“That the arguments drawn from the analogy between Christian baptism and Jewish circumcision, have been objected to and considered irrelevant by those who deny infants the privileges of baptism, is very certain, as it also is, that this objection has been pushed so far by ignorant and heated minds as to separate the New from the Old Testament altogether. But this proves only to what lengths men will go in favor of a particular notion, and that they will even risk the certainty and obligation of the Bible, rather than yeild a distinguishing though untenable point. For, beyond dispute, if you destroy the connexion between the Old and New Testaments, you deprive us of the whole Bible. Uncertainty or disagreement in the revelation of God’s will deprives us of it entirely. Yet nothing is more plan and certain, than that our Lord himself and his inspired apostles viewed this point very differently, and continually refer to the Old Testament, as the ground and authority of those transactions which afterwards formed the New. And St. Paul himself argues this very point on the anaology of the two ordinances, styling Christian’s the circumcision made without hands. And if we would only bear in mind, my friends, that in the sayings of our Lord and his apostles there was no such book as that which we call the New Testament, it might serve to convince us, how dangerous it is to separate the Scriptures from the unity of their purpose, and how certainly unsound and unsafe that form of doctrine must be which requires so desperate a support.”
Bishop John Stark Ravenscroft was the first Bishop of North Carolina, and I am in the process of [slowly] transcribing the first volume of his collected sermons (1856 printing).
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