from no false estimates of worldly good, but from the benevolent instincts of na

mory

ture. The same moral advantage is often derived, in a greater degree, from the meof those children who have left us. Their simple characters dwell upon our minds with a deeper impression; their least actions return to our thoughts with more force than if we had it still in our power to witness them; and they return to us clothed in that saintly garb which belongs to the possessors of a higher existence. We feel that there is now a link connecting us with a purer and a better scene of being; that a part of ourselves has gone before us into the bosom of God; and that the same happy creature which here on earth shewed us the simple sources from which happiness springs, now hovers over us, and scatters from its wings the graces and beatitudes of eternity.

To you, then, my brethren, who have suffered from the present visitation of Providence, Religion thus unfolds the sources of consolation and of improvement. She calls upon you not to mourn as those who have no hope; to give the children of whom you have been deprived into the hands of your and their Father; and when the first pangs of affliction are over, to lift up your thoughts with that faith toward him, which may at last enable you to meet them in his presence for ever. Yet while she calls you not to mourn, she does not ask you to forget, This perhaps may be the language of the world. The loftier language of religion is, that you should remember whatever may contribute to your purity and vir tue; that you should sometimes meditate with holy emotion on those angel forms which are gone before you; and that, amidst the temptations of the world,

you should call to mind, that their eyes are now impending over you, and feel the additional link which binds you to the higher destinations of your being.

To us, my brethren, over whose houses the Angel of death may now have passed, let not the scene which we have witnessed be unaccompanied with instruction. While we fall down in gratitude before Heaven for the deliverance which we have hitherto experienced, let us confess that it is undeserved; that we have not, as we ought, blessed the giver of all our good; and let us henceforth resolve to have his goodness more constantly in our thoughts. Let us sympathize with our brethren in affliction, and feel that their sorrow may soon be ours. Above all, let us make it our firm resolution, to train up those children whom God may have spared to us, in the knowledge of him and of his laws, that at

whatever hour of their future life the call

may come, they may be found of him in peace, and that we too may, with them, glorify him in heaven.

SERMON XXI.

ON RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.

PROV. xxii. 6.

"Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it."

IN these words, my brethren, the wise man points out powerfully the effects of early education. As the mind is very liable to the influence of habit, it is a happy circumstance that it can acquire good habits as well as bad, and that the infant heart can be moulded to the love of vir