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

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

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

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

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

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

the same excellent fortune, fly in infant innocence from the bosom of unconverted parents in heathen or Christian lands to the bosom of their Saviour in heaven.

The commands of Christ so far from abolishing, establish this law.* That it was the custom of the apostolic Church, is proved from the speech and the silence of the Scriptures; its frequent reference to the baptism of houses or families, a word never found in the Baptist vocabulary of revivals;† its silence before the prejudices of Jew, and Greek, and Roman, and to whomsoever the word of this salvation was then sent, a silence that is unac

There are two commands of Christ that are the two watchwords of the most hostile sects, the regenerationist and the immersionist; the one, "He that believes and is baptized shall be saved;" the other, "Except a man be born of water, and of the Holy Ghost he cannot see the kingdom of God." These can be set over against each other, and it is not unlikely, were so uttered by Christ, that he might destroy both the errors of baptismal regeneration and exclusive believer's baptism. If the Baptist says baptism follows faith always, because Christ said so, the baptismal regenerationist asks, Why did he not put it before faith or its substance, in his conversation with Nicodemus? If he, on the other hand, says baptism precedes and occasions regeneration, because Christ said so, the answer is, he puts it after that in his last command. So the balance is kept, and both infant and believer's baptism are both preserved to the Church.

† Of what members did these olkoç or families consist? We have to draw on our judgment for the answer. This is probably affected by our faith and previous thought. To break through these as far as possible, let us suppose these statements were made in a journal of to-day, with whose views we had no acquaintance. Supposing that the Revival Tribune of last winter, about the length of the Acts of the Apostles, should have said, among other items, that in New York, "a Mrs. Lydia, whose heart the Lord had opened, was baptized and her family;" "that in a remarkable o itpouring of grace at Sing Sing, the warden was convicted and converted the same night, and before morning, he and all his' were baptized." In Boston the mayor "believed on the Lord, with all his family, and were baptized." Supposing that a great preacher, whose views were not known, should send a letter to the Church that he had been instrumental in upbuilding, in which he should say, "I baptized the family of Stephanus" and again, "Salute the Church in Priscilla's family, and they who are of Herodian's and Narcissus's families," could any one, however rigid their own views might be, fail to believe that the author of this narrative and letter intended to say that children, even the smallest, were baptized? Could any fair criticism, if it should reject some of them, reject them all? Would not a Baptist brother who should read that Tribune say, that those who wrote that narrative and letter were Methodist or Presbyterian preachers? Would a Baptist preacher, could he give such an account of a revival in his Church to his jour nals? The difference between them and St. Luke and St. Paul is seen in a most striking form in the journals and letters of that great apostle to the Burmans, Dr. Judson. They abound in narratives of baptisms, but not once is the word house or family used in connection with them, so far had he departed from the usage of the first and chief of the apostles to the heathen.

countable if the new religion was to hold the children of its adherents in less vital relations to itself than any one of its contemporaries; the desires of idolators to have the arms of the Church thrown around their babes, so that the whole family may be as a lovely islet in the black and deadly ocean of paganism rolling around them; the inscriptions on the graves of Christian and and baptized babes in the catacombs; the statement of every father, from Tertulian and Origen to Augustine, and of every council, from the first attended by the converts of Timothy and Titus, if not of Paul and John, to the last held by an undivided and unapostatized Church. All these give an array of proof of the apostolic usage that it is impossible to gainsay or resist. We have seen that the doctrine of believers' baptism is complied with if the believer be an unconscious infant placed in the same state into which faith introduces the adult, as if he had passed years in sinful unbelief before his conversion. We have shown that their early admission to all their rights as Church members, though they be ignorant of their full meaning, will bless them and the Church, and be agreeable to the will and education of Him who was taken by his parents when a babe into the temple to do for him after the manner of this law.

We trust the Church will regulate her discipline according to her faith, and that her admission of her babes to her classes, her sacraments, and all other perquisites of membership, will lead her members to give their children their rights, and to train them up in the knowledge of their obligations and benefits. Then shall the reverent words of the holy Herbert be our prayer from childhood:

Then will the doctrine of infant salvation logically embodied in our creed, discipline, and practice, lead all other sects to believe its truthfulness and accept its necessary consequents of infant regeneration and infant baptism. The wall in all churches that is built up between the child and his Lord's table, will crumble under the same power. The little children shall again come to Jesus, surround his table, and partake of that flesh which is meat indeed, and

that blood which is drink indeed for every helpless human soul. The hearts of the fathers will be turned to the children, and out of the mouths of babes and sucklings will He ordain praise, while they, like Samuel, shall abide in the temple, and like Christ shall grow in wisdom, and stature, and in favor with God and man.

ART. II.-BRAZIL AND THE BRAZILIANS.

Brazil and the Brazilians, Portrayed in Historical and Descriptive Sketches. By Rev. D. P. KIDDER, D.D., and Rev. J. C. FLETCHER. Illustrated by one hundred and fifty engravings. Philadelphia: Childs, Peterson, & Co.; New York: Sheldon & Blakeman.

IT was said long ago by the Great Master, "The field is the world." It is an expression worthy of deep thought by his ministry and his Church. If the world be the field for Christian exertion and enterprise; if the world's conversion should be the grand aim of every loyal worker, then the travels of each explorer, the diary of each adventurer, becomes instinct with thrilling interest. To another it may be but a record of marches, of bivouacs, of huts, of botanical or mineralogical observations. To us it is a new revelation of the world, the world we are to aid in renovating. The world is being made known. Much heretofore supposed to be desert is found to be fertile, and abounding in the materiale of wealth. There is yet to be a commerce of which the speculator scarcely dreams. There stand upon the shelves before our table, the volumes of Barth and Livingston, who have brought to Europe and America facts which have awakened inquiry, and suggested future national possibilities which may work a mighty change. The Zambesi is destined to be the world's great cotton canal, and from the broad plains which skirt it, shall be gathered the crop which shall tell with economic arguments, unanswerable facts, in the ears of monopolizing American slaveholders. The sprightly pages of the artist-traveler, Atkinson, have made known the deserts of Siberia, in such manner as we never anticipated. These men, with Captain Kane, in his hyperborean explorations, Wells in his adventures in Honduras, and Loftus in Chaldea and Susiana, have been, in the hands of God, surveyors for his Church. They are mapping the field. We begin to learn what remains to be done ere

"One song employs all nations."