Baptism of the Sick Wife and her Children.

In having all things, and not Thee, what have I?
Not having Thee, what have my labors got?
Let me enjoy but Thee, what further crave I?
And having Thee alone, what have I not?
I wish nor sea, nor land; nor would I be
Possessed of heaven, heaven unpossessed of Thee.

Quarles.—"Emblems."

He whom God chooseth, out of doubt doth well.
What they that choose their God do, who can tell?

Lord Brooke (London, 1633).—"Mustapha."

A lady with whom we spent a summer at a watering-place, and who was then an invalid, and with whom we had formed an intimate acquaintance, was now very sick, with cancerous affections, which threatened to end her life at no distant period.

She had become established in the Christian faith, during her illness, and, being a woman of great intelligence and cultivation, it was instructive to be in her company. Many a lesson had I learned from her, in the freshness and ardor of her new discoveries as a Christian, the old themes of religious experience being translated by her renewed heart, and discriminating mind, into forms that made them almost new, because they were so vivid. She was fast ripening for heaven; she had looked in, and her face shone as she turned to speak with us.

A lady, a friend of hers from a distance, was visiting us, and, knowing that she was sick, requested me to call with her upon the invalid. Hearing that I was in the parlor, she sent for me to come up and sit with her and my friend, after they had seen each other a little while. She was in her easy-chair, able to converse, and was calm and happy.

The door opened suddenly, as we were talking, and in rushed a little boy of about six years, his cap in his hand, a pretty green cloth sack buttoned close about him, his boots pulled over his pants to his knees, and his face glowing with health and from the cold air.

"O, mother!" said he, before he quite saw us,—and then he checked himself; but, being encouraged to proceed, after making his salutations, he said, in a more subdued tone, holding up a great red apple, "See what the man, where we buy our things, sent you, mother. He called me to him, and said, 'Give that to your mother, and tell her it will be first-rate roasted.'"

As the mother smelt of it, and praised it, with her thanks, the boy hung round her chair, and wished to say something.

"Well, what is it, my son?"

He spoke loud enough for us to hear, with his eyes glancing occasionally at us, to be sure that we were not too intently looking at him, and, with his arm resting in his mother's lap, he said:

"Do, please, let me go with my sled on the pond. It is real thick, mother. Gustavus says that last evening it was as thick as his big dictionary, and you know how cold it was last night, mother. Please let me go; I won't get in; besides, if I do, it isn't deep—not more than up to there; see here, mother!" putting his little mittened hand, with the palm down, as high as his waist.

His mother looked troubled, and knew not what to say to him, but remarked to us, "O, if I were well, and about the house, I could divert him from his wish; but," said she to him, "if you will ask Gustavus to take care of you, and bring you home when he comes, you may go."

Off he went, making fewer steps than there were stairs, and we heard his merry voice without announcing his liberty.

"Here I am," said she to us, "with those three children, who come home from school twice a day, and there is no mother below to receive them. With the best of help, things sometimes go wrong, and the young woman who sews for me cannot, of course, do for them what a mother could. Nothing has tried my patience, in suffering, more than to hear the door open, and my children come in from school, and to feel that I am separated from them, within hearing, while I cannot reach them."

She controlled her feelings, and helped herself to conceal them by turning to rock a cradle which stood behind her, though we perceived no need of her doing so; yet we must all distrust our own ears in comparison with a mother's. The child was a boy seven months old.

"Do you know," said she to me, "that I am thinking of joining your church? I have had a very trying visit from my own pastor, and he says that I am too sick to be baptized by immersion, and that it is, therefore, too late for me to receive Christian baptism. It is not necessary, he says, in order to being accepted of God. I was born and brought up in that Communion, and never thought much of the subject of baptism till I hoped that I began to love God, here in my sick-room. If baptism is so important as our ministers tell us it is, in their preaching and by their practice,—for you know how important they deem it, in times of religious attention, to have people baptized in our way,—I cannot see why it is not important to me. If it is man's ordinance, and merely for an effect on others, very well; but if God has anything to do in it, I feel that I need it as much as though I were in health. So my husband asked your minister to come and see me, and he did; and he is to baptize me and my children on Saturday afternoon, and administer the Lord's Supper to me after church the next day."

