social machine are cast and adjusted. The human soul is not only gradually developed, but it conforms to the circumstances by which it is surrounded. It learns what it is taught, and becomes what man makes it. The greatest and most original of men carry with them to their graves some marks, intellectual and moral, of the place where their spiritual infancy was cradled; while the multitude are little less than the hard and painfully exact daguerreotypes of their early homes. It is much harder than most think to comply with the oft-repeated entreaty to make one's self at home. Some say they are at home every where, but such show by their declaration that they do not know what home means. and they have in common many points of close resemblance. In feature and expression of countenance, in form of body, in tone of voice, in certain tendencies to disease, in temper and mental endowments, each child sees in the other the resemblance of himself; and the parents can understand themselves better than before, as they ponder, perhaps with a sad heart, these too correct images of themselves. But, in addition to this, their actual life is one. They are shut out from the world. They Here, too, those who mould charac- know what sorrows cast a shadow on ter have freer scope, and exert a more their cheerful hearth, and what gracious various influence. It is a true saying, interpositions of Providence have kindled "You must know a man at home." But its joys again. They have seen each very few, even of the fair, can afford to other's weaknesses and sins, and will be seen in dishabille. In society all sorts not let a strange, rude world into the of persons are dressed and prepared for sanctuary of their mutual regret, and the occasion. Even in business self-pity, and love, and hope. Except reliinterest imposes many restraints, and gion, perhaps, nothing is more powerful prompts to many kind words and or more sacred than this. It affords on actions. Thus a kind of habitual hypo-earth the resting place of the soul. Even crisy is superinduced; but like all the pleasures of society cost an effort. hypocrisy, it is difficult and painful. If it must be incessant, it would be insufferable. At home, therefore, it is thrown aside. The man who has been as bland as autumn in his neighbour's parlour, becomes as biting as an east wind in his own. Amongst strangers he was all attention, eloquence, and smiles; but in his family he is silent, selfish, frowning, and fretful. Here, where his example must have the greatest power, he is least concerned to have it what it ought to be. It is not the smallest difficulty in domestic duties that they come upon us when we are weary and off our guard. Yet, on the other hand, the charities of home prepare the soil to receive the seed of truth and righteousness. "God maketh my heart soft." The great want of depraved humanity is a tender spirit. If, however, men are impressible at all, it is by the domestic hearth. Whatever advantage a stranger has in authority and terror, a father or a mother has more in the tenderness of love. That child is far gone who can trifle with their tears and prayers. If parents wept and prayed for the salvation of their offspring more frequently, it would impose the most wholesome restraint on themselves, and thus at once improve and enforce their example. There is, further, a wonderful intercommunity of life in the family. They partake physically of the same nature, The relative position of the family to the nation must not be overlooked. The one is the germ and the type of the other. If the families are not disciplined, virtuous, and devout, the nation must sink into impiety and vice. Civil governors may do their utmost, the laws may be founded in truth and justice, and Christian teachers may labour to elevate and guide society, but they cannot touch the real fountains of life. The enclosed wells may send forth their bitter and polluted waters, and no stranger can reach them to cast in a pure and sweetening influence. Here, too, is the secret cement of society. In the family, if at all, the human soul learns to obey and love. The drill-serjeant and the police force may shape an army, but they can never create that unity of thought and feeling which is essential to give strength and permanence to national existence. If you would ascertain the vital force of a nation, see if its families are united, peaceful, and happy. This is the main element of that which has long constituted, and still remains, the glory of England. Here is a mainspring of industry, for none labour like those who are anxious to "provide for their own;" and here too toil rests when weary, and gathers new energy to earn new rewards. If these pillars of our nation are settled and strong, the heaviest storms will be unable to overturn it. Its commerce may develop its energy and skill, its wealth may invest it with the glare of an envied prosperity, but its real and enduring glory must be found in the silent growth of domestic virtue. The sentiment of Burns is as profound as it is beautiful. When having described the piety of the cottage, he adds,— "From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs." Our neighbours, the French, furnish a ready and striking illustration. Great as they are, in many respects, they are and ever have been miserably deficient in domestic virtue. Amidst all the horrors of the great revolution they talked loudly of a universal and equal brotherhood; but they were strangers to the meaning of the word brother, and therefore they never attained a greater elevation than that of "citizen." There are two terms in our language for which they have no equivalents, and they know neither the ideas they express, nor the facts to which they refer. These terms