course produced by the first sight of the child; but the infancy of the babe is but the infancy of our solicitude, which grows with its growth, and strengthens with its strength. Children are ever contracting obligations from the first moment of their existence. What owes not the babe to his mother, for that watchfulness, and labour, and anxiety, which scarcely rest by day or sleep by night! Other animals, though nourished by their parents, are taught many things by instinct; but man, the most helpless of all creatures, must learn every thing from his parents, in the first stage of his existence. Let any one calculate, if he can, the hours of labour, sleeplessness and anxiety; the tears, the tremblings, the alarms, which one weakly infant costs a mother, before he leaves her arms, and stands erect upon his feet in his own strength. My young friend, had your mother remitted her care for one single hour, or ceased, but for a short season, her vigilant inspection, you might have been consumed in your cradle, or have been now a cripple or an idiot." How many months rolled by, before you could wash away a speck of defilement from your frame, help yourself to medicine or to food, express, in articulate language, a single want, put on a garment, or defend yourself against an enemy so feeble as a wasp! What, then, are your obligations to the woman who did all this for you, and delighted to do it? I cannot follow you through the successive stages of your existence, at each of which, you were accumulating fresh obligations to both father and mother; for education, with all its advantages; for instruction in trade, and that capacity you now possess for attaining to respectability in life; but, above all, for that ceaseless, and manifest, and earnest solicitude for your eternal happiness, by which you have had the road to glory, honour, and immortality opened to your view, and have been ad-, monished to walk in it! O, sum up, if you can, your obligations to your parents: but you cannot. And can you resist this motive to obedience? What, has gratitude perished in your soul, till its very root has died in the soil of your depraved nature? Yes; it must be so, if you are unkind to your parents: you stand proved before the universe, to have nothing of a

child, but the name and thé mere fleshly relation, which you possess in common with the tiger, or the serpent, or the toad; but you have not the feelings of a child; you are a kind of monstrous production, out of the course of nature, and, like all such productions, fill the mind with loathing and horror. Few there are, I hope, that will read these pages, to whom such an expostulation is applicable: on the contrary, many, I believe, will experience, as they proceed, the generous emotions of gratitude swelling higher and higher in their bosom, till, with a burst of virtuous feeling, they exclaim, “Accept, my parents, of the surrender, which a sense of my obligation to you compels me to make, of my whole future life, to the promotion of your comfort."

Interest pleads with children for their dutiful behaviour to their parents.

An undutiful child cannot be a happy one. Peace must leave the breast with filial piety, whenever it departs; and uneasiness and misery, and occasional shame and remorse, enter to dwell in the wretched bosom; while the affectionate and dutiful child has a perpetual feast within. And mark the language of the apostle: "Honour thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise; that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest live long on the earth." This is an allusion, it is true, to the temporal promises of the Sinai Covenant, and perhaps to the law which doomed the disobedient son to be judicially cut off from the people. But yet, as repeated by a New Testament writer, it must, to a certain extent, be in force still. Dr. Dwight has the following remarks on this passage which deserve consideration. conversing with the plain people of this country, distinguished for their good sense, and careful observation of facts, I have found them, to a great extent, firmly persuaded of the verification of this promise in our own times, and ready to produce a variety of proofs from cases in which they have seen the blessings realized. Their opinion is mine, and with their experience my own has coincided.

"In

"Indeed, no small measure of prosperity seems ordinarily interwoven with a course of filial piety. The

comfort which it ensures to parents, the harmony which it produces in the family, the peace which it yields in the conscience, are all essential ingredients of happiness. To these it adds the approbation of every beholder, the possession of a fair and lasting reputation, the confidence and good will of every worthy man, and, of consequence, an opportunity of easily gaining those useful employments which good men have to give. Beyond this, it naturally associates itself with temperance, moderation and sobriety, which furnish a solid foundation for health and long life. In my own apprehension, however, these are not all its blessings. I do not say that miracles are wrought for its reward. Neither will I say that purer gales breathe to preserve its health; nor that softer suns arise, or more timely rains descend to mature its harvests; nor that more propitious winds blow to waft its ships home in safety. But I will say that on the tide of Providence multiplied blessings are borne into its possession, at seasons when they are unexpected, in ways unforeseen, and by means unprovided by its own forecast, which are often of high importance, which, altogether, constitute a rich proportion of prosperity, and which usually are not found by persons of the contrary character. At the same time, those who act well as children almost of course act well as men and women; and thus have taken, without design, the scion of happiness from the parental stock, and grafted it upon other stems, which bear fruit abundantly to themselves. Here, in the language of Dr. Watts,

