wish I might get it into the ear of every new husband and wife, that they are going to make a happy and successful life of it themselves in their new home that they are going to make the lives of those that shall be intrusted to them happy and successful only upon conditions. God is not going to interfere with any miracle of his and make a true home life for you, but you are to make it for yourselves.

What the Home needs at its commencement and in its simpler relations, it needs all the way through and in every relationship. Its success is still conditional. Let a single member of a household forget or neglect his duties to the other members of it, and the home fails. It rests upon conditions all the way through.

There are one or two other things about home life, which seem to me so important as elements in home success, that I must speak briefly of them here.

The first is the necessity of compromise. We have had so much of that in our political history for some years, that the word even has become an offence with many, while the thing savors only of unmanly yielding of high principle, and base surrender of great trust. The word, however, is a good one, and so is the thing. The difficulty has been in its use. If you will look not only into human life, but into all organized existence, you will see that all harmonious action is the result of compromise, that there has everywhere

to be an accommodation of forces, that life, as nature, is a system of checks and balances compromises,— that no one element or power is allowed full, unlimited sway. That would bring old chaos back again. The order of the systems, the alternations of day and night, the fertility of the seasons, the flow of rivers, the stability of oceans, are results of equilibrium among forces, any one of which breaking away and exercising its unchecked right, would bring swift and broad destruction to all. Compromise makes our safety. Society likewise rests upon this basis, and is secure so long as it is undisturbed. When some one force rises and insists upon supremacy, then trouble and disintegration and revolt. So in the nation, so in the church, so in the lesser affairs between man and man, and so in the home. I have had men marvel at me because in the marriage ceremony I have wished that the new couple might learn the true compromises of love. They have thought there was a contradiction in such language, that it was a stepping down from the high level upon which wedded love should be assumed to stand, introducing the inexperienced to an unworthy temptation. A very little reflection should convince of the contrary. Wedded love, true home life, are impossible except as the result of compromise. The man or woman who attempts to act without it will make a miserable failure, must become either a selfish tyrant or an abject slave.

Both of these the home has seen, from both of these the home has suffered. The house which has as its law the one imperious will of a master, the selfish whim of a mistress, cannot contain a true and happy home. The house which is ruled by any tyranny cannot be. I have known this tyranny to be in the children quite as painfully as in the parents—in the selfishness or the moodiness or the sin of one and another, which took all the light and joy out of the home, and made it so drear and sad, that the heart ached at merely thinking of it. Can you not recall weary-looking, sad-faced wives, the silent, patient endurers of a husband's uncompromising will; noble men, inwardly thorned by petty and pettish irritations and exactions of their wives? Have you not known weary and heavy-laden fathers, stooping, wrinkled, gray, mothers with faces so mutely eloquent of the heart's troubles, going prematurely down the vale of years unsupported, and unblessed, because of one who would not yield his habit, his wilfulness, his vice, but persisted in making it the centre and law of the home? Had these learned the compromises of love, remembered and respected the rights, the position, the comfort, the happiness of others, studied to deny self, to avoid clashing, to clip away the rough edges of temper and preference, which make too great friction and jar, and endanger safety; the selfsame persons might have made a home angels would have looked upon

with joy, and blessed as a success. A wise writer of our own day says, "In travelling along at night we catch a glimpse into cheerful-looking rooms, with lights blazing in them, and we conclude, involuntarily, how happy the inmates must be. Yet there is heaven and hell in those rooms, the same heaven and hell that we have known in others." The heaven or the hell are determined by the presence or the absence of a spirit of mutual compromise.

Where shall this compromise begin, where shall it end? What shall it include, what shall it exclude? These are questions to which only general answers can be given. They must be left mainly to each one's good sense and good conscience. I should say that one in a home might safely compromise in every thing but principle, and that where right and wrong are concerned, he should be as firm as God. But the compromising ought never to be all upon one side, as I have known it. Where any thing is yielded by the one, something should be yielded by the other. And this even in the little things, for it is the little things that sap and overthrow the dignity and the peace and the hope of home. The husband who expects the wife to give up every thing; the wife who will not yield though she sees the inevitable breach before her; the son, the daughter, the brother, the sister, who will not give way to the broad good of the whole,

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who insist on and press their several tyrannies, establish separate, and ever more and more widely diverging lines of life, and painfully illustrate that centrifugal force there is in a home that does not or will not recognize this necessity of compromise. Let it be felt that there must be giving up on all sides, let that giving up be guided and limited by principle, and I think we have a law of home intercourse which will prevent infinite trouble, and insure the best harmony. It is the bond of that surest unity unity in diversity.

In saying just now that we can afford to compromise in every thing excepting principle, I felt myself nearing a very delicate and difficult question, one which has troubled many, one which has not troubled other many quite enough. What is to be done when two persons are drawn together by love, in a home, whose religious opinions are unlike, who belong to different sects, each believing heartily and honestly in the way of his own faith? Is this a legitimate matter of compromise? If so, what shall the compromise be? Where the parties really care very little about it, and religious faith is the shallow thing it too much is, and religious obligation the easily shifted garment many make it, this may be no question at all; where one is very strenuous, and the other good-naturedly indifferent, it cannot take long to decide; but where both, by education, by conviction, have decided and decidedly opposite views, where each has a faith, a mode of