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No. II.
I
have promised to open a leaf of the past, and shall,
to the best of my ability, perform my promise; but,
in doing so, I must promise that the reader
is not to identify my own self with my
reminiscences. They are more the result of
observation than personal experience; and, although
I do not claim to be better than my fellows, still
I would not have laid to my door all the
delinquencies that I may in the course of my
writings have occasion to point to. Having made this
remark, I shall proceed with my rather painful, but,
I trust, useful task.
We
will not, my venerable friends, commence at “Page
1,” when we were under the guidance and control of
our parents or guardians—when we were neither able
to judge nor act for ourselves, but were led by the
advice and teaching of those who studied our welfare
and happiness; but we will open the book a few
years in advance, and begin by reference to the
period when, having by the course of events become
our own masters, we made our debut on the “world’s
wide stage.” Let us, then, first ask ourselves
whether, at that fearfully responsible period, we
entertained that sincere affection, that deep
veneration, that unbounded gratitude for our
preceptors, which we were in duty bound to do;
whether we cherished what they had, with untiring
zeal and unceasing application, instilled into our
youthful minds, regardless of their own sufferings
and deprivations, so that they could but see their
beloved offspring or regarded pupils fulfil their
religious and moral duties towards God and man? Let
us con over the page carefully, and recall to our
minds whether all this pure love, this love “of
heart, of soul, of might,” was duly appreciated by
us? Did we endeavour, to the fullest extent of
our abilities, to return, even if it was only a
tithe of their affections? Did we strive by our
actions to call forth the approbation of the world
towards our teachers, thus fulfilling God’s
commandments, “Honour thy father and thy mother,”
and <<297>> “Thou shalt bow down to the hoary head?”
Did we perform our duty, by supporting them when
sickness or old age disabled them? And did we bear
with their infirmities, natural at an advanced
period of life, as they had patiently and joyously
borne with ours in our years of helpless infancy? If
we find this page completed by an affirmative answer
to all these questions—if we feel in our own souls
that we have thus read it as we found it, and not,
by misplacing or misconstruing words, made the
record read to suit bur wishes,—then how our old
hearts must warm at the recollection that we thus
fulfilled those duties! How our cold and sluggish
blood must joyously course through our shrunken
veins, at the consciousness that, by acting thus, we
then laid the foundation of our present
happiness,—that the obedience and love of our
children are but the reflection of the brilliant
light shed by our own actions over the horizon of
our future years of peace and happiness.
But perhaps the black and frightful page records a
different history; maybe we find that, no sooner had
we felt ourselves free from the trammels of parental
authority, so exercised, than we at once threw off
all acknowledgment of it, disowned all obedience to
it, discarded an remembrance of it, and became that
most hideous of all monsters, an ungrateful
child. Perhaps we lived on in years of
thoughtlessness, contributing to the scanty
support of the aged and infirm authors of our being;
and, when the Supreme called them hence, followed
them to the grave, shed tears over their cold and
lifeless clay, and, attiring ourselves in all the
fashionable array of mourning for twelve months,
“laid the flattering unction to our souls” that we
had performed our duty! Woe be to those whose page
of early manhood reads thus sinfully; who, in their
selfishness, forgot or slighted those who taught
their weak and tottering childhood first to stand
erect; who impressed upon their plastic minds the
true conception of their Maker, gradually filling
their young hearts with love and adoration, and
teaching their innocent lips to utter praise to God;
who, with patience anti perseverance unequalled,
prepared the soil, planted the seed, and watched its
slow and tedious growth, carefully rooting up the
noxious weeds that now and then would
inter-<<298>>mingle with the cherished culture, and,
as the expanding bud
gave promise of a future fruit, would skillfully and
cautiously train it to perfection.
Oh! what can equal the patient toil, the ceaseless
watchfulness, the disinterested love of a parent for
the child! And shall that love be returned by
indifference, by forgetfulness, by ingratitude?
And have we so returned it? If we have (and
Heaven forbid that it be so!) we have a fearful
account to settle. May God in his infinite mercy
grant us life, that we may repent—that we may, by
fulfilling our duty now, make some amends for our
early dereliction, before he summons us to the last
awful tribunal, where the soul is arrayed against
itself, where there is no chance of suborned
witnesses, and where each action of our life, from
the most trivial to that of deepest import, will be
shown forth in undisguised and truthful form—that we
may so rear our children, that “in the sear and
yellow leaf” of life they may look back with
fearless eye, and heart that trembleth not, at the
page that we now scan. And oh! that they may benefit
by our example, and not forget that a parent owes
great and sacred duties to a child.
Sexagenarian. |
