Let me then ask, in the first place, what is the great characteristic of the religion we profess?

If we look to divines for an answer to this question, we may easily obtain it.  We shall find some of them in their sermons speaking of circumcision, baptismal washings and purifications, new moons, feasts of the passover and unleavened bread, sacrifices, and other rites.  We shall find them dwelling on these as constituent parts of the religion of the Jews.  We shall find them immediately passing from thence to the religion of Jesus Christ.  Here all is considered by them to be spiritual.  Devotion of the heart is insisted upon as that alone which is acceptable to God.  If God is to be worshipped, it is laid down as a position, that he is to be worshipped in spirit and in truth.  We shall find them also, in other of their sermons, but particularly in those preached after the reformation, stating the advantages obtained by that event.  The Roman Catholic system is here considered by them to be as ceremonial as that of the Jews.  The Protestant is held out as of a more spiritual nature, and as more congenial therefore with the spirit of the gospel.  But what is this but a confession, in each case, that in proportion as men give up ceremonies and become spiritual in their worship, their religion is the best, or that spirituality is the grand characteristic of the religion of Jesus Christ?  Now there immediately arises a presumption, if spirituality of feeling had been intended as the characteristic of any religion, that no ceremonious ordinances would have been introduced into it.

If, again, I were to make an assertion to divines, that Jesus Christ came to put an end to the ceremonial parts of the Jewish law, and to the types and shadows belonging to the Jewish dispensation, they would not deny it.  But baptism and the supper were both of them outward Jewish ceremonies, connected with the Jewish religion.  They were both of them types and shadows, of which the antetypes and substances had been realized at the death of Christ.  And therefore a presumption arises again, that these were not intended to be continued.

And that they were not intended to be continued, may be presumed from another consideration.  For what was baptism to any but a Jew?  What could a Gentile have understood by it?  What notion could he have formed, by means of it, of the necessity of the baptism of Christ?  Unacquainted with purifications by water as symbols of purification of heart, he could never have entered, like a Jew, into the spiritual life of such an ordinance.  And similar observations may be made with respect to the Passover-Supper.  A Gentile could have known nothing, like a Jew, of the meaning of this ceremony.  He could never have seen in the Paschal Lamb any type of Christ, or in the deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, any type of his own deliverance from sin, so clearly or so feelingly as if the facts and customs had related to his own history, or as if he had been trained to the connexion by a long series of prophecies.  In short, the passover could have had but little meaning to him.