asting prosperity is wanting, where, by its repulsion or
neglect, the great majority of its baptized youth are alienated from,
and lost to its communion. It is not in the promise of God, or in the
genius of Scriptural Christianity, that "children trained up in the way
they should go," will, in many instances, much less generally, depart
from it in after years....

Impressed with the magnitude of the wrongs and evils above referred to,
dreading personal collision in the Conference, anticipating but little
success from it, and feeling uncertain as to how few were likely to be
the days of my earthly career, and believing that a special duty was
imposed upon me in this respect by Providential circumstances, I
addressed to the President, the 2nd of January, ... as the most likely
means, without collision with any person or body, to draw practical
attention to the subject, on the part of both the ministry and the laity
of the Church.... I have the satisfaction of knowing that, if the first
efforts of my pen, after joining the Conference in 1825, were to
advocate the right of the members of the Church to hold a bit of ground
in which to bury their dead, and the right of its ministers to perform
the marriage service for the members of their congregations, my last
efforts in connection with the Conference have been directed to obtain
the rights of Christian citizenship to the baptized children and
exemplary adherents of the Church. While I maintain that each child in
the land has a right to such an education as will fit him for his duties
as a citizen of the state, and that the obligations of the state
correspond to the rights of the child, so I maintain, upon still
stronger and higher grounds, that each child baptized by the Church is
thereby enfranchised with the rights and privileges of citizenship in
it, until he forfeits them by personal misconduct and exclusion, and
that the obligations of the Church correspond to the rights of the
child. I also maintain that each member of Christ's visible Church, has
a scriptural right to his membership in it as long as he keeps the
"commandments and ordinances of God," whether he attends or does not
attend a meeting which Mr. Wesley (who instituted it), declared to be
"merely prudential, not essential, not of divine institution," and for
not attending which he never excluded, or presumed to authorize
excluding, a person from Church membership. It is a principle of St.
Paul, in the 14th