Imatges de pàgina
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prayer is the answer. If there is no answer, there is no value in the prayer. If the pipe brings no water, it is unprofitable and vain. And it is the Christian's privilege to know that God hears him when he prays. It is his privilege to talk to Jesus of all the joys and sorrows which fill his heart. And we may know if Jesus answers. We may know whether our petition is acceptable and accepted

Reader, you may have often bowed before the Lord, and uttered words before the throne of grace. One word in your ear-"Did Jesus answer? Did he say 'Yes'?" Do not pass by this vital matter. If Jesus does not sooner or later answer your prayers, they are all in vain. And if Jesus does not say "Yes," there is some good reason for it. Do not rest till you know what the hindrance is. Test yourself with the question,-"Did Jesus answer? Did he say 'Yes'?" and never rest till you can say, "Whatsoever we ask we receive of Him, because we keep His commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in His sight." -The Cottager.

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MY MOTHER SAYS IT'S SO."

LITTLE boy was one day making a statement which some one denied, telling him it was not so. The boy repeated his assertion, and, waxing warm at being contradicted, exclaimed, "My mother says it's so! And if my mother says it's so, it is so, if it ain't so."

We could hardly ask for a firmer faith than that; but, ah! mother, what a responsibility rests on you when such young hearts look up to you as to a teacher, guide, and friend.

Good mothers make good men; and many a scoffing sinner has had his tongue hushed by the mention of his mother's prayers, and has said, "Well I do believe if there ever was a Christian on earth, my old mother was one!"

Mother, will your child carry such a memory of you as he goes forth, a wanderer in the world? Will he remember the hymns that mother taught him, and the prayers that mother offered by his side? Will visions of mother's gentle face stand between him and the haunts of sin and shame? Will the beck of mother's hand point him to the heavenly home?

An old lady, some eighty years of age, in the delirium of the dying hour, wanted her mother!-called for her mother, who rocked her to sleep in her infant hours, and who for half a century had been sleeping in her grave! Such is the power of a mother's memory. Oh, mother, see that in the day of Christ your children do not seek in vain for you amid the saved, and that none of flock be wanting in the heavenly fold.

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WAITING FOR THE TRAIN.

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WAS waiting for the train, and saw near me a plain, respectable looking man. I made his acquaintance, and learned that his home was far away. He had, he told me, a small farm of about fifty acres; but the land was poor, and the distance from market considerable, and it was difficult for him to support his family, which was growing rather numerous; and so he had decided to leave his wife and children behind him, and go away for some months to seek for work, by which he might add to their comfort. I said to him, "Your wife and children must be very dear to you, as you are willing to go among strangers for so many months, just to make them comfortable."

"Indeed they are."

"And you are thinking now of the comforts the money you will earn this winter will buy for them."

"Yes, I am."

"You want to clothe them nicely, I suppose, so that you can take them to church and Sabbath-school; for a man who loves his children so much must care a great deal for the welfare of their souls."

The man seemed amazed and overcome with a sudden faintness. "Is it possible," I asked, "that you are making this long and self-denying journey for the good of your family, and have never even thought of anything but their bodies, and always forgetting their souls? Have you never thought to provide for the eternity of those dear children?"

"It is so," the poor man said; "I have never even thought of taking care of their souls; I was only thinking of their bodily comfort."

The bell rang-the stranger and I took seats together; the train started, and I told him, as well as I could, what I thought a man ought to do for the spiritual welfare of his family. He seemed impressed-I could not tell how much. When we reached S, he said to me, "I would like to know your name and address." He left the train, and I rode on. I soon forgot the man altogether, and should probably never have thought of him again if he had not sent me a letter.

His letter informed me that he had not been able to forget my conversation for an hour;-that instead of remaining for months, as he intended, he only worked for a week or ten days; and then, pressed in spirit, he returned to his family, in order to care for their souls. He found them all alive and well-and "thanks be to God," said he in his letter, "we have all with tears and prayers given ourselves to God and His service. And now," said he, “let me beg you, my friend, never omit to speak to every stranger as

you spoke to me, when waiting at the station. There are many who must be as thoughtless as I was when you first spoke to me at at the railway station."

This letter gratified me very much. When I read it in my family I could not help shedding tears; and I believe that all my family wept too.

HONOURING PARENTS.

SOMETIMES wonder what becomes of some oldfashioned texts which I come across in my Bible. "Give honour to whom honour is due." "Be courteous." "Ye younger, submit yourselves to the elder." I sometimes think that parents must teach the very opposite, "Ye younger, do not submit," "Do. not show honour," "Be uncivil."

But some I know will say, "Oh, yes, it's quite true. When I was a child, I was taught to make my bow or my curtsey to the gentlefolk, and I know I liked doing it; we used to run out to drop a curtsey directly we saw them coming, and mostly got a nod or a smile in return. But I don't know how it is, the children seem different now-a-days; though I tell them, I can't get them to do it."

True; I think the children are different, and I am afraid it is a very serious matter. Children are taking quite another place from what they used to take, and it is not a better one. Children become little men and women long before their time, follow their own wills, and do not trouble themselves much to obey their parents. Making a bow or a curtsey may seem a very little thing, but it is just the straw that shows which way the wind blows, and I fear that those who are told, or left to think for themselves, that it is a fine thing not to show respect to those above them, will very soon also think for themselves that there is no need to "Honour their father and their mother."

