Bertha and Her Baptism

by Nehemiah Adams

"There always seemed to me," she said, "to be a grain of truth in every great error. Is it not so? Even among the Brahmins of the East, and among savages, each superstition, and every lie, retains the fossils of some dead truth. When a new error breaks out among us, I feel that the human mind is tossing itself, and reaching after something beyond its experience. It seems to me," she continued, "that, at such times, it is good for ministers and Christians to reëxamine their mode of stating the truths of the Bible, to see how far they can properly go to meet the new development, and, by preaching the truth better, intercept it. The cold, barren view, which many take of ordinances, makes some people hanker after forms and ceremonies; whereas, if we would present baptism and the Lord's Supper as divine acts toward us, we might meet the instinctive wants of many, and hold them to the side of truth.

"But I told Mr. Dow that I was no formalist, nor did I believe in compromising the truth to win errorists. Clear, faithful, strict doctrinal views commend themselves to men's consciences."

I came near saying to the good lady, that, if she were able to talk in such a strain, and to say so much to her minister, he, surely, could not have deemed her so enfeebled in mind as to be incapacitated for admission to the Christian church.

"I told him, also," she added, "I was satisfied that his unvarying mode of baptism was not ordained by Him who sent the Gospel to every creature.—Why, said I, Mr. Dow, what do you make of the apostles' baptizing the jailer, 'at the same hour of the night,' and 'before it was day?' It could not have been for any public effect. What need to have it done just then? Was it superstitious and Romish? No; it was to comfort the soul of the poor, trembling convert, with a sense of God's love to him. How it must have soothed and cheered him to receive God's hand of love in that ordinance, before he himself fully knew what the making of a Christian profession implied! I want that same hand of love here, in my prison of a sick-chamber,—And, I never thought of it much before, but, I said then, it seemed so clear to me that they would not have gone to all the trouble, that night, and in the prison-house, and after the terrors of the earthquake, to put a whole family into bathing-vessels. To take people from sleep, ordinarily, and immerse them in water, would be a singular act; much more when they are weak and faint, as the jailer's family must have been, from fear and excitement. In my own case, I could not be immersed, even at home; it would probably cost me my life. Sprinkling came to me as so sweetly harmonious, in that scene of the jailer's baptism, that I believed it to be the apostolic mode of baptizing, and I told Mr. D. that I should imitate the jailer; and that I should send for a minister who could imitate Paul and Silas."

"But," said I, "what brought you to believe in the propriety of baptizing your children?"

Mrs. P. Your minister enlightened me on that subject. I told him my heart yearned to have it done; for I took the same view of it which I have mentioned with regard to my own baptism—that it is something which God does, to and for the children, primarily, and it is not merely a human act. He said that it was like laying "a penal bond" on children, to baptize them, and oblige them to do or be anything without their consent. O, how many such "penal bonds" I have laid on my children, already!—the more the better, I told him. "A penal bond" to love and serve God!—I mean to add my dying charge to it, and make it as binding as I can. How imperfect such a view of baptism is! It is God coming to us with his seal, not we coming with our own invention to him. I wished to have God enter into a covenant with me, who hope I love him, to be a God to my children forever. I felt that I could die in peace, if I might feel some assurance of this; and, it seemed to me that, to have a sign and seal of it from God himself would make me perfectly happy.

She handed me a book, which her pastor had lent her, and she asked me to read a passage, to which she pointed. It was an argument against baptism in sickness. Speaking of the penitent thief, the writer says:

"The Saviour did not, as a Papist would have done, command some of the women, that stood by bewailing, to fetch a little water; nor the beloved disciple to asperse the quivering penitent."

Remembering the view which the mother of little Philip took of such things, I merely said, that the writer seemed to me to asperse a large part of the Protestant world, under the name, Papist. Christian baptism, I remarked, had not been instituted when the Saviour and the thief were on the cross.

I received an invitation from the husband, a day or two after, to be present at the baptism of his wife and children. The husband was not professedly, nor in his own view, a regenerate man, but one of the best of husbands and fathers, destitute, however, of the one thing needful.