HKB
spots on the sun, which impede neither its light nor its heat, so as to prevent the good seed from growing in a good soil and producing fruits of Redemption.[154]
[147] By certain Biblical philologists of the Teutonic school (men distinguished by learning, but still more characteristically by hardihood in conjecture, and who suppose the Gospels to have undergone several successive revisions and enlargements by, or under the authority of, the sacred historians) these words are contended to have been, in the first delivery, the common commencement of all the Gospels κατα σαρκα (that is, according to the flesh), in distinction from St. John's or the Gospel κατα πνευμα (that is, according to the Spirit).
[148] See Comment to Aphorism VIII., par. 3.--ED.
[149] That every the least permissible form and ordinance, which at different times it might be expedient for the Church to enact, are pre-enacted in the New Testament; and that whatever is not to be found there, ought to be allowed no where--this has been asserted. But that it has been proved, or that the tenet is not to be placed among the revulsionary results of the Scripture-slighting Will-worship of the Romish Church; it will be more sincere to say, I disbelieve, than that I doubt. It was chiefly, if not exclusively, in reference to the extravagances built on this tenet, that the great Selden ventured to declare, that the words, Scrutamini Scripturas, had set the world in an uproar.
Extremes appear to generate each other; but if we look steadily, there will most often be found some common error, that produces both as its positive and negative poles. Thus superstitions go by pairs, like the two Hungarian sisters, always quarrelling and inveterately averse, but yet joined at the trunk.
[150] More than this I do not consider as necessary for the argument. And as to Robinson's assertions in his History of Baptism, that infant Baptism did not commence till the time of Cyprian, who condemning it as a general practice, allowed it in particular cases by a dispensation of charity; and that it did not actually become the ordinary rule of the Church, till Augustine in the fever of his Anti-Pelagian dispute had introduced the Calvinistic interpretation of Original Sin, and the dire state of Infants dying unbaptized--I am so far from acceding to them, that I reject the whole statement as rash, and not only unwarranted by the authorities he cites, but unanswerably confuted by Baxter, Wall, and many other learned Pædo-baptists before and since the publication of his work. I confine myself to the assertion--not that Infant Baptism was not; but--that there exist no sufficient proofs that it was the practice of the Apostolic age.
[151] Let me be permitted to repeat and apply the note in a former page. Superstition may be defined as superstantium (_cujusmodi sunt ceremoniæ et signa externa quæ, nisi in significando nihili sunt et pæne nihil*) *sub_stantiatio.
[152] Conference between Two Men that had Doubts about Infant Baptism. By W. Wall, Author of the History of Infant Baptism, and Vicar of Shoreham in Kent. A very sensible little tract, and written in an excellent spirit: but it failed, I confess, in satisfying my mind as to the existence of any decisive proofs or documents of Infant Baptism having been an Apostolic usage, or specially intended in any part of the New Testament: though deducible generally from many passages, and in perfect accordance with the spirit of the whole.