Why, I know it is so; I see it every day: fathers and mothers tell me of it, perhaps without quite meaning to do so, when I am in their houses. "I tell Dick he ought to do so and so, but there, he won't take heed." "I want Emma to go to Miss Smith's, but she says if she's a mind to, may be she shall go by-and-by." Look at the bold, over-dressed girls, flaunting on Sundays in clothes which they can never pay for honestly, and going of their own accord into places and with companions where you know, as well as I, what sort of temptations they are likely to meet with. There is another fruit. "Oh, I begged them not to go," is the cry of many a poor mother afterwards. Yes, you begged them not to go, but when they were children you did not teach them to obey,

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and now they only laugh at you. If you do not give your sons and your daughters a law when they are little, you will never force it down their throats when they are grown up.

And a law means something which has to be kept. Do not have too many laws, but when you make one, see that it is carried out. Insist upon obedience. "Oh, but," as a mother once said to me, "I can't be always scolding and finding fault." I am sure I hope not. It would be a nice comfortable home indeed, for both husband and children, where that was the case. But the thing is, that when your boys and girls know that you are to be obeyed, they do what you desire at once, and scolding and fussing are just the evils which are kept out of the way. Firmness and genvery tleness are what you must use to gain obedience from your children. Do not lose your temper, and punish them in a passion; then you sin, and the child knows it, and away goes all its respect for you. Do not threaten something which you never mean to do, and your child knows you never mean to do: he trusts you once, and finds you do not keep your word,' and then he does not believe you any more. Be just. Do not let a child do one thing without reproof on one day, and the next day get punished for the very same fault. Think what your children are not stocks or stones to be knocked about as you like-not playthings given to amuse you, but souls,-souls whom God has lent to you to train for Him-souls whom He will one day require at your hands. A precious charge and a very awful one. For they will not grow right of themselves. If a gardener has a pet plant, does he let it grow wild any how, without taking the trouble to train and prune and water and dig about it? If a mason has to build a wall, does he toss the stones one upon another without order; or does he set each carefully and lay it smooth, and fasten it in its place with mortar? And who thinks that children want less care than flowers or stones?

However, what I want to think about at this time is not those who neglect their children, and care nothing that they should grow up godless, wicked men, but those who really wish them well, love them, hope they will be good Christians, and at the same time are inclined to let them do very much what they choose, and to make their own wills their law. And this last evil, making their own wills their law, is one which I wish with all my heart parents would face before it is too late. Are they encouraging that proud spirit of false independence which makes a boy or girl say, "I'm as good as anybody else"? If they are, let them think well what they are doing, for it is the very opposite of all that our Heavenly Father teaches us. "Blessed are the poor in spirit ;" "Blessed are the meek;" these are the words which fell from the lips of the Blessed Saviour, "who humbled Himself." "In lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than himself," is the teaching of an Apostle.

Fathers, mothers, I entreat you think over this; think of what you have to do in the matter; think that you have first of all to make your own lives an example to your children, that they may be taught, through you, to look up to their Heavenly Father. There is the child's life, spread out before you like a fair field, and every day that you live, from that day in which the little baby first looked into your face with smiling eyes, you are sowing seed in that fair field. Good seed or weeds, which is it? Fruit for our God, or fruit for the great enemy? Think over it, and pray over it; and if you do this, be sure that our Master will send you help to train the little ones whom He loves. Teach your children to be humble, modest, obedient. When our Blessed Saviour took a little child, "and set him in the midst of them," what was it in this child that He told His disciples to copy? It was its humility, its thinking lowly of itself. They were to humble themselves like that little child. How contrary to what our dear Lord loved is the spirit which will not submit, nor obey, nor reverence those set over them! It is the spirit of pride, the sin which makes the devil oppose himself to God. It is the spirit which makes men oppose themselves to God: "Who is the Lord that He should rule over me?" It is the spirit which God warns us against, again and again. Did He, who is Lord of everything, refuse to obey His father and mother, who were really His subjects? Listen to the only words which tell us how, until the age of thirty, that most holy life was passed: "And He went down with them, and came to Nazareth, AND WAS SUB

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THE GOSPEL OF THE CHILDREN,-how pure, how bright, how simple! It is not made up of doctrines, it has no sects, it never learned a creed. "I believe" it has never descended to: it dwells as yet in the higher realm of "I love." In it the blessed Lord is not a Personage in a book, but a shining Person, ever present, ever radiant not one who lived ages ago, but one seen and heard day by day. It is the only Gospel that is written nowhere but on the heart; the only Gospel every one of whose disciples shall come right at the last. For "of such is the kingdom of God; and unless we turn back from our selfishness, from our vanity, from our duplicity, and become as one of them, there is no entrance for us there.-The late Dean of Canterbury.

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ALL truth is contained in Scripture. We should admit of no conclusion not approved there. There is no court besides the court of heaven. Though there were an hundred popes, and though all the friars in the world were turned into cardinals, yet we should learn more from the Bible than from that vast multitude.-John Wycliff. Written A.D. 1376.

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