It is very interesting, he says, to notice, that, whereas the old dispensation prescribed the mode of every religious act, minutely, and a departure from it vitiated the act itself, Christianity threw off everything like prescriptive modes altogether.

Considering the attachment of the human mind to forms and ceremonies, he knows of nothing in which Christianity shows its divine origin and supernatural power more, than in its sublime triumph, so immediately, in the minds of great numbers, over forms and ceremonies.

We can hardly conceive, he says, what a revolution a Jew must have experienced in giving up Aaron, and altars, and times, and seasons, and all the minute regard for his religious ceremonies, at once.

Even if it were the original practice to baptize only by immersion, he cannot think that Christianity could have enjoined it as the only proper mode of applying water, in signifying religious consecration.

Bread and wine, eaten and drunk decently and in order, in any way whatever, constitutes the Lord's Supper; water, applied to the person, by a proper administrator, in the name of the Trinity, constitutes Christian baptism; but, had the New Testament required us to recline, and lean on one arm, and take the Lord's Supper with the other arm, insisting that this posture is essential to that sacrament, or had it specified the quantity of bread and wine, he thinks it would have been parallel to the uninspired requirement of a particular mode in applying the water in baptism.
"Baptize," he further remarks, it is said, means immerse.