I asked her what ground of objection her pastor had in her case.

Mrs. P. My minister tells me it is superstition to be baptized on a sick-bed, and that they are careful not to encourage such Romish practices.

"But, O," I said to him, "Mr. Dow, I am afraid it is because your form of baptism will not allow you to baptize the sick and dying, so you make a virtue of necessity." He colored a little, but said, pleasantly, though solemnly, "We see how important it is, Mrs. Peirce, to attend to the subject of religion in health, when we can confess Christ before men, and follow the Saviour, and be buried in baptism with him."

That made me weep, though perhaps it was because I was weak; but I said, "God is more merciful than that, Mr. Dow. I know that I have neglected religion too long, but God has brought me to him, by affliction, and now I do not believe that the seals of his grace are of such a nature that they cannot be applied to people in my condition. I feel the need of those seals, not as my profession to God, but as his professions of love to me. I believe you are wrong, Mr. Dow. You seem to make baptism our act toward God, chiefly; now I take a different view of it. My sick and weak condition makes me feel that in being baptized, and in receiving the Lord's Supper, I submit myself to God's hand of love, and take from him infinitely more than I give him."—"O, that is rather a Romish view of ordinances," said he, smiling.—"No," said I, "Mr. Dow, I am not passive in the ordinances, any more than in regeneration; my whole soul is active in receiving their influences. But there is something done for us in the ordinances, as there is something done for us in regeneration, while we actively repent and believe. Are you not so afraid of Romanism, and of 'sacramental grace,' that you go to an opposite extreme? for it seems to me a morbid state of feeling. I wish for no extreme unction, but I do believe that, in being baptized, and in receiving the Lord's Supper, something more is done for us than helping us to take up and offer to God something on the little needle-points of our poor feelings. I should feel, in being baptized, that God has adopted me, and not merely I him; and, in the Lord's Supper, that it is more for Christ to give me his body and blood, than for me to give him my poor affections." He asked me if I had not been reading the Oxford Tracts. I told him that I read the Oxford Tracts, and other Puseyite publications, in their day, and that I saw through their errors, and had no sympathy with their views.

But I told him I was satisfied that the human mind, in that development, was craving something more supernatural in religious ordinances, to make the impression that the hand of God is in them, and not that we are the principal party. So, instead of taking enlightened, spiritual views of ordinances, the Tractarians sought to improve the quality, by multiplying the quantity, of forms; and others are following them into the Roman Catholic church in the same way.

"There always seemed to me," she said, "to be a grain of truth in every great error. Is it not so? Even among the Brahmins of the East, and among savages, each superstition, and every lie, retains the fossils of some dead truth. When a new error breaks out among us, I feel that the human mind is tossing itself, and reaching after something beyond its experience. It seems to me," she continued, "that, at such times, it is good for ministers and Christians to reËxamine their mode of stating the truths of the Bible, to see how far they can properly go to meet the new development, and, by preaching the truth better, intercept it. The cold, barren view, which many take of ordinances, makes some people hanker after forms and ceremonies; whereas, if we would present baptism and the Lord's Supper as divine acts toward us, we might meet the instinctive wants of many, and hold them to the side of truth.

"But I told Mr. Dow that I was no formalist, nor did I believe in compromising the truth to win errorists. Clear, faithful, strict doctrinal views commend themselves to men's consciences."

I came near saying to the good lady, that, if she were able to talk in such a strain, and to say so much to her minister, he, surely, could not have deemed her so enfeebled in mind as to be incapacitated for admission to the Christian church.

