consequences, as well as the injustice,
of refraining to commend a child, when commendation is due. The timorous
fear, in many conscientious parents, of making children _vain_, is the
common excuse for this unnatural conduct. Such persons seem to confound
things _vain_ with things _valuable_, though they are perfectly opposed
to each other. Approbation for any definite quality, excites the
individual to excel in _that_ quality, whether it be worthless or
otherwise. But virtuous deeds are not worthless; and by commending, as
our Lord repeatedly did, those who have done well, they, by that
principle of our nature of which we are here speaking, are strongly
excited to do better. To feed vanity, is to commend vanities; and they
who prize and commend beauty, or fashion, or dress, or frivolous
accomplishments, may be guilty of this folly; but not the parent or the
person who commends in a child those things which are really
commendable, and after which it is his greatest glory to aspire.

7. We have already taken notice of Nature's mode of employing motives
for the prevention of evil, and for the encouragement of the child in
virtue, and how this is to be imitated in the education of the young;
but we have left for this last section, and for separate consideration,
the greatest and most powerful motive of all. This is a view of the
inherent sinfulness and danger of sin, and the means appointed by God
for man's redemption from it. All other motives to restrain men from
sin, and to induce them to follow holiness, when compared with an
enlightened view of this one, sink into insignificance. God's hatred of
sin, and his holy abhorrence of it in every form, when contemplated in
the abstract, may have a response from the head of him who compares it
with his own detestation of meanness, and fraud, and profligacy; but
when this hatred of vice in the Almighty is viewed in connection with
gospel truth, and is contemplated in its effects upon One to whom it was
only imputed, it begins to wear a very different complexion; and, as a
motive to beware of that which God is determined to punish, and which he
would not pass over even in his own Son, it leaves all other motives at
an immeasurable distance. The same thing may be said of God's goodness
and mercy in the gospel, as a motive for us to love him, and to glory in
denying ourselves to serve him. The extent of the danger from which he
has saved us, the amount and the permanence of the glo