"The Ostrich, silliest of the feathered kind,
And formed of God without a parent's mind,
Commits her eggs, incautious, to the dust,
Forgetful that the foot may crush the trust;
And, while on public nurseries they rely,
Not knowing, and too oft not caring why,
Irrational in what they thus prefer
No few, that would seem wise, resemble her."

To nurse means to educate or draw out and direct what exists in a state of mere involution. It means to protect, to foster, to supply with appropriate food, to cause to grow or promote growth, to manage with a view to increase. Thus Greece was the nurse of the liberal arts; Rome was the nurse of law. In horticulture, a shrub or tree is the nurse or protector of a young and tender plant. We are said to nurse our national resources. Isaiah, in speaking of the coming Messiah and the glory of his church, says, "Thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side." "Kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers."

The place or apartment appropriated to such nursing is called a nursery. Thus a plantation of young trees is called a nursery. Shakspeare calls Padua the nursery of arts. We call a very bad place the nursery of thieves and rogues. Dram-shops are the nurseries of intemperance. Commerce is called the nursery of seamen. Universities are the nurseries of the arts and sciences. The church on earth is called the nursery of the church in heaven. Christian families are called the nurseries of the church on earth, because in the former its members are nursed and propagated for the purpose of being transplanted into the latter.

In the same sense and for the same reason, the Christian home is the nursery of the young, -- of human nature in its normal state. And as home is the nursery of the state as well as of the church on earth and in heaven, we must see that it is a physical, intellectual and religious nursery. We shall briefly consider it in these aspects. Indeed the Christian home cannot be considered in a more interesting and responsible light. The little child, dedicated to God in holy baptism, is entirely helpless and dependent upon the ministrations of the nursery. There is the department of its first impressions, of its first directions, of its first intellectual and moral formation, of the first evolution of physical and moral life. There the child exists as but the germ of what is to be. It grows up under the fostering care and plastic power of the parents. God's commission to them in the nursery is, to bring up these germs of life, in His nurture admonition.

"Take the germ, and make it
A bud of moral beauty. Let the dews
Of knowledge, and the light of virtue, wake it
In richest fragrance and in purest hues."

The nursery is the department of home in which the mother fulfils her peculiar mission. This is her special sphere. None can effectually take her place there. She is the center of attraction, the guardian of the infant's destiny; and none like she, can overrule the unfolding life and character of the child. God has fitted her for the work of the nursery. Here she reigns supreme, the arbitress of the everlasting weal or woe of untutored infancy. On her the fairest hopes of educated man depend, and in the exercise of her power there, she sways a nation's destiny, gives to the infant body and soul their beauty, their bias and their direction. She there possesses the immense force of first impressions. The soul of her child lies unveiled before her, and she makes the stamp of her own spirit and personality upon its pliable nature. She there engrafts it, as it were, into her own being, and from the combined elements of her own character, builds up and establishes the character of her offspring. Hers will, therefore, be the glory or the shame.

"Then take the heart thy charms have won,
And nurse it for the skies."

The nursery is that department of home in which the formation of our character is begun. Infancy demands the nursery. It is not full-formed and equipped for the battle of life. It lies in the cradle in a state of mere involution, and in the hands of its parents is altogether passive, and susceptible of impressions as wax before the sun. The germ of the man is there; but it has yet to be developed. Its indwelling life must be nurtured with tender and assiduous care. It demands an influence suited to the expansion of its nature into bloom and maturity. It demands physical development, mental evolution, moral training, and spiritual elevation. In order to these it must live amidst the sweet and plastic socialities of maternal relationship. It must come under the fostering influence of a mother's heart, and be reared up by the tender touches of a mother's hand. This idea is embodied in home as a nursery. This is fourfold in its conception and relation to the child.

The nursery is physical. This involves the means of keeping the child in health, and the appliances of a vigorous physical development. The Christian mother, to this end, should make herself acquainted with the physiology of the infant body. Many well-meaning mothers, from sheer ignorance, destroy the health of their children; and it is on this account perhaps that four-tenths of them die under five years of age. They should also consider the bearing of the body upon the mind and morals of their children. How often do ignorant and indolent parents, by giving their children over to the care of sickly and immoral nurses, ruin forever the health and souls of their offspring. Much, then, depends upon the physical nurture of your child. If you would not injure its mind and soul, you must nurse its body with tender care and wisdom. A vital bond unites them; they reciprocally influence each other, and hence what affects the one must have a corresponding influence upon the other. Neglect the body of your child; destroy its health either by extreme and fastidious care, or by a brutal neglect, and you at the same time do lasting injury to its mind and morals; for the body as the vehicle of mind and spirit, is used for spiritual ends, and should, therefore, be nurtured with direct reference to these.

