Page:The Life and Works of Christopher Dock.djvu/128

116 be hard for parents and schoolmasters to account for if they do not seriously endeavor to keep their children from it. How near this is to my heart, none knows better than I. An accompanying song for pupils will reveal it in part. The Lord Jesus Himself testifies that the devil is the father of lies. (John viii, 44.) At His time the Scribes and Pharisees, while having the external appearance of piety, did things not for the glory of God, but for their own glory, and colored their cause with lies against truth, for which Christ said to them, as the verse tells us: “Ye are of your father the devil and the lusts of your father ye will do; he was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own, for he is a liar, and the father of it.” Such are Lord Jesus' own words. John the Baptist calls them for the same reason a generation of vipers, as may be seen in Matthew iii, 7. Read also and consider earnestly the twenty-third chapter of Matthew, and you shall find what woes follow lying and selfish actions. The last expression of the woes is described in the thirty-third verse: “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?”

As I have said, by weeding out such bad twigs and plants from our children, and planting good things in their stead, then earnestly exhorting God to add growth to their watering, there is hope of doing some good. For the children themselves are always most to be pardoned, for they are as wax that can be pressed into any shape. But if such evil