gained if every thing had been stated as expressly and minutely as it is in the book of Leviticus. The sabbath, for instance, was instituted at the creation; it was continued during the patriarchal age; it was observed during the Jewish dispensation till the time of Christ; there is no command enjoining it in the New Testament; and though some passages seem at first sight to discountenance the observance of a christian sabbath, yet, from various remarks and circumstances, incidentally scattered through the sacred book, we are led to believe it to be the will of Christ that a sabbath should be continued through the gospel dispensation, and that it should be transferred from the last day of the week to the first; and when we consult early ecclesiastical history, we find all our convictions confirmed by the fact, that the first day of the week was universally observed by the christian church as a day of rest and worship. The ordinance of circumcision, in its connection with baptism, is similarly circumstanced. It was instituted in the time of Abraham, and it continued to be observed till the time of Christ, as a memorial of God’s everlasting covenant, and of the relationship which he had established between believing parents and their children. In the New Testament, we find that the ordinance itself is changed from circumcision to baptism; just as the sabbath is changed, from the seventh to the first day of the week. But this is the principal change relative to the ordinance which the New Testament declares. The old ordinance and the new have precisely the same spiritual signification. Faith, in an adult, was as necessary to precede circumcision, as it is now necessary to precede baptism. Infants are quite as capable of being baptized, as they were of being circumcised; and that it is the will of Christ they should be baptized, is quite as evident, from scripture testimony, as that the first day of the week is the divinely appointed christian sabbath. Indeed, their right to baptism seems to follow as a matter of course from the fact declared in our text, and already illustrated, that _our children now sustain the same relation to the kingdom of God_, _that the children of believers did formerly_; especially when we find that Christ not only said, “of such is the kingdom of God,” but also that “he put his hands on them, and blessed them.”