are "comfort" and "home." The husband rarely dines with the wife, or both dine away from their children; and instead of the seclusion which represses vanity and gives intensity to affection by concentrating it, every thing is paraded in public, when all stare, and many envy, but none can love. Perhaps there is no sign of the times more alarining than the growing inclination of our civil government to invade our domestic hearths, except it be the supineness of the people which allows them to do so. The puritans were the moral antipodes of the French. They have furnished to English history its brightest glories, and to the English constitution its freedom and energy. They founded a new empire across the Atlantic, which, whatever may be its vices and defects, is amongst the other republics formed by European colonies, as a strong man amidst fretful babes. Nothing distinguished these puritans more than their domestic worth. The infidel, or superstitious libertinism, which they opposed, has not found even its effrontery hardy enough to slander them on this ground. In the tumult of camps and the fury of civil war, they guarded the sanctity and fostered the endearments of their homes. And when tired or vanquished they left the arena of public strife, it was with the firm resolution, that though idolatry beat down their altars, it should never pollute their hearths. "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." The bible is full of instruction in reference to the nature and importance of the domestic constitution. God reveals himself as a "Father." Jesus is not ashamed to call his people his "brethren," while with each other they constitute the "household of faith;" and all the unfallen and the saved are but "one family in heaven and earth." The Jews were always contemplated in their relation to the patriarchs, and God spoke to them as the children of Israel and the seed of Abraham his "friend." The law provided for the instruction of the children and the "honour" of the parents. The passover was celebrated by the families apart, and in their domestic capacity they needed and enjoyed the protection offered by the signs of the sprinkled blood. The crimes of the Jewish nation culminated when their families were corrupted; and Messiah was needed and promised, "to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers," lest God should "smite the earth with a curse." The history of Christianity is the history of the elevation of domestic life. Its great Author was the pattern of filial duty. He lived in a mother's thought and love; at Nazareth was subject to his parent, and in the agony of his crucifixion provided for his mother's wants. Polygamy was too deeply rooted and too widely spread to be at once exterminated, but the gospel denounced it as an innovation and a wrong, for "in the beginning" it was not so. No person could hold any chief office in the church who was the husband of more than "one wife," and he must "rule his own house well, having his children in subjection." The reciprocal duties of husbands and wives, of parents and children, are clearly defined and anxiously enforced; nor is it difficult to perceive, that if those duties were scripturally performed, the families of the righteous would soon leaven the world. The law of love is to guide the husband, and the law of submission to guide the wife. Obedience and honour are the appointed fruits of filial piety, while with parents the main object of industry must be to "provide for their own," and the supreme care and effort must aim to train their offspring in "the nurture and admonition of the Lord." It provides, that marriages should be "only in the Lord;" that these duties may be the more easily discharged, and the happy effects of them be more manifest and complete. This is the true import of the term "household," which controversy has so much abused. We read of such, not merely as partaking the honours of baptism, but as believing in God and ministering to the saints. The first apostleship was little more than an extended family compact. Three families furnished eight of the twelve apostles, and some of these were related to our Lord. Each of these fostered domestic piety. John says, "I have no greater joy than to hear that thy children walk in the truth." Paul speaks of a church in a brother's "house," and records the faith of Timothy, and of his mother and grandmother too. This was a mighty instrument in favour of the truth in primitive times. Each family was a secluded spot to which tyranny could not approach, and where an integral portion of the church was quietly imbued with the love of the truth, and trained alike for submission and effort in its cause. The family is the safeguard of freedom, or, at least, it behoves men to make it 80. There is, indeed, a growing tendency in civil governments to intermeddle with our domestic rights; but hitherto ecclesiastical powers have been the most injurious in this respect. In catholic countries, the priest is a tyrant and spy where he can gain admission. The chaplains of the early Scottish presbyterians too closely resembled them. Every father ought to be the priest of his own family. The Englishman's home is his castle. If stripes and chains await him in the streets, at least in his home he may be free. Here is a little citadel which no treachery can undermine and no violence demolish. Here, too, he may labour for God. He may mourn over empires sinking in misery and crime; but he is not responsible for their safety because he has not the power to secure it, but his family he may bless, and heavy guilt will rest upon him if he does not. And when his toil is repaid in the piety and affection of his offspring, as he reposes in this Little spot enclosed by grace, Out