"But I do not know," said he, looking round on your mother and the children, "but that we do wrong to take this time for it. It will be rather a dry subject for these young friends to hear."
Pastor. Not at all. They owe too much to what was done for them when they were little children, to dislike it. Besides, there is nothing dry about it, as I view the subject. It is one of the most beautiful things in religion.
Mrs. Benson. It is next to the Lord's Supper, I always thought, if people take the right view of it.
Pastor. It makes you love God the Father in some such way as the Lord's Supper makes you love the Saviour. I think, sometimes, that the baptism of children is our heavenly Father's Sacrament.
Mr. B. I like that; but there is so much to study and learn about the "Abrahamic covenant," that I feel a little discouraged. I have had books lent me on the Abrahamic covenant, and I began to read them; but they looked hard; so I told my wife that perhaps you would make the thing more clear, and bring it home to our feelings, and that we would come and get your ideas about it.
Pastor. How glad I am that you came! But tell me what you take the Abrahamic covenant to mean.
Mr. B. I suppose it means that God told Abraham to circumcise his children, and infant baptism comes in the place of it, and we must do it if we are Abraham's spiritual children. But I wish to see the use of it. I am willing to do it, but I should like to feel it more; and I want to know how baptism comes in the place of circumcision, and a great many other things.
Pastor. I think that you may possibly have what may be called some Jewish notions about the Abrahamic covenant, though I trust you are right in the main. That phrase sounds foreign and mysterious, and I never use it except in talking with people who I know have the thing itself already in their hearts.
I called Helen to me, and told her to say the hymn which she had repeated to me the last Sabbath evening.
She cleared her voice, leaned against me, and twisted her fingers in my hair behind, and, with her eyes fixed there, she said this hymn: