole office for the baptism of infants proceeds
on this supposition."^ \yatson, a standard au-
thority in Methodism, says of infant baptism, " It
secures, too, the gifts of the Holy Spirit in those
secret spiritual influences by which the actual

* Sermons (London, 1872), vol. II. (sermon 45), p. 74.

68 2 BE MOULD OF DOCTRINE,

regeneration of those infants vrho die in infancy
is effected." This, says the venerable Dr. Curry,
in a recent article, more fully to be referred to a
few pages farther on, was the doctrine of the
earliest American Methodist ministers, to which,
modified somewhat in expression (it may be
fairly inferred from his language), he still holds.

Presbyterianism does not seem to recede from
the Westminster platform. Dr. John Hall says,
"the only reason why the baptized child does
not sit at the Lord's Table, of course, is the
counterpart of the restraint on the vote of the
American youth." ^

Congregationalism, notwithstanding the con-
genital affinity of the Savoy with the Westmin-
ster Articles, and its high-church developments
in New England history, shows strong tenden-
cies toward reaction against the Calvinistic in-
terpretation of infant baptism, and even against
the continuance of the practice itself. Dr. R.
W. Dale, in a volume not long since published,
protested that " no one can become a member of
a Congregational church by birth," supplement-
ing the statement by a vigorous and destructive
criticism of the whole birthright theory.^

Nothing is more curious to observe, in review-

^ Qaestiovs of the Day, p. 263.

2 Ecclesia (Second Series, London, 1871), p. 371.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. r,9

ing tliis subject, than the fertility of ingenuity
displayed in saving the Scriptural doctrine of
salvation by faith alone from the manifest affront
put on it by the administration of baptism where
faith is impossible. This is attempted in every
case by an intruded fiction. The transaction
does rest on faith, says Rome — the faith of the
Church ; not so, says the English Church, but
on the faith of the sponsor : not so, says Calvin,
but on the faith of the parents: not so, says
Luther, but on the unconscious faith of the child
itself. If these devices sucxjeed in justifying the
practice, it will be only because " faith is made
void."

THE SECOND GREAT QUESTION.

2. Does Baptism symbolize Regeneration f
The British Conference of \yesleyan Metho-
dists has, during the present year, after a seven
years' controversy, so modified its formulary as
(in the opinion of the London Quarterly Revieiv,^
the able organ of that body), to decide "that the
Lord has not in the couree of his ministry con-
nected regeneration with baptism in any way.'*
This event affords an apt illustration of the
working of the very principle which these arti-
cles are designed to illustrate — viz. : the power
of symbolic rites as moulds of doctrine: un-
i October Number, 1882, p. 146.

70 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

broken, they hold the outline of opinion secure;
broken, they refashion plastic opinion to thei •
own altered form, and silently but steadily seek
to reduce to the same conformity the harder lines
of formulated statement.

Baptism, administered without preliminary
faith in the recipient, by its symbolic form
compels some theory of regeneration without
faith, and ultimately a reconstruction of the
whole statement of the ground of salvation.
Baptism, so altered in form as no longer to
symbolize regeneration, but "purification" in-
stead, tends rapidly to iBubstitute the idea of
"purification'^ for that of regeneration in the
scheme of doctrine, and to revolutionize creed
statements accordingly.

Students of doctrinal history will not have
been unobservant of a steadily growing aversion
for the term "baptismal regeneration," and the
equally steady growth of emphasis on "bap-
tismal grace" as a substitute therefor. Dr.
Hodge in his Theology, devotes a long section to
the battering down oi' the one and the exaltation
of the other.^ Episcopal writers betray a keen
scent in the same direction.^ Dr. Curry, in the

iVol. III,p. 591,se^.

2 See American Quarterly Cliurch RevteiVy vol.
XXIV., p.] 22, se^.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 71

remarkable article before referred to (in The
Independent of Nov. 2, 1882), repudiates the
doctrine of baptismal regeneration, out of which
he says infant baptism was "developed," but
still insists that the "sacraments of the Church
ordained by Christ" (by evolution, as it appears)
"are not simply ceremonies: but rather that they
are really effective through the spiritual grace
that accompanies them." The able writer in the
London Quai'tedy above cited, also insists that
"no harm can come from a Scriptural and
guarded maintenance of baptismal grace." The
"question as to the specific grace baptism pledges
and conv^eys to the children of the Christian
covenant finds little direct solution in Scripture,
but mucli indirect illustration." It is not, how-
ever, "regeneration," he is sure, for the "new
birth" is the "full development of the germinal
seed" planted in baptism.

Precisely parallel to the growth of the theory
that baptism conveys grace only and not regener-
ation, is that of the theory that baptism means
purification only and not regeneration; and
preliminary to both was that change in the form
of the ordinance which reduced it from a vivid
memorial of Christ's historic resurrection and the
symbol of the believer's correspondent spiritual
passage "through death to life," to a mere "wash-

72 THE MOrin OF DOC THINE,

ing with water/' laying sole emphasis on the
"putting away the filth of the flesh'' thereby.

Concerning all this, it is obvious to remark
that as Christ once only rose from the dead and
men once only are regenerated, so baptism, fitly
complementing the analogy, is once only to be
administered. But if grace is conferred only by
baptism, and when so conferred is but incipient ; if
baptism symbolize "washing" only, which is from
its very nature incomplete, — then either "grace"
must forever stop short of "regeneration" and
imperfect sanctification forever preclude perfect
justification, or baptism must be often repeated
until the measure of grace and holiness be full.
They are the true Anabaptists who divide the one
baptism into two, entailing a separate ritual and
theory for each; or so mutilate the one baptism
that, once administered, it teaches incompleteness,
and suggests some further step to reach the actual
ne\A' life.

CHAPTER V.

BAPTISM AND THE NEW BIRTH.— THE
APOSTOLIC IDEA.

IT is a noticeable circumstance that Paul's
Epistle addressed to the Romans, busies
itself chiefly with the Jews, and when it men-
tions the Gentile world invariably cites the
Greek rather than the Roman as representative
of it. Not less remarkable is its texture. Its
material is borrowed mainly from the Jewish
Scriptures; its method from the Greek dialecti-
cians; while its vocabulary is derived from, and
its whole spirit is redolent of, Roman law. We
are reminded at once how, in the w^orld^s metrop-
olis, Roman, Greek, and Jew were then dwelling
together, equally arrogant and mutually dis-
dainful, but together were hanging over the
world their tri-color of prerogative, against the
outer barbarian who was neither a citizen of the
Empire, a disciple of the school, nor a child of
Abraham.

Paul was himself a Roman freeman, a Greek
scholar, and a Hebrew of pure blood. But he

73

74 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

had heard a voice, like the blast beside Jericho,
before which the triple walls of his citadel of
privilege had fallen flat. It was the same word
that* had startled Nicodemiis, assuring him that
he too, who of all men fan.'ied himself peculiarly
well-born, must equally with the Gentile "dog"
''be born again.'^ With peculiar authority,
therefore, he assails the entrenchments wliich he
himself has found insecure. To the Roman, he
substantially says, "Your law cannot really
'justify;' and it is a small thing to be on the
right side of Roman law, yet on the wrong side
of God's law." To the Greek, "Your knowl-
edge cannot save ; a man may know, ' but how
to perform that which is good, find not.' " To
the Jew, "Your birth is of no avail; high
birth is neither preventive nor cure of low life."
Jew, Roman, and Greek stand, therefore, equally
with the base-born, nomadic, and illiterate barba-
rian, shelterless before God's law: for "there is
no difference."

There is a special significance in the addressing
to the Roman of an argument from the Jewish
standpoint, for it implies a certain community of
ideas, without which it would be unintelligible.
That such a community in fact existed is implied
in the apparition of Judseo-Roman elements in
subsequent church history. The Pope still wears

THE MOULD OF DOGTBINE. 76

the imperial crown and the title of Pontifex
Maximus borrowed from pagan Rome, but with
these assumes the robes and functions of the
Jewish Higli-Priest. Cardinal Newman, in his
sermons, argues that the Church is an imperial
power, prolonging also the Jewish regime, Lu-
ther found ^'new wine," indeed, but borrowed
from Rome her "old bottles" to put it in, and so
Judaized the Reformation. The Genevan system
derived its inspiration, by way of Calvin through
Augustine, from the Latin Theology of North
Africa: and it culminated in an attempted rees-
tablishment of the Old Testament Theocracy in
the New Testament era.

The historic consilience of these two lines of
influence in the systems named, and the uni-
formly coincident occurrence of one of the
theories of privilege above mentioned (the sacer-
dotal or corporate, the hereditary, or the sacra-
mental), suggest something deeper than a mere
casual connection. Perhaps the battering-ram,
ostensibly aimed by the Apostle at the distinctly-
named Jewish bastions of prerogative, but meant
really for the scarcely-named Roman, may, if
given full swing, prove equally destructive to the
work of unnamed theorists who have more
lately built, of the same material, on the same
foundations.

76 TEE MOV LB OF DOCTRINE.

ANALOGY OF ROMAN TO JEWISH BELIEFS.

It should be remembered that those ^^ ruling
ideas in early ages" which Canon Mozley has so
admirably delineated, still survived in PauFs
time, and in fact, have only slowly receded be-
fore the advancing pressure of the gospel. Chief
among these was the notion of right, as the
creature exclusively of birth, of ceremonial, or
of law. The individual had indeed not emerged
into view, as a possessor of rights, or even as a
subject of thought apart from the corporate life
of which he was a fractional element. Of this
wide field, however, there is opportunity only
hastily to glance at the limited section which
embraces the question immediately in hand.

In the Jewish household of Patriarchal times
lay, yet unseparated, the Family, the Church,
and the State. The household was itself incor-
porate in the personality of the Patriarch, of
which wife, house, son, servant, ox, and ass were
regarded as in the strict sense the property,
indissolubly sharing his rights and destiny. The
punishment of Achan would have been incom-
plete, had it not extended to all his belongings,
which were truly parts of him. Subsequently
the household grew through the tribe to the
nation^ and through the Mosaic Institute was

THE MOULD OF DOCTRIXE. 77

merged into the State, which thereupc n absorbed
all priestly, social, and civic functions. Still,
however, the individual had no recognition,
religious or political, except through the high-
l)riest, or as incorporated in the ^^congregation."
The rite of circumcision had been from the be-
ginning the seal of ancestral rights, and still re-
mained the badge and guaranty of membership
in the commonwealth. By its magical power
ev^en an alien could be "adopted" into citizen-
ship, and through a legal fiction counted as a
home-born child. How completely the Jewish
conception of prerogative was bounded by polit-
ical, hereditary, and ceremonial lines, is manifest
from Paul's words to the Ephesians (2 : 12).
The uncircumcised Gentile, whatever his per-
sonal attainments or character, being an "alien
from the commonwealth of Israel," and from
defect of birth a "stranger from the covenants
of promise," is accounted as necessarily "having
no hope, and without God in the world." To
be "cut off from the congregation" was to the
Jew equivalent to being cut off from life itself.
Not one of these conceptions could have been
unfamiliar to the Roman. While stronger em-
phasis in his scheme lay on the imperial than on
the hereditary element, yet so complete an
analogy existed between the Roman an i Jewish

78 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

exaltation of political, ancestral, and ceremonial
right, that the Roman might fairly be called a
secular Jew. The Patria Potestas was in full
force — extending even to the power of life and
death over the son, whose independent existence,
even, was not recognized by the law. The loss
of citizenship, as Ortolan tells us,' was the loss
of liberty, and, as the slave was not accounted a
person, but a thing, amounted to civil extinction.
"Adoption" was analogous to circumcision, in-
vesting the stranger with a fictitious kinship,
through pontifical ceremony.'^ Paul knew how to
make the chief captain "afraid," who had "bound
him with thongs." ^ After the true Roman spirit
he appealed, not to his personal innocence, but to
his political and ancestral claims, for he was "a
Roman," and that not artificially, for he was
" free-born."

PAUL AGAIIfST THESE BELIEFS.

Now it was inevitable that in the mind of
both Jew and Roman the new idea which Paul
brought should at first tend to fall into, and take
form from, the "mould" of their preconcept'on.
They would identify the Church with the State,
whereupon membership in the one would follow

^ History of Roman Law, (London, 1871), p. 607.
2/6., p. .58L ^ Acts 22: 29.

THE MOULD OB DOCTRINE. 79

citizenship in the other. Or they would allot
its privileges according to hereditary right, reck-
oning the father's adhesion to the new order as
necessarily involving his posterity and investing
them also with his new relations. The new
initiatory rite they would be likely to regard as
a mere outward sacramcntum by which the indi-
vidual, not born a citizen of the new State or an
heir of the new race, might be formally incorpo-
rated therein after the analogy of the Jewish
circumcision or the Koman adoption. It is evi-
dent, therefore, why the Apostle lays so much
emphasis on that rite itself as supplying a new
"mould'' of conception, and why he devotes the
preceding chapter of the Epistle to a preparatoiy
dislodgement of the misapprehensions above re-
ferred to.

He attacks first the idea of salvation by cor-
porate relation. Let the Roman boast of his
share in the majesty of the Empire, and the
righteousness of his Twelve Tables. These cor-
porate splendors had not saved individual men
form the Gehenna of shame and misery depicted
in that livid first chapter of the Epistle. Let the
Jew glory in the "election" of Israel, and the
possession of the divine "Ten Words." But
"they are not all Israel which are of Israel":
and though the law be "holy, just, and good/^

80 lUE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

not the ^4iearer" thereof but the "doer" alone
is justified. God "will render to every man/^
not according to his corporate claims whether he
be Jew or Gentile, but " according to his deeds/^
and by those deeds, his own law being witness,
"shall no flesh be justified.'^

He turns next to the notion of salvation by
ceremonial. "Our Rabbins have said," writes
Rabbi Menachem, "that no circumcised man
will see hell." Augustine, who made baptism
the counterpart of circumcision, taught that both
were saving rites.^ But Paul declares that
Abraham was saved before he was circumcised,
and that circumcision was but the palpable
"sign" and "seal" of an accomplished fact.^
The outward form, therefore, he argues, creates
nothing, and even as a symbol means nothing
except there be first a "circumcision of the
heart." It is plain, therefore, that the over-
weening confidence of Jew and Roman in the
thaumaturgic power of rites has no tolerance
in the Apostle's thought.

Closely connected with this idea is the further
notion of hereditary grace through lineal descent.
This inveterate conceit of the Jews, so diametric-
ally opposed to the whole genius of Christianity,

1 See Ecclesi'a., 2 : 57.

2 Romans 4 : 11,

TUE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 81.

and so strangely given a posthumous life in
modern systems, is assaulted in the New Testa-
ment li'om end to end. It is Avorth noticing that
the very first mention of the Abrahamic covenant
in the New Testament is in connection with the
ordinance of baptism, and involves a distinct
repudiation of the modern birth-right theory.
"Think not to say within youi-selves, We have
Abraham to our father/' says John the Baptist to
the Pharisees who came to be baptized, '^for I
say unto you that God is able of these stones to
raise up children unto Abraham."

Paul here declares the whole theory which
interprets the Abrahamic covenant "as pert lining
to the flesh'' unsound. Abraham himself was
justified, not by circumcision "in the flesh," as w^e
have seen, nor by incorporation in the Jewish
commonwealth "according to the flesh," for that
did not exist in his day. The covenant did not run
with descent "according to the flesh," for "Jn
Isaac shall thy seed be called" while Ishmael *s
rejected. It could not be limited to Israel alone
"according to the flesh," for the very name
Abraham is " father of many nations." He con-
cludes, therefore, that as Abraham himself was
saved by faith alone, the covenant inures to all
" them who also walk in the steps of that faith of
our father of Abraham, which he had being yet

82 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

uncircumclscrl ; that he might be the father of
all them that believe, though they be nc»t circum-
cised." If these apostolic propositions be not seen
at once clearly to obliterate the foundations of the
national, the hereditary, and the sacramental
theories of the church, it would be vain to seek
further to elaborate or emphasize them.

THE CENTRAL TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY.

The Apostle now approaches the very heart
of the Epistle and of Christianity — the doctrine
which he terms the "justification of life" (ch. 5:
18). There is a law anterior to and far deeper
than the Roman or the Mosaic code, of which
indeed they are but feeble and fragmentary ex-
cerpts. Our corporate relation to the universe
is one of more consequence than to microcosmic
Bome or Israel, and it depends on our attituc^e
toward that law. The true ancestral question,
also, reaches back, not to Abraham only, but to
Adam, in whom the trend of race destiny was
established. On the one side of law are sin and
death— root and fruit ; on the other side, in like
relation, righteousness and life. Justification is
that rightening with law which effects transition
from sin to righteousness, and so from death to
life. Death coming into the world by Adam
and "passing through to all men" since, is proof

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 83

conclusive of condemnation, and disjointing of
our relations with the universe. Life in the
risen Christ is equally conclusive of justification
and a restored citizenship in the commonwealth
of God. "Christ being raised from the dead,
dieth no more: death no more hath dominion
over him." For Christ's is that ^^ better resur-
rection," now for the first time manifest, by
which he became the ^^ first-horn from the dead"
— a birth "new," not in time only, but as the
Greek words commonly used imply, "new" in
kind.^

It is evident, therefore, that in Christ's death
and resurrection we find the analogue of that
spiritual process through which we too are "jus-
tified," being "born anew." We are "justified
by faith," but " he that hath died is justified from
sin."^ "If any man come unto me . . . and
hate not his own life also," said our Lord, "he
cannot be my disciple." As, therefore, our
Lord "of himself" "laid down his life that he
might take it again," "being raised again for
our justification," so faith, not "counting life
dear unto itself," willingly "surrenders it for
Christ's sake," that it may "find it" ancAV in
him. Fitly, therefore, our Lord's death and

J See Trench, Synontjms, Part II., (New York, 1868),
p 42. ^ Romans^ -."i [Canterhury Revision).

