Page:Opening of the Connecticut Asylum Sermon 1817.djvu/7

 But I pass to considerations of more immediate advantage; and one is, that of affording consolation to the relatives and friends of these unfortunate. Parents! make the case your own! Fathers and mothers! think what would be your feelings, were the son of your expectations, or the daughter of your hopes, to be found in this unhappy condition. The lamp of reason already lights its infant eye; the smile of intelligence plays upon its countenance; its little hand is stretched forth in significant expression of its wants; the delightful season of prattling converse has arrived; but its artless lispings are in vain anticipated with paternal ardour; the voice of maternal affection falls unheard on its ear; its silence begins to betray its misfortune, and its look and gesture soon prove, that it must be forever cut off from colloquial intercourse with man, and that parental love must labour under unexpected difficulties, in preparing it for its journey through the thorny world upon which it has entered. How many experiments must be made before its novel language can be understood! How often must its instruction be attempted before the least improvement can take place! How imperfect after every effort, must this improvement be! Who shall shape its future course through life? who shall provide it with sources of intellectual comfort? who shall explain to it the invisible realities of a future world? Ah! my hearers, I could spread before you scenes of a mother's anguish, I could read to you letters of a father's anxiety, which would not fail to move your hearts to pity, and your eyes to tears, and to satisfy you that the prospect, which the instruction of their deaf and dumb children opens to parents, is a balm for one of the keenest of sorrows, inasmuch as it is a relief for what has been hitherto considered an irremediable misfortune.

The most important advantages, however, in the education of the deaf and dumb, accrue to those who are the subjects of it, and these are advantages, which it is extremely difficult for those of us, who are in possession of all our faculties, duly to appreciate. He, whose pulse has always beat high with health, little understands the rapture of