From what, then, is he turned out by being cut off?
He has never arrived at anything from which he can be separated, except the covenant of God with him through his parents, and its attendant privileges of watch and care.

If, then, we excommunicate an unconverted child, we can only declare the covenant of God with him, henceforth, to be null and void,--an assumption from which, probably, Christian parents and ministers would shrink.

The same long-suffering God, who bears and forbears with ourselves, we shall be disposed to feel, is the God of this recreant child, and no good man would dare to pronounce the child to be separated from the mercies of 'the God of patience and hope.' One who, being in a church, breaks a covenant to which he assented, may be a just subject for discipline, even to excommunication; but, all the promises of God to the child being wholly free, conditioned, at first, upon his parents' relation to God, all the disability which the child seems capable of receiving, is, that the promises made to him he must fail, by his own fault, to receive.
Who will declare even his prospect of their fulfilment to be terminated at any given time?
Much more, who will undertake to divest him of things which he never had?
The church-membership, from which you profess to expel him, does not yet exist in his case; he has not reached it.

All the church-membership of which, if any, he has been possessed, is, his hopeful relation to God and his people through a parent.

To excommunicate a child from this would be a strange procedure." _Mr.A._ That is the strongest thing which I have heard on that side.