onal in what they thus prefer
No few, that would seem wise, resemble her."

To nurse means to educate or draw out and direct what exists in a state of
mere involution. It means to protect, to foster, to supply with appropriate
food, to cause to grow or promote growth, to manage with a view to
increase. Thus Greece was the nurse of the liberal arts; Rome was the nurse
of law. In horticulture, a shrub or tree is the nurse or protector of a
young and tender plant. We are said to nurse our national resources.
Isaiah, in speaking of the coming Messiah and the glory of his church,
says, "Thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side." "Kings shall be thy
nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers."

The place or apartment appropriated to such nursing is called a nursery.
Thus a plantation of young trees is called a nursery. Shakspeare calls
Padua the nursery of arts. We call a very bad place the nursery of thieves
and rogues. Dram-shops are the nurseries of intemperance. Commerce is
called the nursery of seamen. Universities are the nurseries of the arts
and sciences. The church on earth is called the nursery of the church in
heaven. Christian families are called the nurseries of the church on earth,
because in the former its members are nursed and propagated for the purpose
of being transplanted into the latter.

In the same sense and for the same reason, the Christian home is the
nursery of the young,--of human nature in its normal state. And as home is
the nursery of the state as well as of the church on earth and in heaven,
we must see that it is a physical, intellectual and religious nursery. We
shall briefly consider it in these aspects. Indeed the Christian home
cannot be considered in a more interesting and responsible light. The
little child, dedicated to God in holy baptism, is entirely helpless and
dependent upon the ministrations of the nursery. There is the department of
its first impressions, of its first directions, of its first intellectual
and moral formation, of the first evolution of physical and moral life.
There the child exists as but the germ of what is to be. It grows up under
the fostering care and plastic power of the parents. God's commission to
them in the nursery is, to bring up these germs of life, in His nurture
admonition.

"Take the germ, and make it
A bud of moral beauty. Let the dews
Of knowledge, and the light of virtue, wake it
In richest fragrance and in purest