Two important corollaries, one referring to the Church, the other to parents, demand consideration.

First. If this argument be true the Church must extend two favors to their baptized children, which they have thus far steadily refused. One is a recognition of their Church membership, and the other admission to the Lord's supper.

As the Calvinistic Baptist has the advantage of his Calvinistic Pædobaptist in the argument, so he has of all his opponents in their practice. None but avowed believers are usually considered as Church members or admitted to the sacrament. Between these Predestinarian sections there is not a shadow of difference as to the necessity of regeneration and baptism before Church membership, and that the first, which is a pre-requisite of the second, cannot happen till after infancy; hence they both say the last cannot be conferred upon an infant, but he must have a quasi-membership, if any -be "a child of the Church." But if the first and last of these are above that age and class, how can baptism, the intermediate on which both depend, be capable of application to them? It cannot, and the Baptist again wins the day. They go together in the order laid down. If we grant the baptism because of regeneration, we must the membership because of baptism. If we shrink from this, if we dare not call our babes Christians and Church members, let us abandon infant baptism, calling it christening, or what you will, but not the Divine ordinance and sole passport to the Church on earth. We must recognize him as a member; he must be taught that he is one, that after due season, and on the expression of proper feelings on his part, he may assume his vows for himself, and enjoy all the privileges of the Church; but before that hour his connection is as close, his liberty as large as a child in a family before his maturity. If he sins he sins as a Church member. If he persist in his sin he is to be treated as a backslider. Thus alone shall we be consistent with ourselves and the truth. The second necessity is to admit our children, as soon as they can go to Church, to the great privilege and duty of Church members -the Lord's supper. This may seem to some the very extreme of folly and profanity. How will this service be desecrated by such an admission! Better fall back on the very doctrine that excludes infants from heaven than to admit one that drags us to such irreverent conclusions. But we ask, where is the ground for the especial sanctity which is thrown around this ordinance, a sanctity so sacred that those in the congregation who are nearest the heart and the likeness of the Redeemer are to be excluded from its delights? The hospitality which that supper was intended to commemorate and

symbolize is turned into crabbed discourtesy by these close-hearted servitors of the Master of the feast. What objection can arise to the participation of children in its duties and influences? Is it because they cannot understand its meaning? They are taught to pray long before they are sensible of its nature or benefits. Is that greatest of human privileges, speaking to God, turned into a blasphemous pantomime by the broken prattle of a child's prayer? But if this is obligatory on every parental conscience, why shall not the Eucharist, the other mode of approach unto God, be granted them? They will understand it much earlier and easier than they can prayer. The child knows the meaning of food before he does of conversation; and no way of impressing the great central truth of the Gospel on his sensitive nature can compare with this one appointed by Christ. It seems as if he had this object especially in view, so potent would its influence be. The little ones would have every sense brought in contact with the great truth, and as knowledge thus first enters the soul, they would, from this frequent and solemn duty, have the Lamb of God in his sufferings and death as vividly active in their hearts as they now have their daily meals.

It cannot be refused them from their unfitness, for many others, less worthy, go in their adult depravities, having the wedding garment upon a soul, alive, indeed, but not all glorious within, while those babes in Christ have upon them the perfect robe of Christ's righteousness. The one that is nearest a little child is the most heartily welcomed and rewarded by the Lord of the feast, and the child himself will be taken up in his arms there, and blessed as it nowhere else can be. How pleasant the spectacle of parents and children gathering as one family about this great family table of the Father of mercies and God of all comforts! The pictures of a family prayer and family baptism would then have a fitting consummation in the family communion. The very sight of it would remove every objection. As the posture of kneeling in prayer needs no argument save the convictions the beholding eye gives the heart, so the propriety and beauty of this act would convince every

beholder.

These two privileges are absolutely essential to the Church relation and the Church life. Without them baptism is impotent and in a measure harmful; with them it is un fait accompli, a finished and perfect work. Without them, the advocates of believer's baptism can pick flaws in our practice that our argument can never close up. With them it stands forth clear as the sun and fair as the moon, lovely and of good report

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Let baptism then have its perfect work. Do not admit the new-born Christian to the font but shut him off from the class, the covenant, and the supper, until he comes back to his Father's house, from which his elder brethren have driven him, and, too often, with jealousies and surmises contribute to the festival of his return. Keep not this seed-wheat in the wilderness, refusing to plant it in the garden of the Lord, until it has grown up among universal rocks and tares. It is not the best way to keep weeds out of that garden by letting nothing grow from the seed, but all from translated exotics. The tares will be bedded in those roots, will be in the sap of those trees to spring up and defile many after their transplanting. Let us the rather carefully raise the godly seed in the sacred inclosure of the Church; and then shall the glories of her future shine upon our eyes when, not by tributary streams like the Sabbath school, but through the central channel, shall flow in upon her a never-failing stream of holy youth, greatly enriching this paradise of God.

