Children generally hate to be idle; all the care then is that their busy humor should be constantly employed in something of use to them.-Locke. The whining schoolboy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school.-Shakespeare. Happy season of childhood! Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man's hut with auroral radiance; and for thy nursling hast provided a soft swathing of love and infinite hope wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced round by sweetest dreams!Carlyle. Childhood is the sleep of reason.-Rousseau. The child's grief throbs against the round of its little heart as heavily as the man's sorrow; and the one finds as much delight in his kite or drum as the other in striking the springs of enterprise or soaring on the wings of fame. Chapin. Who is not attracted by bright and pleasant children, to prattle, to creep, and to play with them?-Epictetus. A creature undefiled by the taint of the world, unvexed by its injustice, unwearied by its hollow pleasures; a being fresh from the source of light, with something of its universal lustre in it. If childhood be this, how holy the duty to see that in its onward growth it shall be no other!-Douglas Jerrold. Your little child is your only true democrat. Children are very nice observers, and they will often perceive your slightest defects. In general, those who govern children forgive nothing in them, but everything in themselves. Fenelon. I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them; but the prettier the kind of a thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its kind. One daisy differs not much from another in glory; but a violet should look and smell the daintiest. Lamb. A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.—Longfellow. It always grieves me to contemplate the inBeware of fatiguing them by ill-judged ex-itiation of children into the ways of life when actness. If virtue offer itself to a child under a they are scarcely more than infants. It checks melancholy and constrained, aspect, if liberty their confidence and simplicity, two of the best and license present themselves under an agree- qualities that Heaven gives them, and demands able form, all is lost, your labor is in vain.- that they share our sorrows before they are capable of entering into our enjoyments. Dickens. Fenelon. Children have neither past nor future; and, what scarcely ever happens to us, they enjoy the present.-Bruyère. The least and most imperceptible impressions received in our infancy, have consequences very important, and of a long duration. It is with these first impressions, as with a river whose waters we can easily turn, by different canals, in quite opposite courses, so that from the insensible direction the stream receives at its source, it takes different directions, and at last arrives at places far distant from each other; and with the same facility we may, I think, turn the minds of children to what direction we please.-Locke. I hardly know so melancholy a reflection as that parents are necessarily the sole directors of the management of children, whether they have or have not judgment, penetration, or taste to perform the task.-Lord Greville. In bringing up a child, think of its old age. Joubert. Bring together all the children of the universe, you will see nothing in them but inno cence, gentleness, and fear; were they born wicked, spiteful, and cruel, some signs of it would come from them; as little snakes strive to bite, and little tigers to tear. But nature having been as sparing of offensive weapons to Living jewels dropped unstained from man as to pigeons and rabbits, it cannot have heaven.-Pollok. given them an instinct to mischief and destruction.-Voltaire. Blessed be the hand that prepares a pleasure for a child, for there is no saying when and where it may bloom forth.-Douglas Jerrold. If a boy is not trained to endure and to bear trouble, he will grow up a girl; and a boy that is a girl has all a girl's weakness without any of her regal qualities. A woman made out of a woman is God's noblest work; a woman made out of a man is his meanest.-Beecher. Who feels injustice, who shrinks before a I do not like punishments. You will never slight, who has a sense of wrong so acute, and torture a child into duty; but a sensible child so glowing a gratitude for kindness, as a gener-will dread the frown of a judicious mother more ous boy? Thackeray. than all the rods, dark rooms, and scolding schoolmistresses in the universe.-H. K. White. A child is an angel dependent on man. Count de Maistre. Be very vigilant over thy child in the April of his understanding, lest the frost of May nip his blossoms. While he is a tender twig, straighten him; whilst he is a new vessel, season him; such as thou makest him, such commonly shalt thou find him. Let his first lesson be obedience, and his second shall be what thou wilt.-Quarles. Childhood, who like an April morn appears, sunshine and rain, hopes clouded o'er with fears. Churchill. Be ever gentle with the children God has given you; watch over them constantly; reprove them earnestly, but not in anger. In the forcible language of Scripture, "Be not bitter against them." Yes, they are good boys," I once heard a kind father say. "I talk to them very much, but do not like to beat my children, the world will beat them." It was a beautiful thought, though not elegantly expressed.Elihu Burritt. Our children that die young are like those spring bulbs which have their flowers prepared beforehand, and leave nothing to do but to break ground, and blossom, and pass away. Thank God for spring flowers among men, as well as among the grasses of the field.