LORD's Supper', and that the sacrament of the LORD's Supper can only be administered by ministers duly ordained, and that therefore it is needful to continue in the fellowship of the Apostles and the communion of the Church2. Now, all these facts are independent of opinion. You may refuse to believe that they are facts, and thus dare the worst; but if you believe them, you must believe them as facts.

And is it possible that you can believe that these things are really so, and yet not desire to rescue your children from the perdition to which they are born: not to wish to place them within the reach of that sanctification of the HOLY SPIRIT on which their happiness here and hereafter must depend? And if each parent must thus act towards his own child, what is the Church but the common mother of us all ?3 And the care you would extend towards your own household, she would extend to all the Christian family in this country, especially to those whose parents are too ignorant or to indolent to educate them themselves.

1 John vi. 53, 54. 1 Cor. xi. 23, 26.

1 Cor. x. 16. Eph. iv. 11, 12.

" Gal. iv. 26.

The day, I hope, is not far distant when the hands of the Church will be strengthened, when her members will come forward liberally that she may have the means of doing completely what she acknowledges it to be her duty to do, of conducting on a scale commensurate with its importance the religious education of all her children. For it is obvious, as I before remarked, that our schools at present, excellent as far as they go, are insufficient and incomplete. We require a system of religious training that shall meet the wants of all classes of the community. In our more rural districts, the poor, through the care of the clergy, are generally well attended to; but the children of the yeomanry are too often neglected through the pride or the carelessness of their parents, and in our great towns there are always to be found large districts now used as the woods and forests were of old, as the hiding-place of robbers and of outcasts, where misery and vice prevail to an extent not to be imagined by those by whom it has not been witnessed, where children swarm who never hear the name Christ except to blaspheme it, and in whom the depravity of unrenewed human nature exhibits itself in all its unrestrained horrors. How the heart sickens at the thought

of the many such who are destroyed in body and in soul by the evil education they receive; for education they must have; if they are not brought up in the ways of GOD and of godliness, they are educated in the ways of Satan and of vice; trained in the way they ought not to go, they continue, through life, in the broad way of destruction. Thus sadly true is the converse of

our text.

And the contemplation of this fact should quicken our zeal as Christian patriots, and animate our endeavours to fence the bloom of youth from the early blasts of vice, and to train it with a firm, but gentle, hand around the tree of Life. But it has been with reference chiefly to the little ones of our own households that I have, this day, addressed you; and happy is the assurance which you have from HIм who is not a man that He should lie, nor the son of man that He should deceive, that if you train them in the way they ought to go, from that way when they are old they will not depart.

THERE is a Divine pathos in this address of our Blessed SAVIOUR to HIS slumbering Apostles which speaks directly to the heart.

Our LORD was in His agony. He had entered the garden of Gethsemane, and "He took with HIM Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful and very heavy. Then saith HE unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death; tarry ye here, and watch with me. And He went a little further, and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, O My

FATHER, if it be possible, let this cup pass from ME: nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt. And He cometh unto the Disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit, indeed, is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Thrice He retired from them to pray; thrice HE returned to them, and found them not watching but sleeping; thrice did he, not, indeed, upbraid them, but deliver or insinuate a gentle reproach; just such a reproach as a friend might utter when disappointed in some return of affection; the kind of reproach which seemed to signify that something was lost on the part of those who neglected to do what a friend in his kindness had requested.

To the men of this generation the question will suggest itself as to the use of this Apostolic vigil. Where was the use of their watching, it will be asked? They were more profited, it may be said, in taking their rest, that so they might be prepared to endure the fatigue which was awaiting them; besides, their eyes were heavy, and they slept for sorrow. It was natural for them to sleep; their very drowsiness gave proof of the excess of their grief. They could not have assisted their MASTER even if they had been