nevertheless, we are not exempt from obligation, even toward the profane, unthrifty, and ignorant parent, next door, or in the next street, who leaves his children in the paths of the destroyer. No one of us liveth for himself. No one of us may say, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Love will find out a way. Patient, prayerful, benignant piety will, sooner or later, alight on ways and means of dropping some gospel-favor at the door even of the ill-natured or obdurate. The great thing is to have the intention; Providence will give the instrumentality. Bereavement, poverty, any sort of affliction may open to you the door that has been long barred. Kind looks, salutations, and offices will, perhaps, thaw away the icy obstructions. Your voice may be heard in prayer among those who never prayed before, but who send for you, or allow your approach, in the time of their distress. A visit to the diseased, or an alms to the poor, may prove your passport to spiritual labors. Thus it is that, throughout the field of Christian exertion, mercy to the body enlarges into mercy to the soul. The great deficiency is not in means to benefit irreligious families, but in the mind and will to do so. Probably few of us have sufficiently held up before our minds this precise way of honoring our Master, as a duty daily impending over us. A selfish hue has sicklied over the complexion of our household piety. We have forgotten those unregenerate ones without, while enjoying our own mercies, and have wrapped ourselves up in the comforts of our own spiritual privilege. This may be carried so far as to be almost a saying to the children of vice, "Go, serve other gods!" This, if carried out with full consistency, is incompatible with the existence of piety in the soul. And, so far as this exclusion: of our neighbor from our thoughts and cares prevails, we have cause for fear and room for reformation. Human society may be contemplated in various aspects; and among these, we may regard it as a collection of many families. When we arrive at the family, we arrive at a most sacred institution of God, second only to the Church. Indeed, a family may be a church, as, in a sense, the whole church is a family (Eph. iii. 15); and there have been two occasions since the fall, when the whole church was shut up in a single household. As things now are, in Christian lands, family acts on family, and, from this multiplied and mutual influence, going on every moment, vast results of good and evil take place. The question is, how Christian families, or Christian parents who direct them, may convey the largest blessing to those parents and those families who are still in a lower degree of religious organization. Let us restrict the influence to one point: How may we, who call ourselves Christian parents, do the most to insure the godly rearing of children in the houses within our reach? The great means for bettering the condition of ignorant, vicious, or undisciplined families, are instruction, example, and prayer. Instruction should have regard to this all-important point-the right training of the children. It may be conveyed in various ways: by the gift of the Scriptures; by reading and explaining the sacred lessons; by books, and tracts, and religious journals; by leading to teachers, to Sunday Schools, and to the house of God; by social meetings for this express purpose; by visits, and by occasional conversations. How plain and obvious are these means! How much neglected! Yet, how mighty! They should be abundant, frequent, persevering, patient, gentle, affectionate, discreet, and courteous. If possible, they should be methodical and concerted-in a given district, canton, ward, or street. How does the reader know but that her humble, loving endeavors may teach a dozen parents how to reform their households ? Example in bringing up our children is a potent religious engine. The subject is solemn, because we are all guilty before God. Yet we have ourselves felt the force of good domestic example. We have come home from a friend's house, admiring his holy art in commanding his household. (Gen. xviii. 19.) We have joined in the family worship next door, and learned lessons which never occurred to us in years. We have found a pious parent reminding the little ones of their baptismal obligations and privileges, and have been prompted to do the like with our own. We have seen, in some retired dwelling, how possible it is to keep up the ancient Protestant custom of catechising on Saturday or Sunday evening. Such examples have sunk more deeply into us than lectures and sermons. Shall not our example be such as to have similar effects on others? Shall we not, by opening our doors, make this example accessible to those whose opportunities have been less than ours? Shall we not direct the eyes of such to better example than our own? We are prone to begin too far from the center. Let us begin at home. "Keepers at home" exert a benignant influence which often surpasses that of the most bustling itinerancy. Prayer, for innumerable families who have no domestic means of grace, is a silent agency, but one which scarcely knows a limit. Pious mothers understand its efficacy. Their hearts go forth to the children of ignorance and sin, whose orphanage is often worse, in respect to spirituals, than if they were fatherless and motherless. You may meet in the judgment those whom you then see for the first time, but who will, under God, owe their eternal safety and bliss to your secret intercessions. Joint supplications for houses where there is no fear of God, may bring into them