In our own favored country, one child is born of parents devoted solely to this world.  From his earliest moments of understanding, he hears and sees nothing commended but hunting, horse-racing, visiting, dancing, dressing, riding, parties, gaming, acquiring money with eagerness and skill, and spending it in gaiety, pleasure and luxury.  These things, he is taught by conversation and example, constitute all the good of man.  His taste is formed, his habits are riveted, and the whole character of his soul is turned to them before he is fairly sensible that there is any other good.  The question whether virtue and piety are either duties or blessings he probably never asks.  In the dawn of life he sees them neglected and despised by those whom he most reverences; and learns only to neglect and despise them also.  Of Jehovah he thinks as little, and for the same reason as a Chinese or a Hindu.  They pay their devotions to Fo and to Juggernaut:  he his to money and pleasure.  Thus he lives, and dies, a mere animal; a stranger to intelligence and morality, to his duty and his God.

Another child comes into existence in the mansion of knowledge and virtue.  From his infancy, his mind is fashioned to wisdom and piety.  In his infancy he is taught and allured to remember his Creator; and to unite, first in form and then in affection, in the household devotions of the morning and evening.  God he knows almost as soon as he can know anything.  The presence of that glorious being he is taught to realize almost from the cradle; and from the dawn of intelligence to understand the perfections and government of his Creator.  His own accountableness, as soon as he can comprehend it, he begins to feel habitually, and always.  The way of life through the Redeemer is early, and regularly explained to him by the voice of parental love; and enforced and endeared in the house of God.  As soon as possible, he is enabled to read, and persuaded to “search the Scriptures.”  Of the approach, the danger and the mischiefs of temptations, he is tenderly warned.  At the commencement of sin, he is kindly checked in his dangerous career.  To God he was solemnly given in baptism.  To God he was daily commended in fervent prayer.  Under this happy cultivation he grows up “like an olive-tree in the courts of the Lord”; and, green, beautiful and flourishing, he blossoms; bears fruit; and is prepared to be transplanted by the divine hand to a kinder soil in the regions above.

How many, and how great, are the differences in these several children!  How plainly do they all, in ordinary circumstances, arise out of their birth!  From their birth is derived, of course, the education which I have ascribed to them; and from this education spring in a great measure both character and their destiny.  The place, the persons, the circumstances, are here evidently the great things which, in the ordinary course of Providence, appear chiefly to determine what the respective men shall be; and what shall be