as much of the former as is necessary to the latter, and no more. Many exercise the authority, while they withhold the instruction. This is a government, not of truth, but of terror; and children so situated, when they outgrow the passion of fear, having no principles dwelling in them, are left to the dominion of their own hearts. The exercise, the violent, the cruel exercise of mere authority on the young, can produce no lasting good. While we rule we must teach, that when with rising years our authority expires, the truth of God in the heart may govern. Experience proves that families reared in the way that is here condemned, are in after years generally more wicked than families wherein there is less cruelty, although no more instruction. Authority is principally valuable, therefore, as it ministers to instruction. PARENTAL DUTIES. THE duties which result from this large | v. 8. What we state is, that it deeply authority are next to be considered. The authority must always sustain the duty. When this is the case, and both combine with example, a portion of success will ever follow the effort. Of this we have an encouraging illustration in Gen. xviii. 19, where God, speaking of Abraham, says, "I know him that he will command his children, and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and judgment." You are a species of pastors, and your families are your flocks. Every parent and every master possessing the religion of Jesus Christ, is under the most solemn obligation to imitate the example of our father Abraham, and is as seriously charged with the souls of children and servants as any Christian minister with the souls of his flock; and if, through your negligence, they live and die in their sins, their blood will as assuredly be required at your hands! It is not enough that you provide them well in food and clothing; "He that provideth not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, has denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel," 1 Tim. concerns you who are parents and masters of families, to exercise special care over your children and households, and by a diligent and systematic discharge of religious duties to train them up in the fear of God. Boundless good will follow this; when God speaks, as above, of Abraham, he adds, as the result and the reward, "That the Lord may bring upon Abraham that which he hath spoken of him." A holy household is always a happy one; whereas "the curse of the Lord is in the house of the wicked," Prov. iii. 33. The blessing of God always rests upon those families who serve him. As the Lord blessed Obed-Edom, and all his household, for the ark's sake, so certainly doth the Lord withhold no good thing from those who live in his fear all the day. "Godliness is really profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, as well as of that which is to come:" for the truth of this we may most safely appeal to experience. What honours have been forfeited, what businesses ruined, what fortunes lost, what woe has been brought upon families by sin! May we not convert the apostle's terms, and say, "Sin is unprofitable unto all things, having the disgrace, the shame, the misery, of the life that now is, as well as of that which is to come?" All the distress of this afflicted world is attributable to sin. Oh, would men be candid, and take an extended survey of the families of the land, and enumerate the broken-hearted parents, the ruined characters, and blasted prospects of youth, with all besides which chiefly constitutes domestic calamity, it will be found that all arises from sin, and none of it from the fear and service of God. The entire course of providence is inscribed with this motto: "The house of the wicked shall be overturned, but the tabernacle of the upright shall flourish," Prov. xiv. 11. the reaper; and when you do most for your servants, you will be found in the end to do most for yourselves. Then as to children, the sorest griefs as well as the choicest satisfactions are from them: "A wise son maketh a glad father." Now this wisdom consists solely of the fear and love of God. Here again, therefore, the sower is the reaper, who rejoices in a rich harvest of filial obedience and affection. Living and dying, this must be to all parents, who walk in the ways of the Lord, a source of the purest satisfaction. A son, a servant of the living God, can be left without fear, even in this wicked world, and parted with in the cheerful hope of meeting him again! A daughter who has tasted that the Lord is good, is in no alarming danger of allurement from the charms of a world's fashions, and a world's follies. In a word, masters and parents, whether it respects the charge God has laid upon you, whereof you must give an account unto Dear friends, take this as your encouragement, and your guide, "Blessed is he that feareth the Lord, and walketh in his ways, for thou shalt eat the labour of thine hand; happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee," Ps. cxxviii. 