estimated that there are eight thousand women in these two cities who
have expended on their personal array two thousand dollars a year.

What are the men to do in order to keep up such home wardrobes?
Steal--that is the only respectable thing they can do! During the last
fifteen years there have been innumerable fine business men
shipwrecked on the wardrobe. The temptation comes in this way: a man
thinks more of his family than all the world outside, and if they
spend the evening in describing to him the superior wardrobe of the
family across the street that they cannot bear the sight of, the man
is thrown on his gallantry and his pride of family, and without
translating his feelings into plain language, he goes into extortion
and issuing of false stock and skillful penmanship in writing somebody
else's name at the foot of a promissory note; and they all go down
together--the husband to the prison, the wife to the sewing machine,
the children to be taken care of by those who were called poor
relations. Oh, for some new Shakespeare to arise and write

THE TRAGEDY OF CLOTHES!

Act the first of the tragedy: A plain but beautiful home. Enter the
newly married pair. Enter simplicity of manner and behavior. Enter as
much happiness as is ever found in one home.

Act the second: Discontent with the humble home. Enter envy. Enter
jealousy. Enter desire to display.

Act the third: Enlargement of expenses. Enter all the queenly
dressmakers. Enter the French milliners.

Act the fourth: The tip-top of society. Enter princes and princesses
of New York life. Enter magnificent plate and equipage. Enter
everything splendid.

Act the fifth and last, winding up the scene: Enter the assignee.
Enter the sheriff. Enter the creditors. Enter humiliation. Enter the
wrath of God. Enter the contempt of society. Enter death. Now, let the
silk curtain drop on the stage. The farce is ended, and the lights are
out.

Will you forgive me if I say in tersest shape possible, that some of
the men in this country have to forge, and to perjure, and to swindle
to pay for their wives' dresses? I will say it whether you forgive me
or not.

CURTAILS BENEVOLENCE.

Again, extravagant costume is the foe of all Christian alms-giving.
Men and women put so much in personal display that they often have
nothing for God and the cause of suffering humanity--a Christian man
cracking his Palais Royal gloves across the back by shutting up his
hand to hide the one cent he puts into the poor box! a Christian woman
at the story of the Hottentots crying copious tears into a twenty-five
dollar handkerchief, and then giving a two-cent piece to the
collection, thrusting it down under the bills, so people will not know
but it was a ten-dollar gold piece! One hundred dollars for incense to
fashion--two cents for God! God gives us ninety cents out of every
dollar. The other ten cents, by command of His Bible, belong to Him.
Is not God liberal according to this tithing system laid down in the
Old Testament--is not God liberal in giving us ninety cents out of a
dollar when he takes but ten? We do not like that. We want to have
ninety-nine cents for ourselves and one for God.

Now, I would a great deal rather steal ten cents from you than God. I
think one reason why a great many people do not get along in worldly
accumulation faster is because they do not observe this Divine rule.
God says: "Well, if that man is not satisfied with ninety cents out of
a dollar, then I will take the whole dollar, and I will give it to the
man or woman who is honest with me." The greatest obstacle to charity
in the Christian church to-day is the fact that men expend so much on
their table, and women so much on their dress, they have got nothing
left for the work of God and the world's betterment.

DISTRACTS ATTENTION.

Again, extravagant costume is distraction to a public worship. You
know very well there are a good many people who go to church just as
they go to the races, to see who will come out first. Men and women
with souls to be saved passing the hour in wondering where that man
got his cravat, or what store that woman patronizes. In many of our
churches the preliminary exercises are taken up with the discussion
of wardrobes. It is pitiable. Is it not wonderful that the Lord does
not strike the meeting-houses with lightning? What distraction of
public worship! Dying men and women, whose bodies are soon to be
turned into dust, yet before three worlds strutting like peacocks.
People sitting down in a pew or taking up a hymn book, all absorbed at
the same time in personal array, to sing:

    "Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings,
      Thy better portion trace;
    Rise from transitory things
      Toward heaven, thy native place!"

I adopt the Episcopalian prayer, and say: "Good Lord, deliver us!"

MENTAL IMPOVERISHMENT.

Extravagant costume belittles the intellect. Our minds are enlarged or
they dwindle just in proportion to the importance of the subject on
which we constantly dwell. Can you imagine anything more dwarfing to
the human intellect than the study of dress? I see men on the street
who, judging from their elaboration, I think must have taken two hours
to arrange their apparel. After a few years of that kind of
absorption, which one of McAllister's magnifying glasses will be
powerful enough to make the man's character visible? What will be left
of a woman's intellect after giving years and years to the discussion
of such questions? They all land in idiocy. I have seen men at the
summer watering-places through fashion the mere wreck of what they
once were. Sallow of cheek. Meagre of limb. Hollow at the chest.
Showing no animation save in rushing across a room to pick up a lady's
fan. Simpering along the corridors the same compliments they simpered
twenty years ago.

BARS HEAVEN.

Yet, my friends, I have given you only the milder phase of this evil.
It shuts a great multitude out of heaven. The first peal of thunder
that shook Sinai declared: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me,"
and you will have to choose between the goddess of fashion and the
Christian God. There are a great many seats in heaven, and they are
all easy seats, but not one seat for the devotee of costume. Heaven is
for meek and quiet spirits. Heaven is for those who think more of
their souls than of their bodies.

Give up this idolatry of fashion or give up heaven. What would you do
standing beside the Countess of Huntingdon, whose joy it was to build
chapels for the poor; or with that Christian woman of Boston, who fed
fifteen hundred children of the street, at Fanueil Hall, one New
Year's Day, giving out as a sort of doxology at the end of the
meeting a pair of shoes to each one of them; or those Dorcases of
modern society who have consecrated their needles to the Lord, and who
will get eternal reward for every stitch they take?

PERPETUAL ENVY.

Oh, men and women, give up the idolatry of costume! The rivalries and
the competitions of such a life are a stupendous wretchedness. You
will always find some one with brighter array, and with more palatial
residence, and with lavender kid gloves that make a tighter fit. And
if you buy this thing and wear it you will wish you had bought
something else and worn it. And the frets of such a life will bring
the crow's feet to your temples before they are due, and when you come
to die you will have a miserable time.

I have seen men and women of excessive costume die, and I never saw
one of them die well. The trappings off, there they lay on the tumbled
pillow, and there were just two things that bothered them--a wasted
life and a coming eternity. I could not pacify them, for their body,
mind, and soul had been exhausted in the worship of costume, and they
could not appreciate the Gospel. When I knelt by their bedside they
were mumbling out their regrets, and saying: "O God! O God!" Their
garments hung up in the wardrobe never again to be seen by them.
Without any exception, so far as my memory serves me, they died
without hope, and went into eternity unprepared. The two most ghastly
death-beds on earth are the one where a man dies of delirium tremens,
and the other where a woman dies after having sacrificed all her
faculties of body, mind and soul in the worship of costume.

JUDGMENT TO COME.

My friends, we must appear in judgment to answer for what we have worn
on our bodies as well as for what repentances we have exercised with
our souls. On that day I see coming in Beau Brummell of the last
century without his cloak; Aaron Burr, without the letters that to old
age he showed in pride, to prove his early wicked gallantries; and
Absalom without his hair; and Marchioness Pompadour without her
titles; and Mrs. Arnold, the belle of Wall Street, when that was the
centre of fashion, without her fripperies of vesture.

And in great haggardness they shall go away into eternal expatriation,
while among the queens of heavenly society will be found Vashti, who
wore the modest veil before the palatial bacchanalians; and Hannah,
who annually made a little coat for Samuel at the temple; and
Grandmother Lois, the ancestress of Timothy, who imitated her virtue;
and Mary, who gave Jesus Christ to the world; and many of you, the
wives, and mothers, and sisters, and daughters of the present
Christian church who, through great tribulation, are entering into the
kingdom of God. Christ announced who would make up the royal family of
heaven when He said: "Whosoever doeth the will of God, the same is my
brother, my sister, my mother."

FOOTNOTES:

[2] The list of feminine treasures given by the Revised Version is more
intelligible. It is: "Their anklets, and the networks, and the
crescents; the pendants, and the bracelets, and the mufflers; the
head-tires, and the ankle chains, and the sashes, and the perfume boxes,
and the amulets; the rings, and the nose-jewels; the festival robes, and
the mantles, and the shawls, and the satchels; the hand-mirrors, and the
fine linen, and the turbans, and the veils."

HUSBANDS AND WIVES.

    "Let every one in particular so love his wife even as himself;
    and the wife see that she reverence her husband."--EPHESIANS
    5:33.

All this good advice by a man who never married. He lived on to
fifty-eight years of age, in eminent bachelorhood. Indeed, it was
better for Paul to remain in single life, because he went on such
rapid missionary expeditions that no companion could have endured the
hardship. Celibacy in some cases is better. Such persons accomplish
under such circumstances that which could not be accomplished in the
other style of life.

I have known men who remain unaffianced in order that they might take
care of the children of a deceased brother; and what would become of
the world without the self-sacrifice and helpfulness of the maiden
aunts I cannot imagine.

Among the brightest queens of Heaven will be those who took care of
other people's children. Alas for that household which has not within
easy call an Aunt Mary! I know that there are caricatures, and
ungallant things sometimes said; but so far as my observation goes,
they are quite equal in disposition to their married sisters. The
state of celibacy is honored again by such persons as Macaulay and
Washington Irving in literature, and Florence Nightingale and Miss Dix
in philanthropy.

But while Paul remained in the single state, he kept his eyes open,
and he looked off upon the calm sea of married life, and upon the
chopped sea of domestic perturbation. He comes forth in my text to
say, "Let every one in particular so love his wife even as himself;
and the wife see that she reverence her husband;" implying that the
wife ought to be lovable, so there might be something to love, and the
man ought to be honorable, so there might be something to reverence.

It is

A MOST CONGRATULATORY THOUGHT

that the vast majority of people in the married state are well mated.
When the news is first announced in the outside world of the
betrothal, there may be surprise and seeming incongruity, but as the
years pass by it is demonstrated that the selection was divinely
arranged. There may be great difference of temperament, great
difference of appearance, great difference of circumstances. That is
no objection. The sanguine and the phlegmatic temperaments make
appropriate union, the blonde and the brunette, the quick and the
slow, the French and the German. In the machinery of domestic life
there is no more need for the driving wheel than for the brakes. That
is the best union generally which has just the opposites.

The best argument in behalf of marriage as a divine institution is the
fact that the vast majority of conjugal relationships are the very
best things that could have happened. Once in a while there is a
resounding exception to the good rule, the attempt being made to marry
fire and gunpowder, with the consequent explosion in the divorce
courts; but in the vast majority of instances the conjugal relation is
a beautiful illustration of what the Psalmist said when he declared,
"God setteth the solitary in families."

Taking it for granted, then, that you are well mated, I proceed to
give you some

PRESCRIPTIONS FOR DOMESTIC HAPPINESS;

and, first of all, I remark:

I. A spirit of compromise must be dominant. You must remember that you
were twenty or thirty years forming independent habits and having your
own way. In the marriage state these habits must be brought into
accord, and there may be some ingenuity necessary. Be determined to
have your own way, and there will be no peace. Let the rule be: In
all matters of moral principle your determination shall be iron, and
in all unimportant matters, willow. Whatever you may think of the word
compromise in politics, without compromise there is no domestic peace.
A great many people are willing to compromise, if you will do just as
they want you to do; but there is no compromise in that. The rule
ought to be: In all domestic matters, all social matters, all
ecclesiastical matters, all political matters, firm adherence to
fundamentals, easy surrender in non-essentials. Be not too proud or
too stubborn to give up. Compromise! Compromise!

II. I remark, again, that in order to domestic happiness there must be
a spirit of

CONSULTATION.

The home ought to be a cabinet, where all the affairs of the household
and all the affairs of business life come under comparison, inspection
and advisal. That is an absurd rule we hear abroad in the world, that
men ought never to take their business home. Ten thousand financial
failures would have been avoided if men had consulted with their
wives.

In the first place, woman has a capacity to judge of moral character
which man has not. Before you invite into your business partnership
any man, you ought to introduce him to your wife, and get her judgment
as to his capacity and his integrity. After five minutes' conversation
she will tell you as much about him as you will know at the close of
twenty years, and perhaps you may find out too late.

A man proposes to come into your business partnership. You take him to
your home. He tarries a little while, and is gone. You say to your
wife, "Well, what do you think of him?" She says, "I don't like him at
all." You say, "It's an absurd thing to form a prejudice against him
on so short an acquaintance. I have known him for years, and I have
never known any bad against him." "Well," she says, "I don't know why
I have formed that opinion, but I tell you to beware. Put none of your
financial interests in that man's keeping." Ten or fifteen years pass
by. You come home some night and say, "Well, my dear, you are right;
that man swindled me out of my last dollar." It is not because woman
is wiser than man. It is because God has given her that peculiar
intuition in regard to human character.

