BAPTISM AND THE LORD’S SUPPER

(Continued from last issue)

Acting on their views of the distinctive characters of the two sacraments, they enjoyed a liberty in dispensing ordinances, which they cannot have who, acting according to different views, are under the painful constraint of being compelled either to exclude an applicant from membership altogether, or to admit him within the innermost circle around the table of the Lord.

Am I not justified in cherishing the hope of their being Christians regarding some professors whom I cannot confidently embrace as brethren in the Lord? Ought I to admit them into intimate fellowship till I become more satisfied than I am as to their acquaintance with the power of godliness? Surely I am not required summarily to reject all whom I cannot confidently receive as Christians, nor to be on terms of intimate fellowship with all whom, in the judgment of charity, I regard as such. And why should not the same liberty be allowed to the Church? Is she bound to exclude from her pale all whom into full communion she cannot admit? Yet much would be her bondage if the two sacraments were to be administered on the same footing. But such fetters were never placed by Christ’s hand on the conscience of the Church. They who are in the state of bondage have themselves forged their chains.

The practice peculiar to the North has another marked advantage; it is admirably adapted to meet the various feelings of applicants for sealing ordinances. When a Christian applies for admission to the table of the Lord, who is enabled to express a hope of an interest in Christ, and in whom some seeming marks of grace are discerned, at once, but not because any judgment of his state has been formed, his request is complied with. But among true Christians there have always been differences as to the measure of their hope. All of them incline to seek communion with the Church, but some of them can only come with a trembling heart to ask for the privilege. One of these comes to a pious Highland minister in older times to speak to him about communicating. Does the minister insist on his expressing an assurance of his conversion before he grants him admission to the table of the Lord? Does he require him to satisfy him by a record of his experience that the change through which he passed was really spiritual and saving? Not at all. How then does he act? He examines him closely, but wisely and tenderly; and in the measure in which he finds such views and feelings as seem to indicate a work of grace in his soul, he labors to remove his difficulties, and offers him all needed counsel and encouragement when giving him a token of admission to the table of the Lord.

Let us suppose this man under the regime of the South. Not being a communicant he is in the judgment of the Church there no member of the Church at all. His status as a member of the Church, because of his own baptism in infancy, is disallowed; although, by no formal act of the Church, had he ever been deprived of it. He will be acknowledged as a member only if he communicates; although at the time he is a member of the mystical body of Christ, and had been admitted into the visible Church by baptism before! The Sacrament of the Supper is thus made the door of admission to the Church! By a very mysterious process of transposition, the inner becomes at once the outer door of the house of the Lord! Let us further suppose that this man is a parent, and that he is applying for the baptism of his child. Meeting with no one to sympathise with his scruples as to the other sacrament, and no effort made to remove them, he resolved not to ask a token of admission to the table of the Lord. He is asked if he is a communicant, and simply because he says he is not, and cannot promise to become one, the privileges for which he asks is refused. This refusal rests on a denial of his being a member of the Church. No minister, it is presumed, would refuse to baptize the infant of a parent, who himself had just been baptized, before he had at all partaken of the sacrament of the Supper. The Apostles, we know, did not refuse to do so. Baptism conferred, in their judgment, the privileges of membership in the visible Church. Because the parent thus became a member, his child also was baptized. But refuse the applicant in the supposed case, and you act towards the man on the assumption that he is not a member of the Church at all; and you thrust out that timid child of God beyond the pale of the Church because he has not yet the courage to ask for admission into full communion.

The following case has actually occurred:—A Highlander, temporarily residing in a Lowland district, applies to a minister for the baptism of his child. He is one of that minister’s most regular hearers. The elders report him as correct in all his habits. He is, in fact, the only one in the district in which he resides who maintains the worship of God in his family, though his neighbors are all communicants. But because he cannot declare that he is, nor promise to become a communicant, he is summarily dismissed. After him comes to the study a man from whom his children often heard an oath, but from whom they never yet heard a prayer, and who seldom returned sober from a market; but he is a communicant, and, of course, his child is baptized the very next Sabbath.

