what your parents did; whether you deem it a blessing and privilege to be in covenant with God; whether you are thankful for those great mercies revealed in Jesus Christ, and in baptism sealed to your benefit; and whether it is your desire to continue his disciples, and to obtain through him, that salvation which is of God? This good confession is particularly made in the ordinance called Confirmation. It is an ordinance which was instituted by the Apostles of Christ; which has been generally observed in every age of his church; and which experience is daily showing to be a wise and very useful institution. It is useful especially to those who were baptized in infancy; as it gives them an opportunity of publicly approbating the charitable work of those who brought them to baptism. From what has been said in this discourse, you see that you are verily bound to believe and to do as your sponsors promised for you; and most sincerely should you say, "By God's help so I will," and heartily should you "thank your heavenly father that he hath called you to this state of salvation." Gladly should you on the first convenient opportunity, in the presence of God, and of the congregation of his people, renew the baptismal covenant, ratifying and confirming it, and acknowledge yourself bound to believe and to do, what your part of that covenant requires. Confirmation is a rite, in which we very solemnly confess our faith in Christ, and pray for the sanctifying aid of God's Holy Spirit. That you may with your heart believe unto righteousness, and with your mouth make confession unto salvation, God mercifully grant, through Jesus Christ. Amen. SERMON XXI. CHRISTIAN EDUCATION. By the Rev. EDWARD CRAIG, A. M., PROVERBS Xxii. 6. Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. THE immortal spirit as a child is the most sacred deposit, next to a man's own soul, which is committed to his keeping. Every such child is born for eternity; has begun the race of an eternal existence; and the probable end of that existence must be most materially affected by those who have the charge of it in earlier years. It is therefore absolutely impossible for parents to have views too serious of the relation in which they stand to their children, and of the solemn trust reposed in them. They have to watch over the formation of a character that shall endure forever. But this duty is not limited to the actual relation of parent and child. The Christian church is one widely extended family; and the relation in which the matured members of the congregation stand to the young, entails upon them, wherever it is necessary, a very serious responsibility in respect to the proper education of youth in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Jesus Christ said to the members of the visible church in his day, "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not." And it behooves the grown members of the church to consider this, and to look with deep and affectionate interest upon the children of their day, thus brought into outward connection with the visible church, as a most sacred deposit confided to their care -a store-house out of which the saints of God are to be gathered-the raw material out of which the everlasting ornaments, the polished corners of God's spiritual temple are to be wroughtthe nursery out of which souls are to be taken, and made in the paradise of God, trees of righteousness, of the right hand planting of the Lord. Having thus recognized the duty to which our attention is on this occasion directed, we turn now to the text, which speaks very plainly of the mode in which that duty should be fulfilled; and it is on this point that I wish to speak more fully. How is a child's soul to be prepared for heaven? The text answers, "Train up that child in the way it should go," and a blessing shall attend that training, to keep it in the way into which it has been brought; "when it is grown old he will not depart from it," i. e. it shall continue in it unto the end. In this text, then, there are three things to be noticed. I. The way in which a child should go. II. The training of a child in that way. III. The blessing attendant on such training. First, The way in which a child should go; that is, the way consonant to the best interest of his nature-the way of the Lord -the way in which the Almighty Maker of his soul would wish him to walk. In this way a child does not go naturally, spontaneously, and without training. The contemplation of the power of evil, displayed at an early period in a child's disposition, tempers, and ways, supplies a most melancholy proof of this. And they who know any thing intimately of childrens' minds, may well stand and weep over their premature determination to evil-their radical perverseness and willfulness in turning to evil rather than to good-their resolute resistance to those things which they know to be their duty. Experience, and the word of God, combine to testify that foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; and foolishness, in Scripture language, means something more than trifling; it means vice-it means the root and essence of vice in a sinful nature-it means the folly of being opposed to, and at a distance from God. The testimony of Scripture is, that all men naturally are alienated from God, and are without hope and without God in the world; and this being the case, it is evident that even a child does not naturally walk in that way which is pleasing and accept able to God. Let us each look back to the recollections of our own carly days, and we shall surely be enabled to collect ample proof of this fact. All our self-sufficiency will not avail to drown the humbling recollection. But then we come to the point: considering that every youthful soul is far from God by nature, and by works as far as it has had opportunity of acting according to the dictates of inclination; what is the way in which it should go, to obtain deliverance from its evil state? There is a way back to God, consecrated by his blessing, which the child who is rightly trained, will find and walk in; and which, considering the merciful character of the Christian dispensation, and the evident love of the Saviour to the souls of the young, there is every encouragement to hope, will be found by those who seek it. And this way is to seek God with the opening and strengthening powers of the soul-to seek him in the Gospel of his Son, and in the use of the means of grace. If parents are what they ought to be, the friends of a child's soul, and the guardians of its best interests, they should early impress upon it, that this is the grand business of life-that all other things together are of less consequence; that the devotion of the mind to some earthly occupation, however lucrative, however dignified, is but a subordinate and a temporary matter, and that every prospect of worldly advancement or gain, should be readily sacrificed, rather than the progress of the soul towards God, be impeded one single step. 1. The first point to be obtained in this way is the knowledge of God. The mind must have attained a certain measure of information respecting God, before there can be any right religious feeling towards him. And it is surprizing, on the one hand, how ignorant the untutored mind may remain, and for how long a period; and, on the other, how fully, even the child's mind may be trained to such conceptions of God, as are adequate for all the purposes of practical religion and salvation. The neglected savage, or the poor blinded papist,-the one, the child of ignorance, the other, of superstition,-has often, at mature years, little higher notion of God than the stock or the stone to which he prays; while the t at mind of a child of nine or ten years, will be ric of ti ar, and elevating, and sanctifying notions and of the glories of his work of redemp 29 ble tion. Here then, is a primarily important point in a child's education. That mind, which evidently has little or no conception of God and of the truths of his blessed Gospel, in whom the feeray of natural light has in many instances, by bad carly habits, been almost extinguished, must be trained to the knowledge of God. What God is, as the Creator and the Redeemer of the world; what he is as a holy, just, and benevolent being; what he is in his Son Jesus Christ, as a God of love, providing the way of our return to him-all this must become familiar to the mind; must be brought frequently before it, as the most important branch of knowledge-as that for which every thing else should be laid aside; as that of which, if a man is to remain ignorant, he had better never have been born. 2. The next point to be attained in this way, is faith. It is something to have had right ideas of God, of his holy will, and of his mercy, infused into the mind; that even as a matter of mere knowledge, from an early period of life, these ideas should have been implanted. The text point is to train the mind to faith, i. e. in fact, to acting as in the conscious presence of that invisible God of whom they have heard. And I do not mean here, that a child is in the first instance to acquire faith, in the ful! Gospel sense of the word; but I would use the term as implying the habit of reference to, and reliance upon, the unseen God as the Ruler, Guardian, and Guide of the soul; according to that text in Heb. xi., "He who comes to God must first believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him." The whole force of the Gospel statement, which is so simple, and so comprehensible to the mind, may be brought to bear here, in order to strengthen the conviction, and to be made the means of realizing the notion of God's kindly operations towards us, and to give the soul of a child something to lay hold of, on which it may exercise reliance and trust. And in this way, by habituating the mind to reliance on the God of the Gospel, in due time we shall gradually arrive at Scriptural and saving faith. But in the mean time, it is a great point gained, of this wondrous story of our lost state, and of God's exceeding love in the gift of his only begotten Son, to die the death of the cross for us--if this is made available, to give the child a sense of God's nearness and activity towards us, and to impress it with a conviction of his kindness and his love. The habit of receiving our daily mercies as |