"I told him, also," she added, "I was satisfied that his unvarying mode of baptism was not ordained by Him who sent the Gospel to every creature.—Why, said I, Mr. Dow, what do you make of the apostles' baptizing the jailer, 'at the same hour of the night,' and 'before it was day?' It could not have been for any public effect. What need to have it done just then? Was it superstitious and Romish? No; it was to comfort the soul of the poor, trembling convert, with a sense of God's love to him. How it must have soothed and cheered him to receive God's hand of love in that ordinance, before he himself fully knew what the making of a Christian profession implied! I want that same hand of love here, in my prison of a sick-chamber,—And, I never thought of it much before, but, I said then, it seemed so clear to me that they would not have gone to all the trouble, that night, and in the prison-house, and after the terrors of the earthquake, to put a whole family into bathing-vessels. To take people from sleep, ordinarily, and immerse them in water, would be a singular act; much more when they are weak and faint, as the jailer's family must have been, from fear and excitement. In my own case, I could not be immersed, even at home; it would probably cost me my life. Sprinkling came to me as so sweetly harmonious, in that scene of the jailer's baptism, that I believed it to be the apostolic mode of baptizing, and I told Mr. D. that I should imitate the jailer; and that I should send for a minister who could imitate Paul and Silas."

"But," said I, "what brought you to believe in the propriety of baptizing your children?"

Mrs. P. Your minister enlightened me on that subject. I told him my heart yearned to have it done; for I took the same view of it which I have mentioned with regard to my own baptism—that it is something which God does, to and for the children, primarily, and it is not merely a human act. He said that it was like laying "a penal bond" on children, to baptize them, and oblige them to do or be anything without their consent. O, how many such "penal bonds" I have laid on my children, already!—the more the better, I told him. "A penal bond" to love and serve God!—I mean to add my dying charge to it, and make it as binding as I can. How imperfect such a view of baptism is! It is God coming to us with his seal, not we coming with our own invention to him. I wished to have God enter into a covenant with me, who hope I love him, to be a God to my children forever. I felt that I could die in peace, if I might feel some assurance of this; and, it seemed to me that, to have a sign and seal of it from God himself would make me perfectly happy.

She handed me a book, which her pastor had lent her, and she asked me to read a passage, to which she pointed. It was an argument against baptism in sickness. Speaking of the penitent thief, the writer says:

"The Saviour did not, as a Papist would have done, command some of the women, that stood by bewailing, to fetch a little water; nor the beloved disciple to asperse the quivering penitent."

Remembering the view which the mother of little Philip took of such things, I merely said, that the writer seemed to me to asperse a large part of the Protestant world, under the name, Papist. Christian baptism, I remarked, had not been instituted when the Saviour and the thief were on the cross.

I received an invitation from the husband, a day or two after, to be present at the baptism of his wife and children. The husband was not professedly, nor in his own view, a regenerate man, but one of the best of husbands and fathers, destitute, however, of the one thing needful.

The wife had on a loose cashmere dressing-gown, but was sitting in bed for greater support and comfort.

The pastor read to her the articles and covenant of the church. She assented to them; whereupon, at his request, I laid the church-book of signatures before her, gave her a pen full of ink, and she wrote her name among the professed followers of the Lamb.

The pastor then declared her to be admitted, by vote of the church, into full communion and fellowship, after she should have received the ordinance of baptism.

He rose, and read, "And Jesus came unto them, and spake, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen."

He continued: "My dear Mrs. Peirce, God is your God. He will have his name written upon you, by its being called over you, with the use of his own appointed sign and seal of baptism. The name in which he has chosen thus to appear to you, is not God Almighty, nor his name Jehovah; but those names which redemption has brought to view, and which impress upon us the acts of redeeming grace and love. Do not feel, chiefly, that you give yourself up to God in this transaction, though this, of course, you do, and it is essential that you do so; but feel that the Father, Son, and Spirit, come to you, and own you in the covenant of redemption, in consequence of your accepting Christ, by faith, which itself, also, is the gift of God. Professing repentance of your sins, and faith in the Lord Jesus, you are now to receive, from the Sacred Three, a sign and seal, confirming to you all the promises of grace, adopting you as a member of the whole family in heaven and earth, and engaging God to be your God.

