other, with John Wesley; a third, with John Gill; and a fourth, with some one else. Thrice happy the man who lifts the Bible as if it had dropped from heaven into his hand alone; and who, with a single eye, reads for himself!

Q. 134. Who is most likely to understand it? A. He who practises what he already knows.

APPENDIX.

SINCE writing the preceding queries and answers, I have read with approbation a passage in "Coleridge's Aids to Reflection" on the Baptismal Rite, which I deem worthy to add, by way of confirmation of the views given in this treatise on the scriptural subjects of Christian baptism. To the learned reader I need not say, that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was not merely a poet and a philosopher of the highest order, but, by concession, the most talented theologian in the English church, of his day. Some of the London reviews have pronounced him "the greatest theologian in the world, of the first quarter of the present century." That he was a man of the most philosophic and discriminating mind, as well as of prodigious theological attainments, no one who has read his various works, and especially his "Aids to Reflection," can reasonably doubt.

As a member of the Episcopal church, his opinion and his testimony will weigh more with the multitude than any thing that a Baptist could say on our premises or reasonings. While admitting that infant baptism, as a discretionary and prudential custom of the church, may subserve some good purpose to both parents and children, as other human expedients, he boldly takes the ground that there is no authority for it in the Sacred Scriptures.

His words are:-"I am of the opinion that the divines in your side" (that is, the Episcopal church) “are chargeable with a far more grievous mistake-that of giving a carnal and Judaizing interpretation to the various gospel texts in which the terms baptism and baptize occur, contrary to the express and earnest admonitions of the Apostle Paul." "The texts appealed to, as commanding or authorizing infant baptism, are all, without exception, made to bear a sense neither designed nor deducible; and likewise, (historically considered,) there exists no sufficient positive evidence that the baptism of infants was in

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stituted by the Apostles, in the practice of the apostolic age." Page 322, Burlington edition, 1840.

Of the two main foundations on which "sectarians" found the practice of infant baptism, "household baptisms," and of circumcision, he says:-"If I should inform any one that I had called at a friend's house, but had found nobody at home—the family having all gone to the play; and if he, on the strength of this information, should take occasion to asperse my friend's wife for unmotherly conduct in taking an infant, six months old, to a crowded theatre, would you allow him to press on the word 'nobody,' and 'all the family,' in justification of the slander? Would you not tell him that the words were to be interpreted according to the nature of the subject, the purpose of the speaker, and their ordinary acceptation; and that he must, or might have known that infants of that age would not be admitted into the theatre? Exactly so with regard to the words, 'he and all his household.' Had baptism of infants, at that early period of the gospel, been a known practice, or had this been previously demonstrated, then, indeed, the argument that, in all probability, there were infants or young children in so large a family, would be no more objectionable than as being superfluous, and a sort of anticlimax in logic. But, if the words are cited as the proof, it would be a clear petitio principii, (a begging of the question,) though there had been nothing else against it. But when we turn back to the Scriptures preceding the narrative, and find repentance and belief demanded as the terms and indispensable conditions of baptism, then the case above imagined applies in its full force.

"Equally vain is the pretended analogy from circumcision, which was no sacrament at all, but the means and mark of a national distinction." "Nor was it ever pretended that any grace was conferred by it, or that the rite was significant of any inward or spiritual operation." P. 320.

So unanswerably this greatest of men and theologians carries away the long-cherished foundations of infant baptism.

INDEX OF SUBJECTS.