Dear children,—although I am almost a stranger among you, yet I feel a true interest in your welfare. It gives me great pleasure when I enter the Sabbath school to meet your happy countenances and smiling faces. Children, you do not assemble together for the purpose of passing an hour that perhaps might pass unpleasantly elsewhere. It is for a higher and nobler purpose. It is to gain useful and religious instruction from the Bible, the best of all books. You should not be content with learning and reciting your lessons, but you should try to remember what you learn. And when you grow up to be men and women, you will never regret it. It is in the Bible that we are taught to love God, and all mankind.

When we enter the Sabbath school, may we learn to say, To-day is the Sabbath day, ever blessed and beautiful; welcome to its holy and happy influence! Welcome, thrice welcome, the day of sweet repose, and sweeter meditation. Spring is sometimes compared to childhood. In spring, when the brooks fall gurgling down the mountain side, when the earth begins to be covered with its verdant robes, when the birds are joyfully singing around, the trees gently waving in the breeze, and all is gay and gladsome, we sometimes wish that it could always be spring. So in youth, we sometimes wish we could always be young; but it cannot be. But as each season in its turn, spring, summer, autumn, and even winter, clothed in its robes of snow, has its own pleasures, so each season of life is wisely invested of God, with its own peculiar joys.

Though it is now spring-time, it will soon be autumn with you, when you must impart that useful knowledge you will have gained in spring and summer. Now is the time for you to store up that knowledge. If our childhood and youth are rightly employed, age will compare no more unfavorably, as regards its joys, with youth and middle age, than does winter with spring. Endeavor, then, to acquire that useful knowledge that will teach you so to live that you may set a good example to all around you. Children, this beautiful world we live in was made for you. It is filled with beauty, and when we look around upon it, our hearts within us say, how great and good is our God! How wonderful are all of his works! The beautiful in nature is all the production of his power. He spoke this world into being, and decorated it with sun, moon, and stars. Beauty and loveliness are stamped upon everything that he has made. But no scene in the outward world transcends in loveliness the Sabbath school, where the young come to receive Christian instruction. And now, dear children, make this wise resolution; to love your Sabbath school, your parents and teachers, all the world, and especially your heavenly Father, better than you ever have before; and you will be better and happier children.