I.
WHAT CHRISTIAN NURTURE IS.

"Bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord."—Ephesians, vi. 4.

THERE is then some kind of nurture which is of the Lord, deriving a quality and a power from Him, and communicating the same. Being instituted By Him, it will of necessity have a method and a character peculiar to itself, or rather to Him. It will be the Lord's way of education, having aims appropriate to Him, and, if realized in its full intent, terminating in results impossible to be reached by any merely human method.

What then is the true idea of Christian or divine nurture, as distinguished from that which is not Christian? What is its aim? What its method of working? What its powers and instruments? What its contemplated results? Few questions have greater moment; and it is one of the pleasant signs of the times, that the subject involved is beginning to attract new interest, and excite a spirit of inquiry which heretofore has not prevailed in our churches.

In ordinary cases, the better and more instructive way of handling this subject, would be to go directly into the practical methods of parental discipline, and show by what modes of government and instruction we may hope to realize the best results. But unhappily the public mind is preoccupied extensively by a view of the whole subject, which I must regard as a theoretical mistake, and one which will involve, as long as it continues, practical results systematically injurious. This mistaken view it is necessary, if possible, to remove. And accordingly what I have to say will take the form of an argument on the question thus put ill issue; though I design to gather round the subject, as I proceed, as much of practical instruction as the mode of the argument will suffer. Assuming then the question above stated, What is the true idea of Christian education?—I answer in the following proposition, which it will be the aim of my argument to establish, viz:

That the child is to grow up a Christian, and never know himself as being otherwise.

In other words, the aim, effort, and expectation should be, not, as is commonly assumed, that the child is to grow up in sin, to be converted after he comes to a mature age; but that he is to open on the world as one that is spiritually renewed, not remembering the time when he went through a technical experience, but seeming rather to have loved what is good from his earliest years. I do not affirm that every child may, in fact and without exception, be so trained that he certainly will grow up a Christian. The qualifications it may be necessary to add will be given in another place, where they can be stated more intelligibly.

II. WHAT CHRISTIAN NURTURE IS.

“Bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord."—Ephesians, vi. 4.

WE proceed now to inquire—

II. How far God, in the revelation made of his character and will, favors the view of Christian nurture vindicated, in a former discourse, by arguments and evidences of an inferior nature? And—

1. According to all that God has taught us concerning his own dispositions, he desires on his part, that children should grow up in piety, as earnestly as the parent can desire it; nay, as much more earnestly, as he hates sin more intensely, and desires good with less mixture of qualification. Goodness, or the production of goodness, is the supreme end of God, and therefore, we know, on first principles, that he desires to bestow whatsoever spiritual grace is necessary to the moral renovation of childhood, and will do it, unless some collateral reasons in his plan, involving the extension of holy virtue, require him to withhold.

Thus, if nothing were hung upon parental faithfulness and example, if the child were not used, in some degree or way, as all argument, to hold the parent to a life of Christian diligence, then the good principle in the parent might lack the necessary stimulus to bring it to maturity. Or, if all children alike, in spite of ithe evil and unchristian example of the house, were to be started into life as spiritually renewed, one of the strongest motives to holy living would be taken away from parents, in the fact that their children are safe as regards a good beginning, without any carefulness in them, or prayerfulness in their life; and their own virtue might so overgrow itself with weeds, as never to attain to a sound maturity. Let it be enough to know, on first principles in the character of God, that he will so dispense his spiritual agency to you and to your children, as to produce, considering the freedom of you both, the best measure and the ripest state of holy virtue. And how far short is this of the conclusion, that if you live as you ought and may yourselves, God will so dispense his Spirit that you may see your children grow up in piety?

Observe, too, that he expressly pledges his Holy Spirit to you, as one of his first gifts, and, what is more, even commands you to be filled with the Spirit; and considering the organic relation that subsists, by his own appointment, between you and your children, how far off is he, in this, from pledging you a mercy that accrues to their benefit? He appoints you also to be a light to the world, and, by the grace he pours into your being, prepares you to be; how much more a light to minds that are fed by simple nurture from your own? And when you consider how fond he is, if I may so speak, in the blessings he pours on the good, of gathering their children with them in the same circle of favor, how many of his promises, in all ages, run—"to you and to your children," what better assurance can you reasonably ask, to fortify your confidence in whatever spiritual grace may be necessary to your utmost success?

2. If there be any such thing as Christian nurture, distinguished from that which is not Christian, which is generally admitted, and, by the Scriptures clearly asserted, then is it some kind of nurture which God appoints. Does it then accord with the known character of God, to appoint a scheme of education, the only proper result of which shall be that children are trained up under it in sin? It would not be more absurd to suppose that God has appointed church education, to produce a first crop of sin, and then a crop of holiness. God appoints nothing of which sin, and only sin, is to be the proper and legitimate result, whether for a longer or a shorter time; least of all, a mode of training which is to produce sin. Holy virtue is the aim of every plan God adopts, every means he prescribes, and we have no right to look only for sin, in that which he has appointed as a means of virtue. We can not do it understandingly without great impiety.

3. God does expressly lay it upon us to expect that our children will grow up in piety, under the parental nurture, and assumes the possibility that such a result may ordinarily be realized. "Train up a child"—how? for future conversion?—No, but "in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." If it be said that this relates only to outward habits of virtue and vice, not to spiritual life, the Old Testament, I reply, does not raise that distinction, as it is raised in the New. It puts all good together, all evil together, and regards a child trained up in the way he should go, as going in all the ways, and fulfilling all the ideas of virtue. The phraseology of the New Testament carries the same import. "Bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord," a form of expression, which indicates the existence of a Divine nurture, that is to encompass the child and mold him unto God; so that he shall be brought up, as it were, in Him.

4. A time is foretold, as our churches generally believe, when all shall know God, even from the least to the greatest; that is, shall spiritually know him, or so that there shall be no need of exhorting one another to know him; for intellectual knowledge is not carried by exhortation. If such a time is ever to come, then, at least, children are to grow up in Christ. Can it come too soon? And, if we have the opinion that any such thing is impossible, either we, or those who come after us, must get rid of it. A principal reason why the great expectations of the future, that we, in this age, are giving out so confidently, seem only visionary and idle dreams to many, is that we are perpetually assuming their impossibility ourselves. Our very theory of religion is, that men are to grow up in evil, and be dragged into the church of God by conquest. The world is to lie in halves, and the kingdom of God is to stretch itself side by side with the kingdom of darkness, making sallies into it, and taking captive those who are sufficiently hardened and bronzed in guiltiness to be converted!

Thus we assume even the absurdity of all our expectations in regard to the possible advancement of human society and the universal prevalence of Christian virtue. And thus we throw an air of extravagance and unreason over all we do. Whereas there is a sober and rational possibility, that human society should be universally pervaded by Christian virtue. The Christian scheme has a scope of intention, and instruments and powers adequate to this: it descends upon the world to claim all souls for its dominion—all men of all climes, all ages from childhood to the grave. It is, indeed, a plan which supposes the existence of sin, and sin will be in the world, and in all hearts in it, as long as the world or human society continues; but the scheme has a breadth of conception, and has powers and provisions embodied in it, which, apart from all promises and predictions, certify us of a day when it will reign in all human hearts, and all that live shall live in Christ. Let us either renounce any such confidence, or show, by a thorough consistency in our religious doctrines, that we hold it deliberately and manfully.

5. We discover in the Scriptures that the organic law, of which I have spoken, is distinctly recognized, and that character in children is often regarded as, in some very important sense, derivative from their parents. It is thus that "sin has passed upon all men." "By the offense of one, judgment came upon all." Christian faith is also spoken of in a similar way—"The unfeigned faith, which dwelt first, in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice, and, I am persuaded, that in thee also." Not that, in the bald and naked sense, it had descended thus through three generations. But the apostle conceives a power, in the good life of these mothers, that must needs transmit some flavor of piety. In like manner, God is represented as "keeping covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations;" which, if it signifies any thing, amounts to a declaration that he will spiritually own and bless every succeeding generation, to the end of the world, if only the preceding will live so as to be fit vehicles of his blessing; for it is not any covenant, as a form of mutual contract, which carries the divine favor, but it is the loving Him rather, and keeping His commandments, by an upright, godly life, which sets the parents on terms of friendship with God, and secures the inhabitation of his power.

Declarations like those in the eighteenth chapter of Ezekiel, "the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father,"—"the soul that sinneth, it shall die,"—are hastily applied by many, not to show that the child is to be punished only for his own sin, which is their true import, but, as if it were the same thing, to disprove the fact of an organic connection, by which children receive a character from their parents. Whereas this latter is a truth which we see with our eyes, and one that is constantly affirmed in the Scriptures, both in respect to bad character and to good. "God layeth up the iniquity of the wicked for his children,"—"Visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation." By which we are to understand, what is every day exhibited in actual historic proof, that the wickedness of parents propagates itself in the character and condition of their children, and that it ordinarily requires three or four generations to ripen the sad harvest of misery and debasement. Again, on the other side, "he hath blessed thy children with thee,"—"For the good of them and their children after them,"—"For the promise is to you and to your children." The Scriptures have a perpetual habit, if I may so speak, of associating children with the character and destiny of their parents. In this respect, they maintain a marked contrast with the extreme individualism of our modern philosophy. They do not always regard the individual as an isolated unit, but they often look upon men as they exist, in families and races, and under organic laws.

Something has undoubtedly been gained to modern theology, as a human science, by fixing the attention strongly upon the individual man, as a moral agent, immediately related to God, and responsible only for his own actions; at the same time there was a truth, an important truth, underlying the old doctrine of federal headship and original or imputed sin, though strangely misconceived, which we seem, in our one-sided speculations, to have quite lost sight of. And how can we ever attain to any right conception of organic duties, until we discover the reality of organic powers and relations? And how can we hope to set ourselves in harmony with the Scriptures, in regard to family nurture or household baptism, or any other kindred subject, while our theories exclude, or overlook precisely that which is the base of their teachings, and appointments? This brings me to my—

Last argument, which is drawn from infant or household baptism—a rite which supposes the fact of an organic connection of character between the parent and the child; a seal of faith in the parent, applied over to the child, on the ground of a presumption that his faith is wrapped up in the parent's faith; so that he is ac counted a believer from the beginning. We must distinguish here between a fact and a presumption of fact. If you look upon a seed of wheat, it contains, in itself presumptively, a thousand generations of wheat, though by reason of some fault in the cultivation, or some speck of diseased matter in itself, it may, in fact, never repro duce at all. So the Christian parent has, in his character, a germ, which has power, presumptively, to produce its like in his children, though by reason of some bad fault in itself, or possibly some outward hindrance in the Church, or some providence of death, it may fail to do so. Thus it is that infant baptism becomes an appropriate rite. It sees the child in the parent, counts him presumptively a believer and a Christian, and, with the parent, baptizes him also. Furthermore, you will perceive that it must be presumed, either that the child will grow up a believer, or that he will not. The Baptist presumes that he will not, and therefore declares the right to be inappropriate. God presumes that he will, and therefore appoints it. The Baptist tells the child that nothing but sin can be expected of him; God tells him that for his parents' sakes, whose faith he is to follow, he has written his own name upon him, and expects him to grow up in all duty and piety.

I have no desire to press the passages in which mention is made of household baptism beyond their true import. When Paul is said to have "baptized the household of Stephanas," our Baptist friends reply that the text proves nothing, in respect to infant baptism, because it can not be shown that there were any children in the household; and some, who practice infant baptism, have conceded the sufficiency of the objection. But the power of this proof-text does not depend, in the least, on the fact that there were children in the household of Stephanas, but simply on the form of the language. Indeed, it has always seemed to me that the argument for infant baptism is rather strengthened than weakened, by the supposition that there were, in fact, no infants or children in this household; for a household generally contains children, and a term so inclusive in its import, could never come into use, unless it was the practice for baptism to go by households. Under a practice like that of our Baptist brethren, what preacher would ever be heard to speak, in this general inclusive way, of having baptized a household? In the case of the jailor, too, the same reasoning holds. Here, however, our Baptist brethren go farther, endeavoring to show positively, from the language used, that there were no infants or children in the household; for when it is said that the jailor "rejoiced, believing in God with all his house," it is argued that, inasmuch as infant children are incapable of believing, there could have been no infants in the family. Admitting the correctness of the translation, which some have questioned, the argument seems rather plausible as a turn of logic, than just and convincing; for, if we consider the more decisive position held in that age by the heads of families, and how, in common speech, they were supposed to carry the religion of the family with them, we shall be convinced that nothing was more natural than the very language here used. It was taken for granted, as a matter of common understanding, that, in a change of religion, the children went with the parents: if they became Jews, that their children would be Jews; if Christian believers, that their children would be Christians. Hence all the terms used, in reference to their religion, took the most inclusive form. If one believed in God, he believed with all his house: the change he suffered, in the common understanding of the age, carried the house with him; and it occurred to no one to question the literal exactness of such like inclusive terms.

It has been a fashion, with many modern critics, to surrender both these passages as proofs of infant baptism, and they certainly do not prove it, in just the way in which many have used them as proof-texts. But if any one will seek a point of view, whence he may be able to give a natural and easy interpretation to the language used, or if he will ask, on the simple doctrine of chances, what chance there was that these two households should include no children, and moreover what chance that, in the only three cases of household baptism mentioned in the Scripture, the households should have been distinguished by this singularity, he will be as little likely as possible, to concede the fact that infant baptism is not adequately proved by these passages.

But the true idea of these passages, and also of the rite itself, is seen most evidently in the history of its establishment by Christ, in the third chapter of John. The Jewish nation regarded other nations as unclean. Hence, when a Gentile family wished to become Jewish citizens, they were baptized in token of cleansing. Then they were said to be re-born, or regenerated, so as to be accounted true descendants of Abraham. We use the term naturalize, that is, to make natural born, in the same sense. But Christ had come to set up a spiritual kingdom, the kingdom of heaven; and finding all men aliens, and spiritually unclean, he applies over the rite of baptism, which was familiar to the Jews, ("art thou a Master in Israel, and knowest not these things?") giving it a higher sense. "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he can not enter the kingdom of heaven." But the Gentile proselyte, according to the custom here described—here is the point of the argument—came with his family. They were all baptized together, young and old, all regenerated or naturalized together; and therefore, in the new application made of the rite to signify spiritual cleansing and regeneration, it is understood, of course, that children are to come with their parents. To have excluded them would have been, to every Jewish mind, the bight of absurdity. They could not have been excluded, without express exception, and no exception was made.

Some have questioned whether proselyte baptism existed at this early age; but of this the third chapter of John is itself conclusive proof; for how else was baptism familiarly known to the Jews as connected with regeneration; that is, civil regeneration? There is always a historic reason for religious rites and for usages of language; and you will find it impossible to suppose that Christ appointed baptism, and set the rite in connection with spiritual regeneration, by any mere accident, or without some historic basis, answering to that which I have just described. In this manner, all his language, in the interview with Nicodemus, becomes natural and easy.

It follows that the children of Christian disciples, being baptized with their parents, as the children of Gentile proselytes were baptized with theirs, would be taken or presumed by the church to be spiritually cleansed, in the same manner. Accordingly, just as the children of Jews were accounted Jews, and not as unclean, when one of the parents was a Jew, so Paul tells us, that in the church of God, the believing party sanctifies the unbelieving, "else were your children unclean, but now are they holy;" showing that the Jewish analogies, in regard to children, were in fact translated, or passed over to the church, and adopted there—a translation that naturally followed. from the reapplication of proselyte baptism.

III
THE OSTRICH NURTURE.

"The daughter of my people is become cruel, like the ostriches in the wilderness."—Lam. iv. 3.

I CITE this comparison for the sake of the comparison itself, and not to make an example of the mothers of Israel represented in it. They are not to be blamed, if, in the terrors of the siege and the wild feverings of starvation, the voice of nature has been stifled in their bosom. Indeed, it is the wonder of the prophet himself that, while the coarse sea-monsters draw out the breast and faithfully nurse their young, the human mother, so much tenderer and more loving, can be so maddened by distress as to become like the ostrich, and forget the cries of her children.

The ostrich, it will be observed, is nature's type of all unmotherhood. She hatches her young without incubation, depositing her eggs in the sand to be quickened by the solar heat. Her office as a mother-bird is there ended. When the young are hatched, they are to go forth untended, or unmothered, save by the general motherhood of nature itself. Hence the ostrich is called sometimes the "wicked," and sometimes the "stupid" bird. Job describes her with a feeling of natural dislike—"Which leaveth her eggs in the earth, and warmneth them in the dust, and forgetteth that the foot may crush them, or that the wild beast may break them. She is hardened against her young ones, as though they were not hers, her labor is in vain without care, [in our version, "without fear."] Because God hath deprived her of wisdom, neither hath he imparted unto her understanding." In other words, she is both heartless and senseless; too heartless to care for her young, and too senseless to maintain a motherhood as genial even as that of the sand.

Now there is no human mother, unless it be in some terrible stress of siege and starvation, when the mind itself is unsettled by the wild instigation of suffering, who will cease from the bodily care and feeding of her children. And yet there are many forms of nurture for the mind and character of children, that are so far resembled to the ostrich nurture, as to be fitly represented under that type. Practices are adopted, opinions accepted, theories of church life and conversion taught, that make a true Christian parentage virtually impossible, and leave the child, in fact, to a kind of nurture in the sands.

What I propose, accordingly, at the present time, is to characterize these modes of ostrich nurture, miscalled Christian, showing what they are, and the real, though doubtless undesigned, cruelty of them.

As a curious illustration of the looseness and the un settled feeling of the times, in regard to this great subject, it is just now beginning to be asserted by some, that the true principle of training for children is exactly that of the ostrich, viz: no training at all; the best government, no government. All endeavors tc fashion them by the parental standards, or to induct them into the belief of their parents, is alleged to be a real oppression put upon their natural liberty. It is nothing less, it is said, than an effort to fill them with prejudices, and put them under the sway of prejudices, all their lives long. Why not let the child have his own way, think his own thoughts, generate his own principles, and so be developed in the freedom and beauty of the flowers? Or, if he should sometimes fall into bad tempers and disgraceful or uncomely practices, as flowers do not, let him learn how to correct himself, and be righted by his own discoveries. Having thus no artificial conscience formed to hamper his natural freedom, no religious scruples and superstitions inculcated to be a detention, or limitation, upon his impulses, he will grow up as a genuine character, stunted by no cant or affectation; a large-minded, liberal, original, and beautiful soul.

This kind of nurture supposes, evidently, a faith in human nature that is total and complete. As the mother ostrich might be supposed to reason, that her eggs are ostrich's eggs, and must therefore produce genuine ostriches and nothing else, so it assumes that human children will grow up, left to themselves, into the most genuine, highest style of human character. Whereas, it is the misery of human children that, as free beings, answerable for their choices and their character, and already touched with evil, they require some training, over and above the mere indulgence of their natural instincts. They can not be left to merely blossom into character; or, if they are, it will most assuredly be any sort of character but that which parental love would desire. What they most especially want is, what no ostrich or mere animal nurture can give; to be preoccupied with holy principles and laws; to have prejudices instilled that are holy prejudices; and so to be tempered beforehand by moderating and guiding influences, such as their perilous freedom and hereditary damage require.

The question here at issue does not really need to be discussed, but it will greatly instruct and impress those parents who allow their minds to fluctuate in such looseness as quite unsettles the feeling of their obligation, just to notice the immense distinction between the relationship of human parents to their offspring, and that of the animals to theirs. It is not given to the animals, they will perceive, as to men, to pass any results matured by their own experience, to their posterity. They prepare no inventions, create no institutions for their offspring; produce no sciences, write no histories, preserve no records, accumulate no property or wealth that is to be transmitted; even their thoughts they can perpetuate in no literary treasures. Hence, there is no progress among them, over and above that small physiological improvement that may pass by the laws of natural propagation. So far they are all ostriches. All they can de is to follow their instincts, and leave their posterity to follow them over again, in the same manner, beginning at the same point. But with men, as creatures of reason, it is far otherwise. They are creators, all, for them that are to come after. What they can discover, build, produce, acquire, learn, think, enjoy, they are to transmit; giving it to them that come after to begin at the point where they cease, and have the full advantage of their opinions, works, and character. One of their first duties, therefore, is to educate and train their offspring, transmitting to them what they have known, believed, and proved by their experience. If they sometimes transmit their low thoughts, and narrow opinions, and mistaken principles, and so far give their children a great disadvantage, that is but a necessary evil which is incidental manifestly to a system otherwise beneficent, and for that they are of course responsible. If nothing were to pass but mere instincts, the disadvantage would be far greater, and the whole scale of existence lower. How unnatural and monstrous, therefore, is that scheme of nurture which requires it of parents to pass nothing, or as little as possible, to their children. If they have learned wisdom, they are not to inculcate that wisdom, lest it should create a prejudice! If they have found their conscience and the principles of virtue, to be their truest friends aid the best guardians of their life, they are not to hamper their children by subjecting them to the same! If they have found the principal joys that freshen life, in God and the faith of his Son, they are still to let their children find their own sources of strength and joy for themselves, and not to train them, or indoctrinate them in such ways of blessing, lest perchance they be not sufficiently original and free in their development! Why, if they were to discover mines and hide the discovery forever, or acquire immense treasures of property appointing them by their will to be sunk in the sea, leaving their children in utter destitution, they would not be as false to their office of parentage! God has given it to them, as rational creatures, to transmit all possible benefits to their offspring. And what shall they more carefully transmit than what is valuable above every thing else, their principles and their piety?