of the world's wide wilderness," he may ask the weary and distressed to come and look at his family, and learn how much earth may resemble heaven. To maintain and improve the domestic constitution is not an easy task. The difficulties that attend it are many and great. Some of them arise from the condition and character of parents, and others from the temper of the times. There is no duty of half the importance of this, for the discharge of which so little preparation is made. The young man spends his early years in acquiring the knowledge of his business, and of the world in general; but, except what he may pick up from the suggestions of example, he hears nothing about his duties as a husband and a father till he is overborne by their actual occurrence, combined with all the cares and sorrows of mature life. The young lady is studiously oppressed with acquiring accomplishments, which cramp the mind and pervert the morals, and of which the least evil is, that they are expensive frivolities. But moral training, the cultivation of habits of frugality, selfdenial, diligence, and sympathy, is more than neglected; it is rendered impossi ble. Nay, the commonest duties of the domestic circle are forgotten. We fear it would disclose a painful amount of neglect if all parents were required to state how much they had specifically done or said to prepare their offspring for the most important functions which humanity has to discharge. Nothing requires a more exalted character than the post for which preparation is thus neglected. If parents are merely pious they may cause their religion to appear ridiculous, and if they are merely conscientious they may make the exactions of duty repulsively severe; yet, if devotion and integrity are not pre-eminently ardent and unbending, children will neither be attracted to religion, nor impressed by it. Nay, if parents are partial, unjust, or inconsistent, they will only render all professions of piety odious in the same proportion as they make them. If they are selfish and worldly they will be imitated by those who may not think it agreeable, or even honest, to mix up pretensions to self-renunciation with so much self-seeking. Holiness the most vigilant, simplicity the most transparent, and truthfulness the most inflexible, are nowhere more necessary than in the family circle. Yet it is here men are weary, and fretted with care, and apt to think they need and deserve | The sons, instead of being trained under excuse and indulgence. Example, however, is a large part of the influence that must be exerted for good or ill. If this fails, all else will be neutralized or perverted. At home it is watched in the minutest details, in the closest retirement, and with unwearied assiduity. Parents have no human authority higher than their own; no tribunal before which they can be cited, and by which they might be directed and commanded. Their duties are noiseless and unseen. There is no public examination to excite them, and no public applause to recompense them. These duties never cease. They are almost as constant as those of self-government. They refer to the minutest matters, the existence of which | may be overlooked, and the importance of which it is very difficult to feel. And the progress of success is proportionately slow. A hundred admonitions may be required to correct some foolish habit which mere thoughtlessness has contracted. The humble parent may well exclaim, "Who is sufficient for these things?" But parents have to contend with some special difficulties resulting from the temper of the times. Men love what is young and new. Antiquity, which was once venerable, is now almost contemptible. Old age never had so little honour. Filial piety seems, by too many, consigned to the same banishment with superstition. This necessarily loosens the hold of parental authority. The growing tendency to send children to boarding schools is greatly to be deplored. Parents abandon their holiest duties to strangers, and exile their children from their homes, and then complain that they are deficient in obedience and love! Further, parents are eager to get their children well out in the world. For this their education is forced and their ambition excited. They must eclipse their neighbours. The father is impoverished that his children may be spoiled. After all he must dispose of them somehow. The opportunities are few. He is made to appear selfish, and tempted to be worldly. If a good settlement offers good only for this world it must be accepted; for the father cannot wait, and the child has been taught to look for nothing less. The daughters, instead of being retained at home to learn thrift and contentment with little, are scattered all over the land as teachers. the restraints of long apprenticeships, seek early situations, and become their own masters before they have the means or the disposition to become heads of families. This leads to a proud spirit of independence. Young men are detached from those influences which might control and improve them; they associate together to aggravate the evils of their lot, and rush into all the temptations, in which many perish while they are young, and from which but few entirely recover. It is a melancholy thought that there are so many thousands of young men, in London alone, who have to toil hard, and are exposed to the utmost possible amount of spiritual danger, but can never taste the sweets nor enjoy the safeguard of a home. Even the growing habit amongst the wealthier classes in most large towns of residing out of town, is an evil not to be overlooked. The father and the elder brothers leave the house early every morning, and it is late before they return. Except on Sundays and late at night they are strangers from