Let us suppose the case of one whose profession is really false, though his knowledge is competent and his known habits correct. He applies to a Lowland minister for the baptism of his infant. He has himself a suspicion that matters are not right between his soul and the Lord, but he is anxious that his child should be baptized. In order to obtain that he smothers his scruples, and agrees to become a communicant. What effect will this have on the mind and heart of the man? What must he think of the minister who will insist on his taking both the sacraments, while he himself is aware that he is unfiit for either of them? With what feelings will he receive the highest attestation of his profession which the Church has thus thrust upon him, while his own conscience testifies to its falseness? And how will his communicating affect his soul? He will have borne down all his rising scruples, and left the communion table under the judgment of increased hardness of heart. If he had to do with one of the Ross-shire Fathers, the privilege he first sought would not, indeed, have been withheld from him. In such a case it could not, as there was no overt contradiction of his profession of faith by his conduct. The minister would remember, too, that if either parent was a believer the child must be “holy”; and that the probabilities as to both father and mother must be taken into account, as well as the interest of the child; and, therefore, after serious dealing with his conscience, and casting the responsibility on himself, he would agree to baptize his child. But he would do no more. This is all the account he makes of man’s profession. His giving him •the baptism of his child was doing as much as the man’s profession would bear, and his not offering him the other sacrament was a testimony on the side of conscience in the breast of him with whom he was dealing.

Four most desirable results were secured by the mode of dispensing sealing ordinances, practised in the North, which go far to prove that it was according to the mind, and was crowned with the blessing, of the Lord. 1. The Church was preserved from the extreme of exclusiveness on the one hand, and from that of laxity on the other. The door of admission was open to all whom “pity, charity and prudence” would admit, and the inner circle was guarded from the profane rush of the crowd. 2. It marked and preserved a distinction, so far as this can be legitimately done, between the approved followers of Christ, and all others. This distinction, as an ecclesiastical one, is quite blotted out when both sacraments are administered on the same footing. 3. It kept up, in the consciences of noncommunicants, a sense of short-coming that would have been quite extinguished under a different system. 4. It always reminded the ministers of the danger of indiscriminate preaching, and secured some consistency between what was faithfully said in the pulpit and what was done in the session-house. When a minister has always a congregation of communicants before him, he is easily led to address them from the pulpit, as it ought to be fitting he should, when standing at the head of the table of the Lord. It is difficult to change one’s form of addressing the same congregation, though standing on one occasion in the pulpit, and on another before it.

As to the prevalent feeling in the minds of Highlanders, in reference to the sacrament of the Supper, there has been much misconception in the South. It is supposed that the majority are utterly indifferent about it, and that some of the few pious people scare themselves away from it by superstitious notions of its sanctity. This is almost entirely a mistake. It might be an improvement on the state of matters elsewhere if all the communicants had as much respect for this ordinance as many of the non-communicants of the North, and took their way of expressing it; and it is the invariable experience of a Highland minister that all whom he would wish to bring forward to, sooner or later, apply for admission to the table of the Lord. It is often said that it is a sin not to confess Christ before men by obeying his dying command. His must be a most unhealthy state of feeling who, without a disquieting sense of guilt, can refrain from doing so. This cannot be denied; but let it not be forgotten that the sin which should in the first instance be felt is not his absenting himself from the table of the Lord, but his not coming to the Lord of the table. His error lies in his not coming to Christ that he might be entitled to communicate. The lack of faith in his first want and profession cannot surely supply it. And yet, if all are to be told without qualification that it is a sin not to communicate, the result would be a rush to the communion table to get rid of the uneasiness which such doctrine produces. And will not this be, in effect, to make profession a substitute for faith and a shelter for unbelief?

At least something might be said as an excuse for the state of feeling in the North in reference to the sacrament. Our enlightened friends in the South must not expect to find the body of the people in our dark region skilled to act on general principles, or so wise as to be guided otherwise than by simple and direct inference from the Word of God, or so experienced as to have corrected their first impressions. And when a simple Highlander, without any formula to guide him in his study takes up his Bible, to learn from it what the Lord says about this matter, and meets in it with no recorded instances of an unbeliever at the Lord’s table, and ponders the solemn warnings by which it is guarded; when he contrasts the select companies who communicated with the crowds of whose baptism an account is given, and meets with no sanctions, around the one ordinance, that seem to compare with those by which the other is fenced, is it a wonder that this disciple should carry with him, from the perusal of the Bible, a more solemn impression of the one sacrament than of the other? If that man’s state of feeling is not to be regarded with respect, let it not at least be treated with rudeness. And can we wonder that he, accustomed to see the southern practice followed by the Moderates around him, whom he regarded as ungodly men, never looking for guidance from on high, should have imagined that what he had originally derived from a study of the Word of God was confirmed to him by experience, that he should therefore have held his own views very firmly, and have looked with grave suspicion on the state of mind and feeling that differed from his own.

— End —

Deze tekst is geautomatiseerd gemaakt en kan nog fouten bevatten. Digibron werkt voortdurend aan correctie. Klik voor het origineel door naar de pdf. Voor opmerkingen, vragen, informatie: contact.

Op Digibron -en alle daarin opgenomen content- is het databankrecht van toepassing. Gebruiksvoorwaarden. Data protection law applies to Digibron and the content of this database. Terms of use.

Printen