We find, then, a most solid ground for the obligations of Christian nurture. It is one of the grand distinctions of humanity that it has such a power to pass, and is set in such a duty of passing, its gifts, principles, and virtues, on to the ages that come after. Happily, few will need to be convinced of this; and yet there awe a great many, we shall find, who manage, even under what they regard as truly Christian pretexts, to maintain schemes of nurture so nearly unparental and unnatural, as to have a much closer affinity with the ostrich nurture than they suspect themselves.

We have many, for example, who have taken up notions of liberty, or free moral agency, in religion, that separate them effectually from the true sense of their power and privilege in regard to their children. Assuming the unquestionable first truth that religious virtue, or piety, is a matter strictly personal, the free will offering of obedience and duty to God, they sub side into the impression that they are of course absolved from any close responsibility for that which lies so en tirely in the choices of their children themselves. They may not take their absolution by any formal inference, and may not even be aware that they have taken it at all; but the distinction between manhood and childhood is so far hidden, or slurred over, under their supposed principle of responsibility grounded in free agency, that their self-indulgence is accommodated, by the pretext, more easily than they know. Sometimes the inference will be half uttered in their feeling; as when they ask, only not aloud—"after all, must not our children answer for themselves?" So they submit resignedly, to the supposed necessity, and do it with so much less of compunction, because they consciously have so tender a feeling for their children, and are so much pained by the sense of their religious perils. But the submission they fall into, in this pious way, amounts, in fact, to a real absolution, not seldom, from all the finest, tenderest, most faithful, most unworldly cares of their parental office. They subside thus into a habit of remissness and religious negligence, and their way of nurture becomes unparental even as that of the ostriches.

Their blame in such defections from duty is greater than they know. For God has probably instituted the reproductive order of existence, including the parental and filial relation, with a special design to mitigate the perils of free agency. One generation is to be ripe in knowledge and character, and the next is to be put in charge of the former, in the tenderest, most flexible, most dependent state possible, to be by them inducted into the choices where their safety lies. Furthermore, they are bound to fidelity in their charge, by the fact, that, as they have given existence to the subjects of it, so they have also communicated the poison of their own fallen state, to increase the perils of existence. In this manner, God has put it upon them to be the more strenuous in their charge, because of these perils, and expects, by means of their fidelity, to reduce the otherwise disastrous results of free agency to the smallest possible measure. Their responsibility in the parental office is not diminished, but increased even a hundred fold, by the personal liberty and strict individuality of their children. It would be far less cruel to be negligent of their bodily wants; for the body will maintain its growth, and will even manage to increase in robustness, when it is poorly clad and fed upon the coarsest fare. But the mind, or soul, born to greater perils than want or the weather, even the tremendous perils of untaught liberty, and principles unfixed, waits, at the point of its magnificent infancy, to be led into the choices, tastes, affinities, and habits, that are to be the character of its eternity. Tenderness every where else, and remissness here, is only the mockery of kindness. Let the first want be first, and the highest nature have the promptest care; and if any thing is left to the nurtire of the sands, let it be the body, where the crime of the desertion will be less and will certainly not be hid.

IV.
THE ORGANIC UNITY OF THE FAMILY.

"The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke me to anger."—Jeremiah vii. 18.

IN this lively picture, you have the illustration of a great and momentous truth—the Organic Unity of the Family. If it be an idolatrous family, worshipers of the moon, for example, such is the organic relation of the members, that they are all involved together, and the idol worship is the common act of the house. The children gather wood, the fathers kindle the fire, the women prepare the cakes for an offering, and the queen of heaven receives it, as one that is the joint product of the whole family. The worship is family worship; the god of one is the god of all; the spirit of one, the spirit of all.

And so it is with all family transactions and feelings. They implicate ordinarily the whole circle of the house; young and old, male and female, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. Acting thus together, they take a common character, accept the same delusions, practice the same sins, and ought, I believe, to be sanctified by a common grace.

This most serious truth is one that is exceedingly remote from the present age, and from no part of the Christian world more remote than from us. All our modern notions and speculations have taken a bent toward individualism. In the state, we have been engaged to bring out the civil rights of the individual, asserting his proper liberties as a person, and vindicating his conscience, as a subject of God, from the constraints of force. In matters of religion, we have burst the bonds of church authority, and erected the individual mind into a tribunal of judgment within itself; we have asserted free will as the ground of all proper responsibility, and framed our theories of religion so as to justify the incommunicable nature of persons as distinct units. While thus engaged, we have well nigh lost, as was to be expected, the idea of organic powers and relations. The state, the church, the family, have ceased to be regarded as such, according to their proper idea, and become mere collections of units. A national life, a church life, a family life, is no longer conceived, or perhaps conceivable, by many. Instead of being wrought in together and penetrated, to some extent, by historic laws and forces common to all the members, we only seem to lie as seeds piled together, without any terms of connection, save the accident of proximity, or the fact that we all belong to the heap. And thus the three great forms of organic existence, which God has appointed for the race, are in fact lost out of mental recognition. The conception is so far gone that, when the fact of such an organic relation is asserted, our enlightened public will stare at the strange conceit, and wonder what can be meant by a paradox so absurd.

My design, at the present time, is to restore, if possible, the conception of one of these organic forms, viz: the family. For though we have gained immense advantages, in a civil, ecclesiastical, and religious point of view, by our modern development of individualism, we have yet run ourselves into many hurtful misapprehensions on all these subjects, which, if they are not rectified, will assuredly bring disastrous consequences. And nowhere consequences more disastrous than in the family, where they are already apparent, though not fully matured; for the very change of view, by which we have cleared individual responsibility, in our discussions of free will, original sin, and kindred subjects, has operated, in another direction, to diminish responsibility, where most especially it needs to be felt; that is, in Christian families.

What then do we mean by the organic unity of the family? It will be understood, of course, that we do not speak of a physical or vascular connection; for, after birth, there is no such connection existing, any more than there is between persons of different families. In so far, however, as a connection of parentage, or derivation has affected the character, that fact must be included, though it can not be regarded as a chief element in the unity asserted. Perhaps I shall be understood with the greatest facility, if I say that the family is such a body, that a power over character is exerted therein, which can not properly be called influence. We commonly use the term influence to denote a persuasive power, or a governmental power, exerted purposely, and with a conscious design to effect some result in the subject. In maintaining the organic unity of the family, I mean to assert, that a power is exerted by parents over children, not only when they teach, encourage, persuade, and govern, but without any purposed control whatever. The bond is so intimate that they do it unconsciously and undesignedly—they must do it. Their character, feelings, spirit, and principles, must propagate themselves, whether they will or not. However, as influence, in the sense just given, can not be received by childhood prior to the age of reason and deliberative choice, the control of parents, purposely exerted, must be regarded, during that early period, as an absolute force, not as influence. All such acts of control therefore must, in metaphysical propriety, and as far as the child is concerned, be classed under the general denomination of organic causes. And thus whatever power over character is exerted in families one side of consent, in the children, and even before they have come to the age of rational choice, must be taken as organic power, in the same way as if the effect accrued under the law of simple contagion. So too when the child performs acts of will, under parental direction, that involve results of character, without knowing or considering that they do, these must be classed in the same manner.

In general, then, we find the organic unity of the family, in every exertion of power over character, which is not exerted and received as influence; that is, with a design to address the choice on one side, and a sense of responsible choice on the other. Or, to use language more popular, we conceive the manners, personal views, prejudices, practical motives, and spirit of the house, as an atmosphere which passes into all1 and pervades all, as naturally as the air they breathe. This, however, not in any such absolute or complete sense as to leave no room for individual distinctions. Sometimes the two parents will have a very different spirit themselves, though the grace of God is pledged to make the better, if it be truly right, and hindered by no gross inconsistencies, victorious. Sometimes the child, passing into the sphere of other causes, as in the school, the church, neighboring families, or general society, will emerge and take a character partially distinct—partially, I say; never wholly. The odor of the house will always be in his garments, and the internal difficulties with which he has to struggle, will spring of the family seeds planted in his nature.

Having carefully stated thus what I mean by the organic unity of the family, I next proceed to inquire whether any such unity exists? And here it is worth noticing—

1. That there is nothing in this view which conflicts with the proper individuality of persons and their separate responsibility. We have gained immense advantages, in modern times, as regards society, government, and character, by liberating and exalting the individual man. Far be it from me to underrate these advantages, or to bring them into jeopardy. But a child manifestly can not be a proper individual, before he is one. Nothing can be gained by assuming that he is; and, if it is not true, much is sure to be lost. Besides, we are never, at any age, so completely individual as to be clear of organic connections that affect our character. To a certain extent and for certain purposes, we are individuals, acting each from his own will. Then to a certain extent and for certain other purposes, we are parts or members of a common body, as truly as the limbs of a tree. We have an open side in our nature, where a common feeling enters, where we adhere, and through which we are actuated by a common will. There we are many—here we are one.

It is remarkable too how often, without knowing it, and, as it were instinctively, we assume the fact, and act upon it. We do it, for example, as between nations, where it is not so much the moral life as the national that constructs the supposed unity. One nation, for instance. has injured or oppressed another—sought to crush, or actually crushed another by invasion. A century or more afterwards, the wrong is remembered, and the injured nation takes the field, still burning for redress. The history of Carthage and Rome gives us an example. But, suppose it had been said—"This is very absurd in you Carthaginians. The Romans, who did you the injury, are all dead, and those who now bear the name are their children's children. They have done you no injury any more than the people of Britain or India. Neither is it the walls, or streets, or temples of Rome that have injured you. The Roman territory is mere land, and this has not injured you. Why then go to war with the Romans? How absurd to think of redressing your old injuries by a war with men who have done you no harm!" Now it was by just this kind of sophistry that Mr. Jefferson proved that a public debt is obligatory for only one generation, and possibly the Carthaginians might have been speculatively stumbled by such reasonings. Still, they could not have been quite satisfied, I think, of their validity. Against all speculation, they would still have felt that the proposed war was somehow reconcilable with reason. The question is not whether, on Christian principles, they were right, but whether, on natural principles, they were absurd. This probably no reader of the history has ever felt. For, whether it squares with our speculative notions or not, we do all tacitly assume the organic unity of nations. The past we behold, living in the present, and all together we regard as one, inhabited by the common life. How much more true is this (though in a different way) in families, where the common life is so nearly absolute over the members; where they are all inclosed within the four walls of their dwellings, partakers in a common blood, in common interests, wants, feelings, and principles.

2. We discover the organic unity of families, in the fact that one generation is the natural offspring of an other. And so much is there in this, that the children almost always betray their origin in their looks and features. The stamp of a common nature is on them, revealed in the stature, complexion, gait, form, and dispositions. Sometimes we seem to see remarkable exceptions. But, in such cases, we should commonly find, if we could bring up to view the ancestors of remoter generations, that the filmily bond is still perpetuated, only by a wider reach of connection. There are said to be two maiden sisters, the last of a distinguished family, now living in England, who, having no resemblance to any near ancestor, have yet a very striking resemblance to the portrait, still hanging in the family mansion, of an ancestor seven generations back. Indeed, I have myself distinguished, by their looks, the relationship of two persons, connected by a common derivation eight generations back, and who more closely resembled each other in their persons, than either, his nearest kindred. So that, in cases where there seems to be no transmission of resemblances, there is yet a probable transmission, only one that is covert and more comprehensive. Now, strong external resemblances may coexist with marked external differences, and therefore do not prove a coincidence of character. And yet it can not be denied that, as far as they go, they argue a transmission of capacities and dispositions, which enter into character, as remote causes or occasions. Nor does it make any difference, as regards the matter in question, whether souls or spiritual natures come into being through propagation, or not. If they are created, as some fancy, by the immediate inbreathing of God, still they are measured by the house they are to live in, and the outward man is, in all cases, a fit organ for the person within. The dispositions, tempers, capacities—the natural, and, to a great extent, the moral character, have the outward frame, as a fit organ of use and expression. It will even be observed too that, in cases where there is a remarkable change of character, it will be signified, in due time, by a change of manner, aspect, and action.

Besides, it is well understood that qualities received by training, and not in themselves natural, do also pass by transmission. It is said, for example, that the dog used in hunting was originally trained by great care and effort, and that now almost no training is necessary; for the artificial quality has become, to a great extent, natural in the stock. We have also a most ominous example of this fact in the human species. I speak of the Jewish race. The singular devotion of this race to money and traffic is even a proverb. But their ancestors, of the ancient times, were not thus distinguished. They were a simple, agricultural people, remarkable for nothing but their religious opinions, and, in a late period of the commonwealth, for their fanatical heroism and obstinacy. Whence the change? History gives the mournful answer, showing them to view, for long ages, as a hated and down-trodden people, allowed no rights in the soil, shut up within some narrow and foul precinct in the cities, compelled to subsist by some meager traffic, denied every possession but money, and suffered to keep in security not even that, save as they could hide it in secret places, and cloak the suspicion of wealth under a sordid exterior. They have thus been educated to be misers by the extortions and the hatred of Christendom; till finally an artificial nature, so to speak, has been formed in the race, and we take it even as the instinct of a Jew, to get money by small traffic and sharp bargains. So there is little room to doubt that every sort of character and employment passes an effect and works some predisposition in those who come after.

Could we enter into the mental habits of those children, who are spoken of in my text, and trace out all the threads of their inward character and disposition, we should doubtless find some color of idolatry in the fiber of their very being. They are not such as they would be, if their parents, of this and remote generations, had been worshipers of the true God. Their talents, dispositions, propensities are different. The idol god is in their faces and their bones, and his stamp is on their spirit. Not in such a sense that the sin of idolatry is in them—that is inconceivable; for no proper sin can pass by transmission—but that they have a vicious, or prejudicial infection from it, a damage accruing from their historical connection and that of their progenitors with it.

Nor, with these familiar laws of physiology before us, is it reasonable to doubt that, where there is a long line of godly fathers and mothers, kept up in regular succession for many generations, a religious temperament may at length be produced, that is more in the power of conscience, less wayward as regards principles of integrity, and more pliant to the Christian motives. More could be said with confidence, if the godly character were less ambiguous and more thoroughly sanctified.

3. We shall find that there is a law of connection, after birth, under which power over character is exerted, without any design to do it. For a considerable time after birth, the child has no capacity of will and choice developed, and therefore is not a subject of influence, in the common sense of that term. He is not as yet a complete individual; he has only powers and capacities that prepare him to be, when they are unfolded. They are in him only as wings and a capacity to fly are in the egg. Meantime, he is open to impressions from every thing he sees. His character is forming, under a principle, not of choice, but of nurture. The spirit of the house is breathed into his nature, day by day. The anger and gentleness, the fretfulness and patience—the appetites, passions, and manners—all the variant moods of feeling exhibited round him, pass into him as impressions, and become seeds of character in him; not because the parents will, but because it must be so, whether they will or not. They propagate their own evil in the child, not by design, but under a law of moral infection. Before the children begin to gather wood for the sacrifice, the spirit of the idol and his faith has been communicated. The airs and feelings and conduct of idolatry have filled their nature with impressions, which are back of all choice and memory. Go out to them then, as they are gathering faggots for the idol sacrifice, ask them what questions they have had about the service of the god? what doubts? whether any unsatisfied debate or perplexing struggle has visited their minds? and you will probably awaken their first thoughts on the subject by the inquiry itself. All because they have grown up in the idol worship, from a point back of memory. They received it through their impressions, before they were able to receive it from choice. And so it is with all the moral transactions of the house. The spirit of the house is in the members by nurture, not by teaching, not by any attempt to communicate the same, but because it is the air the children breathe.

Now, it is in the twofold manner set forth, under this and the previous head of my discourse, that our race have fallen, as a race, into moral corruption and apostasy. In these two methods also, they have been subjected, as an organic unity, to evil; so that when they come to the age of proper individuality, the damage received has prepared them to set forth, on a course of blamable and guilty transgression. The question of original or imputed sin has been much debated in modern times, and the effort has been to vindicate the personal responsibility of each individual, as a moral agent. Nor is any thing more clear, on first principles, than that no man is responsible for any sin but his own. The sin of no person can be transmitted as a sin, or charged to the account of another. But it does not therefore follow, that there are no moral connections between individuals, by which one becomes a corrupter of others. If we are units, so also are we a race, and the race is one—one family, one organic whole; such that the fall of the head involves the fall of all the members. Under the old doctrines of original sin, federal headship, and the like, cast away by many, ridiculed by not a few, there yet lies a great and momentous truth, announced by reason as clearly as by Scripture—that in Adam all die; that by one man's disobedience many were made sinners; that death hath passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. Not that this original scheme of unity is any disadvantage. I firmly believe and think I could show the contrary even. Enough that so the Scriptures speak, and that so we see, by inspection itself. There can be no greater credulity, than for any man to expect that a sinful and death-struck being, one who has fallen out of the harmony of his mold by sin, should yet communicate no trace of evil from himself, no diseased or damaged quality, no moral discolor, to the gene. rations that derive their existence from him. To make that possible, every law of physiology must be adjourned, and, what is more, all that we see with our eyes, in the eventful era of impressions, must be denied.

I am well aware that those who have advocated, in former times, the church dogma of original sin, as well as those who adhere to it now, speak only of a taint derived by natural or physical propagation, and do not include the taint derived afterwards, under the law of family infection. It certainly can be no heresy to include the latter; and, since it is manifest that both fall within the same general category of organic connection, it is equally manifest that both ought to be included, and, in all systematic reasonings, must be. If, during the age of impressions in the child, and previous to the development of will, a power is exerted over character—exerted necessarily, both as regards the sinful parent and the child, and that as truly as if it fell within the laws of propagation itself-it can not be right to attribute the moral taint wholly, or even principally, to propagation. Until the child comes to his will, we must regard him still as held within the matrix of the parental life; and then, when he is ripe for responsible choice, as born for action—a proper and complete person. Taking this comprehensive view of the organic unity of successive generations of men, the truth we assert of human depravation is not a half-truth exaggerated, (which many will not regard as any truth at all,) but it is a broad, well-authenticated doctrine, which no intelligent observer of facts and principles can deny. It shows the past descending on the present, the present on the future, by an inevitable law, and yet gives every parent the hope of mitigating the sad legacy of mischief he entails upon his children, by whatever improvements of character and conduct he is able to make—a hope which Christian promise so far clears to his view, as even to allow him the presumption that his child may be set forth into responsible action, as a Christian person.

In offering these thoughts, it will be seen that I have not digressed from my subject, but have extended the proof of my doctrine rather, discovering within its scope, the fall of man itself. As a farther proof of the organic unity of the family, I allege—

4. The fact that, in all organic bodies known to us—states, churches, sects, armies—there is a common spirit, by which they are pervaded and distinguished from each other. And we use this word spirit, in such cases, to denote a power interfused, a comprehensive Will actuating the members, regarding also the common body itself, as a larger and more inclusive individual. How different, for example, is the spirit of France from the spirit of England; the spirit of both, from that of the United States; and that, from the spirit of the Spartan or Athenian republic. This national spirit, too, is, as it were, a common power in each, by which the subordinate individual members are assimilated, and made to have a kind of organic character. And so much is there in this, that an Englishman can not make to himself a French character, or any one of us an English character. We can not act the character one of another; for so distant are the feelings, prejudices, and temperaments of each, that they can not even be accurately conceived and reproduced, unless we are actually enveloped in them as an atmosphere.

In the same manner, there is a peculiar spirit in every church Whether you take the larger divisions, the Jewish, the Greek, the Roman, the Episcopal, the Presbyterian, the Baptist, the Congregational, or descend to the particular churches of a given city, you will find something characteristic in each—a common power, which gives a common stamp to the members peculiar to themselves. Or, if you visit a Quaker settlement, where a few men and women are gathered into a kind of church family, you will discover that the members are pervaded, all, by a peculiar spirit, as distinct from the world around them as if they were a new discovered people. And these Quaker settlements; may be taken as a kind of intermediate link between the church-state and the family.

Passing then to families, you are not surprised to discover the same thing. This is specially evident where the family is isolated, and does not mingle extensively with the world. You can scarcely open the door, and take a seat in their house, least of all can you go to their table, or spend a night in their hospitality, without being impressed by the fact. And this family spirit will sometimes be exceedingly opposite to the spirit of goodness. Here it is money, money, written on every face; here it is good living; here show; here scandal and detraction. Sometimes the sense of religion and of spiritual things will seem to be nearly lost, or obliterated. Sometimes a positive hatred of God and all good men and principles will constitute the staple of family feeling. Sometimes a dull and sullen contempt of such things will hold the place of open animosity.

