taken from a font, and falling from the holy hands of a regularly ordained priest, imparts such a mysterious sanctity to the subject whom it touches, as to render any moral or spiritual meetness for the inheritance of the saints in light quite unnecessary. _How wonderful!_" It was amusing to watch the movements of Mrs. John Roscoe during these discussions, and gratifying to hear her occasional observations. She would sit sometimes as patient as a judge when listening to the evidence on some grave charge against a prisoner at the bar, and at other times she was as restless and fidgety as a juryman anxious to deliver the verdict, that he might get home to his dinner as quickly as possible. In general, she held a very tight rein over her excursive spirit, out of respect to the two principal disputants; but occasionally it would drop from her grasp, and then she was off at a tangent. "I think," said she, "a man's bump of credulity must be larger than his head who would tell me, with decorous gravity, that he really has faith to believe such an ecclesiastical dogma." This remark somewhat disconcerted, though it did not displease her husband, who rather liked to see her display her cleverness, but he soon recovered himself, and addressing his brother, he said:-- "But these are the consequences which _you_ deduce from the doctrine, rather than consequences which necessarily follow from its admission. When the child is baptized we pray that he may _lead the rest of his life according to this beginning_; which presupposes the possibility that he may not. If he do not, he forfeits his baptismal rights, and relapses into a state of condemnation and guilt." _Mr. Roscoe._--"Then I presume that, by his relapse into a state of condemnation and guilt, he places himself in a moral condition similar to the condition in which he would have stood if he had never been baptized?" _Rev. Mr. Roscoe._--"Exactly so." _Mr. Roscoe._--"As a state of guilt and condemnation implies, on the part of man, depravity and alienation from God, must he not undergo some _moral change_ in his disposition, his principles, and his taste, before he can loathe himself on account of his impurities, or be fitted to dwell in the immediate presence of a holy God; as we read that 'without holiness no man shall see the Lord?'" _Rev. Mr. Roscoe._--"Certainly; he must be made good and virtuous before he can be admitted into heaven." _Mr. Roscoe._--"But if he were regenerated when he was baptized, and there is no _other regeneration possible in this world_, you see the dilemma in which you place a man who by transgression forfeits his baptismal rights." _Rev. Mr. Roscoe._--"What dilemma?"