A country presbyter, by the name of Fidus, had sent two cases for their adjudication.

One was, "Whether an infant might be baptized before it was eight days old ?" Here is the answer: CYPRIAN, and the rest of the presbyters who were present in the council, sixty-six in number, to Fidus our brother, Greeting: "-- -- As to the case of Infants: whereas you judge that they must not be baptized within two or three days after they were born, and that the rule of circumcision is to be observed,--we are all in the Council of a very different opinion." "This, therefore, was our opinion in the Council, that we ought not to hinder any person from baptism, and the grace of God.

And this rule, as it holds for all, is, we think, more especially to be observed in reference to infants, even to those who are newly born." This was written, within a hundred and fifty years from the time of the apostles, by sixty-six ministers of Christ, some of whom, we may suppose, must have had grace enough to show a martyr-spirit in resisting so gross an invention as the baptizing of infants would have been, if apostolic example had restricted baptism to those who were capable of faith.

Did Paul reprove an abuse of the Lord's Supper, among the Corinthians, and would he not have given an injunction against so Jewish a superstition as the baptizing of children in place of the antiquated circumcision would have been, if it were not commanded, had the churches in his day seemed inclined to practise it?
_Mr.M._ All these things amount to a demonstration, in my view.
_Dr.D._ You would like to hear something from AUGUSTINE, whose "Confessions" you have read with so much interest.
In his writings, on Genesis, Augustine says, about two hundred and eighty-eight years after the apostles, "The custom of our mother, the church, in baptizing infants, must not be disregarded nor accounted useless, and it must by all means be believed to be (apostolica traditio) a thing handed down to us by the apostles." "It is most justly believed to be no other than a thing delivered by apostolic authority; that it came not by a general council, or by any authority later or less than that of the apostles." He also speaks of baptizing infants by the authority of the whole church, which, he says, was undoubtedly delivered to it by our Lord and his apostles.
Augustine was a man of distinguished piety and learning, whose testimony is every way worthy of implicit confidence.

But, connected with his history, we have another substantial evidence with regard to the subject.