It is very true that the family spirit does not always perfectly master and assimilate all the members You will find a Christian son or daughter, here and there, in spite of the ruling spirit of the house. This, however, because families are to some extent intermingled; in which it comes to pass that children often fall under the power of another spirit, that masters the spirit reigning at home. The children go into other families, where they are visited by other feelings. They go into the church of God, where the church spirit breathes another atmosphere. In the school, they are penetrated by the school spirit. In the shop, or in the transactions of trade, the same is true. Were it not for this, the family spirit might almost uniformly rule the character of the members. Who ever expects that an idolatrous religion, in the house, will not uniformly produce idolaters? So the Mohammedan spirit makes only Mohammedans. In like manner, a thievish house perpetuates a race of thieves. Consider also the ductility and the perfect passivity of childhood. Early childhood resists nothing. What is given it receives, making no selection. To expect therefore that a child will form to himself a spirit opposite to the spirit of the family, without once feeling the power of a counteractive spirit, would be credulous in the highest degree. Doubtless he has a conscience, which is the law of God, in his breast, and he has a will free to choose what his conscience requires. But his passions are unfolded before his discretion, his prejudices bent before he assumes the function of self-government. He breathes the atmosphere of the house. He sees the world through his parents' eyes. Their objects become his. Their life and spirit mold him. If they are carnal, coarse, passionate, profane, sensual, devilish, his little plastic nature takes the poison of course. Their very motions, manners, and voices, will be distinguishable in him. He lives and moves and has his being in them.

I do not say, of course, that he will exactly resemble them in character. Were he to receive a contagious disease, he would, doubtless, be differently handled under it, from the person who gave the infection. I only say, that the moral disease of the family he assuredly will take, and that, probably, without even a question, or a cautious feeling started. If some other spirit, from other families, or the church, or the world, do not reach him, the organic spirit of the house will infallibly shape and subordinate his character.

5. We are led to the same conclusions, by considering what may be called the organic working of a family. The child begins, at length, to develop his character, in and through his voluntary power. But he is still under the authority of the parent, and has only a partial control of himself, in the development of which, he is gradually approaching a complete personality. Now, there is a perpetual working in the family, by which the wills, both of the parents and the children, are held in exercise, and which, without any design to affect character on one side, or conscious consent on the other, is yet fashioning results of a, moral quality, as it were by the joint industry of the house. And these results are to be taken, according to our definition, as included in the organic unity of the family. I except, of course, all the voluntary actings that are designed to influence the child, and are yielded to by him, as consciously right or wrong.

The truth here brought to view is graphically set forth in my text. Whatever working there is in the house, all work together. If the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead the cakes, the children will gather the wood, and the idol worship will set the whole circle of the house in action. The child being under the law of the parents, they will keep him at work to execute their plans, or their sins, as the case may be; and, as they will seldom think of what they do, or require, so he will seldom have any scruple concerning it. The property gained belongs to the family. They have a common interest, and every prejudice or animosity felt by the parents, the children are sure to feel even more intensely. They are all locked together, in one cause—in common cares, hopes, offices, and duties; for their honor and dishonor, their sustenance, their ambition, all their objects are common. So they are trained of necessity to a kind of general working, or co6peration, and, like stones, rolled together in some brook or eddy, they wear each other into common shapes. If the family subsist by plunder, then the infant is swaddled as a thief, the child wears a thief's garments, and feeds the growth of his body on stolen meat; and, in due time, he will have the trade upon him, without ever knowing that he has taken it lip, or when he took it up. If the father is intemperate, the children must go on errands to procure his supplies, lose the shame that might be their safety, be immersed in the fumes of liquor in going and coming, and why not rewarded by an occasional taste of what is so essential to the enjoyment of life? If the family subsist in idleness and beggary, then the children will be trained to lie skillfully, and maintain their false pretences with a plausible effrontery—all this, you will observe, not as a sin, but as a trade.

Nor does what I am saying hold, only in cases of extreme viciousness and depravity. Whatever fire the fathers kindle, the children are always found gathering the wood—always helping as accessaries and apprentices. If the father reads a newspaper, or a sporting gazette, on Sunday, the family must help him find it. If he writes a letter of business on Sunday, he will send his child to the office with the letter. If the mother is a scandal-monger, she will make her children spies and eaves-droppers. If she directs her servant to say, at the door, that she is not at home, she will sometimes be overheard by her child. If she is ambitious that her children should excel in the display of finery and fashion, they must wear the show and grow up in the spirit of it. If her house is a den of disorder and filth, they must be at home in it. Fretfulness and ill-temper in the parents are provocations, and therefore somewhat more efficacious than commandments, to the same. The proper result will be a congenial assemblage, in the house, of petulance and ill-nature. The niggardly parsimony that quarrels with a child, when asking for a book needful for his proficiency at school, is teaching him that money is worth more than knowledge. If the parents are late risers, the children must not disturb the house, but stay quiet and take a lesson that is not to assist their energy and promptness in the future business of life. If they go to church only half of the day, they will not send their children the other half. If they never read the Bible, they will never teach it. If they laugh at religion, they will put a face upon it, which will make their children justify the contempt they express. This enumeration might be indefinitely extended. Enough that we see, in the working of the house, how all the members work together. The children fall into their places naturally, as it were, and unconsciously, to do and to suffer exactly what the general scheme of the house requires. Without any design to that effect, all the actings of business, pleasure, and sin, propagate themselves throughout the circle, as the weights of a clock maintain the workings of the wheels. Where there is no effort to teach wrong, or thought of it, the house is yet a school of wrong, and the life of the house is only a practical drill in evil.

Having sufficiently established, as I think, by these illustrations, the organic unity of families, it remains to add some practical thoughts of a more specific nature. And—

1. It becomes a question of great moment, as connected with the doctrine established, whether it is the design of the Christian scheme to take possession of the organic laws of the family, and wield them as instruments, in any sense, of a regenerative purpose? Arind here we are met by the broad principle, that Christianity endeavors to make every object, favor, and relation, an instrument of righteousness, according to its original design. What intelligent person ever supposed that the original constitution, by which one generation derives its existence and receives the bent of its character from another, was designed of God to be the vehicle only of depravity? It might as well be supposed that men themselves were made to be containers of depravity. The only supposition that honors God is, that the organic unity, of which I speak, was ordained originally for the nurture of holy virtue in the beginning of each soul's history; and that Christianity, or redemption, must of necessity take possession of the abused vehicle, and sanctify it for its own merciful uses. That an engine of so great power should be passed by, when every other law and object in the universe is appropriated and wielded as an instrument of grace, and that in a movement for the redemption of the race, is inconceivable. The conclusion thus reached does not carry us, indeed, to the certain inference that the organic unity of the family will avail to set forth every child of Christian parents, in a Christian life. But if we consider the tremendous power it has, as an instrument of evil, how far short of such an opinion does it leave us, when computing the reach of its power as an instrument of grace?

V.
INFANT BAPTISM, HOW DEVELOPED.

“For she promise is unto you and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call."—Acts, ii. 39.

IT is a matter of wonder, with many professed disciples of Jesus in our time, that if the baptism of children and their qualified introduction into the church is any genuine part of the Christian economy, there is so little authority for it, by express mention in the New Testament writings. And yet, over opposite to this, it is quite as fair a subject of wonder that in Peter's first sermon, on the day of Pentecost, when addressing only the adult sinners of the assembly, in terms appropriate to their age, he should yet have given out, as it were unconsciously, a declaration that can signify nothing but the engagement of Christ, in his new and more spiritual economy, to identify children with their parents, even as they had been identified in the coarser provisions of the Old. "To you and to your children," says the apostle, and here, covertly as it were to himself, are hid infant baptism, infant church relations, potentially present but as yet undeveloped, even in what may be fitly called the seed sermon of the Christian church. This was no time to be thinking of infants, or children, as related to church polity; probably there is not one present in the great assembly. It will be soon enough to settle the church position of children, when the question rises practically afterwards. These converted pilgrims, Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and strangers of all names, may not even so much as think of the question till they reach their homes again. But the language, we can see, is Jewish; language of promise, or covenant, only with a Christian addition—"And to them that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call"—and Peter, as we know, did not really come into the meaning of this language himself till years after, when the great sheet let down from heaven three times, and the actual ministering to a Gentile convert, showed him whither, and how far off, the call of the Lord might be going, in these times, to run. Let it not surprise us then, that the facts of infant baptism, and of infant church relations, covered, as they are, by Peter's language in this first sermon, are still not yet developed, even to himself—any more than the fact of Christ's call to the Gentiles.

And when our Baptist brethren reiterate the formula, "believe and be baptized," "believe and be baptized," which they assume to be absolutely conclusive and final on the question of infant baptism because infants can not believe, they have only to make due allowance for the fact that Christianity must needs make its chief address, at the outset, to adult persons, and their argument vanishes. Christianity will of course address itself to the subjects addressed; and, telling them what they must do to be saved, it will not of course tell them, at the same breath, every thing else that is fit to be known. In this manner its language was naturally shaped, for a considerable time, so as to meet only the conditions of adult minds. When at length it shall begin lo be inquired, what is the condition of immature, or infant minds? it will be soon enough to say something appropriate to them.

Besides, the formula has another side—"He that believeth not shall be damned." Does it therefore follow, because it is so continually given to adults as the fixed law of salvation—he that believeth shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned—that infants dying in infancy, and too young to believe, must therefore be inevitably damned? No, it will be answered, even by our Baptist brethren themselves; for the language referred to was evidently designed only for adult persons, and is of course to be qualified so as to meet the demands of reason, when we come to the case of child hood. And why not also the language "believe and be baptized?" Say not that the child is not old enough to believe, and therefore can not be baptized. If he is not old enough to believe, how can he better be saved? Is it a greater, and higher, and more difficult thing to be admitted to baptism, than to be admitted to eternal glory?

Now I can most readily admit that the subject of infant baptism is not as definitely mentioned and formally prescribed in the New Testament, as we might, without any great extravagance, expect. For many will never notice how great a thing it is for Christianity to pass from the first stage of mere propagation, to the stage of a fixed institution. What worlds of modification, correction, new arrangement, are necessary to the transition, they have never observed. They see the real figure of Christianity in the day of Pentecost, having never a conception, it may be, that this figure is most intensely occasional and casual, and the whole scene one that has scarcely a vestige of Christian institution in it.

What I propose, then, is to go over some of the incidents of this Pentecostal scene and show you how it will drop out one point after another, as Christianity becomes a fixed institution; which institutional character, again, will, by a necessary law, bring in other elements whereby to shape itself and complete its organization.

First of all, we are delighted here at the picture given of a new form of society, and a thing so beautiful, so wonderfully hopeful and peculiar, we are ready to think must be the very essence of the new institution itself. "And all that believed were together and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all men, as every man had need. And they, continuing with one accord in the temple and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved." What a picture, taken as a mere external description! Saying nothing of internal experiences, it goes to the simple outward demonstrations, and by these it paints the spring-time, or first blossoming of the Christian love The beauty of the scene consists in the fact, that the disciples hardly know, as yet, what their love signifies. Assembled as pilgrims, from all parts of the world, the Christian love has fallen upon then, and they find, what is altogether new and strange,. that rich and poor, honorable and base, despite of all distinctions, they love one another as brethren! Not knowing what to make of it, or, apparently, whether they are hereafter to have any thing to do but to love one another, they give themselves wholly up to love, as children to a play—come what will, they are all agreed in this, that they want only fellowship with each other, fellowship in doctrine, fellowship in praise, fellowship in bread,—and why not also in goods?

How sad, that a scene so amiable and lovely could not continue, and that all Christian disciples, to the end of the world, could not fall into the same delightful picture in their conduct! Just as sad, I answer, as it is that children can not always be children; for these are the children of love, acting out the simple instinct of love, and wholly ignorant, as yet, of the cares, labors, and confused struggles, in which their Christian spirit is to have its trial. Doubtless we are to regret, as a loss, whatever departure we may have suffered from the spirit of these first disciples; for the spirit of Christian life is one and the same, in all diversities of form and conduct. But it is plain to any one, who will exercise the least consideration, that it was just as impossible to perpetuate these first demonstrations, as it is to preserve the infantile airs of children after childhood is passed, carrying them still on through the sturdy toils and cares of a mature age. The moment we leave these first scenes, following the pilgrims off to their homes, see them entering into the duties of home, see the Christian churches getting body and form in so many places and becoming incorporated as fixed elements of human society, we shall discover that almost all the modes and hospitalities of the Pentecostal society are inevitably discontinued.

But we must go deeper into the history and show, by distinct specification, how intensely casual much that belongs to the scene of the Pentecost was even designed to be, and how many things are to be added to give the new gospel a permanently instituted life. We begin with the things casual that were designed to cease.

The doctrine of the Holy Spirit was here to be inaugurated, as a Divine Force, entered systematically into the world, to work subjectively in men all the characters of love and beauty that are shown objectively in the life of Jesus. He is to be, in other words, a perpetual indwelling Christ in men's hearts. In times more ancient, good men had been wont to pray for spiritual help in a manner correspondent, but now the kingdom of Help, that kingdom which is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost, is to be set up as a Christly dispensation. But, at the beginning, there must be something done before the senses, to waken sensuous impressions. Otherwise, whatever power the Spirit might exert in the recesses of the human soul, it would probably occur to no one to refer the effects wrought to a Divine Agency. Hence the wondrous character of the scene, which here bursts upon the world—a sound from heaven, a rushing, mighty wind sweeping through the hall, lambent tips of fire resting on the heads of the assembly, wondrous utterances or tongues.

Now, the physical incidents of this scene had nothing to do with its substantial import, save as they were added to suggest the idea of a Divine Agency. They hold the same mechanical relation, as a vehicle, to the Spirit, that the human nature of Jesus held to the Divine Word. They are the body, the sensible show of the Spirit, the smoke by which the fire was revealed. So of the tongues. They were the sign of a power that was playing the action of the inner man, and making audible, as it were, the activity within, of a Divine Influence. All these, like the miraculous gifts so conspicuous in the subsequent history, were manifestations of the Spirit, given to profit withal; but being only accidents or exponents, were, of course, to be discontinued, when the doctrine of a spiritual influence from God was sufficiently developed—discontinued and never restored, unless perhaps in cases where the sense of the Spirit is so nearly lost as to require a kind of new development. Accordingly as these fall off, the spiritual influence inaugurated by such tokens, may be expected, for much the same reasons, to move upon the world in a less imposing method; to remit, in some degree, the extraordinary, and, as life is itself ordinary, become, to the human spirit, what the air is to the body—a Perpetual Element of inbreathing love; to dwell in the families, to follow the individual, and whisper holy thoughts in solitary places and silent hours. He is to fill the world, and be a Spirit of Life and love, present to all human hearts. He will produce the same exercises, produced in the first disciples, in the scene of the Pentecost. Sometimes, too, he will glorify himself in scenes of social effect and power. But the grand reality revealed is an Abiding Spirit—not a Scene Spirit, but an Abiding Spirit—accordantly with Christ's own promise—"He shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever." When the sound, therefore, which then shook the air is hushed to be heard no more; when the rushing, mighty wind that typified so powerfully the breath of the arriving Spirit of God has dropped into calm; when the fire-tips have ceased to burn on the heads of all assemblies, and all the Pentecostal signs are over; then is there seen to be left as a result, the fixed conviction of a Jesus unlocalized, a Spirit of Jesus pres. ent in all places, working in all hearts, present, in conscious manifestation, to all discerning souls, as the life of their life. How very casual, in this view, is the scene of the Pentecost. And that is very soon discovered. One year afterwards, not even the persons present in that scene look upon it as being, in any sense, a properly institutional element of Christianity. The Spirit inaugurated is institutional, the life of all hol) institutions, but nothing in the forms of the scene is regarded as having a perpetual character.

Again, it will be found that the preaching of the day of Pentecost, powerful as the sermon of Peter appears to have been upon the assembly at that time, was not such, either in style or substance, as could be continued after the first day or two of the gospel proclamation, and was in fact superseded, in a very short time, by the sturdier methods of argument and instruction. We see this in all the epistles, and as truly in those of Peter as of Paul. The infant churches had scarcely begun to be institutions, before this change was apparent.

And yet we have many, in our own time, who do not appear to see this, even though the manner of Peter's sermon is so completely gone by, that one can hardly imagine how it had any power at all. "See," they say, "how simple it was, how easy of apprehension—nothing but a recitation of facts—and then what power it had!" As if the telling, over and over, of old news, announcing again facts that have been known to every reader of the New Testament from his childhood up, as familiarly as he knows his right hand, could have the same value and be means to ends for producing the same effects! Most of us have a better understanding of the subject, perceiving, as clearly as possible, that while Peter's sermon was good for the occasion, it was good for almost no occasion since. It was one of the first things, of which there can not, by the supposition, be many. A camp meeting, or a band of pilgrims gathered for a single week, a thousand miles from home, may well enough desire such kind of preaching as will serve the zest of the occasion. But it is no design of Christianity to get by the need of intelligence, and fashion a sanctity that has no fellowship with dignity. A regularly instituted Christian congregation, who are to live and grow up on the same spot, from age to age, it has long ago been discovered, must be compelled to gird up the loins of their mind. They must reject the mere gospel drinks and betake themselves to meat. Their life, it will be found, depends, not on scenes and machineries, not on storms and paroxysms; but on a capacity rather to receive instruction, to be exercised in high argument, to bear with patience the discovery how little they know; and on a good healthful appetite for Christian food. To be able to burn in a fire decides nothing. They must know how to supply the fuel of devotion out of their own exercise in God's truth. They must love a ministry of doctrine, or intellectual teaching. Neither is it doctrine, as many fancy, when they complain of a want of doctrinal preaching, to get a few stale dogmas impounded in the head, or stuck in the brain, as dead flies in ointment: all the rich treasures of thought, and high motive, and solemn contemplation, garnered up in God's word, must be brought out, seen, understood, and fall upon the soul, as manna from the skies. Like manna, too, it must be the supply of to-day only. A new shower must be gathered for to-morrow, and the mind of the people must be kept in active and progressive motion.

Such a kind of preaching will feed the intelligence of the hearers, and raise up pillars in the churches. And here is the great distinction between the preaching proper to the scene of the Pentecost, and that of an established Christian congregation. It is the difference between Peter, giving news to the pilgrims, and Paul offering some "things hard to be understood," to churches of organized disciples. Such preaching is required, in an established congregation, as will exert an educating power. And yet it will, in that way, be a converting power, as efficacious as any other, if only it is expected to be. When the community is more deeply moved by spiritual things, it will, of course, vary its tone and its subjects to suit the occasion, perhaps multiply its efforts; but never as being in a hurry, lest the grace of the occasion may be capriciously withdrawn, never over-preaching, or preaching out, as if nothing were to be done by thought in the hearers, but all by the power of a commotion round them; for it is not the same thing to fall out of dignity and self-possession as to get rid of sin, neither is a fever or a whirlwind any proper instrument of sanctification. Mournful proofs have we to the contrary. Better is it to reserve a power for the ordinary, even when we are in the extraordinary. It is not wisdom to overwork the harvest, so that we have no strength left for the bread. Rather let the preacher believe in the Abiding Spirit, and count upon a kind of perpetual harvest. Let him think to gain many to Christ imperceptibly, by keeping alive the interest of God's truth, and letting it distill upon the hearers as a dew, and through them on the rising families. Whatever he gains in this way will assuredly remain; for it is not the birth of an occasion, but of quiet conviction. It partakes the nature of habit. It is the fruit of a godly training. Seldom, therefore. will it fall away, or disappoint expectation.

There is yet another class of incidents, or demonstrations, in the scene of the Pentecost, which are referable to the fact that these first converts are not at home, and all these must, of course, be modified, or discontinued by their simple return. They are pilgrims at the feasts; Parthians, Medes, Elamites—Jewish emigrants, who have returned from every most distant clime of the world, to enjoy the great festivals of their religion.

Their property, their business, and, more commonly, their families, are left behind. Many of them are poor persons, wholly unable to support the expense even of a short stay at Jerusalem. The others can not, of course, leave them to suffer. So they divide their resources with the poor; and some, who belong at Jerusalem, are moved by the overflowing love of Christ in their hearts, to part with their whole property, that they may relieve the necessities of the brotherhood. Only a few days or weeks are thus spent together. Probably, within three months, they are, every man, at home in his own house, providing for his own family, out of the increase of his own industry and property. During their short stay at Jerusalem, they had nothing to do but to exercise their religion. Accordingly they gave themselves wholly up to it. Now the religious occasion is past; the extraordinary is over, and the ordinary has returned. By this time, they have learned, probably, and received it even as a Christian maxim, that one who does not provide for his own, denies the faith, and is worse than an infidel.

Again, these first disciples had not yet been called to blend their piety with the common cares and duties of life. Quite likely, they did not, for some time, consider whether they should hereafter have any thing more to do with these gross and earthly callings. But we, at least, have learned what they must also have learned very soon, that though we can not live by bread alone, it is yet difficult to live without bread. We have learned that the very church of God itself is perpetuated, in part, by industry and production, that it can not live by expenditure, that we have something therefore to do, besides breaking bread from house to house; six days to labor, a spectacle of thrift to present to mankind, as a proof that Christian virtue has its blessings. We must shine as good citizens, neighbors, parents, friends. Life is no mere camp-meeting scene; but the greatest of all Christian attainments, we find, is precisely that which the first disciples had not yet thought of, the learning how to blend the spiritual and economical or industrial together; to live in the world, and not be of it; to labor in earthly things, and maintain a conversation in heaven; to unite thrift with charity, and separate gain from greediness; to use property, and not worship it; to prepare comfort, without pursuing pleasure. For it is, by just this kind of trial, that all spiritual strength is gotten, and the Christian life becomes a light to men.