—Beecher. A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded. Above all things endeavor to breed them up in the love of virtue, and that holy plain way of it which we have lived in, that the world in no part of it get into my family. I had rather they were homely than finely bred as to outward behavior; yet I love sweetness mixed with gravity, and cheerfulness tempered with sobriety.-William Penn. Childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day.-Milton. Truly there is nothing in the world so blessed or so sweet as the heritage of children.— Mrs. Oliphant. Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven. By these tendrils we clasp it and climb thitherward. And why do we think that we are separated from them? We never half knew them, nor in this world could. Beecher. Call not that man wretched who, whatever ills he suffers, has a child to love.-Southey. In trying to teach children a great deal in a short time, they are treated not as though the race they were to run was for life, but simply a three-mile heat.-Horace Mann. I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.—Coleridge. God sends children for another purpose than merely to keep up the race, -to enlarge our hearts, to make us unselfish, and full of kindly sympathies and affections; to give our souls higher aims, and to call out all our faculties to extended enterprise and exertion; to bring round our fireside bright faces and happy smiles, and loving, tender hearts. My sou blesses the Great Father every day, that he has gladdened the earth with little children.-Mary Howitt. A child is man in a small letter, yet the best copy of Adam before he tasted of Eve or the apple; and he is happy whose small practice in the world can only write his character. His soul is yet a white paper unscribbled with observations of the world, wherewith at length it becomes a blurred note-book. He is purely happy because he knows no evil, nor hath made means by sin to be acquainted with misery.Bishop Earle. In praising or loving a child, we love and praise not that which is, but that which we hope for.-Goethe. Just as the twig is bent the tree is inclined. Pope. While childhood, and while dreams, reducing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth.-Lamb. "Beware," said Lavater, "of him who hates the laugh of a child." "I love God and little children," was the simple yet sublime sentiment of Richter.-Mrs. Sigourney What gift has Providence bestowed on man that is so dear to him as his children -Cicero. The child is father of the man.-Wordsworth. Of all sights which can soften and humanize the heart of men, there is none that ought so surely to reach it as that of innocent children, enjoying the happiness which is their proper and natural portion.-Southey Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosom of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments ?-Lamb. Many children, many cares; no children, no felicity. Bovee. A child's existence is a bright, soft element of joy, out of which, as in Prospero's Island, wonder after wonder bodies itself forth, to teach by charming.-Rodney. We should amuse our evening hours of life in cultivating the tender plants, and bringing them to perfection, before they are transplanted to a happier clime.-Washington Men who neglect Christ, and try to win heaven through moralities, are like sailors at sea in a storm, who pull, some at the bowsprit and some at the mainmast, but never touch the helm.-Beecher. Now you say, alas! Christianity is hard; I grant it; but gainful and happy. I contemn the difficulty when I respect the advantage. The greatest labors that have answerable requitals are less than the least that have no regard. Believe me, when I look to the reward, At his birth a star, unseen before in heaven, I would not have the work easier. It is a good proclaims him come.--Milton The nature of Christ's existence is mysterious, I admit; but this mystery meets the wants of man. Reject it, and the world is an inexplicable riddle; believe it, and the history of our race is satisfactorily explained.-Napoleon. In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.-Bible. Unlike all other founders of a religious faith, Christ had no selfishness, no desire of dominance; and his system, unlike all other systems of worship, was bloodless, boundlessly beneficent, inexpressibly pure, and -most marvellous of all went to break all bonds of body and soul, and to cast down every temporal and every spiritual tyranny.-William Howitt. All the glory and beauty of Christ are manifested within, and there he delights to dwell; his visits there are frequent, his condescension amazing, his conversation sweet, his comforts refreshing; and the peace that he brings passeth all understanding.-Thomas à Kempis. Rejecting the miracles of Christ, we still have the miracle of Christ himself.-Bovee. He walked in Judæa eighteen hundred years ago; his sphere melody, flowing in wild native tones, took captive the ravished souls of men, and, being of a truth sphere melody, still flows and sounds, though now with thousand-fold accompaniments and rich symphonies, through all our hearts, and modulates and divinely leads them.