all its natural
affinities give way to complete alienation. The children of such homes,
when grown up, are the most lawless and reckless, ready at once to pass
over from extreme servitude to libertinism.

The government of the Christian home lies in a medium between these two
extremes. It is mild, yet decisive, firm; not lawless, yet not despotic;
but combines in proper order and harmony, the true elements of parental
authority and filial subordination. Love and fear harmonize; the child
fears because he loves; and is prompted to obedience by both. "But give thy
son his way, he will hate thee and scorn thee together."

Christian parents! be faithful to the government of your household. Like
Abraham, command your household. Without this, your children will be your
curse and the curse of the state. Wherever they go they will become the
standard-bearer of the turbulent, and brandish the torch of discord, until
at last, perhaps, they will die in a dungeon or upon the gibbet. And then
the curse will recoil upon you. It will strike deep into your hearts. It
will come to you in the darkness of unfulfilled promises and blighted hopes
and injured affections and desolated homes and wounded spirits and
disgraced names and infamous memories! And you, in the face of these, will
go down with bleeding sorrow to the grave, and up to the bar of God with
the blood of your children's destruction upon your skirts, its voice crying
unto you from the grave of infamy and from the world of eternal
retribution. You will then see the folly and the fruits of your diseased
affection and misguided indulgence,--

"A kindness,--most unkind, that hath always spared the rod;
A weak and numbing indecision in the mind that should be master;
A foolish love, pregnant of hate, that never frowned on sin;
A moral cowardice, that never dared command!"

CHAPTER XIX.

HOME-DISCIPLINE.

"In ancient days,
There dwelt a sage called Discipline,
His eye was meek, and a smile
Played on his lips, and in his speech was heard
Paternal sweetness, dignity, and love.
The occupation dearest to his heart
Was to encourage goodness.
If e'er it chanced, as sometimes chance it must,
That one, among so many, overleaped
The limits of control, his gentle eye
Grew stern, and darted a severe rebuke,
His frown was full of terror, and his voice
Shook the delinquent with such fits of awe
As left him not, till peni