would not be mourning over their unregenerate offspring who have reached mature years; many heads of households would not look with shuddering apprehension back at those once in their employ or under their care, who have not only left their families unconverted, but without any well-ordered effort on their part to that end. The nature of this responsibility, plainly then, is such, that every head of a household is bound to employ at home all proper means, to lead each one committed to his care to Christ, whether he be a heathen, a Romanist, an infidel, his own child, or a stranger sojourning within his gates. The head of the family is the shepherd of that flock, and a heavy woe shall overtake the shepherd through whose unfaithfulness any member of that flock perishes.

Let fathers pray, teach, and act at home, as though they stood at the very sources of power, and held the keys of heaven. They may be grateful for the instructions of the sanctuary and the Sabbathschool, but they are not to commit their jewels altogether to other workmen however skilful. None can feel for them as parents ought to feel, nor labor as they ought to labor, that these jewels may shine in the diadem of Christ. Let strangers manage your property, Christian parents, for even though they rob you of it all, the loss can be repaired or endured, but over these immortal souls, which God has intrusted to you, hold the power yourselves, and see that the Lord of glory is honored in their salvation, by your faithful fulfilment of those conditions which are necessary to secure the efficient workings of the Holy Spirit. Begin with your lisping infants, cause light to dawn on their hearts early, and gently draw them to Christ. Secure the might of prayer, remembering how infinitely willing God is to grant his Holy Spirit. Work early and late and diligently in this enterprise, and prove God herewith, if he will not grant you the desires of your heart in the conversion of each member of your household.

From these trains of thought we may infer,

1. The immense responsibility of being the head of a household. The relation is connected with all that is good and excellent in this world, and desirable in the world to come. Every child, every servant, every dependant, augments the responsibility, until every

such person may well cry out, "Who is sufficient for these things?"

Let every head of a family enjoin it upon himself to ponder this responsibility in all its greatness, its issues of eternal life and death, and then set himself with earnestness and prayer to the work assigned him, as one who must give account to God for one of the most momentous trusts ever committed to a sinful, fallible, and weak steward.

2. The importance of the household institution. It is God's ordained school for the religious education of our race. And in that school some of the greatest and most useful of men have been trained to fill high stations. Moses, the adopted son of a princess, was not educated without the aid of his pious mother-God

plainly indicating by this, that "all the learning of the Egyptians" could not compensate the loss of this influence. Samuel was the child of prayer, whose heart was regenerated while he was yet a babe, and Timothy could bear witness to the faith of his "grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice." And as it were to impress this magnificent truth most deeply on the head of every household, to show in what esteem God holds the family school, the child Jesus was educated in it, and went forth from its sacred precincts to do the will of his Father, and to make an atonement for the sins of the world. If parents wish their sons to resemble a Samuel, a Timothy, or an Edwards, they must lay the foundation for that resemblance in the nursery; they must be, according to divine appointment, God's magistrate to restrain the waywardness of childhood, and God's teacher in justice and judgment; they must be God's ambassador to bear with tearful earnestness the messages of dying love from the Redeemer; they must be like the importunate wrestler with the angel of the covenant, crying out with holy energy, "I will not let thee go, except thou bless me" in the salvation of these immortal souls! Oh, be faithful at home, and God will honor you as he did Abraham, and not curse you as he did Eli. You shall perpetuate the blessings of redemption to other generations, instead of sending on your posterity such withering curses as fell on the descendants of Éli.

3. The neglect of this principle is the undoubted cause of ruin to many children of pious parents. Hophni and Phinehas, with their posterity, were the victims who perished in consequence of this, and it is to be feared many since their day and for the same reason have raised fruitless lamentations in the world of despair. And now, let me earnestly inquire, has this congregation no Eli, with children doomed to eternal darkness because their parents restrain them when they make themselves vile? Say, fathers, shall any of your children be cursed with a curse, a withering curse, an ever-abiding curse, because their father was an Eli?

4. We see also wherein consists the true hope of the Church. It is in the right education of children at home. By this, I do not say it would not be a cause of joy here, as well as in heaven, if the adults were converted. Would it might be done speedily! And yet were a whole generation of such brought into the Church, what a vast difference would there be between them and a generation indoctrinated in infancy, and so trained that the Holy Spirit might consistently implant true grace in their hearts, and thus, from the first, piety become the habit of heart and life? Our true hope is found in coming back to the scriptural plan of religious education. The hearts of children must be moulded, and their habits formed. We must fulfil the conditions rendering it consistent for the Holy Spirit to engraft true religion on their hearts, so that manhood shall find them like holy plants in the Church, bending under the delicious fruits of holiness, rather than as trees grown up to a maturity of evil,

whose wide-spreading branches must be cut away in order to graft in the scions of piety and holiness, or else to be cut down as cumberers of the ground, and burned with unquenchable fire.

