grow thick into the character, and be strengthened in their growth with every passing day; or habits of self-restraint, industry, purity, gentleness, honest simplicity, kindness, and mercy, brotherly love, universal charity, and gradual holiness will root themselves into the heart, and bear fruit many-fold. We know that habit is as a second nature. Men will therefore generally shew either a double nature of sin, both original and actual, or on the nature which was before corrupted by original sin, the goodly scion of christian righteousness will be ingrafted, and the fruits of the Spirit will in due time be seen. The question may be asked, and ought to be asked, how far have we to do with this change in the nature of a child?' and the objection may be made, that no parent, no minister, no human being can give grace to a child? But while no man can do this, we all have it in our power to give a child the means of grace, looking to the Lord alone for the grace itself, for the increase, and for the blessing. We can plant and water; we can watch, and pray, and teach, and in a word, humbly and diligently do the part assigned to us. The child must be taught from the earliest awakenings of his powers of understanding, that he has been thus brought to God, in obedience to the word of Christ, and with prayer for the ful

filment of His promise. He must be taught that he is to live according to this faith, and to trust that the command of the Lord has in his case been complied with; that his parents, his sponsers, the minister, and the members of the church have begun to do their part, and that he is called upon to begin to do his part; and to act in agreement with them, nay, more, that he is called upon (God helping him) to do that which has been promised for him in his name. He must be often reminded, that although by nature sold under sin to the service of satan, he has been bought back again at the costly price of the blood of God manifest in the flesh. Therefore, that he is not his own, but the Lord's, and that having been called unto new life by Christ, he is called upon to walk with Christ, to live, indeed, in the Spirit, and to walk in the Spirit.

To those who think these things of little consequence, and are satisfied to be heedless and merely nominal members of a church which takes peculiar care of her young children, and provides (if her teaching be but followed up) that no child should be left to himself, I would address an argument which I do not think they will be able to gainsay. I would ask them, 'What would be the state of the world if every child from its first dawn of reason. and action were to be carefully instructed in

wickedness? If its first cries were to be provoked and encouraged-if it were to be kept always in idleness and filth-if it were taught to frame its first imperfect words into blasphemy and swearing, and indecent language—if its first faltering steps in walking alone were taught to be upon some harmless insect-if the first use its little hands were put to were to steal a neighbour's property, or to grasp a murderer's knife-if it were taught by some depraved person to practise every crime of indecency in the open face of day, before a crowd of approving witnesses-in short, for I will not unveil more of so frightful a picture, if it were taught directly contrary to "whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report," what would be the end?-one reign of ever waking terror.' Is there a human being who would willingly encourage and establish such an order of things, or rather such a horrible state of disorder in this our place of trial? I do not speak of such a state of things as being even possible, much less probable. The same Being who maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth His rain on the just and on the unjust, acts upon the same gracious principle in His government of the moral world, brings

good out of evil, order out of disorder at present, and has reserved this horrible disorder for that time when the day of grace will be past, for that world which will yawn upon the sinful and ungodly, when this fair but perishable earth shall fall to pieces under their feet. Have you ever thought that you are, each one of you while you continue in your sins, even on the very edge of such a world as ours would be, if every crime were thus carefully taught and thus common. Have you ever seriously considered that death can strike you down, you know not how suddenly, into a place of every imaginable torment, and that unless the Bible is false, this is a fact which cannot be got over. How would you feel, I may say to the ungodly parent, if in that miserable place the faces of your children were to appear before you? If their groans and their reproaches were to increase your agony? This is what your cruel carelessness and neglect have brought me to, might be said. Was it not enough that through you I was born into a world of vanity and wickedness? Why did you not strive to save me from this place of torment? You knew the world better than I did: its deceitfulness could not have been hidden from you. In my childhood, it was new to me. You knew it better; but, alas! I was fast bound with sinful habits before my eyes were

opened to my desperate condition.' Serious thought on this subject will convince you that I have not spoken too strongly. If there is such a hell as the Scriptures describe, and if the wicked are preparing themselves for its agonies, the imagination of man cannot conceive any resemblance too horrible: but the picture would, indeed, be quite horrible enough if we imagine not merely flames and lakes of fire, but every sort of crime and wickedness, now common in this world, at its highest degree. Do you ever consider what fallen man would have made this world, but for the merciful providence and unsought grace of God? For was not the first born of man after his fall a murderer, nay, the murderer of his own unoffending brother? And what would be the fate of all those who like not to retain God in their knowledge, if God were to give them over to a reprobate mind, and to withdraw all the secret influences of His Spirit, all the warnings of His love, saying of them, as of the disobedient in old times, "Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone."* But the world as it is, is filled with crime and forgetfulness of God, and fearful is the diligence of him, who is in the Scriptures called the God of this world. Not a human heart is passed over unattacked by

*Hosea iv. 17.