A father sets his son up in business. He keeps an account of all the
expenditures. So much for store fixtures, so much for rent, so much
for this, so much for that, and all the items aggregated, and the
father expects the son to give an account. Your heavenly Father
charges against you all the advantages of a pious ancestry--so many
prayers, so much Christian example, so many kind entreaties--all these
gracious influences one tremendous aggregate, and He asks you for an
account of it.
Ought not you to be better than those who had no such advantages?
Better have been a foundling picked up off the city commons than with
such magnificent inheritance of consecration to turn out
indifferently.
Ought not you, my brother, to be better, having had Christian nurture,
than that man who can truly say this morning: "The first word I
remember my father speaking to me was an oath; the first time I
remember my father taking hold of me was in wrath; I never saw a Bible
till I was ten years of age, and then I was told it was a pack of
lies. The first twenty years of my life I was associated with the
vicious. I seemed to be walled in by sin and death." Now, my brother,
ought you not--I leave it as a matter of fairness with you--ought you
not to be far better than those who had no early Christian influence?
Standing as you do between the generation that is past and the
generation that is to come, are you going to pass the blessing on, or
are you going to have your life the gulf in which that tide of
blessing shall drop out of sight forever? You are