ame of God,
Amen. I, being of sound mind, make this my last will and testament. I
bequeath to my children all the money I ever made and all the houses I
own; but I disinherit them, I rob them of the ancestral grace and the
Christian influence that I inherited. I have squandered that on my own
worldliness. Share and share alike must they in the misfortune and the
everlasting outrage. Signed, sealed and delivered in the presence of
God and men and angels and devils and all the generations of earth
and heaven and hell, March, 1886."

O ye of highly favored ancestry, wake up this morning to a sense of
your opportunity and your responsibility. I think there must be

AN OLD CRADLE,

or a fragment of a cradle somewhere that could tell a story of
midnight supplication in your behalf. Where is the old rocking-chair
in which you were sung to sleep with the holy nursery rhyme? Where is
the old clock that ticked away the moments of that sickness on that
awful night when there were but three of you awake--you and God and
mother? Is there not an old staff in some closet? is there not an old
family Bible on some shelf that seems to address you, saying: "My son,
my daughter, how can you reject that God who so kindly dealt with us
all our lives and to whom we commended you in our prayers living and
dying? By the memory of the old homestead, by the family altar, by our
dying pillow, by the graves in which our bodies sleep while our
spirits hover, we beg you to turn over a new leaf for the new year."
Oh, the power of ancestral piety, well illustrated by a young man of
New York who attended a prayer-meeting one night and asked for
prayer, and then went home and wrote down these words:

AN ENTRY IN A DIARY.

"Twenty-five years ago to-night my mother went to heaven, my
beautiful, blessed mother, and I have been alone, tossed up and down
upon the billows of life's tempestuous ocean. Shall I ever go to
heaven? She told me I must meet her in heaven. When she took her boy's
hand in hers and turned her gentle, loving eyes on me, and gazed
earnestly and long into my face, and then lifted them to heaven in
that last prayer, she prayed that I might meet her in heaven. I wonder
if I ever shall.

"My mother's prayers! Oh, my sweet, blessed mother's prayers! Did ever
boy have such a mother as I had? For twenty-five years I have not
heard her pray until to-night. I have heard all her prayers over
again. They have had, in fact, a terrible res