know the means which have been made use of by Christian ministers to break up the happy harmony of home, oftentimes in an underhand way which does not savor so much of godliness and care for souls, as of something much lower and wholly personal. I am glad that I do not believe that God makes any such demand of me. The pleasantest thing about a home to me is, to find a thorough unity pervading it from the least interest to the greatest the children growing in it into the faith of the parents, following them in that as in lesser things. There are such homes. I am glad that I know them. May they never be saddened by the straying away of any. May none, climbing up some other way, decoy from the fold a single lamb !

There are other things I would like to say of the home life. The theme is more than fruitful. Let is a thing of

this suffice. It is a thing of beauty, it shame, as you and I shall make it.

God will not make it the one, or prevent it from being the other. He ordained it, but he gave it to us to shape. That shaping is our life work. We lay the corner, we add joint to joint, we give the proportion, we set the finish. It may be a thing of beauty and of joy forever. God forgive any infidelity in us which shall prevent it from putting on its appointed glory!

HE FIRST thing about a Home is the House,

THE

a part of the Home too little considered, which yet has more to do with the character of Home than we are aware. If the prairie, the mountain, the seaside, the environments of nature, are felt to have large influence in shaping the character, — things whose influence is external and must be superficial, — why shall not much more the house, the centre of our daily action and affection, mould and control our lives? The child receives inevitable and indelible impressions from the house in which he is brought up. We know that by our own experience, and a very little thought will show that, as men and women, our lives are still influenced very much by the house we live in. This is none the less true because we cannot always separate and analyze these influences. I cannot tell you why or how, perhaps, but I know that the house I live in shapes to a very considerable extent my character. Its situation, its convenience, its facilities for

movement and for work, the way it faces, the shade about it, the figures on its carpets and its walls, are all unconscious educators and directors, not of my mere outward life, but of that which is deeper within. It is the influences which cannot be detected or analyzed which oftentimes exert the greatest power over us for good or for evil. It is coming to be understood by the philanthropist, that one of the surest ways of elevating the poor man is to give him appropriate house accommodation, make his home comfortable, convenient, and desirable, a pleasant place to think of and to go to; and Mr. Lawrence leaves a legacy for the building of " model houses," that great discovery of modern benevolence, which seems the only method in great cities of counteracting the terrible evils which spring from the filthy and crowded tenements allotted to the poor. In Queen Elizabeth's reign an act was passed forbidding cottages to be erected unless a certain quantity of land were attached to each, and calling such as failed in this respect "silly cottages." I wish that law might revive, and that epithet attach to more modern houses. The idea was to give every man a homestead, and encourage him to economy in his wages till he had secured it. Had that idea been carried out and made a fundamental principle of English law, established by our fathers here and respected by their sons, it would have proved

cf immense importance to the race, and secured homes to that large class which now knows nothing about them. A recent New York paper says, and what it says is equally applicable to other meridians: "If we look well into the causes of the increase of crime and of the growing immorality and corruption, we cannot fail to perceive that the mass of the population have not room to live comfortably, or even decently. Neither physical nor moral health can exist where people are packed into apartments too miserable and too inconvenient to afford the ordinary comforts and conveniences of life. There is nothing like home in such dwellings, nothing like the social and friendly intercourse, and fireside recreations and amusements, which make home happy under other circumstances. The crowding of several families into a building fit for but one, gives rise to bickerings and annoyances which destroy any thing like satisfaction in the domestic circle. Certain physical comforts and conveniences, as well as room, are absolutely necessary for the proper home education of children, and where these are wanting the morals of a community must suffer." A walk through some parts of any large town or city is enough to make the heart ache. Look at the houses that are built on cheap and low lands; think of the money that is coined out of the necessities of the poorer classes, taken, not out of the pocket merely, but out

of the best life. Look into these abodes, erected by the rapacity of landlords who care only for a large return to a small outlay, who grow rich on the penury of their fellow-beings, and tell me if it is possible that they should become homes?

Nor is it only the poorer classes who suffer in this way. High rents and the wretchedness of accommodation afforded, the niggardliness of landlords, have operated unfavorably upon a large class whose circumstances are considered good. How many a man is compelled to live in quarters which he can never love, never feel to be home, which always fret him by their bad arrangement, their want of small repairs, their cramped stair-way and entry and chamber, poor cellar and paltry yard, — simply because a class of selfish speculators have gotten possession of the land and crowded it with cheap houses, leaving to him no choice, no mercy, and no hope? How many of those who are compelled to hire houses feel that they get any thing like a just equivalent for what they give? How many when "the lease is up" leave with any feeling akin to that of leaving home? I think that these wooden houses which spring up like mushrooms everywhere about us, many of them double with but a lath and plaster partition between, having no beauty on the outside, no real convenience within, standing anyhow, anywhere, are not only provocatives and