^ Example is one of the most important of instructors, though it teaches without a tongue. Precept may point the way, but it is silent, continuous example, conveyed to us by habits and living with us, that carries us along. Good advice has its weight, but without the accompaniment of a good example it is of com- paratively small influence : and it will be found that the common saying of " Do as I say, not as I do," is usually reversed in the actual experience of life. All persons are more apt to learn through the eye rather than the ear, and whatever is seen in fact makes a deeper impression than anything that is read or heard. This is especially the case in early life, when the eye is the chief inlet of knowledge. Whatever children see they unconsciously imitate, and they insensibly become like to those who are about them. Hence the importance of domestic training. For, however efficient our schools, the examples set in our homes must always
* Principal TuUoch, in Memoir, by Mrs. Oliphant, 266.
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be of greater injfluence in forming the characters of our future men and women; and from that source, be it pure or tainted, issue the habits and principles which govern public as well as private life. From this central spot the human sympathies radiate to an ever- widening circle until the world is embraced : for though true philanthropy, like charity, begins ' at home, assuredly it does not end there.^
3. This training is indeed a work of watchful anxiety, attended with painful, and often long-protracted, exercise of faith and patience. Who can hold on to it, but for the Divine support of the parental promise — " When he is old he shall not depart from it " ? The man will be as the child is trained. Education is utterly distinct from grace. But when conducted in the spirit, and on the principles, of the Word of God, it is a means of imparting it. Sometimes the fruit is immediate, uniform, and permanent. But in many cases " the bread cast upon the waters of the covenant is found," not till "after many days," perhaps not till the godly parent has been laid in the grave. Yet the fruit, though late, will be not the less sure.
^ In the year 1746, on a small island lying off the western coast of Africa, there might be seen a young man of English birth living in a condition of the most abject misery. He was the servant, it might almost be said the slave, of a trafficker in human flesh, who was himself, through his vile lusts, under the bondage of a ferocious negress, by whom his establishment was ruled. Against the English youth her heart was specially set. She starved him ; she caused him to be unjustly beaten ; she instigated his master against him by false accusations; she refused him when burning with fever even a draught of cold water. Such was the barbarity to which she subjected him that, but for a naturally strong constitution, and the secret assistance of some of the poor slaves of the household, he must have perished. What had brought this youth, who was the son of respectable parents and who had received a good education in his native country, to this deplorable condition ? It was chiefly his own wickedness, recklessness, and folly. He had been a wild, ungovernable youth, and had plunged himself into such an abyss of evil that his friends felt it was hopeless to strive to save him, and so they left him to sink. Who that saw that youth in his misery and his wickedness could have believed it possible that ere many years » S. Smiles, Self-Hdy.
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had passed he should be one of the most influential clergymen in the British Metropolis, a man of devout piety and zeal for God, a man loved, respected, looked up to by the whole religious world of his day, a man who should leave the stamp of his goodness on the nation at large ? And yet all that and more came to pass. The youth was John Newton, the friend of Cowper, the author along with him of the Olney Hymns, and the most venerable name among the Evangelical clergy of the Church of England. And to what did John Newton owe his rescue from the terrible pit into which he had fallen ? His mother had died when he was only six years of age, and had been spared the misery of witness- ing his career of vice, folly, degradation. But she was a godly woman, and during these six years she had stored his mind with Divine truth, and her earnest prayers for him had gone up for a memorial before God. These early lessons, he himself records, he never could get rid of, even during the wildest part of his career. Do what he would there they were, stamped indelibly on his soul, and ever and anon they would thrust themselves upon his notice. And when at length his heart was softened, and his spirit bowed to seek the Lord, the words spoken by that gentle mother in the nursery, long years before, came sounding in his ears again, as words of power, and life, and purity.^