BASILIDEANS, the followers of Basilides of Alexandria, a gnostic leader of the early part of the second century. See [Gnostics].
BASTARD, one born out of wedlock. A bastard among the Greeks was despised, and exposed to public scorn, on account of his spurious origin. In Persia the son of a concubine is never placed on a footing with the legitimate offspring; any attempt made by parental fondness to do so would be resented by the relations of the legitimate wife, and outrage the feelings of a whole tribe. The Jewish father bestowed as little attention on the education of his natural children as the Greek: he seems to have resigned them, in a great measure, to their own inclinations; he neither checked their passions, nor corrected their faults, nor stored their minds with useful knowledge. This is evidently implied in these words of the Apostle: “If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not? But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards and not sons,” Heb. xii, 7, 8. To restrain the licentious desires of the heart, Jehovah by an express law fixed a stigma upon the bastard, which was not to be removed till the tenth generation; and to show that the precept was on no account to be violated, or suffered to fall into disuse, it is emphatically repeated, “A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord,” Deut. xxiii, 2.
BASTINADO, the punishment of beating with sticks. It is also called tympanum, tortured, τυμπανίζω, suffered the tympanum, that is, were stretched on an instrument of torture, and beaten to death.
BAT, עטלף, Lev. xi, 19; Deut. xiv, 18; Isaiah ii, 20; Baruch vi, 22. The Jewish legislator, having enumerated the animals legally unclean, as well beasts as birds, closes his catalogue with a creature whose equivocal properties seem to exclude it from both those classes: it is too much a bird to be properly a mouse, and too much a mouse to be properly a bird. The bat is therefore well described in Deut. xiv, 18, 19, as the passage should be read, “Moreover the othelaph, and every creeping thing that flieth, is unclean to you: they shall not be eaten.” This character is very descriptive, and places this creature at the head of a class of which he is a clear and well-known instance. It has feet or claws growing out of its pinions, and contradicts the general order of nature, by creeping with the instruments of its flight. The Hebrew name of the bat is from עטל darkness, and עמ to fly, as if it described “the flier in darkness.” So the Greeks called the creature νυκτερὶς, from νὺξ, night; and the Latins, vespertilio, from vesper, “evening.” It is prophesied, Isaiah ii, 20, “In that day shall they cast away their idols to the moles and to the bats;” that is, they shall carry them into the dark caverns, old ruins, or desolate places, to which they shall fly for refuge, and so shall give them up, and relinquish them to the filthy animals that frequent such places, and have taken possession of them as their proper habitation.
BATH, a measure of capacity for things liquid, being the same with the ephah, Ezek. xlv, 11, and containing ten homers, or seven gallons and four pints.
BATH-KOL, בח־קול, daughter of the voice. By this name the Jewish writers distinguish what they called a revelation from God, after verbal prophecy had ceased in Israel; that is, after the prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. The generality of their traditions and customs are founded on this Bath-Kol. They pretend that God revealed them to their elders, not by prophecy, but by the daughter of the voice. The Bath-Kol, as Dr. Prideaux shows, was a fantastical way of divination, invented by the Jews, like the Sortes Virgilianæ [divination by the works of Virgil] among the Heathen. For, as with them, the words first opened upon in the works of that poet, was the oracle whereby they prognosticated those future events which they desired to be informed of; so with the Jews when they appealed to Bath-Kol, the next words which they should hear drop from any one’s mouth were taken as the desired oracle. With some it is probable that Bath-Kol, the daughter of the voice, was only an elegant personification of tradition. Others, however, more bold, said that it was a voice from heaven, sometimes attended by a clap of thunder.
BATTLE. See [Armies].
BAXTERIANISM, a modification of the Calvinistic doctrine of election advocated by the celebrated Baxter in his treatise of “Universal Redemption,” and in his “Methodus Theologiæ.” The real author of the scheme, at least in a systematized form, was Camero, who taught divinity at Saumur, and it was unfolded and defended by his disciple Amyraldus, whom Curcellæus refuted. Baxter says, in his preface to his “Saint’s Rest,” “The middle way which Camero, Crocius, Martinius, Amyraldus, Davenant, with all the divines of Britain and Bremen in the synod of Dort, go, I think is nearest the truth of any that I know who have written on these points.” Baxter first differs from the majority of Calvinists, though not from all, in his statement of the doctrine of satisfaction:--
“Christ’s sufferings were not a fulfilling of the law’s threatening; (though he bore its curse materially;) but a satisfaction for our not fulfilling the precept, and to prevent God’s fulfilling the threatening on us. Christ paid not, therefore, the idem, but the tantundem, or æquivalens; not the very debt which we owed and the law required, but the value: (else it were not strictly satisfaction, which is redditio æquivalentis: [the rendering of an equivalent:])[equivalent:])] and (it being improperly called the paying of a debt, but properly a suffering for the guilty) the idem is nothing but supplicium delinquentis. [The punishment of the guilty individual.] In criminals, dum alius solvet simul aliud solvitur. [When another suffers, it is another thing also that is suffered.] The law knoweth no vicarius pœnæ; [substitute in punishment;] though the law maker may admit it, as he is above law; else there were no place for pardon, if the proper debt be paid and the law not relaxed, but fulfilled. Christ did neither obey nor suffer in any man’s stead, by a strict, proper representation of his person in point of law; so as that the law should take it, as done or suffered by the party himself. But only as a third person, as a mediator, he voluntarily bore what else the sinner should have borne. To assert the contrary (especially as to particular persons considered in actual sin) is to overthrow all Scripture theology, and to introduce all Antinomianism; to overthrow all possibility of pardon, and assert justification before we sinned or were born, and to make ourselves to have satisfied God. Therefore, we must not say that Christ died nostro loco, [in our stead,] so as to personate us, or represent our persons in law sense; but only to bear what else we must have borne.”
This system explicitly asserts, that Christ made a satisfaction by his death equally for the sins of every man; and thus Baxter essentially differs both from the higher Calvinists, and, also, from the Sublapsarians, who, though they may allow that the reprobate derive some benefits from Christ’s death, so that there is a vague sense in which he may be said to have died for all men, yet they, of course, deny to such the benefit of Christ’s satisfaction or atonement which Baxter contends for:--