How much Sabbath-breaking is prevented by these instructions! A
very great proportion of those children who attend Sabbath-schools would,
but for them, be spending their time in running about the streets, and
in profaning the Lord's day; and, by the unholy companionships which they
must form, into how much of profligacy and vice would they be led! Is it
true on the one hand, "train up a child in the way he should go; and when
he is old, he will not depart from it?" Then it is equally true, that if
a child be trained up in the way in which he should not go, when he is
old, he is not likely to depart from it! So that by the prevention of
Sabbath-breaking, and its consequent train of evils, you actually lessen
the amount of crime in riper years. Children _will_ be educated; and if
the _people of God_ do not educate them for _their_ Master, and train
them for heaven, the servants of the _devil will_ not be slow in
educating them _for theirs_, and in training them for hell! I conceive
that none, save the _Tractarians of Oxford, and their party_, will deny
the beneficial moral influence which such Sabbath instruction has exerted
upon our teeming population.
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