Now, you have no right to go into an enterprise which involves the
homestead, or the education of your children, or the fate of your
entire family, without home consultation. Of course, all this implies
that you did not marry a fool. If at the marriage altar you committed
suicide, you had better keep all your business affairs in your own
heart and head. But let us hope that you have sound common sense
presiding in your household.

A BEAUTIFUL INCIDENT.

How much a wife may help a husband's business affairs was well
illustrated in the case where the wife saved from the allowance of
herself and the allowance of the family, a certain amount of money for
a rainy day. After some time the husband, coming home, said: "Well,
I'm going to suspend payment to-morrow. A few dollars would get me
through, but I can't get the few dollars, and I'm going to ruin." That
evening the wife said: "I wish you would hunt up the definition of the
word 'independence' in Webster's Dictionary. Hunt it up for me." He
opened Webster's Dictionary, and found the word "independence," and
right opposite was a $100 bill. "Now," she said, "I would like to have
you find the word 'gratitude.'" He turned to the word "gratitude," and
there was another $100 bill. And before the evening was past she asked
him to read a verse of a certain chapter of the Bible. He opened to
the verse in the Bible, and there were $500, and before the evening
had passed, the man had financial relief to tide him over his
disasters. You call that dramatic. I call that beautifully Christian.

In all expenditures there ought to be consultation. Do not dole out
money to your wife as though she were a beggar. Let her know how much
you have, or how little. Appeal to her intelligent judgment, and she
will be content, and your own disposition will not be irritated. As
long as you keep a mystery about your business matters she will wonder
that the allowance is so small. No honorable woman wants to spend more
money than can be afforded. Come into consultation with her on this
matter. Show what are all your necessary outside expenses, all the
money you have for cigars and dinners at Delmonico's, and how much it
takes for the club-house and for the political campaign, and then have
her present all the domestic expenses, and then, after consultation do
your best.

It is a bad sign when a man dare not tell his business transactions to
his wife. There is something wrong. Suppose you that the gigantic
forgeries which have been enacted in this country would ever have
taken place if the wife had been consulted? The wife would have said,
"Stop! Let us live in one room in the poorest house on the poorest
street of the poorest town, and have nothing but dry bread rather than
that you should make yourself culpable before God and the law." In
the vast majority of cases where there has been exposure of great
frauds, the wife has been the most surprised person in the community.

A BANKER

some time ago misused trust funds, and he went from fraud to fraud,
and from knavery to knavery, until it was necessary for him to leave
home before daylight. His wife said: "Where are you going?" "I am
going to New York," said he "I am going on the early train." "Why,
isn't this sudden?" she asked. "Oh, no; I expected to go," and then he
left the room and went up to the room where his daughters slept,
looked upon their calm faces for the last time, as he supposed, and
started. He was brought back by the constables of an outraged law, and
is now in the penitentiary.

Do you suppose that man, with a good wife, as he had, an honest wife,
as he had, a Christian wife, as he had, could have got into such an
enormity if he had consulted in regard to her wishes? Consultation is
the word--domestic consultation.

III. Again: in order to domestic happiness, there must, in the
conjugal state, be

NO SECRETS

kept one from the other. What one knows both must know. It is a bad
sign when one partner in the conjugal relation is afraid to have the
letters opened or read by the other partner. Surreptitious
correspondence is always dangerous. If a man comes to you and says, "I
am going to tell you a great privacy, and don't want you to tell
anybody, not even your wife," say to him, "Well, now, you had better
not tell me, for I shall tell her as soon as I get home."

There must be no secrecy of association. You ought not to be unwilling
to tell where you have been, and with whom you have been. Sometimes an
unwise wife will have a lady confidante whom she makes a depository of
privacies which they are pledged to keep between themselves. Beware!
Anything that implies that husband and wife are two and not one
implies peril, domestic peril, social peril, mighty peril.

In the vast majority of cases of domestic infelicity coming to
exposure in the courts, the trouble began by the accidental opening of
a letter which implied correspondence which was never suspected. In
the conjugal relations, secrets kept one from another are
nitro-glycerine under the hearthstone, and the fuse is lighted!

IV. Again: in order to your happiness there must be a spirit of

FORBEARANCE.

In the weeks, the months, the years that you were planning for each
other's conquest, only the more genial side of your nature was
observable, but now you are off guard, and the faults are all known
the one to the other. You are aware of your imperfections, unless you
are one of those self-conceited people who are quickly observant of
faults in others, but oblivious to faults in yourself; and now having
found out all of each others imperfections, forbear.

If the one be given to too much precision, and the other disorderly in
habits; if the one be spendthrift and the other oversaving; if the one
be loquacious, and the other reticent, forbear. Especially, if you
both have inflammable tempers, do not both get mad at once. Take turn
about! William Cowper put it well when he said:

    "The kindest and the happiest pair
    Will find occasion to forbear;
    And something every day they live
    To pity, and perhaps forgive."

V. Again: in order to your happiness, let there be no interfering with
each other's peculiar

RELIGIOUS SENTIMENTS.

If you are a Baptist and your wife a Pedo-Baptist, do not go to
splashing water into each other's faces! If you are a Presbyterian and
your husband is a Methodist, when he shouts "Hallelujah!" do not get
nervous.

If you have strong denominational proclivities, one of you had better
go to one church, and the other had better go to another church; or,
surrendering some of your intensity on that subject, as in hundreds of
cases, come to some such church as the Brooklyn Tabernacle, where,
while we adhere to the fundamentals of the Gospel, we do not care a
rye straw for the infinitesimal differences between evangelical
denominations--putting one drop of water on the brow, if that is
enough baptism, and if not, then plunging the candidate clear out of
sight, if that is preferred--not caring whether you believe you have
been foreordained to be saved or not, if you are only saved; nor
whether you believe in the perseverance of the saints or not, if you
will only persevere; nor whether you prefer prayer by Episcopal
liturgy or extemporaneous supplication, if you only pray.

Do not let there be any religious contests across the breakfast table
or the tea table. It makes but little difference from what direction
you come toward the riven heart of Christ, if you only come up to the
riven heart. Yet, I know in many families there is constant picking at
opposite religious beliefs, and attempt at proselytism. You, the
father, fight for Episcopacy, and you, the mother, fight for
Presbyterianism, and your children will compromise the matter and be
Nothingarians!

VI. Again: I counsel you, in order to your domestic happiness, that
you

CULTIVATE EACH OTHER'S RELIGIOUS WELFARE.

This is a profoundly agitating thought to every fair-minded man and
woman. You live, together on earth; you want to live together forever.
You do not want ten, or twenty, or fifty years to end your
association, you want to take your companion into the kingdom of God
with you. If this subject is irritating in the household, it is
because you do not understand Christian stratagem.

Every Christian companion may take his or her companion into glory.
How? Ask God, and he will tell you how. Perhaps by occasional
religious remark. Perhaps by earnest prayer. Perhaps by a consistent
life. More probably by all these things combined. Paul put it
forcefully when he said: "How knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt
save thy husband? how knowest thou, O man, whether thou shalt save thy
wife?" In this house, how many have been remarried for the skies!

It has become so much the general rule that when in my congregation,
as I often do, I find a family in which the wife is a Christian, and
the husband is not, I just say frankly to him: "Now you have got to
come in. You might just as well try to swim up against Niagara rapids
as against the tide of religious influence which in this church is
going to surge you into the kingdom of God. You must come in. You know
that your wife is right in this matter of religion. She may be quick
of temper, and you may sometimes lose your patience with her, but you
know she is better than you are, and you know when she dies she will
go as straight to heaven as a shot to a target.

"And, if to-day, on the way home, a vehicle should dash down the
street, and she should fall lifeless, with no opportunity for last
words, you might have a doubt about what would become of you, and a
doubt about what would become of the children, but you would have no
doubt about her eternal destiny. Somewhere under the flush of her
cheek, or under the pallor of her brow is the Lord's mark. She is your
wife, but she is God's child, and you are not jealous of that
relationship. You only wish that you yourself were a son of the Lord
Almighty. Come and have the matter settled. If I die before you, I
will not forget in the next world how you stood together here, but I
will expect both of you. You must come.

"I say it in all Christian love and emphasis, as a brother talks to a
brother. You must come. You have been united so long, you cannot
afford to have death divorce you. How long it is since you began the
struggle of life together! You have helped each other on the road, and
what you have done for each other God only knows. There have been
tedious sicknesses, and anxious watching, and here and there a grave,
short but very deep; and though the blossoms of the marriage day may
have scattered, and the lips that pronounced you one may have gone
into dust, you have through all these years been to each other true as
steel.

"Now, to-day, I am going to remarry you for heaven. This is the bridal
day of your soul's peace. Here is the marriage altar. Kneel side by
side, take the oath of eternal fidelity, clasp hands in a covenant
never to be broken. I pronounce you one on earth, I pronounce you one
for eternity. What God by His grace hath joined together, let not
earth or hell put asunder. Hark! I hear a humming in the air--an
anthem--a wedding march--organs celestial played upon by fingers
seraphic."

I do not think I ever read anything more beautiful and quaintly
pathetic than

COTTON MATHER'S DESCRIPTION

of the departure of his wife from earth to Heaven: "The black day
arrives. I had never seen so black a day in all the time of my
pilgrimage. The desire of my eyes is this day to be taken from me at
a stroke. Her death is lingering and painful. All the forenoon of this
day she was in the pangs of death, and sensible until the last minute
or two before her final expiration. I cannot remember the discourse
that passed between us, only her devout soul was full of satisfaction
about her going to a state of blessedness with the Lord Jesus Christ.
As far as my distress would permit, I studied to confirm her
satisfaction and consolation.

"When I saw to what a point of resignation I was called of the Lord, I
resolved, with His help, to glorify Him. So, two hours before she
expired, I knelt by her bedside and took into my hands that dear hand,
the dearest in the world, and solemnly and sincerely gave her up to
the Lord. I gently put her out of my hands and laid away her hand,
resolved that I would not touch it again. She afterward told me that
she signed and sealed my act of resignation, and though before that
she had called for me continually, after it she never asked for me any
more. She conversed much until near two in the afternoon. The last
sensible word she spoke was to her weeping father: 'Heaven, Heaven
will make amends for all!'"

Now let us be faithful in this relation of which I have been speaking.
Do you want to know

WHAT THE LORD THINKS OF IT?

Read the sixty-second chapter of Isaiah, where he says: "As the
bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over
thee." There is a wedding coming which will eclipse all the princely
and imperial weddings the world ever saw. It was a great day when
Napoleon took Josephine; it was a great day when Henry VIII. led Anne
Boleyn over the cloth of gold on the street, the cloth of gold
reaching up to the palace; it was a great day when the King of Spain
took Mercedes; but there will be a greater time when the Lord shall
take His bride, the Church, to Himself.

Long time ago they were affianced, but she has been down in the
wilderness. He has written her again and again, and the day of
marriage is fixed. She has sent word to Him. He has sent word to her.
But, oh! was there ever such a difference in estate? The King on the
one side, the bride of the wilderness, poor and persecuted, on the
other. The wealth of the universe on the one side, the obscurity of
the ages on the other. The pomp of heaven on the one side, the poverty
of earth on the other. But He will endow her with all His wealth, and
raise her to sit with Him on a throne forever.

Come, thou bridal morn of the ages! Come! and there shall be the
rumbling of great wheels, great chariot wheels down the sky, and there
shall be riders ahead and mounted cavalry behind, the conquerors of
heaven on white horses. Clear the way! A thousand trumpets blare.
"Behold! the bridegroom cometh: go ye out to meet Him."

Then the charioteers shall rein in their bounding steeds of fire, and
the King shall dismount from the chariot, and He shall take by the
hand the bride of the wilderness, all the crowded galleries of the
universe, the spectators. Ring all the wedding bells of heaven. The
King lifts the bride into the chariot and cries, "Drive on! drive up!"
and the clouds shall spread their cloth of gold for the procession,
and the twain shall go through the gates triumphant, and up the
streets, and then step into the palace at the banquet, where ten
thousand potentates and principalities and dominations, cherubic and
archangelic, with ten thousand gleaming and uplifted chalices, shall
celebrate the day when the King of Heaven and earth brings home His
bride from the wilderness. Make haste, my beloved. Be thou like to a
roe, or a young hart upon the mountains of spices.

MATRIMONIAL DISCORDS.

    "Can two walk together, except they be agreed?"--AMOS 3:3.

A church within a church, a republic within a republic, a world within
a world, is spelled by four letters--Home! If things go right there,
they go right everywhere; if things go wrong there, they go wrong
everywhere. The door-sill of the dwelling-house is the foundation of
Church and State. A man never gets higher than his own garret or lower
than his own cellar. In other words, domestic life overarches and
undergirds all other life. The highest House of Congress is the
domestic circle; the rocking-chair in the nursery is higher than a
throne. George Washington commanded the forces of the United States,
but Mary Washington commanded George. Chrysostom's mother made his pen
for him. If a man should start out and run seventy years in a straight
line he could not get out from under the shadow of his own
mantelpiece. I therefore talk to you this morning about a matter of
infinite and eternal moment when I speak of your home.