84 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

resurrection and our analogous spiritual new-
birth are jointly symbolized in that act of faith
in which the believer voluntarily "lays down
liis life" also, that he may resume it again, not
bv his own act, but throuo;h another hand in
Christ's name, as his avowed servant, henceforth
"to walk in newness of life."

For it cannot be too often reiterated that the
central idea of baptism is not a meagre and
imperfect "purification," but that complete and
marvellous "new birth" w^hich alone made
PauFs message "a go.spel," "the power of God
unto salvation to every one that bellevdh: to the
Jew first, and also to the Greek." The symbolic
essence of baptism is therefore, according to the
Apostle's arguments, not the cleansing "applica-
tion of water," but the " burial " of that " breath
which is in man's nostrils" into an element in
which breath and thereby life is cut off, and its
being raised thence by exterior power. Dean
Goulburn, of the English Church, tersely puts
it thus : "Animation having been fc)r one mo-
ment suspended beneath the waters, a type this
of the interruption of man's energies by death,
the body is lifted up again into the air by way
of expressing emblematically the new birth of
resurrection."^ We can but join in his expressed

^ Bampton Lectures (1850), Oxford Edition, p. 18.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 85

"regret" that "the form of administration un-
avoidably (if it be unavoidably) adopted in cold
climates should utterly obscure the emblematic
significance of the rite, and render unintelligible
to all but the educated the Apostle's association
of burial and resurrection with the ordinance/*
"Were immersion universally practiced," he adds,
"this association of two at present heterogeneous
ideas would become intelligible to the humblest.''
How "obedience from the heart" to this
"mould of doctrine" may give outline to the
whole c»f the Christian life, Archbishop Cranmer
tell us after his vigorous manner: "The dipping
into the water doth betoken that the old Adam
with all his sin and evil lusts ought to be
drowned and killed by daily contrition and
repentance." " The Apostle here teaches," adds
Bishop Wordsworth, "that the doctrine of our
ncAV birth in baptism is a practical doctrine, and
is indeed the root of all Christian practice." *

BAPTISM NOT A PURIFICATION.

The idea of purification is never in the New
Testament explicitly associated with baptism, and
the term "wash" but once. In that sole in-
stance it was Ananias' word with reference to
the baptism of Paul himself. It may be re-

^ Commentary on Netv Testament, p. 230.

86 THE MOULD OF DOCIRINB.

marked incidentally that in that case immersion
was necessarily implied : for the Greek louOy Dr.
Robinson's New Testament Lexicon bein^ witness,
is never used except the whole person be involved.
But it is more significant to notice that the em-
phasis is laid, not on washing the man, but
washing away sin; that is to say, in Cranmer's
(and also Luther's) phrase, "drowning the old
Adam,'^ as the old world was flooded and
"washed away" from JN^oah. Alluding to
Noah's case (one of the two typical events of
the Old Testament to which the term baptism
is applied in the New) Peter distinctly antici-
pates and repels that false interpretation of the
ordinance which makes it a mere "putting away
of the filth of the flesh." Noah was not
cleansed by the "application of water," nor
has that "figure" any conceivable "likeness"
to, or connection with, the "resurrection of
Christ." He lays emphasis instead on that
loyal "answer of a good conscience toward
God" by which Noah became, as the Epistle
to the Hebrews phrases it, "the heir of right-
eousness by faith." His loyalty was manifested
in the unhesitating surrender of his life into
God's hand, to be shut up into an unprecedented
structure, without rudder, chart, or compass;
wliereupon he sailed through the flood of death

THE MOULD OF DGCTBiyE, 87

to the shores of a new life, and became, like
Christ, in a manner the ^'first-born of the dead.'^
"The like figure (literally "the antitype")
whereunto," adds the Apostle, "baptism doth
now save us . . . by the resurrection of Jesus
Christ."

Turning to the other Old Testament type
adduced by Paul, we are told that the redeemed
people were "all baptized unto Moses in the
cloud and in the sea." Much childish hilarity
has been indulged by those who think baptism
consists in the cleansing "application of water,"
over the seeming incongruity of an " immersion,"
while going over the sea "dry shod." It is not
difficult to see that such triflers indulge in a bad
joke at their own expense. For if the Israelites
were untouched by water, as is implied in the
narrative, and still were baptized, it is plain that
baptism cannot be "washing." On the other
hand, remember that the Children of Israel were
commanded by Moses in God's name to "go for-
ward " into the as yet unparted sea, and that they
boldly surrendered their lives to his word; and
so " by faith they passed through the Red Sea as
by dry land : which the Egyptians assaying to do
were drowned." "By that act," says Bunsen,
"history was born;" for by it Israel "passed
over" from continent to continent, from slavery

88 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

to freedom, from the kingdom of Pharoah to the
kingdom of God. How thoroughly does all this
harmonize with the figurative language of the
Epistle to the Romans. They had been " buried "
as Egyptian slaves: they had been "raised'^ as
God's freemen to "newness of life." They were
"justified" — that is, completely changed in
relation, but not yet " sanctified " — ^that is, pro-
gressively changed in character. " Sin " had
" po more " rightful " dominion over them," for
they had " died " to it ; but they were yet so to
"yield their members unto righteousne&'s " that
it should have no real dominion. They were got
clean out of Egypt, but Egypt was yet by slow
and painful discipline to be got out of them.
They were " perfect " as " new-born " babes, but
not perfect, nor by any further " birth " to be-
come so, as full-grown men.

Thus it is manifest that into an unbroken
" mould " Old Testament type, New Testament
resurrection, and perennial new birth and justifi-
cation alike fit with an exactness that reveals
their affinity one with another, and links them
all to an antecedent faith, whose " obedience " is
expressed therein. Symbolically the believer
thus pictures forth to men the transaction by
which he has spiritually "passed over" from
" the law of sin ^nd death " to the " law of the

IHE MCULD OF D0C2KINE. 89

Spirit of life in Christ Jesus/' wherein, and
not wherefrom, he has been ^^made free." He
has died " io sin " that he might not die '^in his

CHAPTER VI.

BAPTISM AND THE NEW BIH TIT—PERVERSIONS
AND THEIR SOURCES.

WHAT mean ye by this service ?^^ This was
the question which, as Moses declared, the
Passover ordinance was expected and intended to
provoke from successive generations. We may
gather from the terms employed a significant
hint of the essential nature and functions of an
ordinance. It was a "service/^ that is to say,
something done because commanded, and since
the "servant is not above his master," done as
commanded. It had a "meaning,'' specific and
intelligible. It was God's chosen symbol to
body forth his chosen thought. To have sub-
stituted some supposed higher service for exact
obedience would have been disobedience. King
Saul tried that, and found a quick passage into
history, branded with the stinging legend, "to
obey is better than sacrifice." To have modified
the symbol as if to express some w^iser thought, or
to express the appointed thought in some wiser
way, would have been to insinuate indiscretion

90

THE MOULD OF DOCTBUVE. 91

in the Omniscient One in not taking earlier
counsel of the assumed reviser. "He that rc-
proveth God, let him answer it.'^

"What mean yef^^ said the children to the
fathei-s, and this could be easily told and easily
understood. For so vividly did the appointed
rite reproduce the salient features of that memo-
rable time, in which God " passed-over " sheltered
Israel, and Israel "passed-over" the sea — that
3ven the child must recognize the likeness of the
Dne in the other. But all that God meant thereby
neither fathers nor children could as yet tell. No
— nor can we to whom the "mystery hid from
the ages" has been revealed: for it is a mystery
that forever "passeth knowledge," into which
still even "angels desire to look."

THE SYMBOLISM OF THE ORDINANCES.

This is the common mark of the Divine, in
ordinance and prophecy, that while simple and
obvious in their primary import, they hint far
more than they disclose. So do they in their
deep-lying principles tap the roots of things — so
do they continually freshen and deepen them-
selves in meaning, aptly interpreting new phases
of fact and feeling, and finding "springing and
germinant fulfilment" in growing history — so do
they by subtle allusion touch secret doors opening

92 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE,

into byways of discovery, as to remind us that
he who framed the ordinances of the church is
the same God who also established the "ordi-
nances of heaven." Reverently we watch the
trial of the perfectness of those heavenly ordi-
nances, as the planet lays its pulse-beat open on
the sun, and brings the chronometry of centuries
to the test of seconds ; and lo ! a spider's film is
not delicate enough to find a margin of variance.
How more devoutly ought we to study, and rever-
ently to deal with, those earthly ordinances meant
to steady a sublimer pulse-beat and measure the
arc of a longer flight, even that of a soul, whose
fulfilment of its course is one day to be laid open
and measured against the sun.

The prophets could not comprehend the full
meaning of the sayings given them to utter; all
the less could they safely dwarf or alter them,
but they could "speak God's word faithfully."
Israel could read the historic, but not the deeper
prophetic, meaning of the Passover. So far it
was to them a message sealed. But all the more
reverently did they guard the sacred mystery,
and bring it to later ages safe under the un-
violated seal ; thus " not unto themselves, but unto
us they did minister " a blessing greater than they
knew. Surely the ordinances of the New Testa-
ment are not narrower in range, nor do they

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 93

enshrine a mystery less profound, than those of
the Old. Accordingly our Lord did not lay,
even uj)on his Apostles, the delicate and perilous
task of readjusting as if ill-devised, or ^^ de-
veloping'^ as if incomplete, appointments om-
nisciently prepared; nor did he demand even a
perfect comprehension of the depth and ultimate
bearing of his commands : he asked only a pos-
sible and far humbler service, viz., that they
would "keep'' his "words." The "faithful"
servant in the parable is reckoned also "wise."
For though the " servant knoweth not what his
Lord doeth," he may still borrow of his Lord's
wisdom and further his Lord's end by obeying
unquestioniugly his Lord's command.

"What mean ye by this service?" let us ask
of Paul, concerning either of Christ's ordinances.
His answer is unequivocal. Its authority rests
wholly on Christ's word. He has "received
from the Lord Jesus" what he has "delivered
unto" us; and delivered as he received it. The
ordinances, like the gospel, were given him "in
trust," and not even "an angel from heaven"
might authorize the violation of that trust, nor
could he alter without destroying. The primary
meaning of each ordinance is likewise in Paul's
teaching palpable. In baptism, to which we
here espe( ially turn, the historic resurrection of

94 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

the Lord is reenacted in outline, as we liave
seen, and the analogous spiritual new birth
thereby symbolized. It emphasizes the fact of
the resurrection, and the reality of the new birth.
But beyond this it fastens attention on the old
question of the disciples, ^^ what the rising from the
dead should mean'': and sets men asking again
with Nicodemus concerning the new birth " how
can these things be?"

If the sole aim of baptism were to impale
thoughtless men on these questions, it would be
no unworthy consummation, nor foreign to the
central issues of to-day.

WHAT DOES INFANT BAPTISM MEAN?

But again we ask those who are sprinkling
water upon a babe in the name of the Trinity,
^'What mean ye by this service?" The most
noticeable feature of the somewhat multitudinous
and chaotic reply will be that no one ventures to
turn for authority, as Paul turns concerning
primitive baptism, to the explicit command of
Christ. For no one is mad enough to claim that
our Lord ever by any specific word commanded
men to be sprinkled, or babes to be in any way
baptized. The utmost that is claimed is that the
word used by him was so generically comprehen-
sive, and so vague, that by a liberal construction

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 95

these ideas may be sheltered inclusively under
the outer edges of its meaning: that baptism is
not necessarily confined by Scripture to immer-
sion, nor to adults — only that. The XXXIX.
Articles of the Church of England say, *'The
baptism of young children is in anywise to be re-
tained in the Church as most agreeable with the
institution of Christ/' The Methodist Aiiicles
more curtly say, "The baptism of young children
is to be retained in the Church." ^ While the most
recent utterance of all, that of the Reformed
Episcopal Church, proposes as justifying the re-
tention of the form, the cautious statement that it
is " not contrary to Scripture,^' and is conformable
to "ancient usage.'' ^ It will be observed that
all these recognize the institution as existing and
to be "retained," but there is, in all, significant
silence as to its origin and credentials; unless the
tracing it to "ancient usage" be meant as a return
with Rome to the sufficiency of tradition. The
Council of Trent did, indeed, claim that the bap-
tism of infants was "instituted by our Lord
Jesus Christ " ; but this was asserted equally of all
the seven sacraments, and on the authority, not
of Scripture, but of an alleged Apostolic Tradi-
tion. Cardinal Bellarmine places among the

* Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, vol. III.
*/6.,vol. Ill, p. 820.

96 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

things depending wholly on tradition, because
not found in Scripture — with the perpetual vir-
ginity of Mary, the perpetual recurrence of Easter
on Sunday, and Purgatory (which Luther believed,
)^et admitted it could not be found in Scripture)
— "infant baptism, which is necessary to be
believed, but neither Romanists nor Protestants
can prove it from Scripture."^ The Romanist
Mohler adds, that the retention of the custom is
'^utterly incomprehensible, according to the
Protestant view." The Anabaptists, he says,
drew the natural conclusion from Luther's
premises, and he was powerless to answer them.^
The impression made by this difficulty upon,
and the share it had in shaping the history of,
two men alike so spleudid in endowment, so
acute in criticism, so candid and lovable in char-
acter, as John H. and Francis W. Newman, yet
ultimately driven wide as the Poles asunder in
faith, ought not to be overlooked. The dis-
covery of the spuriousness of the "decretals"
and other alleged early documents upon which
Rome had rested the authority of her traditions,
had left her without even this gwa^i-apostolic
basis of support. All her novelties, their base

1 Browne, on The Thirty-nine Articles (London, 1865),
p. 137.

'^ Symbolism (New York, Thi -d Edition), p. 208.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 97

being cut away, hung like a mirage in the air,
ready to vanish. To meet this "difficulty/'
John H. Newman broached the "hypothesis,"
since so prominent in all discussions of the
theme, of the " Developmext of Doctrine." ^
Protestant writers have been ready to borrow, as
the sole possible resource in the authentication
of infant baptism, this theory, which its inventor
himself regarded as worthless, if it did not vindi-
cate all the peculiarities of the Romish Church.
Commenting on that one of the Tkirty-Nine
Articles of his own Church which bears on this
subject, Principal G. A. Jacob says : Infant bap-
tism "is not mentioned in the New Testament
— no instance of it is recorded there — no allusion
is made to its effects — no directions are given for
its administration — it is not an Apostolic ordi-
nance;" but he adds: "\ye find in the New
Testament the fundamental idea from which it
was afterwards developed."^

Not so easily did Francis W. Newman dispose
of this stumbling-block in the Avay : one of the
first, as he tells us (in the pathetic history of his
soul struggles recorded in his Phases of Faith)^
to escape which he turned aside from the beaten

^Development of Christian Doctrine, (London, 1845),
2 Ecclesiastical Polity of Neio Testament, p. 270
» (London, 1870), pp 6, 9, 10.

98 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

]iath. Being a candidate for orders in the
Church, he was shocked, on approaching this
subject, to find baptismal regeneration plainly
taught in the Articles, and as plainly evaded by
clergymen, as it seemed to him, through '^shifts
inv^ented to avoid the disagreeable necessity of
resigning their functions/' All the defences of
infant baptism he found to partake of the same
Jesuitical spirit: involving the attempt to fasten
upon the Scriptures by insinuation the responsi-
bility of a custom which could not be directly
derived from them. " Even if they can be made
to confirm, they could not have suggested or
established, it." The sharp recoil against dis-
covered disingenuousness in sacred things in-
tensified itself into a suspicious temper, grew to
cynicism, and so he went out into a realm "lonely
as the desert behind Algiers,'' where he still
Avanders solitary and uncomforted, while the
night comes on.

HOW SPRINKLING IS DEFENDED.

The practice of sprinkling is equally devoid
of Scriptural warrant, and carries with it the
marks of human and — in its extended applica-
tion— comparatively modern intrusion. Cere-
monial corruptions, says Archbishop Whately,
are " first overlooked, then tolerated, then sane-

TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 99

tloncd, and finally embodied in a system; of
which they are rather to be regarded as the cause
than the effect."^ When the African Bishop
Cyprian uttered the hesitating, but amiable sug-
gestion, that the drenching of the bed-ridden
convert in water might graciously be accepted as
confessedly imperfect, but in such case the only
possible approach to the divine immersion^ —
probably he little thought an exception based
upon so timid and casual a venture of opinion
would one day assume to be the rule, to the
practical exclusion of the divine order itself.
Yet through that insignificant breach, the deep
waters of baptism have shallowed down until
they are at length reduced to tiny drops trick-
ling on an infant's forehead. The watermarks
of this decline are plainly visible, as will here-
after be shown, in the history of the modification
of ecclesiastical formularies: the juxtaposition
of the new and the surviving old producing in
some cases a sense of incongruity as striking as
the sight of the baker's loaves and pans set in
the niches and mixed with the sculptured relics
of Vesta's temple at Rome. The Methodist
Discipline^ for instance, still solemnly cites the
traditional warrant for infant baptism, ^^ Except

* Errors of Rome, p. 16.

