g intercessions would go for nothing when the great wind came
from the wilderness and smote the four corners of the banqueting-house?
If you cannot banish the love of foolish delights out the hearts of your
sons and daughters, then do not quarrel with them over such things; a
family quarrel in a Christian man's house is surely far worse than a
feast or a dance. Only, if they must feast and dance and such like, be
you all the more diligent in your exercises at home on their behalf till
they are back again, where, after all, they like best to be, in their
good, kind, liberal, and loving father's house.

Have you a family? Are you a married man? Or, if not, do you hope one
day to be? Then attend betimes to what Charity says to Christian in the
House Beautiful, and not less to what he says back again to her.

SHAME

'Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me, and of My words, of him shall the
Son of Man be ashamed, when He shall come in His own glory, and in His
Father's, and of the holy angels.'--Our Lord.

Shame has not got the attention that it deserves either from our moral
philosophers or from our practical and experimental divines. And yet it
would well repay both classes of students to attend far more to shame.
For, what really is shame? Shame is an original instinct planted in our
souls by our Maker, and intended by Him to act as a powerful and pungent
check to our doing of any act that is mean or dishonourable in the eyes
of our fellow-men. Shame is a kind of social conscience. Shame is a
secondary sense of sin. In shame, our imagination becomes a kind of
moral sense. Shame sets up in our bosom a not undivine tribunal, which
judges us and sentences us in the absence or the silence of nobler and
more awful sanctions and sentences. But then, as things now are with us,
like all the rest of the machinery of the soul, shame has gone sadly
astray both in its objects and in its operations, till it demands a long,
a severe, and a very noble discipline over himself before any man can
keep shame in its proper place and directed in upon its proper objects.
In the present disorder of our souls, we are all acutely ashamed of many
things that are not the proper objects of shame at all; while, on the
other hand, we feel no shame at all at multitudes of things that are
really most blameworthy, dishonourable, and contemptible. We are ashamed
of things in our lot and in our circumstances that, if we only knew i