Page:Great importance of parental instruction.pdf/21

 saved himself from trial, which may serve to shew this truth, that there is no just ground to depend on the fidelity of an accomplice in crime.

Many of those who were tried were convicted, and their situations were awfully alarming.

The public execution of such juvenile offenders is justified upon this principle, that if they are of age to contrive, devise, and secretely to perpetrate crimes of such magnitude, they are old enough to suffer the penalties of the law for the same.

Offences like those above described are not accidental, nor such as good children could commit under momentary temptation; they are the effects of most vicious habits of thinking and acting, brought on by long indulged falsehood, idleness, and extravagance; but most of all, by licentious intercourse with the very worst of characters, watching for those who will listen to their voice and be lured by them into their snares.

Death, at all times terrific, presents himself with ten-fold horrors in the case of a lad of unripe years turned off at the place of public execution, for some heinous offence against society.

Let the serious and reflecting youth, therefore, pause a moment over the solemn thought of the dreadful hereafter with respect to these delinquents; and while he bends the knee in thankful acknowledgements to that God who causes him to differ, let him offer his ardent prayers that God will display towards them that mercy which the welfare of society will not allow of their experiencing from man.

And if this letter should fall into the hands of any of those wretched parents who train up their children, not in the way in which they ought to go, but in lies and other vices, and who thus devote their children,