2 " Not unlawful." See Cave, Primitive Christianity,
(Oxford, 1840), p. ] 50.

100 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE,

a man be born of water," etc.," and then as
solemnly provides a teaspoonful of water out of
which the child is to be ^^ born." The Anglican
Catechism of 1862 asks the ancient question,
" What is the outward and visible sign or form
in baptism?" and returns the answer novel, in
more senses than one, ^^ Water: wherein the
person is baptized."^ According to this, water
itself is a "mere form^^ and that being non-
essential, may be dispensed with.

As to the positive symbolic import of the
sprinkling of water upon infants under the name
of baptism, enough has been already said of the
multiplicity and incompatibility of modern theo-
ries, to show that no majority vote could prob-
ably be obtained in favor of any verdict more
definite than that which the Pharisees rendered
concerning the origin of John^s baptism, " We
cannot tell." Nearly all the Chiu*ches — to
quote substantially the language of Dr. John
Hall, used in another connection, but most ajpro-
pos here — appeal first to the New Testament:
if that fails, to the Old Testament : then to anti-
quity: and finally conclude that no inspired rule
is given. "So," he says, "loose practice, like
loose thinking, always seeks to represent the
standard as indefinite." ^

1 Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, p. 521.

2 Questions of the Daj, p. 273, vol. III.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 101

It is probable, however, that on the negative
side far greater definiteness and unanimity might
be reached, in the avowal that baptism does not
symbolize regeneration by faith. This is logi-
cally inevitable, whether or not it take the form
of definite avowal. For literally the sprinkling
of water in no wise touches the life, or even re-
motely shadows forth emergence from death into
life. Theoretically, as applied to infants, it can-
not imply regeneration by faith, for faith is there
impossible. It must therefore, in such case,
either be held to effect regeneration, or to make
no allusion to it. We reach, therefore, this re-
markable result :

AN ENORMOUS CX)NTRADlCTION.

That baptism, which was in Paul's time im-
mersion, the visible ^'likeness of Christ's
resurrection," and the symbol of the believer's
passage through death to life, may in the nine-
teenth century equally well be pouring or
sprinkling, which are alike devoid of every trace
of such likeness, or of such symbolism; that
that era-making idea of the new birth — with
which our Lord startled Nicodemus ; with which
the Apostles "turned the world upside down";
and which has been the inner force of every
great religious revolution since; which our Lord

102 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE,

"writ large '^ in a s}nnbol chosen by himself and
set at the forefront of his advancing church —
may with perfect safety be pushed from its place,
and the notion of "purification, consecration" or
what not, thrust in instead.

Clearly a baptism which carefully excludes
from its purport the central thought which Christ
included, and so refashions the outline of the rite
as to efface all traces of his design, and adapt it
to the utterance of the new thought so alien to
his own, can no longer be Christ's baptism. And
his word returns again : " Ye have made the word
of God of none effect by your tradition."

The enormity of the contradiction reached
through these perversions, and still maintained
by those who declare the Bible their " only and
sufficient rule of faith and practice," is startling.
The most specious if not the only apology,
which Protestantism can be said to have pro-
duced, is the citation of that perilous principle
which Luther himself suggested — for the pro-
tection, however, not only of infant baptism,
but of auricular confession, penance, and the
bulk of the Romish innovations;^ and to which,
as we have seen, the Reformed Episcopal Church
has just recurred, viz. : that nothing can be per-
nicious that is sanctified by antiquity and not
^ Hard wick, History of Thirty-Nine Articles, p. 14.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 103

explicitly forbidden by Scripture. A moment's
consideration will show that this is a revision,
which amounts to rescission, of the Protestant
Canon. For it absurdly proposes two "only''
rules, Scripture and ancient usage, which, how-
ever, must not conflict. But conflict is in fact
inevitable; for "the restless spirit of man," says
Canon Liddon, "cannot but at last press a
principle to the real limit of its application, even
although centuries should intervene between the
premises and the conclusion." ^

Infant baptism, for instance, even if not fairly
included under the authority of Christ's commis-
sion, seems at worst only a harmless superfluous
form, and is often defended on that plea. But
the ver\^ foundation principle of the theory which
introduces infant baptism compels inevitably the
claiming of the whole field for it, leaving adult
baptism, save in heathen nations, exceptional only.
For if baptism can be of any spiritual service,
independent of intelligence or volition, it would
be criminal to neglect or postpone it. That fierce
old Christian militant who made his motto "bap-
tism or death " was an evangelist after his way :
and equally so that enthusiastic Churchman who
covertly sought to save the Algerian Moslems not

"^ Bampton Lectures (1866) on the Divinity of Our
Lord (New York, 1868), p. 484.

104 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

long since. Standing at his window with prayer-
book and watering-pot in hand, he diligently read
the baptismal service from the one, and from the
other simultaneously sprinkled the passers-by.^
But baptism in unresisting infancy would,
according to their theory, have been equally
efficacious, and would have been the normal
course: for it would have saved the resort to
force in the one case and to craft in the other.^
It is evident, then, that infant baptism and
believers' baptism cannot permanently dwell
together. The parasite, once fairly lodged, will,
if it be not torn away, drink the life and usurp
the place of the trunk to which it clings. The
church, no more than the individual, can "serve
two masters." Scripture or tradition alone must
be supreme.

HOW INFANT BAPTISM AROSE.

As to the antiquity of the rite of infant lustra-
tion there can be no doubt. Indeed, it might be
hard to resist for it the claim which one of the
Romish Fathers has triumphantly brought in
vindication of the practice of prayers for dead:
that it was "more ancient than Christianity

* Westminster Review, 114 (October, 1880), p. 549.
2 Curteis, Bampton Lectures, p. 214.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 105

itself." ^ It was almost the universal custom of
heathen nations, as Mr. Tylor tells us, to couple
a religious meaning with the washing and
naminor of the child after birth. The Greeks
and Romans practistKl, not only infant baptism,
but the sprinkling of holy water upon wor-
shippers, as a purifying symbol.^

But when or how the baptism of infants as a
Christian rite began it is not so easy to say.
Evil did not first come into the world in the
manifest garb or with the honest tramp of an
open foe, but with the gliding of the serpent,
" more subtle than any beast of the field." " No
one," says Archbishop Whately, " can point out
any precise period when the Romish corruptions
began — ^they crept in one by one — the natural
offspring of human passions unchecked." ^ They
"all grew out of natural and generally praise-
worthy impulses, as in the case of prayers for the
dead, supposed to be in purgatory," according
to Canon IMozley. But these worthy impulses
were manipulated constantly to an unworthy
end, and cannot hallow the rites they confided
in. In the days when the Roman Republic had
superseded the Kingdom, but the old kingly

' MUller : cited in Barrows' PargaU ry (Americau
Tract Society, 1882). p. 107.

^Prwnhvt Culture, 2 : 430, 439, 441.
* Errors of Home, p. 11.

1C6 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

reverence still lingered, "eight ancient kingly
statues stocxi in the Capitol. A statue of Julius
Caesar was placed near these, two years before
his death, with the covert object of giving him
kingly honors." ^ The statue dumb and motion-
less seemed innocent, but in fact the snow-white
marble was dyed deep with an iniquitious intent,
and the candid sculptor's art suborned to the
basest of treacheries.

So, one by one in the second century A. D.,
there crept to the side of the simple rite Christ
had appointed new "symbolic elements in ac-
cordance with the taste of the time and the
poetic genius of the East, especially of the
Egyptian Church ; " ^ beautiful, tender, seemingly
harmless and even helpful. A little later and
these new features have multiplied, got into the
foreground, taken on a deep and awful signifi-
cance. The brotherly minister has become a
thaumaturgic priest; the simple bread and wine
under his incantations become the literal body
and blood of the Lord, exclusion from the taste
of which, for child or man, is death; the bap-
tismal water must, equally with the bread and
wine, be "trans-elemented" by the pouring in

1 G. C. Lewis, Credibility of Early Roman History,
(London, 1855), p. 107.

2Pressens6, Early Tears of Christianity (London,
1879), p. 4:24.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 107

of oil ill tlie form of a cross, the letting down a
lighted taper until the melted wax had flowed in
and the light was extinguished, with divers
other subsidiary rites and multiplied forms of
words. ^ The water thus made ^'lioly'^ of itself
regenerated all who were plunged therein, and
nothino: else could. Considerino; the strenjyth of
parental love and piety, and the preconceived
unity of parent and child in the popular mind,
as heretofore explained; considering also the new
rod of power thereby lodged in priestly hands —
it Ls not wonderful that the baptism of infants
entered and grew apace.

When sprinkling and pouring had been first
introduceil as " not unlaAvful," says Cave in his
Primitive Christianity, it "quickly succeeded in
the room of immersion, because the tender bodies
of most infants (the only persons now baptized)
could not be put under water in these cold cli-
mates without prejudice to health, if not to their
lives." ^ Wall puts it a little more carefully,
thas : " It being allowed to weak children to be
baptized by affusion, many fond ladies and gen-
tlemen first, and then by degrees the common
people, would obtain the favor of the priest to
have their children pass for weak," and so escape

' Cf. Cowles in Bih. Sac, vol. XXXIII., p. 426.
^Primitive Christianity, p. 156.

108 TUE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

dipping.^ It is noticeable that immersion did
not at once sink into sprinkling. "In 1645,"
says Wall, " when dipping ceased, there was no
sprinkling, but pouring only." He quotes Vas-
quez as saying that "sprinkling (as compared
with pouring) cannot be practised without sin." ^
How sprinkling itself first got a footing as bap-
tism is not clear. Exorcism, which always
accompanied baptism in the early church, in-
volved the sprinkling of holy water. It is quite
possible, as has been maintained by some, ^ that
this was afterwards confounded Avith baptism;
and that the custom of sprinkling to-day is the
"survival" of a superstitious charm to drive
away the Devil: which it were to be devoutly
wished, though quite unlikely, that it may do.

The conclusion is obvious. No antiquity,
however hoary, can change earthly things to
heavenly. No silence of Scripture, however
profound, can be taken as a license for the intru-
sion of human device into rites that are divine:
and such intrusion can bring only evil. Man,
powerless to create, is mighty to destroy. Even
in the Apostles' time the "mystery of lawless-
ness" had begun to work, and the sanction of

1 History of Infant Baptism, p. 717.
2/6., p. 719.
8 /6., p. 723.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRIIfE. 109

the Fathers is weaker still. There is "but one
lawgiver'^ — not Wesley, nor Calvin, nor Augus-
tine, nor Cyprian, nor even Paul, but Christ the
L )rd. " What he saith unto you, do it/'

CHAPTER \LL

BAPTISM AND THE NEW BIRTH— RESULTS OF
PERVERSION.

RESULTS, in history and nature, are often
remote from, di^^proportionate to, and in
themselves unlike, their causes. The links that
bind them are likewise frequently delicate and
obscure. It may easily happen, therefore, that
the suggestion of such intimacy of relation will
at first awaken a sense of surprise, or even of
incredulity — the connection, though real, not be-
ing at once obvious. Nothing could perhaps
seem more incongruous than the attributing the
local persistence of red clover, by Mr. Darwin,
to the presence of cats. ^ But the absurdity dis-
appears when we are reminded that the prolonged
lite of the clover depends on its fertilization by
the humble bee; that the bee cannot survive the
destruction of its comb and nest, and that these,
which the mice would destroy, the cats, by ex-
terminating the mice, protect. Thus often a
most delicate thread of connected circumstance

^ Origin of Species (New York, 1883), p. 57.
110

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. ' 111

once grasped will lead us to the centre of the
labyrinth, and change our embarrassment to sur-
prise.

Doubtless the connection of cats with clover
will seem to the casual observer quite as de-
monstrable as that, for instance, of a perverted
baptism with the current evolution philosophy.
Nevertheless, a patient fumbling among the ad-
jacent facts may touch a clew leading to the
revelation of a real kinship.

THE TESTIMONY OF THOLUCK.

Nowhere has the grosser Evolutionism found
a more congenial air or a better prepared soil
than in the field that Luther ploughed. Indeed,
so rampant has been the growth of thorns and so
abundant the crop of tares in that region since
his day, as to suggest that the '^ enemy'' may in-
sidiouf^ly have broken off the point of his plough,
so that it did not go deep enough, or thrust some
tares into the seed-bag while he was still sowing.
According to Dr. Charles Hodge,^ "in the com-
mon Protestant theory, no judgment is expressed
or implied by the church, in receiving any one,
as to the fact of his regeneration," for it is "not
the purpose of God that the visible church on
earth should consist exclusively of the regenerate.'^

^ Systematic Theology, vol. III., p. 545.

112 THE MOULD OF DOCTRTNE,

In proof of this he cites the parable of the
"^vheat and tares/' But if, as he maintains, the
"fiekV in that parable be the church, and the
"tares" the unregenerate, the scope of the Mas-
ter's directions to his servants is somewhat
enlarged by implication. For they were only
forbidden to usurp the " angels' " functions by
"pulling up" the tares, but it seems they may
without hinderance take on them the "enemy's'^
Avork of planting them. How thoroughly this
has been done in Lutheran Germany let the ven-
erable Professor Tholuck tell. " I regret nothing
so much," said he to Joseph Cook,^ "as that the
line of demarcation between the church and the
world which Jonathan Edwards and Whitefield
drew so deeply in the mind of New-England is
almost unknown, not to the theological doctrines,
but to the ecclesiastical forms of Germany. With
us confirmation is compulsory. Children of un-
believing as well as of believing families must at
an early age be baptized and profess faith in
the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Without a
certificate of confirmation in some Church, em-
ployment cannot be la\\^ully obtained. After
confirmation, the religious standing is assumed to
be Christian : after that, we are all church mem-
bers. Thus it happens that in our State Church
1 Bih. Sac, vol. XXXII., p. 740.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 113

the ronverted and unconverted are mixed pell-
mell together/' In a note Mr. Cook adds that " in
a few cities of North Germany infamous licenses
were granted women for an infamous purpose,
but only on exhibition of a certificate of conjirm-
ation." Of the analogous evil results of infant
bai)tism in New-England, Mr. Joseph Cook, who
is himself a Congregationalist, has borne the most
courageous and trenchant testimony. It led, (he
says in substance, in his lectures on "Qrthodoxi//')^
to the "half-way covenant," and that to skepti-
cism. He affirms, on the authority of Tracy,
that all the churches not following Edwards and
Whitefield in their revolt against unregenerate
church-membership became Unitarian.^ Infant
baptism, imported from the Old World, laid the
foundation of a State Church in New-Eno-land.
Roger Williams, he adds, protested that it would
lead to the secularization of church-membership;
which it in fact did, and out of this secularization
grew the weakness of New-England against
French infidelity.^

UNITARIAXISM AND ITS ORIGIN.

The history of New England Unitarianism is
doubtless familiar, but it is perhaps not so well
known that infant bai)tism was responsible for

1 p. 280. 2 p_ 281. 3 pp. 271, 272, 281.

II

114 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

its origination, as well as its modern revival.
The name itself, according to Bodd, one of their
early historians, was not derived from antipathy
to the doctrine of the Trinity as their character-
istic tenet, but from the union of all parties
(including the Orthodox) at their instance, in a
bond of religious toleration, under the name of
uniti or unitarii. When the rest receded from
this, the name attached to them alone.^ The
first propounder of Unitarianism, says Eees, was
Cellarius. In the beginning of the sixteenth
century, he was appointed by the Reformers to
defend infant baptism against the Anabaptist
leaders. Being overpowered by their arguments,
he repudiated infant baptism not only, but went
further and denied the Trinity. That this was
no legitimate outgrowth of Anabaptism itself,
however, is historically certain; for in 1546
Adam Pastor was excluded from their body for
holding Unitarian views.^ But the intensity of
the revulsion, which led to the supreme exalta-
tion of reason, and the consequent rejection of
the mystery of the Trinity, is not inexplicable
when we remember to Avhat stultiloquence the
Keformers had descended in justifying infant

1 Rees, Bacovi'an Catechism (London, 1818), Preface
IV.
2/6.. VII.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 115

baj)tism. Luther said, for instance, as follows:
"The Anabaptists pretend that children, not as
yet having reason, ought not to receive bap-
tism. 1 answer that reason in no way con-
tributes to faith. Nay, in that children are
destitute of reason, they are all the more fit and
proper recipients of baptism. For reason is the
greatest enemy that faith hath. . . Faith comes
of the word of God, when this is heard : little
children hear that word when they receive bap-
tism, and therewith they receive faith."* Bap-
tism having been thus reduced to magic, and
f lith, for its sake, identified with unreason, the
Unitarians rejected both. Their Racovian Cate-
chism is largely devoted to an arraignment of
infant baptism and sprinkling as unscriptural —
one of the most complete anywhere to be found.^

Luther's great inconsistency.

It is the more remarkable that Luther did not
revolt against infant baptism, when we remember
irs sharp antipathy to Papal usurpation, and
also that the immediate occasion of the Reforma-
tion was the sale of indulgences. For infant
baptism was manifestly, as Dean Mil man terms
it, one of the "strong foundations of sacerdotal

' Lxfher's Table Talk (Philadelphia, 1868). p. 202.
2Recp, Racovian Catechism, p.* 253, seq.