Having glanced, in this manner, at some of the types and conditions of the scene of Pentecost that were, and were inevitably to be, discontinued, let us notice briefly, some of the matters that must also as inevitably be added in the process by which Christianity becomes an institution.

Thus, first of all, as Christ and his evangelists had given the new facts to the world, so it was inevitable that a grand process of thinking or mental elaboration should begin to work out the import or doctrinal interpretation of those facts. In this process, diverse opinions, formulas, sects, controversies, must be developed—consequently new modes of duty.

The simplicity of mere love, displayed, as it was, in the first scenes of the gospel, could not continue, however desirable it may seem. Men must think, as well as love, and thought must make its inroads on mere relations of feeling. And thus a long process of forming and reforming must go on, till the Christ of the head becomes as catholic as the Christ of the heart. Meantime, all must stand for the truth, and there must be no countenance given to error. The happy days of Christian childhood are left far behind, and every church is set in relations of duty that are partly antagonistic. It must take a form required by its new necessities. What to do for the. truth, whom to acknowledge, when to resist and when to forbear, how much consequence to attribute to opinions, over what errors to spread the mantle of charity, how to maintain a polemic attitude in the unity of the Spirit—these are the grave questions that are to occupy ministers and churches, and, in the right exercise of which, they are to justify their Christian name. And on this will depend the power of religion, quite as much as on the duties done to those who are aliens and unbelievers.

Next we pass on to a field where the new creating power of the gospel is displayed yet more distinctly. The first disciples had no thought but to swim in the strange joy they felt, as forgiven of God and filled with the love of Jesus. Of Christianity, as a fixed institution, taking the whole society of man into its bosom, and becoming the school of the race, they had probably, at first, no conception. Passing thence to the modern Christian faith, how great is the change! What a variety of means, instruments and arrangements has it created, maintaining all from age to age, by a sacrifice, compared with which, the casual contributions to poor saints at Jerusalem were far less significant in their effects, and, perhaps, not more to be commended, as proofs of a Christian spirit.

First, a house of worship; and, in order to this, the new spiritual life must become a holder of real estate, and be acknowledged as such in the laws. To make the place worthy of the cause, genius and taste are to be called into exercise, and a new Christian art developed.

VI.
APOSTOLIC AUTHORITY OF INFANT BAPTISM.

"And I baptized also the household of Stephanas."—1 Cotinthians, i. 16.

WE have traced the conditions under which infant baptism would almost certainly be developed. But we do not leave the question here. We have many and distinct evidences for the rite, which are abundantly decisive; some from the nature of the family state, some from the New Testament, and some from the subsequent history of the church. These I will now undertake to present in the briefest mianner possible. And

1. The organic unity of the family makes a ground for it, and sets it in terms of rational respect. The child that is born, is really not born, in the higher sense of that term, till he has breathed a long time. He does not live in his own will, but is in the will and life of his parents. To bring him forward into his own will and responsibility is the problem of years. He is in the matrix still of parental character, where all the graces, faiths, prayers, promises, of the parents are his also. He lives and breathes in them, and is of them, almost as truly as they are of themselves. What we call the house, is the organic life that grows him as a mind or agent, tempers him, works him into his habits, fashions him as by a precedent power, to be born and finally take dominion of himself. Why then should religion make no recognition of a fact so profoundly religious? Why not assume that the child is just where he is; in the faith of the house, to grow up there? It would even be a supposition against nature to suppose that he will not. It is very true that he may not, because the faith of the house is no faith, or so mixed with sense and passion as to have none of the true power. Still, when the discipleship is assumed to be made by faith, it must also be assumed that, being so made, it will have all the power of faith, shaping the parental life in the molds of that power, and just as certainly including or inclosing in those molds, there to be also shaped, the infant life of the offspring. The father and mother are not merely a man and a woman, but they are a man and woman having children; and accordingly it is the father and mother, that is, the man and woman and their children, that are to be baptized.

2. It is precisely this great fact of an organic unity that is taken hold of and consecrated, in the field of religion, by the Abrahamic and other family covenants. And the whole course of revelation, both in the Old and New Testament, is tinged by associations, and sprinkled over with expressions that recognize the religious unity of families, and the inclusion of the children with the parents All the promises run—"to you and to your children;" for Peter's language here is only an inspired transfer and reassertion of the Jewish family ideas at the earliest moment, in the field of Christianity itself. It recognizes the fact that Christianity is just what we know it to be, nothing but a continuation and fuller development of the old religion. It widens out the scope of the old religion, so as to include all nations, even as the prophets foretold; and raises all the rites and symbols into a higher spiritual sense, as they were appointed from the first to be raised. Taken all together, the old and the new constitute a perfect whole or system, and the process is neither more nor less than God's way of developing and authenticating a universal religion. In this universal religion, therefore, we are to look for the continuance onward of the old family character and the inclusive oneness of fathers with their children. The only difference will be that the oneness will be raised into a more spiritual and higher sense, just as every thing else was raised. The children are thus to be looked upon presumptively as believing in the faith, and regenerated in the regeneration of the fathers. And here again,

3. Circumcision comes to our aid, as another and distinct evidence. For it was given to be "a seal of the righteousness of faith," and the application of it, as a seal, to infant children, involves all the precise difficulties—neither more nor less—that are raised by the deniers of infant baptism. Let the point here made be accurately understood. The argument is not that infant baptism was directly substituted for circumcision. Of this there is no probable evidence. Such a substitution could not have been made without remark, discussion, oppositions of prejudice, and the raising of contentions that would have required distinct mention, many times over, in the apostolic history. But the argument is this: that the Jewish mind was so familiarized by custom with the notion of an inclusive religious unity in families, (partly by the rite of circumcision,) that Christian baptism, being the seal of faith, was naturally and by a kind of associational instinct, applied over to families in the same manner. Not to have made such an application would have required some authoritative interposition, some dike of positive hindrance, to turn aside the current of Jewish prepossessions. And if there had risen up, somewhere, a man of Baptist notions, to ask, where is the propriety of applying baptism, given as a rite for believers, to infants, who we certainly know are not old enough to believe? he could not even have begun to raise an impression by it. Was not circumcision given to Abraham to be the seal of faith? and has it not been applied from his time down to the present, in this way—applied to infant children eight days old? True it is the doctrine of Christ, "he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved," and our apostles too are saying, "if thou believest with all thy heart thou mayest." So we all say and think, as relating to adult persons; but do we not all know that what is given to the father includes the children, and that his faith is the faith of the house? Nothing, in short, is plainer than that every argument raised to convict infant baptism of absurdity, holds, iri he same manner, as convicting circumcision of absurdity, and all the religious polity of the former ages. Every such argument, too, mocks the religious feeling and conviction of all these former ages, in a way of disrespect equally presumptuous.

It is very true, as declared by the apostle Paul, in his epistle to the Romans, that circumcision, seal of faith as it was, did not always have its meaning fulfilled; "for all are not Israel that are of Israel." Esau and Edom, his posterity, became, thus, an apostate race; and this, in a certain sense, by Providential appointment. But the scope of God's providential purpose, as every intelligent Christian ought to know, does not correspond with the scope of his grace or the measures of his gifts and promises. For the Providential plan takes in all the perversities of human action, while the grace-plan or promise corresponds with the aims and measures of God's paternal goodness. He means and offers, in other words, more than human perversity will take; gives a presumption of good, on his part, which he knows that human wrongs will not allow to be actualized. Then, as his Providential purposes and plan are graduated to what will actually be, not to what he means, wishes, and promises, it follows that the facts or issues of his Providential order do not answer to the scope of his gracious intention. And thus it comes to pass that, while he gives a seal of faith, which ought to be answered, by a result in which all are Israel that are of Israel, the fact is different. Had Israel ruled his house as he ought, had Rebekah been an honest woman, loving both her sons impartially, and seeking the true welfare of both—not conspiring with one to rob and cheat the other—Esau might have been a different man, and Edom might have been a family of Israel. In circumcision, as a seal of faith, God gave, on his part, the pledge and presumption that so it should be. But Edom was thrown off into apostasy by courses of human perversity that disappointed the seal. And the same is true of infant baptism in all those cases where the faith is narrowed, or denied, by parental misconduct. There is yet no falsity in the circumcision, or the baptism, because all which it signified was true; viz., that God, on his part, sought and meant and would have made actual, the whole promise of it. How often is adult baptism itself applied to such as have no faith at all; but this does not affect the inherent truth of the rite, and if they should live so as not to allow it any correspondence with fact, when applied to their children, does it any more affect the truth of it there? The rite measures God's intent and promise, and refuses to narrow itself by the perversity of the subjects. It says, "this child shall grow up in faith—give it baptism." Then if, by unbelief and graceless conduct in the parents, it grows up to be the stem of an Edomitish stock, it will not disappoint God's providential order and plan, and as little will it disprove God's promise and truth in the baptism. God is honored, and the rite is honored still. It is only the parental faith atd life that are not.

4. It appears that Christian baptism was not a rite wholly new, but a reapplication of proselyte baptism. The custom had been, as the Gentile was an unclean person, to baptize him, as a token of cleansing, when he was received to be a Jew; and his family, of course, were baptized with him, to make the lustration complete. So Christ proposes baptism, as the token of that lustration, which is to purify such as become citizens in the kingdom of heaven. And the conversation ot Christ with Nicodemus evidently supposes such a rite previously existing and familiarly known by him. This being true, all that he says of baptism, or the lustration by water and the Spirit, supposes a baptism also of children with their parents, according to the custom. The civil regeneration of the proselyte and his family by such ceremonies will be answered, in reapplying the rite, by the spiritual regeneration of the convert and his family. If infants were, in this case, to be excepted, or not baptized, the exception required to be expressly made; for otherwise, the very transfer of the rite to a spiritual use must, of itself, carry infant baptism with it. Thus Lightfoot says with great force, "the Baptists object—it is not commanded that infants should be baptized, therefore they should not be baptized. But I say it is not prohibited that infants should be baptized, therefore they should be baptized; for since the baptism of children was familiarly practiced in the admission of proselytes, there was no need that it should be confirmed by express precept, when baptism came to be an evangelical sacrament. For Christ took baptism as he found it, and the whole nation knew perfectly well that little children had always been baptized. On the contrary, if he had intended that the custom should be abolished, he would have expressly prohibited it." Wetstein also says, in the same manner—"I do not see how it could enter into their thoughts to expunge boys and infants from the list of disciples, or from baptism, unless they had been excluded by the express injunction of Christ, which we nowhere find."This subject of proselyte baptism has been spoken of also in the second Sermon, and need not be further dwelt upon here.

5. Christ comes very near to a specific and formal command of infant baptism, when we put together, side by side, what he says of baptism in the third chapter of John, and what he says concerning infants elsewhere. There he recognizes baptism as a token of one's entrance into the kingdom of God; elsewhere he says—suffer little children to come unto me and forbid them not for of such is the kingdom of heaven. These terms, "kingdom of God," and "kingdom of heaven," denote, externally, the church; and the church is also presented under the figure of a school, as here of a kingdom, in all those cases where becoming "a disciple" or learner is spoken of. In this latter view or figure, baptism is conceived to be one's enrollment openly as a disciple; and what is more fit than that children should be learners—brought in by their parents to be learners with them—of the Christian grace? This, in fact, was the general significance of faith in those times; they were called believers who so recognized the truth of Christ's person that they were ready to become learners under him. And the Baptists themselves act on this same principle, never holding the necessity that baptism should actually follow faith. in the high and complete sense of spiritual conversion. Probably half their members, in the church, come into doubt, before they die, of the time when they were really born of the Spirit; and, in cases of open apostasy, where there is a recovery, and the disciple openly testifies that he was not before a truly converted person, he is not rebaptized. It is enough that, by his baptism, he has openly signified his wish to be a disciple in the school of Christ; where, if he has never learned before, it is only the more necessary that he be a true learner now; which if he become, tht great law, "he that believeth and is baptized," is sufficiently fulfilled. Just so with the child of a Christian parentage; whatever doubts may be entertained of his certainly growing up in the faith, there is a much better presumption that he will, if the parents are faithful, than there is, in the case of persons converted from the world, that they will prove to be true believers; and if he should not grow up in the faith, but afterwards becomes a Christian, there is just as much greater propriety in his baptism as an infant, and no more reason why he should be rebaptized, than there is in the case of apostate professors who become truly converted.

6. What is said in the New Testament of household baptism, or the baptizing of households, is positive proof that infants were baptized in the times of the apostles—baptized, that is, in and because of the supposed faith of the parents. The fact of such baptism is three times distinctly mentioned; in the case of "the household of Stephanas," of Lydia "and her household," and the jailor "and all his." In the first case, nothing is said of faith at all, though doubtless he was baptized as a believer. In the second, every thing turns on the personal faith of Lydia—"if ye have judged me to be faithful." In the third, it seems to be said, according to an English translation, that all the house believed—"he rejoiced, believing in God, with All his house." But the participle, believing, is singular and not plural in the original, and the phrase—"with all his house"—plainly belongs to the verb and not to the participle. Rigidly translated, the passage would read—"he rejoiced with all his house, himself believing."

It is often objected that, in all these three cases, for aught that appears, the households were made up of adult persons, who were baptized because they all believed. But the chance that this should be true of the only three households said to be baptized, and that there should be three households, as households were commonly made up in that time, in which there were no young children or infants, is not even one in a million, as computed by what is called the doctrine of chances. Besides, if it was a thing understood that infants were never to be baptized, it is important to observe that no such way of speaking could ever come into use. What Baptist could ever be induced, with his view of baptism, to say inclusively, and without some kind of qualification, that he had baptized the household of Richard or Mary? We need not stop, in this view, to ask whether certainly there were infants in any one of these households; the mode of speaking itself shows that baptism went by households, and that when the head was judged to be faithful, his baptism carried the presumptive faith and consequent baptism of all. Of this, too,

7. We have a distinct indication, in what is said of children, where but one of the parents believes. Thus Paul distinctly teaches, "For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband; else were your children unclean, but now are they holy." It is not meant here that the children are actually and inwardly holy persons, but that only having one Christian parent is enough to change their presumptive relations to God; enough to make them Christian children, as distinguished from the children of unbelievers. So strong is the conviction, even. in these apostolic times, of an organic unity sovereign over the faith and the religious affinities of children that, where but one parent believes, that faith carries presumptively the faith of the children with it And upon this grand fact of the religious economy, baptism was, from the first, and properly, applied to the children of them that believe. Hence, too—

8. It was that the children of believers were familiarly addressed with them as believers; as in the epistles of Paul to the Ephesians and Colossians. These epistles are formally inscribed to churches or Christian brotherhoods—"to the saints, which are at Ephesus, and to the faithful in Christ Jesus"—"to the saints and faithful brethren, which are at Colosse." And yet in both, the children are particularly addressed —"Children obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right"—"Children obey your parents in all things; for this is well pleasing unto the Lord." In this manner, children are formally included among the "faithful in Christ Jesus." The conception is that children are, of course, included in the religion of their parentage, grow up faithful with their faithful or believing parents. Or. the ground of this same presumption, they were properly baptized with them, or on their account. Again—

9. It is a point of consequence to notice that such as reject all these and similar evidences from the Scripture, on the ground that infant baptism can not be rightly practiced, because it is not directly and specifically appointed in the Scripture, do yet make nothing of their own argument in other observances familiarly accepted. Why infant baptism was not and should not be required to have been specifically commanded, I have shown already; how, for example, it was necessarily developed, as from a point distinctly referred to in Peter's first sermon, and how the very institution of baptism carried, of necessity, infant baptism with it, apart from any express mention. In the meantime, it will be found that the objectors themselves are admitting and practicing, without difficulty, observances that have comparatively no specific authority at all. At the sacrament of the Supper, they use leavened bread without scruple, when they know that it was not used by Christ himself, and was solemnly forbidden at the festival, he was there, in fact, reappointing for the Christian uses of his disciples in all future ages. Where then is the authority given for a change even in the element of the Holy Supper itself? The Christian Lord's day, too, accepted in the place of the Jewish Sabbath, and that even against a specific command of the decalogue—how readily, and with how little scruple, do they accept this Lord's day and let the ancient Sabbath go, when it is only by the faintest, most equivocal, or evanescent indications they can make out a shadow of authority for the change? "Direct proof! positive command! specific injunction!" they say, "without these, infant baptism has no right." Where then do they get their authority for these other observances; one of them never referred to in Scripture at all, and the other so doubtfully, that infant baptism has, in comparison, the clear evidence of day?

Lastly, it remains to glance at the evidences from church history, or the history of times subsequent to the age of the apostles. It has been the mood of Christian learning, in the generation past—for the learned men have moods and phases, not to say fashions, like others in the less thoughtful conditions—to make large concessions in the matter of baptism, both as regards the manner and the subjects. But a reaction is now begun, and it is my fixed conviction that it will not stop, till the encouragement heretofore given to the Baptist opinions is quite taken away.

It has never been questioned, however, that infant baptism, became the current practice of the church at a very early date. It is mentioned, incidentally and otherwise, in the writings of the earliest church fathers after the age of the apostles.

Thus it is testified by Justin Martyr, who was probably born before the death of the apostle John—"There are many of us, of both sexes, some sixty and some seventy years old, who were made disciples from their childhood." And the word made disciples is the same that Christ himself used when he said, "Go teach [i.e. disciple] all nations, baptizing," &c.; the same that was currently applied to baptized children afterwards.

Ireneus, born a few years later, writes—"Christ came to redeem all by himself; all who through him are regenerated unto God; infants and little children, and young men, and older persons. Hence, he passed through every age, and for the infants he became an infant, sanctifying infants; among the little children, he became a little child, sanctifying those who belong to this age; and at the same time, presenting them an example of well doing, and obedience; among the young men he became a young man, that he might set them an example, and sanctify them to the Lord." In the phrase, "regenerated to God," which is thus applied to infants, expressly named as distinguished from little children, he refers, it can not be doubted, to baptism; which, being the outward sign of such inward grace, was naturally and very commonly called regeneration. Infants plainly could be regenerated to God in no other sense; and therefore his language can not even be supposed to have any meaning, if this be rejected.

VII.
CHURCH MEMBERSHIP OF CHILDREN.

"To the saints and faithful brethren in Christ which are at Colosse."—Colossians, i. 2.

THESE "saints and faithful brethren," it will be seen, include young children; for the apostle makes a distribution of them afterwards, in the third chapter of the epistle, addressing the class of wives, the class of husbands, the class of fathers, the class of servants, the class of masters, and, among all these, the class of children—"Children obey your parents in all things; for this is well pleasing unto the Lord." The Epistle to the Ephesians, too, is inscribed, in the same way—"to the saints which are at Ephesus, and to the faithful in Christ;" and this, again, makes a like distribution; addressing the classes of husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, children, servants, and masters, all as being included in the church at Ephesus—"children obey your parents in the Lord; for this is right. Honor thy father and mother; for this is the first commandment with promise." Where also it is made clear that he is speaking to quite young children; for he turns immediately to the fathers, exhorting them to bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. They are children so young, therefore, as to be subjects of nurture, and yet are addressed among the faithful brethren.

The explanation, then, is not that such children were believers, in the sense of being converts entered into the fold by an adult experience, and distinguished from other children not thus converted. When Lydia speaks of herself as one adjudged to be "faithful," it is probably in this sense. But when Titus, in ordaining elders, is directed to choose such as have "faithful children, not accused of riot, or unruly," it would be very singular, if he was permitted to ordain only such as have all their children thus formally converted. Paul obviously means that the elders shall be such as are under no scandal on account of their families; whose children are growing up in the Christian way and grace; sober, well-behaved, hopefully Christian children. We can see, too, in the language employed, that Paul includes the Colossian and Ephesian children among the faithful brethren of the two cities, in this more presumptive or merely anticipative way. For when he says, "children obey your parents in the Lord," it is not "children in the Lord," or "children obey in the Lord, your parents," but it is "obey them who are parents in the Lord;" as if their very parentage itself, in the flesh, were a parentage also in the Spirit, communicating both a personal and a Christian life. So, also, when the parents are required to give a nurture in the Lord, we may see that the children are expected to be grown as saints and faithfuls, and to be presumptively in the Lord, apart from all expectations and processes of adult conversion.

And it was out of such uses that the term "faithful" grew into the peculiar kind of church use, in which it denotes all the supposed members of the Christian body, whether adults, or only baptized children; as, for example, in that very ancient inscription cited by Buonarotti, where the child "two years, one month, and twenty-five days old," is described as lying among his Christian kinsmen—"a faithful among faithfuls." The very language supposes a membership in the church, or among the faithful brethren, by virtue of baptism and mere Christian nurture; such as on the footing of strict individualism, held by our Baptist brethren, could never even be thought of.

What I propose then, at the present time, is a full and careful discussion of this great subject, the church membership of baptized children.

