2.  Dedication must be followed by instruction.  Parents must cultivate the tender mind—­instill the principles of virtue—­infuse the knowledge of God, and of the duties due to God and man.  This is a matter of the greatest importance.  If youthful minds are not imbued with knowledge and virtue, they will not remain blank; the void will be filled with that which tends to mischief, and leads to woe and infamy.

When we look among pagans and savages, we are struck with their vices and follies, which raise our disgust, or excite our pity.  But who hath made us to differ from them!  Is it not that divine Sovereign who “divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam,” who cast our lot among the civilized and enlightened, who having been taught, of God, taught us the way of happiness?  Had we been born among heathens, we should probably have been heathens; if among savages, should not have differed from them—­should have gloried, perhaps in those refinements in cruelty, which they consider an accomplishment, but which we shudder to hear related.  It is not probable that we should have had native discernment sufficient to have raised us above our fellows—­to have enabled us to discover their delusions and the absurdity of their views.  Had we been denied revelation, we should probably have been ignorant of our fallen state and need of a Savior, and might have “perished for lack of vision.”

How far God might have pitied our necessary ignorance, we know not; but we can now discern no way of salvation, except by faith in Christ, with repentance from dead works.  Now, the knowledge of these, and the necessity of holiness of heart and life, we have received, not by immediate revelation, but from our fellow men.  And most of those who receive them, to saving effect, receive the first impressions in early life; receive them from those with whom they are conversant in their tender years.  The forming mankind to virtue, and rendering them a godly seed, depends much on the means then used with them, and the bias then given to the mind.

3.  Restraint is also necessary in the morning of life.  BY nature man is inclined to evil.  This disposition originated in the apostasy and descends to the whole race, rendering them untractable and unreachable—­easily susceptible of bad impressions and indisposed to good ones.  It appears and operates at a very early period of life.  “The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray as soon as they are born speaking lies.  Their poison is like the poison of a serpent; they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear.”—­