eek concealment?"

People cannot give full evidence that they are Christians unless they
make a public profession of religion. They cannot properly remember
Jesus without partaking of his body and blood. Depend upon it, my dear
friends, God sets great value on ordinances, and our observance of them.
God has given us two sacraments, and he who dispenses with them because
he undervalues them, or undertakes to say that they are not necessary to
him, or to any in this age of the world, is in peril. The only danger
from forms and ordinances is when they are of human origin. We must take
care and not let our revulsion from Romanism carry us to the extreme of
neglecting or setting aside the ordinances of God's appointment. "There
are three that bear record on earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the
blood; and these three agree in one." A man may, with equal propriety,
dispense with the blood, and its symbol the wine, or with the Spirit, as
with the water, if God has appointed it with the other two as a witness
between him and us. You notice that the Spirit is named with the two
inanimate things, the blood and the water. Take care, I say to my
friends, lest, in setting aside the water, you shut out that divine
Spirit, who, knowing how to deal with our nature, chooses the blood and
the water to be used by us in connection with our most spiritual
religious exercises of the mind and heart. We have no more right to
interfere with God's ordinances than with the number of the persons in
the Trinity.

"All this affects me so," said Mr. Benson, "that I shall not fail to
offer my child to be baptized, if I am allowed to do so. Now, there is
my difficulty. Why do you think, and how do you show, that baptism must
now be used as God's sign and seal of his covenant with believers for
their children? When circumcision was dropped, some insist that the
covenant was dropped with it, and, therefore, that there is no warrant
in Scripture for baptizing children."

"Why," said Mrs. Ford, "if the coming in of Moses' dispensation did not
abolish the arrangement with Abraham, why should its going out? I am
inclined to think that Abraham and his seed are, to Moses and his
dispensation, something like that vine to the trellis, running over it
to the top of the piazza, bending itself in, you see, to accommodate
itself, but having a root and a top, the one below, the other above, the
short frame, which only guides it up to the roof. In the eleventh o