world coming down to this, fully acquainted with the principles of the gospel upon which our religious faith is built, and knowing also that we are professed followers of that Savior whose test of discipleship was, that we should love one another, and who bequeathed his peace as the greatest blessing he could bestow upon those who should keep his commandments. I have imagined such a being reading our public journals, but especially some of our professedly religious ones, and I have thought that the first inquiry he would make, would be, whether he had not arrived at the wrong planet? whether, in fact, he had not alighted upon fiery Mars, rather than descended into the bosom of a Christian community?
I am induced to speak of these strange anomalies in public as well as private feeling, not from any wish presumptuously to interfere with a department of human affairs which is far beyond the purpose of my present work; but I speak of these things, because they constitute too much the atmosphere in which we live, and it is my wish, my entreaty, my prayer, that children should be preserved from breathing this atmosphere sooner than is absolutely necessary. By being too early plunged into all the meanness, the littleness, and, may we not say, the sinfulness of party feeling, by seeing their parents and friends worked up to extravagance and animosity, on all those public occasions which offer exalted places
to the advocates of their particular party, they lose sight of the value of those principles which all good men advocate, and of the supremacy of that party to which all good men belong.
Men are in general too deeply engaged themselves in affairs of public interest to allow of their exercising any very beneficial influence over their children in this respect; but surely women may so far abstract their thoughts from the mere trappings and pageantry of human life, as to lead the minds of their children along with them, in looking to its realities, and especially to its oneness of interest in the great end of existence. Much may be done in this way by a judicious mother, where subjects of sectarian interest are under discussion, to ward off the attention of the young from the extreme importance attached by persons generally to different forms of government, or modes of worship.
