so, by breaking your word to
them, by letting them see you deceitful to others, till they have
lost all trust in you, all reverence for you. Above all, are your
children lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God?--Oh! beware,
beware, lest you have made them so,--lest you have been blasphemers
against God, even when you have been fancying that you talked
religion. Beware lest you have been teaching them dark, cruel,
superstitious thoughts about God,--making them look up to Him not as
their heavenly Father, but as a stern taskmaster whom they must
obey, not from gratitude, but from fear of hell, and so have made
God look so unlovely in their eyes that 'there is no beauty in Him
that they should desire Him.' Can you wonder at their loving
pleasure rather than loving God, when you show them nothing in God's
character to love, but everything to dread and shrink from? And
last of all, are your children despisers of those who are good,
inclined to laugh at religion, to suspect and sneer at pious people,
and call them hypocrites? Oh! beware, beware, lest your lip-
religion, your dead faith, your inconsistent practice, has not been
the cause of it. If you, as St. Paul says, have a form of
godliness, and yet in your life and actions deny the power of it, by
living without God in the world, and following the lowest maxims of
the world in everything but what you call the salvation of your
souls, what wonder if your children grow up despisers of those who
are good? If they see you preaching one thing, and practising
another, they will learn to fancy that all godly people do the same.
If they see your religion a sham, they will learn to fancy all
religion false also. Oh! woe, woe, most terrible, to those who thus
harden their own children's hearts, and destroy in them, as too many
do, all faith in God and man, all hope, all charity! Woe to them!
for the Lord Himself, who came to lay the axe to the root of the
tree, said of such, 'If any man cause one of these little ones to
offend, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about
his neck, and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea.'

So it is too often now-a-days, and so it will be, until people
condescend to learn over again that simple old Church Catechism
which they were taught when they were little, and to teach it to
their children, not only with their lips but in their lives.

'The Church Catechism!' some here will say to themselves with a
smile, '