nition to parental faithfulness. All his
former dealings with the world seem to have failed, because of its great
wickedness,--fire, plagues, good examples, great riches, and power
conferred upon the good; and then he added, as a special means, the
family constitution, and by it he secured a seed to serve him to an
extent sufficient to keep the world from extinction, and to be the
repository and source of divine knowledge. I began to think that, if we
would keep religion from dying out, we must fall in with God's great
plan; for Satan makes use of it, and holds generation after generation
in bondage by means of the family constitution. So I set myself at work
to find out ways by which we might promote family religion; and I could
find no better plan than the old one, of promoting scriptural and
spiritual views of the dedication of children. Then I thought how much
discredit has been cast upon that ordinance, which is intended to be the
great sign and declaration of parental piety and faithfulness; and that
family religion had, proportionably, declined, with the indifference of
Christians to this powerful means of promoting the eminent zeal and
efforts of parents in behalf of their children's spiritual good. Youths
of fifteen to twenty-one years of age are, in a large proportion, the
causes of prevailing wickedness,--Sabbath-breaking, profaneness, and
other things. They need just what the ordinance of baptism, properly
observed and fully carried out by covenanting parents, would do for
them. But, in being present at the formation of new churches, I have
mourned to see that, instead of declaring infant baptism to be the duty
of believers, as was formerly done in our older churches, a compromise
with modern lax views is made, by merely permitting infant baptism,
saying, in the confession of faith, that, "Baptism is the privilege only
of believers and their children."

But the idea of getting up a zeal in favor of infant baptism, or a
public sentiment in the churches which should enforce it as a duty,
seemed to me unprofitable; but it occurred to me, whether something
could not be done to interest Christian parents in the subject, by
showing them the infinite privilege of having God for their God, and the
God of their seed, and then the naturalness and propriety of using an
ordinance to express and to assist it. People need instruction on the
subject; instruction which will commend itself to their Christian
feelings. We can