116 THE MOULD OF BOCTRINE.

power;" ^ and the sale of Indulgences was its
direct outgrowth. For the very notion of indul-
gence, with that of penance and purgatory,
depends on the assumed loss of baptismal grace
by after-lapse into sin, the eifects of which w^re
thus to be averted. But the idea of regenerating
virtue in baptism, again, arose, as we have seen,
in connection with infant baptism, inferentially
interpreted as made efficacious by ^Uransele-
mentation " of the water (an idea still surviving
in the ritual of the English and the Methodist
Churches in the prayer that ^^ this water may be
sanctified," etc.) " Because the taint of our birth
is purified by baptism," says Origen, "therefore
infants are baptized." It is obvious that the
damnation of infants not so purified, logically
follows, even were it not distinctly asserted by
the Fathers, as it was. Even good Dr. Emmons,
in a later day, only softened this inevitable
corollary by hopefully surmising, with Dr. Watts,
that they might be annihilated.^ They are still
ominously excluded by the English Church from
burial in consecrated ground. Infant com-
munion was also early practised ; it being con-
sistently held, with Augustine, that mystic food

^History of Latin Christianity, (London, 1857), vol.
III., p. 277.
2 Works, vol. II., p. G51.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 117

was as essential to the maintenance as mystic
birth to the inception of spiritual life.^

Thus through the misinterpretation and mis-
application of baptism had faith been changed to
superstition, and the shadow of priestly power
been projected over the whole range of life from
the cradle to the grave, and even into the in-
visible beyond. Claiming to hold the "keys of
heaven" through the sacraments, the priesthood
had tyrannically gone on to "bind heavy bur-
dens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on
men's shoulders," which they themselves would
not " move with one of their iiuo^ers."

Out of this region of tradition, with its hidden
reefs, disordered compasses, and baffling winds,
Luther set sail into the open sea of God's word,
laying a straight course along the line of "justi-
fication by faith alone." But unhappily, reaching
the subject of baptism, he at length fell "into a
place where two seas met" — and from that ship-
wreck, only " on boards and broken pieces of the
ship" have men since "escaped safe to land."
To drop the figure, Luther left his people a
priceless legacy in an honestly-translated Scrip-
ture, in the assertion of its sole authority, and in
the doctrine that faith alone justifies. But to
this last and vital doctrine he unhappily ap-

' Ecclesia., Second Series, p. 59.

118 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE,

pendcd, as the only recourse for the defence of
infant baptism, the neutralizing qualification,
"but baptism alone regenerates." Thus divorc-
ing baptism from faith, and regeneration from
justification, he submitted to his critical and
sagacious countrymen a conception of Christian
doctrine hopelessly paradoxical. We must obey
the Bible against tradition, he said: and yet he
endorsed sprinkling as substituted by tradition,
for immersion as commanded (according to his
own translation) in the Bible. He insisted that
the people must read the Bible for themselves,
because intelligence is the basis of faith: yet
contended that the faith of infants is superior
because unintelligent. He argued that salvation
is inward and not outward, and therefore beyond
priestly control: yet by hanging regeneration
upon baptism made the inward the creature of
the outward, and still dependent on another's
whim. The moulding power of a visible act
upon thought and its expression is manifest in
the fact that the uniform connection of Luther's
w^ord taufeUj to dip, with the practice of sprink-
ling, has in fact gradually subverted the meaning
of the Avord itself. So that the American Bible
Society maintains its consistency in publishing
Luther's translation including that word, because
it has now come to mean "sprinkle." If now

THE MOULD OF DOCTIIIJS'E. 119

the Rationalist claims Luther's authority for the
proposition that Christianity demands the re-
nunciation of reason as the condition of faith, it
will not be easy to answer him. If, finally,
the Naturalistic Evolutionist suggest that the
"theory of the potency of every form of life in
matter" ought not to seem novel or incredible
to one who already accepts the idea of spiritual
birth as the product of material baptism, it may
at least freshen our curiosity concerning the
whole matter, and suggest a more careful re-
vision of the words of Christ and the signifi-
cance of his ordinance in this connection.

SCRIPTURAL BAPTISM AND THE NEW BIRTH.

That ordinance, as we have seen, in Paul's
conception symbolically and visibly reenacts the
spiritual transaction which Christ calls the new
birth. The Scriptural primacy and fertility of
that idea have been already insisted on. " It is,"
says Professor Austin Phelps, " one of the con-
strudive ideas of inspiration, which are not so
much here or there as everywhere. It is perva-
sive, like the life blood in the body. It is lilvc ca-
loric in the globe." ^ The Old Testament begins
with "the book of births" — speaking significantly
of the " generations of the heavens and the eartli,"

» The Xew Birth (Boston, 1867), p. 21.

120 TUE MOULD OF DOCTMINE.

and "of man" — and of the "bringing forth" by
the earth and the waters, of grass, herb, and living
creature. The New Testament begins with the
"generation of Jesus Christ," which although
*^ from David according to the flesh " and so in
the old order, was likewise a "new birth" — a
birth "from above"— a birth of "the Spirit."
His discourse with Nicodemus pivots itself on the
same idea, on which also the whole New Testa-
ment henceforth turns.

It is a notable instance of the perverse industry
with which Christ's words have been twisted
from their aim, that one verse (John iii. 5,) of this
most prescient discourse, has not only been robbed
of its deep suggestiveness, but actually so in-
verted as to seem to defend the very idea it was
meant to destroy, For, as Wall says, all the
ancient Christians understand it to refer to bap-
tism, Calvin being the first to deny it. By
which denial, adds Wall, he has done "ten times
more prejudice" to infant baptisni (involving, as
it must, baptismal regeneration) than by "all his
new hypotheses and arguments^" the Baptists
having already seized upon it as confirn^ing their
views.^

But that regeneration is, in any case, inde-
pendent of baptism, is distinctly taught in the
1 Historu of Infant Baptism, pp. ool, 552.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 121

same chapter (verse 36). Surely he that "hath
everlasting life" is regenerate, and this is affirmed
of him "that believeth/' As to the verse itself
it may be incidentally remarked that, the article
being absent, it is doubtful whether the Holy
Spirit is here referred to. In the Armenian and
many earlier versions, the passage reads literally,
"of water and of spirit"^ — the preposition be-
coming thus generic, and perhaps alluding to
certain most significant facts in the physical
order, and not to baptism at all. But there is
no room to enlarge upon or even to explain
this hint.

What is unmistakably to the purpose is the
fact that our Lord's whole discourse is manifestly
aimed, not to encourage, but to beat down the
too gross and mechanical notions of Nicodemus.
His first w^ord was anti-materialistic. It in-
sisted on a birth "from above," impliedly as
asrainst one from beneath. In answer to Nico-
demus' obtuse suggestion of a possible allusion
to earthly rebirth he makes the antithesis still
more distinct, uttering a protest which cannot be
too deeply pondered in our day against the pos-
sible evolution of the spiritual out of the mate-

iSo in Syriac, Slavonic, Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, Persian,
etc. See Malan, on Gospel of John (London, 1865), Note,
p. 42.

122 IRE MOULD OF VOC TRINE.

rial. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh;
and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit."
To suppose that the intervening verse was meant
to teacli precisely the opposite, and to press up(jn
Nicodemus a formalism which was already a snare
to him, would be absurd. It does not identify,
but distinguishes, water-birth and spirit-birth;
and makes the latter not dependent on, but inde-
pendent of, the former, and urges it as the one
newly revealed and essential necessity.

EVOLUTIOX FALLACIES ANTICIPATED.

This sharply defined parting off of the mate-
rial from the spiritual realm, and the assertion
of the powerlessness of the lower to transcend
its limits, are suggestive in many directions.
They point back to that signal break in the
order of creation when it reaches man, as re-
corded in Genesis. Though "formed,'^ like the
rest of the animal creation, " from the dust of
the ground," that is, from beneath, he alone re-
ceived from above the breath of God, and
became thereby a "new creature." Of whom
Professor Huxley says, "Whether from them
(that is. the animal creation) or not, he is not
assuredly of them," "being the only consciously
intelligent denizen of the world.' ^ We remera-
1 Evidence of 3fan's Place m Ncdure, p. 110.

TUE MOULD OF DOCTRTXE. 123

ber likewise that unique element in the Incarna-
tion which severed it from all anterior human
births: by virtue of which Jesus said to the
Jews, "Ye are from beneath, I am from above."
It is not accidental, therefore, but by logical con-
sequence, that a rejection of the doctrine of
regeneration is usually accompanied by a denial
of the Incarnation and the Deity of Christ.
Not less significant is PauFs claim of authority
for his words as emanating, not from a superior
human, but from a superhuman source — a differ-
ence of kind, and not of degree only: for he
declared himself " an apostle, not of men, neither
by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the
Father, who raised him from the dead.'^ Thus
carefully are the discrete lines between the
"flesh" and the "spirit," and their respective
possibilities emphasized in Scripture. The bar-
riers are thus set against the intrusion of any
"Monistic" theory in the interpretation of
Christianity or life, by which the boundaries of
Genius and Inspiration, Natural and Supernatu-
ral, Matter and Force, Body and Spirit, and the
like, may tend to be effaced; the lines of the
symmetric universe melting thus into the chaotic
haze of Agnosticism.

Again, great emphasis is laid in Scripture on
the transitional element in birth. "Flesh'' can-

124 TUE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

not be developed, or disciplined, or reconstructed
into " spirit." For birth is not to be confounded
with growth: the latter is a process, protracted,
continuous, uniform, incomplete: the former is a
transaction, sudden, interruptive, spasmodic, com-
plete. The "old man" must die that the "new
man" may be born. But death is not annihila-
tion, nor birth creation, of the mechanism of
life. The babe dies as to the foetal, that it may-
enter ihe atmospheric, life: this necessitates no
modification of structure, but only a transfer of
the dynamic centre of vitality. The "new
creature" in Christ is simply one the gravitative
centre of whose life has been changed from the
"flesh" to the "spirit."

The great truth which feeds the mills of phil-
osophy to-day with much grain and more chaif,
and from which most heterogeneous grists are
being ground, lies close by. It is that the secret
of the universal order is vital, not mechanical;
anl that a "new thing" can arrive upon the
earth only through the gateway of birtJi.

"We are apt to speak vaguely sometimes,"
says Thoreau, "as if a divine life were to be
grafted onto or built over this present as a
suitable foundation. This might do if we could
so build our own old life as to exclude from it
all the warmth of our affection, and addle it, as

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 125

the thrush builds over the cuckoo's ^^'^ and lays
her own atop, and hatches only that; but the
fact is — so there is the partition — we hatch them
both, and the cuckoo's always by a day first, and
that young bird crowds the young thrashes out
of the nest. No! destroy the cuckoo's ^^^ or
build a new nest." ^

There is still another significant element in
this connection, vividly illustrated, as are those
already noticed, in the resurrection and equally
in baptism, to which Paul refers as its analogue.
It is that the new birth is not self-wrought.
Christ's resurrection power did not issue from
his dead body, much less from the grave — he
"was raised" by power from above. The im-
mersed believer does not resume life of himself;
he too "is raised" by a lifting hand. The old
schoolmen were not wholly ignorant of or in-
different to that series of phenomena which un-
derlie the modern theoiy of evolution. They
preferred, however, the more expressive term
eduction, as indicating a power leading from
before, rather than pushing from behind. The
word "evolution" Is logically colorless in itself.
It becomes theistic or atheistic according as it
recognizes the "hand reaching through nature
moulding man," or reverts to the old Lucretian

^ Letters, (Boston, 1865), p. 42

126 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

thesis that "Nature is able to produce all things
of herself, without the intervention of the gods."
Thus, in the nineteenth century of research
and speculation, the world finds itself sitting
oi)posite the same central idea with which our
Lord taught men to begin in the first. That
primary ordinance, which Christ provided as
the corner-stone of organization in his church,
into Avhich the true doctrine of the new birth
w^as visibly cut, has been marred, defaced, and
thrust aside by the builders, until the idea itself
has been perverted, obscured, or lost. In its
stead therefore comes the specious counterfeit: a
religion whose Bible is "evolved" out of human
literature; its Christ out of social progress or a
mythic tendency; and its inner life out of
culture, inheritance, or good nature; and a
science with the legend, " That which is born of
the flesh is spirit." "Ye must be born from
below."

CHAPTER VIII.

BAPTISM AND LOYALTY— THE HISTORIC IDEA.

rriHERE is a great future for you Baptists,"
JL once said Neander. The prophecy will in
many quarters be met only with a shrug of sur-
prised incredulity. Perhaps it may kindle a
gentle smile of derision even upon the features
of one whose

" Arched brow prilled o'er his eyes
With solemn proof proclaims him wise " ^

— a mute and modest confession of his own con-
sciously superior profundity as contrasted with
the superficiality of the simple-minded old
German. For he has penetration enough to
assure himself that the Baptist function is (as has
been conspicuously published not very long ago)
the "prolonging a conscientious and useless con-
troversy" over "not even an ordinance, but the
external method of its administration " ^ — (what
the internal method might be does not appear) —

i Churchill.

' H. W. Beccher, Life of the Christ vol. L, p. 226.

127

128 THE MOULD OF DOCTUIKE.

thus figliting for ^^an externality of an extern-
ality/' and becoming the elect apostle of formal-
ism, stupidity, and self-Avill. He is further
confident that this eccentric "externality'' consti-
tutes, as the very name Baptist implies, his whole
theological stock in trade: that it is his shibboleth
for the gate of heaven, his sermonic " harp of a
thousand strings," his compendious religion. Is
he not, therefore, rather an anachrc)nism — a be-
lated mediaeval ghost who must soon retire before
the sun?

It may be deferentially suggested to such a
critic, in passing, that as a criterion of character
or doctrine no "externality of an externality"
is more likely to be deluding than a name.
Judged solely by that standard, the "Reformed"
people ought once to have been dissolute, the
" Methodists " ought to be characteristically prim
and cold-blooded, and the " Congregationalists "
and "Sabbatarians" ought to be recognized as
having a peculiar purchase on the better land,
because there alone ^^congregations ne'er break
up and Sabbaths have no end."

The profundity of the logic which gauges the
breadth of the issue by the size of its occasion —
as if the value and dimensions of an estate were
dependent on the acreage of the parchment con-
veying it — is also worthy of a moment's gaze.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 129

The question of baptism, it is said, is only one
of mensuration — a little more water, or a little
less — and pertinacity about such a trifle reduces
Christianity itself to a trifle. By the same
rule, American liberty is "reduced" to the
right to use unstamped paper, about whic^h
"trifle'' our fathers were somewhat perverse;
Mohammedanism was by the Sepoy rebellion
revealed to be only an aversion for greased car-
tridges; and Paul's religion was summed up in
an obstinate and somewhat paradoxical refusal
to circumcise Titus, while consenting to circum-
cise Timothy.

In fact, great doors usually swing on small
hinges. The pass of Thermopylae may be
narrow, but it cradled and kept the life of
Greece. The great battles of the world have
grown out of circumstances often grotesquely
diminutive and commonplace, such as the refusal
to doff a cap, or the belching out of an impet-
uous word; but the results and the principles
involved have not been therefore insignificant.
These battles, moreover, however large the
territory involved, have been fought, not over
broad areiis chiefly, but along narrow border
lines. The engineer does not much dread a
locomotive leap to the track ten feet away, but
he is cautious of the switch points.
I

130 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

THE GROUND OF NEANDER'S SAYING.

But we climb again to Neander. He was not
a Baptist. He was not a novice, nor an en-
thusiast, but a ripened and sedate student and
observer. He saw things, not under the dazzling
glare of the passing noon, but in the calm light
of the centuries. His utterances were not those
of the flippant paragrapher, but of the cautious
and philosophic historian, and are entitled there-
fore to a respectful hearing and pondering.
Neander dwelt in a time and place of peculiar
political and intellectual effervescence and tran-
sition. The ancient despotism in Church and
State had drifted (to borrow a striking figure
from Froude) like icebergs into a warmer sea,
where, steadily melting away beneath, they must
soon topple headlong and be dissolved. The
"signs of the times'^ augured the speedy mastery
of that principle which his countryman Ger-
vinus summarized^ as ^'freedom, or the right to
pay submission to nothing but law : and equality,
the duty of all alike to obey one and the same
law." In all this Neander could but recognize
a divine pressure on the individual soul, causing
it to break out of its cerements: he could but

* Fntrodiiction to History of the Nineteenth Century,
p. 67.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 131

hear a divine voice saying to men, "Loose him
and let him go."

Equally portentous were the phenomena on the
intellectual side. Enlarged area, multiplied mate-
rial, improved apparatus, sharpened methods, had
made the critical school exigent and audacious.
Nothing was too recondite, too fixed, too an-
cient, too sacred, for their prying and ransack-
ing spirit. On every side the iconoclastic hammer
was ringing, the hungry white-hot fm*nace was
bellowing, and eager pincers feeding it with
institutions, customs, traditions, documents, to be
tested and refined or consumed. Nor was this
inexplicable. No sooner was the daughter of
Jairus aroused than it was commanded that
'^something should be given her to eat." The
awakened soul is always hungry. He who is
set free to act must also be set free to inquire,
that he may know how to act. One of the
most stirring trumpet-calls of the Reformation
was that sentence of Luther's, in a letter prefixed
to his Treatise on Chridlan Liberty, wherein he
repudiated restraint in interpreting the word of
God, which, inculcating liberty, must be itself
free. This sentence, says Roscoe,^ exploded
Leo's Bull of Excommunication against him.
Doubtless it did much more. It caused that
1 Li/e of Leo X. (Bohn, 1847), vol. II., p. 214.

