When beyond this sublunary sphere, and the vail is removed which now hides from our view the realities of the unseen world, with what different emotions may we suppose parents will look upon their mission on earth.  It will indeed seem wonderful that they should have been thus intrusted with the care and guardianship of children, which in a peculiar sense is their own, and in this respect widely differing from the angelic band, whose happiness, though they are permitted to minister to the saints, in such efforts and experience, must be inferior to that which parents will feel in training their own offspring—­even emulating the all-wise Creator in his preparing a people for himself.  It is certainly but natural to suppose that the happiest souls in Heaven will be those parents who are the spiritual parents of their own children.

The benefits which must result to parents in the careful training of infants—­children who are, by means of parental faith and fidelity, converted in early life, can scarcely be apprehended, certainly not fully, in this world, even by the most judicious Christian parents.

Considering the instinctive love of offspring which God has implanted in the parental bosom, it is most painful to see the utter dislike which so many persons at the present day, who have entered the marriage relation, evince to the care and responsibility which the guardianship of children must ever involve.

There is something in all this manifestly wrong.  It is unnatural.  It is even monstrous—­even below the brute creation.  It interferes with the whole economy of nature, and frustrates the wise and benevolent designs of the Creator, when he set the solitary in families.  No person who takes into view eternal realities and prospects, can, while so doing, indulge in such selfish, carnal and sordid views.  Those who are without natural affection are classed by Paul with the enemies of all righteousness.  We cannot therefore but look suspiciously upon all such as deny the marriage relation, cause of abuses (this is not the way to cure them), or, for any pretext, profess to plead the superior advantages of those who, for reasons best known to themselves, may choose a state of “single blessedness,” however plausible or cogent their arguments may appear in favor of such a choice.  We may not do evil that good may come, or in other words, “root up the tares, lest we also root up the wheat.”

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Original.

THE ORPHAN SON AND PRAYING MOTHER.

Some years since a small volume was sent to me by a friend, containing an account of the labors of a pious missionary along the line of the Erie canal.  I read it with great interest, and I trust, with profit.  God honors his word; he honors his faithful servants; and when the Great Day shall reveal the secrets of this world, it will be seen to the glory of divine grace, that many a humble missionary was made the instrument of eternal consolation to the poor neglected orphan—­in answer to a pious mother’s prayers.