THE SOCIAL BALANCE.

As individuals we are fragments. God makes the race in part, and then
he gradually puts us together. What I lack, you make up; what you
lack, I make up; our deficits and surpluses of character being the
cog-wheels in the great social mechanism. One person has the patience,
another has the courage, another has the placidity, another has the
enthusiasm; that which is lacking in one is made up by another, or
made up by all. Buffaloes in herds, grouse in broods, quail in flocks,
the human race in circles. God has most beautifully arranged this. It
is in this way that he balances society; this conservative and that
radical keeping things even. Every ship must have its mast, cutwater,
taffrail, ballast. Thank God, then, for Princeton and Andover, for the
opposites.

I have no more right to blame a man for being different from me than a
driving-wheel has a right to blame the iron shaft that holds it to the
centre. John Wesley balances Calvin's Institutes. A cold thinker gives
to Scotland the strong bones of theology; Dr. Guthrie clothes them
with a throbbing heart and warm flesh. The difficulty is that we are
not satisfied with just the work that God has given us to do. The
water-wheel wants to come inside the mill and grind the grist, and
the hopper wants to go out and dabble in the water. Our usefulness and
the welfare of society depend upon our staying in just the place that
God has put us, or intended we should occupy.

A RELIC OF EDEN.

For more compactness and that we may be more useful we are gathered in
still smaller circles in the home group. And there you have the same
varieties again; brothers, sisters, husband and wife; all different in
temperaments and tastes. It is fortunate that it should be so. If the
husband be all impulse, the wife must be all prudence. If one sister
be sanguine in her temperament, the other must be lymphatic. Mary and
Martha are necessities. There will be no dinner for Christ if there be
no Martha; there will be no audience for Jesus if there be no Mary.
The home organization is most beautifully constructed. Eden has gone;
the bowers are all broken down; the animals that Adam stroked with his
hand that morning when they came up to get their names have since shot
forth tusk and sting and growled, panther at panther; in mid-air iron
beaks plunge till with clotted wing and eyeless sockets the twain come
whirling down from under the sun in blood and fire. Eden has gone, but
there is just one little fragment left. It floated down on the River
Hiddekel out of Paradise. It is the marriage institution. It does
not, as at the beginning, take away from man a rib. Now it is an
addition of ribs.

THE HOME ASSAULTED.

This institution of marriage has been defamed in our day, and
influences are abroad trying to turn this earth into a Turkish harem
or a great Salt Lake City. While the pulpits have been comparatively
silent, novels--their cheapness only equalled by their nastiness--are
trying to educate, have taken upon themselves to educate, this nation
in regard to holy marriage, which makes or breaks for time and
eternity. Oh, this is not a mere question of residence or wardrobe! It
is a question charged with gigantic joy or sorrow, with heaven or
hell. Alas for this new dispensation of George Sands! Alas for the
mingling of the nightshade with the marriage garlands! Alas for the
venom of adders spit into the tankards! Alas for the white frosts of
eternal death that kill the orange blossoms! The Gospel of Jesus
Christ is to assert what is right and to assert what is wrong.

THE ASSAULT OF THE SORDID.

Attempt has been made to take the marriage institution, which was
intended for the happiness and elevation of the race, and make it a
mere commercial enterprise; an exchange of houses and lands and
equipage; a business partnership of two, stuffed up with the stories
of romance and knight-errantry, and unfaithfulness and feminine
angelhood. The two after a while have roused up to find that, instead
of the paradise they dreamed of, they have got nothing but a Van
Amburgh's menagerie, filled with tigers and wild-cats. Twenty thousand
divorces in Paris in one year preceded the worst revolution that
France ever saw. It was only the first course in that banquet of hell;
and I tell you what you know as well as I do, that wrong notions on
the subject of Christian marriage are the cause at this day of more
moral outrage before God and man than any other cause.

There are some things that I want to bring before you. I know there
are those of you who have had homes set up for a great many years; and
then there are those here who have just established their home. They
have only been in it a few months or a few years. Then there are those
who will, after awhile, set up for themselves a home, and it is right
that I should speak out upon these themes.

THE BENEFICENT GUEST.

My first counsel to you is, have Jesus in your new home, if it be a
new home, and let Him who was a guest at Bethany be in your
household; let the divine blessing drop upon your every hope and plan
and expectation. Those young people who begin with God end with
heaven. Have on your right hand the engagement ring of the divine
affection. If one of you be a Christian, let that one take a Bible and
read a few verses in the evening-time, and then kneel down and commend
yourselves to Him who setteth the solitary in families. I want to tell
you that the destroying angel passes by without touching or entering
the door-post sprinkled with the blood of the everlasting covenant.
Why is it that in some families they never get along, and in others
they always get along well? I have watched such cases, and have come
to a conclusion. In the first instance, nothing seemed to go
pleasantly, and after awhile came devastation, domestic disaster or
estrangement. Why? They started wrong! In the other case, although
there were hardships and trials, and some things that had to be
explained, still things went on pleasantly until the very last. Why?
They started right!

FORBEARANCE NEEDED.

My advice to you in your home is to exercise to the very last
possibility of your nature the law of forbearance. Prayers in the
household will not make up for everything. Some of the best people in
the world are the hardest to get along with. There are people who
stand up in prayer-meetings and pray like angels, who at home are
uncompromising and cranky. You may not have everything just as you
want it. Sometimes it will be the duty of the husband, and sometimes
of the wife, to yield; but both stand punctiliously on your rights,
and you will have a Waterloo with no Blucher coming up at nightfall to
decide the conflict.

A GRANDFATHER'S APOLOGY.

Never be ashamed to apologize when you have done wrong in domestic
affairs. Let that be a law of your household. The best thing I ever
heard of my grandfather, whom I never saw, was this: that once, having
unrighteously rebuked one of his children, he himself having lost his
patience, and, perhaps, having been misinformed of the child's doings,
found out his mistake, and in the evening of the same day gathered all
his family together, and said: "Now I have one explanation to make,
and one thing to say. Thomas, this morning, I rebuked you very
unfairly. I am very sorry for it. I rebuked you in the presence of the
whole family, and now I ask your forgiveness in their presence." It
must have taken some courage to do that. It was right, was it not?
Never be ashamed to apologize for domestic inaccuracy. Find out the
points; what are the weak points, if I may call them so, of your
companion, and then stand aloof from them.

Do not carry the fire of your temper too near the gunpowder. If the
wife be easily fretted by disorder in the household, let the husband
be careful where he throws his slippers. If the husband come home from
the store with his patience all exhausted, do not let the wife
unnecessarily cross his temper; but both stand up for your rights, and
I will promise the everlasting sound of the war-whoop. Your life will
be spent in making up, and marriage will be to you an unmitigated
curse. Cowper said:

    "The kindest and the happiest pair
    Will find occasion to forbear;
    And something every day they live,
    To pity, and perhaps forgive."

I advise, also, that you make your chief pleasure circle around about
that home. It is unfortunate when it is otherwise. If the husband
spend the most of his nights away from home, of choice, and not of
necessity, he is not the head of the household; he is only the
cashier. If the wife throw the cares of the household in the servant's
lap, and then spend five nights of the week at the opera or theatre,
she may clothe her children with satins and laces and ribbons that
would confound a French milliner, but they are orphans. Oh, it is sad
when a child has to say its prayers alone because mother has gone off
to the evening entertainment! In India they bring children and throw
them to the crocodiles, and it seems very cruel; but the jaws of New
York and Brooklyn dissipation are swallowing down more little children
to-day than all the monsters that ever crawled upon the banks of the
Ganges!

A GODLESS MOTHER'S GRIEF.

I have seen the sorrow of a godless mother on the death of a child she
had neglected. It was not so much grief that she felt from the fact
that the child was dead as the fact that she had neglected it. She
said: "If I had only watched over and cared for the child, I know God
would not have taken it." The tears came not; it was a dry, blistering
tempest--a scorching simoon of the desert. When she wrung her hands it
seemed as if she would twist her fingers from their sockets; when she
seized her hair it seemed as if she had, in wild terror, grasped a
coiling serpent with her right hand.

No tears! Comrades of the little one came in and wept over the coffin;
neighbors came in, and the moment they saw the still face of the child
the shower broke. No tears for her. God gives tears as the summer rain
to the parched soul; but in all the universe the driest and hottest,
the most scorching and consuming thing is a mother's heart if she has
neglected her child, when once it is dead. God may forgive her, but
she will never forgive herself. The memory will sink the eyes deeper
into the sockets, and pinch the face, and whiten the hair, and eat up
the heart with vultures that will not be satisfied, forever plunging
deeper their iron beaks. Oh, you wanderers from your home, go back to
your duty! The brightest flowers in all the earth are those which grow
in the garden of a Christian household, clambering over the porch of a
Christian home.

MATRIMONIAL CONGENIALITY.

I advise you also to cultivate sympathy of occupation. Sir James
Mackintosh, one of the most eminent and elegant men that ever lived,
while standing at the very height of his eminence, said to a great
company of scholars: "My wife made me." The wife ought to be the
advising partner in every firm. She ought to be interested in all the
losses and gains of shop and store. She ought to have a right--she has
a right--to know everything. If a man goes into a business transaction
that he dare not tell his wife of, you may depend that he is on the
way either to bankruptcy or moral ruin. There may be some things which
he does not wish to trouble his wife with; but if he dare not tell
her, he is on the road to discomfiture.

On the other hand, the husband ought to be sympathetic with the wife's
occupation. It is no easy thing to keep house. Many a woman that could
have endured martyrdom as well as Margaret, the Scotch girl, has
actually been worn out by house management. There are a thousand
martyrs of the kitchen. It is very annoying, after the vexations of
the day, around the stove or the table, or in the nursery or parlor,
to have your husband say: "You know nothing about trouble; you ought
to be in the store half an hour." Sympathy of occupation!

If the husband's work cover him with the soot of the furnace or the
odors of leather or soap factories, let not the wife be easily
disgusted at the begrimed hands or unsavory aroma. Your gains are one,
your interests are one, your losses are one; lay hold of the work of
life with both hands. Four hands to fight the battles; four eyes to
watch for the danger; four shoulders on which to carry the trials. It
is a very sad thing when the painter has a wife who does not like
pictures. It is a very sad thing for a pianist when she has a husband
who does not like music.

GENTEEL BUSINESS.

It is a very sad thing when a wife is not suited unless her husband
has what is called a "genteel business." So far as I understand a
"genteel business," it is something to which a man goes at ten o'clock
in the morning, and from which he comes home at two or three o'clock
in the afternoon, and gets a large amount of money for doing nothing.
That is, I believe, a "genteel business;" and there has been many a
wife who has made the mistake of not being satisfied until the husband
has given up the tanning of the hides, or the turning of the
banisters, or the building of the walls, and put himself in circles
where he has nothing to do but smoke cigars and drink wine, and get
himself into habits that upset him, going down in the maelstrom,
taking his wife and children with him.

There are a good many trains running from earth to destruction. They
start all the hours of the day, and all the hours of the night. There
are the freight trains; they go very slowly and very heavily; and
there are the accommodation trains going on toward destruction, and
they stop very often and let a man get out when he wants to. But
genteel idleness is an express train; Satan is the stoker, and Death
is the engineer; and though one may come out in front of it and swing
the red flag of "danger," or the lantern of God's Word, it makes just
one shot into perdition, coming down the embankment with a shout and a
wail and a shriek--crash, crash! There are two classes of people sure
of destruction: First, those who have nothing to do; secondly, those
who have something to do, but are too lazy or too proud to do it.

LOVE TO PRESIDE.

I have one more word of advice to give to those who would have a happy
home, and that is, let love preside in it. When your behavior in the
domestic circle becomes a mere matter of calculation; when the caress
you give is merely the result of deliberate study of the position you
occupy, happiness lies stark dead on the hearthstone. When the
husband's position as head of the household is maintained by loudness
of voice, by strength of arm, by fire of temper, the republic of
domestic bliss has become a despotism that neither God nor man will
abide. Oh, ye who promised to love each other at the altar, how dare
you commit perjury? Let no shadow of suspicion come on your affection.
It is easier to kill that flower than it is to make it live again. The
blast from hell that puts out that light leaves you in the blackness
of darkness forever.

A HOUSE NOT A HOME.

Here are a man and wife; they agree in nothing else, but they agree
they will have a home. They will have a splendid house, and they think
that if they have a house they will have a home. Architects make the
plan, and the mechanics execute it; the house to cost one hundred
thousand dollars. It is done. The carpets are spread, lights are
hoisted, curtains are hung, cards of invitation sent out. The horses
in gold-plated harness prance at the gate; guests come in and take
their places; the flute sounds; the dancers go up and down; and with
one grand whirl the wealth and the fashion and the mirth of the great
town wheel amidst the pictured walls.

