THE LIFE OF THE LAD.

"Seeing that his life is bound up in the lad's life."-Genesis xliv. 30

THESE

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HESE words were spoken by Judah as descriptive of the tenderness and affection which Jacob felt towards Benjamin, the youngest son of that patriarchal family; but they are words just as appropriate to hundreds of parents in this house—“ since his life is bound up in the lad's life." I have known parents that seemed to have but little interest in their children. A father says: My son must look out for himself. If he comes up well, all right; if he turns out badly, I cannot help it. I am not responsible for his behaviour. He must take the same risk in life that I took." As well might the shepherd throw a lamb into a den of lions and then say, "Little lamb, look out for yourself!" It is generally the case that even the beast looks after its young. I have gone through the woods on a summer's day, and I have heard a great outcry in a bird's nest, and I have climbed up to see what was the matter; I found out that the birds were starving, and that the mother-bird had gone off, not to come back again. But that is an exception. It is generally the case that the old bird will pick your eyes out rather than let you come nigh its brood. The lion will rend you in twain if you approach. too nearly the whelps. The fowl in the barnyard, clumsy-footed and heavy-winged, flies fiercely at you if you come too near the little group, and God intended every father and mother to be the protection and the help of the child. Jesus comes into every dwelling, and says to the father or mother: "You have been looking after this child's body and mind; the time has come when you ought to be looking after its immortal soul." I stand before hundreds of people with whom the question, morning, noon, and night is, "What is to become of this child? What will be its history? Will it choose paths of virtue or vice? Will it accept Christ or reject Him? Where will it spend eternity?" I read of a vessel that foundered. The boats were launched; many of the passengers were struggling in the water. A mother with one hand beat the wave, and with the other hand

lifted up her little child towards the lifeboat, crying: "Save my child! save my child!" The impassioned outcry of that mother is the prayer of hundreds of Christian people who sit listening this morning while I speak. I propose to show some of the causes of parental anxiety, and then how that anxiety may

be alleviated.

I find the first cause of parental anxiety in the inefficiency and imperfection of parents themselves. We have a slight hope, all of us, that our children may escape our faults. We hide our imperfections and think they will steer clear of them. Alas, there is a poor prospect of that. There is more probability that they will choose our vices than choose our virtues. There is something like sacredness in parental imperfections when the child looks upon them. The folly of the parents is not so repulsive when the child looks at it. He says: "Father indulges in it; mother indulges in it; it can't be so bad." Your boy, ten years of age, goes up a back street smoking his cigar-an old stump that he found in the street-and a neighbor accosts him and says: "What are you doing this for? What would your father say if he knew it?" The boy says: The boy says: "Oh, father does that himself!" There is not one of us this morning that would deliberately choose that his children should in all things follow his example, and it is the consciousness of imperfection on our part as parents, that makes us most anxious for children.

We are also distressed on account of the unwisdom of our discipline and instruction. It requires a great deal of ingenuity to build a house or fashion a ship; but more ingenuity to build the temple of a child's character, and launch it on the great ocean of time and eternity. Where there is one parent that seems qualified for the work, there seem to be twenty parents who miserably fail. Here is a father who says: "My child shall know nothing but religion; he shall hear nothing but religion; and he shall see nothing but religion. The boy is aroused at six o'clock in the morning to recite the Ten Commandments. He is awakened off the sofa on Sunday night to see how much he knows of the Westminster catechism. It is religion, morning, noon, and night. Passages of Scripture are plastered on the bedroom wall. He looks for the day of the month in a religious almanac. Every minister that comes to the house is told to take the boy aside and talk to him, and tell him what a great sinner he is. After a while the boy comes to that period of life, when he is too old for chastisement and too young to know and feel

the force of moral principle. Father and mother are sitting up for the boy to come home. It is nine o'clock at night-ten o'clock-it is twelve o'clock-it is half-past twelve o'clock, and they hear the night-key jingle in the door. They say he is coming. George goes very softly through the hall, hoping to get upstairs before he is accosted. The father says: "George, where have you been?" "Been out!" Yes he has been out, and he has been down, and he is on the broad road to destruction for this life and the life to come. Father says: "There is no

use in the Ten Commandments; the catechism seems to me to be an utter failure." Ah, my friend, you make a very great mistake. You stuffed that child with religion until he could not digest it; you made that which is a joy in many households, an abhorrence in yours. A man in mid-life said to me: "I can't become a Christian. In my father's house I got such a prejudice against religion, I don't want any of it. My father was one of the best men that ever lived, but he had such severe notions about things, and he jammed religion down my throat until I don't want any of it, sir." There have been some who have erred in that direction.

