water and the Spirit into the kingdom mentioned,everywhere Baptism.

Those, then, who do not believe that our Lord alluded to Baptism, when He expressly mentioned water in His discourse with Nicodemus, are under the necessity of believing that a thing which He laid down as the entrance into His kingdom was, within a very short time after, entirely passed over, both by Himself and His inspired Apostles, when they came actually to admit men into His kingdom.

Another way of neutralizing the express mention of water in our Lord's words, it may be well here to notice, as, by the correction of a popular mistake, we may call attention to a most important view of Christ's ordinance. You hear continually, "the water" and "the Spirit" opposed, as it were, to one another. When a man thinks and asserts that His Saviour had wise reasons for joining water and the Spirit, and that His words are to be taken in their plain acceptation, he is told that there is no intention to depreciate water Baptism,-that it is a very edifying ceremony; but that, after all, the Baptism of the Spirit is the paramount consideration.

All this is said with an air of charitable condescension to his weakness, in taking into any real account his Saviour's mention of water; the falsely spiritual forgetting, it is to be charitably hoped, Who it is Who connects the element of "water" with "the Spirit."

And, in fact, this disjoining of "the water" and "the Spirit," this contrast between water and Spirit Baptism, is said in extreme ignorance of some of the plainest declarations of Scripture, respecting the diversity of the operations of the Holy Ghost.

It is assumed that, because the Holy Ghost is a Spirit, therefore His operations can only be mental or moral workings on the spirit of man; but what saith the Scripture? The first operation of the Holy Spirit mentioned in God's Word, is in the second verse of the

first chapter in the Bible," The Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters." Was that what we call a spiritual work?

The next reference to His working is with respect to what we call a spiritual work; where God says (Gen. vi. 3), "My Spirit shall not always strive with man." Here is His work on the conscience.

The next operation of the Spirit that we shall notice is of another kind. It is where God tells Moses that He has filled Bezaleel with the Spirit of God; to devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, to make the tabernacle. (Exod. xxxi. 3.) Here is a work of the Spirit solely on the intellect, perhaps on its lower functions.

The next that we shall notice is very fearful to contemplate, for it is the endowing a man with one of the highest gifts of a purely spiritual nature, without any corresponding work upon his heart. It is when the Spirit of God came upon the apostate prophet Balaam, and he took up his parable, and foretold the glories in which he was to have no part. (Numb. xxiv.)

The next is diverse still. It is when the Spirit of the Lord endued Samson with supernatural strength of body for the deliverance of God's people. (Judges xiv. 6-19; xv. 14.) Here, then, the moving on the waters, the pricking of men's consciences, the skill of Bezaleel, the prophecy of the reprobate seer, and the strength of Samson, are equally the work of God's Spirit.

Turn we now to the New Testament. The first work of the Spirit of God there, is the greatest work of God on record-greater than the creation of the worlds. It is the creation in the womb of the Virgin of that undefiled human nature in which the Eternal Word was to dwell for ever and ever. "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." (St. Luke i. 35.)

Was this an operation on the mind of the Virgin only? Was it what many would call a spiritual work at all?

Then we find that our Lord, as a man, did His mighty works, not His work of conversion of sinners only, but such works as the casting out of devils, by the Spirit of God. "If I, by the Spirit of God, cast out devils."

On the day of Pentecost, the Spirit of God was given to gather out and build up the Church of Jesus Christ. Then commenced that dispensation of the Spirit in which we are now living. Are His works now only works on the heart or mind? Turn to the twelfth chapter of St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, and you will see that every gift on which the existence and well-being of the Church depends is a gift of God's Spirit, from the first rudimentary gift of faith, which enables a man merely to profess Christ's name, (1 Cor. xii. 3,) to the charity that never faileth all are works of the Spirit,—the word of wisdom, the word of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, working of miracles, prophesying, discerning of spirits, tongues, interpretation of tongues,-all these, some in their operation affecting the mind, some the moral faculties, some the heart, some the body, are equally works of God's Spirit.*

Every work of God on the individual Christian, from the mere rudiment of faith that enables him to say that Jesus is the Lord, (1 Cor. xii. 3,) to the quickening of his mortal body at the last day, (Rom. viii. 11,) are all operations of the Spirit.

