Neglecting Duty

This story relates to a family who were very well off. But the father and mother of this family never went to church, and never said a word to their children on the subject of religion. One of their sons was sick with the consumption, but they would not tell him that he was likely soon to die, nor allow any one to speak to him on the subject. They tried to be cheerful and merry before him. They did everything in their power to keep up his spirits, and to prevent him from thinking of the great change that was soon to overtake him. But at last, they saw that death was near. His father and mother, and brothers and sisters, could no longer hide their feelings from him. He saw them sitting, or standing round his bed, in tears. He could not tell what it meant. “What’s the matter with you all?,” he exclaimed. But they were all silent. And then the terrible thought came into his mind of what was going to happen to him. “Am I in danger? Am I dying?” he asked, in great alarm. They dared not, they could not deny it.

They only wept in silence around his bed. “Then I am lost!” he screamed out. “Lost! There is a hell. I feel it. I am in it. And you, you,” he cried, turning a look of agony upon his parents, “are the cause of the loss of my soul.” And then he died. How dreadful that was! Who would want to have stood in the place of those sorrowful parents? They had gone in the way of trnsgressors, by neglecting their duty to God, and their duty to their children. How hard it must have been for them to think that their transgression, in the way just spoken of, had brought on the son they loved so much, the loss of his soul! And yet it was just so.