uidance will hinge its weal or its woe; and yours, therefore, will be the
lasting benefit or the lasting shame. What you are now doing for your
children is incorporated with their very being, and will be as imperishable
as their undying souls. As the stewards of God, your provision for them
will be "either a savor of life unto life or a savor of death unto death."

We have seen that God has given to you the ability and means of making them
subservient to his glory; and hence from you he will require them as
entrusted talents. If you have been unfaithful to them, your punishment
will be in proportion to the wretchedness entailed upon your children. If,
instead of the bread from heaven, you feed their souls with the husks of
life, and lead them on by the opiates of bastard joys; if, "when they ask
of you bread, you give them a stone, or for a fish, you give them a
serpent," will it not be "more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day
of judgment than for you?"

Thus, therefore, you see, christian parents, how your responsibility is
measured, by the magnitude of those interests committed to your care, by
the kind of influence you exert over them, and by the enormity of that
guilt and wo which are consequent upon your unfaithfulness. Let this be an
incentive to parental integrity. The day is rapidly approaching when you
must give an account of your stewardship. Oh, what, if in that day you
behold your children "fit for the eternal burning," and remember that that
fitness is but the impress of a parent's hand!

Though it is painful to lose a child here; bitter tears are shed; pungent
agonies are felt; there are heart-burnings kindled over the grave of buried
love. But oh, how much more agonizing it is to bend over the dying bed of
an impenitent, ruined child! And especially if, in that terrible moment, he
turns his eyes, wild with despair and ominous of curses, upon the parents,
and ascribes his ruin to their neglect! Let me ask you, would not this part
of that sad drama add to your cup of bitterness, give a fearful emphasis to
all your sighs, and burnings to your flooding tears? God would also speak
to you, and say as he did to Cain, "the voice of thy" children's "blood
crieth unto me!" "And now thou art cursed from the earth which hath opened
her mouth to receive thy" children's "blood from thy hand."

But the scene would not close at the death-bed of your child; the second
act would open at the bar of God. The maledi