Christian parents! it is yours to begin at the cradle a work whose blessed influence shall extend beyond the tomb. By the principles you impart to your little ones, you insure the virtue and the Christianity of generations to come; you kindle lights to burn amidst the world's darkness when the faint glimmering of your own is gone; you adorn the living temple of the Lord with pillars of strength and beauty which shall challenge angelic admiration when all the colonnaded glories of earth's capitals are calcined by the fires of doom. To such an achievement, what are all the treasures of monarchs, and all the splendors of empire, and all the applause of heroism, and all the renown of authorship, and all the fascination of eloquence, and all the entrancing power of song? Who has any fear of God, any love of country, any affection for his children, any regard for the welfare of posterity? By all these I implore you, and by every other consideration that ought to move the heart of man, awake to the work which Heaven enjoins and every instinct of nature urges upon you! Your time, money, knowledge, influence--how can they be better employed than in the Christian culture of the young immortals committed to your care? In the beautiful form you cherish, there is something far more beautiful--a jewel worth immeasurably more than the casket which contains it--a spirit that must live and think and feel when this planet shall have become a chaos, when out of that chaos shall have arisen the new _cosmos_ over which Christ is to rule in righteousness forever. Shall this precious thing perish through your faithlessness to so sublime a trust? Shall harps be wanting in heaven, and white-robed ministrants before the throne, through the recreancy of any bearing the Christian name and honored with the title of father or mother? What is reason's estimate of the parental tenderness which provides so laboriously for the body, but totally neglects the soul--which regards so sedulously the interests of time, but utterly overlooks the concerns of eternity? To see your little ones wandering unrestrained in the broad way to ruin, or trained for this world only, as if there were not another beyond--oh! is it not enough to make their guardian angels turn away their faces and weep beneath their wings?