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Our first birth is outside our choice and the gifts are unconditioned; our second birth, when again we become as little children, demands our response to the Holy Spirit and our persevering cooperation with Him to make His influence effectual for ourselves and for the "communion of saints" and the corporate religion into which the Spirit also baptizes us.
Who can recognise Newman in Father Ignatius, who, while searching for truth, embraced error? or Baptist Noel in the strolling preacher, who uses a horse-pond instead of a font, baptizes adults instead of infants, and, unlike his Master, 'will not suffer little children to come unto him? Ah, Doctor, there are texts neither of these men know the meaning of, 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. One of them has yet to learn that pictures, vestments, music, processions, candlesticks, and confessionals are not religion, and the other that it does not consist in oratory, excitement, camp-meetings, rant, or novelties.
She insinuates herself into all human concerns from the greatest to the most insignificant, she interferes in both public and private life; she baptizes the child when it comes into the world, accompanies the child to school, monopolises love, declaring it shameful and abominable if it does not submit to her benediction, and divides the earth into two categories the consecrated, for those who die in her bosom, and the dunghill in the open air for the heretic.
Even persons not Catholics or not Christians may, in case of necessity, baptize a person wishing to receive Baptism, if they know how to baptize and seriously wish to do what the Church of Christ does when it baptizes. You cannot baptize a person against his will.
"Naturally, therefore, Algernon Sidney Gale Jones baptizes his house Cromwell Lodge, seeing that Algernon Sidney held the Protectorate in especial abhorrence, and that the original Gale Jones, if an honest radical, must have done the same, considering what rough usage the advocates of Parliamentary Reform met with at the hands of his Highness.
We have shown that entire sanctification is coetaneous with the baptism with the Holy Ghost, in fact, that the two experiences are in an important sense identical, or, at least, so related to each other that whoever has one has the other. It is Christ and none other who baptizes with the Holy. Ghost.
The Saint put forward the true idea of the Church and showed that the minister of a sacrament does not communicate to the recipient his own character of holiness or of guilt, that it is Christ Himself who baptizes and absolves and gives efficacy to sacramental signs.
If he had, do you think that he would have sent us into this world at all? I do not. And I trust and hope that you will not. Believe that even when he cuts us to the heart's core, and baptizes us with fire, he does it only out of his eternal love, that he may help and deliver us all the more speedily.
He, like God, baptizes some, that is, his own believing and faithful followers, and promises the putting away of sins by baptism; and if I remember rightly Mithras there signs his soldiers upon their foreheads, celebrates the oblation of bread, introduces a representation of the resurrection, and places the crown beyond the sword." Elsewhere Tertullian writes:
Before the priest leaves he says the office of the dead over a grave made, it may be, many weeks ago, he baptizes children born since his last visit, and perhaps marries one or more bashful couples. "How beautiful upon the mountains," says a Canadian historian of the work of these devoted men, "are the feet of those who bring the gospel of peace."
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