clothed. But as the robe once put on may be renewed, so by frequent repairing it is destroyed." Wherein he strikingly expresses both the possibility of restoration after Baptism, and the danger increasing at each necessity of such restoration.
Further, any one who allows himself to think that it had been better for him not to have been made a "member of Christ" in infancy, knows nothing of the value of God's ordinance: as indeed none can experimentally know it, but those who have grown up in its privileges. Increasing strength was thereby guaranteed to us: strength, which should grow with our growth; surmount every trial with which we should be exercised; be a shield and buckler proportioned to our warfare, in child, in youth, in maturer age: "support us in all dangers, and carry us through all temptations:" and so, strengthened by our Confirmation, we should be delivered on to that other Sacrament, whereby we not only "put on Christ," but "Christ dwelleth in us and we in Him." This might have been; yea, in many has been: but if we cast aside the armour wherewith God had girt us; set at nought His counsels, and listened not to His reproofs; went out naked to the battle, and listlessly neglected our defence; gave way to our enemy daily in little sins, (such as we were then capable of,) and so gradually grew in sin instead of holiness: whom have we to blame, if when the harder trials of life came on, we were worsted? if, when we ought to have been men, we were, in strength but not in innocence, as children? if we reaped as we sowed? sowed little and daily sins, and at last reaped, with increase, a grievous fall? We cannot have both advantages: we cannot have the privilege without the responsibility and the risk. We cannot have all the privileges of Christians, and then, when we have neglected or profaned them, be as if we had been altogether heathens, now, for the first time, to be admitted into the privileges of the Covenant, and so be placed in the same condition as if we had never been put in trust and found unfaithful. Ours is inestimably the higher privilege; to have had God's seal put upon us, God's Spirit within us, from our childhood up: but if we have broken that seal, and resisted that Spirit, we cannot be as if we had kept it safe and listened to His
