Pg. 300

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 12 THE SPOILED CHILD. [300

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 iety on her parents; and, saluting the kind pastor, with the frank and blushing simplicity of innocence, as she presented her hand to receive his cordial welcome, she sat down by her mother’s side. The pastor went on.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 2 “I have learned, from painful experience,” said he, “that many parents, and even some of them the most pious, are apt to prove defective in two grand points; in their domestic discipline; and the early training of their children.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 “They are defective in the matter employed to train them, and in the manner of applying the proper matter. Some parents I have found defective in both of these: some in the former: others in the latter.”

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 “Have the goodness to explain yourself more fully,” said the father. The Pastor went on.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 1 “To understand how a parent may be defective in the matter which he is to employ in the training of his children, you need only to recollect that vital godliness, as Mrs. C—1 has just now hinted, is the only true basis of all genuine morality; and therefore of all pure moral order, such as is pleasing in the eyes of God, in families, as well as in the community. I do not deny that there may be morals, even lovely morals, and virtuous deportment, in a person destitute of true religion. And I also admit that these are good and valuable in their place, and so far as they go. Our blessed Savior looked on the young man spoken of in the Gospel, who had, in the exterior, kept the commandments, ‘and loved him’ though his heart was as yet a stranger to vital piety. We instinctively love such a character, while we are disgusted with vice and profligacy. But all those lovely and beautiful traits are, nevertheless, radically defective: they can no more be compared with the virtues and morality of the Gospel, I mean ‘the beauties of holiness’ than the apples said to grow on the margin of the Dead Sea, to these golden apples of a skilful hand’s engrafting, which you see richly clustering on that magnificent tree before us. The former were fair, very fair, to human view; but they were light and deceptive; the interior was filled up with black dust, emblematical of the depraved and unconverted heart of the mere moralist. But the latter, these rich apples on that grafted tree, are solid, sound to the core, and de-