“Then why resign into a stranger’s hand
  A task so much within your own command,
  That God and Nature, and your interest too
  Seem with one voice to delegate to you?”

The same may be said of boarding schools, to which many parents send their children to rid themselves of the trouble of training them up.  They are sent there at the very age in which they mostly need the fostering care of a parent.  There they soon become alienated from home, and lose the benefit of its influence; and there too they often contract habits and are filled with sentiments the most degenerating and corrupt.  They grow up and enter society without any conscious relation to home, and as a consequence, regard society as a mere heartless conventionalism.  To this part of the subject we shall, in another chapter, devote special attention.  It demands the prayerful consideration of Christian parents.

  “Why hire a lodging in a house unknown,
  For one whose tenderest thoughts all hover round your own? 
  This second weaning, needless as it is,
  How does it lacerate both your heart and his!”

CHAPTER XIV.

Home-sympathy.

  “Sweet sensibility! thou keen delight! 
  Unprompted moral! sudden sense of right! 
  Perception exquisite! fair virtue’s seed! 
  Thou quick precursor of the liberal deed! 
  Thou hasty conscience! reason’s blushing morn! 
  Instinctive kindness, ere reflection’s born! 
  Prompt sense of equity! to thee belongs
  The swift redress of unexamined wrongs! 
  Eager to serve, the cause perhaps untried,
  But always apt to choose the suffering side!”

Where shall we find a more exquisite picture of home-sympathy than this, from the pen of that truly pious woman, Hannah More!  We consider the home-sympathy as an argument against the neglect and abuse of the nursery.  It is the instinctive impulse of the parent’s heart to be faithful to the trust of home.  What mother, prompted by such sympathy, can be recreant to the duties of her household?  Can she, keenly sensible to the danger of her children, anxious for their welfare, prompt to do them justice, eager to procure them interests and joys, yearning to alleviate their misfortunes, push them from her arms, and give them over to the care of unfeeling and immoral nurses?  If among all the members of the Christian home

        “There is a holy tenderness,
  A nameless sympathy, a fountain love,—­
  Branched infinite from parents to children,
  From husband to wife, from child to child,
  That binds, supports, and sweetens human life,”

then the law of sympathy is the standard of faithfulness to the loved ones of home, and its violation is an abuse of the affections and faith of the heart.  We shall now consider the natural and spiritual sympathy of home.