and whose future blossoming you have never tended by one gentle precept? O parent, be faithful to your trust; blessings or curses await you from that child. Accept the gospel of Jesus Christ as your joy and hope in this life and after death. Lis

ten to the music of Sabbath bells, and let your household have a place within the house of God. And listen to this better music with which that house of God resounds. "It is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners." "As I live saith the Lord God, I delight not in the death of a sinner, but rather he would turn from his wicked way and live." "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him." But many fathers have no pity for their children, they have no sympathy for their dependence, no aspiration for their future good. How shall they look for the pity of a Father in Heaven, when they need it most? O there is no heavier responsibility laid upon a human being than that which the parental relation brings with it! Don't neglect your children. Let the rugged appeal of this afternoon kindle fresh interest in the sluggish breast of some indifferent parent. Let it induce a stronger aim at the child's after welfare, and a true resolve to awake to all the demands of this relationship. And, O let it drive fathers and mothers to their knees before God's throne, to pray for His direction, in the sacred trust reposed in them! Teach your children to fold their hands before their Father who is in heaven. Mothers, make your lap an altar where the earliest wreaths of incense shall float up from the infant breath, and teach your little ones to honour Him who said "Suffer them to come to Me, and forbid them not." May God bless you and your children, bringing your hearts and thoughts together to Himself, granting you plenty in this life, and happiness in the life which is to come, and may He bless to such an end the few sentences we have spoken this afternoon about the "Workman's Child."

64

The First Turn to the Left."

I do not know whether or no there is a committee upon our active and public-spirited City Council called the "Foothpaths Committee," or anything of that sort, but those who have the regulation of causeways under their control, have manifested their activity and public spirit by affixing at intervals to the lamp-posts along our principal streets, several little swinging boards or signs, bearing the inscription "Keep to the right" very legibly engraved thereon. Disobedience to this precept is

often the occasion of much hustling and confusion among the foot passengers in a crowded street. By its neglect the unwary pedestrian is frequently brought into contact with the waistcoat of some one going the opposite way, or with the market basket of some trudging saleswoman in a grey shawl on her way to the Smithy Door. I have no doubt the little sideboards I have mentioned, about keeping to the right, were devised by some enlightened mayor or alderman, who in passing along Marketstreet, got his toes trodden on by a pair of wooden clogs, or his shirt frill rumpled by a ticket porter running his head into it. Feeling himself somewhat roughly appealed to in his corporate

capacity, by the collision of some dirty fellow-citizen's elbow, the outraged magistrate probably went down to the Council Chamber determined to bring the offender before a board of the corporation; but feeling his indignation gradually subsiding as he recovered the breath which had been temporarily shaken out of him, he resolved that, as the culprit might be difficult of detection, and as he had already been before the corporation once, in a very unmistakeable manner, and as the "head and front of his offending" was nothing more than the accidental contact of his head into the front of an alderman, it might be as well for the corporation to bring a board before the passengers, as for the passengers to be brought before a board of the corporation. Such, I apprehend, must have been the origin of these morsels of excellent advice to which I have referred, and whereby the lamp-posts of our streets are made to diffuse not only such light as shall appeal to the senses, but moral light, which shall enlighten the mind and improve the character.-"Keep to the right." Not all the gas companies in the world could devise a light so diffusive and so strong as may be struck out of these words, and on moral grounds we feel profoundly grateful to the corporation for their admirable advice. It is quite as efficient a mode of disseminating good instruction and advice, as if the Religious Tract Society had a stall at every street corner, and handed out to the passer-by a bushel of pious pipe-lights or sacred spills, or consecrated curl-papers from morning till night. I don't see how it could have been anyone else but an alderman who invented these boards; because everyone knows that the only way to get an evil redressed is to subject some one in authority to the nuisance or trial complained of. It is a fact so well ascertained, and so universally recognised as scarcely to warrant a reference, that guards, and signalmen, and railway officials are never brought to a proper recognition of the responsibility of the post they occupy until some Director, has had his bones broken by a good respectable collision. The poor govern

ment train people, penned up in the third-class carriages, may be inconvenienced to any extent :-they may be shunted on to a side line for a couple of hours at every alternate station to let half-a-dozen expresses pass by, they may be sent on to a destination they never dreamed of going to; they may be run into by coal wagons, tumbled down embankments, or detained in the centre of a tunnel about two miles long without a light, for just so long a time as may suit the caprice of the guards, or the fancy of the manager of the nearest station. They may be woke up to show their tickets every ten minutes, they may start half-an-hour after time, and reach their journey's end half-a-day too late, it doesn't matter to anybody but the grumbling complainer himself. But once let a corpulent Director be shaken by a bit of a smash, let him be hustled by too much oscillation, let him start or arrive a few minutes past time, let him be shunted on one side while one train goes by, or kept without light in a tunnel, and we shall soon hear of letters to the Times, complaints to the Board, and all the rest of it; and stationmasters will be reprimanded, guards dismissed, bye-laws altered, and everything put straight in no time. For the same reason, I feel convinced that it must have been an alderman who first nailed the colours to the mast or to the lamp-post, which direct us to "keep to the right," like Nelson's motto from the Victory. "England expects every man to do his duty." Whether or no, however, it is capital advice, as will be seen at once by those who foolishly disregard it-for in a very crowded thoroughfare, "the first turn to the left" will prove to be a turn in the wrong direction. But, when once a man gets into the habit of neglecting the counsel to keep to the right, it will grow upon him, and his progress will be often impeded, and his onward course decidedly unsteady, if not dangerous. The more he violates this rule the more will he find himself in difficulties, and the passenger through the streets cannot do better than obey the alderman's counsel, "keep to the right."