possessing what the other lacks; and that the true home alone is possible where these gifts and powers have fair and equal play. There must be no strife for mastery. That question is settled of God. There is no mastery. Male and female made he them, and then brought them together in one, so that he might make a perfect humanity. The gifts of the two are diverse, but only man has said that those of the man were superior to those of the woman. Unlike we are, but not unequal. The man may be the head, but then the woman is the heart; and without the heart, of what avail the head? That estate into which man enters by virtue of a primal fiat of God, which was cleared, by the Saviour's consecration, from Jewish and Gentile corruption, ought never to have raised the question which has so long vexed the world, and is still mooted by almost every man and woman. The learned Athenians may have considered the woman merely the household drudge; the Chinese may destroy the large proportion of female children; the old Russian, as he gave away his daughter, may have said, "Here, wolf, take thy lamb "; and Mahomet may have taught that women have no souls. But under a Christian dispensation, in an enlightened land and the nineteenth century, it should be felt that woman, no longer the drudge or the toy of man, holds a place in the eye of God equal with that of man, her

womanly graces as much needed to the perfecting of the idea of home as his more manly virtues, - that she is not to serve or he to rule.

The change in character, which is often observed to commence during engagement, goes on toward completion after marriage. Character is never the same after marriage as before. It is in deference to this change, and to give ample time for the mutual adjustment of new relations, perhaps, that by a divine law the complete establishment of the home is postponed, and the husband and wife have become used to each other and the reciprocal duties and influences of their position before they are permitted to become father and mother, and allowed to enter upon that connection with immortal spirits which lifts them to the highest earthly dignity, while it devolves upon them the greatest responsibilities.

The constitution of the home is wanting a something essential till there are children in it. No family is perfect that has not a baby in it, and no home complete that has not the presence of children.

I go a step further, and say that, in order to the perfect constitution of home, the children must be of both sexes. There must be girls among the boys, and boys among the girls. No one should repine to whom God has ordered it otherwise; yet there will always be a want in the home circle and a vacant place in

the affections-a desire unanswered and unsatisfied

so long as only one sex is represented at our hearth. There are affections that can only be called out, influences only to be exerted, proportion and finish to character only to be attained, where both boys and girls grow together in the home. The fathers who are growing old without a daughter's clinging affection, the mothers who pass their prime without a son's chivalric devotion; the brothers who come up rude, unpolished, and untamed for want of a sister's gentleness, shy, awkward, and ill at ease; the sisters who have never felt the proud, encouraging protection of a brother's love, each and all have lost from their life an element to completeness, and the home, happy and bright as it is, is shorn of a great glory. The constitution of the home is, then, only perfect when daughters and sons, sisters and brothers, cluster beneath the parental roof.

Some one has said that home is the only thing that has survived the fall. I deny that. Home only became a fact after Eve had sinned. The home did not survive the fall, but followed it. If, as I contend, the family is essential to the idea of home, then there was no home till man had begun to eat his bread in the sweat of his face. Only through pain and sorrow, outside of Eden, has woman ever been a mother. Paradise was fair to gaze on and to dwell in, — fair

as a garden, but as a habitation desolate, as a home impossible. There were all things bright save the bright presence of a child, and every melody save the liquid music of an infant's voice. Eden never knew the joy of a mother, never saw a woman smile upon her first-born babe, or witnessed the passionate yearning and tender devotion of a mother's heart. Along its shaded walks never echoed the patter of little feet ; out from its shady bowers never peered, wondering and delighted, childhood's face; its deep recesses were never startled by the sharp, clear, merry ring of childhood's laugh, or its stately order and decorum set at naught by the impish mischief and irreverent rioting of childhood's frolic. Beautiful and grand and adorned was Eden, yet not the type of home. That is the fact of the fall, the gain man made in losing Paradise. It was not till the flaming sword flashed in her backward-gazing eyes that Eve knew that she was the mother of all the living; and so the outer world, the world of toil and sorrow and death, possessed a joy that the inner world of Paradise had not. And so I cannot make that Eden, Paradise. Beautiful as that picture may be of a first state of innocence and ignorance, I cannot feel that it transmits to us any idea of home. If Eve lost Paradise to man, the loss has proved a blessed gain, for it has given us the necessity of labor, and it has given us homes. Some day the

world will come to see that this strange allegory, whatever it may mean, upon which so much of human faith has stood, cannot represent a paradise. Its first temptation produced sin, and that sin gave to man a home, and that necessity for toil which is his next best earthly blessing.

A home, constituted as I have said, cannot be left to itself. There is no inevitable law by which it shall be impelled toward success. It has no charmed life. Because of its Divine institution and constitution, it is not shielded from danger. Indeed, because it is so noble a thing, it is the more subject to danger. Were the home the low and grovelling thing the savage makes it, a mere place of eating and sleeping, and the barest necessities of existence, there would be no thought or need of watch over it. It could not well sink. The more it becomes elevated, the more sensible men and women are of its responsibilities, the further they advance in general and individual culture, the more numerous and threatening are the dangers to which it is exposed. The home of to-day, both in city and village, is more sorely beset from without and from within than the homes of our fathers. Capable of giving more, it is constantly liable to give less. Indeed, we feel it does give less. It has had much added of external advantage. In some things its gain has been commensurate with the