Now amongst these, and to be carefully distinguished from them all, are His "SACRAMENTAL WORKINGS :" His

"We are to observe that the Spirit of God is the great ministry of the Gospel, and whatsoever blessing evangelical we can receive, it is the emanation of the Spirit of God. Grace and pardon, wisdom and hope, offices, and titles, and relations, powers, privileges, and dignities,-all are the good things of the Spirit; whatsoever we can profit withal, or whatsoever we can be profited by, is a gift of God, the Father of spirits, and is transmitted to us by the Holy Spirit of God. For it is but a trifle and a dream to think that no person receives the Spirit of God but He that can do actions and operations spiritual."-Jeremy Taylor : Liberty of Prophesying, vol. v. p. 578. Eden's Edit.

workings in fulfilling and making good those words of Christ, whereby He ordained certain acts, the two Sacraments, containing not an inward only, but an outward part, for the conveyance of a peculiar blessing, the blessing of participating in His nature as the Second Adam.

Just, then, as it is one work of the Spirit to prick a man's conscience, another to draw him internally to his Saviour, and another to raise up his dead body, so it is another at Baptism to graft a man into Christ's mystical body; for the Apostle says, "By one Spirit are we all baptized into one body." (1 Cor. xii. 13.) *

Let us remember that the two Sacraments differ essentially from all else in Christianity, in the fact of their being covenant acts, and so not only derive their efficacy from the promise of Christ, but are to be considered His

acts.

Luther recognises this fundamental principle with respect to them :—

"You should not regard, therefore, the hand or mouth of the minister who baptizes,-who pours over the body a little water, which he has taken in the hollow of his hand, and pronounces some few words (a thing slight and easy in itself, addressing itself only to the eyes and ears, and our blinded reason sees no more to be accomplished by the minister); but in all this you must behold and consider the word and work of God, by whose authority and command Baptism is ministered, who is its Founder and Author, yea, who is Himself

* Calvin has this remark on this passage: "Paul comprehends the whole Church, when he says that it was cleansed by the washing of water. In like manner, from his expression in another place that by Baptism we are engrafted into the body of Christ, (1 Cor. xii. 13,) we infer that infants, whom he enumerates among His members, are to be baptized in order that they may not be dissevered from His body." And he adds these words: "See the violent onset which they (Anabaptists) make with all their engines on the bulwarks of our faith."— Calvin's Institutes, Book iv. chap. xvi. vol. iii. p. 372. Calvin Soc. Translation. By one Spirit are we all baptized into one body;' that is, the Spirit of God moves upon the waters of Baptism, and in that Sacrament adopts us into the mystical body of Christ, and gives us title to a co-inheritance with Him."— Jeremy Taylor: Liberty of Prophesying, vol. v. p. 580. Eden's Edit.

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the Baptist. And hence has Baptism such virtue and energy (as the Holy Ghost witnesseth by St. Paul), that it is the laver of Regeneration (Titus iii. 5,) and of the renewal of the Holy Ghost; by which laver the impure and sentenced nature which we draw from Adam is altered and amended."

See, also, how Calvin recognises the same principle:

"It ought to be sufficient for us to recognise the hand and seal of our Lord in His Sacraments, let the administrator be who he may." And again: "Against these absurdities we shall be sufficiently fortified, if we reflect that by Baptism we were initiated not into the name of any man, but into the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and, therefore, that Baptism is not of man, but of God, by whomsoever it may have been administered.”*

As

I must now return from this digression to the passage I am considering. "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit." I have shown, I think, clearly, from the whole analogy of Scripture, that it is repugnant to common sense to interpret it otherwise than as an allusion to Baptism. It has been often gravely asserted that our Lord could not in these words allude to Baptism because His (i. e. Christian) Baptism was not then instituted. if He, to whose foreknowledge all the future was present, could not refer to what in one short year He would enjoin as one of the first laws of His kingdom. Surely, on the same principle, we might say that the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah did not speak of Him, because it spoke of what was to be accomplished seven hundred years afterwards. In accordance with the analogy of Scripture, this passage has been expounded from the earliest times, and by almost every great scripturist, as having only this meaning. There is one allusion to it in the writings of a man who lived in the very country of our Lord, and within a

* Calvin's Institutes, Book iv. chap. xv. sec. 16, vol. iii. p. 340. Calvin Society's Translation.