Wisdom

O Lord! bless us in our meeting now. We beseech Thee to give us some word to speak; though our own words be feeble let Thy strength come with them. Do Thou help us, and give us wisdom and utterance and earnestness, and may the word of the Lord be magnified among us, and the message of the great love of the Christ Who keeps us from evil find entrance into many hearts. O Lord, bless us each in our several callings and condition; be near any of us who may have any special temptations or difficulties. If any of us are proving the loneliness of life, or its sadness, or its difficulties, and if our way may seem to be barred against us, do Thou help us to patience and courage, to wise effort, to dependence upon Thee. O Lord, do Thou keep us all, and may every one of us from this time forth say unto Thee, ‘My Father! Thou art my Guide.’ These young men and maidens we commend to Thee that they may grow up serving God, His faithful witnesses and soldiers, hating covetousness and all evil, and binding sound wisdom and discretion on their hearts and their foreheads.

‘Train them up in exact obedience to yourselves, and break them of their own wills.’ … The common course of parents is to please their children so long, by letting them have what they crave, and what they will, till their wills are so used to be fulfilled, that they cannot endure to have them denied; and so can endure no government, because they endure no crossing of their wills. To be obedient, is to renounce their own wills, and be ruled by their parents’ or governor’s wills; to use them therefore to have their own wills, is to teach them disobedience, and harden and use them to a kind of impossibility of obeying. Tell them oft familiarly and lovingly of the excellency of obedience, and how it pleaseth God, and what need they have of government, and how unfit they are to govern themselves, and how dangerous it is to children to have their own wills; speak often with great disgrace of self-willedness and stubbornness, and tell others in their hearing what hath befallen self-willed children.

Or how great importance the wise and holy education of children is, to the saving of their souls, and the comfort of the parents, and the good of church and state, and the happiness of the world.

The Gospel will come to the front and will prove that the wise are fools, and the fools are the wise, and that those who are called heretics are Christians, and those that call themselves Christians, heretics.