If you would die like a Christian, must you not endeavour to fill their minds with your dying thoughts? Must you not tell them that very soon the world will signify no more to them than it does to you? And that there is a _vanity_, a _littleness_ in the things of this life, which only dying men feel as they ought?
Will you not tell them, that all your own failings, the irregularity of your life, the folly of your tempers, and your failure of Christian perfection, has been owing to wrong opinions of the value of worldly things? And that if you had always seen the world in the same light that you see it now, your life had been devoted to God, and you would have lived in all those holy tempers and heavenly affections in which you now desire to die?
Will you not tell them, that riches spent upon ourselves, either in the pleasures of _ease_ and _indulgence_, in the vanity of dress, or in state and grandeur, are the bane and destruction of our souls, making us blindly content with _dreams_ of happiness, till death awakes us into _real_ misery?
From all this therefore it appears, that your kindness for your children is so far from being a good reason why you should so carefully labour to leave them rich, and in the enjoyment of the state and shew of the world; that if you die in a spirit of piety, if you love them as Christ loved his disciples, your kindness will oblige you to exhort them to renounce all such enjoyment of riches, as is contrary to those holy tempers and that heavenly affection which you now find to be the only good and happiness of human nature.