sacraments," it is a proper reply, "But can God do his part toward
your children, and toward you, without them?" For, not only is prayer
"the offering up of our desires to God for things agreeable to his
will," but there is the additional truth, which is well expressed in
those lines of a hymn:

"Prayer is appointed to convey
The blessings God designs to give."

So with sacraments; they convey gifts from God, not primarily gifts from
us to God.

He, then, who declines to have his children baptized, on the ground that
it is useless, may, in so doing, interrupt the communication of a
divinely-appointed medium between God and his child. For he need not be
told that the faith of parents brought blessings from the Saviour, when
on earth, to their children, nor be reminded that the benefits of
circumcision were bestowed on the ground of the parental relation to
God.

One further illustration occurs to me of the power which resides in the
sacraments themselves, in distinction from their being a testimony from
us to God. Let me call to your remembrance notices which you sometimes
see, of young people going, in a frolic, before a clergyman or justice
of the peace, to be married, when they intended nothing but sport, and
found, afterward, that they had brought themselves into difficulty, and
were legally held to be married.

You see by this that covenants do not, by any means, derive all their
efficacy from the feelings of a contracting party. Covenants and their
seals are the most sacred of all human transactions, and cannot be
lightly regarded, or trifled with. God reveals himself often under the
name of the God that keepeth covenant. So that we may not set aside the
sacraments, nor undervalue them. This leads me to say, furthermore, that
children, who doubt whether their parents sincerely and truly offered
them to God in baptism, the parents being in an unregenerate state, as
it afterward appeared, when they came with their children to the
ordinance, may be greatly comforted and encouraged by taking this view
of the divine sacrament of baptism as having a force and application in
their behalf, by the goodness of God, irrespective of their parents'
character. God will not let his sacraments depend, for their efficacy,
on the character either of the administrator or of the parents. For, if
the character of an administrator affected the baptism, it might so
happen that one could never really be baptized, since every