a collegiate education, and in due time he became a member of one of our highest literary institutions.  There he maintained a high rank for both scholarship and morality, and graduated with distinguished honor.  Not long after this, his mind took a decidedly serious direction, and he not only gave himself to the service of God, but resolved to give himself also to the ministry of reconciliation.  After passing through the usual course and preparation for the sacred office, he entered it; and he is now the able and successful minister of a large and respectable congregation.  He has already evidently been instrumental of winning many souls.  I hear of him from time to time, as among the most useful ministers of the day.  I occasionally meet him, and see for myself the workings of his well-trained mind, and his generous and sanctified spirit.  I say to myself, I remember you, when you were only the germ of what you are; but surely the man was bound up in the boy.  I witness nothing in your maturity which was not shadowed forth in your earliest development.

Here again, let me trace the stream to its fountain—­the effect to its cause.  This individual was the child of a discreet and faithful Christian mother.  She dedicated him to God in holy baptism, while he was yet unconscious of the solemn act.  She watched the first openings of his intellect, that no time might be lost in introducing the beams of immortal truth.  She guarded him during his childhood, from the influence of evil example, especially of evil companions, with the most scrupulous care.  She labored diligently to suppress the rising of unhallowed tempers and perverse feelings, with a view to prevent, if possible, the formation of any vicious habit, while she steadily inculcated the necessity of that great radical change, which alone forms the basis of a truly spiritual character.  And though no human eye followed her to her closet, I doubt not that her good instructions were seconded by her fervent prayers; and that as often as she approached the throne of mercy, she left there a petition for the well-doing and the well-being, the sanctification and salvation of her son.  And her work of faith and labor of love were not in vain.  The son became all that she could have asked, and she lived to witness what he became.  She lived to listen to his earnest prayers and his eloquent and powerful discourses.  She lived to hear his name pronounced with respect and gratitude in the high places of the Church.  He was one of the main comforters of her old age; and if I mistake not, he was at her death-bed, to commend her departing spirit into her Redeemer’s hands.  Richly was that mother’s fidelity rewarded by the virtues and graces which she had assisted to form.  Though she recognized them all as the fruits of the Spirit, she could not but know that in a humble, and yet very important sense, they were connected with her own instrumentality.