notes and commentaries. It was impossible for the servants to fall asleep, as will often otherwise be the case, when the eyes of their master were constantly upon them; and it is very certain that in proportion as the senses are awake will the understanding be accessible, and the heart through the mind.

Mr. Gracelove commenced by remarking on the simplicity and beauty of the passage under consideration; and that its wisdom was still more conspicuous than its simple beauty, inasmuch as it respected the preparation of the heart for an immortal happiness in the world to come. "Everything," he said, "that is required to be done in a course of education, ought to have a right and an early direction given to it. The training up a child by a father or mother in the way he should go,' is not accomplished by merely instructing him how to gain a subsistence, or to gratify the cravings of vanity and ambition. This, indeed, would be giving their son a stone when he asked for bread, and a serpent when he asked for a fish,* compared with the zealous endeavours of a fond and pious parent to obtain for a beloved child' that meat which endureth unto everlasting life.' +

"But if," continued he, "the injunction of Solomon be not obeyed, while fostering the tendencies of a carnal education, neither is it more so, if the training but commence when the habits are formed; when vice and folly have taken root in the heart which it was intended altogether to prevent. Take for example," said Mr. Gracelove, -knowing the * Matt. vii. 9, 10. † John vi. 27.

force of familiar illustration to the clearer comprehension of the mind," take, for example, the young sapling of a year's growth, and see with what perfect facility the hand can bend, or form, or incline it to any shape or position it pleases. But wait for ten or a dozen years, and the scion, once so pliable and obedient, as if by instinct, to the merest touch of the finger, has now become rigid, and so immovably fixed in its position, as to resist all the applications of skill or strength to change its direction. You may indeed break it, but you cannot bend it. Let us now take another appropriate similitude, in reference to the source of large rivers. If we commence our operations at the fountain-head of the subsequent stream, and trace out a channel, according to our own will and judgment, for the tiny sparkling jet of water that bubbles up from its hidden spring in the earth, we shall effect our object with ease and success. Should we delay, however, the training process until the jet has become a brook, then a stream, and finally a strong and rapid river, our opportunity will be lost for ever. Nature will then have triumphed over all t the powers of art; the gigantic torrent will then urge on its own impetuous course, defying embankments and artificial boundaries, and occasionally bursting forth into new channels, carry ruin and devastation in its train.

"We have, among a variety of other instances, a celebrated example of this nature in the great Mississippi of North America. The resistless strength of this mighty and almost interminable river is such, when swollen by the melted snows of the moun

tains, as to bear down every barrier. It will then, not unfrequently, cut through and overwhelm its banks with impetuous fury,-tearing down the trees of the forest,-desolating the fruitful plains and harvests of the husbandman,-and scooping out new channels for itself, rush headlong to the ocean by a shortened passage of fifteen or twenty miles.

"Thus it is," said Mr. Gracelove, but too often with the uneducated mind of man. If permitted, in childhood and youth, to follow the unrestrained tendencies of a corrupt and fallen nature,―unreclaimed by wise counsels, untrained in the way he should go,'-the consequences to society, besides the awful personal ruin to the individual, become as powerfully destructive as the inundation to the husbandman. But the salvation of an immortal soul, especially in the case of one so beloved and dear to a parent's heart as his own offspring, must ever be his first and most cherished object. Kind and affectionate treatment, therefore, united with firmness; persuasive exhortations; tenderness in the admonitory rebukes, as regards our children, and commencing with the earliest dawn of reason, should be the judicious and zealously-continued system of domestic management in every family. Should, however, the wayward heart of the child require a stricter moral regimen than advice and lectures will supply, an unwise tenderness must not withhold the application of a more severe remedy. The wise king of Israel explicitly declares, that, He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth

him chasteneth him betimes.' * And again he observes, 'Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.' †

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And now,"

continued Mr. Gracelove, "before I conclude these few remarks, called forth by the interesting subject before us, I will briefly allude to three or four illustrious examples, recorded in sacred Scripture, of the efficacy and wisdom of Solomon's advice contained in the verse we have been considering. The first I shall mention is exhibited in the instructive history of Timothy, whom St. Paul addresses as his own son in the faith,'-'his dearly beloved son.'

"It would appear that his grandmother Lois, and his mother Eunice, were women of pious minds, and, as the apostle describes them, of unfeigned faith.' That they had been most exemplary in the training up of their youthful son, from his earliest years, for that high station which he was destined to fill in the Church of Christ, is evident from the testimony borne to his character by his adopted father in the faith. For thus testifies the apostle of his religious advancement: Continue thou,' he says, in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; and that from a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation, through faith which is in * Prov. xiii. 24. +Ibid. xxiii. 13, 14.

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Christ Jesus.'* Here we perceive the happy effects of pious teaching, which may well stimulate a parent's love in sowing early the seeds of divine truth in the heart of his child, ere yet the enemy has time to scatter the tares which are profitable only afterwards to be burnt in the fire.

Let us now turn to the edifying history of Samuel, that servant of God; so far, at least, as to regard him in his initiation into the paths of righteousness, having been dedicated by his mother to Jehovah even from his infancy, to minister before Him in his holy temple for ever.

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Hannah, the wife of Elkanah, and the mother of the future prophet of the Lord, we are told, in the first chapter of the first book of Samuel-to which interesting passage," said Mr. Gracelove, addressing his auditors, "I wish you to refer in your Bibleswas childless. Her grief on this account was, consequently, very severe; inasmuch as every wife in Israel looked upon that state as one of the greatest misfortunes that could befal her. She was, in addition to this cause of sorrow, unfeelingly taunted by Peninnah, who was a happy but undeserving mother, with the circumstance of her barrenness; therefore she wept and did not eat.'

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We are informed that on one occasion, when Hannah accompanied her husband to worship and to sacrifice unto the Lord of Hosts in Shiloh,'—an annual journey that was undertaken for that purpose, --she entered the temple in great anguish of mind, praying unto the Lord and weeping. And she

* 2 Tim. iii. 15, 16.