Consider, my brethren, what these children would have been but for the reception they have experienced in this place: no parent would have guided them, no preceptor would have taught them; they would never have heard the name of Christ, or been trained in the ways they should go, so that when they were old they might not have departed from them. This is a good work done to mankind, and God loves it, and protects it; to take into our arms these forsaken children, to teach them order, to inure them to wholesome discipline, to rear them up in the love of industry, and with the fear of God in every word and every action. We have stifled innumerable crimes, prevented a thousand shocking atrocities, and smothered the very first seeds and rudiments of guilt. Consider these are not mere words. Not a year elapses but many young creatures are brought to an ignominious death who have never received in their youth the slightest tincture of religious education, but who from the shame or poverty of their parents have been all but exposed from their tenderest age; now give every thing to the laws, and to the love of order and the well-being of society, you please, still how is it possible. to rejoice at the public execution of a child of this description, and what might he not urge in his own defence if his reason were equal to paint his misery? I was half-naked and half-fed from my childhood; I was ashamed to go where I might have learnt my duty, and I had no one to teach it me at home no mother ever spake to me of God, or taught me how to pray. The door of my father's house was shut upon me, and I was driven into the wide world a neglected and forsaken child. Surely it is better this child should be educated by our care than that he should perish by the arm of justice; it is better he should live virtuously to the fair scope and boundary of man's life than that he should perish miserably at what we call the age of joy, but

which to the neglected children of the poor is too often the age of sorrow and of pain. I conclude by commending most earnestly to your protection this great and interesting charity - remember the poor! — remember the forsaken poor! - remember the painful spectacle of childhood polluted by crime! We do not ask you to participate in our labours, but to show that you approve and support them, and that you do not turn away from the cry of the wretched when you hear it in the house of God. Who is there here that does not at some moments reproach himself for neglecting the poor and needy? Who is there that does not feel he might have ministered to more anguish than he has ministered to; that he has not done all the good he might have done; that he has suffered some miserable creature to perish broken-hearted whom he might have lifted up and saved? These are the periods, trite and common as they are, when you may reconcile yourself to your own heart, and by giving some trifle from your abundance return with the consciousness of a well-spent hour; and be sure of this, that no man was ever bountiful to misery but that he was repaid even in this world repaid in pleasant feelings repaid at the time of pain and sickness — in the hour of death — and at every period of life; and numerous enough those periods are, when nothing can console a man but the recollection that he has been kind-hearted to his fellowcreatures in their distress. And now, my brethren, if you listen to my advice, who will thank you? and upon whom are you conferring obligation? Not upon the rich or powerful, or those who can make you any return; you will be thanked only by deserted children without parents, without friends, without one human being in the world who loves them and cares for them. If I know any thing of your goodness of heart, you will not despise such thanks as these:-you will remember that

our great Master, Jesus Christ, loved young children, and put his hands upon them, and blessed them; and you will love them like Christ, and be kind to them, and be to them the tender fathers and the nursing mothers which Providence intended for the protection of all children, but which these unhappy children from the first dawn of their lives have never yet known.

SERMON II.

FOR THE GIRLS' CHARITY SCHOOL, FITZROY CHAPEL.

PROVERBS, iv. 1.

Hear, ye children, the instruction of a father, and attend to know understanding.

SOLOMON, who speaks of every thing relative to human affairs, speaks most frequently of education, because it could not escape the judgment of so great a man, that upon the excellence or imperfection of that system the happiness or the wretchedness of any community principally depends. He says of himself in the ensuing verses, "I was my father's son, tender, and beloved in the eyes of my mother; they taught me also, and said unto me, Let thine heart retain my words, keep my commandments and live; get wisdom, get understanding, forget it not, neither decline from the words of my mouth; forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee; love her, and she shall keep thee; she shall give to thy head an ornament of grace, and a crown of glory shall she deliver unto thee."

It is in truth a great happiness when any system, excellent in itself, is protected by feeling, because the efforts for its success are in that case always more vigorous and more unwearied than when they proceed merely from conviction, and are continued only from duty. The propriety of educating the poor, doubted of by many in secret, ridiculed by some openly, and unheeded by the supineness of great numbers, has been

protected by a strong and irresistible feeling that the thing is right!-it has been carried on, not by men who pretended to embrace the whole of the question, and to trace the bearings of education upon the welfare of nations, but by men who delighted to enjoy the spectacle of order and good discipline, to see the old happy, and the young good, — by men who never doubted when they saw children rendered modest instead of shameless, bowing to the name of Christ rather than blaspheming against it, that such effects, in spite of all sophistry, must tend to the happiness of man, and to the glory of God.

In reading the arguments of ingenious, or in listening to the declarations of eloquent men, we may perhaps still doubt of the wisdom of these institutions; but no man ever saw any one of them, no man ever entered a school where children were educated, without feeling, not only his heart softened, but his understanding convinced. The misfortune is, that these things are reasoned on, speculatively and at a distance; but our object is, that what we do, should be seen, that to estimate the true value of this work it should be known what the description of being is whom we receive from the streets of this vast city, with a neglected body covered with rags; untrue, dishonest, familiar with oaths, and every low infamous habit; hardened often by bad treatment and bad example to such a degree that all the quick and sensitive emotions of childhood upon which education commonly works, appear to be for ever extinguished. First, my brethren, these ruined and neglected children feel that law of God to which the wildest animals of the forest submit. They love the hand which brings them food, and loving, they obey. First, there is a change in the outward appearance of the child: she has a fear of using bad words; she watches the eye of her mistress; her heart beats at the sound of praise; and she evinces by blushes and tears that she has the feelings of shame;

ΑΛ