the cause of God and her neighbour. The reader will excuse this digression.

To return to the subject:-whether we take a general view of human nature as it appears abroad in the world, or a more intimate survey of it from the knowledge of ourselves, and of those immediately within our sphere, it might be expected to operate as a forcible lesson on all to whom Providence has intrusted the culture of the rising generation. Can parents look around them, and take no alarm at the follies and vices which they behold on every side? Do they imagine the moral habits in which their children are nurtured, must of course secure them from the contagion ? Can they be supine and indifferent amid the evils they are every hour compelled to witness, and by which their own happiness is so frequently disturbed? Whence originally proceed those crosses and vexations, those goads in our sides which occasion such frequent complaints of this troublesome world? Not from the immediate hand of Providence, which does not shower down even upon guilty creatures an uninterrupted storm; but would permit them to enjoy many a serene, if not a cloudless day. No, they are woes

which we inflict upon each other. It is true we are thus made instruments in His hand, by which He frequently chastises us; yet He authorises-nay, He commands us to use all our endeavours by education, to convert these swords into ploughshares, these spears into pruning-hooks; to render what is hostile and dangerous, useful and beneficial; and this will assuredly be required at our hands.

It were vain to attempt to enforce such sentiments on self-approving Pharisees, by the contemplation of their own depraved propensities: their ostentatious boasts, that "they are not as other men," drive us to make our appeal to the experienced Christian. Those who feel and bewail the disorder within their own bosoms, can make a salutary application of the principle in the case of their offspring. They see their work before them at greater certainty, and they apply themselves to it with unremitting energy and zeal. They apply themselves to it, so far as their talents and opportunities permit them : the want of these, in many instances, demands a substitute for parental exertions. Yet surely the christian mother will be solicitous, at least, to superintend the moral culture of her charge during the first

years of life. The general admonition, "to look well to our flocks and our herds," she applies to the care of those tender lambs which are exposed during infancy to innumerable perils, from which few hands but those of a mother can defend them. She is solicitous, at least, to lay the foundation of a structure which shall be proof against the boisterous winds, the beating rain, and the swelling flood: having so done, there is less danger in committing the external decorations of the building to other hands. But those who

neglect to do this, or attempt it too late, or perform it unskilfully, or trust too implicitly to the services of others, must not complain of their hard lot, as though some strange thing had befallen them, when they reap the inevitable consequences. It would be much more strange were not their natural effects to follow such causes.

At the conduct of the world in these respects we cannot wonder; but what shall we say to those who, making higher pretensions than a common profession of christianity; those who afford us some reason to hope that they have indeed embraced the Gospel of Christ, and know something of its power, as

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well as of its doctrines; yet so grievously fall short of the spirit of it in the management of their offspring? The head of a family assembles his household together for worship he opens the sacred volume, and reads the history of Eli, and of Eli's family: he closes the book, and like a man beholding his natural face in a glass, and afterwards forgetting what manner of person he is, goes his way without making any salutary application of it although, alas! it is more than the united efforts of the mother and the servants have been able to effect, to restrain his boisterous children, or to maintain a decent silence during the short interval of religious worship!

Be it the ambition then of every true Christian to make his house a seminary, in which citizens are educated for the present world; a temple, in which they are early dedicated to, and prepared for the world to come.

THE END.

T. Miller, Printer, b, Noble Street, Cheapside.