Mothers, I beseech you to impress piety on the babes in your arms, and the children at your side. Fathers, I beseech you to breathe religion into these young hearts, which daily are drinking in lessons of some kind from your eyes, your lips, and your actions. Oh, parents, suffer not your children to depart from the fire-side altar without knowing, as Hannah did, that they are growing before the Lord. With the divine assistance, so freely promised, and so faithfully given, you can accomplish much. Work, then, "while it is called to-day, for the night cometh, in which no man can work."

DAILY BREAD.

BY REV. GARDINER SPRING, D.D.

"I

"Give us this day our daily bread." This prayer regulates the amount of our wants, and the measure of our desires. We are instructed to ask only as we need; there is danger in asking more. God may give more, but it is not safe to ask for more, lest he should of us as he did of his restive and grasping people of other days; gave them their request, but sent leanness into their souls." Wealth is desirable, not for its own sake, nor merely for the wants it supplies. In itself it is an abstract imaginary thing, and where it is possessed, not unfrequently creates more wants than it gratifies. It is desirable to augment influence and extend the facilities of doing good. That accomplished statesman and jurist, the late William Wirt, a name that will long be illustrious and venerated in American history, on this topic makes the following touching observation:" Excessive wealth is neither glory nor happiness. The cold and sordid wretch who thinks only of himself; who draws his head within his shell and never puts it out, but for the purpose of lucre and ostentation; who looks upon his fellow-creatures, not only without sympathy, but with arrogance and insolence, as if they were made to be his vassals, and he to be their lord; as if they were made for no other purpose than to pamper his avarice, or to contribute to his aggrandizement; such a man may be rich, but, trust me, he can never be happy, nor virtuous, nor great. There is in fortune a golden mean, which is the appropriate region of virtue and intelligence. Be content with that; and if the horn of plenty overflow, let its droppings fall upon your fellow-men; let them fall like the droppings of honey in the wilderness, to cheer the faint and weary pilgrim.'

It is a sad thought that wealth is considered essential to distinction. It is not so. The voice of conscience, the voice of reason, the voice of God announces it not so. Wealth alone is not worth living for. Sigh not for wealth. Envy not the splendor of the affluent. The most wealthy are often most in want. A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." No wise man will ever venture to pray that he might be rich. Let a man be thankful, if by exemplary diligence, he can procure a comfortable living; if with this he can be cheerful and happy, he has the earnest of more, and what is of much greater consequence, he has the pledge that more will not be his ruin.-Dr. Springs' Discourses.

XXI.

JUST MEN MADE PERFECT.

BY REV. GEORGE POTTS, D.D.,

PASTOR OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, UNIVERSITY PLACE, NEW YORK.

"But ye are come- -to the spirits of just men made perfect."-HEB. xii. 23.

BETWEEN the dispensation of the Law, and that of the Gospel, there is an intimate connection, yet a manifest difference. The connection is like that which the beginning of a thing has with the end of it. The one was a preparation for the other, and bore the same relation to the other, as the breaking up of the field and the deposit of the winter grain in its furrows, bears to the golden harvest which is to be gathered under the heat of summer. We may ask, why the purposes of Jehovah toward his church should not have been accomplished without any such preparatory process: but this is like asking why the child was not born a man, or the seed a tree. Let it suffice to say that the Law of Progress has been stamped upon the moral and natural worlds for reasons which can even now be vindicated as wise and good; and much more, when the light of the heavenly future is made to fall upon the divine plans. But this, by the way. It is certain that the principles and designs of God's government of this world, have been progressively unfolded in its history, and that the full light of the evangelic dispensation had its beginning in the dim morning of the legal dispensation, in which were seen only the shadows of good things to come.

But if there be this intimate connection between the law and the gospel, there is also, as we have said, a manifest difference between them, amounting, in some things, even to contrast. Just so far as the first discoveries of a Redeemer went, so far the gospel was preached before unto Abraham, and the blessings of the plan by which sinful men were justified through faith, were secured and enjoyed by ancient believers. But, the brightness of the meridian day, is very different from the dimness of the morning twilight. The uncertain traveller fears the possible dangers of his road, and even harmless objects seem distorted and threatening. This is always more or less true of a state of imperfect knowledge: a timid imagi.