The rite of immersion too,—already discountenanced by the united voice of the Scriptures,—when brought to this supreme and final test, is utterly wanting.
It is discountenanced by the transaction at Sinai, in which the church was separated out of the world and consecrated to God by a baptism of sprinkled water and blood.
It is discountenanced by the rites which certified and sealed the restoration of the healed leper to the communion of Israel.
It is discountenanced by the water of purifying with which the Levites were sprinkled, in their consecration to the service of God’s sanctuary.
It is discountenanced by the ordinance which appointed the water of separation, to be sprinkled as the ordinary and perpetuated form of the Sinai baptism, for sealing admission to the benefits of the Sinai covenant.
It is excluded by the declaration of the son of Sirach that the sprinkling of the unclean with the water of separation was a baptizing.
It is discountenanced by the sprinkled baptism of the thirty-two thousand infants and youths of Midian, whereby they were received into the fold of the covenant and the church.
It is condemned by every voice in the Psalms and the prophets which breathes a sense of the sinner’s need, or anticipates the blessings of Messiah’s grace, in the language of these ordinances.
It is excluded by the explicit testimony of the apostle Paul, that these ordinances were baptisms.
It is condemned by the implacable war which it of necessity wages against the identity of the church from the day of the assembly at Sinai,—by its repudiation of the Old Testament church—the church of Moses and the prophets, which was for fifteen centuries a lone beacon light among the nations, God’s only witness amid the gloom of thick darkness which enshrouded the world.