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The Quakers, lay a great stress upon this circumstance: for they say, that if Jesus never baptized with water himself, it is a proof that he never intended to erect water-baptism into a Gospel-rite. It is difficult to conceive, they say, that he should have established a Sacrament, and that he should never have administered it.
Innocent says that 'her Master would have them do'; and they went out into the garden to the bath, and were much enlivened by it. Bunyan left it to the convert to act for himself as to water-baptism; all that he required, as a prerequisite to church-communion, was the new birth, or the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
Water-baptism was to be left to individual conviction; they were to love each other equally, whether they advocated baptism in infancy, or in riper years. The only thing essential to church-fellowship, in Mr.
Some time after, Voltaire being at the Earl Temple's seat in Fulham, with Pope and others such, in their conversation fell on the subject of water-baptism. Voltaire assumed the part of a quaker, and at length came to mention that assertion of Paul.
But though Jesus Christ never forbad water-baptism, and, though he was baptized with water by John, yet he never baptized any one himself. A rumour had gone abroad among the Pharisees, that the Jesus had baptized more disciples than John the Baptist.
When Bunyan pleaded, so energetically, for the communion of saints, irrespective of water-baptism, one of his arguments was, "The strongest may sometimes be out of the way." Here see, that as Christians are made helpful, so also, through prevailing corruptions, they are liable to prove hurtful to each other.
They believe he rejected water-baptism as a gospel ordinance, but that he considered it in itself as an harmless ceremony, and that, viewing it in this light, he used it out of condescension to those ellenistic Jews, whose prejudices, on account of the washings of Moses and their customs relative to proselytes, were so strong, that they could not separate purification by water from conversion to a new religion.
He calls this the 'bath of sanctification'; no Christian considers water-baptism a source of sanctification; it is only the outward sign. There is no travelling on pilgrimage without gathering soil. Christ is the soul's only bath. As all baths are for the purification of the body, such is this bath to our soul.
We believe, too, that the water-baptism, so generally administered, is not according to God's mind; that the baptism spoken of in the Scriptures is that of the Spirit, the answer of a good conscience towards God by the resurrection of Jesus Christ; that by one Spirit we are all baptised into one body; while, with regard to the Lord's Supper as it is spoken of, we do indeed deem that the supper of the Lord is needful, but that it is altogether of a spiritual nature.
The Quakers, among other particularities, reject the application of water-baptism, and the administration of the Sacrament of the Supper, as Christian rites. These ordinances have been considered by many as so essentially interwoven with Christianity, that the Quakers, by rejecting the use of them, have been denied to be Christians.
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