Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 1.djvu/381

 No. 40.]

"Ye hear in the Gospel the express words of our Saviour Christ, that except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. Whereby ye may perceive the great necessity of this Sacrament, where it may be had."—Office of Baptism for those of Riper Years."

the summer, after the conversation last related, in which, as the reader may remember, we had been speaking of the Athanasian Creed, I was called away to a distance from home by the unexpected illness of a near relation, which became serious, and lasted so long as to keep me absent for two or three Sundays. The time of year was about Midsummer, and it so happened that one of the Sundays was the eighth after Trinity. Thinking over the first morning lesson of the day, as I sat watching by my kinsman's bedside, I was forcibly struck by the awful way, in which it appears to impress upon men the duty of separating themselves, in some way or other, from unbelievers. "Eat no bread, nor drink water, neither turn again by the way that thou camest:" that is, "however tired, hungry, and thirsty you may be, and however kind and pressing they may be, have nothing at all to say to them: do not even return the same road, but make yourself as strange among them as ever you can." Long and deeply, with my Bible in my hand, did I muse upon this history, and the more I thought, the more I was convinced, putting every thing together, that such as I have said is its true moral and meaning. I must own, however, that the train of thought was not altogether agreeable to me. I could not disengage myself from an unpleasant, though not a very distinct, conviction that this material part