tion, and of observance, and of calculation, are ours, that we may cultivate them duly :

"The brain is like the hand,

And grows with using!"

And what is true of the intellectual is true also of the moral and spiritual faculties.

I suppose tha all who read this paper believe in the Bible! Listen, then, to these words-"The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." I know this is commonly interpreted as meaning that God will visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, &c., &c. But then the way in which sins are visited is not, I think, by such interpreters, properly understood. I remember being taught in my childhood that God was so very angry with the wicked that He would not only punish them, but their descendants, in order to show the intensity of His displeasure. It is not so! What would be said of a man who took vengeance on his enemy's innocent posterity? And shall man be esteemed less vindictive than his Maker?

God has established laws which are immutable and unchangeable, and there is one great law which underlies the whole moral strata of the universe-the law of consequences. The faults of the parent are repeated in the child, or else—the which is perhaps more general-the parent's faults having been perceived and decried by the child, have created in him antagonistic faults, which are frequently more serious, more fatal, more widely pernicious than the faults which were the original provocation.

And I suppose by "fathers" we are to understand the two sexes of parenthood; and it would seem that in many cases the mother, being chiefly entrusted with the training of the family, it is rather the sour grapes which she has tasted than those which the father has eaten that have set the children's teeth on edge. The teeth set on edge! We know what that is physically, and shun it carefully. What it is in the sense here used is a warping, and corrupting, and perverting of the moral nature, either in whole or in part.

What mothers, as a class, greatly want, is breadth-breadth of thought, breadth of view, breadth of understanding; and it is a common mistake to suppose that experience alone gives breadth. A woman may be as narrow after twenty years of maternity as she was when God gave her first the great and mysterious joy of motherhood. A narrow-minded mother may be pious and selfdenying, but she can never be a wise mother; and the children of an unwise mother will have the flavour of the sour grapes on their teeth so long as they shall live. A mother's education must be incessantly going on. As long as she has a son or a daughter under

her control, or even under her influence, she must be continually inquiring which is the more excellent way.

Not just the way "my mother pursued," because the requirements of one century are not those of the next; nay, every succeeding decade calls for fresh enterprise, evolves new theories, and developes new results. Education has but a few fixed principles, with a million of varied applications thereof. Is England's soil cultivated as it was a century ago? Do farmers breed cattle as their fathers bred them in the vaunted "good old times," which seem to recede farther and farther back as we strive in vain to fix their era? And shall women train their children as they were trained, and try to force them into the exact grooves in which parental discipline required them to move in youthful days?

Another mistake, pregnant with mischief, is trying to mould our children into a certain fixed pattern, which shall be as nearly as possible the repetition of ourselves. Many a mother is sorely disappointed because her daughter or her son, but especially the former, evinces tastes with which she has nothing in common. They display propensities which are perhaps not evil, but incongruous; they rush into an element in which she can scarcely breathe; they think thoughts which startle her, partly because they are novel, partly because they are the antipodes of her own; and then she commits the fatal error of trying to repress all that she dislikes or fails to comprehend. It is only trying, for she seldom, if ever, succeeds. She simply loses the confidence of her children, and teaches them reserve, if not actual deceit.

Nothing that a child naturally displays as the bent of his disposition should be actually repressed-save revenge, lying, want of honour, and some other flagrant derelictions from the paths of virtue; and even these need caution in repression. Too often, through rough and hasty treatment of serious faults, the volcano that seems extinct only slumbers and smoulders through childhood and youth to burst forth in maturer years a terrible and devastating torrent, spreading death and desolation all around its path.

Even early vices sometimes indicate the presence of superior gifts. A childish habit of lying often foreshadows a fine poetic and creative genius, and the dogged obstinacy that tries the patience of the parent sorely is but the germ of a courage and a firmness which, in after years, shall make the child a giant among men—a leader of his fellows. Our children's gifts too frequently become their curses; and it is chiefly, though not entirely the fault of the unwise mothers, who, either admiring too partially, or over-appreciating the gift, let it run riot, so that sour grapes are inevitably the result; or else, disliking it, try to crush it out by main force, when some

thing worse than sour grapes ensues-that which should have been a fruitful vine growing up into a deadly upas-tree.

Many of our loveliest garden flowers and exotics are derived, by sedulous care and skill, from what are generally called weeds. And may not the wise mother vie with the horticulturist in the treatment of the human plant committed to her care? May she not so train the creative faculty that it shall, by God's blessing, emerge from the mazes of falsehood, and the mists of romantic folly, into that glorious ideal and poetic world which is after all the truest as well as the highest type of the real and actual? May she not, by a judicious treatment, change obstinacy into firmness, impudence into frankness, self-complacency into self-reliance, weakness into gentleness, levity into cheerfulness, undue sensitiveness into tenderness for others, and a sullen taciturnity into modest reticence?

But it may be asked, Who is sufficient for this? What wisdom, what discretion, what patience, what courage, what knowledge, does not the mother need who would so winnow out the chaff, nor hurt the precious grain? To this I answer, All wisdom may be hers who truly seeks it; all knowledge is to be had by those who persevere in knowing; all courage is given to those who bravely and unflinchingly pursue the right; all patience is woman's own heritage, if only she be content to renounce selfishness.

