to the throne by virtue of his blood relationship to the ruling monarch. A regenerated man is an heir of God by virtue of his spiritual relationship to Christ. A prince becomes a king by the act of coronation, the putting upon his head of the royal crown. A regenerated man becomes a Christian by his baptism, the putting upon his head of the coronet of the Holy Trinity. In other words, baptism is the formal initiation of a regenerated person into the kingdom of Christ, and that which alone can invest him with the rights and prerogatives of Christian citizenship. Hence that word Christen,' repudiated generally by the advocates of believer's baptism, is etymologically the most exactly expressive of the fact. It is the Christening, or putting of Christ's name and livery upon a man. It is the ceremony which declares his divine rehabilitation and introduction into Christendom; that which says to him, Call yourself no longer a man as descended from Adam by a natural lineage; but call yourself, henceforth, a Christian, because descended from Christ by a spiritual lineage. We may appear, in these statements, to magnify baptism unduly. But, we think, there is little to choose between the error of making baptism and regeneration identical, as the ritualist does, and making them simply parallel and coördinate, as the spiritualist often does. Unless the one be considered as the complement of the other, and the two as the necessary and correlated parts of one fact, . we cannot well suppose that the administration of the former would effect any change in the status of the disciple. It does not answer our conceptions to regard baptism as simply a form, made to hand, for fitting on to the great fact of spiritual renewal, to signalize and illustrate it. It is a symbol; and a symbol not merely implies a corresponding reality, but is necessarily included in that reality. Call it a sign, if you choose, which simply shadows forth a fact; but a shadow must not only be the shadow of something, but every something must necessarily cast a shadow, if it be in the sun. So we believe that the state of being a Christian involves two facts,-a spiritual and a physical, a visible and an invisible, or a belief and a profession. That the first, if it be real, will express itself in the second; and that the second cannot be possible, in any genuine sense, without the first. Lange says, commenting on the words: "He that believeth, and is baptized, &c.," that baptism is here mentioned as "a natural, certainly also a necessary, consequence of faith;" with which we entirely agree, and add that, unless this consequence issues from it, an evidence of its genuineness is wanting. 1 In Wiclif's translation, Rom. vi, 4, is rendered,-"Sothli we ben togêdere biried with him bi Christendom into death." The almost invariable linking together of these two commandments, in the conditions of salvation, surely points to a relation between them of something more than mere juxtaposition, or a relation of correspondence merely without any common root or vital connection. We are persuaded that instead of being parallel lines of duty, which run side by side without ever meeting, they both start from one point in the gospel, and converge to one point in the life of the believer; the baptism standing, henceforth, as the representative of regeneration, no longer to be looked upon as a thin shadow and reflection of the spiritual fact, but its incarnation, its human form divine. In the statement of Mr. Robertson, in the passage above quoted, that all the rights, and privileges, and prerogatives of the Christian life date back to baptism, as those of the king to coronation, he in no wise differs, we take it, from the majority of theologians. The statement is simply a reiteration of the view that baptism is the initiatory rite of the Christian church. This view, however, though held nominally by all churches, seems to be reduced, practically, to the veriest ecclesiastical fiction in many of them. Mr. Robertson's practice, as a minister of the Church of England, shows that he did not, or rather could not, regard the baptized as invested with a single immediate right of Christian citizenship, except the right to be undertutors and governors, sponsors and godfathers. Confirmation, supplementing baptism after a greater or less interval of time, is virtually the initiatory right of the Episcopal church. For it is through that alone that the candidate enters upon the full enjoyment of its privileges and blessings. If one does not choose to submit to that form, he remains, practically, an outlaw from the church. Baptism has said to him, "You are hereby initiated into the full rights and privileges of the visible church;" but ecclesiastical law says to him, You cannot have your franchise, as a citizen, till you have had the bishop's hands laid on your head in confirmation. In the English church, therefore, baptism simply initiates a person into the initiatory steps towards Christian citizenship; or, in other words, renders him eligible to membership in the church. A similar fact is true in the practice of all Pedobaptists; baptism ushering only a part of its subjects into membership with the Christian community, and leaving subsequent events to determine whether the others shall become "fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God." In the usage of some Baptists, it strikes us that there is an equal, though quite opposite, inconsistency. For while they lay stress on the initiatory character of baptism, and demand it, with faith, as an indispensable prerequisite to the Lord's supper, they yet, by recognizing the validity of pedobaptist ordinations, practically admit that into the pulpit and into