The quotation which I read to you, speaks of Popish tendencies as having already begun. This is true; and more may be added. In the second epistle to the Thessalonians, Paul tells us that the mystery of iniquity was already at work. On the subject of religious days and festivals, the first Christians very soon began to be superstitious, incorporating heathen festival days into Christian observances, under the plea of redeeming and sanctifying them, with some such feelings and reasoning as that with which people, now, would transfer secular music to sanctuaries, saying that the enemy ought not to have all the best music. It is true that this sensuous, and, afterward called, Romish, tendency, corrupted everything. The pure stream of apostolic doctrine and practice was like the Moselle, which you saw from the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, pursuing its unmingled course distinctly for some distance in the turbid Rhine, till at last it yields to the general current. Infant baptism, as we learn from ecclesiastical authorities with one consent, proceeded from the apostles; yet soon it began to be practised with many superstitious absurdities; and, moreover, immersion, making such powerful appeals to the senses, suited the taste of the age far better than sprinkling, so that not only did it become the common mode, but the subjects were completely undressed, without any distinction, to denote the putting off the old man and the putting on of the new, and the putting away of the filth of the flesh.[5] Public sentiment finally abolished this practice. After a considerable time affusion, or sprinkling, returned, and became the prevailing mode, without any special enactment, or any formal renunciation of the late mode. The Eastern church, however, retained immersion, while the Greek and Armenian branches use both immersion and sprinkling for the adult and child. But the sick and dying were always baptized by sprinkling, which is sufficient to prove that sprinkling was regarded as equally valid with immersion. It is natural to say that it was superstitious to baptize the sick and dying, by sprinkling, if we hold that only immersion is valid baptism. The sick and dying cannot be immersed; now, is it superstition for a sick person, giving credible evidence of piety, to be admitted into the Christian church, and receive the Lord's Supper? In order to do this properly, the subject must be baptized; hence, we derive one powerful argument that sprinkling is valid baptism. Our Lord would never have made the modes of his sacraments so austerely rigid, that the thousands of sick and feeble persons, ministers in poor health, climate, seasons of the year, times of persecution and imprisonment, and all the stress of circumstances to which Christians may be subjected, should be utterly disregarded, and one inconvenient, and sometimes dangerous, form, of applying water, be insisted on, inflexibly, as essential to the introductory Christian rite. If the early Christians baptized the sick by sprinkling, they of course supposed that it was valid baptism. If it was valid at all, and in any case, of course it was Christian baptism, even if other modes were most commonly used.