CHILDREN AND THE CHURCH.

The Hon. William E. Dodge stirred the Philadelphia Christians a few nights ago with some plain but very timely words. He was on the platform in a great meeting gathered to promote a General Council of Presbyterians, to be held in the City of Brotherly Love. Mr. Dodge told them that the children of the Church are systematically taught to neglect the Church, and while the clergy and others are laying plans to gather their great men in council from all parts of the world, it would be well to look into a little matter in their own families and at their church doors.

Mr. Dodge referred to the practice-now almost universal -of allowing the children to attend the Sunday-school, and then to be absent from the church. His remarks on this habit, which he condemned most earnestly, were loudly applauded, the people being convicted in their own conscience, as the men of Jerusalem were when Jesus said, “He that is without sin among you let him cast the first stone."

I was going to church last Sabbath morning, and as I approached it, a procession, or rather a throng of children, not infants, but boys and girls of ten and twelve years of age, with books and papers in hand, were pouring out of the lecture and Sunday-school room, and going down street, away from the church! Had they been suddenly seized with illness, so that it was necessary for them to get home and into bed? Had the labors of the school been so severe that the poor things were exhausted, and must find rest and recreation without delay ?

Mr. Dodge thought the children went home and spent the day in reading Sunday-school books, a large part of which, he said, were not fit to be read on Sunday or any other day. If they do not spend the day at home, it is better than I fear, for in the case of the boys it is often true that the Sabbath is made a play-day, and the Sunday-school is the only hour of confinement to which they submit.

But it is not about the way in which the children spend the

Sabbath that I am now writing. It is the fact that they do not attend church with their parents regularly, sitting in the same pew, and receiving the regular instruction of the sanctuary. The time was when this was the uniform, steady and excellent habit of all Christian families. It is not so now. It ought to be so again. The Sunday-school has led to the change for the worse. It should now lead the way in a reform.

Were I the pastor of a church in which this evil prevailed, I would break it up in two ways: first, by so regulating the Sunday-school that it should not hinder but should positively help the children to attend the church service: and, secondly, by so enlightening the darkness of the parental mind that the sin and misery of the present habit should appear to the most benighted. I would show them that the church, the ordinances of God's house, the regular worship in the sanctuary, will prove to be more useful in the formation of character, and in training for usefulness and heaven, than the Sunday-school can be: that the church is the home for the soul of the child as well as for the parent, and for its power no human substitute has yet been invented that the habit of church worship should be formed in early childhood, and no means of pleasing or profiting the young are to be compared with it, or put in the place of it: and if but one, the church or the school, can be enjoyed, the church is to be prized and the school abandoned. This is the plain truth, and that is what we want.

Then there are two other matters to be attended to: the Sunday-school must not be held at such an hour as to make it tedious or trying for the children to go to church. It is quite likely that the modern contrivances for making Sundayschools amusing have given them a distaste for the more solemn services of the sanctuary. If so, the amusement is a sin. The school should feed the church. Children ought to be led by one into the other: exposed to the preaching of the Gospel, taught the ways of God's house, and brought up under its influence, with all its hallowed and elevating influences.

To make this service attractive to children, it may be that

the preaching of the present day may have to be modified in some pulpits. But to be modified it need not be babyfied. The namby-pamby twaddle talked to children, and called "children's preaching," is just about as palatable to them when they are old enough to go to Sunday-school as pap is to a boy of ten. Nothing is more attractive to a child of Christian parents than the Bible; itself a wonderful picture and story book, more wonderful than all others together; and he is a great preacher to parents who will hold up these pictures and stories to the entranced attention of the young.

Dr. Bevan says that in London he was wont to devote a part of each morning service to the special wants of the children, and so made them feel that they were an important part of the congregation. Mr. Dodge was so thoroughly applauded by his Philadelphia hearers that he was sure they knew the state of things there to be just as bad as it is here in New York. And now I have a letter from a pastor in Baltimore, who tells me how it is in that fair city. He writes:

"The difficulty with us-and it is a very serious one-is that children are not brought to church as formerly, and as they certainly should be. It is a painful sight to see the large proportion of children who, at the close of the morning-Sabbath school, instead of going into church, go home; and what renders the evil more alarming is that parents not only seem to make no effort to arrest the practice, but approve it; or, to say the least, apologize. The plea is that to go to Sabbath-school, and then to church, is too much for children; the confinement being so long as to prove neither healthful physically or religiously. Some even go so far as to contend that the Sabbath-school answers all the same as church-going, and is perhaps better adapted for children.