the exercise of the highest function of the Christian church,-the ministry of the word,-a man may climb up some other way without being a thief or a robber. If, now, we are to take the assertion that baptism is the initiatory rite of the church, in any strict sense, it seems to us that it must be considered as not only antecedent to all properly Christian acts, but as conferring plenary privilege in the church. It is not an usher that merely conducts one to the porch of the church, and leaves him there, shivering and naked, with not a single shred of privilege to cover him. Nor is it a porter that demands its fee of obedience of those seeking the use of certain prerogatives and rights, but allows others to go unchallenged. It is that which instates him in full membership in the body of Christ, and opens to him every immunity of discipleship, "that to which all dates back." Admirable service has been done by Mr. Robertson in exposing the grossness and absurdity of the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, as generally interpreted in the Anglican church. He has no hesitation in branding it as jugglery and incantation, as debasing to the minds of those who hold it as degrading to the character of God. The following is a fair specimen of his handling of the subject: A child is to be baptized on a given day; but when that day arrives the child is unwell, and the ceremony must be postponed another week or month. Again a delay takes place,-the day is damp or cold. At last the time arrives; the service is read. It may require, if read slowly, five minutes more than ordinarily. Then and there, when that reading is slowly accomplished, the mystery is achieved. And all this time, while the child is ill, while the weather is bad, while the reader procrastinates, I say solemnly,-the Eternal Spirit, who rules the universe, must wait patiently, and come down, obedient to a mortal's spell, at the very second that suits his convenience. God must wait attendance on the caprice of a careless parent, ten thousand accidents; nay, the leisure of an indolent or an immoral priest. Will you dare insult the Majesty on high with such a mockery as this result?1 But we are inclined to think that Mr. Robertson's contempt for this doctrine grew out of his disposition to exclude all supernatural agency from the immediate event of regeneration, and his hostility to what Coleridge calls "the mischievous fanaticism of moments of con 1 Sermons, vol. II, p. 81. version," quite as much as from his conviction of its coarseness and materialism. If some dissenter had told him that, at a certain time and in a certain place, while bowing before God, in deep conviction and agony of spirit, pleading for pardon, he had suddenly felt his burden lifted, and the clear evidence of his acceptance revealed to him in his soul, he would have ridiculed the statement as a worse delusion, in the direction of airy sentimentalism and fanatical nonsense, than the other was in that of materialism. The difficulty was that he could not conceive of the operations of the Spirit as referable to time and space; that he could not believe in the possibility of his touching a soul by a palpable impression and influence; that he could not conceive of conversion as a new creation, an "opus operans et in presenti ;" and hence his dislike of every theory that gave to it the semblance of a definite reality, or recognized in its accomplishment an actual contact of the natural and the supernatural. The general impression which we have received from a view of this subject is that this theory of baptism is an outgrowth of a theology shaped largely, as men's systems invariably are, by personal experience. Robertson seems not to have known conversion, in his own experience, as an abrupt, definite, clearly-marked event,-a change like that of Wesley and Luther, made known and forever memorable to the soul by the awful pain and travail through which it was accomplished. With him, however real it may have been, it was much more vague and undefined. His theory of baptism strikes us as being the scripture theory, bent and accommodated so as to fit into all the peculiarities of such an ideal of regeneration. Evidently making little account of what is commonly termed "experimental religion," his theory of regeneration became experimental in an extraordinary sense,—a “to be or not to be," depending on the efficacy of the baptismal call. JAMAICA PLAIN, MASS. A. J. GORDON. GROWTH AND HISTORY OF LANGUAGE. A HUNDRED Language and the Study of Language: Twelve Lectures on the Lectures on the Science of Language. First and Second Series. Histoire Générale et Système Comparé des Langues Sémitiques. 1re Zur Chronologie der indogermanischen Sprachforschung. GEORG De la Forme et de la Fonction des Mots. Lecon faite au College de years ago, Father Coeurdeux, a French missionary in India, struck with the resemblance he had observed between many words in the sacred language of the Brahmins, and those of European origin, put the following question to the French Academy: How are we to explain the fact that a large number of Sanscrit words are also found in Greek and Latin, especially in Latin? The answer was not then to be had. It came nearly a half century later, in 1816, when Francis Bopp, then twenty-five years of age, issued in Frankfort-on-the-Main, his essay entitled "Conjugation-system of the Sanscrit language, as compared with Greek, Latin, Persian, and German." Others before him had contributed facts and advanced theories, tending to a solution of the problem. Frederic Schlegel, indeed, with the intuition of genius, had divined the answer. But it was reserved for Bopp to establish, by indisputable evidence, the |