faithfulness of all the promises of protection, strength, guidance, watchful care, and every needful help and comfort, which unchanging, unchangeable, and ever faithful Love has promised to those who keep, or endeavour to keep, their covenant with the Most High, “whole and undefiled."

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It is in states of temptation-it is in those states of feeling in which man learns from the experience of his own weakness, and the power of his spiritual enemies, the folly of indulging in self-confidence; and also learns by experience, that "the Lord is a very present help in time of trouble," and that his God and Saviour is both faithful in promising, and omnipotent in performing;-it is from these experiences conjointly, that man is drawn off gradually, by the repetition of them, from trusting in himself, and becomes firmly established in trust in the Lord. He is then able to say from actual knowledge, “I know whom I have believed [margin, "trusted"]; and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him [even my eternal interests] against that day" [in which my warfare and my perils shall cease, and be brought to an end, a blessed end of satisfying peace and everlasting joy!] (2 Tim. i. 12.) It is then that we can testify to his improved knowledge of God and of his goodness, in the striking language of Job, "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee." W. M.

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MORAL TRAINING OF CHILDREN, OR HINTS TO PARENTS AND TEACHERS.

(Continued from page 224.)

IN a former paper it was shewn that the will is the especial object of training, and since the will or the heart is the essential principle of man, all education, as its ultimate object, should be directed to its training and culture. The understanding is the way, the will is the life; we must arrive at the life by the way, but if we stop in the latter, we do not arrive at the former. Hence it happens that whilst the understanding is enlightened in truths, the will may retain all its native dispositions. Selfishness in its various forms may still lurk in the heart, and supply the springs and motives of action; and so long as selfish ends prevail, the will, howsoever enriched with knowledge the understanding may be, is far removed from the proper object of education,—the order and happiness of heaven.

The first school for the training of the will is the parental circle; and the first medium of good to the child from the Lord, and the first N. S. NO. 91.-VOL. VIII.

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instrument of all moral training, is the parent, and especially the mother. This, it is presumed, was clearly shewn in my former paper. Celestial Remains" of innocence, love, charity, kindness, &c., are treasured up by the Lord in the child during the earliest period of life, and the parent is the appointed guardian and cultivator of these precious rudiments of spiritual and celestial life. Man has a parentage of two kinds, heavenly and earthly ;—from his earthly parents he inherits a fallen naturę, conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity;" from his divine Parent, the Lord his Maker, he has also an inheritance of dispositions and tendencies, but directly opposed to those of his earthly inheritance. The tendencies of this latter are to the love of self and of the world, as the all-important and all-absorbing objects of life; the tendencies of the former are to the love of the Lord and of our neighbour, as the eternal realities of our existence. This inheritance from the Lord is called "Remains," which exist potentially in the interiors of the mind; they form the universal plane of all regeneration and heavenly training; without them, man would be more ferocious than any wild beast, (A. C. 1906, 7560) and his salvation would be impossible. The object of education and moral training is to bring out these heavenly tendencies from a potential to an actual state,—from the internal into the external,from the germ to the fruit. This divine process is effected from within, or from above, avwdev, (John iii. 7.) and from without "by water and the spirit," or by the truths of the Word, and by a life according to them; and the parent and teacher are the principal instruments, in the hands of Divine Mercy, by which, in childhood and youth, the work is carried on. The ratio of its accomplishment is the degree in which evil is shunned and abhorred as sin against God. Hence the abhorring and shunning of evil, or the subjugation of selfish and worldly love to what is heavenly and divine, or to the holy truths of the Word, should be the object and aim of all moral and religious training. To accomplish this, the child should be led early to deny himself, to take up his cross, to bear it with patience, to resist the first buddings of selfishness, and to overcome its improper tendencies. When the spirit of selfdenial has not been awakened and strengthened in childhood, it will but with feebleness and difficulty actuate the man;-it will not be a denial from internal motives of resistance to evil, because it is a sin; but from external motives, originating in fear lest the world should not give its reputation, its wealth, and its pleasure. The divine precepts of the Word are the only laws and rules of moral and spiritual life. Morality, based upon any other principle than upon the eternal truth of God's Word, may have an outward appearance of life, but is inwardly dead;

separate from divine truth, there is no living principle in it. The. inquiry is sometimes made, "When are we to begin teaching children a knowledge of these precepts, and when are we to make them understand doctrine?" The Divine Word gives this answer :When they are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the breasts. For precept must be upon precept, line upon line, here a little and there a little." (Isaiah xxviii. 9, 10.) The earliest periods of life, therefore, should be brought under the influence of moral and religious training, and if these periods are neglected, the mind in after-life will be more difficult to train and prepare for heaven. The ground will be more difficult of cultivation, and the seeds of truth will be either obstructed by stony places, or choked by the tares and the thorns.

We will again enter into the domestic circle, the first school of moral training. The cases, by way of example, adduced in the former paper, had relation chiefly to the culture of love to the parent, and to the neighbour, and to the subjugation of selfishness and stubbornness in the will.