And as it has fallen out, in the extreme individualism of our modern era, that multitudes are unable to conceive it as being any thing less than a kind of absurdity, or self-evident monstrosity, I shall be obliged to show the nature and kind of this membership.

As it is very commonly disrespected on the ground of its practical insignificance, I must also show the reasons why it should exist.

And then, since it is to the same extent, disowned as a rightful part of the true church economy, I must also establish the fact of its existence.

VII.
THE OUT-POPULATING POWER OF THE CHRISTIAN STOCK.

"And did he not make one? Yet had he the residue of the Spirit. And wherefore one? That he might have a godly seed."—Malachi, ii. 15.

THE prophet is enforcing here a strict observance of marriage. And he adverts, in his argument, to the single and sole state of the first human pair, as a standing proof against polygamy, inconstancy, and all similar abuses of the marriage state. God was not spent, he says, in creating a single man, Adam, and a single woman, Eve, but he had such a residue, or overplus of creative energy left, that he could have created millions if he would. Wherefore then did he cease, producing only just one man and woman, and no more? The answer is—That he might have a godly seed. In that lies the reason, he declares, of God's economy in this family institution. We perceive, accordingly,

That God is, from the first, looking for a godly seed; or, what is nowise different, inserting such laws of population that piety itself shall finally over-populate the world.

To be more explicit, there are two principal modes by which the kingdom of God among men may be, and is to be extended. One is by the process of conversion. and the other by that of family propagation; one by gaining over to the side of faith and piety, the other by the populating force of faith and piety themselves. The former is the grand idea that has taken possession of the churches of our times—they are going to convert the world. They have taken hold of the promise, which so many of the prophets have given out, of a time when the reign of Christ shall be universal, extending to all nations ant peoples; and the expectation is that, by preaching Christ to all the nations, they will finally convert them and bring them over into the gospel fold. Meantime very much less, or almost nothing, is made of the other method, viz: that of Christian population. Indeed, as we are now looking at religion, or religious character and experience, we can hardly find a place for any such thought as a possible reproduction thus of parental character -and grace in children. They must come in by choice, on their own account; they must be converted over from an outside life that has grown to maturity in sin. Are they not individuals, and how are they to be initiated into any thing good by inheritance and before choice? It is as if they were all so many Melchisedecs in their religious nature, only not righteous at all—without father, without mother, without descent. Descent brings them nothing. Born of faith, and bosomed in it, and nurtured by it still, there is yet to be no faith begotten in them, nor so much as a contagion even of faith to be caught in their garments.

What I propose, at the present time, is to restore, if possible, a juster impression of this great subject; to show that conversion over to the church is not the only way of increase; that God ordains a law of population in it as truly as he does in an earthly kingdom, or colony, and by this increase from within, quite as much as by conversion from without, designs to give it, finally, the complete dominion promised.

Nor let any one be repelled from this truth, or set against it, by the prejudice that piety is and must be a matter of individual choice. The same is true of sin. Many of us have no difficulty in saying that mankind are born sinners. They may just as truly and properly be born saints—it requires the self-active power to be just as far developed to commit sin, as it does to choose obedience. This individual capacity of will and choice is one that matures at no particular tick of the clock, but it comes along out of incipiencies, grows by imperceptible increments, and takes on a character, in good or evil, or a mixed character in both, so imperceptibly and gradually, that it seems to be, in some sense, prefashioned by what the birth and nurture have communicated. We may fitly enough call this character a propagated quality—in strictest metaphysical definition, it is not; in sturdiest fact of history, or practical life, it is.

Nor let any one be diverted from the truth I am going to assert, by imagining that a propagated piety is, of course, a piety without regeneration, dispensing with what Christ himself declared to be the indispensable need of every human creature. For aught that appears, regeneration may, in some initial and profoundly real sense, be the twin element of propagation itself. The parentage may, in other words, be so thoroughly wrought in by the Spirit of God, as to communicate the seeds or incipiencies of a godly, just as it communicates the seeds of a depravated and disordered, character. In one view, the child will be regenerate when he is born; in another view, he will not be, till the godly life is developed in his own personal choice and liberty.

Dismissing these, and other like prepossessions, let us go on to examine some of the evidences by which this doctrine of church population is to be substantiated.

1. I name, as an evidence, the very important fact that in the matter of infant baptism and infant church membership, grounded as they are in the assumption that a believing parentage sanctifies the offspring, God is seen to frame the order of church economy, so as to bring in the law of increase, or family propagation; looking to the populating principle for growth, just as the founder of a new colony, on some foreign shore, would look. He declares that parents are to be parents in the Lord, and children to grow up in the nurture of the Lord. The whole scheme of organic unity in the family and of family grace in the church, is just what it should be, if the design were to propagate religion, not by conversions only, but quite as much, or more, by the populating force embodied in it—just that force which; in all states and communities, is known to be the most majestic and silently creative force in their history.

2. It is a matter of consequence to observe, that the Abrahamic order and covenant stood upon this footing, formally proposing and promising to make the father of the faithful a blessing to mankind, by and through the multitude of his offspring. "Look now," says the word of promise, "toward heaven and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them. So shall thy seed be." Again, "I will make thee a father of many nations." And again, "All the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him." Neither was it to be the only blessing, that Jesus, the Saviour of mankind, was to be born of this honored family. "I will make thee exceeding fruitful," was the form of the promise; and the blessing, as we may see, by all the modes of expression used, was to turn as much on the wonderful populousness of the stock, overspreading the world, as it was, on the new-creating grace to be unfolded in it. For if it be matter of debate, in what precise manner the Christian church has connection with this more ancient and apparently mere family bond, there is certainly no doubt in the mind of the great Christian apostle, that there is a real and valid connection of some kind, such that the promise passes and spreads, and is to get its fulfillment, only when the godly seed has filled the world. The spread of Christianity is, in his view, the blessing of Abraham come on the Gentiles, through Jesus Christ. These Gentile converts, too, he calls the seed of Abraham—"And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise." He looks, you will perceive, on the Gentile converts as being grafted in upon the ancient stock; which also he expressly says, in another place, counting them to be so unified with Abraham, as to be the outgrowth of his person. Just as the proselytes were taken to be sons and daughters of Abraham, naturalized into his stock, so are these converts to become the channel of his over-populating force, till such time as the natural branches, broken off, are grafted in again. And, in this view, it is that the Gentile converts are called "a seed," that being the word that contemplates the fact of their multiplication as a family of God.

3. It is an argument which ought to be convincing, that the universal spread of the gospel, and the universal reign of Christian truth—that which prophets and apostles promise, and which we, in these last times, have taken up as our fondest, most impelling Christian hope—plainly enough never can be compassed by the process of adult conversions, but must finally be reached, if reached at all, by the populating forces of a family grace in the church. We expect that, in that day, all flesh shall see the salvation of God, and that every thing human will be regenerated by it; that the glory of God will cover the earth like a baptism of water—even as the waters cover the sea. These are to be the times of the restitution of all things. God, we believe, will put his laws now in the mind, and write them on the heart, and "all shall know him from the least to the greatest." I do not care to press these epithets least and greatest—perhaps there is no reference to children in them. It would scarcely make the text more significant if there were; for this universal triumph of the word, in which we all believe, this imprinting of it on men's hearts, all over the world in such manner as to make the day of glory—that great day of light which figures so grandly in the visions of God's prophets and apostles, and is promised by Christ himself—such a day, I say, can plainly enough never be reached, as long as the children of the world grow up in sin, as we now assume to be the fact, still to be called and prayed for as now and preached into the kingdom. When the little child shall lead forth in pairs the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the kid, the calf and the young lion; when the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp unstung, and the weaned child shall put his hand unbitten on the cockatrice's den; we not only take hold of it as the prophet's meaning that there is to be a great universal mitigation of the ferocities of appetite, and prey, and passion, in the world, but that the little ones are to have their part in the joy, and be raised in dominion by that all-renewing grace which has now restored and imparadised the world. Otherwise our day of glory would be such a kind of jubilee as shows the adult soils only of the race to be gathered into the kingdom, while the poor, unripe sinners of childhood, a full fourth in the total number, are in no sense, in it, but are waiting their conversion-time on the outside! This is not our millennial day; we have no such hope.

We conceive that Christ will then overspread all souls with his glory, and that children, filled according to their age and measure with the divine motions of grace, will be unfolding the heavenly beauty, as they advance in years, even as the flowers unfold their colors in the sun. These colors no one sees in the root, and the clear, transparent sap it circulates, and yet the color ii there. Just so will God, in that great day of grace, bring out of infancy and childhood, sanctifyingly touched by his Spirit, what creates them children of God, as truly as their parents, though too subtle to be seen, or defined, till it has blushed into color, in the sunlight of their intelligence in the truth. Such a day of glory then contemplates a great in-birth of sanctification, or renewing life. Conversions from without are to have their part in preparing it, but the consummation hoped for is even impossible, as regards a third or fourth part of the race, save as it is reached by a populating process which enters them into life itself, through the gate of a sanctified infancy and childhood.

4. Consider a very important fact in human physiology which goes far to explain, or take away the strangeness and seeming extravagance of the truth I am endeavoring to establish, viz., that qualities of education, habit, feeling, and character, have a tendency always to grow in, by long continuance, and become thoroughly inbred in the stock. We meet humble analogies of this fact in the domestic animals. The operations to which they are trained, and in which they become naturalized by habit, become predispositions, in a degree, in their offspring; and they, in their turn, are as much more easily trained on that account. The next generation are trained still more easily, till what was first made habitual, finally becomes functional in the stock, and almost no training is wanted. That which was inculcated by practice passes into a tendency, and descends as a natural gift, or endowment. The same thing is observable, on a large scale, in the families of mankind. A savage race is a race bred into low living, and a faithless, bloody character. The instinct of law, society, and order is substituted, finally, by the overgrown instinct of prey, and the race is lost to any real capacity of social regeneration; unless they can somehow be kept in ward, and a process of training, long enough to breed in what has been lost A race of slaves becomes a physiologically servile race in the same way. And so it is, in part, that civilization descends from one generation to another. It is not merely that laws, social modes, and instrumentalities of education descend, and that so the new sprung generations are fashioned after birth, by the forms and principles and causes into which they have been set, but it is that the very type of the inborn quality is a civilized type. The civilization is, in great part, an inbred civility. There is a something functional in them, which is itself configured to the state of art, order, law, and property.

The Jewish race are a striking and sad proof of the manner in which any given mode of life may, or rather must, become a functional property in the offspring. The old Jewish stock of the Scripture times, whatever faults they may have had, certainly were not marked by any such miserably sordid, usurious, garbage-vending propensity, as now distinguishes the race. But the cruelties they have suffered under Christian governments, shut up in the Jews' quarter of the great cities, dealing in old clothes and other mean articles for their gains, hiding these in the shape of gold and jewels in the crevices of their cellars, to prevent seizure by the emissaries of the governments, and disguising their prosperity itself by the squalid dress of their persons—these, continued from age to age, have finally bred in the character we so commonly speak of with contempt. Our children, treated as they have been for so many generations, would finally reveal the marks of their wrongs in the same sordid, miserly instincts.

Now if it be true that what gets power in any race, by a habit or a process of culture, tends by a fixed law of nature to become a propagated quality, and pass by descent as a property inbred in the stock; if in this way whole races of men are cultivated into properties that are peculiar—off into a savage character, down into a servile or a mercenary, up into civilization or a high social state—what is to be the effect of a thoroughly Christian fatherhood and motherhood, continued for a long time in the successive generations of a family? What can it be but a general mitigation of the bad points of the stock, and a more and more completely inbred piety. The children of such a stock are born, not of the flesh only, or the mere natural life of their parentage, but they are born, in a sense most emphatic, of the Spirit also; for this parentage is differed, as we are supposing, age by age, from its own mere nature in Adam, by the inhabiting grace of a supernatural salvation. Physiologically speaking, they are tempered by this grace, and it is all the while tending to become, in some sense, an inbred quality. Hence the very frequent remark—"How great a privilege and order of nobility to be descended of a pious ancestry!" It is the blessing that is to descend to the thousandth generation of them that love God and keep his commandments. In this view it is to be expected, as the life of Christian piety becomes more extended in the earth, and the Spirit of God obtains a living power in the successive generations, more and more complete, that finally the race itself will be so thoroughly regenerated as to have a genuinely populating power in faith and godliness. By a kind of ante-natal and post-natal nurture combined, the new-born generations will be started into Christian piety, and the world itself over-populated and taken possession of by a truly sanctified stock. This I conceive to be the expectation of Christianity. Not that the bad heritage of depravity will cease, but that the second Adam will get into power with the first, and be entered seminally into the same great process of propagated life. And this fulfills that primal desire of the world's Creator and Father, of which the prophet speaks—"That he might have a godly seed."

And let no one be offended by this, as if it supposed a possible in-growth and propagation of piety, by mere natural laws and conditions. What higher ground of supernaturalism can be taken, than that which supposes a capacity in the Incarnate Word, and Sanctifying Spirit, to penetrate our fallen nature, at a point so deep as to cover the whole spread of the fall, and be a grace of life, traveling outward from the earliest, moss latent germs of our human development. It is only saying, with a meaning—"My substance was not hid from Thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth." Or, in still another view, it is only conceiving that those sporadic cases of sanctification from the womb, of which the Scripture speaks, such as that of Samuel, Jeremiah, and John, are to finally become the ordinary and common fact of family development.

In such cases, the faith or piety of a single pair, or possibly of the mother alone, begets a heavenly mold in the predispositions of the offspring, so that, as it is born of sin, it is also born of a heavenly grace. If then we suppose the heavenly grace to have such power, in the long continuing process of ages, as to finally work the general stock of parentage into its own heavenly mold, far enough to prepare a sanctified offspring for the world, what higher, grander fact of Christian supernaturalism could be asserted? Nor is it any thing more of a novelty than to say, that "where sin abounded, grace did much more abound." The conception is one that simply fulfills what Baxter, Hopkins, and others, were apparently struggling after,See quotations from these writers in the last Discourse. when contriving how to let the grace of God in our salvation, match itself by the hereditary damage, or depravation, that descends upon us from our parentage, and the organic unity of our nature as a race. And probably enough they were put upon this mode of thought, by the familiar passage of Paul just referred to.

Christianity then has a power, as we discover, to prepare a godly seed. It not only takes hold of the world by its converting efficacy, but it has a silent force that is much stronger and more reliable; it moves, by a kind of destiny, in causes back of all the eccentric and casual operations of mere individual choice, preparing, by a gradual growing in of grace, to become the great populating motherhood of the world. In this conviction, we shall be strengthened—

5. By the well known fact, that the populating power of any race, or stock, is increased according to the degree of personal and religious character to which it has attained. Good principles and habits, intellectual culture, domestic virtue, industry, order, law, faith—all these go immediately to enhance the rate and capacity of population. They make a race powerful, not in the mere military sense, but in one that, by century-long reaches of populating force, lives down silently every mere martial competitor. Any people that is physiologically advanced in culture, though it be only in a degree, beyond another which is mingled with it on strictly equal terms, is sure to live down and finally live out its inferior. Nothing can save the inferior race but a ready and pliant assimilation.

The promise to Abraham depended, doubtless, on this fact for its fulfillment. God was to make his family fruitful, above others, by imparting Himself to it, and so infusing a higher tone of personal life. Hence also the grand religious fact that this race unfolded a populating power so remarkable. Going down into Egypt, as a starving family, it begins to be evident in about four hundred years, that they are overpopulating the great kingdom of Egypt itself. "The children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, and multiplied and waxed exceeding mighty, and the land was filled with them." Till finally the jealousy of the throne was awakened, and the king began to say—"Behold the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we!"

Afterwards little Palestine itself was like a swarm of bees; building great cities, raising great armies, and displaying all the tokens, age upon age, of a great and populous empire. So great was the fruitfulness of the stock, compared with other nations of the time, owing to the higher personality unfolded in them, by their only partial and very crude training, in a monotheistic religion.

And again, at a still later time, when the nation itself is dismembered, and thousands of the people are driven off into captivity, we find that when the great king of Persia had given out an edict of extermination against them, and would like to recall it but can not, because of the absurd maxim that what the king has decreed must not be changed, he has only to publish another decree, that they shall have it as their right to stand for their lives, and that is enough to insure their complete immunity. "They gathered themselves together in their cities, and throughout all the provinces, and no man could withstand them, for the fear of them fell upon all people." In which we may see how this captive race had multiplied and spread themselves, in this incredibly short time, through all the great kingdom of the Medo-Persian kings.

Or we may take a more modern illustration, drawn from the comparative history of the Christian and Mohammedan races. The Christian development begins at an older date, and the Mohammedan at a later. One is a propagation by moral and religious influences, at least in part; the other a propagation by military force. Both have religious ideas and aims, but the main distinction is that one is taken hold of by religion as being a contribution to the free personal nature of souls; and the other is taken hold of by a religion whose grip is the strong grip of fate. For a time, this latter spread like a fire in the forest, propagated by the terrible sword of predestination, and it even seemed about to override the world. But it by and by began to appear, that one religion was creating and the other uncreating manhood; one toning up a great and powerful character, and the other toning down, steeping in lethargy, the races it began to inspire; till finally we can now see as distinctly as possible, that one is pouring on great tides of population, creating a great civilization, and great and powerful nations; the other, falling away into a feeble, half-depopulated, always decaying state, that augurs final extinction at no distant period. Now the fact is that these two great religions of the world had each, in itself, its own law of population from the beginning, and it was absolutely certain, whether it could be seen or not, that Christianity would finally live down Mohammedanism, and completely expurgate the world of it. The campaigning centuries of European chivalry, pressing it with crusade after crusade, could not bring it under; but the majestic populating force of Christian faith and nurture can even push it out of the world, as in the silence of a dew-fall.

What a lesson also could be derived, in the same manner, from a comparison of the populating forces of the Puritan stock in this country, and of the inferior, superstitious, half Christian stock and nurture of the South American states. And the reason of the difference is that Christianity, having a larger, fuller, more new-creating force in one, gives it a populating force as much superior.

How this advantage accrues, and is, at some future time, to be more impressively revealed than now, it is not difficult to see. Let the children of Christian parents grow up, all, as partakers in their grace, which is the true Christian idea, and the law of family increase they are in, is, by the supposition, so far brought into the church, and made operative there. And then comes in also the additional fact, that there are causes and conditions of increase now operative in the church which exist nowhere else.

Here, for example, there will be a stronger tide of health than elsewhere. In the world without, multitudes are perishing continually by vice and extravagance, and, when they do not perish themselves, they are always entailing the effects of their profligacy on the half-endowed constitution of their children. Meantime, in the truly Christian life, there is a good keeping of temperance, a steady sway of the passions, a robust equability and courage, and the whole domain of the soul is kept more closely to God's order; which again is the way of health, and implies a higher law of increase.

Wealth, again, will be unfolded more rapidly under the condition of Christian living than elsewhere; and wealth enough to yield a generous supply of the common wants of life, is another cause that favors population. True piety is itself a principle of industry and application to business. It subordinates the love of show and all the tendencies to extravagance. It rules those licentious passions that war with order and economy. It generates a faithful character, which is the basis of credit, as credit, of prosperity. Hence it is that upon the rocky, stubborn soil, under the harsh and frowning skies of our New England, we behold so much of high prosperity, so much of physical well-being, and ornament. And the wealth created is diffused about as evenly as the piety. A true Christian society has mines opened, thus, in its own habits and principles. And the wealth accruing is power in every direction, power in production, enterprise, education, colonization, influence, and consequent popular increase.

There will also be more talent unfolded in a Christian people, and talent also takes the helm of causes everywhere. Christian piety is itself a kind of holy development, enlarging every way the soul's dimensions. It will also be found that Christian families abound with influences, specially favorable to the awakening of the intellectual principle in childhood. Religion itself is thoughtful. It carries the child's mind over directly to unknown worlds, fills the understanding with the sublimest questions, and sends the imagination abroad to occupy itself where angels' wings would tire. The child of a Christian family is thus unsensed, at the earliest moment, and put into mental action; this, too, under the healthy and genial influence of Christian principle. Every believing soul, too, is exalted and empowered by union to God. His judgment is clarified, his reason put in harmony with truth, his emotions swelled in volume, his imagination fired by the object of his faith. The church, in short, is God's university, and it lies in her foundation as a school of spiritual life, to energize all capacity, and make her sons a talented and powerful race.

