=How Authority Works.=—The supreme authority (and all deputed authority) works precisely as does a good and just national government, whose business it is to defend the liberties of the subject at all points, even by checking, repressing, and punishing the licence which interferes with the rights of others and with the true liberty of the transgressor. The law (that is, the utterance of authority) is for the punishment of evil-doers, but for the praise of them that do well; and the association of harshness, punishment, force, arbitrary dealings, with the idea of authority, human and divine, is an example of the confusion of thought to which most of our errors in conduct are traceable. It is not authority which punishes: the penalties which follow us through life, of which those in the family are a faint foretaste, are the inevitable consequences of broken law, whether moral or physical, and from which authority, strong and benign, exists to save us by prevention, and, if needs be, by lesser and corrective penalties. It seems to me that reading and teaching on the following subjects, for example, might help to focus thought on a subject of vital importance:—our relation to the supreme authority, not a relation of choice, but as inevitable as the family relationships into which we are born; the duty of loyalty and the shame of infidelity; the duty of reverence; the duty of docility to indications of the divine will; scriptural revelations of God, as the ruler of men, as saying to Abraham, ‘Go, and he goeth’; to Cyrus, ‘Do this, and he doeth it’; revelations which history affords of God as the ruler of nations, and as the benign ruler of men who prospers the ways of His servants; how the sense of the divine authority may be imparted in the home; how reverence for holy things may be taught; definite Bible teaching on this head.—Indeed, the subject is capable of great amplification, and suggests trains of thought very important in these days. =The Habits of the Religious Life.=—The next point we must set ourselves to consider is the laying down of lines of _habit_ in the religious life. We need not enter again into the physiological reasons for the compelling power of habit. My present purpose is to consider how far this power can be employed in the religious development of a child. Let us consider the subject as it bears upon habits of thought and of attitude, of life and of speech; though indeed all these are one, for every act and attitude is begotten of a thought, however unaware we be of thinking.