The infant was the first-born of an interesting couple, who had been married little more than twelve months. They lived in a genteel residence at the farther end of the village, and were celebrated amongst their neighbours no less for their affection for each other, than the sufferings which they endured before their union was consummated. The cupidity of their parents kept them apart for a period nearly as long as Jacob served for his beloved Rachel, when death came, and by leaving them orphans, broke down the barrier which had obstructed their union. But they were both too deeply affected by their loss to evince any symptoms of pleasure; and such was the respect in which they held the memory of their parents, that they permitted one year to pass over their heads before they were married. On the nuptial morning, a large number of the villagers greeted them with their simple benedictions as they left the church; and when they alighted from the carriage to enter their own dwelling, they were surrounded by a group of females dressed in white, who presented them with a garland of flowers--expressing, at the same time, a wish that their joy might prove of a less fading nature. "It is," said Mr. Roscoe, "by bringing the incidents and facts of real life to bear on the doctrines of our belief, that we are able to test them. The man who has just gone to his grave was the son of the parish clerk, and I well remember when he was baptized. If regeneration takes place when the ceremony of baptism is performed, he was then made a child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven. But what moral good resulted from this supposed change in his state and character? None. He grew up a wild lad--he lived without religion--and without it he died. But the child whose funeral we have just seen pass--this babe, the first-fruits of conjugal bliss, which just made its appearance in this valley of weeping, a branch too tender to thrive in such an uncongenial soil, after languishing for a few seconds, experienced a premature decay. It was a branch from the wild olive, and required the same spiritual grafting to fit it to luxuriate in the garden of the Lord as a more hardy plant. But if this spiritual operation cannot be performed except when the sacrament of baptism is administered, as some assert, then is this tender scion a brier or a thorn, whose end is to be burned, for it withered and died before the waters of healing could be procured. The impure and impious ruffian, who dies in the act of scornfully rejecting the Christian faith, passes at once into the kingdom of heaven, and takes rank with prophets, and apostles, and martyrs; while the little lovely babe, when waking up into a state of consciousness, instead of feeling the tender embraces of a mother, is startled into terror and anguish, by the sight and sound of infernal and lost spirits! Really this baptismal regeneration of the Tractarian churchman is such a monstrous doctrine, that I