you, and gave you children, the most valuable gift! Oh, it is pitiful to be in such a house, where everything is present but piety, which is the titular saint of all household graces. It seems to me a miracle that it should stand before the Lord. And I almost look for the moment when it will disperse like an illusion. But the Lord is long-suffering and spareth much. He wisheth all to come unto Him, therefore He is kind. Oh, then, revere Him in your houses, and return Him thanks for His great mercies, and you shall dwell safely and securely in the midst of those family infirmities which we now go on to declare as arguments for a godly establishment of the household. of some scion of the house in foreign parts lopped off for ever from the parent stock. Each fair daughter, as she walks abroad, may catch the basilisk eye of some artful wretch; and each hopeful youth fall into the snares of some wicked woman, who lieth in wait for the unwary. Why should these things be hid from the thoughts of parents? Why should not all the infirmity of a family be laid open, that they may have their refuge in Jehovah's everlasting strength? Look upon this city where ye dwell. Behold the daughters of misery and vice. Was not each one of these a father's delight and a mother's joy, and the dwelling-place of as many natural affections and hopeful wishes as the daughter of a king? Each of these is a proof of a family's infirmity. And every youth who in fallen wretchedness paces these weary streets, and every haggard boy who looks into your face for charity, and the thousand striplings who prowl about and lie in wait for things not their own, having often upon their heads more capital offences than years, are all instances of domestic infirmity. And so are the lists of ruined merchants and broken traders, and the shipfuls of heavy-hearted emigrants from the various ports of this blessed island, and the large population of paupers which crowd the poorhouse, or depend upon the parish, and infinite cases more lamentable than those, which modestly hide their want, pining in secret over broken hopes and humbled fortunes, or haply relieved by the unseen hand of charity-these are all instances of that domestic infirmity with When I look upon this family, and further think of its risks and dangers, its hopes and fears, and all its infirmity, I pity the more that it should be without the great patronage and protection of the Almighty Father of all. The life of the industrious father and of the careful mother hang by a thread, which a thousand accidents may cut asunder; and what then is to become of the little nest? To what serve the securities upon your lives-to what your houses and lands, which have no affections to cherish kindred affections, no bosom upon which the helpless infant may hang, nor lip to impart to the ear of listening childhood maternal counsel or paternal wisdom? And what are guardians, and what wealthy relations and friends, in the stead of parents in whom God has planted the rudiments of affection, and made their ministry as necessary for the rearing of a healthy soul, as for the rearing of a healthy body, in their off-which I now desire to impress your mind, that spring? Each child's life contained a thousand anxious affections and precious hopes, which by death are all scattered, as a fine elixir is when the frail vessel which held it falls to the earth. And if they ripen into manhood, how many pitfalls are in their path, and most alluring seductions, wherein being caught, the hearts of the parents are oft broken, and their grey hairs brought with sorrow to the grave! And contentious feuds in families do oft slay affection, and counteract nature, so that there shall be strokes instead of embraces, and frowns for smiles, and bitter wrath for melting love. And hoping the best, that death is escaped, and vice and passion fended off (although in the absence of religion I see not how), what foul winds may cross the course of the vessel in which this domestic state is embarked! Life is not a gay voyage upon the bosom of ample streams through luxuriant and beautiful fields, like that which kings and queens are reported to take at times through their ample territory; but it is a rough and traverse course amongst adverse currents and rough impediments, requiring each day a constant outlook, and ready activity of all concerned. Each post that arrives may bring to the father the heavy burden of a shipwrecked fortune, or to a mother the tidings ye may seek your strength in Him who "placeth the solitary in families, and maketh the children of the youth to be like arrows in the hand of a mighty man." There is refuge nowhere else against these infirmities, whether of the outward condition, or of the inward happiness of a family. In the outward infirmities, on which I insist the least, what refuge is there in the love of father or mother, or both, save in Him who is a father to the fatherless, and a husband to the widow, and the orphan's help? And in the ruin of our household wealth, what refuge save in the arms of His providence unto whom every creature openeth its mouth many times a day for nourishment, and findeth it either in the air or upon the earth, or in the waters under the earth? He alone can fill the house which is empty, and stock our exhausted barns, and make our presses to burst out with new wine. And when riches have taken unto themselves wings and flown away, like an eagle towards heaven, there are treasures on high, where neither moth nor rust corrupts, and where thieves break not through nor steal. But for the inward and spiritual infirmities against which it concerneth a family's weal to be defended-against the quarrels and animosities