discriminating clearly in using the words members and membership in connection with children. Read almost any modern book against infant baptism, and you will find that its main force is directed against the practice as a "church and state" institution, and as making persons members of the church by means of sacraments. Let us who are really free from such imputation, assert the truly spiritual nature and object of this ordinance. I wish to see it divested of all that does not belong to it, made eminently spiritual, expressed in terms which cannot easily be misunderstood, and appealing to the natural affections, the understandings, the consciences, of spiritual men and women, as, in its sober and legitimate use, God's great appointment, from the call of Abraham to the millennium, for the increase and perpetuity of his church.[2] [Footnote 2: This subject is discussed by itself, and more at large, in another part of this book.] You are aware that the great question, which has made most of the trouble in the Christian church from the beginning, relates to the meaning and use of sacraments and ordinances, or what we call Symbolism. The tendency of the human mind, even in Paul's day, as indicated by him, with other things belonging to it, under the name of "the mystery of iniquity, which doth even now work," was, to increase the number of sacraments and ordinances, and make them bear an essential part in the work of regeneration. The right to multiply or extend them, and the claim that they possess a saving efficacy, characterizes one great division of the professed Christian church, while those who are called Protestants and the Reformed, regard them chiefly as signs; though of these, some seem to have much of that appetency after undue reliance on forms which Paul seeks to correct in the Epistle to the Galatians, while others go to an opposite extreme, and undervalue the two divinely-appointed sacraments, which they think have no efficiency as used by the Spirit of God, but only as signs used by us to represent something. Between these divisions of the Christian church lies the battle-ground of great ecclesiastical controversies from the beginning, as the Netherlands were, for a long time, the battle-field of Europe. Archbishop Leighton seems to strike the balance between formalism and sacramental grace in ordinances, as well as any writer, in commenting on these words of Peter, "The like figure whereunto, even baptism, doth also now save us." He says: