"Honour thy father and thy mother," is the first commandment with promise, but even if it were not for that promise the honouring of our berents should remain the first duty and most sacred privilege of all affectionate and grateful hearts. There is one consideration which may induce us to obey this commandment which does not apply to the other nine. The time will come when it will no longer be possible for us to obey it. Other moral laws we can continue to keep to the end of our days, but in the course of nature our parents usually die before us, and if we are guilty of withholding from them in our youth the honour which they have a right to expect. repentance may come too late. Nor do we understand before the calamity arrives how great, how irreparable. is our loss when parents are taken away. If we are successful in life, success loses more than half its joy and triumph, if our parents are not alive to witness it, and, further. in cur sorrows and our sins our perents cling to us to the last, Theirs 15 a love on which we can rely when all other love fails. While we live we are assured that even our worst faults will not wholly deprive us of human affection, Even in our most deserved miseries we shall not be altogether forsaken by human consolation and sympathy—theirs we shall have to the end.
And my last thought is this. In a very real sense the relationship in which we stand to our parents is a symbol of that which we enjoy with God Himself. The petent is the highest human symbol of what God is to us all. So here the divine compass sion is even more enduring, the divine love even more understanding than even theirs. We may weary. Even a father's mercy and a mother's Gevotion and forbearance may at last be exhausted. but even then we may turn with confidence to Him "Whose compassions fail not; they are new every morning."—whose "mercy en-Cureth forever."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.