The Christian life is represented as pleasantness and peace, productive of present enjoyment, and leading to future and eternal blessedness. In every condition of life, the pious Christian has consolations and sources of happiness which the world knows not of, and of which it cannot deprive him; and in the depths of affliction, he has the cheering hope of a glorious immortality. Yet ought it not to be forgotten, that the Scripture exhibits the Christian to our view, as a soldier engaged in an arduous conflict, which needs steady perseverance, and which requires all the excitements to courage and fidelity which the Gospel supplies.
The influence of a mother over the future character and destiny of her child, whether for good or evil, is incalculable. She has the moulding of its moral frame almost as much under her control as the management of its body; and, during the tender years of childhood, the one is almost as yielding and plastic as the other.
Next to the Bible, my father’s chief delight was in studying the works of the old divines, of which, in time-worn editions, he has succeeded in accumulating a goodly number. These, he was wont to say, contained more of the “sap and marrow of the gospel,” and had about them more of the “fragrance and flavour of Paradise, than aught more recently produced.”
Believing that God hath made with me, and with my seed after me, his everlasting covenant, to be a God to me and to my seed, I did, in your baptism, and often since, and now do, before God and his angels, make a solemn surrender of you all into the hands of my God, and my father’s God, and of the God of your mother, and her father’s God; and in the presence of that God, and as ye shall answer at his second coming, I charge you:
