the token of the Covenant_. Their holiness, that is, their being in covenant with God, does not date from their _baptism_, but from their _birth_. {65} To every believing parent God may be supposed to say, as He said to Abraham, “I will establish my Covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.” Much profit ariseth from this connection, if it be made a right use of. Baptism, like circumcision, verily profiteth, if the baptized child keep the law—the requisition which God makes of faith and obedience; but if he be a breaker of the law, his baptism is made no baptism at all; as circumcision was in such a case made uncircumcision. (See Rom. ii. 25.) And let it be farther observed from this text, that it is of _real believers_ and their children that the Apostle speaks when he says,—“Now are your children _holy_.” Hence it appears, that the faith of the parents is the foundation of any children’s claim to baptism. “_Unclean_” is the description which is given of all others. The only other passage in this Epistle in which baptism is referred to, as a Christian Sacrament, is the 13th verse of the xiith Chapter:—“For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.” St. Paul may here allude to baptism in the former part of the verse, and to the cup in the Lord’s Supper in the latter part of it. But whatever he may _allude to_, what he _asserts_ is this;—that it was the baptism of the Holy Spirit which made them real members of Christ’s mystical body. The baptism of water was the sign of this; but the sign would have profited them little, if they had not received also the thing signified. The same may be said of the cup in the Lord’s Supper. It is for the nourishment of those who are real members of the Church of Christ by the baptism of the Spirit: in fact, it cannot possibly nourish any other. The essential unity of all baptized believers, and yet the diversity of Offices and gifts belonging to the several constituent parts or members of Christ’s Church, seems to be what the Apostle is here inculcating upon the Corinthians; and this with the special design to show them the inconsistency and the evil of their emulations and divisions. He aimed at curing them of their unseemly strife, by reminding them that one and the same Holy Spirit had made them all “members of one body,” but had set those members in their several and suitable places; so that each should be content with the place assigned him; and without aspiring to something which had not been given him, or envying those who might be in a higher or a supposed more honourable state, should use what he had for the common good,—for the strengthening and well-being of the whole: “_that there should be_,” as he says in the 25th verse, “_no schism in the body_, _but that the members should have the same care one for another_.”