It is a notable fact and worthy of record in this discussion, that the Greek Church has always retained immersion in baptism. This church extends over Greece, Russia, Arabia, Palestine, Abyssinia, Siberia, and other Oriental countries. Like the Latin Church, it has corrupted the primitive purity of Gospel doctrine and practice with many absurd glosses and superstitious rites. It practices infant baptism, yet it is by _dipping,_ even in the severe climate of Siberia; and it uses _trine_ immersion, or dipping the candidate three times, one to each of the names in the sacred Trinity. But in all its branches immersion is retained. THE EDINBURGH ENCYCLOPEDIA says: "The Greek Church, as well as the Schismatics in the East, retained the custom of _immersing_ the whole body; but the Western Church adopted, in the _thirteenth century,_ the mode of sprinkling, which has been continued by the Protestants, Baptists only excepted." _Ency. Edin., Art. Baptism._ These statements are fully confirmed by Stourdza, Ricaut, Deylingius, Buddeus, Wall, King, Broughton, Stanley, Coleman and others, who have written on the state and history of the Greek Church. THE DESIGN OF BAPTISM What was baptism intended to represent? As a religious rite it meant something, had some symbolic force, and represented some moral or spiritual fact or truth. Its meaning was clearly this: to show forth the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, who died for our sins, and rose again for our justification. And every believer who receives this ordinance, professes thereby to have faith in the merits of Christ's death as the ground of his own hope of Salvation; to have fellowship also with His sufferings, and makes a declaration of his own death to sin, and rising to a new life in Christ. It also typifies the washing of regeneration; it further declares the candidate's hope of a resurrection from the dead, even as Christ, into the likeness of whose death he is buried, was raised up by the glory of the Father. Chiefly _death, burial,_ and _resurrection:_ the great facts of redemptive grace are by it set forth. Immersion in baptism does teach all this, and immersion alone can teach it. Careful students of the New Testament have clearly seen this, and very generally confessed it, whatever may have been their practice. BISHOP NEWTON says: "Baptism was usually performed by _immersion,_ or dipping the whole body under water, to represent the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, and thereby signify the person's own dying to sin, the destruction of its power, and his resurrection to a new life." _Pract. Expos. Cate., p. 297._ Bloomfield, Barnes, Schaff, Poole, Hammond, Barrows, Baxter, MacKnight, Olshausen, Grotius, Saurin, Buddeus, Pictetus, Frankius, Wall, Towerson, Adam Clark, Tyndale, and others, bear similar testimony as to the design of the ordinance, and how it is answered in immersion only. A SUFFICIENCY OF WATER