Our earliest recollections are of our father and mother! All through our childhood they were near us, joining in our play, nursing us in sickness, comforting in pain or trouble. All that made us happy, or that made the world seem bright to us, they gave us. They were always ready to reward us when we were good; they were always grieved when we did wrong. We never can repay our parents for all their kindness to us in our infancy. All the labour which supplied the bread we ate and the bed we slept on; and shall not we do what we can for them in their old age? If your parents, reader, were religious people, they prayed for you besides, and you will never know on this side the grave how many early temptations those prayers may have kept off. You can understand now why it was that your parents sometimes punished you for doing wrong, though you might not have seen the wisdom of it then. And the day will come, believe me, when you will learn--it may be only "through much tribulation"--the wisdom of the punishments inflicted by our Father in heaven. "For _now_ we see through a glass darkly; but _then_ face to face: now I know in part, but _then_ shall I know even as also I am known." And now, in all humility, do let me say a word to those parents into whose hands this book may chance to fall. I have spoken of influence and its wonderful power in the other parts of this book. I have repeatedly dwelt on the necessity of setting a good example; let me do so once again here. I cannot put what I wish to say into better, or shorter, or simpler language than it has been put by a recent writer, who speaks as follows--"Old friends," he says, "fathers, mothers, whose heads are filled with the snows of age, whose brows are furrowed deep with the traces of life’s cares and burthens, perhaps with the thorns of its crown, we look to you to teach us all that God means by death; all the blessings with which the angel who guides our pilgrimage comes laden, when he advances to clasp our hand, to be to us a rod and a staff through the glooms that hang about the threshold of the ever-lasting home. We look to see you with something of the brightness of the heavenly home upon you now; a gleam in the eyes, a tone in the look and bearing, which have been caught from long communion with the things and beings, whose full glory awaits you there. No complaints, no sadness, no sorrowful looking back to the world which you are leaving, and where your place, to which you thought yourself all-important, is already filled."