gain outside, while that very gain has seemed to subtract from its solid and substantial qualities. We are not satisfied with the condition of our homes. They are not what they should be, and do not give us what they should, and we are disposed to lay the blame upon the times upon which we have fallen, and the influences about us we cannot shake off or rise above. Is not more of the trouble in ourselves? Have we not grown supine about these our gone mad after many inventions? are drawn off to other things. thought, are given to them. Great and wise are we in the perishing things of the day. The world is our field, the elements are our slaves, and the hoar sea bows its crested head before our coming. All things about know their master.

nearest duties, and

Our first affections Our time, power,

But this little sacred centre, home, how shamefully is it neglected; and how restless and fretful are we if our neglect is suggested to us, and a reform proposed which shall begin with ourselves. Take the man, he whose very name of husband—in its derivation, houseband-shows that his chief and leading duty should be to bind together the house. Take the man, be he merchant, mechanic, or the man of a profession. He knows that he neglects his home, but he calms his conscience by pleading the inexorable will of his busiBut what is business that it has any right to

ness.

I

contravene that old law of God, which makes the man, who has voluntarily assumed the post of father, the head of the home? What right has it so to absorb him that he has no time, no heart, for his home duties, no pleasure in them? Why must homes have the worst hours of a man's day, his tired hours? Why must those who love him never see him at his best, and why should the whole machinery of domestic economy and rule, all authority and discipline and influence, devolve upon the wife, who in her own appointed sphere has quite enough to do? Who gave man leave to delegate his authority, and bind himself to another service? I know what may be urged in excuse. hear men constantly lament and tamely submit. They see a lion in the way. And yet you put any enterprise before them that they think will pay, and lions are nothing. I never knew men convinced of any thing that they did not do. Let this generation once feel, as it must feel, that this neglect of home is no necessity, but a sin; let it rest red and hot upon men's consciences that God has given them this charge which they have deserted; let these homes grow worse and worse, as they inevitably must, till self-interest rouse to reform, if duty do not, and you will find business as easy to control as you now imagine it to be difficult. If the man was to be a mere moneymaker, why was it not so ordained in the beginning,

and the family organized without the father? No; this is a fearful mistake, and it is telling fearfully upon the characters of our sons and daughters. Upon the old homestead, or when business was a thing of comparative leisure, we knew our fathers, we grew up by them. They watched over us, rewarded and punished, rebuked and encouraged us, and we can trace much of what is best in us back to that steady intercourse between us. Where is that influence to-day? Who of as all is really doing any thing about the daily culture of our sons and daughters, and who or what is supplying our place?

I speak thus of the fathers, not because I suppose that all the trouble with our homes comes from their neglect, but because I think it mainly does, directly or indirectly. The men in middle life are the responsible men in the home as well as in society, and to the men of middle life mainly I speak. With them this neglect of home commenced, with them should commence the remedy. And there can be no remedy till they choose to apply it. Mothers may be all devotion and fidelity, all wisdom and persistence, but there are things in the ordering of our homes and the training of our families which no woman comprehends or is equal to. A man who has been educated exclusively under female influence always wants a something of manliness. What he may gain in tenderness and a

certain elevation of sentiment he loses in strength and health. The home requires the male and the female influence, as God saw in the beginning. The father must coöperate with the mother, not spasmodically, but continually, leaving her liberty for her own special work, the sphere for which she was made, out of which she should never be expected to labor. I think it will be time to blame the really faithful mothers, when the fathers show some disposition to reform.

If I were to mention an error in the wives and mothers, which seems to me to set against true home life, it would be their devotion to the mere detail of domestic life. They never rise above it, and leave a painful impression upon their children even, of the hopeless drudgery of a mother and a wife. May not this be one reason why the daughters so cordially hate and so wholly neglect every thing pertaining to work, and vastly prefer the indolence and mental and moral exposure of a hotel or boarding-house, to the cares, but the securities, of housekeeping? Have you not heard daughters say, "Well, I never mean to work as mother does," and do you not know that they keep their word? I think it may be difficult to prevent this so long as the husbands leave home cares wholly to the wives, and yet I am not sure that woman need sink so utterly all that is higher in her, become so mere a devotee to her home toil. Duty to her home

is not summed up, exhausted in work. Kitchen, nursery, chambers, are not the only spheres for her adorning. She is not the wife the weft, one who weaves - merely; but she has a higher walk before her children, and duties to them as souls, which she may not slight, which she should not delegate. I am not sure but it is the mission of the sewing-machine to ransom the mother and the wife, to leave her fingers idle for a little, and give her time to remember and re-collect the womanly powers that have long been lost under the pressure of daily domestic duty, give her time and heart to undertake the higher culture of her children. For the daughters' sakes I would ask the mothers if they are not mistaken in narrowing the duty of the home so much to mere toil? Is there not a better and a brighter side possible for you and for them, and would it not be well for your present influence over them, and their own by and by advantage, to show that work must sometimes stand aside for pleasure or improvement? How would the faded and jaded mothers and wives of middle life put on their bloom and spirits again if only they would seize now and then a little seasonable intellectual or physical recreation, and how much brighter and wiser would homes be if the mother, now and then, changed work, and showed to her husband and her children that she has a mind as well as hands!