We were all sitting there in the moonlight, when this Mr. Benson and his wife came up the door-way, and were welcomed into our little group. After a few words of mutual inquiry and answer, he said:

"Wife and I, sir, thought that we would make bold to come and trouble you a little to tell us about baptizing our boy. He is getting to be four months old, and we are not willing to put it off much longer. Still, we would like to know the grounds of it a little better. People, you know, do not think much about it till it comes to be a case in hand.

"But I do not know," said he, looking round on your mother and the children, "but that we do wrong to take this time for it. It will be rather a dry subject for these young friends to hear."

Pastor. Not at all. They owe too much to what was done for them when they were little children, to dislike it. Besides, there is nothing dry about it, as I view the subject. It is one of the most beautiful things in religion.

Mrs. Benson. It is next to the Lord's Supper, I always thought, if people take the right view of it.

Pastor. It makes you love God the Father in some such way as the Lord's Supper makes you love the Saviour. I think, sometimes, that the baptism of children is our heavenly Father's Sacrament.

Mr. B. I like that; but there is so much to study and learn about the "Abrahamic covenant," that I feel a little discouraged. I have had books lent me on the Abrahamic covenant, and I began to read them; but they looked hard; so I told my wife that perhaps you would make the thing more clear, and bring it home to our feelings, and that we would come and get your ideas about it.

Pastor. How glad I am that you came! But tell me what you take the Abrahamic covenant to mean.

Mr. B. I suppose it means that God told Abraham to circumcise his children, and infant baptism comes in the place of it, and we must do it if we are Abraham's spiritual children. But I wish to see the use of it. I am willing to do it, but I should like to feel it more; and I want to know how baptism comes in the place of circumcision, and a great many other things.

Pastor. I think that you may possibly have what may be called some Jewish notions about the Abrahamic covenant, though I trust you are right in the main. That phrase sounds foreign and mysterious, and I never use it except in talking with people who I know have the thing itself already in their hearts.

I called Helen to me, and told her to say the hymn which she had repeated to me the last Sabbath evening.

She cleared her voice, leaned against me, and twisted her fingers in my hair behind, and, with her eyes fixed there, she said this hymn:

"Begin, my tongue, some heavenly theme,
And speak some boundless thing;
The mightier works or mightier name
Of our eternal King.

"Tell of his wondrous faithfulness,
And sound his power abroad;
Sing the sweet promise of his grace,
And the performing God.

"Proclaim salvation from the Lord
For wretched, dying men;
His hand has writ the sacred word
With an immortal pen.

"Engraved as in eternal brass
The mighty promise shines;
Nor can the powers of darkness rase
Those everlasting lines.

"He who can dash whole worlds to death,
And make them when he please,
He speaks, and that Almighty breath
Fulfils his promises.

"His very word of grace is strong
As that which built the skies:
The voice that rolls the stars along
Speaks all the promises.

"He said, 'Let the wide heavens be spread;'
And heaven was stretched abroad.
'Abra'am, I'll be thy God,' he said;
And he was Abra'am's God.

"O, might I hear thy heavenly tongue
But whisper, 'Thou art mine!'
Those gentle words should raise my song
To notes almost divine.

"How would my leaping heart rejoice,
And think my heaven secure!
I trust the all-creating voice,
And faith desires no more."

Pastor. What a happy man Abraham must have been when the Almighty made this engagement and promise: "I will be a God to thee!" That was the "Abrahamic covenant," in part.

"Does covenant mean that?" said Mrs. B.

"What?" I inquired.

"Why, sir, what you have just said,—engagement, promise?"

"Nothing more," said I. "But what a happy man, I say, Abraham must have been! 'A God to thee!' To have the Almighty say to one, 'I will be a God to thee!' You know that this is everything."

"That is a fact," said Mr. B., wiping his eyes; "for, when I went to my store, the morning after I became a Christian, I went along the street, saying to myself, 'Now I have a God. God is God to me. Thou art my God.'

"Yes," said his wife; "Deacon B., the post-master, heard you, as you went by his side-window, and he made an excuse to bring me up a paper, that forenoon, and asked whether you had not met with a change in your feelings on the subject of religion."

"Did he?" said Mr. B. "Well, I did not mean to be heard, and yet I was willing that everybody should know how happy I was in having one whom I could call my God. How I had lived so long without God for my God, amazed me."

Pastor. You make me think of a man who, one night, on reaching his house, after having attended a lecture in a school-room, was filled with such surprising views and feelings, with respect to the greatness and goodness of God, that he saddled his horse, rode three miles, waked up the minister, and, as he came to the door, took hold of each arm, and said, "O, my dear sir, what a God we've got!" He would not go in, but soon hastened back. It was the substance of all that he wished to say; he desired to pour out his soul to some one who would understand him. He was like a thirsty land when at last the great rain is descending.

Mr. B. I suppose many people would have thought him crazy.

"I suspect the minister did, at first," said Mrs. B.

"And yet I suppose," said I, "he was never more rational. Just think what it is for a poor sinner all at once to feel that the eternal God is his; that He will be a God to him! We hear of some people dying at the receipt of good news; and I have seen some so happy at this experience, of having a God to love and to love them, that, if the thing itself did not, as it always does, bring peace and inward strength with it, nature could not have sustained it."

"Joy unspeakable," said Mr. B. "And full of glory," said his wife, waiting a moment for him to finish the quotation.

"Now, my dear friends," said I, "that man on horseback, at his minister's door at midnight, had, at that moment, the first part of what is meant by the 'Abrahamic covenant.'