It is no part of our task either to justify or condemn these opinions; but, perhaps, the following extract from an article, probably written by Samuel Wesley, and inserted in the _Athenian Oracle_, (vol. i., p. 457,) may with some find more favour, though there is nothing in it antagonistic to the other opinions of Samuel Wesley already given. “Baptism is called by the apostle ‘the laver of regeneration,’ and accordingly our Church, not only lawfully, but commendably, uses the word regeneration for baptism; and, in the offices for that sacrament, more than once mentions the child’s being regenerate, which it explains by its being grafted into the body of Christ’s Church, and so admitted into the communion of saints. Children have then a federal holiness as children of believing parents; and, as the first-born among the Jews were dedicate, devoted, or holy in the Lord, so in that sense children of believing parents are holy—in that sense they are regenerate.” It is a remarkable fact, not generally known, that John Wesley’s “Treatise on Baptism,” published in the tenth volume of his collected works, and dated November 11, 1756, is nothing less or more than his father’s “Short Discourse of Baptism,” published fifty-six years before. It is true that the son has very _slightly_ abridged and verbally altered his father’s essay, but that is all. He thus makes all the opinions of his father, on baptism, his own; but it is somewhat strange that he should republish the treatise without the least reference to its original author. It is hardly fair that the treatise should be published as his own. In more respects than one, John Wesley was a courageous man. In the same year in which Samuel Wesley published his “Pious Communicant,” he also gave to the public a poem, entitled, “An Epistle to a Friend concerning Poetry, by Samuel Wesley. London: Printed for Charles Harper, 1700.” The poem is a folio of thirty pages, and consists of 1083 lines.