"And now, as you are, yourself, a child of God, your children God adopts to be, in a peculiar sense, his. This is the method of his love from the beginning. Had Adam remained upright, doubtless his children would have been confirmed in their uprightness; but, inasmuch as he fell, and, by his disobedience, they were made sinners, God reËstablished his covenant with Abraham as the father of all believers, under a new church-organization, to the end of time, promising to be the God of a believer's child."

He then read this hymn; and certain expressions in it never struck me with such force and sweetness as in that baptismal scene:

"How large the promise, how divine,
To Abraham and his seed;
I'll be a God to thee and thine,
Supplying all their need.

"The words of his extensive love
From age to age endure;
The angel of the covenant proves,
And seals, the blessing sure.
"Jesus the ancient faith confirms
To our great fathers given;
He takes young children to his arms,
And calls them heirs of heaven.
"Our God, how faithful are his ways!
His love endures the same;
Nor from the promise of his grace
Blots out the children's name."

"And now," said he, "as you belong to the church of Christ, so your children, in a certain sense, and that a very important and precious sense, belong to the church. Your little, unconscious babe belongs, in that sense, to the church. You will not, you cannot, misunderstand me. These are the children of a child of God. All your brethren and sisters in Christ count them in their great family circle. They covenant with you to pray for them, to watch for their good, and to rejoice in it, to provide means for their spiritual prosperity, and to seek their salvation. But, above all, God will ever have special regard to them as the children of his dear child.

"Receive now," said he, "the divine ordinance of baptism, whereby God signifies to you, and seals, all that is implied in being your God."

He drew near the bed, with a silver bowl, from which he sprinkled water upon the head and forehead of the dear believer, whose countenance expressed the peace of receiving, rather than the effort of giving, while her lips moved now and then during the quiet scene.

They brought Edward, the first-born, and he stood, with his hand in his mother's hand, and was baptized. There were almost tears enough shed by us for his baptism, had tears been needed. Lucy came next, and then the rosy-cheeked Roger, who had been persuaded to leave his new sled, a little while, that Saturday afternoon.

But now the little boy was coming in from his cradle. His mother raised herself in the bed, and received him in her arms. He had been weaned, but, on coming to his mother, he began to make some solicitations, which, beautiful and affecting though they were, some of us endeavored not to see, but turned to smell of some violets, and to open a book of engravings. The mother smiled, and held him off, but immediately put two fingers, one on each eye, and wept;—the marriage-ring on one of those fingers,—ah, me! how had the finger shrunk away from it. The nurse took the child and diverted its attention. The husband sat far on the bed, put one arm under the pillow that supported his wife, and held her hand in his. Recollections and anticipations, we knew, were thronging, unbidden, into that mother's soul. She had been reminded of fountains of love sealed up, and yet there were opening within her living fountains of water. She grew calm, beckoned for a little book on the table, opened it, and pointed her husband to a stanza, which she had marked, and he read it for her:—

"When I can trust my all with God,
In trial's painful hour,
Bow all resigned beneath his rod,
And bless his sparing power;
A joy springs up amid distress,
A fountain in the wilderness."

That was her profession of religion, and her signal to the pastor to proceed. The father took the little boy in his arms, held him over the bed, before his wife; the pastor reached from the other side, and baptized Walter, in the name of the covenant-keeping God. The father held the child for the mother's kiss, and then took him away, fearing a repetition of the previous scene. But the wife drew her husband back to her, and left a kiss on his own cheek, amidst his tears.

"And now," said the pastor, after prayer, "God has been in this place, and has himself applied to you and your children the seal of his everlasting covenant. Do not make your faith in it to depend on the degree of equanimity or vividness in your feelings; but remember what Elizabeth said to Mary: 'And blessed is she that believeth, for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord.'"

