in different games. His No one expected it to be

He loved best to go with his father from place to place, and from village to village. He mingled in different kinds of company, saw new faces continually, and all childish embarrassments wore away. He became skilful in riding fleet horses and father's character became his. otherwise. It was easier to teach him a love for loose amusements than for toil. The tavern-house revel was more attractive for the youth of sixteen, than was the corn-field employment. But mark you, the father was not happy. Indolence opens the door to other vices. He lost the respect of his fellow-citizens. He loved intoxicating drinks; he became otherwise abandoned, and was miserable. His iniquity was punished much here in this life. But his son was unhappy too. His father's character descended to him. God has declared in the hearing of all parents, that it is not his plan to prevent it. He became a practiser of the same sins which his father had loved. He became unhappy in proportion to his guilt. The iniquity of the father descended to the son. He followed the same course of idleness and profligacy as closely as his features followed those of his father's in expression. If this, sir, had been the only case where the character and the iniquity of the father had become the son's over again, it would overturn your attempt to be wiser or more amiable than Omnipotence. But you know of cases all around you, and they are all over the earth, where children take after their fathers in their vices, and of course suffer as their fathers suffered, in proportion to their guilt. We will return to notice this and similar cases again, as soon as I have placed before you one of an opposite character, evincing the same principle. There was a man (Mr. T.) whom you knew. He was not poor, that is, he possessed a productive and

valuable tract of land, but he did not refuse to plough it. He earned his bread from day to day, although the sweat dropped from his brow whilst obtaining it. He had no time to go to the horse race, for his harvest he would not neglect. You know how comfortable and how quiet all was around him. He had the confidence of his relatives and his friends. He seemed to be very happy. His sons all took after him. When not in the school-house, he had them in the field. They now work just as hard as he did, and begin to be as much respected. The father's character and his peace have descended to them. You know very well that the father could have taught them idleness as easily as he taught them industry, and God would not have prevented it. There are singular cases of exception to be seen in the process of every common plan, but they prove nothing. God has promised seed time and harvest, and we have it. A few unseasonable weeks, or a failure of harvest, does not disprove the assertion that we have harvest. Winter is a cold season, and a warm day in January does not disprove that truth. Summer is a warm season, and a cold day in June does not falsify the declaration. That father could have taught his sons habits of mirth and revelry, as soon as he taught them months of toil, and God would not have interfered. By refusing to interpose coercively, he visits the evils of the fathers upon their offspring. If that man who was punished at W— -n circuit court for stealing, (his father was notoriously dishonest, and all his neighbours knew it,) if that man had spoken as follows to the jury and to the judge, what would have been their reply? "Fellow-citizens, I cannot see how I am to blame for stealing, for my father did so before me. I always loved it, and I always practised it. My father always preferred taking his neighbour's property to work, and I have only

copied him. I cannot be to blame for I was reared to dishonesty."

You know that the judge would not tell the jury to acquit, because he had shown his father to be also guilty, and to be the cause of his son's unloveliness.

The murderer never is excused even if his father practised it in his sight, so as to make him a murderer in heart from his earliest day. The iniquitous character of the father going down to the son, and acting itself out there again, does not become more lovely because it was a garment worn before. Neither God nor man excuses it. God has warned parents in the hearing of heaven, earth, and hell, that this descent will take place, and that the features of the soul will be visited as certainly as the features of the body. I knew the father, who, in habits of filthy debauch, had acquired disease, which descended to his children, and they were born with feeble, unsound frames, incapable of meeting the hardships of life, and suffering with every morning's sun. Why do you not pretend to have too high an opinion of your Creator to believe that complaints are visited to the third and fourth generation. Go and tell physicians that you do not believe them, when they assert that many diseases are hereditary, because you have a more exalted view of your Maker than to suppose he would make things thus. Poor, innocent child, groaning there on account of the father's licentious and detestable indulgences. You might speak very pathetically and very zealously, and at last not be either as wise, or as benevolent as the Creator, who has made things thus. But to go back again to moral disease, to that iniquity which does descend, when you know there are ten thousand cases all around you, where the son is more inclined to copy his father's vicious habits than to follow

virtue; when you know that all who fall into evil practises, suffer for their character more or less; and this visiting of the iniquity upon the children, God has never altered since he said he would not; why be trying to be wise, and to look lofty, and to disbelieve that which you have seen every day of your life when you mingled with society?

The deist confessed that he had known idle fathers rear idle children, and that men disliked them for their worthlessness.

He confessed that he had known evil tempered, spiteful, or envious parents have families that felt as they did, and were considered unlovely and hateful, in proportion to the amount of malignity which they had copied of their parents. He confessed that it did not excuse the criminal in any court of justice on earth, to say that the murder, or the adultery, or whatever the crime might be, was copied of father or mother, who had acted it out before them. Finally, he confessed that if a father should succeed in training a son in vice and hateful crime, so that this blackness of soul and monstrous deformity caused the suffering of its possessor for fifty years in this life, and then brought him to perish on a gibbet, perhaps it might forbid his joy in the next existence. On the same principle that if I may not take many thousand pounds unfairly, I may not take a single penny; on this principle, if a certain amount of unloveliness acquired in a given way, may detract from the happiness, or cause the suffering of any one for half a century, it may do so much longer, for aught we know.

Now, reader, in the next chapter we have a certain application of this truth to make which, will prevent

our misunderstanding each other when we look together on the Ruins of Empires,

CHAPTER LIII.

Means of Rescue.-More examples of seeming truth but actual falsehood.

There was a man living on the shores of Lake Erie, who taught his children that adultery might offend God, but fornication was not amiss in any way. This was a false religion. His children believed it and suffered for it. His sons looked with entire indifference upon the pollution of their sisters. They would bargain for the prostitution of any female relative, if money were to be realized by the traffic. All the family were brought down near the level of beasts by such false tenets, for other parts of character soon corresponded, and they suffered from their father's teaching, and that greatly, whether we think it proper or not, that they should have been left thus far under his influence.

Reader, the Bible teaches that you can teach your children a false religion, and succeed equally well, if you try. We know this is true from observation, because not one in the whole nation or tribe to which the man mentioned belonged, ever failed, or found any difficulty in training his family, as he himself practised.

There was a man at the foot of an Asiatic mountain, who taught his children that God was sometimes pleased with the sacrifice of a child, nay, that often nothing short of this would answer. In process of time his