Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TREATISE ON INFANT BAPTISM. CHAPTER I. THE CHURCH. ITS ANTIQUITY ITS PROPER AND ESSENTIAL CHARACTER DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE COVENANT AND THE LAW JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN CHURCHES SUBSTANTIALLY ONE AND IDENTICAL. SECTION I. 1. First of all, in our reasoning upon the subject before us, we must have enlightened views with respect to the real church of God. We are not about to inquire which of all the existing churches professing to be Christian is the true one; much less are we about to set up a plea of exclu- siveness, and say,
The temple of the Lord are we. We pass by the different Christian sects,?ascending the stream of time beyond their origin,?and ask, When did the church of God begin to display itself? And here we may admonish the reader, that it will be some time before we shall be prepared to draw our conclusions, and directly urge the force of our arguments. Meantime, he must go with us into details and arguments which may appear dry, but which are necessary to establish our premises. If he have not patience for all this, he had better here abandon the investigation. When we inquire into the proper antiquity of the church of God, we are led far back in the world’s history, to a period remote from the age of Christ and his apostles, and even beyond the prophets and Moses. At an early stage in the history of nations, after the flood, God called Abram,and separated him from his own kindred, and from his own nation, and organized his family into a church proper, bringing them into a visible covenant relation to himself. Jehovah had covenanted with his servants, the patriarchs, at different times, since the days of the first man. These covenants had been distinguished by signs, as that with Noah, by the
token of the
bow in the clouds; but never had the …