Do you love yourself? Do
you regard your own comfort and welfare? Would you avoid painful
solicitude, bitter reflection, heart-burning remorse, dreadful foreboding?
Then be faithful to the home-mission. If you are, God will bless you for it
through your children. What a comfort it will be to you to see them become
Christians, enter the church, and, at their side around the Lord's Table,
hold communion with them in the joys of faith and in the anticipations of
heaven! And should God remove them from you by death, you will be cheered
amidst the agonies of separation by their dying consolation. The hope of a
speedy reunion with them in heaven would afford a sweet solace to your
bereaved heart.
Or should you be taken before them, what a comfort would they afford you in
your last moments! With the glow of Christian faith and hope, they would
whisper to you the consolations of the gospel, and bless you for your
faithfulness to them. And when you and they shall meet at the bar of God,
they will rise up and call you blessed.
But, on the other hand, should you neglect them; and, as a consequence,
they grow up in wickedness and crime; oh, what a source of withering
remorse they would cause you! No sin more heavily punishes the guilty, and
mingles for him a more bitter cup, than the sin of parental neglect. What
if after the lapse of a few years, your neglected child be taken from you,
and consigned to the cold grave, think you not that when you meet it before
the bar of God, it will rise up as a witness against you, and pour down its
curses upon your head!
But suppose that child grows up, unprovided for by you in its early life;
and profligacy mark his pathway, and demon guilt throw its chains around
him in the prison cell; and he trace back the beginning of his ruin to your
unfaithfulness, oh, with what pungency would the reflection send the pang
of remorse to your soul!
"Go ask that musing father, why yon grave So narrow, and so noteless,
might not close Without a tear?"
Because of the bitter and heart-stricken memories of a neglected, ruined
child that slumbers there!
Or suppose that you die before your neglected children, think you not that
the recollection of your past parental unfaithfulness will plant thorns in
your pillow, and invest with deeper shades of horror your descent to the
dark valley of death? And oh, when you meet them before the bar of the
avenging judge, most fearful will be your interview with them.
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