age of their guilty son disturbing
every moment of peace, and preventing the possibility of joy. The day
of execution soon arrived, and their son was led to the gallows, and
launched into eternity. And, crimsoned with guilt, he went to the
bar of God, there to answer for all the crimes of which he had been
guilty, and for all the woes he had caused.

You see, then, how great are your responsibilities as a child. You
have thought, perhaps, that you have no power over your parents, and
that you are not accountable for the sorrow which your conduct may
cause them. Think you that God will hold this child guiltless for all
the sorrow he caused his father and his mother? And think you God will
hold any child guiltless, who shall, by his misconduct, make his
parents unhappy? No. You must answer to God for every thing you do,
which gives your parents pain. And there is no sin greater in the
sight of God than that of an ungrateful child, I have shown you, in
the two illustrations which you have just read, how much the
happiness of your parents depends upon your conduct. Every day you
are promoting their joy or their sorrow. And every act of
disobedience, or of ingratitude, however trifling it may appear to
you, is, in the eyes of your Maker, a sin which cannot pass
unnoticed. Do you ask, Why does God consider the ingratitude of
children as a sin of peculiar aggravation? I reply, Because you are
under peculiar obligation to love and obey your parents. They have
loved you when you could not love them. They have taken care of you
when you could not reward them. They have passed sleepless nights in
listening to your cries, and weary days in watching over you, when
you could neither express thanks nor feel grateful. And after they
have done all this, is it a small sin for you to disobey them and
make them unhappy?

And indeed you can do nothing to make yourself so unhappy as to
indulge in disobedience, and to cherish a spirit of ingratitude. You
never see such a child happy. Look at him at home, and, instead of
being light-hearted and cheerful, he is sullen and morose. He sits
down by the fireside in a winter evening, but the evening fireside
affords no joy to him. He knows that his parents are grieved at his
conduct. He loves nobody, and feels that nobody loves him. There he
sits silent and sad, making himself miserable by his own misconduct.
The disobedient boy or girl is always unhappy. You know how different
the dispositions o