Your child, in the nursery, is like the tender plant. The storm of passion and the chill of indifference and the oppression of parental tyranny should not be heard and felt there; for where the storm rages and coldness freezes and the hand of cruelty oppresses, we can have no beautiful and vigorous development of physical or moral powers. There will be a stinted and one-sided growth. At best it will be dwarfish, and tend to counteract the spontaneous outflow of mental and moral life. The tender plant, when, cramped and clogged by existing impediments, cannot spring up into beauteous maturity. Neither can your child, when crammed with sweetmeats, and oppressed and screwed into monstrous contortions by the cruel inquisition of fashion and fashionable garments.

In this way the misdirected love and cruel pride of mothers often destroy the health and beauty of their children. They cause a sickly and dwarfish growth by too much confinement and mental taxation, by a too rigid choice of diet, by daily, uncalled for decoctions of medicine, and by fitting the body in a dress as the Chinese do their children's feet in shoes; in a word, by making the entire nursery life too artificial, and substituting the laws of art for those of nature. The result must be a delicate, artificial constitution, too fragile for the trials and duties of life. The body of your child has not the blooming, blushing form of nature, but the cold marble cast of a statue; and it imprints itself upon the disposition, the spirit, the mental faculties. It shows itself in peevishness, in imbecility, in such a passive, slavish subjection to the rules and interests of mere artificial life, as to admit no hope almost of spiritual progression.

The nursery is also intellectual. The mind of your child is unfolding as well as its body; and hence the former, as well as the latter, demands the nursery. How much of the mental vigor and attainments of children depend upon the prudent management of the nursery. Hence parents should

"Exert a prudent care
To feed our infant minds with proper fare;
And wisely store the nursery by degrees
With wholesome learning, yet acquired with ease.
And thus well-tutored only while we share
A mother's lectures and a nurse's care."

Parents may abuse the minds of their children in the nursery, either by total neglect, or by immature education, by too early training and too close confinement to books at a very early age, thus taxing the mind beyond its capacities. This is often the case when children betray great precocity of intellect; and the pride of the parent seeks to gratify itself through the supposed gift of the child. In this way parents often reduce their children to hopeless mental imbecility.

Again, parents often injure the minds of their children by their misguided efforts to train the mind. Even in training them to speak, how imprudent they are in calling words and giving ideas in mutilated language. It is just as easy to teach children to speak correctly, and to call all things by their proper names, as to abuse their vernacular tongue. Such mutilations are impediments to the growth of the intellect. The child must afterwards be taught to undo what it was taught to do and say in the nursery. But as this subject will be fully considered in the chapter on Home Education, we shall refrain from further comment here.

The nursery is moral and spiritual. The first moral and religious training of the child belongs to the nursery, and is the work of the mother. Upon her personal exhibition of truth, justice, virtue, &c., depends the same moral elements in the character of her child. In the nursery we receive our first lessons in virtue or in vice, in honesty or dishonesty, in truth or in falsehood, in purity or in corruption. The full-grown man is the matured child morally as well as physically and intellectually. The same may be said of the spiritual formation and growth of the child. Spiritual culture belongs eminently to the nursery. There the pious parent should begin the work of her child's salvation.

From what we have now seen of the nursery, we may infer its very common abuse by Christian parents in various ways. They abuse it either by forsaking its duties, or giving it over to nurses. The whole subject warns parents against giving over their children to dissolute nurses. What a blushing shame and disgrace to the very name of Christian mother, it is for her to throw the whole care and responsibility of the nursery upon hired and irreligious servants. And why is this so often done? To relieve the mother from the trouble of her children, and afford her time and opportunity to mingle unfettered in the giddy whirl of fashionable dissipation. In circles of opulent society it would now be considered a drudgery and a disgrace for mothers to attend upon the duties of this responsible department of home. But the nurse cannot be a substitute for the mother.

"Then why resign into a stranger's hand
A task so much within your own command,
That God and Nature, and your interest too
Seem with one voice to delegate to you?"

The same may be said of boarding schools, to which many parents send their children to rid themselves of the trouble of training them up. They are sent there at the very age in which they mostly need the fostering care of a parent. There they soon become alienated from home, and lose the benefit of its influence; and there too they often contract habits and are filled with sentiments the most degenerating and corrupt. They grow up and enter society without any conscious relation to home, and as a consequence, regard society as a mere heartless conventionalism. To this part of the subject we shall, in another chapter, devote special attention. It demands the prayerful consideration of Christian parents.

"Why hire a lodging in a house unknown,
For one whose tenderest thoughts all hover round your own? This second weaning, needless as it is,
How does it lacerate both your heart and his!"