132 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE,

spark to be dropped in the ready tinder, and the
Cyclopean furnace to be kindled into which the
Pope himself, with his bull, his tiara, and all his
belongings must go beside the word of God, to
be "tried by fire." Neander believed with
David that already " the words of the Lord are
pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of
earth, purified seven times." He could not
doubt, therefore, that while human incrustations
must crumble and waste away in the refining
flame, the divine word itself would come forth
clean and lustrous.

Luther's prophecy historically realized.

Out of the conjoint tendencies of his time,
therefore, he saw a principle emerging and soon
to be dominant, viz.: The unfettered word for the
unfettered soul. But this, the prophetic idea for
the coming era, he found to be the identical his-
toric idea at the roots of that movement then
and still contemptuously stigmatized in his own
country as Anabaptist. "The origin of this
sect," says Professor Butler, of the Episcopal
Church,^ "is very obscure. The name was
extended to persons of very different origin and
of various opinions." "Some came," he adds,
"from the Waldenses and Petrobrusians,"

1 Ecclesiastical History (Philadelphia, 1872), p. 232.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 133

"some" were "the secret disciples of Wiclif,
Huss, and others." "The general views in
which they agreed were, that the visible church
should consist only of holy persons; that nothing
of human device should be admitted into its
order or worship: and that infants were not
proper subjects of baptism." It is deeply signi-
ficant to find the names of the Waldenses, Wiclif,
and Huss, coupled by an impartial hand with
the oris^in of this movement and these ideas.
For of Peter Waldo, says Mrs. Ranyard, ^ " It
is certain that the Christian world is indebted to
him for the ^irs^ translation of parts of the Scrip-
tures into a modern tongue, after the Latin
ceased to be a living language. . . . The prepa-
ration of their (the Waldensian) pastors for the
ministry consisted in learning by heart the (tos-
pels of Matthew and John, all the Epistles, and
most of the writings of David, Solomon, and
the prophets." They were " Biblical Anti-Sacer-
dotalists," says Milman,^ whose "great strength
was in the vernacular Scripture," who denied
" all sacraments, except Baptism and the Eucha-
rist," and whose martyrdom was for "preaching
without authority." To this "voice crying in
the wilderness" more than three hundred years

1 77ie Book and its Story (Phila., 1854), pp. 124, 126.

2 Latin Christianity (London, 1857), vol. lY., p. 98.

134 TUE MOULD OF DOGIRINE.

before Luther, Bishop Newton attributes these
words: "In articles of faith, the authority of the
Holy Scripture is the highest: and for that
reason it is the rule of judging: so that what-
soever agreeth not with the word of God is de-
servedly to be rejected and avoided. The read-
ing and knowledge of the Scripture is free and
necessary for all men, the laity as well as the
clergy. Ceremonies manifestly hindering the
teaching and learning of the word are diabolical
inventions.'^ As to Wiclif, it is scarcely neces-
sary to be reminded that he was for the four-
teenth century in England what Waldo had
been for the twelfth on the Continent. "He
gave the whole Bible to the people, he gave it
without note or comment, and he was the first
man that did so.'' ^ Upon him the friars vented
their maledictions, because by his translation
"the gospel pearl was cast abroad and trodden
under foot of swine, and the gospel which Christ
had given to be kept by the clergy was now
made forever common to the laity." ^ John
Huss again in the fifteenth century, and in
Bohemia, was the champion and martyr of
Wiclif 's doctrines; among them, as specified and
condemned by Pope Pius II. pre-eminently this:

1 TJie Book and Its Story, p. 134.
2/&., p. 133.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 135

that " every one hath free liberty to preach the
word of God/ Thus was the torch of an un-
fettered word passed on from darkened century
to century, until the morning dawn of the Re-
formation.

FRilEDOM, CIVIL AND INTELLECTUAL,
DEMANDED.

The historic connection of freedom of action
with the uncovering of the word of God is no
less manifest than that of freedom of inquiry.
" If the foundations of freedom (that is, civil free-
dom) were laid in religion," says Gervinus,^
there would be no fear concerning its progress.
Machiavelli was aware of this truth when he
looked for a fundamental regeneration of the
times and of States only in a reform of the
Church." "In Luther's time," he adds,^ "when
the first foundations of liberty were only in the
act of being laid, the scheme for the whole future
edifice was sketched by some few who had already

determined on its immediate completion

Among the religious enthusiasts, a few, under the
name of Inspirati or Anabaptists, had conceived
the idea of a purification of Christianity and its
forms, according to the dictates of reason; an

1 Introduction to History of Nineteenth Century, p. 26.
2/6., p. 28.

].% THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE,

idea which was only realized in the days of their
great-grandchildren, whose expatriated mission-
aries found a home in America." He further
instances as especially remarkable their "appeal
to a divine right (the natural rights of man, as
they were afterwards called ) ; the foundation
of Church and State on an idea, on a universal
and natural right, which was urged in opposition
to the vexatious privileges of the few, and of
castes."^ Voltaire, who had few soft words to
bestow on religionists of any sort, and who knew
of the Anabaptists chiefly from their executioners,
who "showed them about in cages as wild beasls
are shown, and caused their flesh to be torn off
with red-hot pincers," declares that the "manifesto
published by these savages in the name of the men
who till the earth might have been signed by
Lycurgus," and that "their demands as delivered
in writing were extremely just." ^ It is they, he
said, who "laid open that dangerous truth which
is implanted in every heart, that mankind are all
born equal; saying that if Popes had treated
princes like their subjects, princes had treated the
common people like beasts." ^

The "manifesto" above referred to is given in
full by Gieseler in his EGdesmdical History,^

1 Introduction to History of Nineteenth Century, p. 30.

2 Works (London, 1701), vol. IV., p. 70. ^ Ih., p. 73.
* (Edinburgh, 1855), vol. V., p. 347-9.

TUE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. VJl

and is worth referring to, alike as an eloquent
statement of their notion of liberty, and a proof
of their avouching of the word of God as the
sole source of that notion and guaranty of their
claim. The third article reads as follows:
"Hitherto it has been the custom for men to
hold us as their own property, which is a pitiable
case, considering that Christ has delivered and
redeemed us with his precious blood shed for us,
the peasant as much as the prince. Accordingly,
it is consistent with Scripture that we should be
free, and wish to be so. Not that we wish to be
absolutely free, and under no authority; but we
take it for granted that you will either willingly
release us from serfage, or prove to us from the
gospel that we are serfs.'^ As a "conclusion
and final resolution" of the whole twelve articles
they say, " If one or more of the articles, herein
set forth, is not in agreement with the word of
God, we will recede therefrom, if it be made
plain to us on Scriptural grounds . . , Likewise
if more articles of complaint be truly discovered
from Scripture, we will also reserve the right of
resolving upon these." Here is unmistakably
Get forth the claim that in the word of God is
to be found that intelligible, infallible, supreme,
and exclusive revelation of fundamental law,
which every man has a right for himself to read

1.18 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

and comprehend, and to wliich every man must
at Ill's peril implicitly submit. And here is
douljtless that radical idea in which the pene-
trating eye of Xeander saw, beneath a rough
husk of crudity and fanaticism in the early
Anabaptists, the "mustard seed" of a near
future.

Crudity and fanaticism enough there clearly
was, registered in that company; filling the fore-
ground of history with violence, monstrosity, and
noisy incoherencies. But Ave must remember
that almost all vital forces are awkward in
their first forms. The swiftest bird first props
itself on ungainly legs, and climbs with tremb-
ling and unsteady wing to reach its arrow flight.
The very criterion of beginning life in the bio-
plasmic mass, according to Dr. Beale, is the
shapelessness of its uneasy heavings.^ Nor is it
to be forgotten that the times were themselves
chaotic. The old was broken, or breaking, the
new was not yet fashioned. The Reformation
flood was sweeping on with impetuous majesty,
and ran into a gulf as yet unmeasured. Up
against the cataract rose a spray of enthusiasm,
formless. Protean, tempestuous. Nevertheless,
looking steadily upon the confused scene, we
may discern, hanging within, distinct, symmetri-
^Life, Force,and Matter (London, 1870), p. 38.

THE MOULD OF DOCllilNE. 139

cal, abiding, a "bow in the cloud." The very
liarbinger that Neander saw of the coming time,
wlien every man should be free for himself to
know and for himself to obey the one law —
when the unfettered soul should be entrusted
fully with the unfettered word.

THE ANABAPTISTS AND THIS DEMAND.

It remains to inquire how directly the Ana-
baptist movement was itself associated with
this idea ; whether such association was logical,
or merely incidental ; and if logical, whether as
cause or effect. For this two or three pre-
liminaiy suggestions may prepare the way.

First It will be noticed that the question of
immei-sion was not as yet involved. The reason
is obvious. The practice of pouring and sprink-
ling, though prevalent in some quarters and to
some extent, had a place by sufferance only, and
not by positive injunction. The formulary
drawn up by Calvin at Geneva was, says the
learned Dr. Wall, "the first in the world that
prescribes affusion absolutely."^

Second. The real point of controversy was not
the alleged rebaptizing itself, as the taunting name
transmitted to history would seem to imply ; but
the repudiation of infant baptism, commonly

^History of Infant Baptism, p. 718.

140 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

expressed in that overt form. It was primarily
a revolt against an existing order, rather than
the fashioning of a new one. Dr. Wall more
accurately terms them Antipedobaptists.

Third, Properly there was no specific Ana-
baptist sect as such. Groups most widely
separated and discordant in doctrine and spirit
were miscellaneously covered by that epithet.
The communistic anarchist, the rationalistic Sj-
cinian, the mystic Illuminist, and the sober Men-
nonite, though differing at almost every other
point, agreed in their contempt for this institu-
tion, and were bound together under a common
name thereby. Indeed, so wide was the sweep
of the stream spanned by that comprehensive
title, and so impetuous was the current, that it
may fairly be said to have drawn in the great
body of those who sought further to reform
the Reformation. Even some of its original
leaders, including Melancthon, CEcolampadius,
and Zwingle, barely escaped its tremendous
power, as they distinctly confess.^

Now, it is scarcely conceivable that mere
accident should have rallied so many and so
discordant groups of combatants to a single and
so narrow a point of resistance. Nor does it

' Of. Meander's History of Dogmas, vol. II., p, 688.
Planck, History of Protestant Tlieology vol. II., p. 47.

TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 141

seem credible that those heterogeneous miihi-
tudes should, through mere caprice or self-will,
have contested even to the galloNvs and the block
so trivial a concession as the harmless submission
of their children to the priest's hands for bap-
tism. It is manifest that they saw, or thought
they saw, some more tremendous weight of con-
sequence hanging on that pivot.

Inevitably thus the great issues of church
history in doctrine and life have grouped about
and hidden in this marvellous symbolic ordi-
nance. As in the time of John, the great re-
former, so now, it is the "axe laid unto the'' very
"root of the trees." "The Reformation had
scarcely boasted an existence of five years," says
Mohler (beginning his account of the "funda-
mental principle of the Anabaptists" in his
work on Symbolism), "when from the midst of
its adherents men arose who declared it to be
insufficient." He proceeds to urge their con-
sistency in that claim, since as a necessary result
of "Luther's maxims and writings," "nothing
is easier than to account for their rejection of
infant baptism."

REFORMERS OF THE REFORMATION.

The pregnant idea of Luther's career was
embodied in his famous ultimatum at the Diet

142 THE MOULD OF BOCTMINE,

of AYorms, refusing to retract anything but
^vhat could be shown "from reason and Scrip-
ture, and not from authority, to be erroneous." ^

For many centuries the Bishops of Rome had
claimed infallibility, and to doubt their dogmatic
utterances or disobey their edicts was not only to
be a heretic but a rebel. Under that usurped
authority they had gagged reason, subordinated
the Scripture to tradition, and substituted the
mailed hand for the winning voice of the gospel.
All this was embodied in infant baptism, in
which reason was insulted by the dogma of bap-
tismal regeneration and vicarious faith, Scripture
perverted or ignored in behalf of tradition, and
voluntary consent of the baptized made impos-
sible.

In his revolt, therefore, against force, tradition,
and unreason, Luther was bound in consistency
to sweep away this final bulwark behind which
they were all entrenched. But magnificent as
was his onset, he halted too soon, and began to
" build again the things he had destroyed.'^ "As
the founder of a new Church ,^^ says Roscoe,^ "he
appears in a very different light." "In one
instance he effected his purpose by strenuously
insisting on the right of private judgment in

1 Roscoe, Leo X, vol. II., pp. 105, 226.

2 Ih., vol. II., pp. 235, 236.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 143

matters of faith, whilst m the other he succeeded
by laying down new doctrines to which he ex-
pected that all those who espoused his cause
should submit/' When arguments from Scripture
failed, he resoii^ to more violent njeasures.

When Carlstadt refused to accept his fantastic
theory of consubstantiation, Luther saw in that,
*"as well as in the denial of infant baptism,^' to
use Gieseler's words,^ "the sole result of the
pride of reason advancing beyond Scripture;
and he resisted both doctrines as entirely analo-
gous fanaticisms," and banished him accordingly.
Insulted reason thereupon, being denied any-
thing, seized everything, lifted the banner of
revolt, and marched away under Socinus into
the Unitarian apostasy.

Luther had staked all upon the supreme au-
thority of the written word, and the universal
"liberty of prophesying.'^ But he forthwith
assumed, not only the arbitrary interpretation of
that word, but the right to impose an observance
confessedly unwarranted by it; and he forbade
the intrusion of all other interpreters except
they could "work miracles'' or show "priestly
orders"^ in the apostolic succession as their cre-
dentials. Naturally enough he found many as

^ Ecclesiastical History, vol. Y., p. 340.
^Mohler's Symbolism, p. 369.

141 TUE MOULD OF LOCTRINE.

sensitive to the claim of monkish, as he had
been of Papal, infallibility; and some, vaunt-
ing excess of liberty, renounced together the
mastery of Pope, monk, and Scripture alike;
trusting to the divine sanction of that "inner
light" which they left to the Quakers as their
chief heritage, and which has cast some warm
gleams along the line of Moravian and Metho-
dist descent.

Again, Luther having summoned mankind
to a revolt against all depotism, temporal or
spiritual, had ended, as Gervinus says, in simply
transferring "the divine right of investiture
from the Pope to the secular magistrate":^ thus
making the struggle to be, "not for the liberty
of conscience of the simple individual of tne
middle class, but for the right of princes to make
reforms in their own lands, and to effect im-
provements in the Church as a benefit conferred
by them on the people." "Luther had been
successful," says Voltaire,^ "in stirring up the
princes against the Pope and Bishops; Miinzer
stirred up the peasants against them all." No
wonder, therefore, when they were summoned
by the civil magistrate, under penalty of death,
to renounce reason and abandon Scripture, in

* Intro, to Hist, of the Nineteenth Century, p. 32.
2 Works, vol. lY., p. 73.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 145

behalf of an ordinance for which they fuund no
sanction in either, that they retorted that "in-
fant baptism is of the Pope and the devil/'
Nor that one group of peasantry raised their
grotesque and savage war-cry, "Forge Pin-ke-
pank on Nimrod's anvil," and like the defrauded
Samson, blind and crazed, bowed themselves be-
tween the pillars to bring down the whole civil
structure — the lawful progenitors of all com-
munistic enthusiasts thenceforth.

But these volcanic outbursts, though so con-
spicuous, were but sporadic hints of a compact
and steady flame blazing deeper down. There
were "yet seven thousand" who would not bow
down the knee either to the Papal, the Lutheran,
or the Libertine Baal. They saw in the unintel-
ligent, unconsenting babe, thrust by magisterial
force into the priest's hand, the very image of
man himself under the terrible hand of Rome :
coming thence spiritually — as was fitly symbolized
physically in the inquisition torture of the "iron
virgin" — with pierced eye-balls, mangled flesh,
and crushed bones. But they saw also that rea-
son and faith are harmonious and trustworthy
only when yoked indissolubly to Scripture. For
liberty is but perfect obedience to perfect law —
and only "the law of the Lord is perfect." Re-
sisting alike the intrusion of all forms of human

146 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

authority — civil, ecclesiastical, or social — into that
realm Avliere "Christ alone is King and Law-
giver," they insisted that baptism, Avhich he has
made the outer badge of discipleship, belongs to
faith alone — that faith rests on freedom — freedom
on intelligence — and that God's word, read and
comprehended, alone is the "truth that makes
free.'' Thus — though successively accounted
rebels, heretics, and obstructives, as the sceptre of
usurped authority has passed from State to
Church, and from Church to nineteenth century
" Catholicity," — they " continue unto this day
^vitnessing both to small and great, saying none
other things than" our Lord himself taught
them when he said, " If a man love me, he will
keep my wordsJ^

CHAPTER IX.

BAPTISM AND LOYALTY— DEBASING THE
STANDARDS.

