Ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ.”[404] Perhaps no one ever hung so many wreaths of flowers around the font as Taylor did; and if we were to take the highly coloured words which he uses by themselves, we should say, that his teaching on the subject was calculated to lull his disciples, if they had been only baptized, into a state of most deceptive and fearful self-security. But then, we know that other parts of his writings are of the most pungent and heart-searching description, destructive of all self-delusion, and, in some respects, ministering to a spirit of bondage, rather than to a spirit of presumptuous hope. The truth is, that much of the air of the old economy is breathed over Taylor’s views of the new dispensation. At times it blows with a chilling gust. We lack, in the garden of his rhetoric, the genial warmth of an evangelical summer; and in his language respecting sacraments, he shows a fondness for what St. Paul calls, “beggarly elements.” It should be noticed, in connection with his doctrine of baptism, that, though, in his _Liberty of Prophesying_, he deals gently with Anabaptists, no one could hold more strongly than did he the doctrine of infant baptism. The doctrine of the Lord’s Supper is expressed in less figurative terms, but with the same excess of description, and, as his admiring biographer admits, with some incautiousness in the use of terms. He says:--“The doctrine of the Church of England, and generally of the Protestants, in this article, is,--that after the minister of the holy mysteries hath rightly prayed, and blessed or consecrated the bread and the wine, the symbols become changed into the body and blood of Christ, after a sacramental, that is, in a spiritual real manner: so that all that worthily communicate, do by faith receive Christ really, effectually, to all the purposes of His passion: the wicked receive not Christ, but the bare symbols only; but yet to their hurt, because the offer of Christ is rejected, and they pollute the blood of the covenant, by using it as an unholy thing. The result of which doctrine is this: It is bread, and it is Christ’s body. It is bread in substance, Christ in the sacrament; and Christ is as really given to all that are truly disposed, as the symbols are; each as they can; Christ as Christ can be given; the bread and wine as they can; and to the same real purposes, to which they are designed; and Christ does as really nourish and sanctify the soul, as the elements do the body. It is here, as in the other sacraments: for as the natural water becomes the laver of regeneration; so here, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ; but, there and here too, the first substance is changed by grace, but remains the same in nature.”[405] [Sidenote: ANGLICANS.--TAYLOR.]