Lest some one should still say, however, that the examples above noted are isolated and exceptional, we note further, that the tenor of the whole Word is in harmony with this idea. Nowhere in the whole Bible is it even intimated that it is God's desire or plan that children must remain outside of the covenant of Grace, and have no part or lot in the benefits of Christ's redeeming work until they come to years of discretion and can choose for themselves. This modern idea is utterly foreign and contradictory to all we know of God, of His scheme of redemption, and of His dealings with His people, either in the old or new dispensation. He ordained that infants at eight days old should be brought into His covenant. He recognized infant children as partakers of the blessings of His covenant. "_Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise_;" "_Suffer them to come unto Me_." Everywhere it is taken for granted that the children who have received either the Old or New Testament sacrament of initiation are His. Nowhere are parents exhorted to use their endeavors to have such children converted, as though they had never been touched by divine Grace. But everywhere they are exhorted to keep them in that relation to their Lord, into which His own ordinance has brought them. Gen. xviii. 19, "_I know that he will command his household after him, and that they shall keep the way of the Lord_." Psalm lxxviii. 6, 7, "_That the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born, which should arise and declare them to their children, that they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments_." Prov. xxii. 6, "_Train up a child in the way he should go; when he is old he will not depart from it_." Eph. vi. 4, "_Bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord_." Let the baptized child then be looked upon as already belonging to Christ. Let the parents not worry as though it could not be His until it experiences a change of heart. That heart has been changed. The germs of faith and love are there. If the parent appreciates this fact and does his part, there will be developed, very early, the truest confidence and trust in Christ, and the purest love to God. From the germs will grow the beautiful plant of child-trust and child-love. The graces of the new life may be thus early drawn out, so that the child, in after years, will never know of a time when it did not trust and love, and as a result of this love, hate sin. This is the ideal of God's Word. It is the ideal which every Christian parent should strive to realize in the children given by God, and given to God in His own ordinance. How can it be done? Of this, more in the next chapter. CHAPTER VI. HOME INFLUENCE AND TRAINING IN THEIR RELATION TO THE KEEPING OF THE BAPTISMAL COVENANT.