are ashamed if it appears that other boys have greater liberty, and are more indulged at home than yourselves. And this extends to school also: you do not like to have less money than other boys,-to have fewer presents sent you,-to find your friends more unwilling to pay your debts, than the friends of other boys are to pay theirs. This not only interferes with your pleasures, but hurts your pride; and I believe that the annoyance to your pride is very often what you mind the most. Thus talking, and thus feeling towards home, the effect of long absence is increased tenfold; concealment and restraint are sometimes the dispositions with which you meet your fathers; you do not like to tell them all that you have done; and you think yourselves hardly used if your requests have not been all complied with. In this undutiful and unchildlike temper, the period which you spend at home is too short to soften you. You return again to school, and the mischief rapidly increases: and it too often happens, that when you go from school to college, the evil becomes yet worse; extravagance there is practised on a larger scale, and is often accompanied with other vices, which make confidence towards a parent still more difficult.

Then comes actual life,-and you go to other parts of the world, or settle at a distance from your father's house the opportunities of undoing the bad and cold impressions of early life are no more attainable; and all that passes between father and son is a few letters, and a few short visits, till the son is called on to perform his last act of duty, in following his father's body to the grave.

Far, very far, am I from saying or thinking that this is always, or even generally, the case to the full extent: but it is the tendency of schools to produce such a state of things; it is the tendency of that false shame, that hateful and contemptible pride, which seals your lips against the expressions of duty and affection, which makes you affect to be undutiful before you are so in reality. Yet so catching is this shame, that I am afraid even those boys among you, who have the happiness of being at once both at school and at home, are tempted to throw away their advantages. The situation of those boys I have always thought most fortunate;-with all the opportunities of forming lasting friendships with those of their own age which a public school so largely affords, and with the opportunity also of keeping up all their home affections,

of never losing that lively interest in all that is said and done under their father's roof, which an absence of several months cannot fail, in some measure, to chill. Your fault then is by so much the greater, if you make yourselves strangers to domestic feelings and affections, through your own fault;—if you think you have any dearer friendships, or any that can better become either youth or manhood, than those which God himself has marked out for you in your own homes. Add others to them if you will, and it is your wisdom and your duty to do so; but beware how you let any less sacred connexion weaken the solemn and universal bond of domestic love. Remember, that when Christ took our nature upon him, and went through every stage of human life to show us our peculiar duties in each, one of the only two things recorded of him, before he arrived at manhood, is his dutiful regard to his parents: "He went down to Nazareth, and was subject unto them."

The other thing recorded of him, is, that it was his pleasure to gain such knowledge as would fit him for the discharge of his duty in active life hereafter. He was found by his parents in the temple, " sitting in the midst

of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions." It is strangely mistaking the meaning of this account, and utterly destroying its usefulness, to call this, as some have done, "Christ's preaching in the temple,”—as if, at twelve years old, and long before he had begun his ministry, he would have attempted to teach the authorized teachers of his country. The drift of the story is wholly different: it does not represent him as doing what no one could imitate without presumption and folly, but as doing and feeling what all those of his age ought to do, and feel also. He was anxious to gain improvement, and took pains of his own accord to gain it. How often do you neglect it when it is brought before you, and every wish of your friends urges you to acquire it! He was interested in what he heard, and tried to get a thorough understanding of it; he did not only sit and hear what was said, as if that were in itself of any use, but he wished to heed and to profit by it. He was found hearing the doctors in the temple, and asking them questions: if any thing in what they said was too hard for him, if he could not fully comprehend it, he asked for more explanation; - he asked questions about it, because he wished to know it. You

will say perhaps that this was about religious subjects, and that these are very different from common lessons. It is true it was about religious subjects, but it seems that it was with a view to his future calling in life: it was to gain that knowledge, which afterwards shone forth so admirably in his own discourses, when, like the wise householder of his own parable, he brought forth out of his treasure things new and old,-and made every object in nature, and every truth relating to human society and human character, serve the purposes of the kingdom of God. The point in the example is, that you should in youth gain the knowledge which may make you better and wiser men hereafter; which may enable you to glorify God in your generation by a wise and understanding heart, and an able and eloquent tongue; which, amidst the infinitely varied relations of society in our days, where there is scarcely a subject on which ignorance does not make us less useful, and knowledge more so, may enable you to ornament the common intercourse of life, and to direct with judgment its practical concerns, filling you with a lively perception and an ardent love of what is beautiful, of what is true, of what is good. After all, this must, in