Shepherd" in the temple above, and your dear child is there, too, and of her and many more are the ancient words true, "Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength."

REV. DR. ROBERT FERGUSON, LONDON.

As partakers of a fallen nature, children are subject to disease and death. Much and tenderly as we love them, it is not unfrequently that we are called to follow them to the silence and the solitude of the tomb. More than onethird of the race die in infancy and childhood. What is their final condition? This is a question which often forces itself upon the thought of Christian parents, and which more or less disturbs their inward peace and quiet. But how tranquillizing, and how assuring, are the words of the Saviour, "of such is the kingdom of heaven"!-as if to intimate that heaven is their true and proper home, their Father's house, in which only they can be for ever safe and happy. Of the salvation of infants there can be no possible doubt; for, "as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive."

Whatever may be the effects involved in man's transgression, these are all provided for and removed by the substitution and the work of Christ; so that if there were no personal sin or actual guilt, the Saviour's mediation would result in the salvation of the whole race. From all such individual, actual guilt, infants are free; and the atonement insures their introduction into the family of God, with a full participation in the glory of the world to come. But myriads of children, no longer within the years of infancy, are permitted to light up our homes with their smiling, beaming faces for a longer or shorter period, and in many ways to add to the sum of our earthly joys, and yet are taken from us while the dew of youth is upon them, and sometimes amid the first and earliest buddings of their intellectual development and intelligence. What is their final condition? It is impossible to fix on any one uniform age in a child as the point at which responsibility begins; but let the age be what it may, we are firm in the belief that the Spirit whom the Saviour sent to glorify Him, and whose office it is to take of the things which are Christ's and show them to us, not only enlightens the minds of these little ones prior to their removal, but so reveals a Saviour's love to them and in them as to draw their

young and susceptible hearts into union and fellowship with Himself here, and thus prepare and meeten them for the life and the bliss of a higher state. If in all things Christ is to have the pre-eminence, then He will have the pre-eminence in numbers. The saved will far outnumber the lost; and among these redeemed and glorified ones, those whose hearts. have been least defiled by actual sin, and who are most susceptible of receiving the impression of the Saviour's image, will occupy a conspicuous place. Just as a single dew-drop can reflect all the rays of the sun, so the mind of a child can take on and reflect the likeness of God: "of such is the kingdom of God." They are there in myriad throngs,-pure, perfect, and for ever blessed. They perfect the family of God. Their presence makes that home of the redeemed all the brighter, and sunnier, and more attractive. There is no circle into which they do not enter, no scene in which they do not mingle, and no service in which they do not perform their part.

REV. DR. J. LOGAN AIKMAN, GLASGOW.

THE argument for infant salvation rests, not on isolated passages, but on the genius of the Bible and its economy of grace. We muse upon the mission of Christ to find one of its principal glories in glorified infancy. The inhabitants of Christian and Pagan lands shall be judged respectively by the Gospel and by conscience, but to neither law can infants be subject. The death of children is traceable to the sin of Adam, and their glory to the righteousness of Christ. The only view which harmonizes universal scripture is, that the redemption by Christ completely covers the sin of Adam, that adults in Bible lands are judged according to their faith or unbelief in the Son of God, and that Christ's covenant with His Father carries the salvation of all infants.

There is an intuitive conviction that infants, who have not personally rejected the law and love of God, cannot be excluded from the kingdom, and that they are as fully identified with the second as with the first Adam. There may be a higher degree of glory given to some translated infants because of their godly parentage. But the soul of man clings to the thought

of no infant being lost in the universe of that God, whose "tender mercies are over all His works."

REV. DR. EDWARD STEANE, LONDON.

WE arrive at the conclusion, so delightful in itself, and so consolatory to parents in the hour of bereavement, that their precious children whom, in the sweetness of their infantile innocence, the cold hand of death has rifled from their bosoms, are translated to the regions of the blest. Those delicate flowers, which the rude storms of our inclement atmosphere have blighted, unfold in eternal fragrancy beneath the pleasant beams of the sun's celestial glory. Those bright, but little stars, which to us seem prematurely quenched, do but sink beneath the horizon till, with new lustre and augmented magnitude, they repair their drooping radiance, and "Flame in the forehead of the morning sky." Those gems, more precious than pearls or rubies, of which the anguished mother has been despoiled, are set in deeper brilliance in that glorious mediatorial diadem which encircles the Redeemer's brow. infantile voices, which had scarce learnt to lisp His name, now sing in lofty descants, "Sal

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