There is, I am aware, a numerous and powerful party in our Church, so numerous and powerful as not seldom to be entitled _the_ Church, who hold and publicly teach, that "Regeneration is only Baptism." Nay, the writer of the article on the Lives of Scott and Newton in our ablest and most respectable Review[134] is but one among many who do not hesitate to brand the contrary opinion as heterodoxy, and schismatical superstition. I trust, that I think as seriously as most men, of the evil of schism; but with every disposition to pay the utmost deference to an acknowledged majority including, it is said, a very large proportion of the present dignitaries of our Church, I cannot but think it a sufficient reply, that if Regeneration means Baptism, Baptism must mean Regeneration; and this too, as Christ himself has declared, a Regeneration in the Spirit. Now I would ask these divines this simple question: Do they believingly suppose a spiritual regenerative power and agency inhering in or accompanying the sprinkling a few drops of water on an infant's face? They cannot evade the question by saying that Baptism is a _type_ or _sign_. For this would be to supplant their own assertion, that Regeneration means Baptism, by the contradictory admission, that Regeneration is the _significatum_, of which Baptism is the significant. Unless, indeed, they would incur the absurdity of saying, that Regeneration is a type of Regeneration, and Baptism a type of itself--or that Baptism only means Baptism! And this indeed is the plain consequence to which they might be driven, should they answer the above question in the negative.
But if their answer be, "Yes! we do suppose and believe this efficiency in the Baptismal act"--I have not another word to say. Only, perhaps, I might be permitted to express a hope, that for consistency's sake they would speak less slightingly of the _insufflation_, and _extreme unction_, used in the Romish Church; notwithstanding the not easily to be answered arguments of our Christian Mercury, the all-eloquent Jeremy Taylor, respecting the latter, which, "since it is used when the man is above half dead, when he can exercise no act of understanding, it must needs be nothing; for no rational man can think that any ceremony can make a spiritual change without a spiritual act of him that is to be changed; nor work by way of nature, or by charm, but morally and after the manner of reasonable creatures."[135]