A Voice from the Past
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We have had an interminable controversy about "Christian doctrines," as if there were such a positive entity in the whole revelation of God. No one has yet found in the plural number the term didaskalia or didache, applied to the oracles of God, or the teaching of his Spirit. The former occurs twenty-one times. The latter occurs thirty times. The former is found four times in the plural, always associated with the doctrines of men and demons. Never doctrines of God or Christ. The latter is found once in the plural, and then it is "divers and strange doctrines." These are most significant and suggestive facts.
To change the subject; we have, indeed but one baptism. No man ever found in our Holy Scriptures from Genesis to the Apocalypse two kinds of baptism, either in water or in Spirit. No man of common sense, not infatuated by a false terminology could ever conclude that sprinkling or pouring is dipping; or that dipping is sprinkling or pouring. In honest truth and the Queen's English, no man can, by any possibility, pour a man or sprinkle a man. You may pour or sprinkle something upon him;--dust, salt, ashes or water, milk or wine, but you cannot sprinkle or pour him; but you can dip, plunge or immerse him in water, milk or wine, or any other fluid. This is plain English, but no plainer than Latin, Greek or Hebrew.
If the reader cannot understand this, I presume him to be irreclaimably gone into a maze of confusion confounded; and while we pity him we cannot help him. For the Christian religion is a reasonable service, and every man must have a reason to give for all that he believes. says, or does, or submits to have done upon him, for him, or by him.
Think, for a moment, curious and inquisitive reader. You can sprinkle dust, salt, or water, but you could not sprinkle a living man were the whole world tendered to you for the act. You say "I could sprinkle or pour water on or upon a man." True. But no man living or dead, ever found the Greek preposition epi (upon) immediately after baptizo. No preposition in Greek literature is ever found associated with baptize save en and eis--"in the name of," and "into the name of." The former preceding, the other accompanying the act. In the name of the Lord I baptize or immerse you into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. These prepositions show relations the most intimate and definite, and decide with all clearness and definiteness the connections of acts and their objects. The violence of partisan zeal in this case demonstrates a superlatively daring attitude in every attempt to substitute a human dogma for a Divine and positive ordinance....
We have, in the Scriptures of the New Institution, salvation, or justification ascribed to grace, to faith, to baptism, to the blood of Christ and to works. These are severally true, but not separately true. Each and every one of these is true, because each of these being true the others are always implied. These are in the science of causation contemplated as inseparable. Hence we have an original cause, an efficient cause, an instrumental cause, a concomitant cause, a meritorious cause, of numerous effects and issues. But of these more exegetically and definitely on some other occasion.
There has been a special revelation vouchsafed to me of the ignorance, real or assumed, of some of our contemporary Scribes and Pharisees, and that, too, by themselves, on the whole premises in issue. They talk of faith, repentance, baptism, justification, sanctificaton, grace and works as though they had never carefully read Paul to the Romans, to the Corinthians, to the Galatians and to the Hebrews. They have got, not the marrow, but the dry and empty bones of Greek and Roman mummies, for which they seem to have a superstitious veneration....
But we must now close these desultory remarks, hints and suggestions, and on some future occasion resume them. Mean-
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