positive influence to deprave or eject those who ought to be their
most useful and honoured members.

It was already breaking upon me, that I could not fulfil the dreams of
my boyhood as a minister in the Church of England. For, supposing that
with increased knowledge I might arrive at the conclusion that Infant
Baptism was a fore-arranged "development,"--not indeed practised in
the _first_ generation, but expedient, justifiable, and intended
for the _second_, and probably then sanctioned by one still living
apostle,--even so, I foresaw the still greater difficulty of Baptismal
Regeneration behind. For any one to avow that Regeneration took place
in Baptism, seemed to me little short of a confession that he had
never himself experienced what Regeneration is. If I _could_ then
have been convinced that the apostles taught no other regeneration,
I almost think that even their authority would have snapt under the
strain: but this is idle theory; for it was as clear as daylight to me
that they held a totally different doctrine, and that the High Church
and Popish fancy is a superstitious perversion, based upon carnal
inability to understand a strong spiritual metaphor. On the other
hand, my brother's arguments that the Baptismal Service of the Church
taught "spiritual regeneration" during the ordinance, were short,
simple, and overwhelming. To imagine a _twofold_ "spiritual
regeneration" was evidently a hypothesis to serve a turn, nor in any
of the Church formulas was such an idea broached. Nor could I hope for
relief by searching through the Homilies or by drawing deductions from
the Articles: for if I there elicited a truer doctrine, it would never
show the Baptismal Service not to teach the Popish tenet; it would
merely prove the Church-system to contain contradictions, and not to
deserve that absolute declaration of its truth, which is demanded of
Church ministers. With little hope of advantage, I yet felt it a duty