"Now as to the matter of physical endurance, is the present race of children more feeble and effeminate than were their fathers and mothers? The latter were trained to go to church as punctually as to Sabbath-school; and none of them were probably the worse, but very much the better for so doing. The plea is only one of the indications of the increasing flabbiness of the piety of our day.

"And as to substituting the Sabbath-school for the sanctuary, what will be the effect of this upon the Church of the future? On Solomon's principle that the training of the child determines the character of the man, what will be the proportion of church-goers in another generation? The

New York Observer of forty or fifty years hence will have to speak even more urgently than in the recent editorial on the 'Falling off of Churchgoing.' The Great Enemy does his work little by little, perhaps, but he does it; and whilst parents, church officers, and possibly pastors, are sleeping on this subject, the tares are being sown. From different and widely separated portions of our country the writer learns that the evil exists, and is, perhaps, increasing. Is it not time to call a halt? Take the children to church. L."

What more can I say than unto you has been said? Here is an evil that is sore under the sun: in the Sunday-school and the Church: every teacher has a duty in the matter and every parent and pastor. Their combined action can work a speedy reform.

THE SHAKERS OF CANTERBURY.

Some seven or eight miles south of the spot where I am now writing, and in full view from the hill-top on which our farm and farm-house repose, is the Shaker village in Canterbury, N. H. We drove over there yesterday. So much romance, sentiment and poetry have been invested in these Shaker communities, that one is hardly prepared for the hard, practical work-a-day communities they are, when he comes to see them. They are related to the Dervishes of Turkey, the Monks of Italy and the Saints of the Desert. One touch of madness makes them all akin: the blunder that to be outside of duty is doing it: that God is pleased with those who shirk his precepts, and set up their own vagaries in place of his will. Freeman, the Pocasset Adventist, slew his little daughter under a mistaken idea of duty: the Shakers sacrifice the husband, wife, father and mother, under an error as wild and as fatal as the fanatic of Cape Cod has made.

Shaker villages are substantially alike. A few large, barnlike houses, pierced with many windows and a few doors, a meeting-house, shops, and barns for the crops and cattle, all

near together, no ornament, no architectural taste, nothing to please or to offend the eye, but rigid lines, perfect cleanliness and order, these are the principal features of the settlements.

We drove up to a door over which was the sign "Trustees' Office." Our party was large-fourteen-and we were looking for something likę a hotel, but there was nothing to be found more public than this. We were welcomed at the door by a neatly-attired and prim Sister, who pleasantly invited us in, and gave us seats in the reception-room. Another sister joined her, both of them bright, smiling, cheerful women, and, without waiting to be asked, they gave us ice-water, and also mint water, a pleasant beverage. Their kind attentions, especially to the ladies of the party, were grateful in their simplicity. Presently Elders Blinn and Kames entered and gave us a cordial welcome. Their cheerful, animated conversation, the interest they showed in the topics of the day, and their readiness to make us acquainted with their mode of life, won upon our regard, and we felt that we were with friends.

Elder Blinn invited us to walk through the village, the houses and barns. Most of the company followed him in what proved to be a pleasant and entertaining stroll. The stalls for the cows, which were in the milking-way at that hour, were scrupulously clean. The milk-maids, mostly young, did not take kindly to the exhibition, and rather hid their faces under cover of the cows. The cows knew their own stalls, over each of which was the name of its tenant. The schoolroom was supplied with all modern improvements, but school was out for the day. The shops were models of neatness and convenience; a place for everything, and everything in its place, being evidently the law of the house. Machinery and factories have cheapened the production of many articles which the Shakers once made, so that their line of business is much restricted. But they do nothing which they do not intend to do well, and their work in the dairy, the garden, the field or the house, is honestly done and commands its price. Elder Kames remained with me while the others surveyed