Ha! this is happiness. Float it on the smoking viands; sound it in the
music; whirl it in the dance; cast it on the snow of sculpture; sound
it up the brilliant stairway; flash it in chandeliers! Happiness,
indeed! Let us build on the centre of the parlor floor a throne to
Happiness; let all the guests, when they come in, bring their flowers
and pearls and diamonds, and throw them on this pyramid, and let it be
a throne; and then let Happiness, the Queen, mount the throne, and we
will stand around and, all chalices lifted, we will say: "Drink, O
Queen! live forever!"

LIGHTS OUT.

But the guests depart, the flutes are breathless, the last clash of
the impatient hoofs is heard in the distance, and the twain of the
household come back to see the Queen of Happiness on the throne amid
the parlor floor. But, alas! as they come back the flowers have faded,
the sweet odors have become the smell of a charnel-house, and instead
of the Queen of Happiness there sits there the gaunt form of Anguish,
with bitten lip and sunken eye, and ashes in her hair.

The romp and joyous step of the dancers who have left seems rumbling
yet, like jarring thunders that quake the floor and rattle the glasses
of the feast, rim to rim. The spilled wine on the floor turns into
blood. The wreaths of plush have become wriggling reptiles. Terrors
catch tangled in the canopy that overhangs the couch. A strong gust of
wind comes through the hall and the drawing-room and the bed-chamber,
in which all the lights go out. And from the lips of the wine-beakers
come the words: "Happiness is not in us!" And the arches respond: "It
is not in us!" And the silenced instruments of music, thrummed on by
invisible fingers, answer: "Happiness is not in us!" And the frozen
lips of Anguish break open, and, seated on the throne of wilted
flowers, she strikes her bony hands together, and groans: "It is not
in me!"

HAPPINESS IN POVERTY.

That very night a clerk with a salary of a thousand dollars a
year--only one thousand--goes to his home, set up three months ago,
just after the marriage-day. Love meets him at the door; love sits
with him at the table; love talks over the work of the day; love takes
down the Bible, and reads of Him who came our souls to save; and they
kneel, and while they are kneeling--right in that plain room, on that
plain carpet--the angels of God build a throne, not out of flowers
that perish and fade away, but out of garlands of heaven, wreath on
top of wreath, amaranth on amaranth, until the throne is done. Then
the harps of God sounded, and suddenly there appeared one who mounted
the throne, with eye so bright and brow so fair that the twain knew it
was Christian Love. And they knelt at the throne, and, putting one
hand on each head, she blessed them, and said: "Happiness is with me!"
And that throne of celestial bloom withered not with the passing
years; and the queen left not the throne till one day the married pair
felt stricken in years--felt themselves called away, and knew not
which way to go, and the queen bounded from the throne, and said:
"Follow me, and I will show you the way up to the realm of everlasting
love." And so they went up to sing songs of love, and walk on
pavements of love, and to live together in mansions of love, and to
rejoice forever in the truth that God is love.

HOTELS VERSUS HOMES.

    "And brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the
    morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to
    the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever
    thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee."--LUKE
    10:34, 35.

This is the good Samaritan paying the hotel bill of a man who had been
robbed and almost killed by bandits. The good Samaritan had found the
unfortunate on a lonely, rocky road, where, to this very day,
depredations are sometimes committed upon travelers, and had put the
injured man into the saddle, while this merciful and well-to-do man
had walked till they got to the hotel, and the wounded man was put to
bed and cared for. It must have been a very superior hotel in its
accommodations, for, though in the country, the landlord was paid at
the rate of what in our country would be four or five dollars a day, a
penny being then a day's wages, and the two pennies paid in this case
about two days' wages. Moreover, it was one of those kind-hearted
landlords who are wrapped up in the happiness of their guests, because
the good Samaritan leaves the poor wounded fellow to his entire care,
promising that when he came that way again he would pay all the bills
until the invalid got well.

THE VALUE OF HOTELS.

Hotels and boarding-houses are necessities. In very ancient times they
were unknown, because the world had comparatively few inhabitants, who
were not much given to travel, and private hospitality met all the
wants of sojourners, as when Abraham rushed out at Mamre to invite the
three men to sit down to a dinner of veal; as when the people were
positively commanded to be given to hospitality; as in many of the
places in the East these ancient customs are practiced to-day. But we
have now hotels presided over by good landlords, and boarding-houses
presided over by excellent host or hostess, in all neighborhoods,
villages and cities, and it is our congratulation that those of our
land surpass all other lands. They rightly become the permanent
residences of many people, such as those who are without families,
such as those whose business keeps them migratory, such as those who
ought not, for various reasons of health or peculiarity of
circumstances, take upon themselves the cares of housekeeping.

QUEENLY CATERERS.

Many a man falling sick in one of these boarding-houses or hotels has
been kindly watched and nursed; and by the memory of her own
sufferings and losses the lady at the head of such a house has done
all that a mother could do for a sick child, and the slumberless eye
of God sees and appreciates her sacrifices in behalf of the stranger.
Among the most marvelous cases of patience and Christian fidelity are
many of those who keep boarding-houses, enduring without resentment
the unreasonable demands of their guests for expensive food and
attentions for which they are not willing to pay an equivalent--a lot
of cranky men and women who are not worthy to tie the shoe of their
queenly caterer. The outrageous way in which boarders sometimes act to
their landlords and landladies show that these critical guests had bad
early rearing, and that in the making-up of their natures all that
constitutes the gentleman and lady were left out. Some of the most
princely men and some of the most elegant women that I know of to-day
keep hotels and boarding-houses.

But one of the great evils of this day is found in the fact that a
large population of our towns and cities are giving up and have given
up their homes and taken apartments, that they may have more freedom
from domestic duties and more time for social life, and because they
like the whirl of publicity better than the quiet and privacy of a
residence they can call their own. The lawful use of these hotels and
boarding-houses is for most people while they are in transitu: but as
a terminus they are in many cases demoralization, utter and complete.
That is the point at which families innumerable have begun to
disintegrate. There never has been a time when so many families,
healthy and abundantly able to support and direct homes of their own,
have struck tent and taken permanent abode in these public
establishments. It is an evil wide as Christendom, and by voice and
through the newspaper press I utter warning and burning protest, and
ask Almighty God to bless the word, whether in the hearing or reading.

PROMOTERS OF GOSSIP.

In these public caravanseries the demon of gossip is apt to get full
sway. All the boarders run daily the gauntlet of general
inspection--how they look when they come down in the morning and when
they get in at night, and what they do for a living, and whom they
receive as guests in their rooms, and what they wear, and what they do
not wear, and how they eat, and what they eat, and how much they eat,
and how little they eat. If a man proposes in such a place to be
isolated and reticent and alone, they will begin to guess about him:
Who is he? Where did he come from? How long is he going to stay? Has
he paid his board? How much does he pay? Perhaps he has committed some
crime and does not want it to be known; there must be something wrong
about him, or he would speak.

The whole house goes into the detective business. They must find out
about him. They must find out about him right away. If he leave his
door unlocked by accident he will find that his rooms have been
inspected, his trunk explored, his letters folded differently from the
way they were folded when he put them away. Who is he? is the
question, asked with intenser interest, until the subject has become a
monomania. The simple fact is, that he is nobody in particular, but
minds his own business. The best landlords and landladies cannot
sometimes hinder their places from becoming

A PANDEMONIUM

of whisperers, and reputations are torn to tatters, and evil
suspicions are aroused, and scandals started, and the parliament of
the family is blown to atoms by some Guy Fawkes who was not caught in
time, as was his English predecessor of gunpowdery reputation.

The reason is that while in private homes families have so much to
keep them busy, in these promiscuous and multitudinous residences
there are so many who have nothing to do, and that always makes
mischief. They gather in each other's rooms and spend hours in
consultation about others. If they had to walk a half mile before they
got to the willing ear of some listener to detraction they would get
out of breath before reaching there, and not feel in full glow of
animosity or slander, or might, because of the distance, not go at
all. But rooms 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25 are on the same corridor, and
when one carrion crow goes "Caw! Caw!" all the other crows hear it and
flock together over the same carcass. "Oh, I have heard something
rich! Sit down and let me tell you all about it." And the first guffaw
increases the gathering, and it has to be told all over again, and as
they separate each carries a spark from the altar of Gab to some other
circle, until from the coal-heaver in the cellar to the maid in the
top room of the garret all are aware of the defamation, and that
evening all who leave the house will bear it to other houses, until
autumnal fires sweeping across Illinois prairies are less raging and
swift than that flame of consuming reputation blazing across the
village or city.

Those of us who were brought up in the country know that the
old-fashioned hatching of eggs in the hay-mow required four or five
weeks of brooding, but there are new modes of hatching by machinery,
which take less time and do the work in wholesale. So, while the
private home may brood into life an occasional falsity, and take a
long time to do it, many of the boarding-houses and family hotels
afford a swifter and more multitudinous style of moral incubation, and
one old gossip will get off the nest after one hour's brooding,
clucking a flock of thirty lies after her, each one picking up its
little worm of juicy regalement. It is no advantage to hear too much
about your neighbors, for your time will be so much occupied in taking
care of their faults that you will have no time to look after your
own. And while you are pulling the chickweed out of their garden yours
will get all overgrown with horse-sorrel and mullen stalks.

A WRONG TO CHILDREN.

One of the worst damages that comes from the herding of so many people
into boarding-houses and family hotels is inflicted upon children. It
is only another way of bringing them up on the commons. While you have
your own private house you can, for the most part, control their
companionship and their whereabouts; but by twelve years of age in
these public resorts they will have picked up all the bad things that
can be furnished by the prurient minds of dozens of people. They will
overhear blasphemies, and see quarrels, and get precocious in sin,
and what the bartender does not tell them the porter or hostler or
bell-boy will.

Beside that, the children will go out into this world without the
restraining, anchoring, steadying and all-controlling memory of a
home. From that none of us who have been blessed of such memory have
escaped. It grips a man for eighty years, if he lives so long. It
pulls him back from doors into which he otherwise would enter. It
smites him with contrition in the very midst of his dissipations. As
the fish already surrounded by

THE LONG WIDE NET

swim out to sea, thinking they can go as far as they please, and with
gay toss of silvery scale they defy the sportsman on the beach, and
after a while the fishermen begin to draw in the net, hand over hand,
and hand over hand, and it is a long while before the captured fins
begin to feel the net, and then they dart this way and that, hoping to
get out, but find themselves approaching the shore, and are brought up
to the very feet of the captors, so the memory of an early home
sometimes seems to relax and let men out further and further from God
and further and further from shore--five years, ten years, twenty
years, thirty years; but some day they find an irresistible mesh
drawing them back, and they are compelled to retreat from their
prodigality and wandering; and though they make desperate effort to
escape the impression, and try to dive deeper down in sin, after a
while are brought clear back and held upon the Rock of Ages.

If it be possible, O father and mother! let your sons and daughters go
out into the world under the semi-omnipotent memory of a good, pure
home. About your two or three rooms in a boarding-house or a family
hotel you can cast no such glorious sanctity. They will think of these
public caravanseries as an early stopping place, malodorous with old
victuals, coffees perpetually steaming, and meats in everlasting stew
or broil, the air surcharged with carbonic acid, and corridors along
which drunken boarders come staggering at one o'clock in the morning,
rapping at the door till the affrighted wife lets them in. Do not be
guilty of the sacrilege or blasphemy of calling such a place a home.

WHAT A HOME IS.

A home is four walls enclosing one family with identity of interest,
and a privacy from outside inspection so complete that it is a world
in itself, no one entering except by permission--bolted and barred and
chained against all outside inquisitiveness. The phrase so often used
in law books and legal circles is mightily suggestive--every man's
house is his castle. As much so as though it had drawbridge,
portcullis, redoubt, bastion and armed turret. Even the officer of the
law may not enter to serve a writ, except the door be voluntarily
opened unto him; burglary, or the invasion of it, a crime so offensive
that the law clashes its iron jaws on any one who attempts it. Unless
it be necessary to stay for longer or shorter time in family hotel or
boarding-house--and there are thousands of instances in which it is
necessary, as I showed you at the beginning--unless in this
exceptional case, let neither wife nor husband consent to such
permanent residence.

HAZARDOUS TO MORALS.

The probability is that the wife will have to divide her husband's
time with public smoking or reading room, or with some coquettish
spider in search of unwary flies; and if you do not entirely lose your
husband it will be because he is divinely protected from the disasters
that have whelmed thousands of husbands with as good intentions as
yours. Neither should the husband, without imperative reason, consent
to such a life unless he is sure his wife can withstand the temptation
of social dissipation which sweeps across such places with the force
of the Atlantic Ocean when driven by a September equinox. Many wives
give up their homes for these public residences so that they may give
their entire time to operas, theatres, balls, receptions and levees,
and they are in a perpetual whirl, like a whip-top, spinning round and
round and round very prettily until it loses its equipoise and shoots
off into a tangent. But the difference is, in one case it is a top and
in the other a soul.

