its discipline. Inevitably the home is influenced by social surroundings, depressed or elevated by the tone of sentiment outside. We cannot so isolate our home as to be free. We are social as well as domestic creatures, and social influences will make their way into our homes. If they are good in themselves and elevating, they should be welcomed and cherished; if bad, watched and shunned. It is not altogether a misfortune that there is this outside influence. Few but may gain from an infusion of some other life into them; few but may be the wiser and the stronger from resisting what they cannot approve. I know it is a difficult thing when growing children come, desiring this or that liberty or possession which is granted in some other home, when they complain of your strictness where other homes are lax, or get infatuated with styles and modes unlike their own; and I know no other way than to face wisely and calmly each separate case, compromise where no principle is at stake, yield something to the spirit of young life and the changes of habit and custom, and stand as a rock where conscience and duty bid.

Let me, in conclusion, say, that I by no means suppose the success or the failure of its inmates to depend entirely upon the influences of home. All virtue does not spring from these: all vice does not. God has other potent educators, and sometimes they rise against

the influences there, and sweep them as with a spring torrent all away. Good children bless bad parents; bad children curse good parents. Dens of infamy and vice are recruited from pious homes. Why and how this should be we cannot say, but it is just often enough to make us watchful and in earnest, knowing as we well do that these are after all but exceptional, and that the great law is, As the home is, so is the man. We are not to be troubled or in despair. Give your children good principles, enforced by your own holy lives. Let the influences of home be all pure and good. Then dismiss your children to the care of God.

Who, then, is the faithful and wise householder ? He who makes less of government than of influence, who hedges his home about with every thing that can purify and elevate, who is felt in it less by word than by example, who makes it his great work to broaden its sympathies, strengthen its integrity, and elevate its aim; in whom no gross inconsistency between word and deed shocks the moral sense or blunts the moral sensibility of childhood, who makes of home that field of God he will sow and till, watching and choking the springing tares, cherishing and garnering the wheat. How few such householders there are! Amid the many waning things— things which we attach to the past rather than the present—is home influence.

Perhaps there are many reasons for it. One to me is not fanciful, but real. Advancing civilization, mistaken economy, have abolished the hearthstone. Our homes have no fireplaces, and no one domestic centre. If we have gained economically and physically, we have lost morally. There is no centre of sympathy and of converse now. You cannot make a room with a stove or a furnace like a room with an open fire, nor is the drawing around a hole in the floor or the gazing at a black iron cylinder like the fondly remembered circle around the blazing fire. When the fire went out upon the hearth, there went with it one of the strongest and healthiest influences of home. May a better civilization, and a truer economy, and a juster sense of comfort combine to restore it, and with it may there come again a troup of wholesome influences, banished from our homes, but not forgotten in our memories, influences unconsciously forming the habits and lives of even the youngest sitter there, influences which, subtracted from our lives, would leave a painful void, influences we seek in vain in other ways, by other means, to supply to our children.

S

V.

EVENINGS AT HOME.

ACRED TO the home before all other portions

of the day is the evening. The morning comes with its demand for labor. Before us lie our varied tasks. Over our first waking moments there is a shade of anxiety, as involuntarily the day's probable demands or accurately-determined duties rise before us. The morning, too, is the signal for separation. Life is awake again, and we must be at work. Business, domestic detail, the school, call us at once from the home, and till the sun goes down we are scattered

children of the dispersion — in our separate spheres, busy in that thing which is our first and prominent duty. There is no home again until

"The world's comforter, with weary gait,

His day's hot task has ended in the west."

That is the glad signal for reunion; and, converging toward the one common centre, with weary bodies or jaded brains; tired of work, tired of play, but with

fresh hearts, come parents and children, brothers and sisters, to forget toil and study and care in the calm and happy life of home. The evening lamp shines out far into the gathering darkness, the welcome beacon to the father's step. The world has treated him hard to-day. He has met repulse from friendship, disappointment or reverse in business, his well-laid schemes have failed. Baffled, thwarted, that clear and steady light, detected and kept separate among all others, dissolves the gloom, lifts off the burden, and the world's chill power vanishes before the magic thought of home. No longer laggard, with rapid tread he hastens on. And now against the windowpane, peering into the gathering gloom, he sees a wellknown face, and then the sudden vanishing tells him that quick-eared love has caught a welcome sound. With hand upon the latch, one moment he pauses ere he will make the vision real, one moment, as the patter of little feet and the joyous crowing of the baby-voice send their love-tones vibrating through his soul, and then, the world shut out, care and struggle, coldness and failure, forgotten till the morrow, -circled and embraced by those who love him best and love him always, he gives himself over to pleasures and duties that await him there. Nor less the wife rejoices. All day long, amid perplexities he little knows and for which he allows too little, she has