ts administration. But upon
the subject of baptism itself, we have seen that there is great laxity of
feeling and opinion.

The spirit of our fathers upon this point is becoming so diluted that we
can scarcely discern any longer a vestige of the good old landmarks of
their sacramental character. Instead of walking in them, Christians are now
falling a prey to a latitudinarian spirit of the most destructive kind.
They are, in leaving these old landmarks, falling into the clutches of
rationalism and radicalism, which will ere long leave their homes and their
church

"A wreck at random driven,
Without one glimpse of reason or of heaven!"

Even ministers themselves seem to grow indifferent to this wide-spread and
growing evil. They hardly ever utter a word of warning from the pulpit
against it. Their members may be known by them to neglect the baptism of
their children; and yet by their silence they wink at this dereliction; and
when they have occasion to speak of this ordinance, many advert to it as a
mere sign, as something only outward, not communicating an invisible grace,
not as a seal of the new covenant, ingrafting into Christ. No wonder when
this holy sacrament is thus disparagingly spoken of, that Christian parents
will neglect it practically, as a redundancy in the church,--as a tradition
coming in its last wailing cry from ages and forms departed,--as a church
rite marked obsolete, as an old ceremonial savoring of old Jewish shackles,
embodying no substantial grace, and unfit for this age of railroad
progression and gospel libertinism.

Will any one deny the extent of such a spirit in the church and homes of
the present day? Let him refer to church statistics, where he may receive
some idea of the magnitude of this evil. In them we can see the extent to
which parents have neglected the baptism of their children. We take from a
note in the "Mercersburg Review" the following statistical items: "The
presbytery of Londonderry reports but one baptism to sixty-four
communicants; the presbytery of Buffalo city, the same; the presbytery of
Rochester city, one to forty-six; the presbytery of Michigan, one to
seventy-seven; the presbytery of Columbus, one to thirty. In the presbytery
of New Brunswick, there are three churches which report thus: one reports
three hundred and forty-three communicants, and three baptisms; another
reports three hundred and forty communicants, and two baptisms. In
Philadelphia, one chur