CHAPTER First.
PROBABILITIES OF AN ORDINANCE FOR CHILDREN.
'Tis aye a solemn thing to me To look upon a babe that sleeps, Wearing in its spirit-deeps The unrevealed mystery Of its Adam's taint and woe .-- MISS BARRETT.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy .-- WORDSWORTH.
It is generally believed that, of those who have gone to heaven from this world, by far the larger part have been infants and young children.
Born here, they were by one man's disobedience made sinners; born of the Spirit, at their early translation to heaven, they hold an important place in the plan of salvation by Christ.

Very beautiful, as well as sublime, is the thought of so large a contribution, to the heavenly world, of human beings in the dawn of their existence, enhancing, as we may suppose, the happiness of heaven by such large admixture of exotic, youthful nature, and illustrating, by their redemption from a helpless state of sin and misery, the unsearchable riches of wisdom and grace.
Has God done anything, in this world, to mark his regard for that class of the human race constituting, thus far, the greater part of the redeemed?
We naturally look for something reminding the world of his interest in these subsidiaries of his kingdom.

Has he confined his notice to those that are full-grown, and who have, thus far, the larger part of them, withheld from him the fruit of his vineyard?
God has a church on earth, with ordinances, symbols, covenant signs: among them is there not some sign, symbol, or ordinance, recognizing those who, more than any other of the race, have, till now, been swelling the numbers of that church in heaven?
Like those elements of astronomical calculation which require and lead men to expect undiscovered planets in a certain quarter of the firmament, analogy, and the known intercourse of God with mankind, and our moral sense, incline us to look for some symbolic recognition of this earthly constituency of heaven by him who ordained and is redeeming to himself a church from among men.

Words of interest and love toward them on the part of God, we all know, are not wanting in the Bible.

Acts of loving-kindness, also, proving the sincerity of those words, and reaching even to a thousand generations of them that love God, are everywhere seen in sacred history.
But is there no great, conspicuous symbol of these things,--no type, no rite?
Symbols appear to be inseparable attendants of God's manifested favor to men.