existence; which looks not at their trade, but at their souls, and brings them not as apt servants to the mill, but as holy children to their God. Education, in the Christian sense, is truly everlasting : childhood preparing for maturity, maturity for age, and the whole of life for death and Heaven. The early training of the young is but that portion of this series, which prepares for self-government and the exercise of Freewill within the limits of Christ's law. Doubtless the responsibility of this task rests, by the decree of Nature and Providence, with the parents to whom the young life is committed as a trust; nor will it ever have settled on its genuine basis, till there shall exist, in every class, an effective domestic sentiment, sufficient to sustain it. But amid the wide decay of the old and healthful parental conscience, it becomes needful to awaken a wider interest in the work, and to call upon neighbourhood and country to take up the neglected office of the home. Nor should any individual, or any family, exempt from the constant cares of subsistence, be held to have discharged the obligations of the Christian life, till they freely give some steady help to this essential work; and provide some fitting care for the neglected child, as still an infant disciple claimed by the arms, and consecrated by the benediction, of their heavenly Lord.

VII.

THE UNCLOUDED HEART.

JOHN V. 30.

MY JUDGMENT IS JUST, BECAUSE I SEEK NOT MINE OWN WILL, BUT THE WILL OF THE FATHER WHICH HATH SENT ME.

For the training of goodness, the ancient reliance was on the right discipline of habit and affection : the modern is rather on illumination of the understanding. The notion extensively prevails that vice, being only the mistaken pursuit of that personal happiness for which virtue is an equal but more sagacious aspirant, is a blunder of the intellect; a defective or erroneous view of things; and, like the optical delusions incident to weak eyes, to be cured by use of the most approved instruments for seeing clearly. The guilty and degraded will, it is said, differs from the pure and noble, not by aiming at a less innocent end, but by being less happy in its choice of means: point out the mis

affection of their passions. 'I could not convince them,' he will say, ' of their error; or, if my arguments impressed them at the moment, the persuasion passed away; and habit proved the more successful advocate, because it was, though not the truer, yet the more importunate.' But were not your appeals just and forcible, and your instructions indisputably true? Then there must be something in the heart where evil passions dwell, that baffles the chance of reason; that takes from evidence its natural force, and gives to error an unmerited triumph. And what advantage do we gain by representing men as the subjects, and their morality as truths, of the pure intellect, if it be an intellect that may lose its distinguishing function, and become inaccessible to just persuasion? What comfort is it to know that guilt is only error, if it be error so peculiar as to be insensible to the merits of the most unquestionable proof? Why tell us that right and wrong are but the love of happiness making its computations, when it is admitted that passion was never computed out of the heart, and that self-interest itself is whiffed away by the tempest of its rage? It is true, that you have only to give the slave of guilty passions a different view of the objects of desire, and he is set free from his miserable thraldom. It is equally true, that you have only to make the collapsed