ved.
This would exclude infants. 'Believe, and be baptized;' how do you
dispose of that, sir?"

"Very easily," said I.

Mrs. Benson exclaimed, "O, sir, if you can, all my difficulty is at an
end!"

"Well, then," said I, "in the first place, there is no such requirement
in the Bible. You see the expression very often, but it is not found in
Scripture. But tell me exactly what your difficulty is."

"Why," said she, "my husband has just stated it. People tell us the
Bible says, 'He that believeth, and is baptized, shall be saved.' So
they insist that no one should be baptized who is not old enough to
believe."

I told her that I could remove her difficulty in very few words.

"Suppose," said I, "that Abraham is preaching to full-grown men in
Canaan, and is trying to proselyte them from their idolatry to the
worship of God. He would say to them, 'Believe and be circumcised,'
would he not? for God ordained that certain proselytes should be
circumcised."

"Yes, sir," said two or three voices at once.

"Well, then," said I, "must it follow that children could not be
circumcised because Abraham said to men, 'Believe and be circumcised'?
How will that reasoning answer? Is it true? No. Little Isaac refuted it,
for he was circumcised even when his father was saying to his pagan
neighbors, 'Believe and be circumcised.'"

"True enough, all who believed, in Christ's day and the apostles',
needed to be baptized, because they were not children, but were grown
up, when Christian baptism began. Had an apostle, however, lived to see
the jailer's family, and that of Lydia, and of Stephanas, grown up, and
any in those families had remained unconverted, and then he had said to
them, 'Believe and be baptized,' there would be some force in saying
that believing and baptism must always go together."

"One other thing always troubled me," said Mr. Benson, "and that is,
that there was no seal of the covenant for any but male children. Now,
if the initiatory rite of Christianity be used for the same purpose as
that given to Abraham, why not confine it, as formerly, to males?"

"How interesting it is," said I, "and it is full of instruction, to see
God paying regard to the world's knowledge and progress, in all his
measures, and doing nothing prematurely. There is a very striking
illustration of this in the account of the fall.

"God knew the history of the tempter during his agency in Paradise; for
angels had sinned and fallen from