A26682:102
An Alarm to Unconverted Sinners
An alarm to unconverted sinners, in a serious treatise ... whereunto are annexed Divers practical cases of conscience judiciously resolved / by Joseph Alleine, late preacher of the Gospel at Taunton in Somerset-shire.An alarme to unconverted sinners, in a serious treatise ... whereunto are annexed Divers practical cases of conscience judiciously resolved / by Joseph Alleine, late preacher of the Gospel at Taunton in Somerset-shire.
London: printed by E.T. and R.H., 1672
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
Sol. I answer it is not the end of Baptism to regenerate. 1. Because then there would be no reason, why it should be confined only to the seed of believers: for both the law of God, and the nature of Charity, require us to use the means of conversion for all, as far as we can have opportunity. Were this true, no such charity as to catch the children of Turks and Heathens, and baptize them, and dispatch them to heaven out of hand, like the bloody wretches, that made the poor Protestants (to save their lives) to swear they would come to mass, and that they would never depart from it, and then put them forth with to death, saying, they would hang them while in a good mind. 2. Because it presupposeth regeneration, and therefore cannot be intended to confer it. In all the express instances in Scripture, we find that baptism doth suppose their repenting, believing, receiving the Holy Ghost. Act. 8 37. Act. 2. 38. Act. 10. 47. Mark 16. 16. And to imagine, that baptism was instituted for an end of which not one of the first subjects was capable (for they were all adult persons and supposed to have faith and repentance according as they professed, and their children were not baptized till after them, in their right,) were no little absurdity. Were this doctrine true, baptism would make disciples, but we find it doth bespeak them such before hand. Matth. 28. 19. 3. Because Baptism, being but a Seal of the Govenant, cannot convey the benefits, but ⟨p. 14⟩according to the tenor of the covenant, to which it is set. Now the Covenant is conditional, therefore the Seal conveys conditionally. The Covenant requires faith and repentance, as the condition of the grand benefits, pardon, and life. Act. 16. 31. Act. 3. 19. And what the Covenant doth not convey but upon these conditions, the Seal cannot. So that baptism doth presuppose faith and repentance in the subject, without which it neither doth, nor can convey the saving benefits: otherwise the Seal should convey contrary to the tenor of the Covenant to which it is affixed.