ms no connection whatever between the instruction and the
conversion of the individual, no such connection exists? It is my firm
conviction that a person who has received instruction in a Sabbath-school
is much more likely to receive the truth in the love of it, than is the
individual who has been brought up in complete ignorance of the truths of
the gospel. The heart and understanding of the former may be compared to
the ground broken up, and prepared for the seed; while those of the
latter are like the field through which the plow has never passed, and
the face of which has never been prepared; to sow seed on which is, in
general, to cast it upon "stony ground, where" it is either picked up by
the "birds of the air," or, should it chance to take root, soon "withers
away, because it has no deepness of earth."

Secondly: if no positive good resulted from Sabbath-schools, the amount
of negative good produced would be sufficient to compensate for all the
labor and toil of the teachers, and to warrant their continuance and
support. How much Sabbath-breaking is prevented by these instructions! A
very great proportion of those children who attend Sabbath-schools would,
but for them, be spending their time in running about the streets, and
in profaning the Lord's day; and, by the unholy companionships which they
must form, into how much of profligacy and vice would they be led! Is it
true on the one hand, "train up a child in the way he should go; and when
he is old, he will not depart from it?" Then it is equally true, that if
a child be trained up in the way in which he should not go, when he is
old, he is not likely to depart from it! So that by the prevention of
Sabbath-breaking, and its consequent train of evils, you actually lessen
the amount of crime in riper years. Children _will_ be educated; and if
the _people of God_ do not educate them for _their_ Master, and train
them for heaven, the servants of the _devil will_ not be slow in
educating them _for theirs_, and in training them for hell! I conceive
that none, save the _Tractarians of Oxford, and their party_, will deny
the beneficial moral influence which such Sabbath instruction has exerted
upon our teeming population. Go to the gloomy prisons, and search in the
lonely cells for those wretched beings who through crime have become
their inhabitants, and make the inquiry as to who are the tenants of
those places; and the result of that inquiry will be, an overwhelmin