Ought not you, my brother, to be better, having had Christian nurture, than that man who can truly say this morning: "The first word I remember my father speaking to me was an oath; the first time I remember my father taking hold of me was in wrath; I never saw a Bible till I was ten years of age, and then I was told it was a pack of lies. The first twenty years of my life I was associated with the vicious. I seemed to be walled in by sin and death." Now, my brother, ought you not—I leave it as a matter of fairness with you—ought you not to be far better than those who had no early Christian influence?
Standing as you do between the generation that is past and the generation that is to come, are you going to pass the blessing on, or are you going to have your life the gulf in which that tide of blessing shall drop out of sight forever? You are
THE TRUSTEE OF PIETY
in that ancestral line, and are you going to augment or squander that solemn trust fund? are you going to disinherit your sons and daughters of the heirloom which your parents left you? Ah! that cannot be possible, that cannot be possible that you are going to take such a position as that. You are very careful about the life insurances, and careful about the deeds, and careful about the mortgages, and careful about the title of your property, because when you step off the stage you want your children to get it all. Are you making no provision that they shall get grandfather and grandmother's religion? Oh, what a last will and testament you are making, my brother! "In the name of God, Amen. I, being of sound mind, make this my last will and testament. I bequeath to my children all the money I ever made and all the houses I own; but I disinherit them, I rob them of the ancestral grace and the Christian influence that I inherited. I have squandered that on my own worldliness. Share and share alike must they in the misfortune and the everlasting outrage. Signed, sealed and delivered in the presence of God and men and angels and devils and all the generations of earth and heaven and hell, March, 1886."
O ye of highly favored ancestry, wake up this morning to a sense of your opportunity and your responsibility. I think there must be
AN OLD CRADLE,
or a fragment of a cradle somewhere that could tell a story of midnight supplication in your behalf. Where is the old rocking-chair in which you were sung to sleep with the holy nursery rhyme? Where is the old clock that ticked away the moments of that sickness on that awful night when there were but three of you awake—you and God and mother? Is there not an old staff in some closet? is there not an old family Bible on some shelf that seems to address you, saying: "My son, my daughter, how can you reject that God who so kindly dealt with us all our lives and to whom we commended you in our prayers living and dying? By the memory of the old homestead, by the family altar, by our dying pillow, by the graves in which our bodies sleep while our spirits hover, we beg you to turn over a new leaf for the new year." Oh, the power of ancestral piety, well illustrated by a young man of New York who attended a prayer-meeting one night and asked for prayer, and then went home and wrote down these words:
AN ENTRY IN A DIARY.
"Twenty-five years ago to-night my mother went to heaven, my beautiful, blessed mother, and I have been alone, tossed up and down upon the billows of life's tempestuous ocean. Shall I ever go to heaven? She told me I must meet her in heaven. When she took her boy's hand in hers and turned her gentle, loving eyes on me, and gazed earnestly and long into my face, and then lifted them to heaven in that last prayer, she prayed that I might meet her in heaven. I wonder if I ever shall.
"My mother's prayers! Oh, my sweet, blessed mother's prayers! Did ever boy have such a mother as I had? For twenty-five years I have not heard her pray until to-night. I have heard all her prayers over again. They have had, in fact, a terrible resurrection. Oh, how she was wont to pray! She prayed as they prayed to-night, so earnest, so importunate, so believing. Shall I ever be a Christian? She was a Christian. Oh, how bright and pure and happy was her life! She was a cheerful and happy Christian. There is