'It revives, and bears

A train of blessings for their heirs." "

If motives so forcible and tender as these have no effect, nothing is left me to do, but to remind the children of disobedience of that day of judgment, which God hath appointed to judge the world in righteousness by Jesus Christ, and to give to every one according to the things done in the body, whether they are good or bad. "In that most awful season, when the wicked shall see the Judge sit above them, angry and severe, inexorable and terrible; under them an intolerable hell; within them, their consciences clamorous and

diseased; without them, all the world on fire; on the right hand, those men glorified, whom they persecuted and despised; on the left hand, the devils accusing " then shall it be found that the severest sentence of the Almighty, and the bitterest dregs of the vials of his wrath, will be poured out on the disobedient and ungodly child of those parents who trained him up in the nurture of the Lord.

CHAPTER VII.

ON THE FRATERNAL DUTIES.

"Next in order to the relationship of the parent and the child may be considered the relation which the child bears to those who are united with him by the same tie to the same parental bosom. If friendship be delightful, if it be above all delightful to enjoy the continued friendship of those who are endeared to us by the intimacy of many years, who can discourse with us of the frolics of the school, of the adventures and studies of the college, of the years when we first ranked ourselves with men in the free society of the world, how delightful must be the friendship of those who, accompanying us through all this long period, with a closer union than any casual friend, can go still farther back, from the school to the very nursery, which witnessed our common pastimes; who have had an interest in every event that has related to us, and every person that excited our love or our hatred ; who have honoured with us those to whom we have paid every filial honour in life, and wept with us over those whose death has been to us the most lasting sorrow of our heart! Such, in its wide, unbroken sympathy, is the friendship of brothers, considered even as friendship only; and how many circumstances of additional interest does this union receive, from the common relationship to those who have original claims to our still higher regard, and to whom we offer an acceptable service, in extending our affection to those whom they love! In treating of the circumstances that tend peculiarly to strengthen this tie, CICERO extends his view even to the common sepulchre that is at last to enclose us. It is, indeed, a powerful image, a symbol, and almost a lesson of unanimity. Every dissension of man with man excites in us a feeling of painful incongruity. But we feel a peculiar incongruity in the discord of those whom one roof has continued to shelter through life, and whose dust is afterwards to mingle under a single stone."-DR. THOMAS BROWN.

To secure the comfort and well being of a state, it is not only necessary for the sovereign to be wise and patriotic, and the laws justly and impartially administered, but the people must be well affected both towards the government, and towards each other; there

must be a tie which binds them to each other, as well as to the state; there must be the fellowship of good neighbourhood. So, also, the happiness and welfare of a family depend not exclusively on the conduct of the parents to the children, nor on the conduct of the children to the parents, but also on the conduct of the children to each other. No family can be happy where a right feeling is wanting on the part of brothers and sisters. Nothing can be a substitute for this defect; and it is of great importance that all young people should have this set in a proper light before them. Many households are a constant scene of confusion, a perpetual field of strife, and an affecting spectacle of misery, through the quarrels and ill will of those, who, as flesh of each other's flesh, and blood of each other's blood, ought to have towards each other no feeling but that of love, and to use no words but those of kindness.

I will divide the fraternal duties into three kinds. Those that are appropriate to the season of childhood-of youth-of manhood.

The general principles which are to regulate the discharge of these duties, and on which, indeed, they rest, are the same in reference to all seasons of life. Love, for instance, is equally necessary, whether broth ers and sisters are sporting together in the nursery, dwelling together as young men and women beneath the parental roof, or descending the hill of life at the head of separate establishments and families of their own. Over and above the feelings of friendship, or of moral esteem, there must be those of complacency in them, as related to us by the ties of consanguinity; a consciousness, that, by the dispensations of providence in uniting them to us by a bond of nature, and which nothing but death can dissolve, they have acquired a claim upon our efforts to make them happy, which is stronger than that of any strangers, except it be in those cases, where our brothers and sisters have, by their unkind and cruel conduct, thrown off every thing but their name, and the stranger has assumed towards us the heart of a brother. And even in this case, we must still consider that they are our brothers, mourn their alienation with grief, view their