proposes. Many generations must live and love and rejoice and suffer within the walls of a house to make it what it should be; the most skilful architect cannot give you out. right the plan of such a habitation; they who estimate an old homestead only as so much building material, and are ready, in obedience to every whim of improvement, to speed on the work of its destruction, do not realize how much besides bricks and mortar and timber enters into the fabric of a true dwelling. But I must hasten to add, that a Home is well ordered and discharging its various functions, when its labors are not excessive, and when time, opportunity, and means are afforded for the lessons, the amusements, and the devotions of the household. When the outward and material exigencies of a family absorb and exhaust the best energies of the householders, the ends are sacrificed to the means of living. When out-of-door duties and interests encroach upon domestic pursuits, the home is virtually treated as subordinate, as having no rights when brought into comparison with the aims of commercial enterprise, or professional ambition, or intellectual curiosity, or of that vague entity known as society. What the Home claims is simply its own, the right to close its doors upon occasion, and mind its own business, and teach and amuse its own children, and waste an hour or two, if the thrifty will persist in calling such an expenditure of the time a waste, in trying to make human beings happy. Is it hard for the Home to make good this claim? Are there any strong circumstances in the world's present condition which do not favor, but hinder, the development of a healthy household life? This is our inquiry.

As I have already intimated, it is not my intention to eulogize the past, and to decry the present. I see no occasion for any such procedure. But although there may be no call for a Jeremiade, it may yet be proper to say that there are encroachments by the outside world upon home prerogatives which ought to be faithfully pointed out and

steadily resisted. It is, as we are ever saying, an ambitious, enterprising, laborious, thrifty age, and countries that we call civilized are vast workshops, and most men and women who try to do anything are doing their utmost. Our industry is styled material, and it is busied upon matter, but with the powers of mind, and miracles of art are the results, whilst the work of subduing the earth is pushed into the heart of that Africa which even our childhood was content to regard as a wilderness, and up or down mighty streams, of which, a few years since, we had scarcely heard the names. The pulse of the city has ever tended towards the fever-stroke; cities have never been very quiet places, especially when nourished by commerce or the arts; all the hopeful and all the dreary elements of human life come out into the light of day in crowded streets. But it has not been the case until of late that the fever of the city has spread into the country along iron paths, and by curious nerves of wire; it is only during the past few years that we have been threatened with the loss of that dividing sea which has heretofore cooled the heats of mental excitement, as well as the hot airs of one and the other hemisphere, and are bidden to regard the loss of that measure of privacy which the continents have enjoyed for thousands of years as a great gain. Now this feverish and all-pervading activity threatens that peculiar life of the home which must be by comparison exceedingly quiet, the dwelling of the family becomes a place of wearying labor and care, and the time which belongs to the household is seized by the world. Enterprise is the catchword of the times. One might as well die utterly, and relieve the world of his presence, as not be enterprising. We must all be getting on, as we phrase it; by which we mean, not always happily, rising out of the station into which we were born, however respectable that may be, into a position that is, or seems to be, higher. In all worldly matters, our ambition is unbounded. Housekeepers, merchants, professional men, mechanics, all are ambitious.

Parents are ambitious of intellectual success for their children; children, taking up life where their parents left it, must still move forward; wealth, or the show of wealth, is reckoned indispensable; the smallest dwellings are likely to be, not modest homes, but miniature palaces, and, save in cases of real abundance, solid comforts are sacrificed to gilded emptinesses. Out of these tendencies which are rather exaggerations and perversions of essentially good elements than radical evils—there have come mischief and grief into our homes. Sometimes a foolish ambition and selfish luxuriousness so far prevail as to prevent altogether the formation of homes, because of the unmanageable expenditures which a life of fashion or of quasi-fashion imposes. Small and plain dwellings, plainly furnished, that simple attire which is so much finer than finery, those modest entertainments which may be repeated again and again without danger of satiety, a practical recognition of the honor and grace that attend domestic labors and make the name of housewife a name of honor, - these do not suit the ambitions of our day, and those who should be building their dwellings are still occupied with counting the cost. It is a condition of things which, as the Scriptures remind us, obtains and justly in the heavens, but it is a very bad condition of things for this world, and those whose examples would have weight in a community where each man is singularly given to doing what his neighbor does, may well ask themselves whether a severer simplicity is not demanded of them, were it only out of regard to their imitators. The utmost that can come of very humble ways and equipage is a failure to win any notice, and for the first years of one's household life this is anything but a misfortune, indeed, the best thing that can possibly happen to us: then we may perhaps put forth a root that shall bear up wide-spreading branches, and gather up the juices of a heavy foliage and of not a little luscious fruit. And too often, when the experiment of householding is tried, the

energies of the experimenters are all lavished upon the external means and appliances, they "keep the house," as they say, but they can hardly be said to live in it, they have no time left for that; when neatness and elegance and etiquette and luxury have had their portions, the hours are all exhausted. If you would know to what much of all this comes, go into the churchyards and read the gravestones sacred to the memories of many a poor wife and mother, each one of whom sought to do with one pair of hands and one aching brain the work of a legion, and never rested till she reached the last resting-place, till time was somehow found for her to die in. We want houses to live in, not merely to take charge of; and in estimating the price of any article of luxury, we should add a hundred per cent to its cost by way of provision for safe-keeping and suitable

care.

Too much labor, then, the times demand within the household, more than that quiet, patient, steady, cheerful, methodical industry which one would see realized at home, at least, if nowhere else, too much labor, leaving no time and no spirits for enjoyment, too much labor of the hands and brain, leaving no opportunity for the tasks upon which the heart enters so gladly. And the weary come home to the weary, the care-worn meets the care-worn. The pressure upon a multitude of business and professional men is really frightful; combined with the necessity in many cases of going long distances to their places of duty, it produces little short of an absolute separation from their families, and may gradually establish a positive disrelish for domestic quiet. There are fathers in our community who are almost strangers to their own children, who do not know one half so much about them as their school-teachers, indeed, can scarcely be said to see them at all except on the Lord's Day, which happily is still kept sacred from most week-day occupations. The appropriate work and play and worship of the home cannot be so much as begun in many

dwellings, and anything is caught at which promises to relieve parents from work which they can find no time to do. Moreover, whilst this excessive laboriousness exhausts the heads of the household, the same weary round must very often be travelled by the children as well. Amongst them also the same mad ambition to get on holds sway. Stimulated by what would seem an unwise appeal to the passion of emulation, spurred on by the offer of school medals, as if our whole social scheme were not one huge, frightful, maddening medal system, the young people commit book after book to memory, and greet you at your coming, not with gay words, kisses, smiles, and questions about common things which you would gladly answer, but with problems in arithmetic, or questions in geography, or even with more abstruse difficulties, matters, it may be, beyond your own humble shallows. They have no time. for household sports, and, if you are not on the watch, are already in school before you have had an opportunity to offer the morning prayer. They are too studious of geography to look at the earth, and too much devoted to astronomy to gaze up at the heavens, and so much given to physiology as to have no time left for the care of their health. They must be got on. The mark is made for the most gifted, and the rest must forever be trying without success to reach it, acquiring a positive disrelish for good learning. In what book of wisdom, sacred or profane, is it written that the active life of man or woman must begin at twenty-one or at eighteen? Why should we insist that precocity shall give the rule to mediocrity, or be impatient with our children if they are in no haste to succeed to the places of men who seem to be in no haste to leave them? Just as the warehouses of commerce are thrusting the family mansion into the suburbs of the city, so the competitions of business, and the ambitious pursuit of knowledge, and the general haste of the times, are restricting the sphere of the home within those quiet rural districts where time is not thought