Confidence and love are closely associated together. There can be no confidence but what is founded in love. To win the confidence of children is a great point in moral training. They are at all times ready to place confidence in the parent, and in all whom they love. Nothing should be done to injure this delightful spirit of confiding love. When properly brought out and directed, it leads to confidence in God, which is the basis in the soul of all trust in the dispensations of Providence, and the essential element of a living faith. But this spirit of confidence in children is often injured by thoughtless parents, and moral culture consequently suffers. Little Mary begged of her father, when he went one day into town, to buy her a doll. He promised to do so. During his absence Mary thought much of her doll, and was greatly delighted, and she told her companions how much pleasure she should have in shewing it to them. They were all in high expectation; the father returned, but had forgotten his promise of buying the doll. He had thought of every thing else, but had forgotten his promise to Mary, who was of course much disappointed and grieved, and began to withdraw her confidence from her father. Such, indeed, was the effect, that when she heard her father make a promise, she not only thought he would probably break it, but she began to entertain the idea that there was no harm in breaking a promise. Here, then, we see evil done to moral culture in the family circle, the first school for heaven. Cases analogous to this often occur, and until parents are alive to the necessity of faithfully keeping a promise to their children, they cannot

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draw out their confidence either to themselves or to the Divine Parent. Moreover, they forcibly impress upon their minds the injurious sentiment, that there is no harm and no sin in trifling with a promise; whereas the faithful keeping of a promise is the basis of all transactions amongst men, and of our covenant of peace with God. All trade and commerce, and all contracts, depend upon the faithful performance of a promise for their accomplishment and success. The promise that Mary should have a doll when the father came home, was as much to her as the promise that a debt of £100. should be paid to a tradesman on a certain day, and the breaking of the promise was equally mortifying. Hence it is that we have so much breaking of contracts in the business of life, so much reckless bankruptcy and consequent ill-will and hatred amongst men. Let it be again repeated, that moral culture must begin in the family circle; if not, it cannot be carried out in the life when we enter into the great circle of the world. We are told by Swedenborg that the great duty of parents is to concentrate their care and diligence in the proper education of children, in doing which, they perform very essential uses of life.

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Confidence always engenders respect, and to secure the respect of children is one great means of moral culture. This respect on the part of children is not awakened and secured so much by precept as by example. They learn more from imitation, and from what they see and hear, than by any preaching or abstract teaching whatever. Hence it is that example in parents is so efficacious. Now one great means of destroying all respect in children for the parental character, is that of witnessing strife and quarrelling between the parents, and of hearing, on such occasions, improper language employed by them. There were two parents who, on the whole, loved each other sincerely, but they had unhappily warm, excitable tempers, which were not subdued by prudent self-control in the Christian principle of self-denial and bearing the That they could control themselves was evident from this fact, that when in worldly company, where every thing depends on external deportment, they never allowed their irritable tempers to appear, although they often met with disappointments and exciting causes. But when at home, and external restraints removed, they allowed the slightest thing to put them out of temper; thus a hole in a stocking, or a button off a shirt, was sufficient to irritate the father against the mother, who, in her sharp replies to her husband, only made matters worse. The children, hearing all this strife and noise, would consequently lose their respect for the parents, and think, from what they heard, that there was no evil in calling others vulgar, bad names, and speaking to them in a

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very unkind and angry tone. Sometimes the parents would tell them how wicked it was to quarrel, and to use bad language; but their own example rendered this instruction utterly impotent and worthless. Thus great injury is done to moral culture. The temper is the general state of mind, which can only be properly controlled by Christian principles, or the truths of the Word operating from within, and not by worldly considerations acting from without.* To lead children to control their tempers from heavenly considerations, or from truly Christian principles, is one of the great objects of all moral and spiritual training. Little is done for the heavenly life, if this is not especially attended to; and little also is done for the child's comfort and prosperity in the world, if this is neglected. Thousands of things occur almost daily in the world which try the temper, and unless a self-control and a self-renunciation be cultivated in childhood, the unsubdued temper will be a source of many troubles and pains, which are avoided by the truly Christian temper. Such parents, therefore, as those mentioned above, know not what evil they do to the moral training of their children, by strife among themselves, and by the exhibition of ungoverned tempers. All genuine respect for them, on the part of the children, soon disap pears; and what they may say against bad tempers and obstinate dispositions goes for nothing, when their own life too often exhibits the contrary of what they teach.

What has been here said of gaining the love, confidence, and respect of children, as the means of moral training, is also peculiarly applicable to the schoolmaster, who can do but little good in his important office of instructing and training youth, unless he have their confidence and respect. A certain mother brought her son to a school, to be instructed in the elements of useful knowledge. The schoolmaster made every arrangement for his improvement, but soon found that the boy was selfwilled, obstinate, and inclined to insolence and mischief. He had been quite neglected in his childhood. The schoolmaster, after repeated admonitions, but to no purpose, was obliged to punish him, otherwise the whole school would have been contaminated by his bad example, and the teacher would have fallen into contempt. The mother no sooner heard that her son was punished, than she came in a violent fit of anger to the schoolmaster, and without examining into the case, took the boy from the school. She sent him to another, but here the boy was also chastised, and again removed. At length he went to a situation in a warehouse, quite unprepared, both as to his will and his under* See the admirable little work on the "Christian Temper," by the Rev. J. Clowes; see also No. 39 of the Manchester Tracts.