Children are as books, which require the study of a lifetime; and, alas! for the mother whose heart is not in her work. She may have half-a-dozen or more of these living books, and each volume be written in a different language; or, what is worse still, some pages may be altogether written in cipher, the key to which she cannot obtain except by prayer, and careful, patient painstaking. And too many mothers are content to do without the key; and too many make a wrong translation, and blunder over the text, and so estrange for ever those who should be nearest as well as dearest. These are the unwise mothers devouring the sour grapes, careless of the children's teeth, or blindly sceptical as to results.

The height or depth, rather of maternal unwisdom is injustice! Not the coarse, wicked injustice of favouritism; that, as our French neighbours say, "goes without telling;" but the injustice which arises out of infirmities of temper the mother's temper, not the child's. The action which pleases, or at worst is ignored to-day, displeases and is punished to-morrow; the liberty which is permitted, if not encouraged, this week, is checked the next; the grace accorded in the morning is withheld at night; and not from principle, not from change of conviction, but simply from change of mood. I knew a family in my youth who were exposed to the

influence of these "moods." They were never sure whether the mother would be reasonable or unreasonable; they were never quite certain what was permitted, and what would be resented as a liberty; they could not tell whether their work would be accepted or tossed away with scorn. Maternal criticism was to them a lottery: they might draw either praise or blame, according to the maternal state of mind; and the eldest son, a youth in his teens, returning home each evening from business, would regularly inquire of the eldest daughter, "How is the temper?" and the answers, always truthfully given, varied from each other as widely as the midsummer sunshine varies from the black November fogs. Happy the children who are certain of justice! They can afford to dispense with many indulgencies if they are sure of impartial praise and blame. They can even endure some unnecessary restraints if they know certainly what will merit displeasure and what will meet with condemnation.

It is difficult, I know, to struggle with that tyrant "mood!" When one feels depressed, or nervous, or disappointed-for the dark shadow rests upon us all sometimes-and when things go wrong perversely wrong, as it would seem- -it is no easy task not to visit our own state of gloom upon those who are expected to obey us, and so make everybody miserable, to match our own condition. But this is cruel treatment of the young. It injures them past calculation. It makes them timid, and of timidity comes cowardice, and of cowardice falsehood, and falsehood opens wide the door for a troop of sins and evils we need not specify. A mother who indulges herself in "moods" is a most unwise mother, and unfit for her position. Better far the weak, indulgent mother, the fashionable, worldly mother, the ignorant mother, the habitually severe mother even, than the moody mother, who sees this little world of her own household through rose-coloured spectacles one day, and regards it through smoked glass to-morrow. Of unwise mothers she is the unwisest perhaps of all. Of course, the moody mother cannot be a Christian? you say. I do not know. I would not dare say she was not; for, indeed, my friends, Christian people do indulge in the dumps to a most marvellous extent, and their dumps do a hundredfold more harm than the dumps of people who do not profess to be religious. Nothing sets the children's teeth more permanently on edge than the sour grapes of moodiness and inequality of temper which the mother eats. Of course it is very bad if the father eats them; but we are speaking here of mothers, whose influence throughout the years of childhood and of early youth undoubtedly predominates. In the family I spoke of just now the mother herself was most unwisely trained. Her children, all now in middle life, are scattered; some have made

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shipwreck, some have escaped as if by miracle-all have suffered; and I fear me the little ones in another hemisphere have already their teeth set on edge by sour grapes eaten by their parents, their grandparents, and their great-grandparents, and probably by their progenitors of earlier generations. This is how the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation.

We cannot set up schools and colleges for mothers; and if we could, who would be the professors? No; mothers must teach themselves earnestly, prayerfully, unremittingly, self-sacrificingly! They must come to the conclusion that it is not enough to be pious, or tender, or devoted even, unless also they are wise. And they must remember, too, that a mass of knowledge is not wisdom, and that experience is more or less valuable according to the use we make of it. A wise mother is firm as gentle, cheerful as pious, and uncapricious as kind. Her yea means yea, and her nay means nay, and her children know it, and her commands are absolute; but then she is scrupulously careful never to be exacting, or unreasonable, or despotic. She hates tyranny as she hates deceit or cruelty, and she is particular not to issue edicts that are likely to be resisted. Nothing strains the bond between mother and child like antagonism; the child is conquered, perhaps, but oh! at what a cost!

And the wise mother seeks earnestly to be broad in her views on every point. Nothing is one-sided, and she strives to look at a question on all sides, that she may come to a just determination. She endeavours to keep up with the age for her children's sake, knowing that they are going into a world which will hustle them about savagely if they are behind the times. She will invite their confidence, not by rigidly questioning, as if she and they were in the confessional, but by relating her own experiences, telling her own doubts, and, above all, by never repressing the warmth, the enthusiasm, scarcely the wildness, of their young imaginings. A harsh word, a taunt, a sour look, has nipped in the bud many a confidence that might have saved the child from suffering and the parent from disgrace; and confidence once lost is seldom if ever regained.

As years pass on the unwise mother either frets over the alienation of her children, or mourns that they have "turned out so ill." She remembers how she nursed them, how she toiled for them, perhaps how she prayed for them; perhaps, at the last, it dawns upon her wearied, saddened mind, that she was unwise! But the wise mother reaps the precious fruit of her labours. Her daughters become her companions and friends; her sons grow up to be her stay and her comfort; their reverence for her is equal to their love, and they, becoming in their turn parents, remember the lessons of their youth, and add the new experience and the fresh teaching