publics were founded, and is the only one on which ours can be expected to prosper. If we would have a literature suited to the wants of the community, and which will increase the political strength and security of the nation, we must look for it in works of domestic origin. They must be manufactured in America. They can be produced no where else. But before this can be secured, provision must be made by the Governments to afford encouragement to indigenous authorship. We cannot reasonably expect a multitude of works of a high character amongst ourselves, as long as American writers are met with the excuse, "It is not worth our while to pay you for your copy-right since your publishers can re-print the best English books for nothing."

Authors must enjoy some security for receiving the value of their labors, as well as other men. The only provision that is necessary is a law that will not permit the gratuitous re-publication of foreign works in the same language. As soon as such a law is established, American authors will be sufficiently protected and amply remunerated, and the same privileges will be extended to British authors, whether living or dead. No longer excluded from fair competition, American writers would produce books in greater abundance, and in a short time the advantages resulting from a purely national literature would be fully realized. Literary labor being more largely remunerated, will attract to itself greater numbers, and encourage to higher degrees of mental culture and effort. The nation will be more thoroughly instructed. Refusing to depend on foreign aid and learning, and thus to condemn its citizens to intellectual impotence and dwarfishness, it will at length, place itself in a favourable position for winning all those trophies of science which are the brightest ornaments of States.

ARTICLE III.

THE EARLY CONVERSION OF CHILDREN.

In the life of Dr. A. Alexander, is recorded this remark, "I have a favorite notion that this is a rich

uncultivated missionary field. There should be a class of preachers for children alone. If I were a young man, I would, God willing, choose that field." And again, "Sermons suited to children can be preached. I have tried it over and over, and I never had an audience more attentive, or who better understood my meaning."

This is, undoubtedly, the voice of wisdom; the suggestion is worthy of our most profound consideration. The rising generation of children and youth are the great hope of the world. And how long will the Church and Christian parents sleep over their most solemn responsi bility in this matter? How few, even of those who have carried their children to the altar and dedicated them to the Saviour, fulfil their solemn pledges, to take those same little ones and train them for God.

It may not be expedient, at present, to act upon the suggestion of Dr. Alexander, and provide a set of preachers specially for children; but Christian parents can be awakened to duty; to preach, both by precept and example in their own families, to labour for the salvation of those standing in so new and interesting a relation to them.

And to a reflecting mind, and especially to a parent, what more interesting object than a new-born child? Weak, both in body and in mind, it has just started in a race towards a goal it will never reach; it has begun an existence that will never end, bnt run parallel with that of its Creator. Its future history all à blank-una written-unknown-save to the mind of Omniscience. Whether the heir of joy or sorrow, of prosperity, or of diversity, no one in this world can tell.

What an obect of tender love, and of anxious solicitude to the immediate cause of its being; and if a first born, how strong, and yet how strange that new affection, that, from the planting of our Creator, springs up in the parental bosom, simultaneous with the new relation and new responsibility. Angels we suppose, were created all at once; all by the same word of power, and in the possession of mature faculties, they started together the race of immortality. There is no such thing among them as successive generations. But a power almost

* Pages 533, 534, quoted in S. P. Review, Oct. 1854, p. 291.

creative is conferred on creatures of a mortal race, to be the means of bringing into being others like themselves; to give being without the power of taking it away; to call up out of non-existence, a self-moving, conscious creature, and confer upon it, in embryo, unmeasured expansion of spiritual life. It is more than probable that a power like this is given to creatures in no other world. And can any who stand in so solemn a position in this world, giving birth to young immortals, under a curse, be unconcerned about the greatest of all concerns to those children so dependent on them? Whether they should be or not, under God, rested, with them; and now, whether they shall be forever children of wrath, and heirs of eternal misery, or hold seraphis' harps in the realms of glory, almost or quite as much depends on them.

