Dear children,--although I am _almost_ a stranger among you, yet I feel
a true interest in your welfare. It gives me great pleasure when I enter
the Sabbath school to meet your happy countenances and smiling faces.
Children, you do not assemble together for the purpose of passing an
hour that perhaps might pass unpleasantly elsewhere. It is for a higher
and nobler purpose. It is to gain useful and religious instruction from
the _Bible_, the best of all books. You should not be content with
learning and reciting your lessons, but you should try to remember what
you learn. And when you grow up to be men and women, you will never
regret it. It is in the _Bible_ that we are taught to love God, and all
mankind.
When we enter the Sabbath school, may we learn to say, To-day is the
Sabbath day, ever blessed and beautiful; welcome to its holy and happy
influence! Welcome, thrice welcome, the day of sweet repose, and sweeter
meditation. Spring is sometimes compared to childhood. In spring, when
the brooks fall gurgling down the mountain side, when the earth begins
to be covered with its verdant robes, when the birds are joyfully
singing around, the trees gently waving in the breeze, and all is gay
and gladsome, we sometimes wish that it could always be spring. So in
youth, we sometimes wish we could always be young; but it cannot be. But
as each season in its turn, spring, summer, autumn, and even winter,
clothed in its robes of snow, has its own pleasures, so each season of
life is wisely invested of God, with its own peculiar joys.
Though it is now spring-time, it will soon be autumn with you, when you
must impart that useful knowledge you will have gained in spring and
summer. Now is the time for you to store up that knowledge. If our
childhood and youth are rightly employed, age will compare no more
unfavorably, as regards its joys, with youth and middle age, than does
winter with spring. Endeavor, then, to acquire that useful knowledge
that will teach you so to live that you may set a good example to all
around you. Children, this beautiful world we live in was made for you.
It is filled with beauty, and when we look around upon it, our hearts
within us say, how great and good is our God! How wonderful are all of
his works! The beautiful in nature is all the production of his power.
He spoke this world into being, and decorated it with sun, moon, and
stars. Beauty and loveliness are stamped upon everything that he has
made. But no scene in the outward world transcends in loveliness the
Sabbath school, where the young come to receive Christian instruction.
And now, dear children, make this wise resolution; to love your Sabbath
school, your parents and teachers, all the world, and especially your
heavenly Father, better than you ever have before; and you will be
better and happier children.