If, in church worship, man placed himself in a relation to God, without God placing Himself in a relation to man, then we might reject infant baptism. But this is not so. God, in baptism, places Himself in a relation to the subject, receives the subject until it become a part of the organism of grace in its subjective and objective force, and is recognized as a member of the church of Christ. Now the falsity of the position assumed by the enemies of infant baptism lies just here, that only the subjective side of baptism is held up, while its objective, sacramental character is left altogether out of view. It reverses the relative positions of faith and baptism, making the former to take the place of the latter, and holding that any one dissociated with the church, can receive and exercise a true living faith, which overthrows the very idea of the church itself. It makes faith first, baptism second, entering the church third; whereas baptism comes before the conscious faith of the subject. If so, then why object to infant baptism? Baptism is that sacrament by means of which the order of divine grace is continued. It generates faith, and its development is from authoritative, to free, personal faith. "What the personal election of Christ was to the first circle of disciples, that baptism is for the successive church, the divine fact through which Christ gives to His church its true and eternal beginning in the individual." If so, then is it not plain that baptism goes before the self-conscious faith of the subject? And if this church-founding sacrament brings your child into a living and saving relation to the church, then why deny it that baptism? Dare you reverse the divine procedure which God has ordained for the salvation of His people? And if Christ is related to the individual only through the general; if He is related to the members only through the body, and having fellowship with them only as the Head of that body, then is it not plain that your children, in order to come to Him as such, to be incorporated with Him and related to Him in a saving way, must come to Him through the church,--must become a member of it, and that too in the manner and through the medium He has prescribed, viz., baptism?