idden us to forbid them, whether
they follow us or not. But yet shall we not still honour and love the
old Evangelical School, and many an Institution which it has left behind,
as heirlooms to some of us, at least, from our mothers, or from women to
whom we owed, in long past years, our earliest influences for good, our
earliest examples of a practical Christian life, our earliest proofs that
there was indeed a Spirit of God, a gracious Spirit, Who gave grace to
the hearts, the deeds, the very looks and voices of those in whom He
dwelt; Institutions, which are too likely some of them to die, simply
from the loss of old friends?

The loss of old friends. Yes, so it is always in this world. The old
earnest hearts go home one by one to their rest; and the young earnest
hearts--and who shall blame them?--go elsewhere; and try new fashions of
doing good, which are more graceful and more agreeable to them. For the
religious world, like all other forms of the world, has its fashions; and
of them too stands true the saying of the apostle: That this world and
the fashion thereof pass away. Many a good work, which once was somewhat
fashionable in its way, has become somewhat unfashionable, and something
else is fashionable in its place; and five-and-twenty years hence
something else will have become fashionable; and our children will look
back on our ways of doing good with pity, if not with contempt, as narrow
and unenlightened, just as we are too apt to look back on our fathers'
ways. And all the while, what can they teach worth teaching, what can we
teach worth teaching, save what our fathers and mothers taught, what the
Spirit of God taught them, and has taught to all who would listen since
the foundation of the world, "shewing man what was good:" and what was
that--"What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love
mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"

Ah! why do we, even in religious and moral matters, even in the doing
good to the souls and bodies of our fellow-creatures, allow ourselves to
be the puppets of fashions? Of fashions which even when harmless, even
beautiful, are but the garments, or rather stage-properties, in which we
dress up the high instincts which God's Spirit bestows on us, in order to
make them agreeable enough for our own prejudices, or pretty enough for
our own tastes. How little do we perceive our own danger--so little that
we yield to it every day--the danger of mistaking