Bertha and Her Baptism

by Nehemiah Adams

I said to my friends, "The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, are about to write their several and joint names on this child's forehead.

"As a lamb has the owner's mark upon his side, this child is to be claimed by them, to be brought up for the service and glory of its redeeming God.

"You are to give him away, to be disposed of by the Most High. You are to be, for Him, what the mother of Moses was for Pharaoh's daughter—nurses to your own child. This dear child lay helpless and exposed, with all of us, to destruction; the Redeemer passed that way; he heard its cries: he had compassion upon it; he saved it from the condemning sentence of divine justice; and now he calls you, and says, 'Take this child, and bring it up for me, and I will give thee thy wages.' He does not commit the child to church, nor pastor, nor Sabbath-school, but to its own father and mother, who may and will avail themselves of all the appointed and the useful helps for its nurture and admonition in the Lord; but he looks to you, as having the chief and principal responsibility, to bring up this child for God.

"You covenant to lay your plans for this child, so that he may, by the surest means, live for God. To this end you will pray with him and for him; teach him what was done for him in baptism, and before, and afterwards; how God was beforehand with him, and was found of him who sought him not. He is to be trained up as a Christian child, with a view to his early conversion, and your great concern is not to be, how he may promote his private happiness, or yours, but how he may best serve God.

"To this end, you will, from the first, watch over all his moral faculties, and instil into him the principles of truth and uprightness; not letting him run loose among the vanities of the world, and feed upon its miserable, corrupted sentiments, and choose worldly and godless persons for his intimate associates, his manners and his habits being like a garden which runs to weeds, and his whole nature left to the perils of sin, trusting to some sudden act of conversion to bring him right; but you will rather be diligent to 'fill the water-pots with water,' and wait for Christ to turn it into wine. You intend, and you promise, that you will educate this child from the beginning with all that strictness of Christian principle which you would expect of him were he, in his infancy, to be a professing Christian, his duty being the same, and, consequently, yours toward him, whether he is regenerate or not,—one and the same law of God being our rule, irrespective of conditions.

"In all times of sickness and peril, you are to feel that this child is the Lord's, to be disposed of by him, without consulting you. If called to die and leave him, you will remember that you received him from God, that he belonged to God at first, and when he was placed in your care; and that God, who thus has the most perfect claim to him, will perfect that which concerns him, even if his parents are in the grave.

"And while you thus covenant with God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, covenant with you, and with the child through you, to be the God of your seed, affording you special help in training the child, bestowing special blessings upon it tending to its spiritual good, having a particular regard for it as something lent to him, and belonging to you; while, in another sense, it is lent to you, and belongs to him; and he and you are to regard the child agreeably to this beautiful transmutation of ownership and loan. The baptism itself cannot save the child, any more than the Lord's Supper can save you; but it is among the first of means to promote the salvation of the child, not merely through its effect on you, or its remembered grace and goodness when the child can be made to appreciate it; but above all, and through all, and in all, it seals that covenant of a covenant-keeping God, assisting your efforts and those of the child,—that promise, I say, 'I will be his God, and he shall be my son.'"

We named the little boy, Philip, as a memorial of the road-side baptism. We stood under the shadow of that great rock, and worshipped Abraham's God. "Doubtless thou art our father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not." The voice of prayer was joined by chimes and symphonies from trickling rills, and the freshening breeze in a silver-leaved maple, leaning at an angle of thirty-five degrees, just above us in the rock, all as quiet as the dear infant's breathing; while, now and then, the sudden flapping and rushing of birds' wings made the monotone around us more soothing.

From a little jet of water, that formed an arc of about an inch, as it burst into life and then disappeared in a great moss-bed, I caught my palm full, and laid it upon the unconscious head.

The little hands were suddenly lifted and dropped, as though a slight shock had been experienced, then a smile played round the mouth, and the sleep seemed deeper.