"Are not these passages plain, full, and earnest? Do you find any of the controverted points to be determined by Scripture in words nigh so plain or pathetic?"
Marginal Note written (in 1816) by the Author in his own copy of Wall's work.
This and the two following pages are excellent. If I addressed the ministers recently seceded, I would first prove from Scripture and Reason the justness of their doctrines concerning Baptism and Conversion. 2. I would show, that even in respect of the Prayer-book, Homilies, &c. of the Church of England, taken as a whole, their opponents were comparatively as ill off as themselves, if not worse. 3. That the few mistakes or inconvenient phrases of the Baptismal Service did not impose on the conscience the necessity of resigning the pastoral office. 4. That even if they did, this would by no means justify schism from Lay-membership: or else there could be no schism except from an immaculate and infallible Church. Now, as our Articles have declared that no Church is or ever was such, it would follow that there is no such sin as that of Schism—that is, that St. Paul wrote falsely or idly. 5. That the escape through the channel of Dissent is from the frying-pan to the fire—or, to use a less worn and vulgar simile, the escape of a leech from a glass-jar of water into the naked and open air. But never, never, would I in one breath allow my Church to be fallible, and in the next contend for her absolute freedom from all error—never confine inspiration and perfect truth to the Scriptures, and then scold for the perfect truth of each and every word in the Prayer-book. Enough for me, if in my heart of hearts, free from all fear of man and all lust of preferment, I believe (as I do) the Church of England to be the most Apostolic Church; that its doctrines and ceremonies contain nothing dangerous to Righteousness or Salvation; and that the imperfections in its Liturgy are spots indeed, but spots on the sun, which impede neither its light nor its heat, so as to prevent the good seed from growing in a good soil and producing fruits of Redemption.[154]
* * * The author had written and intended to insert a similar exposition on the Eucharist. But as the leading view has been given in the Comment on Redemption, its length induces him to defer it, together with the Articles on Faith and the philosophy of Prayer, to a small supplementary volume.[155]
[147] By certain Biblical philologists of the Teutonic school (men distinguished by learning, but still more characteristically by hardihood in conjecture, and who suppose the Gospels to have undergone several successive revisions and enlargements by, or under the authority of, the sacred historians) these words are contended to have been, in the first delivery, the common commencement of all the Gospels κατα σαρκα (that is, according to the flesh), in distinction from St. John's or the Gospel κατα πνευμα (that is, according to the Spirit).
[148] See Comment to Aphorism VIII., par. 3.—Ed.
[149] That every the least permissible form and ordinance, which at different times it might be expedient for the Church to enact, are pre-enacted in the New Testament; and that whatever is not to be found there, ought to be allowed no where—this has been asserted. But that it has been proved, or that the tenet is not to be placed among the revulsionary results of the Scripture-slighting Will-worship of the Romish Church; it will be more sincere to say, I disbelieve, than that I doubt. It was chiefly, if not exclusively, in reference to the extravagances built on this tenet, that the great Selden ventured to declare, that the words, Scrutamini Scripturas, had set the world in an uproar.
Extremes appear to generate each other; but if we look steadily, there will most often be found some common error, that produces both as its positive and negative poles. Thus superstitions go by pairs, like the two Hungarian sisters, always quarrelling and inveterately averse, but yet joined at the trunk.
[150] More than this I do not consider as necessary for the argument. And as to Robinson's assertions in his History of Baptism, that infant Baptism did not commence till the time of Cyprian, who condemning it as a general practice, allowed it in particular cases by a dispensation of charity; and that it did not actually become the ordinary rule of the Church, till Augustine in the fever of his Anti-Pelagian dispute had introduced the Calvinistic interpretation of Original Sin, and the dire state of Infants dying unbaptized—I am so far from acceding to them, that I reject the whole statement as rash, and not only unwarranted by the authorities he cites, but unanswerably confuted by Baxter, Wall, and many other learned Pædo-baptists before and since the publication of his work. I confine myself to the assertion—not that Infant Baptism was not; but—that there exist no sufficient proofs that it was the practice of the Apostolic age.