individuals, the aggregate of whom constitutes the national church, so
that any one individual, or any number of such individuals, may at the
same time be, by an act of their own, members of the church spiritual,
and in every congregation may form an 'ecclesia' or Christian community;
and how to facilitate and favor this without any schism from the
'enclesia', and without any disturbance of the body politic, was the
problem which Grindal and the bishops of the first generation of the
Reformed Church sought to solve, and it is the problem which every
earnest Christian endued with competent gifts, and who is at the same
time a patriot and a philanthropist, ought to propose to himself, as the
'ingens desiderium proborum'.

8th Sept, 1826.


Ib. c. viii. 7. p. 232.

Baptizing of infants, although confessed by themselves, to have been
continued ever sithence the very apostles' own times, yet they
altogether condemned.

'Quaere'. I cannot say what the fanatic Anabaptists, of whom Hooker is
speaking, may have admitted; but the more sober and learned
Antipaedobaptists, who differed in this point only from the reformed
churches, have all, I believe, denied the practice of infant baptism
during the first century.


B.J. c. ii. 1. p. 249.