having a grace for every season.

When we are troubled with

erroneous opinions, He is the Spirit of truth; when assaulted with temptations, He is the Spirit of holiness; when dissipated with worldly vanity, He is the Spirit of compunction; when broken with worldly sorrow, He is the Holy Ghost the Comforter. It is He who, after having regenerated us in our baptism, confirms us by the imposition of hands; renews us to repentance, when we fall away; teaches us, all our life long, what we know not; puts us in mind of what we forget; stirs us up when we are dull; helps us in our prayers; relieves us in our infirmities; consoles us in our heaviness; gives us songs of joy in the darkest night of sorrow; seals us to the day of our redemption; and raises us up again in the last day; when that which was sown in grace shall be reaped in glory, and the work of sanctification, in spirit, soul, and body, shall be completed.

JONES, PRESBYTER.-On the figurative Language of the Holy Scriptures. Lect. vi. p. 156.

As the Ark was prepared by Noah, so hath CHRIST prepared His Church, to conduct us in safety through the waves of trouble and the perils of the world, in which so many are lost. And as the waters of the flood carried Noah and his family into a new world after the old was drowned; so do the waters of baptism carry us into a new state with JESUS CHRIST, who passed over the waves of death, and is risen from the dead. And this practical inference is to be made in favour of the ordinance of the Church, that as the ark could not be saved but by water, so must all the Church of CHRIST be baptized.

p.

Ibid. 167. We know that Satan has not that sovereignty over baptized Christians as he hath over men in the state of nature. After baptism a Christian is no longer the subject of that tyrant, but the child of God, who undertakes thenceforth to conduct him through all the trials and dangers of this life to the inheritance promised to the fathers.

HEBER, BISHOP.-Sermons in England. xviii.

It (justification) is the same with that regeneration of which baptism is the outward symbol, and which marks out, wherever it occurs, (that it ordinarily occurs in baptism, I am for my own part firmly persuaded,) our admission into the number of the children of God, and the heirs of everlasting happiness. It is the commencement of that state of salvation, in which, if a man continues, death has no power over him, in as much as the grave, which our nature so greatly fears, is to him no extinction of life, but a passage to a life more blessed and more glorious.

JEBB, BISHOP.-Pastoral Instructions. Disc. vi. p. 112.

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But how, may it be asked, are the benefits and blessings of spiritual regeneration conferred upon infants in their tender years? To this inquiry we need not be careful to reply: we need only state, that in this, as in various other instances, it hath pleased Almighty God to set limits to the presumptuousness of human curiosity; and thus, at once to try our humility and our faith. It is enough for us, rest assured, that God is now, and ever, the same all-good and gracious Parent; that, as in times past, it was out of the mouths of babes and sucklings he perfected praise:" and as "He revealed unto babes those things which were hidden from the wise and prudent," so He is, at all times, abundantly able to pour forth the dew of His blessing upon infants who are faithfully brought to the baptism of his Son. It is enough for us to believe and cherish the prevalent sentiment of the universal Church, as it has been maintained from the age of the Apostles, that at the time of baptism, a new nature is divinely communicated, and gracious privileges are especially vouchsafed, in such measure and degree that, whosoever are clothed with this white garment, may, through God's help, "keep their baptism pure and undefiled, for the remainder of their lives, never wilfully committing any deadly sin."

VAN MILDERT, BISHOP.-Bampton Lectures, vi.

Regeneration is represented, by a certain class of interpreters,

as an instantaneous, perceptible, and irresistible operation of the Holy Spirit upon the heart and mind; which, whether the person have been baptized or not, affords the only certain evidence of his conversion to a saving and justifying faith. By others, it is regarded as a continued and progressive work of the Spirit, or as a state commencing in baptism, but not completed until, by perseverance to the end, the individual has "finished his course, and is about to enter upon his final reward." Others again, separating what the Scriptures state to be joined together in the work of the new birth, maintain a distinction between baptismal and spiritual regeneration; the former taking place in the Sacrament of Baptism; the latter subsequent to it, and, whether progressive or instantaneous in its operation, equally necessary with baptism to a state of salvation.

But here the analogy of faith seems to be violated throughout. For how can any of these views of regeneration consist with the plain and simple notion of it as an entrance upon a new state, or a sacramental initiation into the Christian covenant? Nay, how can they consist with the terms and conditions of the covenant itself? If the Gospel be a covenant, admission into which, on the terms of faith and repentance, gives an immediate title to its present privileges, with an assurance of the spiritual helps necessary for the attainment of salvation; and if baptism be the divinely-appointed means of admission into that covenant, and of a participation in those privileges; is not the person so admitted actually brought into a new state? Has he not obtained that thing which by nature he cannot have? "And being thus regenerated and born anew of water and of the Holy Ghost," to what subsequent part of his Christian life can a term so peculiarly expressive of his first entrance upon it be with propriety applied?

MANT, BISHOP.-Bampton Lectures, vi.

....

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, &c. It should appear, I say, that he was here alluding by anticipation to the Sacrament of Baptism, which he intended to ordain: and to that supernatural grace,

which was thereby to be conferred through the instrumentality of water, and by the Holy Ghost; adopting, not only the ceremony itself, which he meant to exalt to more noble and spiritual purposes; but also the very term, by which the Jews had described the change wrought in the baptized, although he undoubtedly employed it, in a similar sense indeed, but in an infinitely more dignified sense. To the proselyte from heathenism to the Jewish faith, baptism had been a death to his natural incapacities, and a new birth to the civil privileges of a Jew: to him, who should be admitted to a profession of the Christian faith, and who should be "born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh," &c. . . . . . it was to be a death unto sin, and a new birth unto those spiritual privileges, which should accompany his deliverance "from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of GOD." The Jewish proselyte had been baptized with water: the Christian was to be baptized, not with water only, but with the Holy Ghost.

OXFORD.

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