overlooked sympathy. The child looks out beyond its own thought and life, feels itself admitted into the high places of other men's experience, comes to have a personal interest, property, in its father's or its mother's friend. Ah! how many in this world there are, the echo of whose voices, once familiar about the home-hearth, friends of the dear ones gone, linger still, twined inseparably with old home memories! Let the children stay and hear the talk, and do you talk wisely for their profit and blessing!

There was in the days of my boyhood a book called "Evenings at Home ;" and there was in the days of my boyhood a thing called "Evenings at Home." I miss them both now; and society, which thinks it has grown so wise, has lost two things which did much toward making the men and women of to-day. Too much the old spend the evening from home, in stores, in clubs, in secret societies, in concerts, and in theatres and balls. Too many things have been devised away from home, which draw the men away, and make them associate exclusively with themselves. Our young people follow where the elders lead. I may be unfortunate, but it is very rarely that I find a young man at home with the family in my evening calls. With both sexes there is a restless craving for outside amusement, as if the evening were for nothing else. I have desired simply to hint at that wealth of

occupation, improvement, happiness, which there is in our own homes, which it lies with parents to evoke and recommend, neglecting which they have recklessly thrown their children into contact with evils against which they are neither forewarned or forearmed. God placed the inexperienced soul within a hone, that about its inexperience a father's and a mother's love might throw their protection. For watch and ward were they set over it. And God made the day for labor, and the night for rest; but where these joined - when the one was ended ere the other begun - His dear love interposed a precious neutral season, and sanctified it to the hallowing associations and influences of home. Let us feel God's command upon us in this precious season; let us neglect neither its responsibility nor its privilege. Let us trim anew the flame of the evening lamp, let us draw in closer circle round the evening table, and let the joy of our present and the blessing of our future come from the holy and happy EVENINGS AT HOME!

11

VI.

THE SUNDAY AT HOME.

HERE IS not a gift of God to man which has

TH

we

been so universally misunderstood and abused as the gift of the Sabbath day,- misunderstood and abused quite as much by the religious as by the irreligious. Handed from generation to generation,always found in our homes and accepted there, have grown up thinking that woe remained for those who should depart by one jot or one tittle from the accustomed method of keeping it. The sanction of years has had with us the weight of authority, and wherever the New-Englander has gone, has gone with him, as a peculiar institution, the New England Sunday. I would not speak lightly of a day about which clusters so much that is sacred. I would not deny influences of good that have gone out from it. Stern, harsh, repulsive, exacting, we owe to it much of that which distinguishes New England character, and wins for it confidence and respect. I honor the day. I believe in its capacity for good. I respect the memory

of those grim old men who fashioned and transmitted it to us, while I long to see a more thoroughly Christian spirit pervading it. Ours has been too long rather the Jew's Sabbath than the Christian's Sunday. I would still wish to remember the Sabbath to keep it holy; but it should be with the holiness of the spirit of the religion of Jesus, not with that of the letter of Moses.

Nothing can be clearer than the abrogation of the Jewish Sabbath. The Saviour more than once showed that its ceremonies and forms, and its idea of rest, had no place under his religion. He said that "the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." Man was not to conform to it, but it was to conform to man, changing its methods and modes as the changing circumstances of man required. He was not to be the slave, but the lord of the Sabbath. It may have all been very well that the Jew should keep the day as he did. It was, perhaps, the best way for him. It may be that the Puritan kept it in the best way for himself and his age; but that Puritan strictness and narrowness are desirable, or can be efficacious, in our day, were it not for the power of education and prejudice, no one would allow, and the persistent attempts to force an observance upon a generation every way unlike those going before, is producing pernicious and lasting, if not fatal, results. Many, both of the older

and younger, are repelled from the day, or observe it only in form, to whom it would be holiest and welcomest if it came in the broad and liberal spirit of the Gospel; while others, frowned upon by those who take to themselves the exclusive spirit of sanctity, are using it to truest advantage. Another generation will not pass without a radical change in the keeping of holy time. There are signs which make that sure. How shall I best spend the Sunday is the anxious question of many, and the patent answer less and less suffices. Not the indifferent and the scoffer, but the man of serious faith and devout life, begins to doubt of so much church-going, of such exclusive religious and public use of the day. I am free to confess that I believe the Sunday will only be safely and sacredly used when it shall be made to minister to a man's domestic and social needs quite as much as his religious.

One of the gravest objections to the popular method of keeping Sunday · I mean the popular religious method is that it leaves nothing to the home, or, more truly, requires nothing of the home. Before the domestic duties of the day have fairly subsided, the bell proclaims that the hour of morning service has come. An early dinner hardly gives time for a prompt appearance at the Sunday school, and the close of the afternoon service finds old and young