ers is no limitation of the command touching children.

The omission of the Saviour, therefore, to qualify or limit the command by some reference for the exclusion of children is a very emphatic omission. The inference, in the circumstances, that they would be included unless specifically excluded, becomes an index to his purpose to retain for them the relation to the Church that they had had from time immemorial. If he said nothing to prevent an obvious conclusion from known facts and common practices, then we must not turn aside from the obvious conclusion that he designed that inference to be drawn. For we must remember the common practice and rule of interpretation, - that changes, variations from usage, and not the continuance of a usage, call for remark. Silence leaves a rite or custom undisturbed in its continuance. Its modification, specially if it be radical, is what is spoken of. It is the new, not the old, that occasions remark.

We revise some of the statutes of the State at each session of the legislature. The law or section of which nothing is said holds over with full force and without any allusion. The ancient and original statute concerning admissions to the Church of God provides for and requires the admission of the children of the adult member. In the transition period of this one Church from the old to the new dispensation, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church, revises this statute of admission so far as to make baptism take the place of circumcision: so, where the statute formerly read "circumcise," it is changed to read "baptize."

Making no other change in the statute, what remains unchanged holds over with full force under the new dispensation; and so the present divine law of admission provides for and requires the admission of the children of the adult member, the silence of the lawgiver implying no change.

Viewing, therefore, the common use made of baptism, when our Saviour took it up from among the Jews, and adopted it as the substitute for circumcision in the new dispensation, and regarding the views that the apostles must naturally and necessarily have had of their application of the rite under the last command of Christ, we cannot but regard that command, thus given without qualification or limitation, as binding and intending to bind the apostles to the doctrine and practice of Infant Baptism. Previous practices in the Church, and those common and daily practices among the Jews, and all the attendant circumstances, demand a specified omission and exclusion of the children, if they were to be omitted. The argument on this question demands that those who deny infant baptism should show where it is prohibited. All the facts we have adduced show that it comes as a matter of course from the circumstances of the times, and the command of our Lord. The children having been always included aforetime in God's Church economy, if they are now to be cast out, in this transition from the old to the new dispensation, they who affirm it assume the burden of proof, and must show by what command or lawful inference they are rejected. It is Christ who says, "Forbid them not."

CHAPTER XVII..

IN

THE POSITION OF THE APOSTLES.

N a scriptural inquiry concerning the doctrine and practice of infant baptism, it is very important to learn what was usage with the apostles. We now open this branch of the general subject; and in doing this it is necessary to remember, while we proceed, a few facts. By keeping these facts before us, we shall place ourselves in the position and circumstances of the apostles, and so be the better able to judge of their doctrine and practice in this thing.

We must remember, then, that household baptism was a common practice in the times of the apostles, and among their own people the Jews, before the manifestation of the Christian Church. They grew up in the sight of this usage. The baptism of children was familiar to them from their own childhood. It was administered to the little ones of a proselyte as a matter of course. So, from the very source and practice whence they derived their ideas of baptism at all, they took also the idea, that, when it was applied to an adult believer in Judaism, it was also to be applied to his children, so far as they could yet be regarded as infants.

We must also remember that they had no concep

tion or expectation of a new Church. The ancient Church of God was to be continued as a matter of course. The gracious, promised, and prophesied time of its enlargement had come, when the Gentiles should flow unto it. Instead of any new tabernacle, Zion was to lengthen her cords and strengthen her stakes, and so enlarge the covering of her tent for all the nations. The old "olive-tree" was to be preserved, and Gentile grafts inserted. Even the Jewish limbs that had been broken off by unbelief were to be recovered, and "graffed into their own olivetree."1 So in that first apostolic preaching, under the last commission, and in the first Christian revival, the promise of mercy for the latter days is interpreted to cover Jews. And when those three thousand, a mixed multitude of Jews "out of every nation under heaven," received Christ and Christian baptism, and "the same day were added unto them," the company of apostles and disciples, they were those broken branches "graffed into their own olive-tree again." These were the first professors of religion that the apostles received into the Church. And they were received into "their own olive-tree," the ancient, original Church of God. To this same body the apostles added all their other converts, Jewish and Gentile. To the Jew it was his own, the Jewish Church, and to the Gentile it was the Christian Church. So we see that both were but different names and dispensations of one and the same body. This Pentecostal revival and ingathering of con

1 Rom. xi. 17-24.

verts was the time to constitute and set forth a new Church, if any such thing was to be ever done. This was the beginning, properly, of Christian preaching, Christian baptism, and Christian profession of religion. But the three thousand converts went into "their own" Church, the ancient "olive-tree" of God; and all converts under the apostles followed them. So no new Church was ever constituted.

Then we must remember, too, in this connection, that the children of believers were also included in this ancient Church. The apostles not only knew this to be universal practice, but that it was an essential in the constitution and usage of the body. Nay, more: they knew that they themselves had come into it in their infancy. No peculiarity of the ancient Church was more marked than its infant membership. No condition of adult membership was more stringently enforced than this dedication of the children to God. A Jew esteemed few, if any, of his rights and privileges so precious and inalienable as the one to place his child within the sacred enclosure of the people of God.

All this was well known to the apostles, as a law in Israel, and a universal custom with the chosen of God. And these very apostles, who were still only Jews who had "found the Christ" and accepted him, had all the deep scriptural and traditional feelings and prejudices of a Jew on this question.

This we must bear in mind while inquiring for their usage in Infant Baptism. At the same time we must bear in mind that the Saviour had given them, so far as the record shows, no intimation that