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has not made sad; in order that you may not hinder your hearers from drawing nigh to God with a pure heart and faith unfeigned, and receiving the blessings which God has promised to all who seek him.

I now turn to the High Church view of Baptism, against which, I hope, you may feel somewhat less prejudice than you did when I commenced the discussion. You will, I think, be inclined to believe that those who hold this view may not be "all (with possibly a few exceptions,) open sinners. self-righteous Pharisees and dead formalists,” as Mr. Philpot, late of Worcester College, kindly reports of them; or in the more gentle and humane language of the Record Newspaper, (though it, I believe, does not acknowledge the possibility of any exceptions), "soul-destroyers." This is all I desire; for, as I told you in the beginning of my letter, I am not about to set up their notion as the true and exclusive one. I mean to show you wherein I think it inconsistent with itself and with the idea of the church, and how that inconsistency must be removed from it before it can be reconciled with the views of the other parties, and can contribute an element to that grand idea of Baptism which will, I believe, result from their union.

The doctrines of this party, which are nowhere so ably and so eloquently expressed as in the tracts of Dr. Pusey, (published the year before last,) entitled "Scripture views of Baptism," turn, as I have said, mainly upon the principle that God,

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PHRASE NEW BIRTH."

of his free will and mere grace, does, by the operation of the Spirit, in the act of Baptism, change the nature of the person partaking that ordinance, and thereby constitute him his child, the member of Christ, the heir of heaven. If you read Dr. Pusey's tracts, you will see at once, that no other notion of regeneration except that which is implied in the words Change of Nature, has ever struck him as even possible; or if it has, that he has at once rejected it as inadequate. This is the point which I wish now to examine.

every thoughtful

In older and simpler times, man felt deep thankfulness to our Lord for the wonderful blessing which he conferred on us by teaching us the phrase New Birth, or Birth from above. To be taken out of the region of abstractions, to be presented with a fact of every day occurence, yet still amazing and mysterious, as a key to this deeper mystery,-to be able to translate words into life,-this was exactly what every man who knew his wants felt that he needed. It was a fulfilment of the promise, that the Lord would teach his people a pure language, a language which they might interpret, not by a dictionary, but by another part of his own scheme, a part of it known to all tribes of the earth, to rich and poor, learned and unlearned alike. Therefore, understanding this to be the intent of Christ, they meditated on the obvious facts of ordinary birth, and thus they felt that their minds became clearer respecting the more transcendent truth. That the body passes from the dark night

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of the womb into the light of ordinary day, was the simplest view of physical birth; that the spirit comes out of the womb of nature into the light of the Son of Righteousness, was the corresponding view of the New Birth. Now, in the full belief that God, by Baptism, takes the child into covenant with himself; that he adopts it into Christ's holy body; that he bestows on it his Spirit; it was most just and reasonable that the word portodes should be applied to the baptised man. If he did not afterwards walk in the light, and seek fellowship with the light, he would die in his sin. But still the light is come into the world; the man is brought into the light; God himself has brought him into it; and any sinking hereafter into the dark flesh,-the womb out of which he has been brought,—is the voluntary abdication of a glorious privilege. Such is the view, I conceive, most present to the mind of the fathers of the church: and to this view, you perceive, there is nothing hostile in any of those facts respecting a passage from darkness to light in mature age, on which the Evangelical party dwell; on the contrary, one assertion rightly understood, sustains the other.

Neither is there anything contrary to what God had been previously teaching man respecting his own condition. For he had been teaching him to know that he was a spiritual creature, and that he had a nature; he had been teaching that his spirit was united to the Divine Word, that his flesh was chained to earth; he had been teaching him,

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lastly, that the Divine Word had claimed a union with him, and had gotten the victory over his enemies. If, then, it pleased God to claim the man as a spiritual creature united to Christ, and by Baptism to stamp him as such, it is pure mercy and grace indeed; but it is mercy and grace according to a Divine order; it is a mystery, but it is a mystery into the fellowship of which, God, with infinite wisdom and prudence, has been all along conducting his saints. But if for the words, New Birth' you put Change of Nature,' Christ's beautiful analogy, which he has with such pains and love made known to us, is altogether set aside; for no man in his senses can find anything like a change of nature in ordinary birth. Again, the order of God is violated; he does not deal with man as he hath been doing with him; he has been preparing man, hitherto, by a wonderful process, for the kingdom of his Son, and now he sets up that kingdom on a principle of which he had given no hint before-hand. Baptism is not the consummation of a foregone scheme; it satisfies no wants previously excited, it makes useless all former dispensations. But it is a graver fault still, that by this notion the idea of a sacrament is destroyed; for in the idea of sacrament is necessarily implied, that all the virtue and life of the creature consists in its union with a Being above itself. It is dead of itself; it lives in him. Suppose nature, as such, to become anything pure, or holy, or righteous, by virtue of any change wrought in it; or suppose a new nature

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to be communicated as an endowment to the man, this idea is sacrificed altogether.

I would earnestly entreat Dr. Pusey and his friends, to consider whether by this phrase they are not getting rid of a mystery for the sake of introducing a mystification; whether they are not departing from the text of Scripture, in those passages to which they most appeal, in order to steal a notion from their opponents, which of right belongs to them, and to the stage of life which they deal with ; — (for the idea of a change of heart, where heart is taken for affections and desires, and when change is taken to be the turning these desires from a wrong object to which they have been conformed, to a right object to which they are meant to be conformed, is surely a legitimate idea, and one not at all at variance with the idea of Baptism as a covenant, but the fulfilment of its intent and the fruit of its promises; and change of nature in any other sense than this, no Evangelical who understands himself supposes to take place at conversion or any other period ;)— whether they are not forcing themselves into a series of consequences which actually set at nought the truth they are so eager to defend. For, first, no persons are more anxious to assert the dignity and glory of the church than they, -to upset the notion that it is composed of a number of individual atoms, instead of being a Divine constitution into which men, from age to age, are brought; and yet, by representing Baptism as that which confers a portion of grace on