that God's power is consistent with righteousness in their death, they present our Heavenly Father in a most unamiable character. There is, however, one fact more awful still the mystery of Calvary. He that did not spare these infants, "spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all." As I stand by the cross, and in the study of the character of the sufferer, and His sufferings, learn that "God, from the pure energy of principle, gives Himself, in the person of His Son, to die, rather than that His character should be impugned," He appears to me sublimely great, and intensely holy. Dishonoring as He pronounces death, He esteems it not so great an evil as dishonor; for He gave up His Son, the Mighty Maker, to die, rather than that His truth or justice should be compromised. And if, when the issue came, He should give up His well-Beloved Son, rather than that His law, which is the reflection of His holiness, should be tarnished, or fail, what must be His estimate of sin? And if He puts "under tribute the whole resources

of the invisible world-to impress us with the sacredness of right-to make us feel how awful goodness is," surely there

Him no unrighteousness at all.

can be in

He must be

actively as well as essentially holy, and consequently holy in all His ways.

Judge of all the earth will do right.

The

Shut up to this conclusion, the inference was irresistible. "When were the righteous ever cut off? or, who ever perished being innocent? God will not slay the righteous with the wicked." Then, since death is the righteous penalty of sin, God, in inflicting it upon infants, must regard and treat them as sinners. From the Saviour's own words (Luke xviii. 1, 5) we learn that the fact of their being involved in a common ruin with desperate transgressors, does not imply an equality of guilt. But it does imply sin; for without sin there can be no suffering. And had those who perished in the awful catastrophies alluded to been sinless, He who saved Noah, rescued Lot, and delivered Rahab, had sufficient wisdom and power to have interposed, even mi

raculously, or their redemption from the flood and the fire.

With all these facts spread before me, to what conclusion could I come. I was shut up to but one. I tried to close my eye to the truth so painful, so humiliating to my wounded affections, that my bright-eyed, loving and guileless ones, had been regarded by God as depraved, and justly amenable to the law as transgressors. For, if the reign of death over adults proves the reign of sin, then also the reign of death over infants proves over them the reign of sin.

My God! how awful, how terrible is sin!

This solution was quickly followed by another question. How have they sinned? Personally? Actually? Impossible. They were unconscious of their relation to God, and in the innocency of their first young dawn, incapable of wilfully offending Him.

Reasoning from observation, I could clearly infer that their nature was depraved. So far as we can perceive and learn from history, there is not a single instance of any one individual

perfectly free from sin. The universal prevallence of sin in all countries, and in all varieties of situations, and under every measure of advantage, is decisive proof of a natural propensity to sin. The uniformity is proof of the propensity. Then in the mechanism of an infant's being there must be a tendency to sin, a constitutional aptitude to evil, which is developed as soon as their powers are sufficiently expanded, and an opportunity occurs. This tendency sufficiently accounts for the first exhibitions of conscious evil action in all who live long enough to manifest their natural dispositions. And as we are sure that poison is in the fang of the adder that has just burst its egg and then is killed, so "if the preventing stroke of death cut off the infant from all possibility of ever committing one act of iniquity, we are just as sure sin is in. its frame as if it had been developed in actual transgression."* But the fact that it possesses a depraved nature, shows that it is under the reign of spir

* Chalmers.

itual death, which carries temporal death in its train. And being possessed of a nature which is tainted, and in which are transmitted the elements of decay and dissolution, it is the same deadly virus which carries it off, whether it breathe its last in a week from its birth, or survive until it be bowed down with the weight of years. And consequently, if they die in their earliest years, it is evident it is not for any actual iniquity of their own, but because they are connected with a race that must die because corrupted by sin; and because they have themselves received from the fountain head of the human family that moral infection which corrupts the whole species, and transmits, from generation to generation, the elements of destructibleness to all the members of it.

Though this satisfactorily accounted for the death of infants upon physiological grounds, which I could not deny, it did not sufficiently relieve my mind in regard to the Divine agency in the event. I saw that God teaches clearly in His holy Word, that "where there