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

some, like Usher, seemed to allow the same difference of destiny in those who should pass into the world to come as in those who should survive in this; others, like some of the Synod of Dort, suggested that all who died in infancy might be of the elect. A part of the harsher doctrine was still that the condemnation of infants who might not be chosen would be the lightest of all future woes; but even from this the mild Watts took refuge in the strange conjecture that heathen infants might possibly cease to exist. The theory of election is now less agitated; the vastness of the redemption is seen in the word of truth; and Protestant Christians, almost with one sentiment, regard the infant world as safe in the hands of a faithful Creator and most merciful Saviour.

"Of such," said He, who knew the glory from which He came, and to which He returned, "of such is the kingdom of heaven;" of such as the little child before Him; not because it was a Jewish child, and circumcised; not because it was a child elected. from the rest; but simply because it was a little child, like other little children. Not merely that, through His covenant, they may be heirs of glory, are they consecrated and regenerated in baptism; but because, in His design, they are already made heirs of glory. Therefore, the pious mind, surveying the manifold uncertainties and sorrows of protracted life, and understanding the dangers through which so large a proportion of mankind shipwreck their everlasting hopes, can contemplate, with grateful reverence, the decree under which half have been removed before the season of peril. How sweet must be the songs of that innumerable company, who die without knowing the sting of death, and exchange the vale of tears for a second birth into a world where their angels always behold the face of the Father!

XIX.

Death by Pestilence.

"Nature sickened, and each gale was death."

POPE.

THE air which we breathe is so affected by certain causes, and very mysterious causes, that from time to time it becomes loaded with disease. Some maladies, also, may be conveyed from man to man, by contact. These sources of death, thus distinguished by their origin in infection or contagion, are classed under the common name of pestilence; and they fill a very solemn place in the history of mortality.

Of one such visitation, at least, it is divinely recorded, that it was ordained in punishment for transgression;. that an angel was the controlling minister; and that in three days 70,000 men died through the sin of their sovereign. At another time, almost 15,000 died in the camp of Israel; at another, 24,000; and of the people about Bethshemesh, when they dishonoured the ark, 50,000 fell. Men have always felt that these seasons of rapid, simultaneous death had a peculiar language, and demanded a special interpretation. All have bowed themselves before their Preserver, and have confessed that, as death is the fruit of sin, so extraordinary sin is justly visited with extraordinary triumphs of death.

The chief orders of pestilence, since medical science has been sufficient to distinguish their features and record their passage, have been the plague, the sweating

sickness, the small-pox, the yellow-fever, and the cholera. In ancient and in modern times, the plague has haunted the cities of the East. During three years of the Peloponnesian war, it was in Athens, and furnished a terrible theme to the descriptive powers of Thucydides. Out of an expedition of 4000 men, 1050 died in forty days. It was fatal, perhaps, to Pericles; certainly to almost all his family. In the time of Justinian, 10,000 died of it daily in Constantinople; and, in a solemn procession at Rome for imploring deliverance, eighty dropped dead in one hour. When it passed over Europe, in 1345 and several succeeding years, Florence lost. 100,000 of its population; Venice, 100,000; Naples, 60,000; Genoa, 40,000; and Trapani, in Sicily, all its inhabitants. It was computed, that in Asia and Africa, 23,000,000 had perished; and in Europe, sometimes a fifth, a third, and even three-fourths and nineteen-twentieths were supposed to have died from different cities and provinces. No visitation so dreadful has befallen the earth since the deluge. In the plague of 1406, 30,000 died in London; in that of 1603, 35,000; as many in that of 1625; and 68,000 in that of 1665, when, at times, about 1000 were buried daily. By the plague, Brussels, in 1489, lost 30,000, and in 1578 almost as many; in 1711, 30,000 died at Copenhagen; in 1720, 30,000, half of the whole population, at Marseilles, and a still larger proportion at Toulon; and in 1743, 20,000 at Messina. Its propagation, for a century past, has been prevented by the strict precautions of every Christian people; but in Egypt, where, in 1801, while the French army suffered little, 150,000 natives perished; at Constantinople, where, in the au tumn and winter of 1836, 100,000 were swept away; and at Bagdad, where, amidst a tremendous destruction,

the accomplished Rich was its victim; it is much more than an occasional visitant. Amongst those who have died by the plague, were Joanna, daughter of Edward the Third, who was seized at Bayonne, where she had just met her betrothed bridegroom; Holbein, the painter; Conrad Gesner, Jansenius, Simon Grynæus, Capito, and the dramatic poet Fletcher.

The small-pox is first mentioned in the seventh century, and amongst the Saracens. Its ravages seem to have become more and more terrible, till they were checked by the discovery of inoculation, and then of vaccination. At this day, the traveller in Europe is surprised at the number of faces which bear its marks, and can judge how great a host must have fallen before these preventives were suggested. The younger Queen Mary of England, Louis the Fifteenth, Joseph the First, and the great metaphysician and divine Jonathan Edwards, were thus removed from the world.

The sweating-sickness was an epidemic which visited England and the north of Europe about the beginning and middle of the sixteenth century. It swept away the learned Colet, and the two young Dukes of Suffolk, on whom many hopes reposed; and in a week eight hundred died in London. It was probably some fever, like those which are often infectious, but seldom spread themselves over so large a surface.

The yellow-fever has been terribly destructive in single ports within the warmer latitudes, especially in America; but disappears with particular seasons, and does not extend into the country. At Malaga, in 1803, almost 12,000 were its prey.

The cholera, originating in India, repeatedly passed over the Asiatic continent to Russia, Poland, Germany, the shores of the Atlantic, Great Britain, and the