Village Sermons on the Baptismal Service Author:John Keble, Edward Bouverie Pusey Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SERMON III. Ephesians ir. 5. " One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism." Do you not perceive, by the very sound of these words, what a great and holy thing Bapti... more »sm must be : seeing that it is reckoned up with the greatest and holiest Name of all—the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of God the Father of all—and with faith in those Names ? as though it were not altogether sufficient for us to have all one Lord, one faith and one God, but we must also have one Baptism. Plainly we are here given to understand two great truths concerning that holy Sacrament: first, that it is a very solemn thing—one of the most solemn and important that can possibly be : and secondly, that it can come but once; a man can be baptized only once in his life. Now regarding the solemnity of Baptism I have shewn you from the Eubric in the Prayer Book, at the beginning of the Baptismal Service, what care the Church takes, to make it as public as she can, that all persons may think much of it, in that it isappointed to be, if possible, only on great days. I will remind you of some more things of the same kind, which have already been pointed out in the Catechising. It is convenient that Baptism be administered in the vulgar tongue : i. e. in the English language, not in the Latin which has sometimes been used in the Church: in order that all persons present may be more effectually reminded of their own Baptism. Now see, how certainly this makes every one of us answerable before God for a devout remembrance of his Baptism, as being indeed that good work, whereby he was made a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven. If we lived in Spain or Italy, or France, and did not understand the words of the service when we heard it, then of course we could not out of...« less