made part of the offence; for, here is something that takes the heart from you.  Nobody ever yet saw, and nobody ever will see, a young man, linked to a prostitute, and retain, at the same time, any, even the smallest degree of affection, for parents or brethren.  You may supplicate, you may implore, you may leave yourself pennyless, and your virtuous children without bread; the invisible cormorant will still call for more; and, as we saw, only the other day, a wretch was convicted of having, at the instigation of his prostitute, beaten his aged mother, to get from her the small remains of the means necessary to provide her with food.  In HERON’S collection of God’s judgments on wicked acts, it is related of an unnatural son, who fed his aged father upon orts and offal, lodged him in a filthy and crazy garret, and clothed him in sackcloth, while he and his wife and children lived in luxury; that, having bought sackcloth enough for two dresses for his father, the children took away the part not made up, and hid it, and that, upon asking them what they could do this for, they told him that they meant to keep it for him, when he should become old and walk with a stick!  This, the author relates, pierced his heart; and, indeed, if this failed, he must have had the heart of a tiger; but, even this would not succeed with the associate of a prostitute.  When this vice, this love of the society of prostitutes; when this vice has once got fast hold, vain are all your sacrifices, vain your prayers, vain your hopes, vain your anxious desire to disguise the shame from the world; and, if you have acted well your part, no part of that shame falls on you, unless you have administered to the cause of it.  Your authority has ceased; the voice of the prostitute, or the charms of the bottle, or the rattle of the dice, has been more powerful than your advice and example:  you must lament this:  but, it is not to bow you down; and, above all things, it is weak, and even criminally selfish, to sacrifice the rest of your family, in order to keep from the world the knowledge of that, which, if known, would, in your view of the matter, bring shame on yourself.

330.  Let me hope, however, that this is a calamity which will befall very few good fathers; and that, of all such, the sober, industrious, and frugal habits of their children, their dutiful demeanor, their truth and their integrity, will come to smooth the path of their downward days, and be the objects on which their eyes will close.  Those children must, in their turn, travel the same path; and they may be assured, that, ’Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land,’ is a precept, a disregard of which never yet failed, either first or last, to bring its punishment.  And, what can be more just than that signal punishment should follow such a crime; a crime directly against the voice of nature itself?  Youth has its passions, and due