ness. And when you die
yourselves, you can anticipate a happy meeting with your parents, in
that heavenly home, where sin and sorrow, and sickness and death, can
never come.

God has, in almost every case, connected suffering with sin. And
there are related many cases in which he has, in this world, most
signally punished ungrateful children. I read, a short time since, an
account of an old man, who had a drunken and brutal son. He would
abuse his aged father without mercy. One day, he, in a passion,
knocked him flat upon the floor, and, seizing him by his gray hairs,
dragged him across the room to the threshold of the door, to cast him
out. The old man, with his tremulous voice, cried out to his
unnatural son, "It is enough--it is enough. God is just. When I was
young, I dragged my own father in the same way; and now God is giving
me the punishment I deserve."

Sometimes you will see a son who will not be obedient to his mother.
He will have his own way, regardless of his mother's feelings. He has
grown up to be a stout and stubborn boy, and now the ungrateful
wretch will, by his misconduct, break the heart of that very mother,
who, for months and years, watched over him with a care which knew no
weariness. I call him a wretch, for I can hardly conceive of more
enormous iniquity. That boy, or that young man, who does not treat
his affectionate mother with kindness and respect, is worse than I
can find language to describe. Perhaps you say, your mother is at
times unreasonable. Perhaps she is. But what of that? You have been
unreasonable ten thousand times, and she has borne with you and loved
you. And even if your mother be at times unreasonable in her
requirements, I want to know with what propriety you find fault with
it. Is she to bear with all your cries in infancy, and all your
fretfulness in childhood, and all your ingratitude and wants till you
arrive at years of discretion, and then, because she wishes you to do
some little thing which does not exactly meet your views, are you to
turn upon her like a viper and sting her to the heart? The time was,
when you was a little infant, your mother brought paleness to her own
cheek, and weakness to her own frame, that she might give you
support. You were sick, and in the cold winter night she would sit
lonely by the fire, denying herself rest that she might lull her babe
to sleep. You would cry with pain, and hour after hour she would walk
the floor, carrying you in h