She had been brought
up an Independent. After my father's death she became a Baptist, from
conscientious scruples. She considered the Baptists, as I do, as the only
sect who thoroughly embody the Calvinistic doctrines. She held it, as I do,
an absurd and impious thing for those who believe mankind to be children
of the devil till they have been consciously "converted," to baptise
unconscious infants and give them the sign of God's mercy on the mere
chance of that mercy being intended for them. When God had proved by
converting them, that they were not reprobate and doomed to hell by His
absolute and eternal will, then, and not till then, dare man baptise them
into His name. She dared not palm a presumptuous fiction on herself,
and call it "charity." So, though we had both been christened during
my father's lifetime, she purposed to have us rebaptised, if ever that
happened--which, in her sense of the word, never happened, I am afraid, to
me.
She gloried in her dissent; for she was sprung from old Puritan blood,
which had flowed again and again beneath the knife of Star-Chamber
butchers, and on the battle-fields of Naseby and Sedgemoor.
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