make His present bountifulness a ground of disbelieving His past loving-kindness. God had given them their former birth in Baptism, and clad them with Christ, and graffed them into Christ, had buried them and raised them up with Christ. This life they had wasted, and destroyed. God now has given them another, whereby "Christ may again be formed in them." Let them not, in conformity to any system of man, lose the benefits of their past experience; but rather take the more earnest warning that they suffer not this life also to decay. They may know from God's word, that they were quickened with Christ in Baptism; they know from their own experience, that they have been since dead. God has taught them to beware of a second death. It may be the last.
There are, then, these limitations in Scripture, or derived from it by the Fathers, to this second birth after Baptism. That it is one of suffering, whereas the former birth, by Baptism, was one of joy and ease; that it is less complete than the former, and is a slower and more toilsome process (the slowness is spoken of by St. Paul, "my little children, of whom I travail in birth again, until Christ be formed in you:") that it is a second regeneration, ("of whom I travail again,")—not differing from the preceding, as if the regeneration of Christ's ordinance were a change of state, the regeneration of repentance a change of nature; that, outward in the flesh; this, inward in the spirit: God forbid that we should so speak of Christ's ordinances!—but that it is a sort of restoration of that life, given to those to whom it is given, by virtue of that ordinance; a restoration of a certain portion of their Baptismal health. It is not "the new birth" simply; that is Baptism; but it is a revival, in a measure, of that life; to be received gratefully, as a renewal of a portion of that former gift; to be exulted in, because it is life; but to be received and guarded with trembling, because it is the renewal of what had been forfeited; not to be boasted of, because it is but the fragment of an inheritance, "wasted in riotous living." Lastly it is bestowed through the ministry of the Church. "Little children, of whom I travail again."
With such limitations, and always presupposing that a former
