but the whole strength of the body will be exerted to recover you. Do you not see in all this the parable of the Church? It is because of this that we baptise infants. They, like us, are under God's education; they, like us, are members of the body. Incorporated into the Church, they are subjected to influences which no man can measure, but none ought to overlook. Who can tell why it is that each age has its type of face and tone of voice? Who can tell why you can name the century in which a portrait was painted by the contour of the face? Or why it is that the language of Chaucer presents rhymes which are no rhymes to us? Insensibly our face, our speech, is moulded by the influences which surround us. The action of the whole body on each part, so that the history of the life is written on the lines of the hand or the shape of the ear, is an undoubted fact, though thought fails to explain the process.

And is this all sentiment? So it does not seem in other things. It is something to belong to a nation with traditions and with a future. Why does the heart beat fast, and the eye swell, and the whole body tremble with emotion, as one tells how Englishmen fought at Agincourt, or won at Alma, or charged at Balaclava, or died at

Isandula? What it means who can tell? but it makes for much in history and life. This sentiment of a Christian body was a powerful factor in early Christian life. When Paul would win his Corinthian flock from two great sins, sins of want of charity and sins of impurity, he used two arguments very strange to men who have lost this notion of a body. He pointed to the destiny of that body in the future. 'Know ye not that we shall judge angels?' He verily thought that men who wrangled before the heathen courts about their miserable bits of property could be stirred to better things by reminding them that they belonged to a body whose destiny it was to judge angels. And he meets impurity with the question—‘Shall I take the members of Christ and make them the members of an harlot?' A strange argument is this, unless we grasp the premises on which it is built up.

And so to point the moral by the parable from which I have taken my text, Christ points out the two lives a man has. There is one life which is due to the care of the man who puts the seed into the ground, watches it, tends it. That is like our individual life. But there is another life independent of his action. He sleeps and wakes, but the seed springs up, he knows not how. By unseen

forces, by power totally independent of his action, by the life it possesses as belonging to the organism of the plant, it springs and grows up. So is the kingdom of heaven. The Divine life in man is due to circumstances under his control. It is due also to circumstances outside his control. It lives a life dependent on the individual, it lives a life dependent on the organism. That individual life (this is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God) finds its highest development not in the individual, but in the Church, not the Church of England, not that nor yet another. It is the Church spoken of in our own Canon lv. -the whole congregation of Christian people dispersed throughout the whole world.'

The Baptists who put their immersion font in the place of the communion table of other churches, represent individuality. The communion, the supreme act of worship, is to others the barrier which keeps off the profane. They make the barrier at the initiatory rite of baptism. They appeal to no confession of faith, have no general convention, set apart their ministers by no act of ordination on the part of the Church as opposed to the congregation. They cannot conceive of

1 Wayland's History of the Baptists.

hereditary Christianity. The little children are not of their kingdom of heaven. It would be easy to argue against all this. It is better to ask what this protest in favour of individuality has added to the Church. That answer I have tried to give. And a system which has produced a John Bunyan, received the sanction of a Milton, given birth in our own days to a Spurgeon-who, whatever may be thought of him or about him, has certainly revolutionised the preaching of the ageto a Carey, the pioneer of modern foreign missions, to a Robert Hall, an Evans, and a Tipple, is one at which no earnest man can sneer.

The Church represents the corporate life. It admits all children to baptism, it admits all who offer themselves to confirmation, the Lord's table is free to all but notorious evildoers. It believes in an hereditary life. Earnest men groan at this laxity on the part of a Church whose principle is, as opposed to that of all other sects, inclusion, and not exclusion. By their fruits ye shall know them.' It has produced a Hooker, a Wilson, a Robertson, a Kingsley, a Stanley—men who have spoken to the Church outside as well as to their own body.

Both these voices are needed in the grand

choir.

The Baptists mayhap strike notes too high for the ordinary run of voices; and yet there are goodly bands who can take the alto part. The Church suits best the ordinary compass of the human voice. It is content to sing the air, whilst other sects are engaged with their several parts. But as Baptists and other sectarians shall join with the Church in singing the new song in that Church above, would it not be well if all practised the choruses in the Church below?