TN a volume of Theological Essai/s, published
J- a few years since, Mr. E,. H. Hutton oifers
these suggestive comments upon the history and
policy of the Romish Church. "Rome alone
has presented her theology to the world in a

thoroughly institutional form Romanism

was a vast organization almost before it was a dis-
tinct faith. Rome did not so much incarnate her
dogmas in her ritual as distill her dogmas out of
her ritual.^' ^ Again, "Rome in general acted
first and thought afterwards. She distilled her
Christian theory out of her Christian institu-
tions. And what is the rule by which she has
tested her institutions, and therefore, in the last
result, her dogmas? It is by their adaptation to
the mind of the universal church. Neither
ancient nor modern Rome has had any strong
love for truth as truth. . . . The definition of
divine truth coming nearest to the conception

» (Philadelphia; 1876), p. 336.

147

148 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

which seems to be formed of it by the Romish
Church would be "that body of theoretic as-
sumptions which would be needed completely
to justify, on intellectual grounds, all those in-
stitutions, special and general, by which practi-
cally she has been enabled to win hearts and
guide nations.'' ^ That is to say, she recognized
the necessity of positive institutions as the em-
bodiment of authority and basis of a visible
organism, and that such institutions will in-
evitably "distill" doctrine and mould faith.
She thus saw that she must build upon a rock,
and that the outline of the rock would shape
the outline of the building. But instead of
taking "Christ" for "that rock," or even Peter,
as she claimed to do, laying her walls along the
line of the divine ordinances as devised by the
one, and set in place by the other, she took het^self
for a foundation; and reshaping the ordinances
to the measure of human credulity, passion, and
self-interest, built thereon a temple of supersti-
tion and self-will, wherein Christ may speak
only in an unknown tongue or the dumb show
of the mass, and appear only dead on the
crucifix, or superfluous in the niche, or in the
picture on the wall.

Recognizing even to an extreme the value of

1 Theological Essays, pp. 345, 346.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 149

"catholicity" as a test of truth, Mr. Ilutton
insists that "in order that the social power and
influence of an institution may be any sign of
its divine origin, the common cry must go up
spontaneously, and without ulterior aim, out of
the popular heart": not so "if it be only the
result of combination, instead of its cause. If
you can explain it in the vulgar method by
merely pointing to a common and visible self-
interest, or even to a clearly recognized class of
common aims and purposes, then there is no
sacred mystery in this uplifting of a common
voice. . . . ^ Great is Diana of the Ephesiaus'
was no vox populi, but merely a vox argenta-
riorum — ^a voice of silversmiths. It was an offi-
cial cry, the clamor of consentient self-interests,
issuing from the artificial mouth-pieces of esprit
de corps J' ^ Tried by this canon the "catho-
licity" of Romanism breaks up into a partisan-
sliip, none the less real, because of the length
of its antiquity and the strength of its majority.

And what other alleged "catholicity" will fare
better, when offered as a criterion of truth?
For where is the man that does not belong to
some "craft" that is, or at times seems to be,
"in danger," and to whom is not some vox
argentariorum a vernacular? The acme of

* Theological Essa^/s, p. 347.

ino THE MOV LB OF DOCTRINE.

achievement in vital mechanics is balanced per-
pendicularity in man, and even he cannot get
forward without leaning. So long as ^Svinds of
doctrine '^ blow, we shall be likely to bend be-
fore them or against them. Even without their
disturbing pressure, a sudden mental apocalypse
might surprise many of us by showing that we
are reeling heavily under the fumes of preju-
dice, or lolling against the pillars of custom.
The determining of truth by the averaging of
opinions, therefore, would be a process as unre-
liable as the sifting out a vertical line by com-
puting the net direction of a wilderness of slant-
ing ones. And even more fatuous would it be
to submit a standard once found to revision by
such a process. Woe to the man who attempts
to improve the perpendicularity of the plumb-
line by taking counsel of ^Hhe blowing clover
and the falling rain.'' Such a plumb-line is the
revealed word of the Divine Christ, and such an
improvement upon its perfectness Kome has
essayed by the consent of tradition, the vote of
Councils, and the decree of Popes. Infallibility
having been successively assumed for these, falli-
bility by obvious inference fell upon all else;
and the practice of Rome became the mould by
which worship, duty, and doctrine must be
shaped, and into conformity with which the

THE MOULD OF D0CTIiI2iE. 151

meaning and even the words of Scripture r. ust
l)e refashioned.

A REMNANT OF ROME.

Can the Romish spirit have been so subtle and
so tenacious as imperceptibly to have penetrated
in any degree into and lingered in the atmos-
phere of Protestantism? The spectroscopists
have amazed us by finding the three-millionth of
a milligramme of sodium in a dust speck, where
the most delicate chemical tests had failed to re-
veal its presence.^ Perhaps we may err in fancy-
ing we have a spiritual spectroscope so fine, or at
least that we know equally well how to use it.
But wherever we find an ecclesiastical practice or
dogma virtually erected into a standard, to the
pattern of which formularies are progressively
readjusted, (such readjustment gravitating toward
the gradual extrusion of associated Scriptural
language or idea as incongruous), and to the exi-
gencies of which the canons of interpretation
and translation must be made to bend, we may
fairly suspect a residual element from Pome.
That the practice of sprinkling, in lieu of im-
mersion, under the name of baptism, applied to
infants as the rule and to adults only exception-

^ Schellen's Spectrum Analysis (New York, 1872), p. 5.

ir,2 HIE MOULD GF DOCTRINE.

ally, has been made such a standard, and with
such results, it is sought here to show.

The testimony of the late Dean Stanley, in his
before-mentioned Nineteenth Century article on
Baptism (afterward substantially embodied in his
book on Chnstian Institutions), is worthy of
citation in this connection. The pnmitive bap-
tism he distinctly affirms was immersion. "On
philological grounds it is quite correct to trans-
late John the Baptist by John the Immerser.'^ ^
"Baptism by sprinkling was rejected by the whole
ancient Church (except in the rare case of death-
beds or extreme necessity) as no baptism at all.'' ^
It was of adults. "The liturgical service of
baptism was framed entirely for full-grown con-
verts, and is only by considerable adaptation ap-
plied to the case of infants.'' ^ It was intelligent
and voluntary, for it was " of their own delibe-
rate choice" — it was ^'tlie special sacrament,"
"the pledge," the "oath of allegiance."* Of
this primitive normal type he sets out to find
what he significantly calls the "residue." In-
stead of a baptism which is the immersion of an
adult believer, he finds a baptism which is not
immersion, not of an adult, and not of a believer.
Suppose that on an apothecary's shelf is a jar

1 Nineteejith Century Magazine, vol. YI., p. 698.
^Ih. Uh.,^.&^% -^ 76., p. 692.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 163

labeled "pure water." Now pure water is "color-
less, trausparent, and without taste or smell."
But in the jar he finds only a viscid drop which
is not colorless, not transparent, and not without
taste or smell. He will surely conclude that the
only "residue" is the label, which to avoid con-
fusion might better be removed. At least he
will take it as an odd suggestion that the muddy
globule be made the standard of "pure water,"
and Webster's definition re-adjusted thereto. But
Dean Stanley says the primitive ordinance was
one "to which no existing ritual of any Euro-
pean Church offers any likeness" — "the change
from immersion to sprinkling has set aside the
larger part of the apostolic language, and has
altered the very meaning of the word." ^ By
way of testing the trustworthiness of these con-
clusions, it may be profitable to study some of
the reflex influences of the present practice on —

FIKST — THE REVISION OF FORMULARIES.

The successive changes made by the English
Church, and by the American Methodist Church
advancing thereon, will afford a convenient field
of inquiry. For impartial authority WalFs
well-known History of Infant Baptism and

* Nineteenth Century Magazine, vol. VI., p. 698.

154 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

Sherman's History of the MdJiod'ist DiscipUney
will be relied upon. ^

Up to 1530, according to Wall, the formu-
laries for public baptism universally enjoined
dipping, without mentioning pouring or sprink-
ling. The Sar-um Manual of that year pre-
scribed dipping alone. In the Common Prayer
Book printed in 1549, it is added, "if the child
be weak, it shall suffice to pour water upon it,''
etc.^ Subsequently, he says, "the inclination of
the people, backed with these authorities (that
of Dr. Whitaker, Calvin, and others), carried the
practice against the rubric, which still required
dipping, except in cases of weakness."^ In
revising the Prayer Booh at the Restoration (the
Pmitan Directory Avhich had disj)laced it in
1644 having declared it "not only lawful, but
most expedient" to use pouring or sprinkling),
the Church "did not think fit to forego their
maxim in favor of dipping": but being equally
unwilling to ignore the drift of custom and
popular taste, they so modified the rubric as to
concede in fact what they refused in word. For
by requiring the child to be dipped only when
the godfather shall certify that it "may well
endure it," they removed the presumption of

1 Wall, before cited. (See p. 34.) Sherman (N. Y., '74).

2 Wall, pp. 715, 716. 3 75.^ p. 713.

TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 1^5

robustness by which alone dipping had been
preserved as the rule. Thenceforth, as Wall re-
gretfully remarks, "they never do certify the
priests/' and " the priests seldom ask the ques-
tion/' and dipping has wholly wasted away in
the English Church.^

The American Methodist Episcopal Church,
formally organized in 1784, in its original
Discipline provides for "the choice either of
ininiersion or sprinkling" (to which is added in
1786 "or pouring.")'^ Persons baptized in
infancy and having now scruples are, if they
persist after argument, to be baptized "by im-
mei'sion or sprinkling," as they desire.' This
"Anabaptist" heresy lingered in the Discipline
until 1868. The ritual order of baptism,
abridged from that of the English Church,
originally required the minister, taking the
child into his hands, "to dip it in water or
sprinkle it therewith" — in the midst of which
was inserted in 1786 "or pour water upon it"
— and finally in 1792 the whole clause was
erased, and in its stead inserted "sprinkle or
pour water upon it, or if desired, immerse it
in water."* In the original formulary ape re-
tained, from the English, allusions to the case

1 Wall, pp. 750, 721. 2 Sherman, p. t20. ' Tb.
* lb., p. 306.

15C THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

of Noah and of Israel led through the sea, as
"figuring this holy baptism'' — to the baptism
of Jesus "in the river Jordan" — to the burial
of the "old Adam'' and the raising up of the
"new man in him" — to "spiritual regeneration"
and the "resurrection from the dead" — all which
have successively, but with singular uniform'ty,
been singled out for expurgation.^ Substantially,
therefore, the ritual, by purging itself of all
malapropos Scripture, has so far refashioned
itself to the " broken mould," that regeneration
and resurrection are effectively excluded from
its symbolism; a result which, as before men-
tioned, has been reached by the British Wes-
leyans in a still more categorical form. And
this notwithstanding John Wesley's comment
on Rom. 6 : 4, viz. : " Buried with him — allud-
ing to the ancient manner of baptizing by im-
mersion," and the entry in his Journal of "Feb.
21, 1736, Mary Welch, aged eleven days, was
baptized according to the custom of the first
church, and the rule of the Church of England,
by immersion."^

It may be added, that while Calvin was un-
equivocal in admitting that "the word baptize
means immerse,"^ and the Westminster Confession

^ Sherman, p. 300, seq.

2 Journal (London, 1872), vol. I., p. 25.

3 Commentary on A ds, 8 : 38.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 157

declared only that "dipping" was "not neces-
sary," the Presbyterian Church of to-day in its
^'Directory for Worship^^ has gone on actually
to forbid immersion, for it enjoins "pouring or
sprinkling," "without adding any other cere-
mony." ^ The unique attitude thus assumed by
Presbyterianism in practice and ritual may sug-
gest one element at least for the explanation
of another phenomenon equally unique. Any
student of the later Commentaries will be struck
with the fact, that while nearly all scholars of
the English and Continental Churches have
recognized frankly and without reserve the con-
clusiveness of the verdict of philology, exegesis,
and history, in favor of immersion as the primi-
tive baptism, there has been a conspicuous sensi-
tiveness and reluctance in that direction on the
part of the Scotch writers, followed and intensi-
fied along the same lines on this side of the sea.
Among the Episcopalians and Lutherans, where
the union of Church and State and the con-
tinuance of prelatic functions make extreme
notions of ecclesiastical authority still tolerable;
or where, on the other side, rationalism has
supplanted the supremacy of Scripture, there is
no sense of discomfort in confessing the distinct-

1 Appendix to Psalms and Hymns, Presbyterian
Boa-d, Philadelphia, p. 42.

158 TEE MOULD OF D0C2HINE.

ness of the command, avoiding its present claims
by pleading release through subsequent author-
ity. But in non-prelatic Churches, and where
latitudinarianism is not yet dominant, this re-
source fails. It will be in vain there to forbid
what the Scripture is acknowledged to prescribe.
To have reconstructed the ritual so as to coincide
with the practice will be in vain, except the
Scripture can also be reconstructed so as to har-
monize with both. Hence the emergency that
issues in —

SECOXD THE WARPING OF INTERPRETATION.

" The Scriptures," says Bungener, " were writ-
ten by common men to be understood by common
men.'' ^ " The more any interpretation bears the
mark of simplicity, and it appears as if it ought
to have struck the reader before, the more likely
is it to be true," says Ernesti. "It is better to
run all lengths with Scripture truth in a natural
and open manner," Bengel ^ adds, " than to shift
and twist and accommodate." "The sense of
Scripture is one, certain and simple," breaks in
Melancthon,^ and is everywhere to be ascertained
in accordance with the principles of grammar

1 History of Council of Trent (N. Y., 1855), p. 96.

2 Life by Burck, p. 257.

3 Elements of Rhetoric, II.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 159

and human disccurse." And finally Luther:
" We must not make God's word mean what we
wish; w^e must not bend it, but allow it to bend
U8; and give it the honor of being better than
we could make it; so that we must let it stand."
But the fatal facility of exegesis when under
stress is proverbial, and has been often justly
satirized. Mohammed, it was said, prohibited
the eating of a certain part of the swine. But
the Mussulman, having first assumed uncertainty
as to the part forbidden, argued against the
probability of the intended application of the
prohibition to each part successively, until he
had gone over the whole. The result Cowper
sums up:

Thus, conscience freed from every clog,
Mohammedans eat up the hog. i

Dean Swift's famous study of the dexterously
interpreted will scarifies the same foible. The
retention of the demise was made dependent
among other things on the heir's refraining from
the wearing of "silver fringe." But that style
of decoration having come in fashion, it was
opportunely found that the term "silver" was
"allegorical," and that "fringe" (being perhaps
a "generic" word) might mean "broomstick."

1 Jacox, Secular Annot. (London, 1871), vol. II. p. 49.

IGO lUE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

The objection that a prohibition to wear an
"allegorical broomstick" was unmeaning, ^^as
overruled as "irreverent and hypercritical."^
This sarcasm is not lower than the strange
abuses of Scripture which provoked it. Of
such a character ^vas the sermon justifying the
persecution of heretics, from the words "Rise,
Peter, slay and eat." The defence of seven as
the number of the sacraments on the ground
that mysterion is the Greek word for sacrament,
and that se\-3n is the mystic number; and the
proof that the mass Ls a true oblation because
Paul speaks of the "table of the Lord," while
"table" means "altar," and an "altar" implies
"sacrifice," are of like character.^ Dumoulin
justly says, that to depend on such proof-texts is
"like warming oneself at the moon." Even
the great Augustine, to save unbroken the
doctrine that baptism is essential to salvation,
maintains that the dying thief was baptized
with blood from the Saviour's wounded side,
or else had been baptized before his conviction.

SOME ILLU.STEATIVE IK^STANCES.

Matthew (3: 6) describes the people as bap-
tized "in Jordan." Dr. Whedon^ {in loco) says:

1 Tale of a Tub, Works, (Ediii., 1814) vol. II., p. 88.

2 Buugeuer, Council of Trent, pp, 152, 337, 338.

* Commentary/ on Matthew (New York, 1870), p. 47.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 161

"The Jordan had several banks within banks,
so that a person could be in the Jordan on dry
ground." This curious geographical informa-
tion, fortified by a citation from Dr. Thomson,
is conveyed for the purpose of adding a caveat
against what, it seems to be implied, would be a
a natural inference from the language itself.
"This expression, 4n Jordan,' only indicates,
therefore, where the rite was performed : it in no
luay indicates the mode.^' This adroit effort at
the evisceration of the Evangelist's meaning —
suggested long before, by the way, by Ewing,
an antagonist of Dr. Carson — ^ has been since
treated somewhat harshly by the Revisers, who
make the text now read "in the river Jordan,"
as the parallel passage in Mark already did.
But waiving that, consider how fantastic a theory
is here put forth in the name of interpretation,
to divest the words of their natural meaning,
obvious, but inconvenient for the interpreter.
By the same process, having moved 1800 years
forward, try the statement that a man was
"drowned in the Mississippi." "Mississippi"
may readily mean ^Mississippi Valley, especially
as that is often called the Mississippi "bottom"
— the word "drowned" means "strangled," and
"strangled" is a "generic" word including

1 Sec Baptism (Philadelphia, 1860), p. 125.
L

162 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

'^hanged;" and since no man would go into the
water to be hanged, the legitimate rendering of
the passage would be that he was '^hanged in
the Mississippi Valley/^ One of the pioneers
and among the ablest exponents of this school
of exegesis was Dr. Paulus, who sought to prove
by the same process, also with an ulterior though
different motive, that when our Lord is said to
have walked on the Sea of Galilee, he only
walked in fact along its shores. ^

One of the expressions cited most widely and
confidently by theologians and- liturgies as de-
scribing baptism, and with special emphasis by
some as justifying infant baptism, and excluding
immersion, is that used by Paul in Titus 3 : 5,
"the washing of regeneration." But those who
thus apply it must maintain : \. Immersion. For
the Greek word {loutron) takes in the whole
body, not a part.^ 2. Baptismal regeneration.
Since this is, in such a case, the literal force of
the terms used. On the other hand, that this
was not the natural interpretation of the words,
but reflected upon them by a perverted ordinance,
and a false doctrine craving justification, is man-
ifest: 1. From the grammatic parallelism —

' Christlieb, Modern Doubt, p. 346
2 "■Louo'' to bathe, to wash, but only a person or the
whole body.'' — Robinson, Gr. Lex. of New Testament.

