through a day, and retire at night, with every plan of the day frustrated -every hope with which it began disappointed; is the day lost? There is no loss about it; we have gained from it all it could give. Its whole experience is ours; the soul is never defeated; its name is victor; it goes forth conquering and to conquer: and these experiments it failed in, or rather they failed to it, because they could not give it what it sought; but all they could give it took. We set our heart on some object, and lose it; just as we are about to raise its cup to our lips, an unseen hand dashes it away; it is because the soul needs it not; it has taken all from that cup of happiness that the latter can yield to it: the soul voluntarily rejects it; but we are not conscious of this, because we are not quite conscious of our spirit-nature.

The soul gains truth only in experiencing or conscious living. All experience is an inlet to some portion of truth; and the highest truth must be a matter of experience. This did Jesus insist upon in his conversation with Nicodemus: "A man to know a truth, must be born into it."

PERSONAL WORTH. ACCORDING to Scripture- "The righteous is more excellent than his neighbour;" that is, than the wicked around him. Sin always derogates from excellence, from value, and all that renders man a profitable member of society. The axiom is one of unquestionable truth, and of universal application. Compared with this there is another, although uninspired, "The Christian is the

highest style of man;" man can only be developed to the full by Christianity. The value of a slave, it is well known, is infinitely and vastly increased by his conversion. This fact is strikingly indicated by the Apostle Paul in his beautiful letter to Philemon.

The following sensible and pithy counsel, addressed to young men, is from the letters of "Timothy Titcomb, Esq.:"

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"Young men, your personal value depends entirely upon your possession of religion. You are worth to yourself what you are capable of enjoying; you are worth to society the happiness you are capable of imparting. To yourself, without religion, you are worth very little. A man whose aims are low, whose motives are selfish, who has in his heart no adoration for the great God, and no love of His Christ, whose will is not subordinate to the Supreme will gladly and gratefully -who has no faith, no tenable hope of a happy immortality, no strongarmed trust that with his soul it shall be well in all the future, cannot be worth very much to himself. Neither can such a man be worth very much to society, because he has not that to bestow which society most needs for its prosperity and its happiness. A locomotive off the track is worth nothing to its owner or the public so long as it is off the track. The conditions of its legitimate and highest value are not complied with. It cannot be operated satisfactorily to the owner, or usefully to the public, because it is not where it was intended to run by the man who made it.

"Just look at the real object of religion, and see how rational it is. It is the placing of your souls in harmony with God and His laws. God is the perfect, supreme soul, and your souls are the natural offspring of that soul. Your souls are made in the image of His, and like all created things, are subject to certain immutable laws. The transgression of these laws damages your souls, warps them, stunts their growth, outrages them. Do you not see that you can only be manly and attain a manly growth by preserving your true relation to the Father soul, and a strict obedience to the laws of your being? God has given you appetites, and He meant that you should indulge them, and that they should be sources of happiness to you; but always in a way which shall not interfere with your spiritual growth and development. He gave you passions, and they are just as sacred as any part of you, but they are to be under the strict control of your reason and your conscience. He gave you desires for earthly happiness. He planted in you the love of human praise, delight in society, the faculty to enjoy all His works. He gave you His works to enjoy, but you can only enjoy them truly when you regard them as blessings from the great germ, to feed and not starve your higher natures. There is not a true joy in life which you are required to deprive yourself of, in being faithful to Him and His laws. Without obedience to law, your souls cannot be healthful, and it is only to a healthful soul that pleasure comes with its natural, its divine aroma. Is a nose

tuffed with drugs capable of perceiving the delicate fragrance of the rose? Is the soul that intensifies its pleasures as an object of life capable of a healthy appreciation of even purely sensual pleasures? The idea of a man's enjoying life without religion is absurd.

"I have been thus particular upon this point because I love you, and because that without it, or independent of it, all my previous talk has very little significance. I have reasoned the thing to you on its merits, and I urge it upon your immediate attention, as a matter of duty and policy. The matter of duty you understand. I do not need to talk to you about that. Now about policy. It will not be five years, probably, before every one of you will be involved, head and ears, in business. Some of you are thus involved already. You grow hard as you grow older. You get habits of thought and life which incrust you. You become surrounded with associations which hold you, so that the longer you live without religion the harder it will be for you, and less probable will be your adoption of a religious life. If you expect to be a man, you must begin now. It is so easy, comparatively, to do it now!"

"IN THE NIGHT HIS SONG

SHALL BE WITH ME." In the night of my solitude, kneeling alone,

When friends may forsake me and

comforts have flown, May I say, not alone! while I think upon thee,

My Father, in secret, thy song be

with me.

FOR distinctness' sake, we shall arrange our points under the heads of Prayer, Instruction, Example, Government.