Here, too, are the great truths, and all the grandest, most fruitful ideas of existence. Here will spring up science, discovery, invention. The great books will be born here, and the highest, noblest, most quickening character will here be fashioned. Popular liberties and the rights of persons will here be asserted. Commerce will go forth hence, to act the preluding of the Christian love, in the universal fellowship of trade. And so we see, by this rapid glance along the inventories of Christian society, that all manner of causes are included in it, that will go to fine the organization, raise the robustness, swell the volume, multiply the means, magnify the power of the Christian body. It stands among the other bodies and religions, just as any advanced race, the Saxon for example, stands among the feebler, wilder races, like the Aborigines of our continent; having so much power of every kind that it puts them in shadow, weakens them, lives them down, rolling its over-populating tides across them, and sweeping them away, as by a kind of doom. Just so there is, in the Christian church, a grand law of increase by which it is rolling out and spreading over the world. Whether the feebler and more abject races are going to be regenerated and raised up, is already very much of a question. What if it should be God's plan to people the world with better and finer material? Certain it is, whatever expectations we may indulge, that there is a tremendous overbearing surge of power in the Christian nations, which, if the others are not speedily raised to some vastly higher capacity, will inevitably submerge and bury them forever. These great populations of christendom—what are they doing, but throwing out their colonies on every side, and populating themselves, if I may so speak, into the possession of all countries and climes? By this doom of increase, the stone that was cut out without hands, shows itself to be a very peculiar stone, viz: a growing stone, that is fast becoming a great mountain, and preparing, as the vision shows, to fill the whole earth.

We are not, of course, to suspend our efforts to convert the heathen nations—we shall never become a thoroughly regenerate stock, save as we are trained up into such eminence, by our works of mercy to mankind. It is for God to say what races are to be finally submerged and lost, and not for us. Meantime, we are to gain over and save as many as possible by conversion, and so to hasten the day of promise. And what feebler and more pitiful conceit could we fall into, than to assume that we have the grand, over-populating grace in our own stock, and sit down thus to see it accomplish by mere propagation, that which of itself supposes a glorious inbred habit of faith, and sacrifice, and heavenly charity. I only say that, when we set ourselves to the great work of converting the world, we are to see that we do not miscondition the state of childhood, and throw quite away from us, meantime, all the mighty advantages that God designs to give us, in this other manner; viz., in the religious nurture and growth of the godly seed.

Once more, it is a consideration that will have great weight with all deeply thoughtful persons, that the vindication of God in sin, suffering, punishment, and all evil pertaining to the race, probably depends, to a great degree, on just the truth I am here endeavoring to establish. How constantly is the question raised, why God, as an infinitely good and gracious Father, should put on foot such a scheme of existence as this; one that unites such oppressive disadvantages, and is to be such a losing concern? We begin life, it is said, with constitutions depravated and poisoned, and come thus into choice with predispositions that are damaged even beforehand. Idolatry, darkness, and guilt, overspread tie world, in this manner, from age to age, and the vast majorities of the race, rotting away thus into death under sin, are being all the while precipitated into a wretched eternity, which is their end; for they go hence in a state visibly disqualified for the enjoyment, either of themselves, or of God. The picture is a very dark one, though I feel a decided confidence that every single part of God's counsel in it can be sufficiently vindicated. But this is not a matter in the compass of my present inquiry, except so far as the general difficulty is relieved by the possibility and prospect of great future advantages that are to accrue, in the fact of a grand over-populating righteousness, which is finally to change the aspect of the whole question. We are not to assume, with many, that the world is now just upon its close, but to look upon it as barely having opened its first chapter of history. Its real value, and what is really to come of it, probably does not even yet begin to appear. When its propagations cease to be mere propagations of evil, or of moral damage and disaster, and become propagations of sanctified life, and ages of life; when the numbers, talents, comforts, powers of the immense godly populations are increased to more than a hundred fold what they now are; and when, at some incomputable distance of time, whose rate of approach is only hinted by the geologic ages of the planet, they look back upon us as cotemporaries almost of Adam and forward through ages of blessing just begun, beholding so many worlds-full of regenerated mind and character, pouring in from hence to over people, as it were, eternity itself; they will certainly have a very different opinion of the scheme of existence from that which we most naturally take up now. Then it will be confessed that the nurture of the Lord has meaning and force enough to change the aspect of every thing in God's plan. Our scheme of propagated and derivative life is no longer a scheme of disadvantage, but a mode of induction that gives to every soul the noblest, safest beginning possible. On the other hand, if we cling to the present way and state as the measure of all highest possibilities, and expect to go on converting over, out of heathenism and death, the sturdy, grownup aliens of depravity, it will be a most difficult—always growing more and more difficult—thing to vindicate the ways of God in what he has put upon the world. Shall we miss, and give it to the future ages to miss, a vindication of God's way so inspiring ill itself and so often promised in his word?

Having reached this closing point or consummation of the doctrine of nurture, we are able, I think, to see something of the dignity there is in it. How trivial, unnatural, weak, and, at the same time, violent, in comparison, is that overdone scheme of individualism, which knows the race only as mere units of will and personal action; dissolves even families into monads; makes no account of organic relations and uses; and expects the world to be finally subdued by adult conversions, when growing up still, as before, in all the younger tiers of life, toward a mere convertible state of adult ungodliness. Such a scheme gives a most ungenial and forlorn aspect to the family. It makes the church a mere gathering in of adult atoms, to be in creased only by the gathering in of other and more numerous adult atoms. It very nearly makes the scheme of existence itself an abortion; finding no great law of propagative good and mercy in it, and taking quite away the possibility and prospect of that sublime vindication of God which is finally to be developed, and by which God's way in the creation is to be finally crowned with all highest honors of counsel and beneficence. Opposite to this, we have seen how it is God's plan, by ties of organic unity and nurture, to let one generation extend itself into and over another, in the order of grace, just as it does in the order of nature; to let us expect the growing up of children in the Lord, even as their parents are to be parents in the Lord, and are set to bring them up in the nurture of the Lord; on this ground of anticipation, permitting us to apply the seal of our faith to them, as being incipiently in the quickening of our faith, even before they have intelligence to act it, and consciously choose it; so accepting them to be members of the church, as being presumptively in the life of the church; in this manner incorporating in the church a great law of grace and sanctifying power, by which finally the salvation will become an inbred life and populating force, mighty enough to overlive, and finally to completely people the world. And this is what we call the day of glory. It lies, to a great degree, in the scheme of Christian nurture itself, and is possible only as a consummation of that scheme. If I rightly conceive the gospel work and plan, this is the regeneration [παλιγγεννεσία] which our Lord promises, viz.: that he will reclaim and re-sanctify the great principle of reproductive order and life, and people, at last, the world with a godly seed.

The church, as being made up of souls that are born of the Spirit, is a new supernatural order thus in humanity; a spiritual nation, we may conceive, that was founded by a colony from the skies. It alights upon our globe as its chartered territory. Can it overspread the whole planet and take possession? We see that it can unfold more of health, wealth, talent, than the present living races of inhabitants. It has within itself a stronger law of population, as well as a mighty power to win over and assimilate the nations. Its people have more truth, beauty, weight of character to exalt their predominance. And, what is more, God is in them by his all-informing, all-energizing Spirit, to be Himself unfolded in their history, and make it powerful. Not to believe that the Heavenly Colony, thus constituted and endowed, will finally overspread and fill the world, is to deny causes their effects, and to quite invert the natural order of strength and weakness. God, too, has testified in regard to this branch of his planting—"They shall inherit the land."

It is very obvious that this general view of Christian nurture and its effects is one that, becoming really installed in our faith, and the aims of our piety, would induce important modifications in our Christian practice, and change, to a considerable degree, the modes of our religious demonstration. Our over-intense individualism carries with it an immense loss of feeling, affection, sentiment, which hardens the aspect of every thing, and dries away the sweet charities and tender affections that would grace the older generations of souls, when conceiving that the younger live in them, and are somehow folded in their personality. We not only lose our children under this atomizing scheme of piety, which is a loss we can not afford, but a certain misproportion is induced, which distempers all our efforts and demonstrations.

One principal reason why we are so often deficient in character, or outward beauty, is, that piety begins too late in life, having thus to maintain a perpetual and unequal war with previous habit. If it was not true of Paul, it is yet too generally true, that one born out of due time will be found out of due time, more often than he should be, afterwards—unequal, inconsistent with himself, acting the old man instead of the new. Having the old habit to war with, it is often too strong for him. To make a graceful and complete Christian character, it needs itself to be the habit of existence; not a grape grafted on a bramble. And this, it will be seen, requires a Christian childhood in the subject. Having this, the gracious or supernatural character becomes itself more nearly natural, and possesses the peculiar charm of naturalness, which is necessary to the highest moral beauty.

I. WHEN AND WHERE THE NURTURE BEGINS.

"When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice, and I am persuaded that in thee also."—2 Timothy, i. 5.

THIS faith of Timothy, which is but another name for the grace of life in his character, the apostle speaks of here, it will be seen, as a kind of personal hereditament, or heir-loom in the family. He does not mean to say, as I understand him, that it is literally such, or in what sense, and how far, it is such. He only recognizes a godly parentage, doing godly things in him and for him, for one, two, three, or he knows not how many, generations back. He regards his young friend as born of godliness, nurtured and trained by godliness, and indulges a certain pleasant conviction that his present, full developed faith in Jesus, was a seed somehow planted in him by the believing motherhoods of the past, and began to live and grow in him, thus, long before he knew it himself, or others observed it in him. So by a short method, which includes and covers all, the apostle calls it his heir-loom; complimenting his godly motherhood in the figure, and testifying the greater confidence in his piety, that it was so near to being the inborn nobility of his Christian stock.

II.
PARENTAL QUALIFICATIONS.

"For I know him, that he will command his children and his house hold after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord."—Genesis, xviii 19.

THE real point of the declaration, here, is not that Abraham will command his children, but that he is such a man, having such qualities or qualifications as to be able to command, certain to command, and train them into an obedient and godly life. The declaration is, you will observe—"For I know him;" not simply and directly—"For I know the fact." Every thing turns on what is in him, as a father and householder—his qualifications, dispositions, principles, and modes of life—and the declaration is, that what he is to do, will certainly come out of what he is. He will certainly produce, or train a godly family, because it is in him, as a man, to do nothing else or less. The subject raised then by the declaration is, not so much family training and government, as it is—

The personal and religious qualifications, or qualifications of character, necessary to success in such family training and government.

There is almost no duty or work, in this world, that does not require some outfit of qualifications, in order to the doing of it well. We all understand that some kind of preparation is necessary to fill the place of a magistrate, teach a school, drill a troop of soldiers, or do any such thing, in a right manner. Nay, we admit the necessity of serving some kind of apprenticeship, in order to become duly qualified for the calling, only of a milliner, or a tailor. And yet, as a matter of fact, we go into what we call the Christian training of our children, without any preparation for it whatever, and apparently without any such conviction of negligence or absurdity, as at all disturbs our assurance in what we do. Not that young parents, and especially young mothers, are not often heard lamenting their conscious insufficiency for the charge that is put upon them, but that, in such regrets, they commonly mean nothing more than that they feel very tenderly, and want to do better things than, in fact, any body can. It does not mean, as a general thing, that they are practically endeavoring to get hold of such qualifications as they want, in order to their Christian success. After all, it is likely to be assumed that they have their sufficient equipment in the tender instinct of their natural affection itself. So they go on, as in a kind of venture, to command, govern, manage, punish, teach, and turn about the way of their child, in just such tempers, and ways of example and views of life, as chance to be the element of their own disfigured, ill-begotten character at the time. This, in short, is their sin—the undoing, as it will by and by appear, of their children—that they undertake their most sacred office, without any sacred qualifications; govern without self-government, discharge the holiest responsibilities irresponsibly, and thrust their children into evil, by the evil and bad mind, out of which their training proceeds.

I know not any thing that better shows the utter incompetency of mere natural affection as an equipment for the parental office, or that, in a short way, proves the fixed necessity in it, of some broader competency and higher qualification, than just to glance at the real cruelties, even commonly perpetrated, under just those tender, faithful instigations of natural affection, that we so readily expect to be a kind of infallible protection to the helplessness of infancy. How often is it a fact, that the fondest parents, owing to some want of insight, or of patience, or even to some uninstructed, only half intelligent desire to govern their child, will do it the greatest wrongs—stinging every day and hour, the little defenseless being, committed to their love, with the sense of bitter injustice; driving in the ploughshare of abuse and blame upon its tender feeling, by harsh words and pettish chastisements, when, in fact, the very thing in the child that annoys them is, that they themselves have thrown it into a fit of uneasiness and partial disorder, by their indiscreet feeding; or that in some appearance of irritability, or insubjection, it has only not the words to speak of its pain, or explain its innocence. The little child's element of existence becomes, in this manner, not seldom, an element of bitter wrong, and the sting of wounded justice grows in, so to speak, poisoning the soul all through, by its immedicable rancor. The pain of such wrong goes deeper, too, than many fancy. No other creature suffers under conscious injury so intensely. And the mischief done is only aggravated by tihe fact that the sufferer has no power of redress, and has no alternative permitted, but either to be cowed into a weak and cringing submission, or else, when his nobler nature has too much stuff in it for that, to be stiffened in hate and the bitter grudges of wrong. I know not any thing more sad to think of, than the cruelties put upon children in this manner. It makes up a chapter which few persons read, and which almost every body takes for granted can not exist. For the honor of our human nature, I wish it could not; and that what we call maternal affection, the softest, dearest, most self-sacrificing of all earthly forms of tenderness and fidelity, were, at least, sufficient to save the dishonor, which, alas! it is not; for these wrongs are, in fact, the cruelties of motherhood, and as often, I may add, of an even over-fond motherhood, as any—wrongs of which the doers are unconscious, and which never get articulated, save by the sobbings of the little bosom, where the sting of injury is felt.

Here, then, at just the point where we should, least of all, look for it, viz: at the point of maternal affection itself, we have displayed, in sadly convincing evidence, the need and high significance of those better qualifications of mind and character, by which the training of children becomes properly Christian, and upon which, as being such, the success of that training depends. Few persons, I apprehend, have any conception, on the other hand, of the immense number and sweep of the disqualifications that, in nominally or even really Christian parents, go in to hinder, and spoil of all success, the religious nurture of their children. Sometimes the disqualification is this, and sometimes it is that; sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious; sometimes observable by others and well understood, and sometimes undiscovered. The variety is infinite, and the modes of combination subtle, to such a degree, that persons taken to be eminently holy in their life, will have all their prayers and counsels blasted, by some hidden fatality, whose root is never known, or suspected, whether by others, or possibly by themselves. The wonder that children, whose parents were in high esteem for their piety, should so often grow up into a vicious and ungodly life, would, I think, give way to just the contrary wonder, if only some just conception were had of the various, multifarious, unknown, unsuspected disqualifications, by which modes of nurture, otherwise good, are fatally poisoned.

Sometimes, for example, it is a fatal mischief, going before on the child, but probably unknown to the world, that the parents, one or both, or it may be the mother especially, does not accept the child willingly, but only submits to the maternal office and charge, as to some hard necessity. This charge is going to detain her at home, and limit her freedom. Or it will take her away from the shows and pleasures for which she is living. Or it will burden her days and nights with cares that weary her self-indulgence. Or she is not fond of children, and never means to be fond of them—they are not worth the trouble they cost. Indulging these und such like discontents, unwisely and even cruelly provoked, not unlikely, by the unchristian discontents and foolish speeches of her husband, she poisons both herself and her child beforehand, and receives it with no really glad welcome, when she takes it to her bosom. Strange mortal perversity that can thus repel, as a harsh intrusion, one of God's dearest gifts; that which is the date of the house in its coming, and comes to unseal a new passion, whereby life itself shall be duplicated in meaning, as in love and duty! This abuse of marriage is, in fact, an offense against nature, and is no doubt bitterly offensive to God. Though commonly spoken of, in a way of astonishing lightness, it is just that sin, by which every good possibility of the family is corrupted. What can two parents do for the child, they only submit to look upon, and take as a foundling to their care? If they have some degree of evidence in them that they are Christian disciples, they will have fatally clouded that evidence, by a contest with God's Providence, so irreverent to Him, and so cruel to their child. If now, at last, they somewhat love the child, which is theirs by compulsion, what office of a really Christian nurture can they fill in its behalf? They are under a complete and total disqualification, as respects the duties of their charge. They are out of rest in God, out of confidence toward Him, hindered in their prayers, lost to that sweetness of love and peace which ought to be the element of their house. Delving on thus, from such a point of beginning, and assuming the possible chance of success, in what they may do in the spirit of such a beginning, is simply absurd. What can they do in training a child for God, which they have accepted, at his hands, only as being thrust upon them by compulsion?

I might speak of other disqualifications that have a similar character, as implying some disagreement with Providence. But it must suffice to say generally, that there can be no such thing as a genuine Christian nurture that is out of peace with God's Providence—in any respect. On the contrary, it is when that peace is the element of the house, and sweetens every thing in it—pain, sickness, loss, the bitter cup of poverty, every ill of adversity or sting of wrong—then it is, and there, as nowhere else, that children are most sure to grow up into God's beauty, and a blessed and good life. The child that is born to such keeping, and lovingly lapped in the peaceful trust of Providence, is born to a glorious heritage. On the other hand, where the endeavor and life-struggle of the house is, at bottom, a fight with Providence; envious, eager, anxious, out of content, out of rest, full of complaint and railings, it is impossible that any thing Christian should grow in such an element. The disqualification is complete.

Another whole class of disqualifications require to be named by themselves; those I mean which are caused by a bad or false morality in the parties, at some point where the failure is not suspected, and misses being corrected by the slender and very partial experience of their discipleship.

They are persons, for example, who make much of principles in their words, and really think that they are governed by principles, when, in fact, they do every thing for some reason of policy, and value their principles, more entirely than they know, for what they are worth in the computations of policy. Contrivance, artifice, or sometimes cunning, is the element of the house. A subtle, inveterate habit of scheming creeps into all the reasons of duty; and duty is done, not for duty's sake, but for the reasons, or prudential benefits to be secured by it. Even the praying of the house takes on a prudential air, much as if it were done for some reason not stated. A stranger in the house, seeing no scandalous wrong, but a fine show of principle, has a certain sense of coldness upon him, which he can not account for. How much of true Christian nurture there may be in such a house, it is not difficult to judge. Here, probably, is going to be one of the cases, where everybody wonders that children brought up so correctly, turn out so badly. It is not understood that such children were brought up to know principles, only as a stunted undergrowth of prudence, and that now the result appears.

Again there is, in some persons, who appear, in all other respects, to be Christian, a strange defect of truth or truthfulness. They are not conscious of it. They would take it as a cruel injustice, were they only to suspect their acquaintances of holding such an estimate of them. And yet there is a want of truth in every sort of demonstration they make. It is not their words only that lie, but their voice, air, action, their every putting forth has a lying character. The atmosphere they live in is an atmosphere of pretense. Their virtues are affectations. Their compassions and sympathies are the airs they put on. Their friendship is their mood and nothing more. And yet they do not know it. They mean, it may be, no fraud. They only cheat themselves so effectually as to believe, that what they are only acting is their truth. And, what is difficult to reconcile, they have a great many Christian sentiments, they maintain prayer as a habit, and will sometimes speak intelligently of matters of Christian experience. But how dreadful must be the effect of such a character, on the simple, trustful soul of a little child. When the crimen falsi is in every thing heard, and looked upon, and done, he may grow up into a hypocrite, or a thief, but what shall make him a genuine Christian?

In the same manner, I could go on to show a multitude of disqualifications for the office of a genuine Christian nurture, that are created by a bad or defective morality, in parents who live a credibly Christian life. They make a great virtue, it may be, of frugality or economy, and settle every thing into a scale of insupportable parsimony and meanness. Or, they make a praise of generous living, and run it into a profligate and spendthrift habit. Or, they make such a virtue of honor and magnanimity, as to set the opinions and principles of men in deference, above the principles of God. Or, they get their chief motives of action out of the appearances of virtue, and not out of its realities. There is no end to the impostures of bad morality, that find a place in the lives of reputably Christian persons. They are generally too subtle to be detected by the inspection of their consciousness, and very commonly pass unobserved by others. And yet they have power to poison the nurture of the house, even though it appears to be, in some respects, Christian. Hence the profound necessity that Christian parents, consciously meaning to bring up their children for God, should make a thorough inspection of their morality itself, to find if there be any bad spot in it, knowing that, as certainly as there is, it will more or less fatally corrupt their children.

We have still another whole class of disqualifications to speak of, that belong, as vices, to the Christian life itself, and will, as much more certainly, be ruinous in their effects. Some of them would never be thought of as disqualifications for the Christian training of children, and yet they are so, in a degree to even cut off the reasonable hope of success. Probably a great part of the cases of disaster, that occur in the training of Christian families, are referable to these Christian vices, which are commonly not put down as evidences of apostasy, or any radical defect of Christian principle, because they are not supposed to imply a discontinuance of prayers or a fatal subjection to the spirit of this world.

III.
PHYSICAL NURTURE, TO BE A MEANS OF GRACE.

"Feed me with food convenient for me, lest I be full and deny thee and say, who is the Lord?"—Proverbs, xxx. 8-9.

A MOST fit subject of prayer! And if the feeding of an adult person, such as Agur, has a connection so intimate with his religious life and character, how much more the feeding and the physical nurture of a child. I use the text, therefore, to introduce, for our present consideration, as a kind of first point, the food or feeding of children, and their physical treatment generally.