--Carlyle. CHRISTIANITY. I do not want the walls of separation between different orders of Christians to be destroyed, but only lowered, that we may shake hands a little easier over them.-Rowland Hill. Master whom we serve, who not only pays, but gives; not after the proportion of our earnings, but of his own mercy.-Bishop Hall. Christianity has no ceremonial. It has forms, for forms are essential to order; but it disdains the folly of attempting to reinforce the religion of the heart by the antics of the mind.— Rev. Dr. Croly. Alas! how has the social spirit of Christianity been perverted by fools at one time, and by knaves and bigots at another; by the selftormentors of the cell, and the all-tormentors of the conclave !-Colton. Ordinarily rivers run small at the beginning, grow broader and broader as they proceed, and become widest and deepest at the point where they enter the sea. It is such rivers that the Christian's life is like. But the life of the mere worldly man is like those rivers in Southern Africa, which proceeding from mountain freshets, are broad and deep at the beginning, and grow narrower and more shallow as they advance. They waste themselves by soaking into the sands, and at last they die out entirely. The farther they run, the less there is of them. Beecher. Christianity, which is always true to the heart, knows no abstract virtues, but virtues resulting from our wants, and useful to all.— Chateaubriand. The real security of Christianity is to be found in its benevolent morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the facility with which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of every human intellect, in the consolation which it bears to every house of mourning, in the light with which it brightens the great mystery of the grave.--Macaulay. He that loves Christianity better than truth Every Christian is born great because he is will soon love his own sect or party better than born for heaven.-Massillon. Christianity, and will end by loving himself better than all.-Coleridge. It is more to the honor of a Christian soldier by faith to overcome the world, than by a monastical vow to retreat from it; and more for the honor of Christ to serve him in a city than to serve him in a cell.-Matthew Henry. The relations of Christians to each other are like the several flowers in a garden that have upon each the dew of heaven, which, being shaken by the wind, they let fall the dew at each other's roots, whereby they are jointly nourished, and become nourishers of one anoth- | er.-Bunyan. As to the Christian religion, besides the strong evidence which we have for it, there is a balance in its favor from the number of great men who have been convinced of its truth after Ia serious consideration of the question. Grotius was an acute man, a lawyer, a man accustomed to examine evidence, and he was convinced. Grotius was not a recluse, but a man of the world, who certainly had no bias on the side of religion. Sir Isaac Newton set out an infidel, and came to be a very firm believer. Johnson. CHRISTIANITY. Though the living man can wear a mask and carry on deceit, the dying Christian cannot counterfeit.-Cumberland. Christianity has carried civilization along with it, whithersoever it has gone; and, as if to show that the latter does not depend on physical causes, some of the countries the most civilized Christianity commands us to pass by in- in the days of Augustus are now in a state of juries; policy, to let them pass by us.— hopeless barbarism.—Hare. Franklin. A Christian in this world is but gold in the ore; at death the pure gold is melted out and separated, and the dross cast away and consumed.-Flavel. Christian graces are like perfumes; the more they are pressed, the sweeter they smell; like stars that shine brightest in the dark; like trees, the more they are shaken, the deeper root they take, and the more fruit they bear.Rev. John Mason. He who is truly a good man is more than half way to being a Christian, by whatever name he is called.-South. Great books are written for Christianity much oftener than great deeds are done for it. City libraries tell us of the reign of Jesus Christ, but city streets tell us of the reign of Satan.-Horace Mann. The other world is as to this like the east to the west. We cannot approach the one without turning away from the other.-Abd-el-Kader. If ever Christianity appears in its power, it is when it erects its trophies upon the tomb; when it takes up its votaries where the world leaves them; and fills the breach with immortal hope in dying moments.-Robert Hall. In becoming Christians, though we love some persons more than we did, let us love none less.-Gambold. Christianity is indeed peculiarly fitted to the more improved stages of society, to the more delicate sensibilities of refined minds, and especially to that dissatisfaction with the present state which always grows with the growth of our moral powers and affections.-Channing. I would give nothing for the Christianity of a man whose very dog and cat were not the better for his religion.-Rowland Hill. A Christianity which will not help those who are struggling from the bottom to the top of society needs another Christ to die for it.-Beecher. An I have not forgotten what the inside of a church is made of, I am a peppercorn, a brewer's horse.-Shakespeare. CHURLISHNESS. My master is of churlish disposition, and little recks to find the way to heaven by doing deeds of hospitality -Shakespeare. |