ministry are in the most pitiful and degrading religious position of the
youth of any Church that recognizes the doctrine of infant baptism; and
it appears to me that we ought rather not to baptize infants at all, or
recommend their parents to take them to other churches for baptism, than
thus to treat the feelings of such parents, and to regard their children
as having no more membership and privileges in our Church than the rest
of the youth of the land, or even the world at large.

It is happily true, that many of the children of our people, as well as
those of other people, are converted and brought into the Church under
the faithful ministrations of the Word; but how many ten thousand more
of them would never wander from the Church, would more easily and more
certainly be led to experience all the power of inward religion and the
blessings of Christian fellowship, were they acknowledged in their true
position and rights, and taught the significancy, and obligation, and
privilege of all that the outward ordinances and their visible relations
involve were intended to confer. It ought to make a Christian heart
bleed to think that our largest increase of members, according to
returns over which we are disposed to congratulate ourselves, falls
vastly short of the natural increase of population in our own community,
apart from the increase of the population of the country at large, and,
therefore, that perhaps five or more persons are sent out into the
world, as worldlings, from the families of our Church, while one is
retained or brought into it from the world by all our ministrations and
agencies. The prophets did not deny to a Jew his membership in the
Jewish Church, in order to make him a Jew inwardly. Mr. Wesley did not
un-church the tens of thousands of baptized members of the Church of
England to whom he successfully preached salvation by faith: he made
their state, and duties, and privileges, as baptized members of the
Church of Christ, the grounds of his appeals; and this vantage ground
was one great means of his wonderful success.

But I will not enlarge. I will only add, that as in former years, I,
with others, maintained what we believed to be the rights of Canada and
of our Canadian Church against pretensions which have long since been
withdrawn, and the erroneous information and impressions connected with
which have long since been removed; so, I now feel it my duty to do what
I can to secure and maintain t