4. Servants hold the hap-him at the day of judgment, or the piness of families very much in their hands. From their number and their functions, they have much in their power, whether for evil or for good. No small share of domestic inquietude arises from this cause alone. Whatever makes for the increase of a generation of true, honest, upright, gentle, and obedient servants, ought to be viewed as a great public benefit, as an instrument for the advancement of human welfare and happiness. The gospel of Christ is a universal remedy for all disorders of this class. Now, there is no way whereby this gospel is brought home with such efficacy as by domestic instruction Here there is no escaping; they are hemmed in; they are shut up. In this duty, as much as in any, the sower is felicity and substantial benefit you yourselves will reap thereby, you will see ground, both just and good ground, to be diligent and constant in the discharge of holy duties amongst your families. This, however, is only one side of the picture; at least, the other is only slightly exhibited. It is, therefore, necessary that we glance at the manifold mischiefs and calamities which usually, and, to some extent, invariably follow the neglect of family duties and domestic instructions. Hence domestic broils and contentions. Where there is no union with Christ, there can be no real and spiritual union with each other. All such families, more or less, resemble a body that is subject to convulsions; the calamity may come on at any moment, and none can hinder it. The fear of God is an adequate substitute in a nation, a city, or a family, for all artificial provisions for preserving peace. Oh! it is a dreadful sight to witness parents at variance with children, husbands with wives, masters with servants! Yet the world is full of such sights as these; just because it is full of iniquity. Where God is served with purity of heart, there is peace; and "the voice of joy and thanksgiving is heard in the tabernacles of the righteous." When we examine into the history of the profane and dissolute multitude, we find that almost without exception, they have been reared in homes of ungodliness, polite or vulgar; and many of them as if in a "seminary of little devils, a household of fiends." Here it is that human beings are trained for the colonies, the hulks, and the gibbet! When families leave God, God leaves them. Where the service and altar of God have no place, there sin and the servants of sin occupy the dwelling. Then the neglect of duty is followed by the punishment of permission to commit sin. In our times the complaints are great and just against the disobedience of children, the selfishness and dishonesty of servants; the deficiency of these two classes are matters that are seen and felt-they are productive of immediate suffering. But were children and servants as much alive to the things of eternity, as parents and masters are to the things of time, we should have complaints far more loud, bitter, and full of desperation. The wrongs they suffer are infinitely more grievous than the wrongs they commit; the latter are confined to time, the former extend to eternity In one of the Addresses préfixed to the Westminster Confession of Faith, we find it written: "Wherever thou goest, thou wilt hear men crying out of bad children and bad servants; whereas indeed the source of the mischief must be sought a little higher: it is bad parents and bad masters that make bad children and bad servants; and we cannot blame so much their untowardness as our own negligence in their education." Dear brethren, these are stirring words! Let us dread the application of them to us. If in any case they have applied, Olet them apply no more. It may contribute at once to rebuke, instruct, and encourage us, to survey the practice of the church in past ages with respect to this great matter. THE term Church, as applied to religious assemblies, has two, and only two, distinct significations. In the first sense, it denotes the whole of God's elect, the general assembly and church of the first-born, whose names are written in heaven, as in the following Scriptures: Heb. ii. 12., xii. 23; 1 Cor. xii. 28; Col. i. 18. In the second acceptation, it signifies a society or congregation of believers, meeting statedly for religious purposes. The term is thus applied in Acts ix. 31, xiv. 23, xvi. 5; 1 Cor. xiv. 23, xvi. 19; Rom, xvi. 23. The Church of Rome found it convenient to alter the language of Scripture, when she subverted the authority of Christ, and destroyed the church of God. The term was then employed to denote a building set apart for worship; thus substituting unconscious matter for the living stones of the spiritual temple! This change served several ends to the Papacy. tion even of the Reformed Protestant Words are the safeguards of things; churches. They are not confined to having disposed of the former, the lat- any one party, although parties greatly ter became more manageable. This differ in the degree of their culpability. perversion aided to establish both the The Church of Rome also applied the thraldom of the people, and the power term church, to