has been subject to natural influences, which in their appointed course, and within their just limits, nourish and preserve him, with all other creatures. But, when some irregularity disturbs that course, or when he invades those limits with a rash step, he only struggles against a power which is the basis of all corporeal existence. He has no strength to endure a temperature above or below that which is adapted to his feeble frame; and the air in which he lives must be blended from its constituent elements in exact proportions, or the vital machine is deprived at once of its moving power, and all the parts which compose the substance of his body hasten back to their sources in surrounding nature. These deaths are not very numerous; but more mightily, perhaps, than any other class, they speak the essential mortality of our present condition; for, though we could escape every disease and accident, we never could brave the might of extreme heat or cold, or of a decomposed and noxious atmosphere.

XVIII.

Death in Infancy.

"There thousands and ten thousands I beheld,
Of innocents like this, that died untimely,
By violence of their unnatural kin,

Or by the mercy of that gracious Power,
Who gave them being, taking what He gave,
Ere they could sin or suffer like their parents.

I saw them in white raiment, crowned with flowers,
By the fair banks of that resplendent river,
Whose streams make glad the city of our God."

MONTGOMERY.

In an age of refinement and humanity, and in lands where a most watchful tenderness guards the cradle, one third of a generation die in early childhood. But the fragile life, which seemed to need but a gentler or a ruder breath to preserve or extinguish its flame, must often have ceased through the roughness or inattention of barbarians, ignorant even in their kindness. A multitude of infants have been born to die almost at once, with the consent or by the act of parents, brutalized through superstition, or extreme want, or habits of cruelty. All the calamities, too, by which whole communities and tribes have been visited, could not but act most fatally on the feeble beings whose lives were wrapped in the lives of fathers and mothers. From all these causes, the computation of Hufeland, if too large for the present age, may perhaps be admitted for the past history of the world; and it may be believed that half the human race have died within the first ten years of life.

It seems, at first sight, a mysterious ordinance, that death should hold such dominion, before the higher ends. of life could be attained or attempted. The same principle seems to have presided over that arrangement by which one third of human existence is apparently lost in the inactivity of sleep, and that other by which almost all the waking hours of almost all mankind must be given to the mere labour of obtaining sustenance. I seems as if the greatest purposes were thus sacrificed or disappointed. But sadder views, compelled by human history, not only satisfy the mind of the wisdom of these ordinances, but result in adoration of the goodness which through them has turned aside so many perils. While labour employs the body, more than half the temptations which would else assail the soul are kept aloof. In sleep, the soul, as well as the body, is refreshed, and ripens passively; and if it makes little progress in good, advances as little in evil. Infancy, a kind of partial sleep of the moral nature, is unmolested by the worst of human temptations and they who close their days within that region of but half waking thoughts, have never offended as men offend. They die without the burden of a guilt which has been contracted against reason, knowledge, admonition, deliberation and experience. If we knew no more, it would be but too certain a gain for a mighty proportion of mankind, to fall so early.

But more is known. For these, as for all who died. in the first of men, there remains, through the seed of the woman, another life, in which the body that dies, and the spirit that never dies, shall alike participate. That the life to come should be to them a state of strict punishment for deeds done in this life, could neither be averred nor imagined; because, whatever be the ten

dency of the dispositions which they disclose, and whatever the abstract character and merit of those dispositions, it is impossible, with any knowledge which we possess, to impute any very high accountability to their persons. The future life, indeed, without being for such strictly a place of punishment, might still be the beginning of sorrows. To enter it with a mass of impious desires, all sure of their development, would be only to make it at the best a world like this, where evils, unchecked by any future redemption, must pass into evils still blacker and more unmitigated. Not, therefore, through their mere freedom from deliberate guilt can they who depart in childhood be secure of future felicity. But if the evil which they inherit, the downward tendency which has been the load of all men since sin came into the world, be once removed, there is then no bar to their free entrance on all the joy which the Sovereign Father has reserved for the creatures of His love. If they who, from the weakness of their years, cannot embrace a message that announces and offers redemption, may yet be embraced within that redemption, death may be to them the seal of their exemption from trial; of pureness once bestowed, and never again to be endangered; and of their free admission to a purchased possession. But it has always been believed that they could be and were embraced within the redemption which was promised before Paradise was forsaken. Its Author and Finisher gave to such as them an express inheritance in the kingdom of heaven.

The theological question between universal and particular redemption, seemed not necessarily to involve a question on the future peace of such as die in childhood. Should it be pronounced universal, as by the general

voice of Christendom at this day, their peace would certainly be decided in that decision. But should redemption be pronounced particular, or limited to a chosen number, that number might still include all who were destined to die before conscious rebellion. Two theories, however, have alike, in their turn, darkened the hopes of the bereaved parent. Tertullian, at the end of the second century, intimates that innocent infants needed not, like older mortals, the sacrament of baptism for the remission of sins, and would die uninjured by its delay. But, fifty years after, Cyprian and the other African bishops were unanimous in urging that the youngest infant should not be debarred from the grace of that sacrament. Its absolute necessity was thenceforth declared with so little qualification, that after the time of Augustin, infants dying without baptism were generally believed to be excluded from the blissful abodes. But a state was imagined for them, which was little more than exclusion from heaven, without suffering, while the baptized were supposed to be in endless felicity. Even Melancthon speaks of those children only as admitted to grace, who are not Turkish, nor Jewish, nor Pagan, but in the church. It has been easy for some Protestant divines, in lands where scarcely, till of late, one unbaptized person in a hundred or a thousand could be encountered, to speak in a tone of uncertainty when they spoke of infants dying without baptism. But the fathers of the reformed church of England hesitated not to declare that, without doubt, unbaptized infants might be heirs of Heaven. Such, too, was the doctrine of Calvin and his followers; but their theory of an irrespective election inclined them to imagine a separation even amongst little ones; and they spoke of elect infants. While