with simplicity, and diligently enforced, will leave nothing, in the form of direct instruction, to be attempted for their salvation.

You will allow me to suggest a few obvious considerations, in illustration of the high importance of instruction so explained and enforced.

1. The youth learns nothing good until he is taught. Foolishness is bound up in his heart. Though wise to do evil, to do good he has no knowledge. It is commonly an arduous enterprise to educate him for worldly eminence; but far greater are the skill and labor necessary to educate him for glory, honor, and immortality. In the first case, the difficulties to be overcome lie chiefly in the volatility of the mind, reluctance to salutary discipline, indifference to useful knowledge, the fascinations of novelty, the love of amusement, and a thirst for sensual gratifications. In the last case, beside these difficulties, existing in full strength, there is a heartfelt aversion to the claims of religion to be removed, and a love of moral culture to be inspired; the force of corrupt example operating on every side, is to be broken down, and the efforts of the adversary to cultivate tares instead of wheat on the virgin soil, are to be defeated. The young mind, it is true, has all the faculties of riper years, but they are yet in their immaturity, and wait the lapse of time to complete their development. Reason and judgment are too weak to give a wise direction to the course of life, even when perception, imagination and memory, have acquired great activity and energy; and unless controlled and guided by the paramount influence of correct instruction constantly imparted, the youth is ever liable to plunge into darkness and ruin. He is ever exposed also to the withering blast that sweeps along the path of the wily unbeliever and the bold transgressor. Unhappily the number of those who cast off fear, and abandon themselves to works of iniquity is not small, even in an age and country as enlightened as ours; and, with them, virtue in her loveliest forms is the subject of unceasing reproach, and vice in its most unseemly garb is the theme of commendation and applause; wine and debauchery inflame their blood; stratagem and violence absorb their thick-coming fancies, and daringness of spirit and hardihood of resistance to the claims of God, give them fearful power over the simplicity of childhood.

And what if God hath said, "If sinners entice thee, consent thou not"-the untaught and inexperienced youth, heedless of the admonition, lends a willing ear to the Syren voice that assures him of safety in indulgences that perverted appetites demand. Certain it is that no man can take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned, nor go upon hot coals and his feet not be burned; but the young, even if instructed, are slow to credit what the Almighty saith, and, obediently, to turn away from the companionship of

fools. The structure of the mind, the depravity of the heart, the force of ungodly example, and the direct efforts of those who set their mouths against the heavens, render it certain that the untaught youth will learn nothing good.

2. The susceptibilities of the young mind to deep and enduring impression are strongly marked. The melted wax receives not more readily the impress of the seal, nor does the fused metal take more certainly the form of the mould into which it is cast, than the infant mind receives the principles and yields to the passions which sway maturer minds in contact with it. And the impressions of the earliest years are not lost, down to life's latest period. Long after those of later date are effaced are they retained in nearly all their original freshness; and so inwrought are they with the very framework of the moral system, that death itself fails to annihilate them, and the light of eternity restores them in more than their original vividness. Whether these impressions shall assimilate the child to his Maker, or strengthen his inherent corruptions, is a momentous question. It is a fair question, too, worthy to be revolved by every one who bears a part in the training of the youthful world around him---whether the principles of wisdom and truth shall be permanently stamped on the fair page of childhood, assimilating it to God, or whether the principles of error shall take their place, and form fit sluiceways for floods of vain imaginings bearing away the soul irresistibly to the ocean of death! Give to the mind of youth the moral culture which its susceptibilities permit, and which the authority of Heaven requires; watch the first buddings of its moral powers, and direct its earliest efforts to objects of transcendant interest, as the scriptures reveal them, and the labor cannot be in vain. Millions, unable to distinguish the right hand from the left, have received impressions from the lips of maternal piety of infinite value; and other millions, by the combination of scriptural instruction with parental prayers and tears have been prepared to swell the joys of heaven by their labors and songs, who had otherwise been left to everlasting wailings. You have seen the rich intervale over which the plough and the harrow have never passed; it was not bare like the sands of an African desert, or the hill-tops, stretching upwards into regions of perpetual frost; but luxuriance was there-the luxuriance, indeed, of the bramble instead of the vine, of the morass instead of the wheatfield; but it was luxuriance still. Such is the mind richly furnished with heaven's endowments, but denied the moral culture, to which by birthright it is entitled. Its productions, though abundant are useless, as the weeds of the garden, or noxious as the grapes of Sodom, and the clusters of Gomorrah. "The two legged animal" says one "that eats of nature's dainties what his taste or appetite craves, and satisfies his thirst at the crystal fountain; who pronagates his kind as.

occasion or lust prompt; repels injuries, and takes alternate res and repose, is like a tree of the forest, purely of nature's growth. But this same savage, hath within him the seeds of the logician, the man of taste and breeding, the orator, the statesman, the man of virtue, and the saint; which seeds, though planted in his mind by nature, yet, through want of culture and exercise, must lie for ever buried and be hardly perceivable by himself or others."

Though this opinion of the philosopher needs an important qualification in one point at least, it is yet too clearly true as a whole to admit of question. Every mind is rich in native wealth though it be yet in the ore, and is capable of an expansion large enough to embrace an amount of knowledge and love as yet unattained by the most exalted spirits of heaven; and, if sanctified, it will pour into the treasury of God a boundless revenue of imperishable riches. But abandon it to wasteness, or allow its susceptibilities to be engrossed with the dreamings of infidelity, and the pleasures of sense, and it had been better for it at the moment of its birth, to have been blotted out from among Jehovah's works.

