thus approaching God through his dear Son. The study of this pure yet human imitation of the divine moral excellence, this likeness of God in our own nature, is attended with none of that difficulty which often embarrasses us, when we seek God in the infinity of his works. Jesus is our brother. His accents come to us as the well known voices of our most intimate and endeared friends. It is not possible to be in his presence without a feeling of confidence and hope. We do not doubt the tenderness of the divine compassion, while we are listening to the words which Jesus addresses to the sinner bathed in tears at his feet. We are filled with awe and reverence for the divine holiness, while we attend to the uncompromising doctrine, the severe rebuke of sin, the unconditional precepts, the stainless example, which meet us everywhere in the Saviour's history. The more intimately we connect our minds with him, the more sensible do they become to the claims which God has upon our affection and service. It is this fellowship with the Son, which brings us into communion with the Father. As we imbibe the spirit of the one, we are transformed into the image of the other. In loving Jesus, it is, that we come to love God. And how happy were it for us all, if we could cease to much consequence to the theories which tell us about the abstract and metaphysical nature of our Lord, and each address himself earnestly to the contemplation of those qualities, which all alike acknowledge and admire in his recorded life. These are the qualities which, when combined, constitute that likeness to the divinity which Jesus bears. These are what we must possess if we mean to imitate God. These we must understand and appreciate, if we would worship God in spirit and in truth. For

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these are what the Apostle saw "in the face of Jesus Christ," and their glorious effulgence it is, which imparts the knowledge of the glory of God.

A second application of this truth relates to the trial of religious opinions concerning the divine character and government. None can find out the Almighty to perfection. We see but parts of his ways. He maketh darkness often his pavilion, and his path is in the deep where no eye can trace his footsteps. Hence there has always been a readiness to admit as true respecting God, whatever has a plausible appearance of evidence in its favor in the words of the Bible, without regard to the moral difficulties, or even inconsistencies which such admission may involve. It would seem as if men, who are so sensitive to blame themselves, and so scrupulous about the imputation of wrong to such of their own race as they wish to see honored, had no manner of hesitation in affording countenance to that which reproaches their Maker. But we have in the fact that Jesus is the image of the invisible divinity, a warrant for rejecting at once, as false, all such views of God as we find inconsistent with those qualities which distinguish his Son. Take your opinions into the presence of Jesus. Ask yourselves how they harmonize with this image of the Creator's goodness, and if you cannot reconcile the two, your opinions should be suspected, and your search of truth resumed, in order to correct them. Imagine how Jesus would seem, uttering on one occasion such parables as the prodigal son, and on another, rehearsing the doctrine of infant damnation. Who that has ever felt the power of that parable, could conceive of this doctrine as a just view of the same benignant being? And so of a hundred other dogmas. Put

them into Jesus' lips, and how do they sound? Can you find words which came from him to express them, by even a distorted application? In any case there need be no solicitude about opinions which Christ has left us no terms to express. And in all instances what we should be shocked to read in the evangelic history, must be allowed no admission among evangelic truths.

Another application of the fact that Jesus is the image of God, relates to our estimate of our own nature. If this gracious friend be thus allied to the Divinity, he is no less intimately allied to us. If he is the brightest resemblance of our Creator's glory, he is also a partaker in all that belongs to humanity, but that guilt which obscures and degrades it. If he is the image of the invisible God, we too were made in the same likeness, and called to share with him in a divine nature. And is it meet to be said of such, with Calvin, that their nature "is not able to aspire to anything good," or with Augustine, that "it is not possible for it to be excited to anything but evil? It would seem as if it were criminal to speak honorably of human nature, although it is the chief work of God, while all the wise and good are in arms against Voltaire or Bayle, if they but lisp a doubt as to the perfection of the physical universe. If it were a reflection on the Divinity to disparage the forms of lifeless matter, or ridicule some mishapen product of the animate creation, what is it to scoff in bitter mockery at that nature which rises nearer to the divine than all beneath the heavens? Humanity is no fit subject for such abuse. And an intimate persuasion of the Saviour's excellence ill accords with habitual contempt for that nature which was his as truly as it is our own. Exhaust your reproaches on the suicidal

spirit which has bartered its native glories for an earthly price, upon man the sinner, not upon that creature so wonderfully made, so richly endowed, so strong in innocence although so weak in guilt, so noble as inspired by God, however base he may become when that inspiration is resisted. It is time men had done reproaching their Maker by the scorn they utter against his chief work in this lower world. It is time to awake from the lethargy of sloth produced by those fatal opiates, which self-contempt has led so many to administer to their deceived consciences. What we are by nature is to be set in contrast to what we have made ourselves by sin, and not sin and nature wedded by indissoluble bonds, as if the former were only the reflected image of the latter. Sin is not our nature. It is a foe to our nature. Why do we apply the term, unnatural, to any sins, if not to all? Is cruelty to your child unnatural any more than the wounding of your own soul? Is it contrary to our nature, and everywhere called inhuman, to forsake a fellow-creature in his extremity, and is it natural and what ought to be expected of a human being, to tempt that fellow-creature to the death from which we in the other case do only refuse to save him? Is not such seduction more unnatural and inhuman than such dereliction? Is it not more contrary to all that God has made us to approve and honor, to draw another into fatal snares, than to turn away from one who by no act of ours has fallen already into them? Nature, human nature, like all other parts of the one great whole to which the term "nature" is applied, is good, essentially and as seen by God. Evil there is in fatal plenty. The harvests which await that sickle which is destined to gather the clusters of the vine of the earth," are

luxuriant in their growth, and fully ripe will they soon be. Let the good man waste no energy of his, in the vain work of attempting to make sure the dominion of any theory about the origin of that seed, from which such fruits have sprung. There is a call for him far more urgent, and a work far more necessary. Let him go out into this vine-yard of death, and destroy what he can of its ripening clusters. Let him give himself no rest till there shall appear upon every branch of that "vine of the earth" which he can reach, the budding of a new and better growth. Such is the task to which the Lord of the vineyard summons us, and such the labor which he has promised to reward.

INFLUENCE OF MATERNAL CHARACTER ON EARLY EDU

CATION.

It will be the purpose of the following observations to point out some causes of failure in the domestic discipline and instruction of infant children. In thus familiarly stating my notions on the subject, in the hope of adding some items to the stock of true principles, and subtracting from the common mind some of the many errors, which serve to retard, or frustrate parental wishes, I must entreat to be pardoned for that want of method, and for those repetitions, which naturally characterise such unstudied compositions. Conceiving the colloquial air this careless and unstudied mode of treatment gives them, may be calculated to catch attention and promote inquiry, I have trusted much to the candor of my readers in prosecuting my subject.

One cause of the prevalent errors in education, espe