more in the value of the fruit, inclined to forget that the tree was not perfect. Here in New England, because of that rigor, has sprung a more liberal element, toning down the sharper and harsher features of old creeds, and breathing a larger spirit into the interpretations of the Divine will, — not driving God out of our homes, but making him a brighter presence in them, while life, as it rolls on with all its various experience and teachings, modifies, without destroying, those views of duty and of God our earlier days received. The best that is in us we feel has come from the religion of home, the truths it taught, the duties it enforced, the faith it manifested. The Bible may have been too exclusively our Sunday book, the old home prayers may have been tediously long, the home requirements exact, and home privileges few, and home discipline stern; and yet what do we not owe to them just as they were? Nor can we spare religion, vital, practical, out of the home of the present. If we do, the peculiar glory of the New England home perishes. Its support is gone. If there be no home religion, no controlling, sanctifying influence taking its rise in that, and mighty because of it, no one steady, holy law, the New England home has only a name to live, and our posterity must receive from us that which is but the shadow of its former self. You who are neglecting religion as too many are, in your homes, who allow fashion and vanity and parade and selfishness to reign there, and not God, — reflect that you are so defrauding posterity of that which has made you what you are. It shall go hardly with New England character and New England influence when religious faith shall cease to characterize and control our homes. Obedient themselves to the commandments of God, it was inevitable that our fathers should in turn exact obedience of their children. With all the inflexible strictness of the Decalogue the law of the home was propounded and administered. As they expected God would deal with them, so they dealt with theirs, with less of mercy than of justice. It was one great point with them to use our common word—that children should “mind." Unhesitating, unquestioning obedience was the law. No abating, no parleying, no giving reasons, no hearing excuses, no suspense of opinion, no revocation of command, no confession of mistake, but the word once uttered, the will once expressed, that was to be obeyed though the heavens should fall. The autocracy of a father's will, against which the mother set herself, and children plead and wept in vain, was a part of the religious faith of the time. Beneath the stern exterior, there might be a yearning or a breaking heart; but was he not standing in a God-appointed trust? was he not to be held And so to strict account should he not do his duty? In the genuine New England home of to-day, still that good, old-fashioned thing called obedience lingers. In too many homes, judging by what we see and hear, it is deemed intrusive, and turned out. Parents have ceased to command where children have ceased to obey. Aspiring boys and girls put down fathers and mothers, and set aside the will of middle life as old and slow. I have heard boys in short jackets ridicule their mothers, snub their fathers, and behind their backs say every thing of them but what was decent and filial. I have known pert misses, scarcely in their teens, override authority and entreaty, and boast among their associates of the manner in which they had got round their mothers. One may gather from his own observation and experience the most atrocious instances of disrespect and misrule, such as would disgrace an age of barbarism. And unfortunately we have come to consider all this as inevitable, and are lamenting as incurable that which is the work of our own hands. The trouble grows out of the fact that we have not insisted upon obedience. Desirous of avoiding the harshness of our own early experience, we have insensibly run into a more pernicious extreme, relaxing all family discipline, and becoming a mere "mush of concession" as Emerson says- to our children. If we give a command, they feel pretty sure it will not be insisted on; if we make a threat, they feel confident it will not be executed; if we establish a law, in a little while they know we shall grow tired of enforcing it. And so we have virtually put home into the hands of our children, as old Helios put the horses of the sun into the hands of Phaeton, and they seem driving us to much the same disaster. But there are homes where obedience is still believed in and enforced, and they are not the most wretched, but the brightest and the gladdest, the true types of the New England home. Irksome and old-fashioned, stale and unprofitable, as our young people deem obedience, home joy, happiness, growth, all that is peculiar and best about home, are because of it. As in the universe all harmony is because of one controlling will, all order because of consent to law, so, in the home, harmony and order-the topmost graces and virtues are only through obedience. Were every element and world to have their will and way, and sea and star and fire insist upon their right, something worse than chaos must ensue; and such must be the crash and wreck of home where each rebels against the central authority and law, and makes a law unto itself. In the true home there will be obedience claimed and yielded as a thing of course. long as a child, whatever his years, shall remain as a member of the home, so long is he under the law of home. So I am no advocate of the old rigor of family disci |