Sundays. I mean that general habit of self-indulgence which permits two or three extra hours of sleep on Sunday. I do not believe there is any one thing introduces so much trouble and vexation into the home, tends to so much Sabbath-breaking, and gives rise to more and more various disturbance, than this habit, which ought to be honored only in the breach. What a record would the Sunday mornings at home of a village or city be, and what varied unhappiness should we find beginning there and dragging its troubled trail through the livelong day, "from morn till dewy eve." The day has not started right, and it cannot go on right. Something is lost that cannot be found; something escaped that cannot be recaptured. Squandered at the drowsy importunacy of the body is time that was not yours to squander. Your home had a claim upon it, made a direct demand of it. Your selfishness clogged or stopped the domestic wheels. The day long it suffers because of you. Something is omitted, or is imperfect, or postponed. I grant that there are sometimes those upon whom labor lays so heavy a hand that the Sunday demands some longer indulgence in sleep; but in the vast majority of cases the plea for the necessity is simply the plea of our indolence. It is the sluggard's plea. You do not take special interest in Sunday. You have got nothing to do. Sunday is a day of rest, and

so you turn again to slumber. Is there not something of self-reproach when at last you fairly rouse yourself, and feel that it is late, is late, when you hurry yourself and hurry others and are hurried by them, and when all your hurrying will not bring things as they ought to be? Your domestics have taken their cue from you, and they are late. Your breakfast is late. Things that ought to have been done yesterday, shoes that ought to have been blacked, hats and gloves that ought to have been found, buttons that ought to have been sewed on, all come at the last impossible moment to be done, all importunate, making of the Sunday morning at home clatter and confusion and worry,-destroying its peace, unsettling the mind, unstringing the nerves, and the second bell calls perturbed and every way illy prepared spirits to the sacred solemnities of worship, hurries you late into church, or keeps you in vexation at home. Ah! the wretchedness every week entailed upon homes, every week repeated, because of the needless extra sleep of the Sunday morning!

It is a wretched mistake men make when they take it for granted that the prime purpose of the Sabbath is physical rest, and that so they have the right to use its hours in a dull animal torpor. Inordinate lying in bed is not the sort of rest that even the animal economy demands. Idleness does not rest the mind, lazi

ness cannot rest the body. No good comes of it. The truest rest is that which comes, not of lethargy, but of simple change of work; and the father, mother, son, daughter, who will rise as early on Sunday as on any other day, and set about the Sunday's duties, will find themselves as truly refreshed when Monday comes as those who loitered long in bed, while they will have gained a day in which every thing had its proper place and time. It is a grave mistake of the home to allow the earlier hours of its Sundays to be spent in sleep.

To consecrate and complete the home, there must be religion in it; and, as the world and life are, Sunday must be looked to mainly for the giving that consecration and completeness. In itself the home is a sacred place. Its founder is God. Its gifts, its possibilities are his. The things sacred to the soul and life are of it. It is the place of birth, of growth, of death, and these three great mysteries, these processes in our being, sanctify it unto us. Distinctively religious then should the home be made by us, and every father and mother be known as the priest and priestess of the domestic altar. The old Levitical law should be revived among us, and every man "sanctify his house to be holy unto the Lord."

But here we are in the midst of difficulties various and great, which many seem to think they escape by avoiding altogether, — which are only to be escaped

by being met. What is to be the religion of home, and by what means is it to be established?

The religion of home should be broad and genial as religion in itself is, not confined to seasons and to tasks, not to catechisms and articles of faith, not to set acts and forms, not to the Bible and devotion, but liberal and complete, enfolding and touching every thing, everybody, every position, relation, act, —joys as well as sorrows, the least, the common, as well as the greatest and the exceptional. It should have all the reverence of the first commandment, and all the scope of the second, and this secured by word and work, by precept, by influence direct and indirect, not by causing to know and do, but by leading the way in knowing and doing. The thing most to be apprehended, most to guard against, is disgusting the members of the home with the subject of religion, a thing many well-meaning homes have done.

I presume that nearly every child in what would commonly be called a Christian home has been taught to pray. That is, in its early childhood it was taught the Lord's Prayer, or some simple petition which it nightly repeated to its mother. But this habit would seem to be put away with other childish things, and the parent really knows nothing about the devotional habits of the growing boys and girls, who probably have long ago discontinued a practice whose spiritual

meaning and importance they never knew any thing about. Of the religious habits of their parents children are left very much in the dark, save as a suspicion may grow in their minds that they talk of, and perhaps demand of them, that of which in themselves they give no evidence. A child will sometimes be so simple as to turn upon a parent and ask him if he prays, or believes, or does this or that, to the parental confusion, perhaps, though scarcely to his reformation. This is wrong. No child should ever be left to doubt or suspect a parent's faith. There should be a free and true communion on this first and greatest of subjects, - an interchange of thought and feeling, purpose and hope. Home was made for the soul, and the parent is parent of it as well as of the body, — and he has but skimmed the surface of his duty who has fed and fashioned the body, stored and disciplined the mind, but done nothing for the soul. I do not believe in talk about one's inner life for talk's sake, but how it would hallow the relation of parent and child, help them both, if the interior of each heart were laid bare, it many times may be in the confidential intercourse of home, and how it would speed a child onward in its work could it but know that through just these experiences and struggles father and mother have passed before.

as

I do not believe much in children's going to church.