in bearing him, let the ravens of the brooks pick it out, and the young eagles eat it." [1] There are on record many instances of undutiful children, who were made the signal objects of the divine vengeance. The disobedience of Absalom to his father David did not go unpunished: he perished miserably: three lances transfixed his body. [2] But of those who resist the spiritual authority of the priest it is written: " He that will be proud, and refuse to obey the commandment of the priest who ministereth at that time to the Lord thy God, by the decree of the judge that man shall die." [3]
As, then, the law of God commands children to honour their parents and render them an obsequious obedience, so are there reciprocal duties which parents owe to their children, to bring them up in the knowledge and the practice of religion, and to give them the best precepts for the regulation of their lives; that instructed in the truths of religion, and prepared to make these truths the guiding principles of their conduct through life, they may preserve inviolate their fidelity to God, and serve him in holiness. This duty of parents is beautifully illustrated in the conduct of the parents of the chaste Susanna. [4] The pastor, therefore, will admonish parents to be to their children models of the virtues, which it is their duty to inculcate, of justice, chastity, modesty, and, in a word, of every Christian virtue. He will also admonish them to guard particularly against three things, in which they but too often transgress. in the first place, they are not by words or actions to exercise too much harshness towards their children: this is the instruction of St. Paul in his Epistle to the Colossians: " Fathers," says he, " provoke not your children to indignation, lest they be discouraged." [5] Parental severity may, it is to be apprehended, break the spirit of the child, and render him abject and timid, afraid of every thing, and is therefore to be deprecated: instead of indulging intemperate passion, the parent should reprove in the spirit of parental correction, not of revenge. Should a fault be committed which requires reproof and chastisement, the parent should not, on the other hand, by an unseasonable indulgence, overlook its correction: children often become depraved by too much lenity and indulgence; and the pastor, therefore, will deter from such criminal weakness, by the warning example of Heli, who, in the misguided fondness of a father's feelings, for got his duty to religion, and was in consequence visited with the heaviest chastisements. [6] Finally, in the instruction and education of their children, let them not follow the pernicious example of many parents, whose sole concern it is to leave their children wealth, riches, an ample and splendid fortune; who stimulate them not to piety and religion, or to honourable and virtuous pursuits, but to avarice, and an increase of wealth;