a Christian reformation. This is a way of reaching hearts that are bolted and barricaded against your most affectionate importunities. Yet prayer is the accompaniment of effort, and not its substitute. True prayer and true effort spring from the very same root, even that love which wisheth no ill to its neighbor. Remembrance of these prayerless and godless houses in our daily worship, might be more common and instant than it is. May we not stir up one another to this lected duty? neg ABOUT eighteen hundred years ago, the angelic observers of Divine Providence might have beheld, at Lystra, in Lycaonia, a little group often gathered around the unrolled parchments of the Holy Scriptures. A lad, scarce weaned from his mother's arms, is leaning upon her knee, and, as he spells out the Holy Word, turns, from time to time, to look up into her face and hear the explanations which render it intelligible. With earnest affection she regards her child, and strives to find words and illustrations adapted to his infant mind. Nor is she alone in her happy, though anxious duty. Seated by her side is that faithful parent by whom her infancy had been hallowed unto God. Age has softened but not dimmed the luster of her eye, and time has but deepened upon her brow the impress of benevolence, as she beholds her maternal care renewed in her pious daughter and her gentle boy. She too watches the progress of the lesson, and shares the mother's task. The little one reads of Abel's sacrificed lamb, and the rescued Isaac, when God provided His own burnt offering, and then pauses to hear of Him, the promised, who comes to find the ransom for Abraham's seed. Again, he reads of Salem's former splendor, now the prey of the Gentile spoiler; but he reads also of the virgin-born, the IMMANUEL, who comes, the Shiloh from among the descendants of Judah, to rebuild her ruins and bid her dust arise, when God, who dwelt between the cherubim, shall again dwell among His people, and "the throne of David be established forever." The lesson ended, the lispings of the child, the rich voice of woman, and the tremulous accents of age, blend together in one of the songs of Zion. For a while, they dwell in plaintive strain upon the fallen glories and the moral decay of the chosen nation; and now they swell into lofty praise, as they anticipate the coming triumph: "Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion! Put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, thou holy city for henceforth there shall no more come unto thee the uncircumcised and unclean." Nor is the pious duty ended. Together they kneel, looking toward the holy temple, and the child responds to the mother's prayer. The shadows of the night have gathered around them while they worship. The child is laid upon his pillow; and, as he sinks to peaceful slumber, the mother and the grandmother invoke the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob, to bless the son of their seed. Let others Let others Happy mother! Happy woman! Happy child! flaunt in gorgeous apparel at the public spectacle. smooth with down the couch of the infant hero, or flatter into imperial tyranny his youthful pride. The angels of God watch that lowly bed. The God of Jacob pours out His blessing upon that infant heart. Obscure and unknown among the proud ones of the earth, they are the objects of Heaven's observance, and Jehovah's care. There is an unusual movement 66 Years have rolled away. among the people of Lystra. "The gods have come down unto us in the likeness of men." They prepare the garlanded, victims for the sacrifice. They surround, with acclamations, two strangers, who regard their homage with horror. One of them-humble in stature, but of noble countenance-answers their cry: Sirs, why do ye these things? We are men of like passions with yourselves, and preach unto you, that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God." Among the astonished crowd is that infant son, now grown to early manhood. With breathless interest he listens to the message of St. Paul. He hears the announcement that the Messiah promised to his fathers hath appeared; that the Lamb of God, the reality of Abel's sacrifice and Levi's types, hath been slain; that the IMMANUEL, the Virgin-Born, hath dwelt among his people. His heart, cultivated by his mother's piety, received the word with joy. The Holy Ghost descends upon his soul. He returns gladly to his home, and his mother Eunice, and his grandmother Lois, rejoiced in the faith of Christ with their son Timothy, whom "from a child they had taught the Holy Scriptures." Thus prepared for the blessed work, Timothy could be no ordinary Christian. He joins himself to St. Paul. He becomes his own son in the faith, and the love of the Gospel. He kindles with a zeal imitative of his master. Thousands of souls hear the Gospel gladly from his lips; they, in their turn, tell to thousands more the glad tidings of salvation; and the circling influence of him who first stirred the waters, enlarges from generation to generation, until they break upon the shores of far eternity. Who can estimate the number of souls that now rejoice, and that will rejoice in heaven, through the influence of that young apostle, who finished his course in martyrdom amid the mob at Ephesus. How brightly does he shine amid that starry host "who have turned many to righteousness!" But will no reward, through grace, be found for those holy women who trained him from his infancy to the work? Have his mother Eunice and his grandmother Lois no share in the trophies of his apostleship? Oh! who will say that woman |