sanctity of home, and if we have a child
there, we shall find affection without alloy, a welcome that leaps from
the heart in sunshine to the face, and speaks right from the soul;--a
companion who is not afraid or ashamed of us, who makes no calculation
about our friendship, who has faith in it, and requires of us perfect
faith in return, and whose sincerity rebukes our worldliness, and makes
us wonder at the world. And if all this makes us better and happier,
if it keeps our hearts from hardness and attrition, if it begets in us
something of the same sincerity, and hallows us with something of
the same affection, if it softens and purifies us at all, then do not
children, in this respect perform a mission for us?

And shall we not learn from them more confidence in human nature, seeing
that "the child is father to the man," and that much that seems cold and
hard in men may conceal the remains of childhood's better feeling? And,
also, shall it not make us deplore and guard against those influences
which can change the sincere and loving child into the deceitful and
selfish man-that cover the spring of genuine feeling with the thick rime
of worldliness, and petrify the tender chords of the heart into rough,
unfeeling sinews? The man should not be, in all respects, as the child.
The child cannot have the glory of the man. If it is not polluted by his
vices, it is not ennobled by his virtues. But in so much as the child
awakens in us tenderness, and teaches us sincerity, and counteracts our
coarser and harder tendencies, and cheers us in our isolation from human
hearts, by binding us close with a warm affection, and sheds ever around
our path the mirrored sunshine of our youth and our simplicity, in so
much the child accomplishes for us a blessed mission.

II. Children teach us faith and confidence. Man soon becomes proud with
reason, and impatient of restraint. He thinks he knows, or ought to
know, the whole mystery of the universe. It is not easy for him to take
anything upon trust, or to lie low in the hand of God. But the child is
full of faith. He is not old enough to speculate, and the things he sees
are to him so strange and wonderful that he can easily believe in "the
things that are unseen." He propounds many questions, but entertains no
doubts as to God and heaven. And what confidence has he in his father's
government and his mother's providence!

I do not say, here, that a man's faith should be as a child's fa