their home. All parties are thus injured. The father ceases to be the real head of the family; the several members of the family have dissimilar interests and partial sympathy; the female branch becomes more selfindulgent, more showy, less orderly, and less energetic; and the male branch becomes ruder, more secular, less considerate, and less cordial. We may mention, lastly, the almost universal substitution of public worship on the evening of the Lord's day for that of the afternoon. Gas and comfortable chapels, and increased attention to sabbath school teaching, have all contributed to this. But it is not an unmixed advantage. Time was when the Lord's day evening was spent in domestic prayer. Parents called the family together, brought to mind the discourses of the earlier parts of the day, talked to their children and prayed for them till the God of the families of the saints was felt to be present. From that point the current of domestic life flowed on with new impulse and freshness for another week. Alas! those days are gone, and the most powerful and genial instrument of domestic advancement is destroyed! Parents cannot too earnestly ponder their duties, nor too fervently seek for grace to enable them to discharge them. Their toils have a large promise and a sure reward. A happy family is the nearest resemblance of the "Father's house;" and he is an enviable man who, when the world is full of corruption, and treachery, and strife, can shut to his door and sit down by his own hearth to find a holy quiet and confiding love. Lectures on the Acts of the Apostles, with an Appendix in Continuation of the Inspired History, by a Sketch of the Revelation. By JAMES BENNETT, D.D. London: Gladding. pp. 473. In relation to the present condition of the church of Christ, to the aspects of the missionary field, and to the complete triumph of the gospel over every form of error and superstition, few books are more worthy of consideration by the expositor than is the book of the Acts of the Apostles. The apostolic epistles pour forth the results of sanctified understandings, illuminated and inspired by the divine Spirit, operating upon the facts of the gospel history; but in the Acts we witness the historical application of those facts to the differing circumstances of the Jew and Gentile. The epistles were addressed to persons who had already believed. They open up, and enlarge upon, the rich stores of consolation and of grace, which are the inheritance of the followers of Jesus. They are the chart and the education of the moral and spiritual life of Christians. The internal man, renewed by the Holy Spirit, is invigorated, admonished, built up. The individual is urged to the attainment of every virtue, and to the display of every feature of that holy image in which he is anew created. Christ is shown as the supporting life of the soul, and the sanctification of the justified is carried on to its glorious consummation. The Saviour's prayer is answered," Sanctify them through thy truth." matter of simple hope or promise. The anticipations and inspired visions of patriarchs, prophets, kings, and devout men, the sighings of the captive, the oppressed, the dying, in lands of Gentile darkness, are answered in the declaration, "There is born unto us a Saviour." The Acts of the Apostles were the development of the historical application of this precious fact to the condition of the Jew and Gentile-that is, to the whole world. Though both Jew and Gentile were alike "concluded in unbelief," their position in relation to the Christ of God was different. To the Jews had been given the oracles of God. An unceasing stream of prophetic intimations bare them onwards to the Great Deliverer. Their national existence, their religious worship, their daily and hourly life, had respect to his approach. From their most renowned king, they were taught, should lineally descend Him who should build up their desolations, restore their kingdom, break the yoke of the oppressor, re-introduce them once more and for ever into the favour of their fathers' God, and bestow upon them a resurrection from the graveNot so the Gentile. He was without God, and without hope in the world. To him no check existed but the still small voice of conscience, so easily stifled, so often unheard, to the accumulation of every vice, to the commission of every crime, and to the debasement and death of every moral faculty. The present life was one of inexplicable suffering and wretchedness; the future was all dark and hopeless. And if here and there arose one of purer views, one in whose heart the ancient traditions of our race touched a chord of sympathy and shot a beam of light, waking up the echoes of the soul which the voice of superstition and the rush of passion had till then left silent, the darkness appeared by the contrast to be yet more dense, and their very uncertainty produced fresh wailings and tears. Elysian fields were, indeed, imagined to satisfy the cravings of the soul; but her dreams were disfigured by her own moral impurity; her gods were the disembodied shadows of her own debasement. But this superstructure has a foundation, laid broad and deep, in facts of unquestionable occurrence. The imaginings and musings of the soul on her high destiny are not the fleeting visions of fancy or of feeling. Real as are the wants and miseries of man, deepened in To these two classes had the first their intensity by the moral nature that advent of the Lord to be proclaimed. suffers them, equally so is the fact that To the one, the substance of the shadows there is a Saviour, a Restorer, a Resur-through which the beams of divine Love rection. His advent has ceased to be a had so often gloriously shone; to the VOL. X.-FOURTH SERIES. * ૨ |