An old-fashioned clergyman—­a visitor to a city church which I chanced to attend last winter—­prefaced his sermon, “as was his custom at home,” he said, by “a five-minute talk to the lambs of the fold.”  In the congregation of at least 800 souls there were exactly three “lambs” under fifteen years of age.  It was impossible for the most reverent of his hearers to help thinking of the solitary parishioner who composed his pastor’s congregation upon a stormy day, and objected to the sermon dutifully delivered by the minister “as good, but too personal.”

It is as impossible for the thoughtful student of the signs of the times to avoid the conclusion that the growing disposition of the young to deny the authority of the church and to supersede her stated ordinances by organizations established and run by themselves may be the legitimate fruit of the prominence given by their parents to what should be the nursery of the church over the church itself.  It would be strange if, after witnessing for fourteen or fifteen years such open and systematic disrespect of the gates of Zion, they were to develop veneration for her worship and devout appreciation of the mystic truth that this is the place where God’s honor dwells.

If—­and the “if” is broad and deep and long—­the little ones are faithfully trained by the parents in the nurture and admonition of the Lord (dear, quaint old phraseology, fine, subtle and pervasive as lavender scent!), if sacred songs and Bible stories and tender talk of the Saviour’s love and the beautiful life of which this may be made a type and a foretaste, keep in the minds of the little ones at home the sanctity and sweetness of the day of days, there is a shadow of excuse for the failure to make room for them in the family pew.  Even then the tree will grow as the twig is inclined.

The mother whose knee is the baby’s first altar, who gathers about her for confession, for counsel and for prayer sons and daughters who will, in older and sterner years, call her blessed for the holy teachings of their childhood, will teach them to find, with her, the tabernacles of the Lord of Hosts “amiable,” i.e., worthy of all love and fidelity.  The chrism of motherhood consecrates a woman as a priestess.  Neither convenience nor custom can release her from the office.  Let not another take her crown.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

A PARTING WORD FOR BOY.

Upon the satin seat of a chair in the corner of the drawing-room, lie six white Lima beans, and three small red-spotted apples.  Wild fruit they are, cast by a superannuated crab, spared by the woodman’s axe because it stands on the verge of the orchard.  The apple-pickers never look under it for gleanings.  The beans were pulled from a frost-bitten vine in the garden, and shelled with difficulty, the pods being tough, and Boy’s fingers tender.  Both trophies secured, they were brought into the house, deposited in the safest place Boy’s ingenuity could devise, and, alas! forgotten in the hurry of catching the “twain.”  There was no room for them in Boy’s long-suffering pockets.  They bulged to the bursting point with chestnuts, also the spoil of the grasping little fingers.