it were an union between one dead and one living?  And that perpetual contact with a heathen, and therefore an enemy of God, is not that in a relation so close and intimate, perpetual defilement?  The apostle decides this with his usual inspired wisdom.  He decides that the marriage-bond is sacred still.  Diversities of religious opinion, even the farthest and widest diversity, cannot sanction separation.  And so he decides in the 13th verse, “The woman which hath an husband that believeth not, if he be pleased to dwell with her, let her not leave him.”  And, “if any brother hath a wife that believeth not, and she be pleased to dwell with him, let him not put her away,” v. 12.

Now for us in the present day, the decision on this point is not of so much importance as the reason which is adduced in support of it.  The proof which the Apostle gives of the sanctity of the marriage is exceedingly remarkable.  Practically it amounts to this;—­If this were no marriage, but an unhallowed alliance, it would follow as a necessary consequence that the offspring could not be reckoned in any sense as the children of God; but, on the other hand, it is the instinctive, unwavering conviction of every Christian parent, united though he or she may be to a heathen, “My child is a child of God,” or, in the Jewish form of expression, “My child is clean.”  So the apostle says, “the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband:  else were your children unclean; but now they are holy,” for it follows if the children are holy in this sense of dedicated to God, and are capable of Christian relationship, then the marriage relation was not unhallowed, but sacred and indissoluble.

The value of this argument in the present day depends on its relation to baptism.  The great question we are deciding in the present day may be reduced to a very few words.  This question—­the Baptismal question—­is this:—­whether we are baptized because we are the children of God, or, whether we are the children of God because we are baptized; whether in other words, when the Catechism of the Church of England says that by baptism we are “made the children of God,” we are to understand thereby that we are made something which we were not before—­magically and mysteriously changed; or, whether we are to understand that we are made the children of God by baptism in the same sense that a sovereign is made a sovereign by coronation.  Here the apostle’s argument is full, decisive, and unanswerable.  He does not say that these children were Christian, or clean, because they were baptized, but they were the children of God because they were the children of one Christian parent; nay more than that, such children could scarcely ever have been baptized, because, if the rite met with opposition from one of the parents, it would be an entire and perfect veto to the possibility