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respect the church of Christ, so also in the ordinance of the Lord's Supper we find a very fit guide and precedent for our direction in the customs and laws appointed by God to Moses and Abraham. The passover, as before explained, was the type of the Lord's Supper, and in the account of the passover, as given in the book of Exodus, we find very explicit directions as to the qualifications necessary for that holy ordinance. It is thus directed: "And the Lord said unto Moses and Aaron, This is the ordinance of the passover: there shall no stranger eat thereof, but every man's servant that is bought for money, when thou hast circumcised him, then shall he eat thereof. A foreigner and a hired servant shall not eat thereof. And when a stranger shall sojourn with thee, and will keep the passover to the Lord, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near and keep it; and he shall be as one that is born in the land, for no uncircumcised person shall eat thereof."*

Here, then, we see one essential point in the observance of the passover to be circumcision. No stranger was permitted, in any case, to partake of it. What is the meaning of a "stranger ?" One not circumcised, one not admitted into the Jewish church, by that ordinance which Jehovah had commanded as the sign

* Exod. xii. 43.

of his first covenant between himself and the descendants of Abraham. Abraham was separated by God's especial command from the nations of the world; his family was made a peculiar family of God; his posterity was promised to be numerous as the sand upon the sea-shore, and the blessings and privileges of the nation which was to descend from his loins were to be poured down in countless profusion. But the sign by which the promise on God's part, and the obedience which Abraham pledged, on the other part, was ratified and confirmed, was circumcision. This rite of circumcision constituted the true Israelite; it was the mode of admission into God's family, as we find detailed in the book of Genesis: "And I will establish my covenant between me and thee, and thy seed after thee, in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee and thy seed after thee. This is This is my covenant, which ye shall keep between me and thee, and thy seed after thee every man child among ye shall be circumcised."*

Accordingly, in pursuance of this covenant, we find God continually calling himself, and directing the Israelites to call him "their God-the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob," "Jehovah God of Israel," "The Holy

* Exod. iv. 22.

One of Israel," and so forth. While, at the same time, with reciprocal affection, he calls the Israelites his children, his peculiar people, his sons: "Israel is my son, even my firstborn."*

When, therefore, in after times, other circumstances arose in which God thought it right to interfere personally in the conduct of this his appointed family-that is to say, in the deliverance from Egypt,-it was not inappropriate than another sign should be instituted commemorative of that second event. But none were to be admitted to the second covenant that were not members of the first. If not members of the first, they were strangers to God and not his own family; and it was perfectly just that those who refused to be of his family in the first instance, should not partake of those privileges and blessings which he had in store for them, in the second instance.

Thus precisely the case stands with Christianity. As to the Jew, circumcision was the initiatory rite by which he became a child of God, so baptism is the initiatory rite by which the Gentile, excluded from God by natural and original sin, is washed and regenerate, and made the child of God; and unless a man be so baptized, whether Jew or Gentile, unless he be so baptized, into the name

* Genesis xvii. 7.

of Jesus Christ, he cannot be entitled to the second ordinance of Christianity, the Eucharist.*

At the same time, we must not consider baptism as a mere outward form. Even circumcision, in a religion which dealt much more extensively in forms than ours does, even circumcision was not a mere outward form; it represented something. It represented inward purity, casting away the foulness of the flesh, and a dedication of the spiritual feelings to God. So in the epistle to the

Romans we find: "He is not a Jew which is one outwardly, neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh. But he is a Jew which is one inwardly, and circumci

* "A person must be admitted into covenant first in order to renew, must be initiated in order to be perfected, must be born into Christian life before he takes in the food proper to support and increase it. There is an instance in antiquity as high as the third century, of a person who had long been a communicant, and who afterwards found reason to doubt whether he had been validly baptized, and scrupled the coming again to the Lord's table. His bishop advised him (considering how long he had been a communicant, and honestly all the time,) to go on without scruple, not presuming to give him baptism, which now seemed to be superseded by the long and frequent use of the other sacrament; the case was very particular, and the resolution probably wise and just. Both the scruple on the one hand and the determination on the other, shew how acknowledged a principle it then was, that baptism is ordinarily a most essential part of the qualification required for receiving the holy communion."-Waterland's Review, chap. xiii.

sion is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter, whose praise is not of men, but of God,"* and so we find in Jeremiah, "uncircumcised in heart and ears," and in Ezekiel, “uncircumcised in heart and flesh." If so much more in a church whose very existence depends upon spiritual affections, and whose boast it is to have cast aside the burdens of the Jewish ceremonies, must we expect that the rite of baptism should convey a far higher meaning than a mere outward form and watchword of admittance into the privileges of Christianity? Yet it is to be feared that many esteem it no higher, many make the holy sacrament of baptism but a mere worldly ceremony, bringing their children to the font for the sake of registering their names in the books of the church, without any spiritual feelings whatever, and without any religious understanding of the obligations and solemn covenant thereby entered upon between God and man. In the case of adult baptism, when it happens that the sacrament is not administered until years of discretion, then indeed does the covenant so solemnly pledged, stand solely between the individual baptized and his Creator, and Saviour. But where infants are baptized, whatever the understanding, or the motive of the parent

*Romans ii, 28.

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