We have seen that God has given to you the ability and means of making them subservient to his glory; and hence from you he will require them as entrusted talents.  If you have been unfaithful to them, your punishment will be in proportion to the wretchedness entailed upon your children.  If, instead of the bread from heaven, you feed their souls with the husks of life, and lead them on by the opiates of bastard joys; if, “when they ask of you bread, you give them a stone, or for a fish, you give them a serpent,” will it not be “more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for you?”

Thus, therefore, you see, christian parents, how your responsibility is measured, by the magnitude of those interests committed to your care, by the kind of influence you exert over them, and by the enormity of that guilt and wo which are consequent upon your unfaithfulness.  Let this be an incentive to parental integrity.  The day is rapidly approaching when you must give an account of your stewardship.  Oh, what, if in that day you behold your children “fit for the eternal burning,” and remember that that fitness is but the impress of a parent’s hand!

Though it is painful to lose a child here; bitter tears are shed; pungent agonies are felt; there are heart-burnings kindled over the grave of buried love.  But oh, how much more agonizing it is to bend over the dying bed of an impenitent, ruined child!  And especially if, in that terrible moment, he turns his eyes, wild with despair and ominous of curses, upon the parents, and ascribes his ruin to their neglect!  Let me ask you, would not this part of that sad drama add to your cup of bitterness, give a fearful emphasis to all your sighs, and burnings to your flooding tears?  God would also speak to you, and say as he did to Cain, “the voice of thy” children’s “blood crieth unto me!” “And now thou art cursed from the earth which hath opened her mouth to receive thy” children’s “blood from thy hand.”

But the scene would not close at the death-bed of your child; the second act would open at the bar of God.  The maledictions of that ruined one would there be poured out with increased fury upon you.  Parents of my home on earth!  I am lost—­lost forever!  Soon I shall go where “the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.”  Had you, in the home of my childhood, but instructed me, and been as faithful to my soul as you were to my body, I might stand here with a palm of victory in my hand, a crown of glory on my head, the joy of the redeemed in my heart, and with hosannas of praise upon my lips, rise upward to the untold felicities of God’s eternal throne!  But you did not!  You fed my body, but you starved my soul, and left it to perish forever!  Cursed, be the day in which you begat me, and the paps that gave me suck!  Cursed be the years that I lived under your roof,—­cursed be you!  Oh, parents, such rebuke would leave an undying worm in your souls; and would cry unto you from the very depths of hell.