Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 2.djvu/251

Rh the love of the of the Church, "in nourishing and cherishing it." For a man doth not launch out into such a fervid description as this, without strong emotions of the value and excellency of what he so describes. Or, rather, one should say, the Holy Spirit, in filling the Apostle's mind with such high notions of the continual love and providence of for His Church, as manifested in the efficacy which he gave to the water of Baptism, to sanctify and cleanse it, and in causing him thus to dwell on the purity thereby to be effected, must have intended to work a corresponding love in us, and to correct the cold and unloving sophisms of sense and reason about the power of  institution. And yet I would confidently appeal to a large number of persons in the present day, whether, often as they have dwelt upon this animating description of the sanctification and spotlessness of Church, they have not (with a tacit feeling of not entering into them) passed by, almost unnoticed, the words "with the washing of water," to which, however, the Apostle throughout refers in his subsequent picture of the Church's unblemishedness? And if so, is it not time that we seek to correct this variance between the Apostle's feelings and our own ?

One might apply the same argument to the passages of St. John, (1 Epist. ii. 20, 27,) in which he speaks of the "anointing" which Christians had received from. In each place he speaks of it as abiding in its effects; but in the latter (c. ii. 27,) as having been received of at some former time. Here again it might be natural to infer that a gift, whose operation continued, but which is spoken of as having been formerly received, was first communicated at some particular time, and