3. It has passed into a maxim that "knowledge is power." The sceptre awes nations into submission to individual will; the sword slays thousands, and the arm of the victor binds millions in chains; but it is instructed mind that sways the sceptre, wields the sword, and nerves the conqueror's arm. Without some knowledge of the philosophy of man, and the principles of science, and without a warm imagination, an eloquent tongue, or a vigorous pen no man within the domains of civilization, can maintain a permanent ascendancy over his brethren. He may stir up strife and contention; he may shed torrents of blood, and pile up mountains of human bones, but he leaves the world as destitute of every monument of well directed skill and power, as are the wilds of Africa, or the untrodden forests of America, while his own name perishes, or becomes the loathing of mankind. Knowledge, indeed, like. every other gift of heaven, not excepting even the blood of Christ, is often perverted to purposes of mischief, for

"Perversion marks man's guilty way"

from the cradle to the grave, but it nullifies the value of no blessing of God; and not wealth or honor, health or pleasure, instinct or conscience, are less justly contemned for their frequent abuse and prostitution to ignoble ends, than that furniture of the mind which is sometimes desecrated by ambition and revenge. Shall heaven's bounties be dashed from existence because of their misuse, and the darkness of primeval chaos be thrown over the manifested goodness of God, because man employs it to accomplish wicked devices?

And then no wealth like that of mind rises superior to the plottings of knavery, the fluctuations of fortune, and the capricious action of the elements of nature. Disease may dim its lustre, and age abate its force, and an overruling Providence defeat its immediate aims; but not even death itself, sweeping away all that is earthly beside, lays upon it the hand of violence. Man carries it with him, unharmed by the convulsion that rends asunder the body and spirit, beyond the grave, where it secures him a place but little lower than the angels, and forms an amount of capital, if I may so speak, proportioned to his present acquisitions, with which he enters on the holy commerce of heaven. Of course you will not understand me to speak of knowledge and piety as synonymous. They may live and flourish to some extent independently. But wherever they co-exist, knowledge is the most efficient handmaid of religion, while in their separation, ignorance is religion's most powerful antagonist.

"Blessed is he who knoweth wisdom and instruction and perceiveth the words of understanding." Connect love and knowledge, as they have not unfrequently been connected in ancient and modern times, and give them a fair field for their united labors, and none can estimate fully the amount of their happy results to the glory of God, and the welfare of the world.

True it is that Baxter and Owen, Leighton and Edwards, to say nothing of thousands more, endeared to Christian recollection by learning and piety, with Noah and Moses, Elijah and Paul had entered heaven though possessed of a faith no more intelligent than that which sustains her who

"Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true."

Yet with only a common measure of intellectual resources and cultivation, the luminous productions of their pens, and the holy example of their lives had done little to strengthen the faith of their brethren, and bless the world. Learning gave lustre and efficiency to their piety. Knowledge, sanctified by communion with Heaven gave them the mighty influence they threw over the generations in which they lived; an influence that has come down to our own times, and will flow onward, in ever-widening streams, till time shall be no more.

Their intellectual treasures embalm their piety in sweet and everlasting remembrance. Not the wealth of Croesus, combined with the valor of Hannibal, and the rhetoric of Tully, and the clemency of Augustus, and the virtues of all the wise men and great men of pagan antiquity, had they fallen to the share of these holy men had left upon their memory the perfumes they now bear and which the lapse of ages will not exhale; nor have placed on their heads, crowns so studded with gems of unfading lustre.

And these are the more cogent reasons for urging onward the march of intellectual improvement, because the day has arrived when infidelity, throwing aside to some extent, its distinctive name, and the philosophical garb of other years, penetrates every community in more specious guise and spreads abroad

"Its legions, angel forms

Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks

Of Vallambrosa"

all

Or, if circumstances permit, assumes a bold and haughty front and challenges "the sacramental host of God's elect" in the boastful spirit of Philistia's champion ; when Romanism too, half-healed of its deadly wound, resolves to strengthen the despotisms of the Old World, and crush the liberties of the New, and fastens upon nations, the yoke of a baptized Paganism, heavier far than ever Boodh or Brama laid upon the neck of China or Hindostan ; and when errors in every shape lulling individual and public conscience into profound repose, banishing the fear of future retribution, and cherishing illusory hopes of heaven, start up like mushrooms among the fens and marshes of abounding ignorance, and multiply like venomous reptiles in solitudes penetrated by the rays of a vertical sun; now is the time for every friend of God and man to disengage himself from the folds of a voluntary supineness, to put on zeal as a cloak and take the word of God for his sword, and press onward, cleaving his way through the thickest of the foe, maintaining in simplicity the claims of God, vindicating the honor of the Cross, and opening the door for thousands around him, and coming after him, to enter the kingdom of heaven. And for labors and conflicts such as these, let the young be qualified by teaching them knowledge, and making them understand doctrine, giving them "precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and there a little."

4. Scriptural knowledge is not only of surpassing value, but is more easily imparted to the young than most of that human knowledge for which the opening powers are often severely tasked. Said a great and holy man of old, whose counsellors were eminent men and learned in all the wisdom of their generation, "I have more understanding than all my teachers." Spending his youth amid his father's flocks at Bethlehem and blessed no doubt with pious parental instruction, he made the testimonies of the Lord his meditation by day and by night. God, in all his greatness was ever before him. The Holy Spirit instructed him. He searched the scriptures and pondered the path of his feet. derful is the adaptation of the book of God to the demands of the immortal mind, whether in youth or old age. "Blessed is the man" and blessed is the child, "whose delight is in the law of the Lord;

Won