monies of which it

are strangers to us. Perhaps we husbands and wives are strangers to each other. We do not try to know each other. We let things take their own course, we have no guiding or controlling law, and then wonder that our homes are the unsatisfactory, chaotic things they are. Home, like a delicate, sensitive, manystringed instrument, can only be kept in perfect tone by constant care. Without that, the exquisite haris capable become only clashing and horrid discords, the jangle of a thing abused and broken. The homes that are bright, happy, and successful are not the special gifts of God, they are not homes endowed with the things position or wealth give, but they are homes wisely regulated, based upon, and growing out of, broad and generous principles. They are homes in which self is subordinate, in which familiarity has led to no abridgment of courtesy, where there is enough, and not too much of discipline, where children and parents grow together, sharing in each other's confidence, partaking in each other's sorrow or joy. I think the idea of home should be a place to grow in, parents as well as children. It should have progress, this year better than last year; it should have renewal, so that the mistakes of the past may be avoided, and the future lead to something better; it should have a plan, because without plan nothing is ever done. And all this lies in parental

hands. By special Divine enactment they are the educators of the home, to lead it and to mould it.

Its success or its failure rests with them.

Except in very rare cases, the home cannot be higher than the aspiration of its heads. Then with them there rests a vast responsibility. With the first formation of the family it begins. It is not the mother's work alone, because her life chances to be more immediately and at all times connected with the home, but quite as much the father's. He ought to begin at the beginning, and know his children, not as playthings, not as disturbers of his peace, not as expenses, but, from their very babyhood up to the time he dismisses them to the world, as moral and immortal beings, whose destiny in the present, if not the future, he may and does control. He ought never to dissociate himself from the interests of his children, but by word and work prove his interest and sympathy in their experiences, their achievements, and their plans, little things, perhaps, to do, but great things to leave undone. The intercourse of home is not the set, deliberate intercourse of the lips alone, it is not the great things we attempt merely, but mainly that intercourse is among trivial and occasional things, and out of these, these which we cannot anticipate, which we do not create, comes the power of that intercourse, a power that may lift the home to heaven, or thrust it down

to hell. Tacitus said of Agricola, " that he governed his family, which many find to be a harder task than to govern a province." It is not government of that old Roman stamp that we wish to have as the result of parental intercourse, the exercise and control of mere will, but the government which results from a wise, considerate, intelligent, and impartial love.

I

IV.

HOME INFLUENCES.

HAVE now a few words to say of those subtile influences more potent and more delicate than any authority or power which have so much to do with shaping the character and controlling the destiny of home. They are things which may not be catalogued or accurately defined; but, undefinable, nameless, innumerable, they are always at work upon the heart, and always accomplishing results vast, important, and lasting. We outgrow, we set aside, other control; other influences are partial and transient, — imperative to-day, to-morrow they have yielded, but the influences of the home of our childhood are felt in the home of our maturity, in the small as in the great, in conduct and character and faith. Do we not know this from our own consciousness, has not the experience of life repeated and re-repeated the fact; and is it not evident that our children must carry with them out of their homes influences of some sort, as strong and as permanent as we took out of ours?

A home-good or bad-is the result, not of authority, of direct, sharp, positive law, but of influence. I do not think this is generally understood. The aim of a parent is to establish authority, to make his will felt. The home is to have a rigid, inflexible law. That established, the matter of home rule is settled. The requirements and the falling off of each day is measured by that, and the fatal thing to have done is to have sinned against the law of the house. Now, as I have already said, law is essential to the well-being and development of the home; yet he who should suppose that a home is to be governed only by authority would make a very grave mistake. Authority is limited. "It cannot modify dispositions, nor implant sentiments, nor alter character." It is an outside thing; he who is under it is never free from a certain feeling of constraint and subjection. It regulates actions only. It cannot reach opinions or affections. This is the work of influence, so that he who should rule by law, who should be watchful over, jealous only for, his authority, would fail in just that thing which he wished to do. He might compel his children to a little circle of prescribed duties, but he could never inspire them with the large sentiment of obedience, outrunning positive injunctions. What a home wants is domestic influences rather than laws. In the more complicated and artificial relations of so