having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.’  Will none of these hard words hit some grown people in our day?  Will not they fill some of us with dread, lest the parents now-a-days should be as much in fault as the children of whom they complain; lest the parents’ sins should be but too often the cause of the children’s sins?  Read through St. Paul’s sad list of sins, and see how every young man’s sin in it has some old man’s sin corresponding to it.  St. Paul does not part his list, and I dare not, and cannot.  St. Paul mixes the parents’ and the children’s sins together in his words, and I fear that we do the same in our actions.

Oh! beware, beware, you who complain of the behaviour of children now-a-days, lest your children have as much cause to complain of you.  Are your children selfish, lovers of themselves?—­See that you have not set them the example by your own covetousness or laziness.  Are they boastful?—­See that your pride has not taught them.  Incontinent and profligate?—­See that your own fierceness has not taught them.  If they see you unable to master your own temper, they will not care to try to master their appetites.  Are they disobedient and unthankful?—­See, well, then that your want of natural affection to them, your neglect, and harshness, and want of feeling and tenderness, has not made the balance of unkindness fearfully even between you.  Are your children disobedient to you?—­ See that you have not taught them to be so, by breaking your word to them, by letting them see you deceitful to others, till they have lost all trust in you, all reverence for you.  Above all, are your children lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God?—­Oh! beware, beware, lest you have made them so,—­lest you have been blasphemers against God, even when you have been fancying that you talked religion.  Beware lest you have been teaching them dark, cruel, superstitious thoughts about God,—­making them look up to Him not as their heavenly Father, but as a stern taskmaster whom they must obey, not from gratitude, but from fear of hell, and so have made God look so unlovely in their eyes that ’there is no beauty in Him that they should desire Him.’  Can you wonder at their loving pleasure rather than loving God, when you show them nothing in God’s character to love, but everything to dread and shrink from?  And last of all, are your children despisers of those who are good, inclined to laugh at religion, to suspect and sneer at pious people, and call them hypocrites?  Oh! beware, beware, lest your lip-religion, your dead faith, your inconsistent practice, has not been the cause of it.  If you, as St. Paul says, have a form of godliness, and yet in your life and actions deny the power of it, by living without God in the world, and following the lowest maxims of the world in everything but what you call the salvation of your souls, what wonder if your children grow up despisers of those who are good?  If they see you preaching