l interposition can break them up. Hence the importance of an early
training up to good. If parents but leave their children to their own ways,
they will run into evil habits; for sin is an epidemic. Profanity and
falsehood and all other outrages against God will soon become the
controlling habits of their lives. But when taken early, parents have
complete power over their offspring. It is, therefore, a gross abuse of the
Christian home when parents become indifferent to the formation of habits.
It is their duty to crush every evil habit in its incipient state.

The forming of a good habit may not at first be congenial with our
feelings. It may be irksome. But if we persevere in it, that which at
first was painful and difficult will soon be a source of enjoyment. Thus
the habit of family prayer may at first be repulsive even to the Christian
parent; a feeling of delicacy and the sense of unworthiness may, at the
family altar, repress the feelings of enjoyment experienced in the closet;
but soon the habit of this devotion will be formed, when it will be enjoyed
as an essential part of home. To abandon it would be like breaking up the
tenderest ties which bind the members together. The same may be said of the
omission of a duty. How easily can the Christian form the habit of omitting
family prayer or any other duty! Every such omission but forms and
increases the habit, until it gains an ascendancy over our sense of duty,
and at last exhibits its sovereign power in our total abandonment of the
duty. Each omission has the power of reproducing itself in other and more
frequent omissions. In this way Christian homes insensibly become
unfaithful to their high vocation, and degenerate finally into complete
apathy and estrangement from God. That indulgence which the misguided
sympathy of too many parents prompts to, and which does away with all
parental restraint, is the cause of children coming under the curse of evil
habits. In this way parents often contribute to the temporal and eternal
ruin of their offspring. This indulgence is no evidence of tender love, but
of parental infatuation. It shows a blind and unholy love,--a love which
owns no law, which is governed by no sense of duty, and which excludes all
discipline; and hence unlike the love of God, who "chastiseth every one
whom He loveth and receiveth."

The force and influence of home-habits will teach us the importance of
establishing such only as receive the sanction