which "overcomes the world," and which is made perfect in fruition. So that we wish to teach both knowledges combined, because we believe both to be necessary.

There are but two modes of treatment of the rising generation namely, the prevention of the crime or the punishment of the criminal. One or other we must adopt. Surely it is painful to see children before a magistrate, at the police offices, who were really never taught the vast distinctions between vice and virtue, between holiness and sin, but who were allowed to grow up in the belief, that it is their duty to enrich themselves at their neighbors' expense; and then they are punished for principles which have been ingrafted on their earliest recollections, and which have been taught them beneath the shelter and authority of a mother's home. We ought to prevent the growth of the juvenile criminal, rather than punish the full-grown and matured criminal; we ought to exercise the privilege of prevention rather than the stern duty of punishment; and in doing so we should not only fall in with the prescriptions of the gospel more fully, but we should leave upon society an impression more permanent and more valuable. It would be more economical to do so. We pay so much for poor's rates, and police tax, and for gaols, just because we feel so little interest and do so little for the instruction of

the rising race. If the schoolmaster do not lay hold of that poor child in St. Giles's, a police-man will lay hold of him; if we do not place him in a Christian school, we shall find him in Newgate; if we were to give more for the maintenance of Christian schools, we should be taxed much less for gaols, and all the punitive apparatus with which our country is furnished.

Where is property most valuable because most safe? Where should we prefer to leave an estate for the maintenance of our children? Would it not be in this country?

How much was Lot's house worth in Sodom, into which the rabble were ready to burst every moment? How much was property worth in France, at the time of the Revolution? How comes it to pass that the barren acres of Scotland will fetch more than the fertile fields of Mahometan Turkey? The answer is, because Christian education has made a visible impression upon the one, while the other is completely overrun with ignorance and superstition. But I will not dwell upon such grounds: I put the matter upon the highest ground of all. Train children for Christ; prepare their hearts for immortality and glory; transplant them from a soil in which they wither, to a soil in which they will grow and prosper. Bring them from the waters of the swelling flood into communion with the people of God.

CHAPTER XIII.

ARARAT; OR, THE FIRST MORNING OF A NEW DAY.

"The wave is breaking on the shore,

The echo fading from the chime,

Again the shadow moveth o'er

The dial-plate of time.

"Oh! in that dying year hath been

The sum of all since time began;

The birth and death, the joy and pain,

Of nature and of man."

"And Noah builded an altar unto the LORD; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. - GEN. viii. 20.

NOAH, a member of the Church before the Flood, commemorated the past and commenced the future by a religious act. He owned God in the end, as he had owned him in the beginning of his peculiar, and, as he thought at first, his perilous career. God with Noah was not a mere speculative idea that floated in his head, but an ever present, ever plastic, ever consolatory conviction; he began his voyage with God, he ended it in worship and adoration to God.

As Noah ended one world and began another, we should end one year and begin the next. A year is the epitome of an age; an age is the expansion of a year; and both ought to be made by us, as they were meant to be by Him

who created them, subservient to the highest, the holiest, and the most beneficent of ends. End, therefore, each year, and begin its successor, as you would wish to end this life, and to begin the next. Let the last notes of praise in 1852 mingle with the first notes of prayer for 1853. Let us close great epochs as we would wish to close the grand epoch. Time is the porch of eternity, the pathway to a crown of glory, or to an heirdom of misery and sorrow and grief. He must be blind indeed, who has not seen God's hand sweep along the currents of the year that is gone; and he must be deaf indeed, who has not heard his voice upon the right and upon the left, saying, "This is the way, walk ye in it;" and he must be insensible and hardened indeed, who, having closed one year without God, can risk, or dare, or venture to commence and continue its successor in defiance of God. Beautifully, then, did Noah close the world that passed away with solemn worship; most appropriately did he commence an unsounded world, into whose ups and downs, and heights and depths, his weary feet were soon to go, by seeking him to be with him in the future, lighting it up with the love which had been with him in the past, superintending him by his paternal and benevolent

care.

But, in looking at this act of Noah, which closed one epoch and commenced another, let us try to ascertain what was the first feeling that it expressed. No doubt it was thanksgiving, adoration, and praise. Ararat was to Noah a standing monument that God's overshadowing wings had been over him upon the stormy deep, that God's fatherly eye had been fastened upon that little, often doubting, but still safe voyager! And as he thought that the same Flood that was the grave of a vast world, was the preservation of his little family; surely it became him, it was worthy of him as a Christian, for such he was, to offer thanksgiving

and praise to Him who had kept his eyes from tears, his ark from foundering, and placed him on Ararat, a monument of preserving goodness. New-year's day is the Ararat of Christians still. It is that day on which we stand and look back on all the way that God has guided us; and from whose summit, as it were, we may look forward; and if we have fears and faintings, and dim and sad prospects, we need have no misgivings; because 1853 is as naked before our God as 1852, and he that poured the one from his hand, and has taken it again to himself, is pouring forth the other for us, to carry us a stage nearer to himself. And as we look back from each Ararat, the first day of a new year, upon the past, we can see rocks as Noah saw, and debris and fragments of barks and disorganized things; but we can see what Noah also saw, the green grass that begins again to grow, and the young flowers that begin again to bloom; and around its awful brow, girdling it with fresh glory and grand riches, the rainbow, the memorial of a God at peace with mankind, and mankind accepted and blessed in covenant with him. Have we, then, standing where we now are, no mercies, like Noah, to commemorate? Have we no God to praise for the past? have we no Ararat that prompts that praise? If we are this day in health, and some in prosperity, and all in safety, to whom do we give the praise? Do we praise the ship that carried us, the skill of the crew that manned it, the winds and the waves, as the heathen do? or do we praise the love and faithfulness of that God who controls the archangel that is next his throne, and takes care of the meanest reptile that was admitted into the ark, as Christians should? Let God have all the praise for the last year, let him have our hearts' complete confidence for the coming one. I say, like Noah, we may have much to deplore in the past, and much that we could wish were not swept away by the past; but we have