Oh, miracles of Grace Incarnate! By each little child repeated, Cradled with the Saviour's kiss, From Earth's sorrows all transported, To the Heaven of God's own peace, By the grace of Christ's provision, Through each praying Mother's Faith, Conquering even unto death! Oh the sweetness of such glory! Look up, thou trembling Little Faith, Nor ever more despair! Look up the bow is round the cloud, Thy loving Lord's o'ershadowing wings Beyond this sin-defiled world, The stars of mercy rise! Then wait, my soul, upon the Lord, His bow above the stormy cloud, The thunders may be long and loud, The rain a deluge be, Yet boundless springs of life and love, They shall create for thee. Thou art still covered with the wings Of His surprising grace, Though for a day thou mayst not see The shinings of His face;- The little ones of Jesus' love, The mummified carcasses of the old crocodileworshippers on the borders of the Nile make light and fuel for modern Mohammedans. The admission of paganism makes sunlight for advancing Deism, without need of a Saviour. Peor and Baalim forsake their antique shrines and place themselves, as living Caryatides, under the throne of the Vatican. Now every prepossession by such falsehood and blindness in education is prophetic of inevitable guilt and misery. Ashes of thought may be good for guano, but must depend on what was the material burned. Coal ashes are fit only for roadways or mudholes. All the life of Truth burned out, what remains. is impossible to be rekindled. The saying of a poet has been admired, that even in our ashes live their wonted fires. But how so? Nothing but clinkers and cinders of thought remain. Some kinds of coal make them rapidly, and they stick so fast to the furnace that they cannot be cleaned away. Like an old well, the cement in which the stones are laid becomes stronger than the stones themselves; and it is easier to break away the stones than the prejudices in the work of a boy's education. Vile examples are the most powerful of all prepossessions. Hence the necessity of prepossessions grounded in Truth and Love, the very cement of Heaven. But wrong prepossessions, by falsehoods-an education built up and cemented by lying, how infinitely terrible! Prevention is better than cure, and prepossession is preposition, and if held as firmly as taken, secures the Victory. Preposition is power; and prepossession in a right way, by the elements of truth, is not only nine-tenths of the law, but, in Divine love, is the whole law. Let any man take a comprehensive dictionary of any language, the English especially, with the references and illustrative quotations, and he can read no more solemn and profoundly instructive pages, even in the most sacred moralists, than he can in tracing the words compounded with the governing particles pre and pro; from pre-accusation (the very first compound noun occurring in this form, and for the consciousness of guilt how significant!) down through pre-admonition, precaution, preception, "Pre predilection, pre-disposition, pre-emption, prejudication, and so on, to the last of the alphabet, presentiment, presumption, pretension, prevention, prevision. Forewarned, forearmed. venient grace descending," builds lighthouses in our very language for us, foreseeing, foretelling our dangers, our refuges, the reefs, the shoals, the harbors. Agree with thine adversary while thou art in the way with him. Prepossession waits on preposition; the last is first, the first follows and holds. So it is with right principles, taking the highest positions and confirmed by habits. In our war of Independence, Ticonderoga was fortified by the Americans. They had prepossession. But to have secured that, to have held it against the enemy, there should have been preposition, higher up, not only of that fort, but of every other higher eminence from which an enemy, having prepossessed that height, could overlook, overshoot, and dispossess the other. And so the native-born patriots had to move out. It is a warning lesson for a right education, a right beginning, a granite foundation. How impossible, except by God's merciful providence and grace, for us to reverse an evil habit when it has become a second nature, a despotism within and without. It is like those fearful Venetian prisons, so contrived as to close gradually and imperceptibly around and upon the helpless condemned victims, day by day, closer and closer, till they are crushed to death. But the prisons of a sinful nature, growing from within, seem enchanted ground, so terrible is the delusion of sin, the vision of a liberty, large, wide, confident, pleasurable, over which one can roam at will and sin on at pleasure without danger. But at length the horizon seems to be contracting, every day growing narrower, and after a while the airy walls are found to be a solid material fabric, gradually closing upon you. At first they were far off; now they are coming nearer; at length, a few steps on either side, and you can touch them. Some one seems to be turning the screws. A voice is heard outside: Thine own doings have beset thee roundabout! Thou hast destroyed thyself. The Vice upon thee is within thee. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. Our daily thoughts, emotions, actions, words, are sent from us as from a station on telegraphic wires, playing into eternity. Then the recording angel writes them down, and they are eternal characters, and, if we die in them, everlasting, with their consequences. "Some men's sins are open beforehand, going before to judgment: and some they follow after," and the prison door is shut. |