and jealousies of husband and wife-against the misdirected affectionateness of parents towards children, which hath the sentence of God upon it, "He that spareth the rod hateth the child," and doth more than all other things fill the asylums with lunatics, and against the quarrels of children, and family feuds of every kind; what protecteth but the fear of God as the common head of the whole, which becometh like a centre towards which the wills of all do bend inwards, and from which they receive their directions outward? And what furnisheth the young men and young maidens against the temptations of the world, and especially of cities, which are as thickets limed by the fowler for the feet of youth? Ah! what can furnish their souls with that unfailing grace which shall preserve them from their own frailties in worldly desires, and so condition them around as that they shall grow up in the rough weather of life, and become patriarchs and matrons in their turn, and rear up a holy offspring to carry down the spiritual seed in their line till the end of time? Ah! where are those outward defences and inward supplies, save in the gift of God, who giveth liberally and upbraideth not? Whence are they but from the Spirit of God, who worketh in us to will and to do of God's good pleasure? Now, which of you would wish your children to be tossed to and fro on passion's wave, shipwrecked in some of the gulfs of hell, which are sensuality, worldliness, pride, cunning, ungodliness? Who of you would have his sons strong as the lion, and his daughters pure and innocent as the virgin before whom the lion croucheth? Who would live his honourable life over again in his honourable children, and see, like Abraham or Jacob, a long line of godly sons and pious daughters? Let that man plant the roof-tree of his house in holiness, and rear its walls in integrity; let him purify its threshold three times with prayer, and make the outgoings of the evenings and the mornings to rejoice together with a holy joy and mirth-making unto the Lord. Let him make his hearth holy as an altar; let him sanctify the inmost nook of his house with prayer; let his servants be of the seed of the godly, yea, the porter of his gate let him be a brother in Christ. Now, I have no time for digressions, but I will have no man say to me that these things are Utopian. If he be a commoner who saith it, I will take him to the north and show him the reality of which I faintly sketch the picture. Our poet hath given it not amiss, because it was in his father's house; and, poor man! in his better days, when his father was gone, he, as the head of his father's house, fulfilled the holy office, which, had he continued faithfully and spiritually to perform, then at this day he would have been the first, yea, the very first, of Scotia's sons. For the holy fire still here and there shineth through the witch-light of genius. And it was the severe religion of his father which gave to his poetry that manly tone, and to his sentiment of love that holy tenderness which is the chief charm of his works. But I say he hath done it but faintly. For no man bred in towns can comprehend the nature of a Scottish peasant's prayer, and the martyr wildness of their psalmody. Except it be in the service-book of our sister Church, which is the gathered piety, not of one age or country, but of all ages and countries in Christendom,-except in that volume, there is nothing I have seen in print or heard in pulpits that cometh near to what I have heard in the smoky cottages of my native country. The prophetic wildness of their imagery, the spiritual richness of their diction, the large utterance of their soul, the length, the strength, and the fervour of their prayers, is a thing to be talked of by the natives of the towns, in which religion seemeth to me oft a kind of marketable commodity. And it is a thing to make pastors and bishops look to their gifts, as truly it did amaze two of the most spiritually-gifted and learned of bishops, the pious Leighton and the learned Burnet. Let no man talk, therefore, of these speculations as Utopian, but go and see, go and learn, go and do likewise. And if the man who chargeth Utopianism upon these institutions be a great one-a peer or noble of the realm-I tell him it is a shame, a crying shame, a sin that smelleth rank in the land, and reacheth even to heaven, the way in which these spacious households are ordered, men-servants and maid-servants, man and child, noblemen and noblewomen, and the hopes of noble houses, without morning or evening prayer, or any spiritual exhortation; all the day long huddled together in horrid moral and spiritual confusion-week-day and Sabbathday spent nearly alike-lying a necessary accomplishment in servants, unseemly hours, meetings at midnight, and housefuls of people commencing the night in hot and crowded places, till the sun ashamed looketh upon such doings of immortal men. In the name of Heaven, what piety, what virtue, what manhood, what common sense, or meaning, can stand such customs? They would corrupt an anchorite, and a saint would rise and run like Joseph from the temptation. I think an angel or an archangel could hardly endure it. Can any pious prayer co-exist, any melody unto the Lord, any jubilee or merry-making of the Spirit, with such disjointed living? Can repentance, can meditation, can reflection, or any mood of mind which consisteth with God, or savoureth of nobleness, live in such a vain show and idle rout? But there have been noble families otherwise ordered, both in this and the other end of the island; and happily there are some still, wherein chaplains were kept for use and not for show--learned men, and men who feared God, not men who hung on for a scrap of patronage, but men who stood for the Lord, and for the spirit of holiness in the family-to offer up its prayers, to counsel the heads of the house, to instruct the children, to teach the servants their duties in a religious sense, to gather the whole household together and exhort them all-one who was a minister of God amongst them, and showed his gifts in watching over the souls of a household, thereby manifesting his worthiness to be translated to a parochial or a diocesan cure. The Protestant religion made its way through the noble families of the north. Knox first preached the doctrines of the Reformed religion in a nobleman's hall; and there he first administered the sacrament of the Supper in that simple form which soon laid low the vain and wicked foolery of the mass. So that the idea which I represented of a godly family is far from being Utopian in high or in low life. Nothing is Utopian for which God hath given forth His rescript; and in this way He hath ordered houses to be trained up, adding His promise, that when they are old they will not depart from it. But while the world lasts, fashion will whirl it about, and luxury intoxicate it, and passion drive it headlong. Let the world go; let it go its wicked round to its miserable end. But ye are not of the world who have come up to serve Him this day in His courts; or if ye be, come out from them and be saved. Who is upon the Lord's side? Who? Let that man look better to his children than the world doth to its flocks and its herds. Let him look to the holiness of his home more than they do to the profits of their business room. Oh, let him look to the righteous standing of his children with God, more than they do to their right standing with great men and their prospects in life. Then shall the infirmity of his family be cured, and in weakness it shall be strong, and in poverty rich, and in the darkest hidings of the world's countenance it shall be glad. In its afflictions it shall be comforted, in its sicknesses healed, in its bereavements blessed, and in everything made superior to the vexations of life and the troubles of time. I look upon a family, and think of its dissolution-how it shall disappear before the touch of death like the frost-work of a winter morning, and all its strong attachments dissolve like the breaking-up of the ice-bound waters at the approach of spring-how snowy age, and tottering feebleness, and stark death, shall at length come upon the stately supporters of the domestic state, and they shall fall into the grave, bearing with them the thousand loves and affections which can find no second stem to which to transplant themselves. And then comes strong grief for an honest and wise father, and the sad apparel and pale countenance of widowhood and fatherless children, who know not where to look for bread or for patronage. And a mother hath the right over her children shared by some relative or friend, who supplieth the evening and morning consultations of parents over their offspring. And oft the children, like encumbrances, are got rid of to the earliest employment, without any study of their natural disposition or turn of mind, and sent into a cold fatherless world to make the best of it. And perhaps also, ere this, a mother is reft away in her tenderness from the midst of her babes and immature children, who go about the cold house, and cry for her that bore them; but she is not to be found, neither answereth to their cries. And now cometh orphanage, fatherless and motherless orphan. age. A stranger comes to nurse the babe, and the babe is happy in its unconsciousness of its loss; but the little ones know not the voice of the stranger. Then asylums are sought for some, and charitable foundations for others, where, far from the chamber of home, their hearts winnowed of their natural loves, they grow as upon a rock, hardy but stunted, strong but crooked and twisted in their growth, for want of the natural soil and genial atmosphere of a father's and a mother's love. And if it is ordered otherwise, that the children should be plucked away in their youth or in their prime, and the two parents left, naked and solitary, without a scion from their roots, or any fruit upon their boughs; then they go all their days mourning; the joy of their life is cut off in the mid-time of their days, their best hopes and dearest affections are buried in the dust. But in whatever way the king of terrors maketh his approach, and in whatever order he taketh away his victims, certain it is that he will not cease until he hath taken them all. He will leave none to tell unto future ages the domestic tale of sufferings and death. One by one they shall be plucked away; after intervals of days, or months, or years, he shall come again, and a mother's tears and a father's repressed and silent sorrow, yet too big for his manly breast to contain, and fond children, and the tender years of his victim-nothing shall withhold his arm, or ward off the blow. Time after time he shall come, and fill the hearts of all with sorrow, and clothe their countenances with sadness, and deluge their couch with tears, and fill the house with lamentations, until, one by one, he hath gotten them in his hold, and all the affection that smiled and prattled, all the happiness that glowed around the fire, and all the festivity of birthday and bridal-day that gladdened the halls of that house, are now converted into the dampness and darkness and unsightliness of the family vault, where father and mother, and children, and children's children, with all their beauty and strength, lie a heap of unsavoury earth. And perhaps the mansion where they were reared is roofless