THE MOULD OF DOUTJilJVE. 163

"washing of regeneration, and renewing of the
Holy Ghost" — as the Holy Ghost renews, so re-
generation washes. One-half cannot be inverted
without inverting both, which Avoiild shatter the
sense. 2. From the force of the figure. Kcgen-
eration may wash, for life cleanses ; death only is
pollution. "Being born again by the word of
God," says Peter, — " that he might cleanse it (the
church) with the washing of water by the word,"
says Paul — "Now are ye clean through the
word," says our Lord. On the other hand, wash-
ing can never bring life. No washing can change
the "leopard's spots" and the "sow's" filth into
the purity of a "new creature." ^

Another passage strangely distorted and even
reversed in emphasis by enforced subjection to a
theory, is Paul's joint reference to baptism and
circumcision in Col. 2: 11, 12. Here, true to
the instinct above mentioned, the Scotch Presby-
terian, Dr. Eadie, says, " We are not prepared to
admit c>f any allusion to that form (immei-sion)
in the clause before us." " The apostle looks on
baptism and circumcision as being closely con-
nected, the spiritual blessing symbolized by both
being of a similar nature." ^ Baptism having
been assumed to be a drop applied at a single

^ Cf. Jacox, Secular Annotatiov}^, vol. IT., p. 48.

^ Commentary on Colussians (Lcutlon, 18.")G), p. 153.

164 THE MOULD OB DOCTRINE.

\r)h\t of the body, and to be the exact counter-
part of circumcision, how natural and how com-
fortable is it to read the apostle as here confirm-
ing both ideas. But this is wholly to dislocate
his meaning. The comparison is one of con-
trast, not of resemblance. It is, says Lightfoot, ^
the " contrast of literal circumcision of part of
the flesh, with putting off the whole in baptism."
The word used to describe the contrasted whole-
ness of baptism is a double compound to that
end: "a word," he adds, "as strong as it is rare
to express the idea of completeness, both in
energy of action and extent of operation."^
"The eye, the ear, the hands, the feet, all have
been baptized with the divine baptism," says
Perowne. ^ Hence follows the exhortation in
ch. 3: 5, to realize what has been symbolized,
"Deaden therefore your members," etc. The
same emphasis on symbolized entireness occurs
in Gal. 3 : 27 ; for as Baur remarks on that pas-
sage,'* "he who puts on a garment goes alto-
gether inside it," and so there is an " end of the
exterior identity of the believer." This, he

^ Commentary on Colossians (London, 1880), p. 184.

2 Jh., pp. 184, 189.

3 Halsean Lectures, 1868, on Immortality (New York,
1870), p. 119.

4 F. 0. Baur, Life of Paul (London, 1875), vol. IL,
p. 177.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 105

says, "graphically represents" burial into Christ's
death in "immersion."

Finally, the "baptism of fire," referred to by
John in Matt. 3: 11, has been most grotesquely
put under the bellows to forge a shaft against
immersion. " This text," Dr. Whedon says,* " is
the fundamental passage for showing from the
very nature of the rite what is the true method

of performing baptism The baptism of the

Holy Spirit was not by immersion, but aiFu.sion.
. . . the tongues of fire sat on them." He adds
the glim Boeotian hint, for those "whom it may
concern," that " baptismal fire is aifusion ; the fire
of Hell is immersion." Dr. James Strong, of
the same Church, on the other hand, insists that
the " baptismal fire" here alluded to is the "fire
of Hell," being an "overwhelming" with "con-
suming vengeance."^

That the Pentecostal allusion is imposed upon
and not suggested by the expression in question is
manifest. The contextual use of "fire" not only
does not hint but really forbids it, as has been
often pointed out. Nor is there anything in the
Pentecostal scene to suggest the idea of pouring
or sprinkling, more than of immersion, in the
"appearing" of "tongues parting asunder" that

1 Commentary on Matthew.

2 Harmony of the Gospels (New York, 1854), p. 30.

166 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

" sat on each of them/^ In fact, the attempt to
determine the 'Hrue mode of performing bap-
tism" from the single featui-es of that occasion
will land the inventors of that scheme at an unde-
sired port. To identify the baptism of the Spirit
with the " rushing of a mighty wind/^ the " being
filled with the Holy Spirit/^ and the "speak-
ing" with "tongues," would teach re-baptism,
which all Christendom repudiates : for these were
repeated upon the same subjects.^ One solitary
circumstance remains that never recurred to
them: "it filled all the house where they were
sitting." They were, in the words of Professor
Plumptre, of King's College, "plunged as it
were in the creative and informing Spirit which
was the source of life and holiness and wisdom."^
The confusion introduced into this whole sub-
ject by a back-handed exegesis might be greatly
relieved by remembering that the "baptism of
the Spirit" and the "gifts of the Spirit" are
distinct. The priest was anointed after he was
washed: the Spirit came on our Lord after
baptism, and AndrcAv thereupon spoke of him
as " the Christ " : and the charisms, whether of
tongues or other, are nowhere confused with
baptism in the New Testament.

^ Acts4.: 31.

2 ''Handy Commentary" (T.ondon, 1879), edited by
Bp. Ellicott, on Matt. 3:11; cf. Acts 1 : 5.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 107

These examples may suffice to show how
imperious, how insidious, and how pernicious is
the power of a mutilated ordinance. There was
once a "shekel of the sanctuary," the standard
and test of all others. Plow certainly would tlio
holder of a coin clipped or wasted, but which lie
claimed to be the true shekel, desire to bring the
sanctuary standard to conformity with his own.
Speaking of the good and learned men who
persist that en hudatl must be rendered with
water J Dr. Campbell,^ of Aberdeen, an extraordi-
nary Presbyterian, says, "The true partisan
always inclines to correct the diction of the Spirit
by that of the party. ^^ " I am sorry to observe,"
he adds (p. 23) " that the Popish translators from
the Vulgate have shown greater reverence for
the style of that version than the generality of
Protestant translators have shown for that of the
Original. For in this the Latin is not more
explicit than the Greek."

1 Four Gospels, on Matthew 3 ; 11.

CHAPTER X.

BAPTISM AND LOYALTY— THE TIL TIM A TE ISSUE.

FARRAR begins his History of Free Thought
by describing it as "the struggle of the
human mind to free itself from the authwity of
the Christian faith." ^ As if responding to con-
firm this view Strauss writes in his New Life of
Jesus: "In the person of Jesus no supernatur-
alism shall be allowed to remain : nothing which
shall press upon the souls of men with the
leaden weight of arbitrary , insci-utable authority. '' ^
The chief priests and elders had challenged our
Lord himself long before with the words "By
what authority doest thou these things?"^

It becomes us earnestly to ask — What is this
"authority'^ which seems to provoke to instinc-
tive and perhaps unconscious revolt? — lest we
ourselves may have come in contact with it, and
" haply be found even to fight against God/^ If
there be any embodiment of it, we may fairly

» Bampton Lectures, 1862 (New York, 1863), p. 1.

2 Cited in Farrar's Witness of History to Christ (Lon-
don, 1871), p. 5].

3 Matt. 21 : 23.

168

THE MOULD OF DOCIHINE. 100

regard as such that last consummate expression
of his kingly will, which the risen Redeemer
gave to his disciples as the organic statute of his
kino:dom. As rendered in the Revised Version
the passage reads thus : "All authority is given
unto me in heaven and on earth. Go ye there-
fore, and make disciples of all the nations, bap-
tizing them into the name of the Father and of
the Son and of the Holy Ghost : teaching them
to observe all things whatsoever I commanded
you." The first and last of these injunctions,
viz. : to " make disciples,'' and to " teach them to
observe'' all "things commanded," have been
universally regarded as of literal obligation.
But the mid-lying clause, although it embodies
one of those very "things commanded," and the
only one thus exalted into isolated eminence, is
not only treated as belonging to an inferior
category, but the proposition to "observe" it as
of positive significance like the rest, is in many
quarters treated with an impatience verging to-
ward indignation or contempt.

It is totally immaterial, we hear continually,
whether "baptize" means "immerse" or not,
since precise conformity is in any case unne-
cessary. And this because,

1. Christianity, being a spiritual, not a formal
religion, looks to the intent, and lays no emphasis

170 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE,

on the outward act. Insistence on immersion,
J- ays Dr. Scliaif in his Church History, is a
''pedantic Jewish literalism.^' ^

2. The verdict of Christendom has settled the
question. " The overwhelming majority of Prot-
estant Christians, to say nothing of Roman
Catholics, are unbaptized," if immersion only is
baptism. Such is the broadside poured into the
Baptist stronghold by Dr. Rice.^

3. Our more refined civilization revolts at so
coarse a form. It is, to cite Dean Stanley,
"peculiarly unsuitable to the tastes, the conve-
nience and the feelings of the countries of the
North and West.'^ The substitution of sprink-
ling he regards as "a striking example of the
triumph of common sense and convenience over
the bondage of form and custom."^

In the Gospel of Matthew (chapters 21 and
22) are recorded in immediate succession three of
of our Lord's parables, apparently uttered on a
single occasion, which precisely anticipate these
modern suggestions, one by one. They are full
of profound significance in this connectic»n, of
which only a hint can here be given. They are :

1 (New York, 1860), vol. L, p. 123.

2 Mode of Baptism, p. 36.

^ Nineteenth Century Magazine, vol. VI., p. 698.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRIJSE. 171

FIRST, THE PARABLE OF THE DISOBEDIENT SON.

A father commanded his two sons to work In
the vineyard. The first said "I will not,'^ but
afterwards went. The second said " I will,"
but never went. The bystanders, being appealed
to, decided instantly that the first alone "did the
will of his father." Now the "doing the
Father's will" is the one thing on which our
Lord lays most stress as essential in the Chris-
tian life.^ He here plainly teaches that when
that will is embodied in an explicit command,
there is no obedience, whatever the intent, short
of doing the specific thing commanded, in a
"pedantically literal" way. Had the father
given the son a parable to be puzzled over, a
doctrine to be meditated on, or even a statement
of fact to be received, these addressing them-
selves to the intellect might have demanded
delay, and involved embarrassment in appre-
hension and mental adjustment. But a com-
mand is addressed to the will alone: and no
response is possible but surrender or refusal,
and these take form in outward act or omission
to act. All law is specifically a rule of conduct.
Only where, as in the old common law, that rule
must be traced through a tangle of bewildering

1 Malt. 7 : 21 ; 12 : 50 ; MarkZi 35 ; John 4 : 34 ; 5 : 30.

172 THE MOULD OF DOG THINE, .

precedents and general maxims, can imperfect
conformity be in any degree atoned for by good
intent. The explicit statute cuts off such a plea.
Failure to keep that lias no excuse, except it can
show the statute itself ambiguous or impracti-
cable. There is no trouble in distinguishing the
common law realm of the parabolic, doctrinal,
and ethical in Scripture — which are given to
stimulate research, reflection, and inference —
from the explicit statutes of the Lord, which
need only to be obeyed. Concerning these he
says, " Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not
the things which I say?'^

That so palpable a principle as is here empha-
sized should ever be overlooked is due in part,
perhaps, to a latent and dangerous ambiguity of
thought lying in the word " authority '^ itself.
Thiers and the first Napoleon were both
"authors": the one of the History of the Em-
jpire, the other of the Empire itself. The
"authority" of the one was doctrinal — in the
realm of opinion only; of the other magisterial
— in the realm of law.^

It is quite possible to pass insidiously from
the one sphere to the other, and under the garb
of an interpreter to assume the functions of a

1 Cf. Gladstone's Gleanings, (Scribner, New York),
vo\ III., p. 139.

THE MOULD OF DOCTIliyE. 173

lawgiver. John Calvin, in his Institutes, spoke
with the authority of a logician; in his comments
on the Romans with that of an exegete; in his
translation of baptir.o^ with that of a linguist,
appealing to reason and the Scripture itself for
his vindication; but when, having admitted the
command to immerse to be distinct and unquali-
fied, he proceeded to offer dispensation from
literal obedience by decreeing that ^^ dipping is
not necessary," ^ he assumed the functions of a
Pope, and spoke with no authority at all, for he
appealed to nothing. Dr. Hodge, of Princeton,
decided that baptism with sand, mud, wine, oil,
or milk, though in the name of the Trinity, and
with perfect intent, is invalid: because 'Svater
is essential to baptism, and as far as 'the matter'
is concerned nothing else is."^ It is as though
where the law required an official signature for
the authentication of a particular document, a
judge should hold that a blotch from an over-
turned inkpot would be sufficient; since ''ink is
essential to a signature, and as far as ' the matter'
is concerned nothing else is." Our Lord com-
manded a specific act to be performed — whatever

1 Commentary/ on Acts (Edinburgh, 1846), (on ch.
8 : 38), vol. I., p. 364.

2 Jb., cf. institutes, Book IV., cap. 15, p. 19.

3 Oil Church Polity/ (New York, 1878), p. 198.

174 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

is conditional to that act is of course implied;
but to teach that the thing implied is essential,
and the thing commanded non-essential, is not to
interpret, but to legislate.

It is curious, indeed, that those who are so
averse to literalness in form should be so pain-
fully precise as to literalness in element. Is
water in itself more "spiritual'' than milk or
wine? And is it really venial, in a religion
which "regards only the intent,'' to change the
form through caprice, but mortal to change the
elements through necessity, as in the case of the
desert-bound disciple, whose sand baptism was
pronounced invalid? In this specific case it was
Rome who first taught us to appeal from Christ
to the Pope to learn what is really essential in
the divine word.^

"Go work," said the father. The words are
verbs, and describe acts. They are not figurative
or paradoxical. The son who refused literal
obedience disobeyed. "Go baptize," said our
Lord. The word "baptize," says the learned
preacher, means "immerse" — "I baptize thee,"
he repeats, moistening the forehead with a drop.
" They say, and do not," said our Lord of the
Pharisees.

1 On Church Polity (New York, 1878), p. 198.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 175

SECOND, THE PARABLE OF THE REBELLIOUS
TENANTS.

Never was there a more "catholic cousent"
than that of the husbandmen who had hired the
vineyard. The verdict that they need not pay for
it, but on the contrary might usurp the inheritance
itself, was unanimous, and vigorously acted on
against all claimant messengers. But it is plainly
liinted that there are some questions not deter-
minable by a majority vote. Obligation arises
out of a state of facts, and cannot be extinguished
by any process short of payment, or abolition of
these facts. It may be very true that if the
debtor " owes ten thousand talents and has not
to pay," he may "be sold, etc., that payment may
be made" :^ but that unhappy consequence would
be quite irrelevant as disproving the existence of
the debt. It is painful enough to think of the
"overwhelming majority of Protestant Chris-
tians" as " unbaptized," and so it is to think of
the over^vhelming majority of the people in
Christian lands as not Christians at all : either
statement would bring offence, but neither pain
nor indignation settles a question of fact. The
toothache does not extinguish itself by agonizing
as. The obligation to be baptized arises, not

I Matthew 18 : 25.

176 THE MOULD OF DOCTIillfE.

out of the consent of Christendom, but out of
the command of Christ. Whether any man has
obeyed the command is to be determined, not by
asking what conclusion would be most comfort-
able for him or most flattering to the majority,
but rather what was the exact thing required,
and has that thing been done. The debt due to
the landlord was neither disproved nor paid by
resentment against the messengers.

SUBJECTS.

The citizens who had tacitly accepted the in-
vitation to the king's feast did not generally find
it "convenient" to come when summoned. One
went, but in a garment of his own devising,
seeing the "wedding garment" was unsuited to
his "tastes." There is a significant inverse
gradation in these parables. On the one side
they ascend — the father, the landlord, the king:
on the other they descend — an arbitrary com-
mand, an equitable claim, a courteous invitation.
But while no specific punishment is attributed to
the sluggish son, the presumptuous guest meets
the bitterest fate of all. The lesson is obvious.
Evil as is the neglect of the father's authority,
still worse is an insult to the king's majesty.
And that insult they offer who "make light of"

TUE MOULD OF DOCTJil^E. 177

his message, or prefer their own patterns as more
decorous than his.

Notwithstanding Dean Stanley's statement,* it
is very difficult to believe that the change from
immersion to sprinkling was due at all to change
in climate, custom, or taste. Palestine itself
was not strictly tropical. Our Lord speaks of a
"cloak" as well as a "coat."^ Ritter says, "the
cold north winds of winter make furs very com-
fortable in Jerusalem."^ "The waters of the
Jordan are then (in winter and early spring) so
cold, as they flow from the snows of Lebanon,
that even Arabs will not bathe." So writes
Geikie,'' citing Sepp and others. Frozen Russia
has clung to immersion. Subtropical Italy has
abandoned it. The change since the days of
Queen Elizabeth, who was immersed/^ has not
coincided with a roughening English climate, or
a gradual abandonment of " bathing " (if that
has any bearing). They plainly delude them-
selves, therefore, who imagine that so flimsy a
pretext could ever have been the original and

^Nineteenth Century Magazine, vol. VI., p. 698.

