hich is not for her
children? does she not seem always to be thinking of you? have you never
noticed how her eye brightens with delight when you or any of your
brothers or sisters do right, or even when she looks around on the
health and happiness of her children? and, when you or any of her dear
ones are ill, how sad she looks, how her cheek will become pale, and how
she will watch and wait at the bed-side of her child, how her own hand
gives the medicine, how nothing can call her away from home, no friends,
no amusements, often not even the church and Sabbath-day, and if she did
go to church while you were ill, she went there to pray that God would
make you well. And I would have you also think of the large surrenders
of ease, time and fortune which your father is daily making for the
benefit and comfort of his children. How many fathers will compass land
and sea in quest of provision for them, and in order to give them name
and station in society? How many adventurously plow the ocean in their
behalf? How many live for years in exile, and in the estrangement of a
foreign land, with nothing to soothe them in the midst of their toil and
fatigue, but the image of their dear and distant home? How many toil and
plan, day after day, and year after year, from early morn until late at
night, for no other object than to gather wealth, which in their love
they expect and intend their children to enjoy, when they themselves
have gone down to the grave! Oh, my young friends, though ye have not
perhaps thought of it, yet the devotedness of a parent to his children,
in the common every-day duties and comforts of life, often equals and
surpasses that which history has recorded for us of the sublimest
heroism.

It would often seem utterly impossible to wear out a father's affection
or a mother's love, and many a child, after the perversities and losses
of a misdirected manhood, has found himself welcomed back again to the
paternal home, with all the unquenched and unextinguishable kindness of
his early and dependent childhood; welcomed even amid the hardships of
poverty, with which declining years and his own hand, perhaps, have
united to surround the whitening heads of the authors of his being.

Now, it is in view of the reality and strength of these parental
regards, thus flowing from a father's or a mother's heart upon their
children, that we bid you see the force, the reason, and the right of
the direction, Be kindly affectiona