ful and hurtful to you if you should enjoy it. If there is any thing for which you will be grateful to your parents in after-life, it will be that they did not allow you to have your own way in such things, which you will then see to be foolish and sinful, though you may not think it so at present. There is scarcely any duty so painful to a parent as to chastise a child. The Word of God says, "He that spareth the rod hateth the child," and it is to be feared that there are some parents who are too selfish to punish their children when they need punishment, and in this way many children are ruined for time and eternity. There is nothing in which those of us who have grown to manhood see the love of our parents more plainly, and nothing for which we respect them more, than for their correction of our faults, though at the time we perhaps felt very differently. We did not know then that the punishment they inflicted was far more painful to them than to us. I trust that the children I address rarely need punishment, but you may be assured that a Christian parent never more tenderly loves his child than when he corrects your faults, or denies your wishes. True filial love and duty not only obey promptly, but do not wait for a positive command. A Christian child will study a parent's wishes, and even in little matters will pay a studious respect to their views and judgment. Even when parents are not present, you will say to yourself, "Would my father or my mother approve of this ?" and if you think they would disapprove, that would have as much weight as if they were present and forbade it. If you slight and neglect their wishes, a day will come when every little neglect will rise up and reproach you, and that, too, when you can no longer make up for it by redoubled attention. Some of us could tell you how, a quarter of a century after we have buried our parents, some boyish folly or waywardness, to say nothing of graver offences, will spring up in memory and sting us to the heart like an adder. Show your confidence in your parents' love, and your respect for their judgment by making them your friends and counsellors. From how many errors would it save you if you entered on no scheme on which you could not ask a parent's advice, and in which you could not expect a parent's approval! As you pass through life you will find that advice is cheap and plentiful, but for the most part it is worthless. For you need not hope to find counsellors whose love for you and whose interest in your happiness will render their advice as safe or as well considered as that of your father or your mother. As you advance in years your filial duty will gradually advance from a mere submission to your parents' will to an active desire to promote their happiness. While you will have an unfailing support amid the calamities of life in your mutual love and sympathy, the thought of the gratification it will afford them will be a main element of your enjoyment in every success. A time will come when the arms that toiled for you and protected you will lose their vigor, and when the mind that cared for you and counselled you will begin to fall into a second childhood. When that time comes, whose hand but yours should steady the tottering footsteps of age? Who, with patient tenderness, will bear the infirmities, and perhaps the querulousness of declining years, if not you, who can recall the days when that now faded eye watched over your inexperience and waywardness? There are few things more lovely on earth than filial piety watching over a parent's declining years, when to disease and bodily infirmities there may be added a weak fretfulness, which no attention can satisfy, and an exacting caprice which repays every kindness with undeserved reproaches, but which finds in all that, only the proofs of a weakness which needs the more to be comforted. I cannot forbear to break through the reserve that may ordinarily be proper in such relations as those of a writer to his readers; reserve, I mean, on all that is personal to * himself, and inscribe on these pages a memorial of grateful love in recording an example worthy of universal imitation. I recall the image of one whose age was not more venerable for the remembered virtues of a godly and beneficent life, than for the chastened graces of a Christian character in the midst of long-continued suffering, and the childlike gentleness, which augmented while it softened the veneration which gathered around his hoary head. I recall by his side the image of one, whose youth and beauty might have seemed more at home in far other scenes, though they could nowhere appear more noble and attractive than there by the side of a father weighed down with suffering, which no hand could so skilfully soothe as hers. I see her through years of patient but cheerful toil, foregoing all the attractions of youthful and congenial society for the companionship of a frail old man, and doing all, not with the air of one who was conscious of martyrdom or even of some meritorious effort, but as the spontaneous outgoing of a heart that could not do otherwise, and that bore much because it loved much; spending the years of youth's prime in ministering to his comfort; happier far when he leaned upon her arm his trembling hand, than the child of folly was in the giddy whirl of the dance, when encircling eyes of alternate envy and admiration marked the moment of beauty's most intoxicating triumph; at last devoting to the couch of his lingering sickness the hours which others, her equals, found too short for the so-called pleasures of young and joyous life; preferring to the smile of universal admiration, which waited to greet her, the languid smile of enjoyment or approbation which love's assiduity might at length kindle on one solitary countenance pallid with pain; more than repaid by his dying benediction for the exhaustion of the vigor of her own young life, in soothing the protracted sufferings in which his last sands of life ran out. Happy father in the love of such a daughter! Happy daughter in the remembrance of that father's blessing! Both blessed of God, blessed your memory on earth, blessed, eternally blessed your meeting in heaven! And though no marble commemorates such virtue, there is still that in it which ranks with the constancy of martyrs at the stake, and which, it may be, will scarcely come short of a martyr's crown, there where it will be known how the love of a Heavenly Father was finding expression in that love of an earthly father; and where He whose grace sustained it all will say: "You did it unto me." Perhaps the occasions of such devotion may be rare; at all events, the instances of it are. Yet if you are privileged, in the maturity of your own years, to look upon the forms bowed down with age of those who lavished upon you the treasures of parental love, when you could neither appreciate nor return it-surely you will permit them to have no want which you can supply; their comfort must take precedence of your own, and you will allow no one to take your place by the side of their feebleness or the couch of their suffering. You can never indeed repay the benefits you have received from them; but you can make the return which is most grateful to their hearts, when your unwearied assiduity testifies that their love has not been thrown away. To minister to their comfort and supply their wants is not only a duty which nature prompts; it is one which God in His word most solemnly enjoins. "If any widow have children or nephews, let them learn first to show piety at home and to requite their parents: for that is good and acceptable to God." It may be well to remember that it is in the neglect of such provision for those of his kindred, that a man is said to have denied the faith and to be worse than an infidel. ABIDE WITH ME. JOHN 14: 23. ABIDE with me. Fast falls the eventide; Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day; Not a brief glance I beg, a passing word, Come not in glory, as the King of kings, And when my soul, released from earth, shall soar For ever, Lord, I shall abide with Thee! |