designate the pope and of the priests; but above all, it facili- his clergy, as the ministers of the gostated the abolition of a most momentous pel, so called, came to be denominated. distinction, the distinction of mankind The object and the dire results of this, into two classes, the godly and the un- may be seen in the pages of ecclesiastigodly, as expressed by the Scripture cal history. After the Reformation, terms, the church and the world, a the term church received a modification, step, which, up to this hour, has been but its primitive use was not restored; attended with the most ruinous effects ceasing to be the Church of Rome, it to the souls of men. Having destroyed became the church of nations. Each this everlasting distinction between the nation of the Reformed had its own friends and enemies of God, all the or- church as a nation, and each parish, its dinances of the gospel were perverted to own church as a parish, the national harmonize with the new arrangement. church being the sum total of the paThe church became the world, and the rochial churches. Many of the Reworld the church. Every creature of formers well understood the nature of a every nation, who acknowledged the gospel church; and, notwithstanding Papal sway, was pronounced a Chris- the connexion which obtained between tian, without any regard to knowledge the church and the state in those naor to character. The scriptural import tions, considerable provision was made of the term church was utterly abolished. in some, if not in most countries, for Christianity ceased to be an affair of the pure administration of ordinances. the soul, and of repentance toward God, The corruptions, therefore, which have and faith in Jesus Christ, and was prevailed in established churches have wholly an affair of country. Churches arisen as much from worldly patronage every where became national; and to in the matter of pastorship, and the belong to the nation was to belong to consequent carnality and sloth of the the church. She affected to regenerate bulk of their ministers from age to age, and make all Christians whom she bap- as from defects in their articles, creeds, tized; and with admirable consistency, confessions, and rituals. The term has in life and death she took their spiritual also been applied to a number of condestinies into her own hands. The gregations unconnected with the state, Romish clergy" violated the law of the maintaining the same faith and order, Lord, and profaned his holy things; and subject to the same ecclesiastical they put no difference between the holy jurisdiction, as the Moravian Church, and profane; neither did they show &c. All this, however, is the language difference between the unclean and the of division; for such modes of expression clean," Ezek. xxii. 26, 27, The awful were unheard of in earlier times. Paul consequences of this procedure are still knew nothing of the church of a counmanifest, more or less, in every sec- try, but only as churches of Christ resi dent and meeting in some particular | but the Church of England plainly is. locality. He wrote to the "churches of Galatia," not to the Galatian church, or the church of Galatia. John wrote to the "seven churches in Asia," not to the Asian church, or the church of Asia. It is therefore time to return to the wholesome dialect of purer periods. P. WHY I DARE NOT CONFORM TO I I prove this, first, from the Articles of the Church itself, which say, "The visible church is a congregation of faithful men, in which the pure word of God is preached, and the sacraments be duly administered according to Christ's ordinance." Now the Church of England is a society formed by Act of Parliament, and made up of all sorts of people. The ministers, or priests, as they are profanely called, are very few of them faithful men. Puseyism, or Popery, in place of the pure word of God, is preached in many of the buildings ignorantly called churches; while a rite similar to the Lord's supper, which papists and churchmen call the sacrament, and try to persuade men (oh awful delusion!) will, if properly given and taken, save the soul, is offered to people the most wicked, therefore it cannot be a true church, our accusers themselves being judges. How can I, then, dare to belong to it? But not only I say, Out of thine own mouth do I judge thee. But that it is no church I prove, zecondly, from the Bible. Christ says, 'My kingdom is not of this world:" The state ruler, even if living in the II. Because it claims to rule my conscience, which my Bible tells me is wrong; it bids me reverence and obey, as a Christian teacher, without doubting his authority or questioning his teaching, a man, it may be, of bad character, ignorant of, and, perhaps, hating, the gospel, who has sought the office merely for bread, and been put into it by the man to whom the state has given the power of putting a parson over a parish, without giving me a voice in the matter, and forbids my hearing the pure gospel fully preached by men plainly called by the Holy Ghost, but not in bondage by government hire: so |