By parental neglect, they may be led to say with the patient patriarch, "Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, there is a man child conceived.' Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it."*

They may, in the end, wish they had never been born, rather than to have filled up life with sin and misery; than to have met a shameful end, and a disgraceful death instead of doing what they might have done, in filling up life with usefulness and honour, and dying only to live again where life shall never end, instead of shining like the stars, forever and ever. They may curse forever the worse than neglect, the cruel hatred, as they then view it, of those who gave them being, but who, while attending, perhaps faithfully, to their physical wants, forgot that they had souls, and neglected to provide for their imperishable part.

Let us imagine the thoughts that at this moment fill the minds of lost souls in the world of woe, who might, and would have been saved, if at the proper time, and by proper attention, their parents had instructed them, restrained them, prayed for them, and laboured for their salvation, who were the children of the covenant, and to

*Job iii: 3, &c.

whom the promises belonged. If they had sowed the good seed of the Word in the infant mind, and watered it with tears, and waited for the Divine blessing promised from on high. For God has established a sure connection between means and ends here, as well as in natural sowing and reaping.

But, by parental neglect of a plain duty, they lost their souls, their crown of life, their birthright of bliss.

And what will be their bitter reflections? They will think within themselves, God did not make us, as he did the angels, in the full exercise and maturity of our intellectual and moral powers, to govern and control ourselves from the first, but made us dependent on others who had them, to be exercised for our benefit. If that maturity of mind, and capacity of knowledge, that was in the angels at their creation, had been given to us at our birth, we would have done differently; our course of life, and our whole destiny, as rational beings and free agents, would have been more in our own hands, and at our own responsibility.

Or, if our parents, that by the law of nature, could not stand in such a relation till they had attained a good degree of knowledge and judgment, both for themselves and for their children, had exercised them in our behalf as God intended, we might have been drinking draughts ever fresh from the fountain of life, instead of draining dry the cup of the Almighty's wrath for our wayward

courses.

These reflections are natural, and who will say that they are too strongly expressed? Who will say they are not in part true? For men do not lose their rationality when they lose their souls. Indeed, this internal action of the mind tearing and rending itself to pieces; this power of reflection, this exercise of reason and conscience, while the thoughts are accusing or excusing one another, and memory is adding fuel to the flame, is their

torment.

And whatever efforts they may make to throw the responsibility of their destruction upon others, and whatever blame may attach to others in it, they cannot rid themselves notwithstanding, of the thought, that "they knew their duty, but did it not." Every one shall bear

his own burden. He cannot justify himself by the failure of others, but every effort to do so will be made.

Nor let it be supposed, that the reflections we have imagined to rise in the minds of the lost, are peculiar to those who have gone down to perdition from the families of Ministers of the Gospel, of elders, or even of private Christians. Or, that the duties to which we have alluded, are confined to professors of religion. All parents are under the same obligation to do all that one can do, to secure the welfare of those they have brought into being for eternity. These obligations are independent of the fact, whether they themselves, are Christians or not. They owe them to their children, when not within the pale of the Church, just as much as if they were. Neglect of duty to themselves, a failure to work out their own salvation, does not excuse their neglect of duty, both natural and revealed, to those who, but for them, would not have lived at all; and so, but for them, would not have run the fearful hazard of eternal loss. All ought to be children of God, that the promises may belong to them, and to their children. And he who entrusts so precious a treasure to their hands, as an immortal soul, the workmanship of Divine skill and power, will, undoubtedly, hold them responsible for its safe keeping, and safe return to him, to be laid up among his jewels; washed in his blood, sanctified and adorned by the graces of the Holy Spirit. We believe that the time must soon come when very different views will be entertained, at least by Christians, from what now obtain, in relation to the early conversion of children to God. We hope and believe, that the time is not far distant when the Christian world will look with astonishment at the apathy that has so long prevailed on the subject.

When, instead of regarding it as almost a miracle, a real prodigy, that a child from two or three, to ten years of age should be converted, and made to bear the fruit, and give evidence of solid, consistent, piety, efforts will generally, be made to secure such a result, and it will more generally be looked for as a matter of course, in Christian families at least, if no where else. And infant voices more frequently than now, will be heard