and tenantless, and the garden where they took their pleasure overrun with weeds; and if some descendant come from foreign parts to visit the place of which his father spoke so much, haply he hardly findeth its ruins, or discovereth the spot which once glowed beneath the fires of the patriarchal hearth. "Our fathers, where are they? The prophets, do they live for ever?" Is not our life like a vapour, and the days of our years like a tale that is told? Now, I know not how a family without the comforts of religion, and the hopes of reunion in heaven, can see its way through this succession of terrible afflictions which must come, wave upon wave, until they be all washed away from the shores of time; how they can join affections in this uncertainty of their abiding; how they can knit them in this certainty of their being reft asunder; how they can thus sleep and take their rest; how they can thus rejoice together and make happy, while the terrors of death are around them, and the dark skirts of eternity are shifting from place to place in their neighbourhood, ever hovering more and more near, and, now and then, enfolding one and another in its dark bosom. And what comfort, what shadow of consolation, remaineth to a death-invaded family, to which there is no hope beyond death and the grave? The Catholics have a provision for this in the deceitful doctrine of purgatory; but we Protestants have none. Ours is a remorseless religion to the irreligious; no bowels of compassion can move it from its awful truth, no tears of a tender wife or griefdistracted mother can win one compromising word. As sure as it is written, "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from henceforth, yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours, and their works do follow them," so surely it is written, "He that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him;" "Depart from me, ye workers of iniquity, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." Why should these things be hidden, and men left in their lethargy and sleep till the awakening of the last trump? heals the wounds of time by slaying eternity. He vampeth up a kind of endurance of threescore and ten years by the death of ages and ages. That is the cure of time. Do you say, the shifting scenery of the world wears the impression out? Then again the visible pleaseth us by obscuring the invisible-the ups and downs of life and its goings to and fro whirl the brain out of its musings and contemplationsand that is comfort. So a mother comforts her baby with a toy, and wiles it out of the memory of what it hath lost by a gaudy thing given it to look at or to handle. And what kind of affection is that which gaieties and diversions can obliterate? and what affection is that which looks for its remedy in the oblivion of a few years? It is of the very essence of affection that it should last and last for ever. The soul knows no death in its feelings except the death brought on by vice, and the world, and unspiritual desires. And that affection which in its sense and touch looks for the remedy of change or of oblivion contains its own power and its own death within itself; and though it open itself fair and full as the opening rose, there is a serpent under it to sting him that layeth hold thereon; and there is a canker-worm in the heart to consume itself. Affection thinks not of dissolution; if it be true affection, it thinks only of everlasting, of lasting for ever. And such are the affections of nature; they knit themselves for everlasting, and they grow up for everlasting, and they are arguments of an everlasting life, and death cometh upon them in their prime, and beareth them away like lovers on their bridal day. Oh, then, what is a family full of affection, which have no hopes of eternity! It is like a nest of callow young seized upon by the kite ere yet they have known to float over the azure heaven in that free liberty for which nature was feathering their little frames. But when the family is impressed with the spirit of holiness, then affection opens itself without any fear of untimely dissolution, and grows up for eternity, and hath therein the gratification of its proper nature. For as it is the nature of the understanding to conceive all things under the conditions of time and place, it seems to be the nature of the affections to forget these conditions, and to act under the opposite conditions of eternity and omnipresence. They seem to defy time, and to unite as it were for ever; they are regardless of place, consume the intervening distance, dwell with their object, and rejoice over it. The contem As sure as father and mother, and stately sons and beautiful daughters, do now live in the bower of family blessings, so sure shall father and mother, and stately sons and beautiful daughters, be taken, one after another, into the grave of all blessing, and the house of all cursing, unless they seek the Lord while He is to be found, and call upon Him while He is near. And as strong as your affection now is to one another, so strong shall your grief, your inconsolable grief be, when one and another and another are taken away, until at length one isplation of change by place or time is the death left, like Rachel, weeping for the rest, whose bosom hath received all the wounds, and hath been doomed to live and behold all the arrows of the Lord accomplish their unerring aim. And what comfort is there, I ask you, but such as cometh from eternity and immortality? Do you say, Time heals every wound? Ay, time of affection-it lives for all places and for all duration, and cannot abide the thought of dissolution; nor is it ever dissolved, as hath been said, save by the withering