we see all that lesson forgotten. Even after God's own hand has so
conspicuously cut the bars of iron in sunder; after He has made the
solitary to dwell in families; we still see sin continuing in new shapes
and in other forms to poison the sweetest things in human life. What
selfishness we see in family life, and that, too, after the vow and the
intention of what self-suppression and self-denial. What impatience with
one another, what bad temper, what cruel and cutting words, what coldness
and rudeness and neglect, in how many ways our abiding sinfulness
continues to poison the sweetest springs of life! And, then, how soon
such unhappy men begin to see themselves reproduced and multiplied in
their children. How many fathers see, with a secret bitterness of spirit
that never can be told, their own worst vices of character and conduct
reproduced and perpetuated in their children! One father sees his
constitutional and unextirpated sensuality coming out in the gluttony,
the drunkenness, and the lust of his son; while another sees his pride,
his moroseness, his kept-up anger and his cruelty all coming out in one
who is his very image. While many a mother sees her own youthful
shallowness, frivolity, untruthfulness, deceit and parsimony in her
daughter, for whose morality and religion she would willingly give up her
own soul. And then our children, who were to be our staff and our crown,
so early take their own so wilful and so unfilial way in life. They
betake themselves, for no reason so much as just for intended
disobedience and impudent independence, to other pursuits and pleasures,
to other political and ecclesiastical parties than we have ever gone
with. And when it is too late we see how we have again mishandled and
mismanaged our families as we had mishandled and mismanaged our own
youth, till it is only one grey head here and another there that does not
go down to the grave under a crushing load of domestic sorrow. When the
best things in life are so poisoned by sin, how bitter is that poison!