"Well, then," said I, "must it follow that children could not be circumcised because Abraham said to men, 'Believe and be circumcised'? How will that reasoning answer? Is it true? No. Little Isaac refuted it, for he was circumcised even when his father was saying to his pagan neighbors, 'Believe and be circumcised.'" "True enough, all who believed, in Christ's day and the apostles', needed to be baptized, because they were not children, but were grown up, when Christian baptism began. Had an apostle, however, lived to see the jailer's family, and that of Lydia, and of Stephanas, grown up, and any in those families had remained unconverted, and then he had said to them, 'Believe and be baptized,' there would be some force in saying that believing and baptism must always go together." "One other thing always troubled me," said Mr. Benson, "and that is, that there was no seal of the covenant for any but male children. Now, if the initiatory rite of Christianity be used for the same purpose as that given to Abraham, why not confine it, as formerly, to males?" "How interesting it is," said I, "and it is full of instruction, to see God paying regard to the world's knowledge and progress, in all his measures, and doing nothing prematurely. There is a very striking illustration of this in the account of the fall. "God knew the history of the tempter during his agency in Paradise; for angels had sinned and fallen from heaven. But the existence and agency of fallen spirits had not been disclosed in the Bible,--the time for the disclosure had not come,--and therefore it is said, with beautiful simplicity, 'Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made;' and the narrative has respect only to the external appearance of the tempter, the serpent, because it would have been premature as yet to bring in the story of fallen angels, or make allusion to them. "So, for reasons belonging to the early ages of the world, woman was included in man, who acted for her.[1] "But, however the arrangement began, God regarded that organic law of society, and, in giving Abraham a seal of a covenant for his children, he restricted it to the sons, they in all things standing and acting as the representatives of the house, according to the existing custom. God did not go far beyond the world's advancement, in his ordinances, but, with condescension and in wisdom, suited the one to the other. But, as things were then generally represented by types, so the male child was a type and representative of the more full and complete form, which was reserved till the fulness of time, and till the world should know the fulness of Him that filleth all in all. For 'in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female.'"