[Bertha and Her Baptism by Nehemiah Adams]@TWC D-Link bookBertha and Her Baptism CHAPTER Second 21/50
Take care, I say to my friends, lest, in setting aside the water, you shut out that divine Spirit, who, knowing how to deal with our nature, chooses the blood and the water to be used by us in connection with our most spiritual religious exercises of the mind and heart.
We have no more right to interfere with God's ordinances than with the number of the persons in the Trinity. "All this affects me so," said Mr.Benson, "that I shall not fail to offer my child to be baptized, if I am allowed to do so.
Now, there is my difficulty.
Why do you think, and how do you show, that baptism must now be used as God's sign and seal of his covenant with believers for their children? When circumcision was dropped, some insist that the covenant was dropped with it, and, therefore, that there is no warrant in Scripture for baptizing children." "Why," said Mrs.Ford, "if the coming in of Moses' dispensation did not abolish the arrangement with Abraham, why should its going out? I am inclined to think that Abraham and his seed are, to Moses and his dispensation, something like that vine to the trellis, running over it to the top of the piazza, bending itself in, you see, to accommodate itself, but having a root and a top, the one below, the other above, the short frame, which only guides it up to the roof.
In the eleventh of Romans does not Paul say that Jews and Gentiles have one and the same 'root'? I always supposed that root to be Abraham and his covenant." I did not quote Latin to my friends, but I thought of the old law-maxim, _Manente ratione, manet ipsa lex_--which, if your scholarship is not at hand to translate it, Percival will tell you, means, "The reason for a law remaining, the law itself also remains." It is used in such cases as the following: When one would insist that a law was intended to be repealed by the operation of another law, not directly or expressly aimed to repeal it, it is a good reply.
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