piety for which in after life they became so eminent. Do you aspire to the same results. Let pious mothers associate together at stated times expressly to plead with God for their offspring. Sow the seed in faith, carefully watch and weed the springing blade, and fear not but you shall reap a rich harvest of ripe fruits in due season. The system of education in our public schools is to the mind of every reflecting Christian a subject of deep concern. At most of these seminaries the Bible, if read at all, is read only as a task-book, while the youths are diligently instructed in the mythology of the heathen, and made familiar with the licentious writings of the Greek and Latin poets. That this should be the case in the nineteenth century of the Christian era is a most humiliating fact. That Christian mothers should consent to have their children thus educated is passing strange; but,if your sons must be exposed to the contamination of such a system, you ought at least to be doubly careful that the pure precepts of the gospel should throw a panoply around these immortal beings, which may, as much as possible, shield them from the unhallowed influence of such an education. Follow them with your counsels; follow them with your prayers; set them your example; be diligent in the use of means; look up for a blessing, and may the Lord Jehovah give you an abundant increase, so that it may be said of the rising generation, " One shall say, I am the Lord's, and another shall call himself by the name of Jacob, and another shall subscribe with his hand unto the Lord and surname himself by the name of Israel." If moral virtue be true nobility, surely Christianity must be tenfold more so. No heraldic honours can bestow on you the dignity which the title of Christian confers, and no humility you can practise can ever equal that of the Son of God! Let us pray that we may drink more into his spirit. Let the line of demarcation between us and a world lying in wickedness be more strongly defined. "Forgetting those things that are behind, let us press towards the mark for the prize of our high calling of God in Christ Jesus." "O be his service all our joy; Around let our example shine, CHRISTIANA. PIETY THE BEST ORNAMENT OF WOMAN. (ADDRESSED TO YOUNG WOMEN.) "Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain; but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised."-Prov. xxxi. 30. THE arts of eloquence, and poetry, and painting, and sculpture, and music, have all been frequently laid under contribution to do homage to female beauty; but here inspiration gives its verdict in a few words: "Favour" (comeliness, personal attraction)" is deceitful, and beauty is vain." Beauty in all its forms, and of all kinds, is vain and deceitful; it is no symbol of real goodness; it may miserably disappoint every hope of happiness that is founded upon it; at best it is fading and shortlived, and, if disease or accident has not prematurely laid it waste, it must at least be converted into loathsomeness and corruption in the grave. But "the fear of the Lord"-that is the true ornament of woman as of man; that is not an adventitious but a real excellence, one that is independent of all those causes which affect the graces of the person, and one which shall outlive death-that event, which wastes and ruins the body, only consummating and perfecting the beauty of the soul. It may to some extent show with what anxiety every Christian mind ought to be affected in this matter, and it may at least have the effect of awakening sympathy, if, in the first instance, one or two well-authenticated facts be here mentioned. You ought not to be ignorant that the number of wretched beings in this city who have fallen from virtue, and who live by transgression, is supposed to be no less than eighty thousand—that is, one in every five of the whole adult female population. I might speak to you, my friends, of the heartless cruelty, and of the cool villany, by which such a terrific result has been accomplished-that villany which takes advantage of unsuspecting confidence, which, for a grovelling indulgence, tramples upon another's character, blights and withers once fond hopes, and creates a misery which even all eternity may not calculate. But what a wreck of hopes and of character do we not here behold!-the peace of families banished for ever, the hearts of friends broken and desolate! and for the pitiable victims themselves-shut out from society, from friendship, from sympathy-who can depict the agony with which they look upon a world from which they are The outcasts, back upon joys which can never return to them, and forward upon a course of debasement and of pollution from which there is no escape? By the very necessity of their condition, they are excluded from the sound of the gospel and from the means of grace. No voice of mercy-no tidings of the love and of the pity of Christ—no invitations to apply to his blood can reach them. The desolation of all their earthly hopes is but the prelude to the blackness of eternal darkness. anguish that preys upon them now only prepares the way for the gnawings of the worm that never dies and for the torments of the fire that is never quenched. It ought not to be omitted, besides, that the wretched beings to whom reference has been made will be found to have come, not from any one rank merely, but from the lower, and from the middle, and even from the higher classes of society. They will be found, many of them, to have been the children of pious parents, and to have, at first, maintained a blameless character. If they be awfully depraved, and if they be shameless in their depravity, it is not because they are worse than others by nature. The loveliest forms of beautynot only so, even the most amiable and virtuous natural dispositions-betrayed by brutal and by infernal cruelty, have been transformed into all from which the eye of modesty and of religion turns with horror. And, surely, of the authors of such misery can we but say, "Into their secret, my soul, enter not unto their assembly, my honour, be not thou united?" There is yet another fact which requires to be mentioned; there are in this city 100,000 persons in the capacity of female servants, and of these about 10,000 are constantly out of employment. D These, in many cases, are unprotected and friendless, and are exposed, not only to many hardships, but to endless and to powerful temptations. causes But even in the absence of any such unusual danger, and with the defence of parents, of friends, of station in life, of religious education, and of religious habits, there are unnumbered that render our youthful female population urgent objects of deep and powerful anxiety. They may not be in danger-many of them from vice in its worst shapes may be in no danger; but between this and the true fear of God there are countless forms of irreligion and of ungodliness, into which they may be seduced. My dear friends, if I speak to you of the corruption, and of the weakness, and of the deceitfulness of your own hearts-if I tell you that you are in danger from your own sex and from ours, that you are in danger from those of your own age and from the old, that you are in danger from the society into which you may be thrown, from the books that you may happen to read, from the scenes that you may witness, that, in short, you are surrounded with a thousand unknown and unsuspected dangers-it is that, alive to your situation, you may flee to him who is the faithful and the powerful friend-it is that you may be safe in his keeping, that you may be strong in his strength, and that you may be secure in the impregnable sanctuary of his salvation-it is that, rising superior to all outward and fading distinctions, you may choose that which is eternally valuable and eternally beautiful, and in which security, and honour, and peace, are combined. All sound moralists agree that one of the best safe-guards of private virtue, and one of the surest |