will bring forth the fruit of good living or not depends upon the amount and kind of cultivation which that new life receives. If we practice our religion sincerely and earnestly, if we avoid evil companions, if we pray daily and receive the sacraments with devotion and faith, if we are regular in the worship of God, if we truly repent of our sins, if we are trying daily to follow the example of our Saviour Christ, then from that seed of new life planted in us at Baptism there ought to be growing up a new life, which will gradually crowd out the old.

By nature we are the children of a fallen race. That is the meaning of original sin. God created the human race with the gift of His life, in a state of righteousness. At the very beginning of the race the life of God was lost through sin, and that accounts for our inheriting a nature which easily falls into sin. We have inherited human nature bereft of the life of God. But God has mercifully provided that we may be born again and receive the life of God through Baptism. The actual facts seem to belie this theory: but the reason is that we have all sinned since our Baptism. Had we used the grace which God through Baptism entrusted to us, sin would not now have such hold upon us.

We might state the matter in still another way.

God looked

The human race has been a failure. back over human history and saw that from the very beginning that history had been marked by sin. God willed to blot out this huge mistake by making a new creation. "Behold, I make all things new." He willed to form on the earth a new human family, and to that end He sent His only-begotten Son into the world. The incarnate Son of God became the second Adam, the new Head of the race. God provided that all men might be united to that second Adam, taken up into the family of God, grafted into the new creation, through the sacrament of Baptism. By Baptism we are made "members of Christ, children of God, and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven."

Baptism, simple as it is, carries with it tremendous obligations. The Church thus addresses the sponsors who answer for the infant: "Ye are to take care that this child be virtuously brought up to live a godly and a Christian life; remembering always that Baptism doth represent unto us our profession; which is, to follow the example of our Saviour Christ, and to be made like unto Him; that, as He died and rose again. for us, so should we who are baptized die from sin, and rise again unto righteousness; continually mortifying all our evil and corrupt affections, and

daily proceeding in all virtue and godliness of living." That is the obligation that rests upon all of us who have been baptized. The life of the baptized must necessarily be different from the life of the unbaptized. God expects great things from us in our character and in our actions. God has given us the power to do great things; and we are responsible in His sight for a terrible failure if we do not live up to that high calling.

XII

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE BAPTIZED AND THE UNBAPTIZED

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T the beginning of the Order in the Prayer Book for the Burial of the Dead this rubric is to be found: "Here is to be noted, that the Office ensuing is not to be used for any unbaptized adults, any who die excommunicate, or who have laid violent hands upon themselves." It must seem to many that this classifying of unbaptized adults with those who die excommunicate, and with those who have committed suicide, is rather a harsh stricture upon the unbaptized. For we know there are many adults who are unbaptized through no fault of their own, but simply because they never had the importance of baptism brought to their attention. Many of them are good people, thoroughly respectable and decent members of the community. Their lives may be largely governed by Christian standards of morality. Indeed they look upon themselves as

Christians and would feel insulted if some one spoke of them as heathen or pagan.

Why should there be this discrimination against unbaptized adults? What can the Church mean by refusing to allow her burial office to be read over the bodies of those who die unbaptized?

The answer is that the Church has composed this office for those who die in sacramental union with Christ, and who therefore are members of His mystical Body the Church. If a man has been baptized and has not been put out of the communion of the Church nor taken his own life, the Church assumes that he was in a state of grace when he died and therefore that he is in Christ. There are many statements in the Burial Office which are intelligible only on the supposition that the deceased person was by virtue of his baptism a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Let us look at the Burial Office with this in mind. Take the opening sentence for example: "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die." This plainly implies that the deceased person has made some definite act of faith in Christ, that he has by baptism put on Christ. The familiar sentence which