HKB
brought against it, of being narrow and exclusive. "How kind these Christians are to the poor and afflicted, without distinction of religion or country; but how they love each other!"
Now combine with this the consideration before urged--the duty, I mean, and necessity of checking the superstitious abuse of the baptismal rite: and I then ask, with confidence, in what way could the Church have exercised a sound discretion more wisely, piously, or effectively, than by fixing, from among the several ends and purposes of Baptism, the outward ceremony to the purposes here mentioned? How could the great body of Christians be more plainly instructed as to the true nature of all outward ordinances? What can be conceived better calculated to prevent the ceremony from being regarded as other and more than a ceremony, if not the administration of the same on an object, (yea, a dear and precious object) of spiritual duties, though the conscious subject of spiritual operations and graces only by anticipation and in hope;--a subject unconscious as a flower of the dew falling on it, or the early rain, and thus emblematic of the myriads who (as in our Indian empire, and henceforward, I trust, in Africa) are temporally and even morally benefited by the outward existence of Christianity, though as yet ignorant of its saving truth! And yet, on the other hand, what more reverential than the application of this, the common initiatory rite of the East sanctioned and appropriated by Christ--its application, I say, to the very subjects, whom he himself commanded to be brought to him--the children in arms*, respecting whom *Jesus was much displeased with his disciples, who had rebuked those that brought them! What more expressive of the true character of that originant yet generic stain, from which the Son of God, by his mysterious incarnation and agony and death and resurrection, and by the Baptism of the Spirit, came to cleanse the children of Adam, than the exhibition of the outward element to infants free from and incapable of crime, in whom the evil principle was present only as potential being, and whose outward semblance represented the kingdom of Heaven? And can it--to a man, who would hold himself deserving of anathema maranatha (1 Cor. xvi. 22.) if he did not love the Lord Jesus--can it be nothing to such a man, that the introduction and commendation of a new inmate, a new spiritual ward, to the assembled brethren in Christ (--and this, as I have shown above, was one purpose of the baptismal ceremony) does in the baptism of an infant recall our Lord's own presentation in the Temple on the eighth day after his birth? Add to all these considerations the known fact of the frequent exposure and the general light regard of infants, at the time when Infant Baptism is by the Baptists supposed to have been first ruled by the Catholic Church, not overlooking the humane and charitable motives, that influenced Cyprian's decision in its favour. And then make present to your imagination, and meditatively contemplate the still continuing tendency, the profitable, the beautiful effects, of this ordinance now and for so many centuries back, on the great mass of the population throughout Christendom--the softening, elevating exercise of faith and the conquest over the senses, while in the form of a helpless crying babe the presence, and the unutterable worth and value, of an immortal being made capable of everlasting bliss are solemnly proclaimed and carried home to the mind and heart of the hearers and beholders! Nor will you forget the probable influence on the future education of the child, the opportunity of instructing and impressing the friends, relatives, and parents in their best and most docile mood. These are, indeed, the mollia tempora fandi.