THE LARES AND PENATES.

Beside this there is an assiduous accumulation of little things around
the private home which in the aggregate make a great attraction, while
the denizen of one of these public residences is apt to say: "What is
the use? I have no place to keep them if I should take them."
Mementoes, bric-a-brac, curiosities, quaint chair or cosy lounge,
upholsteries, pictures, and a thousand things that accrete in a home
are discarded or neglected because there is no homestead in which to
arrange them. And yet they are the case in which the pearl of domestic
happiness is set. You can never become as attached to the appointments
of a boarding-house or family hotel as to those things that you can
call your own, and are associated with the different members of your
household, or with scenes of thrilling import in your domestic
history. Blessed is that home in which for a whole lifetime they have
been gathering until every figure in the carpet, and every panel of
the door, and every casement of the window has a chirography of its
own, speaking out something about father or mother, or son or
daughter, or friend that was with us a while. What a sacred place it
becomes when one can say: "In that room such a one was born; in that
bed such a one died; in that chair I sat on the night I heard such a
one had received a great public honor; by that stool my child knelt
for her last evening prayer; here I sat to greet my son as he came
back from a sea voyage; that was father's cane; that was mother's
rocking chair." What a joyful and pathetic congress of reminiscences!

HOSPITALITY CURTAILED.

The public residence of hotel and boarding-house abolishes the grace
of hospitality. Your guest does not want to come to such a table. No
one wants to run such a gauntlet of acute and merciless
hyper-criticism. Unless you have a home of your own you will not be
able to exercise the best rewarded of all the graces. For exercise of
this grace what blessing came to the Shunamite in the restoration of
her son to life because she entertained Elisha, and to the widow of
Zarephath in the perpetual oil well of the miraculous cruise because
she fed a hungry prophet, and to Rahab in the preservation of her life
at the demolition of Jericho because she entertained the spies and to
Laban in the formation of an interesting family relation because of
his entertainment of Jacob, and to Lot in his rescue from the
destroyed city because of his entertainment of the angels, and to Mary
and Martha and Zaccheus in spiritual blessing because they entertained
Christ, and to Publius in the island of Melita in the healing of his
father because of the entertainment of Paul drenched from the
shipwreck, and of innumerable houses throughout Christendom upon which
have come blessings from generation to generation because their doors
swung easily open in the enlarging, ennobling, irradiating, and divine
grace of hospitality. I do not know what your experience has been, but
I have had men and women visiting at my house who left a benediction
on every room--in the blessing they asked at the table, in the prayer
they offered at the family altar, in the good advice they gave the
children, in the gospelization that looked out from every lineament of
their countenances; and their departure was the sword of bereavement.

The Queen of Norway, Sweden and Denmark had a royal

CUP OF TEN CURVES,

or lips, each one having on it the name of the distinguished person
who had drank from it. And that cup which we offer to others in
Christian hospitality, though it be of the plainest earthenware, is a
royal cup, and God can read on all its sides the names of those who
have taken from it refreshment. But all this is impossible unless you
have a home of your own. It is the delusion as to what is necessary
for a home that hinders so many from establishing one. Thirty rooms
are not necessary, nor twenty, nor fifteen, nor ten, nor five, nor
three. In the right way plant a table, and couch, and knife and fork,
and a cup, and a chair, and you can raise a young paradise. Just start
a home, on however small a scale, and it will grow. When King Cyrus
was invited to dine with an humble friend the king made the one
condition of his coming that the only dish be one loaf of bread, and
the most imperial satisfactions have sometimes banqueted on the
plainest fare.

Do not be caught in the delusion of many thousands in postponing a
home until they can have an expensive one. That idea is the devil's
trap that catches men and women innumerable who will never have any
home at all. Capitalists of America, build plain homes for the people.
Let this tenement-house system, in which hundreds of thousands of the
people of our cities are wallowing in the mire, be broken up by small
homes, where people can have their own firesides and their own altar.
In this great continent there is room enough for every man and woman
to have a home. Morals and civilization and religion demand it.

SMALL HOMES NEEDED

We want done all over this land what George Peabody and Lady
Burdett-Coutts did in England, and some of the large manufacturers of
this country have done for the villages and cities, in building small
houses at cheap rents, so that the middle classes can have separate
homes. They are the only class not provided for. The rich have their
palaces, and the poor have their poorhouses, and criminals have their
jails; but what about the honest middle classes, who are able and
willing to work, and yet have small income? Let the capitalists,
inspired of God and pure patriotism, rise and build whole streets of
small residences. The laborer may have, at the close of the day, to
walk or ride further than is desirable to reach it, but when he gets
to his destination in the eventide he will find something worthy of
being called by that glorious and impassioned and heaven-descended
word, "home."

SOMETHING TO SAVE FOR.

Young married man, as soon as you can buy such a place, even if you
have to put on it a mortgage reaching from base to cap-stone. The
much abused mortgage, which is ruin to a reckless man, to one prudent
and provident is the beginning of a competency and a fortune, for the
reason he will not be satisfied until he has paid it off, and all the
household are put on stringent economies until then. Deny yourself all
superfluities and all luxuries until you can say: "Everything in this
house is mine, thank God!--every timber, every brick, every foot of
plumbing, every door-sill." Do not have your children born in a
boarding-house, and do not yourself be buried from one. Have a place
where your children can shout and sing and romp without being
overhauled for the racket. Have a kitchen where you can do something
toward the reformation of evil cookery and the lessening of this
nation of dyspeptics. As Napoleon lost one of his great battles by an
attack of indigestion, so many men have such

A DAILY WRESTLE

with the food swallowed that they have no strength left for the battle
of life; and though your wife may know how to play on all musical
instruments, and rival a prima donna, she is not well educated unless
she can boil an Irish potato and broil a mutton-chop, since the diet
sometimes decides the fate of families and nations.

Have a sitting-room with at least one easy chair, even though you have
to take turns at sitting in it, and books out of the public library or
of your own purchase for the making of your family intelligent, and
checkerboards and guessing matches, with an occasional blind man's
buff, which is of all games my favorite. Rouse up your home with all
styles of innocent mirth, and gather up in your children's nature a
reservoir of exuberance that will pour down refreshing streams when
life gets parched, and the dark days come, and the lights go out, and
the laughter is smothered into a sob.

CHRIST IN THE HOME.

First, last and all the time, have Christ in your home. Julius Cæsar
calmed the fears of an affrighted boatman who was rowing him in a
stream by stating: "So long as Cæsar is with you in the same boat no
harm can happen." And whatever storm of adversity or bereavement or
poverty may strike your home all is well as long as you have Christ
the King on board. Make your home so far-reaching in its influence
that down to the last moment of your children's life you may hold them
with a heavenly charm. At seventy-six years of age the Demosthenes of
the American Senate lay dying at Washington--I mean Henry Clay, of
Kentucky. His pastor sat at his bedside and the "old man eloquent,"
after a long and exciting public life, trans-Atlantic and
cis-Atlantic, was back again in the scenes of his boyhood, and he kept
saying in his dream over and over again: "My mother! mother! mother!"
May the parental influence we exert be not only potential but holy,
and so the home on earth be the vestibule of our home in heaven, in
which place may we all meet--father, mother, son, daughter, brother,
sister, grandfather and grandmother, and grandchild, and the entire
group of precious ones, of whom we must say in the words of
transporting Charles Wesley:

    "One family we dwell in Him,
      One church above, beneath;
    Though now divided by the stream--
      The narrow stream of death;
    One army of the living God,
      To His command we bow;
    Part of the host have crossed the flood,
      And part are crossing now."

EASY DIVORCE.

    "What therefore God hath joined together let not man put
    asunder."--MATTHEW 19:6

That there are hundreds and thousands of infelicitous homes in America
no one will doubt. If there were only one skeleton in the closet, that
might be locked up and abandoned; but in many a home there is a
skeleton in the hallway and a skeleton in all the apartments.

"UNHAPPILY MARRIED"

are two words descriptive of many a homestead. It needs no orthodox
minister to prove to a badly mated pair that there is a hell; they are
there now. Sometimes a grand and gracious woman will be thus
incarcerated, and her life will be a crucifixion, as was the case with
Mrs. Sigourney, the great poetess and the great soul. Sometimes a
consecrated man will be united to a fury, as was John Wesley, or
united to a vixen, as was John Milton. Sometimes, and generally, both
parties are to blame, and Thomas Carlyle is an intolerable scold, and
his wife smokes and swears, and Froude, the historian, is mean enough,
because of the shekels he gets for the manuscript,[3] to pull aside
the curtain from the lifelong squabble at Craigenputtock and Five,
Cheyne Row. Some say that for

THE ALLEVIATION

of all these domestic disorders of which we hear, easy divorce is a
good prescription. God sometimes authorizes divorce as certainly as He
authorizes marriage. I have just as much regard for one lawfully
divorced as I have for one lawfully married. But you know and I know
that wholesale divorce is one of

OUR NATIONAL SCOURGES.

I am not surprised at this when I think of the influences which have
been abroad militating against the marriage relation.

For many years the platforms of the country rang with talk about a
free-love millennium. There were meetings of this kind held in the
Academy of Music, Brooklyn, Cooper Institute, New York, Tremont
Temple, Boston, and all over the land. Some of the women who were most
prominent in that movement have since been distinguished for great
promiscuosity of affection. Popular themes for such occasions were the
tyranny of man, the oppression of the marriage relation, women's
rights, and the affinities. Prominent speakers were women with short
curls and short dress and very long tongue, everlastingly at war with
God because they were created women; while on the platform sat meek
men with soft accent and cowed demeanor, apologetic for masculinity,
and holding the parasols while the termagant orators went on preaching
the gospel of free love.

That campaign of about twenty years set more devils in the marriage
relation than will be exorcised in the next fifty. Men and women went
home from such meetings so permanently confused as to who were their
wives and husbands that they never got out of the perplexity, and the
criminal and the civil courts tried to disentangle the Iliad of woes,
and this one got alimony, and that one got a limited divorce, and this
mother kept the children on condition that the father could sometimes
come and look at them, and these went into poorhouses, and those went
into an insane asylum, and those went into dissolute public life, and
all went to destruction. The mightiest war ever made against the
marriage institution was that free-love campaign, sometimes under one
name and sometimes under another.

Another influence that has warred upon the marriage relation has been

POLYGAMY IN UTAH.

That is a stereotyped caricature of the marriage relation, and has
poisoned the whole land. You might as well think that you can have an
arm in a state of mortification and yet the whole body not be
sickened, as to have those territories polygamized and yet the body of
the nation not feel the putrefaction. Hear it, good men and women of
America, that so long ago as 1862 a law was passed by Congress
forbidding polygamy in the territories and in all the places where
they had jurisdiction. Twenty-two years have passed along and five
administrations, armed with all the power of government, and having an
army at their disposal, and yet the first brick has not been knocked
from that fortress of libertinism.

Every new President in his inaugural has tickled that monster with the
straw of condemnation, and every Congress has stultified itself in
proposing some plan that would not work. Polygamy stands in Utah and
in other of the territories to-day more entrenched, and more brazen,
and more puissant, and more braggart, and more infernal, than at any
time in its history. James Buchanan, a much-abused man of his day, did
more for the extirpation of this villainy than all the subsequent
administrations have dared to do. Mr. Buchanan sent out an army, and
although it was halted in its work, still he accomplished more than
the subsequent administrations, which have done nothing but talk,
talk, talk.

I want the people of America to know that for twenty-two years we have
had a positive law prohibiting polygamy in the territories. People are
crying out for some new law, as though we had not an old law already
with which that infamy could be swept into the perdition from which it
smoked up. Polygamy in Utah has warred against the marriage relation
throughout the land. It is impossible to have such an awful sewer of
iniquity sending up its miasma, which is wafted by the winds north,
south, east, and west, without the whole land being affected by it.

Another influence that has warred against the marriage relation in
this country has been a

PUSTULOUS LITERATURE,

with its millions of sheets every week choked with stories of domestic
wrongs, and infidelities, and massacres, and outrages, until it is a
wonder to me that there are any decencies or any common-sense left on
the subject of marriage. One-half of the news-stands of Brooklyn and
New York and all our cities reeking with the filth.

"Now," say some, "we admit all these evils, and the only way to clear
them out or correct them is by easy divorce." Well, before we yield to
that cry, let us find out

HOW EASY IT IS NOW.

I have looked over the laws of all the States, and I find that while
in some States it is easier than in others, in every State it is easy.
The State of Illinois through its legislature recites a long list of
proper causes for divorce, and then closes up by giving to the courts
the right to make a decree of divorce in any case where they deem it
expedient. After that you are not surprised at the announcement that
in one county of the State of Illinois, in one year, there were 833
divorces. If you want to know how easy it is you have only to look
over the records of the States. In Massachusetts 600 divorces in one
year; in Maine 478 in one year; in Connecticut 401 divorces in one
year; in the city of San Francisco 333 divorces in 1880; in New
England in one year 2113 divorces, and in twenty years in New England
20,000. Is that not easy enough?

