of God will have silently and surely struck their roots into our heart and all that is within us. Our early and sustained convictions will save us from being eventually weary in well-doing. We shall endure the heat and the burden of the day. If, on the other hand, the tap-root be broken, our leaf will wither, and we shall not bring forth fruit in due season, and many things that we do will not prosper.

This early, persistent, and continuous course of action will not only give us that power that will prevail over ourselves, but that power that will prevail with our God and our children. Every year our position will become stronger at a throne of grace, and we shall learn that "the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much."... When the time has come that we may plead with our little ones, the words will come from our hearts and not from our mouths, and the accumulated abundance of thought and feeling will furnish us with arguments which may perhaps win them at once to the love and service of God. If they are not to be persuaded by us in their youth; if, growing up, they leave our homes and appear to be beyond our further influence; or if we die ;-we may, living or dying, possess our souls in patience, for we have not only the word of God, which guarantees that we shall reap as we have sown, and that our children shall grow up as they have been trained (" and the scripture cannnot be broken "), but we have also the witness in ourselves. Those of us who were constrained to arise and go to our Father, long after we had left our homes, by the latent force of early nurture, and who find that to be a present means

of grace which a generation since was a means of conversion, may well believe that God cannot be mocked, that none spend their strength for nought who labour under his direction, and that He ashames and confounds none who put their trust in him.

“O Lord, thou art not fickle,

Our hope is not in vain ;

The harvest for the sickle

Will ripen yet again."

The first birthdays of our children are to be holy-days to us, but they must be holidays to them. We have to nourish and cherish in our own hearts the conviction that their birth was a blessing, and we must sow this good seed in the hearts of our children before the enemy comes with his tares, trying to raise within them suspicions and doubts respecting the reality of the boon of existence. Well-spent birthdays will do much to preserve our homes from the scepticism and infidelity which prevail about "children" being "the heritage of the Lord," and if these anniversaries are amongst the earliest and the happiest of their associations, we shall have furnished them with abiding arguments against ever arriving at the miserable conclusion that their life is a mistake or a mystery.

Where there is more than one child the first anniversary of the fresh life may be openly kept. The day is to be anticipated, and time, and thought, and money are to be spent in securing the most acceptable gifts. The gifts are to be given together, and when they have possessed sound, motion, and colour, we have fancied that we have seen the monotonousness of babyhood

broken, and, if only for a moment or two, the gifts have made room in a heart that is only a year old. We have been quietly watching, this very day, a little thing that is just three years of age, and who has passed, if large eyes full of fun, unceasing prattle, and a thousand antics, are any criteria, the happiest day of her life. She has lived to learn the meaning of a birthday; and as the impression which is evidently made is not the result of expensive presents or a children's party, but is the simple effect of the day, we imagine this "new sensation" will not be forgotten. She has just been into our study for a kiss on her way to bed, and as we knelt together for a minute and thanked the Father in heaven for her by name, and for the day, it is possible that she may connect her coming into our home, in some childish way of her own, with Him, notwithstanding she was threading her little fingers into the canework of the chair. at which we bent.

We acknowledge that we have never been tempted with the morbid feeling that we were not wanted in the world, and we have been in the habit of attributing this happy deliverance, in some measure, to a dressing-table which we found, as soon as we were old enough to get out of bed by ourselves, laden with birthday presents. We have even now as we write, tingling in our fingers' ends, the sensation with which we touched the gifts, as we tried to find out, before the dawn, the secrets which had been so long and so faithfully kept. The letters which in after years came with the presents were read at the break of the day, and whether it was prejudice or not, there was always

one letter which was read twice, and one gift which seemed to be more precious than the others. Perhaps there is a world of truth in the line of the old play—

"The mother in her office holds the key of the soul."

If it be the will of God that none of our little ones should perish, and if He has given to us "the nurture and admonition of the Lord," as the means by which they shall eventually be brought to know Him, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent, and if we have believed in these truths to the uttermost, then we shall be training our children in the sure and certain hope that they will not become the children of this world, but the children of God. As long as they continue in the nursery, we shall have many things to say to them which they will not be able to receive, but as they increase in years we shall be able, little by little, to unfold to them the faith and hope of the gospel. Year by year, birthday after birthday, we shall have been making good some ground on which we may stand as we plead with them that our Father may be their Father, and our God their God.

The birthday, when we find that the first full revelation may be made to our children of the purpose of God in our relationship to them, will be anticipated by us with unaccustomed preparation. It will come, of course, earlier or later, according to the development of the child, and the effort "to deliver our soul" will vary with the difference in ourselves and in our children. Such an opportunity may possibly present itself on any ordinary day in the year, and we shall only too readily avail