Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Primitive Doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration
N ow I can imagine it said, Why not take statements as they stand? Here is a plain assertion in our baptismal service; take it in its plain meaning, and do not trouble yourself with elaborate explanations and inquiries.
But the answer to this is obvious. It is very easy and very proper to take a statement as it stands, if there is no other statement either required or allowed, to which it is Opposed. But if there is, our attitude is immediately altered. We cannot help ourselves, then, but are obliged, instead of taking one statement as it stands, to go into and examine two statements. The line Of simplicity is over, and that of explanation has come; and, the surface once broken, there is no knowing how much work there may be under neath. Single truths may be taken simply; but if we have to combine con?icting truths, we must go more or less deep for the point of junction; for truth is like a tree, the more space it covers above ground the further it goes below, the more comprehensive it is, the deeper its root or basis is. Do those who say generally take statements as they stand, see difficulties as they stand? Or rather, do they not live in a world of truth of their own, wholly different from the real one?
The course they recommend is doubtless much the simpler one, and truth also would be much more simple if it was not so complex. But truth being the complex and con?icting system which it is, this general maxim is for us visionary and impracticable. Let persons, then, who repeat this maxim beware that, in saying take statements as they stand, they do not practically mean take statements without under standing them, take them by themselves, out of their place, apart from their relation to other truths.
This will explain, then, why, with a view to reconcile the two positions on the subject of grace, to which I have re ferred, a treatise on predestination was needful - a treatise to a certain extent metaphysical. To reconcile these two posi tions, it was necessary to enter fully into both; and it was impossible to go at all fully into the predestinarian position without a certain amount of metaphysics.
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