it is of the more importance to us to note all such instances of God's rigor. Alexandria, the bulwark of the faith in the Holy Trinity, and North Africa, of the unmeritedness of God's free grace, a desolation! Rome, once characterized for steady practical adherence to sound doctrine, a seat of Anti-Christ! Geneva, once proposed as the model for all reformed Churches, and of influence well-nigh unbounded, and yet immediately the parent of Socinianism, and now a prey to the heresy which came forth, but was for the time ejected, also from its bosom! Let us "not be high-minded, but fear." Especially let us beware of that straining of the letter of Holy Scripture in conformity with preconceived notions, and the requisitions of human reason, wherein the school of Calvin most fatally set the example to that of Socinus.
Neither the above, nor any other views of Christian truth, ought, of course, to be hastily adopted; nor need it be concealed that they would make a great change in much of our more earnest preaching, in the early education of our children, and so of the children of our country, and in our calls to the unconverted, or, (as they were better called,) backsliding or apostate Christians. There will, namely, when we are duly impressed with the value of this Holy Sacrament, be far more earnest care to preserve this seal of faith unbroken: men cannot go on with this apparent recklessness, which is intolerable, when they think that childhood has only been dedicated to God, not hallowed by Him, but which becomes an hundredfold more intolerable, when we look on them as actually "children of God, members of Christ, inheritors of Heaven," and when we acknowledge that if we allow them again to become "children of the devil," we have no covenanted means of restoring the bond broken through our negligence, no mode of wholly renewing them again. How must the Bishop, to whom St. John committed a young man, and who, after Baptism, had neglected him, have shrunk when he understood the words, "Restore the deposit, which I and the Saviour have committed to you, whereof the Church, over which thou presidest, was witness!"—how must he have trembled to say, "He is dead, dead to God!" But now it will not be
