if souls are there “fed upon the sincere milk of the word,” and “trained up in the ways of the Lord.”  The training of the soul for heaven is both the duty and the glory of our homes.  What if parents lay up affluence here for their children, and secure for them all that the world calls interest, while they permit their souls to famish, and do nothing for their redemption!  Will not such parents be denounced in the day of judgment as unjust and unfaithful stewards?  And yet alas! how many such Christian parents there are who prostitute this highest interest of home either at the altar of mammon or of fashion!  The precious time and talents with which God has entrusted them, they squander away in things of folly and of sin, leaving their children to grow up in spiritual ignorance and wickedness, while they resort to balls and theaters and masquerades, in pursuit of unhallowed amusement and pleasure.

Such are unnatural parents as well as unjust stewards, and their homes will ere long be made desolate.  Other parents prostitute the holy trust of home to money.  They are “self-willed” stewards, “given to filthy lucre,” who, for the sake of a few dollars, will “waste the goods” of their Lord, make their homes a drudgery, and work their children like their horses, bring them up in ignorance, like “calves in the stall,” and contract their whole existence, and all their capacities, desires and hopes, in the narrow compass of work and money.

We would direct the attention of such parents to our last thought upon the stewardship of the Christian home, (the practical view of which we shall consider in the next chapter,) viz., that it involves the principle of accountability.  It implies a settlement, a time when the Master and his steward shall meet together to close accounts.  “Give an account of thy stewardship; for thou mayest be no longer steward.”  That time will be when “the dead, both small and great, shall stand before God.”  Then He will examine into your stewardship.  He will ask you how you employed your talents, and to what purpose you appropriated those interests He committed to your trust; and whether you were faithful to those souls which “hung upon your hire;” whether you “nursed them for him,” and whether you provided them with “their meat in due season.”  And if you can answer, “Yea, Lord, here are those talents which thou hast given me; behold I have gained for thee five other talents.  Here, Lord, are those children whom thou hast given me; I have brought them up in thy nurture, and trained them in thy ways.”  Your Lord will then answer, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant, thou hast been faithful over a few things; behold I will make thee ruler over many things; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord!”

But if you have been unfaithful as stewards, and have made your household unproductive for God, then you shall hear from his lips the dreadful denunciation, “Thou wicked and slothful servant!” “Take the talent from him, and cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth; for unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath!”