Thus when home-sympathy is purified and developed by Christian faith and love, it opens up the most elevated of all home-feeling and solicitude, and becomes the most effectual safeguard against impending ruin.  No family can be true to its privileges and mission without it.  It allures to the cross, leads all the members in the path of the sympathizing one, and prompts them to say, “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God; where thou diest I will die, and there will I be buried; the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.”

What would the Christian home be, therefore, without such sympathy?  Powerless, amoral desolation!  We read in God’s Word, of men losing natural affection, and of mothers forgetting their sucking children.  But these were worse than brutes.  What shall we then say of Christian parents being devoid of spiritual sympathy,—­shedding no tear of anguish over their moral ruin, nor showing the least concern about their salvation?  Such parents do not rejoice even over the return of their children to God.  They are a disgrace to the Christian name, and bring infamy upon the Christian home.

Some parents do not proceed quite so far.  They indulge in the feeling of sympathy for their children; but alas! that feeling is never expressed in efforts to save them.  It is all expended in vain and fruitless lamentations, and is, therefore, at best but a morbid sentimentalism,—­but a cloak behind which are lurking parental hard-heartedness and religious apathy; proving plainly the great truth advanced by Adams, in his Elements of Christian Science, “that an indulgence in the feelings of sympathy without carrying them out to the relief of actual distress, produces hardness of heart to such a degree that the most pitiless and cruel, the most licentious and unnatural, and ungrateful conduct shall be joined with the most overflowing and deeply thrilling sentiment.”

Let those parents who are ever lamenting the wickedness of their children, but do nothing to make them better, ponder well this sentiment, and see it in the grin, of their own hypocrisy, and the desolation of their injured home and children.  Let the other members, as well as the parents, take the timely warning.  Let the pious wife here see the character of her sympathy for her impenitent husband.  And let each see that their pious sympathy “always issue forth in actions.”  Let that sympathy give not only eloquence to the tongue, tears to your eye, and sighs to your heart, but also faithfulness to your life and holy calling.  As the cry of hunger from your children, and their shivering cold in winter, prompt you to provide for their natural wants, so let their moral wants impel you to fidelity to their souls.  All will be vain without this.  The stern demands of a father’s authority, and the formal teachings of a mother’s lip, will fall like the frost of a winter’s morning, upon their tender hearts,—­only to sear and to harden and to freeze up the heart against God.  For