sensible that all the vehemence with which I urged the virtues and the proprieties of social life, had the weight of a feather on the moral habits of my parishioners."

But not only should ministers give a central and high position to religious principles. They should be the earnest and constant study of the members of the churches. They are in their nature vitalizing and stimulating to the Christian. They are calculated to detect errors and hypocrisies, and to make the believing steadfast, unmovable. They enable him to give "a reason for the hope that is in him." True religion consists in right views, producing right feelings and conduct. Laymen are called to attend councils for the examination of candidates for ordination. Upon them devolves the choice of pastors over the churches. It is important that they should be able to tell "what aileth" the man who hesitates and stumbles at the fundamental principles of the Gospel, and who seems to have spent most of his time in preparation for the ministry, in learning shrewdly to set aside or neutralize most of the creed of the Fathers.

Here, then, is a wide and important field for the study and reading of laymen. Why should not they be readers, yea writers, in theological reviews, adapted not so much to curious speculations, to rare classical research, and foreign scholarship, as to the pressing wants and demands of the Church in its struggles with error and sin, and its toils to hasten the Redeemer's kingdom. It is no narrow, sectarian study which we invite and urge the ministry and membership of the churches to enter. It is broader than denomination, it is wide and liberal as is the basis of truth and righteousness. It will be ennobling and successful, though against much opposition. For are we not warranted in believing that the next grand step towards the millennium must be accompanied by a truer, deeper, and more general indoctrination of the membership of Christ's body into the principles of the Gospel as taught in the Word of God.

ARTICLE II.

CYPRIAN'S LETTER TO FIDUS;

OR, THE SIXTY-SIX BISHOPS ON INFANT BAPTISM.

IT was A. D. 253 that a large meeting of African bishops was held at Carthage. It was one of those informal meetings in the Ancient Church, held occasionally at convenient centres, by the bishops of the surrounding region. They met for mutual improvement, and for the consideration of any topic that might come up concerning the welfare of the Church. Such meetings were not ecclesiastical, like those of synods or of councils, but only ministerial. They were not called by any authority of the Church, nor yet to do any specific or previously arranged work. As bishops of the district, they came together of their own accord, much after the manner and for the purposes of a clerical association of our own day.

At this meeting, held in Carthage, sixty-six bishops were present. What other topics were raised for consultation we are not informed; but Fidus, a country bishop, presented by letter two questions. One was, whether an infant might receive baptism before it was eight days old.

The question is accompanied with an argument on the negative by Fidus. He urges that earlier than the eighth day the new-born would seem to be so unfinished and unclean that men would revolt from giving it the usual kiss of welcome into the Church. He makes much also of the fact that circumcision was prescribed for the eighth day, and insists that the rule of initiation in that form should hold in this. And other things he urges against the baptism of an infant before its eighth day.

The question and argument of Fidus seem to have been very fully discussed by the bishops, and their result was unanimous. The duty of condensing their opinion, and making reply to their inquirer, was devolved on Cyprian. This letter of Cyprian to Fidus is preserved. In the editions of his works by Parmelius and by the Benedictines, it is the Fifty-Ninth Epistle; in the Oxford edition of Bishop Fell, it is the Sixty-Fourth. We make a few quotations from this letter.

..... As to the case of infants; whereas you judge that they must not be baptized within two or three days after they are born, and that the rule of circumcision is to be observed, so that none should be baptized and sanctified before the eighth day after he is born; we were all in our assembly of the contrary opinion (longe aliud in concilio nostro omnibus visum est). For as for what you thought fitting to be done, there was not one that was of your mind, but all of us, on the contrary, judged that the grace and mercy of God is to be denied to no person that is born. ...... And whereas you say, that an infant in the first days after its birth is unclean, so that any of us abhor to kiss it, we think not this neither to be any reason to hinder the giving to it the heavenly grace. For it is written, 'to the clean all things are clean.' ...... We judge that no person is to be hindered from obtaining the grace by the law that is now appointed, and that the spiritual circumcision ought not to be restrained by the circumcision that was according to the flesh. ...... If the greatest offenders, and they that have grievously sinned against God before, have, when they afterward came to believe, forgiveness of their sins, and no person is kept off from baptism and the grace, how much less reason is there to refuse an infant, who being newly born, has no sin, save that being descended from Adam according to the flesh, he has from his very birth contracted the contagion of the death anciently threatened. ... ... This, therefore, dear brother, was our opinion in the assembly, that it is not for us to hinder any person from baptism and the grace of God, who is merciful and kind, and affectionate to all. Which rule, as it holds for all, so we think it more especially to be observed in reference to infants and persons newly born, to whom our help and the divine mercy is rather to be granted, because by their weeping and wailing at their first entrance into the world, they do intimate nothing so much as that they implore compassion." We have used here, for convenience, the fair translation of Dr. Wall, (Hist. Inf. Bap. 1: 129-32.)