It will not be incredible to any thoughtful person, least of all to any genuinely philosophic person, that the treatment and fare of the body has much to do with the quality of the soul, or mind—its affinities, passions, aspirations, tempers; its powers of thought and sentiment, its imaginations, its moral and religious development. For the body is not only a house to the mind as other houses are, which we may live in for a time with no perceptible effect on our character, but it is a house in the sense of being the mind's own organ; its external life itself, the medium of all its action, the instrument of its thought and feeling, the inlet also of all its knowledges and impressions, and the instigator, by a thousand reactions, of all such spiritual riot and corruption as have had their leaven brewed in as many physical abuses and disorders. So intimate is this connection of mind and body, so very close to real oneness are they, that no one can, by any possibility, be a Christian in his mind, and not be in some sense a Christian in his body. If his soul is to be a temple of the Holy Ghost, then his body must be. If his soul is under government, then his body will be. And if his body is not under government, then his soul, by no possibility, can be; save that, in every such ease, it will and must be under the government of the body; subject to its power, swayed by all its excesses and distempers.

Hence that most determined, almost proud, resolve of the apostle, when he declares—"I will not be brought under the power of any." Under the body? No! he will scorn that low kind of thraldom. Meats, drinks, appetites—none of these shall have the mastery in him. He will assert the supreme right of the soul or person, above the house it lives in; so God's preeminent right in the soul. He will say to the body—"stay thou down there"—as they that fast do, in fasting; and, what is more profoundly, more scientifically rational than fasting, when it is practiced in the real insight of its reasons? It is the soul rising up, in God's name, to assert herself over the body; over its appetites, passions, tempers, and, if possible, distempers, And how often the poor, coarse, stupid, sensual, fast-bound slaves of the body, calling themselves disciples, need this kind of war, and a regular campaign of it, to get their souls uppermost and trim themselves for the race.

One must be a very inobservant person, not to have noticed, that all his finest and most God-ward aspirations are smothered under any load of excess, or overindulgence. It is as if the body were calling down all the other powers, even those of poetry, magnanimity, and religion, to help it do the scarcely possible work of digestion. At that point they gather. The sense of beauty is there, and the soul's angel of hope, and the testimony of God's peace, and the music of devotion, and the thrill of sermons, dosing, all together, and soughing in dull dreams round the cargo of poppies in the hold of the body. To raise any fresh sentiment is now impossible. Even prayer itself is mired, and can not struggle out. The news of some best friend's death can only be answered by dry interjections, and forced postures of grief, that will not find their meaning till to-morrow.

And much the same thing holds true, only under a different form, when the body is prematurely diseased and broken, by the excesses of self-indulgence. Its distempers will distemper the mind itself; its pains prick through into the sensibilities, even of the spiritual nature. Out of the pits of the body, dark clouds will steam up into the chambers of the soul, and all the devils of dyspepsia will be hovering in them, to scare away its peace, and choke the godlike possibilities, out of which its better motions should be springing.

IV.
THE TREATMENT THAT DISCOURAGES PIETY.

"Fathers provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged."—Colossians, iii. 21.

DISCOURAGED, the apostle means, in good; that is, in worthy purposes and pious endeavors. Nothing will more certainly put a child in a discouraged feeling, than to be angered by a parent's ill-nature and abuse. The anger is, most certainly, far enough from being itself a state of discouragement; but anger is a passion that can not hold long and the after state into which it subsides, in the case of inferiors and dependants, is commonly a giving up to the bad, a passionless and low desperation, that is equivalent to a general surrender of all high aims and aspirations.

In this view, it would not be altogether amiss, and certainly no improper use of the apostle's words, if I were to offer under them a lecture to parents, on the provoking ways of treatment and government. But I have chosen them for a different purpose, and one that is more inclusive, viz: to introduce and give sanction to a discourse on—

The discouragement of piety in children; the ways in which it is discouraged, and the great care necessary to avoid a mistake so injurious.

V.
FAMILY GOVERNMENT.

"One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity."—1 Timothy, iii. 4.

TO BE a Christian bishop, whether in a clergy of one order or of three, is to be set in a high office, demanding high qualifications. What may be taken as qualifications, the apostle is here specifying; and among the rest, he names the character evinced by maintaining a good and sound government in the house. "For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?" A very singular test, in one view, for a Christian bishop; one that passes by the matter of learning and eloquence, and church reputation, laying hold, instead, of a gift in which some very ordinary men, and not a few ordinary women, excel. And with good reason; for, in fact, how very much alike, in the elements of merit and success, are all that purchase to themselves a good degree, in whatever rank, or sphere—alike in fidelity, order, patience, steadiness, attention, application to the charge that is given them. Nay, when the apostle drops in thoughtfully what he takes to be the same thing in effect, as ruling one's house well, viz: "the having his children in subjection with all gravity," the words themselves, appear to have a sound of character and office in them, as if spoken of a bishop with his flock. And what indeed is the house but a little primary bishopric under the father, taking oversight thereof?

Family Government, then, is the subject here suggested for discussion. And we naturally endeavor—

I To ascertain what is the true conception of family government.

Of course it is to be government; about that there ought to be no hesitation. It is not to be a mere nursing, or dressing, or provisioning agency; not to be an exhorting, advising, consulting relationship; not to be a lavishing of devotion, or parental self-sacrifice; but the radical constitutive idea, that in which it becomes family government, is that it governs, uses authority, maintains law and rules, by a binding and loosing power, over the moral nature of the child. Parents, it would sometimes appear, fall into a practical ambiguity here—as if the governing power were a kind of severity, or harsh assumption; not perceiving that, by common consent, we speak of an ungoverned family as the synonym of a disorderly, wretched, and dishonored, if not ruined, family. There is no greater cruelty, in fact, than this same false tenderness, which is the bane of so many families. There is a kind of cruelty indeed, which is exactly opposite, and misses the idea of government on the other side, viz: that brutish manner of despotic will and violence, which makes no appeal to the moral nature at all, driving straight by, upon the fears, in a battery of force. And yet, whether even this be really more cruel in its effects, than the false tenderness just named, is a fair subject of doubt. The true idea, that which makes the domestic order and state so beneficent, is that it is to be a state of government; a state where love has authority, and presides ill the beneficent order of law.

But when we have reached this point, that family government is to govern, we shall find that multitudes of parents who assume the Christian name, have yet no practical sense of the intensely religious character of the house, or the domestic and family state. They go into their office loosely, and without any conception, for the most part, of what their authority means. This, I will now undertake to show, drawing out especially the points in which they most commonly seem to fall below the real sense of their office, in the opinions they hold concerning it.

First of all, their family government is never conceived, in its true nature, except when it is regarded as a vicegerent authority, set up by God, and ruling in his place. Instead of creating us outright, God has seen fit to give us existence under laws of reproduction; having it for his object, in the family order and relationship, to set us forth, under a kind of experience in the small, and in terms of sense, that faithfully typify our wider relationship to Him, the eternal Father and invisible Ruler of the worlds. We are infants too, men and women in the small, that we may be as flexible in our will as possible. Our parents, if they are godly themselves, as by the supposition they will be, are to personate God, in the double sense of bearing his natural and moral image before us, ever close at hand; and also in the right of authority with which they are clothed. And, that they may have us at the greatest advantage, it is given them to clothe us, and feed us, and bathe us, day and night, in the unsparing and lavish attentions of their love; enjoying our enjoyments, and even their own sacrifices for us. First, the mother has us, at her bosom, as a kind of nursing Providence. Perused by touch and by the eyes, her soul of maternity, watching for that look and bending ever to it, raises the initial sense of a divine something in the world; and when she begins to speak her soft imperative, putting a little decision into the tones of her love, she makes the first and gentlest possible beginning of authority. And then the stiffer tension of the masculine word, connected with the wider, rougher providence of a father's masculine force, follows in a stouter mode of authority, and the moral nature of the child, configured thereto, answers faithfully in a rapidly developed sense of obligation. The parents are to fill, in this manner, an office strictly religious; personating God in the child's feeling and conscience, and bending it, thus, to what, without any misnomer, we call a filial piety. So that when the unseen Father and Lord is Himself discovered, there is to be a piety made ready for him; a kind of house-religion, that may widen out into the measures of God's ideal majesty and empire. Hence the injunction, "Children obey your parents in the Lord." They could not make a beginning with ideas of God, or with God as an unseen Spirit; therefore they had parents given them in the Lord—the Lord to be in them, there to personate and finite himself, and gather to such human motherhood and fatherhood, a piety, transferable to Himself, as the knowledge of his nobler, unseen Fatherhood arrives.

Again, it is another point, very commonly overlooked, or forgotten, that parental government is genuine, only as it bears rule for the same ends that God Himself pursues, in the religious order of the world. True family government will be just as religious as His, neither more nor less. It will have exactly the same ends and no other. Just here, accordingly, is the main root of mischief and failure in the government of Christian families. The parents are not Christian enough to think of bearing rule for strictly Christian ends. They drop into a careless, irresponsible way, and rule for any thing that happens to chime with their own feeling or convenience. They want their children to shine, or be honorable, or rich, or brave, or fashionable; so to serve themselves in them, or their pride, or their mere natural fondness. They bring in, thus, bad motives to corrupt all government, and even to corrupt themselves. If they have some care of piety in their government, it is a kind of amphibious care, sometimes in one element and sometimes in another. They are never truly and heartily in God's ends. And the result is that what they do in the name of religion, or to inculcate religion, shows their want of appetite, and has really no effect but to make both God's authority and theirs irksome. Nothing answers the true purpose here, but to bring in all the noblest ideas of truth, and forgiveness and self sacrifice, and assert a pitch of virtue in the house high enough to be inspiring. The government will then have a genuine authority and power, because the rule of God is in it. As it rules for God, and with God, God will be in it; otherwise it is mortal self-assertion only.

Closely related is the conviction to be firmly held, that family discipline, rightly administered, is to secure, and may secure, a style of obedience in the child that amounts to a real piety. If we speak of conversion, family government should be a converting ordinance, as truly as preaching. For observe and make due account of this single fact, that when a child is brought to do any one thing from a truly right motive, and in a genuinely right spirit, there is implied in that kind of obedience, the acceptance of all best and holiest principle. I do not mean, of course, that children are to be made Christians by the rod, or by any summary process of requirement. There is no such short method of compulsory piety here, as some are reported to have held, or put in exercise. But it is not absurd to expect and aim to realize in the family, a genuine spirit of obedience; obedience, that is, front the principle that God enthrones, and which underlies all piety—just what the apostle means, if I understand him rightly, by having children "in subjection with all gravity." In the phrase "all gravity," he is looking at a kind of obedience that touches the deepest notes of principle and character. Contrary to this, there is an obedience without principle, which is obedience with all levity; that which is paid to mere will and force; that which is another name for fear; that which is bought by promises and paid by indulgences; that which makes a time-server, or a coward, or a lying pretender as the case may be, and not a Christian. This latter—that which makes a Christian—is the aim of all true government, and should never be out of sight for an hour. Let the child be brought to do right because it is right, and not because it is unsafe, or appears badly, to do wrong. In every case of discipline for ill-nature, wrong, willfulness, disobedience, be it understood, that the real point is carried never till the child is softened into love and duty; sorry, in all heartiness, for the past, with a glad mind set to the choice of doing right and pleasing God. How often is it true that in the successful carrying of such a point, (which can not be carried, save by great resources of love and gospel life in the parents,) the fact of a converted will is gained. And one must be a dull observer of children and their after life, who has not many times suspected that just the ones who are said to be converted afterwards, and suppose themselves to be, had their wills not seldom bowed to this in their childhood, under the government of the house.

Having so far indicated what is the true idea of family government as a Divine institution, let us next inquire—

VI.
PLAYS AND PASTIMES, HOLIDAYS AND SUNDAYS.

"And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof."—Zechariah, vii. 5.

HAPPY days are these that figure in the prophet's vision. The people of the city are accustomed to scenes that are widely different, and give a peculiar zest to his picture. In the times of pestilence, in the horrors of the siege, in the sweeping out of captivity, what silence of desolation have they seen—the silence of ghastly death, the silence of gaunt famine, the silence of emptiness and depopulated life. It shall no more be so; the city shall be God's mountain, sheltered under his care, exempt from all the past desolations of pestilence and war—peaceful, populous, secure, and strong. All which is shown by two simple touches that make out the complete picture—"There shall yet old men and old women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem, and every man with his staff in his hand for very age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls, playing in the streets thereof."

We can see, too, for ourselves that the prophet's feeling goes into his picture; and that he has a natural delight in it himself. He sees the venerable crones gathering at the corners, and blesses himself in the sight; hears the ring of happy voices in the streets and market-places, and plays his feeling in, with the playing boys and girls of the Lord's glad mountain. Inspiration has not taken the nature out of him, but has only made him love the innocent glee of childhood the more.

I draw it, accordingly, from this beautiful touch of the prophet's picture, that religion loves too much the plays and pleasures of childhood, to limit or suppress them by any kind of needless austerity.

Having set the young of all the animal races a playing, and made their beginning an age of frisking life and joyous gambol, it would be singular if God had made the young of humanity an exception; or if, having put the same sportive instinct in their make, he should restrict them always to a carefully practical and sober mood. What indeed does he permit us to see, in the universal mirth-time which is given to be the beginning of every creature's life, but that He takes a certain pleasure in their exuberant life, and regards their gambols with a fatherly satisfaction? What, too, shall we judge, but that as all instincts are inserted for that to which they tend, so this instinct of play in children is itself an appointment of play?

Besides, there is a very sublime reason for the play-state of childhood which respects the moral and religious well-being of manhood, and makes it important that we should have our first chapter of life in this key. Play is the symbol and interpreter of liberty, that is, Christian liberty; and no one could ever sufficiently conceive the state of free impulse and the joy there is in it, save by means of this unconstrained, always pleasurable activity, that we call the play of children. Play wants no motive but play; and so true goodness, when it is ripe in the soul and is become a complete inspiration there, will ask no motive but to be good. Therefore God has purposely set the beginning of the natural life in a mood that foreshadows the last and highest chapter of immortal character. Just as he has made hunger in the body to represent hunger in the soul, thirst in the body to represent thirst in the soul, what is sweet, bitter, sour in the taste to represent what is sweet, bitter, sour in the soul's feeling, lameness to represent the hobbling of false principle, the fierce combustion of heat to represent the rage of angry passion, all things natural to represent all things spiritual, so he prepares, at the very beginning of our life, in the free self-impulsion of play, that which is to foreshadow the glorious liberty of the soul's ripe order and attainment in good. One is the paradise of nature behind us, the other the paradise of grace before us; and the recollection of one images to us, and stimulates us in, the pursuit of the other.

Holding this conception of the uses, and the very great importance of play, as a natural interpreter of what is highest and last in the grand problem of our life itself, we are led, on sober and even religious conviction, to hold in high estimation the age of play. As play is the forerunner of religion. so religion is to be the friend of play; to love its free motion, its happy scenes, its voices of glee, and never, by any needless austerities of control, seek to hamper and shorten its pleasures. Any sort of piety or supposed piety that i.s jealous of the plays and bounding activities of childish life, is a character of hardness and severity that has, so far at least, but a very questionable agreement with God's more genial and fatherly feeling. One of the first duties of a genuinely Christian parent is, to show a generous sympathy with the plays of his children; providing playthings and means of play, giving them playtimes, inviting suitable companions for them, and requiring them to have it as one of their pleasures, to keep such companions entertained in their plays, instead of playing always for their own mere self-pleasing. Sometimes, too, the parent, having a hearty interest in the plays of his children, will drop out for the time the sense of his years, and go into the frolic of their mood with them. They will enjoy no other play-time so much as that, and it will have the effect to make the authority, so far unbent, just as much stronger and more welcome, as it has brought itself closer to them, and given them a more complete show of sympathy.

On the same principle, it has an excellent effect to make much of the birthdays of children, because it shows them, little and dependent as they are, to be held in so much greater estimation in the house. When they have each their own day, when that day is so remembered and observed as to indicate a real and felt interest in it by all, then the home in which they are so cherished is proportionally endeared to feeling, and what has magnified them they are ready to magnify.

On the same principle, too, public days and festivals, those of the school, those of the state, and those of religion, are to be looked upon with favor, as times in which they are to be gladdened by the shows, and plays, and simple pleasures appropriate to the occasions; care being only taken to put them in no connection with vice, or any possible excess. Let them see what is to be seen, enjoy what is to be enjoyed, and shun with just so much greater sensibility whatever is loose, or wild, or wicked.

Religious festivals have a peculiar value to children; such I mean as the festivals of Thanksgiving and Christmas—one a festival of thanks for the benefits of Providence, the other for the benefits of that supernatural providence which has given the world a Saviour and a salvation. Both are religious, and, in that fact, have their value; for nothing will go farther to remove the annoyance of a continual, unsparing, dry restraint upon the soul of childhood, and produce a feeling, as respects religion, of its really genial character, than to have it bring its festive and joyously commemorative days. One of the great difficulties in a properly religious nurture is, that religion has to open its approaches to the soul, and make its beginnings in the shape of law; to say God requires of you this, forbids you in that, makes it your life to be set in all ways of obedience. It takes on thus a guise of constraint, and so far wears a repulsive look; but if it can show how genial it is, how truly it loves even childish enjoyment, by gilding for it days of joy and festive celebrations, then the severities of law and responsible obedience take on themselves a look of benignity, and it begins to be felt that God commands us, not to cripple us, but to keep as safe and lead us into good. Such days, it is true, may be greatly abused by what is really unchristian; what is sensual and low, and very close to vice itself; and it is much to be regretted that the Christmas festival, otherwise so beautiful and appropriate, taken as a Christian commemoration of the greatest fact of the world's history, has been so commonly associated with traditional looseness and excess. The friends of such a day can not do it any so great honor, as to clear it entirely of the excess and profane jollity by which it was made to commemorate any thing and every thing but Christ, that, setting it in character as a genuine religious festivity, they may give it to all friends of Christ as a day of universal observance.

Happily there is now such an abundance of games and plays prepared for the entertainment of children, that there is no need of allowing them in any that stand associated with vice. Those plays are generally to be most favored that are to be had only in the open air, and in forms of exercise that give sprightliness and robustness to the body. At the same time, there needs to be a preparation of devices for the entertainment of children indoors in the evening; for the prophet did not give it as a picture of the happy days of Jerusalem, that the streets of the city should be full of boys and girls playing there in the evening, or into the night, away from their parents and the supervision of their home. There is any thing signified in that but happiness and public well-being. Christian fathers and mothers will never suffer their children to be out in the public streets in the evening, unless they are themselves too loose and self-indulgent to assume that care of the conduct and the hours of their children, which is imposed upon them by their parental responsibilities. In country places, far removed from all the haunts of vice, and in neighborhoods where there are no vicious children, it might work no injury if boys were allowed to be out, now and then, in their coasting or skating parties in the evening. But the better rule in large towns, the absolute rule, having no exceptions as regards very young children, will be that they are never to be out or away from home in the evening. Meantime, it will be the duty of the parents, and a kind of study especially of the mother, to find methods of making the house no mere prison. but a place of attraction, and of always cheerful and pleasant society. She will provide books that will feed their intelligence and exercise their tastes—pictures, games, diversions, plays; set them to inventing such themselves, teaching them how to carry on their little society, in the playful turns of good nature and fun, by which they stimulate and quicken each other; drilling them in music, and setting them forward in it by such beginnings that they will shortly be found exercising and training each other; shedding over all the play, infusing into all the glee, a certain sober and thoughtful look of character and principle, so that no over grown appetite for sport may render violent pleasures necessary, but that small, and gentle, and easy, and almost sober pleasures, may suffice; becoming, at last, ever most satisfactory. Here is the field of the mother's greatest art, viz: in the finding how to make a happy and good evening for her children. Here it is that the lax, faithless, worthless mother most entirely fails; here the good and wise mother wins her best successes.

Meantime some care must be exercised, that the religious life itself be never set in an attitude of repugnance to the plays of childhood. There must be no attempt to raise a conscience against play. Any such religion will certainly go to the wall; any such conscience will be certainly trampled, and things innocent will be done as if they were crimes; done with a guilty feeling; done with as bad effects every way, on the character, as if they were really the worst things. Nothing is more cruel than to throw a child into the attitude of conflict with God and his conscience, by raising a false conscience against that which both God and nature approve. It is nothing less than making a gratuitous loss of religion, required by no terms of reason, justified by no principle, even of Christian sacrifice itself.

Suppose, for example, that a child has begun to show many pleasant evidences of love to God and all good things, but that he is eager still in play, or sometimes gets quite wild in the excitement of it. If, at such a time, it is sprung upon him, as a conclusion, that he does not truly love God, because he is so much taken by the excitements of play, he will thus be discouraged without reason, in all his confidences of piety, and it will be strange, if by and by he does not begin to show a settled aversion to religious things. How can he do less, when he is compelled to see it, as in conflict with all the most innocent and most truly natural instincts of his age? Or, to make the case more plain, drawing the question to a closer point, suppose the child, having so many evidences of piety in his dispositions, to be found at some kind of play in the family prayers, or that he rushes out from such prayers, in a manner that indicates eagerness and an emancipated feeling, or that he sometimes shows uneasiness in the hours of public worship on Sunday, or gives manifest tokens, in the morning, of a desire to escape from it, is it then to be set down, in your parental remonstrances with him, that he has, of course, no love to God, or the things of religion? By no means. How often does the adult Christian feel even a disinclination to such things; how often hurry away from his formal prayer, that he may get into his shop, or his field, or into some negotiation that has haunted his sleep in the night; how often sit through sermons with his mind on the game of politics, on the investment made or to be made, on his journey, or his mortgage, or the rivals he has in his trade? Is it worse for a child to be after his plays, with only the same kind of eagerness? Doubtless all such engrossments of the soul, whether of one kind or the other, are to be taken as bad signs, and, as far as they go, to be allowed their due weight. But which is worse and more fatal, the child's undue possession by the spirit of play, or the man's by the spirit of gain—the honest, artless, letting forth of nature by one, or the deliberate, studied, scheming of the other—it is not difficult, I think, to guess. No matter if the latter is more sober and thoughtful in the mood, observing a better show of gravity. For just that reason he is only to be judged the more harshly. If then we can beat with adult Christians, who are much in the world, and, forgetting themselves often, fall into moods of real disinclination to their duty, are we to set it down as some total evidence against the piety of a child, that, by mere exuberance of life, he is occasionally hurried away from sacred things, into matters of play? Nothing is more unjust. Why should we require it of a child to be perfect, when we do not require it of a man? And if we tolerate inconstancy of feeling or impulse in one, why not a much less worldly and deliberate inconstancy in the other?

Thus far we speak for the side of play, showing how far off it is from the purpose of religion to take away, or suppress, the innocent plays of childhood; how ready it is, on the other hand, to foster them and give them sympathy. But it is not the whole of life, even to a child, to be indulged in play. There is such a thing as order, no less than such a thing as liberty; and the process of adjustment between these two contending powers, begins at a very early date. Under the law of the house, of the school, and of God, the mere play impulse begins very soon to be tempered and moderated by duty, and the problem is to make divine order itself, at last, a state of liberty analogous to the state of play, as already suggested. But the law that is to fashion such order will be first felt as a restriction; then, when it becomes the spirit of the life, the order itself will be liberty. There is no such thing, therefore, as a possibility to childhood of unrestricted play. Restriction must be encountered as often as the order of the house demands it, then as often as the school demands it, then as often as the duties of religion demand it; though such restrictions are never to be looked upon as hostile to the child's play, but only as terms that are really necessary for his training into the organic relations under which he is born, best for his character, and even best for the enjoyments of his play itself. Otherwise he would either become sated by it in a short time, or his appetite for it would become so egregiously overgrown, that no possible devices or means could be invented to keep pace with it. Besides, a child, thus put to nothing but mere play, would very soon grow into such lightness and dissipation of feeling, as to be mentally addled, and would so be wholly incapacitated for any of the more sober an4 manly offices of life.

Here, then, begins a process of training into moral order, which, without wishing to be any restriction upon play, is yet of necessity such a restriction. The child is required to conform his conduct, including his plays, to the peace of the house, to the conditions of sick persons in it to the hours and times and general comfort of other inmates older than himself. Errands are put upon him that require him to forego his pleasures. When he is old enough, he is set to works of industry, it may be, that he may contribute something to the general benefit. By all which restrictions of play, lie is only prepared to enjoy his pastimes and plays the more. The restrictions he will doubtless feel, at the time, and may be somewhat restive under them; but when he is thoroughly brought into the order of the house, and is set in the habit of serving it, as an interest of his own, then he will obey, contrive, and work, and even drudge himself to serve it, constrained by no motive but the service itself.

In the same manner it will be laid upon him to be at his place in the school, to be punctual to his times, to miss no lesson, to hold his mind to his studies by close, unfaltering application, even though it cost him a loss of just that liberty in play that he would most like, and take it as the very bliss of his good fortune to have. Restricted thus by the order of the school, he will only enjoy his play-times the more, and finally will come to the enjoyment of study itself for its own sake.

And so it will be in religion. There must, of course, be in it, what may be called restrictions upon children. All law is felt as restriction at the first, but it will not be that God makes war on their innocent plays; they only need as much to be established in right conduct, well-doing, and piety, as to have their indulgence in such pleasures. If God will take them away from all misrule and wretchedness, and will bring them into all best conditions of blessedness and peace, and even of liberty itself, he must pit them under his commandments, train them into his divine will, and settle them in his own perfect order; and if he is obliged, in such a design, to infringe here and there upon their plays, it is not be cause he likes the infringement, but only that he seeks the higher bliss of character for them. Thus when a little child is required to say his prayers and retire at the proper time for sleep, there is nothing to complain of in that kind of constraint, even though he wants to continue his play; for the thing required is plainly for his good—this for the double reason that it trains him toward obedience to God, and a life in heaven's order, and because it even gives him a better appetite, and a fuller fund of vigor for, his play itself. And so it is universally; no constraint is to be blamed as infringement on his happiness, or a harsh severity against his pleasures, when, in fact, all highest happiness and widest range of liberty depend on the requirement imposed.

The suggestions and distinctions thus far advanced, have, it will now be seen, another kind of use and importance, when taken as preparatives for the settlement of a great practical question, viz: how to use the Christian Sabbath, or Sunday. so as to best honor the day in its true import, and best secure the ends of Christian nurture. The question is one that relates to a whole seventh part of the child's time, and to just that part which is most peculiarly religious in the form, and most likely to assist the implanting and due fostering of religious impressions. So much indeed is there in this matter of a right use of Sundays, that the success of family nurture will be more exactly represented and measured by that use, than by any thing else. Sunday is preeminently the child's day for the soul, and the defective or bad use of it is never going to be compensated, by any wisest, best use of the other six days of the week. Indeed there is so much depending on this day, as regards human society, and the growth, and purity, and power of religion, that where it is lost in the training of families, no other kind of advantage—no liturgical drill, or eloquent preaching, or faithful and clear doctrine—can possibly make up the loss.

The main question, here, is how much, or little, of restriction is to be laid upon children in the due observance of the day? And the tendency is, it will be observed, to one or the other of two opposite extremes—that of undue severity, or that of unchristian looseness—and this, for two distinct sets of reasons. Sometimes for the reason of self-indulgence, or indolence in the parents; and sometimes for the reason of insufficient views of the day, as it stands in the Scripture, or in the judgments to be held of its uses. Thus it will be noted—

1. That, where parents are too indolent for any kind of painstaking in their families, they will contrive to case the burdens of their duty by one or the other of two distinct methods. They will either take up the notion that it is best and most soundly orthodox, to make a very stiff practice for their children; in which case they will perhaps require them to sit down within doors a good part of the day, learning catechism or scripture, stilling the house in that manner so as to allow them to sleep; or else they will take up the notion that, in modern times, we are to be more liberal, of course, being more intelligent; in which case they will get their children off to the Sunday-school, (with a lesson, or without,) or if they better like it, send them into the streets, or the fields. Here is the first great obstacle to be encountered, in securing a right and useful Sunday in families, viz: that invincible self-indulgence in parents, which is the bane of all true care and responsibility; the poison, too, of all honest judgment in finding what the way of duty is. They have frequently nc such earnest and prayerful desire of the religious benefit of their children, as fastens their own attention, or presses them into a study of plans and expedients for creating a religious interest in their minds. And then a double mischief follows, viz: that they grow rusty themselves in their religious character, and having no good conscience, subside into a state of silence and acknowledged incapacity; and next, that, having become mere drones of respectful nothingness in the positive duties of religion, they stand as actual impediments in the way of all genuine religious impressions in their families. The man who can make sacrifices and take pains for his children at home will grow, and be a useful Christian every where; and the man who can not, will be a dead weight every where. Here is the secret of a great part of that drying up of character which we so often deplore; and the secret also of that strangely irreligious temper, that hatred and contempt of all religion, that so often excites our wonder in the children of nominally Christian families. Let no parent hope to have God's blessing on the Sundays of his house, or indeed on any thing else that concerns the religious welfare of his children, unless he is willing to take pains, make sacrifices, burn as a light of holy example, for them and before them. Pass then,

2. To the inquiry what is the true conception of our Lord's day, or Sunday? What, according to the Scripture, and to all sound judgment of the day, as related to the Christian training of families, and to the general welfare of society, is the mode and amount of restriction imposed by it? I think it will be found, in giving a right answer to this question, that the true use of the day lies between two errors, or extremes, that stand over against each other; one that makes a virtually Jewish day of it, and an opposite that, with undue haste, quite sweeps it away. Neither is the mode of scripture, and the two are about equally weak, as regards their philosophic grounds and reasons.

According to the Scripture, God ordained a religious day, called a Sabbath, at the very morning of the creation. This was the day that Moses found already existing and only re-enacted in the ten tables of the moral law, as he did the statutes against lying and murder. The Sabbath stands, therefore, on precisely the same ground, scripturally, as the others; on the same too morally, save that the precise natural and social reasons for it, equally clear to God, are not so to us; and that, so far, it has the character to us of a simply divine institute, while the other nine statutes of the decalogue have the nature of acknowledged principles, grounded in their perceptible moral reasons. Could we also grasp, as God does, the precise natural reasons for observing just one day in seven as holy time, tracing perfectly the vast religious, and social, and moral, and physical effects involved, it would have no more the look of an institute, and would become a principle of natural obligation, like the others that stand with it.

In this view, it can not be repealed any more than the statute against theft, or false witness. It is not a Jewish day, in any proper sense of the term, but a day of humanity, a world's-creation day; type also and ground of the new-creation day of the Lord. Moses went on, it is true, after the delivery of the decalogue, and ordained laws civil, and police regulations, by which the Sabbath was to be observed and enforced, and it was these that gave a Jewish character to their Sabbath. And, so far, no farther, it was that the Sabbath was repealed, in becoming a Lord's day. When Paul complains to the Colossians, that they "observe new moons and Sabbaths," and boldly rebukes the Galatians, that they "turn again to the beggarly elements desiring to be in bondage," and "observe days, and months, and times, and years," he does not mean to call the seventh day of the decalogue beggarly elements, any more than he does the command to have but one God, or not to steal or kill. The beggarly elements are the political additions, those rigors of observance that were added by the political statutes and the religious drill of the ritual; designed, as it was, for a slavish people, low in their perceptions, and unable to know religion at all, save in the practice of austerities under it. Restriction was to them, at their low point, about the only religious conception they were equal to, and their whole ritual economy had a great part of its merit, in the stringent closeness of it, and the perpetual girding of their practice under its hard austerities. So far the whole economy was to be displaced, and the civil-law Sabbath was to go down with it. But the more ancient Sabbath be longed to the covenant of promise itself, and had the same kind of freedom and genial life in it that pertained, in Paul's view, to the whole Abrahamic order in religion. We can see too, for ourselves, that, so far as it is affirmed in the moral code of the decalogue, in distinction from the civil law, it has a character of extreme beauty and benignity. What can be a more genial token for God, than that he appoints such an institute of universal rest from labor? And what could evidence a more beautiful mercy than that God should take the part, in this manner, of all labor, even that of servants and slaves, and indeed of the laboring beasts, the oxen and the asses, asserting his protection over them (beautiful lesson of mercy to animals!) even against the selfishness of their owners, and allowing them to have a respite to their otherwise endless toils. There is, in fact, no restrictive word in the commandment, save what may be felt of restriction in the injunction to "keep the day holy," and even that is interpreted, to a great degree, by the simple requirement of a cessation from labor; though it is, doubtless, to be understood that the day is duly hallowed, only by a careful devotion of it to the uses of religion. Is there any thing harsh or unduly restrictive in such a day? Does Christianity itself find any thing to accuse, or any want of benignity in it?

There is, then, no pretext of authority in the Scripture for making the Lord's day, or Sunday, a Jewish day to children. And those parents who make it a point of fidelity to lay it on their children, according to the strict police regulations of the Jewish code, would be much more orthodox, if they went farther back, and took up conceptions of the day some thousands of years older. When they assume that every thing which can be called play in a very young child is wrong, or an offense against religion, they try, in fact, to make Galatians of their children; incurring a much harsher, Christian rebuke, than if they only turned to the beggarly elements themselves, and laid their own souls under the bondage. What can a poor child do, that is cut off thus, for a whole twenty-four hours, from any right to vent his exuberant feeling—impounded, strictly, in the house and shut up to catechism; or taken to church, there to fold his hands and sit out the long solemnities of the worship, and what to him is the mysterious lingo of preaching; then taken home again to struggle with the pent up fires, waiting in dreary and forlorn vacancy, till what are called the mercies of the day are over? What conception does he get of religion, by such kind of treatment, but that it comes to the world as foe to every bright thing in it; a burden, a weariness, a tariff, on the other six days of life?

But there comes in, here, a grand scripture reason for some sort of restriction, viz: that restriction is the necessary first stage of spiritual training every where. Instead of rushing into the conclusion, therefore, as many parents do, that all religious observances which create a feeling of restraint, or become at all irksome to children, are of course hurtful, and raise a prejudice in their minds against religion, the Scripture boldly asserts the fact that all law begins to be felt as a bondage. Law and gospel have a natural relationship, and they are bound together every where, by a firm interior necessity. It is so in the family, in the school, and in religion. The law state is always felt to be a bondage, and the restriction is irksome. By and by, the goodness of the law, and of them by whom it is administered, is fully discovered, and the obedience that began as restriction merges in liberty. The parents are obeyed with such care, as anticipates even their wishes; the lesson, that was a task, is succeeded by that free application which sacrifices even health and life to the eagerness of study; and so the law of God, that was originally felt only in the friction, rubbed in by that friction, is finally melted into the heart by the cross of Jesus, and becomes the soul's liberty itself. It is no fault then of a Sunday that it is felt, in some proper degree, as a restriction; or even that the day is sometimes a little irksome to the extreme restlessness of children. All restraint, whether in the family or the school, is likely to be somewhat irksome at the first. The untamed will, the wild impulse of nature, always begins to feel even principle itself in that way of collision with it. Nor is it any fault of the Sunday observance, that it has, to us, the character of an institute. If it were a mere law of natural morality, we might observe it without any thought of God's will; but if we receive it as an institute, we acknowledge God's will in it; and nothing has a more wholesome effect on just this account, than the being trained to an habitual surrender to what God has confessedly enjoined or instituted by his will. It is the acknowledging of his pure authority, and is all the more beneficial, when the authority is felt in a somewhat restrictive way. The transition too is easy from this to a belief in the supernatural facts of Christianity. The conscience and life is already configured to such faith; for whatever is accepted as an institution of God, is accepted as the supernatural injunction of his will.

The flash judgments, therefore, of many, in respect to the observance of Sunday, are not to be hastily accepted. We are not to read the prophet, as if promising that the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls, on the Lord's holy day, playing in the streets thereof; or as if that kind of license were necessary to clear the irksomeness of an oppressive observance; or as if the power of religion were to be increased by removing every thing in it, which disturbs the natural impatience of restraint. Some child that was, for example, now grown up to be a man—a profligate it may be, a sworn infidel, a hater of all religion—laughs at the pious Sundays that his godly mother made him keep, and testifies to the bitter annoyance he suffered under the irksome and superstitious restrictions thus imposed on his childish liberty. Whereupon some liberalist or hasty and superficial disciple, immediately infers that all Sunday restrictions are injurious, and only raise a hostile feeling in the child toward all religion. Whereas it may be, in the example cited, for such are not very infrequent, that the child was never accustomed to restriction at any other time as he ought to have been, or that his mother was too self-indulgent to exert herself in any such way for his religious entertainment, as to respite and soften the strictness of the Sunday observance. Perhaps the requirement was really too restrictive, or perhaps it was so little and so unevenly restrictive, as to make it only the more annoying. Be it as it may, in this or any particular example, a true Sunday observance needs to be restrictive in a certain degree, and needs to be felt in that way, in order to its real benefit. What is wanted is to have God's will felt in it, and then to have it reverently and willingly accepted. A Sunday turned into a holiday, to avoid the supposed evil of restrictiveness, would be destitute of religious value for just that reason.

The true principle of Sunday observance, then, appears to be this: that the child is to feel the day as a restriction, and is to have so much done to excite interest, and mitigate the severities of restriction, that he will also feel the true benignity of God in the day, and learn to have it as one of his enjoyments. When the child is very young, or just passing out of infancy, it will be enough that, with some simple teaching about God and his day, a part of his more noisy playthings are taken away; or, what is better than this, that he have a distinct Sunday set of playthings; such as may represent points of religious history, or associate religious ideas, abundance of which can be selected from any variety store without difficulty; then, as the child advances in age, so as to take the full meaning of language, or so as to be able to read, the playthings of the hands and eyes will be substituted by the playthings of the mind; which also will be such as connect some kind of religious interest—books and pictures relating to scripture subjects, a practice in the learning and beginning to sing Christian hymns, conversations about God and Christ, such as bring out the beauty of God's feeling and character, and present Him, not so much as a frightful, but more as a friendly and attractive being; for the child who is only scared by God's terrors and severities, will very soon lose out all proportional conceptions of him, and will want to hear of him no more. Even the Sunday itself that only brings him to mind will, for just that reason, become a burden. The endeavor should be to excite a welcome interest in the day and the subjects it recalls.

VII.
THE CHRISTIAN TEACHING OF CHILDREN.

But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them.—2 Timothy, ii. 14.

THIS exhortation of the apostle to his young friend Timothy, is the more remarkable that it relates to his training in the Old Testament scriptures, which were the only sacred writings known at the time of his childhood—"And that, from a child, thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation, through faith which is in Christ Jesus." His father was a Greek, (Acts xvi. 1,) and probably an unbeliever; but his mother was a woman of such piety, that she omitted nothing in the training of her son, and the apostle speaks of her, in the same epistle, even as having let down upon him a kind of piety by entail. But her faithful lessons—these are what he is now calling to mind; and it is affecting to notice that he not only charges it on him to remember what he has learned from the Scriptures, because they are God's word, but also to value the same things the more, "knowing of whom he has learned them;" that is, from his gracious and faithful mother. Under cover of this beautiful example, as it appears in all the parties concerned, the young minister and disciple, the godly mother and her instructions, the apostle and his congratulations, you will perceive that I am going to speak of—

The Christian teaching of children.

And I can not do better than to notice, in the beginning, three points which stand upon the face of the apostle's exhortation.

1. The very great importance of this teaching, when rightly dispensed. It is not indeed the first duty of the parent, for other duties go before, as we have already seen, preceding even the use of language. Neither is it, as a great many parents appear to assume, a matter in which their religious duties to their children are principally summed up. It is not every thing to teach, or verbally instruct their children, least of all to indoctrinate them in the formulas and theoretic principles of the faith. But how very great importance must there be in the teaching, when an apostle, setting his young friend in charge as a preacher of the gospel, bids him continue still in the teachings of his godly mother, and even to remember them for her sake. The New Testament preacher is exhorted still to be an Old Testament son, and is sent forth, in the power of the ancient Scripture, even after Christ has come. And just so it will ever be true of the ripest and tallest of God's saints, who were trained by His truth in their childhood, that however deep in their intelligence or high in spiritual attainments they have grown to be, the motherly and fatherly word is working in them still; and is, in fact, the core of all spiritual understanding in their character.

VII1.
FAMILY PRAYERS.

"And it shall come to pass in that day, I will hear, saith the Lord, I will hear the heavens, and they shall hear the earth and the earth shall hear the corn, and the wine, and the oil, and they shall hear Jezreel."—Hosea ii. 21-2.

BY this very elaborate and poetically ingenious figure, the prophet appears to be giving a contrived representation of the fact, that when God brings in the promised day of his universal reign in the earth, there will be a grand convergency of causes to prepare it, and, like so many concurrent prayers, to make common suit for it before Him. Thus he figures the world as being the beautiful valley called Jezreel, which is the garden, so to speak, of the land. And it is to be as when the people of Jezreel get their harvest, by having every thing in a train of concurrent agency to prepare it—they make petition by their careful tillage to the corn, the grapes, and olives, that they will grow apace; these, in turn, make suit to the earth to give them nutriment; this again hears them, and lifts its petition to the heavens, asking rain and dew; whereupon, last of all, the heavens hand up the prayers to God, to furnish them water, and let them shed it down; which petition he graciously hears, and the harvest follows. So he conceives it will be, as the harvest of the world approaches. It will be as if all things were put striving together, and a prayer were going up for it through all the concurrent circles of Providence. God's counsel and kingdom are constructing always a perfect harmony, by their convergence on his perfect end. Then, as the perfect end is neared, and the harmony with it grows more complete, it will be as if more things were concurring in it and asking for it, and prayer, falling in as a cause among causes, will have them all praying with it, or handing up its request. In which we may see what holds good of all prayer, and how or by what law it prevails. In one view, the whole future is prayed in by the whole present, being such a future as the whole present demands. The more things, therefore, prayer can get into harmony with itself in its request, the more likely it is to prevail; and the more alone it is, and the more things it has opposite to it, in the field of causes, the less likely it is to prevail—even as Adam had less hope of success in praying for Cain, that the blood of Abel was crying to God against him from the ground.

All prayer being under this general condition, family prayer will be of course; and of this I now propose to speak. I choose to handle the subject in this form, in the conviction that the prayers of families are so often defeated by the want of any such concert in the aims, plans, tempers, works, and aspirations of the house, as is necessary to a common suit before God; in other words, because the prayers, commonly so called, are defeated by the suit of so many causes contrary to them.