hand of vice and worldliness. Therefore without hope of everlasting, affection is miserable; and if I had time, I could show that it enjoys itself only by a kind of illusion that it is to be everlasting, from which, alas! it is awakened by the bereavements of death. But with hope of immortality, affection is in its element, and flourisheth beautifully. And the family state being a web of interlacing affection, religion is its very life; and in proportion as it is present, the affections wax warmer and warmer, purer and purer, more and more spiritual, less and less dependent upon adversity or affliction or death. And when so rooted and grounded in Divine love, and glorious hope of immortality, a family is fenced against evil, and made triumphant over death. Life is but its cradle, and the actions of life are its childhood, and eternity is its maturity. EXTRACTS. GOD'S GOODNESS TO MAN. He presents Himself as our Father, who first breathed into our nostrils the breath of life, and ever since hath nourished and brought us up as children-who prepared the earth for our habitation, and for our sakes made its womb to teem with food, with beauty, and with life. For our sakes no less He garnished the heavens, and created the whole host of them with the breath of His mouth, bringing the sun forth from his chamber every morning with the joy of a bridegroom and a giant's strength, to shed his cheerful light over the face of creation, and draw blooming life from the cold bosom of the ground -from Him also was derived the wonderful workmanship of our frames-the eye, in whose small orb of beauty is pencilled the whole of heaven and of earth, for the mind to peruse and know, and possess, and rejoice over even as if the whole universe were her own-the ear, in whose vocal chambers are entertained harmonious numbers, the melody of rejoicing nature, the welcomes and salutations of friends, the whispering of love, the voices of parents and of children, with all the sweetness that resideth in the tongue of man. His also is the gift of the beating heart, flooding all the hidden recesses of the human frame with the tide of life-His the cunning of the hand, whose workmanship turns rude and raw materials to pleasant forms and wholesome uses-His the whole vital frame of man, is a world of wonders within itself, a world of bounty, and, if rightly used, a world of finest enjoyments. His also the mysteries of the soul within-the judgment which weighs in a balance all contending thoughts, extracting wisdom out of folly, and extricating order out of confusion; the memory, recorder of the soul, in whose books are chronicled the accidents of the changing world, and the fluctuating moods of the mind itself; fancy, the eye of the soul, which scales the heavens and circles round the verge and circuits of all possible existence; hope, the purveyor of happiness, which peoples the hidden future with brighter forms and happier accidents than ever possessed the present, offering to the soul, the foretaste of every joy; affection, the nurse of joy, whose full bosom can cherish a thousand objects without being impoverished, but rather replenished, a storehouse inexhaustible towards the brotherhood and sisterhood of this earth, as the storehouse of God is inexhaustible to the universal world; finally, conscience, the arbitrator of the soul and the touchstone of the evil and the good, whose voice within our breast is the echo of the voice of God. These, all these-whose varied actions and movement constitutes the maze of thought, the mystery of life, the continuous chain of being-God hath given us to know that we hold of His hand, and during His pleasure, and out of the fulness of His care. Upon which tokens of His affectionate bounty, not upon bare authority, command and fear, God desireth to form a union, and intimacy with the human soul; as we love our parents from whom we derived our being, sustenance, and protection while we stood in need, and afterwards proof of unchanging and undying love, so God would have us love Him in whom we live and move, and breathe, and have our being, and from whom proceedeth every good and perfect gift; and as out of this strong affection, we not only obey, but honour the commandments of our father and mother, so willeth He that we should honour and obey the commandments of our Father in heaven. As we look up to a master in whose house we dwell, and at whose plentiful board we feed - with whose smiles we are recreated, and whose service is gentle and sweet-so God wisheth us to look up to Him, in whose replenished house of nature He hath given us a habitation, and from whose bountiful table of providence we have a plentiful living, and whose service is full of virtue, health, and joy. As we love a friend who took us by the hand in youth, and helped us step by step up the hill of life, and found for our feet a room to rest in, and for our hands an occupation to work at, so God wisheth to be loved for having taken us up from the womb, and compassed us from our childhood, and found us favour in the sight of men—as we revere a master of wisdom, who nursed our opening mind, and fed it with knowledge and with prudence, until the way of truth and peacefulness lay disclosed before us, so God wisheth to be revered for giving to our souls all the faculties of knowledge, and to nature all the hidden truths which these faculties reveal. In truth, there is not an excellent attachment, by which the sons of men are bound together, which doth not bind us more strongly to God, and lay the foundation of all generous and noble sentiments towards Him within the mind—of all loving, dutiful, reverential conduct towards Him in our outward walk and conversation. |