ry pretty share of
abuse, such as it was the fashion of that day, at least in certain
quarters, to bestow upon those who were outside of the high-walled
enclosures in which many persons; not naturally unamiable or exclusive,
found themselves imprisoned. Since that time what changes have taken
place! Who will believe that a well-behaved and reputable citizen could
have been denounced as a "moral parricide," because he attacked some of
the doctrines in which he was supposed to have been brought up? A single
thought should have prevented the masked theologian who abused his
incognito from using such libellous language.

Much, and in many families most, of the religious teaching of children is
committed to the mother. The experience of William Cullen Bryant, which
I have related in his own words, is that of many New England children.
Now, the sternest dogmas that ever came from a soul cramped or palsied by
an obsolete creed become wonderfully softened in passing between the lips
of a mother. The cruel doctrine at which all but case-hardened
"professionals" shudder cones out, as she teaches and illustrates it, as
unlike its original as the milk which a peasant mother gives her babe is
unlike the coarse food which furnishes her nourishment. The virus of a
cursing creed is rendered comparatively harmless by the time it reaches
the young sinner in the nursery. Its effects fall as far short of what
might have been expected from its virulence as the pearly vaccine vesicle
falls short of the terrors of the confluent small-pox. Controversialists
should therefore be careful (for their own sakes, for they hurt nobody so
much as themselves) how they use such terms as "parricide" as
characterizing those who do not agree in all points with the fathers whom
or whose memory they honor and venerate. They might with as much
propriety call them matricides, if they did not agree with the milder
teachings of their mothers. I can imagine Jonathan Edwards in the
nursery with his three-year-old child upon his knee. The child looks up
to his face and says to him,--"Papa, nurse tells me that you say God
hates me worse than He hates one of those horrid ugly snakes that crawl
all round. Does God hate me so?"

"Alas! my child, it is but too true. So long as you are out of Christ
you are as a viper, and worse than a viper, in his sight."

By and by, Mrs. Edwards, one of the loveliest of women and sweetest of
mothers, comes into the nursery. The child