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"Mystical birthright": Jelf's Bampton Lectures on Baptismal Regeneration

From the 1844 Bampton Lectures of R.W. Jelf, An inquiry into the means of grace, their mutual connection, and combined use, with especial reference to the Church of England. Jelf - one of those whom Nockles lists as the 'Zs', the post-1833 continuation of the Old High tradition - in the first of the lectures expounds the doctrine of baptismal regeneration:

It is not without good grounds, therefore, but rather with the full plenitude of assurance, that our own branch of Christ's Church has given a prominent place to this doctrine in her formularies. What else could be expected from that Church, which to a due appreciation of the weight of Christian antiquity, unites an unconditional reliance upon Scripture as her one supreme, paramount, and infallible guide? What is there to surprise us, if a Church founded upon these principles instructs the very babes in Christ, that they are "made in Baptism members of Christ, the children of God, and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven"? That the inward and spiritual grace, of which water and the words of institution are the outward means, is "a death unto sin, and a new birth unto righteousness"? How could she do otherwise, in all her Offices for Baptism, than seize the very moment in which the Baptism is consummated, to remind the by-standers that the babe in Christ is now regenerate. Upon what other, except Scriptural grounds, does she make the very Collect in which she commemorates the Nativity of our Lord, a vehicle for acknowledging the new nativity of those for whom that Divine and Holy Child opened the "fountain for sin and for uncleanness", as of those who are "regenerate and made God's children by adoption and grace"? More unequivocal assertions of the Church's doctrine it is impossible to frame; and it is difficult to see, by what evasion any member, still more any Minister, of her communion, can elude their force ...

On the whole, the opinion of our Church, upon the grounds just stated, having been so unequivocally expressed, it would be a betrayal of the preacher's trust, to shrink from connecting all the "means of grace" with this great initiatory Sacrament. The life thus imparted seems to be a state of transition between earth and heaven; a life to be improved, awakened, sanctified, rendered immortal by God's Holy Spirit here in a state of grace, with a view to its rising again in unclouded purity in a state of glory. Accordingly, we may venture in the ensuing Lectures to consider it as the connecting link between the several means of grace. May God give grace to all His children to perceive the nature and value of their mystical birthright, to "make" their "calling and election sure".

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