"O," said Mrs. P., "is it possible that I live to see this day? I almost forget my sickness, my separation from my husband and children, in the thought that God is my covenant God, and the God of my children. My baptism is to me a visible writing and seal from God; and my children's baptism is the same. I always used to think of baptism merely as a profession on our part. O, how much more there is in it, besides that! It is God's covenant and testimony toward me. Blessed names!" said she, soliloquizing,—"Father, Son, and Holy Ghost! sweet society of the Godhead! They come together; they are like the three that came to Abraham's tent. Each has his precious gift and influence for my soul. Why was I allowed to see this day, and enjoy this?"

The pastor said, "This is just one of those things which make us say, 'His goodness is unsearchable.' There seems to be no way of accounting for this rich, free, sovereign love."

"Can I fear," said she, "to leave my children in such hands? No. God of Abraham! 'thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations.' Faithful God! 'a God to thee and thy seed after thee;' what power the seal of the covenant has to make you believe it; yes, and seemingly to hear it read to you. Do speak to all our dear mothers, and tell them in health to make far more, than many do, of baptism for their children."

"And have you no blessing for me?" said the husband, as the pastor rose to go.

"Dear sir," said the pastor, "they seem to have left you alone."

He had been sitting, somewhat out of sight, at the foot of the bedstead; but, it was evident, from several signs, that his feelings were deeply moved.

The pastor took his arm, and, bidding the wife an affectionate but hasty adieu, he went with him to the sitting-room below.

"I need no arguments," said the husband, "to satisfy me, further, that you are right. You have a system of religion which, I see, is good for everything, and for everybody, and for all times, and places, and circumstances. Sir, I have been sceptical; but I must confess that a religion which can come into a family, like mine, and do what it has done, through you, sir, to mine, and to me, must be from God. Sir, I shall always respect our pastor for his consistency with his principles, and for many other reasons; but I prefer principles like yours, which can go to the sick and dying, and to little children whose mother——"

Here he began to weep. The pastor said, "To take a mother from a young family of children, like yours, Mr. Peirce, is just the thing which we should prevent, could we have the ordering of affairs."

"I feel," said Mr. P., "that God's hand is upon me. Passages from the Bible, which I learned at sea, from love to my mother, come to me now. She put a Bible in a box, and covered it up with a dozen pairs of woollen hose, knit with her own hands. I have been saying to myself, in the chamber, 'Behold, he cometh with clouds.' It is growing dark over my dwelling; God is descending upon us in a cloud. 'Behold, he taketh away, who can hinder him? Who will say unto him, what doest thou.' O, you never lost a wife, my dear sir, nor looked on a motherless family, as I begin to do. God help me, for I shall lose my reason."

"No, my dear sir," said the pastor; "think what has just taken place up stairs. You now seem to say, as Manoah did, 'We shall surely die;' but his wife said, 'If the Lord were pleased to kill us,—he would not have showed us all these things.' God has bestowed on your children, through their believing mother, his covenant, to be their God.—You are a Notary Public, I believe, sir."

"I am," said Mr. Peirce.

"Then," said the pastor, "you know the importance of seals."

"O, yes," said Mr. P. "A gentleman, last week, came near losing the sale of a large property, situate in one of the Middle States, because he had had some papers executed, here, before a court not having a seal. I told him, beforehand, that he was wrong; but he wished to know of what possible use a seal could be, when the judge and the clerk used printed forms, and the blanks were filled under their own hands. The papers came back, and he had to do his business over again, and before a court having a seal."

"But he was perfectly honest, at first, I presume," said the pastor, "only the form was defective."

Mr. P. Yes, sir; but the form, in such a case, is the warranty. You know that the power to have and use a seal is one of the things specially conveyed by a legislature.

