But, on the other hand, should you neglect them; and, as a consequence, they grow up in wickedness and crime; oh, what a source of withering remorse they would cause you!  No sin more heavily punishes the guilty, and mingles for him a more bitter cup, than the sin of parental neglect.  What if after the lapse of a few years, your neglected child be taken from you, and consigned to the cold grave, think you not that when you meet it before the bar of God, it will rise up as a witness against you, and pour down its curses upon your head!

But suppose that child grows up, unprovided for by you in its early life; and profligacy mark his pathway, and demon guilt throw its chains around him in the prison cell; and he trace back the beginning of his ruin to your unfaithfulness, oh, with what pungency would the reflection send the pang of remorse to your soul!

     “Go ask that musing father, why yon grave So narrow, and so noteless,
     might not close Without a tear?”

Because of the bitter and heart-stricken memories of a neglected, ruined child that slumbers there!

Or suppose that you die before your neglected children, think you not that the recollection of your past parental unfaithfulness will plant thorns in your pillow, and invest with deeper shades of horror your descent to the dark valley of death?  And oh, when you meet them before the bar of the avenging judge, most fearful will be your interview with them.  Tell me, how will you dare to meet them there, when the voice of their blood will cry out from the hallowed ground of home against you!  And then, eternity, oh, eternity! who shall bring out from the secrets of the eternal world, those awful maledictions which God has attached to parental unfaithfulness?

Provide, therefore, for your family as the Lord commands.  Remember that if you do not, you “deny the faith and are worse than an infidel;” and in the day of Judgment “it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah than for you.”

CHAPTER III.

Family religion.

  “Lo! where yon cottage whitens through the green,
  The loveliest feature of a matchless scene;
  Beneath its shading elm, with pious fear,
  An aged mother draws her children near,
  While from the Holy Word, with earnest air,
  She teaches them the privilege of prayer. 
  Look! how their infant eyes with rapture speak;
  Mark the flushed lily on the dimpled cheek;
  Their hearts are filled with gratitude and love,
  Their hopes are centered in a world above!”

The Christian home demands a family religion.  This makes it a “household of God.”  Without this it is but a “den of thieves.”  It is “the one thing needful.”

What is “family religion?” It is not an exotic, but is indigenous to the Christian home.  It is not a “new measure,” but an essential ingredient of the home-constitution,—­coexistent with home itself.  The first family “began to call upon the name of the Lord;” the first parent acted as high-priest of God in his family.