ow does
the blessing of Abraham fully come upon us, the Gentiles? But give me
his covenant for my children; then I see that Christ is executor of the
testament made with Abraham for his children; and I am one of the heirs;
as indeed I am, even if I have no children, but if I have, all of
Abraham's privileges and his covenanting God are mine and theirs.

So that, I said to my friends, I go to the Bible not to say, "Must I
baptize my children?" but, "Am I forbidden to baptize them?"

All my predecessors in the church of God, before Christ, had the
privilege of bringing their children into the bonds of the covenant with
themselves. If they felt as we do about it (and strict usage, and the
rich experience which they had had of its benefits, must have made it
inestimably precious to them), it is incredible that a sudden and total
discontinuance of it, at the beginning of Christianity, should not have
occasioned great clamor. The formalists, at least, would have
remonstrated at the seeming violation, by this new order of things, of
natural affection. For, as Doddridge well observes, "What would have
been done with the infants, or male children, of Christians?"--that is,
of converted Jews, as well as others. They could not circumcise them;
but their teachers, being spiritually-minded men, knew that circumcision
was a seal of faith, not merely of nationality, and must not the
converts have required some sign and symbol still for their children?
Now they had long been used to the baptism of proselytes and their
children; so that baptizing their own children, as a substitute for
circumcising them, could not have been a violent change with those whom
Peter's vision of the sheet had taught that the Gentiles should be
fellow-heirs. And when he, in one of his first sermons, said to the
whole house of Israel, "Ye are the children of the covenant," and "The
promise is unto you and to your children," we can account for their
utter silence as to any revocation by Christianity of the right and
privilege of applying the initiatory ordinance of religion, for the time
being, to a believer's child.

"But," said Mr. Benson, "the Saviour said, 'He that believeth, and is
baptized, shall be saved.' The apostles said, 'Repent and be baptized,
every one of you.' Show us, now, why this does not prove that repentance
and faith were not thus made essential to baptism. According to these
passages, none could be baptized who had not repented and belie