If the same ratio continue, the ratio of multiplied divorce and
multiplied causes of divorce, we are not far from the time when our
courts will have to set apart whole days for application, and all you
will have to prove against a man will be that he left his slippers in
the middle of the floor, and all you will have to prove against a
woman will be that her husband's overcoat was buttonless. Causes of
divorce doubled in a few years, doubled in France, doubled in England,
and doubled in the United States. To show how very easy it is I have
to tell you that in Western Reserve, Ohio, the proportion of divorces
to marriages celebrated is one to eleven; in Rhode Island is one to
thirteen; in Vermont is one to fourteen. Is not that easy enough?

I want you to notice that frequency of divorce always goes along with
the dissoluteness of society. Rome for five hundred years had not one
case of divorce. Those were her days of glory and virtue. Then the
reign of vice began, and divorce became epidemic. If you want to know
how rapidly the Empire went down, ask Gibbon. Do you know how the
Reign of Terror was introduced in France? By 20,000 cases of divorce
in one year in Paris.

WHAT WE WANT

in this country and in all lands is that divorce be made more and more
and more difficult. Then people before they enter that relation will
be persuaded that there will probably be no escape from it except
through the door of the sepulchre. Then they will pause on the verge
of that relation until they are fully satisfied that it is best, and
that it is right, and that it is happiest. Then we shall have no more
marriage in fun. Then men and women will not enter the relation with
the idea it is only a trial trip, and if they do not like it they can
get out at the first landing. Then this whole question will be taken
out of the frivolous into the tremendous, and there will be no more
joking about the blossoms in a bride's hair than about the cypress on
a coffin.

What we want is that the Congress of the United States at this present
session move for the changing the national Constitution so that a law
can be passed which shall be uniform all over the country, and what
shall be right in one State shall be right in all the States, and what
is wrong in one State will be wrong in all the States.

HOW IS IT NOW?

If a party in the marriage relation gets dissatisfied it is only
necessary to move to another State to achieve liberation from the
domestic tie, and divorce is effected so easy that the first one party
knows of it is by seeing it in the newspaper that Rev. Dr. Somebody,
on April 14, 1884, introduced into a new marriage relation a member of
the household who went off on a pleasure excursion to Newport or a
business excursion to Chicago. Married at the bride's house. No cards.
There are States of the Union which practically put a premium upon the
disintegration of the marriage relation, while there are other States,
like our own New York State, that has the pre-eminent idiocy of making
marriage lawful at twelve and fourteen years of age.

The Congress of the United States needs to move at the present session
for a change of the National Constitution, and then to appoint a
committee--not made up of single gentlemen, but of men of families and
their families in Washington--who shall prepare a good, honest,
righteous, comprehensive,

UNIFORM LAW

that will control everything from Sandy Hook to Golden Horn. That will
put an end to brokerages in marriage. That will send divorce lawyers
into a decent business. That will set people agitated for many years
on the question of how shall they get away from each other to planning
how they can adjust themselves to the more or less unfavorable
circumstances.

More difficult divorce will put an estoppal to a great extent upon
marriage as a financial speculation. There are men who go into the
relation just as they go into Wall Street to purchase shares. The
female to be invited into the partnership of wedlock is utterly
unattractive, and in disposition a suppressed Vesuvius. Everybody
knows it, but this masculine candidate for matrimonial orders, through
the commercial agency or through the county records, finds out how
much estate is to be inherited, and he calculates it. He thinks out
how long it will be before the old man will die, and whether he can
stand the refractory temper until he does die, and then he enters the
relation; for he says, "If I cannot stand it, then through the divorce
law I'll back out." That process is going on all the time, and men
enter the relation without any moral principle, without any affection,
and it is as much a matter of stock speculation as anything that
transpired yesterday in Union Pacific, Wabash, and Delaware and
Lackawanna.

Now, suppose a man understood, as he ought to understand, that if he
goes into that relation there is no possibility of his getting out,
or no probability, he would be more slow to put his neck in the yoke.
He should say to himself, "Rather than a Caribbean whirlwind with a
whole fleet of shipping in its arms, give me a zephyr off fields of
sunshine and gardens of peace."

Rigorous divorce law will also hinder women from

THE FATAL MISTAKE

of marrying men to reform them. If a young man by twenty-five years of
age or thirty years of age has the habit of strong drink fixed on him,
he is as certainly bound for a drunkard's grave as that a train
starting out from Grand Central Depot at 8 o'clock to-morrow morning
is bound for Albany. The train may not reach Albany, for it may be
thrown from the track. The young man may not reach a drunkard's grave,
for something may throw him off the iron track of evil habit; but the
probability is that the train that starts to-morrow morning at 8
o'clock for Albany will get there and the probability is that the
young man who has the habit of strong drink fixed on him before
twenty-five or thirty years of age will arrive at a drunkard's grave.
She knows he drinks, although he tries to hide it by chewing cloves.
Everybody knows he drinks. Parents warn, neighbors and friends warn.
She will marry him, she will reform him.

If she is unsuccessful in the experiment, why then the divorce law
will emancipate her, because habitual drunkenness is a cause for
divorce in Indiana, Kentucky, Florida, Connecticut, and nearly all the
States. So the poor thing goes to the altar of sacrifice. If you will
show me the poverty-struck streets in any city I will show you the
homes of the women who married men to reform them. In one case out of
ten thousand it may be a successful experiment. I never saw the
successful experiment. But have a rigorous divorce law, and that woman
will say, "If I am affianced to that man it is for life; and if now in
the ardor of his young love, and I am the prize to be won, he will not
give up his cups, when he has won the prize, surely he will not give
up his cups." And so that woman will say to the man, "No, sir, you are
already married to the club, and you are married to that evil habit,
and so you are married twice, and you are a bigamist. Go!"

A rigorous divorce law will also do much to hinder hasty and

INCONSIDERATE MARRIAGES.

Under the impression that one can be easily released people enter the
relation without inquiry and without reflection. Romance and impulse
rule the day. Perhaps the only ground for the marriage compact is that
she likes his looks and he admires the graceful way she passes around
the ice cream at the picnic! It is all they know about each other. It
is all the preparation for life. A man not able to pay his own board
bill, with not a dollar in his possession, will stand at the altar and
take the loving hand, and say, "With all my worldly goods I thee
endow!" A woman that could not make a loaf of bread to save her life
will swear to cherish and obey. A Christian will marry an atheist, and
that always makes conjoined wretchedness; for if a man does not
believe there is a God, he is neither to be trusted with a dollar nor
with your lifelong happiness.

Having read much about love in a cottage people brought up in ease
will go and starve in a hovel. Runaway matches and elopements, 999 out
of 1000 of which mean death and hell, multiplying on all hands. You
see them in every day's newspapers. Our ministers in this region have
no defence such as they have in other cities where the banns must be
previously published and an officer of the law must give a certificate
that all is right; so clergymen are left defenceless, and unite those
who ought never to be united. Perhaps they are too young or perhaps
they are standing already in some domestic compact.

By the wreck of ten thousand homes, by the holocaust of ten thousand
sacrificed men and women, by the hearthstone of the family which is
the corner-stone of the State, and in the name of that God who hath
set up the family institution and who hath made the breaking of the
marital oath the most appalling of all perjuries, I implore the
Congress of the United States to make some righteous, uniform law for
all the States and from ocean to ocean, on this subject of marriage
and divorce.

ADVICE TO LOVERS.

Let me say to the hundreds of young people in this house this morning,
before you give your heart and hand in holy alliance, use all caution;
inquire outside as to habits, explore the disposition, scrutinize the
taste, question the ancestry, and find out the ambitions. Do not take
the heroes and the heroines of cheap novels for a model. Do not put
your lifetime happiness in the keeping of a man who has a reputation
for being a little loose in morals or in the keeping of a woman who
dresses fast. Remember that while good looks are a kindly gift of God
wrinkles or accident may despoil them. Remember that Byron was no more
celebrated for his beauty than for his depravity. Remember that
Absalom's hair was not more splendid than his habits were despicable.
Hear it, hear it! The only foundation for happy marriage that ever has
been or ever will be, is good character.

ASK FATHER AND MOTHER'S COUNSEL

in this most important step of your life. They are good advisers. They
are the best friends you ever had. They made more sacrifices for you
than any one else ever did, and they will do more to-day for your
happiness than any other people. Ask them, and, above all,

ASK GOD.

I used to smile at John Brown of Haddington because when he was about
to offer his hand and heart in marriage to one who became his lifelong
companion, he opened the conversation by saying, "Let us pray." But I
have seen so many shipwrecks on the sea of matrimony, I have made up
my mind that John Brown of Haddington was right. A union formed in
prayer will be a happy union, though sickness pale the cheek, and
poverty empty the bread tray, and death open the small graves, and all
the path of life be strewn with thorns, from the marriage altar with
its wedding march and orange blossoms clear on down to the last
farewell at that gate where Isaac and Rebecca, Abraham and Sarah, Adam
and Eve, parted.

And let me say to you who are in this relation, if you make one man or
woman happy you have not lived in vain. Christ says that what He is to
the Church you ought to be to each other; and if sometimes through
difference of opinion or difference of disposition you make up your
mind that your marriage was a mistake, patiently bear and forbear,
remembering that life at the longest is short and that for those who
have been badly mated in this world, death will give quick and
immediate bill of divorcement written in letters of green grass on
quiet graves. And perhaps, my brother, my sister, perhaps you may
appreciate each other better in heaven than you have appreciated each
other on earth.

In the "Farm Ballads" our American poet puts into the lips of a
repentant husband after a life of married perturbation these
suggestive words:

    "And when she dies I wish that she would be laid by me,
    And lying together in silence, perhaps we will agree.
    And if ever we meet in heaven, I would not think it queer
    If we love each other better because we quarrelled here."

And let me say to those of you who are in happy married union,

AVOID FIRST QUARRELS;

have no unexplained correspondence with former admirers; cultivate no
suspicions; in a moment of bad temper do not rush out and tell the
neighbors; do not let any of those gad-abouts of society unload in
your house their baggage of gab and tittle-tattle; do not stand on
your rights; learn how to apologize; do not be so proud, or so
stubborn, or so devilish that you will not make up. Remember that the
worst domestic misfortunes and most scandalous divorce cases started
from little infelicities. The whole piled-up train of ten rail cars
telescoped and smashed at the foot of an embankment one hundred feet
down came to that catastrophe by getting two or three inches off the
track. Some of the greatest domestic misfortunes and the widest
resounding divorce cases have started from little misunderstandings
that were allowed to go on and go on until home, and respectability,
and religion, and immortal soul went down in the crash, crash!

And, fellow-citizens as well as fellow-Christians, let us have a
divine rage against anything that wars on the marriage state. Blessed
institution! Instead of two arms to fight the battle of life, four.
Instead of two eyes to scrutinize the path of life, four. Instead of
two shoulders to lift the burden of life, four. Twice the energy,
twice the courage, twice the holy ambition, twice the probability of
worldly success, twice the prospects of heaven. Into that matrimonial
bower God fetches two souls. Outside the bower room for all
contentions, and all bickerings, and all controversies, but inside
that bower there is room for only one guest--the angel of love. Let
that angel stand at the floral doorway of this Edenic bower with drawn
sword to hew down the worst foe of that bower--easy divorce. And for
every Paradise lost may there be a Paradise regained. And after we
quit our home here may we have a brighter home in heaven at the
windows of which this moment are familiar faces watching for our
arrival and wondering why so long we tarry.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Dr. Talmage, in common with many critics, here censures Mr. James
Anthony Froude for making the disclosures. It is, however, due to that
eminent historian to say that he gives a different explanation of his
motives than that suggested by Dr. Talmage of a regard for "shekels." He
states that as Mr. Carlyle had selected him as his biographer and given
the materials for the work into his hands, he conceived that his duty as
a conscientious man was to tell the whole truth. He did it also as a
matter of policy as well as of principle. Had he kept back any part, it
would have been told with less accuracy by others who knew some of the
facts but not all of them.--ED.

MATERNITY.

    "Moreover his mother made him a little coat, and brought it to
    him from year to year, when she came up with her husband to
    offer the yearly sacrifice."--I SAMUEL 2:19.

The stories of Deborah and Abigail are very apt to discourage a
woman's soul. She says within herself: "It is impossible that I ever
can achieve any such grandeur of character, and I don't mean to try;"
as though a child should refuse to play the eight notes because he
cannot execute a "William Tell." This Hannah of the text differs from
the persons I just now named. She was an ordinary woman, with ordinary
intellectual capacity, placed in the ordinary circumstances, and yet,
by extraordinary piety, standing out before all the ages to come.

THE MODEL CHRISTIAN MOTHER.

