beating their sons into the career of guilt; and mothers--worse than those who made horrid food of their own children--offering their daughters to the Moloch of lust in the shape of some "gentlemanly" devil with a portable hell in his own breast! And it seems to me that if one with a prophet vision and a prophet heart, widened to the compass of humanity, should thus go into these waste places, nothing would affect him more; nothing would strike a deeper and tenderer chord in his bosom; than the condition of these little ones amidst the siege and terror. And, comprehending all their need--their moral as well as their physical destitution--he might exclaim, as describing the most pitiable spectacle of all--"The young children ask bread, and no man breaketh it unto them." And I think that every one of you who has reflected at all upon this subject, must feel that, of all the conditions of Humanity in the darker regions of the City, there is none more sorrowful, more momentous, and at the same time more hopeful, than the condition of the Children of the Poor. And I do not call your attention to this subject to-night with the expectation of proclaiming any fresh doctrine, or offering any novel suggestion, but because in a series of discourses like the present I cannot consistently pass by such a prominent phase; and more especially because I wish to push the old truth from your heads into your hearts, so that you may be excited to immediate and practical action. I purpose then, in regard to the Children of the Poor, to maintain one or two _principles_, to state a few _facts_, and to consider some _remedies_; and these will constitute the divisions of my discourse. In the first place then, I lay down a general principle which divides itself into two specific principles. I maintain that we are under peculiar obligations in regard to children. Of all our duties, except those which we owe directly to God--of all the ways in which we are required to _show_ our duty to God--I know of none more peremptory than this. It is the obligation of an instinct that appears everywhere; that swells in the breasts of the rudest people; that mingles with the most tender and beautiful and sacred associations of human life.