1. Prayer, for your children, and with them. For your children. If you have indeed known the blessedness of ceaseless prayer for your own souls, how high a privilege, solace, happiness, shall you not find it to commend your beloved offspring to the Lord in prayer, taking hold of His great and precious promises for them, even from their earliest days! How dear to you will be that old, yet ever fresh, priceless record of the parents who brought their little ones to Jesus that He might touch them; of His holy, gracious displeasure with the disciples who rebuked them; and His

loving welcome alike of the mothers and of their children in the words, "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God. And He took them up in His arms, put His hands upon them, and blessed them!" How will you thus take encouragement, so soon as your children come into the world (or sooner, like the mother of Samuel), to dedicate them in solemn prayer to the Lord! How, in a more peculiar manner at their baptism, and in the near prospect of it, will you be encouraged to plead in their behalf, stirring up yourselves to a Peniellike earnestness (Gen. xxxii. 24-30), in the faith of the divine covenant! How will you take encouragement, thereafter, while they are still in

capable of formal instruction, to carry them daily to the Lord in the arms of your faith-not ceasing, when they have become capable of it, still to plead for them daily, one by one, as by name! We beseech you, fathers and mothers, that, pleading together, and pleading apart, in continual prayer for your offspring, you do regard this as one of the most exalted of all your privileges, as well as urgent of your duties. Thus seek to travail as in birth for them, till Christ be formed in their hearts the hope of glory. And, if the Lord shall see fit to remove any of them from you to His presence above, still cease not to make mention of them before Him -but only turn your prayers now into thanksgivings for their higher gain, amid the tears you shed over your own loss.

Thus praying for your children, you cannot possibly fail to pray also with them. From time to time you will take them aside individually for that purpose; and you will maintain the worship of God in your households morning and evening, with all possible regularity according to your circumstances in providence. We only add respecting this, that it will be of high importance to avoid fatiguing the young with too prolonged prayers in the family, and to aim at rendering the whole exercise lively, interesting, palpably real and true-an object to which nothing will more conduce than just your feeling and realizing the exercise to be a very high privilege, -to be, like those secret prayers for your children, a most precious support and solace amid the trials

Here we

and anxieties of your domestic life. But we pass on to notice, 2. Parental Instruction. remind you of the following words of the Lord:-"He established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which He commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children; that the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born, who should arise and declare them to their children." (Psa. lxxviii. 5, 6.) "Hear, ye children, the instruction of a father, and attend to know understanding. For I was my father's son, tender, and only beloved in the sight of my mother. He taught me also, and said unto me," &c.-(Prov. iv. 1, 3, 4.) "Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart, and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes. And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt write them upon the door-posts of thine house, and upon thy gates; that your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the Lord sware unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth." These last words (Deut. xi. 18-21, with which compare also Deut. vi. 6-9) do a great deal more than establish the duty of parental religious instruction. They cast invaluable light both on the more peculiar grounds of it, and on the right manner of discharging

it, on its peculiar and distinctive grounds. Beautifully they tell of facilities and opportunities necessarily enjoyed by parents, beyond all others, for instructing their children in the things of the Lord, "Ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up." Not only is the parent, and specially the mother, with the child from earliest years, but with it during those years constantly-" when thou sittest in thine house," &c. And thus do the words tell also of a very peculiar influence and weight attaching to a parent's instructions, since, besides all the authority of the parental relation in general, it follows from the character of those special opportunities, that the parent's lessons must needs come to be interwoven gradually with all that is most sweet, sacred, endearing, enduring, in the associations of home-"thou shalt speak of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up."

But the words bear no less evidently on the right manner of discharging the duty. They intimate that, over and above all the parent's more formal and stated teaching of his child (in the quiet and hallowed hours of the Sabbath evening, for example), his instructions are to be largely occasional, incidental, habitual, and, as to the manner and spirit of them, frank, conversational, easy, affectionate

thou shalt talk of thein when thou

sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up." "Whom shall he teach knowledge ?" asks the Lord by Isaiah, “and whom shall he make to understand doctrine? them that are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the breasts. For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line;"-that is to say, with much indispensable reiteration -"here a little and there a little" -by littles at a time, as well as at all times, on all occasions.-(Isa. xxviii. 9, 10.) "In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thy hand; for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good."-(Eccl. xi. 6.)

Does any one object, We are not fit to teach religion to our children? We affectionately answer that, if the unfitness arise from yourselves being strangers still to the fear and love of the Lord, then it is, alas! but too real. Only the plea will prove at last a very unavailing one. The unfitness is too real, indeed. You certainly cannot teach your children what you do not yourselves know,-commend a Saviour to them whom you do not yourselves know. But that will be found a mournfully insufficient defence, which runs up, in fact, into nothing else than a plea for your own voluntary estrangement from the blessed God. But perhaps you do truly desire to fear the Lord, and serve Him in this duty, and only are weighed down by much deep-felt and lamented insufficiency. In this case, we venture