labor and toil of the teachers, and to warrant their continuance and
support. How much Sabbath-breaking is prevented by these instructions! A
very great proportion of those children who attend Sabbath-schools would,
but for them, be spending their time in running about the streets, and
in profaning the Lord's day; and, by the unholy companionships which they
must form, into how much of profligacy and vice would they be led! Is it
true on the one hand, "train up a child in the way he should go; and when
he is old, he will not depart from it?" Then it is equally true, that if
a child be trained up in the way in which he should not go, when he is
old, he is not likely to depart from it! So that by the prevention of
Sabbath-breaking, and its consequent train of evils, you actually lessen
the amount of crime in riper years. Children _will_ be educated; and if
the _people of God_ do not educate them for _their_ Master, and train
them for heaven, the servants of the _devil will_ not be slow in
educating them _for theirs_, and in training them for hell! I conceive
that none, save the _Tractarians of Oxford, and their party_, will deny
the beneficial moral influence which such Sabbath instruction has exerted
upon our teeming population. Go to the gloomy prisons, and search in the
lonely cells for those wretched beings who through crime have become
their inhabitants, and make the inquiry as to who are the tenants of
those places; and the result of that inquiry will be, an overwhelming
majority stands on the side of the ignorant--of those who never had the
benefits of Sabbath-school instruction. Search into the history of those
poor wretches who people our "Union Houses," and you will find that but
few of them enjoyed the benefits of Sabbath-school instruction. And it
may be relied on as a fact, that in the black catalogue of the annals of
crime comparatively few are to be found who were instructed in
Sabbath-schools. Let Sabbath-schools become universal, let proper
teachers be provided for the children, and let religious instruction of
an orthodox character be instilled into their minds, and next to the