tleness must soften authority.

Wisdom muft

give weight and dignity to our character. Purity of manners must add force to inftruction, and impart confiftency to devotion. While Heaven is addreffed by our humble and fervent prayers; the eyes, the hearts of our children must be addreffed by the beauties, excellencies, and worth of our example.

Painful is it to reflect, that there are parents, to whom the language of devotion is an unknown language; whofe thoughts, except under fome deep diftrefs, feldcm afcend to God; and who, however they may wish to see their children profper in the world, have very little concern, whether they be adorned with virtue, and ripen for heaven. We lament the conduct of such parents: we lament the state of their children.

Ye, Chriftians, are not infenfible to the duties and obligations of the parental character. We truft, we may congratulate your offspring as the heirs of bleffings, the fruit of parental devotion and prayer.

Oh! ye rifing race, ye youthful minds, into whofe hearts have been infinuated, from early years; a ftrong fenfe of the wif

dom of piety and virtue, by the prayers ye have heard in the family; let virtue be your purfuit, and to your Creator devote your first years. To his enlightening influences, to his guidance, to his favour, have the manly devotion of the father, and the pious fondness of the mother, commended you. Could ye have witnessed the overflowings of their hearts in the unbended moments of their religious retirements; ye would have perceived that through your growing years, and. on every rifing event of your lives, this hath been the burden of their fouls, that ye might "c grow in wisdom as in ftature, and in favour "with God and man." Ye would have heard this request uttered with fervour from their lips, "O GOD, O GOD of mercy, and God of

wisdom, give unto my children a heart to "know and ferve thee." Believe it, this hath been the concern of their minds, this hath been the subject of their fupplications for you. Should it not have a great and good effect upon you? Their wisdom, their experience, their piety instructed them, that in piety and virtue ye would find your true intereft, and honour, and glory, and happiness. Feel the

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obligation to make what was the fubject of their prayer the aim and purfuit of your lives. Then their prayers will be answered, and their hopes accomplished. Then the favour of heaven, implored, in the seasons of devotion, will defcend on you, as the dew on the grass. Then fhall ye grow up the pillars and ornaments of truth and religion on earth, and the future glorious inhabitants of Heaven. Amen.

"Be ready always to give an answer to every one that "asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you, with "meekness and fear."

TH

"HIS exhortation, as it is expreffive of the manly and rational way which the first preachers of the gospel took to bring men over to the Chriftian faith, and to confirm them in it, so it is equally applicable to every form and mode of a religious profeffion. It supposeth, that men ought, in the concerns of religion, to be determined by reason, by the clearness of argument, and the ftrength of evidence. This is neceffary to justify their conduct to their own minds, and to vindicate it to others. :

It is more than probable, that one time or another a man may be called upon to give an account of his principles and profeffion, and to affign the grounds of the preference he gives to one form of religion above another; and if he be not well informed upon the point, he must be exposed to confufion, and be liable to be drawn afide by the weakest attack on his principles. Principles, indeed, he can scarcely be faid to have, who is not able to give a reafon of the hope that is in him, and of the par-. ticular line of conduct he pursues. Yet it may be feared, that this is very often the case, when it is confidered how many grow up,. under the influence of education, in an attachment to one mode of religion, without being inftructed in the grounds of it, or re flecting on the propriety and wisdom of the part they act. This is evidently the cafe with the bulk of mankind, in all nations who can give no other reason of the hope that is in them, than that it is the hope of their country, and was that of their parents.

But if this ignorance be culpable in any, it is peculiarly fo in those who diffent from the religion of their country: for what can