Hannah was the wife of Elkanah, who was a person very much like
herself--unromantic and plain, never having fought a battle or been
the subject of a marvelous escape. Neither of them would have been
called a genius. Just what you and I might be, that was Elkanah and
Hannah. The brightest time in all the history of that family was the
birth of Samuel. Although no star ran along the heavens pointing down
to his birthplace, I think the angels of God stooped at the coming of
so wonderful a prophet.

As Samuel had been given in answer to prayer, Elkanah and all his
family, save Hannah, started up to Shiloh to offer sacrifices of
thanksgiving. The cradle where the child slept was altar enough for
Hannah's grateful heart, but when the boy was old enough she took him
to Shiloh and took three bullocks, and an ephah of flour, and a bottle
of wine, and made offering of sacrifice unto the Lord, and there,
according to a previous vow, she left him; for there he was to stay
all the days of his life, and minister in the tabernacle.

Years rolled on, and every year Hannah made with her own hands a
garment for Samuel, and took it over to him. The lad would have got
along well without that garment, for I suppose he was well clad by the
ministry of the temple; but Hannah could not be contented unless she
was all the time doing something for her darling boy. "Moreover his
mother made him a little coat, and brought it to him from year to
year, when she came up with her husband to offer the yearly
sacrifice."

I. Hannah stands before you, then, in the first place, as

AN INDUSTRIOUS MOTHER.

There was no need for her to work. Elkanah, her husband, was far from
poor. He belonged to a distinguished family; for the Bible tells us
that he was the son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, the
son of Zuph. "Who were they?" you say. I do not know; but they were
distinguished people, no doubt, or their names would not have been
mentioned.

Hannah might have seated herself with her family, and, with folded
arms and dishevelled hair, read novels from year to year, if there had
been any to read; but when I see her making that garment, and taking
it over to Samuel, I know she is industrious from principle as well as
from pleasure. God would not have a mother become a drudge or a slave;
He would have her employ all the helps possible in this day in the
rearing of her children. But Hannah ought never to be ashamed to be
found making a coat for Samuel.

Most mothers need no counsel in this direction. The wrinkles on their
brow, the pallor on their cheek, the thimble-mark on their finger,
attest that they are faithful in their maternal duties. The bloom, and
the brightness, and the vivacity of girlhood have given place for the
grander dignity, and usefulness, and industry of motherhood. But there
is

A HEATHENISH IDEA

getting abroad in some of the families of Americans; there are mothers
who banish themselves from the home circle. For three fourths of their
maternal duties they prove themselves incompetent. They are ignorant
of what their children wear, and what their children eat, and what
their children read. They intrust to irresponsible persons these young
immortals, and allow them to be under influences which may cripple
their bodies, or taint their purity, or spoil their manners, or
destroy their souls.

From the awkward cut of Samuel's coat you know his mother Hannah did not
make it. Out from under flaming chandeliers, and off from imported
carpets, and down the granite stairs, there has come a great crowd of
children in this day, untrained, saucy, incompetent for all practical
duties of life, ready to be caught in the first whirl of crime and
sensuality. Indolent and unfaithful mothers will make indolent and
unfaithful children. You cannot expect neatness and order in any house
where the daughters see nothing but slatternness and upsidedownativeness
in their parents. Let Hannah be idle, and most certainly Samuel will
grow up idle.

Who are the industrious men in all our occupations and professions?
Who are they managing the merchandise of the world, building the
walls, tinning the roofs, weaving the carpets, making the laws,
governing the nations, making the earth to quake, and heave, and roar,
and rattle with the tread of gigantic enterprises? Who are they? For
the most part they descended from industrious mothers, who, in the old
homestead, used to spin their own yarn, and weave their own carpets,
and plait their own door-mats, and flag their own chairs, and do their
own work. The stalwart men and the

INFLUENTIAL WOMEN

of this day, ninety-nine out of a hundred of them, came from such an
illustrious ancestry of hard knuckles and homespun.

And who are these people in society, light as froth, blown every
whither of temptation and fashion--the peddlers of filthy stories, the
dancing-jacks of political parties, the scum of society, the
tavern-lounging, the store-infesting, the men of low wink, and filthy
chuckle, and brass breast-pins, and rotten associations? For the most
part, they came from mothers idle and disgusting--the scandal-mongers
of society, going from house to house, attending to everybody's
business but their own, believing in witches, and ghosts, and
horseshoes to keep the devil out of the churn, and by a godless life
setting their children on the very verge of hell. The mothers of
Samuel Johnson, and of Alfred the Great, and Isaac Newton, and of St.
Augustine, and of Richard Cecil, and of President Edwards, for the
most part were industrious, hard-working mothers.

Now, while I congratulate all Christian mothers upon the wealth and
the modern science which may afford them all kinds of help, let me say
that every mother ought to be observant of her children's walk, her
children's behavior, her children's food, her children's looks, her
children's companionships. However much help Hannah may have, I think
she ought every year, at least, make one garment for Samuel. The Lord
have mercy on the man who is so unfortunate as to have had a lazy
mother!

II. Again, Hannah stands before you as

AN INTELLIGENT MOTHER.

From the way in which she talked in this chapter, and from the way she
managed this boy, you know she was intelligent. There are no persons
in the community who need to be so wise and well-informed as mothers.

Oh, this work of culture in children for this world and the next! This
child is timid, and it must be roused up and pushed out into
activity. This child is forward, and he must be held back and tamed
down into modesty and politeness. Rewards for one, punishments for
another. That which will make George will ruin John. The rod is
necessary in one case, while a frown of displeasure is more than
enough in another. Whipping and a dark closet do not exhaust all the
rounds of domestic discipline. There have been children who have grown
up and gone to glory without ever having had their ears boxed.

Oh, how much care and intelligence are necessary in the rearing of
children! But in this day, when there are so many books on the
subject, no parent is excusable in being ignorant of the best mode of

BRINGING UP A CHILD.

If parents knew more of dietetics there would not be so many dyspeptic
stomachs and weak nerves and inactive livers among children. If
parents knew more of physiology there would not be so many curved
spines and cramped chests and inflamed throats and diseased lungs as
there are among children. If parents knew more of art, and were in
sympathy with all that is beautiful, there would not be so many
children coming out in the world with boorish proclivities. If parents
knew more of Christ, and practised more of His religion, there would
not be so many little feet already starting on the wrong road, and all
around us voices of riot and blasphemy would not come up with such
ecstasy of infernal triumph.

The eaglets in the eyrie have no advantages over the eaglets of a
thousand years ago; the kids have no superior way of climbing up the
rocks than the old goats taught hundreds of years ago; the whelps know
no more now than did the whelps of ages ago--they are taught no more
by the lions of the desert; but it is a shame that in this day, when
there are so many opportunities of improving ourselves in the best
manner of cultivating children, that so often there is no more
advancement in this respect than there has been among the kids and the
eaglets and the whelps.

III. Again, Hannah stands before you as

A CHRISTIAN MOTHER.

From her prayers and from the way she consecrated her boy to God, I
know that she was good. A mother may have the finest culture, the most
brilliant surroundings; but she is not fit for her duties unless she
be a Christian mother. There may be well-read libraries in the house,
and exquisite music in the parlor, and the canvases of the best
artists adorning the walls, and the wardrobe be crowded with tasteful
apparel, and the children be wonderful for their attainments, and
make the house ring with laughter and innocent mirth, but there is
something woeful-looking in that house if it be not also the residence
of a Christian mother.

I bless God that there are not many prayerless mothers--not many of
them. The weight of the responsibility is so great that they feel the
need of a divine hand to help, and a divine voice to comfort and a
divine heart to sympathize. Thousands of mothers have been led into
the kingdom of God by the hands of their little children. There were
hundreds of mothers who would not have been Christians had it not been
for the prattle of their little ones. Standing some day in the
nursery, they bethought themselves: "This child God has given me to
raise for eternity. What is my influence upon it? Not being a
Christian myself, how can I ever expect him to become a Christian?
Lord, help me!" Are there

ANXIOUS MOTHERS

who know nothing of the infinite help of religion? Then I commend to
them Hannah, the pious mother of Samuel. Do not think it is absolutely
impossible that your children may come up iniquitous. Out of just such
fair brows and bright eyes, and soft hands, and innocent hearts, crime
gets its victims--extirpating purity from the heart, and rubbing out
the smoothness from the brow, and quenching the lustre of the eye, and
shriveling up and poisoning and putrefying and scathing and scalding
and blasting and burning with shame and woe.

Every child is a bundle of tremendous possibilities; and whether that
child shall come forth to life, its heart attuned to the eternal
harmonies, and, after a life of usefulness on earth, go to a life of
joy in heaven; or whether across it shall jar eternal discords, and,
after a life of wrong-doing on earth, it shall go to a home of
impenetrable darkness and an abyss of immeasurable plunge, is being
decided by nursery song and Sabbath lesson and evening prayer and walk
and ride and look and frown and smile. Oh, how many children in glory,
crowding all the battlements, and lifting a million-voiced hosanna,
brought to God through Christian parentage!

One hundred and twenty clergymen were together, and they were telling
their experience and their ancestry; and of the one hundred and twenty
clergymen, how many of them, do you suppose, assigned as the means of
their conversion the influence of a Christian mother? One hundred out
of the one hundred and twenty! Philip Doddridge was brought to God by
the Scripture lesson on the Dutch tiles of a chimney fireplace. The
mother thinks she is only rocking a child, but at the same time she
may be rocking the fate of nations, rocking the glories of heaven. The
same maternal power that may lift the child up may press a child down.

A daughter came to

A WORLDLY MOTHER

and said she was anxious about her sins, and she had been praying all
night. The mother said: "Oh, stop praying! I don't believe in praying.
Get over all these religious notions and I'll give you a dress that
will cost $500, and you may wear it next week to that party." The
daughter took the dress, and she moved in the gay circle the gayest of
all the gay, that night; and sure enough all the religious impressions
were gone and she stopped praying. A few months after she came to die,
and in her closing moments said: "Mother, I wish you would bring me
that dress that cost $500." The mother thought it a very strange
request, but she brought it to please the dying child. "Now," said the
daughter, "mother, hang that dress on the foot of my bed," and the
dress was hung there, on the foot of the bed. Then the dying girl got
up on one elbow and looked at her mother, and then pointed to the
dress, and said: "Mother, that dress is the price of my soul." Oh,
what a momentous thing it is to be a mother!

IV. Again, and lastly, Hannah stands before you

THE REWARDED MOTHER.

For all the coats she made for Samuel, for all the prayers she offered
for him, for the discipline exerted over him she got abundant
compensation in the piety and the usefulness and the popularity of her
son Samuel; and that is true in all ages. Every mother gets full pay
for all the prayers and tears in behalf of her children. That man
useful in commercial life; that man prominent in a profession; that
master mechanic--why, every step he takes in life has an echo of
gladness in the old heart that long ago taught him to be a Christian,
and heroic and earnest.

The story of what you have done, or what you have written, of the
influence you exerted, has gone back to the old homestead--for there
is some one always ready to carry good tidings--and that story makes
the needle in the old mother's tremulous hand fly quicker, and the
flail in the father's hand come down on the barn floor with a vigorous
thump. Parents love to hear good news from their children. Do you send
them good news always?

Look out for the young man who speaks of his father as "the governor,"
the "squire," or the "old chap." Look out for the young woman who
calls her mother her "maternal ancestor," or the "old woman." "The eye
that mocketh at his father, and refuseth to obey his mother, the
ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat
it."

God grant that all these parents may have the great satisfaction of
seeing their children grow up Christians. But, oh! the pang of that
mother, who, after a life of street gadding and gossip retailing,
hanging on the children the fripperies and follies of this world, sees
those children tossed out on the sea of life like foam on the wave, or
nonentities in a world where only bravery and stalwart character can
stand the shock! But blessed be the mother who looks upon her children
as sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty.

Oh! the satisfaction of Hannah in seeing Samuel serving at the altar;
of Mother Eunice in seeing her Timothy learned in the Scriptures. That
is the mother's recompense, to see children coming up useful in the
world, reclaiming the lost, healing the sick, pitying the ignorant,
earnest and useful in every sphere. That throws a new light back on
the old family Bible whenever she reads it, and that will be ointment
to soothe the aching limbs of decrepitude, and light up the closing
hours of life's day with the glories of an autumnal sunset!

There she sits,

THE OLD CHRISTIAN MOTHER,

ripe for heaven. Her eyesight is almost gone, but the splendors of the
celestial city kindle up her vision. The gray light of heaven's morn
has struck through the gray locks which are folded back over the
wrinkled temples. She stoops very much now under the burden of care
she used to carry for her children. She sits at home, too old to find
her way to the house of God; but while she sits there, all the past
comes back, and the children that forty years ago tripped around her
armchair with their griefs and joys and sorrows--those children are
gone now. Some caught up into a better realm, where they shall never
die, and others out in the broad world, testing the excellency of a
Christian mother's discipline. Her last days are full of peace; and
calmer and sweeter will her spirit become, until the gates of life
shall lift and let in the worn-out pilgrim into eternal springtide and
youth, where the limbs never ache, and the eyes never grow dim, and
the staff of the exhausted and decrepit pilgrim shall become the palm
of the immortal athlete!

