+IV. Is to be entitled to the inheritance of joint heirship with Christ.+--"If ye be Christ's, then are ye . . . heirs according to the promise" (ver. 29). In Christ the lineal descent from David becomes extinct. He died without posterity. But He lives and reigns over a vaster territory than David ever knew; and all who are of His spiritual seed, Jew or Gentile, share with Him the splendours of the inheritance provided by the Father. Here the soul reaches its supreme glory and joy. In Worcester Cathedral there is a slab with just one doleful word on it as a record of the dead buried beneath. That word is _Miserrimus._ No name, no date; nothing more of the dead than just this one word to say he who lay there was or is _most miserable._ Surely, he had missed the way home to the Father's house and the Father's love, else why this sad record? But in the Catacombs at Rome there is one stone recently found inscribed with the single word _Felicissima._ No name, no date again, but a word to express that the dead Christian sister was _most happy._ Most happy; why? Because she had found the Father's house and love, and that peace which the storms of life, the persecutions of a hostile world, and the light afflictions of time could neither give nor take away. +Lessons.+--1. _Faith confers higher privileges than the law._ 2. _Faith in Christ admits the soul into sonship with God._ 3. _The sons of God share in the fulness of the Christly inheritance._ _GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES._ Vers. 26-29. _Baptism._ +I. The doctrine of Rome.+--Christ's merits are instrumentally applied by baptism; original sin is removed by a change of nature; a new character is imparted to the soul; a germinal principle or seed of life is miraculously given; and all this in virtue, not of any condition in the recipient, nor of any condition except that of the due performance of the rite. The objections to this doctrine are: 1. _It assures baptism to be not the testimony to a fact, but the fact itself._ Baptism proclaims the child of God; the Romanist says it creates him. 2. _It is materialism of the grossest kind._ 3. _It makes Christian life a struggle for something that is lost, instead of a progress to something that lies before._ +II. The doctrine of modern Calvinism.+--Baptism admits all into the visible Church, but into the invisible Church only a special few. The real benefit of baptism only belongs to the elect. With respect to others, to predicate of them regeneration in the highest sense is at best an ecclesiastical fiction, said in the judgment of charity. You are not God's child until you become such consciously. On this we remark: 1. _This judgment of charity ends at the baptismal font._ 2. _This view is identical with the Roman one in this respect--that it creates the fact instead of testifying to it._ 3. _Is pernicious in its results in the matter of education._