There are households where mother pulls one way and father pulls the other way. Father says: Father says: "My son, I told you the first time I caught you in a falsehood, I would chastise you, and now I am going to do it." Mother says: "Don't; let him off this time." In some families it is all scolding and fretfulness with the child; from Monday morning to Saturday night, it is that style of culture. The boy is picked at, and picked at, and picked at. Now, you might better give one sound chastisement, and have done with it, than to indulge in the perpetual scolding and fretfulness. There is more health in one good thunder-storm, than in three or four days of cold drizzle.

Here is a parent who says: "I will not err on the side that parent has erred in being too strict with his children. I will let mine do as they please. If they want to come into prayers, they can; if they want to stay out, they can. If they want to play cards, they can; they can do anything they please, and there shall be no hindrance. Go it! Here are tickets for the opera and theatre, son; take your friends with you; do whatever you desire." One day, a gentleman comes in from the bank to the father's office, and says: They want to see you over at the bank a minute." Father goes into the bank. The cashier that your cheque ?" Father looks at it, and says: "No, I never

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says:

"Is

gave that cheque; I never cross a 'T' in that way; I never make the curl to a 'Y' in that way; it is not my cheque; that's a forgery: send for the police! "Ah," says the cashier, "don't be so quick; your son did that!" The fact was that the boy had been out in dissipating circles, and ten and fifty dollars went in that direction, and he had been treated, and he had to treat others, and the boy felt he must have five hundred dollars to keep himself in that circle. That night, the father sits up for the son to come home. It is one o'clock before he comes into the hall. He comes in very much flushed, his eye glaring and his breath offensive. Father says: "My son, how can you do so? I have given you everything you wanted, and everything to make you comfortable and happy, and now I find in my old age that you are a spendthrift, a libertine, and a drunkard!" son says: "Now, father, what's the use of your talking in that way? You told me I might have a good time, and to go it. I have been acting on your suggestion, that's all!" And so one parent errs on one side and another parent errs on the other side, and how to strike a happy medium between severity and too great leniency, and train our sons and daughters for usefulness on earth and bliss in heaven, is a question that agitates every Christian household in my congregation. Where so many good men and women have failed, is it strange that we should sometimes doubt the propriety of our theory and the accuracy of our kind of government.

The

Again, parental anxiety often arises from an early exhibition of sinfulness in the child. The morning glories bloom for a little while under the sun, and then they shut up as the heat comes on; but there are flowers along the Amazon that blaze their beauty for weeks at a time; but the short-lived morningglory fulfils its mission as well as the Victoria Regia. There are some people who take forty, fifty, or sixty years to develop. Then, there are little children who fling their beauty on the vision and vanish. They are morning-glories that cannot stand the glare of the hot noon sun of trial. You have known all such little children. They were pale; they were ethereal; there was something very wonderfully deep in the eye; they had a gentle foot and soft hand, and something almost supernatural in their behaviour-ready to be wafted away. You had such an one in your household. Gone now! It was too delicate a plant for this rough world. The Heavenly Gardener saw it, and took it in. We make splendid Sunday-school books out of such children,

but they almost always die. I have noticed, for the most part, that children that live sometimes get cross, and pick up bad words in the street, and quarrel with brother and sister, and prove unmistakeably that they are wicked-as the Bible says, going astray from the womb, speaking lies. See the little ones in the Sabbath class, so sunshiny and beautiful. You would think they were always so, but mother, seated a little way off, looks over at those children, and thinks of the awful time she had to get them ready. After the boy or girl comes a little further on in life, the mark of sin upon them is still more evident. The son comes in from a pugilistic encounter in the street, bearing the marks of a defeat. The daughter practises positive deception, and the parent says: "What shall I do? I can't always be correcting and scolding, and yet these things must be stopped." It is especially sad if the parent sees his own faults copied by the child. It is very hard work to pull up a nettle that we ourselves planted. We remember that the greatest frauds that ever shook the banking-houses of the country started from a boy's deception a good many years ago; and the gleaming blade of the murderer is only another blade of the knife with which the boy struck at his comrade. The cedar of Lebanon that wrestles with the blast, started from seed lodged in the side of the mountain, and the most tremendous dishonesties of the world once toddled out from a cradle. All these things make parents anxious.

Anxiety on the part of parents, also, arises from a consciousness that there are so many temptations thrown all around our young people. It may be almost impossible to take a castle by siege-straightforward siege-but suppose in the night there is a traitor within, and he goes down and draws the bolt, and swings open the great door, and then the castle falls immediately. That is the trouble with the hearts of the young; they have foes without and foes within. There are a great many who try to make our young people believe it is a sign of weakness to be pure. The man will toss his head and take dramatic attitudes, and tell of his own indiscretions, and ask the young man if he } would not like to do the same. And they call him verdant, and they say he is green and unsophisticated, and wonder how he can bear the puritanical straight-jacket. They tell him he ought to break from his mother's apron-strings, and they say: "I will show you all about town. Come with me. You ought to see the world. It won't hurt you. Do as you please, but it will be the