THE CHILDREN'S PATRIMONY.

    "Whose son art thou, thou young man?"--SAMUEL 17:58.

Never was there a more unequal fight than that between David and
Goliath. David five feet high; Goliath ten. David a shepherd boy,
brought up amid rural scenes; Goliath a warrior by profession. Goliath
a mountain of braggadocia; David a marvel of humility. Goliath armed
with an iron spear; David armed with a sling with smooth stones from
the brook. But you are not to despise these latter weapons. There was
a regiment of slingers in the Assyrian army and a regiment of slingers
in the Egyptian army, and they made terrible execution, and they could
cast a stone with as much precision and force as now can be hurled
shot or shell. The Greeks in their army had slingers who would throw
leaden plummets inscribed with the irritating words: "Take this!" So
it was a mighty weapon David employed in that famous combat.

A Jewish rabbi says that the probability is that Goliath was in such
contempt for David, that in a paroxysm of laughter he threw his head
back, and his helmet fell off, and David saw the uncovered forehead,
and his opportunity had come, and taking his sling and swinging it
around his head two or three times, and aiming at that uncovered
forehead, he crushed it in like an egg-shell. The battle over,

BEHOLD A TABLEAU:

King Saul sitting, little David standing, his fingers clutched into
the hair of decapitated Goliath. As Saul sees David standing there
holding in his hand the ghastly, reeking, staring trophy, evidence of
the complete victory over God's enemies, the king wonders what
parentage was honored by such heroism, and in my text he asks David
his pedigree: "Whose son art thou, thou young man?"

The king saw what you and I see, that this question of heredity is a
mighty question. The longer I live the more

I BELIEVE IN BLOOD

--good blood, bad blood, proud blood, humble blood, honest blood,
thieving blood, heroic blood, cowardly blood. The tendency may skip a
generation or two, but it is sure to come out, as in a little child
you sometimes see a similarity to a great-grandfather whose picture
hangs on the wall. That the physical and mental and moral qualities
are inheritable is patent to any one who keeps his eyes open. The
similarity is so striking sometimes as to be amusing. Great families,
regal or literary, are apt to have the characteristics all down
through the generations, and what is more perceptible in such families
may be seen on a smaller scale in all families. A thousand years have
no power to obliterate the difference.

ROYAL RASCALS.

The large lip of the House of Austria is seen in all the generations,
and is called the Hapsburg lip. The House of Stuart always means in
all generations cruelty and bigotry and sensuality. Witness Queen of
Scotts. Witness Charles I. and Charles II. Witness James I. and James
II. and all the other scoundrels of that imperial line.

Scottish blood means persistence, English blood means reverence for
the ancient, Welsh blood means religiosity, Danish blood means
fondness for the sea, Indian blood means roaming disposition, Celtic
blood means fervidity, Roman blood means conquest.

The Jewish facility for accumulation you may trace clear back to
Abraham, of whom the Bible says "he was rich in silver and gold and
cattle," and to Isaac and Jacob, who had the same

FAMILY CHARACTERISTICS.

Some families are characterized by longevity, and they have a tenacity
of life positively Methuselahish. Others are characterized by
Goliathian stature, and you can see it for one generation, two
generations, five generations, in all the generations. Vigorous
theology runs on in the line of the Alexanders. Tragedy runs on in the
family of the Kembles. Literature runs on in the line of the
Trollopes. Philanthropy runs on in the line of the Wilberforces.
Statesmanship runs on in the line of the Adamses. Henry and Catharine
of Navarre religious, all their families religious. The celebrated
family of the Casini, all mathematicians. The celebrated family of the
Medici--grandfather, son and Catharine--all remarkable for keen
intellect. The celebrated family of Gustavus Adolphus, all warriors.

This law of heredity asserts itself without reference to social or
political condition, for you sometimes find the ignoble in high place
and the honorable in obscure place. A descendant of Edward I. a toll
gatherer. A descendant of Edward III. a door-keeper. A descendant of
the Duke of Northumberland a trunk-maker. Some of the mightiest
families of England are extinct, while some of those most honored in
the peerage go back to an ancestry of hard knuckles and rough
exterior. This law of heredity entirely independent of social or
political condition.

Then you find avarice and jealousy and sensuality and fraud having
full swing in some families. The violent temper of Frederick William
is the inheritance of Frederick the Great. It is not a theory to be
set forth by worldly philosophy only, but by divine authority. Do you
not remember how the Bible speaks of "a chosen generation," of "the
generation of the righteous," of "the generation of vipers," of an
"untoward generation," of "a stubborn generation," of "the iniquity of
the past visited upon the children unto the third and fourth
generation?" So that the text comes to-day with the force of a
projectile hurled from mightiest catapult: "Whose son art thou, thou
young man?"

"Well," says some one, "that theory discharges me from all
responsibility. Born of sanctified parents we are bound to be good and
we cannot help ourselves. Born of unrighteous parentage we are bound
to be evil and we cannot help ourselves."

TWO INACCURACIES.

As much as if you should say, "The centripetal force in nature has a
tendency to bring everything to the centre, and therefore all things
come to the centre. The centrifugal force in nature has a tendency to
throw out everything to the periphery, and therefore everything will
go out to the periphery." You know as well as I know that you can make
the centripetal overcome the centrifugal, and you can make the
centrifugal overcome the centripetal. As when there is a mighty tide
of good in a family that may be overcome by determination to evil, as
in the case of Aaron Burr, the libertine, who had for father President
Burr, the consecrated; as in the case of Pierrepont Edwards, the
scourge of New York society seventy years ago, who had a Christian
ancestry; while on the other hand some of the best men and women of
this day are those who have come of an ancestry of which it would not
be courteous to speak in their presence.

YOUR DUTY.

The practical and useful object of this sermon is to show to you that
if you have come of a Christian ancestry, then you are solemnly bound
to preserve and develop the glorious inheritance; or if you have come
of a depraved ancestry, then it is your duty to brace yourself against
the evil tendency by all prayer and Christian determination, and you
are to find out what are the family frailties, and in arming the
castle put the strongest guard at the weakest gate. With these smooth
stones from the brook I hope to strike you, not where David struck
Goliath, in the head, but where Nathan struck David, in the heart.
"Whose son art thou, thou young man?"

There is something in the periodical holidays to bring up

THE OLD FOLKS.

Sometime in the winter holiday, when we are accustomed to gather our
families together, old times have come back again, and our thoughts
have been set to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne." The old folks were so
busy at such times in making us happy, and perhaps on less resource
made their sons and daughters happier than you on larger resource are
able to make your sons and daughters happy. The snow lay two feet
above their graves, but they shook off the white blankets and mingled
in the holiday festivities--the same wrinkles, the same stoop of
shoulder under the weight of age, the same old style of dress or coat,
the same smile, the same tones of voice. I hope you remember them
before they went away. If not, I hope there are those who have recited
to you what they were, and that there may be in your house some
article of dress or furniture with which you associate their memories.
I want to arouse the most sacred memories of your heart while I make
the impassioned interrogatory in regard to your pedigree: "Whose son
art thou, thou young man?"

I. First, I accost all those who are descended of a

CHRISTIAN ANCESTRY.

I do not ask if your parents were perfect. There are no perfect people
now, and I do not suppose there were any perfect people then. Perhaps
there was sometimes too much blood in their eye when they chastised
you. But from what I know of you, you got no more than you deserved,
and perhaps a little more chastisement would have been salutary. But
you are willing to acknowledge, I think, that they wanted to do right.
From what you overheard in conversations, and from what you saw at the
family altar and at neighborhood obsequies, you know that they had
invited God into their heart and life. There was something that
sustained those old people supernaturally. You have no doubt about
their destiny. You expect if you ever get to heaven to meet them as
certainly as you expect to meet the Lord Jesus Christ.

That early association has been a charm for you. There was a time when
you got right up from a house of iniquity and walked out into the
fresh air because you thought your mother was looking at you. You
have never been very happy in sin because of a sweet old face that
would present itself. Tremulous voices from the past accosted you
until they were seemingly audible, and you looked around to see who
spoke. There was an estate not mentioned in the last will and
testament, a vast estate of prayer and holy example and Christian
entreaty and glorious memory. The survivors of the family gathered to
hear the will read, and this was to be kept, and that was to be sold,
and it was share and share alike. But there was

AN UNWRITTEN WILL

that read something like this: "In the name of God, Amen. I, being of
sound mind, bequeath to my children all my prayers for their
salvation; I bequeath to them all the results of a lifetime's toil; I
bequeath to them the Christian religion which has been so much comfort
to me, and I hope may be solace for them; I bequeath to them a hope of
reunion when the partings of life are over; share and share alike may
they have in eternal riches. I bequeath to them the wish that they may
avoid my errors and copy anything that may have been worthy. In the
name of the God who made me, and the Christ who redeemed me, and the
Holy Ghost who sanctifies me, I make this my last will and testament.
Witness, all ye hosts of heaven. Witness, time, witness, eternity.
Signed, sealed, and delivered in this our dying hour. Father and
Mother."

You did not get that will proved at the surrogate's office; but I take
it out to-day and I read it to you; I take it out of the alcoves of
your heart; I shake the dust off it, I ask you will you accept that
inheritance, or will you break the will? O ye of Christian ancestry,
you have a responsibility vast beyond all measurement! God will not
let you off with just being as good as ordinary people when you had
such extraordinary advantage. Ought not a flower planted in a
hot-house be more thrifty than a flower planted outside in the storm?
Ought not a factory turned by the Housatonic do more work than a
factory turned by a thin and shallow mountain stream? Ought not you of
great early opportunity be better than those who had a cradle
unblessed?

THE CAPITAL ACCOUNT.

A father sets his son up in business. He keeps an account of all the
expenditures. So much for store fixtures, so much for rent, so much
for this, so much for that, and all the items aggregated, and the
father expects the son to give an account. Your heavenly Father
charges against you all the advantages of a pious ancestry--so many
prayers, so much Christian example, so many kind entreaties--all these
gracious influences one tremendous aggregate, and He asks you for an
account of it.

Ought not you to be better than those who had no such advantages?
Better have been a foundling picked up off the city commons than with
such magnificent inheritance of consecration to turn out
indifferently.

Ought not you, my brother, to be better, having had Christian nurture,
than that man who can truly say this morning: "The first word I
remember my father speaking to me was an oath; the first time I
remember my father taking hold of me was in wrath; I never saw a Bible
till I was ten years of age, and then I was told it was a pack of
lies. The first twenty years of my life I was associated with the
vicious. I seemed to be walled in by sin and death." Now, my brother,
ought you not--I leave it as a matter of fairness with you--ought you
not to be far better than those who had no early Christian influence?

Standing as you do between the generation that is past and the
generation that is to come, are you going to pass the blessing on, or
are you going to have your life the gulf in which that tide of
blessing shall drop out of sight forever? You are

THE TRUSTEE OF PIETY

in that ancestral line, and are you going to augment or squander that
solemn trust fund? are you going to disinherit your sons and daughters
of the heirloom which your parents left you? Ah! that cannot be
possible, that cannot be possible that you are going to take such a
position as that. You are very careful about the life insurances, and
careful about the deeds, and careful about the mortgages, and careful
about the title of your property, because when you step off the stage
you want your children to get it all. Are you making no provision that
they shall get grandfather and grandmother's religion? Oh, what a last
will and testament you are making, my brother! "In the name of God,
Amen. I, being of sound mind, make this my last will and testament. I
bequeath to my children all the money I ever made and all the houses I
own; but I disinherit them, I rob them of the ancestral grace and the
Christian influence that I inherited. I have squandered that on my own
worldliness. Share and share alike must they in the misfortune and the
everlasting outrage. Signed, sealed and delivered in the presence of
God and men and angels and devils and all the generations of earth
and heaven and hell, March, 1886."

O ye of highly favored ancestry, wake up this morning to a sense of
your opportunity and your responsibility. I think there must be

AN OLD CRADLE,

or a fragment of a cradle somewhere that could tell a story of
midnight supplication in your behalf. Where is the old rocking-chair
in which you were sung to sleep with the holy nursery rhyme? Where is
the old clock that ticked away the moments of that sickness on that
awful night when there were but three of you awake--you and God and
mother? Is there not an old staff in some closet? is there not an old
family Bible on some shelf that seems to address you, saying: "My son,
my daughter, how can you reject that God who so kindly dealt with us
all our lives and to whom we commended you in our prayers living and
dying? By the memory of the old homestead, by the family altar, by our
dying pillow, by the graves in which our bodies sleep while our
spirits hover, we beg you to turn over a new leaf for the new year."
Oh, the power of ancestral piety, well illustrated by a young man of