that its bestowment would but enhance his misery.  Then indeed, it would be a blessing to withhold it.  “A child’s vices may be of that sort,” says Paley in his Philosophy, “and his vicious habits so incorrigible, as to afford much the same reason for believing that he will waste or misemploy the fortune put into his power, as if he were mad or idiotish, in which, case a parent may treat him as a madman, or an idiot; that is, may deem it sufficient to provide for his support by an annuity equal to his wants and innocent enjoyments, and which he may be restrained from alienating.  This seems to be the only case in which a disinherison, nearly absolute, is justifiable.”

Neither should parents be capricious in the distribution of their property among their children.  They have no right to withhold a dowry from children because they have married against their will, no more than they have a right, for this reason, to disown, them.  This would be distributing their property upon the principle of revenge or reward.  No parent has a right to indulge a preference founded on such an unreasonable and criminal feeling as revenge.  Neither has he a right to distribute his property from considerations of age, sex, merit, or situation.  The idea of giving all to the eldest son to perpetuate family wealth, and distinction; or of giving; all to the sons, and withholding from the daughters; or of giving to those children only who were more obsequious in their adherence to their parent’s tyrannical requisitions,—­is unreasonable, unchristian, and against the generous dictates of natural affection.

From this whole subject we may infer the infatuation of those parents who toil as the slave in the galley, to amass a large fortune for their children.  To accomplish this object they become drudges all their life.  They rise early and retire late, deny themselves even the ordinary comforts of life, expend all the time and strength of their manhood, make slaves of their wives and children, and live retired from all society, in order to lay up a fortune for their offspring.  To this end they make all things subordinate and subservient; and, indeed, they so greatly neglect their children as to deprive them of even the capacity of enjoying intellectually or morally the patrimony they thus secure for them.  They bring them up in gross ignorance of every thing save work:  and money.  They teach them close-fisted parsimony, and prepare them to lead a life as servile and infatuated as their own.  Miserable delusion!  “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

  “O cursed lust of gold! when for thy sake
  The fool throws up his interest in both worlds;
  First starved in this, then damned in that to come!”

CHAPTER XXV.

THE PROMISES OF THE CHRISTIAN HOME.

  “The promise is unto you, and to your children.”

  ACTS II., 39.