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.