1. A point to be specially noticed is John's declaration, that he who sent him to baptize with water had charged him that the Messiah would be made manifest by the spirit of God descending from heaven like a dove, and alighting and remaining on him. John affirms that he bare record that Jesus was the Son of God, because in his case this condition was fulfilled. Now, who sent John to baptize with water? Is there anything in the Old Testament scriptures to give baptism with water place as an ordinance of the being therein upheld as divine, and whom both John the Baptist and Jesus claimed to represent? Not one word! Who, then, sent John to baptize with water? Did he receive his directions from angels in dreams or otherwise? Some of the lustrations in connection with the heathen temples were, however, very similar to the ordinance of baptism since practised among Christians. 2. The spirit of the Eternal in a bodily shape like a dove! is that an Old Testament prediction, an Old Testament belief? Let the following passages reply:--Isaiah xl. 25, "To whom then will ye liken me, or shall I be equal? saith the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number," &c. Deut. iv. 15-17,--"Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves; for ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire: lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air," &c. Here then, at the very outset, are John the Baptist and Jesus represented as connected with a marvellous event, utterly abhorrent to the Old Testament deity, whose will and purpose they claimed to be fulfilling! But though the conception of the deity appearing in the shape of any bird or beast was wholly foreign to the Old Testament writers, it was one quite familiar to the heathen world. In the _Iliad_, for instance, the god Sleep, like the shrill bird of night, alighting, perched on the loftiest fir on Mount Ida, to aid the amorous design of Juno on mightiest Jove; Apollo and Pallas were seated on a lofty beech, like two vultures, to watch the duel between Ajax and Hector. The Egyptian deities had each their appropriate symbol-beast, bird, or reptile. A dove, as an emblem of meekness and peace, was no doubt deemed by the gospel compilers the most fitting of what they wished to convey as the mission of Jesus; but the conception being heathen, and not Jewish, it discredits the claim of Christianity, that the New Testament is a continuation and fulfilment of the Old.