"God has seals," said the pastor. "One is baptism. It used to be circumcision. But, as the old royal seal is broken at the coronation of a new king, God appointed a new seal, baptism, to mark the new dispensation; as he also changed the Sabbath of creation in honor of his Son's reign, and removed the memorial of his deeds of greatest renown, the Passover, for one that signifies still greater deeds, the Lord's Supper. Thus God has his seals. He attaches great importance to them. He binds himself by them. Your wife, being a child of God, it is his arrangement, from the beginning, to enter into covenant with her in behalf of her children. He stands, now, in a special relation to them, and has placed the beautiful seal of Heaven upon his promise to that dear sick mother, 'I will be a God to thee and to thy seed after thee.'"

"Is it necessary that the father should be left out?" said Mr. P., covering his face with his handkerchief. "They are mine, and God holds me responsible for them. I am to be left alone with them in the world. Is there not mercy for me, too? O, I had such a gleam of hope in the chamber! As I saw the water descending from your hand upon those dear heads, I thought, How much like a divine act such baptism is,—something from God. I always thought of baptism as a cross, to which I must submit; now I see that it is a token of love, bestowed upon me. So I thought of those words: 'I am found of them that sought me not.' God seems to have come to me in that baptism. I was expecting that, if I ever became a Christian, I must, in token of my submission, be buried in the waters of baptism. I would be willing to be, still, if necessary; but that gentle baptism, coming to me and mine, seems like God being beforehand with me, doing something with me and for me. It made me think of Christ inviting himself into the house of Zaccheus, to save his soul. I always felt that I must obtain religion wholly of myself; now I feel that God has begun the work in me. I am sustained and borne on. That baptism was the most powerful appeal that ever reached my heart. It seems to me, in its connection with the gospel, like a beautiful symphony of instrumental music in an anthem, which strives to interpret the words. It proved an overture to me, indeed, in the best sense. But, my dear sir, how near we came to losing all this which my wife has enjoyed."

The door opened, and little Lucy came in with two plates and two silver knives, and that great red apple which her mother had received a few days before. "Mother sends her love to you, sir, and begs that you and father will eat this."

They looked at the apple for a few moments, when the husband said, "I do not feel like eating it. Do oblige me by taking it home with you."

The pastor took it home with him, placed it on his mantel-piece in his study, where, for several days, it gave such an odor as to attract the notice of every one that came in. The hand that sent it to him, in less than a week had finished its work on earth. The apple then became a hallowed thing. There it remained till it wilted, grew soft, and finally turned nearly black.

A little, unceremonious visitant to his father's study would often climb into the chair near the shelf, and express his wonder, and repeat his questions, at the seeming mystery,—first, of not eating the apple, and suffering it to be wasted; and then, of letting it remain when it ought to be thrown away. It was not long, however, before the apple was buried in a pot of earth. In due time green shoots appeared. And when the pastor saw them, he said with himself, "The children of thy servants shall continue, and their seed shall be established before thee."

How it grew in the pastor's study, a little sacramental emblem of hallowed scenes, and of infinitely precious truths,—how a place was selected, and afterwards prepared, for it, near a garden-wall which separates the wife's little garden from her grave,—and how the husband came alone, one Sabbath, and joined the church, receiving the seal of baptism from the same hand that sprinkled the water upon the heads of his wife and children,—I cannot tell you now, nor, after so long detention, would you be willing at present to hear.

[1] A curious reason for this, in the minds of some, appears to be that, when man was created, woman was included in him. For, they say, in the first chapter of Genesis, and in the account of the sixth day, before woman was made, the plural word them is used: "male and female created he them." They say that the blessing was pronounced on the man and woman in Adam. For they think it improbable that Moses would anticipate his history so much as to bring in woman, and, withal, her blessing, too, at the sixth day, when the narrative teaches that she was made some time afterwards. Hence, they say, it was that woman was for ages treated as included in man. There is something pleasing in this fancy, but it seems like one of Origen's allegories, he being the father of allegorical interpretation. It had its origin in an ancient Rabbinical sentiment.