Her charge is an infant soul; her vow is to be faithful to it; her promise is to train it up for God; and her’s will be the lasting glory or the lasting shame!  These very engagements and trusts elevate the pious parents; diffuse a tenderness and sympathy over all the domestic relations, and make better husbands, better wives, better parents, and better children, by the deep insight which is given to their faith in those mysterious relations and mutual obligations which bind them together.  As the consecrated water falls upon the face of the devoted child, the parents feel the solemn vow sink deep into the soul, and realize the weight of that responsibility which God lays upon them.

God commands us not only to dedicate our children to Him, but to do so in the way He has appointed, viz., in and through Christian baptism.  In this way we bring our children into the church, and train them up in a churchly way.  We bring them to God through the church.  In their baptism we have, as it were, a confirmation of their dedication by “the mighty Master’s seal.”  It is the link which binds our children to the church, the rite of their initiation into the kingdom of Christ, the sign and seal of their saving relation to the covenant of grace.  By it they are solemnly set apart to the service of God, enrolled among the members of His kingdom, entitled to its privileges and guardian care, and placed in the appointed way of salvation and eternal life, receiving the seal and superscription of the Son of God.  This is indispensable to the demands of the Christian faith.  To deny that infants are thus included in the covenant of grace, destroys the purity and spiritual unity of the Christian compact, and subverts the foundations and harmony of the Christian home.

It is revolting to the parent’s faith to forbid his little ones the privilege of the church, and to treat them as aliens from the covenant of promise.  Does the gospel place them under such a ban of proscription?  Surely not!  He who instituted the family relation had special regard to the family in all the appointments of his grace.  His command is like that of Noah, “Come thou and all thy house into the ark.”  “The promise is unto you and your children.”  This is the comfort of the parent, that his children are planted by the ordinance of God into the soil of grace, where they may grow up as a tender plant in the likeness of His death, and be “like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that shall bring forth his fruit in his season; his leaf shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.”

Baptism in the Christian home is eminently infant baptism.  Take this away, and you sever the strongest cord that binds church and home.  As the Jew was commanded to circumcise his child, and thus bring it into proper relations to the theocratical covenant, so the Christian has a similar command from Christ to bring his children, through the holy sacrament of baptism, to Him.  It is not our purpose to discuss