rance, with all their moral corruption and responsibility, with all their immortality, and all their capacity for enjoyment and suffering, they are entrusted to the faithful love and nurturing care of parents. And when the God of heaven says, as he virtually says to every parent, "Take this child, and nurse it for me," how tender the obligation to preserve the trust inviolate! Children have strong claims on parental sympathy for this Christian training. Are your children frail? That frailty they derived from you. Have they imperfections? How strongly they resemble you! Have they peculiarities of character which afflict and embarass you? See if they did not derive them

from you. Are they morally and altogether depraved? How certain it is that you have begotten them in your own likeness! Do parents love their children? Shall some disinterested individual sympathise in their wants and woes, while the heart of a parent remains cold and unfeeling as a stone? Shall some "impartial Samaritan bind up the wounds and staunch the sorrows of this guilty being just about to expire" under the mortal plague of sin, while its unfeeling parent passes by on the other side? Was it for the suffering body alone; was it for the vicissitudes of time; was it for the prosperity of their children in this world only; that the God of nature implanted in the

parental bosom, the tender and inextinguishable affection for their offspring? An unenlightened, degraded heathen might immolate his child on the altar of some idol deity, or "cause him to pass through the fire unto Moloch;" but what shall be thought of a parent in a Christian land, who by his neglect, or self-indulgence, leaves his child to ten thousand times worse than such an immolation, and plunges him into the lake of fire? The ostrich of the wilderness, whom "God hath deprived of wisdom, neither hath he imparted to her understanding, leaveth her eggs in the earth, and warmeth them in the dust, and forgetteth that the foot may crush them, or that the wild beast may

break them;" but what shall be thought of the still more cruel insensibility of that parent who gives birth to a creature of immortality, and cherishes it for awhile amid the sands of this comfortless world, but forgets that the time is coming when it must break this "mudwalled cottage," and try, and through parental negligence, try in vain, to wing its way to purer skies.

3. Children who are religiously educated are usually a distinguished blessing to the church and the world. What children are to be at a more advanced age, depends on the character they form in childhood. There is no subject of more momentous interest to the world, therefore, than the efforts of parents to

educate them in the fear of God.

"One

generation goeth, and another cometh," and with a rapidity like the eagle's, "when she hasteth to her prey." In a few years, our sons will become the agents in all that is interesting to the church and the world, and our daughters every where exerting a happy, or baleful influence throughout human society. Our sun begins to set, theirs just begins to rise. Before we are aware of it, we shall be in our graves, or laid aside as useless, and our children occupying our places of labor and business, and exerting our influence and authority. They must increase; we must decrease. The whole face and character of human society, as they will