, and are seated at their ease, some in
chairs, and the rest on a sofa, which, at the suggestion of a kind lady,
they had lifted from its place in the parlor to the yard.

They are all of them pastors of churches, met, for social intercourse
and friendly counsel, at the house of one of their number, with their
wives, who are also together by themselves, in a pleasant room on the
north side of the house, and into whose sayings and doings these
husbands will, no doubt, be disposed to make, in due time, suitable
inquiry.

Those wonderful little elves, the humming-birds, are frequent visitors
to those honeysuckles, under which I have placed my reader to be a
listener. How many vibrations those little wings make in a minute, how
so long a bill can have subtractive force sufficient to get anything
from the flower, how, when obtained, that product is conveyed to the
throat, and where these creatures build their nests, and whither they
migrate, are questions which will, perhaps, divert attention from
everything else for a time, especially if the reader has escaped for a
season from a large city, and is one of those who there "dwell in
courts." Perhaps, therefore, he will choose to refresh himself, in
silent contemplation, in this arbor; and I will make true report of all
that transpires in the yard.

One of these pastors, Mr. A., has been reading to his brethren, for
their judgment as to the soundness of his views, a sermon, not yet
preached, on the relation of baptized children to the church. We will
call him, and two of the ministers who agreed with his views, by their
initials, respectively, which consisted of the first three letters of
the alphabet; while the three who dissented from them had, as initials
to their names, letters remote from these. Neither Messrs. A., B., and
C., nor Messrs. R., S., and T., had had any previous concert or
comparison of views on this interesting subject; but they found
themselves thus arrayed on different sides of the question.

Omitting the sermon that gave occasion to the discussion which follows,
a few lines only will put us in possession of the whole subject. I give
the opening paragraph:

"It is held by all who practise infant baptism, that the children of
believers have a peculiar relation to the church. That relation is very
generally expressed by the word membership. We have treatises, by the
most orthodox divines, on the church-membership of the children of
believers; which chi