e, such as it was the fashion of that day, at least in certain
quarters, to bestow upon those who were outside of the high-walled
enclosures in which many persons; not naturally unamiable or exclusive,
found themselves imprisoned. Since that time what changes have taken
place! Who will believe that a well-behaved and reputable citizen could
have been denounced as a "moral parricide," because he attacked some of
the doctrines in which he was supposed to have been brought up? A single
thought should have prevented the masked theologian who abused his
incognito from using such libellous language.

Much, and in many families most, of the religious teaching of children
is committed to the mother. The experience of William Cullen Bryant,
which I have related in his own words, is that of many New England
children. Now, the sternest dogmas that ever came from a soul cramped
or palsied by an obsolete creed become wonderfully softened in passing
between the lips of a mother. The cruel doctrine at which all but
case-hardened "professionals" shudder cones out, as she teaches and
illustrates it, as unlike its original as the milk which a peasant
mother gives her babe is unlike the coarse food which furnishes her
nourishment. The virus of a cursing creed is rendered comparatively
harmless by the time it reaches the young sinner in the nursery. Its
effects fall as far short of what might have been expected from its
virulence as the pearly vaccine vesicle falls short of the terrors of
the confluent small-pox. Controversialists should therefore be careful
(for their own sakes, for they hurt nobody so much as themselves) how
they use such terms as "parricide" as characterizing those who do not
agree in all points with the fathers whom or whose memory they honor
and venerate. They might with as much propriety call them matricides,
if they did not agree with the milder teachings of their mothers. I can
imagine Jonathan Edwards in the nursery with his three-year-old child
upon his knee. The child looks up to his face and says to him,--"Papa,
nurse tells me that you say God hates me worse than He hates one of
those horrid ugly snakes that crawl all round. Does God hate me so?"

"Alas! my child, it is but too true. So long as you are out of Christ
you are as a viper, and worse than a viper, in his sight."

By and by, Mrs. Edwards, one of the loveliest of women and sweetest of
mothers, comes into the nursery. The child is crying.

"What is