The duty is twofold, to God and to His children. God, who entrusts to us their religious education, has a right to be set before them as truly, as nobly, as worthily as our capacity allows, as beautifully as human language can convey the mysteries of faith, with the quietness and confidence of those who know and are not afraid, and filial pride in the Christian inheritance which is ours. The child has a right to learn the best that it can know of God, since the happiness of its life, not only in eternity but even in time, is bound up in that knowledge. Most grievous wrong has been done, and is still done, to children by well-meaning but misguided efforts to "make them good" by dwelling on the vengeance taken by God upon the wicked, on the possibilities of wickedness in the youngest child. Their impressionable minds are quite ready to take alarm, they are so small, and every experience is so new; there are so many great forces at work which can be dimly guessed at, and to their vivid imaginations who can say what may happen next? If the first impressions of God conveyed to them are gloomy and terrible, a shadow may be cast over the mind so far-reaching that perhaps a whole lifetime may not carry them beyond it. They hear of a sleepless Bye that ever watches, to see them doing wrong, an Bye from which they cannot escape. There is the Judge of awful severity who admits no excuse, who pursues with relentless perseverance to the very end and whose resources for punishment are inexhaustible. What wonder if a daring and defiant spirit turns at last and stands at bay against the resistless Avenger, and if in later years the practical result is--"if we may not escape, let us try to forget," or the drifting of a whole life into indifference, languor of will, and pessimism that border on despair. Parents could not bear to be so misrepresented to their children, and what condemnation would be sufficient for teachers who would turn the hearts of children against their father, poisoning the very springs of life. Yet this wrong is done to God. In general, children taught by their own parents do not suffer so much from these misrepresentations of God, as those who have been left with servants and ignorant teachers, themselves warped by a wrong early training. Fathers and mothers must have within themselves too much intuition of the Fatherhood of God not to give another tone to their teaching, and probably it is from fathers and mothers, as they are in themselves symbols of God's almighty power and unmeasured love, that the first ideas of Him can best reach the minds of little children.