» Matthew, 5 : 40.

3 Geography of Palestine, (New York, 1866), vol. IV.,
p. 182.

♦ Life of Clirist, (New York, Appleton, 1880), vol.
I., p. 577.

6 AVall, History of Jvf. Bap., pp. 712, 717.
M

178 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE,

avowed basis of so serious a departure, however
it may be urged in defence of an established
custom. The case of Italy, as contrasted with
that of Russia, shows that the alleged " triumph
of common sense and convenience'' is in fact
the triumph of Papal assumption. The devout
Presbyterian does not in fact refer to his arbi-
trary "taste" as the ultimate criterion, in decid-
ing what is valid baptism, but to the Church
formulaiy — and that rests on the "authority"
of John Calvin.

It is nevertheless a serious matter to "make
light of" any feature of our Lord's regulations,
even by a frivolous or disparaging word. The
beggars were welcome at the king's feast, for
they were not too "refined" to wear the garments
which the king himself had chosen : but the man
who sought to air his "Christian liberty" in a
garment of newer and superior cut, got himself
and the rebuke that met him pinned fast on the
enduring page, for the leisurely study of all sub-
sequent adventurers Avho incline to exalt sesthe-
tics above revelation.

Immediately succeding these parables in Mat-
thew's narrative is an incident which crowns
their teaching; reminding us that events were as
fluent as parables to the Divine Teacher's will.*

^ Matthew 22: 15—22.

TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 179

The ^'entangling" qnestion — the coin from Cses-
ar's "mould" — the pungent answer, "Render
therefore to Caesar the things which are Caesar's ;
and unto God the things that are God's" — all
these are familiar. They teach us to recognize
discriminate spheres, and to render "tribute to
■whom tribute is due" in each. Tacitus speaks
of soldiers who preferred "to discuss, rather than
to obey, their leader's commands," thus virtually
assuming leadership themselves. Caesar's coin
bore the impress of his majesty in his "image
and superscription:" to alter that, to clip the
coin itself, or to withhold it when claimed as
tribute, would be treason against the empire.
But if unquestioning loyalty in the slenderest
trifle was due to a human ruler, how much more
to the Divine. Caesar might utter laws super-
fluous, ephemeral, or otherwise needing to be
repaired or to be adjusted: this is only to say
that he was human. ^ Not so of him who
" knows the end from the beginning," and whose
command is to last unchanged and unrepealed to
the end of the world. To attempt remodeling
that to meet changes impliedly unforeseen or
neglected, is to revise the judgment of Omnis-
cience and "charge God with folly."

' Of. G. C. Lewis, on Methods of Observation, etc., in
Politics (London, 1852), vol. L, pp. 470, 472.

180 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE,
BAPTISM THE TEST OF LOYALTY.

And now, lest this discussion should seem to
be a mere grouping of accidental coincidences
and their perversion to an alien end, it may be
well to call attention to the circumstance that *
occasioned the parables cited, and furnished their
theme. The transition will be easy, from the
contrasted claims of God and Caesar, just men-
tioned, to the contrasted authority of baptism,
regarded respectively as "from heaven or of
men." (Ch. 21 : 25.)

The chief priests and elders had questioned
our Lord's authority. He flashed their lantern-
light back into their own faces, and down into
their hearts, with a question which, though seem-
ingly remote, was all too close for them.^ He
picketed them in fact between the two horns of
a dilemma, from one of which they must dangle,
unless they could slip out between. *'The bap-
tism of John, whence was it? from heaven or
of men?'' They had superciliously treated it
as human, "being not baptized of him":^ but
they had not dared to deny that it was divine,
"for they feared the people." They vaulted
therefore through a ready loophole, saying, "We

^ See Dr. Parker's admirable chapter on Christ as an
Interlocutor, Kcce Deus, (Boston, 1868), p. 207, seq.
2 Luke 7 : 30.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 181

cannot tell": and were pursued by the athletic
parables in question.

It is noticeable that our Lord here makes bap-
tism the test, as it is in itself the expression, of
wholeness of loyalty. "His (John's) idea of
repentance exceeded the outward requirements of
the Mosaic law," writes Dr. Lange, "as much as
his rite of immersion that of sprinkling."^ It
was "to fulfil all righteousness," "laying down
his life of himself" ^^ symbolically, as he after-
wards did literally, that Christ was baptized in
Jordan. "Ye became obedient from the heart to
that form (or pattern) of teaching whereunto ye
were delivered":' so Paul sums up the whole-
ness and absoluteness of the life-surrender em-
bodied in the sacramental t\-pe.

The Pharisee's answer may imply contempt
for the question as trivial, or real uncertainty.
If the latter, it was, as shown by our Lord's
further words, only a convenient and inexcusable
uncertainity. " None deny there is a God, but
those for whom it maketh that there w^ere no
God," Lord Bacon pithily remarks.* Having
repudiated John's baptism, it was needful some-
how to discredit it. The plea of impracticability

iLanffe, Matthexv (Ed. Sehaff, 1869,) p. 69.
2 Matthew 3 : 15 ; John 10 : 18.
'^Romans 6 : 17. [Canterbury Revision).
* Wbately's Bacon, p, 155.

182 2 HE MOULD OF VOG TRINE.

being obviously unavailable, that of uncertainty
alone remained possible. But they were flour-
ishing a deadlier weapon than they knew.

A recent periodical contained a stirring sermon
from a Methodist preacher on this question to
the Pharisees, concerning the origin of John's
baptism.^ The theme deduced from it was,
"The Inspiration of Moses." Its relation to
the text will not at once blaze on the reader,
but its statement reveals a true homiletic in-
stinct. The baptism of John and the message
of Moses proceed from the same source, appeal
to like credentials and demand like reverent
submission. Wilful or disingenuous dealing
with the one will inevitably entail like treat-
ment of the other. Therefore, Christ will not
"commit himself to them;" for, as he intimates
in his parable, they who have not dealt fairly
with the "servants" will not "reverence the
Son." 2

A LINGUISTIC AGNOSTICISM.

If the validity of baptism be really inde-
pendent of mode, so that proving the word to
mean "immerse" would be entirely irrelevant
and immaterial, as is constantly affirmed, it is
plain that so translating the word would be

^ Cliautauqua Assembly Herald, Aug., 1882.
2 Matthew 21: 38, 39.

THE MOULD OF DOCTltlSE. 183

equally harmless. In that case it is singular
that Bishop Titcomb should have been so "em-
barrassed" by such translation, and that the
Bible Society should have decided it impossible
"consistently to use and circulate" a Bible
infected by it.^ The sensitiveness thus mani-
fested reveals the conscious untrust worthiness of
the theory advanced. " The bed is shorter than
that a man can stretch himself on it." The
meaning of the word is of consequence. It
must\)Q "embarrassing" to explain even to the
stupidest Burman that Christ has commanded his
followers to be " immersed/^ that he has said, " if
a man love me he will keep my loords,'' and that
therefore it is his duty to be — sprlnlded. There
is a more convenient way — it is, when he asks
what Christ means by being baptized, to say,
" We cannot tell." This linguistic agnosticism
is the inevitably adjacent burrow into which t e
argument vanishes if hotly pressed. The mean-
ing of the word is only immaterial when men
do not insist on knowing it, but impossible
when they do. Indeed, it is argued that the
meaning is uncertain because it is immaterial,
and also immaterial because it is uncertain.

It is possible here only by fragmentary illus-
tration to show how the exigency thus arising

1 Bible Society Record, June 15, 1882.

184 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

presses scholarship awry, and "blinds the eyes
of the wise/' The mention of a name so dis-
tinguished and revered as that of Dr. Schaff, in
this connection, affords occasion to say, what it
is hoped might in any case be charitably believed,
that the citations made in these papers have been
made purposely from men in various denomina-
tions high in attainments and in the esteem of
the Christian world. It would be absurd to
suppose that the inconsistent or erroneous teach-
ings attributed to them are meant to impugn
their abilities or motives; on the contrary, the
more clear-sighted and unimpeachably conscien-
tious they are reckoned, the stronger is the case
here sought to be made against the witchery of
a perverted ordinance,

The difference in th^ ecclesiastic atmosphere
of German Lutberanism and Presbyterian ism
has been already s^lluded to. Dr. Schaif (then
in the Lutheran Seminary at Mercersburg), piib-
lished in 1858 his History of the Christian
Church. In 1882, (then being in the Prasby-
terian Seminary in the city of New York), he
published a revised edition of the first volume.
In this revision anjong many changes occur
t!.ese significant ones. The statement of 1858,
that "the usual form of baptism was immersion,
is plain/' ^ from divers circumstances, becomes

» Vol. I, p. 122.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 185

now only that It is "inferred."^ The old refer-
ence to ^^ later Hellenistic usage" ^ as allowing to
baptism "sometimes the wider sense of washing
and cleansing," now becomes an avowal that
" Hellenistic usag^e " ^ at laro^e did the like. A
serious change: for while the former statement
could not affect the question in hand, the latter
clearly might. It would be interesting to know
what secret archives have recently disgorged tes-
timony to reverse the overwhelming verdict of
scholarship since Schneckenburger's day/ to
which Dr. Schaff assented in 1858, that prose-
lyte baptism was unknown in Christ's day.
Again, in 1869, Dr. Schaif published Lange's
Commentary on Matthew , annotated by himself.
It is there stated without note of qualification
or dissent, as to John's baptism, that " This bap-
tism was administered by immersion, and not by
sprinkling."^ Ten years later, in 1879, Dr.
Schaff published another Commentary on 3Iat-
thew, prepared by himself with the help of Dr.
Kiddell. Speaking of the same baptism, he now

1 Vol. I., p. 468. 2 p, 125. 3 p. 469.

* The whole matter is thus summed up by Fairbairn:
" So far as the direct evidence goes, the very utmost that
can be said is, that indications appear of Jewish prose-
lyte-baptism as an existing practice during the fourth
century of the Christian era." — Hermeneutics (Phila-
delphia, 1859), p. 305.

* Lange, Matthew, p. 68.

186 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE,

says, "The subjects went into the river, and
were either immersed by John, or water was
poured on them. The Greek verb baptize is a
technical term for a symbolical washing." ^ If
this means that it has now become a technical
term, it is irrelevant. If it means that it was
so when our Lord used it, the world waits for
proof. Most extraordinary tasks have been
attempted in that direction. Dr. Krauth his
even undertaken to prove that the modern tech-
nical sense of taufen is in fact its ancient sense,
and that Luther never used it as meaning to dip,
although Luther himself says he did.^

One of the most extraordinary books on the
"technical sense" is that of Dr. Armstrono:,
whose whole argument is distinctly " limited to
baptizo used as a religious or sacred term.^^^ It is,
he says, "always a generic term, having no
reference to mode : and hence to translate it by

1 Scribner's Popular Commentary, 1879, vol. I., p. 42.
Cf. also, on use of Greek preposition en, Lange on Mat-
thew 3 : 11, with Schaff and Riddell on same verses, and
also on Mark 1 : 8.

2 Krauth, Conservative Reformation in Theology
(Philadelphia. 1871), p. 536. Cf. Schaff-Herzog, Kn'cy-
clopoedia of Religious Knowledge (New York. 1882).
*' Luther sided with the im^lersiotlist^J, and described the
baptismal act as an immersion, and derived taufe (Ger-
man for baptism), from tief (deep), because what one
baptized, he sank tief in the water." — p. 210.

3 Sacraments of the New Testament, (New York, 1880),
p. 12.

TUB MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 187

(lip, immerse, sprinkle, or pour, will be to mis-
translate the word of GodJ'^ His main au-
thority for asserting the occurrence of such terms
in the New Testament is Dr. Campbell, from
whom he quotes in extenso — substantially to the
eifect that "classical use is not only sometimes
unavailing, but may even mislead."^ Dr. Camp-
bell is correctly cited thus far : but he supplies
further information on this subject, which is, very
abstemiously, refused, viz. : " The word baptizeifij
both in sacred authors and in classical, signifies
to dip, to plunge, to immerse, and was rendered by
Tertullian, the oldest of the Latin Fathers,
linger e, the term used for dyeing cloth, which
was by immersion J^^ The same Dr. Campbell
reminds those who insist that it is impossible
definitely to translate a word because it has secon-
dary meanings, that by the same rule all lan-
guage would become hopelessly indefinite. " The
explanation of a simple sentence will appear like
the solution of a riddle." " The verb to make in
our language has, according to Johnson, sixty-
six meanings, to put eighty, and to take one hun-
dred and thirty-four." * Every institution ought
to be suspected, which for its own self-justifica-

^ Sacraments of the New Testament (New York, 1880),
p. 1. ^Jb.,]).^.

3 The Four Gospels (Aberdeen, 1854), vol. IV., p. 24
(on Matthew 3: 11). ^ lb., vol. I., p. 97.

188 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

tion begets an effort to weaken confidence in the
certainty of the word of God. Milraan in his
Essays says, "The first to impugn the authen-
ticity of Scripture, leading Astruc, Eichhorn,
Pauhis, and Strauss, was the Jesuit father Simon ;
who did it to assert the authority of the Church/' ^
To reach tliat end Simon contended that "the
greater part of the Hebrew words are equivocal,
and that their signification is entirely uncertain,'^
and that the "Hebrew lexicons commonly contain
nothing but uncertain conjecture.''^ "Modern
neology deals with Christ's words just as Rome
does," says Archer Butler, "treating them as
imperfect; showing that the philosophy of
Romanism and that of Rationalism are funda-
mentally one."^

THE WITNESSING WOED.

Akin to the exigency which tempts to obscure,
is that which tempts to alter, the written word.
The liberties which Rome has taken in this
direction are familiar to all. In the Index of
Pope Clement VIII. it is declared proper "to
expunge even the words of sacred Scripture
which may be impiously turned to a profane

1 (London, 1870), p. 302 ; cf. p. 305.

2 Campbell, The Four Gospels, vol. I. pp. 81-3.

3 Letters on Eomamsm (Cambridg-e, 1858), p. 28.

TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 189

use."^ In Cardinal Wiseman's Essays we are
informed that "the prenomen ' Jesns/ of Barab-
bas, has from motives of reverence been dropped
from the text."

Dr. Jenner, physician to Edward YI., pub-
lished a Drama in which he represents the mass
as praying thus :

" Because in the Bible I cannot be found
The heretics would bury me under ground.
I prav you heartily, if it be possible, ^^
To get me a place in the great Bible."

The Council of Trent exalted the Vulgate above
the original Greek and Hebrew, as the "authen-
tic" Scripture. =^ Eadie says, the British and
Foreign Bible Society did the same thing for the
Elzevir text of 1624, (and by keeping verses in
it now known to be spurious, "circulated a
forgery in the divine name."^) The American
Bible Society has erected the common English
Version into a like canon; requiring all its
issues to be " conformed in the principles of their
translation" to it.* It has gone further; it has
declared that version authentic only as the word
"baptism" is taken in a particular sense: it
being impossible "consistently to use and circu-

i Cited in Letters on Romanism, p. 27.

2 Bungener, Council of Trent, p. 90.

3 History English Bible, vol. II., p. 347, note.
* See Rules of Translation.

100 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE.

late" any translation in which the equivalent for
"baptize'^ is understood among the peopl.'^ as
meaning "immerse."^ It follows logically that
if the autograph manuscripts of the Evangelists
should be discovered to-day, they must be de-
clared ^Meficient in catholicity/^ and could not
be "consistently used and circulated'' among the
Greeks (where the word baptizo is universally
understood to mean "immerse'')^ until revised
by inserting rantizo or cheo, in order to conform
them to the "principles" of the English version.
It is a good omen that there is so much anxiety
to explain away the definite meaning of this
critical word. It reveals an increasing popular
anxiety and determination to know its meaning.
Prelacy is an anachronism — indiflPerentism does
not quiet the conscience — the issue narrows to the
word itself. " What is written in the law ? how
readest thou?" The "mould" has been broken,
but the witnessing word — kept by the providence

» Bible Society Becord, June 15, 1882.

2Cf. Stanley, Eastern Church (London, 1861), p. 17.
" The humblest peasant who reads his Septuagint or
Greek Testament in his own mother tongue, on the hills
of Boeotia, may proudly feel that he has an access to the
original words of divine truth which the Pope and Car-
dinal reach by a barbarous and imperfect translation."
'•There can be no question that the original form of
baptism — the very meaning of the word — was complete
immersion in the deep baptismal waters. . . To this
form the Eastern Church rigidly still adheres." — p. 34.

THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 191

and grace of God through superslitioiis jealousy
of the letter, fossilization of language and
palimpsest — remains intact. To it the final
ajipeal must be had. In it the tru€ outlines of
the ^^ mould " are traceable, and by it they may
be restored. "It is not he that hath good gold
that is afraid to bring it to the touchstone," said
King James's translators. He only will l)j
justified in the end who shall be found in sim-
plicity and integrity, '^Holding fast the

THE END.

BV811 .T45

The mould of doctrine : a study of

Princeton Theological Semmary-Speer Library

1 1012 00051 8425

-m