6. The baptismal covenant of grace therefore is the essential part of the gospel, and of the christian religion; and all the rest are the integrals, and accidents or adjuncts.
7. This covenant containeth,
I. Objectively, 1. Things true as such; 2. Things good as such; 3. Things practicable or to be done, as such: the credenda, diligenda, (et eligenda,) et agenda; as the objects of man's intellect, will, and practical power.
The credenda, or things to be known and believed, are, 1. God as God, and our God and Father. 2. Christ as the Saviour, and our Saviour. 3. The Holy Ghost as such, and as the Sanctifier, and our Sanctifier (as to the offer of these relations in the covenant).
The diligenda are the same three Persons in these three relations as good in themselves and unto us, which includeth the grand benefits of reconciliation and adoption, justification, and sanctification, and salvation.
The agenda in the time of baptism that make us christians, are, 1. The actual dedition, resignation, or dedication of ourselves, to God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in these relations. 2. A promise or vow to endeavour faithfully to live according to our undertaken relations (though not in perfection); that is, as creatures to their Creator, and their reconciled God and Father; as christians to their Redeemer, their Teacher, their Ruler, and their Saviour; and as willing receivers of the sanctifying and comforting operations of the Holy Spirit.
II. The objects tell you what the acts must be on our part; 1. With the understanding, to know and believe; 2. With the will to love, choose, desire, and resolve; and, 3. Practically to deliver up ourselves for the present, and to promise for the time to come. These are the essentials of the christian religion.
8. The creed is a larger explication of the credenda, and the Lord's prayer of the diligenda, or things to be willed, desired, and hoped for; and the decalogue of the natural part of the agenda.
9. Suffer not your own ignorance, or the papists' cheats, to confound the question about fundamentals, as to the matter, and as to the expressing words. It is one thing to ask, What is the matter essential to christianity? And another, What words, symbols, or sentences are essential to it? To the first, I have now answered you. To the second I say, 1. Taking the christian religion as it is, an extrinsic doctrine in signis, so the essence of it is, words and signs expressive or significant of the material essence. That they be such in specie is all that is essential. And if they say, But which be those words? I answer, 2. That no particular words in the world are essential to the christian religion. For, (1.) No one language is essential to it. It is not necessary to salvation that you be baptized, or learn the creed or Scriptures, in Hebrew, or Greek, or Latin, or English, so you learn it in any language understood. (2.) It is not necessary to salvation that you use the same words in the same language, as long as it hath more words than one to express the same thing by. (3.) It is not necessary to salvation, that we use the same (or any one single) form, method, or order of words, as they are in the creeds, without alteration. And therefore while the ancients did tenaciously cleave to the same symbol or creed, yet they used various words to express it by. (As may be seen in Irenæus, Tertullian, Origen, and Ruffin, elsewhere cited by me; so that it is plain, that by the same symbol they meant the same matter, though expressed in some variety of words.) Though they avoided such variety as might introduce variety of sense and matter.
10. Words being needful, 1. To make a learner understand; 2. To tell another what he understandeth: it followeth that the great variety of men's capacities maketh a great variation in the necessity of words or forms. An Englishman must have them in English, and a Frenchman in French. An understanding man may receive all the essentials in a few words; but an ignorant man must have many words to make him understand the matter. To him that understandeth them, the words of the baptismal covenant express all the essentials of christianity: but to him that understands them not, the creed is necessary for the explication: and to him that understandeth not that, a catechism, or larger exposition, is necessary. This is the plain explication of this question, which many papists seem loth to understand.