n the condition of the Children of the
Poor. And I do not call your attention to this subject to-night with the
expectation of proclaiming any fresh doctrine, or offering any novel
suggestion, but because in a series of discourses like the present I
cannot consistently pass by such a prominent phase; and more especially
because I wish to push the old truth from your heads into your hearts,
so that you may be excited to immediate and practical action.

I purpose then, in regard to the Children of the Poor, to maintain one
or two _principles_, to state a few _facts_, and to consider some
_remedies_; and these will constitute the divisions of my discourse.

In the first place then, I lay down a general principle which divides
itself into two specific principles. I maintain that we are under
peculiar obligations in regard to children. Of all our duties, except
those which we owe directly to God--of all the ways in which we are
required to _show_ our duty to God--I know of none more peremptory than
this. It is the obligation of an instinct that appears everywhere; that
swells in the breasts of the rudest people; that mingles with the most
tender and beautiful and sacred associations of human life.

Childhood and Children! is there any heart so sheathed in worldliness,
or benumbed by sorrow, or hardened in its very nature, as to feel no
gentle thrill responding to these terms? Surely, in some way these
little ones have "touched the finer issues" of our being, and given us
an unconscious benediction. Some of you are Mothers, and have acquired
the holiest laws of duty, the sweetest solicitudes, the noblest
inspirations, in the orbit of a child's life. And, however wide the
circle of its wandering, you have held it still, by some tether of the
heart, bound to the centre of a fathomless and unforgetting love. Some
of you are Fathers, and in the opening promise of your sons have built
fresh plans and enjoyed young hopes, and even in the decline of life
have walked its morning paths anew. Many of us have felt our first great
sorrow, and the breaking up of the spiritual deep within us, by the
couch of a dead child. Clasping the little lifeless hand, we have
comprehended, as never before, the _reality_ of death, and through the
gloom, covering all the world about us, have caught sudden glimpses of
the immortal fields. And, all of us, I trust, are thankful that God has
not created merely men and women, crimped into artificial pattern