of husbands, fathers, sons, neighbours, subjects, and
governors, have you been? And above all, Malachi says, the root
question of all would be, what sort of fathers have you been to your
children? What sort of children to your fathers? Does that seem to
you a small question, my friends? Would you have rather expected to
hear John the Baptist ask, what sort of saints they had been? What
sort of doctrines they were professing?

A small question? Look at these two little words, Father and Son.
Father and Son! Are they not the most deep and awful, as well as
the most blessed and hopeful words on earth? Do they not tell us
the very mystery of God's being? Are they not the very name of God,
God The Father and God The Son, knit together by one Holy Spirit of
Love to each other and to all, who proceeds alike from The Father
and from The Son? And then, will you think it a light matter to ask
fallen creatures made in the likeness of that perfect Father and
that perfect Son, what sort of fathers and sons they have been? God
help us all, and give us grace to ask ourselves that question
morning and night, before the great and terrible day of the Lord
come, lest He come and smite this land with a curse.

I have been led to think deeply and to speak openly upon this solemn
matter, my friends, by seeing, as who can help seeing, the great
division and estrangement between the old and the young which is
growing up in our days. I do not, alas! I cannot, deny the
complaints which old people commonly make. Old people complain that
young people are grown too independent, disobedient, saucy, and what
not. It is too true, frightfully, miserably true, that there is not
the same reverence for parents as there was a generation back;--that
the children break loose from their parents, spend their parents'
money, choose their own road in life, their own politics, their own
religion, alas! too often, for themselves;--that young people now
presume to do and say a hundred things which they would not have
dreamed in old times. And they are ready enough to cry out that all
this is a sign of the last days, of which, they say, St. Paul speaks
in 2 Tim. iii. 4--when men 'shall be disobedient to parents,
unthankful, boasters, heady, high-minded, despisers of those who are
good, lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God.' My friends, my
friends, it is far better for us who have children, instead of
prying into the times and seasons which Go