Some of these conclusions—especially separation of church and state and the denial of any analogy between baptism and circumcision—were pleasing to the Baptist audience. But the basis of the argument, the complete abrogation of the Old Testament law, seemed to many a dangerous doctrine. The preachers who heard the sermon went out to spread among the churches their fears that this bold and brilliant young man might be a disturber of Baptist usage. Thereafter he “itinerated less” among the Baptist churches and confined his labors to “three or four little communities constituted on the Bible, one in Ohio, one in Virginia and two in Pennsylvania.” But he also made one or two preaching trips a year among the regular Baptists. He opened in 1818, and conducted for four years, a boarding school for boys, especially with a view to finding and training candidates for the ministry. Debates on Baptism Mr. Campbell’s Baptist colleagues may have considered him heretical about the covenants, but they could not fail to value him as a champion of immersion. So when a Seceder Presbyterian minister, John Walker of Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, issued a challenge for a debate on that topic, they urged him to accept it. Mr. Walker, as challenger, affirmed that the infant children of believers are proper subjects for baptism and that sprinkling is a proper mode. As to the baptism of infants, he rested his case almost wholly on the proposition “that baptism came in the room of circumcision, that the covenant on which the Jewish church was built and to which circumcision is the seal, is the same with the covenant on which the Christian church is built and to which Baptism is the seal.” This is precisely the proposition that Mr. Campbell had denied in his “Sermon on the Law,” and it gave him opportunity to elaborate and reinforce his argument as to the radical newness of Christianity and its freedom from Old Testament law. In addition, he made use of his careful studies of the Greek word _baptizein_ and the prepositions used with it in the passages describing baptism. He quoted pedobaptist lexicographers and commentators to prove that the Greek verb means “to immerse”; and he stressed the distinction between “positive” and “moral” precepts to show that the former, including baptism, demand implicit obedience with no reasoning on our part as to the expediency or value of the thing commanded.