_Mr. S._ Suppose that the legislature should incorporate a fish-market, and cede to the proprietors fifteen square miles of the sea, within which they should have the privilege of taking fish. All the fish, within those fifteen miles of salt water, might be said to _belong_ to the market; yet every one of them must be taken by hook and line ere his belonging to the market is of any practicable value. So the children of the church may be said to belong to the church, and are to constitute her chief resource. Rivers, and other distant or neighboring waters, would also send fish to that market, even if they were "far off;" but it is from the bay at her doors that the market would derive her principal supplies. I do not see that children are members of the church, any further than those fishes belong to that market. Go there when you will, you see the stalls filled from those adjacent waters; supplies are continually coming in; they are, in a sense, secured to the market by a covenant; yet every fish is caught and handled, before he has anything like membership in that market, as really as though he swam and were caught in Baffin's Bay;--only he is now far more likely to be caught, and, in a sense, he already belongs to the market by the seal of the state. Mr. A., the reader of the sermon, not having much ideality, but much plain good sense, yet taking everything literally at first, and from his own honesty supposing that all figures of speech are to be cashed, as it were, for what they purport on their face, immediately challenged his brother to carry out the illustration. He asked him whether the constant passage, in and out, of fishes from and beyond the ceded fifteen miles, allowed of any resemblance, in the migratory creatures, to the children of the church, who are born and remain in the limits of the church, and are designated, individually, by virtue of their parentage. Mr. S. replied, that he did not mean to make a comparison to satisfy all the points of the case, and he hoped that the brethren would take it with due allowance. Mr. T. said that he had thought of this illustration: "All the young male children of the Levites might be said to be members of the priesthood. They certainly 'belonged' to the priesthood. But no one of them could officiate till he had complied with certain conditions, nor if he was the subject of certain disabilities. He believed that the children of God's people have, by the grace of God, as really a presumptive relation, by future membership, to the church of Christ, as an infant Levite boy had to sacred offices; prayer, with the child, as well as for it, and faithful training, with a spiritual use of God's appointed ordinances, constitute, he was persuaded, as good reason to hope that the child of a true believer will become a Christian, and that, too, early in life, as that the young son of Levi would minister in the levitical office."