sts
support the practice? They appear to me to have scarcely any
ground at all which they can acknowledge, consistently with
their fundamental principles as Congregationalists. They are
supported in the practice wholly by clinging to custom, and by
borrowing the arguments of the advocates of national churches
just for an occasion. It is quite inconsistent with their
principles to acknowledge such a visible church as infants are
professedly introduced to by baptism. They recognise no such
church, except on the occasion of baptizing their children.
They admit of no officers, and allow no government, for such a
church. They consider all apparently unconnected persons as
belonging only to the world, and admit their own children to
become members of their churches exactly in the same way as
they would a stranger coming from a country not professing
Christianity; except that, in their case, they are saved the
ceremony of baptizing, which is the divinely appointed way of
admission into a visible church. National ecclesiastical
establishments, which yet unavoidably resulted from the
practice of infant baptism, they hold to be altogether
anti-scriptural, and founded upon an anti-christian union
of church and state. They have, therefore, no reasonable
pretence for arguing for the practice from the appointment of
circumcision, which can with consistency be used only by those
who think that Christianity was designed to have a secular,
external character. Some of them, indeed, seem ashamed of this
obvious inconsistency, and have recourse to an imaginary
distinction between the covenant of redemption and the covenant
of grace; and instead of professing that by baptism they make
their children members of the visible church, they assert that
by doing so they place them visibly within the one covenant,
though not within the other. But a serious refutation of such a
notion can hardly be necessary; it may be classed with other
unintelligible and unauthorized imaginations.

"The members of the church, retaining their veneration for the
notions respecting the sacraments established as catholic in
the primitive ages, have some specious ground of hope that
the administration of the ordinance to their infants will be
accompanied with a communication of gr