chapters, the probability awakens our liveliest sympathies, that some parts of the volume will be written in "lamentation, mourning, and woe." There may be poverty, with its pressing wants and frequent fears; sickness, with its pining look and tortured frame; disappointment, with its stinging reverse and clouded future; bereavement, with its starting sigh and bitter tear, to change the aspect of the now care-free brow and rapture-beaming countenance, and impress the sterner and more distinctly defined features of anxiety, dejection, and grief. We almost shudder to think of the change that will be wrought in character, feeling, and experience, by the lapse of years the flight of a few short cycles of time. How soon will the sublime simplicity, the holy ignorance, the adorable ingenuousness, the beautiful credulity, which invests childhood with something of the sanctity which belongs to celestial natures, vanish before the sombre truths, the killing cold, the stern realities of the world! Now there is innocence, thinking no ill; ignorance, unconscious of its existence; hope, suspecting no blight; love, apprehending no guile. And these gentle spirits will be banished from the holy temple of the child's imagination, and in their place there will come doubt, jealous of confidence; fear, poisoning enjoyment; reason, dispelling illusion; and the fruit of the forbidden tree, "knowledge of good and evil." There is, however, a deeper and more awful sensibility produced by the dreadful possibility, that, perhaps, in the "child set in the midst of us," that spirit of evil may be lurking from

which the "man of sin" will spring, in ample portraiture and masterful energy. When the first birth took place in our world-when, amid the bitterness of that hour, the voice of maternal exultation exclaimed, "I have gotten a man the Jehovah !”* little did the mother of our race imagine, that, instead of the promised seed, it was "Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother."† Benoni or Jabez would have been a more appropriate name than that which, in the fond imagination of her heart, she gave him. But thus in their days of infancy calmly slumbered, sweetly smiled, and innocently lisped, the monsters of our race- -Nero, Caligula, Alaric, and the Corsican, who were the world's dread and marvel, who lived to develop in fearful maturity, and indulge with insatiate appetite, the worst passions of our nature.

But there are higher and more momentous considerations which engage the attention of the devout and reflective mind. The child set in the midst of

us is to live for ever. It may be insignificant as a material creature-fallen as a moral agent; but it is infinitely more valuable than "Arcturus with his sons," as a spiritual and immortal being. The world is but the cradle in which it is nurtured for immor

tality. It has emerged from non-existence into being; it has begun, emphatically, to feel, to suffer, and to experience; and gradually thought will flash, intellect expand, and reason operate, and the duties

* Gen. iv. 1.

+ 1 John iii. 12.

Benoni, the son of my sorrow. Jabez, sorrowful. Cain, an acqui

sition.

of a rational and intelligent creature be performed. An existence has thus commenced which is never to terminate, which is to survive the lapse of ages, and to be prolonged when the history of the world shall close, and the hills are moved from their deep foundations. The things that are seen are temporal,the objects of sight and sense tend to destruction and decay, but the lamp of life is never to go out, it is to burn for ever, and never to be quenched in darkness. "Yesterday," says an eloquent speaker, "that child was nothing; but when will it cease to be? Never! Immortality is written upon it, and the inscription is indelible, for it was traced by the finger of God. The mind has but begun its play; its instincts and its faculties but now move with incipient life. Even dull and worthless matter is of older date: 'Of old thou didst lay the foundation of the earth.' Ages of history passed before it was said of him, 'A child is born into the world.' History will continue its annals, matter its combinations, the heavens their course; but he shall survive them all. The revolutions of ages shall be forgotten, the high events of life chase each other from the stage, 'the fashion of this world pass away,'—a period may arrive when it shall require an effort of even a perfected memory to recall the events accounted the most important on earth, the heavens shall pass away with a great noise,' and leave the spaces they have occupied to silence and to nothing; but 'the child set in the midst of us' shall then be. The basis of its existence cannot be shaken; but, in those

countless ages which its existence must fill, never let it be forgotten that it will be a happy spirit before the throne of God, or a hopeless outcast from his heaven."

It is a beautiful, soothing, and encouraging sentiment, that children attract the attention, and occupy the care of purified spirits in the heavenly world; a sentiment which stands on higher ground than the suggestion of our partial feelings; the direct, as well as the inferential testimony of Scripture. "For I say unto you," says the Saviour, "that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven."* Many of the ancient, and some of the modern interpreters, have deduced from this passage the notion, received by almost all nations, that every person has a spiritual guardian, who has always access to God, to receive orders relative to the management of his charge. If this is going farther than what is written, yet the language of the Saviour may be fairly considered as opening unto us the consoling thought, that "angels, beautiful and bright," minister for the younglings of earth's myriad flocks. A cold philosophy may advance its heartless objection, that intellectual natures so highly exalted above the most perfected minds on earth, can derive no improvement from creatures so far beneath them; but besides the exercise of their philanthropy, who can tell but that there are thoughts and feelings in the paradise of an infant's bosom which may commu

Matt. xviii. 10.

nicate lessons of wisdom and instruction even to the

loftiest intelligences?

"And they say that little infants reply by smiles and signs

To the band of guardian-angels that round about them shines." The sentiment is instructive. It teaches us care and kindliness to those whom both heaven's Lord and heaven's inhabitants condescend to notice; to pay them offices of love, as totally dependent upon our protection; and to bring them under a course of moral and spiritual training, as gifted with immortal natures, and consequent capacities for happiness and salvation.

If for the meanest of the children of our race the sympathies of these mighty minds who "excel in strength" are called into benevolent exercise, it is not surprising that this should be peculiarly the case when He who had listened to their praises "of old, even from everlasting," became incarnate. It was calculated to excite the astonishment, and summon the attention of angelic natures; to rouse the intellectual faculty to vigorous investigation—when He thus descended from his high and glorious throne below the least of the principalities in his native heaven, and entered into our world of sorrow and of shame. "Unto us a child was born, unto us a Son was given"—"that holy thing"-"the Son of the Highest"-"a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes"-" set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel." Upon the birth of this wondrous child, when, in the language of pious Quesnel, a son was given to a virgin, a saviour to the world, a pattern