s parents, perhaps, entire
strangers, goes to his place of private prayer, and, moved with
disinterested love toward those parents and the child, supplicates the
blessing of God upon them. Could Christian love be more pure than this,
or prayer more pleasing to God? In the revelations of eternity such
prayers will not only be rewarded openly by Him who saw those doors shut
with that secret love and piety, but blessings upon parents and child
without measure may be traced to such petitions as their procuring
cause. How good it is to perform such acts, knowing that they can never
come abroad in this world! Should every Christian who witnesses the
baptism of a child, afterward pray for that immortal soul in secret,
with special petitions, what an increased privilege and blessing it
would be esteemed to offer a child in baptism, and in God's house,
before a witnessing church, rather than at home! I hope, my dear
daughter, that you and Percival, as private Christians, will do good to
your own souls, and to the souls of baptized children, and to their
parents, by making it one of your private rules to pray in secret, on
the Sabbath, for every child whose baptism you witness.

The effort to promote and enforce infant baptism, by ecclesiastical
enactments merely, is absurd. We must fertilize the soil, not spread
glass sashes over the plants. Give Christians right views and feelings
about their covenant privileges and duties; disabuse them of their
mistakes about the severance of the Old Testament from the New; teach
them to look at Abraham, not as a decayed peer, or an old Jew, but as
the founder of the church of all ages, to whom Almighty God virtually
said, 'On this rock I will build my church,'--Abraham being the first
foundation stone, waiting for apostles to be added with him, and, as our
great representative, bearing in his hand the covenant made with him for
us, as well, as for the other great branch of the family of God; show
them that baptism is now the initiating ordinance, and that the old
covenant was never repealed, though the seal be changed; let them see
what it is to have God in covenant with them to be the God of their
seed; and, withal, let us correct, or modify, the intense anti-papal
jealousy of the Christian rites, which makes us all, unconsciously,
verge to the opposite extreme, thus missing the divinely-appointed
intention and use which there is in our two simple ordinances; and then,
with the revival of s