you may establish them in the best business; you may fit them for an honorable and responsible position in life; you may be careful of their health and reputation; and you may caress them with all the tender ardor of the parental heart and hand; yet if you provide not for their souls; if you seek not their salvation; if you minister only to their temporal, and not to their eternal welfare, all will be vain, yea, a curse both to you and to them.  Husband and wife may love each other, and live together in all the peace and harmony of reciprocated affection; yet if the religious part of their home-mission remain unfulfilled, their family is divested of its noblest attraction; its greatest interests will fall into ruin; its highest destiny will not be attained; and soon its fruits will be entombed in oblivion; while their children, neglected and perishing, will look back upon that home with a bitterness of spirit which the world can neither soothe nor extract!

How many such homes there are!  Even the homes of church members are too often reckless of their high vocation.  Their moral stewardship is neglected; their dedications, formal and heartless.  No prayers are heard; no bible read; no instructions given; no pious examples set; no holy discipline exercised.  Their interests, their hopes and their enjoyments; their education, their labor and their rest, are all of the world,—­worldly.  The curse of God is upon such a home!

The importance and responsibility of the home-mission may be seen in its vicarious character, and in its influence upon the members.  The principle of moral reproduction is manifest in all the home-relations.  What the parent does is reproduced, as it were, in the child, and will tell upon the generations that follow them.  Those close affinities by which all the members are allied, give to each a moulding influence over all the rest.  The parents live, not for themselves alone, but for their children, and the consequence of such a life is also entailed upon their offspring.  “The iniquity of the fathers shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.”  If the parent “sow to the flesh,” the child, with him, “shall of the flesh reap corruption;” but if he “sow to the spirit,” his offspring, with him, shall “of the spirit reap life everlasting.”

Sacred and profane history proves and illustrates this great truth.  Did not God punish the first born of Israel, because their fathers had sinned?  And is it not a matter of daily observation that the wickedness of the parent is entailed upon the child?  Such is indeed the affinity between them that the child cannot, unless by some special interposition of Providence, escape the curse of a parent’s sin.  “If one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.”

The guilt and condemnation of unfaithfulness to the home-mission may be inferred from its importance and responsibility.  Those who are unfaithful are guilty of “blood.”  We see the curse of such neglect in that deterioration of character which so rapidly succeeds parental delinquency.  They must answer before God for the loss which the soul, the state, and the church sustain thereby.  “It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for them.”