only are properly baptized,--how
can we be silent? Would you be silent if Episcopalians should set up
Latin prayers, or the confessional; or the Methodists turn their
love-feasts into the old Passover?

_Mr. M._ We must tolerate the mistakes and errors of those who, in the
main, are confessedly good, and are conscientious in what we deem their
errors. When the noble array of great and good men in the Episcopal Low
Church, and among the Methodists, fall into such mistakes as you have
specified, there will be opportunity for other Christians to express
themselves. But you are rather rhetorical in your reasoning, to compare
the practice of infant baptism by Owen, and Watts, and Doddridge, and
Leighton, and Baxter, and all like them, with Latin prayers and a return
to the Passover.

_Mr. K._ There is not a case of sprinkling in the New Testament. You are
too well-informed to deny this.

_Mr. M._ Mr. K., there is not one instance of baptism, in the New
Testament, where there does not appear to me to be an improbability of
its having been administered by immersion.

By this time Mrs. K., who had been called away to attend to her child,
returned, and hearing my last remark, said, with a significant look at
her husband:

"We shall require you to prove that, Mr. M."

"Most willingly," said I. "Do you think, cousin Eunice, that the
multitudes who came to John and the apostles to be baptized, brought
changes of raiment with them?"

"No," said she; "and there were no conveniences for making a change of
dress in those places, I presume."

_Mr. M._ Were they immersed in the clothes which they had on?

_Mrs. K._ That does not seem probable. Some of them, at least, had
valuable garments, we may suppose, and few, if any, would wish to have
their apparel wet through, or to keep it on them, if wet.

_Mr. M._ They were not immersed without clothing, of course,
promiscuously, and, therefore, I believe that they were all baptized by
sprinkling or pouring, their loose upper garments allowing them to step
into the water, or very near it; and John, standing there (and the
apostles, also, when they administered baptism), and laying on the water
with his hand, or, which is not impossible, with the long-accustomed
bunches of hyssop. The Episcopal mode of administering the Lord's
Supper, enables me to conceive how baptism by sprinkling could be
administered rapidly. As six or more people are kneeling, the Episcopal
minister gives each