As the Church is yet restrained by an imperfect theology from its full duty, so many Christian parents deprive their children of this privilege under convictions originating in like error. Two reasons prompt them to deny their babes this symbol of and passport to the sacramental grace, the first arising from convictions of the invalidity of the ordinance, the last from an unwillingness to impose a yoke on the child which shall afterward burden his conscience. The first we have already examined; let us consider the latter. They dislike to impose a burden on their children, and that this is one proved by the dissatisfaction of many with it when they enter the Church on profession of their faith. The general objection is easily disposed of. In multitudes of cases the parent imposes burdens on the child without his consent, often irksome, painful, and irremediable, and sometimes deadly, which it is sinful for them to murmur at, and from which they cannot escape but by the door of death, made lustrous to their sad eyes by these parental impositions. Do they object to imposing their blood and lineage on an immortal soul? Do they shrink from compelling him to carry their name, or speak their language, or abide in their social condition, be these what they may? Besides these burdens, which substantially make up the whole life of the child, they receive others from their hands for which they are responsible, and which may be equally intolerable. They bear a name at which they may be justly aggrieved and ashamed, an incurable deformity laid upon them by the poor taste of their parents. Is this not interfering with their rights and privileges?

But it may be said this is mere trifling. These are the necessary FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XI.-2

incidents of our origination from paternity, and are overbalanced by the blessings flowing from that relation. If children are hampered in these things over which we have little or no control, let them have freedom in their spiritual life. Do they have freedom there? Whence come those doctrinal views so closely resembling their parents'? How happens it that even in this land, with all our freedom of action, the son so seldom deserts the faith of his fathers? As his social and civil notions are growths from seeds of parental planting, so his religious sentiments draw their life blood from his convictions. If it be said these are the inevitable consequences of an intimacy for which the elders are not responsible, but they differ from a Christian duty, we answer, not materially, for these all involve and end in duty. Yet take an imposition which is a Christian duty exclusively, and which every Christian parent lays upon his child-prayer, for before he can well pronounce the name of God and has no glimmering of his nature, he is taught to address him. He is taught the parent's theology in his prayers, in its most vital forms. He is carried to his Church, placed in his Sabbath school, taught his catechism, made to expound the Bible as he understands it, placed under every possible religious burden but this, and without a thought in the parent that he is cramping the freedom of a soul. Why should not infant baptism precede these prayers and studies, giving them a fruitfulness, like good seed in good ground, they can never otherwise attain. It is the grand central duty of them all. It will make each of them vastly more efficacious than they can be in their present disorganized activity. His doctrinal views will be confirmed if he examines them as a Church member. His prayers will have a directness and force if he prays in the temple of the visible Church. Therefore, as in his blood, race, language, and name, social and civil condition, food and raiment, studies and trades, politiical and religious opinions, Sabbath instructions and daily prayers, in every other case, voluntary or otherwise, the child is under conditions in which he must live, and move, and have his being, it cannot make the fetters much heavier, or the victim much more indignant than he now is or ought to be, according to this reasoning, if the great Divine duty crowned and consecrated them all.

Finally, it may be said, This is solitary and alone solitary and alone among duties; it is the solemn sealing of the soul unto its God and Saviour. I cannot take this responsibility on myself, especially when I see how dissatisfied some are with their baptism. If you would rebaptize them I would give them the benefits of this consecration.

Not one in a thousand of other denominations murmur at having received this rite in infancy. Our children are exposed to peculiar

temptations. Many of our converts are from the unbaptized world, and their necessary baptism sometimes troubles the Christian child who takes his vows upon himself at the same time. But this would occasion no trouble did not many of these, under external pressure, prefer immersion; and this striking form, having the appearance of greater sanctity and self-denial, troubles their tender conscience, especially as their connection with their baptism has never been kept up by the Church, and of course equally neglected in the parental culture. Let them be instructed from their childhood in the duties, and made partakers of the privileges of the Church, and these murmurs will never rise in the heart of the baptized child, but rejoicings rather that he has never gone away, like these, into a far country, but always abode in his Father's house.

If we are still asked to rebaptize, we should refuse; for we make a mockery of the ordinance in reapplying it when we believe it is invalid. We take the name of God in vain over these candidates under the most solemn circumstances. If we are sincere in the act we unbaptize the rest of our Church, and perhaps disturb the peace of thousands while seeking to satisfy the crookedness of an individual conscience, whose difficulty is not usually with infant or believer's baptism, but with immersion, and who is, in fact, an exclusive believer in this mode, and ought, if he cannot be cured, to go with those whose practice honestly conforms to that opinion.

We have endeavored to show that this ordinance is appointed of God; that it is based on the right of every infant as embraced in the covenant of grace, not merely in that with Abraham, but in the larger one made with Adam, made in Christ; that it is impossible, from any basis of human or Divine honor and love, for God to send those who die in infancy to perdition, and yet it is impossible, on the same basis, for them to be saved except by the atonement of Christ, which must not include them as special subjects, but under a general law, whereby all yet in their infancy are subjects of saving grace, their inherited evil taken away, and they, though weak and erring, still without condemnation till they have fallen consciously and wilfully into sin. From this comes the inevitable conclusion that every child being made by Christ a member of his invisible Church, has a right, as a human being, to enter the human or visible Church. This right, while it inheres in all children, is properly conferred, except in extraordinary cases, only on those of believers, because they alone can experimentally bring them up in the obligations it imposes, while there is no such regenerative grace in it, or election through the covenant with the parents, as makes the baptized child, if he dies, the more sure of salvation than multitudes who, by