This Epistle of the martyr-bishop of Carthage is worthy of a few special notes. As a witness concerning the ordinance of infant baptism, it has a leading and commanding place on the stand among the ancients. We make six points in the outline and bearings of this testimony.

1. The Epistle itself is a genuine Epistle of Cyprian.— It is a convenient and no rare thing to break the force of evidence from the Fathers by allusions to the mutilations and interpolations by which some of their works have been dishonored.

So Danvers, in his "Treatise of Baptism," being unable to resist the force of this Epistle, if admitted to be genuine, attempts to make his position good against the ordinance, thus:

"We would rather believe that these things were foisted into his writings by that villanous, cursed generation, that so horribly abused the writings of most of the ancients."

But this Epistle of Cyprian is as well authenticated as any work whatever of the Fathers. Without attempting to exhaust the evidence on this point, it is enough to say, that Jerome and Augustine have quoted it so freely, that almost every passage of it may be found in their works. Jerome alone quotes the most of it in the Third Book of his Dialogue against the Pelagians. Augustine, in his Fourth Book against the Two Epistles of the Pelagians, quotes it extensively, and also in his work on the merits and remission of sins. And in one of his letters to Jerome, the Twenty-Eighth, he says, "Blessed Cyprian, not making any new decree, but expressing the firm faith of the Church, in refuting those that thought a child must not be baptized before the eighth day, said," &c.

So in their times this Epistle was known and received as the genuine production of Cyprian. And they lived so near to his times that we cannot suppose it possible that they were duped by it as a forgery. Cyprian's Letter to Fidus is therefore a lawful chapter in church history.

2. The Question submitted by Fidus to the bishops. It is sometimes the case that a question gives more information than its full answer. It is so in this case. The inquiry is an ample revelation on the subject of infant baptism in the third century. In it Fidus assumes the validity and universality of the ordinance. It is no part of his inquiry, whether the ordinance. shall be administered. By the very terms in which he puts it, the question concedes this. The Scriptural authority for the ordinance, or its propriety, does not lie with any doubt in his own mind, or lead him to ask for light from his brethren in the African ministry. A question so precise, and so sharp in its point, could arise only where infant baptism was, by common consent, assumed, granted, and practised, as a Christian ordinance. It is simply a question of time. May the rite be administered before the infant is eight days old? Would such a

question arise in any community where infant baptism was not common usage? And the discussion and answer of the question concede all that Fidus concedes in it. No one raises a doubt as to the authority and propriety of the rite. Were the ordinance at that time an innovation, or had it intruded itself into the Church within the memory of some of the aged bishops in that assembly, such a question could not have come in, and been discussed under so full an assumption and admission of its apostolical authority. Not only is its divine institution as fully conceded as that of adult baptism, but the association say, "we think it more especially to be observed in reference to infants, and persons newly born."— Magis circa infantes ipsos, et recens natos observandum putamus.

They thus give infant baptism precedence, as worthy of a more prompt and prominent attention than adult baptism. Nothing less than the unquestioned and apostolical authority, in their estimation, of this ordinance, and its general observance at that time in the Christian Church, could have led them to this high, not to say radical, ground, for the practice of the rite.

3. The connection, in the estimation of Fidus and the bishops, between baptism and circumcision. — Fidus argues that the rule of circumcision must be the rule of baptism as to time, and that the only proper day is the eighth, for administering the rite. Can it be an undesigned and untaught coincidence that he here presents? Why the connection of the two initiatory rites to the Church, and such a connection as makes the ancient rule the modern as to time? And why is baptism called "the spiritual circumcision"? We cannot escape the conviction that this connecting of the two rites, and this law of time, and this synonym for baptism, are the result of tradition and instruction, from the apostles; that the latter ordinance comes in the place of the former. If such were the teaching and belief of that early day, we can easily explain the introduction of these expressions. Otherwise the connection and some of the expressions are strangely accidental, and yet coincident.

4. The large section of the Church represented in this assembly. — The number of bishops in it was sixty-six. At that early date, A. D. 253, this number must have represented a very large portion of the African Church. For in the best days of Chris